If you catch even a snippet of a song, you can find the title and artist easily by putting the words you heard into Google. If you have the title and artist, you can buy the CD, sure; but you can also download the song now. If you only heard the song, there's a chance that you'll recognize the artist. The RIAA doesn't care if you know what that particular song is, because they want you to buy the whole CD. If you want to find out what CD it's on, you'll go into the store and listen to the samples. Now you're in the store: you're probably going to buy something. Maybe something else will catch your eye as well. Remember, the RIAA is still pretty firmly against using the internet as a means of distribution, it would seem.
Remove the lyric sites, and you're making it just a bit harder for people to effectively utilize P2P networks to get what they want. This is more of an informational war, and I think it's one of the RIAA's smarter legal moves. I disagree with it, but this one is intelligent. They're starting to target the process that the consumers are using, rather than the broad networks and the consumers themselves.
I haven't studied much in the way of electricity outside of basic physics, but I have taken a number of engineering courses on water. The problem isn't just pumping the water, though that would take a fair amount of power in itself. Where do you plan to put the pipes? Wires are relatively easy - you can string them above ground, or you can dig barely beneath the surface and lay the lines there. Theoretically, you could have above-ground pipes, but in order to have a working model of what you're proposing (a nationwide water grid) the pipes would either need to be very large, or the water would need to be moving at very high speeds. Water at higher speeds has the potential to cause increased stress on the pipes (look into cavitation/"water hammer" if you're interesting) and will consume more energy. Additionally, pipes above ground will face weather and other forms of erosion.
Placing the pipes underground would require a lot of digging, and digging very deep. Many cities don't want to replace their aging infrastructure because it was expensive enough to place the pipes, and now they'll need to dig them up and place new ones: the cheaper method is to ram newer, somewhat smaller pipes through the old ones.
Blame Motorola OS. I would have bought a RAZR - technologically it was a good few steps above the v220 I was using at the time, but I heard that Motorola OS was implemented poorly on the phone. Instead, I went for a similarly-priced MPx220. The hardware is much better (200 MHz ARMv4 processor, 64 MB SDRAM with 32 MB flash memory built in and a Mini-SD card bay, 1.2 megapixel camera (though there are complaints about the camera quality), bluetooth support) and it runs Windows 2003 Mobile Edition service back 2. This OS may be the only OS that I've heard people praise Microsoft over, and I agree - it is very impressive. In addition to having an array of programs available for it, if something about the phone bothers you, you can hack the registry. If you're a Windows user, you're likely used to doing this, and it makes the phone nearly 100% customizeable - very useful! Its synchronization with Windows and Outlook was extremely well-done as well, though my only complaint is that it only works with Windows, so I'm not sure what I'll do when I want to synchronize it with my Linux system, and I'm not sure what my father would do if he bought one and wanted to use it with his Apple.
Just some more information, the MPx220 is a product from Motorola's "smartphone" line. There are other smartphones of theirs that do run Linux, but they're only marketed in Europe (you can probably find one in America, though, and if your carrier uses GSM, there's a good chance that it would work regardless). While the phone is still far behind the phones marketed by Vodaphone (various models produced by Toshiba, Sony, SHARP, and so on), I think it's definitely a step in the right direction. And, if you're looking to use your phone for more than talking, this will make your phone much more valuable to you.
I've read that a number of programmers prefer Windows Mobile 2003 SP2 to Symbian OS. I haven't used a Symbian-based phone myself, but I can say that Windows Mobile 2003 SP2 (the SP2 is important!) is truly a quality product. If you find reviews that talk about freezes and bluescreens, they're likely referring to an earlier version type. I've only ever had one freeze-up, and it was while I was hacking the registry:) (Specifically, I was performing a search for a key - I ended up just hooking the phone to the computer and having the computer run the search)
Symbian, Windows, or Linux, either one will greatly increase what you can do with your phone. I highly recommend going for a "Smartphone" the next time you're looking for a new phone. You can synchronize Motorola OS to your computer, it's true, but what you can do with it overall is incredibly limited when you compare it with these more advanced phone operating systems. (Now that I've experienced a Smartphone, I'd love to get my hands on a Blackberry or Treo...)
