In the new service, BitTorrent's partners will upload authorized versions of their TV shows and films onto the network. No pricing details have yet been announced. Files will be protected by Microsoft's content management system, and files will play right inside the user's Web browser. Users who buy content will have to enter a special encryption key before watching the movie, and they will only be able to view it on two computers -- say, a desktop and a laptop they might bring with them on a business trip.
who is going to watch a film "in their web browser" (by which they mean IE of course).
Assuming a child jumps out in front of the car, do we (a) hit the child, (b) swerve and hit a brick wall, possibly killing the occupants of the car (c) swerve the other way and t-bone another car, possibly killing its occupants.
Or (d) brake instantly. If you are that close to hitting the child, then swerving won't help them, and directly causes (b) and/or (c). Absolutely the most definite way to lose control of a vehicle is to change direction at speed under braking. The best way would be to use a radar system on the front of the car to deploy an air bag, which deflates at the same time as the car is braking. So even if you do make contact, the impact speed is kept as low as possible.
The best way of all IMHO, is to completely separate vehicles and pedestrians, thereby avoiding the issue entirely.
Look at it this way - Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, he probably made some money out of it. Then whoever bought it, sold it at a profit. Then somebody "acquires" the rights to make poster prints to sell to tourists. All of a sudden, the poster print maker starts sue-ing everybody who takes a photo of the original painting. The photos are never meant to be for resale, they are just cheap personal mementos, but the poster printer sues anyway. No-one is ever going to "own" the original copy, and anybody who wants a decent reproduction buys the damn poster anyway.
If a third party set up a poster printing shop and sells posters of the Mona Lisa without a licence from the paintings owner , then the original poster printer has a legitimate grievance. But not against someone with no financial interest in the matter.
In my opinion, the only way forward is to go backwards, and not allow reproductions at all, except by the original artist. So in music terms, you have to go to a concert to hear the songs. In painting terms, you go to a gallery. Fuck the middle men.
Why should the spoiled, whiny, drug-addicted, self-centered, egotistical singer get all the money for showing up (late) at the studio, singing a few songs that someone else wrote for them, then going off, getting drunk, and partying while the real work begins, making the album?
So they're not really an artist then, and thus deserve no recognition for the "music". So who is the artist we are supposed to be paying for ? Oh, that's right, we don't pay for great musical entertainment anymore, we just pay everybody in the whole foodchain regardless of whether the product is any good.
Music is supposed to be art - if only the artists got paid, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Remember RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America, no mention of "artist" there.
Nintendo also added that sales of the Wii's highly anticipated launch title, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, has already has achieved sales of more than 454,000 units in the Americas, a figure which it notes represents in excess of of 75 percent of all hardware purchasers."
Can anyone decipher that for me ?
As it reads, 454,000 SOFTWARE purchases exceeds 75% of all HARDWARE purchase(r)s. Does that mean 75% of all wii purchases, or 75% of all console purchases ? If it's the latter, does that mean non-wii owners have been buying this game (if that's at all possible) ? For people who are supposedly "in the media" their writing skills need a lot to be desired.
Clockwise from top left = DVB broadcast tv, VLC player streaming the X Files from my media server, WinDVD playing chronicles of Riddick, and RealPlayer streaming NasaTV live. The resolution looks crap, but bear in mind that it is only 800x600 and the video has been run through DrDivx ! Also it's hard to focus the camera on a live screen. The monitor is a 19" CRT at 1600x1200.
Not enough room. You need to have a sizeable room for front projection if you really want to get to that 100" size. Being able to project the image is only part of the equation. Optimal viewing distance for a 50" set is between 6 and 10 feet (depending on HD or SD content). Do you really have a room big enough to accomodate a 20ft viewing distance for your 100" image?
My projector is about 13 feet from the screen and I get a nice 84" diagonal. I view it from my bed, so my head is underneath and in front of the projector.
Not enough control over ambient lighting. Front projection needs a relatively dark room, much moreso than a rear-projection TV (CRT, LCoS, DLP, LCD) or direct-view (CRT, LCD, Plasma).
