Part of the problem is people see only two options, bullets or a taser. There are many more options. What on earth must police have done before guns, tasers, and even pepper spray?
If you have to use a gun, why not a net gun? If you can hit someone with a taser, you can hit them with a net gun, too.
As much as Taser International might like you to believe it, tasers are not the only non-lethal alternative. Unfortunately, my (perhaps biased) perception seems to be that because law-enforcement buys into the "non-lethal" part of the story, they feel they are justified to use it in all kinds of circumstances where a real gun would never have been employed. We've all seen the numerous videos of people being tasered after three officers have already taken them to the ground, or being tasered simply for yelling or shouting and waving their arms around. Strap on a pair of balls and tackle the guy why don't you? It's not like cops aren't armed with a long reach baton.
Leap seconds are lost moments in time depending on the time system you use. Linux time is a good example. Every time there is a leap second Linux time deviates further from UTC.
In this day and age, do we really have to keep lining up our time system to astronomy events, rather than realizing that time is actually linear, and so should our time system be? Over time our time system will not be perfectly synchronized to every event that happens to occur in the universe, nor should we try to force it to be.
I'd love to know how AT&T would determine that you did or did not have a license to download or even serve the content. IANAL, but if they start using this to examine traffic going over their wires couldn't it make them liable if they a) detect copyright content, but choose to take no action, or b) take action on certain content, but not on other? There is also the issue of privacy - if the Government (supposedly) can't go intercepting whatever communications it likes, why would AT&T be allowed to? Even if one end-point was an AT&T customer the other may not be.
I can't possibly see how this would work for examining video from anything other than an AT&T-hosted site.
No, I didn't RTFA. But I figure my comment will probably make as much sense as most others:)
Da Vinci Easter Egg: Open a copy of any Da Vinci painting in Firefox and quickly tap Ctrl+P then enter. Before you know it, it will appear in hard copy on the nearest printer!
Known issues: Unfortunately Da Vinci, although a brilliant artist, wasn't so hot at embedded coding back in the day, and occasionally the hard copies will appear in greyscale only.
I have two comments: 1) I guess people can interpret music in anything and get some recognition from it. 2) If there really isn't music intentionally hidden in these works I bet the artists wouldn't be too happy having people alleging that there is, and changing the interpretation of the piece. Honestly, if the artist had some reason to hide a message in a painting, perhaps because of the potential consequences of his speech, wouldn't he do it in a form where the message was intelligible later? Music seems a poor choice, and there really isn't any motive I can easily think of why you'd have to hide a musical score from view. After all, it's not like the RIAA was filing lawsuits back then;)
If you happen to use Firefox, a little trick I learned the other day (but which has probably been there for ages) is to tap the escape key once the page has loaded. It stops animated GIF's dead in their tracks.
Every time someone tries to enforce a patent claim people make these knee-jerk statements.
If their claims are legitimate and based on genuinely innovative technology, and they're also working in good faith to make reasonable licensing deals with infringers, then maybe you should be boycotting the parties being sued for infringing with no license instead.
The patent system is wildly abused, but some times it does protect innovators that drive the industry forward. It would seem to me that SanDisk does at least ship a boatload of products using the technology that they (claim to) have developed, and are not simply acting as a patent licensing business.
Followed by: Comcast subscribers unhappy with rate hikes. Preceded by tons of highly visible bad press for Comcast and big dips in share price.
The point of a lawsuit, especially with the EFF driving it, is going to be to effect a change in Comcast policies and hopefully make a statement to the industry that this kind of thing isn't going to be tolerated going forward. So what if the lawyers will make a bunch of money? If Comcast stopped pulling this crap isn't it worth it? I suspect there are lots of people who would love to sue Comcast right now over this themselves, but couldn't afford to. This way it actually happens.
