How is it anymore dangerous today than it was when he had it decrypted for his own use before? What did he spontaneously forget his plans for world domination during his 5 year incarceration? If so why didnt he forget the more likely component of the equation namely the encryption key? Infact because things are 5 years older all the information in there could be so dated right now unless he has information in there on some sort of secret government coverup, which I doubt he does or he would have posted it immediately. After all we know they're out there what did he do break into Area 51 computers that have tachyon FTL realtime linkups to aliens out there? Then again this is the same government that thinks the anarchist's cookbook can still take down the modern world:)
The Governments are so screwed, its been that way since the birth of politicians rather than average joe in the political offices
This being a dead thread I doubt anyone will get this, but what the hell:
You cannot speculate about how dangerous the information that has been encrypted may be. Do you not think 5 year old information can be potentially dangerous in the ways the gov't is worried about? Source code to programs dates, but does not become worthless in 5 years. Nor do password files, private financial records, or any number of other bits of information which were meant to be kept protected. The fact they might not have been adequately defended from someone with malicious purposes bothers me greatly; this happens because of the carelessness of people in charge of the data, and is very wrong. But, the idea that the gov't should willingly give that data back, even though they have legitimate suspicion about that data and how it could be used, well that would just be plain moronic.
I don't think the data on there is anything against the government anyhow. It's much more likely that they are merely protecting the assets of a large company. That being said, I'm very glad the government would attempt to protect the assets of a large company. I'm glad like I would be glad to see them attempt to protect the financial history of someone who has had their identity "stolen". The government should be out there fighting for our rights. It doesn't always happen (yes, an understatement of immense proportion). But fighting to uphold basic intellectual property laws (ie. preventing thievery of code, or trade secrets), even when it's to protect big business, is a good thing.
The idea behind them not giving back the data (or at least their explanation, probably not the real reason), is that a man like Mitnick who has been convicted of certain computer crimes should not get access to potentially dangerous information. I wonder if many people who have commented thus far read the part where the judge likened it to giving back a coat without knowing whether there was a loaded gun inside.
Now it may be childish to assume that just because someone wants their data encrypted, it must be used for conspicuous purposes. But for someone who has allready been convicted of crimes of this nature, it's not so farfetched to assume that since you don't know what the information is, it could be potentially harmful.
I don't think that he should ever have to give the key to decrypting his files to the government. However it's hard to say whether he should get the files back. There is no comparable legal precedent here. I wouldn't write it off as a basic right of his to have his files returned. A drug dealer wouldn't have his smack returned after it was ceased in a bust, ever.
Anyhow, this would be a precedent setting case, but after reading all the 3+ moderated comments, not one of them convinces me that Kevin obviously deserves his files back.
I gave you a quarter, that'll be 23 cents back please.
It'd be interesting to see what happens to the human psyche if it can be scanned but is done incorrectly. After all, no matter how good it is I can usually tell the difference between the original and a photocopy. Or talking to someone on the phone and talking to someone in person. And at the beginning they'll almost certainly not get a person 100% right. So what will happen to these virtual people who are incomplete copies? Perhaps they can get memory and logic right, but not conciense. A league of cyber sociopaths. I can't wait.
Yeah, where does it say RedHat finished last? If you check the Scorecard and NetResults you'll see that RedHat scored a total of 6.35 while SCO scored a total of only 6.10.
Hmmmm.
Anyhow, this article was rather good for CNN. Generally even handed, aside from the fact that they scored Win2K too high for some things in the breakdown (Security most notably. I'll believe Win2k is more secure when I see it. This isn't a CNN fault though, it's a fault of the testers.)
Oh yeah, and making scalability the most weighted factor with 20% overtaking either file services benchmarking or network benchmarking... Is this really justified? To someone who is not necissarily a layperson, but definitely not a sys admin guru, this seems a bit excessive being that it's worth so much of their score and Microsoft has the highest score (Along with SCO, but they scored so poorly on other things they're not a microsoft contender in this test.)