Amen. Let me tell you a really funny story that happened to me this weekend on the same subject, actually.
I am a Cingular Blue customer - that is, my contract was with AT&T, which were then bought out by Cingular. Cingular was bound to honor the plan that AT&T had given me, but they don't like it one bit. And with an equivalent plan on their end costing $30 more per month, it's easy to see why.
I recently bought a Motorola MPx220. It is Cingular-branded. "No problem, I'm a Cingular customer" I thought to myself. I backed up my old phone to my computer, removed the SIM card (an AT&T SIM card, mind you) and inserted it into the new phone. Booted up, and shortly after the phone rejects the SIM card. The phone demands a PIN code to unlock itself. An unlocked phone, mind you, can work with any cellular provider in the world (GSM providers, that is).
I contact Cingular customer support, and I am informed that they do not hand out unlock codes like that. I can either buy a new phone, or "upgrade" to a Cingular plan. The tech supporter also informed me (somewhat sympathetically, I thought) to search around online - apparently, there are dozens of people charging $40 to $50 to unlock your phone for you. I refuse to pay that amount knowing that Cingular could generate the code for me, and for free. And apparently they have given some customers an unlock code - however, in my case, I have not been so lucky.
The solution is to send the phone back to Motorola (I bought the phone through them, NOT through Cingular!) and request that they send me either an unlocked phone or an AT&T-locked one. Can you believe it? I am a Cingular customer, being locked out of a Cingular phone, and Cingular COULD allow me to use the phone with my current SIM card, but instead they're going to put me through this inconvenience? It's shoddy business tactics, and I dare say that there may even be something illegal with it.
I can understand why cellular providers lock phones to their networks - to make it more difficult for customers to switch and to make themselves a bit more exclusive physically (phone style appeal and so on). In my case, though, I am pretty much infuriated with how they've handled this. It's purely nonsensical, and I don't feel like a valued Cingular customer one bit.
Yeah wow, I won't buy a CD or DVD either. I mean, if I'm going to get put away for that long, I wouldn't want it to be for something as lame as "evading copy protection." I'd definitely rather go down on charges of having bought sex from a minor - and having paid with counterfeit money!
Hopefully, they won't base things too heavily off of this. While DNA testing does work well in most cases, there are two cases where it doesn't. As people have brought up, DNA falsification (someone trailing evidence that would genetically lead to another person), and people with chimerism.
Chimerism, as I understand it, is a condition that forms when two zygotes fuse together in the womb. That is, what would have been two people - twins, perhaps - fuse back together and form a single embryo. What results is a person with two sets of DNA. For example, their skin, hair, and so on may have one DNA line, but their internal organs would have another. It's relatively rare, but just imagine the mixups that would be possible. I believe there have been cases where this came up, actually; where a single person committed a crime, but DNA sequencing led people to believe that two were involved. Quite interesting, really; at the same time, given that it's so rare, few people know about it. And I certainly don't expect the government to have it in mind, either, knowing their record with scientific matters...
It's a good point, but that sort of thinking is generally what leads to those sorts of arms races. It's the lack of trust for other nations, as well as the overall need for secrecy. A totally open world is completely ideal, of course: if everyone were open, only one group would need to stop playing by the rules, and they'd have a huge tactical advantage over everyone else.
I suppose that development of defense technologies isn't so bad as development of offensive technologies, the likes of which express a different intention to other nations. Overall, this leads to a larger social issue that has no easy solution, if it even has a solution at all.
This just feels like a waste, economically. I can see some benefits for the military, but won't other world powers want to have this ability, too? I don't mean to sound like a peace monger, but the US has to realize that even though we don't see ourselves as a threat (rather, we see ourselves as the ultimate force of good, it seems), once we develop some technology, other nations will want to match or better it. Overall... wasted resources, wasted time, wasted effort that could have been put toward something productive.
If I remember right, WinMX and WinNY (aka "winny") weren't developed as predecessor and successor. Rather, winny was based off of the freenet model, which centered around anonymity. If you haven't heard, the author/maintainer of winny was arrested in Japan. I believe this happened last year.
