Assuming the ASCAP fees have been paid for the rights to the music in question have been paid, its your karaoke singers you need to be mindful of here.
If you are broadcasting these people's performances without getting them to sign a release you can probably be sued by any/all of them for violating their performers rights.
You aren't legally allowed to do what youre doing without the explicit permission of the performers.
Basically, it sounds to me like you, and AOL are committing criminal acts under the letter of US law.
I wonder if theyre going to throw the TV station and MTV executives in jail, and the people who record the digitally streamed videos on their TiVos for violating this law because they include major label music without DRM?
If this license pollution issue is real, then could someone why it is not possible to legally force proprietary software vendors to GPL their code when a user chooses to dynamically link their user-space code with a GPL library?
e.g. I have a GPLed library - lets say i've written some replacements for standard C library routines, placed them under a GPL license and forced the dynamic linker on my machine to use them via overlays.
And then I run Oracle. Can I call Oracle and accuse them of GPL violation and demand they release their source code?
What I have running on my machine is a closed source application commingled via dynamic linking with GPL code. Is this illegal?
And, exactly which part of the process was illegal?
was it
a) writing a GPLed library capable of interoperating with Oracle?
b) instructing my dynamic linker to use the GPL library?
c) running oracle.exe, causing it to be linked with GPL components?
d) possessing, in my computer's memory, a commingled GPL/Proprietary work?
What makes any of this illegal, and does this situaton hold true where the roles - e.g. GPLed application running on a proprietary-but-similarly 'viral' licensed platform - are reversed?
Would it be illegal to run GPL code on Windows if MS placed an incompatible licensing term into their EULA?
What law, precisely, is being violated when a user loads a proprietary driver into the kernel?
I agree that distributing a mixture of closed and open source is a violation of the GPL, but doesn't the GPL guarantee freedom to personally use the software in any way you see fit?
From this point on, if you are not dressed in a suit and tie, you will not be able to contribute software to Open Source Software projects.
I predict this will immediately result in a massive jump in both adoption of the software and its functionality, because, as we all know, it is people dressed in suits who are the smartest, most efficient and most productive members of our society.
I mean really, if this is a problem, why hasn't the larger business community contributed some type of ISO standard for dress code, and required everyone developing software for them to comply with it, simply rejecting any software products that have been worked on by people who do not conform?
Easy: Weaponize moon dust and disclaim liability
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 1
I mean, the US is building several permanent bases in Iraq and don't seem to be concerned about the health effects of the thousands of tons radioactive dust they have introduced into the area. It's safe, right?
Birth defects, cancer and the introduction of radioactively and chemically toxic elements into the food chain arent seen as a concern. Those effects clearly don't exist. Silicosis could similarly be made to disappear with a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking here.
Simply degrade the worth of astronauts lives to the same value that is placed on thousands of soldiers or Iraqi civilians lives, and there you go.
FIA rule changes banned the 787B or any other car with a rotary engine displacing over 2L from competing in Le Mans from 1992. The ACO, at least back then, was very responsive to FIA requests and rules.
I guess you could say there was no 'outright ban' on rotaries, but it was certainly an effective ban, rendering the engines used in the ~10-year long Mazda Le Mans programme unable to compete in Le Mans any more.
I refer to the IMSA GTU class, where the RX-7 has won more races than any other model. In the GTO class, RX-7s won 7 years in a row, and 10 years in a row in the GTU class.
Other notable successes include racing against porsches and others around Bathurst in Australia (obviously this isnt directly relevant to claims of US racing success) - winning their classes in 92,93,94 and 95 before getting banned (They also banned Nissan skylines for making the aussie V8s look bad).
Take a look down towards the bottom of this page and you will see that in the 80s and 90s Mazda RX-7s and others were very competitive on the racetracks of the US.
Well, aircooled rotaries are available brand new from http://rotamax.net/ - in 650cc and 1300cc varieties, I believe these were designed by the same people responsible for the rotary engines in the Moller skycar.
There is room in the world for more than one type of engine, and rotary-powered cars have been pitched against all comers including V8s on the racetrack, dragstip and the street for a long time now. and at least where I am (New Zealand) theres a big rotary following.
