You're either *extremely* fucking stupid or a troll.
Please stick to arguing the case, personal attacks don't make you any more credible.
So since anybody... or more accurately whoever does it more efficiently, can make money off of it it actually is completely unrelated to to communism.
No it isn't, your interpretation is not what I argued. Taking a personal possession or efforts from someone without due compensation and for the free use of everyone is communism. On top of that someone else profiting from your stuff being taken from you without you getting any more compensation is just plain stealing. In my book anyway.
New works are promoted. Reselling the same old crap is discouraged. It follows absolutely from what you're saying. Your conclusions are completely opposed to your own arguments. Sane people change their minds at that point.
How is this absolute? I believe free content that is 5 years old will at best keep new content creation at todays level and at worst lower the amount (and possibly quality) created. This is because I believe fewer people will be buying if they can get other stuff for free. (just like not everyone wants to spend money on the new latest and greatest car and buys second hand) You believe it will encourage more new content. Both yours and mine conclusions are speculative as there is no proof either way, so, again, no need for name calling.
But my main point is: too much government interference. Why should there be a law that prevents you from selling the same old crap? If someone wants to sell the same old crap and another wants to sell better new stuff, the market will take care of it - and it does; while back-catalogs make a lot of money as a whole, that is only because there are so many individual items. Besides, that is not the case I am arguing. What I am arguing is that I do not believe copyright limits should be quite so short. It should be a free world in which we are free to sell our same old crap if people want it.
Now, can we have a meaningful discussion with name calling and insults?
It is a step in the right direction for sure. But what would be even better is a PDF-like version of ODF, one just for publishing. Light-weight with not enough information in it to edit it, like PDF, with a special light-weight viewer. (not that Adobe Reader for windows is light-weight anymore, but luckily Preview on the Mac is)
I really hate getting Word documents from people (like all the MS documentation on their website) that when opened in Word get re-formatted automatically, show spelling mistakes with red underline and ask me if I would like to save the document before closing. (even though I have not changed anything) Somehow I do not think getting an ODF opening in Word or OpenOffice would be much of an improvement on that experience.
I am sorry, but your post keeps contradicting itself.
Why would more information be produced if it is free to share? Any information anyone produces is free to share if the producer wants it to be. Yes, you have copyright, but you can license your information any way YOU want. Got something to share, make it public domain or give it a creative commons license. Knowing that their information is going to be copied freely might be inspiring, but it is hardly going to make anyone able to spend days, months, years of full-time work to produce it; they have bills to pay and need a day job. (not to mention a social life outside of the day job)
Also, if I can freely copy, I can freely modify. So why would I not take out the commercials?
Sponsorship won't work either. Imagine if Coke pays for "Shrek" to be made so that they can have Shrek-based competitions and put the image on their packaging. But if Shrek is not copyrighted, what is stopping Pepsi from doing all the same promotions but without actually paying for the movie to be made?
The only thing that makes sense is product placement as it is hard to remove, but god help us if we need to sit through movies with enough products placement in there to finance the movie.
No thanks, I'd rather pay my $10 at the box office.
I do not see why anyone should not be allowed to make a good investment and then live off it for the rest of their lives. Are we really going to force people to produce more?
It would be like doing 10 years of good investing on the stock market, retiring on $10M dollars only to be told 5 years down the track to hand all your capital gains over because you are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of your work; you must keep working.
And why would I pay for something new the artists created when I can have so much stuff that is only 5 years old for free?
I know the corporate IP holders are crying all the way to the bank and would do fine with a little less profit from their back-catalog, but what about the independent artists, are we going to have two rules? It would be nice to have more of our cultural heritage lapse into the public domain, but I feel it is a much more complex issue than most people realize. What you are proposing is pretty much communism and after 5 years anyone can get it for free, but it would also mean anyone can make money on it!
Imaging a 5 year rule and "Top Gun" has become public domain years ago, but most people can not get it easily, so someone WILL make money of selling copies on DVD. Not to mention TV stations broadcasting it for those not able to download or afford the few bucks for the DVD copy and selling commercials. Should the original creator really be shut out completely? And how is the TV station going to get their broadcast quality copy? Someone has the physical medium, most likely the corporate entity that created the film. Is there going to be a law that states the copy MUST be handed over or supplied at cost to the anyone who wants to broadcast it? Do you really think that in that case stations would buy much new material? I think not and it would be counterproductive to your "artists would have much more incentive to produce new works".
