I hope not either. The metal interface flies in the face of the UI standards Apple developed and has championed since the beginnings of the Macintosh. The buttons aren't standard, the "appliance" metaphor doesn't translate well, and it is unweildy and wastes lots of space. I'm not sure what changed internally within Apple's UI team to allow this to fester and grow.
Most true audio geeks would never use a SB Live in the first place, that's why. The Audigy2 is the first consumer card to do true 24/96 resolution for input/output, all the way through the audio path. The Audigy1 *claimed* 24/96, but the internal DACs were still 16-bit so having 24-bit outputs was useless. For comparision, it's the difference between the sound quality of a CD (16-bit) and the sound quality of a DVD-Audio disc (24-bit). It's a quality difference that won't "blow you away" and you may not even notice the difference unless you have a good pair of speakers/headphones or your ears are "trained" to pick up minor quality changes, but if you are someone who enjoys good audio fidelity, it's a great option for a consumer who is a bit of an audiophile, but also plays games so a pro-level card is not an option.
If memory serves, I believe that the Audigy2 onboard processing is also far more powerful than the SB Live, so that enabling Creative's 3D positional effects in games won't be a resource drag on your system, and it supports Creative's newest advances in those kinds of effects (which may or may not float your boat).
Personally, I think audio in games is vastly underrated, by both gamers and developers. Good audio is just as important in games as it is in movies. But I think a lot of people don't want to buy a separate speaker system for their computer, either because they already invested a lot in their home theatre system, or they don't want to seem like a "geek" by shelling out for one of the 5.1 computer speaker setups just to play games. I think console games will really start to overcome this, because the console is already hooked into the home theatre system. For instance, DTS just released an SDK to help developers put DTS into their PS2 games.
But I digress. It doesn't sound like the Audigy2 is something you *need*, but it might make for a more enjoyable experience in Doom 3 because of the increased fidelity and effects processing since you indicated you already had a surround system hooked up to your box.
From that report, it appears (though I may be interpreting it wrong) that 97% of the content under copyright by the studios et al is not being commercially exploited. But it is my understanding that the other 97% of content is still under control of these big studios. So how does implementing a plan where copyright holders pay for extensions help to free up that 97% of content? You don't think that the studios will pay to keep all their copyrights, even if they don't use the content? I think this will just enable the big content holders to keep dormant content under their control forever.
You're forgetting all the other interested parties that will never let their copyrights go, like the movie studios, record labels, etc. I think the percentage will be much lower than 98%.
Besides, these guys have already been paying off Senators and Congressmen...the only difference is, this plan makes it legal.
The only people that globalization have helped are the execs running the big multinationals. Everyone laughed at Ross Perot, but he was right. NAFTA should be abolished, tariffs should be imposed, and we should protect our public's right to get a job from an American-based company. The more that globalization takes place, the more powerful the megacorps become, and the more power they have to drag down everyone's standard of living to the bottom. Sure, India's standard of living has raised a *little*, but at the cost of putting Americans out of work. All the manufacturing jobs going to China and Mexico haven't helped anyone except the corps.
Capitalism does not require a borderless economy. That is the lie that multinationals would like you to believe, though.
If you aren't paying for the service, you get what you pay for. I don't pay for either, and it costs me about 4 hours each month to keep each one useful. Fair trade.
Four hours per month * the rate at which you value your time = much too costly and tedious for most people's tastes. Only a fair trade if you consider the value of Hotmail/Yahoo's services to be worth your four hours of time. For a few dollars you can usually request an additional e-mail account from your preferred ISP or hosting company, of which most have some sort of web interface to access the mail account, and they won't serve up banner ads or send you advertisements. Seems like a fairer trade than your current solution.
The parent comment should be modded up. Very insightful, as this is certainly the main reason Congress is putting up the roadblock to the TIA. Let's be realistic, this is primarily the same Congress that overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act and instituted the Homeland Security Deparment. Congress has given no reason for us to believe they're suddenly concerned with the our basic rights now.
