Well, I'm not a native, but my wife is. I've only been here about 21 years. Born in D.M. IA, way back then, hung my hat several places "west of the river" over the years.. But I feel plumb at home here, having previously spent a decade in the black hills, but this is anywhere up to 40F warmer which suits my old, beginning to be diabetic bones quite well. I don't know what I'd do if I walked out of the house today, checked the thermometer nailed to the tree in the front yard where it was when I lived just out of Rapid City, and found it telling me that the bite in the air was plumb serious at -39F like it did at 5am one morning there.
But I did manage to get KOTA-TV on the air on time, one vehicle out of 3 in the yard did start. The other 2 had batteries that had frozen and split wide open. But it was full of reclaimed oil of about 50W, and I drove it the first mile and a half at about 700 rpm listening to dry rod bearings rattle before the oil pump got warm enough to prime itself & give those poor old rod bearings a bit of a cushion. The fact that it started blew me away, this was mid february and it hadn't been moved since deer season ended at the end of november. Once it got oil, it was as good as ever, which wasn't saying much, it was one of fords pushrod 6's from 1952 & never ran on more than 5.5 cylinders since I'd bought it. I guess converting it to 12 volts the previous summer did pay off after all. It got a heart transplant a year later after a mustang and my 57 ford wagon had an argument, and I took the 272 v8 from the wrecked 57 and put it on that pickup, making a pretty good concealed weapon according to one fellow that tried the stop light grand prix against it one day.
I'll observe one thing about my born and bred neighbors here in WV, they seem to have an excellent supply of something thats not all that common anymore, common sense. That sure beats the heck out of some I met in my various broadcast engineering jobs in California.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Thats not worth the cost of the bullet, OR the hassle with both the authorities AND your concience.
In my home I am king.
At the 7/11 with a punk holding on the cashier, its a standoff, until he cracks a cap. Then believe me, its the last cap he'll crack. If he's got an IQ over 70, he'll hit the floor face down on my command with his piece thrown or kicked well out of reach. Bet on it. Those are his choices, its up to him which one because the 3rd choice, to swing to cover me will be a bad one. At that point I'm facing deadly force and can respond in kind. And if, because of my age (70), I'm not fast enough, at least I did try.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I agree wholeheartedly that there really should be a lot more sunshine in our court system than what there is now. Closed settlements do no one, including the winners of the settlement in most cases, any good in the long view of correcting what many (dare I say the majority?) of us deduce is a bad situation. More sunshine should stop such BS before its the real problem it is today.
A few sunshine laws that cover our court system seem way the hell and gone overdue to me. But we'll not get those past the 'rabble talking about it' stage until we have a national Bill Shakespear Day.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
And you are forgetting the 2nd ammendment to our constitution.
And its backed in my case by a state law that says no matter how you get along with the local sheriff, if your record is clean, and you have passed the safe handling checks and have proved on the range in the presence of an licensed instructor that you can shoot reasonably accurately given the capability of the weapon in hand, he must issue a CCW to all who qualify as stated above.
Like the sign showing the raging dog and the loaded revolver pointed directly at the viewer says, "Never mind the dog, beware of the owner".
Do I carry? Damn betcha. Any chance of it being used? Only in my own home, or at work alone, and possibly if I should walk into a situation at a local convienience store, but the latter would have to be done under shots already fired circumstances. Otherwise the perp had better be in condition to get up from his face time on the floor and walk to the squad car.
The bleeding hearts among us all tend to forget that the perp who does this, usually makes a consious choice to take what he wants/needs illegally from those who earned it legally. Generally speaking, society as a whole isn't going to miss those that claim a darwin award for their miss-guided efforts.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
It's going to take more court wins to substantiate the GPL
Which is going to take a while yet. But I don't suppose you've felt the need to try and analyze why there hasn't been a truely precedent setting court case just yet, have you?
Think about those that have been through what passes for our legal system, and try and explain why it is that they've not went down to the wire and had a judges opinion rendered so it gets into recorded case law.
Go ahead, I've got a bit of time while you cogitate on the subject of the relative lack of suitable precedent setting cases.... . . . . . ....
Have you got it figured out yet? No?
Here is a hint: What do most folks do when they know they've been had?
They try to deal their way out of the corner, hopefully with their shirt still on their back, right? The natural tendency to 'cut your losses' usually results in the violating party agreeing to comply with the terms of the license and reaching a settlement, at which point the court case dissolves on both sides to cut the monetary losses in paying all those attorneys & costs. And therefore the precedent setting decision is never rendered. I don't see that the GPL is toothless like some loudly proclaim, because everytime somebodies legal help sits down to see what it is they are up against, the legal teams advice going back to the boardroom, in very firm words, is to comply, which is usually the settlement agreed to, and cut your losses while you still have something to lose.
Make sense yet? If not, go back to the top and re-read, until it does.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Uhmm... rockets work due to conservation of momentum, not because of some mysterious reaction force.
Not a very good explanation. Rockets work in space because the exhaust gases are, in the process of being accelerated out the back of the engine, are pushing equally hard on the walls of the engine thats burning the fuel. Since thats cone shaped, wider at the rear, its the net circular square area of the back flange of the motor that the gasses push against, and its anchor to the rest of the rocket transfers that push to the rocket proper. And don't forget that a little like the e=mc2 of Einsteins famous equation, the net power, minus some losses here and there, is still e=mv2, so the holy chalice/grail of the rocket is the one that moves the gas at the highest velocity at the face of the nozzle, with some of the flame cone actually being a velocity to pressure translation so in the end, the gas velocity, being highest out near the tip of the flame, serves to increase the felt pressure pushing forward on the engine proper.
The ion and plasma drives that use zenon gas, electrostaticly or thermally accelerated to a fraction of C speed, are many times more efficient in terms of the amount of push per pound of expendable than any chemically fired rocket can ever hope to be simply becasue of the 'fraction of C speed' is many times what a chemical fired gas generator can do.
I've heard/read of estimates that a xenon gas rocket, fired by a nuclear light bulb heat source (circa 30,000 degrees C) making a plasma out of the gas, could go to Alpha Centari in just a few years, as it would accelerate at a steady.05G's to the halfway point, then turn around and decelerate at that same rate. THat of course means it would have to be launched into leo by some other means before lighting the torch. If not turned around and slowed down, it would go by Alpha Centari at truely relativistic speeds, near.99 C. I haven't personally ran the math, but the article I read 2 decades back sure did. ISTR the article said it would only take about 20 tons of gas. That was with estimates of about 5 tons for the whole nuclear light bulb reactor so the total vehicle weight wouldn't be near as heavy as a Saturn5 at launch. We played with such a reactor at Rocky Flats for a while, but the natives (thats us people folks) got restless. I don't know if there ever was a true 'accident' involving one of them because basicly if the 'light bulb' envelope fails, the reaction is self quenching. One of the safest reactors ever developed, but the word nuclear was its death knell.
