I have an AP, named "linksys" and a fairly efficient antenna located high up. If anyone wants to use it, they are my guest. Abuse it, and it'll be gone. What's wrong with opening bandwidth for people in your vicinity to make use of?
You're saying that some people caught infringing copyright should get off, while others should be prosecuted. Has nothing to do with drugs, stop fishing for red herrings.
Does this mean there's an opening for crypto research at Harvard now? Do you have to be a goddamed foreigner to apply, or have they started accepting Americans again?
"The users was already in an unsafe position. If you fortget to lock your door, putting on a blindfold that prevents you from seeing the open door, will not protect you from burglary."
That's very true. But this case seems to be about the guy who, with intent to harm you, goes downtown, picks up a crackhead, and drops him off at your house. Yeah, he might have found your unlocked house on his own, and that's one problem. But this is a separate problem. The company is claiming that the researcher had malicious intent.
I don't agree with their position, but I think I understand it.
> *THEY* put the users at risk, not this >researcher!!! THEY should be sued by the users!
That makes sense to you and me, who understand where to place the blame. But their position seems reasonable to them, that the reseracher exacerbated the problem, increasing the risk. And they maintain that he did so intentionally, in a hostile and destructive manner, repeatedly over an extended period of time, and they have presumably taken less drastic actions, before finally going to the courts with their greivance.
I understand the point of view of the informed geek, but I also don't expect the company to automatically take that position, nor do I see any means to persuade them.
You're not going to get your wish, where it's legal for some operators to get away with some specific crime for which others can be prosecuted. I'm not even going to bother with your red herring about handicapped people.
Now, certainly the penalties for such a law can be scaled to represent the magnitude of the offense (and that is the situation today, at any rate). But you would like impunity for yourself to take actions that others would be prosecuted for. That won't fly. (What makes you special, to be entitled to different rights from everyone else?).
"BUT, the law needs to be very clear and unambiguous that it can't be used against someone uploading for free on BitTorrent or just selling a couple copies to his buddies."
Why not? Do you realize that the doctrine of equal protection makes your desire completely unfeasable (any such law would be unconstitutional!)
>Kind of funny, I was listening to Paula Cole's >"Where have all the cowboy's gone?" right now >...guess they're mostly dead.
They finally listened to enough country music to realize that the whole cowboy thing means you'll marry some woman, who will cheat on you, and then take everything you own in the divorce, driving you to drink until your liver fails.
"The last thing any competent individual would want to do is join a massive, incompetent, brainless bureaucracy."
You're missing the big picture. Not "Join" the bureacracy! Infiltrate it, and fix it by eliminating the problems. Whether that means, mere firings, or literally dismembering politicians, burning them at the stake, etc., depends on whether you advocate violence and rebellion as a means to political ends.
I realized too late you meant that you'd like the mess that is Tax Code to be presented as a state machine. We live in a very different world from the people on the supply side of tax laws, I'm afraid.
Perhaps if more logical minded people would pursue careers in politics and finance, the world would be a better place.
"This is not true. In many cases it was the other way round, as resort areas tend to lie close to the beach an on long shores."
I didn't phrase that correctly, sorry. Tens of thousands killed in resorts, compared to entire societies of indigineous people wiped out. Tourists, on the whole, have not suffered more than others, but are treated as more important by the media.
"Shouldn't the IRS really put it's enormous numnber of rules into a machine format for us?"
IRS rules, like all Federal Agency law, is available in machine formats. You can get the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register online or in a number of formats. Last time I worked with the stuff they still even had 9-track tape.
"Will you still believe that when to avoid that device or format, you have to pay ten or even a hundred times as much money for the same device because all the sheep who didn't understand or care created economies of scale for the DRM device?"
I already have to pay a premium for pro gear just to avoid DRM restrictions. But, to answer your question, I won't ever point the finger of blame at anybody, except the last person to take the action.
If you signed a homeowner's agreement that restricts your rights, well, YOU signed it, not a pig's ear.
If I bought a Sony Minidisc, well, I bought it.
Sony hasn't impaired my ability to write and record music, but they have made it impossible for me to use their nice inexpensive format in good conscious. That's an argument to not use the format, but I don't think I ought to sue them, and I don't think I can hold them responsible for my being forced to look elsewhere for recording devices.
I don't consider these types of DRM issues to be rights concerns until they cross a specific line: When they restrict me from copying music that I myself composed, performed and recorded.
When a device does *that*, I consider my rights to have been abridged. On the other hand, I don't think it gives me the right to sue anyone. Rather, I think it gives me the responsibility to avoid using that device or format.