So how many litres is a 1.3 litre 2-stroke 'really'? Do you call a 1.3 litre 2-stroke a 2.6 litre engine because it pumps twice as much air as a 4-stroke?
It's 1.3 litres displacement- thats the *largest* capacity of the combustion chamber.
You can talk about swept volume, and in this respect, just like the 2-stroke, the rotary is equivalent in terms of the volume of air it can exchange in a single crankshaft revolution to a larger 4-stroke engine, and i certainly wouldn't argue that a 1.3 litre rotary should be compared directly to a 1.3 litre 4-stroke. Because of course the rotary would stomp all over it.
But you trying to turn the fact that the rotary has a better power to weight ratio than the 4-stroke piston engine into some kind of slight against Mazda - well, nope thats just crap.
Rotary engines were not used on WW1 era aircraft. These were *radial* engines, with a set of cylinders in a circular arrangement.
The rotary has some big benefits and some notable acheivements:
Power-to-weight ratio is excellent. Minimal moving parts, no valve train and short eccentric shafts mean that vibration is very low, and this enables rotaries to rev very smoothly and at relatively high RPM (10,000+ RPM on a normally aspirated rotary in street trim is not difficult). Hot, high velocity exhausts make turbocharged rotaries capable of very high power levels.
The Mazda rotary has seen enormous success on the racetrack - Mazda is the only japanese manufacturer to win Le Mans, and the RX-7 has been extremely successful - winning more races outright than any other model in major US racing classes.
A 1.3L rotary engine is easily capable of producing 500bhp with a good turbocharger and fuelling setup, and the most powerful 13Bs used in drag racers produce up to 1000bhp in the extreme (it is true that a 1000bhp 13B will not last long).
the 2 litre (20B) engine was the torquiest production engine in a japanese car while the JC Cosmo was being made, and the boosted 20B in the worlds fastest rotary does the quarter mile in 6.9 seconds/202 mph with something approaching 1000 bhp.
The engine that powered the Le-Mans winning 787B in 1991 used a 2.6l 4-rotor normally aspirated engine with ceramic coatings, which produced about 700bhp, exhibited an almost perfectly flat power delivery curve over the entire race, and when disassembled at the end of the 24 hour race, showed practically no wear whatsoever.
Not only does the rotary produce excellent power for it's weight and displacement, it is also very reliable on a racetrack, or as an airplane engine.
On the downside:
Unfortunately heat/cooling cycles are the rotary's worst enemy, as the engine is constructed of a 'sandwich' of different metals, which tend to expand and contract at different rates. This leads to failure of coolant seals (letting water leak into the engine) - analogous to head gasket failure.
Apex seal breakage is the other major failure mode of the rotary, often due to detonation, or oil starvation.
Both of the major failure modes necessitate removal and rebuild of the engine block, which is labour-intensive and expensive.
Fuel efficiency is very difficult to maintain over a wide rev-range because of the shape of the rotary's combustion chamber, which is long and narrow, meaning it is difficult to get a smooth flame front and complete combustion, something piston engines (due to their 'closer to spherical' combustion chambers) have a natural advantage in.
Ceramic coatings and side-port designs such as used in the Renesis keep heat in the charge and insulate engine parts better, which provides cleaner burns and smoother combustion.
The Renesis (1.3l 2-rotor RX-8 engine) can burn hydrogen because it's side-ported intakes and exhausts (as opposed to the peripheral exhaust ports in production cars and the peripheral intake + exhaust in race engines) enable a complete separation between the intake, combustion and exhaust chambers, equivalent to zero valve overlap in a piston engine, while retaining the ability to rev high and without majorly impacting on flow.
This is more or less impossible with a conventional 2 or 4-stroke piston engine - any piston engine running hydrogen either needs a totally different and switchable cam profile which produces anemic performance, or is built to run on dedicated hydrogen fuel and is still a pretty poor performer.
The Renesis is an outright better hydrogen hybrid engine than anything anybody at any other car manufacturer can come up with, despite their much longer histories and enormous research budgets.
You can only go 62 miles on a tank of hydrogen in an RX-8, but how far can you go running hydrogen in any other vehicle? Not very.
