That's not true in all cases - I get high def out of my components just fine, and for one of my TVs, it has less artifacts than the HDMI does (likely because of a bad connector on the TV).
It really depends on how locked down your boxes are. The ones our cable company provides are Scientific Atlanta(ic?). They really are atrocious in all other ways, but at least they spit out high def on component!
Very true. I did pretty much the precise opposite and now I'm fairly deep underwater in my vehicle. After another 4 years of this, I should be "okay", but I would have been far better off if I had gone the route you mentioned than the one I took. Far better off.
The Digital Performance in Sound Recordings Act of 1995 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 together granted a performance right for sound recordings. As a result, copyright law now requires that users of music pay the copyright owner of the sound recording for the public performance of that music via certain kinds of digital transmissions.
`(2) In the absence of license agreements negotiated under paragraph (1), during the 60-day period commencing 6 months after publication of the notice specified in paragraph (1), and upon the filing of a petition in accordance with section 803(a)(1), the Librarian of Congress shall, pursuant to chapter 8, convene a copyright arbitration royalty panel to determine and publish in the Federal Register a schedule of rates and terms which, subject to paragraph (3), shall be binding on all copyright owners of sound recordings and entities performing sound recordings. In addition to the objectives set forth in section 801(b)(1), in establishing such rates and terms, the copyright arbitration royalty panel may consider the rates and terms for comparable types of digital audio transmission services and comparable circumstances under voluntary license agreements negotiated as provided in paragraph (1). The Librarian of Congress shall also establish requirements by which copyright owners may receive reasonable notice of the use of their sound recordings under this section, and under which records of such use shall be kept and made available by entities performing sound recordings.
I'd rather no light at all than most fluorescent lights. I still roll with them in my house - with a decent enough lampshade, you don't even notice it's not an incandescent, but the moment you stick those long-ass bitches over my head, I start getting massive headaches from the lighting. Luckily work is lenient about us twistingthe lightbulbs out overhead and leaving the lights off, as long as the hallways are brightly lit.
If I had my way, I'd work in a room with natural sunlight. Barring that, I'd accept incandescent. Barring that, I'd rather work in a deep dark pit with only a pair of LCDs to light my way.
Actually, you can buy 2x2GB DDR2 for 45$ - at least in the states. The point is, it's cheap. Really cheap. Almost "yo momma" cheap. Or at least my momma cheap. Either way, it's cheap.
The question is "is that space debris? is that a commercial satellite? is that even WORKING?"
On top of that, I imagine they paint the things with a paint so that the don't reflect much light (just hypothesizing here, but I know I'd do it if I were them), to make it hard to see. Also, what about during the day?
If you figure every piece of space debris is watching you, you probably won't be doing much outside, ever.
The point is, someone is trying to put together information about sensor capabilities from the unclassified data (hell, maybe even we do it to other countries, and that's why we know to protect it ourselves), and that's why the DoD decided being able to pass that shit around wasn't worth it in comparison to possibly compromising the loss of capability.
That's not the point. The point is if we can tell you what meteors are landing and where, it doesn't take an extensive amount of data for you to be able to pinpoint where those military satellites are in the sky. It doesn't take a lot for you to then calculate when you can be doing shit outside, and when you need to be under cover.
It makes sense. If it were possible to determine the capabilities of your sensors (whether we're talking from a satellite or a human informant) by putting together the bits and pieces of their unclassified information, you've effectively leaked highly classified information to well funded and highly motivated foreign entities.
[opinion]At the end of the day, somebody is going to find out about your sensor and it's capabilities. You just do everything you can to make sure it's well past the usefulness of said sensor, so far beyond that the understanding of this information nets the "opponent" nothing[/opinion].
As for writing software that would obfuscate this information enough that it wouldn't give away the methods of gathering it - sure, it sounds simple, and on a case by case basis, I'm sure you could do it. But can you do it for every single scenario even remotely conceivably imagined under the sun, for potentially large quantities of information, with guaranteed 0% failure rate?
I understand, but frankly, that is your opinion. I vastly prefer e-books, and would probably happily drop a few hundred dollars to get an ebook version of every last book I owned, as a PDF, even the books nobody seems to ever have been interested in but me. I'd much rather have the whole kit & kaboodle in one device (that I use, and backed up a few dozen other places), and only keep my hardbacks and reference books around on my bookshelf.
