what's the 'heavy weapons' cut off at the moment?
A 9mm pistol?
A P90?
An AK47?
A BREN gun?
An M2 Heavy machine gun (or equivalent)?
An M61 Vulcan Autocannon?
BOFORS gun?
4.5 Inch artillery?
18 Inch artillery?
Surely to fight off a speedboat you don't need 'heavy' weapons per se, you just need a lot of lighter weapons
Has the UN thought about passing a security council resolution providing for military escort for aid freighters? I don't suppose pirates are likely to try anything whilst staring down a fully equipped modern destroyer or frigate - a perfect trial mission for new ships.
but surely the absolute right to privacy means that there are no reasonable searches.
Under what circumstances is it reasonable for someone to barge their way into my home and look around entirely on the grounds that they have a piece of paper with someone's signature on it?
Of course, a system without the ability to search would be unworkable, that's where interpretation comes in.
they're not, and that's the problem.
The H300 has great features, like support for a superior, free, codec, but since Joe Public doesn't have a clue why it's good and therefore why they should care about it, the pretty one with the flashing multicoloured adverts is the one that wins.
To answer the other reply to my original post; I wasn't aware that the H300 played encrypted WMAs (which I assume that internet services use). Actually, I may have seen something about being able to play them but with a firmware upgrade only available for the US model, which is the primary market, but no advantage to me.
agreed.
Ever seen the iRiver H300 series? actually this is the wrong place to ask, but I'll wager that Joe Public has probably never even heard of iRiver, but I bet they've heard of the iPod.
Now, the iRiver is vastly superior to the iPod: 20/40GB, plays MP3, WMA, asf, wav and most importantly, ogg. Views images, views text files, built in microphone and a socket for an external one with possibility of quite high bitrate encoding, has a built in radio, can record from the radio. All manner of audio-changing functions, works as UMS (which I see as an advantage, it's not too hard for someone to write something seemless to sit on top of that for simpletons, but those of use who like to treat it as an external disk aren't left without that), plays video with a firmware upgrade, 16 hour battery life, oh, and it has a USB 1.1 host port for connecting to extra memory sticks & most digital cameras (excluding mine, curiously), etc.
No, I don't work for iRiver, but I do have one of these.
See, now, you don't see the iPod doing that, you also see the iPod costing about the same or slightly more.
So, why aren't H300 series players flying off the shelves like hot cakes?
They look a bit boxey, don't have a clickwheel and don't have the huge image of the iPod (I've never seen them advertised) There's also no easy way to get music that will play on them across the internet.
the iPod only needs enough features for apple to be able to point and say 'look at the features our iPod has' better than anyone else can point at the features on their player to sell the Joe Public en masse.
"Eliminate the ability to buy parts in small quantities and you wipe out virtually all prototyping of electronic designs. The effects of this on the economy are incalculable."
No, it just means that all prototyping will have to be done with computer simulations. Such software will, of course, be only made available to 'trusted' corporations in much the same way as encryption software is controlled. No-one else will have access to the required components to gather data to roll their own.
ah yes, this happened in Europe. Several quite toxic chemicals were banned at the Europe-wide level, making just about anyone with garden chemicals in their shed which hadn't been used in 20 years a criminal. It's kinda ridiculous that things people own can be made illegal to own, requiring them to 1) know that they're been made illegal when it's generally not publicised 2) turn them in without compensation. We win. You lose. It'll be illegal to successfully defend yourself in court next - can't have the plebs being in the right!
surely the resolution on an ipod's LCD isn't anywhere near Enough. At the osteo..., er, bone clinic at my local hospital they have huge extremely high resolution CRT's for this sort of thing.
Of course, if you RTFA you'll notice that they have such a screen there too with the ipod, it appears that it's being used to check images when on the move rather than as a replacement for high-quality monitors, which does seem like a good use. (such as finding out roughly where in someone's leg the fracture is when you come around to them). It looks like a great convenience boon, but they need to make sure that they're not relying on them and giving up on the proper monitors for actual diagnosis.
