I'm scared of telling it to update album art, how well does it do? A fully automated system makes me worry I'm going to have all sorts of songs with hilariously incorrect artwork on them.
It did just fine on mine, though it didn't add anything for a few of my albums, presumably because they don't sell it in the iTMS (though I haven't checked that).
The reasonable tactic would have been to approach Target and offer to work with them to find a solution. Not only would it be cheaper for all sides in the short and long terms, but the positive light it would cast all parties in would bring everyone more money--more than enough to offset the costs of at least a partial site rebuild. In this case, the cheaper solution is the one that lets everyone win. Sadly, this fight is not about what's best for everyone. It's about sticking it to Target. That is how I think most people will see it.
I think you have a somewhat optimistic view of how a company like Target would respond to such a request. I think a more likely response would be that they would say that they're definitely interested in building a more accessible site, that they'll get to it when time allows, a short flurry of memos would be distributed among the website people stating such, and then it would be forgotten about by the time the next redesign came around and nothing would end up happening.
Doing it that way would definitely be cheaper for Target, and probably cheaper for the disabled, but runs the serious risk of resulting in absolutely no change at all. In truth, there's nothing in the story that indicates what kind of contact they may have had with Target prior to filing suit (there's really nothing much in the story at all), so they may well have attempted to pursue that option but ended up having to file suit anyway.
Re:Should Congressional Action Be Warranted?
on
UnBox Calls Home, A Lot
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· Score: 3, Interesting
That's a statement I am so fucking sick of reading on this site. It would be applicable if the entertainment companies weren't pretty much the only game in town. But 99% of everything to do with media entertainment available is from them, so you have no damn choice but to deal with them. This "well you don't have to buy their products" line is bullshit, and over-used, dead tired bullshit at that.
You absolutely have a choice, you have the option of not consuming mainstream media. It may not be a choice that you like, but it's a choice nonetheless. Just because you don't want to do something doesn't mean the option isn't available to you.
It's obviously not a simple choice, to be sure. It's a tradeoff between two different interests, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Most people do decide to purchase mainstream media, they value access to that content over whatever money or rights they have to give up to get it, and they have the option to do so. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the fact that lots of people make a particular choice means it's the only choice anyone could possibly make, though.
I'm actually against prisons, period. They punish the victims as well as the criminals (through costly taxation), and never fit the crime (with the possible exception of kidnapping).
A spammer should be made to pay for the resources and timet he has cost every victim. Have him send five bucks to every resident of Virginia and let him make an honest living after that.
The big practical problem with eye-for-an-eye solutions like that is, what if he doesn't have that kind of money? You're left with a few options:
You can allow him to declare bankruptcy or otherwise remove some portion of the sentence until you're left with what he can pay. Probably not a choice that's going to satisfy society.
You can force him to pay out basically all the money he ever makes until the sentence has been served. That's forcing someone who already has a criminal history into institutionalized poverty. Not exactly good for getting them to follow the straight and narrow.
You can take something else from him, presumably either life or liberty. I think most people would agree that taking life for being unable to pay whatever fine has been imposed isn't appropriate, so you're left with liberty. Which is the whole problem you were trying to get out of in the first place, with the added problem that the rich are able to avoid having their liberty curtailed while the poor aren't.
For all the ills of imprisoning people, it does have the practical benefit that it's a punishment that can be imposed on anyone in a largely equivalent manner.
This would mean that Canadians... or pretty much every other place that dares sell Cuban cigars somehow have the obligation now to deny US citizens from buying Cuban cigars.
No it wouldn't, because the occurance is happening entirely in Canada (assuming the purchase is done in person). The people themselves don't matter on their own, they matter as being parties to the transaction; the important thing is the location of the transaction itself. For the gambling site, the monetary transaction happens partially within the United States, so the US can regulate it.
The only way they could have arrested him legally, if he broke a law in the USA WHILE in the USA.
You cannot break US laws outside the USA, so in the UK what he does is perfectly legal.
