>How does anyone with any functioning brain cells >come up with this?
We're trying to understand what motivates an 82 year old politician in charge of an organization which has been permitted to operate above the highest law of the land.
I think that people with this much power should be subjected to an annual confidence vote. This includes anyone with "Czar" in their job description, and anyone with direct political authority who was not elected.
If you can get him to deliver these lies under oath (e.g., to Congress or to a judge), he could be thrown in jail for the rest of his life -- almost certainly 5 years or less. How many 82 year olds can still go to the bathroom by themselves, much less run the most powerful media cartel in the world?
What surprises me is that some fresh upstart with a lot of energy, a lot of money, and a lot of political ambition hasn't simply toppled this guy. Considering Valenti is freakin' 82 years old, he's an obvious target for sending out to pasture.... 20 years ago! You're telling me that people don't want his job badly enough to engage in the cutthroat politics necessary to get it?
It bothers me that the guy running Hollywood was born before the first talkie, and 15 years before the first color picture, and here he is being allowed to establish policy for media that will be with us for another 100 years, even though Valenti only has 10 years if he's lucky, if he never smoked or drank or lived in an industrial area.
A lot of people don't seem to realize who Jack Valenti is, or the power he had even before his position with the MPAA.
Valenti was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated -- and was the first person to be given a new job under Johnson (before AF1 even left Dallas!) He had a part in writing most of Johnson's speeches, and was stronly in favor of the war in Vietnam.
The man is over 80 years old.
One thing I definitely have observed is that people over 80 make short-term decisions. (Little old ladies selling farms to be paved over, old politicians milking the last bit of pork from the barrel).
I thought our society was supposed to strongly encourage retirement at age 65? For Valenti, that would have been during the Reagan administration.
>just as enineers told em not to launch the >challenger at those tempratures if they didnt >want it to blow up on the pad ?
If the engineers could have made a credible case for their argument, (or if they had a case that they were not allowed to present, as some have alleged), the mission could have been aborted.
It isn't HARD to abort a mission (in fact, it's a miracle every time one flies -- LOTS of stuff has to be 100% or it's no-go!) But there does need to be a reason. With the gift of hindsight, it is obvious that the engineers who saw the risk did not make, or were not given the opportunity to make their case. The notion that NASA management chose to proceed with a launch that they knew had risks beyond the "normal" VERY RISKY mission parameters is flawed. Nobody ever said "yes, I know if the O-Rings are frozen the fuel tank will blow up killing the astronauts and ending my career."
Hindsight allows us to look only at the incident of disaster. Everyone involved in the launch had a LOT of work, was evaluating any number of risks, and every choice is a compromise. Otherwise, we'd never leave the ground.
>self employed, NO management to harrass or to >blame
You ARE the management. Absent anyone else who is affected by the consequences of your decision, you have no metric but your own by which to measure the pointedness of your hair.
There are limitations to any analysis, and when our analysis is wrong, hindsight is 20/20. Although I *would* go as far as to say that after Challenger, we should have seen it was long overdue for us to scrub the shuttle, and use the lessons learned to bring us into the next generation of spaceflight. I remember a "scholastic book services" flyer in 1971 that showed the Orbiter on the cover. Apollo was still flying when the basic design for the shuttle was already being popularized. When I saw the Enterprise roll out in 1977, it was already long-expected, and to a child's eye, was hardly different from the original conception.
Among my most prized posessions is a copy of "We Came in Peace" autographed for me by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in 1969.
A complete newbie can download mirc and have whatever program he wants from a dalnet mirror inside of an hour. There is a world of difference between a situation like that, and another which would require the slightest bit of motivation, thought, learning, or skill.
"The last mile is still a big problem in many rural areas"
It's a problem in urban areas too.
I telecommute, and because I require high-speed ADSL with static routing in order to work, I am finding it somewhat difficult to move. I currently have 1.2MB ADSL. I have found it utterly impossible to determine in advance, whether such service will be available at a given location. It is the first piece of information I want after selecting a house, apartment, duplex, or condo. I have come to the conclusion that I need to close on a property, but have the necessary legal phrases in whatever lease or contract to make it very clear that the deal is off if I find out I can't get DSL after we close.
Try asking an apartment manager anything about the "High Speed Internet" they offer. Shared cable won't work for what I need to do.
I am willing to pay up to $2200/year for really good broadband. Why isn't that enough to motivate anyone to give me straight answers to my questions?
The phenomenon of buying one to play, and buying another one to not ever open, vanished completely with vinyl! Nobody routinely buys two copies of a CD, one to listen to and another for the collection, anymore. This was very common before CD's... There is a world of difference between a record that has never been played, and one that has been played once. (That first play would always be recorded on 1/4" tape, in my case, and the tapes were what I actually listened to.)