Many people trash the rotary out of ignorance, but the truth is that it is the
The reason Futurama is so popular o DVD is because it didnt run long enough to become old, tired and boring. Although by the 4th season it was kind of looking that way.
Personally, i want to see a new idea - Futurama was a big departure from the Simpsons and was all the better for it.
But sure, drag Futurama out to 20-something seasons like the simpsons to milk DVD sales revenue instead of doing something, i dont know, creative and interesting?
This decision just smacks of greed and really shows how risk-averse and downright dull the TV industry is today.
While it may be the case that the private university can put any provisions it likes in its contracts with students, it seems like it is not too much of a stretch to imagine your rights to free speech being limited by every EULA you agree to when you buy a consumer product, and every contract you sign with banks, insurance agencies, credit card companies.
I mean, its one thing to say 'if you don't agree with the university's terms , then go to another school', but what will you do when all the providers of, say, credit cards place clauses in their contracts that limit your free speech rights?
It seems to me it is becoming more and more difficult to do simple things like stay in a hotel or book a flight without a credit card, and in a few years time, this policy will effectively place total control over your freedom to travel internationally in the hands of a cartel of private companies. Credit card revoked? You dont fly.
How long before your rights to speak freely are similarly bound up in a the licensing agreements associated with some other socially pervasive (and broadly necessary) corporate product? Violate the no-criticising-speech clauses in your insurance contract and your car ignition doesnt work (insurance is mandatory to drive) - violate the no-criticising-speech clauses in your banking contract and a 'fine' is automatically deducted from your account.
Violate the no-criticising speech clause in your health insurance and be denied access to drugs or medical care.
When every corporate contract carries increasingly broad limitations on your rights, can you really say you are living in a free society?
Personally, I think the 'no stable ABI to discourage closed source drivers' is just wrong-headed. I mean, it has hardly stopped people writing closed source drivers for Linux, has it.
And it's just bad design - The kernel devs are deliberately making it harder for *anyone* to write drivers for the Linux kernel, regardless of their license. Two wrongs don't make a right.
And the only real effect is that it just makes it a hell of a lot harder for the users to make their computers do useful work.
They are quite happy, for example, to claim that Reiser4 can't go into the kernel because it implements its functionality in a non-standard way, not using the kernel VFS API/ABI, and then turn around and say that standards are the enemy of innovation and encourage closed source software when it comes to a generic driver ABI/API.
They are quite happy to take advantage of other peoples published standards and decry companies like Microsoft for not adhering to them, but then come out with crap like this - if standards are the enemy of innovation and encourage un-debuggable components in the kernel, then this is surely the case in other areas of software development as well.
Do kernel developers really believe that Internet Explorer's approach to supporting standards is the right one?
I especially like it's loop recording function - the existing tracks will continue to loop over and over while you record as many 'takes' as you like in a new track.
The other app I use (Garageband on my iBook) doesn't offer this feature, and cuts off audio recording after the first take.
You can get around this by simply repeating your tracks so you have more repeats in the loop to record over, but then youre not really 'loop recording' any more, and ardour's approach to this is so much more convenient.
I was able to crash ardour by dragging audio around on it's timeline, but I expect this bug has been fixed by now.
I see lots of exciting things happening in the Linux audio world, apps like seq24, ardour and hydrogen make it hard to justify using anything else for the niches that these apps fill.
And they can't conduct a comparison between Windows and Linux by themselves?
I mean, clearly they are simply trying to find some specific area that Windows beats Linux at and have this fact 'endorsed' by an organisation with some respect inside the OSS community.
If their 'fact-based' studies use sound methodology and draw sound conclusions, I dont see what there is to be gained from doing a 'joint' study unless it is purely to gain ammunition in a FUD-fight.
If Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner w/regard to credibility, they need to pull themselves out by simply publishing good, unbiased data, and simply proving their critics wrong by being scrupulously thorough, scientific and honest with their published research.
What they are essentially admitting with this move, is that they are unable to make people believe them, regardless of the truth of the message at the moment, and they would like some help from some people who arent assumed to be morally and ethically bankrupt on the strength of a shallow claim that 'I just want people to judge technology on its merit versus on hype and emotion'.