Relatively dark room, not completely blacked out. I'm lucky enough to work for a living, so I don't get to view daytime tv really, even if there were something worth watching.
Wife-acceptance factor. Try telling your wife that she has to make sure the blackout shades are down if she wants to watch her soaps or Oprah in the middle of the day.
Not married, don't care. Besides which, how many people here live in a one TV household ?
You realize that size isn't everything. Sure, you can get a 100" display, but depending on the technology in your projector you'll likely suffer screen-dooring or pixelization (especially for low-end consumer-grade projectors). 1280x720 (16x9 720p) at 100" diagonal is 14 pixels per inch.
I'm running mine at 800x600 as I don't have DVI on my current graphics card. I don't see pixels and the image is as sharp as I need it to be for watching TV or DVDs.
You realize that the price of the projector isn't everything. For proper viewing, you really need a good screen. A flat, white wall is merely "okay". A flat wall with special paint is better. A proper screen is best. Bear in mind that most people don't have truly flat walls, since drywall is usually somewhat textured. It might look flat, but project an image on it and you've suddenly got a bunch of little bumps causing little shadows all throughout the picture. A screen is really the way to go, and that's not cheap, especially if you want a roll-up model so it hides easily.
A flat white wall is actually crap. A grey wall is better, but as for the lumps being visible, that's just not true. I also have a Da-Lite screen and it rolls up and it cost me a huge £89 !
You can certainly go overboard, like a friend of mine who just put in a $15,000 theater, but even a modest projector + screen + blackout curtains will run you more than the $2000 I spent on a 50" rear-projection DLP.
The biggest ongoing cost is the lamp, but mine has lasted over a year since the last change. My projector was around £600, I don't need blackout curtains, and the screen was £89, so say £700 all told for a maximum projection size of 21 feet diagonal !
Also, how long do plasmas and lcds last. It's a lot of cash for a limited lifespan and a lot of cash to replace. At least I just get a new bulb. Of course you need a tuner as well, but I'm using the pc for that.
There was a time that it was safe to assume that people at least had built a treehouse or some such and had a clue about basic woodworking techniques. Apparently that time is now past.
Apparently it has.
Ever heard of a mortice and tenon joint ? A dovetail joint, a lap joint, a finger or box combing joint ?
My fathers house was built in the 1700s and the roof beams are reclaimed from a ship, as can be seen from all the peg holes and the shape of the beams. I doubt there was a single nail used in its construction.
What you are describing is called jerry-building. A house is supposed to be an investment, not a commodity.
I have several Sony products here which work perfectly well, and always have. One is a VAIO PCG-FXA36 laptop with a 1 GHZ AMD cpu, firewire, 15" screen, tv out, dvd/cdrewriter, and floppy drive, which I bought in december 2001. Another is a DCR-PC9 miniDV cam with nightshot, steadyshot, firewire, usb, memory stick, tv-out, 10x optical zoom, 120x digital zoom. bought at roughly the same time.
Both these items were taken on a long trip to various places, like across the US 3 times by car, around Australia, by car, plane, and train, to Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, where they were subjected to extremes of temperature, humidity, vibration stresses, and rain. They both operated flawlessly throughout that trip (duration 9 months) and I used the camera to capture video which was then transferred to the laptop, edited, and uploaded to my website as a kind of travel "blog" (the word didn't exist back then).
Since then they have continued to work flawlessly, and I have added a bullet cam and a LANC to the DV-cam so I can take video via a remote control whilst driving. Also, I have a Garmin sat nav which when connected to the laptop and running Infomap navigator I can plot and navigate routes full screen when driving. I am working on combining the two inputs (video and gps) to create a dbase that allows you to select a route and see the actual road that route consists of. Google Maps would be a nice interface.
The laptop has only one flaw now, and that is because while I was pissed I dropped it, and it landed on the wireless pcmcia card, breaking the connector right off the motherboard. I removed the broken bits to stop them rattling and possibly causing shorts and the laptop continues to run as well as it ever did.