"[W]hat all did he do that was bad? Get a blow and lie about it? "
Lying about it was the worst of crimes, because, not only was Clinton the Head of State, but, more importantly he was an attorney.
When it comes to perjury, Attorneys are held to far higher standards than regular witnesses. He lied to a judge. I would support making that a capital offense.
It bothers me a lot that we accept the term "czar" as applied to American leadership. The leaders upon whom we bestow the appellation "Czar" are not even elected. What's next? The Shah of Agriculture? The Reichsfuhrer of commerce? The Emperor of the Interior? Grand Poobah of Energy?
It is nice to be able to develop on an inexpensive workstation and deploy on an enterprise system. Just because linux does not, or Solaris on a small sun workstation for that matter does not, have the same performance as big iron, it does not follow that the system is useless in a development or testing shop.
Re:XML is NOT just text!
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
>Sure it is. It's the entire justification for >having a text-based protocol -- otherwise, why >waste the cycles?
You don't use the text-based *representation* unless you are marshalling or unmarshalling the data. When you work with bound XML objects, you are using the document model as a container for methods to process the data, but not necessarily as a means to present the data in a text format.
You can use XML to represent data which is stored in a RDBMS. Naturally you can see that just because your query is presented as Document Nodes, and/or translated to a document marked up according to some DTD, that the document or the object in memory is not the same thing as the data in the database.
XML in a text file is not "the data", unless that's where your application needs it. There are plenty of applications for XML where the data never sees ascii at all.
"They" say that anything under 10 ms is "not noticeable" but, as a musician, I must say it becomes unnerving and makes playing impossibly difficult when it becomes noticeable. Just playing solo is a challenge, playing ensemble is extremely difficult if there is a time delay between your action and the sound. You can fix this somewhat with a monitor, but it's also a challenge to sync your recording. It's really not fun to play live with a synth that is a 10th second away from your key press, especially if you have gear with all different latency.
>>You ever hear "Frampton Comes Alive"?... No studio at all.
Yabbut, if you had the S/N ratio that you get at concert levels (which translates to "lowering the noise floor" in the studio, which is one of the most expensive pieces), and if you had the 3" console they had in the "no studio" soundboard tent when that was recorded, AND if you had the great Chris Kimsey on the knobs (the engineer responsible for that Frampton album, and the person who made the great live Rolling Stones albums), you have the best studio one could ever ask for. It does not matter if it had walls.
Please also consider how much of the work is postproduction. The masters for that Frampton album could have been mixed a million different ways in post, but there's only the single 2-channel vinyl master released to the public. So there's quite a bit of artistry yet to be done to a live recording after the concert is over.
It is very easy to make a tape that sounds like crap, no matter how good the original source is. But it certainly does help if the source happens to be one of those immortal performances:-)
If you could manage to hack together a prototype that *worked* using consumer gear on a shoestring budget, you'd be a long way towards being the person who released the "professional solution backed by serious support."
What was being described in the original article isn't something that you can go out and buy yet, professional or no. There really isn't much between the Tivo on the low end, and multitrack digital video systems on the high (HIGH) end. There are NO consumer products for this niche.
You are thinking as a consumer, a TV viewer. You're not putting yourself in the shoes of someone who needs to do research or production on a shoesting budget, e.g., a university TV station, cable access channel, or grassroots political organization.
Nevermind that there's nothing worth watching (much less recording!) You might have other purposes, such as archiving local newscasts or monitoring commercials.
Or maybe the application isn't really broadcast tv at all, but rather archiving other media to digital.
My university library has a wall of vcr dubbing decks for the purpose of copying tapes. If the tapes could just be copied to digital format 16 (or 200!) at a time, archived on a disk array, then burned to DVD on demand, that would be great. If it costs a million dollars for equipment do to this, it won't happen. If someone can build it out of spare parts though...
Segways seem to share more in common with motorized wheelchairs than they do with bicycles or skateboards.
They appear to have a simiar footprint and speed factor. Whatever laws allow motorized wheelchairs might just have the loophole needed for the segway. Would it be some form of discrimination to claim you must be handicapped in order to use a wheelchair? Who would set the standard? What if the technology in the segway is useful in wheelchair-like devices and is widely adopted? Will the "no segway" laws turn out to be the target of accessibility suits?
Slashdot Mirror
this
and:
this
>How does anyone with any functioning brain cells
>come up with this?
We're trying to understand what motivates an 82 year old politician in charge of an organization which has been permitted to operate above the highest law of the land.
I think that people with this much power should be subjected to an annual confidence vote. This includes anyone with "Czar" in their job description, and anyone with direct political authority who was not elected.
>Then sue them for false advertising maybe?
If you can get him to deliver these lies under oath (e.g., to Congress or to a judge), he could be thrown in jail for the rest of his life -- almost certainly 5 years or less. How many 82 year olds can still go to the bathroom by themselves, much less run the most powerful media cartel in the world?
