FFS, people donate money to the FSF for their work, if I had and found out they were spending it on this I'm be pretty miffed.
Well, it doesn't sound like you donate to the FSF, so you don't have any right to be miffed. We all benefit from their work. You wouldn't have any reason to be miffed anyway, this is a separate fund created by the FSF and you donate money to.
3. the ratio of the work done or energy developed by a machine, engine, etc., to the energy supplied to it, usually expressed as a percentage.
The original post said it took into account all energy inputs and outputs to come up with the 80% efficiency. That simply means they looked at all the energy going into the system and coming out of the system and 80% of the energy coming in was converted to useful work, not waste heat. If they didn't look at 'all' the energy going into the system (i.e. it was done in sunlight), the 80% figure might not represent the actual efficiency for this conversion.
Also, for 1 dollar a week you are buying a mild emotional high when checking the numbers and a mild emotional low when you find out that math pwned you again.
Actually, I buy lottery tickets because I like thinking about what I would do with all that money. It's just somehow different when you imagine what you would do with millions of dollars when you have an actual chance of getting that money. I already had my chance at $100,000 in POWERball (1 in 12 million odds), but I didn't have a ticket. I always play my birthday and age, and 25 for the powerball. My birthday and age hit but not the powerball, but I hadn't bought a ticket in two weeks. That was a 'mild' emotional low:)
At the astronomical odds against winning, I figure my chances of finding a winning ticket on the ground are only marginally worse than my chances of buying a winning ticket.
Strangely enough, it would seem that your chances of finding a winning ticket on the ground are nearly infinitely better than your chances of buying a winning ticket since you don't play.
Please, for the love of god remember, there are two forms of logic, inductive which has arguments from experience (physics), and deductive which has arguments from pure reason (mathematics). Only deductive arguments can be proven because you can always argue with the strength of the evidence in inductive claims. It is a fact (supported by inductive evidence and deductive proofs) that inductive claims may be false no matter how strong the evidence for them is. Thus they can never be proven, but you can say "there are strong practical reasons to believe."
The error you make is in assuming that article summaries on Slashdot should be read as if they were scientific papers. The common use of the word "prove" is appropriate here. You can't remove the usage of the word from our language. I can 'prove' I have a driver's license by showing it to you. By your reasoning that wouldn't prove I had a driver's license because the claim could be false no matter how strong the evidence is.
A TM is a universal computer in that it can imitate any other, but that doesn't say anything about how long it will take to do so. Any finite number of steps is fine, no matter how slow. A TM is a thought experiment, not a device for practical computing.
I don't think this was hyped as a replacement for traditional computers or because of its speed, it is really only interesting at a theoretical level right now. One can imagine non-practical applications where time wouldn't be so much of a factor, possibly in terraforming a foreign world for habitation in the far future. Maybe a chip with billions of these could be of some use...
Universal Turing Machines are "[...] extremely basic abstract symbol-manipulating devices which, despite their simplicity, can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed."
Here it is. Just two states and three colors. And able to do any computation that can be done.
[...]
There were some simpler universal Turing machines constructed in the mid-1900s--the record being a 7-state, 4-color machine from 1962.
So basically there's a machine that has two states, each of which can be three colors, and that machine can perform ANY computation that an x86 cpu can perform. The code to add two 32 bit numbers in an x86 processor might be just a few bytes and the code to do the same thing with this 2,3 Turing machine might be thousands of bytes, but it can do it. It will be horribly inefficient and slow, but it can be done. They've proved that a 2,2 machine is impossible so a 2,3 machine was the simplest possible theoretical Turing machine. This paper proved that one exists. It doesn't have a practical application right now, but the article mentions possible molecular computers that can use this simple machines to do calculations on strands of molecules like DNA.
If you were actually serious about being worried that your game would break, you simply would have gone to GameStop or Toys'R'Us or the local equivalent and gotten one of their game warranties.