I'm a firm believer that people should be made to take responsability for their actions. And I don't think age should be any real factor in making that judgement. How are children to learn to manage their own affairs if we continue to attempt to shield them from life for 19 years and then thrust them into it? Obviously they will need time to learn about life, and that's what good parenting is about. But the idea that the government should set their own ages for when a child can and cannot do certain things is to me a bit much. As this case illustrates, the main people who get hurt are the achievers. Those who excel faster, and want to accomplish more are told that because many of their peers generally are not as responsible as them they should be denied the ability to do certain things (ie take part in certain open source software).
But as I've said before, being young myself probably skews my viewpoint, although hopefully it doesn't skew anyone elses view of my opinion (but who would I be kidding if I thought it didn't).
Just a quick comment on people under 18 being unable to legally enter into a contract. I know what the point of this is, but doesn't it seem crazy that in an effort to protect underaged people from hurting themselves (financially), you merely limit their options?
As an example it is against the law in Canada to enforce collect on certain types of debt from anyone under 19. My specific example is a phone bill, where I know nobody under 19 can be forced to pay. Why do I know this? Well in a recent attempt to get a phone line hooked up for when I had to move out of town to get a job, it became clear that being under 19 I could not get a phone line. I had (in essance) been from the ability to actually get phone service.
The companies aren't really to blame in any case where people under 18 or 19 can't certain things. It's this general idea by society (north american society mainly) that once you turn 18 or 19 you are suddenly much more capable of being responsible.
I suppose I'm in a minority. But being under 19 I've already completed 2 years of University, and a year of work in the IT field. Yet because of my age I cannot: sign a lease (ie rent almost any residence), get a credit card, get an account at a video store, get a phone line, get cable, or do many other things crucial to actually living.
It's a sad testament that, in an effort to protect our children, our society decides to bind their hands and treat them as invalids before they reach a magic age at which point it is assumed they will have the ability to be "responsible".
Not only do we legally get to rebroadcast cell phone calls over the internet (because as we all know according to the CRTC the Internet is not a broadcast medium, which by the way is a ruling that puts power strongly in the hands of the people, not large companies), but now we can watch TV that is broadcast over it. And of course soon we'll be able to posses all the child porn we can get our hands on. Unless of course the Canadian Supreme Court decides to circumvene our equivilant to the first amendment (Charter of Rights and Freedoms). I believe they have done it before though, in regards to making hate literature illegal. Or was it that they upheld a schoolteachers right to tell his class the holocaust didn't exist. Dave, my mind is going dave.
Seriously though, Canada is pretty messed in a few ways. We've crippled our public broadcasting by cutting all of its funding, then we make regulations that it can't have nearly as many ads (nice double way to make sure it goes belly up), then we mismanage 3 billion dollars in government human resources programs. And yet out of all of these things people are most offended by the fact that out government is thinking of giving hockey teams 3 million each. Ohhhh nooo. Not $3 Million. That'll be what busts the bank. Not the 108 senetors for 27 million people, each of whom (the senetors) has to be a rubber stamp, work a MINIMUM of 7 days a year (this is actually flexible) and make upwards of $100,000 a year.
And that being said, Canada is a great country that I love living in.
Got Contradiction?
(footnote: I am actually Canadian. You can tell because I know something about the Canadian gov't, barely)
(additional footnote: just because I think people are making too big a deal of it, doesn't mean I want hockey teams to get any gov't money)
This number does not only include what's mainly viewed as online games, such as Quake, UO, EQ, Diablo... it also counts Yahoo's online games of Hearts, and the various Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune type games at The Station.
Those are extremely dominated by women, who generally posses no tech skills other than knowing how to get their web browser into a game.
I know just as many great quake players with basically zero technical knowledge as I do women who play hearts online with zero technical knowledge. Many people I play with don't know how to fix or diagnose problems, and the technical skills needed to play quake under ideal conditions are no greater than those required to play online hearts. Remember, just because they don't bother to learn more than they need to doesn't mean anything other than that they're usually not as obsessive as male geeks.
Something tells me whoever sells the rights to broadcast sports events to the networks has airtight contracts making sure that the ads around the rink will be seen.
This is why there will probably be no legal issue as far as blocking an advertisement on New Years eve at Times Square goes. After all, it's public property, and they didn't sign a contract (at least not with NBC) to be there.