What surprises me is that some fresh upstart with a lot of energy, a lot of money, and a lot of political ambition hasn't simply toppled this guy. Considering Valenti is freakin' 82 years old, he's an obvious target for sending out to pasture.... 20 years ago! You're telling me that people don't want his job badly enough to engage in the cutthroat politics necessary to get it?
It bothers me that the guy running Hollywood was born before the first talkie, and 15 years before the first color picture, and here he is being allowed to establish policy for media that will be with us for another 100 years, even though Valenti only has 10 years if he's lucky, if he never smoked or drank or lived in an industrial area.
A lot of people don't seem to realize who Jack Valenti is, or the power he had even before his position with the MPAA.
Valenti was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated -- and was the first person to be given a new job under Johnson (before AF1 even left Dallas!) He had a part in writing most of Johnson's speeches, and was stronly in favor of the war in Vietnam.
The man is over 80 years old.
One thing I definitely have observed is that people over 80 make short-term decisions. (Little old ladies selling farms to be paved over, old politicians milking the last bit of pork from the barrel).
I thought our society was supposed to strongly encourage retirement at age 65? For Valenti, that would have been during the Reagan administration.
>just as enineers told em not to launch the
>challenger at those tempratures if they didnt
>want it to blow up on the pad ?
If the engineers could have made a credible case for their argument, (or if they had a case that they were not allowed to present, as some have alleged), the mission could have been aborted.
It isn't HARD to abort a mission (in fact, it's a miracle every time one flies -- LOTS of stuff has to be 100% or it's no-go!) But there does need to be a reason. With the gift of hindsight, it is obvious that the engineers who saw the risk did not make, or were not given the opportunity to make their case. The notion that NASA management chose to proceed with a launch that they knew had risks beyond the "normal" VERY RISKY mission parameters is flawed. Nobody ever said "yes, I know if the O-Rings are frozen the fuel tank will blow up killing the astronauts and ending my career."
Hindsight allows us to look only at the incident of disaster. Everyone involved in the launch had a LOT of work, was evaluating any number of risks, and every choice is a compromise. Otherwise, we'd never leave the ground.
>self employed, NO management to harrass or to
>blame
You ARE the management. Absent anyone else who is affected by the consequences of your decision, you have no metric but your own by which to measure the pointedness of your hair.
There are limitations to any analysis, and when our analysis is wrong, hindsight is 20/20. Although I *would* go as far as to say that after Challenger, we should have seen it was long overdue for us to scrub the shuttle, and use the lessons learned to bring us into the next generation of spaceflight. I remember a "scholastic book services" flyer in 1971 that showed the Orbiter on the cover. Apollo was still flying when the basic design for the shuttle was already being popularized. When I saw the Enterprise roll out in 1977, it was already long-expected, and to a child's eye, was hardly different from the original conception.
Among my most prized posessions is a copy of "We Came in Peace" autographed for me by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in 1969.
>Clearly there is a demand for a warez-free (OK,
:-)
>no specific file transfer channel) network.
Bet it's so much lower than the demand for warez as to be statistically insignificant
A complete newbie can download mirc and have whatever program he wants from a dalnet mirror inside of an hour. There is a world of difference between a situation like that, and another which would require the slightest bit of motivation, thought, learning, or skill.
So, do you regard that as an argument for or against the value of patents?
So you're suggesting that Nathan Stubblefield stole Jagadish Chandra Bose's invention 30 years before Jagadish was born?
"The last mile is still a big problem in many rural areas"
It's a problem in urban areas too.
I telecommute, and because I require high-speed ADSL with static routing in order to work, I am
finding it somewhat difficult to move. I currently have 1.2MB ADSL. I have found it utterly impossible to determine in advance, whether such service will be available at a given location. It is the first piece of information I want after selecting a house, apartment, duplex, or condo. I have come to the conclusion that I need to close on a property, but have the necessary legal phrases in whatever lease or contract to make it very clear that the deal is off if I find out I can't get DSL after we close.
Try asking an apartment manager anything about the "High Speed Internet" they offer. Shared cable won't work for what I need to do.
I am willing to pay up to $2200/year for really good broadband. Why isn't that enough to motivate anyone to give me straight answers to my questions?
>> I wanted my own virgin original.
The phenomenon of buying one to play, and buying another one to not ever open, vanished completely with vinyl! Nobody routinely buys two copies of a CD, one to listen to and another for the collection, anymore. This was very common before CD's... There is a world of difference between a record that has never been played, and one that has been played once. (That first play would always be recorded on 1/4" tape, in my case, and the tapes were what I actually listened to.)
"Copyright infringement still comes under CIVIL law, the record companies can sue if they want."
It had been strictly civil, but the DMCA has completely changed that for digital media.
