Not likely if you reproduce the song in whole. If you used a 30 second exerpt, then it probably would. According to the Supreme Court "undoubtedly the single most important element of fair use" is the degree to which the copying affects the potential marketability or value of the work. If the copying has a potential to affect the sales (or otherwise cost the owner revenue) then it is not likely to be considered Fair Use. Distributing a copy in whole of a song is likely to be viewed as having this potential, regardless of the intent of criticism -- which to me seems pretty bogus, if you're truly looking to review a track you don't have to include it in its entirety.
"Fair use, when properly applied, is limited to copying by others which [p*567] does not materially impair the marketability of the work which is copied."
Read sections 2.8 and 2.9 of this FAQ for a good Fair Use discussion.
Re: jukeboxes. This is covered in 17 USC 116 which is titled "Negotiated licenses for public performances by means of coin-operated phonorecord players.":-) It states that the copyright owner and the vendor can negotiate whatever terms they want for these circumstances (I think.)
Re: software. Section 117 is a very interesting read. Specifically, it allows you to make copies of a computer program provided that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner. This is in response to the line of reasoning that one has to copy the program from disk to RAM in order to run it (and all sorts of variations on that theme.) It also specifically allows copying the program in the normal process of maintenance or repair, i.e. copying the contents of a failing hard disk to a new one.
It also permits you to copy software provided that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. This is the "right to make backups" that everyone is probably familiar with. It also states that any such backups must be sold or transferred with the original copies, i.e. you must transfer or destroy them if you sell, lease, or otherwise yield your rights to the work.
So by copyright law alone, executing a program is a right that you freely have, since you are specifically given the right to copy the program for this purpose. I think the confusion in this regard comes because "licensing" is a whole layer on top of (or in addition to) copyright law. In other words the software vendor, in return for the right to acquire a copy of the software, engages you in an additional contract (the license) above and beyond copyright law. This is where all the restrictions regarding reverse modification, publishing of performance data, and all the other sorts of restrictions on what you can do with the software come from, I believe. I guess the idea is that the vendor is free to offer any contract he wishes in return for the right to obtain the copy of the software, and if you do not agree to enter into the contract as stated then you do not have a legitimate right to the copy in the first place, since that's an exclusive right of the copyright holder.
The crux of the matter, then, rests on whether most EULA's are valid contracts, and contract law is a whole other branch of the code. In general, I would say that if you are given due opportunity to review the license before entering into the contract, then it's a perfectly valid arrangement and you are legally obliged to the terms within, whatever those may be. The gray area comes in when the contract terms are not fully disclosed until after the agreement has been made, i.e. "shrinkwrap EULAs." To be valid, a contract requires that both parties knowingly enter into a mutually beneficial agreement, among other thing. I'm not sure of the details here but a contract must fulfill a fairly well-defined set of criteria in order to be valid, so there's a chance that some of these EULAs would fail on other accounts as well.
Re: derivative work. It depends on the particular format; for sound recordings, a simple modification of the order, arrangement, or quality of the work results in a derived work that falls under the original copyright owner's control... but creating "an independent fixation of other sounds" constitutes a new work not covered by the original copyright. From section 114:
The exclusive right of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clause (2) of section 106 is limited to the right to prepare a derivative work in which the actual sounds fixe
The way copyright law works is that it grants the copyright holder exclusive rights, and then specifies certain conditions under which some of those rights are forfeited. So rather then looking at this from the point of view of "what rights does buying a CD give me?" you should look at it from the point of view "The law gives the copyright owner certain rights, and I am free to do whatever I want as long as I don't infringe those rights." The main rights that copyright grant are outlined in 17 U.S.C. 106 and amount to the following rights:
to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission
Chaper 106a also gives further rights dealing with the right of attribution ("the paternity right") and the right of integrity... these specify that an author can generally claim ownership of works and disclaim ownership of distorted versions of the work, etc.
Chapters 107 thru 122 then whittle away at these rights, defining certain exemptions and special circumstances. Most well known is Chapter 107 which outlines the Fair Use principle which allows a looser enforcement of the above rights in certain circumstances, for the overall wellbeing of society... i.e. exceptions for literary, satirical, educational, literary, critical, etc. purposes. This is the old "you can photocopy a few pages from the encyclopedia so you can read it at home" clause. See sections 2.8 and 2.9 of this FAQ for a very good explanation of Fair Use.