I do think there may be some legal recourse if CBS advertised their coverage as live (which they obviously did). I think it's entirely likely a judge would rule that live means unedited footage of something currently happening (and since there was no actual CBS logo out there...). Of course one could argue that if a company can be sued for not accurately representing the truth at one point in time, couldn't you sue a company that undergoes transmission problems? After all, if you were standing where the camera was, it's incredibly unlikely your vision would distort to static for a few frames.:)
Just thought it was too funny when I got to this point in the press release:
These changes were announced following the release of Microsoft® Windows® 2000, which the company said is a crucial building block of its strategy to focus on software services -- a major technology shift that will transform the industry in the way the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the Internet did.
Lay down that crackpipe Bill.
I guess I should be used to the same old marketing BS, but it never ceases to amaze what companies will try to sell their products as.
Evil tyrannical meglomiacal corporations and such
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 2
The cornerstone of anti-trust law -- and the idea behind a free press -- is that the individual citizen/consumer benefits from openness, choice and diversity of expression and opinion. The impact of mergers like this is to deny choice, concentrate power and homogenize creativity and expression. Many of us are free marketers here, and we like the booming global economy. But there are limits. Steve Case and Gerald Levin have broached them. At some point, Americans have to decide if they still want a free information culture, along with a functioning government. Or not.
I'm just curious as to how Mr. Katz thinks AOL/Time Warner have broached the limits of what any free market society will take from corporations. All I see here is a strategic business strategy by AOL to allow itself to move onto broadband distribution of internet content. I mean, really, do you expect AOL to sit back and merely offer modem service while it loses a huge chunk of its customer base to faster cable/dsl services? And Time Warner have made the terrible mistake of taking a good deal when offered one.
Terrible. Horrific. But in all honesty I merely ask, why would the gov't staying out of this deal be a bad thing. Deregulation of the telephone industry is what allows us in the 90's to reap the benefits of competition. In the 80's when there was rampant regulation telephone service was expensive, and customer service was not a priority.
Competition does make the service and price better from the consumer, but is the best way to encourage competition to regulate the hell out of companies? Will the people falling behind the race catch up if you trip the leader? Possibly. But in the end what good will it do? I may not like AOL or the service they provide, but some people must for their subscriber base to be that high. And without them constantly searching for innovation to stay ahead of the pack, many of the services they offer might not be available to as many people.
I don't know about now, but up until a few years ago there were still places in america that couldn't get reliable service except from AOL. If AOL plans to bring broadband to all of America, how is that a bad thing? If nobody else is going to try and cash in on the goldmine this will be, then AOL deserves a monopoly.
And as I understand it, the main idea behind the merger is the bring the internet to even more people. What a terrible attack on free speech that is. I'm not planning on buying service from AOL/Time Warner directly, but I know quite a few people still on dialups who would enjoy it. And you can always bypass the AOL crap anyhow. We saw when customers demanded flat-rate instead of hourly service that even AOL cannot ignore its customers, and they never will be able to, with or without regulation.
I've always wanted to name servers after either the seven deadly sins or virtues. Pride, Avarice, Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth or Humility, Generosity, Love, Kindness, Self Control, Temperence, Zeal Lots of them fit good names for both inter and intranet file and/or web servers (Pride, Avarice, Generosity, Gluttony). A couple of good ones for firewalls (Wrath, Self Control). Backup could also fit (Gluttony, Sloth(tape backups)). The only downfall is the users would think all the servers were named Sloth. Paelon
I believe that you can set any price to sell your own stock. I think this would be RedHat selling stock that they still retain at a loss. After all, you can give stock away, so I don't see why you couldn't sell it at a loss if you feel like it. It's just that you usually wouldn't because you (in theory) can get a lot more.
I however know next to nothing about stocks so someone feel free to prove me wrong.
Actually, to jump back in and nitpick again myself, I think you've got them reversed again. Perhaps you've seen differently, but in my experience a Bps is a bit per second and a bps is a byte per second. I could be wrong about this though, and encourage someone to quote someone who is sure:).
But yeah, in the original post I mixed up bits and bytes and all. For all who care: CD audio is exactly 1408 BITS per second, or 176 BYTES per second. It also appears that if you take the bits per second (1408) divide by number of channels (1408 / 2 = 704), and divide by the refresh rate (704 / 44 = 16), you'll get 16 which is why you commonly refer to cd audio as 16bit/44khz wheras DVD is 22bit/(i forget the refresh exactly, either 44 or 76 I believe). Fun with cd audio stats.
