A more correct term is idempotent - take the output of a process (e.g. image compression), use it as the input for the next iteration of the exact same process and you will still get the exact same output. Repeat ad infintum. So, gif/png compression is idempotent. JPEG is not idempotent.
Not to be confused with omnipotent which means the ability to get anything -- male, female, animate, inanimate -- pregnant. If you're omnipotent, the condom gets pregnant.
It needs hardware encryption so that the disk is useless without the right pass-phrase, and optionally a hardware token like a separate USB pendrive (or compact flash, whatever) with a really big one-time pad on it. And I mean real encryption like AES or Blowfish, or at least triple-DES. Not something that Joe-Bob and his little beowulf cluster can crack in a week or too.
Anybody remember those cell phones by Sony that had the thumbwheel and a flip out microphone stalk? That was back before Sony got of actually making their own cellphones like 5+ years ago.
SprintPCS provided those Sonys. But, they had a problem (or at least the ones that my wife and I owned did) - sometimes the software would crash, perhaps related to a drop in signal level, hard to say because it was fairly rare. But when they crashed, they crashed LOUD.
The speaker, which you've got right up against your ear because you are in the middle of a conversation, would go blare out a constant tone at maximum volume when the software crashed. It was the kind of LOUD sound that would kick-off one of those reflexes that only makes it to the upper spinal cord before reacting - you'd be talking along and then all of a sudden your ear would be sore and you had just thrown the phone across the room and you weren't quite sure why.
Except for that, those were some damn good phones though! They survived being thrown across the room many times. The cheap shit you get today will break if you just drop it on a cement floor, never mind chucking it like it was a live grenade.
Your.sig is so amazingly appropos that I thought I would point it out for the people who read with.sig's disabled:
the reason it is permitted is that the High Court has found an implied right to political communication in the Constitution. A federal law banning political spam would be invalid. ...
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -- Goethe
It'd have to be a pretty amazing contract to somehow bind other potential users of the image besides his initial customer...
What does he care? He designs logos on spec. The only person who might see it before he has been paid is the client. Once the client pays for the logo, the designer's interest in the logo is over. Work once, get paid once. What's so hard to understand about that?
Somebody told me that's why Cray's are so expensive: they're diskless so you can't turn them off
Somebody was completely wrong.
Crays were so expensive because Seymour did not believe in compromise, if you wanted all-out balls-to-the-wall performance, you could not compromise when you designed your computers. So, he tried to never cut corners, that's what made Crays so expensive.
Maybe you confused cache with disk - Crays did not have cache - the memory subsystem was designed to run as fast as cache would, so the entire system memory was essentially composed of super expensive static ram (and before that MOS ram). Now that Seymour is dead (killed by a speeding car -- a freaking national resource, and the guy was taken out by a redneck in a camaro), what's left of his companies are more, "flexible" in their designs. Partly because the kind of customer willing to pay crazy money for crazy performance does not exist anymore -- fall of the wall and all that.
That's all an oversimplification, but this is slashdot, not comp.supercomputers.
In fact, each of those incidents was worth far more of each person's share of taxation than this raid was to the taxes paid by the whole of the music industry. You might say these people got more for their tax dollars than the RIAA did. But in order to say that, you'd have to be more than an anti-corporate clown unable to realize that corporations have the same rights as small businesses
So, according to some of the most pro-corporate people around, the RIAA didn't pay one cent in taxes, so they certainly got vastly more than their money's worth. Since the PEOPLE are the ones paying the taxes, then maybe the government ought to be serving their interests instead.
Your example to support copyright is a pretty poor one. Your buddy is just using copyright law as a default contract. If he were to require that his clients sign a contract with the exact same terms as current copyright law before starting the work, he would be just as well protected in a world without copyright law.
As for all your comparisons to physical objects, PUH-LEAZE, even with a slash-id in the 200Ks, you ought to know by now that such analogies just don't work, they are always flawed and easily picked apart. Usually with some variant of the economics of scarcity versus the economics of plenty comparison, your not-free-beer example is no different.
As others have already pointed out, filesize is no deterrent. For the people who don't care about pristine image quality, they will simply re-encode. The others will just wait a year for available bandwidth to catch up.
Since the purpose of copyright, as defined in the US constitution is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and overbearing copyright enforcement is begining to have the opposite effect, perhaps it is time to start rethinking the incentive structure to get things back on track.