Which does little good for the saved games it's taken you hundreds of hours to create. With the R4 and M3 DS Simply, you can backup all your games and saved game files by dragging them to your hard drive. You also can play any of your games and not have to carry around and swap out all of your cartridges. The R4 also has a built-in cheat system to allow you to play the games by your own rules. I buy games if I like them. I have a legal right to make backup copies of software I own.
Having lived in a college dorm, I can tell you the real use of mod-chips is for downloading games that you don't own and playing them.
That is sad, but the answer is not to destroy a product that has many legitimate uses and fills a need that Nintendo was unwilling to fulfill itself. The movie industry tried to kill the VCR when it came out because of fears of copyright monopoly violation. Later they started making more money from movie rentals and sales than they did from theatrical runs, due to a technology they tried to have axed, but that's not the point. You can't only think what's good for copyright holders, the important thing is the public good. The public good is the whole reason for copyright's existence, we shouldn't let this limited government-granted (non-natural) right trample on our natural rights.
We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.
They can tell you that "by using our website, you agree to name your first-born child after one of our partners", but that doesn't mean you have to do it. However, it is a lie to say that it is a violation of their copyright. Copyright grants a monopoly on copying and distributing original creative works to the authors. There is no no monopoly on simply "viewing" a copyrighted work. By creating a public web page and providing it on a public server, they are copying the work and distributing the work to you over the internet. What law would they use to go after someone? The judge would laugh them out of court and award attorney fees to the defendant.
So you mean she didn't try to claim someone was spoofing her using her wifi connection when she didn't even have a wireless connection? Accidentally just happening to use her favourite handle?
I agree about that, although I don't know if she said that is what happened or if they just laid out the possibility. The plaintiff's expert didn't seem to know a whole lot about the internet in his deposition, or he made several misleading statements.
Actually, I remember those demonstrations (presumably contrived to be as absolutely fast as possible) as taking twice a long as the timestamps on the files. This is suspicious in the least.
The times were 145 seconds and 137 seconds I believe. The lawyer for the plaintiff said they took over a minute longer each, but the Ars Technica reporter that was there timed the second one the same as the defense. Maybe the plaintiff's used the setup time as well, but all we're talking about is the 15-20 second gap between file timestamps which would only be during actual ripping. If the CD had seven songs, that comes to about 20 seconds per song, if the CD had ten songs that comes to about 15 seconds per song. I just ripped a 15 song NiN cd on my laptop in 252 seconds which gives 16.8 seconds per song, and they are long songs (total playtime: 75 minutes 44 seconds). Also, there is no other explanation for a gap between albums other than physically having to change CDs.
If anything, ripping the files and putting them in the share directory for KAZAA just makes her look more liable, because it means she had to make a conscious decision to share the files.
Well, we're talking about her lying, and this shows the plaintiffs are the ones that are lying and have the expert that doesn't know what they're talking about. He said they had obviously been copied from another hard drive. My laptop copied an entire album of mp3s in under 5 seconds to the same hard drive, which is slower than copying to another hard drive. Also, maybe KAZAA automatically searches your hard drive for music to share. I've never used KAZAA, but iTunes does that... They did make a stink at trial claiming she downloaded those songs also, it wasn't just about uploading.
That may be true for some games, but not the ones I remember. Battlefield 2 for instance forces you to sit through several logo movies while it is doing absolutely nothing. You can actually mod the game to take those movies out, but then you can't play online because others don't have the same modded game. The lack of the logo movies sped the game up by the duration of the movies.
One game that comes to mind is "God of War II". The final scene where you're killing Zeus and you have to do all the random joystick movements and button presses is preceded by a cutscene that you cannot skip. I think the button-pressing is a little arbitrary anyway, but it's not that annoying when spread throughout the game in small pieces and it allows you to still feel like you're a part of the action when your character is doing some heavily scripted and defined things. This particular section was many times harder than any other instance of it in the game, one mistake meant instant death and you were forced to watch that damn cutscene each time you died. I was ready to chuck the game right when I finally got through it, and I was so pissed that I hardly enjoyed the ending cutscene.