What about spending a lot of money scanning and cleaning up the negatives and re-releasing it on Blu-Ray or HDDVD? How is that going to work, a new copyright term for the new format, so that you may freely copy the DVD of Top Gun, but not a copy (converted into whatever format) of the HDDVD?
I do not think it is quite a clear cut as you seem to think it is!
I do not see anything wrong with copyright; if I spend a lot of time and money into creating something that can so easily be copied, there should be some protection against that. I also have no problem with RIAA and MPAA going after those who blatantly share music and movies; just because the industry make enough money to be profitable through their preferred distribution channels does not mean I should just get it for free. Eventually most people will be connected to the internet so fast and sharing will be made so easy that nobody will go through the legitimate means of obtaining the content they want.
That said, I DO have a problem with legislation like the DMCA or any DRM. If I have paid for a perpetual license for personal and household use, including any guests present, for content, I should not be limited to how I should be allowed to store and play this content. Yes, giving a copy of a movie to a friend is bad, but moving it to my media server and letting him watch it in the guest bedroom when he is visiting should be fine.
Unfortunately, temptation is too great and I don't always practice what I preach; I do download, though mostly TV series that I either can not watch at all in my region or that I can't be bothered to find. I don't like downloading someone's recording, I would much rather pay a little money for it and get it straight from the source and reward the creators. Unfortunately, they won't let me. And even when they do (we have some content on iTunes), the pirated versions are of much better quality.
Take for instance "Bender's Big Score"; only R1 NTSC with no R2/4 PAL version even announced. This is a true geek show, how much money do you think they would have made overnight if they made a 4GB 720p version available for a $10 download? As a true fan I had to see this and was left with no choice but to download a pirated copy. I might buy it when it comes out, I might not, but in any case the studio and distributers have proven themselves complete retards not to offer their geek movie to the geeks in the way that geeks want.
To conclude, I feel that just because we can we should not just copy everything left right and center, but the truth is that we do and the industry mostly has themselves to blame by not keeping up with what consumers want. And that makes them retarded because the internet is the easiest form of distribution ever invented and they completely fail to exploit it.
"Surpassing Xing"!? Are you serious? That should be the easiest thing for any encoder to do! Maybe they got better later, but way back in 1999/2000 when everyone was using Xing ("it is so fast!" - yeah, that's likely the problem) it sounded terrible.
I actually ended up buying "Audioactive Production Studio" because the Fraunhofer Pro coded (not to be confused with "MP3 Pro"!) it used sounded so good, also compared to LAME at the time and did so for a long time. When I ended up switching to Mac early 2005, I could not use it anymore. Fortunately, after doing a double blind test with scripts randomly renaming the test files and keeping a record of what was what so I could go back later and see which one I really preferred, I found LAME had become every bit as good. (I could not tell the difference between the two anymore) I have always used 256K as well, so not sure how the two would compare at lower bit rates.
Now I have abandoned MP3 altogether; I have more than enough space for a lossless codec. The one of choice is Apple Lossless, simply because it works easy in iTunes and iPod. As Apple has a good API, it will never be more than a couple hours of work to whip something up that converts it to something else if I want/need to so while it is binary only, there is no real lock in.
For Perl, there is mod_perl, Ruby runs on Fast CGI. Now I am not the biggest Perl fan, but I would still take it over any Fast CGI application any day.
I know there is Mongrel now, but even the creators don't seem to trust it enough to let it run stand-alone and recommend you run it behind an Apache proxy. Not something I can imagine the BBC - or anyone with a large web farm - wanting to live with.
I can't speak for Verizon's CDMA network, but GSM most certainly has a "data" mode that nobody in Europe charges you extra for. When you make a data call, you get the native 9600 bps speed that the voice goes over, error-corrected and everything. It emulates a v.32 modem and you can thus connect to any normal modem, ISP, etc. I have done this many times and it is very stable. Heck, in the early days you used to have GSM FAX machines for cars!