Sorry, but once "your" ideas enter the public, they're not yours anymore. We may graciously allow you to make a profit from them for a few years, but after that, tough.
Don't like it? Keep those ideas bottled up. If 28 years isn't enough for you to make it with your while, chances are overwhelmingly good they never will be. Or maybe you just need to kill yourself to put your ideas/works in stark relief. That's seemed to work for other "artists".
I'm sorry you feel like you own an idea that, as soon as someone hears it, becomes *theirs*, as they, too, now have the idea, but that's how it fucking works. That's the problem with ideas - they're not ACTUALLY property.
I'm on board with your last rant, provided we take the child away and start up some sort of boarding school setup with a focus on making these children college ready (so we're not talking inner-city school systems, here, we're talking "wow, good enough to be a private school" type).
I mean, it's all a pipe dream, so we may as well dream big.
Homer: Well, there's not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is sure doing its job. Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, sweetie. Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers. Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock. Homer: I see. Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you? Homer: Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.
I wasn't bitching about your right to complain, I was bitching about your perception that it was "right" to be outraged when you entered into a contract that sucks. That's kind of like ordering a steak and complaining that there's meat in it when it gets there. It just makes you look like a fucking douche.
And yeah, not getting a phone is fine. There's also services like Cricket available if you absolutely need a phone. And if you're going to whine about how you don't like it and the service is flaky or the phones suck, that's just you being a whining william - again your right, but petulance ill becomes an adult.
It's not extra money, it's the money you owe them after you entered into what amounts to a loan for the telephone you got at a lower cost.
Arguments can indeed be made as to whether the phone even cost that much, but you still signed it. The point I was trying to make is that if you don't like it, get out of the game and don't play again. Believe me, you really, really can live without a cellphone. Seriously.
The interesting thing to keep in mind is that your users are often operating under deadlines. Deadlines they could have made if the liberal policies currently in effect were not in effect, and as such, you are seen as an impediment.
It's short sightedness on their part, probably coupled with poor planning on either their or a superior's part, but the stress they feel is still there, and it usually manifests itself in said rudeness, skirting of said polices, etc.
For example, our IT department decided to implement a much more comprehensive firewall than before. It had the unintended side effect of blocking eclipse plugin downloads (which apparently usually operate with an SSL certificate, which is currently being hijacked by our organization's "security solution", and so refuses to work).
I could either a: wait the 3 days (made even worse by not knowing, at the time, it would take 3 days or 3 months) and do zero work, costing my project a few hundred / low thousands of dollars in lost labor in the process, or b: figure out how to get around it. Being a nerd yourself, which would you submit to? Especially if you have a deliverable 5 days out, and you don't really fancy the idea of working 18 hour days just to make up for the lost 3 days in the short term?
As soon as I had access to the tools I needed, when I truly needed them, I stopped skirting the system. I'm not there to be a jerk and I'm not trying to make IT's job miserable. But I am (I hope understandably) irritated when IT institutes something new like this, without fully testing it with a pilot program, without noting the majority of these gaps in expected service in advance, and without notifying any of the programs operating within the official infrastructure in advance (some of our programs have their own segregated intranets for their development, and so don't really have this problem - mostly because they have zero connectivity to anything outside themselves).
So keep in mind - what seems to be a perfectly reasonable policy to you (and, in fact, it is), is going to cause some people some (in their mind) unnecessary stress as they try to meet their own deadlines. This doesn't give them the right to be an ass to you, but it may help if you put their behavior in context. The subtleties between being genuinely stressed and upset and being a rude jerk for the sake of being a rude jerk are sometimes lost.
Or you could boycott the particularly onerous terms of your contract by paying your ETF and not giving AT&T your money any longer. You and I both know it doesn't cost them even remotely close to 95$ a month for your service - their profit margins are obscene. It's absolutely their right to request you pay that amount each month, and if you were suckered into a contract, that's a blow to you. Learn by your mistake by terminating the contract in the legal manner (and if that means waiting until they change the terms of the contract, so be it) and don't fucking enter another one like it again. Until you tell them you're not interesting in paying obscene costs or entering into their service with any contract (even forgoing your precious ball and chain for a while), they'll keep bending you over and blasting your asshole repeatedly. If you want to just lay there and take it, that's your prerogative, but kindly have the decency to shut the fuck up about how you're not receiving a perceived fair bargain from the entity you willfully signed your custom away to.