Short of a truly fascist global empire to enforce copyrights, the only true solution to piracy is to define it out of existence. Make unauthorized sharing legal, and both piracy and the oppressive and culturally taxing infrastructure to "fight" it go away.
That may sound crazy, but only if you've been indoctrinated by the current crop of copyright capitalists. Consider how everybody else in this world gets paid - they do a job, they get paid for the work. Why should producing ideas and information be any different? Why is it that such ephemeral products as ideas let the creaters work once but get paid over and over again?
Enter the idea of "work once, paid once." If we start paying the creators for the work and energy they put into creation and not copies of the creation itself, the whole "piracy" problem goes away. Did you like that last book by Stephen King? Then put $5 into an escrow account to be paid to King once his next book is released -- to the public domain. Did you like that last Jimi Hendrix album? Put $10 into an escrow account to pay Jimi once his next album is released -- to the public domain. (Jimi may be dead, but he still is making albums, just check amazon.)
This idea of escrowed release to the public domain lets artists get paid for their effort. It is no communist answer either - quality does get rewarded by greater pay. If an artist is very popular, he can set a higher escrow price for his next work. With a potential audience, or more directly - customer base, in the billions because of the internet, a really popular artist could easily charge tens of millions for his next work and get it.
On the flip-side, society is the relieved from all of the hassle and overhead associated with, "copyright enforcement." The public domain of ideas is again revitalized (ironically, the copyright industry's invocation of the tragedy of the commons effect with respect to the public domain is completely backwards, their locking down of property rights in the public domain has in effect forced it to go fallow -- the exact reverse of the way the tragedy of the commons works with real property).
So, a "work once, paid once" approach is a win-win for everyone -- except the current copyright industry who have a huge vested interest in the status quo. It is unfortunate that they are the ones calling the shots with congress today.
Screening based on race will only make the procedures LESS secure. Why? Well, after you eliminate all the clean-shaven, blue-eyed, blond-haired, light-skinned men from the list, guses what? Those members of al-quaeda that look like that will be the next ones to bring a bomb on board.
Oh, so you didn't know there was plenty of aryan and northern european stock in the middle-east? Well, now you do. There are all kinds of historical reasons for it, not the least of which is known as "the crusades" - they didn't all just go home you know, and of the ones that did, plenty left a little genetic material behind. Just because the stereotype is "dark and swarthy" doesn't mean everybody looks like that.
Besides, even if no member of al-queada were blond and blue-eyed, it takes about 30 minutes with the peroxide and 30 seconds to pop in colored contacts and viola! Whitey-McWhite-White-in-a-box. Given a few years to develop a backstory, do a little identity-theft, and Azif Al-Hazred is now Biff Buffly sporting his new tan from his trip to the Bahamas and with all the right documents to match. Not a terribly difficult transformation, and we already know that al-queada knows how to do long-term planning. (Oh, don't even think of geting hung up over the "tan" either, 5 years of regular topical treatments with benoquin -- look it up -- will take care of that, no problemo. I even know a person who did it herself.)
So please, let's not pander to the racists *AND* reduce what pathetically little security the current system provides.
Poor Osama Bin Laden. He was so starved, hungry, and tired of death, that he asked the friendly US troops for help. Oh wait, no he didn't.
A) Yes he did, it was to fight Russia in Afghanistan. We sent him help too. Lots of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles for one.
B) Some republicans like to point out that the democratic party is full of rich people yet claims to represent the poor and downtrodden. They claim that for all their rhetoric, the guys in charge have no idea what its like for the rank and file members that outnumber them by more than 10,000 to 1.
Do you think it is possible to recognize the same disconnect in a global organization that has actually directly killed members of the republican party? Or is it only the common American man that has it rough in this world, and all those dirt-poor people living under the oppression of US-corporate supported dictators are really just lounging away their time at Club Med?
Instead, Businessweek, being what they are, is in the business of fantasizing about free giveaways to large companies.
So, BusinessWeek is really just porn for MBA's. I guess that makes the golf course their version of Hooters too -- all those big round curves and that hole they are always trying to get their balls into, swinging their rods of wood and iron around.
There's way too much nonsense spouted about Red Hat. Some people see that they're making money (that usually means, performing a valuable service to society) and think that's somehow impure.