Considering you can't actually attach a modem to a cell phone, I assume what the OP was trying to do was use the phone's data mode over either a USB or serial cable or bluetooth using the appropriate client software. Just that the phone tries to do it most likely means CDMA is capable of this.
That leaves only one option, Verizon really does not want to enable data mode for you and just charge you minutes of airtime without paying the extra $60.
One of the issues is that in most of the world, mobile number start with a specific prefix (06 in.nl, 04 in.au, 07 in.uk and so on) but in the US they do not. Instead, your number starts with the area code of the area (or close to) where you bought the phone and callers can not tell the difference between a landline (cheap to call) and a mobile (expensive to call) like you can elsewhere.
Taking that into account, it starts to make sense that if you are the one who decided to be on an expensive network, you pay the difference and the person calling you only pays the normal rate to your cell phone's area code.
That they are three simple chords isn't really the issue here; there are tonnes of musicians out there that can play a song the same as "the original".
Much more important here is most likely the work of the recording and mixing engineers (and not to mention the instrument technicians, keyboard programmers, etc.) that managed to make it *sound* the same as the original recording.
That said, I agree it should not make a difference, a cover is a cover and the *sound* of the recording is not copyrighted, only the music and the recording itself.
A couple of years back I read an interview in "Sound on Sound" with a producer of cover music for use in commercials that specialized in copying the sound. Quite often, the advertiser wanted an original song but could not get a license at any price. More than once, when the rights holders heard the re-recording sounding almost indistinguishable from the original they relented and decided they might as well get paid for it and allowed the original to be used.
Interestingly, the same technique applies to "Greatest Hits" albums by label-hopping artists. A prime example is Tina Turner's greatest hits that contain only original recordings from one label and the rest are remakes that sound almost exactly the same as the originals. In studying the liner notes, you can see all the same musicians on all tracks, all recorded in the same place by the same people - different ones from those that did the original recoding.
Unfortunately, with HDMI cables they actually have a point. But that is more because HDMI is so lousy and requires it; cheap cables won't do on longer runs.
The sad thing is the professionals have HD-SDI which does long runs on cheap 75 ohm coax.
It is not about the technology. Sure, what you say is true, anyone can buy that kind of equipment. The question is: can they use it? The most important thing in making your album a success is working with the right people. That starts with the recording engineer and instrument technicians. (yes, setting up a drum kit is hard) Then you need someone to bring out the best you - the musician - have inside you: that's the producer's job. And when it is all recorded, you hand it over to someone for mixing. Look at the liner notes, albums are usually mixed by someone other than who recorded it - they are very different specialties.
All these people cost a lot more money than a good studio does, and they sure as hell have much more of an influence over the final musical and technical qualities of an album than the choice of recording equipment does.
It could also be that ACLU mailed it on behalf of The Nation. That is ACLU got the brochures from The Nation and printed the envelope and/or did the mail merging. That way you get mail from The Nation, but all they know is that ACLU sent it to x-number of people that fit profile Y without ever knowing who you are.
This is quite common practice and often there are two opt-ins (or outs) on applications: "allow us to share your information with our partners" and "allow us to send you information on behalf of our partners".
While it is true that you can expect every reasonable CD player to pick up the same digital stream, CD players can and do in fact sound quite different from one another. Few are "crap" these days (though in the early 90s, the cheaper ones were absolute rubbish!) but there is a difference. If you compare different players anyone can hear some difference, no audiophiles required.
The main reason for this are the D/A converters and some further colouring is added by the rest of the analog stage.
The upshot of this is that on Mac, you get by far the best looking Swing implementation of any Java platform.
It could also well be that SUN decided they didn't want to put the effort in and Apple should be commended for sticking with Java and doing a very good job releasing their VM. (Which I suspect is mostly SUN sources, with Apple AWT/Swing)
Despite 6 not being available, I don't mind. I also get paid to write Java, which means I can't use 6 anyway as most clients aren't ready for it...
Yes, I am sure that my cousin's garage band, even if they were as good Radiohead, would have been able to generate enough attention to their album to get anywhere near this kind of exposure and sales. Add to that the fact that Radiohead already had the funds to actually record this album working with world-class engineers and producers in world-class facilities. Thanks to being a well-know multi-million selling band doing a novelty promotion that every news outlet in the world picked up on, this became a success.
