A vehicle such as this would be a great addition to any manned venture to another planet or even the moon. I think you all can work out the details of why... eh, this is/. I'll spell it out in a traditional format:
1) Build a light weight, fuel efficient vehicle powered by the most abundant resource in the universe 2) Launch it into space 3) ??? 4) Profit!!!
Wrong. If you want to see where people have switched from IE to another browser, you need to go to where > 80% of the users have had IE. If those people switch you know something momentous is happening. If a few percent of a minority switch on a site that's already diverse - could just be blip.
Is it illegal to perform the acts, record the performing of the acts or distribute the recorded performance of the acts?
I'll assume that performing it is not illegal at least in a private environment. These were not public performances (though if they were what might happen?)
The recording likewise is unlikely to be illegal (excepting recording without permission - inclusive of underage persons - there are no laws covering the recording of anything).
SO it's really down to the distribution of such things. Where does morality, indecency, depravity, etc. come into the equation when we're discussing a law about distribution. We've already skipped past the parts where the content itself is at question - performance and recording are fine, just don't share it? or is it the money changing hands part?
If it is distribution, really, the prosecutor should have to prove that society or some individual was harmed by the distribution, in a concrete example. There needs to be a victim. Prove that the people purchasing the videos are going out and re-enacting the scenes with non-consenting persons or that it is influencing them to harm society in some way.
The length of the sentence underscores these sentiments. A year and 1 day is giving lip service to an overbearing authority figure and yet is still an abuse of the legal system. It's embarrassing really. Hypocrisy at it's finest.
Yes it's a problem that the news agencies are not being compensated adequately for their efforts and can not continue to exist in their current form without a new model or some guarantees for their existing model.
No this is not a legal problem.
The big issue seems to be that 99% of people are happy reading a headline and a quick summary of some news item. Apparently only a small percentage actually click through to the article (as we are well aware on/.)
Seems to me that this is a problem of their own creation. People have been trained on Headline News... soundbites, etc.
Look at 60 Minutes, blogs and/. as an analogue to what the news organizations really need to do. If you want to train people to actually read the article you've got to:
a) provide in-depth reporting that is truly engaging.
b) provide first person opinions that people can relate or oppose and then let them voice their opinion.
c) provide a forum for discussion on the topic.
None of these solutions fix the problem of people being satisfied with Headlines... those need to be loss-leaders. News organizations need to get over themselves as the "primary source" or "we got the scoop" providers. Nobody cares anymore. They'll either hear about it from a friend, the TV news, online or via txt or RSS... at a time and frequency of their choosing. You can't control when people choose to get up-to-date with current events.
What you can do is provide bonus material and added benefit.
News agencies have the resources and experience to provide a wealth of value add to their sites. They just don't want to apparently or they want to do so in a way that can't compete with alternative outlets.
This is not a legal problem, it's a business problem. Compete or get out of the competition.
Just use one of those companies that is always spamming me to do piecemeal typesetting... though i'm betting there's someone in North Korea who could do it for even cheaper.
Actually no... if you put the input inside a div with a class and set the class to display:none then there is no indication that the input element is special. The key thing about a honeypot is that the spam bot can not tell which input is the honeypot... they have to fill in every field. If your form has 5 fields, that means 5 factorial attempts are required to submit and they have no indication of success so they have to do it each time.
The only way to thwart the honeypot is to personally browse the page, view the source and then write a special script to handle that particular website. If you are this special then you'll need something else. For the vast majority of the web however it will work really well.
Make friends with some females at work. Complement their new hair, new shoes, new dress; ask them about their weekend; do not ask them about work or dates or anything too personal... just talk to them.
Fast forward 6 weeks (or maybe longer)... ask the girl you are most comfortable with if she could get a group together to go out to a bar after work (if she asks why you don't do it, just tell her you're shy - girls love shy guys). Now go hang out with the group, don't drink too much and don't talk about geek stuff... surely you have a family story or some past vacation you can talk about.
OK, so now you have a small group of friends you can say hi to and later say "hey wanna go out after work?"
