Oh come now, all scientists, especially those from Harvard, know that manually modifying a URL, or clicking a link that connects you to a different server than the server that gave you the link, is vile hacking and must be punished.
To people who think the "to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" phrase is commentary instead of limitation, I'd like to point out that that power of congress is the only one that mentions a broader goal before giving the specifics. The other enumerated powers simply list the specific power, not to what purpose it should be used. To me, this is clear evidence that that broader goal was very important to the framers.
The DRM and no-DRM environments are both equally fair to the industry, because an equal amount of mass piracy occurs in both. The DRM environment, however, is not fair to the consumer, because the legal rights of Fair Use and First Sale have been removed, not directly by an act of Congress, but by a technical measure imposed on us by a non-competitive market.
You know... as much as it sucks, you have to admit that if people weren't pirating things, there'd be no need for DRM.
Absolutely false! Look around you - it's plainly obvious that DRM does nothing at all to stop piracy, and never will. This is because if you distribute content to a billion people, and one in a million have the ability and desire to offer it for piracy, that's a thousand different versions on the P2P network of the day. The analog hole dictates that there will always be that one in a million, and probably many more.
DRM is about preventing fair use, and nothing more. Piracy is merely an excuse. Piracy is actually one of the best things to happen to the music industry, because it gives the industry an easy way to convince idiots like you that DRM is something other than a direct attempt to usurp your legal rights.
It was a laptop; I couldn't very easily have rolled my own. Heck, it was hard enough to even find an nVidia laptop. And as far as I know, all laptop manufacturers do the same crap with Windows drivers. I wish they could just make their hardware conformant enough that first-party drivers could handle it. Unfortunately, most consumers don't care, so there's no reason not to just connect the chips together randomly, tweak the BIOS tables with trial-and-error until no magic smoke issues forth, hack together enough unstable drivers that Windows boots, then call it a day.
The PC version (all I had handy) of GTA:SA weighs in at 4.0 GB. Even allowing for the massive quantities of hidden porn, that's most of a single layer DVD.
Actually, that doesn't make me wonder why people aren't running Linux, it makes me wonder why people are running ATI (even a few Linux people!).
On my laptop, in Linux (AMD64 even) the NVidia drivers work just fine with one special setting in xorg.conf so the full width of the screen is used. In Windows, the stock nVidia drivers don't even believe I have an nVidia chip, and I'm stuck waiting for Compaq to update their drivers to work around a bug when scaling while preserving aspect ratio.
Argh, it shouldn't matter. Using communication technology to transfer ads has existed since the Tuesday after written language was discovered. Using RSS for ads has been done (heck, Slashdot does it, if you believe some submissions are just ads in disguise). Targeting ads has also been done since advertising began. Taking two fucking obvious things and combining in them in a fucking obvious way is, well, fucking obvious, and shouldn't be patentable, no matter how much legalease you use to hide the fucking obvious fucking obviousness. Grrr - venting is fun.
While it might not be the easiest system to implement, the obvious solution is to make one second last two seconds, with the fractional component simply increasing twice as slowly as it usually does.
In practice, what happens is that most computers simply ignore the leap second when it happens, because there is no special code for it. Then, at some point they contact a time server, and simply act as though their system clocks were a bit more imprecise than they usually are. Depending on the design of the system, there may be skips, jumps, or gradual changes - but these are the same changes that happen all the time anyway when the imprecise clock gets resynched, so it doesn't really cause problems.
In other words, for most computers, it isn't an issue. Those for which it is should be better-designed in the first place. However, if you eliminate leap-seconds in favor of leap-hours, you end up eventually puttng the entire world at least a half-hour off from the physical time of day, and then you have a far, far bigger problem when you do finally do the leap-hour - because for that, doubling the hour would cause much bigger problems, and going slow would be noticably weird - so you'd have to implement it by adding special cases to translate between time_t and displayed time, which will actually require deploying more code. So it's a stupid idea.
Another option is to simply do the change gradually over a year. Basically, you would have two clocks - one clock with leap seconds for people who care if their seconds are a few cesium-vibrations too long, and more common clock without for people who just want simplicity, and don't care about a second being 0.00000317% too long (actual number).