Sometimes I swear we are our own worst enemy.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.
Unforch, either the exponent was forgotten, or got lost in an html glitch someplace, What I'm refering to is the 1050 figure used above, which should be 10^50, which is the correct value used in Martin Rees's original release on the subject.
And that is not a trivial difference folks, it is truely astronomical in its own right.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
In fact, if one really thinks about it, patents are probably the most anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-progress part of our Constitution. They are the equivalent of economic terrorism - patent liability can strike any business, anywhere, with devastating effect.
While I can sympathize with this sentiment, there are a couple of case I can relate to where the cease and desist orders were simply ignored.
The most recent case occured maybe 7 or 8 years ago now, in the broadcast industry, where we all got a letter from some shyster outfit demanding royalties of many thousands per year for using their patented technology in the government mandated Emergency Alert System that was put in place to replace the outgrown and outmoded EBS system that had been in place since the 70's or so.
We all made very pointed phone calls to our senators and reps, to the people who sold us the stuff, and to the commission, stateing point blank that we were damned if we were going to pay this annual fee to anyone when to comply with the new rules cost us 5 to 15 thousand for new gear in the first place, and non-compliance was not an option if we wanted to keep our license. We used words that weren't very civilized in many of those conversations.
It must have done some good because none of us that I know of ever got a 3rd letter demanding we pay up. Most of us got a second, even snottier letter, about 30 days after the first. It took 3 friggin years, and there wasn't any publicity at all, but eventually the USTPO reviewed the patent and "found it wanting due to prior art".
We came to the conclusion the legal sharks had overheard a dinner conversation in a greasy spoon someplace, made notes on a napkin, and went flying to the USTPO to patent it, 2 years after it was a fait acompli in the industry by government edict.
Like I said before, we need a National Bill Shakespear Day.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Now thats a novel idea, actually making the perps suffer. And I certainly don't disagree with the premise. However, bet the farm that the body of the SAE weren't terribly fond of the idea, just their attornies trying to justify their retainer.
I still think we need a National Bill Shakespear day.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yes, thats one of the ways they are different. Dammit.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I see you still don't 'get' it regarding the GPL. So let one of those freaks you refer to attempt to enlighten you.
When those GPL'd libraries are linked in, staticly or dynamicly at runtime, you are still making use of code that bears a GPL license. If your code that wants to use that GPL licensed code as part of its functionality isn't GPL also, then the linking is, and properly so, a violation of the GPL and illegal by copyright law.
There is no 'slightly pregnant' here. If you want to use GPL'd code, then your code must be likewise GPL'd or under an approved similar license. End of discussion.
Gawd I wish some dummy would actually let this get to where the judge renders his/her opinion for public record and let the precedent actually be set instead of saveing a few on attorneys fees with a settlement when they realise that tweaking the GPL tigers tail is going to get them eaten.
You're right about one thing, these decisions really are quite obvious. Oh, and go learn how to spell license too. There are in fact several ways, but yours is not among them in my dictionary.
-- Cheers, gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Well I'll be... First post! And then they've raised the time between posts to 2 minutes. Now that sucks.
-- Cheers, gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Bah, go study up on exterior balistics my friend. Gravity, acting on the bullet is straight down, but if the bullet isn't traveling perfectly horizontal, then the gravity vector of 32 feet per second per second isn't being applied at right angles to the path, but at a vector.
So if you are shooting downhill at a 45 degree angle, then that 300 yards you mentioned must be multiplied by the sin of the downward (or upward, they are in fact interchangeable) angle which for 45 degrees is.707 in round terms, making the true horizontal distance traveled only 212 yards, so the fall is proportionatly reduced and the bullet will hit a wee bit higher than the 300 yards over level ground math would indicate. Just a very few inches at 300 yards depending on just how far your piece can reach out and touch someone, but a much larger difference will be seen at the longer ranges and at even higher angles from level.
There are other effects to figure in, such as the distance for the air to slow it down remains at the line of site measured distance of 300 yards so the loss of velocity remains at the 300 yard figure. So does the effect of a crosswind in the drift.
Which is why my email sig warns the yahoo attornies that any additions to the email message above made by me are copyright 2005 by me. They got grabby that way several years ago, but there was so much hell raised that it got dropped in about 60 days. Thats been the last 2 lines of my sig for many years, serving to remind me that we can never sleep.
Now I suppose I have to add aol to the list of attornies that should take note.
And, aol lusers (I've never been one) should be doing their own raising of hell, and when you get one corner jacked up, stick a brick under it to keep in permanently off balance. It will be good for what ails them in the long run.
Better yet, we need a national holiday named the Bill Shakespear "first, we kill all the lawyers" Day, where you get to off your favorite sleazebag attorney for free. I'd bet that would put real honesty back into the legal profession fairly quickly. For the rest, well, there is always the annual Darwin Award competition which might so honor some of the more widely known offenders... The enron thing comes to mind.
Didja ever notice that for all the smoke and mirrors our dearly beloved guvmunt puts up, getting those folks who lost everything some of their money back seems to be enum'd about 10,000 lines down from the top of the list of todo's? Ditto for the global crossing thing. The "Ken Lay's" of these things that ruined so many people, should die in a homeless shelter without a cent in their pocket, but keep them completely flat broke, eating in a soup kitchen every other day for 20+ years first, while wearing clothes tossed out the back door at goodwill.
Hindi is not the principle language of Karnakata, the state where Bangalore is located; Kannada is its official and largest language. Of course, in practice, tech workers in Bangalore come from different regions of India--or indeed, the world--so probably English is even more common in technical workplaces.
Excuse me, but since when is that crap being spoken by the tech support folks who've been pharmed out to India being called english?
Its even worse than some of the quotes on engrish.com!
I've spent the better part of a couple of hours on the phone with someone whose command of the english language was so poor that I was never able to make him understand what my problem really was, and the best I could understand was that I was supposed to downgrade the firmware in the device. It was a router, and with the latest firmware in it, it would not pass either icmp or udp traffic, and lagged the tcp traffic down to about 50 bytes second effective speed.
With the downgraded firmware installed, tcp worked most of the time, and icmp could get through, but still no udp. I tried 2 of them, getting slightly better results with sample #2, but finally gave it up and got my money back from Circuit City.
This outfit is so disconnected from reality I got an email from them the other day, claiming the.zip file attached was beta software, and would I please try it. Unforch, there was no attachment. And I do know where there are two more samples that I could have tried that firmware in had it been attached.
Now, to put this back on subject, I'd certainly poo-poo the idea of getting an MBA, because I've yet to meet an MBA who was willing to get his hands dirty, or in one case, wasn't even worth the bullet to put him out of my misery.