Though fans still write patches and such for winny, and the network is still alive and well (for Japanese stuff, anyway - haven't seen it used for anything else, and with no great surprise), another program - tentatively called "Share" - has been developed. Unlike winny, it doesn't require an extensive patching process to run under a non-Japanese system locale, and its menus can easily be swapped out to another language. It operates on a similar principle, and development is -very- active, with new versions being released seemingly at least once a week (and there was a brief period where a new version was released daily). One difference between the two is that Share allows you to create a user key, and it hashes with SHA-1. winny hashed with MD5.
You may be interested to know that CD isos, along with scans of inserts and any booklets that may come with them, are available on P2P networks. Most of these are made with EAC (Exact Audio Copy). Not only do you get the benefit of having the CD image - meaning that you can rip to any format you want to, at any bitrate - but because it's a CD image, you can also mount it and take it online for use with online CD databases (Gracenote and such) so have all of the songs tagged right away. Admittedly, I have not seen this on American P2P networks, only Japanese networks. The fact that you need to do a few extra steps before you can hear the music (namely mounting the image to a virtual drive) is probably what keeps it from becoming overly popular, particularly since most people don't mind having a 128 kbps-encoded song.
That responsibility lies with the system designer.
To an extent, you're right about that. If there's a crippling vulnerability within a piece of software that can easily be exploited, and worse, the developer knows about it, then you could argue that not only were they not so intelligent in how they operated, but also that they were provoking most crackers to take advantage of that exploit. At the same time, I'm reminded of a quote by a fellow from Netscape (probably someone important, and I'm sure we'll all heard similar quotes before). It goes something like this: "If something is made by humans, it can be unmade by humans." How heavily the developer should be blamed isn't so easy to say. After all, you can build the most secure piece of software the world has ever seen, but if the user runs malicious code, it won't matter.
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If you catch even a snippet of a song, you can find the title and artist easily by putting the words you heard into Google. If you have the title and artist, you can buy the CD, sure; but you can also download the song now. If you only heard the song, there's a chance that you'll recognize the artist. The RIAA doesn't care if you know what that particular song is, because they want you to buy the whole CD. If you want to find out what CD it's on, you'll go into the store and listen to the samples. Now you're in the store: you're probably going to buy something. Maybe something else will catch your eye as well. Remember, the RIAA is still pretty firmly against using the internet as a means of distribution, it would seem.
Remove the lyric sites, and you're making it just a bit harder for people to effectively utilize P2P networks to get what they want. This is more of an informational war, and I think it's one of the RIAA's smarter legal moves. I disagree with it, but this one is intelligent. They're starting to target the process that the consumers are using, rather than the broad networks and the consumers themselves.
Precisely.
I haven't studied much in the way of electricity outside of basic physics, but I have taken a number of engineering courses on water. The problem isn't just pumping the water, though that would take a fair amount of power in itself. Where do you plan to put the pipes? Wires are relatively easy - you can string them above ground, or you can dig barely beneath the surface and lay the lines there. Theoretically, you could have above-ground pipes, but in order to have a working model of what you're proposing (a nationwide water grid) the pipes would either need to be very large, or the water would need to be moving at very high speeds. Water at higher speeds has the potential to cause increased stress on the pipes (look into cavitation/"water hammer" if you're interesting) and will consume more energy. Additionally, pipes above ground will face weather and other forms of erosion.
Placing the pipes underground would require a lot of digging, and digging very deep. Many cities don't want to replace their aging infrastructure because it was expensive enough to place the pipes, and now they'll need to dig them up and place new ones: the cheaper method is to ram newer, somewhat smaller pipes through the old ones.