The cynic in me thinks it's very unlikely that any patent lawyer who reads Slashdot would change his opinion on software patents, and thus his career choice, on the strength of any post, however well worded, on this site.
There is in fact a clear distinction between software and hardware, and one that is very important to the patent debate. Specifically, copyright is applicable to software, but not to hardware. And history has shown that the software industry can easily survive, prosper, and innovate with 'mere' copyright protection.
I think an absolutely huge problem with at least software patents, and a big reason why they should cease to exist, is the patent office's narrow view on prior art. For the first 30 or 40 years of the existance of software, nobody bothered to patent it (as they understood it was protected under copyright). And the vast majority of what is done more recently is mere rehashing of those principles. In other words, there's tons of prior art for any software written today, but very little of it has been patented. Grandparent mentioned that part of the cost of an application is the patent office searching previously granted patents for prior art. But looking for prior art in the patent database is like looking at home for a contact lens you lost at work, because the light's better.
The other reasons I'm against software patents are, too many are obvious, they don't make economic sense, and copyright is much better suited to protecting investment in the software industry.
That's a really dumb idea. Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to somebody "skilled in the art." Having random people examine patents would effectively change the requirement to "non-obvious to laymen." I'm pretty sure that I could make a for loop seem non-obvious to most non-programmer people, and if I described bubble-sort in legalese they'd want to give me a Nobel prize.
Well, the problem is that our stupid moderation system doesn't have the categories it should. If someone says something you think is incorrect, what mod should you give them? Overrated? Troll? Flamebait? Redundant? None of the negative mods fit the most common situation in which negative mods are warranted, -1 Disagree. (Granted, this may be by design, as you're encouraged to only mod up. But if there are stupid posts at +5, than no intelligent comment posted later than that will go above it, because scores only go up to 5.)
My ideal mod system would be, you get to choose a short word to describe the post, and give a score between -1 and 1. There would be no +5 limit. Each post would show its score, the number of mods, and its top 3 words. You could mod and post in the same discussion. And mod points would be a much more common occurance.
I think there's a significant overlap between the audiophiles who want better-quality audio and the technophiles who want to organize and use it with their computers. Since DVD-Audio/SACD doesn't provide that flexibility, it isn't worth it to people in that overlap.
I really don't understand why format wars are such a bad thing. Isn't this supposed to be capitalism, and isn't competition supposed to be a good thing?
Consumer confusion - really? Perhaps consumers aren't as stupid as they look, maybe they can understand that there is a difference between two formats. This isn't like CD+RW vs. CD-RW, because unlike that war, HD-DVD and Blu-ray have consumer visible differences. They have different sizes, different durabilities, different media and player manufacturing costs, and hopefully, different use-inhibition technologies. So let's offer them both, and let the consumer decide.
I prefer Blu-ray too, mostly because it's bigger. Media cost is almost irrelevant - if it's less than $5 per pressed disc, it's lost in the noise of MPAA costs, and the price will fall eventually. And I think that if the PS3 has the ability to play them, they'll almost certainly win. Especially if the restrictions on its use turn out to be less severe.
I realize you're AC, but be careful with that! A while ago when a bunch of Windows source code was released, Microsoft sent a C&D letter to someone who hosted a torrent of a Linux kernel tarball as a joke.
Supposedly the dots are just dots, spred out over the page in a pattern that identifies the printer. This would not be technically hard to do, and it would even be easy to have the code somewhat robust against some of the dots being lost. The anti-counterfeiting technology is entirely seperate, and involves the printer detecting patterns of blue circles which are present on recent currency designs.
I share your interest in motive, however. The anti-counterfeiting technology I can somewhat see, because it's remotely possible that some court, somewhere, could blame printer manufacturers for assisting counterfeiting (at least in general, if not specific instances), and this way the manufacturers can say they're doing something. But why the dots? What possible interest do these companies have in having the ability to identify which of their printers printed a given document? I can't see a printer company being held liable because their printer didn't allow the Feds to trace a printed-in-Comic-Sans ransom note back to its source or something. What's the point?