I'd tend to think the CPA might be OK, or a good electrical engineering school. Anything that can improve your knowledge of the hardware your code runs on is a definite plus in my view. Classes that cover the physics of semiconductors is something that if the engineering school offers, should be scarfed up as fast as you can raise the tuition. Knowing how stuff works, and how it can fail, is priceless when something thats busted, absolutely must be working by the 5 oclock news hour. It gets you raises you didn't have to ask for is one side effect. And you get people asking to see your feet cause they heard you can walk on water.
All of that would give you a leg up on the resume IMO. I would certainly look favorably on such a resume, at least till the interview, my BS filter usually works pretty good.
I speak from the vantage point of old age, 70 now, mostly retired, having been there, and done that, on some mighty interesting projects in my 55 years of chasing electrons for a living. My fingerprints were in the cameras that were on the Trieste when it went 37,000 feet down into the mohole, and my fingerprints (if they hadn't been washed off that is) were on some of the hardware that gave John Glenn his first ride to black skies.
I've written niche software that was in continuous daily use at the tv stations where I've engineered at for well in excess of a decade, twice now. And in both cases I also had to design and build the hardware, the first time litterally from scratch using vectors S100 cards. Video, and control interfaces to both the human and the machine it was controlling. I'l bet you didn't know you can generate a 2 digit counter display with a 4 bit counter, a 74154, some diodes, and 6 bytes worth of dma per vertical synch pulse. Fun times, those.
Funny thing, I have never outright asked for a raise, I earned them, and sometimes even walked away from them, like the CE position at a tv station in 1979, a small market station, I was the one man engineering dept. It finally got to me and I walked away from $25,000 a year, which was pretty good money in 1979.
That 55 years I quoted above is not a typo, I quit school in the middle of my freshman year in high school
I have rx'd probably 50 of these ebay phishing messages here. I forwarded the first couple of them to abuse at ebay, but never got a bounce or a reply other than the usual boilerplate , and came to the conclusion that officially, they could care less.
So why are they now, damned near 6 months later, finally admitting it?
Unforch, I think both of us have missed the boat, that 120 watt figure is for a square inch of it.
Quite frankly, there is no way in hell that 1 square inch of solar cell material can make 120 watts worth of electricity at 120 volts without a sufficiently large and steered fresnel lens, of several square feet total area, all focused on the square inch. It would also require active liquid cooling else it would be destroyed by the resultant fire.
Even at 144 times that area, or one square foot, getting 120 watts out of it will still require a conversion efficency well about 100%, or a still large, ungainly, and actively steered fresnel lens to concentrate the incoming energy.
Methinks they better send their web page writer back to school since he's actively getting several hundred out of a simple 2+2.
And if thats an example of their veracity, I sure as hell wouldn't be looking to buy some stock until they get both feet firmly on sound engineering and physical laws ground.
I meant free as in beer, of course, I suspect you realized that and were just being coy.
No, I wasn't in the least, I really would like to know how DRM is usefull to the FOSS community, other than driveing the victims in our direction. Thats a given, but with one provisio: The 'sheeple' must be made aware that there is a choice, and that they do not have to put up with such BS. Unforch, that publicity costs money...
If exersizing that choice means they may have to buckle down and actually learn something in order to make use of it, who knows, maybe they just might get into the habit of thinking for themselves instead of playing the sheeple character all their life. Sadly, in my travels over the last 70 years, I have learned a couple of things, most obvious being that the average Joe Sixpack thinks he knows it all the minute he has the diploma in his hot little hands, and promptly forgets that one never really graduates from the University of Hard Knocks, although I do have a diploma from that school hanging on the wall. But Joe Sixpack takes himself out of the learning mode all too often and coasts along the rest of his life, wondering why all the good stuff seems to pass him by. Me, for the first 50 years, tended to grab that brass ring and con myself into jobs that expanded my learning, for the simple reason that while I may not have ever seen that particular piece of gear before, the darned thing does come with manuals AND I CAN LEARN. Pretty good for a guy with officially, an 8th grade education. (From Iowa, which helps more than you can imagine)
Or even sometimes there wasn't a manual and we played it by ear, listening to the guys with the sheepskin on the wall. By those means, my fingerprints have been on some unique, nearly one of a kind things, such as the tv cameras that were mounted on the Trieste when it made that trip down into the mohole and brought back those pictures of the eyeless fish that lived 37,000 feet down in the marianas trench. The pix were shot off the monitors with leica cameras because in the very early 60's, no one had yet dreamed up the idea of putting video on tape yet. I suspect there were people at Ampex in Redwood City who were researching it, but their first machine was only 10x the cubic volume of that 6 foot diameter cast iron ball that had all the gear for life support for two smallish men who were also crammed into that potentially lethal ball along with the electronics, as the exterior pressure at the bottom of the dive was in the 18,000 psi range.
One picture they brought back which hasn't been widely published was of the battery racks that powered the Trieste, a few tons of Sears Die-Hards sitting in cages that supported the weather balloons snapped over the necks of the batteries, and which had been prefilled with about a pint of battery acid each before being snapped over the filler necks. The picture shows very clearly that the extra pint of so of acid had been sufficiently compressed that the balloons weren't visible, haveing been pushed into the batteries. Tell me again you can't compress water?
We had built the pan and tilt cases so that they were open to the sea pressure, but with a neoprene diaphram to prevent the mixing of the oil they were filled with with the sea water. We miss-calculated the oils compression or there were hidden air pockets in the units that never got filled with oil, and both units, while still barely working, did come back to the surface with big cuts in the diaphrams from the moving gears within. They were disposed of as you cannot imagine the rapidity with which sea water corrodes things at those pressures.
Feel free to be a martyr for some nonexistent cause. I'll continue to buy a product so long as the DRM doesn't interfere with my intended use.
And what happens if you buy something, and the DRM prevents you from using it as you intended. Can you then take the product back and get your money back, after breaking the shrinkwrap in order to test to see if it works? No known retailer on this planet that I'm aware of allows that, so you are out the cost of that product. Period, its not even open for discussion. To them, the fact that the shrinkwrap is broken means you took it home and copied it.
Besides, it is not a non-existant cause. And I'd wager there are enough of us old (I'm 70) farts, yeah, us with the assured disposable income, to make a highly measurable difference in sales. I am not the only one I see browseing the racks at wallyworld, picking up an interesting cd, search in vain for the CD logo, and put it back when its not found. If asked, they will often parrot my own reason for not buying it, no logo. If sales wanted to measure it instead of yelping piracy to their Disney bought and paid for reps and senators that is...
Not that I ever buy CDs anyway.
Oh really? Then how do you legally acquire the music you listen to, other than writing it yourself, and then finding sufficiently talented mu$icians, who usually like to be paid, to perform it so you can personally make a recording of it? Interesting question that...