Totally. Everytime I read one of those posts, I have to say, "What the fuck?" Don't these people get it? It's like the pro-free-software version of the idiots who scream that, "Free software is COMMUNISIM!!! Y'all are buncha pinko, hippie COMMIES!" Free software is about making money for services rendered not about making money by selling the same thing over and over again.
In other words, "Work Once, Paid Once." Not the communism-meme's "Work Once, Paid Nonce" nor the information-as-property-meme's "Work Once, sit on ass and get paid over and over again."
That's just silly. A person who has a 1000 downloaded albums clearly loves music and would have VERY PROBABLY bought at least a few of them if that was the only way to get them.
The size of a collection acquired at essentialy zero marginal cost has no bearing on the size of the collection that would be acquired at substantial marginal cost.
For example, consider the stereotypical college kid with little free spending money, aka broke, but lots of free time on his hands. He may spend plemnty of hours acquiring music for "free" through his "free" school internet connection. Yet, if the school cuts him off and stops him from using the "free" connection to acquire music, he still won't have any more money to spend on purchasing music. Instead he will seek alternate zero-cost routes, like borrowing CDs from people in the dorm and ripping them. Still zero marginal dollar cost, just less time-efficient. But he's got plenty of time, and no dollars, so its obvious he won't paying money for music anytime soon.
Nah. The Olympics have become about control. The people running them have this terribly simplistic and fairly out of date belief that the more control they exercise over information about the Olympics, the more money they will make.
I think most everyone here knows what that approach leads to -- nepotism, corruption, stagnation and ultimately a slow rot into dismal irrelevance. The slack ticket sales are just one aspect of that retreat from glory.
Short-term they may make more money, but in the process they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. No amount of corporatized hype can sell people (or disuade them) on a product like word of mouth. The net is the ultimate mouth. If they don't want to strangle themselves to death, they need to wake up and realize that they need to cultivate the net's communications about the good stuff at the Olympics. Instead, all we get is stories about what a bunch of incompetent, corrupt political bastards are running the organization.
Hey NBC -- I had little interest in the Olympics this time around, your only hope that I would have watched them would be an enticing, personal story that convinced me to follow-up. No, corporate-sanctified and sanitized fluffy news-bite is going to cut it, and now that your business partner has killed any other method for the news to get out, I'll probably never get that chance to hear that compelling story that would make me care. You should ask for a refund from the IOC.
back in, oh, 1994 or so, sending finger requests to their machine and using the VMS equivalent of talk(1) (can't remember what it was called...) to send text messages to the folks logged on. I don't remember ever getting a response, though. It was also kind of fun to do traceroutes and pings to the machine. The network path was insane...apparently it went over satellite
So, you were one of those guys? Where you the one who told all his friends about us? Back then we only had a 64bps (yes, that's right 64bps not 64kbps) link and it was always getting clogged up with tourists trying to check out our machine and see who was on. Lots of kids sending us silly "phone" requests, for a couple of months there nobody could get any work done at all. Thanks a lot dude!
So, without having direct experience with this new copy-prevention mechanism (I don't even play games anymore, damn, I'm getting old) it seems to me that putting the copy-pevention in a driver could make it easier to hack. Why, well drivers are pretty isolated from user-space with only limited, well-defined entry-points (you know 'em, open, close, read, write, seek, etc).
Seems like a good first pass at reverse-engineering this driver would be to do the windows equivalent of strace/truss/tusc on it and see how the game communicates with the driver and what the driver says back.
I'm sure it wouldn't be as simple as that, they probably aren't "well-behaved" (which should me no WHQL for them). But if it were that simple, writing your own dummy driver that spoofs the game into thinking everything is hunky-dory would be trivial.
open("/dev/starforce", O_RDWR, 0600) = 5 write(5, "Hey Super Copy Prevention Driver, is this ramdisk properly secured?",56) = 56 read(5, "Yes, yes it is.", 64) = 15
Then the card would require a hardware MPEG2 decoder which would add about $100 to the price - see all the other such cards available like the AccessDTV and the MyHD, etc, all at a pricepoint at least $100 more than this one. If all you want is composite out, then all you need is the the composite/svideo on your regular video card, neither of which is capable of full hdtv res anyway.
Nothing in this def says a documentary can't have a point view.