How does NASA know it won't fail in space? Maybe because the entire fuel-tank is useless once they reach space, and the sensors have no function after main engine cutoff? Do you have any idea what the sensors do? Has it occured to you that without knowing these things, as the people who decide whether the lanch should proceed do, your assesment of what risk NASA has taken is meaningless?
While crossing wires for 7 volts is the cheapest option for fans you already have that hook up to the large power connectors, if you're building a new system, I'd recommend getting the type of fan with a 3-pin connector that hooks up to the motherboard like CPU fans do. Most motherboards nowadays have a few extra fan connectors of this type, and the advantage is that you can then control their speed with software. The motherboard uses pulse-width modulation, which is supposedly better than voltage regulation because it slows down the fan without lowering its torque, so the fan can reliably start at slower settings. (Mine can start at 3/255.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come now, all scientists, especially those from Harvard, know that manually modifying a URL, or clicking a link that connects you to a different server than the server that gave you the link, is vile hacking and must be punished.
To people who think the "to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" phrase is commentary instead of limitation, I'd like to point out that that power of congress is the only one that mentions a broader goal before giving the specifics. The other enumerated powers simply list the specific power, not to what purpose it should be used. To me, this is clear evidence that that broader goal was very important to the framers.
Luckily that won't happen, because, unlike in the music industry, there is competition in the retail market.
The DRM and no-DRM environments are both equally fair to the industry, because an equal amount of mass piracy occurs in both. The DRM environment, however, is not fair to the consumer, because the legal rights of Fair Use and First Sale have been removed, not directly by an act of Congress, but by a technical measure imposed on us by a non-competitive market.
Absolutely false! Look around you - it's plainly obvious that DRM does nothing at all to stop piracy, and never will. This is because if you distribute content to a billion people, and one in a million have the ability and desire to offer it for piracy, that's a thousand different versions on the P2P network of the day. The analog hole dictates that there will always be that one in a million, and probably many more.
DRM is about preventing fair use, and nothing more. Piracy is merely an excuse. Piracy is actually one of the best things to happen to the music industry, because it gives the industry an easy way to convince idiots like you that DRM is something other than a direct attempt to usurp your legal rights.
It was a laptop; I couldn't very easily have rolled my own. Heck, it was hard enough to even find an nVidia laptop. And as far as I know, all laptop manufacturers do the same crap with Windows drivers. I wish they could just make their hardware conformant enough that first-party drivers could handle it. Unfortunately, most consumers don't care, so there's no reason not to just connect the chips together randomly, tweak the BIOS tables with trial-and-error until no magic smoke issues forth, hack together enough unstable drivers that Windows boots, then call it a day.
The PC version (all I had handy) of GTA:SA weighs in at 4.0 GB. Even allowing for the massive quantities of hidden porn, that's most of a single layer DVD.
On my laptop, in Linux (AMD64 even) the NVidia drivers work just fine with one special setting in xorg.conf so the full width of the screen is used. In Windows, the stock nVidia drivers don't even believe I have an nVidia chip, and I'm stuck waiting for Compaq to update their drivers to work around a bug when scaling while preserving aspect ratio.
Argh, it shouldn't matter. Using communication technology to transfer ads has existed since the Tuesday after written language was discovered. Using RSS for ads has been done (heck, Slashdot does it, if you believe some submissions are just ads in disguise). Targeting ads has also been done since advertising began. Taking two fucking obvious things and combining in them in a fucking obvious way is, well, fucking obvious, and shouldn't be patentable, no matter how much legalease you use to hide the fucking obvious fucking obviousness. Grrr - venting is fun.
In practice, what happens is that most computers simply ignore the leap second when it happens, because there is no special code for it. Then, at some point they contact a time server, and simply act as though their system clocks were a bit more imprecise than they usually are. Depending on the design of the system, there may be skips, jumps, or gradual changes - but these are the same changes that happen all the time anyway when the imprecise clock gets resynched, so it doesn't really cause problems.
In other words, for most computers, it isn't an issue. Those for which it is should be better-designed in the first place. However, if you eliminate leap-seconds in favor of leap-hours, you end up eventually puttng the entire world at least a half-hour off from the physical time of day, and then you have a far, far bigger problem when you do finally do the leap-hour - because for that, doubling the hour would cause much bigger problems, and going slow would be noticably weird - so you'd have to implement it by adding special cases to translate between time_t and displayed time, which will actually require deploying more code. So it's a stupid idea.
