Copyrights are in force, whether registered with the US Library of Congress, or not. Every crayon scribbling you've ever made, every photograph you've ever snapped, every recorded karaoke performance you've ever warbled, is protected by the force of law. Registration is a paper trail for the courts, but not a necessary element of a copyright enforcement lawsuit.
LOTS of people were swiping their cards through it, oblivious to the fact that it wasn't cleaning their card, but it could have been snagging their card number... note: The video requires an MSN Passport account (free)
There's something ominous about requiring a swipe of my e-wallet info to view a video of a scam for people's p-wallet info.
Nobody's mentioned the killer feature (in my book) behind the SliMP3 and the Squeezebox:
You can sync or desync multiple devices around the house. Play the same playlist in sync at multiple points around a large house. With any remote, browse the library or change the music everywhere at any device. From any PC in the house, browse the library or change the music everywhere.
These things are thin terminals and the "server" box can remain in one out-of-sight location to serve files.
One poster said you can get an XBox to do the same thing. Sure, but not in sync with other XBoxes (out of the box). And not wirelessly. Sure, you can buy the wireless adapter, but then you're exceeding the price of the Squeezebox, aren't you?
It's not for everyone. Fine. Neither is the iPod, or the XBox, for that matter.
Um, the site in question isn't interesting for any individual FILE, but in the browsable nature of his gallery. He doesn't even post the full size version of any of his artwork, where a bittorrent might make sense. When the majority of web browsers can torrent many small files invisibly, then your post becomes interesting.
Unfortunately, the image feature detection algorithm, called SIFT, is patented and it doesn't look like we'll be able to make use of the method. Some people are looking at ways to go past SIFT to get the same auto-stitching functionality.
The image Max Lyons is discussing was (in part) assembled using the panotools back-end. Max also wrote the PTAssembler front-end which helps to set up the alignments and other features. It's still a HELL of a manual job. For Linux, see the Hugin project which is an Open Source tool now in fully-functional beta.
Of course, Photoshop CS also requires activation, and is published by a company which directs government agents to arrest visiting foreign nationals during security conventions, but I digress...
Well, if you wait a few days for the site to calm down, you can READ his site to get a LOT of information about his processes.
Use a tripod and a pano head to rotate the camera around the nodal point.
Take 196 images that overlap slightly in grid formation.
Use a GUI to assign several control points for each pair of images: image[N]@x1,y1 == image[M]@x2,y2 (He uses his own GUI called PTAssembler for Windows. Others exist, and Hugin works on Linux and Windows.)
Use an engine to optimize the distortions, and to render the distorted images onto a final image. (He uses Helmut Dersch's panotools, as does PTGui and Hugin and other front-ends.)
He had additional challenges due to 2GB address limits in Windows (and most 32bit Linux builds would have similar challenges).
He had additional challenges due to apps breaking with images bigger than 16bit signed coordinate space (and a few Linux tools break on this too).
The free-as-in-beer panotools libraries itself is closed-source, and not supported anymore. IPIX(tm) apparently was one of several companies chasing Helmut for patent issues, the resolution of which I am not sure. New work is being done today to open the process up with Open Source equivalents. Otherwise, it's the top tool since it can stitch images taken from any orientation into several projections into several image formats with high quality.
I use (and help develop) the Hugin tool for my front-end; I've done a few 25 MP images, but nothing so large or as diverse as Max Lyons' works.
Actually, it's kinda sad-- Max doesn't post any of his originals anywhere, because the bandwidth would eat him alive. His site has hundreds of panoramic stitch images, at much-reduced size to let you browse the collection for free. But now he's facing a slashdotting. If you're a fan of his art, I suggest you wait a week, find a photo you really enjoy, and BUY A PRINT from him.
If I leave my dinner on the coffee table to get something out of the kitchen, I know my dog will eat it. When he does, I punish him. By punishing him, he learns not to eat my dinner when I'm away. Sure I'm setting a trap for him, but it's needed in order to train him. It's still his own free will to eat the food, but he's very predictable. To God, we're very predictable.
But you see, I didn't create my dog. So of course he has free will which is independent of my plan. He might decide to eat, and he might decide not to eat. To me, his behavior is not 100% deterministic, but to God, everything I do is pre-ordained. Why? Because He designed me, He designed my world, and even the theory of chaos breaks down when discussing His ability to predict my outcomes.
I don't usually get into metaphysical arguments about religion, but I'll bite. Take this as a gedankenexperiment only, please. I'm agnostic.
If God is all-creator, then He created Satan.
If God is all-knowing, then He knew what Satan would be.
If God is all-capable, then He chose to create Satan the way He did.
If God is all-supreme, then He created Hell and designed it for Satan.
If God is all-perfect, then His plan for the world requires a fallen Satan.
If Satan, Satan's fall, and Hell are requirements for the Universe to unfold in the way God intends, then everything Satan does is with God's blessing. I don't see how Satan's arrogance or pride is wrong, if his role in God's plan is as great as it seems by all stretch of religion. Fate itself is irrelevant, and choice is false.