Maybe you can implement IP->Geo, generate some secure tokens for access to downloads, and issue tokens based on copyright by geo. I don't know if you're using a CDN or serving the files yourself, but most CDNs have token solutions you can leverage, and if you're hosting yourself it's probably not too hard to build, even if it takes a few days.
Finally, remember that each of us has a finite amount of disposable income to spend on music, and a finite ability to discover new music over time.
Further thought: The more you combat piracy (remembering that category B is not a real loss), the more you inhibit discovery, one of the two key factors that influences our spending. How many DVD box sets do you think get sold because people get addicted to watching series on YouTube, or albums because fans get to link their friends to their idols performing?
I don't agree with that completely, Bill, but I think you're heading in the right direction.
I think that given the opportunity most people will take something for free if they can and there isn't much risk involved. The real point is that the people who [i]would[/i] have paid for the content originally are still likely to pay for the content regardless of what everyone else is doing. Maybe they enjoyed the content enough to want to support it's creators. Maybe for this group of people having the opportunity to access the content using a nice interface that's reliable (in terms of service level and making accessible what they're searching for) is worth the expenditure versus the effort involved in other methods. Maybe they just want to stick to the law.
I think many of us would make the argument, for example, that we have a) used the Internet to discover content that we've later gone on to pay for, but also b) we've also downloaded some content "for free" that really we would have never seen enough value in to pay for anyway (although perhaps we might have, if we could have chosen to pay less for it than was asked). So for certain pieces of content we fall into category A, and category B shouldn't really have much impact on a business - if I wasn't going to pay anyway who cares? The only impact is if the number of people in category A decreases.
And that's where I think the problem lies. The recording industry in particular has shot itself in the foot repeatedly over the years. Many of us simply do not believe that the artists get a real share of revenues these days, diminishing some of the reason that might cause people to fall into category A. Some of us don't want manufactured pop pushed on us all the time, and this means less content in category A because that's mainly what the industry spits out (as far as what is considered "mainstream" and well known). If we're smart, none of us want to be locked into a platform via DRM that limits where we can take our music and what we can do with it (again, fewer people in category A). And most importantly, the RIAA can [i]not[/i] cause people to psychologically move content from category B into category A via lawsuits.
This all goes back to what we've all been saying for a long time: * Compensate creators well so that as a consumer I know that when I spend my money I am really supporting the creator * Build many platforms competing for my business. I shouldn't be locked into iTunes if I want a wide selection, and I should be able to choose a platform that serves my needs. * Territory restrictions need to go away. If we want to get our hands on a piece of music and you refuse to sell it to us legally, guess what is going to happen? * Don't use DRM. Why do I want to pay money for content I really only have the option to use with your permission, and that I can't load onto any kind of playback device I might own? * Allow me to contribute to an artist at less than retail price if I want to. In the past few days we've seen certain artists trying this out. It's better than a category B (aka "I wouldn't pay retail for this anyway") decision.
Finally, remember that each of us has a finite amount of disposable income to spend on music, and a finite ability to discover new music over time. The act of adding DRM does not suddenly make these problems go away. Even if you killed 100% of all piracy tomorrow that does not mean that we'd all suddenly buy more music. Which takes us back to where I started - it's all about making sure the people who are buying now still see the value in buying tomorrow. Look after category A and you'll be fine.
If you expect a digital cable provider to send you SD at better than DVD quality and you're complaining about H.264 at 40Mbps then I'm sorry to say that you're in the extreme videophile category and no cable company is going to give two hoots over what you want because 99.9% of the population isn't nearly so pedantic. Bitrate is also a poor quality guideline. Variation in the allowed bitstream features can easily vary the required bitrate for equal quality metric by a good 20%, and bitrate required to achieve a certain quality value (based on some metric) changes with the type of content being encoded (and varies much more). For broadcast you'll also find various encoders use very simple but predictable rate control methods, whereas media optimized for DVD/BluRay/HDDVD tends to be produced with more flexible rate control that in turn means equivalent overall quality can be reached with lesser average rate.