The larger question of whether this situation raises the barrier to entry for an independent musician, is left as an exercise.
The reality is in the dynamic domain -- you cannot afford 104 dB of dynamic range on tape. No, you can't. You can have it cheaply in digital.
So what does everybody do? They mix so that every track is in the top 4 bits, because people perceive "louder" as "better". But it totally eliminates one of the main things that makes digital superior. The order of magnitude higher dynamic headroom. Thrown away because "we" lack the taste for anything like a quiet passage or a subdued element in a mix.
I know of situations where 48kHz in the frequency domain is a problem, but none of them are musical in nature. 96kHz is enough of a sample rate for bat research, so it's plenty above the plateau of human proportions.
The fidelity problem is solved. What's a problem now, is the want of specific aberrations, say as in vintage gear, that need to be simulated with signal processing, and that's by nature going to be artificial. Whether it sounds artificial is neither here nor there. A tube simulator, ribbon mike simulator, analog filter simulator, or tape saturation simulator is synthetic, and nothing synthetic is perfect.
Good enough for production work? Certainly. Good enough that tube amps and tape decks and Telefunkens won't have a market? Wrong.
ProTools is something you MUST have on your marketing literature, and also, for transparent data interchange because it's a de facto standard, but it's not the best platform to actually use. You use it because you *have to*. Scholz doesn't have to.
He could have dedicated digital studio gear if he wanted, no reason to use a consumer PC pressed into service as a recording studio, which is really what ProTools is when you get down to it.
"The big problem here is that analog tape is the universal archival medium."
*Was* the universal archival medium. Adapt. Use a digital medium, or risk losing your archive. If it's *really* worth archiving, have it pressed as DVD. I don't mean DVD-R. I mean commercial DVD. The prognosis for the longevity of the medium is pretty damned good. Yeah, you can argue that the players will be obsolete, but I'm not going there with you.
I'm not convinced 2" tape has a 100 year shelf life. There is some entropy in those magnetized ferrite particles. They want to realign with the planetary field.
If there is a market for 1/4", Maxell will reintroduce XL. Or some Chinese plant will start making it.
Pro tape, especially 2", is staggeringly expensive. And it still offers some qualities of sound which take a significant effort to duplicate with digital. Yes, this is aberration, but it's a desirable *analog* aberration, and studios that use tape contribute sort of a gestalt to the overall product, an organic quality.
I'm a big fan of digital, and I don't really care about analog tape, but I do sympathize with the folks still using 1" and 2" decks.
Digital recording is only *just now* getting to the point where it can truly take over. (It's been there for playback for decades, sure, but production is another story.)
But it's always been expensive to do 2". In the day, we'd get tapes that had been used once in a voiceover studio and bulk erase them.
Oh well... I feel sorry for the plant workers and anybody still using an ampex console. Somewhere I think i still have a Teac 4-track 1/4", and boxes of unused, or only partly used, tapes. Ebay time?
"There was a time when I was really looking forward to work in the US sometime in the future. Now I wouldn't live there even if I would get paid for doing so."
I'm sure that if you consider only the sensational press of any place, you would reach the same conclusion. Despite the bleak picture painted by the media, or the homogenized conception of the US you may have, the US is a very diverse place with a lot decent stuff going for it.
Despite what you may have read, not everybody is unemployed, obese, drives an SUV, or suicidal.
"At this distance laser beam will widen to the point where the cross-section of the beam will be around 1 meter"
Diffused into the laminated glass of the airplane cockpit, that would be just about right to obscure the visibility, wouldn't it?
I think people are jumping to the conclusion of "retina damage", even though that's not really the claim being made. Obscuring the pilot's visibility is.
"For about $20 you can buy a laser level. No more need for chalk lines or or fashioned levels."
The funny thing about that is, in order to level the beam, you still need the old-fashoned spirit level!
I prefer chalk line. I also find that dead reckoning can be more effective in an asymetrical room. Houses were built by carpenters working in inches not millimeters. Also, houses change shape. What's level on a meter doesn't always look right!
Slashdot Mirror
I have an AP, named "linksys" and a fairly efficient antenna located high up. If anyone wants to use it, they are my guest. Abuse it, and it'll be gone. What's wrong with opening bandwidth for people in your vicinity to make use of?
You're saying that some people caught infringing copyright should get off, while others should be prosecuted. Has nothing to do with drugs, stop fishing for red herrings.
Does this mean there's an opening for crypto research at Harvard now? Do you have to be a goddamed foreigner to apply, or have they started accepting Americans again?