For all their faults, record companies do a lot of marketing, do still take risks and get artists out there. Sure, bands can gain traction and even live comfortably the home brew way, but none would explode onto the international stage like, say, Matchbox 20 did with their first album. Like it or not, that requires big multinational record companies.
One of the main problems with Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 is that in the poorer districts (i.e.: mostly black) there was no investment in enough scanners to have one in the booth. So votes were simply counted on the few machines they had in the back room. Those people thus did not have a chance to check their votes before walking away and incorrect votes were simply cast aside.
And yes, the human eye would easily see what the person intended to vote, which is what they should have done with the "spoilt" votes. But if not doing so would win the party that controls the supreme court the white house, of course this hand count would be halted.
Well, this seem to be a particular problem for mailing lists. Most mailing lists do not allow big attachments, if any. On top of that, how big is the chance that a significant number of your list's recipients are on the same domain? It would have to be an incredible amount before reasonable message sizes would cause any kind of problem. (the average mail size is only 20KB, after all.)
A simple workaround is to simply send the message to every user in a different SMTP session. So no repeated RCPT commands means Hotmail will deliver them all, first time, every time.
In Postfix you can set this using default_destination_recipient_limit. Setting this to 10 would solve the problem as after 10 recipients, Postfix will deliver the DATA part and then start a new session for the remaining recipients. I am sure other MTAs will have a similar setting. (and if they don't they should)
The other solution might have been to use something not as dog slow as PHP. OK, that is trolling, it is a lot better these days, especially with caching compilers and the like.
If you want really fast and scalable, AOLserver still blows PHP away today (like it did at the time you were testing), despite PHP's (and Apache's!) improvements.
AJAX is a terrible solution in my opinion. First of all, it doesn't free you from server-side processing; all you are doing is caching what would otherwise have come from the database. If you do similar caching using something like memcached, or even files on disk and make sure your dynamic pages do nothing more than reading from the cache while assembling the pages, you certainly won't see a 40x speed drop compared to static pages like you saw in your early PHP tests. In fact, I doubt there will be a 2x drop. (again, with the right technology used correctly and optimized)
And of course AJAX sites don't get indexed by search engines, back/forward buttons are hard to make work properly and so is bookmarking. The initial load time of complex Ajax apps, like the one you describe, is usually quite long too.
AJAX is great for proper web-based applications, like a mail client or word processor or a business app. What you describe sounds terrible for your average website.
I like my dynamic pages and with my choice of technology and experience, I have no problem making my complex dynamic pages (without much caching and several DB queries) run at over 100/sec even on my lowly 700MHz Athlon test box. It would take quite a Slashdotting to take the production quad Xeon out...
Though that still doesn't quite explain why I can get a cat 6 patch cable capable of 1GB/sec for one tenth the price of the cheapest HDMI cable of equal length that has to do only up to 1.5GB/sec at the very most!
I have downloaded several 8.5GB 1080p movies and 4.25GB 720p movies in h.264 with AC3 sound and played them back on my 37" 720p LCD via my Macbook Pro's DVI output. They look stunning, way, way beyond DVD quality, not matter what the ACs replying to your post say. And as they were rips off HDDVD and Blu-Ray, studio produced files from the masters would be even better.
I too wish they would have simply upgraded the DVD standard with an h.264 codec without changing the disc an be done with it.
The only thing you probably could not fit on the disc is anything much more than 384kbit AC3 sound. You might get away with DTS, but certainly not Dolby TrueHD.
But it is too late for that, now I just wish Toshiba would sell their north american (HD-A*) players down here in Oz, and do so for a reasonable price. (i.e.: what Americans pay) My DVD-rental-by-post service has loads of HDDVDs already, but with players costing 2.5 times as much for previous generation of tech as they sell in the US, I am not buying a player just yet.
Sounds to me like the issue was that they either do not have enough bandwidth, or the routers could not handle the load.
They used shaping to make the experience of non-gamers better, at the expense of throttling the gamers' traffic and making their experience worse.
One can argue about which is better use of the uni's resources, but you can never claim the issues were caused by "not shaping UDP", there is no requirement to shape anything to make your network work.
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You're either *extremely* fucking stupid or a troll.
Please stick to arguing the case, personal attacks don't make you any more credible.
