in fact, there's even a clause in the DirectTV pay-per-view contract that says that they can (and will) exercise the right to censor by blackout sections of a pay-per-view product that violate your local indeceny laws.
that's not true at all. it may be "cable", but it is still subject to local indecency laws enforced by the FCC or else no channel would bother to censor because the know letting it all out would be the way to get more ratings.
similarly, there are restrictions, enforced also by local FCC agencies, on the content even for pay channels -- porn vids are modified for television compared to their video-tape releases. This includes DirectTV and Dish; they're under the same regs and cable operators.
so far, the fact that the FCC has opted to stay out of satellite radio is one of the few smart things they've done, but once Stern moves in to Sirius and GW Bush appoints somebody more annoying than M. Powell to be the FCC boss (he will i don't doubt), that decision won't last.
see my comment here. i wasn't talking about whether or not one could play protected/licensed WMA, but specifically on microsoft releasing a legal player (or at least codec) as per their announcement 14 months ago.
but for my self, i've had hassles with every linux player ever for playing video, from the mid-90s onwards. none have been reliable for me, and i get tired of being told "just upgrade your OS again to get a better player" because the player upgrade was built with a newer GTK or what the hell ever. in the end, aside from real, i've had bad luck with any video player i've tried, including mplayer.
I was referring specifically to legal (in america), and SUPPORT, not just "someone reverse-engineered it". as in, having a legal license to use software that plays those files. right now, there is no legal license recognized by American law (the foreign downloads don't count).
i was also specifically referring to pointing out how microsoft tapped into the vaporware technique (again). by promising WMA (and by extension, DRM) support for linux, they put apple on the punch to linux-ify quicktime and protected aac or lose out on a microsoft market, AND they put real on the spot because the announcement implied that legal DRM would come to linux through microsoft -- moving more media suppliers making their format choice to go to microsoft instead of real for their distribution.
it was, and remains until i see otherwise, a total bluff call on their part -- a 1-2 punch to hurt both Apple and Real, and never to "help linux" in any way. if they *really* wanted to help linux, the player announced 14 months ago would have been released by now.
at least Real works on linux (most of the time). compare that to Windows Media, iTunes protected AAC, Quicktime, liquid audio, or a host of other formats for which there is no (and will never be any) official linux support.
i find it interesting that its been over 1 year since the annoucement that Microsoft would support WMA on Linux, and nothing has come of it since. To quote Shakespeare, "and lastly, they are lying knaves.".
at any rate, its no longer a blocked word. When Carlin was on "Inside the Actor's Studio", he read off the list, and tits was one of several (including piss and cocksucker) that was never beeped out.
of course it was excactly the same "using the words to talk about censorship" discussion that had led to the California lawsuit that upheld the words as offensive in the first place.
nope, you can't even use the words to talk about the words and misapplied censorship.
"We believe there is a place for censorship in this country, and we only wish we could tell you were it is." -- Pat Paulson.
...of a web designer who can't even keep their own home page from being full of easily fixed 404 errors.
(hint: they're all supposed to be in a photo/ subdirectory but someone forgot to do that update when the files got moved...which wouldn't have happened anyways if they'd used relative hrefs in the first place...)
kids have never known what freedom (of the press) really is.
Schools, in order to deal with lawsuits about how such-n-such kid was "exposed" to a lifestyle or something or other they "shouldn't" have been, have been an absolute hammer of conformity.
School uniforms, dress codes, censorship of t-shirts and buttons, regulations on number of ear piercings, restrictions on where you can and can't spend your lunch hour, restrictions on the books that can be in the library, restrictions on what books from home you can read, censorship of school newspapers and newsletters, random locker inspections, "zero-tolerance" for drugs leading to expulsions for possession of Advil or sudafed or even sharing a cough drop, and of course the prison-level security systems of metal detectors and barbed wire fences...
they've never known what a free society is. A high school history or government class can talk a good story about it, but the truth is they've never seen it, they'll never really know what it means.