If this woman had downloaded 22 songs and been caught, _then_ turned over the right hard drive and not told lies, taken straight to court with no reasonable offer to settle and been honest, then probably either the jury would've decided on the minimum $750/song penalty or refused to convict. Because then all she would have done would be download a few songs and probably share a few back, total money lost maybe $200 even with the price of a single.
She had her hard drive replaced due to mechanical failure outside her control before the RIAA ever sent her a letter. The only thing she "lied" about was she said the wrong dates by accident in her deposition. Do you remember when you replaced that flat tire on your bike? Was it three or four years ago?
However, what she actually did do was obstruct the police and lie a lot (which juries do not like, especially when it's obvious after the fact that the lies were never going to work), then when she had an offer to settle (which was larger than a 'reasonable offer' would be in the previous case, but after the lies it was probably the best option) she reject
She didn't obstruct the police, this is a civil trial and not a criminal investigation. She didn't lie about anything to my knowledge, in fact the plaintiff's attorneys lied in open court about the length of time the demonstrations took (reporter at the trial and defense attorney both timed CD rips within 1 second of each other under 2:20 and plaintiff's attorney said it was over 3 and a half minutes), and the plaintiff's expert lied also on the stand saying it was impossible to rip songs that fast (15-20 seconds between songs). If he knew anything about computers and CD ripping, he should have known that the only explanation for an extra gap between albums (40 sec?) is that CDs were being physically swapped, that makes no sense if copying from a hard drive since there is no delay for switching directories in a massive file copy. Also, a hard drive copy would probably be at least 10 or 20 times faster than the 300kb/s I calculate for a 15-20 second gap between 5mb mp3 files.
Hegg added that the jury believed Thomas' liability was magnified because she turned over to RIAA investigators a different hard drive than the one used to share music. "She lied," he said. "There was no defense. Her defense sucked."
Her hard drive went bad. The Best Buy "Geek Squad" member that testified said that the old drive was in fact bad. Everyone testified that this occurred prior to the RIAA sending her a letter, meaning this incident was in no way affected by the lawsuit. Hard drives go bad, if you have one long enough it will eventually go bad. I had a computer that had both hard drives go bad within a month of each other.
She said she ripped those songs from CDs herself. The plaintiff's "expert" said the timestamps on the files made that impossible. An in-court demonstration proved it was possible (15-20 seconds between songs, 40 seconds or so between CDs) and the plaintiff's attorney lied about how long both demonstrations took. Also, the expert saying they must have been copied from another hard drive makes no sense because straight file copying wouldn't produce an extra delay between CDs. Files are files, the only explanation for a longer time is that the CD drive had to be opened and the CD physically replaced. So the evidence shows that she did in fact rip those songs from CD and didn't download them from the internet.
This reminds me of my own jury duty. The questions some jurors ask almost blow my mind, like they haven't been listening at all and didn't understand a thing. Apparently this was the perfect storm of numbskull jury selection. Maybe it's something to do with Duluth? I hope the RIAA sends letters to this guy because his kids and wife are downloading music...
But Hegg said the jury in U.S. District Court in Duluth would have found her liable even if the plaintiffs had been required to establish that Kazaa users had actually downloaded the music.
Wow... They were willing to find her liable of something they have NO PROOF she did! Imagine getting convicted of murder simply because you owned a gun, without any proof of anyone even being shot! This just boggles the mind. They are instructed to only find her liable if the plaintiffs can establish that Kazaa users had actually downloaded the music, the plaintiffs failed to do that, and they would still be willing to find her liable. Astonishing...
Expert testimony from an RIAA witness also showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said.
Being a computer expert, and from what I've read of his expert report, I almost doubt he knows what a wireless router is, let alone how to tell if one was used to access Kazaa. I agree though that having the same username on Kazaa is incriminating, unless she can show that she was deliberately framed.