So since anybody... or more accurately whoever does it more efficiently, can make money off of it it actually is completely unrelated to to communism.
No it isn't, your interpretation is not what I argued. Taking a personal possession or efforts from someone without due compensation and for the free use of everyone is communism. On top of that someone else profiting from your stuff being taken from you without you getting any more compensation is just plain stealing. In my book anyway.
New works are promoted. Reselling the same old crap is discouraged. It follows absolutely from what you're saying. Your conclusions are completely opposed to your own arguments. Sane people change their minds at that point.
How is this absolute? I believe free content that is 5 years old will at best keep new content creation at todays level and at worst lower the amount (and possibly quality) created. This is because I believe fewer people will be buying if they can get other stuff for free. (just like not everyone wants to spend money on the new latest and greatest car and buys second hand) You believe it will encourage more new content. Both yours and mine conclusions are speculative as there is no proof either way, so, again, no need for name calling.
But my main point is: too much government interference. Why should there be a law that prevents you from selling the same old crap? If someone wants to sell the same old crap and another wants to sell better new stuff, the market will take care of it - and it does; while back-catalogs make a lot of money as a whole, that is only because there are so many individual items. Besides, that is not the case I am arguing. What I am arguing is that I do not believe copyright limits should be quite so short. It should be a free world in which we are free to sell our same old crap if people want it.
Now, can we have a meaningful discussion with name calling and insults?
It is a step in the right direction for sure. But what would be even better is a PDF-like version of ODF, one just for publishing. Light-weight with not enough information in it to edit it, like PDF, with a special light-weight viewer. (not that Adobe Reader for windows is light-weight anymore, but luckily Preview on the Mac is)
I really hate getting Word documents from people (like all the MS documentation on their website) that when opened in Word get re-formatted automatically, show spelling mistakes with red underline and ask me if I would like to save the document before closing. (even though I have not changed anything) Somehow I do not think getting an ODF opening in Word or OpenOffice would be much of an improvement on that experience.
That is a different issue entirely. Unless you think the writers are the only creators of TV content, that is.
I am sorry, but your post keeps contradicting itself.
Why would more information be produced if it is free to share? Any information anyone produces is free to share if the producer wants it to be. Yes, you have copyright, but you can license your information any way YOU want. Got something to share, make it public domain or give it a creative commons license. Knowing that their information is going to be copied freely might be inspiring, but it is hardly going to make anyone able to spend days, months, years of full-time work to produce it; they have bills to pay and need a day job. (not to mention a social life outside of the day job)
Also, if I can freely copy, I can freely modify. So why would I not take out the commercials?
Sponsorship won't work either. Imagine if Coke pays for "Shrek" to be made so that they can have Shrek-based competitions and put the image on their packaging. But if Shrek is not copyrighted, what is stopping Pepsi from doing all the same promotions but without actually paying for the movie to be made?
The only thing that makes sense is product placement as it is hard to remove, but god help us if we need to sit through movies with enough products placement in there to finance the movie.
No thanks, I'd rather pay my $10 at the box office.
I do not see why anyone should not be allowed to make a good investment and then live off it for the rest of their lives. Are we really going to force people to produce more?
It would be like doing 10 years of good investing on the stock market, retiring on $10M dollars only to be told 5 years down the track to hand all your capital gains over because you are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of your work; you must keep working.
And why would I pay for something new the artists created when I can have so much stuff that is only 5 years old for free?
I know the corporate IP holders are crying all the way to the bank and would do fine with a little less profit from their back-catalog, but what about the independent artists, are we going to have two rules? It would be nice to have more of our cultural heritage lapse into the public domain, but I feel it is a much more complex issue than most people realize. What you are proposing is pretty much communism and after 5 years anyone can get it for free, but it would also mean anyone can make money on it!
Imaging a 5 year rule and "Top Gun" has become public domain years ago, but most people can not get it easily, so someone WILL make money of selling copies on DVD. Not to mention TV stations broadcasting it for those not able to download or afford the few bucks for the DVD copy and selling commercials. Should the original creator really be shut out completely? And how is the TV station going to get their broadcast quality copy? Someone has the physical medium, most likely the corporate entity that created the film. Is there going to be a law that states the copy MUST be handed over or supplied at cost to the anyone who wants to broadcast it? Do you really think that in that case stations would buy much new material? I think not and it would be counterproductive to your "artists would have much more incentive to produce new works".