In fact, even the examples of Watergate or Iran-Contra have been so perverted and distorted by the right-wing media that they're useless. The worst part is that the right-wingers are using the same so-called "Freedom" of the press and speech to condemn that very freedom.
(Plus, most kids don't get exposed to constitutional instruction 'til their 11th and 12th grade years anyways, so asking 10th graders what they think is pointless, because they haven't even been taught what it means).
As long as kids are never shown what freedom truly is, they'll never learn to respect it. It'll just become a buzzword for saying, "well, I can vote...whatever THAT means".
actually, i'm thinking the other way around -- is it OpenOffice's (or StarOffice's or WorkPerfect's) job to duplicate every single feature in MS Office?
If the XML being imported has a section that is based on a feature that OpenOffice has not implemented, should OpenOffice therefore be modified to duplicate MS Office on that one feature when no OpenOfficer user has really requested it so far or it requires a major refactoring effort to fit it in?
I don't think so. The 80-20 rule still applies, and anybody using an MS Office feature that relatively obscure really has no interest in exchanging their stuff with an OpenOffice user. The two aren't meant to be 100% clones of each other; no two products should.
In fact, if OpenOffice WAS a 100% feature-compatible version of Word, I likely wouldn't use it because Word has way too much crap I don't need, don't want, and couldn't figure out how to use even if i did.
yeah -- like the NAACP and CBS canning Jimmy the Greek over his comments about the likelyhood that American slaveowners were effectively "breeding" stronger black people through artificial selection.
absolutely true (hell, even Whoopi Goldberg agreed on Comic Relief a few months later), but you simply can't say shit like that in these days of "everybody must be equal, *especially* those who are more equal than others".
the current common technique (as described by Will Ackerman in his Returning album's liner notes) is to do everything *mostly* digital, but pass the track through an analog head-to-head to "brighten" the sound (analog being the only way to do that right) before going to mix-down (back to all-digital, to minimize hiss introduced by that analog pass-thru).
in this, its all still DDD, though closer to DaDD.
however, Ackerman is only dealing with one (in one case, two) guitars in that recording, not trying to mix-down an entire ensemble or orchestra. i'm not sure how well that technique scales and still holds onto the bright sound tonality that an analog 2inch gives.
or was it just the fact that all the email addresses on it are so new that they hadn't gotten propagated around on spam-lists.
or is it that now that there are so many email addresses @ gmail, any random 6-8 character string @ gmail.com is likely to match up with *somebody*, so just flooding the system will get some through.
gmail, like hotmail, will become a victim of its own success very quickly.
by settling out of court, there are no decisions and no "findings of fact", thus, it sets no precident that can be used to justify furthur lawsuits and/or corrections in their systems.
i was referring to time efficiency. letting the stuff decay naturally in the ground will take thousands of years. letting the sun burn it up will take thousands of minutes.
and the problem with looking at the financial cost of shoving it in the sun compared to the cost of burying it is that we can't agree on the cost of burying it (hence the debate on where to bury it in the first place). it may seem "cheap" but only in the short term, because we simply can't know all of the environmental impacts.
send the crap into the sun. its the most efficient disposal system we have, and for heaven's sake, its only 93 million miles away.
(yes, i know the main concern out there is that suppose the rocket blows up before it leaves earth during launch? that's one giant dirty bomb dumping its load right into the atlantic...).
And hell, it was the sun's ancestor star that made all that junk in the first place, and deep in the core, our own sun is making more of the junk itself, so it won't notice.
so? i just means removing email and chat and ...
on
Netscape Reborn?
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· Score: 1
'cause netscape 7.2 is a very stable release based on mozilla 1.7 so it has most of the "standards" feature set of firefox only with specific user-interface controls to match old-school netscape. all it needs is the better popup controls, find bar, and simpler extension management tools, and its got what makes firefox useful.
marxian socialism/communism is something that simply doesn't work (humanity's inner nature of greed and that sense of imbalance will always prevent it from reaching the idealized state he proposed.
however, his cautions on unfettered capitalism still have considerable merit. however, vigilence and a little regulation here and there to hold the corporations from getting too much power are usually enough.