Most importantly, Fair Use also allows time shifting and media shifting for the purposes of personal, non-commerical archival use, at least according to the EFF.
Anyway, the point is that the way copyright law works is not that it says "you get these rights when you pay for a CD", rather it states "the owner of the copyright has the following exclusive rights (with a few exceptions.)"
So, for example it dictates that the copyright holder has the right of public performance which means that you are free to play the CD any way that you want, so long as you don't infringe on this "public performance" right (or any other right.)
Alternatively put, you can do anything you want, just so long as you don't infringe any of the above enumerated exclusive rights.
If your copy of the cd is destroyed, you're fucked. Youre license doesn't give you a generic license to a copy of the work that was reproduced on the CD -- it gives you a license to a *SPECIFIC* copy.
This represents a poor understanding of Copyright Law becuase it is false to fact. You are specifically allowed to make copies of the work as defined under Fair Use. Unfortunately, Fair Use is not clearly defined, but rather a weighing of factors. Specifically, there are four general considerations to Fair Use, from USC Title 17, Section 107:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Based on these four criteria, and previous precendent, it seems clear that making a copy of a work (in whole) for personal archival purposes DOES fall under Fair Use. From the eff's Fair Use FAQ:
What's been recognized as fair use?
Courts have previously found that a use was fair where the use of the copyrighted work was socially beneficial. In particular, U.S. courts have recognized the following fair uses: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research and parodies.
In addition, in 1984 the Supreme Court held that time-shifting (for example, private, non-commercial home taping of television programs with a VCR to permit later viewing) is fair use. (Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984, S.C.)
Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:
Space-shifting or format-shifting - that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, "ripping" an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)
Making a personal back-up copy of content you own - for instance, burning a copy of an audio CD you own.
Therefore, as permitted under the eff's Fair Use interpretation, you ARE entitled to make a copy, and are NOT bound to the single purchased medium. I'm afraid I must side with their opinion in this matter, and not a random slashdot poster's opinion.
The one glaring omission in this new Snapster 2.0 plan is that for it to
work, thousands of people must not only buy shares of this collective,
but they must donate their physical CDs to this virtual library.
Indeed, the plan is predicated on the idea that thousands or millions of
people will cede their ability to play at will any of the tracks of the
CDs they have paid for and own... True, they can in return "borrow"
tracks from other users (and they'd be receiving the paltry "bookkeeping
fee" for their originals), and I suppose you could rig some sort of priority system where
the physical media owner can force his/her way to the top of the queue
of a song. However for it to be legal the owner will still have to wait
for someone to check in a track (assuming no free slots) before they can
listen to that track of a CD they own.
I really think you will have great problems convincing thousands (or
millions) of people to essentially give up the ability to play at will
the tracks of the CDs they own. Yeah, if everyone suddenly became part
of the collective there would probably be enough overlap so that no one
would ever really have to wait very long. But for the more obscure
tracks there could be a definite shortage of slots and the possibility
could be very real that the owner of a CD would be unable to play his
library for a significant time period until someone checks something in.
And, this all completely ignores the problem of enforcement -- how do
you:
prevent someone from checking out a track indefinitely
prevent someone from keeping a track after checking it back in
prevent someone from otherwise using a single check-out for multiple
instances
prevent the physical owner from listening to their "donated" CDs that
are currently "borrowed" (thus violating the "one copy per use"
doctrine)
If courts find that there is significant or rampant evidence of these
protections failing, then the legitimacy of the plan really takes a
hit. And let's face it, people are used to copying MP3 tracks at will,
so why would they ever be inclined to voluntarily restrict themselves
(and pay for the right to do so)?
I'll admit, v2.0 is a lot closer to legal than 1.0 -- in fact it would
actually BE legal if you could enforce the above restrictions... but
human nature being what it is, I wouldn't count on it. Finally, to get
mass appeal you would have to stay clear from proprietary formats or
DRM, and that usually means that your chances of enforcement through
software go way down.