Neg, they've been using it. My dad's house was just built less than 2 years ago, and they used Cat5e throughout the lot of it. I know because I swapped over half the phone jacks to network jacks and wired it all up for them.
Sorry dude. I own the copper. I fucking put it there. There's a junction box outside the house, and from that point on, it's my property, my responsibility, and occasionally, my problem. If I want ANYBODY else to touch it, I either have to pay them or I need to get line protection insurance. But I don't, you see, because I fucking put it there, and I can handle any problems it throws my way.
Just because it always seemed an annoying, snarky thing to say and I've never got the opportunity to say it: not everybody lives in Australia, and not everybody who reads Slashdot is Australian. Stop being so aussie-centric.
The problem is for any libertarian viewpoint to come across, it almost needs to be an extreme viewpoint or else people won't pay attention.
This has the ironic side effect of people attributing lunacy to libertarians.
I feel strongly toward many libertarian things, but I fully recognize the absolutely essential public works such as roads, bridges, schools, dams, communications - in a word, infrastructure - as being a governmental responsibility. I would even go so far as to say health care.
Other than those few things, however, I reserve the right to enter into any political discussion with the initial stance that it is not the federal government's duty to intervene. In some situations, I may change that position, but our fundamental resting point should, always, be "is this even the United States government's fucking job to worry about?"
In some cases, a little regulation will help quell sporadic (and occasionally horrific) turbulent moments. We need to err on the side of not doing enough than doing too much. I doubt many legislators go into office thinking "oh, it's perfectly OK to make crappy laws that serve a specific purpose now but have serious ramifications in the future, and we'll never revisit it again". They likely do have the best of intentions.
The problem is, much like software engineering, you rarely (if ever) get the opportunity to go back and rectify your mistakes. Instead they stick around forever, problems with them pile up, and you attempt a hack workaround because you've got 1098180158901509815 things that need attending to RIGHT THIS SECOND zomg. It just happens. It's not something anybody intended, but what you intend to has little bearing on what actually gets done. So these crappy little hacks stick around for years and eventually they cause more problems in the end than they solved.
A slower, steadier pace on federal regulation would be a far more sustainable situation than the breakneck, half-assed pace we take now.
In essence: First ask if the issue at hand truly requires a federal law to address. Then discuss the situation in a relatively calm manner. For most individuals, the more passionate you feel about a subject, the less rational you are able to come across. If the situation is truly an egregious problem that only the federal government can solve, THEN begin discussing solutions. Under all circumstances, keep the regulation as simple as is absolutely possible. I fully understand this is, without a doubt, the most difficult step to be on. If a problem is complicated, the solution often tends toward the complicated as well. However, at all times, the legislators must be fully cognizant of the fact that overly complicated laws tend to have a higher incidence of unintended consequences than those that are simple. Laws should be constructed with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, not the brutality of an 18 wheeler shot from a railgun into a kitten orphanage. On fire.
These are all ideals that I believe most individuals can get behind. The problem is that ideals can never be ideally implemented. They will be perverted, for humans are imperfect, and in this particular case, the siren song of power corrupts.
I'm a libertarian who believes that choice is fine, drugs should be legal, health care should be provided by the state, any consenting non-married adult can marry any other consenting non-married adult. I'll argue each of those specific points with anyone, but the basic, core belief I hold is that the more we rely on imperfect individuals to resist the perversions of power, the worse off we are. The "closer" these individuals are to us, the less power they will wield, the less it will (hopefully) corrupt, and the more localized the impact of poor laws will be found. In that way, if you dislike the laws of your state, you can either move to change them, or move to another state closer to your liking. Consider it "moving to Canada" on training wheels. That should be enough to make almost everybody empowered and modestly content. It won't be perfect, but it will likely* last longer than the more rigid, top heavy balance we have now.