Bingo! In fact, it is quite difficult to find a "documentary" that does not promote an opinion or point of view. Moore's opinion is blatant or straight forward, depending on what you think of him. Many documentaries are just much more subtle forms of the same, often dealing with less controversial issues in the first place. But make no mistake, to the person making the film -- whatever the topic -- the issues are as important to them as Moore's politics is to him.
Temperature measured in F or C is an interval scale and thus percentage differences are not meaningful. But temperature measured in K is a ratio scale that is nice and linear and so it is entirely reasonable to measure percentage differences.
Similary, wavelegnth is also a ratio scale, simply distance per cycle. In other words, if it makes sense to talk about percentage difference between two distances then it makes just as much sense to talk about percentage difference between two wavelengths.
Furthermore, your x-ray example could just as easily be written as 400.0001nm - 400nm = 0.0001nm (start of gamma rays actually). So if your example had meaning, it would be saying that ~ doesn't mean even 0.0001nm in which case, one must ask, why did you say ~ in the first place if 400.0001nm is so vastly different from 400nm. Of course it ain't and that's why your comparison x-rays is not applicable.
Comparing the effects on life is just as meaningless, since anyone can pick any life, any range of wavelengths and any effects. Way too arbitrary for ~ to have any useful meaning either.
All your examples are suspectible to the same end-run that LAME and the XViD guys use - source distribution. Source code is almost (not quite, but getting there) universally considered speech or in other words a communication between humans explaining how to implement something - no different from a paper or book that describes a process. Thus distributing source code for a program that when compiled and run would implement/violate a patent is not prohibited by patent law, at least not yet. I'm sure there are lawyers itching for a new clause about "contributory patent infringement" or somesuch nonsense.
Note, this end-run does not protect the end-user who compiles and then runs the code, but hunting them down and extorting fees out of them is orders of magnitude harder and more expensive than doing the same for a nice big fat slow moving target like HP or IBM.
Well, there's a 15nm difference between 385nm and 400nm
Yeah, but there is a ~0nm difference between ~400nm and 385nm that's what the ~ means. 350nm, even 325nm you'd probably have a point but less than 4% variation is easily within the bounds of ~.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are going to give lasers to mice, don't be surprised when the cats decide to fight back.
A more correct term is idempotent - take the output of a process (e.g. image compression), use it as the input for the next iteration of the exact same process and you will still get the exact same output. Repeat ad infintum. So, gif/png compression is idempotent. JPEG is not idempotent.
Not to be confused with omnipotent which means the ability to get anything -- male, female, animate, inanimate -- pregnant. If you're omnipotent, the condom gets pregnant.
It needs hardware encryption so that the disk is useless without the right pass-phrase, and optionally a hardware token like a separate USB pendrive (or compact flash, whatever) with a really big one-time pad on it. And I mean real encryption like AES or Blowfish, or at least triple-DES. Not something that Joe-Bob and his little beowulf cluster can crack in a week or too.
Anybody remember those cell phones by Sony that had the thumbwheel and a flip out microphone stalk? That was back before Sony got of actually making their own cellphones like 5+ years ago.
SprintPCS provided those Sonys. But, they had a problem (or at least the ones that my wife and I owned did) - sometimes the software would crash, perhaps related to a drop in signal level, hard to say because it was fairly rare. But when they crashed, they crashed LOUD.
The speaker, which you've got right up against your ear because you are in the middle of a conversation, would go blare out a constant tone at maximum volume when the software crashed. It was the kind of LOUD sound that would kick-off one of those reflexes that only makes it to the upper spinal cord before reacting - you'd be talking along and then all of a sudden your ear would be sore and you had just thrown the phone across the room and you weren't quite sure why.
Except for that, those were some damn good phones though! They survived being thrown across the room many times. The cheap shit you get today will break if you just drop it on a cement floor, never mind chucking it like it was a live grenade.
Your .sig is so amazingly appropos that I thought I would point it out for the people who read with .sig's disabled:
...
the reason it is permitted is that the High Court has found an implied right to political communication in the Constitution. A federal law banning political spam would be invalid.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. -- Goethe
It'd have to be a pretty amazing contract to somehow bind other potential users of the image besides his initial customer...
What does he care? He designs logos on spec. The only person who might see it before he has been paid is the client. Once the client pays for the logo, the designer's interest in the logo is over. Work once, get paid once. What's so hard to understand about that?
