I like this idea. Sounds like a commercial-flagging algorithm could easily detect it and skip every single frame in the recording.
Did I mention I have a mythbox?
A lot of people aren't all that sensitive to flicker and can't hear the buzz. A lot of others are willing to pretend they don't exist for the sake of energy savings.
Light quality is easy to measure. The measurement results a couple of numbers -- color temperature, and CRI (Color Rendering Index). Color temperature can be easily manipulated by the bulb maker. CRI is much harder. To get a decent CRI you need to use several phosphors, some of them expensive. And you still don't even approach that of an incandescent. And the CRI of a fluorescent bulb drops as the bulb ages, too, as the phosphors fade at different rates. GE CFLs have a CRI of 82.
"Instant on" fluorescents are fast, but not really instant; there is still a perceptable delay.
It's time to sue Microsoft for contibutory and vicarious infringement for doing this. Use the Grokster case as precedent. It's time the pro-DRM side got a taste of their own legal medicine.
CFLs have been the "next wave" for 20 years. The problems with them are the same as always
1) Flicker. Easy to solve with a good high frequency ballast, but do you think the lowest-bidder bulbs at Home Despot or Walfart are going to have one? No, they'll flicker like a cheap neon sign in a red-light district.
2) Buzz. Pretty much the same issues as flicker.
3) Light quality. The color rendering index of an incandescent bulb is 100. That of a fluorescent, anywhere from in the miserable 50s to the not-so-good 80s. That means that colors just won't look right when illuminated by them. And yes, people can tell and don't like it. Reds are particularly affected.
4) Flexibility. They'll work in most (but not all) places you use a regular B-type bulb. But they can't replace any sort of smaller bulbs, decorative bulbs, three-way bulbs, etc.
5) Switch-on delay. It's been much reduced but is still perceptable and gets worse as the bulb ages.
6) Cost. Cheap fluorescents in real service don't last anything like the claims made in the article. I don't know what kills them, but two years is about all you can expect from them. I have incandescents that have lasted as long. That screws up all the cost-savings calculations.
Unless your insulation sucks, if the unit is undersized, all you really can do is replace it. I bit the bullet last year and replaced my 2 ton unit (on a 5 year old house) with a 3 ton, and now it actually turns off in the summer. Still uses just as much power (maybe even slightly more), but at least it cools the place so it is comfortable to sleep.
If you're getting shocked from the shield of your Ethernet wire, you've got problems other than unnecessary electrical use. Something's wired badly, and you've might have an electrocution waiting to happen. Grounding the leakage current is fixing the symptom, not the problem. Fix that first, THEN worry about usage.
If the 22" CRT really uses 40W in standby, put it on a switched outlet. If your computer documentation doesn't say whether USB gets standby power, measure it with a meter. Unplug your battery charger. Turn off the laser printer if it runs the heater while in standby. But unless you don't have air conditioning or heating, don't fool yourself into thinking all this will add up to much. HVAC swamps everything, IME.
We've got those interoperability and security testing exceptions in the US, too. They're carefully written to be practically useless but to make the law appear more reasonable.
It's a good thing the U.S. Code isn't copyrighted or this thing would be a serious violation...
Of course it's bull, just like the coming "100 year copyright" for harmonization with Mexico will be bull.
Here in the US I live in, we speak up against them and are ignored. Those who fight them in court, lose (just ask the EFF. Or bnetd or 2600). If we vote against those who support them, it's for a loser as the candidates with a chance all support the law. The fix is in, and not just in the US and OZ. Our choices are simple; obey, disobey and avoid getting caught, disobey and be bankrupted, or disobey and be jailed.
Making your case in the proper jurisdiction is pretty basic in law. If Spamhaus has no US presence, suing them in Illinois doesn't make sense. Even if they had a US presence but none in Illinois, suing them in Illinois wouldn't make sense.
The alternative is that any dirtbag could sue you in their own convenient jurisdiction (from Alaska to Zaire) and force you to go well out of your way to defend yourself.