The unencoded ripped wav should be identical to the CD quality, although playing it through your computer might (read: definitely will) give lower quality output than if you played it through your stereo system. Once the wav is encoded a lot of information is tossed out, and that is what causes the biggest quality loss. Another thing to watch out for is that all bitrates are not created equal. It's almost as important what program is used to encode an mp3 as it is what bitrate is allocated to it, because some encoders use dirty encoding tricks (cutting off any frequencies over 16khz, etc.)
Hopefully this can come of some use to people who know little about mp3s and CDs. I forget the exact number, but audio on CDs takes up somewhere around 1400 kilobytes per second. The majority of mp3s don't even reach 256 kilobytes per second. The reason that mp3s can sound so close to CD audio with the savings in size is through the masking of frequencies.
The phenomenon is almost equivilant to the difference between newsprint advertisements and a painting (not in quality, but in terms of perception). With the newsprint, the picture is actually made up of tiny dots which, when viewed from afar, blend together to make a seamless looking picture, even though there are gaps if you look up close. Mp3s use the same principle, only with sound. Say you have a sound with a frequency of 80hertz at 60decibels; because of how our hearing works, that sound being played will mask out sounds around it. So for instance, if you had that sound playing, and suddenly you played a frequency of 75hertz at 30decibels, there would be no audible difference (note: these are numbers I'm making up to illustrate the general idea. I don't know the actual mathematics of it).
What mp3s do is allocate a certain amount of space (128kilobytes/sec or 256kilobytes/sec), break down a second of music into a number of frames (usually 44.1) and then for each frame looks at what the frequencies are, and gradually and more agressively gets rid of the sound that is most likely to next be masked.
The problem that can arise with this fixed bitrate encoding is that the encoder is not making an overall judgement based on what the quality of each frame should be, it merely knows how much it MUST cut out of each second of music. The solution to this is VBR or variable bitrate encoding, which has not been very widely accepted as far as I've seen. The difference with this style of ecoding is that you specify to the encoding program a quality level to set the song, and then it will go through each frame and cut only enough sound to fit your preference for sound quality, not some arbitrary number.
Anyhow, I think that's enough of me rambling. Hopefully someone found that at least slightly informative and interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it anymore dangerous today than it was when he had it decrypted for his own use before? What did he spontaneously forget his plans for world domination during his 5 year incarceration? If so why didnt he forget the more likely component of the equation namely the encryption key? Infact because things are 5 years older all the information in there could be so dated right now unless he has information in there on some sort of secret government coverup, which I doubt he does or he would have posted it immediately. After all we know they're out there what did he do break into Area 51 computers that have tachyon FTL realtime linkups to aliens out there? Then again this is the same government that thinks the anarchist's cookbook can still take down the modern world :)
The Governments are so screwed, its been that way since the birth of politicians rather than average joe in the political offices
This being a dead thread I doubt anyone will get this, but what the hell:
You cannot speculate about how dangerous the information that has been encrypted may be. Do you not think 5 year old information can be potentially dangerous in the ways the gov't is worried about? Source code to programs dates, but does not become worthless in 5 years. Nor do password files, private financial records, or any number of other bits of information which were meant to be kept protected. The fact they might not have been adequately defended from someone with malicious purposes bothers me greatly; this happens because of the carelessness of people in charge of the data, and is very wrong. But, the idea that the gov't should willingly give that data back, even though they have legitimate suspicion about that data and how it could be used, well that would just be plain moronic.
I don't think the data on there is anything against the government anyhow. It's much more likely that they are merely protecting the assets of a large company. That being said, I'm very glad the government would attempt to protect the assets of a large company. I'm glad like I would be glad to see them attempt to protect the financial history of someone who has had their identity "stolen". The government should be out there fighting for our rights. It doesn't always happen (yes, an understatement of immense proportion). But fighting to uphold basic intellectual property laws (ie. preventing thievery of code, or trade secrets), even when it's to protect big business, is a good thing.
At least that's what capitalism taught me.