Somebody told me that's why Cray's are so expensive: they're diskless so you can't turn them off
Somebody was completely wrong.
Crays were so expensive because Seymour did not believe in compromise, if you wanted all-out balls-to-the-wall performance, you could not compromise when you designed your computers. So, he tried to never cut corners, that's what made Crays so expensive.
Maybe you confused cache with disk - Crays did not have cache - the memory subsystem was designed to run as fast as cache would, so the entire system memory was essentially composed of super expensive static ram (and before that MOS ram). Now that Seymour is dead (killed by a speeding car -- a freaking national resource, and the guy was taken out by a redneck in a camaro), what's left of his companies are more, "flexible" in their designs. Partly because the kind of customer willing to pay crazy money for crazy performance does not exist anymore -- fall of the wall and all that.
That's all an oversimplification, but this is slashdot, not comp.supercomputers.
In fact, each of those incidents was worth far more of each person's share of taxation than this raid was to the taxes paid by the whole of the music industry. You might say these people got more for their tax dollars than the RIAA did. But in order to say that, you'd have to be more than an anti-corporate clown unable to realize that corporations have the same rights as small businesses
... corporations don't pay taxes. They merely collect them.
Anti-corporate clown or staunch capitalist?
The chairman of the Economists for Bush, J Edward Carter says that, "As most college freshmen learn in Economics 101, corporations do not pay taxes, people do."
The editors of the Wall Street Journal said:
So, according to some of the most pro-corporate people around, the RIAA didn't pay one cent in taxes, so they certainly got vastly more than their money's worth. Since the PEOPLE are the ones paying the taxes, then maybe the government ought to be serving their interests instead.
Your example to support copyright is a pretty poor one. Your buddy is just using copyright law as a default contract. If he were to require that his clients sign a contract with the exact same terms as current copyright law before starting the work, he would be just as well protected in a world without copyright law.
As for all your comparisons to physical objects, PUH-LEAZE, even with a slash-id in the 200Ks, you ought to know by now that such analogies just don't work, they are always flawed and easily picked apart. Usually with some variant of the economics of scarcity versus the economics of plenty comparison, your not-free-beer example is no different.
As others have already pointed out, filesize is no deterrent. For the people who don't care about pristine image quality, they will simply re-encode. The others will just wait a year for available bandwidth to catch up.
Since the purpose of copyright, as defined in the US constitution is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and overbearing copyright enforcement is begining to have the opposite effect, perhaps it is time to start rethinking the incentive structure to get things back on track.
Short of a truly fascist global empire to enforce copyrights, the only true solution to piracy is to define it out of existence. Make unauthorized sharing legal, and both piracy and the oppressive and culturally taxing infrastructure to "fight" it go away.
That may sound crazy, but only if you've been indoctrinated by the current crop of copyright capitalists. Consider how everybody else in this world gets paid - they do a job, they get paid for the work. Why should producing ideas and information be any different? Why is it that such ephemeral products as ideas let the creaters work once but get paid over and over again?
Enter the idea of "work once, paid once." If we start paying the creators for the work and energy they put into creation and not copies of the creation itself, the whole "piracy" problem goes away. Did you like that last book by Stephen King? Then put $5 into an escrow account to be paid to King once his next book is released -- to the public domain. Did you like that last Jimi Hendrix album? Put $10 into an escrow account to pay Jimi once his next album is released -- to the public domain. (Jimi may be dead, but he still is making albums, just check amazon.)
This idea of escrowed release to the public domain lets artists get paid for their effort. It is no communist answer either - quality does get rewarded by greater pay. If an artist is very popular, he can set a higher escrow price for his next work. With a potential audience, or more directly - customer base, in the billions because of the internet, a really popular artist could easily charge tens of millions for his next work and get it.
On the flip-side, society is the relieved from all of the hassle and overhead associated with, "copyright enforcement." The public domain of ideas is again revitalized (ironically, the copyright industry's invocation of the tragedy of the commons effect with respect to the public domain is completely backwards, their locking down of property rights in the public domain has in effect forced it to go fallow -- the exact reverse of the way the tragedy of the commons works with real property).
So, a "work once, paid once" approach is a win-win for everyone -- except the current copyright industry who have a huge vested interest in the status quo. It is unfortunate that they are the ones calling the shots with congress today.
