Far violet (~400nm) and far red (~700) are both visible. They might make the viewing experience much richer, and light at those wavelengths won't damage skin / eyes or cook your dinner.
Oh yes they will. I have an itty-bitty (uses 2 AA cells) 385nm UV flashlight (LED based) and just ten minutes of use in a dark area is enough to make my eyeballs feel sunburned, similar to spending an entire day out on a boat without sunglasses. And no, I'm not shining the light in my face, just using it like a regular flashlight, shining it around on other stuff to see what glows.
Since then I've acquired set of uv-blocking eye protectors and no longer get that effect.
a) Only the.TGZ, aka.tar.gz for real unix people, is marked. So, just re-tar it and the tag (that ain't even deserving of the term watermark) is gone.
b) If they did something more hardcore, two copies would not necessarily be enough remove all identifiers. It isn't hard to come up with a scheme in which there are multiple sets of tags and any one combination of those tags defines a single download, but if say, 3 of the 4 tags are the same, then a straight diff only picks up 1 of the 4 tags and thus leaves the other 3 to identify a group of downloads from which both "pirates" took their copies. Play enough games assigning different users to different sets of tags for different releases and you could probably narrow down the pool to the exact people who are participating in unauthorized sharing in a month or two. It just a practical application of set theory to do it.
This review struck me as a bit clueless, or unfinished.
Unfortunately, that is the case with so many of these "review" sites like anandtech and tom's hardware. For the most part, they are all just a bunch of kids or hobbiests with little to no industry experience. If they are lucky, they've got a CS degree but that's a bare minimum requirement not a qualification. More often than not the people writing these "reviews" are the same guys wearing the blue shirts down at the local best buy smurf cave.
If you think about it, it isn't too surprising. People with a real understanding of modern cpu architecture and system design are still rare enough, even in this depressed and outsourced micro-economy, that they can earn one or two orders of magnitude more money working in the labs of the big boys like Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, etc. Thus there is very little incentive for them to go do evaluations and write meaningful reports for hobbiest websites. The end result is you've got the blind leading the blind and at the same time these hobbiest websites are able to generate a hugely loyal following (whenever I post a critical message like this, there is usually at least on adherent to a website who replies with vitriolic denial).
That is not to say that there are no good sources of discussuion of modern computer architecture - the comp.arch usenet group has a few distinguished regulars like Andy Glew, a cpu architect who has worked on Intel and AMD microprocessors, for example. Though comp.arch has apparently become populare enough over the last year or so that the signal-to-noise ratio has significantly decreased. As for websites, of those with any regular activity, I think realwordltech has the highest level of knowledgable articles and community discussion going on, although many of the participants are just comp.arch regulars in a different venue.
According to this post the patent fees for a DVD player work out to be about $20. The author is effectively anonymous, so hard to verify, but the DVD 6c fees are listed here and they are only part of the picture, so $20 may be the real deal.
Given that half the cost of the system goes to the patent holders (remind anyone of Microsoft?), it is no wonder that China has licensed On2 Technology's VP6 codec for a reported flat $2 a player for there own hi-def video disc standard.
That should get them out from under the thumb of the big-corp licensing fees at home and lead to a flood of DVD players in the USA that also support VP6. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if within a year or so we start seeing asian bootleggers who currently do VCDs and SVCDs switch over to bootleg VP6 discs that are higher quality than even any DVD.
Wouldn't that be some global karma for the pigopolists in hollywood? I, for one, am actually rooting for China on this.
Fine, how about his - the director of the CIA was George Tenet, a Clinton appointee. He was definitely not a GWB loyalist or anything like that. So do you really see Bush walking up to this guy and pressuring him to do *anything* that could come back to haunt him?
You should do a little research on Mr Tenet before assuming that he is a Democratic party water-boy. He worked for the late Senator John Heinz -- a republican -- until 1985 when he became staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, under the wing of Senator Boren (democrat, but big-time connected to the CIA - the CIA that George Bush Sr. had been director of).
The point is that he has ample reason to be friendly to Bush - after all, if he were loyal to the democrats you can bet Bush would not have left him in such a senior position in the first place -- he's as much a Bush appointee as he is a Clinton appointee.