The jury, he said, was convinced that Thomas was a pirate after hearing evidence that the Kazaa account RIAA investigators were monitoring matched Thomas' internet protocol and modem addresses.
The jury was convinced that she was "a person who robs or commits illegal violence at sea or on the shores of the sea"? We need to stop using inflammatory rhetoric when describing copyright violation. Copyright violation is no more "theft" than running a red light is "theft". Artificial laws were created by man to extend a temporary monopoly the the original authors of creative works. I am not for the abolition of copyright, but its restriction. I think good does come from granting the original authors the sole right to profit from their works, but they need to be able to figure out a way to make money by doing something that others cannot do themselves for free. With regards to intellectual "property", I refer you to the writings of John Locke:
No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst:"
One final quote from the juror:
I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naïve. We're not that stupid up here," he said.
I keep hearing that the 2nd amendment would help in this situation but I haven't noticed any militias storming the local branch of the federal administration. I think the best way to protect Democracy is probably through self-motivated knowledge seeking and political activism on how things work instead of guns, but who can argue with a MP5.
Well, our second amendment rights have been eroded... There's no real way for the people to go to a store and buy shotguns to take on the government when they have planes and tanks. Also, it took more than a tax hike on tea to get our founding fathers up in a tizzy. Their real argument was that they weren't represented in the decisions that affected them. King George would come out with some decree that they had to obey yet they had no say in it. Now we could "revolt" simply by forming a new political party and voting the bastards out of office, but there's no real traction for it. All people seem to care about on election day is what candidate will give them back the most money. The Libertarian party would protect our rights, but they're never going to win any major elections as long as they are going to stop paying for Grandma's medication...
Forget about the fact that Grandma's medication can cost ten or more times what it sells for in other countries... The reason is that the pharmaceutical companies know the government has deep pockets and won't let Grandma go without her meds. Catch-22! If you think that drug companies need to have such high prices to fund R&D, here's a breakdown of where drug company revenues go:
32% - marketing, advertising, administration (gotta get more people to buy your drug to make more money)
~30% - Production
18% - Profit
14% - R&D
~6% - Taxes and "other"
So the drug companies take their research budget, add 25%, and take that as pure profit for a job well done.
From TFA, it sounds like the documentation was added to their website recently, it wasn't there before. Also, the 'help' for the command-line tools doesn't display those options.
Once cross-examination began, Toder started asking Jacobson about things such as MAC address spoofing, cracking, P2P pollution, and multipeer contamination, intimating that one of those things could have been in play when Media Sentry detected the shared folder at the IP address in question. He then questioned Jacobson about his assertion that the music currently on Thomas' computer had to have come from a hard drive and announced that he wanted to demonstrate to the jury that it was possible to rip CDs as quickly as the timestamps from the forensic examination showed (the timestamps were approximately 15-20 seconds apart with a longer 30- to 45-second gap between CDs).
This would tend to prove that the CDs were ripped, and not copied from another hard drive. 15-20 seconds? If they are normal 128kbit MP3 quality, the files are around 5 megabytes. If your hard drive can only copy at 300 kilobytes per second, you need another hard drive. Also that wouldn't account for the extended gap between CDs. If she was copying files from another hard drive, there should be no extra gap. The expert said that speed of ripping wasn't possible, so the defense went on to demonstrate the ripping of a CD and timed it. They came up with 2:36.18, the plaintiff's attorney objected saying it was over 4 minutes. He ripped another coming up with 2:17.71 (the reporter timed this one too and got 2:18.97), and the plaintiff's attorney objected again saying it was over 3 and a half minutes. I hope the jury "got" this. If an "expert" f-ed up this badly, I would disregard everything he said on the stand as unreliable.