The idea behind them not giving back the data (or at least their explanation, probably not the real reason), is that a man like Mitnick who has been convicted of certain computer crimes should not get access to potentially dangerous information. I wonder if many people who have commented thus far read the part where the judge likened it to giving back a coat without knowing whether there was a loaded gun inside.
Now it may be childish to assume that just because someone wants their data encrypted, it must be used for conspicuous purposes. But for someone who has allready been convicted of crimes of this nature, it's not so farfetched to assume that since you don't know what the information is, it could be potentially harmful.
I don't think that he should ever have to give the key to decrypting his files to the government. However it's hard to say whether he should get the files back. There is no comparable legal precedent here. I wouldn't write it off as a basic right of his to have his files returned. A drug dealer wouldn't have his smack returned after it was ceased in a bust, ever.
Anyhow, this would be a precedent setting case, but after reading all the 3+ moderated comments, not one of them convinces me that Kevin obviously deserves his files back.
I gave you a quarter, that'll be 23 cents back please.
It'd be interesting to see what happens to the human psyche if it can be scanned but is done incorrectly. After all, no matter how good it is I can usually tell the difference between the original and a photocopy. Or talking to someone on the phone and talking to someone in person. And at the beginning they'll almost certainly not get a person 100% right. So what will happen to these virtual people who are incomplete copies? Perhaps they can get memory and logic right, but not conciense. A league of cyber sociopaths. I can't wait.
:P
Yeah, where does it say RedHat finished last? If you check the Scorecard and NetResults you'll see that RedHat scored a total of 6.35 while SCO scored a total of only 6.10.
Hmmmm.
Anyhow, this article was rather good for CNN. Generally even handed, aside from the fact that they scored Win2K too high for some things in the breakdown (Security most notably. I'll believe Win2k is more secure when I see it. This isn't a CNN fault though, it's a fault of the testers.)
Oh yeah, and making scalability the most weighted factor with 20% overtaking either file services benchmarking or network benchmarking... Is this really justified? To someone who is not necissarily a layperson, but definitely not a sys admin guru, this seems a bit excessive being that it's worth so much of their score and Microsoft has the highest score (Along with SCO, but they scored so poorly on other things they're not a microsoft contender in this test.)
I'm a firm believer that people should be made to take responsability for their actions. And I don't think age should be any real factor in making that judgement. How are children to learn to manage their own affairs if we continue to attempt to shield them from life for 19 years and then thrust them into it? Obviously they will need time to learn about life, and that's what good parenting is about. But the idea that the government should set their own ages for when a child can and cannot do certain things is to me a bit much. As this case illustrates, the main people who get hurt are the achievers. Those who excel faster, and want to accomplish more are told that because many of their peers generally are not as responsible as them they should be denied the ability to do certain things (ie take part in certain open source software).
But as I've said before, being young myself probably skews my viewpoint, although hopefully it doesn't skew anyone elses view of my opinion (but who would I be kidding if I thought it didn't).
Just a quick comment on people under 18 being unable to legally enter into a contract. I know what the point of this is, but doesn't it seem crazy that in an effort to protect underaged people from hurting themselves (financially), you merely limit their options?
As an example it is against the law in Canada to enforce collect on certain types of debt from anyone under 19. My specific example is a phone bill, where I know nobody under 19 can be forced to pay. Why do I know this? Well in a recent attempt to get a phone line hooked up for when I had to move out of town to get a job, it became clear that being under 19 I could not get a phone line. I had (in essance) been from the ability to actually get phone service.
The companies aren't really to blame in any case where people under 18 or 19 can't certain things. It's this general idea by society (north american society mainly) that once you turn 18 or 19 you are suddenly much more capable of being responsible.
I suppose I'm in a minority. But being under 19 I've already completed 2 years of University, and a year of work in the IT field. Yet because of my age I cannot: sign a lease (ie rent almost any residence), get a credit card, get an account at a video store, get a phone line, get cable, or do many other things crucial to actually living.
It's a sad testament that, in an effort to protect our children, our society decides to bind their hands and treat them as invalids before they reach a magic age at which point it is assumed they will have the ability to be "responsible".
Anyhow, just my biased rant.