The unions more represented de Tocqueville's "Enlightened Self-Interest" than anything overtly leftist. compared to the rest of the world, aside from New Harmony, Indiana (an utter failure, b.t.w.), America has always been a country full of moderates.
That things today have reached the point where corporations have too much influence on the government that's supposed to be keeping an eye on them? well, that's a flaw in the system that again, "Enlightened Self-Interest" is meant to correct. However, other aspects of the system have weakened the ability for grass-roots organizations to build up much power -- the unions have been powerless outside of the service industry (airlines, hotels) for over a decade because ISO-9000 justifies the claim that any factory can be picked up and moved out of the country overnight with no loss (and in fact, substantial gain) for the company. (Hell, the only reason Japanese and European cars are assembled in America is because the shipping costs outweigh the price of the people on the line, thanks to the high price of oil).
So the electorate that wishes to weaken corporate influence is going to have to put their own candidates forward ahead of the corporate-sponsored hacks we get today.
The trouble is that the time for that to happen is in the primaries, not in the main election, and not nearly enough people vote in the primaries to make a difference against the power-to-the-party hard-liners. A recent study showed that half as many people voted in the 2002 congressional primaries compared to 1998.
its both good for web designers to know what their audience browser percentages are...
Its also good in that it drives the rest of the commercial market to consider that IE is not the only browser out there, and that its in THEIR best interests not to support IE-only extensions and features, but to work to the Standards (Html4, DOM 2, CSS 2/3).
They don't program to browsers that don't have a decent market share, just like they don't program to O/S's that don't have a decent market share.
not always. there are still limits, such as certain rules about what can and can't be shown in pornography as pay-per-view. yes, its "pay" and they show they *want* to view it, but it still ends up being an edited version compared to the actual for-home-viewing video tape / dvd.
now, i admit, this particular example not as applicable to satellite radio, since they can only describe things, not view them. but it does show that just because something is restricted to those willing to pay doesn't mean that local obscenity rulings can't be applied.
of course, when the rulings gave priority to the "local" rulings over any national level, they weren't expecting a single service to be available over the entire world at once. things are different now and the law hasn't kept up with peoples' right to choice.
because satellite-radio is digital technology, as well as paid-subscription based, and *currently* not regulated by the FCC. However, Stern's presence may lead the FCC into trying to assert some jurisdiction into the genre, especially when you combine that with the fact that XM Radio is looking at internet-broadcasting their signal, meaning its back to being land-based (and also in a realm that the FCC would love to get their regulatory hands on).
in short, this attracts attention since stern's got such a rep for bucking FCC regulations on free speech, and his presense in another realm will bring fcc (and other local obscenity-minded bastards) attention to the world of sat-radio.
preaching to the choir with me on the first few paragraphs (i started out as a physics major, and still regularly read sagan and feynman, among others.
As for the last, I understand the need for clear definitions, but I also understand the need to use semi-emotional connotative words, particularly when dealing with those who already do so. "Facts" only have a limited validity where strong emotion-grabbing words are used.
The current administration is best described as Reactionary, but nobody seems to use that term in common discussions or in the media anymore to the point that unlike "Liberal" or "Radical", its a word that lost meaning from disuse, as opposed to innappropriate overuse.
So no, the current administration isn't Radical (that's a term strictly used on the left side), its Reactionary. Their goal is a systematic restoration to the way things were (specifically, the 1870s when the Republican party had uncontested power, public morality was at a high point, corporations were unrestricted by most labor and anti-trust laws...and oddly enough government leaders were among the most corrupt in our history).
Radical to me means going to a state that has never existed before. In America, a Radical seeks to rewrite or disband entirely the existing constitution and/or economic structure. Reactionary just wants to go back to their interpretation of the constitution as being as it was in the past.