Another option is to simply do the change gradually over a year. Basically, you would have two clocks - one clock with leap seconds for people who care if their seconds are a few cesium-vibrations too long, and more common clock without for people who just want simplicity, and don't care about a second being 0.00000317% too long (actual number).
The cynic in me thinks it's very unlikely that any patent lawyer who reads Slashdot would change his opinion on software patents, and thus his career choice, on the strength of any post, however well worded, on this site.
There is in fact a clear distinction between software and hardware, and one that is very important to the patent debate. Specifically, copyright is applicable to software, but not to hardware. And history has shown that the software industry can easily survive, prosper, and innovate with 'mere' copyright protection.
The other reasons I'm against software patents are, too many are obvious, they don't make economic sense, and copyright is much better suited to protecting investment in the software industry.
That's a really dumb idea. Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to somebody "skilled in the art." Having random people examine patents would effectively change the requirement to "non-obvious to laymen." I'm pretty sure that I could make a for loop seem non-obvious to most non-programmer people, and if I described bubble-sort in legalese they'd want to give me a Nobel prize.
My ideal mod system would be, you get to choose a short word to describe the post, and give a score between -1 and 1. There would be no +5 limit. Each post would show its score, the number of mods, and its top 3 words. You could mod and post in the same discussion. And mod points would be a much more common occurance.
I think there's a significant overlap between the audiophiles who want better-quality audio and the technophiles who want to organize and use it with their computers. Since DVD-Audio/SACD doesn't provide that flexibility, it isn't worth it to people in that overlap.
Consumer confusion - really? Perhaps consumers aren't as stupid as they look, maybe they can understand that there is a difference between two formats. This isn't like CD+RW vs. CD-RW, because unlike that war, HD-DVD and Blu-ray have consumer visible differences. They have different sizes, different durabilities, different media and player manufacturing costs, and hopefully, different use-inhibition technologies. So let's offer them both, and let the consumer decide.
I prefer Blu-ray too, mostly because it's bigger. Media cost is almost irrelevant - if it's less than $5 per pressed disc, it's lost in the noise of MPAA costs, and the price will fall eventually. And I think that if the PS3 has the ability to play them, they'll almost certainly win. Especially if the restrictions on its use turn out to be less severe.
I realize you're AC, but be careful with that! A while ago when a bunch of Windows source code was released, Microsoft sent a C&D letter to someone who hosted a torrent of a Linux kernel tarball as a joke.
I share your interest in motive, however. The anti-counterfeiting technology I can somewhat see, because it's remotely possible that some court, somewhere, could blame printer manufacturers for assisting counterfeiting (at least in general, if not specific instances), and this way the manufacturers can say they're doing something. But why the dots? What possible interest do these companies have in having the ability to identify which of their printers printed a given document? I can't see a printer company being held liable because their printer didn't allow the Feds to trace a printed-in-Comic-Sans ransom note back to its source or something. What's the point?
Hmm, those odds are about twice as good as the historic odds.
How does NASA know it won't fail in space? Maybe because the entire fuel-tank is useless once they reach space, and the sensors have no function after main engine cutoff? Do you have any idea what the sensors do? Has it occured to you that without knowing these things, as the people who decide whether the lanch should proceed do, your assesment of what risk NASA has taken is meaningless?
Where does the rest of the energy go? Does the PC slowly get more massive or something?
Or you could just tune your radio to an empty band.
While crossing wires for 7 volts is the cheapest option for fans you already have that hook up to the large power connectors, if you're building a new system, I'd recommend getting the type of fan with a 3-pin connector that hooks up to the motherboard like CPU fans do. Most motherboards nowadays have a few extra fan connectors of this type, and the advantage is that you can then control their speed with software. The motherboard uses pulse-width modulation, which is supposedly better than voltage regulation because it slows down the fan without lowering its torque, so the fan can reliably start at slower settings. (Mine can start at 3/255.)
Otherwise, point taken.