"I think I'm going to get a court order to change my surname to Cmdrtaco. Hopefully there aren't too many people on the no-fly list named Daniel P. Cmrdtaco."
Ah, but now you'll be on the list yourself, you've just come up with a way to get around a really dumb government system and show it up for how dumb it is. You evil subversive, you.
we have two TV's
One has a normal DVD player and a 'freeview' Digital Video Broadcast decoder.
The other has the fancy DVD player, a cable decoder and a VCR attached to it. Now, if someone is watching a DVD on the normal player, or is watching a channel only available on freeview and you want to watch (say) Blackadder you have to use the Cinea one which is a pain. If we only had one TV we wouldn't be having two different DVD players, one to pander to the whims of a few studios and one to actually watch DVD's on.
Admittedly it's really only an inconvenience, but it's still quite bad as an ordinary DVD player for what it's worth (I understand that they're not cheap, although the academy paid for it) and would presumably be so for encrypted DVD's if we ever get sent one. If you don't get a screener at all, or you get a bad quality one it does adversely affect what you think of a film. Now, back to the 1 TV scenario mentioned above, it'll be the fancy player which gets hte chop, which means that the films with the fancy encryption get the chop.
For instance, for the BAFTA's most years there are at least 50 films, it's entirely infeasable to go out to a cinema and watch those that you don't get a DVD/tape for. If it's not the Lord of the Rings or something that would have been to see anyway, of course. This is how last year's went:
1) Watch the first 10 minutes of each DVD and note those that catch your attention over the course of an evening (I did the jumping up and down to change the DVD's)
2) Spend a weekend watching the 15-20 films that made it through that and base final decision on that.
Now, for a film to be even in with a chance if has to at least get into stage 1. Previewing that many films really does require you to be able to watch 10 minutes of each one then change to another, you can't spend all day every day for a week down at the local multiplex watching each of the other films (not least because 3/4 of them will be out of the cinema by the time that the awards that they're up for are actually judged).
Since most of the DVD's can be played on an ordinary player something is far less likely to win favour if it makes you jump through hoops to watch it and shows it at reduced quality as an added bonus.
as a reviewer for BAFTA about this time last year.
I'm not impressed.
Ours is actually connected with a composite video lead rather than scart and every few minutes black bands begin to appear across the picture, which I assume is some sort of an anti-copying measure but also somewhat ruins the film.
The machine was difficult to set up, requiring registration, which is a pain, especialyl when you have to call a call-centre which is only open during US West Coast office hours. (which isn't really anyone's fault). The biggest issue, however, is the fact that, to my knowledge, he hasn't actually recieved any films which need to be watched using it.
As an ordinary DVD player it's worse than the first one that we ever had - it takes a good 30 seconds to start up and then obeys all the 'do-not-skip' tags, which isn't too bad for screeners because they generally go straight to the film, but with ordinary DVDs it's a torturous wait every time you want to watch it, at least you could fast forward with VHS.
Basically, the machines are a pain for everyone and it was a really bad idea on the part of Disney.
similar story:
During WW2 a B29 was attacked by Japanese fighters and had to make an emergency landing in Russia. Being allies the Russians sent the pilots back to the US but, for whatever reason, (probably because it wasn't worth the effort) they didn't send the plane, or at least not promptly. The Russian engineers were told to copy it exactly and that what they did - they even copied the bullet holes from where it was attacked and the incorrect paint job from the shortage of the right colour when the original B29 was made.
right, but what if you're skulking around in the back lane (which is public property)? they might ask you questions but they're unlikely to prove that you're doing anything wrong (and if they can, then the law that allows them to do so needs changing)
(or this one at least) that seems like an utterly crazy system of taxation, wouldn't it be easier to set it at (say) 5% for everyone which goes to a central pot and is then distributed to the individual states based on population or estimated online sales or who-needs-it-the-most (or whatever)?
Funny you should say that, during WW2 in Britian there was a law (with a cutesy acronym which spelt a girls name, might have been DORA) which made it illegal to talk on the telephone in a non-English language (or maybe a foreign language, since non-English would eliminate several British-only minority languages, like Welsh)
from your native-American (is that the PC term now?) great-great-great-uncle "I've recorded the instructions for getting to the family fortune in navajo onto this wax cylinder...".