I'd get tired of listening to my stuff pretty quickly. But then my stuff is not music, its computer code although some of it does make something resembling music.
Where DRM is most promising is with regard to free products.
That is an application of DRM I hadn't considered, please explain how it applies to free products such as linux which is released under the GPL and is already freely copyable, at least for the stuff thats included in the freely downloadable iso images to do that install. You have my curiousity piqued.
The bit at the end, about, "Is that asking too much?" The answer is a resounding yes. You want to set the terms of the transaction. Well, guess what. You don't get to. The creator, by virtue of the fact that he created the work, gets to set the terms. If you don't like that, tough. Shop elsewhere.
Ahh, but you fail to understand that the ultimate choice in the matter is my decision to buy, or not to buy. Your putting such terms on the sale guarantees that the sale will not be made to me or to anybody else that cares about the copyrights as our founding fathers envisioned them. That loss of the sale will take money out of your pocket in a very direct manner since there is no way you can force me to buy such a product.
Which would you rather have, a 5 million seller that might make you an instant $20k after the sleazy accounting is done, and possibly gets copied another 5 million times under less than copyright compliant conditions because there are jerks (I'm being kind, there are much more colorfull adjectives that should be applied to such people) out there that think it should be free, or a 500,000 seller that due to accounting practices used leaves you $80k in the hole?
My choice to buy, or not to buy can make that difference because I'n not just one person.
You're right, I didn't see that provision. That helps considerably in the security dept. What I'd also like to see in that event, is a seperate physical network for the data collection that is not physically connected in any way, to a network with internet access, or with a wireless port connected to it such as might be capable of bridgeing that gap in the copper.
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement. DRM is a technology. The two are not at all interrelated.
With all due respect, The Hell They Aren't. Any DRM that prevents me from making a backup copy, or a media its stored on change or prevents me from playing that movie again via any kind of long term storage, restricts my fair use of the material I bought and paid for. Note that I don't say I hand out or sell copies. They are for my own use exclusively.
This is precisely why, when browsing the racks at the music peddlers after hearing something I might want to add to my pool playing background music, any cd I pick up that doesn't have the Compact Disk logo on it, is summarily dropped back into the bin. In other words, understand that by your demanding that the distributor use some sort of a copy protection that interferes with my fair use costs you the sale. If folks like you would take their heads out of someplace dark and smelly, you would understand that the so-called downturn in sales that you are falsely calling piracy, is far more related to the fact that the public is not as dumb as you take them to be. We're willing to pay a fair price for your product, but we don't think that prices approaching at $20 bill or more, is a fair price, particularly when the distributor's accounting makes damn sure that at the end of the day, a million seller cd doesn't make you a dime, and in fact you probably still owe production and advertising costs on it.
Thats not how copyright, and royalties that accrue to the copyright holder should work at all, but its not going to improve your lot until you get the MPAA/RIAA out of your pocket, and find a distributor willing to gamble, and pay you a guaranteed so much per sale royalty. That means you'll have to take them better demo tapes before they'll take that gamble. That might even be good for the quality of the music since some of what I've heard lately should never have been pressed in the first place. But thats another subject best not opened, like a can of worms...
Copyright, thats another sore subject with me, and IMO, the copyright belongs to the author/composer, and cannot be transfered to a second party ever. You may be able, if the law were written correctly, to sell an exclusive right to make copies of your composition to a corporation for a limited time frame, say 5 or 7 years, long enough to have received as much profit as can be expected. But at the end of that time, the copyright is still yours to do with as you please, say for another 15 years maximum. No more selling your soul to Michael Jackson or Sony/Bertelsman/whomever.
I'm not out to rip any artist off, but I damned sure want to be able to use what I've bought and paid for. Any time, on any playback device since technology changes, as long as its on my property and the audience isn't a paying guest other than bringing in a 6 pack while we play pool or whatever. Is that asking too much?
Excellent point, but somehow I imagine that interstellar sized loophole will be fixed in committee. Too many lawyers to not get it fixed. How of course, may not be the way we'd like if past history is consulted...
If not, then we go back to paper ballots, which I voted on the last 3 elections here. I don't know if the early voters (because they are going to be out of town on ballot day) are still using the one machine the courthouse has or not. I had to use it a couple of years ago, and raised all kinds of hate & discontent when they admitted there was no paper trail. It wasn't a diebold, but who knows what off-brand gizmo that looked like the usual laptop to me, complete with an 802-11 antenna sticking out of it. They didn't care for it when I volunteered to borrow another one with 802-11 in it, and some snooping software, and make it read any damned thing I wanted it to read from a parking spot around the block. That did raise eyebrows, and every bad story about those things thats got any meat in it at all, has been printed and the worst of it delivered to the clerk.
Here in small town USA, paper works just fine when the tally for an individual candidate is often less than 500.
Things at BoA apparently haven't changed much in the 24 years that have elapsed since I last had an account there. Only one other person with the same last name as mine in the whole of california, but in the about 8 weeks I had a checking account there, they miss-credited my deposits 3 times, causeing all sorts of bounced checks when in fact there was a kilobuck in there to cover.
The first time I was nice, and only asked for, and got, the check charges dropped.
The next time I wasn't so nice and made them draw up a letter of apology to everyone who saw an NSF notice on the check when it got back to them, then checked with the victims about 4 days later to make sure they got it.
The third time I walked in and wrote a check for my calculated balance (without deducting for any check charges that had accrued yet again) and presented it to the teller, who refused to honor it, you guessed it, NSF. And it wasn't by the check charges, their books said it would have overdrawn the account by the amount of my last deposit PLUS the check charges, a rather convieniently provable figure to within a couple of cents as I had the deposit slip in hand.
I escalated my squawking until I got a bank officers attention, informing him that I was closing the account, and that he had better find the money to cash my check else we'd be in court for extended damages eventually. They hemmed, and hawed, and eventually did cash it. From what pieces of the conversations I could overhear, I could only assume that they were re-using account numbers, and that my money had been credited to whomever was the former name that number linked to.
At no point, despite lots of apologies, did they ever admit to me that it was their mistake. It was just a mistake with no spoken indication as to who made it. They (by then there was another 3 or 4 from the second floor involved too) were obviously both practiced and experienced at handling such situations.
BoA no doubt has plenty of attentive, dilligent employees who do not deserve the abuse, but with all due respect (none) to the corporate managers on the second floor, screw 'em. If they were the only bank left, my matress or cookie jar would start getting lumpy. Both are well guarded by some gentlemen with loud voices named Ruger, and Charter Arms...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not a native, but my wife is. I've only been here about 21 years. Born in D.M. IA, way back then, hung my hat several places "west of the river" over the years.. But I feel plumb at home here, having previously spent a decade in the black hills, but this is anywhere up to 40F warmer which suits my old, beginning to be diabetic bones quite well. I don't know what I'd do if I walked out of the house today, checked the thermometer nailed to the tree in the front yard where it was when I lived just out of Rapid City, and found it telling me that the bite in the air was plumb serious at -39F like it did at 5am one morning there.