It doesn't matter where the person happens to be standing when the illegal act is carried out, it matters where the illegal act happened. If I throw an explosive across the US border, I still committed a crime in the US, despite not being within the border when the crime happened. In this case, it was a financial transaction with an American, which means that it happened (in part) in the United States.
You really should use the neighborhood instead (e.g. East New York, Bensonhurst, etc).
You could certainly do that, and I'm sure it would work, I was just saying the official mailing address for all of Brooklyn is Brooklyn, NY (honestly, as long as you have the zip code right you could probably put gibberish for the city and it would get there). The official mailing addresses for places in Queens is in fact their neighborhood, though.
The big problem with Parallels is that it is very RAM hungry. Seriously I have 1.5 GB and the virtual memory swapping when I click on parallels is simply amazing. Anything less than 2 GB is painful. So running Windows and expecting to painlessless switch between windows is a bit of a pipe dream. Don't get me wrong. I love it - it lets me run my Quickbooks and Visual Studio without booting into Boot Camp. But seamless it is not.
A lot of that depends on how much RAM you assign to the VM. I run Parallels and only give the virtual machine 256 MB of RAM. As a result, my OS X experience is perfectly smooth, but things are a little choppy inside the VM. I'm running very lightweight stuff inside the VM, though, so that works fine for me. You might try tuning how much memory you've assigned to the VM until you reach a point where you're happier about the balance between host and guest OS performance.
The only way the crime could spill over into the real world is if the game money had a real world value in term of dollars and not just hurt feelings.
According to EVE Online's rules, game money is allowed to be used to purchase game time cards, and game time cards are allowed to be traded for real dollars, so there is an allowable method of exchange that would turn these credits into money.
I'm not saying that I think this should be considered a real-world crime, but the credits most certainly have monetary value in the real world.
Actually, there is. One of the oddities about New York City is that a mailing address of New York, NY means Manhattan. To properly address something in Brooklyn (and thus for Google Maps to find it) you need to use Brooklyn, NY.
The same applies to any items and other 'valuables' in those games; any particular scarcity of any particular item is purely artificial and can be instantly changed at the whim of the company (or any less than honest admin or someone exploiting the game).
Isn't the same true for money, to a certain extent? For instance, while it's highly illegal, a banking establishment could simply add money to a computerized account balance. Less trivially but perfectly legally, the United States (or any other country) could decide to print a whole mess of money. Perhaps more down to earth, stealing rare baseball (or trading card game) cards is illegal, but a card company can print as many of those as they desire, and could give them out for free if they wanted to. How do you determine what kinds of scarcity are or aren't legit?
In no MMO I've ever played was it OK to exploit game mechanics, or even misinform people to get a better deal.
I believe that in EVE Online, it's perfectly fine to con people in this manner. It's not okay to exploit game mechanics to do so, but convincing them that their money really belongs with you is within the rules of the game.
While that's a handy work-around for occasional use, I still find it amaziung that it would be necessary. Can't you just clobber the sound file or something?
The Mac chime is a part of the BIOS. It's basically like the single beep on a normal PC BIOS that says, "Your hardware appears to be working okay." As far as I know, it's imbedded in there and isn't just a normal file on the hard drive, though I could be wrong.
I'm not an electrical engineer but to the best of my understanding, batteries have complex chemicals and, ultimately, are a large capacitor storing energy with nothing but a insulator between the two negative and positive charges. Should these insulators decay, then disastrous effects can take place. Have you seen the pictures for the Dell laptops? Some of them are basically the entire battery slot burned out (top and bottom) with melted plastic, circuit board and screen. We're talking potential bodily harm here.
Not that it's really important, but a battery isn't the same as a capacitor. Batteries use chemical processes to produce electricity, capacitors store electricity across conductive plates. As well, batteries aren't necessarily dangerous just because they're batteries, the particular kind of battery determines how dangerous it is (with lithium-ion batteries falling squarely on the more-dangerous end of consumer batteries in that particular area).
17 USC 1201 (c)(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
I don't know that the legality of stripping DRM solely for personal use, without transferring the non-DRMed work to others, is significantly in question. Transferring that non-DRMed work to someone else is certainly illegal, but despite what the RIAA would like you to think, I don't believe it's illegal to strip DRM for personal use.