Copyright holding corporations are greedy. If they had the option, they'd charge you every time you sang a song in the shower. It's time for we the people to assert our rights, and to fight for the ones we've lost due to complacency.
It's not just that simple, but I think light pollution could be better calculated using that and some algorithms. One thing to take into account is elevation, at higher elevations the same amount of light visible from space wouldn't equal the light pollution. With less atmosphere to go through, more light will pass into space so the satellite will record a higher value than the same lights at a lower elevation, while less will actually be reflected back to the ground by the atmosphere so there will be less light pollution. Also let's say you are looking at a normal street lamp. Without a special hood, a lot of the light goes up into the atmosphere at various angles, but not straight up. If the satellite was directly overhead, it would not count all the light pollution produced by these lights.
I forgot to take the 25% energy conversion efficiency into account, so it would actually take about 8 ounces or 1/2 pound of tritium to give an average of 50 watts over 12 years...
The first problem is your assumption that they are using radium when they are really using tritium. With tritium, a Hydrogen-3 atom has a neutron decay to a proton, giving off an electron. There are 6.022*10^23 tritium atoms in about 3 grams. If you have 1 kilogram of tritium, 500 grams will decay over 12 years, giving off a total of 1*10^27 electrons. That averages to 2.6*10^18 electrons per second, or about 0.42 Ampere average.
The major problem though is that each electron given off will be moving through the wires to create current. In actuality, there will be a material collecting the high-energy electrons and converting them to electricity. One 0.01859 MeV electron caused by tritiium decay will push more than one electron through the wire. If you take that decay energy and the said 25% energy conversion... You get 3.25E-15 joules per decay. With 1kg of tritium and 500g decaying over 12 years, that's 1E26 decays, or 3.25E11 joules of energy. That converts to 9.4E7 watt-hours. That equates to 860 watts of average energy. Take that down to the 50 watts or so a laptop would use, and you could get by with about 2 ounces of tritium.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it doesn't sound like you donate to the FSF, so you don't have any right to be miffed. We all benefit from their work. You wouldn't have any reason to be miffed anyway, this is a separate fund created by the FSF and you donate money to.
Efficiencey:
The original post said it took into account all energy inputs and outputs to come up with the 80% efficiency. That simply means they looked at all the energy going into the system and coming out of the system and 80% of the energy coming in was converted to useful work, not waste heat. If they didn't look at 'all' the energy going into the system (i.e. it was done in sunlight), the 80% figure might not represent the actual efficiency for this conversion.
Actually, I buy lottery tickets because I like thinking about what I would do with all that money. It's just somehow different when you imagine what you would do with millions of dollars when you have an actual chance of getting that money. I already had my chance at $100,000 in POWERball (1 in 12 million odds), but I didn't have a ticket. I always play my birthday and age, and 25 for the powerball. My birthday and age hit but not the powerball, but I hadn't bought a ticket in two weeks. That was a 'mild' emotional low :)
Strangely enough, it would seem that your chances of finding a winning ticket on the ground are nearly infinitely better than your chances of buying a winning ticket since you don't play.
I can't wait to go see "Unauthorized Copiers of the Carribean".
Flash memory is already pretty low-power, at 1/1000th the power of it, that might actually produce net energy gain :). Seriously, at 1/10th the cost
Then I'll be able to power it with those 75% efficient and 1/10th the cost solar cells that are supposed to be coming out "in 18 months".
The error you make is in assuming that article summaries on Slashdot should be read as if they were scientific papers. The common use of the word "prove" is appropriate here. You can't remove the usage of the word from our language. I can 'prove' I have a driver's license by showing it to you. By your reasoning that wouldn't prove I had a driver's license because the claim could be false no matter how strong the evidence is.
I don't think this was hyped as a replacement for traditional computers or because of its speed, it is really only interesting at a theoretical level right now. One can imagine non-practical applications where time wouldn't be so much of a factor, possibly in terraforming a foreign world for habitation in the far future. Maybe a chip with billions of these could be of some use...