What about spending a lot of money scanning and cleaning up the negatives and re-releasing it on Blu-Ray or HDDVD? How is that going to work, a new copyright term for the new format, so that you may freely copy the DVD of Top Gun, but not a copy (converted into whatever format) of the HDDVD?
I do not think it is quite a clear cut as you seem to think it is!
I do not see anything wrong with copyright; if I spend a lot of time and money into creating something that can so easily be copied, there should be some protection against that. I also have no problem with RIAA and MPAA going after those who blatantly share music and movies; just because the industry make enough money to be profitable through their preferred distribution channels does not mean I should just get it for free. Eventually most people will be connected to the internet so fast and sharing will be made so easy that nobody will go through the legitimate means of obtaining the content they want.
That said, I DO have a problem with legislation like the DMCA or any DRM. If I have paid for a perpetual license for personal and household use, including any guests present, for content, I should not be limited to how I should be allowed to store and play this content. Yes, giving a copy of a movie to a friend is bad, but moving it to my media server and letting him watch it in the guest bedroom when he is visiting should be fine.
Unfortunately, temptation is too great and I don't always practice what I preach; I do download, though mostly TV series that I either can not watch at all in my region or that I can't be bothered to find. I don't like downloading someone's recording, I would much rather pay a little money for it and get it straight from the source and reward the creators. Unfortunately, they won't let me. And even when they do (we have some content on iTunes), the pirated versions are of much better quality.
Take for instance "Bender's Big Score"; only R1 NTSC with no R2/4 PAL version even announced. This is a true geek show, how much money do you think they would have made overnight if they made a 4GB 720p version available for a $10 download? As a true fan I had to see this and was left with no choice but to download a pirated copy. I might buy it when it comes out, I might not, but in any case the studio and distributers have proven themselves complete retards not to offer their geek movie to the geeks in the way that geeks want.
To conclude, I feel that just because we can we should not just copy everything left right and center, but the truth is that we do and the industry mostly has themselves to blame by not keeping up with what consumers want. And that makes them retarded because the internet is the easiest form of distribution ever invented and they completely fail to exploit it.
"Surpassing Xing"!? Are you serious? That should be the easiest thing for any encoder to do! Maybe they got better later, but way back in 1999/2000 when everyone was using Xing ("it is so fast!" - yeah, that's likely the problem) it sounded terrible.
I actually ended up buying "Audioactive Production Studio" because the Fraunhofer Pro coded (not to be confused with "MP3 Pro"!) it used sounded so good, also compared to LAME at the time and did so for a long time. When I ended up switching to Mac early 2005, I could not use it anymore. Fortunately, after doing a double blind test with scripts randomly renaming the test files and keeping a record of what was what so I could go back later and see which one I really preferred, I found LAME had become every bit as good. (I could not tell the difference between the two anymore) I have always used 256K as well, so not sure how the two would compare at lower bit rates.
Now I have abandoned MP3 altogether; I have more than enough space for a lossless codec. The one of choice is Apple Lossless, simply because it works easy in iTunes and iPod. As Apple has a good API, it will never be more than a couple hours of work to whip something up that converts it to something else if I want/need to so while it is binary only, there is no real lock in.
For Perl, there is mod_perl, Ruby runs on Fast CGI. Now I am not the biggest Perl fan, but I would still take it over any Fast CGI application any day.
I know there is Mongrel now, but even the creators don't seem to trust it enough to let it run stand-alone and recommend you run it behind an Apache proxy. Not something I can imagine the BBC - or anyone with a large web farm - wanting to live with.
...but Trench Warfare came of age in the American Civil War, particularly a the Siege of Petersburg.
I can't speak for Verizon's CDMA network, but GSM most certainly has a "data" mode that nobody in Europe charges you extra for. When you make a data call, you get the native 9600 bps speed that the voice goes over, error-corrected and everything. It emulates a v.32 modem and you can thus connect to any normal modem, ISP, etc. I have done this many times and it is very stable. Heck, in the early days you used to have GSM FAX machines for cars!