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in fact, there's even a clause in the DirectTV pay-per-view contract that says that they can (and will) exercise the right to censor by blackout sections of a pay-per-view product that violate your local indeceny laws.
that's not true at all. it may be "cable", but it is still subject to local indecency laws enforced by the FCC or else no channel would bother to censor because the know letting it all out would be the way to get more ratings.
similarly, there are restrictions, enforced also by local FCC agencies, on the content even for pay channels -- porn vids are modified for television compared to their video-tape releases. This includes DirectTV and Dish; they're under the same regs and cable operators.
so far, the fact that the FCC has opted to stay out of satellite radio is one of the few smart things they've done, but once Stern moves in to Sirius and GW Bush appoints somebody more annoying than M. Powell to be the FCC boss (he will i don't doubt), that decision won't last.
bastards.
see my comment here. i wasn't talking about whether or not one could play protected/licensed WMA, but specifically on microsoft releasing a legal player (or at least codec) as per their announcement 14 months ago.
but for my self, i've had hassles with every linux player ever for playing video, from the mid-90s onwards. none have been reliable for me, and i get tired of being told "just upgrade your OS again to get a better player" because the player upgrade was built with a newer GTK or what the hell ever. in the end, aside from real, i've had bad luck with any video player i've tried, including mplayer.
I was referring specifically to legal (in america), and SUPPORT, not just "someone reverse-engineered it". as in, having a legal license to use software that plays those files. right now, there is no legal license recognized by American law (the foreign downloads don't count).
i was also specifically referring to pointing out how microsoft tapped into the vaporware technique (again). by promising WMA (and by extension, DRM) support for linux, they put apple on the punch to linux-ify quicktime and protected aac or lose out on a microsoft market, AND they put real on the spot because the announcement implied that legal DRM would come to linux through microsoft -- moving more media suppliers making their format choice to go to microsoft instead of real for their distribution.
it was, and remains until i see otherwise, a total bluff call on their part -- a 1-2 punch to hurt both Apple and Real, and never to "help linux" in any way. if they *really* wanted to help linux, the player announced 14 months ago would have been released by now.
at least Real works on linux (most of the time). compare that to Windows Media, iTunes protected AAC, Quicktime, liquid audio, or a host of other formats for which there is no (and will never be any) official linux support.
i find it interesting that its been over 1 year since the annoucement that Microsoft would support WMA on Linux, and nothing has come of it since. To quote Shakespeare, "and lastly, they are lying knaves.".
try new Nabisco Tits!
at any rate, its no longer a blocked word. When Carlin was on "Inside the Actor's Studio", he read off the list, and tits was one of several (including piss and cocksucker) that was never beeped out.
of course it was excactly the same "using the words to talk about censorship" discussion that had led to the California lawsuit that upheld the words as offensive in the first place.
nope, you can't even use the words to talk about the words and misapplied censorship.
"We believe there is a place for censorship in this country, and we only wish we could tell you were it is." -- Pat Paulson.
...of a web designer who can't even keep their own home page from being full of easily fixed 404 errors.
(hint: they're all supposed to be in a photo/ subdirectory but someone forgot to do that update when the files got moved...which wouldn't have happened anyways if they'd used relative hrefs in the first place...)
kids have never known what freedom (of the press) really is.
Schools, in order to deal with lawsuits about how such-n-such kid was "exposed" to a lifestyle or something or other they "shouldn't" have been, have been an absolute hammer of conformity.
School uniforms, dress codes, censorship of t-shirts and buttons, regulations on number of ear piercings, restrictions on where you can and can't spend your lunch hour, restrictions on the books that can be in the library, restrictions on what books from home you can read, censorship of school newspapers and newsletters, random locker inspections, "zero-tolerance" for drugs leading to expulsions for possession of Advil or sudafed or even sharing a cough drop, and of course the prison-level security systems of metal detectors and barbed wire fences...
they've never known what a free society is. A high school history or government class can talk a good story about it, but the truth is they've never seen it, they'll never really know what it means.
In fact, even the examples of Watergate or Iran-Contra have been so perverted and distorted by the right-wing media that they're useless. The worst part is that the right-wingers are using the same so-called "Freedom" of the press and speech to condemn that very freedom.
(Plus, most kids don't get exposed to constitutional instruction 'til their 11th and 12th grade years anyways, so asking 10th graders what they think is pointless, because they haven't even been taught what it means).