But I did manage to get KOTA-TV on the air on time, one vehicle out of 3 in the yard did start. The other 2 had batteries that had frozen and split wide open. But it was full of reclaimed oil of about 50W, and I drove it the first mile and a half at about 700 rpm listening to dry rod bearings rattle before the oil pump got warm enough to prime itself & give those poor old rod bearings a bit of a cushion. The fact that it started blew me away, this was mid february and it hadn't been moved since deer season ended at the end of november. Once it got oil, it was as good as ever, which wasn't saying much, it was one of fords pushrod 6's from 1952 & never ran on more than 5.5 cylinders since I'd bought it. I guess converting it to 12 volts the previous summer did pay off after all. It got a heart transplant a year later after a mustang and my 57 ford wagon had an argument, and I took the 272 v8 from the wrecked 57 and put it on that pickup, making a pretty good concealed weapon according to one fellow that tried the stop light grand prix against it one day.
I'll observe one thing about my born and bred neighbors here in WV, they seem to have an excellent supply of something thats not all that common anymore, common sense. That sure beats the heck out of some I met in my various broadcast engineering jobs in California.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Thats not worth the cost of the bullet, OR the hassle with both the authorities AND your concience.
In my home I am king.
At the 7/11 with a punk holding on the cashier, its a standoff, until he cracks a cap. Then believe me, its the last cap he'll crack. If he's got an IQ over 70, he'll hit the floor face down on my command with his piece thrown or kicked well out of reach. Bet on it. Those are his choices, its up to him which one because the 3rd choice, to swing to cover me will be a bad one. At that point I'm facing deadly force and can respond in kind. And if, because of my age (70), I'm not fast enough, at least I did try.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I agree wholeheartedly that there really should be a lot more sunshine in our court system than what there is now. Closed settlements do no one, including the winners of the settlement in most cases, any good in the long view of correcting what many (dare I say the majority?) of us deduce is a bad situation. More sunshine should stop such BS before its the real problem it is today.
A few sunshine laws that cover our court system seem way the hell and gone overdue to me. But we'll not get those past the 'rabble talking about it' stage until we have a national Bill Shakespear Day.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
And you are forgetting the 2nd ammendment to our constitution.
And its backed in my case by a state law that says no matter how you get along with the local sheriff, if your record is clean, and you have passed the safe handling checks and have proved on the range in the presence of an licensed instructor that you can shoot reasonably accurately given the capability of the weapon in hand, he must issue a CCW to all who qualify as stated above.
Like the sign showing the raging dog and the loaded revolver pointed directly at the viewer says, "Never mind the dog, beware of the owner".
Do I carry? Damn betcha. Any chance of it being used? Only in my own home, or at work alone, and possibly if I should walk into a situation at a local convienience store, but the latter would have to be done under shots already fired circumstances. Otherwise the perp had better be in condition to get up from his face time on the floor and walk to the squad car.
The bleeding hearts among us all tend to forget that the perp who does this, usually makes a consious choice to take what he wants/needs illegally from those who earned it legally. Generally speaking, society as a whole isn't going to miss those that claim a darwin award for their miss-guided efforts.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
It's going to take more court wins to substantiate the GPL
...
Which is going to take a while yet. But I don't suppose you've felt the need to try and analyze why there hasn't been a truely precedent setting court case just yet, have you?
Think about those that have been through what passes for our legal system, and try and explain why it is that they've not went down to the wire and had a judges opinion rendered so it gets into recorded case law.
Go ahead, I've got a bit of time while you cogitate on the subject of the relative lack of suitable precedent setting cases....
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Have you got it figured out yet? No?
Here is a hint: What do most folks do when they know they've been had?
They try to deal their way out of the corner, hopefully with their shirt still on their back, right? The natural tendency to 'cut your losses' usually results in the violating party agreeing to comply with the terms of the license and reaching a settlement, at which point the court case dissolves on both sides to cut the monetary losses in paying all those attorneys & costs. And therefore the precedent setting decision is never rendered. I don't see that the GPL is toothless like some loudly proclaim, because everytime somebodies legal help sits down to see what it is they are up against, the legal teams advice going back to the boardroom, in very firm words, is to comply, which is usually the settlement agreed to, and cut your losses while you still have something to lose.
Make sense yet? If not, go back to the top and re-read, until it does.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Uhmm ... rockets work due to conservation of momentum, not because of some mysterious reaction force.
.05G's to the halfway point, then turn around and decelerate at that same rate. THat of course means it would have to be launched into leo by some other means before lighting the torch. If not turned around and slowed down, it would go by Alpha Centari at truely relativistic speeds, near .99 C. I haven't personally ran the math, but the article I read 2 decades back sure did. ISTR the article said it would only take about 20 tons of gas. That was with estimates of about 5 tons for the whole nuclear light bulb reactor so the total vehicle weight wouldn't be near as heavy as a Saturn5 at launch. We played with such a reactor at Rocky Flats for a while, but the natives (thats us people folks) got restless. I don't know if there ever was a true 'accident' involving one of them because basicly if the 'light bulb' envelope fails, the reaction is self quenching. One of the safest reactors ever developed, but the word nuclear was its death knell.
Not a very good explanation. Rockets work in space because the exhaust gases are, in the process of being accelerated out the back of the engine, are pushing equally hard on the walls of the engine thats burning the fuel. Since thats cone shaped, wider at the rear, its the net circular square area of the back flange of the motor that the gasses push against, and its anchor to the rest of the rocket transfers that push to the rocket proper. And don't forget that a little like the e=mc2 of Einsteins famous equation, the net power, minus some losses here and there, is still e=mv2, so the holy chalice/grail of the rocket is the one that moves the gas at the highest velocity at the face of the nozzle, with some of the flame cone actually being a velocity to pressure translation so in the end, the gas velocity, being highest out near the tip of the flame, serves to increase the felt pressure pushing forward on the engine proper.
The ion and plasma drives that use zenon gas, electrostaticly or thermally accelerated to a fraction of C speed, are many times more efficient in terms of the amount of push per pound of expendable than any chemically fired rocket can ever hope to be simply becasue of the 'fraction of C speed' is many times what a chemical fired gas generator can do.
I've heard/read of estimates that a xenon gas rocket, fired by a nuclear light bulb heat source (circa 30,000 degrees C) making a plasma out of the gas, could go to Alpha Centari in just a few years, as it would accelerate at a steady
Sometimes I swear we are our own worst enemy.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.