Doesn't look lile Palast is actually charged, at least not yet. Exxon has lodged a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security (probably in a crude attempt to shut him up), but there's no mention of arrests, hearings, grand jury proceedings, and the like, all of which generally follow the filing of criminal charges.
(and if they were going to disappear him off to Gitmo, they would have just DONE it, not told him about the complaint and given him a chance to squawk)
Autism manifests long before electronic games could be the cause, unless your infant has a PS2.
As for ADD/ADHD, IMO those "disorders" are mostly bogus, the result of a normal child placed in an abnormal environment. As you say, schools used to use punishment (operant conditioning, if you will) to deal with it, now they're inclined to use drugs. It would be interesting, however, to see if those people who were identified as ADD/ADHD but were not drugged also have a higher rate of cocaine and meth addiction than the rest of the population. My guess would be that they do.
The stolen CD doesn't belong to the thief, it still belongs to you, so the legal status of the MP3s, or of reburning a CD shouldn't change (note that I didn't say they were legal in the first place!). However, if you accept an insurance payment for the CD, the ownership of the stolen CD transfers to the insurance company, so now those MP3s probably ARE illegal, regardless of their original status.
Realistically, what safeguards are there against someone simply suing you, on any grounds or no grounds at all, and offering a settlement which is slightly below the minimum it would cost to defend oneself? This isn't just the RIAA; DirecTV did the same thing against people who bought perfectly legal "unloopers", and when they countersued, the judge slapped them with DirecTVs legal costs.
Current FCC rules do not allow broadcast stations to encrypt, nor do they allow the cable companies to encrypt the local broadcast feeds ("basic cable").
Credit history makes perfect sense... when evaluating whether to extend credit to someone. But it's also the only readily available and objective proxy measure for general reliability and responsibility, which means the temptation to use and misuse it is very high. With employers it is worse because HR departments in general really have no idea how to separate the wheat from the chaff, at least in technical jobs, so they'll grab at straws for seemingly useful, objective, and easy to apply measures to cut down the applicant pool.
The other problems you mention, I think, are not as bad as you make them out. Someone with no credit history might have a problem, but nearly everyone who has lived independently for a while will have SOME credit history. Paying utility bills establishes credit history, for instance. So can paying rent (if you're paying to the Big Faceless Property Management Company rather than an individual landlord who probably doesn't deal with credit agencies). If Mr. X wants to establish credit, he can get credit cards and pay them off within the billing cycle. All that is enough to establish a very good credit history.
On the flip side, someone who manages to keep debt up in the air may have a good credit history (no late payments or defaults) but it will count against them in credit score, where their debt-to-credit ratio will probably be high, as will the amount of new debt.
If you've got a US bank account and you have no credit as opposed to bad credit, it should be fairly simple to get a decent credit rating. Get a credit card (a secured card if you can't get a regular one, but not a debit card), charge all your normal expenses to it and pay it off every month.
Again: patenting a method or system for performing X != patenting X.
Would be true if the patent really was patenting a particular method for performing X. But it isn't. "A method for performing X" is boilerplate; the patent then covers ALL methods which perform X and meet the other restrictions in the claims. For Microsoft's first claim, this means that _any_ computer program which, given a verb in one language, can display all the corresponding verb forms in the same language or some other language, is covered by the claim. Including one using the trivial table-lookup method.
It's true that the patent application doesn't cover conjugating verbs. It does, however, really cover conjugating verbs _on a computer_.
It's a patent on automatically providing all of the different possible conjugation forms of any verb on the fly, which is something I, for one, haven't seen before and think could be pretty useful...
Congratulations! Your application for a position as Patent Examiner has been approved.
I can see where this law could be useful in cases where we know someone has committed a heinous act but the state can't punish him. Maybe the key evidence linking him is inadmissible in court (but still reliable). Maybe the statue of limitations has expired or there are jurisdictional problems. Maybe the victim is unwilling to press charges or has fled. Maybe what the person did is despicable but not criminal, e.g. someone with HIV who knowingly refuses to use protection or inform his/her partners. A criminal conviction is a very high bar. We can't always establish criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt even though we know for certain the person has done very bad things. Not saying I think this is the right approach, but it's not as harebrained as many here have suggested.