So you may be correct when you diss Sony for their quality these days, but my Sony gear, which is coming up on 5 years old, is perfectly functioning. Of course the items mentioned weren't cheap to buy ($1600 laptop, $1400 DV-cam) but maybe if you pay for the higher spec, you actually get a higher spec of components, not just capability, and also better reliability. Which leads me to think that maybe Sony these days is trying to compete on price, which leads to lower spec equipment. I can't say for sure because I don't need to replace the items I have, they still work !
insurance is a property of the driver, not the car. Assuming you gave me permission to do so, and we're talking about the UK, I could get into your car and legally drive it, regardless of whether or not you had insurance.
Absolutely wrong. You insure a driver for a particular car, unless you have a company policy in which case you name drivers for the vehicles that the company owns. Even if I gave you permission, you could not legally drive my car if I had not insured it myself. If you care to check out your insurance documents you will see that the car you drive in such a manner MUST be insured already, and your insurance will only cover you for third party risk even then.
If I try to tax my car that way, it fails. Yet I have valid insurance. I therefore have to tax my car by taking an insurance cover note from my insurer to a post office or DVLA office; I can't use the web interface. That's something I live with in order to save the ~£400 per annum that having multiple policies would cost.
Well I don't know what you've done to deserve that. But normal drivers find it works just fine. And whats the multiple policy crap about ? You are obviously not talking about everyday private car policies here.
I've been stopped by the police before; they have no idea whether or not my vehicle is insured. Therefore, they have to require me to produce documentation (which, fortunately, I can usually do by the roadside). There's no way around this, unforuntately.
It strikes me that you either have a criminal record or have been convicted of a motoring offence before, because all the things you are saying are not usual at all.
My driver's licence doesn't have a photo on it. How do you fix that one?
Send off to DVLA and get one ? If you change your address then it's free, if you PASS a test then it's free. What's the big deal ?
How many hours in your day, and how many hours do you want to sit in a crappy cinema ?
FWIW, I speed-read LOTR in 3 days (after school - before bed, say 4 hours a day) when I was about 12 or 13. I had already read it five or six times previously though.
Sigh. Read the SUMMARY. These laws allow certain people to get around COPYRIGHT.
Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books. All told, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted.
Except in order to use these new rights, you must break the DMCA -
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law which criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself
(My bold).
So even if you are a film professor, you will still have to break the law in order to exercise your rights.
The police already have access to all the information they need regarding vehicles and ownership. They have computerised records that show whether a vehicle is insured and by whom. Those records also show whether the vehicle has an MOT.
The registered keeper is also part of the same record. If you doubt the insurance claims I just made, go here and follow the link to "How do we check Insurance,new style MOT Test Certificates and GVT Test Certificates?" (sorry no link - session id crap)- all you need is a number from the V5 and a number from the MOT certificate, nothing insurance related at all. If you tax the car in a post office you need a valid insurance cert, so the DVLC must have a record of insurance relating to the vehicle. The police have a direct line to the DVLC because they regularly run operations to catch people driving without tax. They already know who they are, they just wait for you to drive past.
The previous posters comments about matching the face to the licence should be all that's needed. Otherwise fingerprints prove nothing, because they don't have mine, and checking them will prove nothing.
Had you been born in Iran, in all likelyhood you would believe in Mohammed and not Jesus. Therefore your faith is related to that chance accident which is your place of birth. Strange, how there can be so many books, about so many gods.
Actually the Muslim religion has pretty much the same god as the christians. Jesus is a prophet as is Mohammed. Except, the christians want jesus to be called the "Son of God" and so the wars started. We are all related to Abraham in both religions.
Apart from that, all I wanted to say was, just as there is no proof that "God" exists, there is no proof that "He" doesn't. I have no problem with science exploring the *how* of natural things, but science was never intended to answer the philosophical questions. As far as science should care, there may well be an omnipotent being or force somewhere. One thing that has always intrigued me is - if we take the big bang as read - where did it happen ? For all that science can tell us, the entire universe might be in a really big (relative to our scale) test tube or petri dish full of agar (or the cosmic equivalent), and there may well be a cosmic "other" running experiments as we speak. We just don't know.