Note that there is no basic right to distribution, so distributing software that strips DRM is also illegal, regardless of what your intended audience is, which is a nice little chicken-and-egg issue. Using it, though, is not illegal from my understanding.
waste less of my CPU on stupid and meaningless crap like Dashboard
Just for reference, Dashboard never spends time doing anything if you never open it. It initializes the widgets the first time you activate it each boot, for that very reason.
OT and nitpicking - but.. at what point in computer science history did a 'library' get to be called a 'framework' ?
I've always felt they were two different things. A library is a collection of tools for performing a particular job or set of jobs that you call into. A framework is a set of code that calls into you (though it probably contains code you can then call). You make requests of libraries, frameworks make requests of you. In this case, I'd definitely say any linked list code is library code.
I'm not putting a dent in studio sales by downloading a movie. They hardly make anything on the DVD sales compared to ticket sales.
That's not quite right. DVD sales are extremely profitable. Slate has a breakdown of the way studios make money. For 2004, they have a loss of $2.22 billion on $7.4 billion in ticket sales compared to a profit of $13.95 billion on $20.9 billion in video sales.
The law doesn't say what constitutes proof of ownership, that's what the jury is for, so a good lawyer is probably going to get you a lot further than any object or piece of paper you can produce.
I don't see why we can't use Firewire (IEEE 1394) for these types of products.
Firewire is both more complex on the electronics level and more expensive in licensing fees. Since the basic premise of these things is generally that they're small and cheap, USB is the more common choice. Plus, practically every machine has at least one USB port, whereas a lot of machines don't come with Firewire.
What I'd like to see next is a USB thumb drive with an RJ-45 connection with built in Wireless access point.
You'd need an external power supply to use it without it being connected to a computer, which would mean both a cord and the space for a power transformer. That probably wouldn't work out well.
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I'm scared of telling it to update album art, how well does it do? A fully automated system makes me worry I'm going to have all sorts of songs with hilariously incorrect artwork on them.
It did just fine on mine, though it didn't add anything for a few of my albums, presumably because they don't sell it in the iTMS (though I haven't checked that).
There are plenty of other, better, digital music players out there,
I'm curious, what other digital music players do you feel are better than the iPod, and what makes them so?
The reasonable tactic would have been to approach Target and offer to work with them to find a solution. Not only would it be cheaper for all sides in the short and long terms, but the positive light it would cast all parties in would bring everyone more money--more than enough to offset the costs of at least a partial site rebuild. In this case, the cheaper solution is the one that lets everyone win. Sadly, this fight is not about what's best for everyone. It's about sticking it to Target. That is how I think most people will see it.
I think you have a somewhat optimistic view of how a company like Target would respond to such a request. I think a more likely response would be that they would say that they're definitely interested in building a more accessible site, that they'll get to it when time allows, a short flurry of memos would be distributed among the website people stating such, and then it would be forgotten about by the time the next redesign came around and nothing would end up happening.
Doing it that way would definitely be cheaper for Target, and probably cheaper for the disabled, but runs the serious risk of resulting in absolutely no change at all. In truth, there's nothing in the story that indicates what kind of contact they may have had with Target prior to filing suit (there's really nothing much in the story at all), so they may well have attempted to pursue that option but ended up having to file suit anyway.
That's a statement I am so fucking sick of reading on this site. It would be applicable if the entertainment companies weren't pretty much the only game in town. But 99% of everything to do with media entertainment available is from them, so you have no damn choice but to deal with them. This "well you don't have to buy their products" line is bullshit, and over-used, dead tired bullshit at that.
You absolutely have a choice, you have the option of not consuming mainstream media. It may not be a choice that you like, but it's a choice nonetheless. Just because you don't want to do something doesn't mean the option isn't available to you.
It's obviously not a simple choice, to be sure. It's a tradeoff between two different interests, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Most people do decide to purchase mainstream media, they value access to that content over whatever money or rights they have to give up to get it, and they have the option to do so. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the fact that lots of people make a particular choice means it's the only choice anyone could possibly make, though.
You're assuming he knows the difference between an en and a de.