But to make that work, you also have to believe it of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell. Not one of them has ever been accused of being stupid,
Well, they sure have now. The first two were probably just blinded by a false world-view (not so uncommon among the rich and isolated). Rice, I haven't thought about too much, she may just not have a big enough swinging dick to win the internal debate, or she may have enough financial interest in the outcome not care -- when Chevron names an oil tanker after you, that means you're pretty well hooked up. I suspect that Powell was convinced that he was going to lose the internal debate about the invasion and so decided to cut his losses and support the hawks, probably in exchange for concessions like more involvement of the state department in the post-war, rebuilding and relations stuff, the kind of thing that the state department is good at. If so, he got suckered on that one, because Rumsfeld certainly tried to pull as much state-department category work into the pentagon as could, and of course fucked it up in the process since that's not what the pentagon knows how to do. Powell probably ended up throwing away any future he might have had as en elected politician by doing that. For what it's worth, I bet that if Bush gets re-elected, Powell will resign before the end of March 2005. He'll stick out the current term to avoid hurting Bush at the polls because he's the type to be loyal to his boss, even if he's not happy about it.
Even assuming that everyone listed above is pure evil, do you really believe any of them is stupid enought to have lied without a plan to make the lie come true?
So, at what point does self-delusional arrogance begin to qualify as evil?
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle were clearly just looking for any excuse to invade Iraq, since it had been on their agenda for many years already as their 1998 Letter to Clinton illustrates. They were so deluded with the righteousness of their cause that they, "found it hard to conceive that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than it had been to conquer it." That despite some serious disagreement from the Army - so serious that General Shinseki, the number one guy at the army, end up "retiring" not too long afterwards.
If that were true, would they need the incentive of 70 virgins?
That virgins in the afterlife for martyrs thing has been blown way out of proportion by the press (because its weird and weird news sells) and by those who have an interest in downplaying these people's real motivations -- sex-crazed nutjobs don't get any sympathy, but the public will have far more empathy for someone who lost their parents and little sister to a "police action."
If we actually started to gain some insight into what makes these people tick, we might have to address our own short-comings in our handling of the matter and if there is one thing a politician can't do, it is admit that he was wrong.
You guys are all way off, its DDR
on
Life After Doom
·
· Score: 3, Funny
It's obvious that Id is going to do some sort of benami. I think we can expect Id to do their own version of DDR - Doom Doom Revolution. Instead of blowing the shit out of mutants and demons, you'll have to dance yourself to Hell and back.
It already costs in exceses of $3K, usually very much in excess, to get a patent approved. See this article How Much Does A Patent Cost?
So, lifting the base price from $375 to $1000 isn't that big a deal. Ironically, this supports your original point - garage inventors already need serious investment to get a patent filed. So, patents are pretty much already solely the domain of corporations.
Furthermore, the problem alluded to in an earlier post in this thread is that all the corporations are patenting anything they can get away with. This frenzy is not about invention, it is about protection from other corporations doing the same thing (and, as usual, the lawyers are behind it all).
The reason this frenzy exists is to maintain the ability to cross-license patent pools. So, if MongoCorp A invents something and it turns out that it may infringe on one of MongoCorp B's patents, they spend some money on lawyers and eventually end up with some sort of low-to-no cross-licencsing agreement for their respective patent-pools. The attorney's get paid for handling the negotiation of a problem they created in the first place, and MongoCorp A gets to market its product without fear of interference from MongoCorp B.
But, this situation of low-cost patent-pool licensing results in the exclusion of players who don't have a patent-pool to threaten anyone with. This lone garage inventor guy with one brilliant invention to his name has no leverage. Turns out that his invention may infringe somewhat on MongoCorp B. MongoCorp B says, "sell us the rights to your single patent for this piddly sum and we won't sue you into oblivion." Garage inventor says, "shit, I either get sued to the poorhouse and MonoCorp B gets the rights to my patent or I sell it to them for a few month's worth of income and don't have to worry about losing my house and having to declare bankruptcy.
See, that's how the current system keeps the mythical little-guy out of the game TODAY. You would be hard pressed to come up with a situation with a worse result. So, increasing the fees to something outrageous, like $100K to file for a patent won't lock out anyone useful who isn't really locked out now and it will start to serve as a disincentive to the growth and maintenance of patent pools. Maybe with such crazy fees, 18 years down the road we would start to see the return of the individual inventor. But that breed is practically extinct in America today.
Or, we could go the other route and reduce the term of patents to something more appropriate for the fast pace of the modern age, like say, 2 years tops. I expect the results of either approach to be similar in the long run and also the chance of either happening is about zero, the entrenched interests like things the way they are.
Didn't you hear? Either you are for bush or against bush, he even said so himself. So, not voting for kerry is the same thing as voting for bush.
As for myself, I'm definitely anti-bush, so I'm voting brazilian. Fortunately, the wife agrees and doesn't mind going to the "polling booth" once a month or so. But, that's our own personal double entendre.
If my mod points had not expired about 4 hours ago I would have modded you up instead of try to make jokes.
