The analogy would be selling/buying heroin in an open air drug market, out on the street. If a cop happens to be standing there watching you, the information he gathers is perfectly legitimate, even though he is not involved in the transaction.
If the sale goes down in your living room, and the cop is peeking through the window - then it's thrown out in court.
Of course the 4rth amendment protects you from the state, not from private interests.
> digital "media" is just a bunch of 1's and 0's. A file is no more than a certain number, and how can one person or corporation own a number?
Exactly.
And a novel is just a bunch of letters in a particular order.
And a movie is just a bunch of images displayed in a particular sequence. The images, of course, are just a bunch of beams of colored light that are in a particular order.
And a song is just a bunch of circles and sticks drawn on a handful of parallel lines.
Hell, any product you can name is just a bunch of elemental atoms arranged in a particular formation.
Reasoning like this is why the pro-IP lobby has gotten so out-of-hand.
Your "James Bond" PDA displays undistorted images, while filtering the secret content somewhere else.
Or you could embed a ton of secret messages in a simple server-to-server mirroring operation, and still wind up with a 1:1 mirror - never tipping anyone off that anything but the visible content was transferred.
That way when the bad guys find it they see no distortions, can find no trace that the image was ever altered, and just think you're looking at porn.
Well, yeah, SCSI will always have a place in high end workstations and servers.
But my new desktop (as I've already posted) has an onboard SATA RAID controller.
Personally I cant wait to get some workstation-level performance at desktop-level prices.
And no more big ugly cables uglying up my side window. These little cables that came in the mobo box are going to look pretty good in there.
It's an improvement over PATA no matter how you slice it. It promises to be cheaper, faster, easier, hot-swappable, self-powered.
I dunno why people are complaining. Well, yes I do. This is slashdot, and any new technology is equated with a bid for world dominance from [CORPORATION].
> Forgive me if I sound a bit naive but wouldn't parallel be faster than serial?
No. It's much harder to keep 10, 20, 30, 40 lines in sync at higher clock speeds than it is 1. There's a ton of crosstalk, which is why the cables are limited to about 18" right now.
Parallel is pretty crude. This is why your ethernet cable has 4 wires (that it uses).
I got a shiny new SATA RAID controller on my new motherboard, now when the hell am I gonna get a couple of 80 gig cheap, fast SATA drives to put into a striped set?
VCD claims to have the same quality as VHS, in that it loses about the same amount of the original signal.
Thing is, with VHS the signal degredation is 'spread out', and it results in a fuzzier image.
With VCD, it's chunked in, and the lost signal results in artifacts, and little squares, and are much more obvious.
Kind of like how a casette tape wears out over time and will slowly become more muted and 'muddy' sounding. A scratched CD just pops and skips and stops making sound altogether.
So it's a matter of opinion which "sucks". Personally when it comes to A/V stuff, I'd take the comparable analog system over the digital one.
> It is most certainly not fine to essentailly harass reporters for doing their job.
"Their job" is to sell newspapers, magazines or get radio/tv ratings.
Imagine, if you will, a reporter who knows who the sniper in the DC area is. He converses with him every day, and gets the 'scoop' on each murder, and gets the first gory shots of the latest victim to print.
Now when the police ask him to reveal the 'sources' identity, he refuses. Of course he cites some moralistic argument about some made-up "journalistic integrity", but all he really wants is his daily bi-line.
You think that should be protected? The Reporters without Borders sure do.
.. and they're oh-so objective they are when it comes to America.
"The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings"
I've always wondered why the fuck a little piece of index card with the word "PRESS" stuck into the band of your fedora should entitle you to go anywhere, and do anything.
Anyways, realize that these countries are just listed in arbitrarily.
I mean, in Canada they don't allow camera's into the courtroom. Nor does it allow reporting on the action of what the government deems "hate groups". Hear no evil, see no evil. But that didn't seem to hurt their rating.
Frankly, given the number of countries in the world, 17 isn't all that "poor", even by these guy's "pull it outta our ass" standards.
It doesn't matter that antarctica is 'uninhabitable', the argument is that it is still 'influenced' by 'human activity'. Ie; if you take the global warming (caused by humans) theory to be true, then antarctica is affected, therefore falls into the 83%.
Its another environmento-political scare tactic. There are a lot of examples of lands directly used by humans, yet provide a truly excellent habitat for wildlife at the same time.
The thousands of acres of lands used by a military airfield, for one example - wildlife thrives there, and the planes flying around overhead don't seem to bother them. But if you ask these guys, humans are 'affecting' it, therefore it must be completely barren and dead.