Not only do we legally get to rebroadcast cell phone calls over the internet (because as we all know according to the CRTC the Internet is not a broadcast medium, which by the way is a ruling that puts power strongly in the hands of the people, not large companies), but now we can watch TV that is broadcast over it. And of course soon we'll be able to posses all the child porn we can get our hands on. Unless of course the Canadian Supreme Court decides to circumvene our equivilant to the first amendment (Charter of Rights and Freedoms). I believe they have done it before though, in regards to making hate literature illegal. Or was it that they upheld a schoolteachers right to tell his class the holocaust didn't exist. Dave, my mind is going dave.
Seriously though, Canada is pretty messed in a few ways. We've crippled our public broadcasting by cutting all of its funding, then we make regulations that it can't have nearly as many ads (nice double way to make sure it goes belly up), then we mismanage 3 billion dollars in government human resources programs. And yet out of all of these things people are most offended by the fact that out government is thinking of giving hockey teams 3 million each. Ohhhh nooo. Not $3 Million. That'll be what busts the bank. Not the 108 senetors for 27 million people, each of whom (the senetors) has to be a rubber stamp, work a MINIMUM of 7 days a year (this is actually flexible) and make upwards of $100,000 a year.
And that being said, Canada is a great country that I love living in.
Got Contradiction?
(footnote: I am actually Canadian. You can tell because I know something about the Canadian gov't, barely)
(additional footnote: just because I think people are making too big a deal of it, doesn't mean I want hockey teams to get any gov't money)
Those are extremely dominated by women, who generally posses no tech skills other than knowing how to get their web browser into a game.
I know just as many great quake players with basically zero technical knowledge as I do women who play hearts online with zero technical knowledge. Many people I play with don't know how to fix or diagnose problems, and the technical skills needed to play quake under ideal conditions are no greater than those required to play online hearts. Remember, just because they don't bother to learn more than they need to doesn't mean anything other than that they're usually not as obsessive as male geeks.
Of course that's just my perception of it.
Something tells me whoever sells the rights to broadcast sports events to the networks has airtight contracts making sure that the ads around the rink will be seen.
:)
This is why there will probably be no legal issue as far as blocking an advertisement on New Years eve at Times Square goes. After all, it's public property, and they didn't sign a contract (at least not with NBC) to be there.
I do think there may be some legal recourse if CBS advertised their coverage as live (which they obviously did). I think it's entirely likely a judge would rule that live means unedited footage of something currently happening (and since there was no actual CBS logo out there...). Of course one could argue that if a company can be sued for not accurately representing the truth at one point in time, couldn't you sue a company that undergoes transmission problems? After all, if you were standing where the camera was, it's incredibly unlikely your vision would distort to static for a few frames.
Ahhh the joys of modern legality.
These changes were announced following the release of Microsoft® Windows® 2000, which the company said is a crucial building block of its strategy to focus on software services -- a major technology shift that will transform the industry in the way the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the Internet did.
Lay down that crackpipe Bill.
I guess I should be used to the same old marketing BS, but it never ceases to amaze what companies will try to sell their products as.
I'm just curious as to how Mr. Katz thinks AOL/Time Warner have broached the limits of what any free market society will take from corporations. All I see here is a strategic business strategy by AOL to allow itself to move onto broadband distribution of internet content. I mean, really, do you expect AOL to sit back and merely offer modem service while it loses a huge chunk of its customer base to faster cable/dsl services? And Time Warner have made the terrible mistake of taking a good deal when offered one.
Terrible. Horrific. But in all honesty I merely ask, why would the gov't staying out of this deal be a bad thing. Deregulation of the telephone industry is what allows us in the 90's to reap the benefits of competition. In the 80's when there was rampant regulation telephone service was expensive, and customer service was not a priority.
Competition does make the service and price better from the consumer, but is the best way to encourage competition to regulate the hell out of companies? Will the people falling behind the race catch up if you trip the leader? Possibly. But in the end what good will it do? I may not like AOL or the service they provide, but some people must for their subscriber base to be that high. And without them constantly searching for innovation to stay ahead of the pack, many of the services they offer might not be available to as many people.
I don't know about now, but up until a few years ago there were still places in america that couldn't get reliable service except from AOL. If AOL plans to bring broadband to all of America, how is that a bad thing? If nobody else is going to try and cash in on the goldmine this will be, then AOL deserves a monopoly.