Holy great hell, I'd love to see the social engineer that can convince somebody to chop off a finger voluntarily. They would put Mitnick to shame!
I expect yakuza organizations will be particularly vulnerable to this type of social engineering. Either that, or they just won't have enough fingers to implement it in the first place.
"the albums.. did not mesh with the values of a majority of Kansans" is blatent censorship.
Are you sure? Getting dicked over by the RIAA does not mesh with my values, I bet it doesn't mesh with the values of the majority of any state.
As long as he didn't spell out the specific values they are in conflict with, everyone is free to view the action in whatever way they want. Very much a politician's way of handling things. Perhaps this time such vagueness is actually doing good for the people instead of hiding a secret corporate ass-kissing.
1 Alcohol - get people drunk to make them do stupid things 2 Drugs - the abuse of things designed to help you
Haven't you seen those public service announcements? Alochol makes teenagers smoke marijuana and smoking marijuana makes teenagers have unprotected sex. And having unprotected sex makes you either pregnant and/or infected with AIDS.
So, you see, using P2P software will give you AIDS, so we must all be protected from it by the great and benevolent Ass's of America. Never mind anything you've heard about getting AIDS from an entertaining Ass, or any other ass for that matter...
I'm honestly kinda surprised (but happy) that the Navy agreed to it.
Probably a left-hand/right-hand kinda thing. As soon as the office of jack-booted thugs, er homeland security, gets wind of it they'll strong-arm the Navy into shutting it down. Or perhaps something even more idiotic like trying to embedd a "secret" backdoor without pausing to take into account just how well that will work with open-source.
It's even faster between neigborhoods with testing in Keller TX, on multi gig transferrs taking a few seconds.
Yeah, right. Unless there is some sort of secret highspeed comm lab in Keller, you are talking about Verizon's fiber to the premises (FTTP, the acronym you already used once without defining).
Those people in Keller can't do "multi gig transfers taking a few seconds" even on their own home LAN. much less across their verizon links. Even if you are talking multi-gigaBIT and not gigaBYTE you arne't going to find any systems in Keller with a disk subsystem capable of sustaining 125MBytes+/sec while streaming to or from the network, which would be the minimum required for 1Gbit/sec. Either that or Joe-Bob has got an Athlon64 with 4GBytes+ of memory to use as a really, really big ram disk...
Then there is the little limitation of a max receive rate of 30Mbits/sec on the Verizon line, that'll choke those gigabits real fast.
n the case of literature and the like this is intended to keep publishers from printing copies without paying the authors, for a limited time....
If you want to make such a change, you need to amend the consititution. That's a really tough road to hoe.
Especially if it is paved with asphalt. Really, that's "tough row to hoe" as in "row of corn."
I think it was Valenti who was quoted as saying that he wants to define "limited time" as "forever" but since his lawyers told him that's not possible, he'll settle for "forever minus a day."
But, just as the copyright industry is "legally hacking" the provision, we could do the same thing (if we had the power to get an amendment in place, we certainly would have the enough power to do the following) -- define "limited time" to the first 10 seconds after publication.
The difference between Valenti's absurdity and my apparent absurdity is that his position is akin to eating his own feedcorn -- by destroying the public domain, eventually there will be no raw material to draw on as a basis for new creations, everything will require licensing and royalties and you can be certain that as soon as there is no longer any "free" competition for raw material, the cost of the not-free stuff will skyrocket.
Meanwhile, my proposal still leaves open plenty of room for artists to make money. Not distributors and the other types of middlemen who make up the copyright induistry and only serve as bottlenecks today, there is no room for them to make much money, certainly not the gazillions that they do today. But the artists, the actual creators of the work can still get paid and even paid well if they are successful by implementing the idea of escrowed release to the public domain. Essentially, they set a total price for their work, interested buyers pay into an escrowed account. Once the total meets the price (or the seller lower his asking price), the work is released to the public domain. Artists who create popular work will be able to fetch successively higher prices for each new release.
One might argue that under such a scheme it is impossible to get started in the first place since no one will know the quality of your work. My response is that under today's system so many artists work for next to nothing all of their lives that simply releasing a few pieces of work for free as advertising is effectively no different than the way things work today and provides a much higher probability of achieving some level of success in the long run.
Perhaps a simpler, more catchy way to say "escrowed release to the public domain" would be - "work once, paid once (just like everybody else)."
PS, googling for "streetperformer protocol" will turn up a white paper or two describing one form of escrowed release to the public domain.
If the studios don't like it, how about tearing down some Wal-Marts and resurrecting the drive-ins that were torn down to build the Wal-Marts? Or how about building drive-ins atop the roofs of the Wal-Marts?