No kidding. I just looked through the mod option list for the GP and I couldn't find "-1: Fucking Moron" in there to give to him. I'll just go with a comment in support of your comment instead.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not true in all cases - I get high def out of my components just fine, and for one of my TVs, it has less artifacts than the HDMI does (likely because of a bad connector on the TV).
It really depends on how locked down your boxes are. The ones our cable company provides are Scientific Atlanta(ic?). They really are atrocious in all other ways, but at least they spit out high def on component!
Very true. I did pretty much the precise opposite and now I'm fairly deep underwater in my vehicle. After another 4 years of this, I should be "okay", but I would have been far better off if I had gone the route you mentioned than the one I took. Far better off.
From Wikipedia:
From the Library of Congress, Section 3f2: ( http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c104:1:./temp/~c104dVWooD:e844: )
Emphasis mine.
I'd rather no light at all than most fluorescent lights. I still roll with them in my house - with a decent enough lampshade, you don't even notice it's not an incandescent, but the moment you stick those long-ass bitches over my head, I start getting massive headaches from the lighting. Luckily work is lenient about us twistingthe lightbulbs out overhead and leaving the lights off, as long as the hallways are brightly lit.
If I had my way, I'd work in a room with natural sunlight. Barring that, I'd accept incandescent. Barring that, I'd rather work in a deep dark pit with only a pair of LCDs to light my way.
Actually, you can buy 2x2GB DDR2 for 45$ - at least in the states. The point is, it's cheap. Really cheap. Almost "yo momma" cheap. Or at least my momma cheap. Either way, it's cheap.
Wait, is it a zombie meteor?
I'm confused.
Not at all. You keep them moving, and you make sure there are enough that you have no dark window. However, angle is still important.
The question is "is that space debris? is that a commercial satellite? is that even WORKING?"
On top of that, I imagine they paint the things with a paint so that the don't reflect much light (just hypothesizing here, but I know I'd do it if I were them), to make it hard to see. Also, what about during the day?
If you figure every piece of space debris is watching you, you probably won't be doing much outside, ever.
The point is, someone is trying to put together information about sensor capabilities from the unclassified data (hell, maybe even we do it to other countries, and that's why we know to protect it ourselves), and that's why the DoD decided being able to pass that shit around wasn't worth it in comparison to possibly compromising the loss of capability.
That's not the point. The point is if we can tell you what meteors are landing and where, it doesn't take an extensive amount of data for you to be able to pinpoint where those military satellites are in the sky. It doesn't take a lot for you to then calculate when you can be doing shit outside, and when you need to be under cover.
The data they may be collecting may end up being unclassified, but the means they're using to collect it are likely classified fairly highly. Usually this information is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States#Sensitive_Compartmented_Information_.28SCI.29_and_Special_Access_Programs_.28SAP.29
It makes sense. If it were possible to determine the capabilities of your sensors (whether we're talking from a satellite or a human informant) by putting together the bits and pieces of their unclassified information, you've effectively leaked highly classified information to well funded and highly motivated foreign entities.
[opinion]At the end of the day, somebody is going to find out about your sensor and it's capabilities. You just do everything you can to make sure it's well past the usefulness of said sensor, so far beyond that the understanding of this information nets the "opponent" nothing[/opinion].
As for writing software that would obfuscate this information enough that it wouldn't give away the methods of gathering it - sure, it sounds simple, and on a case by case basis, I'm sure you could do it. But can you do it for every single scenario even remotely conceivably imagined under the sun, for potentially large quantities of information, with guaranteed 0% failure rate?
If so, I'm sure someone would like to hire you!
I understand, but frankly, that is your opinion. I vastly prefer e-books, and would probably happily drop a few hundred dollars to get an ebook version of every last book I owned, as a PDF, even the books nobody seems to ever have been interested in but me. I'd much rather have the whole kit & kaboodle in one device (that I use, and backed up a few dozen other places), and only keep my hardbacks and reference books around on my bookshelf.
Sorry, but once "your" ideas enter the public, they're not yours anymore. We may graciously allow you to make a profit from them for a few years, but after that, tough.