When I was around eight or nine I played Asteroids on my Atari for hours and hours one evening when my mom wasn't around. I flipped the score three times in one game, and realizing I had fallen into some sort of neverending, existential hell I finally forced myself to turn it off.
"It sounded like a great idea until the terrorists released a virus called WOPR that exploited a vulnerability in MS Captain and launched a thermonuclear war..."
I guess you've never read Rousseau? Or do you believe that a king is a king by Divine Right then? Democracy wouldn't be around without the idea of a social contract.
And in Eldred v Ashcroft, the majority argued that the trail of copyright extensions since the 1800s self-validated existing copyright extensions. Pre-existing behavior doesn't necessarily make it justified.
A copyright is a social contract with the public. The owner gets exclusive use of the content for a limited time, and after that the content is owned by the public at large. To then say that the public can also use bits and pieces of the content while the copyright is still in effect, seems to me in effect breaking that contract. The balance between the the interests of the creator and the interests of the public is thrown off center. The focus of our efforts should be on reducing the copyright term limits. I'm not saying we should throw all applications of Fair Use out the window; certainly things like "personal use" or usages in non-profit ways are probably valid, but under a system with strict copyright limits (i.e. 14 years), I think for-profit usage of copyrighted content goes against the intent of the system.
Your DRM argument is pretty speculative, especially as the-handcuffs-formally-known-as-Palladium isn't even out yet. I imagine technology would follow the market.
As for Fair Use, it isn't a constitutional guarantee. It was only instituted in the 1976 Copyright Act as a way to diffuse the impact of the lengthy copyright extensions contained in that act. The idea of "Fair Use" was just a diversionary tactic from the fact that copyrighted content would never again enter the public domain. Fair Use would be a non-issue if we actually had a 28-year hard limit on copyrights. If the company only had the right to profit from their content for 28 years, I say let them put whatever restrictions they want on it...because we'd have *free, complete and legal* access to do whatever we want with the content after that. That was the original intent behind copyright law and that's what we need to get back to.
Because the extension isn't a guarantee. It would be up to the government to grant another 14-year term or not. This is how it worked in the early days (early 1800s) of American copyright.
My first reaction this piece was very knee-jerk, but upon thinking about it a bit it makes a lot of sense. While we tend to think of Fair Use as a constitutional guarantee, the idea of Fair Use was instituted in the 1976 Copyright Act, probably under the auspice of making sure some speck of the original constitutional intent of copyrights remained since they had just extended the copyright terms past one's lifetime. Now, doing away with the 1976 Act and reverting to something akin to the 1710 British Statute of Anne, the original 14-year term law upon all copyright law is based, would return current copyright law to the proper constitutional framework of a limited term for the sake of public interest and societal advancement.
The question is, would the megacorps be happy with this tradeoff? Probably not, because they would be forced to actually produce more new content instead of regurgitating the same content over and over for new generations. I think they hope they can slowly destroy Fair Use with DRM technologies and legal action, and still have their immortal copyrights to boot. So as long as their lobbyists control many members of Congress, it seems unlikely to happen.
You mean this ecosystem doesn't exist? Granted, there are no permanent land creatures there, but waste products, chemical runoff etc., can impact the marine ecosystem. It is more than "one freakin' ice road," as the road is only one facet of the high neutrino observatory project. This permanent presence will give a green light for other permanent observatories, which was my original point.
Alaska is not the same as the Antarctic. The former is largely protected under U.S. environmental laws (although the Bush administration and the oil interests are dying to change that), while the latter is pretty much open territory that anyone can exploit.
I don't necessarily think that it's going to become a resort area, but I do think that this big science project sets a precedent for further inhabitation by scientists in the Antarctic, and therefore the possibility of environmental contamination and adverse impact to the ecosystem.