Just one example of a format that isn't commonly accessible today. You COULD do it, but you'd need someone who speaks a very rare language (I have got that right, haven't I? if not replace navajo with a best-part-of-the-way-to-dead language) and an extremely dated piece of audio reproduction equipment. It would be possible to get the two together, but pretty difficult. I imagine that it would be the same with a CD of images, the CD specification and the jpeg specification would in all likelyhood still exist (in the same way that 100 year old scientific papers still exist) but you might have to recreate the equipment to access them. I suspect that wax cylinders, when they are played, are played on new machines. 100 years on people can still figure out a wax cylinder or follow an originary design well enough to make a modern player, unless something catastrophic happens to the human race, the technology and skills required to a make a CD drive will likely be commonly taught as basic skills. When the CD drive was new it was brand new and cutting-edge (ish) now 1st year physics students are being taught how the laser diodes work, and people in clean-rooms all around the world can churn them out to their heart's content (the laser being the hard part of a CD drive, belt, accurate-speed regulated motors and a decoding chip that follows defined standards aren't that hard - not having tried it myself, of course).
I suspect that he was referring to the flash of the camera as it snapped someone on the other side of the road distracting a driver - especially as the flash would be right in his/her face.
Surely the primary point of the vans is to convey the impression that you're likely to get caught watching TV without a licence.
No, they put posters up saying "two households in this street don't have TV licenses". They also have a a picture printed in lemon juice depicting simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. One of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it runs.
Slashdot Mirror
"and all the universities in western europe are forced to buy upgrades from Dell."
Nonsense! We have Viglens with P4s in them...
what's the 'heavy weapons' cut off at the moment?
A 9mm pistol?
A P90?
An AK47?
A BREN gun?
An M2 Heavy machine gun (or equivalent)?
An M61 Vulcan Autocannon?
BOFORS gun?
4.5 Inch artillery?
18 Inch artillery?
Surely to fight off a speedboat you don't need 'heavy' weapons per se, you just need a lot of lighter weapons
Has the UN thought about passing a security council resolution providing for military escort for aid freighters? I don't suppose pirates are likely to try anything whilst staring down a fully equipped modern destroyer or frigate - a perfect trial mission for new ships.
to take it to an extreme length:
but surely the absolute right to privacy means that there are no reasonable searches.
Under what circumstances is it reasonable for someone to barge their way into my home and look around entirely on the grounds that they have a piece of paper with someone's signature on it?
Of course, a system without the ability to search would be unworkable, that's where interpretation comes in.
they're not, and that's the problem.
The H300 has great features, like support for a superior, free, codec, but since Joe Public doesn't have a clue why it's good and therefore why they should care about it, the pretty one with the flashing multicoloured adverts is the one that wins.
To answer the other reply to my original post; I wasn't aware that the H300 played encrypted WMAs (which I assume that internet services use). Actually, I may have seen something about being able to play them but with a firmware upgrade only available for the US model, which is the primary market, but no advantage to me.
agreed.
Ever seen the iRiver H300 series? actually this is the wrong place to ask, but I'll wager that Joe Public has probably never even heard of iRiver, but I bet they've heard of the iPod.
Now, the iRiver is vastly superior to the iPod: 20/40GB, plays MP3, WMA, asf, wav and most importantly, ogg. Views images, views text files, built in microphone and a socket for an external one with possibility of quite high bitrate encoding, has a built in radio, can record from the radio. All manner of audio-changing functions, works as UMS (which I see as an advantage, it's not too hard for someone to write something seemless to sit on top of that for simpletons, but those of use who like to treat it as an external disk aren't left without that), plays video with a firmware upgrade, 16 hour battery life, oh, and it has a USB 1.1 host port for connecting to extra memory sticks & most digital cameras (excluding mine, curiously), etc.
No, I don't work for iRiver, but I do have one of these.