He can't tell the difference between English and German?
I'm actually against prisons, period. They punish the victims as well as the criminals (through costly taxation), and never fit the crime (with the possible exception of kidnapping).
A spammer should be made to pay for the resources and timet he has cost every victim. Have him send five bucks to every resident of Virginia and let him make an honest living after that.
The big practical problem with eye-for-an-eye solutions like that is, what if he doesn't have that kind of money? You're left with a few options:
You can allow him to declare bankruptcy or otherwise remove some portion of the sentence until you're left with what he can pay. Probably not a choice that's going to satisfy society.
You can force him to pay out basically all the money he ever makes until the sentence has been served. That's forcing someone who already has a criminal history into institutionalized poverty. Not exactly good for getting them to follow the straight and narrow.
You can take something else from him, presumably either life or liberty. I think most people would agree that taking life for being unable to pay whatever fine has been imposed isn't appropriate, so you're left with liberty. Which is the whole problem you were trying to get out of in the first place, with the added problem that the rich are able to avoid having their liberty curtailed while the poor aren't.
For all the ills of imprisoning people, it does have the practical benefit that it's a punishment that can be imposed on anyone in a largely equivalent manner.
This would mean that Canadians... or pretty much every other place that dares sell Cuban cigars somehow have the obligation now to deny US citizens from buying Cuban cigars.
No it wouldn't, because the occurance is happening entirely in Canada (assuming the purchase is done in person). The people themselves don't matter on their own, they matter as being parties to the transaction; the important thing is the location of the transaction itself. For the gambling site, the monetary transaction happens partially within the United States, so the US can regulate it.
The only way they could have arrested him legally, if he broke a law in the USA WHILE in the USA.
You cannot break US laws outside the USA, so in the UK what he does is perfectly legal.
It doesn't matter where the person happens to be standing when the illegal act is carried out, it matters where the illegal act happened. If I throw an explosive across the US border, I still committed a crime in the US, despite not being within the border when the crime happened. In this case, it was a financial transaction with an American, which means that it happened (in part) in the United States.
You really should use the neighborhood instead (e.g. East New York, Bensonhurst, etc).
You could certainly do that, and I'm sure it would work, I was just saying the official mailing address for all of Brooklyn is Brooklyn, NY (honestly, as long as you have the zip code right you could probably put gibberish for the city and it would get there). The official mailing addresses for places in Queens is in fact their neighborhood, though.
The big problem with Parallels is that it is very RAM hungry. Seriously I have 1.5 GB and the virtual memory swapping when I click on parallels is simply amazing. Anything less than 2 GB is painful. So running Windows and expecting to painlessless switch between windows is a bit of a pipe dream. Don't get me wrong. I love it - it lets me run my Quickbooks and Visual Studio without booting into Boot Camp. But seamless it is not.
A lot of that depends on how much RAM you assign to the VM. I run Parallels and only give the virtual machine 256 MB of RAM. As a result, my OS X experience is perfectly smooth, but things are a little choppy inside the VM. I'm running very lightweight stuff inside the VM, though, so that works fine for me. You might try tuning how much memory you've assigned to the VM until you reach a point where you're happier about the balance between host and guest OS performance.
The only way the crime could spill over into the real world is if the game money had a real world value in term of dollars and not just hurt feelings.
According to EVE Online's rules, game money is allowed to be used to purchase game time cards, and game time cards are allowed to be traded for real dollars, so there is an allowable method of exchange that would turn these credits into money.
I'm not saying that I think this should be considered a real-world crime, but the credits most certainly have monetary value in the real world.
Also, there is no 17th Ave in Brooklyn.
Actually, there is. One of the oddities about New York City is that a mailing address of New York, NY means Manhattan. To properly address something in Brooklyn (and thus for Google Maps to find it) you need to use Brooklyn, NY.
The same applies to any items and other 'valuables' in those games; any particular scarcity of any particular item is purely artificial and can be instantly changed at the whim of the company (or any less than honest admin or someone exploiting the game).