While you're out with these girls and guys from work, look around. See if anyone is noticing you - if so, walk up to them and say "Hi, my name is [your name here]";-p Get the girl (or guy's) name then say "Nice meeting you" and walk back over to your group. Likely they will have seen your move and will congratulate you or give you a hard time.... perfect. The girl or guy you just talked to will see that you have friends and that you are popular with them... at which point if she is interested in more, she will come over to the group and introduce herself to join the group. Hang out with everyone for a while (not just the girl), then get ready to leave.. if the girl is still there, ask her to walk you out - if she starts to leave early - ask to walk her out. Now is the time to get that number.
If the girl excuses herself and goes off to some other group, just make eye contact and smile. She may be back or she may not. No big deal... you're already with a group of friends, so have fun.
Ask your users what they want to be able to do. Make all of those things incredibly easy and confirm that your idea of easy is the same as their idea of easy via user testing. When you've got that down and all your users love you, apply the same amount of effort to everything else.
The second round will actually go much more smoothly because your users won't get hung up on the basics when they are trying to test out your more advanced features (since you already made the basics easy).
I have an AppleTV which means I've had access to HD movies for a year now (well more like 6 months if you're looking at a good selection). I don't rent them... I rent the SD version.
Why? It's a buck cheaper.
Really why? Cause I only have a 27 inch flatscreen that plays 720p at best (and wouldn't benefit from 1080i anyways).
I'm probably the middle of the road in terms of having the capability to benefit from HD movies. My screen is too small, so HD just isn't that compelling. OTOH the screen is the perfect size for good quality SD w/ upscaling.
Even at 35 in. I suspect that HD is just barely going to be a game changer unless you have perfect vision, in which case you probably do see the compression in SD. With upscaling however it's likely less noticeable.
Now if I had a 40 in. screen or larger I would say that HD is a requirement. SD just can't scale up to fill that much space without starting to show compression squares or blurring, upscaling included.
So really the reason I stick with SD movies is that for my setup there is no noticeable benefit. If I get a raise before Christmas I might upgrade my TV to a 40 in. - at which point I will start paying an extra $1 to download HD movies... I still won't be buying a Blueray or HD DVD player.
Flash uses hardware acceleration for H.264 in Full Screen mode. Nobody encodes to FLV anymore for the last 2 years (or since H.264 was openly supported by Flash Player).
Half that because this is the RIAA we're talking about... they don't make 0.99 per song.... they make 0.5 the rest of that revenue goes to the distributor or other middlemen and the RIAA does not represent Apple or Amazon for instance, nor Tower Records or whomever would have sold the music (though I'd stick with online distributors since that is the method being used here).
Throw my vote this way as well... that was my first thought that it was a strategy to make the damages more extreme than necessary, so extreme that the next jury in the appeal process would be suitably offended by it and want to correct the problem.
This will get appealed and the next jury is likely to go really low (say $0.99 per song like iTunes) on the damages, which will be appealed by the RIAA so it goes up the appeal chain again.
Somebody needs to learn how to rent expensive sports cars for the weekend, as in show up at the next college party in a Diablo and you'll get noticed real quick by the 18 year olds... just claim that your insurance is special and only covers weekend driving - or say it's being 'cleaned' or 'in-the-shop' if anyone asks during the week. The advantage to being 25+ is that you CAN rent a car;-p
A friend of mine made a carbon fibre vacuum "pontoon" to experiment with this notion. Essentially it was a balloon with a rigid structure that was neutrally buoyant at above sea level due to displacement of air with vacuum such that is was 'lighter than air'. Fortunately or unfortunately the carbon fiber was heavy enough that it didn't just float away;-p
With a light enough rigid material that could hold a vacuum, you could create something that would be neutrally buoyant at altitude (where you have to displace a) a lot of atmosphere or b) be really really light weight.
Games of pure chance and luck are not illegal... they are called lotteries and sweepstakes. You put the money down and get a chance to win the pot minus the house take. Anything else is a game of skill and is regulated and taxed heavily where it is legal.
In grade school you are not expected to carry books home. They give out Readers or Workbooks which are cheaply printed and have just the take home materials in them. The textbooks stay in the class and get pulled out for reference and in-class use.
There is no good case for Textbooks at the grade school level.
California needs to negotiate a periodic license fee for a variety of material with optional updates. Purchase interactive white-boards which are simply big LCD displays with fairly cheap touch screen capability (doesn't need to be very accurate). Display lessons and material on these... with handouts as needed for supplementation and home study.
Grade school kids don't need textbooks at all. They need good teachers who can engage them in the lessons.