Notice it is Taylor, personally saying this, always prepended by 'I' instead of 'Microsoft' or 'we' when it comes to meaningful statements on the motivation behind these moves.
There is a lot of this in the article, and while it may be quite understandable, as he is being personally interviewd, I don't see what the mans personal opinion has to do with these issues when it comes to his company's position on these issues, which are of far more relevance.
We need to write out business apps in Javascript now because this is the only standard browser vendors can agree on?
Javascript, it's non-standard browser-specific extension syntax and the restrictive, incomplete and non-standard HTML DOM is an awful environment to write apps in, and it illustrates clearly just how dysfunctional the modern software industry is today.
AJAX is a shit way to write apps, it's central concept revolves around badly hacking around a problem that shouldn't even exist in a language that was never intended for use in such a way, its like we've got the worst aspects of every major technology available today, grudgingly provided by browser vendors who are want to take their ball and go home since nobody wants to use their proprietary ActiveX or XUL - in an incompatible fashion and we're supposed to see this as a step forward?
It's stupid, AJAX is stupid, and browser based apps are crap.
CSS2 sure isn't as popular as it could be - Half the web designers I know still only trust HTML TABLEs for their layout, and while they grudgingly use CSS font specs because the '' solution is just so unwieldy, CSS2's advanced features are ignored because of compatibilty concerns (and when they are used, they are usually the source of compatibility problems).
Personally I don't regard the current state of the CSS2 support in browsers as 'good' - CSS2 is another great example of a standard that is too difficult and open-ended to write a real-word application around, and whos more esoteric features are so useless to the majority of browser users that nobody gives a crap about making them available.. MS refuses to implement this 'standard', Mozilla and Apple struggle to pass even the ACID2 test (which is by no means exhaustive). I'm not even sure anyone has a complete CSS1 implementation at this point(Please feel free to correct me if this is not the case).
CSS2 isn't popular - browser-specific implementations of half-assed CSS2 are popular.
Because theres no alternative in the form of a reference implementation to use, or test against, or to use as a model to design APIs and applications.
It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.
Even if it is somewhat slow and clunky, at least it shows that it is possible to do.
At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.
Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases, but for some reason everybody wants to write their own browser plugin from scratch instead of starting from the authoring tools and extending them to support a 'playback' mode.
Has nobody noticed Flash and what made it so popular?
You can publish standards till the cows come home but the only way anything becomes popular is by being useful.
A reference implementation of a standard is immediately useful, both to users and to developers. Why isn't it there, and if the answer is 'it's too much work' then maybe, just maybe, the overcomplexity of the standard is the problem.
Standards are a good thing, but standards must be both implementable, and accompanied by an implementation, unless they want to float in limbo for years like SVG.
And so they should. Its still sort of a free country, and Oracle has no right to control people speaking about their poor engineering.
Theres ways to do this that cause Oracle more inconvenience than others, but Oracle would be the last company to dump its inflated pricing if I said to them it wasn't ethical or caused me inconvenience.
If the problem exists, accept it, and fix it as quickly as possible. Oracle are just upset that when they are informed of vulnerabilities they get exposed to more legal liability than if they can claim they didnt know anything about it.
The Machine has been completely f**ked for years
on
The Future of the Net
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· Score: 1
The idea that the internet is robust and able to route around faults just isn't really true any more, if it ever was.
CIDR and the inability of smaller organisations to publish routes means that if a provider 'goes down', all of the organisations below them are cut off.
The internet is more of a hierarchical tree than a distributed fabric of nodes.
For many countries, all it takes is a botched cable-tapping effort by the US, or an assault by a rat to bring the internet down.
Even if redundant connectivity is available, in many cases, corporate policy dictates that they cannot be used. And as further consolidation in the industry occurs, this is going to get worse, not better.
Slashdot Mirror
The Year of the Linux Desktop
or
The Year of The OS X Viruses
Inquiring minds want to know.
Assuming the ASCAP fees have been paid for the rights to the music in question have been paid, its your karaoke singers you need to be mindful of here.
If you are broadcasting these people's performances without getting them to sign a release you can probably be sued by any/all of them for violating their performers rights.
You aren't legally allowed to do what youre doing without the explicit permission of the performers.
