I learned that after paying money to 321 Studios for their DVD X Copy software (via Best Buy). Registered but didn't get around to using it before they lost in court, and since it required activation and the server was gone, I never got to use it.
Not that I needed to. There's very nice free software out there for that purpose that will continue to function long after their development ceases. I was just contributing monetarily to their fight.
But then they sold their e-mail list to spammers....
Instead of twelve wires leading to twelve plugs going to a powerstrip or two before reaching the wall for a dozen devices, you have one wire going to the wall and the devices on a flat surface which may if you like be cluttered with other non-charging devices. Or you build it into your countertop or other piece of furniture so you don't even see that wire.
No, the real problem is that these devices needing charging are mobile, and continue to be mobile when used in the home. People want to keep their iPods with them to listen to their playlists while walking room-to-room and their phones so they can answer them instead of forgetting them in one room while they're in another. You'd need a pad in easy reach in every room where someone spends any amount of time motionless: coffee table, kitchen counter, bedside table, bathroom counter, back of the toilet....
A desk "blotter" that also charges the wireless keyboard and mouse, now that's useful!
Why do they have to keep using 2 letter acronyms for everything?
How about you learn what an acronym is. First and foremost it is an abbreviation. If you can't expand it, it's not an abbreviation, and thus not a pronounceable abbreviation: it's just a short trademark.
It's translucent. It if were transparent then it would be clear, instead it's like a dark tinted piece of glass which isn't that easy to see through if you ask me.
No, translucency prevents seeing details through the medium, such as the glass you'd use in a bathroom window which allows light to pass through but scatters the photons preventing seeing detail. Transparency is a sliding scale, which can allow various levels of light through or even only certain wavelengths (colors) from 100% clear transparent to nearly opaque.
... and are still living on a small planet orbiting Tau Ceti, and hence copyright still applies.
Indeed, you've pointed out a serious problem with copyright being at minimum author's lifetime. Not just longevity, cryogenics(*), or even immortality, but the problem of relativistic travel being able to extend copyright over one's works far far beyond the lifetimes of one's peers. (Though, frankly, the current terms of copyright seem to have the goal of denying their use by anyone who knew of you when you were alive to use your works for free.)
(*) In the US at least, to be cryogenically frozen you must first be legally dead, so that one problem solved.
i think fair use, by definition, is non-commercial
Not so. A for-profit publication can certainly reproduce an image for commentary or criticism as fair use. And certainly parody as exercised by people like "Weird Al" Yankovic is often a commercial venture and still considered fair use.
Granted, for politeness, Al does request permission and abstains from publication when it is not granted (Michael Jackson reportedly didn't want any parodies made of "Billy Jean"), but he isn't legally required to do so. There was one song in which he was granted permission by the label but the artist still objected which he did not know about until after the fact: "Amish Paradise". He apologized sincerely, but didn't pull the album from shelves.
That doesn't mean others haven't backed down from a parody, such as Monty Python from their Contractual Obligations Album:
Graham Chapman: And now, the sound of John Denver being strangled.
John Denver [Eric Idle]: [singing to the tune of "Annie's Song"] You came on my pillow.... BLAHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGH!! COUGH!
Graham Chapman: Thank you.
Though it isn't disclosed from whence the legal advice came to omit it on later pressings, though it is on current CD pressings.
I have yet to find a ripper that does everything you'd need to remaster the disk. I'd love to have a ripper that creates a DVD Studio Pro project containing all the assets, including the menus and buttons and links and chapter marks and scripts. Then one can intelligently edit the project to remove the parts you don't want, including removing the buttons leading to them, use an image editor to airbrush out the button, expose and preserve all the easter eggs, and finally remaster them all to your preferred storage medium without transcoding.
I'd love to take an entire series on DVD and remaster it onto a single hard drive, all the menus intact but with links to the next disk, and replace the optical drive in a DVD player with a swappable hard drive bay. The drive would include the option to play every episode of the series in order automatically, including the promos for the next episode stored on the special features disk between the episodes (or between chapters), without swapping disks.
The same device would also accept any USB device as a media source. Imagine a single drobo pro holding 14.55 TB of video plugged in. That would be enough to hold some people's entire libraries. (Except you'd probably need one or two more maxed-out drobo pros just to have the space needed to master one.)