So the scientists spend their time attempting to reverse engineer the universe to explain the "how", and the religions attempt to describe the "why". There are extremists in both camps. I guess I'm agnostic. Science doesn't need belief to be constructive anyway, but it doesn't exclude cosmic interference, it just can't test it. Take dark matter. Apparently there is something missing that would account for the apparent mass needed to explain the way the universe appears to work, and hold together. What if that something was a f*kin massive tokamac providing a massive magnetic field to contain the experiment that is our universe. The only way to prove that is to get to the outer edges of the universe and see if it can be seen or detected. As we can't do that, its a bit of a moot point and not worth worrying about. I wouldn't go as far as to say that "God" is responsible for that containment device, but if there was such a device, then as far as we are concerned, the builder would pretty much be a god by any reasonable definition.
I definitely draw the line at suggesting that such a god would have the slightest interest in me or even humankind, considering how minute we are on such a universal scale (or nanoscale from "his" point of view !). The funny thing is, if there were such a device and such a builder, then he and his kind are probably arguing much the same points as us, in some cosmic/. post.
More beer...
The above post can be more succinctly expressed thus:
The Bush administration has said it is planning to spend $120bn (£68bn) on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars this year, bringing their total cost so far to $440bn.
The US is sharing the $12 bn cost of ITER.
Get your own countries priorities straight before you complain about funding for something that may benefit the entire world.
Well, I haven't done it for a while, but the last time I did it, I just put a 5 1/4" drive in the new machine. I had a really basic darts game that I transferred to a 3 1/2" floppy and took to work where I ran the game on a much newer pc. Not all games work however, most of them are tied to clock speed, and become unplayable on a modern system.
The BBC is reporting that after bloggers highlighted recent public sexual harassment within view of Egyptian police, the government of Egypt has been arresting bloggers.
I heard a program on the BBC World Service a couple of weeks ago, when this public sexual harassment was taking place.
Apparently, according to one of the people being interviewed, there is very high unemployment amongst young men in Egypt at the moment. This leads them to gather in large groups with nothing to do. Also, because sex before marriage is forbidden under Islamic law, and none of them can afford to pay dowries (being unemployed) they ain't gettin any !
None of this excuses the behaviour, but mobs of young horny men behave much the same way the world over.
I wish I could link to some audio, but the BBC World Service site is not search friendly (at least when searching for content of audio).
Slashdot Mirror
If you are that close to hitting the child, then swerving won't help them, and directly causes (b) and/or (c). Absolutely the most definite way to lose control of a vehicle is to change direction at speed under braking.
The best way would be to use a radar system on the front of the car to deploy an air bag, which deflates at the same time as the car is braking. So even if you do make contact, the impact speed is kept as low as possible.
The best way of all IMHO, is to completely separate vehicles and pedestrians, thereby avoiding the issue entirely.
Yeah, and look what happened to him.
Zune, meet Hammer.
You should have done, you might have got sucked !
Look at it this way - Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, he probably made some money out of it. Then whoever bought it, sold it at a profit. Then somebody "acquires" the rights to make poster prints to sell to tourists. All of a sudden, the poster print maker starts sue-ing everybody who takes a photo of the original painting. The photos are never meant to be for resale, they are just cheap personal mementos, but the poster printer sues anyway. No-one is ever going to "own" the original copy, and anybody who wants a decent reproduction buys the damn poster anyway.
If a third party set up a poster printing shop and sells posters of the Mona Lisa without a licence from the paintings owner , then the original poster printer has a legitimate grievance. But not against someone with no financial interest in the matter.
In my opinion, the only way forward is to go backwards, and not allow reproductions at all, except by the original artist. So in music terms, you have to go to a concert to hear the songs. In painting terms, you go to a gallery. Fuck the middle men.