Basically, it sounds to me like you, and AOL are committing criminal acts under the letter of US law.
I wonder if theyre going to throw the TV station and MTV executives in jail, and the people who record the digitally streamed videos on their TiVos for violating this law because they include major label music without DRM?
If this license pollution issue is real, then could someone why it is not possible to legally force proprietary software vendors to GPL their code when a user chooses to dynamically link their user-space code with a GPL library?
e.g. I have a GPLed library - lets say i've written some replacements for standard C library routines, placed them under a GPL license and forced the dynamic linker on my machine to use them via overlays.
And then I run Oracle. Can I call Oracle and accuse them of GPL violation and demand they release their source code?
What I have running on my machine is a closed source application commingled via dynamic linking with GPL code. Is this illegal?
And, exactly which part of the process was illegal?
was it
a) writing a GPLed library capable of interoperating with Oracle?
b) instructing my dynamic linker to use the GPL library?
c) running oracle.exe, causing it to be linked with GPL components?
d) possessing, in my computer's memory, a commingled GPL/Proprietary work?
What makes any of this illegal, and does this situaton hold true where the roles - e.g. GPLed application running on a proprietary-but-similarly 'viral' licensed platform - are reversed?
Would it be illegal to run GPL code on Windows if MS placed an incompatible licensing term into their EULA?
What law, precisely, is being violated when a user loads a proprietary driver into the kernel?
I agree that distributing a mixture of closed and open source is a violation of the GPL, but doesn't the GPL guarantee freedom to personally use the software in any way you see fit?
From this point on, if you are not dressed in a suit and tie, you will not be able to contribute software to Open Source Software projects.
I predict this will immediately result in a massive jump in both adoption of the software and its functionality, because, as we all know, it is people dressed in suits who are the smartest, most efficient and most productive members of our society.
I mean really, if this is a problem, why hasn't the larger business community contributed some type of ISO standard for dress code, and required everyone developing software for them to comply with it, simply rejecting any software products that have been worked on by people who do not conform?
I mean, the US is building several permanent bases in Iraq and don't seem to be concerned about the health effects of the thousands of tons radioactive dust they have introduced into the area. It's safe, right?
Birth defects, cancer and the introduction of radioactively and chemically toxic elements into the food chain arent seen as a concern. Those effects clearly don't exist. Silicosis could similarly be made to disappear with a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking here.
Simply degrade the worth of astronauts lives to the same value that is placed on thousands of soldiers or Iraqi civilians lives, and there you go.
FIA rule changes banned the 787B or any other car with a rotary engine displacing over 2L from competing in Le Mans from 1992. The ACO, at least back then, was very responsive to FIA requests and rules.
I guess you could say there was no 'outright ban' on rotaries, but it was certainly an effective ban, rendering the engines used in the ~10-year long Mazda Le Mans programme unable to compete in Le Mans any more.
Check your facts. Le Mans banned rotaries outright in 1992 after Mazda won.
The ban was later lifted, which is why the Courage C2 is now racing in the 2005 American Le Mans series. (rotarynews.com has good coverage of this).
I refer to the IMSA GTU class, where the RX-7 has won more races than any other model. In the GTO class, RX-7s won 7 years in a row, and 10 years in a row in the GTU class.
r ticle_id=19303
Other notable successes include racing against porsches and others around Bathurst in Australia (obviously this isnt directly relevant to claims of US racing success) - winning their classes in 92,93,94 and 95 before getting banned (They also banned Nissan skylines for making the aussie V8s look bad).
http://media.ford.com/mazda/article_display.cfm?a
Take a look down towards the bottom of this page and you will see that in the 80s and 90s Mazda RX-7s and others were very competitive on the racetracks of the US.
Well, aircooled rotaries are available brand new from http://rotamax.net/ - in 650cc and 1300cc varieties, I believe these were designed by the same people responsible for the rotary engines in the Moller skycar.
http://www.atkinsrotary.com/ specialises in aircraft applications for the rotary, based on Mazda 13Bs.
Both of these companies could probably advise you much better on aircraft-oriented stuff than I could.
Just becaouse you could, doent mean you should.