At the end of the day, this is just a very efficient library. However, it achieves this efficiency by eliminating the one thing that guarantees the legitimacy of the library: the fact that the items are physical units that pass from hand to hand, so that the one-copy-per-use notion is enforced. By doing away with the physical item, you open up a huge degree of efficiency and scale, yet you also make it very easy to cheat the system... and at then end of the day there's no way to ensure compliance, so this will fail along with all the Napsters and MP3.com's of the world.
That means the voltage of the battery should be at least double the voltage drop of the LED.
Not if you want decent battery life, it shouldn't.
I think you'll find most "advanced" LED flashlights use a small PIC and utilize PWM to regulate the LED current rather than wastefully throwing away any battery voltage in excess of the LED's forward voltage.
And if they don't use a microcontroller, they use a battery arrangement as close to the forward voltage of the LED so as to maximize available life.
In other words, in such an application it's fine if the LED current varies significantly over the discharge of the battery, because it means a much longer usable overall battery life.
For reference, I have a Photon Micro-Light (a popular brand of small LED flashlight) which uses no resistor (or PWM) whatsoever. Just two watch batteries in series connected directly across the LED.
You'll notice there are also hosts listed in the 127/8 range, which would appear bogus as well. But remember that a domain admin can set the DNS server that has authority for that domain to point to any IP address he chooses, and that's what this survey is based on. So there are some domains out there that resolve to 10.x.x.x or 127.x.x.x. It doesn't mean there's anything actually there.
Or randomly wasting SCO's web server bandwidth in a ridiculous attempt to get their attention, and "get them back" for some perceived evil. Not that I agree with SCO, but fighting abuse with abuse is retarded.
Correct. The guy in this article is incorrect in looking at the speed on the label of the dremel and assuming that's what the disk is spinning. The max speed on those things is almost always the "no load" speed, and the actual speed will be significantly less, depending on the load. A CD presents quite a large moment of inertia (compared to a small little grinding bit) so I wouldn't be surprised if it's only spinning at 15 kRPM or less.
What's even worse is when you look at how few actual web sites are actually hosted in those "legacy class A" spaces. I've heard that, for example, GM has tons of ancient robotics and other embedded applications that are running on hard coded IPs in their allocated space. Not that they're publicly visible, just that no one really ever considered a scarcity of IP addresses in the past.
To some degree I'd say the scarcity of IP addresses is somewhat manufactured. While you don't want to go willy-nilly allocating large blocks, at some point you have to recognise the genuine need and start unreserving some space. Also, some concensus should be reached on all those "legacy" blocks that aren't being used efficiently.
I care because I have not fallen for the "golden ears" fallacy. To me, 192kbps ABR lame-encoded sounds exactly like the original. I don't have super expensive speakers attached to the computer, nor do I have a fancy sound card (Creative Live 5.1.) Storing music losslessly is a waste of space to me. Sometimes I like to share music files and it's a heck of a lot easier and others are a heck of a lot more interested in trading compressed music compared to lossless files. And I can put a heck of a lot more of them on a CDR. And should I wish to listem to them in my MP3 player with limited memory, I'm sure as hell not going to use a lossless format.
If YOU want to use up your hard drive space, internet bandwidth, and blank media with huge lossless encoded files, feel free. But don't get all smug and proclaim to not have any idea why anyone would not want to waste their resources.
Oh, and I'm not going to touch that "mathematically lossless" crap, others have covered that already.
No, it's more like handing your car over to the mechanic with a large cardboard box full of polaroids of naked 8-year-olds in the back seat. The pictures in question are obviously suspect in both cases, and in both cases they were in plain sight, albeit in a place not primarily related to the thing being fixed (but still available to the technician for reasonable purposes, ie "backing the car onto the lift and turning around and noticing" compared to "cleaning up crap on the hard drive to make more room".)
I guess the point I was trying to (poorly) make was that apparently the world doesn't need giant 120' x 80' foot windtunnels anymore, because similar results can be had with smaller windtunnels and e.g. higher mass flow raters or a different viscosity, or whatever.