Considering you can't actually attach a modem to a cell phone, I assume what the OP was trying to do was use the phone's data mode over either a USB or serial cable or bluetooth using the appropriate client software. Just that the phone tries to do it most likely means CDMA is capable of this.
That leaves only one option, Verizon really does not want to enable data mode for you and just charge you minutes of airtime without paying the extra $60.
Which is evil.
One of the issues is that in most of the world, mobile number start with a specific prefix (06 in .nl, 04 in .au, 07 in .uk and so on) but in the US they do not. Instead, your number starts with the area code of the area (or close to) where you bought the phone and callers can not tell the difference between a landline (cheap to call) and a mobile (expensive to call) like you can elsewhere.
Taking that into account, it starts to make sense that if you are the one who decided to be on an expensive network, you pay the difference and the person calling you only pays the normal rate to your cell phone's area code.
That they are three simple chords isn't really the issue here; there are tonnes of musicians out there that can play a song the same as "the original".
Much more important here is most likely the work of the recording and mixing engineers (and not to mention the instrument technicians, keyboard programmers, etc.) that managed to make it *sound* the same as the original recording.
That said, I agree it should not make a difference, a cover is a cover and the *sound* of the recording is not copyrighted, only the music and the recording itself.
A couple of years back I read an interview in "Sound on Sound" with a producer of cover music for use in commercials that specialized in copying the sound. Quite often, the advertiser wanted an original song but could not get a license at any price. More than once, when the rights holders heard the re-recording sounding almost indistinguishable from the original they relented and decided they might as well get paid for it and allowed the original to be used.
Interestingly, the same technique applies to "Greatest Hits" albums by label-hopping artists. A prime example is Tina Turner's greatest hits that contain only original recordings from one label and the rest are remakes that sound almost exactly the same as the originals. In studying the liner notes, you can see all the same musicians on all tracks, all recorded in the same place by the same people - different ones from those that did the original recoding.
Unfortunately, with HDMI cables they actually have a point. But that is more because HDMI is so lousy and requires it; cheap cables won't do on longer runs.
The sad thing is the professionals have HD-SDI which does long runs on cheap 75 ohm coax.
It is not about the technology. Sure, what you say is true, anyone can buy that kind of equipment. The question is: can they use it? The most important thing in making your album a success is working with the right people. That starts with the recording engineer and instrument technicians. (yes, setting up a drum kit is hard) Then you need someone to bring out the best you - the musician - have inside you: that's the producer's job. And when it is all recorded, you hand it over to someone for mixing. Look at the liner notes, albums are usually mixed by someone other than who recorded it - they are very different specialties.
All these people cost a lot more money than a good studio does, and they sure as hell have much more of an influence over the final musical and technical qualities of an album than the choice of recording equipment does.
It could also be that ACLU mailed it on behalf of The Nation. That is ACLU got the brochures from The Nation and printed the envelope and/or did the mail merging. That way you get mail from The Nation, but all they know is that ACLU sent it to x-number of people that fit profile Y without ever knowing who you are.
This is quite common practice and often there are two opt-ins (or outs) on applications: "allow us to share your information with our partners" and "allow us to send you information on behalf of our partners".
While it is true that you can expect every reasonable CD player to pick up the same digital stream, CD players can and do in fact sound quite different from one another. Few are "crap" these days (though in the early 90s, the cheaper ones were absolute rubbish!) but there is a difference. If you compare different players anyone can hear some difference, no audiophiles required.
The main reason for this are the D/A converters and some further colouring is added by the rest of the analog stage.
The upshot of this is that on Mac, you get by far the best looking Swing implementation of any Java platform.
It could also well be that SUN decided they didn't want to put the effort in and Apple should be commended for sticking with Java and doing a very good job releasing their VM. (Which I suspect is mostly SUN sources, with Apple AWT/Swing)
Despite 6 not being available, I don't mind. I also get paid to write Java, which means I can't use 6 anyway as most clients aren't ready for it...
Yes, I am sure that my cousin's garage band, even if they were as good Radiohead, would have been able to generate enough attention to their album to get anywhere near this kind of exposure and sales. Add to that the fact that Radiohead already had the funds to actually record this album working with world-class engineers and producers in world-class facilities. Thanks to being a well-know multi-million selling band doing a novelty promotion that every news outlet in the world picked up on, this became a success.