There is room in the world for more than one type of engine, and rotary-powered cars have been pitched against all comers including V8s on the racetrack, dragstip and the street for a long time now. and at least where I am (New Zealand) theres a big rotary following.
Take a look at http://www.kiwi-re.com/ - you can keep your V8s.
So how many litres is a 1.3 litre 2-stroke 'really'? Do you call a 1.3 litre 2-stroke a 2.6 litre engine because it pumps twice as much air as a 4-stroke?
It's 1.3 litres displacement- thats the *largest* capacity of the combustion chamber.
You can talk about swept volume, and in this respect, just like the 2-stroke, the rotary is equivalent in terms of the volume of air it can exchange in a single crankshaft revolution to a larger 4-stroke engine, and i certainly wouldn't argue that a 1.3 litre rotary should be compared directly to a 1.3 litre 4-stroke. Because of course the rotary would stomp all over it.
But you trying to turn the fact that the rotary has a better power to weight ratio than the 4-stroke piston engine into some kind of slight against Mazda - well, nope thats just crap.
Rotary engines were not used on WW1 era aircraft. These were *radial* engines, with a set of cylinders in a circular arrangement.
The rotary has some big benefits and some notable acheivements:
Power-to-weight ratio is excellent. Minimal moving parts, no valve train and short eccentric shafts mean that vibration is very low, and this enables rotaries to rev very smoothly and at relatively high RPM (10,000+ RPM on a normally aspirated rotary in street trim is not difficult). Hot, high velocity exhausts make turbocharged rotaries capable of very high power levels.
The Mazda rotary has seen enormous success on the racetrack - Mazda is the only japanese manufacturer to win Le Mans, and the RX-7 has been extremely successful - winning more races outright than any other model in major US racing classes.
A 1.3L rotary engine is easily capable of producing 500bhp with a good turbocharger and fuelling setup, and the most powerful 13Bs used in drag racers produce up to 1000bhp in the extreme (it is true that a 1000bhp 13B will not last long).
the 2 litre (20B) engine was the torquiest production engine in a japanese car while the JC Cosmo was being made, and the boosted 20B in the worlds fastest rotary does the quarter mile in 6.9 seconds/202 mph with something approaching 1000 bhp.
The engine that powered the Le-Mans winning 787B in 1991 used a 2.6l 4-rotor normally aspirated engine with ceramic coatings, which produced about 700bhp, exhibited an almost perfectly flat power delivery curve over the entire race, and when disassembled at the end of the 24 hour race, showed practically no wear whatsoever.
Not only does the rotary produce excellent power for it's weight and displacement, it is also very reliable on a racetrack, or as an airplane engine.
On the downside:
Unfortunately heat/cooling cycles are the rotary's worst enemy, as the engine is constructed of a 'sandwich' of different metals, which tend to expand and contract at different rates. This leads to failure of coolant seals (letting water leak into the engine) - analogous to head gasket failure.
Apex seal breakage is the other major failure mode of the rotary, often due to detonation, or oil starvation.
Both of the major failure modes necessitate removal and rebuild of the engine block, which is labour-intensive and expensive.
Fuel efficiency is very difficult to maintain over a wide rev-range because of the shape of the rotary's combustion chamber, which is long and narrow, meaning it is difficult to get a smooth flame front and complete combustion, something piston engines (due to their 'closer to spherical' combustion chambers) have a natural advantage in.
Ceramic coatings and side-port designs such as used in the Renesis keep heat in the charge and insulate engine parts better, which provides cleaner burns and smoother combustion.
The Renesis (1.3l 2-rotor RX-8 engine) can burn hydrogen because it's side-ported intakes and exhausts (as opposed to the peripheral exhaust ports in production cars and the peripheral intake + exhaust in race engines) enable a complete separation between the intake, combustion and exhaust chambers, equivalent to zero valve overlap in a piston engine, while retaining the ability to rev high and without majorly impacting on flow.
This is more or less impossible with a conventional 2 or 4-stroke piston engine - any piston engine running hydrogen either needs a totally different and switchable cam profile which produces anemic performance, or is built to run on dedicated hydrogen fuel and is still a pretty poor performer.