Screening based on race will only make the procedures LESS secure. Why? Well, after you eliminate all the clean-shaven, blue-eyed, blond-haired, light-skinned men from the list, guses what? Those members of al-quaeda that look like that will be the next ones to bring a bomb on board.
Oh, so you didn't know there was plenty of aryan and northern european stock in the middle-east? Well, now you do. There are all kinds of historical reasons for it, not the least of which is known as "the crusades" - they didn't all just go home you know, and of the ones that did, plenty left a little genetic material behind. Just because the stereotype is "dark and swarthy" doesn't mean everybody looks like that.
Besides, even if no member of al-queada were blond and blue-eyed, it takes about 30 minutes with the peroxide and 30 seconds to pop in colored contacts and viola! Whitey-McWhite-White-in-a-box. Given a few years to develop a backstory, do a little identity-theft, and Azif Al-Hazred is now Biff Buffly sporting his new tan from his trip to the Bahamas and with all the right documents to match. Not a terribly difficult transformation, and we already know that al-queada knows how to do long-term planning. (Oh, don't even think of geting hung up over the "tan" either, 5 years of regular topical treatments with benoquin -- look it up -- will take care of that, no problemo. I even know a person who did it herself.)
So please, let's not pander to the racists *AND* reduce what pathetically little security the current system provides.
Poor Osama Bin Laden. He was so starved, hungry, and tired of death, that he asked the friendly US troops for help. Oh wait, no he didn't.
A) Yes he did, it was to fight Russia in Afghanistan. We sent him help too. Lots of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles for one.
B) Some republicans like to point out that the democratic party is full of rich people yet claims to represent the poor and downtrodden. They claim that for all their rhetoric, the guys in charge have no idea what its like for the rank and file members that outnumber them by more than 10,000 to 1.
Do you think it is possible to recognize the same disconnect in a global organization that has actually directly killed members of the republican party? Or is it only the common American man that has it rough in this world, and all those dirt-poor people living under the oppression of US-corporate supported dictators are really just lounging away their time at Club Med?
Instead, Businessweek, being what they are, is in the business of fantasizing about free giveaways to large companies.
So, BusinessWeek is really just porn for MBA's. I guess that makes the golf course their version of Hooters too -- all those big round curves and that hole they are always trying to get their balls into, swinging their rods of wood and iron around.
There's way too much nonsense spouted about Red Hat. Some people see that they're making money (that usually means, performing a valuable service to society) and think that's somehow impure.
Totally. Everytime I read one of those posts, I have to say, "What the fuck?" Don't these people get it? It's like the pro-free-software version of the idiots who scream that, "Free software is COMMUNISIM!!! Y'all are buncha pinko, hippie COMMIES!" Free software is about making money for services rendered not about making money by selling the same thing over and over again.
In other words, "Work Once, Paid Once." Not the communism-meme's "Work Once, Paid Nonce" nor the information-as-property-meme's "Work Once, sit on ass and get paid over and over again."
That's just silly. A person who has a 1000 downloaded albums clearly loves music and would have VERY PROBABLY bought at least a few of them if that was the only way to get them.
The size of a collection acquired at essentialy zero marginal cost has no bearing on the size of the collection that would be acquired at substantial marginal cost.
For example, consider the stereotypical college kid with little free spending money, aka broke, but lots of free time on his hands. He may spend plemnty of hours acquiring music for "free" through his "free" school internet connection. Yet, if the school cuts him off and stops him from using the "free" connection to acquire music, he still won't have any more money to spend on purchasing music. Instead he will seek alternate zero-cost routes, like borrowing CDs from people in the dorm and ripping them. Still zero marginal dollar cost, just less time-efficient. But he's got plenty of time, and no dollars, so its obvious he won't paying money for music anytime soon.
Aftar all, now that they've got beach volley, I suppose anything goes..
Not interested until it is NUDE beach volleyball.
Er, scratch that.
NUDE FEMALE beach volleyball!
Guess the Games have become about money too now.
Nah. The Olympics have become about control . The people running them have this terribly simplistic and fairly out of date belief that the more control they exercise over information about the Olympics, the more money they will make.
I think most everyone here knows what that approach leads to -- nepotism, corruption, stagnation and ultimately a slow rot into dismal irrelevance. The slack ticket sales are just one aspect of that retreat from glory.