Isn't the same true for money, to a certain extent? For instance, while it's highly illegal, a banking establishment could simply add money to a computerized account balance. Less trivially but perfectly legally, the United States (or any other country) could decide to print a whole mess of money. Perhaps more down to earth, stealing rare baseball (or trading card game) cards is illegal, but a card company can print as many of those as they desire, and could give them out for free if they wanted to. How do you determine what kinds of scarcity are or aren't legit?
In no MMO I've ever played was it OK to exploit game mechanics, or even misinform people to get a better deal.
I believe that in EVE Online, it's perfectly fine to con people in this manner. It's not okay to exploit game mechanics to do so, but convincing them that their money really belongs with you is within the rules of the game.
While that's a handy work-around for occasional use, I still find it amaziung that it would be necessary. Can't you just clobber the sound file or something?
The Mac chime is a part of the BIOS. It's basically like the single beep on a normal PC BIOS that says, "Your hardware appears to be working okay." As far as I know, it's imbedded in there and isn't just a normal file on the hard drive, though I could be wrong.
I'm not an electrical engineer but to the best of my understanding, batteries have complex chemicals and, ultimately, are a large capacitor storing energy with nothing but a insulator between the two negative and positive charges. Should these insulators decay, then disastrous effects can take place. Have you seen the pictures for the Dell laptops? Some of them are basically the entire battery slot burned out (top and bottom) with melted plastic, circuit board and screen. We're talking potential bodily harm here.
Not that it's really important, but a battery isn't the same as a capacitor. Batteries use chemical processes to produce electricity, capacitors store electricity across conductive plates. As well, batteries aren't necessarily dangerous just because they're batteries, the particular kind of battery determines how dangerous it is (with lithium-ion batteries falling squarely on the more-dangerous end of consumer batteries in that particular area).
I don't know that the legality of stripping DRM solely for personal use, without transferring the non-DRMed work to others, is significantly in question. Transferring that non-DRMed work to someone else is certainly illegal, but despite what the RIAA would like you to think, I don't believe it's illegal to strip DRM for personal use.
Note that there is no basic right to distribution, so distributing software that strips DRM is also illegal, regardless of what your intended audience is, which is a nice little chicken-and-egg issue. Using it, though, is not illegal from my understanding.
waste less of my CPU on stupid and meaningless crap like Dashboard
Just for reference, Dashboard never spends time doing anything if you never open it. It initializes the widgets the first time you activate it each boot, for that very reason.
Slashdot decides to make fun of slashdotters...
You must be new here.
OT and nitpicking - but.. at what point in computer science history did a 'library' get to be called a 'framework' ?
I've always felt they were two different things. A library is a collection of tools for performing a particular job or set of jobs that you call into. A framework is a set of code that calls into you (though it probably contains code you can then call). You make requests of libraries, frameworks make requests of you. In this case, I'd definitely say any linked list code is library code.
But then CowboyNeal would probably end up president.
I'm not sure if that should go in the "pro" column or the "con" column.
I'm not putting a dent in studio sales by downloading a movie. They hardly make anything on the DVD sales compared to ticket sales.
That's not quite right. DVD sales are extremely profitable. Slate has a breakdown of the way studios make money. For 2004, they have a loss of $2.22 billion on $7.4 billion in ticket sales compared to a profit of $13.95 billion on $20.9 billion in video sales.
The law doesn't say what constitutes proof of ownership, that's what the jury is for, so a good lawyer is probably going to get you a lot further than any object or piece of paper you can produce.
I don't see why we can't use Firewire (IEEE 1394) for these types of products.
Firewire is both more complex on the electronics level and more expensive in licensing fees. Since the basic premise of these things is generally that they're small and cheap, USB is the more common choice. Plus, practically every machine has at least one USB port, whereas a lot of machines don't come with Firewire.
What I'd like to see next is a USB thumb drive with an RJ-45 connection with built in Wireless access point.
You'd need an external power supply to use it without it being connected to a computer, which would mean both a cord and the space for a power transformer. That probably wouldn't work out well.
You know what type of person is writing this article, when there aren't even any pictures of hot booth babes.
You know what type of person is writing this article, when the article is about Gen Con.