From the article:
So basically there's a machine that has two states, each of which can be three colors, and that machine can perform ANY computation that an x86 cpu can perform. The code to add two 32 bit numbers in an x86 processor might be just a few bytes and the code to do the same thing with this 2,3 Turing machine might be thousands of bytes, but it can do it. It will be horribly inefficient and slow, but it can be done. They've proved that a 2,2 machine is impossible so a 2,3 machine was the simplest possible theoretical Turing machine. This paper proved that one exists. It doesn't have a practical application right now, but the article mentions possible molecular computers that can use this simple machines to do calculations on strands of molecules like DNA.
Which does little good for the saved games it's taken you hundreds of hours to create. With the R4 and M3 DS Simply, you can backup all your games and saved game files by dragging them to your hard drive. You also can play any of your games and not have to carry around and swap out all of your cartridges. The R4 also has a built-in cheat system to allow you to play the games by your own rules. I buy games if I like them. I have a legal right to make backup copies of software I own.
That is sad, but the answer is not to destroy a product that has many legitimate uses and fills a need that Nintendo was unwilling to fulfill itself. The movie industry tried to kill the VCR when it came out because of fears of copyright monopoly violation. Later they started making more money from movie rentals and sales than they did from theatrical runs, due to a technology they tried to have axed, but that's not the point. You can't only think what's good for copyright holders, the important thing is the public good. The public good is the whole reason for copyright's existence, we shouldn't let this limited government-granted (non-natural) right trample on our natural rights.
They can tell you that "by using our website, you agree to name your first-born child after one of our partners", but that doesn't mean you have to do it. However, it is a lie to say that it is a violation of their copyright. Copyright grants a monopoly on copying and distributing original creative works to the authors. There is no no monopoly on simply "viewing" a copyrighted work. By creating a public web page and providing it on a public server, they are copying the work and distributing the work to you over the internet. What law would they use to go after someone? The judge would laugh them out of court and award attorney fees to the defendant.
I agree about that, although I don't know if she said that is what happened or if they just laid out the possibility. The plaintiff's expert didn't seem to know a whole lot about the internet in his deposition, or he made several misleading statements.
You started it :)
The times were 145 seconds and 137 seconds I believe. The lawyer for the plaintiff said they took over a minute longer each, but the Ars Technica reporter that was there timed the second one the same as the defense. Maybe the plaintiff's used the setup time as well, but all we're talking about is the 15-20 second gap between file timestamps which would only be during actual ripping. If the CD had seven songs, that comes to about 20 seconds per song, if the CD had ten songs that comes to about 15 seconds per song. I just ripped a 15 song NiN cd on my laptop in 252 seconds which gives 16.8 seconds per song, and they are long songs (total playtime: 75 minutes 44 seconds). Also, there is no other explanation for a gap between albums other than physically having to change CDs.
Well, we're talking about her lying, and this shows the plaintiffs are the ones that are lying and have the expert that doesn't know what they're talking about. He said they had obviously been copied from another hard drive. My laptop copied an entire album of mp3s in under 5 seconds to the same hard drive, which is slower than copying to another hard drive. Also, maybe KAZAA automatically searches your hard drive for music to share. I've never used KAZAA, but iTunes does that... They did make a stink at trial claiming she downloaded those songs also, it wasn't just about uploading.
That may be true for some games, but not the ones I remember. Battlefield 2 for instance forces you to sit through several logo movies while it is doing absolutely nothing. You can actually mod the game to take those movies out, but then you can't play online because others don't have the same modded game. The lack of the logo movies sped the game up by the duration of the movies.
One game that comes to mind is "God of War II". The final scene where you're killing Zeus and you have to do all the random joystick movements and button presses is preceded by a cutscene that you cannot skip. I think the button-pressing is a little arbitrary anyway, but it's not that annoying when spread throughout the game in small pieces and it allows you to still feel like you're a part of the action when your character is doing some heavily scripted and defined things. This particular section was many times harder than any other instance of it in the game, one mistake meant instant death and you were forced to watch that damn cutscene each time you died. I was ready to chuck the game right when I finally got through it, and I was so pissed that I hardly enjoyed the ending cutscene.
