I wonder if it's possible to (successfully) sue whatever private entity gave up your email information (i.e. the "someone else's computer")...Seems like the government should be forced to get a warrant even for your email stored at your ISP...otherwise, your ISP should be liable for not protecting your personal information.
Judging by the comments on Broadband Reports they sound just as bad as wireless phone companies in the contract department -- automatically resubscribing people to another year of service and charging $180 to break out of "contracts" early.
While I'm not usually one to defend big business, it's not really all that difficult to cancel your plan after your contract expires. I've done it before, and it's actually a very easy process. As for the period before your contract expires, you *did* sign the contract, presumably in exchange for a huge discount on your phone. You didn't have to sign the contract...you could have paid full price for the phone, and entered into a month-by-month agreement with the provider. It's your own fault if you're not happy with the contract that you signed.
Lasers are not in themselves digital; they are no more discontinuous than any other light source.
Never said they were digital. However, in practice, the laser-based turntables that I'm aware of do, in fact, convert the signal to digital before converting it back to analog and amplifying it for output. I'm actually not sure how you would create a laser-based reader that didn't digitally sample the signal received from the laser, but I'm not an EE, so what do I know...
http://www.laser-vinyl.com/Turntables/Laser/HowItW orks.htmTwo Tracking Laser beams are directed to the left and to the right shoulders of the groove of the record. Only the part of the beams that reach the groove are reflected to two PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) optical semiconductors. The part of the beams that fall on the land area of the record are deflected and not picked up by the PSD devices. The signals are sent to a microprocessor via analogue to digital converters, then to servos to maintain the reader head position directly above the groove. This part of the player is digital.
SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol) is a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over computer network, normally using HTTP. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the Web services stack, providing a basic messaging framework that more abstract layers can build on. The original acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard, which became a W3C Recommendation on June 24, 2003, as it was considered to be misleading. - Wikipedia.org
Vinyl is a bit better in this respect but playing it on any but the most expensive laser record players will decrease the amount of useful information and make it that more likely to skip.
The irony here is that the people buying these laser record players are the same ones complaining about how CD's sound "digital", and how vinyl is just so "warm"...while going out and buying a record player that basically turns their records into giant CD's.
I've bought brand new dvds I had to return because they wouldn't play. Now I'll admit my first dvd plays fine but others don't.
I think sometimes this has more to do with the player than the discs...I have two DVD players, and while I generally use one of them, I'll occasionally run into a disc that will only play on the other player...can't explain it, but it's happened a handful of times over the past few years.
It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the pedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal". It's the same problem that is caused by allowing pre-teen and teen models to be dressed up as if they were adults by clothing advertisers.
Well, that's your theory, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been proven either. If it has been proven, or at least shown that there is a high correlation, I'd be interested to see the source. Much like the argument that violent-themed video games or music make teens more violent, it's the sort of argument that folks inclined to "truthiness" and "thinking from their gut" can line up behind, but it doesn't really make it any more true or accurate.
But they don't need to be paid 150 years after they die (and Mozart died well and truly before he reached a 100)!
The summary *did* mention that while the works themselves have been in the public domain for quite some time, published copies of them are still under copyright by whomever published them. This site just makes freely available a printable version of an already free collection of sheet music. If I sat down with Mozart's manuscripts, and produced my own printed version, I would still own the copyright of that, but its value would obviously be reduced now that anybody can get a different version for free online...
What??? That's utter bullshit. First of all, you'd have to assume that this guy has some sort of magical ability to sense EM radiation in the WiFi range, even though no other human on the planet has been shown to have this ability. Apparently he just evolved it over the last few weeks, since he apparently hasn't been effected by all of the other Wireless networks he's come into contact with since WiFi was first introduced in the marketplace. I'm at home right now, and there are 3 wireless networks in range of my laptop, and I don't even live in an urban area. I'd be really surprised if this is the first wireless network this guy has come into contact with.
If anything, Occam's razor says that this guy's problems are all in his head, because that explanation involves the least number of assumptions. The only way that you could prove that these problems are caused by WiFi is to conduct a double-blind test. Something tells me this won't be done, and if it were, it would show that this guy is either just making it up, or the victim of his own psychosomatic paranoia.