The Renesis is an outright better hydrogen hybrid engine than anything anybody at any other car manufacturer can come up with, despite their much longer histories and enormous research budgets.
You can only go 62 miles on a tank of hydrogen in an RX-8, but how far can you go running hydrogen in any other vehicle? Not very.
Many people trash the rotary out of ignorance, but the truth is that it is the
The reason Futurama is so popular o DVD is because it didnt run long enough to become old, tired and boring. Although by the 4th season it was kind of looking that way.
Personally, i want to see a new idea - Futurama was a big departure from the Simpsons and was all the better for it.
But sure, drag Futurama out to 20-something seasons like the simpsons to milk DVD sales revenue instead of doing something, i dont know, creative and interesting?
This decision just smacks of greed and really shows how risk-averse and downright dull the TV industry is today.
While it may be the case that the private university can put any provisions it likes in its contracts with students, it seems like it is not too much of a stretch to imagine your rights to free speech being limited by every EULA you agree to when you buy a consumer product, and every contract you sign with banks, insurance agencies, credit card companies.
I mean, its one thing to say 'if you don't agree with the university's terms , then go to another school', but what will you do when all the providers of, say, credit cards place clauses in their contracts that limit your free speech rights?
It seems to me it is becoming more and more difficult to do simple things like stay in a hotel or book a flight without a credit card, and in a few years time, this policy will effectively place total control over your freedom to travel internationally in the hands of a cartel of private companies. Credit card revoked? You dont fly.
How long before your rights to speak freely are similarly bound up in a the licensing agreements associated with some other socially pervasive (and broadly necessary) corporate product? Violate the no-criticising-speech clauses in your insurance contract and your car ignition doesnt work (insurance is mandatory to drive) - violate the no-criticising-speech clauses in your banking contract and a 'fine' is automatically deducted from your account.
Violate the no-criticising speech clause in your health insurance and be denied access to drugs or medical care.
When every corporate contract carries increasingly broad limitations on your rights, can you really say you are living in a free society?
Personally, I think the 'no stable ABI to discourage closed source drivers' is just wrong-headed. I mean, it has hardly stopped people writing closed source drivers for Linux, has it.
And it's just bad design - The kernel devs are deliberately making it harder for *anyone* to write drivers for the Linux kernel, regardless of their license. Two wrongs don't make a right.
And the only real effect is that it just makes it a hell of a lot harder for the users to make their computers do useful work.
They are quite happy, for example, to claim that Reiser4 can't go into the kernel because it implements its functionality in a non-standard way, not using the kernel VFS API/ABI, and then turn around and say that standards are the enemy of innovation and encourage closed source software when it comes to a generic driver ABI/API.
They are quite happy to take advantage of other peoples published standards and decry companies like Microsoft for not adhering to them, but then come out with crap like this - if standards are the enemy of innovation and encourage un-debuggable components in the kernel, then this is surely the case in other areas of software development as well.
Do kernel developers really believe that Internet Explorer's approach to supporting standards is the right one?
Exactly, the fact that the features present in major DAW apps are being implemented in F/OSS software for use on OSes like Linux is pretty damn cool.
I especially like it's loop recording function - the existing tracks will continue to loop over and over while you record as many 'takes' as you like in a new track.
The other app I use (Garageband on my iBook) doesn't offer this feature, and cuts off audio recording after the first take.
You can get around this by simply repeating your tracks so you have more repeats in the loop to record over, but then youre not really 'loop recording' any more, and ardour's approach to this is so much more convenient.
I was able to crash ardour by dragging audio around on it's timeline, but I expect this bug has been fixed by now.
I see lots of exciting things happening in the Linux audio world, apps like seq24, ardour and hydrogen make it hard to justify using anything else for the niches that these apps fill.
And they can't conduct a comparison between Windows and Linux by themselves?
I mean, clearly they are simply trying to find some specific area that Windows beats Linux at and have this fact 'endorsed' by an organisation with some respect inside the OSS community.
If their 'fact-based' studies use sound methodology and draw sound conclusions, I dont see what there is to be gained from doing a 'joint' study unless it is purely to gain ammunition in a FUD-fight.
If Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner w/regard to credibility, they need to pull themselves out by simply publishing good, unbiased data, and simply proving their critics wrong by being scrupulously thorough, scientific and honest with their published research.