Don't like it? Keep those ideas bottled up. If 28 years isn't enough for you to make it with your while, chances are overwhelmingly good they never will be. Or maybe you just need to kill yourself to put your ideas/works in stark relief. That's seemed to work for other "artists".
I'm sorry you feel like you own an idea that, as soon as someone hears it, becomes *theirs*, as they, too, now have the idea, but that's how it fucking works. That's the problem with ideas - they're not ACTUALLY property.
I'm on board with your last rant, provided we take the child away and start up some sort of boarding school setup with a focus on making these children college ready (so we're not talking inner-city school systems, here, we're talking "wow, good enough to be a private school" type).
I mean, it's all a pipe dream, so we may as well dream big.
I wasn't bitching about your right to complain, I was bitching about your perception that it was "right" to be outraged when you entered into a contract that sucks. That's kind of like ordering a steak and complaining that there's meat in it when it gets there. It just makes you look like a fucking douche.
And yeah, not getting a phone is fine. There's also services like Cricket available if you absolutely need a phone. And if you're going to whine about how you don't like it and the service is flaky or the phones suck, that's just you being a whining william - again your right, but petulance ill becomes an adult.
It's not extra money, it's the money you owe them after you entered into what amounts to a loan for the telephone you got at a lower cost.
Arguments can indeed be made as to whether the phone even cost that much, but you still signed it. The point I was trying to make is that if you don't like it, get out of the game and don't play again. Believe me, you really, really can live without a cellphone. Seriously.
The interesting thing to keep in mind is that your users are often operating under deadlines. Deadlines they could have made if the liberal policies currently in effect were not in effect, and as such, you are seen as an impediment.
It's short sightedness on their part, probably coupled with poor planning on either their or a superior's part, but the stress they feel is still there, and it usually manifests itself in said rudeness, skirting of said polices, etc.
For example, our IT department decided to implement a much more comprehensive firewall than before. It had the unintended side effect of blocking eclipse plugin downloads (which apparently usually operate with an SSL certificate, which is currently being hijacked by our organization's "security solution", and so refuses to work).
I could either a: wait the 3 days (made even worse by not knowing, at the time, it would take 3 days or 3 months) and do zero work, costing my project a few hundred / low thousands of dollars in lost labor in the process, or b: figure out how to get around it. Being a nerd yourself, which would you submit to? Especially if you have a deliverable 5 days out, and you don't really fancy the idea of working 18 hour days just to make up for the lost 3 days in the short term?
As soon as I had access to the tools I needed, when I truly needed them, I stopped skirting the system. I'm not there to be a jerk and I'm not trying to make IT's job miserable. But I am (I hope understandably) irritated when IT institutes something new like this, without fully testing it with a pilot program, without noting the majority of these gaps in expected service in advance, and without notifying any of the programs operating within the official infrastructure in advance (some of our programs have their own segregated intranets for their development, and so don't really have this problem - mostly because they have zero connectivity to anything outside themselves).
So keep in mind - what seems to be a perfectly reasonable policy to you (and, in fact, it is), is going to cause some people some (in their mind) unnecessary stress as they try to meet their own deadlines. This doesn't give them the right to be an ass to you, but it may help if you put their behavior in context. The subtleties between being genuinely stressed and upset and being a rude jerk for the sake of being a rude jerk are sometimes lost.
Even Hitler started with baby steps
Or you could boycott the particularly onerous terms of your contract by paying your ETF and not giving AT&T your money any longer. You and I both know it doesn't cost them even remotely close to 95$ a month for your service - their profit margins are obscene. It's absolutely their right to request you pay that amount each month, and if you were suckered into a contract, that's a blow to you. Learn by your mistake by terminating the contract in the legal manner (and if that means waiting until they change the terms of the contract, so be it) and don't fucking enter another one like it again. Until you tell them you're not interesting in paying obscene costs or entering into their service with any contract (even forgoing your precious ball and chain for a while), they'll keep bending you over and blasting your asshole repeatedly. If you want to just lay there and take it, that's your prerogative, but kindly have the decency to shut the fuck up about how you're not receiving a perceived fair bargain from the entity you willfully signed your custom away to.
What percentage of your income is taxed?