"The users was already in an unsafe position. If you fortget to lock your door, putting on a blindfold that prevents you from seeing the open door, will not protect you from burglary."
That's very true. But this case seems to be about the guy who, with intent to harm you, goes downtown, picks up a crackhead, and drops him off at your house. Yeah, he might have found your unlocked house on his own, and that's one problem. But this is a separate problem. The company is claiming that the researcher had malicious intent.
I don't agree with their position, but I think I understand it.
> *THEY* put the users at risk, not this
>researcher!!! THEY should be sued by the users!
That makes sense to you and me, who understand where to place the blame. But their position seems reasonable to them, that the reseracher exacerbated the problem, increasing the risk. And they maintain that he did so intentionally, in a hostile and destructive manner, repeatedly over an extended period of time, and they have presumably taken less drastic actions, before finally going to the courts with their greivance.
I understand the point of view of the informed geek, but I also don't expect the company to automatically take that position, nor do I see any means to persuade them.
You're not going to get your wish, where it's legal for some operators to get away with some specific crime for which others can be prosecuted. I'm not even going to bother with your red herring about handicapped people.
Now, certainly the penalties for such a law can be scaled to represent the magnitude of the offense (and that is the situation today, at any rate). But you would like impunity for yourself to take actions that others would be prosecuted for. That won't fly. (What makes you special, to be entitled to different rights from everyone else?).
"BUT, the law needs to be very clear and unambiguous that it can't be used against someone uploading for free on BitTorrent or just selling a couple copies to his buddies."
Why not? Do you realize that the doctrine of equal protection makes your desire completely unfeasable (any such law would be unconstitutional!)
>Kind of funny, I was listening to Paula Cole's
>"Where have all the cowboy's gone?" right now
>...guess they're mostly dead.
They finally listened to enough country music to realize that the whole cowboy thing means you'll marry some woman, who will cheat on you, and then take everything you own in the divorce, driving you to drink until your liver fails.
"The last thing any competent individual would want to do is join a massive, incompetent, brainless bureaucracy."
You're missing the big picture. Not "Join" the bureacracy! Infiltrate it, and fix it by eliminating the problems. Whether that means, mere firings, or literally dismembering politicians, burning them at the stake, etc., depends on whether you advocate violence and rebellion as a means to political ends.
I realized too late you meant that you'd like the mess that is Tax Code to be presented as a state machine. We live in a very different world from the people on the supply side of tax laws, I'm afraid.
Perhaps if more logical minded people would pursue careers in politics and finance, the world would be a better place.
"This is not true. In many cases it was the other way round, as resort areas tend to lie close to the beach an on long shores."
I didn't phrase that correctly, sorry.
Tens of thousands killed in resorts, compared to entire societies of indigineous people wiped out.
Tourists, on the whole, have not suffered more than others, but are treated as more important by the media.
"Shouldn't the IRS really put it's enormous numnber of rules into a machine format for us?"
IRS rules, like all Federal Agency law, is available in machine formats. You can get the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register online or in a number of formats. Last time I worked with the stuff they still even had 9-track tape.
http://www.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/cfrassemble.c
"Will you still believe that when to avoid that device or format, you have to pay ten or even a hundred times as much money for the same device because all the sheep who didn't understand or care created economies of scale for the DRM device?"
I already have to pay a premium for pro gear just to avoid DRM restrictions. But, to answer your question, I won't ever point the finger of blame at anybody, except the last person to take the action.
If you signed a homeowner's agreement that restricts your rights, well, YOU signed it, not a pig's ear.
If I bought a Sony Minidisc, well, I bought it.
Sony hasn't impaired my ability to write and record music, but they have made it impossible for me to use their nice inexpensive format in good conscious. That's an argument to not use the format, but I don't think I ought to sue them, and I don't think I can hold them responsible for my being forced to look elsewhere for recording devices.
"the computers we have now are already insanely over-powered."
That depends on your application. Are you doing word processing or low latency general purpose signal processing?
I don't consider these types of DRM issues to be rights concerns until they cross a specific line: When they restrict me from copying music that I myself composed, performed and recorded.
When a device does *that*, I consider my rights to have been abridged. On the other hand, I don't think it gives me the right to sue anyone. Rather, I think it gives me the responsibility to avoid using that device or format.
The larger question of whether this situation raises the barrier to entry for an independent musician, is left as an exercise.
"Of course, it goes without saying that you need to pay taxes on cash winnings, too."
It certainly does NOT "go without saying."