No, no, no. That's the HARD way to go about fixing it. Instead, just get a homeless person to move into the wal-mart, if they squat there long enough then it is their home, emminent domain or somesuch. The places are so freaking big that he could probably live there for a couple of years and never get caught.
Once he's been there long enough, just display the movies on the side of the wal-mart. It's his home now, so it's home use and wal-marts are so freaking big that the side of one is probably at least as big as an old drive-in screen. Plus, since it is wal-mart, there will already be plenty of DVD's right there in the place to start with. Some with big smiley faces on them, even.
Signs is too dark and contrasty to look very good on the back of a semi. Instead, go for an animated movie - they are all bright and super-colorful (well, most of them) and have very little contrast.
You will probably also want some sort of stabilizer for the projector, kind of like a stedicam mount, just to help minimize the image jumping off the back of the truck whenever you hit a bump. Still won't be perfect, but better than nothing.
Also, a long-throw projector would be good, else you might find you need to keep within 10-15' of the rear of the truck. That's a lot closer than most sane people, and even some people from Los Angeles, prefer to get to a semi on the road.
Either way - and I'll admit to not having worried about ps fonts for close to a decade now - that hinting is stuff that isn't common with much, if any, other kinds of vector data so isn't likely to be easily specified in a generalized vector image format like SVG.
I haven't looked at the SVG spec for a long, long time, but last I remember it was simply a way to specify vectors. The other reason that postscript fonts are programs and not just tables of vectors is that they really work is in the "hinting" such that a font rendered at 9 points needs to look substantially different from the same font rendered at 72 points.
The good postscript fonts "know" things about human perception and thus render themselves in different fashions based on that knowledge. Simple vectors can't do that because vectors aren't just for fonts and human perceptual tricks that apply to fonts don't necessarily apply to other kinds of vectorish information.
First, to the other poster who tried to show that coming and going are ambiguous -- sentences do not have much meaning at all in a vacuum. The context from which such a hypothetical sentence came from would almost certainly make the intended meaning clear, just as you know I am not talking about kinky, anthropomorphization of literary terms in this paragraph either.
As for powers-of-2 giga- and powers-of-10 giga-, again context is your friend. This is a pet-interest of mine, after hearing people complain about it for the umpteenth million time (see context, you know it's a figurative million) I researched it and thus I am going to detour and go on at length about it, something that many consider annoying in an IT person...
First, ignore the silly jiggly/ghibli/gibi series of prefixes from ISO, both for the sake of argument and because everybody else ignores them too. Now, lets take a look at common technical uses of giga: gigahertz (clock)frequencies -powers of ten, gigabit ethernet -powers of ten, gigabytes of raw disk space -powers of ten, gigabytes of filespace -powers of 2, gigabytes of ram - powers of 2.
I could go on, but those are the most common uses. One could just memorize these contexts and use them by rote, or you could learn the rule-of-thumb that, for some reason, very few people know (even most editions of the jargon file lack a good definition). Here it is: If the quantity being measured is inherently organized or grouped in binary, then use powers-of-2, else powers-of-10.
To cut to the most controversial items - raw disk space, it is just a bunch of bits in circles on platters. Yes the bits are indeed binary but there is no inherent organization to them that is binary (even if you look at the raw sectors, they may have payloads that are powers of two, but all the internal house-keeping bits in each sector add up to a number that is rarely, if ever, a power of 2). But when you put a filesystem on top of the raw disk space, the data structures that organize the filesystem are binary because they are stored in the most efficient manner in RAM, which is inherently binary. Thus file(system)space - binary, raw diskspace -decimal.
So, to come back to my original point, context is everything. As a term of art, "irony" will probably always have a specific, well-defined meaning. But, if you are posting on slashdot, chances are that you aren't an editor, literary critic or professional author. Even more certainly, 999 times out of 1000 your audience is not such a person either. Thus expecting people to use a strict definition of a literary term of art here is to ignore the context in which it is being used. Go to a blog for the writer's guild and the reverse will be true.
Slashdot Mirror
Far violet (~400nm) and far red (~700) are both visible. They might make the viewing experience much richer, and light at those wavelengths won't damage skin / eyes or cook your dinner.
Oh yes they will. I have an itty-bitty (uses 2 AA cells) 385nm UV flashlight (LED based) and just ten minutes of use in a dark area is enough to make my eyeballs feel sunburned, similar to spending an entire day out on a boat without sunglasses. And no, I'm not shining the light in my face, just using it like a regular flashlight, shining it around on other stuff to see what glows.
