You might want to check out the Timezone Watch school at http://www.timezonewatchschool.com/WatchSchool/. They offer online courses on the basics of watchmaking. It's a pretty good hobby to get into.
I've commented a lot here already, but one thing I've alluded to with little response is the issue of redistribution and licensing. IANAL or serious license junkie, but isn't the whole idea of licenses like the GPL that they gain their force from copyright? While various licenses have their own particularities, the underlying strength of them comes from copyright and the ability to control your work's reproduction. Without the underlying force of copyright the licenses would have no power to restrict your use and redistribution.
One of the common themes below for those who oppose this decision is that if the original rights owner is getting paid, then they are not harmed by the redistribution of the altered work. Obviously if you apply the same logic to free software, you would find the licenses unenforceable, because even though money is not involved, the underlying strength of the license comes from the owners ability to control the distribution and alteration of their work without permission.
Yes, I've already responded once here, but actually looked at the meat of this post again. The law that you cited would only appear to affect technologies that allow individual users to change the work at their own home. It specifically does not cover the actions in this case. In particular, this act allows the use of technologies to alter the content of videos, but does not allow the creation of a new copy, nor does it appear to allow redistribution of the altered work.
Your comments on the Family Movie act are interesting, but you missed a major point. This was a US court in Denver making the decision, the submitter just referenced a CBC story on it.
I've got to say I'm pretty surprised by the number of voices saying here that there is a problem with this decision. This sounds like a perfectly sound interpretation of the law to me. The bowdlerizing companies are taking a copyrighted work, altering it in small ways, and then selling or renting the new work in a commercial enterprise. Even if the studios are paid, that does not mean that the buyer has a right to change and re-distribute the work, if the original owner does not permit that. Copyright gives the owner substantial control over his or her works.
In the same way, the GPL allows me to copy and change source code, but does not allow me to do so without restriction, because the owner of the copyrights have assigned a license to that effect.
I think that this has got to be the most commonly uttered silly thing in these threads, and that is a high bar to set. At first, it had the hint of plausibility; positing that the first week or so of shortages would generate hype, especially for the Christmas season. When the Christmas season came and went with almost no product on the shelves, that pretty much shot down this argument. Face it, Microsoft wants to sell as many boxes as possible because each box sold makes it harder for their competitors to come in later and sell another box. There is absolutely no way that Microsoft would have wanted to miss all of those potential sales in 4Q 2006. It just doesn't make sense to miss the biggest quarter of the year, when your competitors don't have a product in the market, just to generate some ephemeral hype. The much more sensible explanation is that they just had problems somewhere in the supply line.
I think that the issue is that it is becoming easy enough to do this that you do not need to have state sponsorship. One crazy McVeigh type can do an awful lot of dammage with a pretty small investment.
I actually had one of these, and thought that the controller was a good design, except for the failure issues which you mentioned. Especially when you consider that the dominant 2600 only had the eight position, one fire button design. I remember a couple of games that made good use of the twist action. Next time that I'm at my parent's house, I'll have to see if it is still lying around.
The article babbles on about breaking up the "water clusters" and letting alcohol more fully mix with the the water to make the wine age more quickly. In fact, wine ages by a number of complex reactions both in cask storage, and later in the bottle. In particular, fine red wines age in the bottle through a series of reactions, many involving the breakdown of various tannic molecules. Also, really fine wines age over years, cheaper wines designed to be drunk early just get worse after time. If you take a five liter jug of crap wine and store it in a cellar for ten years, it just tastes like crap.
I saw a lot of comments here about the snob value of wine, and how that will hold this process back. Actually the wine industry is pretty open to new technology in all but the most hidebound, traditional regions. The reason you will never here about this process again, is because it won't do anything, not because "the industry" will quash it.
I was planning on buying a TiBook for a while, but after a lot of reflection and consideration of job security, (I work in telcom) I decided that the iBook was a better choice. The cost saving over the TiBook is substantial and the performance is more than adequate as long as you don't plan on playing a lot of graphic-intensive FPSs or doing a lot of video encoding on a daily basis. Just make sure you buy one of the latest iBook models with the Radeon chipset; the earlier ones don't take advantage of 'Quatz extreme', which gives a substantial boost to percieved speed in everyday use.
It is absolutely possible. There is a nice set of instructions at here for installing Debian. While it is explicitly about the iBook, the process should work on a Ti book just fine.
There are a lot of fake Spaceview Accutrons out there. The Spaceview is the really neat clear faced model, and there are a lot of plain faced Accutrons that have been modified to look like the much more valuable Spaceviews. Of course, this is real common on eBay.
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You might want to check out the Timezone Watch school at http://www.timezonewatchschool.com/WatchSchool/. They offer online courses on the basics of watchmaking. It's a pretty good hobby to get into.