Junior High/Middle schools also do not need Textbooks but do need some form of personal access. Here they should have built-in units in the desks. Scratch resistant good touchscreens and a durable keyboard pad with a very basic OS that can handle accessing media, local network resources and a word processor nothing more. There is no access to the OS itself except the login prompt.
They don't need full access to the internet (or filtered access). Set up a proxy server that pulls in copies of various websites (wikipedia, discovery channel, etc) on a weekly basis. The teacher gets the same whiteboard but with full access to the internet to pull up current events or additional materials.
Again, handouts go home. These can be bulk printed to reduce costs each semester with a local printer. Each child still has the same access to learning materials as they've always had based on their families priorities. They can still stay after school to use the media desks, the library (with additional media desks) or ask the teacher questions.
High School takes Junior High and simply swaps out the media and provides more applications. High School doesn't need anything additional - never has. There are still computer labs for doing things on a computer - these are not computers, they are media desks.
Savings would include the Textbooks, all test taking materials and any costs related to Scantron type machines, any multi-media devices, a whole host of games and other learning materials that could be applications rather than physical items.
Outdated textbooks are horrible. It's not the facts that are left behind it's the relevance to the current student. A math problem created in the 90s about some topic relevant to a student then will leave a student in the year 2020 wondering how useful math is really...
Question: "There are two cars traveling the same distance of 100 miles, one car gets 10 MPG the other gets 20 MPG. How many gallons of gas will each car need to arrive at their destination?"
Answer: "My car is electric and we just plug it in at night. It goes 300 miles on a charge."
Slashdot Mirror
If the fuel in the Hindenburg had been uncontained gasoline
There wouldn't have been any problems, it never would have left the ground ;-p
shift over to clean power for plants
What? I always thoughts plants used the cleanest power available... lied to again, when will the deception end... first Santa Claus... now this...
A vehicle such as this would be a great addition to any manned venture to another planet or even the moon. I think you all can work out the details of why... eh, this is /. I'll spell it out in a traditional format:
1) Build a light weight, fuel efficient vehicle powered by the most abundant resource in the universe
2) Launch it into space
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
Wrong. If you want to see where people have switched from IE to another browser, you need to go to where > 80% of the users have had IE. If those people switch you know something momentous is happening. If a few percent of a minority switch on a site that's already diverse - could just be blip.
Is it illegal to perform the acts, record the performing of the acts or distribute the recorded performance of the acts?
I'll assume that performing it is not illegal at least in a private environment. These were not public performances (though if they were what might happen?)
The recording likewise is unlikely to be illegal (excepting recording without permission - inclusive of underage persons - there are no laws covering the recording of anything).
SO it's really down to the distribution of such things. Where does morality, indecency, depravity, etc. come into the equation when we're discussing a law about distribution. We've already skipped past the parts where the content itself is at question - performance and recording are fine, just don't share it? or is it the money changing hands part?
If it is distribution, really, the prosecutor should have to prove that society or some individual was harmed by the distribution, in a concrete example. There needs to be a victim. Prove that the people purchasing the videos are going out and re-enacting the scenes with non-consenting persons or that it is influencing them to harm society in some way.
The length of the sentence underscores these sentiments. A year and 1 day is giving lip service to an overbearing authority figure and yet is still an abuse of the legal system. It's embarrassing really. Hypocrisy at it's finest.
Yes it's a problem that the news agencies are not being compensated adequately for their efforts and can not continue to exist in their current form without a new model or some guarantees for their existing model.
No this is not a legal problem.
The big issue seems to be that 99% of people are happy reading a headline and a quick summary of some news item. Apparently only a small percentage actually click through to the article (as we are well aware on /.)
Seems to me that this is a problem of their own creation. People have been trained on Headline News... soundbites, etc.
Look at 60 Minutes, blogs and /. as an analogue to what the news organizations really need to do. If you want to train people to actually read the article you've got to:
a) provide in-depth reporting that is truly engaging.
b) provide first person opinions that people can relate or oppose and then let them voice their opinion.
c) provide a forum for discussion on the topic.
None of these solutions fix the problem of people being satisfied with Headlines... those need to be loss-leaders. News organizations need to get over themselves as the "primary source" or "we got the scoop" providers. Nobody cares anymore. They'll either hear about it from a friend, the TV news, online or via txt or RSS... at a time and frequency of their choosing. You can't control when people choose to get up-to-date with current events.