Look up the Pi Similarity theorem some time. With it, you can take all the relevant equations of interest (Navier-Stokes) and determine how the physical units scale with respect to interesting ratios. In other words, if you're intereted in the Reynolds number, you may find that as long as you scale a characteristic length with the inverse of viscosity, for example, the Reynolds number will remain constant. Using this technique you can study all sorts of interesting things that you could not ordinarily test directly because of size constraints, etc.
In other words, it's possible to get very useful information from flow testing a scale model, as long as you are careful to know what you're doing.
Because they're a terrible solution. All you wind up doing is pissing off the poor people whose email address the spammer used in the forged From: line, and not to mention the quagmire that is making these things play nicely with mailing lists.
But, I think John Levine does a much more eloquent job of explaining why C-R systems are not the answer:
Date: 11 May 2003 21:41:35 -0400 Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.4.40.0305111408240.28246-100000@tom.iecc.com> From: "John R Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan@well.com> Subject: Re: FC: MailFrontier.net, poor anti-spamware, and future of mailing lists In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030511122149.00b1a710@mail.well.co m >
> My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations
> have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.
No, it's worse than that. The collateral damage from widely used C/R systems, even with implementations that avoid the stupid bugs, will destroy usable e-mail.
Challenge systems have effects a lot like spam. In both cases, if only a few people use them they're annoying because they unfairly offload the perpetrator's costs on other people, but in small quantities it's not a big hassle to deal with. As the amount of each goes up, the hassle factor rapidly escalates and it becomes harder and harder for everyone else to use e-mail at all.
A relatively easy to solve problem with challenge systems is that most of them are written by dimwits who don't understand the way that e-mail really works. In 1983 the 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix "vacation" program correctly dealt with mail from lists and other mechanical sources, yet 20 years later I still see out-of-office replies from Lotus Notes and MS Exchange to list mail every day. (Is there really nobody at IBM or Microsoft who used 4.3BSD or knows the rules of thumb to recognize non-personal but legit mail?) Challenge systems have the same bugs, and list managers are now routinely kicking people off lists whose broken challenge systems spam out stupid challenges to everyone who posts to the list, and ignoring challenges to signup confirmation messages. These particular problems are soluble; the few challenge systems used by experienced mail users like Brad and Dan Bernstein avoid them.
But the real damage from challenge systems will come when spammers start attacking them. Challenge systems all have user whitelists so that each correspondent only gets one challenge, then mail goes through directly. So spammers will start trying to send spam with forged sender addresses that are on the recipients' whitelists. That's not so hard, sign up for a mailing list, scrape addresses from the list traffic, then send NxN copies of spam, to each list address from each list address. Similarly with addresses scraped in groups from web pages, usenet groups, and anywhere else scrapage happens.
So what will the effect of this be? You won't be able to trust that mail from your friends is actually from your friends, since an increasing fraction will be spam leaking through your challenge system. What will people do? Given the basic principle of challenge systems, which is that it's someone else's job to solve your spam problem, people will dump their whitelists and start challenging every message. At this point, it's possible to automate much of the work, most challenge systems are scriptable, so that for example I have a few lines in my mail sorting filters that catch the per-message challenges from submissions to Dan Bernstein's mailing lists and automatically send confirmations. But of course, if I can send responses from scripts, spammers can and will too, so challenge systems will increasingly include "prove you're human" features like showing you a picture and asking you how many kittens are in
Just a note about that page: no wonder it suffered a slashdot-induced meltdown:
Total images: 130 Total bytes: 2196527
Image loading will take about:
1350.92 seconds @ 14.4
675.46 seconds @ 28.8
347.74 seconds @ 56K
130 images on one page is a heck of a lot... it means each page load takes 130 connections and 130 http GETs (ignoring http pipelining and keep-alive which no doubt helps tremendously.) The load of a near-instantaneous swarm of tens of thousands of visitors each trying to launch a bazillion connections for all those images must really tax a server. Also consider that if 10,000 people load the page, that's about 22GB of traffic right there.
Heh, that kind of reminds me of that crappy Rutger Hauer movie where he played a prisoner at a facility where everyone wore a neck collar thing that was packed with explosives and set to go off if they went past the perimeter. Hilarity ensues...