She had her hard drive replaced due to mechanical failure outside her control before the RIAA ever sent her a letter. The only thing she "lied" about was she said the wrong dates by accident in her deposition. Do you remember when you replaced that flat tire on your bike? Was it three or four years ago?
She didn't obstruct the police, this is a civil trial and not a criminal investigation. She didn't lie about anything to my knowledge, in fact the plaintiff's attorneys lied in open court about the length of time the demonstrations took (reporter at the trial and defense attorney both timed CD rips within 1 second of each other under 2:20 and plaintiff's attorney said it was over 3 and a half minutes), and the plaintiff's expert lied also on the stand saying it was impossible to rip songs that fast (15-20 seconds between songs). If he knew anything about computers and CD ripping, he should have known that the only explanation for an extra gap between albums (40 sec?) is that CDs were being physically swapped, that makes no sense if copying from a hard drive since there is no delay for switching directories in a massive file copy. Also, a hard drive copy would probably be at least 10 or 20 times faster than the 300kb/s I calculate for a 15-20 second gap between 5mb mp3 files.
Her hard drive went bad. The Best Buy "Geek Squad" member that testified said that the old drive was in fact bad. Everyone testified that this occurred prior to the RIAA sending her a letter, meaning this incident was in no way affected by the lawsuit. Hard drives go bad, if you have one long enough it will eventually go bad. I had a computer that had both hard drives go bad within a month of each other.
She said she ripped those songs from CDs herself. The plaintiff's "expert" said the timestamps on the files made that impossible. An in-court demonstration proved it was possible (15-20 seconds between songs, 40 seconds or so between CDs) and the plaintiff's attorney lied about how long both demonstrations took. Also, the expert saying they must have been copied from another hard drive makes no sense because straight file copying wouldn't produce an extra delay between CDs. Files are files, the only explanation for a longer time is that the CD drive had to be opened and the CD physically replaced. So the evidence shows that she did in fact rip those songs from CD and didn't download them from the internet.
This reminds me of my own jury duty. The questions some jurors ask almost blow my mind, like they haven't been listening at all and didn't understand a thing. Apparently this was the perfect storm of numbskull jury selection. Maybe it's something to do with Duluth? I hope the RIAA sends letters to this guy because his kids and wife are downloading music...
Wow... They were willing to find her liable of something they have NO PROOF she did! Imagine getting convicted of murder simply because you owned a gun, without any proof of anyone even being shot! This just boggles the mind. They are instructed to only find her liable if the plaintiffs can establish that Kazaa users had actually downloaded the music, the plaintiffs failed to do that, and they would still be willing to find her liable. Astonishing...
Being a computer expert, and from what I've read of his expert report, I almost doubt he knows what a wireless router is, let alone how to tell if one was used to access Kazaa. I agree though that having the same username on Kazaa is incriminating, unless she can show that she was deliberately framed.
The jury was convinced that she was "a person who robs or commits illegal violence at sea or on the shores of the sea"? We need to stop using inflammatory rhetoric when describing copyright violation. Copyright violation is no more "theft" than running a red light is "theft". Artificial laws were created by man to extend a temporary monopoly the the original authors of creative works. I am not for the abolition of copyright, but its restriction. I think good does come from granting the original authors the sole right to profit from their works, but they need to be able to figure out a way to make money by doing something that others cannot do themselves for free. With regards to intellectual "property", I refer you to the writings of John Locke:
One final quote from the juror:
You should have kept your mouth shut, retard.