The Doctor: Why are you repeating? Sky Silvestry: Why are you repeating? The Doctor: What is that, learning? Sky Silvestry: What is that, learning? The Doctor: Copying? Sky Silvestry: Copying? The Doctor: Absorbing? Sky Silvestry: Absorbing? The Doctor: The square root of pi is 1.7... Sky Silvestry: [talking over] The square root of pi is... The Doctor: 7245385090... Sky Silvestry: 1.77245385... The Doctor: 551602729... Sky Silvestry: 090551602... The Doctor: 816748334... Sky Silvestry: 729816748... The Doctor: 1. Wow. Sky Silvestry: 3341. Wow.
I think you'll find you don't need anywhere near that level of precision of pi to find the radius of the Universe in Planck lengths. 50 digits is sufficient.
So... excessive introduction of mass in a single locality causes unbalanced time dilation effects and even loss of consciousness? Sounds like an interesting game mechanic to me.
"Oh dear, I think you will find reality is on the blink again." -- Marvin
Actually I just fixed a 2010 bug, where someone did exactly as you suggested. They created a system back in 2000 or 2001 where the last digit of the year was used as a key. Someone realized there might be a problem back in early November...
The same happened for GBBS Pro where it wasn't expected that that Apple II BBS software would continue to be used in the 1990s. "1989" was followed by "198:". Attempts to correct it made it "199:" until an update was made available. The system otherwise functioned, but sites that didn't update to the version that was fixed were suspected of running pirated versions. The fixed version included a forced copyright notice for GBBS Pro on logout coded in the underlying ACOS interpreter even if you weren't running the GBBS Pro source on it.
By 2000 I was no longer running a dial-up BBS, so I don't know if it recurred.
I think the general principle behind that would be
"This valuable item is not in use, it is not on private property, its rightful owner has for all intents and purposes forgotten that it existed anymore and will very likely not use it ever again. But all citizens have an interest in not letting value vanish, so it is appropriate that the disclaimed value is transferred to the State to use it. That way, all can benefit from lower taxes and higher revenues. No one is hurt, because the value was disclaimed long ago and would have otherwise benefited someone who's not the rightful owner or no one at all when the value finally vanished."
He has his own coiner's remorse over it. See his cameo appearance in the miniseries Wild Palms, playing himself:
Paige Katz: This is William Gibson, Harry. Harry Wyckoff: Oh, yeah... Neuromancer, right? Paige Katz: He invented the word "cyberspace". William Gibson: And they'll never let me forget it.
I'd say about half of the companies on the list were failures due to lack of vision and avoidance on making changes.
That figure's about right. A shame I've already posted or I'd mod you up. About half (6 of the 12) decided to change markets and even their names and are still successful businesses.
DIVX is not even the same company as who created DivX.
Neither is the Westinghouse that made my 47" HD Monitor and the candelabra bulbs I bought yesterday the same company it was before it bought-and-became CBS.
How they weren't sued to oblivion, I have no idea.
Which one? Oh, right: either one.
Anyway, the rules are: was a big name and successful, died, then whored out their trademarked name recognition for unrelated and usually substandard products. Digital VIdeo eXpress was never successful and existed only inside the doors of Circuit City; the codec is.
Napster was important because it was the first P2P program. The post-lawsuit Napster company wasn't important, but it brought file sharing to the masses and scared the record labels as badly as the VCR scared the movie industry.
Scared them like the Boston Strangler scared the woman at home alone.
We have an IT department of one, no local administrator rights, and several programmers still running Redhat 9 while new programmers (and IT's fellow vegetarians) get Ubuntu.
It makes me want to run a privilege-elevating exploit just to be able to swap out a blurry CRT for a damaged LCD (can't modify XF86Config).
Slashdot Mirror
Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All.
// This will never happen
I learned that after paying money to 321 Studios for their DVD X Copy software (via Best Buy). Registered but didn't get around to using it before they lost in court, and since it required activation and the server was gone, I never got to use it.
Not that I needed to. There's very nice free software out there for that purpose that will continue to function long after their development ceases. I was just contributing monetarily to their fight.
But then they sold their e-mail list to spammers....
I don't really see the point.
Instead of twelve wires leading to twelve plugs going to a powerstrip or two before reaching the wall for a dozen devices, you have one wire going to the wall and the devices on a flat surface which may if you like be cluttered with other non-charging devices. Or you build it into your countertop or other piece of furniture so you don't even see that wire.