Blame Motorola OS. I would have bought a RAZR - technologically it was a good few steps above the v220 I was using at the time, but I heard that Motorola OS was implemented poorly on the phone. Instead, I went for a similarly-priced MPx220. The hardware is much better (200 MHz ARMv4 processor, 64 MB SDRAM with 32 MB flash memory built in and a Mini-SD card bay, 1.2 megapixel camera (though there are complaints about the camera quality), bluetooth support) and it runs Windows 2003 Mobile Edition service back 2. This OS may be the only OS that I've heard people praise Microsoft over, and I agree - it is very impressive. In addition to having an array of programs available for it, if something about the phone bothers you, you can hack the registry. If you're a Windows user, you're likely used to doing this, and it makes the phone nearly 100% customizeable - very useful! Its synchronization with Windows and Outlook was extremely well-done as well, though my only complaint is that it only works with Windows, so I'm not sure what I'll do when I want to synchronize it with my Linux system, and I'm not sure what my father would do if he bought one and wanted to use it with his Apple.
:) (Specifically, I was performing a search for a key - I ended up just hooking the phone to the computer and having the computer run the search)
Just some more information, the MPx220 is a product from Motorola's "smartphone" line. There are other smartphones of theirs that do run Linux, but they're only marketed in Europe (you can probably find one in America, though, and if your carrier uses GSM, there's a good chance that it would work regardless). While the phone is still far behind the phones marketed by Vodaphone (various models produced by Toshiba, Sony, SHARP, and so on), I think it's definitely a step in the right direction. And, if you're looking to use your phone for more than talking, this will make your phone much more valuable to you.
I've read that a number of programmers prefer Windows Mobile 2003 SP2 to Symbian OS. I haven't used a Symbian-based phone myself, but I can say that Windows Mobile 2003 SP2 (the SP2 is important!) is truly a quality product. If you find reviews that talk about freezes and bluescreens, they're likely referring to an earlier version type. I've only ever had one freeze-up, and it was while I was hacking the registry
Symbian, Windows, or Linux, either one will greatly increase what you can do with your phone. I highly recommend going for a "Smartphone" the next time you're looking for a new phone. You can synchronize Motorola OS to your computer, it's true, but what you can do with it overall is incredibly limited when you compare it with these more advanced phone operating systems. (Now that I've experienced a Smartphone, I'd love to get my hands on a Blackberry or Treo...)
I just laughed at the notion of the girl being ruined by copy protection. Good thing you put that hint in there!
Amen. Let me tell you a really funny story that happened to me this weekend on the same subject, actually.
I am a Cingular Blue customer - that is, my contract was with AT&T, which were then bought out by Cingular. Cingular was bound to honor the plan that AT&T had given me, but they don't like it one bit. And with an equivalent plan on their end costing $30 more per month, it's easy to see why.
I recently bought a Motorola MPx220. It is Cingular-branded. "No problem, I'm a Cingular customer" I thought to myself. I backed up my old phone to my computer, removed the SIM card (an AT&T SIM card, mind you) and inserted it into the new phone. Booted up, and shortly after the phone rejects the SIM card. The phone demands a PIN code to unlock itself. An unlocked phone, mind you, can work with any cellular provider in the world (GSM providers, that is).
I contact Cingular customer support, and I am informed that they do not hand out unlock codes like that. I can either buy a new phone, or "upgrade" to a Cingular plan. The tech supporter also informed me (somewhat sympathetically, I thought) to search around online - apparently, there are dozens of people charging $40 to $50 to unlock your phone for you. I refuse to pay that amount knowing that Cingular could generate the code for me, and for free. And apparently they have given some customers an unlock code - however, in my case, I have not been so lucky.
The solution is to send the phone back to Motorola (I bought the phone through them, NOT through Cingular!) and request that they send me either an unlocked phone or an AT&T-locked one. Can you believe it? I am a Cingular customer, being locked out of a Cingular phone, and Cingular COULD allow me to use the phone with my current SIM card, but instead they're going to put me through this inconvenience? It's shoddy business tactics, and I dare say that there may even be something illegal with it.
I can understand why cellular providers lock phones to their networks - to make it more difficult for customers to switch and to make themselves a bit more exclusive physically (phone style appeal and so on). In my case, though, I am pretty much infuriated with how they've handled this. It's purely nonsensical, and I don't feel like a valued Cingular customer one bit.