If they think mold inside a CRT is bad, wait until they try to scrape the pile of molten silicon from the floor of their server room after slashdot's done with it.
Why was this story linked to Science Blog and not the actual MIT press release? Science Blog adds absolutely no content whatsoever to this story, they simply cut and pasted the first two paragraphs as a summary and then included the rest of the press release. If you want to mention that you saw this at Science Blog that would be one thing but saying that "there's a story on SB about X" is really pushing it.
Next up on the gripe list, slashdot story submissions that consist of a cut and paste of the first few sentences of the linked content. If you can't write a concise summary of the article in your own words, then you probably didn't read it, you're lazy, or you lack the language skills of a ninth-grader.
Here are the slides [pdf] from the Oct 2002 NSF review. Lots of pictures, graphs, technical details, etc. for anyone interested. In a nutshell they are aiming to measure strain on the order of 10^-21 over the frequency range of 100Hz - 1kHz. Using two facilities separated by 3000km allows them to search for correlated events and weed out localized noise. IANAP.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote the Supreme Court decision in Harper and Row v. Nation Enterprises:Read sections 2.8 and 2.9 of this FAQ for a good Fair Use discussion.
Re: software. Section 117 is a very interesting read. Specifically, it allows you to make copies of a computer program provided that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner. This is in response to the line of reasoning that one has to copy the program from disk to RAM in order to run it (and all sorts of variations on that theme.) It also specifically allows copying the program in the normal process of maintenance or repair, i.e. copying the contents of a failing hard disk to a new one.
It also permits you to copy software provided that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. This is the "right to make backups" that everyone is probably familiar with. It also states that any such backups must be sold or transferred with the original copies, i.e. you must transfer or destroy them if you sell, lease, or otherwise yield your rights to the work.
So by copyright law alone, executing a program is a right that you freely have, since you are specifically given the right to copy the program for this purpose. I think the confusion in this regard comes because "licensing" is a whole layer on top of (or in addition to) copyright law. In other words the software vendor, in return for the right to acquire a copy of the software, engages you in an additional contract (the license) above and beyond copyright law. This is where all the restrictions regarding reverse modification, publishing of performance data, and all the other sorts of restrictions on what you can do with the software come from, I believe. I guess the idea is that the vendor is free to offer any contract he wishes in return for the right to obtain the copy of the software, and if you do not agree to enter into the contract as stated then you do not have a legitimate right to the copy in the first place, since that's an exclusive right of the copyright holder.
The crux of the matter, then, rests on whether most EULA's are valid contracts, and contract law is a whole other branch of the code. In general, I would say that if you are given due opportunity to review the license before entering into the contract, then it's a perfectly valid arrangement and you are legally obliged to the terms within, whatever those may be. The gray area comes in when the contract terms are not fully disclosed until after the agreement has been made, i.e. "shrinkwrap EULAs." To be valid, a contract requires that both parties knowingly enter into a mutually beneficial agreement, among other thing. I'm not sure of the details here but a contract must fulfill a fairly well-defined set of criteria in order to be valid, so there's a chance that some of these EULAs would fail on other accounts as well.
Re: derivative work. It depends on the particular format; for sound recordings, a simple modification of the order, arrangement, or quality of the work results in a derived work that falls under the original copyright owner's control... but creating "an independent fixation of other sounds" constitutes a new work not covered by the original copyright. From section 114:
- to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
- to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
- to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
- in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
- in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
- in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission
Chaper 106a also gives further rights dealing with the right of attribution ("the paternity right") and the right of integrity... these specify that an author can generally claim ownership of works and disclaim ownership of distorted versions of the work, etc.Chapters 107 thru 122 then whittle away at these rights, defining certain exemptions and special circumstances. Most well known is Chapter 107 which outlines the Fair Use principle which allows a looser enforcement of the above rights in certain circumstances, for the overall wellbeing of society... i.e. exceptions for literary, satirical, educational, literary, critical, etc. purposes. This is the old "you can photocopy a few pages from the encyclopedia so you can read it at home" clause. See sections 2.8 and 2.9 of this FAQ for a very good explanation of Fair Use.