Useful? Sure. But these are exactly the kind of uses the Constitution forbids. If the evidence linking him to the crime is inadmissable but reliable, allowing the state to punish him anyway vitiates the prohibition against whatever bad act the state committed which made the evidence inadmissable. Statute of limitations expired -- same thing, punishing the guy anyway eliminates the protection of the statute of limitations. Victim unwilling to press charges or has fled -- punishing him anyway violates the Sixth Amendment. Despicable but not criminal? Punishing anyway eliminates rule of law entirely, allowing behavior to be made malum prohibitorum on an ex post facto and ad hoc basis by any judge. (did I get enough Latin in there?)
Yes, criminal conviction is a high bar. It's that way for a reason. If the state can't get over that bar, they lose; if they get to take action against the accused anyway (or without even trying), then all the protections in the criminal justice system have been eliminated.
Apologists for the law will of course claim being put on the list isn't punishment and therefore doesn't qualify for criminal protections. None of them, I bet, would volunteer to be put on the list to show just how it doesn't punish them. You can be sure that the list is or will be used to screen job applicants for many state positions, for licensed or regulated jobs involving contact with children, and for other things -- things which will just be added to as time goes on. Being put on a state-sanctioned blacklist is punishment, no matter how you word the law.
Bah. The _Dying Earth_ stories with Cugel are examples in fantasy of much which is wrong with mainstream literature. Cugel is a conflicted, complex anti-hero? No, he's simply an amoral slug who retains our sympathies (if he does) mostly because he's the main character and we don't really give a crap about the characters he mistreats. There's no real plot; Vance just has Cugel give us a tour of the setting, much as Dante has Virgil give us a tour of Hell. Only Hell's more interesting. As with much mainstream literature, _Dying Earth_ is written in an overblown style which makes it difficult to read; this appears to be the main criterion by which literature snobs judge books.
As for a "nasty, racist political agenda"... you've only read _Farnham's Freehold_, right?
But a third of American working women are given no paid leave, and a quarter of men get no pay from their employer if they take a week or more off for rest and recreation.
At least thats what the media is telling me to think this week.
And I'll bet they're including part time workers and probably primary & secondary schoolteachers (who get precious little leave during the school year, but get a week off in the winter and 2-3 months in the summer) as well.
The program 'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.'. That sort of phrasing in bureaucrat-speak generally implies "...without actually providing those attributes."
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I like this idea. Sounds like a commercial-flagging algorithm could easily detect it and skip every single frame in the recording. Did I mention I have a mythbox?
A lot of people aren't all that sensitive to flicker and can't hear the buzz. A lot of others are willing to pretend they don't exist for the sake of energy savings.
Light quality is easy to measure. The measurement results a couple of numbers -- color temperature, and CRI (Color Rendering Index). Color temperature can be easily manipulated by the bulb maker. CRI is much harder. To get a decent CRI you need to use several phosphors, some of them expensive. And you still don't even approach that of an incandescent. And the CRI of a fluorescent bulb drops as the bulb ages, too, as the phosphors fade at different rates. GE CFLs have a CRI of 82.
"Instant on" fluorescents are fast, but not really instant; there is still a perceptable delay.
It's time to sue Microsoft for contibutory and vicarious infringement for doing this. Use the Grokster case as precedent. It's time the pro-DRM side got a taste of their own legal medicine.
CFLs have been the "next wave" for 20 years. The problems with them are the same as always
1) Flicker. Easy to solve with a good high frequency ballast, but do you think the lowest-bidder bulbs at Home Despot or Walfart are going to have one? No, they'll flicker like a cheap neon sign in a red-light district.
2) Buzz. Pretty much the same issues as flicker.
3) Light quality. The color rendering index of an incandescent bulb is 100. That of a fluorescent, anywhere from in the miserable 50s to the not-so-good 80s. That means that colors just won't look right when illuminated by them. And yes, people can tell and don't like it. Reds are particularly affected.