See, now, you don't see the iPod doing that, you also see the iPod costing about the same or slightly more.
So, why aren't H300 series players flying off the shelves like hot cakes?
They look a bit boxey, don't have a clickwheel and don't have the huge image of the iPod (I've never seen them advertised) There's also no easy way to get music that will play on them across the internet.
the iPod only needs enough features for apple to be able to point and say 'look at the features our iPod has' better than anyone else can point at the features on their player to sell the Joe Public en masse.
"Eliminate the ability to buy parts in small quantities and you wipe out virtually all prototyping of electronic designs. The effects of this on the economy are incalculable."
No, it just means that all prototyping will have to be done with computer simulations. Such software will, of course, be only made available to 'trusted' corporations in much the same way as encryption software is controlled. No-one else will have access to the required components to gather data to roll their own.
ah yes, this happened in Europe. Several quite toxic chemicals were banned at the Europe-wide level, making just about anyone with garden chemicals in their shed which hadn't been used in 20 years a criminal. It's kinda ridiculous that things people own can be made illegal to own, requiring them to 1) know that they're been made illegal when it's generally not publicised 2) turn them in without compensation. We win. You lose. It'll be illegal to successfully defend yourself in court next - can't have the plebs being in the right!
it already does it Britain (not to the FCC, obviously)
surely the resolution on an ipod's LCD isn't anywhere near Enough. At the osteo..., er, bone clinic at my local hospital they have huge extremely high resolution CRT's for this sort of thing.
Of course, if you RTFA you'll notice that they have such a screen there too with the ipod, it appears that it's being used to check images when on the move rather than as a replacement for high-quality monitors, which does seem like a good use. (such as finding out roughly where in someone's leg the fracture is when you come around to them). It looks like a great convenience boon, but they need to make sure that they're not relying on them and giving up on the proper monitors for actual diagnosis.
"I think I'm going to get a court order to change my surname to Cmdrtaco. Hopefully there aren't too many people on the no-fly list named Daniel P. Cmrdtaco."
Ah, but now you'll be on the list yourself, you've just come up with a way to get around a really dumb government system and show it up for how dumb it is. You evil subversive, you.
we have two TV's
One has a normal DVD player and a 'freeview' Digital Video Broadcast decoder.
The other has the fancy DVD player, a cable decoder and a VCR attached to it. Now, if someone is watching a DVD on the normal player, or is watching a channel only available on freeview and you want to watch (say) Blackadder you have to use the Cinea one which is a pain. If we only had one TV we wouldn't be having two different DVD players, one to pander to the whims of a few studios and one to actually watch DVD's on.
Admittedly it's really only an inconvenience, but it's still quite bad as an ordinary DVD player for what it's worth (I understand that they're not cheap, although the academy paid for it) and would presumably be so for encrypted DVD's if we ever get sent one. If you don't get a screener at all, or you get a bad quality one it does adversely affect what you think of a film. Now, back to the 1 TV scenario mentioned above, it'll be the fancy player which gets hte chop, which means that the films with the fancy encryption get the chop.
For instance, for the BAFTA's most years there are at least 50 films, it's entirely infeasable to go out to a cinema and watch those that you don't get a DVD/tape for. If it's not the Lord of the Rings or something that would have been to see anyway, of course. This is how last year's went:
1) Watch the first 10 minutes of each DVD and note those that catch your attention over the course of an evening (I did the jumping up and down to change the DVD's)
2) Spend a weekend watching the 15-20 films that made it through that and base final decision on that.
Now, for a film to be even in with a chance if has to at least get into stage 1. Previewing that many films really does require you to be able to watch 10 minutes of each one then change to another, you can't spend all day every day for a week down at the local multiplex watching each of the other films (not least because 3/4 of them will be out of the cinema by the time that the awards that they're up for are actually judged).
Since most of the DVD's can be played on an ordinary player something is far less likely to win favour if it makes you jump through hoops to watch it and shows it at reduced quality as an added bonus.
Did I answer the original question?
as a reviewer for BAFTA about this time last year.
I'm not impressed.