Since then I've acquired set of uv-blocking eye protectors and no longer get that effect.
It seems that
.TGZ, aka .tar.gz for real unix people, is marked. So, just re-tar it and the tag (that ain't even deserving of the term watermark) is gone.
a) Only the
b) If they did something more hardcore, two copies would not necessarily be enough remove all identifiers. It isn't hard to come up with a scheme in which there are multiple sets of tags and any one combination of those tags defines a single download, but if say, 3 of the 4 tags are the same, then a straight diff only picks up 1 of the 4 tags and thus leaves the other 3 to identify a group of downloads from which both "pirates" took their copies. Play enough games assigning different users to different sets of tags for different releases and you could probably narrow down the pool to the exact people who are participating in unauthorized sharing in a month or two. It just a practical application of set theory to do it.
This review struck me as a bit clueless, or unfinished.
Unfortunately, that is the case with so many of these "review" sites like anandtech and tom's hardware. For the most part, they are all just a bunch of kids or hobbiests with little to no industry experience. If they are lucky, they've got a CS degree but that's a bare minimum requirement not a qualification. More often than not the people writing these "reviews" are the same guys wearing the blue shirts down at the local best buy smurf cave.
If you think about it, it isn't too surprising. People with a real understanding of modern cpu architecture and system design are still rare enough, even in this depressed and outsourced micro-economy, that they can earn one or two orders of magnitude more money working in the labs of the big boys like Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, etc. Thus there is very little incentive for them to go do evaluations and write meaningful reports for hobbiest websites. The end result is you've got the blind leading the blind and at the same time these hobbiest websites are able to generate a hugely loyal following (whenever I post a critical message like this, there is usually at least on adherent to a website who replies with vitriolic denial).
That is not to say that there are no good sources of discussuion of modern computer architecture - the comp.arch usenet group has a few distinguished regulars like Andy Glew, a cpu architect who has worked on Intel and AMD microprocessors, for example. Though comp.arch has apparently become populare enough over the last year or so that the signal-to-noise ratio has significantly decreased. As for websites, of those with any regular activity, I think realwordltech has the highest level of knowledgable articles and community discussion going on, although many of the participants are just comp.arch regulars in a different venue.
By the way - his girlfriend is hot. Too bad they seem like a couple of religious nuts.
Sounds like you would be more interested in this site.
According to this post the patent fees for a DVD player work out to be about $20. The author is effectively anonymous, so hard to verify, but the DVD 6c fees are listed here and they are only part of the picture, so $20 may be the real deal.
Given that half the cost of the system goes to the patent holders (remind anyone of Microsoft?), it is no wonder that China has licensed On2 Technology's VP6 codec for a reported flat $2 a player for there own hi-def video disc standard.
That should get them out from under the thumb of the big-corp licensing fees at home and lead to a flood of DVD players in the USA that also support VP6. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if within a year or so we start seeing asian bootleggers who currently do VCDs and SVCDs switch over to bootleg VP6 discs that are higher quality than even any DVD.
Wouldn't that be some global karma for the pigopolists in hollywood? I, for one, am actually rooting for China on this.
Fine, how about his - the director of the CIA was George Tenet, a Clinton appointee. He was definitely not a GWB loyalist or anything like that. So do you really see Bush walking up to this guy and pressuring him to do *anything* that could come back to haunt him?
You should do a little research on Mr Tenet before assuming that he is a Democratic party water-boy. He worked for the late Senator John Heinz -- a republican -- until 1985 when he became staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, under the wing of Senator Boren (democrat, but big-time connected to the CIA - the CIA that George Bush Sr. had been director of).
The point is that he has ample reason to be friendly to Bush - after all, if he were loyal to the democrats you can bet Bush would not have left him in such a senior position in the first place -- he's as much a Bush appointee as he is a Clinton appointee.
But to make that work, you also have to believe it of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell. Not one of them has ever been accused of being stupid,
Well, they sure have now. The first two were probably just blinded by a false world-view (not so uncommon among the rich and isolated). Rice, I haven't thought about too much, she may just not have a big enough swinging dick to win the internal debate, or she may have enough financial interest in the outcome not care -- when Chevron names an oil tanker after you, that means you're pretty well hooked up. I suspect that Powell was convinced that he was going to lose the internal debate about the invasion and so decided to cut his losses and support the hawks, probably in exchange for concessions like more involvement of the state department in the post-war, rebuilding and relations stuff, the kind of thing that the state department is good at. If so, he got suckered on that one, because Rumsfeld certainly tried to pull as much state-department category work into the pentagon as could, and of course fucked it up in the process since that's not what the pentagon knows how to do. Powell probably ended up throwing away any future he might have had as en elected politician by doing that. For what it's worth, I bet that if Bush gets re-elected, Powell will resign before the end of March 2005. He'll stick out the current term to avoid hurting Bush at the polls because he's the type to be loyal to his boss, even if he's not happy about it.