Most importantly, Fair Use also allows time shifting and media shifting for the purposes of personal, non-commerical archival use, at least according to the EFF.
Anyway, the point is that the way copyright law works is not that it says "you get these rights when you pay for a CD", rather it states "the owner of the copyright has the following exclusive rights (with a few exceptions.)"
So, for example it dictates that the copyright holder has the right of public performance which means that you are free to play the CD any way that you want, so long as you don't infringe on this "public performance" right (or any other right.)
Alternatively put, you can do anything you want, just so long as you don't infringe any of the above enumerated exclusive rights.
Based on these four criteria, and previous precendent, it seems clear that making a copy of a work (in whole) for personal archival purposes DOES fall under Fair Use. From the eff's Fair Use FAQ:
Therefore, as permitted under the eff's Fair Use interpretation, you ARE entitled to make a copy, and are NOT bound to the single purchased medium. I'm afraid I must side with their opinion in this matter, and not a random slashdot poster's opinion.
I really think you will have great problems convincing thousands (or millions) of people to essentially give up the ability to play at will the tracks of the CDs they own. Yeah, if everyone suddenly became part of the collective there would probably be enough overlap so that no one would ever really have to wait very long. But for the more obscure tracks there could be a definite shortage of slots and the possibility could be very real that the owner of a CD would be unable to play his library for a significant time period until someone checks something in.
And, this all completely ignores the problem of enforcement -- how do you:
If courts find that there is significant or rampant evidence of these protections failing, then the legitimacy of the plan really takes a hit. And let's face it, people are used to copying MP3 tracks at will, so why would they ever be inclined to voluntarily restrict themselves (and pay for the right to do so)?
I'll admit, v2.0 is a lot closer to legal than 1.0 -- in fact it would actually BE legal if you could enforce the above restrictions... but human nature being what it is, I wouldn't count on it. Finally, to get mass appeal you would have to stay clear from proprietary formats or DRM, and that usually means that your chances of enforcement through software go way down.
At the end of the day, this is just a very efficient library. However, it achieves this efficiency by eliminating the one thing that guarantees the legitimacy of the library: the fact that the items are physical units that pass from hand to hand, so that the one-copy-per-use notion is enforced. By doing away with the physical item, you open up a huge degree of efficiency and scale, yet you also make it very easy to cheat the system... and at then end of the day there's no way to ensure compliance, so this will fail along with all the Napsters and MP3.com's of the world.
That means the voltage of the battery should be at least double the voltage drop of the LED.
Not if you want decent battery life, it shouldn't.
I think you'll find most "advanced" LED flashlights use a small PIC and utilize PWM to regulate the LED current rather than wastefully throwing away any battery voltage in excess of the LED's forward voltage.
And if they don't use a microcontroller, they use a battery arrangement as close to the forward voltage of the LED so as to maximize available life.
In other words, in such an application it's fine if the LED current varies significantly over the discharge of the battery, because it means a much longer usable overall battery life.
For reference, I have a Photon Micro-Light (a popular brand of small LED flashlight) which uses no resistor (or PWM) whatsoever. Just two watch batteries in series connected directly across the LED.
You'll notice there are also hosts listed in the 127/8 range, which would appear bogus as well. But remember that a domain admin can set the DNS server that has authority for that domain to point to any IP address he chooses, and that's what this survey is based on. So there are some domains out there that resolve to 10.x.x.x or 127.x.x.x. It doesn't mean there's anything actually there.
Or randomly wasting SCO's web server bandwidth in a ridiculous attempt to get their attention, and "get them back" for some perceived evil. Not that I agree with SCO, but fighting abuse with abuse is retarded.
Correct. The guy in this article is incorrect in looking at the speed on the label of the dremel and assuming that's what the disk is spinning. The max speed on those things is almost always the "no load" speed, and the actual speed will be significantly less, depending on the load. A CD presents quite a large moment of inertia (compared to a small little grinding bit) so I wouldn't be surprised if it's only spinning at 15 kRPM or less.