Ours is actually connected with a composite video lead rather than scart and every few minutes black bands begin to appear across the picture, which I assume is some sort of an anti-copying measure but also somewhat ruins the film.
The machine was difficult to set up, requiring registration, which is a pain, especialyl when you have to call a call-centre which is only open during US West Coast office hours. (which isn't really anyone's fault). The biggest issue, however, is the fact that, to my knowledge, he hasn't actually recieved any films which need to be watched using it.
As an ordinary DVD player it's worse than the first one that we ever had - it takes a good 30 seconds to start up and then obeys all the 'do-not-skip' tags, which isn't too bad for screeners because they generally go straight to the film, but with ordinary DVDs it's a torturous wait every time you want to watch it, at least you could fast forward with VHS.
Basically, the machines are a pain for everyone and it was a really bad idea on the part of Disney.
similar story:
During WW2 a B29 was attacked by Japanese fighters and had to make an emergency landing in Russia. Being allies the Russians sent the pilots back to the US but, for whatever reason, (probably because it wasn't worth the effort) they didn't send the plane, or at least not promptly. The Russian engineers were told to copy it exactly and that what they did - they even copied the bullet holes from where it was attacked and the incorrect paint job from the shortage of the right colour when the original B29 was made.
It's a joke, Son. (not bad for 1947)
I think that's about 1/3 of a Nelson's Column, 1 1/2 London Busses or 1/10 of a St. Paul's Cathedral
right, but what if you're skulking around in the back lane (which is public property)? they might ask you questions but they're unlikely to prove that you're doing anything wrong (and if they can, then the law that allows them to do so needs changing)
Limeys? what did the Royal Navy have to do with it?
British soldiers were/are tommys
(or this one at least) that seems like an utterly crazy system of taxation, wouldn't it be easier to set it at (say) 5% for everyone which goes to a central pot and is then distributed to the individual states based on population or estimated online sales or who-needs-it-the-most (or whatever)?
Funny you should say that, during WW2 in Britian there was a law (with a cutesy acronym which spelt a girls name, might have been DORA) which made it illegal to talk on the telephone in a non-English language (or maybe a foreign language, since non-English would eliminate several British-only minority languages, like Welsh)
more importantly, if they're entirely assetless, can a minor declare thenselves bankrupt? they wouldn't have much to lose.
from your native-American (is that the PC term now?) great-great-great-uncle "I've recorded the instructions for getting to the family fortune in navajo onto this wax cylinder...".
Just one example of a format that isn't commonly accessible today. You COULD do it, but you'd need someone who speaks a very rare language (I have got that right, haven't I? if not replace navajo with a best-part-of-the-way-to-dead language) and an extremely dated piece of audio reproduction equipment. It would be possible to get the two together, but pretty difficult. I imagine that it would be the same with a CD of images, the CD specification and the jpeg specification would in all likelyhood still exist (in the same way that 100 year old scientific papers still exist) but you might have to recreate the equipment to access them. I suspect that wax cylinders, when they are played, are played on new machines. 100 years on people can still figure out a wax cylinder or follow an originary design well enough to make a modern player, unless something catastrophic happens to the human race, the technology and skills required to a make a CD drive will likely be commonly taught as basic skills. When the CD drive was new it was brand new and cutting-edge (ish) now 1st year physics students are being taught how the laser diodes work, and people in clean-rooms all around the world can churn them out to their heart's content (the laser being the hard part of a CD drive, belt, accurate-speed regulated motors and a decoding chip that follows defined standards aren't that hard - not having tried it myself, of course).
The board game turns players into slashdot editors who must create dupes in the quickest way possible
I suspect that he was referring to the flash of the camera as it snapped someone on the other side of the road distracting a driver - especially as the flash would be right in his/her face.
Surely the primary point of the vans is to convey the impression that you're likely to get caught watching TV without a licence.
No, they put posters up saying "two households in this street don't have TV licenses". They also have a a picture printed in lemon juice depicting simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. One of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it runs.
There's a medal for "making the president look relatively less incompetent"?