As long as kids are never shown what freedom truly is, they'll never learn to respect it. It'll just become a buzzword for saying, "well, I can vote...whatever THAT means".
actually, i'm thinking the other way around -- is it OpenOffice's (or StarOffice's or WorkPerfect's) job to duplicate every single feature in MS Office?
If the XML being imported has a section that is based on a feature that OpenOffice has not implemented, should OpenOffice therefore be modified to duplicate MS Office on that one feature when no OpenOfficer user has really requested it so far or it requires a major refactoring effort to fit it in?
I don't think so. The 80-20 rule still applies, and anybody using an MS Office feature that relatively obscure really has no interest in exchanging their stuff with an OpenOffice user. The two aren't meant to be 100% clones of each other; no two products should.
In fact, if OpenOffice WAS a 100% feature-compatible version of Word, I likely wouldn't use it because Word has way too much crap I don't need, don't want, and couldn't figure out how to use even if i did.
so talk to the Mono people and tell them to get started. they've been working to much on C#.MONO to do a VB.MONO.
personally, i wouldn't touch it. i wouldn't sneeze on it, as i respect my germs more than that.
yeah -- like the NAACP and CBS canning Jimmy the Greek over his comments about the likelyhood that American slaveowners were effectively "breeding" stronger black people through artificial selection.
absolutely true (hell, even Whoopi Goldberg agreed on Comic Relief a few months later), but you simply can't say shit like that in these days of "everybody must be equal, *especially* those who are more equal than others".
the current common technique (as described by Will Ackerman in his Returning album's liner notes) is to do everything *mostly* digital, but pass the track through an analog head-to-head to "brighten" the sound (analog being the only way to do that right) before going to mix-down (back to all-digital, to minimize hiss introduced by that analog pass-thru).
in this, its all still DDD, though closer to DaDD.
however, Ackerman is only dealing with one (in one case, two) guitars in that recording, not trying to mix-down an entire ensemble or orchestra. i'm not sure how well that technique scales and still holds onto the bright sound tonality that an analog 2inch gives.
or was it just the fact that all the email addresses on it are so new that they hadn't gotten propagated around on spam-lists.
or is it that now that there are so many email addresses @ gmail, any random 6-8 character string @ gmail.com is likely to match up with *somebody*, so just flooding the system will get some through.
gmail, like hotmail, will become a victim of its own success very quickly.
by settling out of court, there are no decisions and no "findings of fact", thus, it sets no precident that can be used to justify furthur lawsuits and/or corrections in their systems.
its just money, and that's the easy part.
bleh.
uh, a rocket burns hydrogen and oxygen, provided its not using solid fuel.
the number one polutant of that combination is water.
i think we'll live.
the rest of it is the rocket boosters themselves, some of which will burn up, others can be dragged along to the sun for the ride.
i wasn't referring to cost-efficiency.
i was referring to time efficiency. letting the stuff decay naturally in the ground will take thousands of years. letting the sun burn it up will take thousands of minutes.
and the problem with looking at the financial cost of shoving it in the sun compared to the cost of burying it is that we can't agree on the cost of burying it (hence the debate on where to bury it in the first place). it may seem "cheap" but only in the short term, because we simply can't know all of the environmental impacts.
send the crap into the sun. its the most efficient disposal system we have, and for heaven's sake, its only 93 million miles away.
(yes, i know the main concern out there is that suppose the rocket blows up before it leaves earth during launch? that's one giant dirty bomb dumping its load right into the atlantic...).
And hell, it was the sun's ancestor star that made all that junk in the first place, and deep in the core, our own sun is making more of the junk itself, so it won't notice.
'cause netscape 7.2 is a very stable release based on mozilla 1.7 so it has most of the "standards" feature set of firefox only with specific user-interface controls to match old-school netscape. all it needs is the better popup controls, find bar, and simpler extension management tools, and its got what makes firefox useful.
both parties are mercantilists. the only difference is whether or not you have any feelings for the corporations they shill for.
marxian socialism/communism is something that simply doesn't work (humanity's inner nature of greed and that sense of imbalance will always prevent it from reaching the idealized state he proposed.
however, his cautions on unfettered capitalism still have considerable merit. however, vigilence and a little regulation here and there to hold the corporations from getting too much power are usually enough.