This article is a waste of time,
What's even worse is when you look at how few actual web sites are actually hosted in those "legacy class A" spaces. I've heard that, for example, GM has tons of ancient robotics and other embedded applications that are running on hard coded IPs in their allocated space. Not that they're publicly visible, just that no one really ever considered a scarcity of IP addresses in the past.
Here's a great link that shows where web servers are in relation to the various class A (/8) address spaces. As you can see, they're mostly clumped in small zones, with a large majority of the IP space marked as either reserved or not in use for the "public" internet.
To some degree I'd say the scarcity of IP addresses is somewhat manufactured. While you don't want to go willy-nilly allocating large blocks, at some point you have to recognise the genuine need and start unreserving some space. Also, some concensus should be reached on all those "legacy" blocks that aren't being used efficiently.
I care because I have not fallen for the "golden ears" fallacy. To me, 192kbps ABR lame-encoded sounds exactly like the original. I don't have super expensive speakers attached to the computer, nor do I have a fancy sound card (Creative Live 5.1.) Storing music losslessly is a waste of space to me. Sometimes I like to share music files and it's a heck of a lot easier and others are a heck of a lot more interested in trading compressed music compared to lossless files. And I can put a heck of a lot more of them on a CDR. And should I wish to listem to them in my MP3 player with limited memory, I'm sure as hell not going to use a lossless format.
If YOU want to use up your hard drive space, internet bandwidth, and blank media with huge lossless encoded files, feel free. But don't get all smug and proclaim to not have any idea why anyone would not want to waste their resources.
Oh, and I'm not going to touch that "mathematically lossless" crap, others have covered that already.
Come on, the timecube guy is obviously a master at modern UI deign and html layout. :-)
Seriously though, here are some sites whose design I like:
Sweetcode
Mathworld
openrbl.org
perldoc
Paul Borke's website
the Joel On Software forums
the Tech Report (a debatable choice, but the best of its type)
Dmitry's Design Lab
No, it's more like handing your car over to the mechanic with a large cardboard box full of polaroids of naked 8-year-olds in the back seat. The pictures in question are obviously suspect in both cases, and in both cases they were in plain sight, albeit in a place not primarily related to the thing being fixed (but still available to the technician for reasonable purposes, ie "backing the car onto the lift and turning around and noticing" compared to "cleaning up crap on the hard drive to make more room".)
I guess the point I was trying to (poorly) make was that apparently the world doesn't need giant 120' x 80' foot windtunnels anymore, because similar results can be had with smaller windtunnels and e.g. higher mass flow raters or a different viscosity, or whatever.
Look up the Pi Similarity theorem some time. With it, you can take all the relevant equations of interest (Navier-Stokes) and determine how the physical units scale with respect to interesting ratios. In other words, if you're intereted in the Reynolds number, you may find that as long as you scale a characteristic length with the inverse of viscosity, for example, the Reynolds number will remain constant. Using this technique you can study all sorts of interesting things that you could not ordinarily test directly because of size constraints, etc.
In other words, it's possible to get very useful information from flow testing a scale model, as long as you are careful to know what you're doing.
Because they're a terrible solution. All you wind up doing is pissing off the poor people whose email address the spammer used in the forged From: line, and not to mention the quagmire that is making these things play nicely with mailing lists.
.com>
But, I think John Levine does a much more eloquent job of explaining why C-R systems are not the answer:
Date: 11 May 2003 21:41:35 -0400
Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.4.40.0305111408240.28246-100000@tom.iecc
From: "John R Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: "Declan McCullagh" <declan@well.com>
Subject: Re: FC: MailFrontier.net, poor anti-spamware, and future of mailing lists
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030511122149.00b1a710@mail.well.co m >
> My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations
> have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.
No, it's worse than that. The collateral damage from widely used C/R
systems, even with implementations that avoid the stupid bugs, will
destroy usable e-mail.
Challenge systems have effects a lot like spam. In both cases, if only a
few people use them they're annoying because they unfairly offload the
perpetrator's costs on other people, but in small quantities it's not a
big hassle to deal with. As the amount of each goes up, the hassle factor
rapidly escalates and it becomes harder and harder for everyone else to
use e-mail at all.