What you can do is provide bonus material and added benefit.
News agencies have the resources and experience to provide a wealth of value add to their sites. They just don't want to apparently or they want to do so in a way that can't compete with alternative outlets.
This is not a legal problem, it's a business problem. Compete or get out of the competition.
That's because it's now Google Voice - they removed everyone form the Grand Central list when the bought it, just didn't tell you ;-p
Just use one of those companies that is always spamming me to do piecemeal typesetting... though i'm betting there's someone in North Korea who could do it for even cheaper.
Actually no... if you put the input inside a div with a class and set the class to display:none then there is no indication that the input element is special. The key thing about a honeypot is that the spam bot can not tell which input is the honeypot... they have to fill in every field. If your form has 5 fields, that means 5 factorial attempts are required to submit and they have no indication of success so they have to do it each time.
The only way to thwart the honeypot is to personally browse the page, view the source and then write a special script to handle that particular website. If you are this special then you'll need something else. For the vast majority of the web however it will work really well.
Frames are the devils hand-maiden... never ever frames.
Bad for usability, bad for programmatic access, bad for seo, bad for everything...
Yes but smart webmasters block all requests from libwww-perl bots and send it a 503 response... so they never get a chance to de-munge...
Make friends with some females at work. Complement their new hair, new shoes, new dress; ask them about their weekend; do not ask them about work or dates or anything too personal... just talk to them.
Fast forward 6 weeks (or maybe longer)... ask the girl you are most comfortable with if she could get a group together to go out to a bar after work (if she asks why you don't do it, just tell her you're shy - girls love shy guys). Now go hang out with the group, don't drink too much and don't talk about geek stuff... surely you have a family story or some past vacation you can talk about.
OK, so now you have a small group of friends you can say hi to and later say "hey wanna go out after work?"
While you're out with these girls and guys from work, look around. See if anyone is noticing you - if so, walk up to them and say "Hi, my name is [your name here]" ;-p Get the girl (or guy's) name then say "Nice meeting you" and walk back over to your group. Likely they will have seen your move and will congratulate you or give you a hard time.... perfect. The girl or guy you just talked to will see that you have friends and that you are popular with them... at which point if she is interested in more, she will come over to the group and introduce herself to join the group. Hang out with everyone for a while (not just the girl), then get ready to leave.. if the girl is still there, ask her to walk you out - if she starts to leave early - ask to walk her out. Now is the time to get that number.
If the girl excuses herself and goes off to some other group, just make eye contact and smile. She may be back or she may not. No big deal... you're already with a group of friends, so have fun.
Ask your users what they want to be able to do. Make all of those things incredibly easy and confirm that your idea of easy is the same as their idea of easy via user testing. When you've got that down and all your users love you, apply the same amount of effort to everything else.
The second round will actually go much more smoothly because your users won't get hung up on the basics when they are trying to test out your more advanced features (since you already made the basics easy).
OK I'll bite... let's see on a Mac with a wireless connection it is like this:
System Preferences => Network => Advanced =>TCP/IP => Dropdown Menu, choose manual, the settings below will become editable.
WIth an ethernet connection it's a few steps less:
System Preferences => Network => Dropdown Menu, choose manual, the settings below will become editable.
I have an AppleTV which means I've had access to HD movies for a year now (well more like 6 months if you're looking at a good selection). I don't rent them... I rent the SD version.
Why? It's a buck cheaper.
Really why? Cause I only have a 27 inch flatscreen that plays 720p at best (and wouldn't benefit from 1080i anyways).
I'm probably the middle of the road in terms of having the capability to benefit from HD movies. My screen is too small, so HD just isn't that compelling. OTOH the screen is the perfect size for good quality SD w/ upscaling.
Even at 35 in. I suspect that HD is just barely going to be a game changer unless you have perfect vision, in which case you probably do see the compression in SD. With upscaling however it's likely less noticeable.
Now if I had a 40 in. screen or larger I would say that HD is a requirement. SD just can't scale up to fill that much space without starting to show compression squares or blurring, upscaling included.
So really the reason I stick with SD movies is that for my setup there is no noticeable benefit. If I get a raise before Christmas I might upgrade my TV to a 40 in. - at which point I will start paying an extra $1 to download HD movies... I still won't be buying a Blueray or HD DVD player.