The unions more represented de Tocqueville's "Enlightened Self-Interest" than anything overtly leftist. compared to the rest of the world, aside from New Harmony, Indiana (an utter failure, b.t.w.), America has always been a country full of moderates.
That things today have reached the point where corporations have too much influence on the government that's supposed to be keeping an eye on them? well, that's a flaw in the system that again, "Enlightened Self-Interest" is meant to correct. However, other aspects of the system have weakened the ability for grass-roots organizations to build up much power -- the unions have been powerless outside of the service industry (airlines, hotels) for over a decade because ISO-9000 justifies the claim that any factory can be picked up and moved out of the country overnight with no loss (and in fact, substantial gain) for the company. (Hell, the only reason Japanese and European cars are assembled in America is because the shipping costs outweigh the price of the people on the line, thanks to the high price of oil).
So the electorate that wishes to weaken corporate influence is going to have to put their own candidates forward ahead of the corporate-sponsored hacks we get today.
The trouble is that the time for that to happen is in the primaries, not in the main election, and not nearly enough people vote in the primaries to make a difference against the power-to-the-party hard-liners. A recent study showed that half as many people voted in the 2002 congressional primaries compared to 1998.
its both good for web designers to know what their audience browser percentages are...
Its also good in that it drives the rest of the commercial market to consider that IE is not the only browser out there, and that its in THEIR best interests not to support IE-only extensions and features, but to work to the Standards (Html4, DOM 2, CSS 2/3).
They don't program to browsers that don't have a decent market share, just like they don't program to O/S's that don't have a decent market share.
not always. there are still limits, such as certain rules about what can and can't be shown in pornography as pay-per-view. yes, its "pay" and they show they *want* to view it, but it still ends up being an edited version compared to the actual for-home-viewing video tape / dvd.
now, i admit, this particular example not as applicable to satellite radio, since they can only describe things, not view them. but it does show that just because something is restricted to those willing to pay doesn't mean that local obscenity rulings can't be applied.
of course, when the rulings gave priority to the "local" rulings over any national level, they weren't expecting a single service to be available over the entire world at once. things are different now and the law hasn't kept up with peoples' right to choice.
because satellite-radio is digital technology, as well as paid-subscription based, and *currently* not regulated by the FCC. However, Stern's presence may lead the FCC into trying to assert some jurisdiction into the genre, especially when you combine that with the fact that XM Radio is looking at internet-broadcasting their signal, meaning its back to being land-based (and also in a realm that the FCC would love to get their regulatory hands on).
in short, this attracts attention since stern's got such a rep for bucking FCC regulations on free speech, and his presense in another realm will bring fcc (and other local obscenity-minded bastards) attention to the world of sat-radio.
but, to quote marvin, "I think I feel good about it."
preaching to the choir with me on the first few paragraphs (i started out as a physics major, and still regularly read sagan and feynman, among others.
As for the last, I understand the need for clear definitions, but I also understand the need to use semi-emotional connotative words, particularly when dealing with those who already do so. "Facts" only have a limited validity where strong emotion-grabbing words are used.
The current administration is best described as Reactionary, but nobody seems to use that term in common discussions or in the media anymore to the point that unlike "Liberal" or "Radical", its a word that lost meaning from disuse, as opposed to innappropriate overuse.
So no, the current administration isn't Radical (that's a term strictly used on the left side), its Reactionary. Their goal is a systematic restoration to the way things were (specifically, the 1870s when the Republican party had uncontested power, public morality was at a high point, corporations were unrestricted by most labor and anti-trust laws...and oddly enough government leaders were among the most corrupt in our history).
Radical to me means going to a state that has never existed before. In America, a Radical seeks to rewrite or disband entirely the existing constitution and/or economic structure. Reactionary just wants to go back to their interpretation of the constitution as being as it was in the past.