No, the real problem is that these devices needing charging are mobile, and continue to be mobile when used in the home. People want to keep their iPods with them to listen to their playlists while walking room-to-room and their phones so they can answer them instead of forgetting them in one room while they're in another. You'd need a pad in easy reach in every room where someone spends any amount of time motionless: coffee table, kitchen counter, bedside table, bathroom counter, back of the toilet....
A desk "blotter" that also charges the wireless keyboard and mouse, now that's useful!
Why do they have to keep using 2 letter acronyms for everything?
How about you learn what an acronym is. First and foremost it is an abbreviation. If you can't expand it, it's not an abbreviation, and thus not a pronounceable abbreviation: it's just a short trademark.
Samsung's new laptop with a transparent OLED screen
And there was much feline rejoicing.
However, on the issue of privacy, can people on the other side of the screen also see what you have displayed?
Then again, could it be also be used as a tablet without having to flip the screen?
It's translucent. It if were transparent then it would be clear, instead it's like a dark tinted piece of glass which isn't that easy to see through if you ask me.
No, translucency prevents seeing details through the medium, such as the glass you'd use in a bathroom window which allows light to pass through but scatters the photons preventing seeing detail. Transparency is a sliding scale, which can allow various levels of light through or even only certain wavelengths (colors) from 100% clear transparent to nearly opaque.
... and are still living on a small planet orbiting Tau Ceti, and hence copyright still applies.
Indeed, you've pointed out a serious problem with copyright being at minimum author's lifetime. Not just longevity, cryogenics(*), or even immortality, but the problem of relativistic travel being able to extend copyright over one's works far far beyond the lifetimes of one's peers. (Though, frankly, the current terms of copyright seem to have the goal of denying their use by anyone who knew of you when you were alive to use your works for free.)
(*) In the US at least, to be cryogenically frozen you must first be legally dead, so that one problem solved.
i think fair use, by definition, is non-commercial
Not so. A for-profit publication can certainly reproduce an image for commentary or criticism as fair use. And certainly parody as exercised by people like "Weird Al" Yankovic is often a commercial venture and still considered fair use.
Granted, for politeness, Al does request permission and abstains from publication when it is not granted (Michael Jackson reportedly didn't want any parodies made of "Billy Jean"), but he isn't legally required to do so. There was one song in which he was granted permission by the label but the artist still objected which he did not know about until after the fact: "Amish Paradise". He apologized sincerely, but didn't pull the album from shelves.
That doesn't mean others haven't backed down from a parody, such as Monty Python from their Contractual Obligations Album:
Though it isn't disclosed from whence the legal advice came to omit it on later pressings, though it is on current CD pressings.
What I want to know is, when we say "Ocean-crossing" here...
But we didn't say "ocean-crossing dragonflies" here, we said "ocean crossing dragonflies".
How do you get an ocean to cross a dragonfly? And how do you get the dragonfly to hold still while it does it?
It's like that movie about eight freaks with legs.
(Hint: tags aren't working for everyone.)
I have yet to find a ripper that does everything you'd need to remaster the disk. I'd love to have a ripper that creates a DVD Studio Pro project containing all the assets, including the menus and buttons and links and chapter marks and scripts. Then one can intelligently edit the project to remove the parts you don't want, including removing the buttons leading to them, use an image editor to airbrush out the button, expose and preserve all the easter eggs, and finally remaster them all to your preferred storage medium without transcoding.
I'd love to take an entire series on DVD and remaster it onto a single hard drive, all the menus intact but with links to the next disk, and replace the optical drive in a DVD player with a swappable hard drive bay. The drive would include the option to play every episode of the series in order automatically, including the promos for the next episode stored on the special features disk between the episodes (or between chapters), without swapping disks.
The same device would also accept any USB device as a media source. Imagine a single drobo pro holding 14.55 TB of video plugged in. That would be enough to hold some people's entire libraries. (Except you'd probably need one or two more maxed-out drobo pros just to have the space needed to master one.)
The Doctor: Why are you repeating?
Sky Silvestry: Why are you repeating?
The Doctor: What is that, learning?
Sky Silvestry: What is that, learning?
The Doctor: Copying?
Sky Silvestry: Copying?
The Doctor: Absorbing?
Sky Silvestry: Absorbing?
The Doctor: The square root of pi is 1.7...
Sky Silvestry: [talking over] The square root of pi is...
The Doctor: 7245385090...
Sky Silvestry: 1.77245385...
The Doctor: 551602729...
Sky Silvestry: 090551602...
The Doctor: 816748334...
Sky Silvestry: 729816748...