Unforch, either the exponent was forgotten, or got lost in an html glitch someplace, What I'm refering to is the 1050 figure used above, which should be 10^50, which is the correct value used in Martin Rees's original release on the subject.
And that is not a trivial difference folks, it is truely astronomical in its own right.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
In fact, if one really thinks about it, patents are probably the most anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-progress part of our Constitution. They are the equivalent of economic terrorism - patent liability can strike any business, anywhere, with devastating effect.
While I can sympathize with this sentiment, there are a couple of case I can relate to where the cease and desist orders were simply ignored.
The most recent case occured maybe 7 or 8 years ago now, in the broadcast industry, where we all got a letter from some shyster outfit demanding royalties of many thousands per year for using their patented technology in the government mandated Emergency Alert System that was put in place to replace the outgrown and outmoded EBS system that had been in place since the 70's or so.
We all made very pointed phone calls to our senators and reps, to the people who sold us the stuff, and to the commission, stateing point blank that we were damned if we were going to pay this annual fee to anyone when to comply with the new rules cost us 5 to 15 thousand for new gear in the first place, and non-compliance was not an option if we wanted to keep our license. We used words that weren't very civilized in many of those conversations.
It must have done some good because none of us that I know of ever got a 3rd letter demanding we pay up. Most of us got a second, even snottier letter, about 30 days after the first. It took 3 friggin years, and there wasn't any publicity at all, but eventually the USTPO reviewed the patent and "found it wanting due to prior art".
We came to the conclusion the legal sharks had overheard a dinner conversation in a greasy spoon someplace, made notes on a napkin, and went flying to the USTPO to patent it, 2 years after it was a fait acompli in the industry by government edict.
Like I said before, we need a National Bill Shakespear Day.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Now thats a novel idea, actually making the perps suffer. And I certainly don't disagree with the premise. However, bet the farm that the body of the SAE weren't terribly fond of the idea, just their attornies trying to justify their retainer.
I still think we need a National Bill Shakespear day.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yes, thats one of the ways they are different. Dammit.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I see you still don't 'get' it regarding the GPL. So let one of those freaks you refer to attempt to enlighten you.
When those GPL'd libraries are linked in, staticly or dynamicly at runtime, you are still making use of code that bears a GPL license. If your code that wants to use that GPL licensed code as part of its functionality isn't GPL also, then the linking is, and properly so, a violation of the GPL and illegal by copyright law.
There is no 'slightly pregnant' here. If you want to use GPL'd code, then your code must be likewise GPL'd or under an approved similar license. End of discussion.
Gawd I wish some dummy would actually let this get to where the judge renders his/her opinion for public record and let the precedent actually be set instead of saveing a few on attorneys fees with a settlement when they realise that tweaking the GPL tigers tail is going to get them eaten.
You're right about one thing, these decisions really are quite obvious. Oh, and go learn how to spell license too. There are in fact several ways, but yours is not among them in my dictionary.
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Cheers, gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Well I'll be... First post! And then they've raised the time between posts to 2 minutes. Now that sucks.
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Cheers, gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Subject says it all.
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Cheers, Gene
Bah, go study up on exterior balistics my friend. Gravity, acting on the bullet is straight down, but if the bullet isn't traveling perfectly horizontal, then the gravity vector of 32 feet per second per second isn't being applied at right angles to the path, but at a vector.
.707 in round terms, making the true horizontal distance traveled only 212 yards, so the fall is proportionatly reduced and the bullet will hit a wee bit higher than the 300 yards over level ground math would indicate. Just a very few inches at 300 yards depending on just how far your piece can reach out and touch someone, but a much larger difference will be seen at the longer ranges and at even higher angles from level.
So if you are shooting downhill at a 45 degree angle, then that 300 yards you mentioned must be multiplied by the sin of the downward (or upward, they are in fact interchangeable) angle which for 45 degrees is
There are other effects to figure in, such as the distance for the air to slow it down remains at the line of site measured distance of 300 yards so the loss of velocity remains at the 300 yard figure. So does the effect of a crosswind in the drift.
--
Cheers, Gene
Which is why my email sig warns the yahoo attornies that any additions to the email message above made by me are copyright 2005 by me. They got grabby that way several years ago, but there was so much hell raised that it got dropped in about 60 days. Thats been the last 2 lines of my sig for many years, serving to remind me that we can never sleep.
Now I suppose I have to add aol to the list of attornies that should take note.
And, aol lusers (I've never been one) should be doing their own raising of hell, and when you get one corner jacked up, stick a brick under it to keep in permanently off balance. It will be good for what ails them in the long run.
Better yet, we need a national holiday named the Bill Shakespear "first, we kill all the lawyers" Day, where you get to off your favorite sleazebag attorney for free. I'd bet that would put real honesty back into the legal profession fairly quickly. For the rest, well, there is always the annual Darwin Award competition which might so honor some of the more widely known offenders... The enron thing comes to mind.
Didja ever notice that for all the smoke and mirrors our dearly beloved guvmunt puts up, getting those folks who lost everything some of their money back seems to be enum'd about 10,000 lines down from the top of the list of todo's? Ditto for the global crossing thing. The "Ken Lay's" of these things that ruined so many people, should die in a homeless shelter without a cent in their pocket, but keep them completely flat broke, eating in a soup kitchen every other day for 20+ years first, while wearing clothes tossed out the back door at goodwill.
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Cheers, Gene
Hindi is not the principle language of Karnakata, the state where Bangalore is located; Kannada is its official and largest language. Of course, in practice, tech workers in Bangalore come from different regions of India--or indeed, the world--so probably English is even more common in technical workplaces.
.zip file attached was beta software, and would I please try it. Unforch, there was no attachment. And I do know where there are two more samples that I could have tried that firmware in had it been attached.
Excuse me, but since when is that crap being spoken by the tech support folks who've been pharmed out to India being called english?
Its even worse than some of the quotes on engrish.com!
I've spent the better part of a couple of hours on the phone with someone whose command of the english language was so poor that I was never able to make him understand what my problem really was, and the best I could understand was that I was supposed to downgrade the firmware in the device. It was a router, and with the latest firmware in it, it would not pass either icmp or udp traffic, and lagged the tcp traffic down to about 50 bytes second effective speed.
With the downgraded firmware installed, tcp worked most of the time, and icmp could get through, but still no udp. I tried 2 of them, getting slightly better results with sample #2, but finally gave it up and got my money back from Circuit City.
This outfit is so disconnected from reality I got an email from them the other day, claiming the
Now, to put this back on subject, I'd certainly poo-poo the idea of getting an MBA, because I've yet to meet an MBA who was willing to get his hands dirty, or in one case, wasn't even worth the bullet to put him out of my misery.