And as I understand it, the main idea behind the merger is the bring the internet to even more people. What a terrible attack on free speech that is. I'm not planning on buying service from AOL/Time Warner directly, but I know quite a few people still on dialups who would enjoy it. And you can always bypass the AOL crap anyhow. We saw when customers demanded flat-rate instead of hourly service that even AOL cannot ignore its customers, and they never will be able to, with or without regulation.
Cheers
I've always wanted to name servers after either the seven deadly sins or virtues. Pride, Avarice, Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth or Humility, Generosity, Love, Kindness, Self Control, Temperence, Zeal Lots of them fit good names for both inter and intranet file and/or web servers (Pride, Avarice, Generosity, Gluttony). A couple of good ones for firewalls (Wrath, Self Control). Backup could also fit (Gluttony, Sloth(tape backups)). The only downfall is the users would think all the servers were named Sloth. Paelon
I believe that you can set any price to sell your own stock. I think this would be RedHat selling stock that they still retain at a loss. After all, you can give stock away, so I don't see why you couldn't sell it at a loss if you feel like it. It's just that you usually wouldn't because you (in theory) can get a lot more.
I however know next to nothing about stocks so someone feel free to prove me wrong.
Actually, to jump back in and nitpick again myself, I think you've got them reversed again. Perhaps you've seen differently, but in my experience a Bps is a bit per second and a bps is a byte per second. I could be wrong about this though, and encourage someone to quote someone who is sure :).
But yeah, in the original post I mixed up bits and bytes and all. For all who care: CD audio is exactly 1408 BITS per second, or 176 BYTES per second. It also appears that if you take the bits per second (1408) divide by number of channels (1408 / 2 = 704), and divide by the refresh rate (704 / 44 = 16), you'll get 16 which is why you commonly refer to cd audio as 16bit/44khz wheras DVD is 22bit/(i forget the refresh exactly, either 44 or 76 I believe). Fun with cd audio stats.
Paelon
The unencoded ripped wav should be identical to the CD quality, although playing it through your computer might (read: definitely will) give lower quality output than if you played it through your stereo system. Once the wav is encoded a lot of information is tossed out, and that is what causes the biggest quality loss. Another thing to watch out for is that all bitrates are not created equal. It's almost as important what program is used to encode an mp3 as it is what bitrate is allocated to it, because some encoders use dirty encoding tricks (cutting off any frequencies over 16khz, etc.)
Paelon
Hopefully this can come of some use to people who know little about mp3s and CDs. I forget the exact number, but audio on CDs takes up somewhere around 1400 kilobytes per second. The majority of mp3s don't even reach 256 kilobytes per second. The reason that mp3s can sound so close to CD audio with the savings in size is through the masking of frequencies.
The phenomenon is almost equivilant to the difference between newsprint advertisements and a painting (not in quality, but in terms of perception). With the newsprint, the picture is actually made up of tiny dots which, when viewed from afar, blend together to make a seamless looking picture, even though there are gaps if you look up close. Mp3s use the same principle, only with sound. Say you have a sound with a frequency of 80hertz at 60decibels; because of how our hearing works, that sound being played will mask out sounds around it. So for instance, if you had that sound playing, and suddenly you played a frequency of 75hertz at 30decibels, there would be no audible difference (note: these are numbers I'm making up to illustrate the general idea. I don't know the actual mathematics of it).
What mp3s do is allocate a certain amount of space (128kilobytes/sec or 256kilobytes/sec), break down a second of music into a number of frames (usually 44.1) and then for each frame looks at what the frequencies are, and gradually and more agressively gets rid of the sound that is most likely to next be masked.
The problem that can arise with this fixed bitrate encoding is that the encoder is not making an overall judgement based on what the quality of each frame should be, it merely knows how much it MUST cut out of each second of music. The solution to this is VBR or variable bitrate encoding, which has not been very widely accepted as far as I've seen. The difference with this style of ecoding is that you specify to the encoding program a quality level to set the song, and then it will go through each frame and cut only enough sound to fit your preference for sound quality, not some arbitrary number.
Anyhow, I think that's enough of me rambling. Hopefully someone found that at least slightly informative and interesting.
Paelon