Is it just me, or is the first year I've really noticed any sort of competitive pricing on game systems. Generally it hasn't mattered too much where you bought your game system, because they were pretty much exactly the same price wherever you looked. But this year, I got an ad for a $100 rebate on an XBox360 from MicroCenter, and now this stunt by Amazon...
Perhaps I should find a busy polling place and use it as an excuse to take the day off, though I promise to send in my absentee ballot;)
The question is, are you most likely to find that "busy polling place" in poorer arears that are more likely to vote for democrats, essentially disenfranchising the voters who are least likely to be able to show up late for work because they're voting? That's what happened hear in Chicago in 2004. There were a number of overcrowded polling places on the poorer south side of the city. Me, I live in a fairly affluent area with close to a 50/50 divide between republicans and democrats. My polling place is at a very nice country club. I've never had to wait in a line of any sort, and we don't use those Diebold touchscreen voting contraptions. We fill in little ovals. It's been that way since I moved here 4 years ago.
Apple has a lossless codec in addition to AAC. It's playable in itunes and the ipod.
I wasn't aware of that. However, it's somewhat irrelevant as the topic of the conversation related to transferring files from WMP playable formats into MP3. Unless Apple has been more open with their lossless codec than they have been with their version of AAC, it's doubtful that WMP is able to play the files.
Apparently you didn't see the quotes around "hunting". My point is that there is *no* reason for civilians to have assault weapons, and they should be banned. When one says that to a gun-nut, however, they tend to act like you're taking away their right to hunt and defend their family.
They don't mention re-compression. If they're using the Apple lossless format, quality loss should be negligible unless you have a really awful soundcard.
The Apple iTunes AAC format is not lossless. At the bitrate that they use for most of their stuff, it's not even close. Whenever you're going from one lossy compressed format (in this case AAC) to another lossy compressed format (MP3), there will be recompression. There's no other way around it.
One wonders just how many of the leftist gun grabbers are actually going to have this epiphany.
You actually think a bunch of untrained civilians with guns would stand an ounce of a chance against the most powerful military in the world? The 2nd amendment may have been relavent for this reason at one time, but not anymore...now it's just an excuse for gun-nuts to make sure they can still buy automatic weapons for "hunting". It's interesting that "Liberals" are (stereotypically) more concerned with freedom of speech and "Conservatives" are more concerned with freedom of guns (and the oppression of the freedom of speech). Says a lot, if you ask me...
I've always found it interesting that the right-wing religious concervatives thump their bibles at all sorts of people who are just trying to mind their own business, but are still willing to ignore "Thow Shalt Not Kill", as long as the killing is framed in some sort of mythical wartime struggle between good and evil.
It is still looped through the sound card, so while quality may still be "excellent", there is still loss.
There's also loss do to re-compressing an already compressed file as an MP3. Overall, it's not the best of option...especially given the horrid quality of most consumer-level ADC's.
True, but it's even more valuable to get that free marketing plus a kickback from Google. Google probably saw this coming a mile away...I'd be amazed if their plan for buying YouTube didn't involve some sort of sustainable business model like using ad revenue to pay copyright holders of high-profile content...
Though really, do 5-minute clips of the show threaten Comedy Central's revenue model, or help it?
Now that YouTube is owned by a company with serious money, they're probably trying to negotiate a deal where Google pays X amount per view or something. They can't do that while they're allowing their content to be downloaded for free. My guess is it's all political maneuvering.
I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...I mean, I think the DMCA is as much a piece of crap as everyone else, but Comedy Central would still have the right to force YouTube to take the content down even without the DMCA. It's just a copyright law violation. Just because they "passively allowed" it for a time doesn't make it impossible for them to change their mind sometime down the road...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it's possible to (successfully) sue whatever private entity gave up your email information (i.e. the "someone else's computer")...Seems like the government should be forced to get a warrant even for your email stored at your ISP...otherwise, your ISP should be liable for not protecting your personal information.
Judging by the comments on Broadband Reports they sound just as bad as wireless phone companies in the contract department -- automatically resubscribing people to another year of service and charging $180 to break out of "contracts" early.