Even assuming that everyone listed above is pure evil, do you really believe any of them is stupid enought to have lied without a plan to make the lie come true?
So, at what point does self-delusional arrogance begin to qualify as evil?
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle were clearly just looking for any excuse to invade Iraq, since it had been on their agenda for many years already as their 1998 Letter to Clinton illustrates. They were so deluded with the righteousness of their cause that they, "found it hard to conceive that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than it had been to conquer it." That despite some serious disagreement from the Army - so serious that General Shinseki, the number one guy at the army, end up "retiring" not too long afterwards.
If that were true, would they need the incentive of 70 virgins?
That virgins in the afterlife for martyrs thing has been blown way out of proportion by the press (because its weird and weird news sells) and by those who have an interest in downplaying these people's real motivations -- sex-crazed nutjobs don't get any sympathy, but the public will have far more empathy for someone who lost their parents and little sister to a "police action."
If we actually started to gain some insight into what makes these people tick, we might have to address our own short-comings in our handling of the matter and if there is one thing a politician can't do, it is admit that he was wrong.
It's obvious that Id is going to do some sort of benami. I think we can expect Id to do their own version of DDR - Doom Doom Revolution. Instead of blowing the shit out of mutants and demons, you'll have to dance yourself to Hell and back.
It already costs in exceses of $3K, usually very much in excess, to get a patent approved. See this article How Much Does A Patent Cost?
So, lifting the base price from $375 to $1000 isn't that big a deal. Ironically, this supports your original point - garage inventors already need serious investment to get a patent filed. So, patents are pretty much already solely the domain of corporations.
Furthermore, the problem alluded to in an earlier post in this thread is that all the corporations are patenting anything they can get away with. This frenzy is not about invention, it is about protection from other corporations doing the same thing (and, as usual, the lawyers are behind it all).
The reason this frenzy exists is to maintain the ability to cross-license patent pools. So, if MongoCorp A invents something and it turns out that it may infringe on one of MongoCorp B's patents, they spend some money on lawyers and eventually end up with some sort of low-to-no cross-licencsing agreement for their respective patent-pools. The attorney's get paid for handling the negotiation of a problem they created in the first place, and MongoCorp A gets to market its product without fear of interference from MongoCorp B.
But, this situation of low-cost patent-pool licensing results in the exclusion of players who don't have a patent-pool to threaten anyone with. This lone garage inventor guy with one brilliant invention to his name has no leverage. Turns out that his invention may infringe somewhat on MongoCorp B. MongoCorp B says, "sell us the rights to your single patent for this piddly sum and we won't sue you into oblivion." Garage inventor says, "shit, I either get sued to the poorhouse and MonoCorp B gets the rights to my patent or I sell it to them for a few month's worth of income and don't have to worry about losing my house and having to declare bankruptcy.
See, that's how the current system keeps the mythical little-guy out of the game TODAY. You would be hard pressed to come up with a situation with a worse result. So, increasing the fees to something outrageous, like $100K to file for a patent won't lock out anyone useful who isn't really locked out now and it will start to serve as a disincentive to the growth and maintenance of patent pools. Maybe with such crazy fees, 18 years down the road we would start to see the return of the individual inventor. But that breed is practically extinct in America today.
Or, we could go the other route and reduce the term of patents to something more appropriate for the fast pace of the modern age, like say, 2 years tops. I expect the results of either approach to be similar in the long run and also the chance of either happening is about zero, the entrenched interests like things the way they are.
Didn't you hear? Either you are for bush or against bush, he even said so himself.
So, not voting for kerry is the same thing as voting for bush.
As for myself, I'm definitely anti-bush, so I'm voting brazilian. Fortunately, the wife agrees and doesn't mind going to the "polling booth" once a month or so. But, that's our own personal double entendre.
If my mod points had not expired about 4 hours ago I would have modded you up instead of try to make jokes.
Holy great hell, I'd love to see the social engineer that can convince somebody to chop off a finger voluntarily. They would put Mitnick to shame!
I expect yakuza organizations will be particularly vulnerable to this type of social engineering.
Either that, or they just won't have enough fingers to implement it in the first place.
"the albums .. did not mesh with the values of a majority of Kansans" is blatent censorship.
Are you sure? Getting dicked over by the RIAA does not mesh with my values, I bet it doesn't mesh with the values of the majority of any state.