Neg, they've been using it. My dad's house was just built less than 2 years ago, and they used Cat5e throughout the lot of it. I know because I swapped over half the phone jacks to network jacks and wired it all up for them.
Sorry dude. I own the copper. I fucking put it there. There's a junction box outside the house, and from that point on, it's my property, my responsibility, and occasionally, my problem. If I want ANYBODY else to touch it, I either have to pay them or I need to get line protection insurance. But I don't, you see, because I fucking put it there, and I can handle any problems it throws my way.
Just because it always seemed an annoying, snarky thing to say and I've never got the opportunity to say it: not everybody lives in Australia, and not everybody who reads Slashdot is Australian. Stop being so aussie-centric.
(Roofles. I made myself giggle.)
We pay income tax, though, so it's really apples to starships in comparison
The problem is for any libertarian viewpoint to come across, it almost needs to be an extreme viewpoint or else people won't pay attention.
This has the ironic side effect of people attributing lunacy to libertarians.
I feel strongly toward many libertarian things, but I fully recognize the absolutely essential public works such as roads, bridges, schools, dams, communications - in a word, infrastructure - as being a governmental responsibility. I would even go so far as to say health care.
Other than those few things, however, I reserve the right to enter into any political discussion with the initial stance that it is not the federal government's duty to intervene. In some situations, I may change that position, but our fundamental resting point should, always, be "is this even the United States government's fucking job to worry about?"
In some cases, a little regulation will help quell sporadic (and occasionally horrific) turbulent moments. We need to err on the side of not doing enough than doing too much. I doubt many legislators go into office thinking "oh, it's perfectly OK to make crappy laws that serve a specific purpose now but have serious ramifications in the future, and we'll never revisit it again". They likely do have the best of intentions.
The problem is, much like software engineering, you rarely (if ever) get the opportunity to go back and rectify your mistakes. Instead they stick around forever, problems with them pile up, and you attempt a hack workaround because you've got 1098180158901509815 things that need attending to RIGHT THIS SECOND zomg. It just happens. It's not something anybody intended, but what you intend to has little bearing on what actually gets done. So these crappy little hacks stick around for years and eventually they cause more problems in the end than they solved.
A slower, steadier pace on federal regulation would be a far more sustainable situation than the breakneck, half-assed pace we take now.
In essence:
First ask if the issue at hand truly requires a federal law to address.
Then discuss the situation in a relatively calm manner. For most individuals, the more passionate you feel about a subject, the less rational you are able to come across. If the situation is truly an egregious problem that only the federal government can solve, THEN begin discussing solutions.
Under all circumstances, keep the regulation as simple as is absolutely possible. I fully understand this is, without a doubt, the most difficult step to be on. If a problem is complicated, the solution often tends toward the complicated as well. However, at all times, the legislators must be fully cognizant of the fact that overly complicated laws tend to have a higher incidence of unintended consequences than those that are simple. Laws should be constructed with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, not the brutality of an 18 wheeler shot from a railgun into a kitten orphanage. On fire.
These are all ideals that I believe most individuals can get behind. The problem is that ideals can never be ideally implemented. They will be perverted, for humans are imperfect, and in this particular case, the siren song of power corrupts.
I'm a libertarian who believes that choice is fine, drugs should be legal, health care should be provided by the state, any consenting non-married adult can marry any other consenting non-married adult. I'll argue each of those specific points with anyone, but the basic, core belief I hold is that the more we rely on imperfect individuals to resist the perversions of power, the worse off we are. The "closer" these individuals are to us, the less power they will wield, the less it will (hopefully) corrupt, and the more localized the impact of poor laws will be found. In that way, if you dislike the laws of your state, you can either move to change them, or move to another state closer to your liking. Consider it "moving to Canada" on training wheels. That should be enough to make almost everybody empowered and modestly content. It won't be perfect, but it will likely* last longer than the more rigid, top heavy balance we have now.
* IANAP(sychic)
True, we would, if only because we wanted to see what a penisLength - 120 would end up looking like.
Some of us are infinitely curious, after all.
No kidding. I just looked through the mod option list for the GP and I couldn't find "-1: Fucking Moron" in there to give to him. I'll just go with a comment in support of your comment instead.