> So in other words, what you're saying is that the Poincaré conjecture is the supposition that any n-dimensional solid object of uniform density can be deformed by some reversible mathematical translation into an n-dimensional sphere
I took a bunch of math, but am no super-whiz. I think it's something like this.
A simply connected object is homeomorphic to a sphere in 3-space. Ie; An egg-shaped object is a sphere that's been stretched, and can be a sphere again by compressing along one of the axes. A doughnut (properly called a torus) isnt
This is true in 2 and 3 space. An ellipse is a stretched circle, an egg is a stretched out sphere.
Poincare's conjecture extends this into n-space. So a 'simply connected' n-dimensional object should be homeomorphic to an n-dimensional sphere.
> people have been doing that since the inception of magnetic tape
And they tried to shut that down too.
> there was a music distributor with millions of subscribers that they (the music industry) didn't control
No, because never before had music 'sharing' been done on such a grand scale.
There's a world of difference between copying a CD for a handful of friends, and putting it online and getting thousands of downloads.
> this distributor (Napster) was actually promoting independant bands.
Name one.
> it's ALL about dollars & cents.
Of course it is. As it should be. This is a capitalist society, why do people keep pointing to corporations making profits and screeching 'evil'?
I'm against many RIAA initiatives, because I dont want my hand forced through legislation or taxes. Not because I think it's unfair that a company wants to make as much money as it can.
> "Record companies lose money on CDs. Recorded music has not turned a profit for a long time. The real money is made from concert tickets and merchandising."
You have that backwards. This is about the artists, not the record companies.
Artists are the ones who lose money on CDs, and make it up on tour selling T-shirts.
The "record companies" make a killing selling a 0.02$ plastic disc for 20 bucks, after all the content was provided by the artist. Their only expenses are production and promotion.
What I hear you saying is that Hollywood and MSFT should support your linux OS for some reason.
So far I don't see how any of this is going to take linux away.
The worry seems to be that, if Hollywood decides to release films or music for commercial purposes on the 'net, then those releases will be solely for the Windows platform.
But, I really don't see what's wrong with this. They don't support my Betamax or the 8-Track in my uncles field truck either.
I don't like the idea of Palladium, but IMO, this is the wrong argument to oppose it with. Because it doesn't make sense.
Perhaps you can get linux users covered by the ADA act, and then force Hollywood et al to support it?
No, the DMCA is a problem, and the problem is that existing legislation was perfectly adequate. Is copying an eBook really different, from a legal point of view, from photocopying a real book? Or is copying an mp3 any different from copying a cassette tape? Apparently, because one is digital and one is analog - I see that as a bogus argument.
Anyhow, the ADA already applies, to an extent, to phone based services already.
IANAL, but there are certain scenarios in which they are obligated to provide TDD support (Telephone Devices for the Deaf). Is a website altogether different?
Traditional market forces will prevail despite any laws, in this case. The airlines that are accessable to the blind, will be patronized by them. The ones that arent wont, and will probably also lose the business of the blinds family, friends, and whoever else would join a boycott.
I really dont see why everyone gets so scared and offended. It's been said before that making a site accessable really just entails what should be a good design in the first place.
If a text-to-speech engine cant read the site, neither can lynx, or other less feature rich browsers. I mean if they want to base the whole ordering system on activex or shockwave components, then they've already cut out a ton of potential business.
In short, an inaccessable web site thats designed for sales, is probably a crappy website in the first place.
Not that the airlines care about good business practices. If they falter they'll just ask for another handout from the feds.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the internet is a public forum by definition.
The analogy would be selling/buying heroin in an open air drug market, out on the street. If a cop happens to be standing there watching you, the information he gathers is perfectly legitimate, even though he is not involved in the transaction.
If the sale goes down in your living room, and the cop is peeking through the window - then it's thrown out in court.
Of course the 4rth amendment protects you from the state, not from private interests.
> digital "media" is just a bunch of 1's and 0's. A file is no more than a certain number, and how can one person or corporation own a number?
Exactly.
And a novel is just a bunch of letters in a particular order.
And a movie is just a bunch of images displayed in a particular sequence. The images, of course, are just a bunch of beams of colored light that are in a particular order.
And a song is just a bunch of circles and sticks drawn on a handful of parallel lines.
Hell, any product you can name is just a bunch of elemental atoms arranged in a particular formation.
Reasoning like this is why the pro-IP lobby has gotten so out-of-hand.
> the music/movie industry is a huge money maker for the US
Not nearly as huge as the tech and telecom industries.
Who does the government want to help out, given a choice between Metallica and Intel, or Britney Spears and Verizon, etc?