I've commented a lot here already, but one thing I've alluded to with little response is the issue of redistribution and licensing. IANAL or serious license junkie, but isn't the whole idea of licenses like the GPL that they gain their force from copyright? While various licenses have their own particularities, the underlying strength of them comes from copyright and the ability to control your work's reproduction. Without the underlying force of copyright the licenses would have no power to restrict your use and redistribution. One of the common themes below for those who oppose this decision is that if the original rights owner is getting paid, then they are not harmed by the redistribution of the altered work. Obviously if you apply the same logic to free software, you would find the licenses unenforceable, because even though money is not involved, the underlying strength of the license comes from the owners ability to control the distribution and alteration of their work without permission.
Yes, I've already responded once here, but actually looked at the meat of this post again. The law that you cited would only appear to affect technologies that allow individual users to change the work at their own home. It specifically does not cover the actions in this case. In particular, this act allows the use of technologies to alter the content of videos, but does not allow the creation of a new copy, nor does it appear to allow redistribution of the altered work.
Your comments on the Family Movie act are interesting, but you missed a major point. This was a US court in Denver making the decision, the submitter just referenced a CBC story on it.
Actually, those edits are done by the studios, and with the consent of the appropriate rights holders, so it is a very different situation.
I've got to say I'm pretty surprised by the number of voices saying here that there is a problem with this decision. This sounds like a perfectly sound interpretation of the law to me. The bowdlerizing companies are taking a copyrighted work, altering it in small ways, and then selling or renting the new work in a commercial enterprise. Even if the studios are paid, that does not mean that the buyer has a right to change and re-distribute the work, if the original owner does not permit that. Copyright gives the owner substantial control over his or her works. In the same way, the GPL allows me to copy and change source code, but does not allow me to do so without restriction, because the owner of the copyrights have assigned a license to that effect.
I think that this has got to be the most commonly uttered silly thing in these threads, and that is a high bar to set. At first, it had the hint of plausibility; positing that the first week or so of shortages would generate hype, especially for the Christmas season. When the Christmas season came and went with almost no product on the shelves, that pretty much shot down this argument. Face it, Microsoft wants to sell as many boxes as possible because each box sold makes it harder for their competitors to come in later and sell another box. There is absolutely no way that Microsoft would have wanted to miss all of those potential sales in 4Q 2006. It just doesn't make sense to miss the biggest quarter of the year, when your competitors don't have a product in the market, just to generate some ephemeral hype. The much more sensible explanation is that they just had problems somewhere in the supply line.
I think that the issue is that it is becoming easy enough to do this that you do not need to have state sponsorship. One crazy McVeigh type can do an awful lot of dammage with a pretty small investment.
I actually had one of these, and thought that the controller was a good design, except for the failure issues which you mentioned. Especially when you consider that the dominant 2600 only had the eight position, one fire button design. I remember a couple of games that made good use of the twist action. Next time that I'm at my parent's house, I'll have to see if it is still lying around.
The article babbles on about breaking up the "water clusters" and letting alcohol more fully mix with the the water to make the wine age more quickly. In fact, wine ages by a number of complex reactions both in cask storage, and later in the bottle. In particular, fine red wines age in the bottle through a series of reactions, many involving the breakdown of various tannic molecules. Also, really fine wines age over years, cheaper wines designed to be drunk early just get worse after time. If you take a five liter jug of crap wine and store it in a cellar for ten years, it just tastes like crap. I saw a lot of comments here about the snob value of wine, and how that will hold this process back. Actually the wine industry is pretty open to new technology in all but the most hidebound, traditional regions. The reason you will never here about this process again, is because it won't do anything, not because "the industry" will quash it.
It's a conflation of Bombay and Hollywood.
Come on people, everyone knows that the Economist is a flaming hippie media rag. You can't take anything those tree-huggers say seriously.
This site has some relevant info.
I was planning on buying a TiBook for a while, but after a lot of reflection and consideration of job security, (I work in telcom) I decided that the iBook was a better choice. The cost saving over the TiBook is substantial and the performance is more than adequate as long as you don't plan on playing a lot of graphic-intensive FPSs or doing a lot of video encoding on a daily basis. Just make sure you buy one of the latest iBook models with the Radeon chipset; the earlier ones don't take advantage of 'Quatz extreme', which gives a substantial boost to percieved speed in everyday use.
It is absolutely possible. There is a nice set of instructions at here for installing Debian. While it is explicitly about the iBook, the process should work on a Ti book just fine.
There are a lot of fake Spaceview Accutrons out there. The Spaceview is the really neat clear faced model, and there are a lot of plain faced Accutrons that have been modified to look like the much more valuable Spaceviews. Of course, this is real common on eBay.