As long as he didn't spell out the specific values they are in conflict with, everyone is free to view the action in whatever way they want. Very much a politician's way of handling things. Perhaps this time such vagueness is actually doing good for the people instead of hiding a secret corporate ass-kissing.
The P2P companies would probably be smart to engage in some customer education, if only to cover their butts.
That money would be 10x more effective if spent on bribing, err lobbying, the appropriate politicians.
1 Alcohol - get people drunk to make them do stupid things
2 Drugs - the abuse of things designed to help you
Haven't you seen those public service announcements? Alochol makes teenagers smoke marijuana and smoking marijuana makes teenagers have unprotected sex. And having unprotected sex makes you either pregnant and/or infected with AIDS.
So, you see, using P2P software will give you AIDS, so we must all be protected from it by the great and benevolent Ass's of America. Never mind anything you've heard about getting AIDS from an entertaining Ass, or any other ass for that matter...
I'm honestly kinda surprised (but happy) that the Navy agreed to it.
Probably a left-hand/right-hand kinda thing. As soon as the office of jack-booted thugs, er homeland security, gets wind of it they'll strong-arm the Navy into shutting it down. Or perhaps something even more idiotic like trying to embedd a "secret" backdoor without pausing to take into account just how well that will work with open-source.
Heck, the modern autopilots can take off, fly to the destination, fly the approach, and do all but about the last 50ft onto the runway.
They sound like terrorists to me.
They've learned how to do everything to fly an airplane except land. Is this autopilots terrorist group on the OHS's no-fly list?
It's even faster between neigborhoods with testing in Keller TX, on multi gig transferrs taking a few seconds.
Yeah, right. Unless there is some sort of secret highspeed comm lab in Keller, you are talking about Verizon's fiber to the premises (FTTP, the acronym you already used once without defining).
Those people in Keller can't do "multi gig transfers taking a few seconds" even on their own home LAN. much less across their verizon links. Even if you are talking multi-gigaBIT and not gigaBYTE you arne't going to find any systems in Keller with a disk subsystem capable of sustaining 125MBytes+/sec while streaming to or from the network, which would be the minimum required for 1Gbit/sec. Either that or Joe-Bob has got an Athlon64 with 4GBytes+ of memory to use as a really, really big ram disk...
Then there is the little limitation of a max receive rate of 30Mbits/sec on the Verizon line, that'll choke those gigabits real fast.
n the case of literature and the like this is intended to keep publishers from printing copies without paying the authors, for a limited time. ...
If you want to make such a change, you need to amend the consititution.
That's a really tough road to hoe.
Especially if it is paved with asphalt. Really, that's "tough row to hoe" as in "row of corn."
I think it was Valenti who was quoted as saying that he wants to define "limited time" as "forever" but since his lawyers told him that's not possible, he'll settle for "forever minus a day."
But, just as the copyright industry is "legally hacking" the provision, we could do the same thing (if we had the power to get an amendment in place, we certainly would have the enough power to do the following) -- define "limited time" to the first 10 seconds after publication.
The difference between Valenti's absurdity and my apparent absurdity is that his position is akin to eating his own feedcorn -- by destroying the public domain, eventually there will be no raw material to draw on as a basis for new creations, everything will require licensing and royalties and you can be certain that as soon as there is no longer any "free" competition for raw material, the cost of the not-free stuff will skyrocket.
Meanwhile, my proposal still leaves open plenty of room for artists to make money. Not distributors and the other types of middlemen who make up the copyright induistry and only serve as bottlenecks today, there is no room for them to make much money, certainly not the gazillions that they do today. But the artists, the actual creators of the work can still get paid and even paid well if they are successful by implementing the idea of escrowed release to the public domain. Essentially, they set a total price for their work, interested buyers pay into an escrowed account. Once the total meets the price (or the seller lower his asking price), the work is released to the public domain. Artists who create popular work will be able to fetch successively higher prices for each new release.
One might argue that under such a scheme it is impossible to get started in the first place since no one will know the quality of your work. My response is that under today's system so many artists work for next to nothing all of their lives that simply releasing a few pieces of work for free as advertising is effectively no different than the way things work today and provides a much higher probability of achieving some level of success in the long run.
Perhaps a simpler, more catchy way to say "escrowed release to the public domain" would be - "work once, paid once (just like everybody else)."
PS, googling for "streetperformer protocol" will turn up a white paper or two describing one form of escrowed release to the public domain.
First of all, patent infringement is not stealing, so refrain from using that silly, emotionally-loaded misnomer.
Yes, let's call it Patent Hacking.