The Doctor: 1. Wow.
Sky Silvestry: 3341. Wow.
I think you'll find you don't need anywhere near that level of precision of pi to find the radius of the Universe in Planck lengths. 50 digits is sufficient.
Maybe, in base 36, beginning at the trillionth digit, pi is:
"URTEHSUXXORUNEED2GETALIFESRSLYKTHXBYE"
That would be amazing.
Well, take that base36 string, convert it into a base10 string, and search for it.
So... excessive introduction of mass in a single locality causes unbalanced time dilation effects and even loss of consciousness? Sounds like an interesting game mechanic to me.
"Oh dear, I think you will find reality is on the blink again." -- Marvin
Actually I just fixed a 2010 bug, where someone did exactly as you suggested. They created a system back in 2000 or 2001 where the last digit of the year was used as a key. Someone realized there might be a problem back in early November...
The same happened for GBBS Pro where it wasn't expected that that Apple II BBS software would continue to be used in the 1990s. "1989" was followed by "198:". Attempts to correct it made it "199:" until an update was made available. The system otherwise functioned, but sites that didn't update to the version that was fixed were suspected of running pirated versions. The fixed version included a forced copyright notice for GBBS Pro on logout coded in the underlying ACOS interpreter even if you weren't running the GBBS Pro source on it.
By 2000 I was no longer running a dial-up BBS, so I don't know if it recurred.
I think the general principle behind that would be
"This valuable item is not in use, it is not on private property, its rightful owner has for all intents and purposes forgotten that it existed anymore and will very likely not use it ever again. But all citizens have an interest in not letting value vanish, so it is appropriate that the disclaimed value is transferred to the State to use it. That way, all can benefit from lower taxes and higher revenues. No one is hurt, because the value was disclaimed long ago and would have otherwise benefited someone who's not the rightful owner or no one at all when the value finally vanished."
Just like copyright. Oh, wait....
He has his own coiner's remorse over it. See his cameo appearance in the miniseries Wild Palms, playing himself:
Paige Katz: This is William Gibson, Harry.
Harry Wyckoff: Oh, yeah... Neuromancer, right?
Paige Katz: He invented the word "cyberspace".
William Gibson: And they'll never let me forget it.
Actually, it's been months since I've seen a credible "dupe" declaration here.
Why aren't [the Acme Buggy Whip Company] on the list too?
Because no one is making ACME Buggy Whip dessert topping today.
I'd say about half of the companies on the list were failures due to lack of vision and avoidance on making changes.
That figure's about right. A shame I've already posted or I'd mod you up. About half (6 of the 12) decided to change markets and even their names and are still successful businesses.
DIVX is not even the same company as who created DivX.
Neither is the Westinghouse that made my 47" HD Monitor and the candelabra bulbs I bought yesterday the same company it was before it bought-and-became CBS.
How they weren't sued to oblivion, I have no idea.
Which one? Oh, right: either one.
Anyway, the rules are: was a big name and successful, died, then whored out their trademarked name recognition for unrelated and usually substandard products. Digital VIdeo eXpress was never successful and existed only inside the doors of Circuit City; the codec is.
Radio Shack doesn't qualify since it hasn't died as a company before whoring its trademark name out to substandard products.
DiVX would qualify if the new product wasn't so much better than the disposable cheap DVDs it was created under. It is a counter-example to Napster.
AIDS laxatives doesn't qualify because its name was co-opted for a disease, not volunteered.
The brand Circuit City is now owned by Systemax Inc. Whether they'll defile the name is yet to be seen.
Napster was important because it was the first P2P program. The post-lawsuit Napster company wasn't important, but it brought file sharing to the masses and scared the record labels as badly as the VCR scared the movie industry.
Scared them like the Boston Strangler scared the woman at home alone.
We have an IT department of one, no local administrator rights, and several programmers still running Redhat 9 while new programmers (and IT's fellow vegetarians) get Ubuntu.
It makes me want to run a privilege-elevating exploit just to be able to swap out a blurry CRT for a damaged LCD (can't modify XF86Config).
IDE (integrated development environment)
Congratulations on being the first (and apparently only) poster to define what IDE means in this context!
But I'll have to penalize you a point for only doing it by quoting someone else defining it.
I'll leave it to someone else to backronym eSATA to refer to a development environment.
("The term Advanced Technology Attachment is kept, but is an anachronism. The last IBM PC/AT is now nearly dead, and has been for many years.")