I would, however, agree that cable companies are artificially restricting the quality of SD content to sell more HD packages. This really ought to be illegal. If we're going to impose quality guarantees choose a metric with some meaning behind it with respect to quality - "You must achieve 32db PSNR or greater end-to-end for SD channels" or something similar.
DBAN and similar tools are great for erasing data on a hard drive you're loosing physical possession of (for whatever reason), but there's no need to spend hours or days cleaning a disk you've just acquired. If you erase the boot sector and partition information then you have destroyed everything you need to destroy in order to ensure it's "clean" - i.e. as far as the BIOS or OS is concerned there is nothing stored on the disk to load and execute. This can be achieved in just a few seconds.
The only scenario where something like DBAN will help on media you've acquired is if, for some reason, you suspect that a) the media has been used before, and b) you have a reasonable expectation that at some point in the future someone is going to do a forensic analysis on it and you don't want whatever was on there to be associated with you. Then the additional hours/days might be worthwhile.
I still like the idea of encrypted hard drives where the user can change the hardware key by swapping a module or flipping some switches on the physical drive. Want to instantly erase all the data on a drive? Change the key via the switches and boom! Data is permanently scrambled and meaningless without the original key settings.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is people see only two options, bullets or a taser. There are many more options. What on earth must police have done before guns, tasers, and even pepper spray?
If you have to use a gun, why not a net gun? If you can hit someone with a taser, you can hit them with a net gun, too.
As much as Taser International might like you to believe it, tasers are not the only non-lethal alternative. Unfortunately, my (perhaps biased) perception seems to be that because law-enforcement buys into the "non-lethal" part of the story, they feel they are justified to use it in all kinds of circumstances where a real gun would never have been employed. We've all seen the numerous videos of people being tasered after three officers have already taken them to the ground, or being tasered simply for yelling or shouting and waving their arms around. Strap on a pair of balls and tackle the guy why don't you? It's not like cops aren't armed with a long reach baton.
Did you even read the summary? All you need is to interconnect the spam! We could probably use some kind of TCP/IP based infrastructure...
Pics or it didn't happen ;)
Sure, and instead of making high mileage vehicles, why don't we just ban cars altogether?
Sometimes you can have a sensible half-way solution. And before you reply, I don't think leap seconds is one of them.
It is broken.
Leap seconds are lost moments in time depending on the time system you use. Linux time is a good example. Every time there is a leap second Linux time deviates further from UTC.
In this day and age, do we really have to keep lining up our time system to astronomy events, rather than realizing that time is actually linear, and so should our time system be? Over time our time system will not be perfectly synchronized to every event that happens to occur in the universe, nor should we try to force it to be.
I'd love to know how AT&T would determine that you did or did not have a license to download or even serve the content. IANAL, but if they start using this to examine traffic going over their wires couldn't it make them liable if they a) detect copyright content, but choose to take no action, or b) take action on certain content, but not on other? There is also the issue of privacy - if the Government (supposedly) can't go intercepting whatever communications it likes, why would AT&T be allowed to? Even if one end-point was an AT&T customer the other may not be.
:)
I can't possibly see how this would work for examining video from anything other than an AT&T-hosted site.
No, I didn't RTFA. But I figure my comment will probably make as much sense as most others
Da Vinci Easter Egg: Open a copy of any Da Vinci painting in Firefox and quickly tap Ctrl+P then enter. Before you know it, it will appear in hard copy on the nearest printer!
Known issues: Unfortunately Da Vinci, although a brilliant artist, wasn't so hot at embedded coding back in the day, and occasionally the hard copies will appear in greyscale only.
.. the story sounds remarkably similar to this one:
;)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/2047212
I have two comments:
1) I guess people can interpret music in anything and get some recognition from it.