What they are essentially admitting with this move, is that they are unable to make people believe them, regardless of the truth of the message at the moment, and they would like some help from some people who arent assumed to be morally and ethically bankrupt on the strength of a shallow claim that 'I just want people to judge technology on its merit versus on hype and emotion'.
Notice it is Taylor, personally saying this, always prepended by 'I' instead of 'Microsoft' or 'we' when it comes to meaningful statements on the motivation behind these moves.
There is a lot of this in the article, and while it may be quite understandable, as he is being personally interviewd, I don't see what the mans personal opinion has to do with these issues when it comes to his company's position on these issues, which are of far more relevance.
We need to write out business apps in Javascript now because this is the only standard browser vendors can agree on?
Javascript, it's non-standard browser-specific extension syntax and the restrictive, incomplete and non-standard HTML DOM is an awful environment to write apps in, and it illustrates clearly just how dysfunctional the modern software industry is today.
AJAX is a shit way to write apps, it's central concept revolves around badly hacking around a problem that shouldn't even exist in a language that was never intended for use in such a way, its like we've got the worst aspects of every major technology available today, grudgingly provided by browser vendors who are want to take their ball and go home since nobody wants to use their proprietary ActiveX or XUL - in an incompatible fashion and we're supposed to see this as a step forward?
It's stupid, AJAX is stupid, and browser based apps are crap.
CSS2 sure isn't as popular as it could be - Half the web designers I know still only trust HTML TABLEs for their layout, and while they grudgingly use CSS font specs because the '' solution is just so unwieldy, CSS2's advanced features are ignored because of compatibilty concerns (and when they are used, they are usually the source of compatibility problems).
Personally I don't regard the current state of the CSS2 support in browsers as 'good' - CSS2 is another great example of a standard that is too difficult and open-ended to write a real-word application around, and whos more esoteric features are so useless to the majority of browser users that nobody gives a crap about making them available.. MS refuses to implement this 'standard', Mozilla and Apple struggle to pass even the ACID2 test (which is by no means exhaustive). I'm not even sure anyone has a complete CSS1 implementation at this point(Please feel free to correct me if this is not the case).
CSS2 isn't popular - browser-specific implementations of half-assed CSS2 are popular.
Because theres no alternative in the form of a reference implementation to use, or test against, or to use as a model to design APIs and applications.
It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.
Even if it is somewhat slow and clunky, at least it shows that it is possible to do.
At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.
Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases, but for some reason everybody wants to write their own browser plugin from scratch instead of starting from the authoring tools and extending them to support a 'playback' mode.
Has nobody noticed Flash and what made it so popular?
You can publish standards till the cows come home but the only way anything becomes popular is by being useful.
A reference implementation of a standard is immediately useful, both to users and to developers. Why isn't it there, and if the answer is 'it's too much work' then maybe, just maybe, the overcomplexity of the standard is the problem.
Standards are a good thing, but standards must be both implementable, and accompanied by an implementation, unless they want to float in limbo for years like SVG.
Then people are going to point it out.
And so they should. Its still sort of a free country, and Oracle has no right to control people speaking about their poor engineering.
Theres ways to do this that cause Oracle more inconvenience than others, but Oracle would be the last company to dump its inflated pricing if I said to them it wasn't ethical or caused me inconvenience.
If the problem exists, accept it, and fix it as quickly as possible. Oracle are just upset that when they are informed of vulnerabilities they get exposed to more legal liability than if they can claim they didnt know anything about it.
The idea that the internet is robust and able to route around faults just isn't really true any more, if it ever was.
CIDR and the inability of smaller organisations to publish routes means that if a provider 'goes down', all of the organisations below them are cut off.
The internet is more of a hierarchical tree than a distributed fabric of nodes.
For many countries, all it takes is a botched cable-tapping effort by the US, or an assault by a rat to bring the internet down.
Even if redundant connectivity is available, in many cases, corporate policy dictates that they cannot be used. And as further consolidation in the industry occurs, this is going to get worse, not better.
Could have been a good, useful desktop OS.
But its just a shitty, unpolished Linux distro.
Oh well.