While I'm not usually one to defend big business, it's not really all that difficult to cancel your plan after your contract expires. I've done it before, and it's actually a very easy process. As for the period before your contract expires, you *did* sign the contract, presumably in exchange for a huge discount on your phone. You didn't have to sign the contract...you could have paid full price for the phone, and entered into a month-by-month agreement with the provider. It's your own fault if you're not happy with the contract that you signed.
Saying this will pass would be equivalent of Microsoft being able to quash OpenOffice.org and StarOffice's .doc import utilities.
Shhhh! Don't give them any ideas...
I say, make it calculate the last digit of pi.
You could just guess...you have reasonably good odds of getting it correct. I bet it's 7.
I wonder how hard it would be to design a website that was so awful that it actually caused physical illness...
Lasers are not in themselves digital; they are no more discontinuous than any other light source.
W orks.htm
Two Tracking Laser beams are directed to the left and to the right shoulders of the groove of the record. Only the part of the beams that reach the groove are reflected to two PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) optical semiconductors. The part of the beams that fall on the land area of the record are deflected and not picked up by the PSD devices. The signals are sent to a microprocessor via analogue to digital converters, then to servos to maintain the reader head position directly above the groove. This part of the player is digital.
Never said they were digital. However, in practice, the laser-based turntables that I'm aware of do, in fact, convert the signal to digital before converting it back to analog and amplifying it for output. I'm actually not sure how you would create a laser-based reader that didn't digitally sample the signal received from the laser, but I'm not an EE, so what do I know...
http://www.laser-vinyl.com/Turntables/Laser/HowIt
SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol) is a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over computer network, normally using HTTP. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the Web services stack, providing a basic messaging framework that more abstract layers can build on. The original acronym was dropped with Version 1.2 of the standard, which became a W3C Recommendation on June 24, 2003, as it was considered to be misleading. - Wikipedia.org
Vinyl is a bit better in this respect but playing it on any but the most expensive laser record players will decrease the amount of useful information and make it that more likely to skip.
The irony here is that the people buying these laser record players are the same ones complaining about how CD's sound "digital", and how vinyl is just so "warm"...while going out and buying a record player that basically turns their records into giant CD's.
I've bought brand new dvds I had to return because they wouldn't play. Now I'll admit my first dvd plays fine but others don't.
I think sometimes this has more to do with the player than the discs...I have two DVD players, and while I generally use one of them, I'll occasionally run into a disc that will only play on the other player...can't explain it, but it's happened a handful of times over the past few years.
owned by local city and then have competitive bids on it every 5-10 years. All else should then be free to charge whatever they want.
Oh, yeah, because the "lowest bidder" mentality has really brought us some great stuff in the past...I, for one, am all for open-market competition.
It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the pedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal". It's the same problem that is caused by allowing pre-teen and teen models to be dressed up as if they were adults by clothing advertisers.
Well, that's your theory, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been proven either. If it has been proven, or at least shown that there is a high correlation, I'd be interested to see the source. Much like the argument that violent-themed video games or music make teens more violent, it's the sort of argument that folks inclined to "truthiness" and "thinking from their gut" can line up behind, but it doesn't really make it any more true or accurate.
But they don't need to be paid 150 years after they die (and Mozart died well and truly before he reached a 100)!
The summary *did* mention that while the works themselves have been in the public domain for quite some time, published copies of them are still under copyright by whomever published them. This site just makes freely available a printable version of an already free collection of sheet music. If I sat down with Mozart's manuscripts, and produced my own printed version, I would still own the copyright of that, but its value would obviously be reduced now that anybody can get a different version for free online...
Occam's razor says it was the wireless network.
What??? That's utter bullshit. First of all, you'd have to assume that this guy has some sort of magical ability to sense EM radiation in the WiFi range, even though no other human on the planet has been shown to have this ability. Apparently he just evolved it over the last few weeks, since he apparently hasn't been effected by all of the other Wireless networks he's come into contact with since WiFi was first introduced in the marketplace. I'm at home right now, and there are 3 wireless networks in range of my laptop, and I don't even live in an urban area. I'd be really surprised if this is the first wireless network this guy has come into contact with.