Music is supposed to be art - if only the artists got paid, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Remember RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America, no mention of "artist" there.
As it reads, 454,000 SOFTWARE purchases exceeds 75% of all HARDWARE purchase(r)s. Does that mean 75% of all wii purchases, or 75% of all console purchases ? If it's the latter, does that mean non-wii owners have been buying this game (if that's at all possible) ?
For people who are supposedly "in the media" their writing skills need a lot to be desired.
The screen in action 31MB file but you can stream it in VLC or Xine.
Clockwise from top left = DVB broadcast tv, VLC player streaming the X Files from my media server, WinDVD playing chronicles of Riddick, and RealPlayer streaming NasaTV live. The resolution looks crap, but bear in mind that it is only 800x600 and the video has been run through DrDivx ! Also it's hard to focus the camera on a live screen. The monitor is a 19" CRT at 1600x1200.
Also, how long do plasmas and lcds last. It's a lot of cash for a limited lifespan and a lot of cash to replace. At least I just get a new bulb. Of course you need a tuner as well, but I'm using the pc for that.
Ever heard of a mortice and tenon joint ? A dovetail joint, a lap joint, a finger or box combing joint ?
My fathers house was built in the 1700s and the roof beams are reclaimed from a ship, as can be seen from all the peg holes and the shape of the beams. I doubt there was a single nail used in its construction.
What you are describing is called jerry-building. A house is supposed to be an investment, not a commodity.
I have several Sony products here which work perfectly well, and always have. One is a VAIO PCG-FXA36 laptop with a 1 GHZ AMD cpu, firewire, 15" screen, tv out, dvd/cdrewriter, and floppy drive, which I bought in december 2001. Another is a DCR-PC9 miniDV cam with nightshot, steadyshot, firewire, usb, memory stick, tv-out, 10x optical zoom, 120x digital zoom. bought at roughly the same time.
Both these items were taken on a long trip to various places, like across the US 3 times by car, around Australia, by car, plane, and train, to Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, where they were subjected to extremes of temperature, humidity, vibration stresses, and rain. They both operated flawlessly throughout that trip (duration 9 months) and I used the camera to capture video which was then transferred to the laptop, edited, and uploaded to my website as a kind of travel "blog" (the word didn't exist back then).
Since then they have continued to work flawlessly, and I have added a bullet cam and a LANC to the DV-cam so I can take video via a remote control whilst driving. Also, I have a Garmin sat nav which when connected to the laptop and running Infomap navigator I can plot and navigate routes full screen when driving. I am working on combining the two inputs (video and gps) to create a dbase that allows you to select a route and see the actual road that route consists of. Google Maps would be a nice interface.
The laptop has only one flaw now, and that is because while I was pissed I dropped it, and it landed on the wireless pcmcia card, breaking the connector right off the motherboard. I removed the broken bits to stop them rattling and possibly causing shorts and the laptop continues to run as well as it ever did.
So you may be correct when you diss Sony for their quality these days, but my Sony gear, which is coming up on 5 years old, is perfectly functioning. Of course the items mentioned weren't cheap to buy ($1600 laptop, $1400 DV-cam) but maybe if you pay for the higher spec, you actually get a higher spec of components, not just capability, and also better reliability. Which leads me to think that maybe Sony these days is trying to compete on price, which leads to lower spec equipment. I can't say for sure because I don't need to replace the items I have, they still work !
YMMV.Even if I gave you permission, you could not legally drive my car if I had not insured it myself. If you care to check out your insurance documents you will see that the car you drive in such a manner MUST be insured already, and your insurance will only cover you for third party risk even then.Well I don't know what you've done to deserve that. But normal drivers find it works just fine. And whats the multiple policy crap about ? You are obviously not talking about everyday private car policies here.It strikes me that you either have a criminal record or have been convicted of a motoring offence before, because all the things you are saying are not usual at all.Send off to DVLA and get one ? If you change your address then it's free, if you PASS a test then it's free. What's the big deal ?