Short-term they may make more money, but in the process they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. No amount of corporatized hype can sell people (or disuade them) on a product like word of mouth. The net is the ultimate mouth. If they don't want to strangle themselves to death, they need to wake up and realize that they need to cultivate the net's communications about the good stuff at the Olympics. Instead, all we get is stories about what a bunch of incompetent, corrupt political bastards are running the organization.
Hey NBC -- I had little interest in the Olympics this time around, your only hope that I would have watched them would be an enticing, personal story that convinced me to follow-up. No, corporate-sanctified and sanitized fluffy news-bite is going to cut it, and now that your business partner has killed any other method for the news to get out, I'll probably never get that chance to hear that compelling story that would make me care. You should ask for a refund from the IOC.
back in, oh, 1994 or so, sending finger requests to their machine and using the VMS equivalent of talk(1) (can't remember what it was called...) to send text messages to the folks logged on. I don't remember ever getting a response, though. It was also kind of fun to do traceroutes and pings to the machine. The network path was insane...apparently it went over satellite
So, you were one of those guys? Where you the one who told all his friends about us? Back then we only had a 64bps (yes, that's right 64bps not 64kbps) link and it was always getting clogged up with tourists trying to check out our machine and see who was on. Lots of kids sending us silly "phone" requests, for a couple of months there nobody could get any work done at all. Thanks a lot dude!
Seems like a good first pass at reverse-engineering this driver would be to do the windows equivalent of strace/truss/tusc on it and see how the game communicates with the driver and what the driver says back.
I'm sure it wouldn't be as simple as that, they probably aren't "well-behaved" (which should me no WHQL for them). But if it were that simple, writing your own dummy driver that spoofs the game into thinking everything is hunky-dory would be trivial.
Then the card would require a hardware MPEG2 decoder which would add about $100 to the price - see all the other such cards available like the AccessDTV and the MyHD, etc, all at a pricepoint at least $100 more than this one. If all you want is composite out, then all you need is the the composite/svideo on your regular video card, neither of which is capable of full hdtv res anyway.
Great idea, then slashdot would be blamed for kicking off a china syndrome reaction. I always thought the Earthe didn't have enough holes in it!
Nothing in this def says a documentary can't have a point view.
Bingo! In fact, it is quite difficult to find a "documentary" that does not promote an opinion or point of view. Moore's opinion is blatant or straight forward, depending on what you think of him. Many documentaries are just much more subtle forms of the same, often dealing with less controversial issues in the first place. But make no mistake, to the person making the film -- whatever the topic -- the issues are as important to them as Moore's politics is to him.
Temperature measured in F or C is an interval scale and thus percentage differences are not meaningful. But temperature measured in K is a ratio scale that is nice and linear and so it is entirely reasonable to measure percentage differences.
Similary, wavelegnth is also a ratio scale, simply distance per cycle. In other words, if it makes sense to talk about percentage difference between two distances then it makes just as much sense to talk about percentage difference between two wavelengths.
Furthermore, your x-ray example could just as easily be written as 400.0001nm - 400nm = 0.0001nm (start of gamma rays actually). So if your example had meaning, it would be saying that ~ doesn't mean even 0.0001nm in which case, one must ask, why did you say ~ in the first place if 400.0001nm is so vastly different from 400nm. Of course it ain't and that's why your comparison x-rays is not applicable.
Comparing the effects on life is just as meaningless, since anyone can pick any life, any range of wavelengths and any effects. Way too arbitrary for ~ to have any useful meaning either.
All your examples are suspectible to the same end-run that LAME and the XViD guys use - source distribution. Source code is almost (not quite, but getting there) universally considered speech or in other words a communication between humans explaining how to implement something - no different from a paper or book that describes a process. Thus distributing source code for a program that when compiled and run would implement/violate a patent is not prohibited by patent law, at least not yet. I'm sure there are lawyers itching for a new clause about "contributory patent infringement" or somesuch nonsense.
Note, this end-run does not protect the end-user who compiles and then runs the code, but hunting them down and extorting fees out of them is orders of magnitude harder and more expensive than doing the same for a nice big fat slow moving target like HP or IBM.
Well, there's a 15nm difference between 385nm and 400nm
Yeah, but there is a ~0nm difference between ~400nm and 385nm that's what the ~ means. 350nm, even 325nm you'd probably have a point but less than 4% variation is easily within the bounds of ~.