If anything, Occam's razor says that this guy's problems are all in his head, because that explanation involves the least number of assumptions. The only way that you could prove that these problems are caused by WiFi is to conduct a double-blind test. Something tells me this won't be done, and if it were, it would show that this guy is either just making it up, or the victim of his own psychosomatic paranoia.
hazard that wasn't investigated (e.g., hearing loss or arthritis).
So *that's* why my arthritis and hearing loss get worse every time I search the internet for information on arthritis and hearing loss...
Is it just me, or is the first year I've really noticed any sort of competitive pricing on game systems. Generally it hasn't mattered too much where you bought your game system, because they were pretty much exactly the same price wherever you looked. But this year, I got an ad for a $100 rebate on an XBox360 from MicroCenter, and now this stunt by Amazon...
...wish I'd gotten one...
Perhaps I should find a busy polling place and use it as an excuse to take the day off, though I promise to send in my absentee ballot ;)
The question is, are you most likely to find that "busy polling place" in poorer arears that are more likely to vote for democrats, essentially disenfranchising the voters who are least likely to be able to show up late for work because they're voting? That's what happened hear in Chicago in 2004. There were a number of overcrowded polling places on the poorer south side of the city. Me, I live in a fairly affluent area with close to a 50/50 divide between republicans and democrats. My polling place is at a very nice country club. I've never had to wait in a line of any sort, and we don't use those Diebold touchscreen voting contraptions. We fill in little ovals. It's been that way since I moved here 4 years ago.
...wish it had a camera ;-)
Apple has a lossless codec in addition to AAC. It's playable in itunes and the ipod.
I wasn't aware of that. However, it's somewhat irrelevant as the topic of the conversation related to transferring files from WMP playable formats into MP3. Unless Apple has been more open with their lossless codec than they have been with their version of AAC, it's doubtful that WMP is able to play the files.
Apparently you didn't see the quotes around "hunting". My point is that there is *no* reason for civilians to have assault weapons, and they should be banned. When one says that to a gun-nut, however, they tend to act like you're taking away their right to hunt and defend their family.
They don't mention re-compression. If they're using the Apple lossless format, quality loss should be negligible unless you have a really awful soundcard.
The Apple iTunes AAC format is not lossless. At the bitrate that they use for most of their stuff, it's not even close. Whenever you're going from one lossy compressed format (in this case AAC) to another lossy compressed format (MP3), there will be recompression. There's no other way around it.
One wonders just how many of the leftist gun grabbers are actually going to have this epiphany.
You actually think a bunch of untrained civilians with guns would stand an ounce of a chance against the most powerful military in the world? The 2nd amendment may have been relavent for this reason at one time, but not anymore...now it's just an excuse for gun-nuts to make sure they can still buy automatic weapons for "hunting". It's interesting that "Liberals" are (stereotypically) more concerned with freedom of speech and "Conservatives" are more concerned with freedom of guns (and the oppression of the freedom of speech). Says a lot, if you ask me...
I've always found it interesting that the right-wing religious concervatives thump their bibles at all sorts of people who are just trying to mind their own business, but are still willing to ignore "Thow Shalt Not Kill", as long as the killing is framed in some sort of mythical wartime struggle between good and evil.
It is still looped through the sound card, so while quality may still be "excellent", there is still loss.
There's also loss do to re-compressing an already compressed file as an MP3. Overall, it's not the best of option...especially given the horrid quality of most consumer-level ADC's.
True, but it's even more valuable to get that free marketing plus a kickback from Google. Google probably saw this coming a mile away...I'd be amazed if their plan for buying YouTube didn't involve some sort of sustainable business model like using ad revenue to pay copyright holders of high-profile content...
Though really, do 5-minute clips of the show threaten Comedy Central's revenue model, or help it?
Now that YouTube is owned by a company with serious money, they're probably trying to negotiate a deal where Google pays X amount per view or something. They can't do that while they're allowing their content to be downloaded for free. My guess is it's all political maneuvering.
I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...I mean, I think the DMCA is as much a piece of crap as everyone else, but Comedy Central would still have the right to force YouTube to take the content down even without the DMCA. It's just a copyright law violation. Just because they "passively allowed" it for a time doesn't make it impossible for them to change their mind sometime down the road...