Ultimately, the elected politicians need votes. They're just starting to realize that these types of laws may just not be the way to get 'em.
Your "James Bond" PDA displays undistorted images, while filtering the secret content somewhere else.
Or you could embed a ton of secret messages in a simple server-to-server mirroring operation, and still wind up with a 1:1 mirror - never tipping anyone off that anything but the visible content was transferred.
That way when the bad guys find it they see no distortions, can find no trace that the image was ever altered, and just think you're looking at porn.
It's completely transparent to the OS. So far as linux is concerned, it's just the same as parallel.
Well, yeah, SCSI will always have a place in high end workstations and servers.
But my new desktop (as I've already posted) has an onboard SATA RAID controller.
Personally I cant wait to get some workstation-level performance at desktop-level prices.
And no more big ugly cables uglying up my side window. These little cables that came in the mobo box are going to look pretty good in there.
It's an improvement over PATA no matter how you slice it. It promises to be cheaper, faster, easier, hot-swappable, self-powered.
I dunno why people are complaining. Well, yes I do. This is slashdot, and any new technology is equated with a bid for world dominance from [CORPORATION].
> All data goes through the PCI bus...and it's bandwidth is only 133MB/sec theoretical
PCI-X?
> Ever read the actual throughput specs on a drive? The media throughput is not much more than 40MB/sec!!!
4 of them in RAID 0?
> Add this all up and what do you get?
150Mb/s peak bandwidth to and from my drives.
> Forgive me if I sound a bit naive but wouldn't parallel be faster than serial?
No. It's much harder to keep 10, 20, 30, 40 lines in sync at higher clock speeds than it is 1. There's a ton of crosstalk, which is why the cables are limited to about 18" right now.
Parallel is pretty crude. This is why your ethernet cable has 4 wires (that it uses).
It should be at least a bit cheaper, the logic for a serial circuit is much simpler than for a parallel one. (less wires = less logic).
> All of IDE's shortcomings are fixed by SCSI
You mean the oversized 40-conductor ribbon cables are solved by 68 conductor ones?
> If more people used it, it would be a cheaper solution
Heh, sure it would.
> 15k rpm scsi drives get seek times in the low three range--that's three times faster than your average 5400 rpm ide hdd.
And 10x more expensive.
You are the first SCSI fanboy I've ever seen.
Now bring on the cheap!
Where are my drives?
I got a shiny new SATA RAID controller on my new motherboard, now when the hell am I gonna get a couple of 80 gig cheap, fast SATA drives to put into a striped set?
huh? huh?
VCD claims to have the same quality as VHS, in that it loses about the same amount of the original signal.
Thing is, with VHS the signal degredation is 'spread out', and it results in a fuzzier image.
With VCD, it's chunked in, and the lost signal results in artifacts, and little squares, and are much more obvious.
Kind of like how a casette tape wears out over time and will slowly become more muted and 'muddy' sounding. A scratched CD just pops and skips and stops making sound altogether.
So it's a matter of opinion which "sucks". Personally when it comes to A/V stuff, I'd take the comparable analog system over the digital one.
> It is most certainly not fine to essentailly harass reporters for doing their job.
"Their job" is to sell newspapers, magazines or get radio/tv ratings.
Imagine, if you will, a reporter who knows who the sniper in the DC area is. He converses with him every day, and gets the 'scoop' on each murder, and gets the first gory shots of the latest victim to print.
Now when the police ask him to reveal the 'sources' identity, he refuses. Of course he cites some moralistic argument about some made-up "journalistic integrity", but all he really wants is his daily bi-line.
You think that should be protected? The Reporters without Borders sure do.
.. and they're oh-so objective they are when it comes to America.
"The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings"
I've always wondered why the fuck a little piece of index card with the word "PRESS" stuck into the band of your fedora should entitle you to go anywhere, and do anything.
Anyways, realize that these countries are just listed in arbitrarily.
I mean, in Canada they don't allow camera's into the courtroom. Nor does it allow reporting on the action of what the government deems "hate groups". Hear no evil, see no evil. But that didn't seem to hurt their rating.
Frankly, given the number of countries in the world, 17 isn't all that "poor", even by these guy's "pull it outta our ass" standards.
It doesn't matter that antarctica is 'uninhabitable', the argument is that it is still 'influenced' by 'human activity'. Ie; if you take the global warming (caused by humans) theory to be true, then antarctica is affected, therefore falls into the 83%.
Its another environmento-political scare tactic. There are a lot of examples of lands directly used by humans, yet provide a truly excellent habitat for wildlife at the same time.