For all their faults, record companies do a lot of marketing, do still take risks and get artists out there. Sure, bands can gain traction and even live comfortably the home brew way, but none would explode onto the international stage like, say, Matchbox 20 did with their first album. Like it or not, that requires big multinational record companies.
One of the main problems with Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 is that in the poorer districts (i.e.: mostly black) there was no investment in enough scanners to have one in the booth. So votes were simply counted on the few machines they had in the back room. Those people thus did not have a chance to check their votes before walking away and incorrect votes were simply cast aside.
And yes, the human eye would easily see what the person intended to vote, which is what they should have done with the "spoilt" votes. But if not doing so would win the party that controls the supreme court the white house, of course this hand count would be halted.
Well, this seem to be a particular problem for mailing lists. Most mailing lists do not allow big attachments, if any. On top of that, how big is the chance that a significant number of your list's recipients are on the same domain? It would have to be an incredible amount before reasonable message sizes would cause any kind of problem. (the average mail size is only 20KB, after all.)
I wouldn't worry about it...
A simple workaround is to simply send the message to every user in a different SMTP session. So no repeated RCPT commands means Hotmail will deliver them all, first time, every time.
In Postfix you can set this using default_destination_recipient_limit. Setting this to 10 would solve the problem as after 10 recipients, Postfix will deliver the DATA part and then start a new session for the remaining recipients. I am sure other MTAs will have a similar setting. (and if they don't they should)
The other solution might have been to use something not as dog slow as PHP. OK, that is trolling, it is a lot better these days, especially with caching compilers and the like.
If you want really fast and scalable, AOLserver still blows PHP away today (like it did at the time you were testing), despite PHP's (and Apache's!) improvements.
AJAX is a terrible solution in my opinion. First of all, it doesn't free you from server-side processing; all you are doing is caching what would otherwise have come from the database. If you do similar caching using something like memcached, or even files on disk and make sure your dynamic pages do nothing more than reading from the cache while assembling the pages, you certainly won't see a 40x speed drop compared to static pages like you saw in your early PHP tests. In fact, I doubt there will be a 2x drop. (again, with the right technology used correctly and optimized)
And of course AJAX sites don't get indexed by search engines, back/forward buttons are hard to make work properly and so is bookmarking. The initial load time of complex Ajax apps, like the one you describe, is usually quite long too.
AJAX is great for proper web-based applications, like a mail client or word processor or a business app. What you describe sounds terrible for your average website.
I like my dynamic pages and with my choice of technology and experience, I have no problem making my complex dynamic pages (without much caching and several DB queries) run at over 100/sec even on my lowly 700MHz Athlon test box. It would take quite a Slashdotting to take the production quad Xeon out...
Though that still doesn't quite explain why I can get a cat 6 patch cable capable of 1GB/sec for one tenth the price of the cheapest HDMI cable of equal length that has to do only up to 1.5GB/sec at the very most!
I have downloaded several 8.5GB 1080p movies and 4.25GB 720p movies in h.264 with AC3 sound and played them back on my 37" 720p LCD via my Macbook Pro's DVI output. They look stunning, way, way beyond DVD quality, not matter what the ACs replying to your post say. And as they were rips off HDDVD and Blu-Ray, studio produced files from the masters would be even better.
I too wish they would have simply upgraded the DVD standard with an h.264 codec without changing the disc an be done with it.
The only thing you probably could not fit on the disc is anything much more than 384kbit AC3 sound. You might get away with DTS, but certainly not Dolby TrueHD.
But it is too late for that, now I just wish Toshiba would sell their north american (HD-A*) players down here in Oz, and do so for a reasonable price. (i.e.: what Americans pay) My DVD-rental-by-post service has loads of HDDVDs already, but with players costing 2.5 times as much for previous generation of tech as they sell in the US, I am not buying a player just yet.
Sounds to me like the issue was that they either do not have enough bandwidth, or the routers could not handle the load.
They used shaping to make the experience of non-gamers better, at the expense of throttling the gamers' traffic and making their experience worse.
One can argue about which is better use of the uni's resources, but you can never claim the issues were caused by "not shaping UDP", there is no requirement to shape anything to make your network work.