It triggers my "fetch my rifle" reflex.
What kind of People agreed to this bullshit?
"The prosecutor was not fired, but reassigned to another job where he could do less harm."
You mean, he was promoted.
>So the question now is, what do I replace it with?
Nothing? You said it still works, right?
I replaced my TV (and the potato-rest, and the line-of-sight) with a piano. But I'm a musician so that made a whole lot of sense.
TV is overrated. Way, way overrated.
Where do you live that has a 50% tax on TV sales?
The reality is in the dynamic domain -- you cannot afford 104 dB of dynamic range on tape. No, you can't. You can have it cheaply in digital.
So what does everybody do? They mix so that every track is in the top 4 bits, because people perceive "louder" as "better". But it totally eliminates one of the main things that makes digital superior. The order of magnitude higher dynamic headroom. Thrown away because "we" lack the taste for anything like a quiet passage or a subdued element in a mix.
I know of situations where 48kHz in the frequency domain is a problem, but none of them are musical in nature. 96kHz is enough of a sample rate for bat research, so it's plenty above the plateau of human proportions.
The fidelity problem is solved. What's a problem now, is the want of specific aberrations, say as in vintage gear, that need to be simulated with signal processing, and that's by nature going to be artificial. Whether it sounds artificial is neither here nor there. A tube simulator, ribbon mike simulator, analog filter simulator, or tape saturation simulator is synthetic, and nothing synthetic is perfect.
Good enough for production work? Certainly. Good enough that tube amps and tape decks and Telefunkens won't have a market? Wrong.
>He has switched to ProTools but hates it
That's because ProTools *sucks*.
There are several far better DAW platforms.
ProTools is something you MUST have on your marketing literature, and also, for transparent data interchange because it's a de facto standard, but it's not the best platform to actually use. You use it because you *have to*. Scholz doesn't have to.
He could have dedicated digital studio gear if he wanted, no reason to use a consumer PC pressed into service as a recording studio, which is really what ProTools is when you get down to it.
"The big problem here is that analog tape is the universal archival medium."
*Was* the universal archival medium. Adapt. Use a digital medium, or risk losing your archive. If it's *really* worth archiving, have it pressed as DVD. I don't mean DVD-R. I mean commercial DVD. The prognosis for the longevity of the medium is pretty damned good. Yeah, you can argue that the players will be obsolete, but I'm not going there with you.
I'm not convinced 2" tape has a 100 year shelf life. There is some entropy in those magnetized ferrite particles. They want to realign with the planetary field.
If there is a market for 1/4", Maxell will reintroduce XL. Or some Chinese plant will start making it.
Pro tape, especially 2", is staggeringly expensive. And it still offers some qualities of sound which take a significant effort to duplicate with digital. Yes, this is aberration, but it's a desirable *analog* aberration, and studios that use tape contribute sort of a gestalt to the overall product, an organic quality.
I'm a big fan of digital, and I don't really care about analog tape, but I do sympathize with the folks still using 1" and 2" decks.
Digital recording is only *just now* getting to the point where it can truly take over. (It's been there for playback for decades, sure, but production is another story.)
But it's always been expensive to do 2". In the day, we'd get tapes that had been used once in a voiceover studio and bulk erase them.
Oh well... I feel sorry for the plant workers and anybody still using an ampex console. Somewhere I think i still have a Teac 4-track 1/4", and boxes of unused, or only partly used, tapes. Ebay time?
"There was a time when I was really looking forward to work in the US sometime in the future. Now I wouldn't live there even if I would get paid for doing so."
I'm sure that if you consider only the sensational press of any place, you would reach the same conclusion. Despite the bleak picture painted by the media, or the homogenized conception of the US you may have, the US is a very diverse place with a lot decent stuff going for it.
Despite what you may have read, not everybody is unemployed, obese, drives an SUV, or suicidal.
"At this distance laser beam will widen to the point where the cross-section of the beam will be around 1 meter"
Diffused into the laminated glass of the airplane cockpit, that would be just about right to obscure the visibility, wouldn't it?
I think people are jumping to the conclusion of "retina damage", even though that's not really the claim being made. Obscuring the pilot's visibility is.
"For about $20 you can buy a laser level. No more need for chalk lines or or fashioned levels."
The funny thing about that is, in order to level the beam, you still need the old-fashoned spirit level!
I prefer chalk line. I also find that dead reckoning can be more effective in an asymetrical room. Houses were built by carpenters working in inches not millimeters. Also, houses change shape. What's level on a meter doesn't always look right!