I'd tend to think the CPA might be OK, or a good electrical engineering school. Anything that can improve your knowledge of the hardware your code runs on is a definite plus in my view. Classes that cover the physics of semiconductors is something that if the engineering school offers, should be scarfed up as fast as you can raise the tuition. Knowing how stuff works, and how it can fail, is priceless when something thats busted, absolutely must be working by the 5 oclock news hour. It gets you raises you didn't have to ask for is one side effect. And you get people asking to see your feet cause they heard you can walk on water.
All of that would give you a leg up on the resume IMO. I would certainly look favorably on such a resume, at least till the interview, my BS filter usually works pretty good.
I speak from the vantage point of old age, 70 now, mostly retired, having been there, and done that, on some mighty interesting projects in my 55 years of chasing electrons for a living. My fingerprints were in the cameras that were on the Trieste when it went 37,000 feet down into the mohole, and my fingerprints (if they hadn't been washed off that is) were on some of the hardware that gave John Glenn his first ride to black skies.
I've written niche software that was in continuous daily use at the tv stations where I've engineered at for well in excess of a decade, twice now. And in both cases I also had to design and build the hardware, the first time litterally from scratch using vectors S100 cards. Video, and control interfaces to both the human and the machine it was controlling. I'l bet you didn't know you can generate a 2 digit counter display with a 4 bit counter, a 74154, some diodes, and 6 bytes worth of dma per vertical synch pulse. Fun times, those.
Funny thing, I have never outright asked for a raise, I earned them, and sometimes even walked away from them, like the CE position at a tv station in 1979, a small market station, I was the one man engineering dept. It finally got to me and I walked away from $25,000 a year, which was pretty good money in 1979.
That 55 years I quoted above is not a typo, I quit school in the middle of my freshman year in high school
Likewise, kmail to the rescue.
I have rx'd probably 50 of these ebay phishing messages here. I forwarded the first couple of them to abuse at ebay, but never got a bounce or a reply other than the usual boilerplate , and came to the conclusion that officially, they could care less.
So why are they now, damned near 6 months later, finally admitting it?
--
Cheers, Gene
Unforch, I think both of us have missed the boat, that 120 watt figure is for a square inch of it.
Quite frankly, there is no way in hell that 1 square inch of solar cell material can make 120 watts worth of electricity at 120 volts without a sufficiently large and steered fresnel lens, of several square feet total area, all focused on the square inch. It would also require active liquid cooling else it would be destroyed by the resultant fire.
Even at 144 times that area, or one square foot, getting 120 watts out of it will still require a conversion efficency well about 100%, or a still large, ungainly, and actively steered fresnel lens to concentrate the incoming energy.
Methinks they better send their web page writer back to school since he's actively getting several hundred out of a simple 2+2.
And if thats an example of their veracity, I sure as hell wouldn't be looking to buy some stock until they get both feet firmly on sound engineering and physical laws ground.
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Cheers, Gene
I meant free as in beer, of course, I suspect you realized that and were just being coy.
No, I wasn't in the least, I really would like to know how DRM is usefull to the FOSS community, other than driveing the victims in our direction. Thats a given, but with one provisio: The 'sheeple' must be made aware that there is a choice, and that they do not have to put up with such BS. Unforch, that publicity costs money...
If exersizing that choice means they may have to buckle down and actually learn something in order to make use of it, who knows, maybe they just might get into the habit of thinking for themselves instead of playing the sheeple character all their life. Sadly, in my travels over the last 70 years, I have learned a couple of things, most obvious being that the average Joe Sixpack thinks he knows it all the minute he has the diploma in his hot little hands, and promptly forgets that one never really graduates from the University of Hard Knocks, although I do have a diploma from that school hanging on the wall. But Joe Sixpack takes himself out of the learning mode all too often and coasts along the rest of his life, wondering why all the good stuff seems to pass him by. Me, for the first 50 years, tended to grab that brass ring and con myself into jobs that expanded my learning, for the simple reason that while I may not have ever seen that particular piece of gear before, the darned thing does come with manuals AND I CAN LEARN. Pretty good for a guy with officially, an 8th grade education. (From Iowa, which helps more than you can imagine)
Or even sometimes there wasn't a manual and we played it by ear, listening to the guys with the sheepskin on the wall. By those means, my fingerprints have been on some unique, nearly one of a kind things, such as the tv cameras that were mounted on the Trieste when it made that trip down into the mohole and brought back those pictures of the eyeless fish that lived 37,000 feet down in the marianas trench. The pix were shot off the monitors with leica cameras because in the very early 60's, no one had yet dreamed up the idea of putting video on tape yet. I suspect there were people at Ampex in Redwood City who were researching it, but their first machine was only 10x the cubic volume of that 6 foot diameter cast iron ball that had all the gear for life support for two smallish men who were also crammed into that potentially lethal ball along with the electronics, as the exterior pressure at the bottom of the dive was in the 18,000 psi range.
One picture they brought back which hasn't been widely published was of the battery racks that powered the Trieste, a few tons of Sears Die-Hards sitting in cages that supported the weather balloons snapped over the necks of the batteries, and which had been prefilled with about a pint of battery acid each before being snapped over the filler necks. The picture shows very clearly that the extra pint of so of acid had been sufficiently compressed that the balloons weren't visible, haveing been pushed into the batteries. Tell me again you can't compress water?
We had built the pan and tilt cases so that they were open to the sea pressure, but with a neoprene diaphram to prevent the mixing of the oil they were filled with with the sea water. We miss-calculated the oils compression or there were hidden air pockets in the units that never got filled with oil, and both units, while still barely working, did come back to the surface with big cuts in the diaphrams from the moving gears within. They were disposed of as you cannot imagine the rapidity with which sea water corrodes things at those pressures.
I've probably bored you by now, so I'l quit here.
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Cheers, Gene
Feel free to be a martyr for some nonexistent cause. I'll continue to buy a product so long as the DRM doesn't interfere with my intended use.
And what happens if you buy something, and the DRM prevents you from using it as you intended. Can you then take the product back and get your money back, after breaking the shrinkwrap in order to test to see if it works? No known retailer on this planet that I'm aware of allows that, so you are out the cost of that product. Period, its not even open for discussion. To them, the fact that the shrinkwrap is broken means you took it home and copied it.
Besides, it is not a non-existant cause. And I'd wager there are enough of us old (I'm 70) farts, yeah, us with the assured disposable income, to make a highly measurable difference in sales. I am not the only one I see browseing the racks at wallyworld, picking up an interesting cd, search in vain for the CD logo, and put it back when its not found. If asked, they will often parrot my own reason for not buying it, no logo. If sales wanted to measure it instead of yelping piracy to their Disney bought and paid for reps and senators that is...
Not that I ever buy CDs anyway.
Oh really? Then how do you legally acquire the music you listen to, other than writing it yourself, and then finding sufficiently talented mu$icians, who usually like to be paid, to perform it so you can personally make a recording of it? Interesting question that...