4) Flexibility. They'll work in most (but not all) places you use a regular B-type bulb. But they can't replace any sort of smaller bulbs, decorative bulbs, three-way bulbs, etc.
5) Switch-on delay. It's been much reduced but is still perceptable and gets worse as the bulb ages.
6) Cost. Cheap fluorescents in real service don't last anything like the claims made in the article. I don't know what kills them, but two years is about all you can expect from them. I have incandescents that have lasted as long. That screws up all the cost-savings calculations.
Unless your insulation sucks, if the unit is undersized, all you really can do is replace it. I bit the bullet last year and replaced my 2 ton unit (on a 5 year old house) with a 3 ton, and now it actually turns off in the summer. Still uses just as much power (maybe even slightly more), but at least it cools the place so it is comfortable to sleep.
If you're getting shocked from the shield of your Ethernet wire, you've got problems other than unnecessary electrical use. Something's wired badly, and you've might have an electrocution waiting to happen. Grounding the leakage current is fixing the symptom, not the problem. Fix that first, THEN worry about usage.
If the 22" CRT really uses 40W in standby, put it on a switched outlet. If your computer documentation doesn't say whether USB gets standby power, measure it with a meter. Unplug your battery charger. Turn off the laser printer if it runs the heater while in standby. But unless you don't have air conditioning or heating, don't fool yourself into thinking all this will add up to much. HVAC swamps everything, IME.
We've got those interoperability and security testing exceptions in the US, too. They're carefully written to be practically useless but to make the law appear more reasonable. It's a good thing the U.S. Code isn't copyrighted or this thing would be a serious violation...
Of course it's bull, just like the coming "100 year copyright" for harmonization with Mexico will be bull. Here in the US I live in, we speak up against them and are ignored. Those who fight them in court, lose (just ask the EFF. Or bnetd or 2600). If we vote against those who support them, it's for a loser as the candidates with a chance all support the law. The fix is in, and not just in the US and OZ. Our choices are simple; obey, disobey and avoid getting caught, disobey and be bankrupted, or disobey and be jailed.
When it was passed in the US we were told it was required for harmonization with Europe.
Making your case in the proper jurisdiction is pretty basic in law. If Spamhaus has no US presence, suing them in Illinois doesn't make sense. Even if they had a US presence but none in Illinois, suing them in Illinois wouldn't make sense.
The alternative is that any dirtbag could sue you in their own convenient jurisdiction (from Alaska to Zaire) and force you to go well out of your way to defend yourself.
Are these the same thugs who were suing grannies for making multiple items from the same (paper) pattern?
What they need is to sue some granny who has a terminal illness and a shotgun.
Doesn't look lile Palast is actually charged, at least not yet. Exxon has lodged a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security (probably in a crude attempt to shut him up), but there's no mention of arrests, hearings, grand jury proceedings, and the like, all of which generally follow the filing of criminal charges.
(and if they were going to disappear him off to Gitmo, they would have just DONE it, not told him about the complaint and given him a chance to squawk)
Autism manifests long before electronic games could be the cause, unless your infant has a PS2.
As for ADD/ADHD, IMO those "disorders" are mostly bogus, the result of a normal child placed in an abnormal environment. As you say, schools used to use punishment (operant conditioning, if you will) to deal with it, now they're inclined to use drugs. It would be interesting, however, to see if those people who were identified as ADD/ADHD but were not drugged also have a higher rate of cocaine and meth addiction than the rest of the population. My guess would be that they do.
The stolen CD doesn't belong to the thief, it still belongs to you, so the legal status of the MP3s, or of reburning a CD shouldn't change (note that I didn't say they were legal in the first place!). However, if you accept an insurance payment for the CD, the ownership of the stolen CD transfers to the insurance company, so now those MP3s probably ARE illegal, regardless of their original status.
Realistically, what safeguards are there against someone simply suing you, on any grounds or no grounds at all, and offering a settlement which is slightly below the minimum it would cost to defend oneself? This isn't just the RIAA; DirecTV did the same thing against people who bought perfectly legal "unloopers", and when they countersued, the judge slapped them with DirecTVs legal costs.