Or even better, Patent Piracy!
Way hay and up she rises
Patent blocks o' diff'rent sizes,
Way hay and up she rises
Earl-aye in the morning
If the studios don't like it, how about tearing down some Wal-Marts and resurrecting the drive-ins that were torn down to build the Wal-Marts? Or how about building drive-ins atop the roofs of the Wal-Marts?
No, no, no. That's the HARD way to go about fixing it. Instead, just get a homeless person to move into the wal-mart, if they squat there long enough then it is their home, emminent domain or somesuch. The places are so freaking big that he could probably live there for a couple of years and never get caught.
Once he's been there long enough, just display the movies on the side of the wal-mart. It's his home now, so it's home use and wal-marts are so freaking big that the side of one is probably at least as big as an old drive-in screen. Plus, since it is wal-mart, there will already be plenty of DVD's right there in the place to start with. Some with big smiley faces on them, even.
Signs is too dark and contrasty to look very good on the back of a semi. Instead, go for an animated movie - they are all bright and super-colorful (well, most of them) and have very little contrast.
You will probably also want some sort of stabilizer for the projector, kind of like a stedicam mount, just to help minimize the image jumping off the back of the truck whenever you hit a bump. Still won't be perfect, but better than nothing.
Also, a long-throw projector would be good, else you might find you need to keep within 10-15' of the rear of the truck. That's a lot closer than most sane people, and even some people from Los Angeles, prefer to get to a semi on the road.
Microsoft gives Linux a lot of competition on interoperability, although it is only with other Microsoft products.
You keep using that word "interoperability," I do not think it means what you think it means.
Security isn't that big of a deal to lock down either, as long as you have a decent firewall configured right.
"security"
ditto
Either way - and I'll admit to not having worried about ps fonts for close to a decade now - that hinting is stuff that isn't common with much, if any, other kinds of vector data so isn't likely to be easily specified in a generalized vector image format like SVG.
I haven't looked at the SVG spec for a long, long time, but last I remember it was simply a way to specify vectors. The other reason that postscript fonts are programs and not just tables of vectors is that they really work is in the "hinting" such that a font rendered at 9 points needs to look substantially different from the same font rendered at 72 points.
The good postscript fonts "know" things about human perception and thus render themselves in different fashions based on that knowledge. Simple vectors can't do that because vectors aren't just for fonts and human perceptual tricks that apply to fonts don't necessarily apply to other kinds of vectorish information.
Context is everything.
First, to the other poster who tried to show that coming and going are ambiguous -- sentences do not have much meaning at all in a vacuum. The context from which such a hypothetical sentence came from would almost certainly make the intended meaning clear, just as you know I am not talking about kinky, anthropomorphization of literary terms in this paragraph either.
As for powers-of-2 giga- and powers-of-10 giga-, again context is your friend. This is a pet-interest of mine, after hearing people complain about it for the umpteenth million time (see context, you know it's a figurative million) I researched it and thus I am going to detour and go on at length about it, something that many consider annoying in an IT person...
First, ignore the silly jiggly/ghibli/gibi series of prefixes from ISO, both for the sake of argument and because everybody else ignores them too. Now, lets take a look at common technical uses of giga: gigahertz (clock)frequencies -powers of ten, gigabit ethernet -powers of ten, gigabytes of raw disk space -powers of ten, gigabytes of filespace -powers of 2, gigabytes of ram - powers of 2.
I could go on, but those are the most common uses. One could just memorize these contexts and use them by rote, or you could learn the rule-of-thumb that, for some reason, very few people know (even most editions of the jargon file lack a good definition). Here it is: If the quantity being measured is inherently organized or grouped in binary, then use powers-of-2, else powers-of-10.
To cut to the most controversial items - raw disk space, it is just a bunch of bits in circles on platters. Yes the bits are indeed binary but there is no inherent organization to them that is binary (even if you look at the raw sectors, they may have payloads that are powers of two, but all the internal house-keeping bits in each sector add up to a number that is rarely, if ever, a power of 2). But when you put a filesystem on top of the raw disk space, the data structures that organize the filesystem are binary because they are stored in the most efficient manner in RAM, which is inherently binary. Thus file(system)space - binary, raw diskspace -decimal.
So, to come back to my original point, context is everything. As a term of art, "irony" will probably always have a specific, well-defined meaning. But, if you are posting on slashdot, chances are that you aren't an editor, literary critic or professional author. Even more certainly, 999 times out of 1000 your audience is not such a person either. Thus expecting people to use a strict definition of a literary term of art here is to ignore the context in which it is being used. Go to a blog for the writer's guild and the reverse will be true.