2) If there really isn't music intentionally hidden in these works I bet the artists wouldn't be too happy having people alleging that there is, and changing the interpretation of the piece. Honestly, if the artist had some reason to hide a message in a painting, perhaps because of the potential consequences of his speech, wouldn't he do it in a form where the message was intelligible later? Music seems a poor choice, and there really isn't any motive I can easily think of why you'd have to hide a musical score from view. After all, it's not like the RIAA was filing lawsuits back then
If you happen to use Firefox, a little trick I learned the other day (but which has probably been there for ages) is to tap the escape key once the page has loaded. It stops animated GIF's dead in their tracks.
- Fellow animated ad hater
Being vulnerable or upgrading the Macrovision drivers you never knew you had = Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Sure, let's play fair.
Why don't we correct the headline right after we stop blaming Microsoft for the effects of third party drivers on Windows?
around here (Sweden) SanDisk has always been considered as a cheapish manifacturer of questionable quality.
Which is not really relevant to their patent claims and this suit.
Shame I'm not buying another SanDisk after this.
Really? Why?
Every time someone tries to enforce a patent claim people make these knee-jerk statements.
If their claims are legitimate and based on genuinely innovative technology, and they're also working in good faith to make reasonable licensing deals with infringers, then maybe you should be boycotting the parties being sued for infringing with no license instead.
The patent system is wildly abused, but some times it does protect innovators that drive the industry forward. It would seem to me that SanDisk does at least ship a boatload of products using the technology that they (claim to) have developed, and are not simply acting as a patent licensing business.
The linked site looks 'shopped.
Comcast pass the cost to their subscribers
Followed by: Comcast subscribers unhappy with rate hikes.
Preceded by tons of highly visible bad press for Comcast and big dips in share price.
The point of a lawsuit, especially with the EFF driving it, is going to be to effect a change in Comcast policies and hopefully make a statement to the industry that this kind of thing isn't going to be tolerated going forward. So what if the lawyers will make a bunch of money? If Comcast stopped pulling this crap isn't it worth it? I suspect there are lots of people who would love to sue Comcast right now over this themselves, but couldn't afford to. This way it actually happens.
Practical limitation is 10M, useless through walls.
Bah. I've been able to see people in HD from ten meters for years!
It's simple, you just drill a small hole in each wall to let the signal through; about 5.1mm should do it.
And at that point it's better than using a cable because... ?
Is this different from the previously reported military use of millimeter wave in anything other than power? If so, what are the dangers, or is it supposedly safe?
Maybe you can implement IP->Geo, generate some secure tokens for access to downloads, and issue tokens based on copyright by geo. I don't know if you're using a CDN or serving the files yourself, but most CDNs have token solutions you can leverage, and if you're hosting yourself it's probably not too hard to build, even if it takes a few days.
Hope you find a way.
Oh.
;)
Then... Thanks ExtremeTech!
Way to write an article about a 5W system and then forgetting to tell us the expected battery life.
Finally, remember that each of us has a finite amount of disposable income to spend on music, and a finite ability to discover new music over time.
Further thought: The more you combat piracy (remembering that category B is not a real loss), the more you inhibit discovery, one of the two key factors that influences our spending. How many DVD box sets do you think get sold because people get addicted to watching series on YouTube, or albums because fans get to link their friends to their idols performing?
I don't agree with that completely, Bill, but I think you're heading in the right direction.
I think that given the opportunity most people will take something for free if they can and there isn't much risk involved. The real point is that the people who [i]would[/i] have paid for the content originally are still likely to pay for the content regardless of what everyone else is doing. Maybe they enjoyed the content enough to want to support it's creators. Maybe for this group of people having the opportunity to access the content using a nice interface that's reliable (in terms of service level and making accessible what they're searching for) is worth the expenditure versus the effort involved in other methods. Maybe they just want to stick to the law.
I think many of us would make the argument, for example, that we have a) used the Internet to discover content that we've later gone on to pay for, but also b) we've also downloaded some content "for free" that really we would have never seen enough value in to pay for anyway (although perhaps we might have, if we could have chosen to pay less for it than was asked). So for certain pieces of content we fall into category A, and category B shouldn't really have much impact on a business - if I wasn't going to pay anyway who cares? The only impact is if the number of people in category A decreases.