I'd get tired of listening to my stuff pretty quickly. But then my stuff is not music, its computer code although some of it does make something resembling music.
Where DRM is most promising is with regard to free products.
That is an application of DRM I hadn't considered, please explain how it applies to free products such as linux which is released under the GPL and is already freely copyable, at least for the stuff thats included in the freely downloadable iso images to do that install. You have my curiousity piqued.
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Cheers, Gene
The bit at the end, about, "Is that asking too much?" The answer is a resounding yes. You want to set the terms of the transaction. Well, guess what. You don't get to. The creator, by virtue of the fact that he created the work, gets to set the terms. If you don't like that, tough. Shop elsewhere.
Ahh, but you fail to understand that the ultimate choice in the matter is my decision to buy, or not to buy. Your putting such terms on the sale guarantees that the sale will not be made to me or to anybody else that cares about the copyrights as our founding fathers envisioned them. That loss of the sale will take money out of your pocket in a very direct manner since there is no way you can force me to buy such a product.
Which would you rather have, a 5 million seller that might make you an instant $20k after the sleazy accounting is done, and possibly gets copied another 5 million times under less than copyright compliant conditions because there are jerks (I'm being kind, there are much more colorfull adjectives that should be applied to such people) out there that think it should be free, or a 500,000 seller that due to accounting practices used leaves you $80k in the hole?
My choice to buy, or not to buy can make that difference because I'n not just one person.
Clear?
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Cheers, Gene
You're right, I didn't see that provision. That helps considerably in the security dept. What I'd also like to see in that event, is a seperate physical network for the data collection that is not physically connected in any way, to a network with internet access, or with a wireless port connected to it such as might be capable of bridgeing that gap in the copper.
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Cheers, Gene
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement. DRM is a technology. The two are not at all interrelated.
With all due respect, The Hell They Aren't. Any DRM that prevents me from making a backup copy, or a media its stored on change or prevents me from playing that movie again via any kind of long term storage, restricts my fair use of the material I bought and paid for. Note that I don't say I hand out or sell copies. They are for my own use exclusively.
This is precisely why, when browsing the racks at the music peddlers after hearing something I might want to add to my pool playing background music, any cd I pick up that doesn't have the Compact Disk logo on it, is summarily dropped back into the bin. In other words, understand that by your demanding that the distributor use some sort of a copy protection that interferes with my fair use costs you the sale. If folks like you would take their heads out of someplace dark and smelly, you would understand that the so-called downturn in sales that you are falsely calling piracy, is far more related to the fact that the public is not as dumb as you take them to be. We're willing to pay a fair price for your product, but we don't think that prices approaching at $20 bill or more, is a fair price, particularly when the distributor's accounting makes damn sure that at the end of the day, a million seller cd doesn't make you a dime, and in fact you probably still owe production and advertising costs on it.
Thats not how copyright, and royalties that accrue to the copyright holder should work at all, but its not going to improve your lot until you get the MPAA/RIAA out of your pocket, and find a distributor willing to gamble, and pay you a guaranteed so much per sale royalty. That means you'll have to take them better demo tapes before they'll take that gamble. That might even be good for the quality of the music since some of what I've heard lately should never have been pressed in the first place. But thats another subject best not opened, like a can of worms...
Copyright, thats another sore subject with me, and IMO, the copyright belongs to the author/composer, and cannot be transfered to a second party ever. You may be able, if the law were written correctly, to sell an exclusive right to make copies of your composition to a corporation for a limited time frame, say 5 or 7 years, long enough to have received as much profit as can be expected. But at the end of that time, the copyright is still yours to do with as you please, say for another 15 years maximum. No more selling your soul to Michael Jackson or Sony/Bertelsman/whomever.
I'm not out to rip any artist off, but I damned sure want to be able to use what I've bought and paid for. Any time, on any playback device since technology changes, as long as its on my property and the audience isn't a paying guest other than bringing in a 6 pack while we play pool or whatever. Is that asking too much?
I don't think so.
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Cheesr, Gene
Excellent point, but somehow I imagine that interstellar sized loophole will be fixed in committee. Too many lawyers to not get it fixed. How of course, may not be the way we'd like if past history is consulted...
If not, then we go back to paper ballots, which I voted on the last 3 elections here. I don't know if the early voters (because they are going to be out of town on ballot day) are still using the one machine the courthouse has or not. I had to use it a couple of years ago, and raised all kinds of hate & discontent when they admitted there was no paper trail. It wasn't a diebold, but who knows what off-brand gizmo that looked like the usual laptop to me, complete with an 802-11 antenna sticking out of it. They didn't care for it when I volunteered to borrow another one with 802-11 in it, and some snooping software, and make it read any damned thing I wanted it to read from a parking spot around the block. That did raise eyebrows, and every bad story about those things thats got any meat in it at all, has been printed and the worst of it delivered to the clerk.
Here in small town USA, paper works just fine when the tally for an individual candidate is often less than 500.
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Cheers, Gene
In that case I'd call you a majority of one.
Things at BoA apparently haven't changed much in the 24 years that have elapsed since I last had an account there. Only one other person with the same last name as mine in the whole of california, but in the about 8 weeks I had a checking account there, they miss-credited my deposits 3 times, causeing all sorts of bounced checks when in fact there was a kilobuck in there to cover.
The first time I was nice, and only asked for, and got, the check charges dropped.
The next time I wasn't so nice and made them draw up a letter of apology to everyone who saw an NSF notice on the check when it got back to them, then checked with the victims about 4 days later to make sure they got it.
The third time I walked in and wrote a check for my calculated balance (without deducting for any check charges that had accrued yet again) and presented it to the teller, who refused to honor it, you guessed it, NSF. And it wasn't by the check charges, their books said it would have overdrawn the account by the amount of my last deposit PLUS the check charges, a rather convieniently provable figure to within a couple of cents as I had the deposit slip in hand.
I escalated my squawking until I got a bank officers attention, informing him that I was closing the account, and that he had better find the money to cash my check else we'd be in court for extended damages eventually. They hemmed, and hawed, and eventually did cash it. From what pieces of the conversations I could overhear, I could only assume that they were re-using account numbers, and that my money had been credited to whomever was the former name that number linked to.
At no point, despite lots of apologies, did they ever admit to me that it was their mistake. It was just a mistake with no spoken indication as to who made it. They (by then there was another 3 or 4 from the second floor involved too) were obviously both practiced and experienced at handling such situations.
BoA no doubt has plenty of attentive, dilligent employees who do not deserve the abuse, but with all due respect (none) to the corporate managers on the second floor, screw 'em. If they were the only bank left, my matress or cookie jar would start getting lumpy. Both are well guarded by some gentlemen with loud voices named Ruger, and Charter Arms...
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Cheers, Gene