Why is it that we have to encroach upon and destroy every piece of pristine land we come across?
I don't think that "science" is an overriding reason to destroy one of the Earth's last untampered ecosystems. Sure, it's only a highway, but a constant stream of bulldozers can certainly disrupt that region's fragile ecosystem. And once we build a highway, what is next? Hotels? Restaurants? Casinos? We should leave well enough alone, before there are no reminders left of what we have lost in the name of technology and progress.
Do you have interest in continuing to be "hands-on" in the tech community, or will you just act as a security consultant and public speaker? Or do you want to get out of the tech field entirely and do something else?
Also, have you talked to any of the FBI agents that captured you? If so, what is their viewpoint in hindsight of your treatment back then?
I'll admit that I haven't checked any of the links there, but is there a place I can search for an artist name and get the label they're signed under, and (even better) if they support/are supported by/whatever you want to call it any groups we [slashdot.org] might be opposed to?
The RIAA Membership List lists the record labels that are members. You can use CD Now (part of Amazon now) to look up labels that an artist appears on. Or use Google.
Oh, and I haven't bought a single music CD in the last 3 years. And I'm proud of it. Once a system is in place to pay money to artists directly, I'll put some money in towards the artists I like. Until then, I ain't paying squat.
That's a pretty lame excuse. I understand your hatred of the RIAA, but record labels do pay for the packaging and distribution costs to get them into record stores. If you don't want to support the RIAA, you would be better off buying records from artists on independent labels who treat their artists fairly. You'll get the added bonus of finding artists you think are worth paying for, too. Labels such as Matador, Up, Drag City, K, and many more. You can find a lot of indie label music reviewed at Pitchfork Media. You can listen to a fair amount of indie label stuff at KCRW's online streams.
Of course, if you really just have to support the artist directly, go get out of the house and see them perform live and buy their cd from them personally. Don't just complain, be proactive.
I don't think so, but I do think acceleration of China's space program is one of the reasons Bush is pushing for a Mars mission. I'm sure he doesn't want America to be seen as "equals" with China technologically when they (try to) send a man into space this year. I think the situation is very similar to the moon space race.
BTW, Mars is not red, despite the fact that NASA would have you believe so.
I found this paragraph from Judge Stevens' dissent very insightful. Much more thorough and logical than the superficial argument given by the majority opinion. James Madison would be furious to see what has happened today.
Moreover, members of Congress in 1790 were well aware of the distinction between the creation of new copyright regimes and the extension of existing copyrights. The 1790 Act was patterned, in many ways, after the Statute of Anne enacted in England in 1710. 8 Ann., c. 19; see Fred Fisher Music Co. v. M. Witmark & Sons, 318 U. S. 643, 647-648 (1943). The English statute, in addition to providing authors with copyrights on new works for a term of 14 years renewable for another 14-year term, also replaced the booksellers claimed perpetual rights in existing works with a single 21-year term. In 1735, the booksellers proposed an amendment that would have extended the terms of existing copyrights until 1756, but the amendment was defeated. Opponents of the amendment had argued that if the bill were to pass, it would "in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly . . . only to increase the private Gain of the Booksellers . . .." The authors of the federal statute that used the Statute of Anne as a model were familiar with this history. Accordingly, this Court should be especially wary of relying on Congress' creation of a new system to support the proposition that Congress unquestionably understood that it had constitutional authority to extend existing copyrights.
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I hope not either. The metal interface flies in the face of the UI standards Apple developed and has championed since the beginnings of the Macintosh. The buttons aren't standard, the "appliance" metaphor doesn't translate well, and it is unweildy and wastes lots of space. I'm not sure what changed internally within Apple's UI team to allow this to fester and grow.