And that's where I think the problem lies. The recording industry in particular has shot itself in the foot repeatedly over the years. Many of us simply do not believe that the artists get a real share of revenues these days, diminishing some of the reason that might cause people to fall into category A. Some of us don't want manufactured pop pushed on us all the time, and this means less content in category A because that's mainly what the industry spits out (as far as what is considered "mainstream" and well known). If we're smart, none of us want to be locked into a platform via DRM that limits where we can take our music and what we can do with it (again, fewer people in category A). And most importantly, the RIAA can [i]not[/i] cause people to psychologically move content from category B into category A via lawsuits.
This all goes back to what we've all been saying for a long time:
* Compensate creators well so that as a consumer I know that when I spend my money I am really supporting the creator
* Build many platforms competing for my business. I shouldn't be locked into iTunes if I want a wide selection, and I should be able to choose a platform that serves my needs.
* Territory restrictions need to go away. If we want to get our hands on a piece of music and you refuse to sell it to us legally, guess what is going to happen?
* Don't use DRM. Why do I want to pay money for content I really only have the option to use with your permission, and that I can't load onto any kind of playback device I might own?
* Allow me to contribute to an artist at less than retail price if I want to. In the past few days we've seen certain artists trying this out. It's better than a category B (aka "I wouldn't pay retail for this anyway") decision.
Finally, remember that each of us has a finite amount of disposable income to spend on music, and a finite ability to discover new music over time. The act of adding DRM does not suddenly make these problems go away. Even if you killed 100% of all piracy tomorrow that does not mean that we'd all suddenly buy more music. Which takes us back to where I started - it's all about making sure the people who are buying now still see the value in buying tomorrow. Look after category A and you'll be fine.
I'm really tired. I hope this post made sense.
If you expect a digital cable provider to send you SD at better than DVD quality and you're complaining about H.264 at 40Mbps then I'm sorry to say that you're in the extreme videophile category and no cable company is going to give two hoots over what you want because 99.9% of the population isn't nearly so pedantic. Bitrate is also a poor quality guideline. Variation in the allowed bitstream features can easily vary the required bitrate for equal quality metric by a good 20%, and bitrate required to achieve a certain quality value (based on some metric) changes with the type of content being encoded (and varies much more). For broadcast you'll also find various encoders use very simple but predictable rate control methods, whereas media optimized for DVD/BluRay/HDDVD tends to be produced with more flexible rate control that in turn means equivalent overall quality can be reached with lesser average rate.
I would, however, agree that cable companies are artificially restricting the quality of SD content to sell more HD packages. This really ought to be illegal. If we're going to impose quality guarantees choose a metric with some meaning behind it with respect to quality - "You must achieve 32db PSNR or greater end-to-end for SD channels" or something similar.
That's a bit extreme, isn't it?
DBAN and similar tools are great for erasing data on a hard drive you're loosing physical possession of (for whatever reason), but there's no need to spend hours or days cleaning a disk you've just acquired. If you erase the boot sector and partition information then you have destroyed everything you need to destroy in order to ensure it's "clean" - i.e. as far as the BIOS or OS is concerned there is nothing stored on the disk to load and execute. This can be achieved in just a few seconds.
The only scenario where something like DBAN will help on media you've acquired is if, for some reason, you suspect that a) the media has been used before, and b) you have a reasonable expectation that at some point in the future someone is going to do a forensic analysis on it and you don't want whatever was on there to be associated with you. Then the additional hours/days might be worthwhile.
I still like the idea of encrypted hard drives where the user can change the hardware key by swapping a module or flipping some switches on the physical drive. Want to instantly erase all the data on a drive? Change the key via the switches and boom! Data is permanently scrambled and meaningless without the original key settings.