"[W]hat all did he do that was bad? Get a blow and lie about it? "
Lying about it was the worst of crimes, because, not only was Clinton the Head of State, but, more importantly he was an attorney.
When it comes to perjury, Attorneys are held to far higher standards than regular witnesses. He lied to a judge. I would support making that a capital offense.
"Yes, I love America but damn, George really really does want fascism."
And collectively, we haven't the guts to stop it.
It follows that we as a country *also* want fascism.
It bothers me a lot that we accept the term "czar" as applied to American leadership.
The leaders upon whom we bestow the appellation
"Czar" are not even elected. What's next? The Shah of Agriculture? The Reichsfuhrer of commerce? The Emperor of the Interior? Grand Poobah of Energy?
It is nice to be able to develop on an inexpensive workstation and deploy on an enterprise system. Just because linux does not, or Solaris on a small sun workstation for that matter does not, have the same performance as big iron, it does not follow that the system is useless in a development or testing shop.
>Sure it is. It's the entire justification for
>having a text-based protocol -- otherwise, why
>waste the cycles?
You don't use the text-based *representation* unless you are marshalling or unmarshalling the data. When you work with bound XML objects, you are using the document model as a container for methods to process the data, but not necessarily as a means to present the data in a text format.
You can use XML to represent data which is stored in a RDBMS. Naturally you can see that just because your query is presented as Document Nodes, and/or translated to a document marked up according to some DTD, that the document or the object in memory is not the same thing as the data in the database.
XML in a text file is not "the data", unless that's where your application needs it. There are plenty of applications for XML where the data never sees ascii at all.
Read up on JAXB.
"They" say that anything under 10 ms is "not noticeable"
but, as a musician, I must say it becomes unnerving and
makes playing impossibly difficult when it becomes noticeable.
Just playing solo is a challenge, playing ensemble is extremely
difficult if there is a time delay between your action and
the sound. You can fix this somewhat with a monitor, but
it's also a challenge to sync your recording. It's really
not fun to play live with a synth that is a 10th second
away from your key press, especially if you have gear with
all different latency.
>I'd buy a lot more.
More than twice as much, if the price were half,
in my case. It's not the price for me, but the
perception of value.
>>You ever hear "Frampton Comes Alive"?... No studio at all.
Yabbut, if you had the S/N ratio that you get at concert levels
(which translates to "lowering the noise floor" in the studio, which
is one of the most expensive pieces), and if you had the 3" console
they had in the "no studio" soundboard tent when that was recorded, AND
if you had the great Chris Kimsey on the knobs (the engineer responsible
for that Frampton album, and the person who made the great live Rolling
Stones albums), you have the best studio one could ever ask for. It does
not matter if it had walls.
Please also consider how much of the work is postproduction. The masters
for that Frampton album could have been mixed a million different ways in
post, but there's only the single 2-channel vinyl master released to the
public. So there's quite a bit of artistry yet to be done to a live recording
after the concert is over.
It is very easy to make a tape that sounds like crap, no matter how good
the original source is. But it certainly does help if the source happens
to be one of those immortal performances
If you could manage to hack together a prototype that *worked*
using consumer gear on a shoestring budget, you'd
be a long way towards being the person who released
the "professional solution backed by serious support."
What was being described in the original article
isn't something that you can go out and buy yet, professional or no.
There really isn't much between the Tivo on the low end,
and multitrack digital video systems on the high (HIGH) end.
There are NO consumer products for this niche.
You are thinking as a consumer, a TV viewer.
You're not putting yourself in the shoes of someone
who needs to do research or production on a shoesting
budget, e.g., a university TV station, cable access channel,
or grassroots political organization.
Nevermind that there's nothing worth watching (much less recording!)
You might have other purposes, such as archiving local newscasts
or monitoring commercials.
Or maybe the application isn't really broadcast tv at all,
but rather archiving other media to digital.
My university library has a wall of vcr dubbing decks for the purpose
of copying tapes. If the tapes could just be copied to digital format 16 (or 200!) at a time,
archived on a disk array, then burned to DVD on demand,
that would be great. If it costs a million dollars for
equipment do to this, it won't happen.
If someone can build it out of spare parts though...
"Most recalls are silent"
For safety recalls, the owner gets letters. They send the letter repeatedly if you don't respond.
Performance recalls get tech service bulletins posted for the shop mechanics. That's a completely different deal.
Segways seem to share more in common with motorized wheelchairs than they do with bicycles or skateboards.
They appear to have a simiar footprint and speed factor. Whatever laws allow motorized wheelchairs might just have the loophole needed for the segway. Would it be some form of discrimination to claim you must be handicapped in order to use a wheelchair? Who would set the standard? What if the technology in the segway is useful in wheelchair-like devices and is widely adopted? Will the "no segway" laws turn out to be the target of accessibility suits?