Most true audio geeks would never use a SB Live in the first place, that's why. The Audigy2 is the first consumer card to do true 24/96 resolution for input/output, all the way through the audio path. The Audigy1 *claimed* 24/96, but the internal DACs were still 16-bit so having 24-bit outputs was useless. For comparision, it's the difference between the sound quality of a CD (16-bit) and the sound quality of a DVD-Audio disc (24-bit). It's a quality difference that won't "blow you away" and you may not even notice the difference unless you have a good pair of speakers/headphones or your ears are "trained" to pick up minor quality changes, but if you are someone who enjoys good audio fidelity, it's a great option for a consumer who is a bit of an audiophile, but also plays games so a pro-level card is not an option.
If memory serves, I believe that the Audigy2 onboard processing is also far more powerful than the SB Live, so that enabling Creative's 3D positional effects in games won't be a resource drag on your system, and it supports Creative's newest advances in those kinds of effects (which may or may not float your boat).
Personally, I think audio in games is vastly underrated, by both gamers and developers. Good audio is just as important in games as it is in movies. But I think a lot of people don't want to buy a separate speaker system for their computer, either because they already invested a lot in their home theatre system, or they don't want to seem like a "geek" by shelling out for one of the 5.1 computer speaker setups just to play games. I think console games will really start to overcome this, because the console is already hooked into the home theatre system. For instance, DTS just released an SDK to help developers put DTS into their PS2 games.
But I digress. It doesn't sound like the Audigy2 is something you *need*, but it might make for a more enjoyable experience in Doom 3 because of the increased fidelity and effects processing since you indicated you already had a surround system hooked up to your box.
From that report, it appears (though I may be interpreting it wrong) that 97% of the content under copyright by the studios et al is not being commercially exploited. But it is my understanding that the other 97% of content is still under control of these big studios. So how does implementing a plan where copyright holders pay for extensions help to free up that 97% of content? You don't think that the studios will pay to keep all their copyrights, even if they don't use the content? I think this will just enable the big content holders to keep dormant content under their control forever.
You're forgetting all the other interested parties that will never let their copyrights go, like the movie studios, record labels, etc. I think the percentage will be much lower than 98%. Besides, these guys have already been paying off Senators and Congressmen...the only difference is, this plan makes it legal.
Fuck India!
The only people that globalization have helped are the execs running the big multinationals. Everyone laughed at Ross Perot, but he was right. NAFTA should be abolished, tariffs should be imposed, and we should protect our public's right to get a job from an American-based company. The more that globalization takes place, the more powerful the megacorps become, and the more power they have to drag down everyone's standard of living to the bottom. Sure, India's standard of living has raised a *little*, but at the cost of putting Americans out of work. All the manufacturing jobs going to China and Mexico haven't helped anyone except the corps.
Capitalism does not require a borderless economy. That is the lie that multinationals would like you to believe, though.
If you aren't paying for the service, you get what you pay for. I don't pay for either, and it costs me about 4 hours each month to keep each one useful. Fair trade.
Four hours per month * the rate at which you value your time = much too costly and tedious for most people's tastes. Only a fair trade if you consider the value of Hotmail/Yahoo's services to be worth your four hours of time. For a few dollars you can usually request an additional e-mail account from your preferred ISP or hosting company, of which most have some sort of web interface to access the mail account, and they won't serve up banner ads or send you advertisements. Seems like a fairer trade than your current solution.
The parent comment should be modded up. Very insightful, as this is certainly the main reason Congress is putting up the roadblock to the TIA. Let's be realistic, this is primarily the same Congress that overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act and instituted the Homeland Security Deparment. Congress has given no reason for us to believe they're suddenly concerned with the our basic rights now.
When I was around eight or nine I played Asteroids on my Atari for hours and hours one evening when my mom wasn't around. I flipped the score three times in one game, and realizing I had fallen into some sort of neverending, existential hell I finally forced myself to turn it off.
"It sounded like a great idea until the terrorists released a virus called WOPR that exploited a vulnerability in MS Captain and launched a thermonuclear war..."
Or perhaps you need something more geek-oriented?