Flash uses hardware acceleration for H.264 in Full Screen mode. Nobody encodes to FLV anymore for the last 2 years (or since H.264 was openly supported by Flash Player).
just fyi
Half that because this is the RIAA we're talking about... they don't make 0.99 per song.... they make 0.5 the rest of that revenue goes to the distributor or other middlemen and the RIAA does not represent Apple or Amazon for instance, nor Tower Records or whomever would have sold the music (though I'd stick with online distributors since that is the method being used here).
So the new number is $240 (0.5*24*2*10)
Throw my vote this way as well... that was my first thought that it was a strategy to make the damages more extreme than necessary, so extreme that the next jury in the appeal process would be suitably offended by it and want to correct the problem.
This will get appealed and the next jury is likely to go really low (say $0.99 per song like iTunes) on the damages, which will be appealed by the RIAA so it goes up the appeal chain again.
Somebody needs to learn how to rent expensive sports cars for the weekend, as in show up at the next college party in a Diablo and you'll get noticed real quick by the 18 year olds... just claim that your insurance is special and only covers weekend driving - or say it's being 'cleaned' or 'in-the-shop' if anyone asks during the week. The advantage to being 25+ is that you CAN rent a car ;-p
A friend of mine made a carbon fibre vacuum "pontoon" to experiment with this notion. Essentially it was a balloon with a rigid structure that was neutrally buoyant at above sea level due to displacement of air with vacuum such that is was 'lighter than air'. Fortunately or unfortunately the carbon fiber was heavy enough that it didn't just float away ;-p
With a light enough rigid material that could hold a vacuum, you could create something that would be neutrally buoyant at altitude (where you have to displace a) a lot of atmosphere or b) be really really light weight.
Just something to get you thinking.
Games of pure chance and luck are not illegal... they are called lotteries and sweepstakes. You put the money down and get a chance to win the pot minus the house take. Anything else is a game of skill and is regulated and taxed heavily where it is legal.
In grade school you are not expected to carry books home. They give out Readers or Workbooks which are cheaply printed and have just the take home materials in them. The textbooks stay in the class and get pulled out for reference and in-class use.
There is no good case for Textbooks at the grade school level.
California needs to negotiate a periodic license fee for a variety of material with optional updates. Purchase interactive white-boards which are simply big LCD displays with fairly cheap touch screen capability (doesn't need to be very accurate). Display lessons and material on these... with handouts as needed for supplementation and home study.
Grade school kids don't need textbooks at all. They need good teachers who can engage them in the lessons.
Junior High/Middle schools also do not need Textbooks but do need some form of personal access. Here they should have built-in units in the desks. Scratch resistant good touchscreens and a durable keyboard pad with a very basic OS that can handle accessing media, local network resources and a word processor nothing more. There is no access to the OS itself except the login prompt.
They don't need full access to the internet (or filtered access). Set up a proxy server that pulls in copies of various websites (wikipedia, discovery channel, etc) on a weekly basis. The teacher gets the same whiteboard but with full access to the internet to pull up current events or additional materials.
Again, handouts go home. These can be bulk printed to reduce costs each semester with a local printer. Each child still has the same access to learning materials as they've always had based on their families priorities. They can still stay after school to use the media desks, the library (with additional media desks) or ask the teacher questions.
High School takes Junior High and simply swaps out the media and provides more applications. High School doesn't need anything additional - never has. There are still computer labs for doing things on a computer - these are not computers, they are media desks.
Savings would include the Textbooks, all test taking materials and any costs related to Scantron type machines, any multi-media devices, a whole host of games and other learning materials that could be applications rather than physical items.
Outdated textbooks are horrible. It's not the facts that are left behind it's the relevance to the current student. A math problem created in the 90s about some topic relevant to a student then will leave a student in the year 2020 wondering how useful math is really...
Question:
"There are two cars traveling the same distance of 100 miles, one car gets 10 MPG the other gets 20 MPG. How many gallons of gas will each car need to arrive at their destination?"
Answer:
"My car is electric and we just plug it in at night. It goes 300 miles on a charge."
Uh, there is no provision for States to go in to Bankruptcy. AFAIK they can not do so and will simply have to write IOUs to various debt holders.
So no, they don't get a judge or the power to change laws.
Of course there were no computer errors, that would leave companies open to litigation... and that's just *not possible*.