Well, our second amendment rights have been eroded... There's no real way for the people to go to a store and buy shotguns to take on the government when they have planes and tanks. Also, it took more than a tax hike on tea to get our founding fathers up in a tizzy. Their real argument was that they weren't represented in the decisions that affected them. King George would come out with some decree that they had to obey yet they had no say in it. Now we could "revolt" simply by forming a new political party and voting the bastards out of office, but there's no real traction for it. All people seem to care about on election day is what candidate will give them back the most money. The Libertarian party would protect our rights, but they're never going to win any major elections as long as they are going to stop paying for Grandma's medication...
Forget about the fact that Grandma's medication can cost ten or more times what it sells for in other countries... The reason is that the pharmaceutical companies know the government has deep pockets and won't let Grandma go without her meds. Catch-22! If you think that drug companies need to have such high prices to fund R&D, here's a breakdown of where drug company revenues go:
- 32% - marketing, advertising, administration (gotta get more people to buy your drug to make more money)
- ~30% - Production
- 18% - Profit
- 14% - R&D
- ~6% - Taxes and "other"
So the drug companies take their research budget, add 25%, and take that as pure profit for a job well done.From TFA, it sounds like the documentation was added to their website recently, it wasn't there before. Also, the 'help' for the command-line tools doesn't display those options.
From an article:
This would tend to prove that the CDs were ripped, and not copied from another hard drive. 15-20 seconds? If they are normal 128kbit MP3 quality, the files are around 5 megabytes. If your hard drive can only copy at 300 kilobytes per second, you need another hard drive. Also that wouldn't account for the extended gap between CDs. If she was copying files from another hard drive, there should be no extra gap. The expert said that speed of ripping wasn't possible, so the defense went on to demonstrate the ripping of a CD and timed it. They came up with 2:36.18, the plaintiff's attorney objected saying it was over 4 minutes. He ripped another coming up with 2:17.71 (the reporter timed this one too and got 2:18.97), and the plaintiff's attorney objected again saying it was over 3 and a half minutes. I hope the jury "got" this. If an "expert" f-ed up this badly, I would disregard everything he said on the stand as unreliable.
Copyright holding corporations are greedy. If they had the option, they'd charge you every time you sang a song in the shower. It's time for we the people to assert our rights, and to fight for the ones we've lost due to complacency.
It's not just that simple, but I think light pollution could be better calculated using that and some algorithms. One thing to take into account is elevation, at higher elevations the same amount of light visible from space wouldn't equal the light pollution. With less atmosphere to go through, more light will pass into space so the satellite will record a higher value than the same lights at a lower elevation, while less will actually be reflected back to the ground by the atmosphere so there will be less light pollution. Also let's say you are looking at a normal street lamp. Without a special hood, a lot of the light goes up into the atmosphere at various angles, but not straight up. If the satellite was directly overhead, it would not count all the light pollution produced by these lights.
I forgot to take the 25% energy conversion efficiency into account, so it would actually take about 8 ounces or 1/2 pound of tritium to give an average of 50 watts over 12 years...
The first problem is your assumption that they are using radium when they are really using tritium. With tritium, a Hydrogen-3 atom has a neutron decay to a proton, giving off an electron. There are 6.022*10^23 tritium atoms in about 3 grams. If you have 1 kilogram of tritium, 500 grams will decay over 12 years, giving off a total of 1*10^27 electrons. That averages to 2.6*10^18 electrons per second, or about 0.42 Ampere average.
The major problem though is that each electron given off will be moving through the wires to create current. In actuality, there will be a material collecting the high-energy electrons and converting them to electricity. One 0.01859 MeV electron caused by tritiium decay will push more than one electron through the wire. If you take that decay energy and the said 25% energy conversion... You get 3.25E-15 joules per decay. With 1kg of tritium and 500g decaying over 12 years, that's 1E26 decays, or 3.25E11 joules of energy. That converts to 9.4E7 watt-hours. That equates to 860 watts of average energy. Take that down to the 50 watts or so a laptop would use, and you could get by with about 2 ounces of tritium.