A copyright is a social contract with the public. The owner gets exclusive use of the content for a limited time, and after that the content is owned by the public at large. To then say that the public can also use bits and pieces of the content while the copyright is still in effect, seems to me in effect breaking that contract. The balance between the the interests of the creator and the interests of the public is thrown off center. The focus of our efforts should be on reducing the copyright term limits. I'm not saying we should throw all applications of Fair Use out the window; certainly things like "personal use" or usages in non-profit ways are probably valid, but under a system with strict copyright limits (i.e. 14 years), I think for-profit usage of copyrighted content goes against the intent of the system.
As for Fair Use, it isn't a constitutional guarantee. It was only instituted in the 1976 Copyright Act as a way to diffuse the impact of the lengthy copyright extensions contained in that act. The idea of "Fair Use" was just a diversionary tactic from the fact that copyrighted content would never again enter the public domain. Fair Use would be a non-issue if we actually had a 28-year hard limit on copyrights. If the company only had the right to profit from their content for 28 years, I say let them put whatever restrictions they want on it...because we'd have *free, complete and legal* access to do whatever we want with the content after that. That was the original intent behind copyright law and that's what we need to get back to.
Because the extension isn't a guarantee. It would be up to the government to grant another 14-year term or not. This is how it worked in the early days (early 1800s) of American copyright.
The question is, would the megacorps be happy with this tradeoff? Probably not, because they would be forced to actually produce more new content instead of regurgitating the same content over and over for new generations. I think they hope they can slowly destroy Fair Use with DRM technologies and legal action, and still have their immortal copyrights to boot. So as long as their lobbyists control many members of Congress, it seems unlikely to happen.
All your next-generation secure computing base belong to us!
You mean this ecosystem doesn't exist? Granted, there are no permanent land creatures there, but waste products, chemical runoff etc., can impact the marine ecosystem. It is more than "one freakin' ice road," as the road is only one facet of the high neutrino observatory project. This permanent presence will give a green light for other permanent observatories, which was my original point.
You have seen the screenshots, right? Graphically, it's not exactly DOOM 3. Hopefully it'll be as good as MOO 2, though.
I don't necessarily think that it's going to become a resort area, but I do think that this big science project sets a precedent for further inhabitation by scientists in the Antarctic, and therefore the possibility of environmental contamination and adverse impact to the ecosystem.
I think it's about time to dress up as Bill Gates and dump some fiber optic cable in the harbor..
I don't think that "science" is an overriding reason to destroy one of the Earth's last untampered ecosystems. Sure, it's only a highway, but a constant stream of bulldozers can certainly disrupt that region's fragile ecosystem. And once we build a highway, what is next? Hotels? Restaurants? Casinos? We should leave well enough alone, before there are no reminders left of what we have lost in the name of technology and progress.
Do you have interest in continuing to be "hands-on" in the tech community, or will you just act as a security consultant and public speaker? Or do you want to get out of the tech field entirely and do something else? Also, have you talked to any of the FBI agents that captured you? If so, what is their viewpoint in hindsight of your treatment back then?
The RIAA Membership List lists the record labels that are members. You can use CD Now (part of Amazon now) to look up labels that an artist appears on. Or use Google.
That's a pretty lame excuse. I understand your hatred of the RIAA, but record labels do pay for the packaging and distribution costs to get them into record stores. If you don't want to support the RIAA, you would be better off buying records from artists on independent labels who treat their artists fairly. You'll get the added bonus of finding artists you think are worth paying for, too. Labels such as Matador, Up, Drag City, K, and many more. You can find a lot of indie label music reviewed at Pitchfork Media. You can listen to a fair amount of indie label stuff at KCRW's online streams.
Of course, if you really just have to support the artist directly, go get out of the house and see them perform live and buy their cd from them personally. Don't just complain, be proactive.
BTW, Mars is not red, despite the fact that NASA would have you believe so.