Current FCC rules do not allow broadcast stations to encrypt, nor do they allow the cable companies to encrypt the local broadcast feeds ("basic cable").
Credit history makes perfect sense... when evaluating whether to extend credit to someone. But it's also the only readily available and objective proxy measure for general reliability and responsibility, which means the temptation to use and misuse it is very high. With employers it is worse because HR departments in general really have no idea how to separate the wheat from the chaff, at least in technical jobs, so they'll grab at straws for seemingly useful, objective, and easy to apply measures to cut down the applicant pool.
The other problems you mention, I think, are not as bad as you make them out. Someone with no credit history might have a problem, but nearly everyone who has lived independently for a while will have SOME credit history. Paying utility bills establishes credit history, for instance. So can paying rent (if you're paying to the Big Faceless Property Management Company rather than an individual landlord who probably doesn't deal with credit agencies). If Mr. X wants to establish credit, he can get credit cards and pay them off within the billing cycle. All that is enough to establish a very good credit history.
On the flip side, someone who manages to keep debt up in the air may have a good credit history (no late payments or defaults) but it will count against them in credit score, where their debt-to-credit ratio will probably be high, as will the amount of new debt.
If you've got a US bank account and you have no credit as opposed to bad credit, it should be fairly simple to get a decent credit rating. Get a credit card (a secured card if you can't get a regular one, but not a debit card), charge all your normal expenses to it and pay it off every month.
Would be true if the patent really was patenting a particular method for performing X. But it isn't. "A method for performing X" is boilerplate; the patent then covers ALL methods which perform X and meet the other restrictions in the claims. For Microsoft's first claim, this means that _any_ computer program which, given a verb in one language, can display all the corresponding verb forms in the same language or some other language, is covered by the claim. Including one using the trivial table-lookup method.
It's true that the patent application doesn't cover conjugating verbs. It does, however, really cover conjugating verbs _on a computer_.
Useful? Sure. But these are exactly the kind of uses the Constitution forbids. If the evidence linking him to the crime is inadmissable but reliable, allowing the state to punish him anyway vitiates the prohibition against whatever bad act the state committed which made the evidence inadmissable. Statute of limitations expired -- same thing, punishing the guy anyway eliminates the protection of the statute of limitations. Victim unwilling to press charges or has fled -- punishing him anyway violates the Sixth Amendment. Despicable but not criminal? Punishing anyway eliminates rule of law entirely, allowing behavior to be made malum prohibitorum on an ex post facto and ad hoc basis by any judge. (did I get enough Latin in there?)
Yes, criminal conviction is a high bar. It's that way for a reason. If the state can't get over that bar, they lose; if they get to take action against the accused anyway (or without even trying), then all the protections in the criminal justice system have been eliminated.
Apologists for the law will of course claim being put on the list isn't punishment and therefore doesn't qualify for criminal protections. None of them, I bet, would volunteer to be put on the list to show just how it doesn't punish them. You can be sure that the list is or will be used to screen job applicants for many state positions, for licensed or regulated jobs involving contact with children, and for other things -- things which will just be added to as time goes on. Being put on a state-sanctioned blacklist is punishment, no matter how you word the law.
Bah. The _Dying Earth_ stories with Cugel are examples in fantasy of much which is wrong with mainstream literature. Cugel is a conflicted, complex anti-hero? No, he's simply an amoral slug who retains our sympathies (if he does) mostly because he's the main character and we don't really give a crap about the characters he mistreats. There's no real plot; Vance just has Cugel give us a tour of the setting, much as Dante has Virgil give us a tour of Hell. Only Hell's more interesting. As with much mainstream literature, _Dying Earth_ is written in an overblown style which makes it difficult to read; this appears to be the main criterion by which literature snobs judge books.
As for a "nasty, racist political agenda"... you've only read _Farnham's Freehold_, right?
The program 'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.'. That sort of phrasing in bureaucrat-speak generally implies "...without actually providing those attributes."