A relatively easy to solve problem with challenge systems is that most of
them are written by dimwits who don't understand the way that e-mail
really works. In 1983 the 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix "vacation" program
correctly dealt with mail from lists and other mechanical sources, yet 20
years later I still see out-of-office replies from Lotus Notes and MS
Exchange to list mail every day. (Is there really nobody at IBM or
Microsoft who used 4.3BSD or knows the rules of thumb to recognize
non-personal but legit mail?) Challenge systems have the same bugs, and
list managers are now routinely kicking people off lists whose broken
challenge systems spam out stupid challenges to everyone who posts to the
list, and ignoring challenges to signup confirmation messages. These
particular problems are soluble; the few challenge systems used by
experienced mail users like Brad and Dan Bernstein avoid them.
But the real damage from challenge systems will come when spammers start
attacking them. Challenge systems all have user whitelists so that each
correspondent only gets one challenge, then mail goes through directly. So
spammers will start trying to send spam with forged sender addresses that
are on the recipients' whitelists. That's not so hard, sign up for a
mailing list, scrape addresses from the list traffic, then send NxN copies
of spam, to each list address from each list address. Similarly with
addresses scraped in groups from web pages, usenet groups, and anywhere
else scrapage happens.
So what will the effect of this be? You won't be able to trust that mail
from your friends is actually from your friends, since an increasing
fraction will be spam leaking through your challenge system. What will
people do? Given the basic principle of challenge systems, which is that
it's someone else's job to solve your spam problem, people will dump their
whitelists and start challenging every message. At this point, it's
possible to automate much of the work, most challenge systems are
scriptable, so that for example I have a few lines in my mail sorting
filters that catch the per-message challenges from submissions to Dan
Bernstein's mailing lists and automatically send confirmations. But of
course, if I can send responses from scripts, spammers can and will too,
so challenge systems will increasingly include "prove you're human"
features like showing you a picture and asking you how many kittens are in
Just a note about that page: no wonder it suffered a slashdot-induced meltdown:
Total images: 130
Total bytes: 2196527
Image loading will take about:
1350.92 seconds @ 14.4
675.46 seconds @ 28.8
347.74 seconds @ 56K
130 images on one page is a heck of a lot... it means each page load takes 130 connections and 130 http GETs (ignoring http pipelining and keep-alive which no doubt helps tremendously.) The load of a near-instantaneous swarm of tens of thousands of visitors each trying to launch a bazillion connections for all those images must really tax a server. Also consider that if 10,000 people load the page, that's about 22GB of traffic right there.
No, it was a Rutger Hauer movie. You may be thinking of Fortress, but I wasn't.
Heh, that kind of reminds me of that crappy Rutger Hauer movie where he played a prisoner at a facility where everyone wore a neck collar thing that was packed with explosives and set to go off if they went past the perimeter. Hilarity ensues...
If they think mold inside a CRT is bad, wait until they try to scrape the pile of molten silicon from the floor of their server room after slashdot's done with it.
Why was this story linked to Science Blog and not the actual MIT press release? Science Blog adds absolutely no content whatsoever to this story, they simply cut and pasted the first two paragraphs as a summary and then included the rest of the press release. If you want to mention that you saw this at Science Blog that would be one thing but saying that "there's a story on SB about X" is really pushing it.
Next up on the gripe list, slashdot story submissions that consist of a cut and paste of the first few sentences of the linked content. If you can't write a concise summary of the article in your own words, then you probably didn't read it, you're lazy, or you lack the language skills of a ninth-grader.
Come on folks, this isn't "Insightful", it's a direct copy and paste from the damn article.
Here are the slides [pdf] from the Oct 2002 NSF review. Lots of pictures, graphs, technical details, etc. for anyone interested. In a nutshell they are aiming to measure strain on the order of 10^-21 over the frequency range of 100Hz - 1kHz. Using two facilities separated by 3000km allows them to search for correlated events and weed out localized noise. IANAP.
More slides here.
LIGO home page.
HTH.
Final KDevelop 3.0 Alpha Released
Posted by michael [...] "The KDevelop team has released the final alpha of KDevelop [...] has been released.
But I'm still not sure, has it been released or not?
Is it too much to ask to read your submission at least once before submitting? Really now, come on.