Yeah wow, I won't buy a CD or DVD either. I mean, if I'm going to get put away for that long, I wouldn't want it to be for something as lame as "evading copy protection." I'd definitely rather go down on charges of having bought sex from a minor - and having paid with counterfeit money!
:)
Kidding, kidding
Hopefully, they won't base things too heavily off of this. While DNA testing does work well in most cases, there are two cases where it doesn't. As people have brought up, DNA falsification (someone trailing evidence that would genetically lead to another person), and people with chimerism.
Chimerism, as I understand it, is a condition that forms when two zygotes fuse together in the womb. That is, what would have been two people - twins, perhaps - fuse back together and form a single embryo. What results is a person with two sets of DNA. For example, their skin, hair, and so on may have one DNA line, but their internal organs would have another. It's relatively rare, but just imagine the mixups that would be possible. I believe there have been cases where this came up, actually; where a single person committed a crime, but DNA sequencing led people to believe that two were involved. Quite interesting, really; at the same time, given that it's so rare, few people know about it. And I certainly don't expect the government to have it in mind, either, knowing their record with scientific matters...
It's a good point, but that sort of thinking is generally what leads to those sorts of arms races. It's the lack of trust for other nations, as well as the overall need for secrecy. A totally open world is completely ideal, of course: if everyone were open, only one group would need to stop playing by the rules, and they'd have a huge tactical advantage over everyone else. I suppose that development of defense technologies isn't so bad as development of offensive technologies, the likes of which express a different intention to other nations. Overall, this leads to a larger social issue that has no easy solution, if it even has a solution at all.
This just feels like a waste, economically. I can see some benefits for the military, but won't other world powers want to have this ability, too? I don't mean to sound like a peace monger, but the US has to realize that even though we don't see ourselves as a threat (rather, we see ourselves as the ultimate force of good, it seems), once we develop some technology, other nations will want to match or better it. Overall... wasted resources, wasted time, wasted effort that could have been put toward something productive.
Check http://www.uguu.org/share/. You might also find this site on winny, made by the same author, to be of interest: http://www.uguu.org/winny/
If I remember right, WinMX and WinNY (aka "winny") weren't developed as predecessor and successor. Rather, winny was based off of the freenet model, which centered around anonymity. If you haven't heard, the author/maintainer of winny was arrested in Japan. I believe this happened last year.
Though fans still write patches and such for winny, and the network is still alive and well (for Japanese stuff, anyway - haven't seen it used for anything else, and with no great surprise), another program - tentatively called "Share" - has been developed. Unlike winny, it doesn't require an extensive patching process to run under a non-Japanese system locale, and its menus can easily be swapped out to another language. It operates on a similar principle, and development is -very- active, with new versions being released seemingly at least once a week (and there was a brief period where a new version was released daily). One difference between the two is that Share allows you to create a user key, and it hashes with SHA-1. winny hashed with MD5.
You may be interested to know that CD isos, along with scans of inserts and any booklets that may come with them, are available on P2P networks. Most of these are made with EAC (Exact Audio Copy). Not only do you get the benefit of having the CD image - meaning that you can rip to any format you want to, at any bitrate - but because it's a CD image, you can also mount it and take it online for use with online CD databases (Gracenote and such) so have all of the songs tagged right away. Admittedly, I have not seen this on American P2P networks, only Japanese networks. The fact that you need to do a few extra steps before you can hear the music (namely mounting the image to a virtual drive) is probably what keeps it from becoming overly popular, particularly since most people don't mind having a 128 kbps-encoded song.
That responsibility lies with the system designer. To an extent, you're right about that. If there's a crippling vulnerability within a piece of software that can easily be exploited, and worse, the developer knows about it, then you could argue that not only were they not so intelligent in how they operated, but also that they were provoking most crackers to take advantage of that exploit. At the same time, I'm reminded of a quote by a fellow from Netscape (probably someone important, and I'm sure we'll all heard similar quotes before). It goes something like this: "If something is made by humans, it can be unmade by humans." How heavily the developer should be blamed isn't so easy to say. After all, you can build the most secure piece of software the world has ever seen, but if the user runs malicious code, it won't matter.