Thanks for that Steve, go throw a chair, you've earned it !
Great choice, they could have called it "shite".
FWIW, I speed-read LOTR in 3 days (after school - before bed, say 4 hours a day) when I was about 12 or 13. I had already read it five or six times previously though.
So even if you are a film professor, you will still have to break the law in order to exercise your rights.
The police already have access to all the information they need regarding vehicles and ownership. They have computerised records that show whether a vehicle is insured and by whom.
Those records also show whether the vehicle has an MOT.
The registered keeper is also part of the same record. If you doubt the insurance claims I just made, go here and follow the link to "How do we check Insurance,new style MOT Test Certificates and GVT Test Certificates?" (sorry no link - session id crap)- all you need is a number from the V5 and a number from the MOT certificate, nothing insurance related at all. If you tax the car in a post office you need a valid insurance cert, so the DVLC must have a record of insurance relating to the vehicle. The police have a direct line to the DVLC because they regularly run operations to catch people driving without tax. They already know who they are, they just wait for you to drive past.
The previous posters comments about matching the face to the licence should be all that's needed. Otherwise fingerprints prove nothing, because they don't have mine, and checking them will prove nothing.
wassat ? Oh these drugs are approved by the man coz he gets paid.
Typical !
Apart from that, all I wanted to say was, just as there is no proof that "God" exists, there is no proof that "He" doesn't. I have no problem with science exploring the *how* of natural things, but science was never intended to answer the philosophical questions. As far as science should care, there may well be an omnipotent being or force somewhere. One thing that has always intrigued me is - if we take the big bang as read - where did it happen ? For all that science can tell us, the entire universe might be in a really big (relative to our scale) test tube or petri dish full of agar (or the cosmic equivalent), and there may well be a cosmic "other" running experiments as we speak. We just don't know.
So the scientists spend their time attempting to reverse engineer the universe to explain the "how", and the religions attempt to describe the "why". There are extremists in both camps. I guess I'm agnostic. Science doesn't need belief to be constructive anyway, but it doesn't exclude cosmic interference, it just can't test it.Take dark matter. Apparently there is something missing that would account for the apparent mass needed to explain the way the universe appears to work, and hold together. What if that something was a f*kin massive tokamac providing a massive magnetic field to contain the experiment that is our universe. The only way to prove that is to get to the outer edges of the universe and see if it can be seen or detected. As we can't do that, its a bit of a moot point and not worth worrying about. I wouldn't go as far as to say that "God" is responsible for that containment device, but if there was such a device, then as far as we are concerned, the builder would pretty much be a god by any reasonable definition.
I definitely draw the line at suggesting that such a god would have the slightest interest in me or even humankind, considering how minute we are on such a universal scale (or nanoscale from "his" point of view !). /. post.
More beerThe funny thing is, if there were such a device and such a builder, then he and his kind are probably arguing much the same points as us, in some cosmic
The above post can be more succinctly expressed thus :
I dunno !
I already have one, linked to my sony dv camera.
The US is sharing the $12 bn cost of ITER.
Get your own countries priorities straight before you complain about funding for something that may benefit the entire world.
Well, I haven't done it for a while, but the last time I did it, I just put a 5 1/4" drive in the new machine. I had a really basic darts game that I transferred to a 3 1/2" floppy and took to work where I ran the game on a much newer pc. Not all games work however, most of them are tied to clock speed, and become unplayable on a modern system.
Apparently, according to one of the people being interviewed, there is very high unemployment amongst young men in Egypt at the moment. This leads them to gather in large groups with nothing to do. Also, because sex before marriage is forbidden under Islamic law, and none of them can afford to pay dowries (being unemployed) they ain't gettin any !
None of this excuses the behaviour, but mobs of young horny men behave much the same way the world over.
I wish I could link to some audio, but the BBC World Service site is not search friendly (at least when searching for content of audio).
Aah ha - found a similar news story in text here.
Now with 5 cores ! (and a seperate core for those tricky areas)