The thousands of acres of lands used by a military airfield, for one example - wildlife thrives there, and the planes flying around overhead don't seem to bother them. But if you ask these guys, humans are 'affecting' it, therefore it must be completely barren and dead.
> Someone thinks i'll do it (use windows) just to use a big fat expensive pen, HA. I say HA
No, someone thinks you're in a very small minority, and wants to maximize their profits by targetting the largest audience they can.
You're right!
How dare they use an OS platform that 99.9999% of the audience for such a techno-gimmicky executive toy is running!
While you're writing letters, send one to Nintendo and ask why they haven't released an open source port of Super Mario Sunshine for linux.
> So in other words, what you're saying is that the Poincaré conjecture is the supposition that any n-dimensional solid object of uniform density can be deformed by some reversible mathematical translation into an n-dimensional sphere
Holy shit! I said that?
> It's been proven that that DIDN'T hurt record company sales.
And that's irrelevant. Try this on for size.
"Get off my lawn."
"But I'm not hurting anything. Therefore I can sit on your lawn."
I took a bunch of math, but am no super-whiz. I think it's something like this.
A simply connected object is homeomorphic to a sphere in 3-space. Ie; An egg-shaped object is a sphere that's been stretched, and can be a sphere again by compressing along one of the axes. A doughnut (properly called a torus) isnt
This is true in 2 and 3 space. An ellipse is a stretched circle, an egg is a stretched out sphere.
Poincare's conjecture extends this into n-space. So a 'simply connected' n-dimensional object should be homeomorphic to an n-dimensional sphere.
At least I think?
> people have been doing that since the inception of magnetic tape
And they tried to shut that down too.
> there was a music distributor with millions of subscribers that they (the music industry) didn't control
No, because never before had music 'sharing' been done on such a grand scale.
There's a world of difference between copying a CD for a handful of friends, and putting it online and getting thousands of downloads.
> this distributor (Napster) was actually promoting independant bands.
Name one.
> it's ALL about dollars & cents.
Of course it is. As it should be. This is a capitalist society, why do people keep pointing to corporations making profits and screeching 'evil'?
I'm against many RIAA initiatives, because I dont want my hand forced through legislation or taxes. Not because I think it's unfair that a company wants to make as much money as it can.
> "Record companies lose money on CDs. Recorded music has not turned a profit for a long time. The real money is made from concert tickets and merchandising."
You have that backwards. This is about the artists, not the record companies.
Artists are the ones who lose money on CDs, and make it up on tour selling T-shirts.
The "record companies" make a killing selling a 0.02$ plastic disc for 20 bucks, after all the content was provided by the artist. Their only expenses are production and promotion.
What I hear you saying is that Hollywood and MSFT should support your linux OS for some reason.
So far I don't see how any of this is going to take linux away.
The worry seems to be that, if Hollywood decides to release films or music for commercial purposes on the 'net, then those releases will be solely for the Windows platform.
But, I really don't see what's wrong with this. They don't support my Betamax or the 8-Track in my uncles field truck either.
I don't like the idea of Palladium, but IMO, this is the wrong argument to oppose it with. Because it doesn't make sense.
Perhaps you can get linux users covered by the ADA act, and then force Hollywood et al to support it?
No, the DMCA is a problem, and the problem is that existing legislation was perfectly adequate. Is copying an eBook really different, from a legal point of view, from photocopying a real book? Or is copying an mp3 any different from copying a cassette tape? Apparently, because one is digital and one is analog - I see that as a bogus argument.
Anyhow, the ADA already applies, to an extent, to phone based services already.
IANAL, but there are certain scenarios in which they are obligated to provide TDD support (Telephone Devices for the Deaf). Is a website altogether different?
Traditional market forces will prevail despite any laws, in this case. The airlines that are accessable to the blind, will be patronized by them. The ones that arent wont, and will probably also lose the business of the blinds family, friends, and whoever else would join a boycott.
I really dont see why everyone gets so scared and offended. It's been said before that making a site accessable really just entails what should be a good design in the first place.
If a text-to-speech engine cant read the site, neither can lynx, or other less feature rich browsers. I mean if they want to base the whole ordering system on activex or shockwave components, then they've already cut out a ton of potential business.
In short, an inaccessable web site thats designed for sales, is probably a crappy website in the first place.
Not that the airlines care about good business practices. If they falter they'll just ask for another handout from the feds.
I'd imagine some sort of phase-change system (same as an air conditioning unit uses).
For 90 mill, I doubt you'd see a bay bus with a bunch of Delta 80mm fans..