God created all possible choices I could make.
God knows what choices I will make before I even know my choices.
Perhaps choice is merely illusory: I make the choice, but the other course of action also exists as a different branch of possible universes. An infinite God could surely imagine and create all possible universes. But He still knows which choices I will make. A world with an all-knowing God is pre-ordained, with all fates sealed, by definition, so I have no choice.
Therefore, if I ignore God in my day-to-day decision-making, am I being arrogant as was Satan? Or am I merely the puppet who has no choices to make? If I know I cannot really make choices, how can I be arrogant? Conversely, if I am given a real choice, and I think I have an important role to make good choices, how is having a sense of self-importance and a pride in my role in that plan a sin?
What encryption? RFID as it stands has no challenge-response, it's just a static barcode readable by radio interference. When my number is stolen, do I get a new government-sponsored surgery to change numbers?
Unicode describes a canonical mapping of tens of thousands of characters in many languages. That character will always be that number, and that number will always be that character.
The problem is, bytes only fit integers from 0 to 255. Some situations (like DNS entries) only allow a subset of those byte values. Larger numbers must be described with more than one byte. That's where the encodings come in. How will you refer to the number 10000 if you can only use A-Z, a-z, 0-9 ASCII values? How will you refer to the number 10000 if you can use any bit pattern, on a little-endian computer? If you always use four bytes to allow for any legal Unicode number, do you waste 80% of the space when you have a text file that's *almost* entirely composed of plain old ASCII characters?
Unicode has many encodings; UTF-8 is one encoding and Punycode is another. UTF-8 aims for efficiency when the majority of the text is ASCII, and Punycode aims for completeness when you must fit in 64 characters and use only the ASCII characters to do it.
I throw out all the packing materials, but keep all the extra cables, driver disks, replacement rubber feet, instruction manuals, disposable headphones, and other cruft in separate ziplock baggies. All sizes; the 1 Gallon freezer bags can contain a spare five-port ether hub, a DC brick, and two short cat-5s. Then I can toss the baggies into a crate without worrying about them getting too intermingled. I have dozens of clear stackable containers I use for everything, including such electronics junk. And I mean, everything. http://www.halley.cc/pix/?f=portraits/naptime
If you're thinking of retooling the slash engine itself, I hope you consider some of the oft-complained areas for the most improvement. Things get mixed up in any random-access submission "queue" engine, but slash seems to suffer from these things often. Even editors have grumbled about not seeing other editors' status on various stories.
detect multiple/overlapping story submissions by their URLs, and make it easier for editors to find the earliest and to find the best (longest, most links, no broken links) examples of a breaking story
automatically give submitters a reason for their rejections: "rejected; another poster broke the story earlier and/or better."
capitalize stories according to title rules (not just every word)
fix or highlight the top fifty most common grammatical mistakes in submissions automatically (s/\bmore then\b/more than/g)
automatically mirror (and provide as separate link) a front-page snapshot of featured stories for the first hour of a story going public
searcher should be aware of common three-letter acronyms, and index them better
allow meta-moderation of "overrated" and "underrated"
If I were in charge, I would pre-emptively put a pace-maker inside any president upon election, healthy or not.
So you're saying that if you were the outgoing President (you're in charge), you would declare that your successor (who beat you and/or your political party in an election) must go through an unnecessary surgery? Thanks, but I'll keep the current policy guidelines as written into the Constitution.
The router is the new favorite device for censorship. It's the last single-point-of-diversion before the network spreads out again, into the home or office department.
How long before libraries are forced to use scary, sealed products with cuddly names like RouterNanny or RightRoute or PopCop? Where librarians can't adjust or override those kill lists?
Is it worth maintaining our old friend Hubble, or should NASA let him go out in a blaze of glory?
It's already beyond its original expected mission lifetime. It's worth maintaining, if it were just a matter of money and labor and willpower.
However, the very real issues of the unforeseen logistics hurdles can really shift the equation. Shuttles don't fly this year. Congress is in a cut-taxes, cut-spending mode. Space Station gets the focus of any meager space program priorities in the interim.
That's the clause that allows a device to operate as designed to play the music. To operate, the signal is buffered between the original and the speakers, but buffering is "making a copy." This clause allows that.
Backups are neither integral nor essential in the data path; they may be obvious and appropriate, but that's not what the clause describes.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyrights are in force, whether registered with the US Library of Congress, or not. Every crayon scribbling you've ever made, every photograph you've ever snapped, every recorded karaoke performance you've ever warbled, is protected by the force of law. Registration is a paper trail for the courts, but not a necessary element of a copyright enforcement lawsuit.
There's something ominous about requiring a swipe of my e-wallet info to view a video of a scam for people's p-wallet info.
You can sync or desync multiple devices around the house. Play the same playlist in sync at multiple points around a large house. With any remote, browse the library or change the music everywhere at any device. From any PC in the house, browse the library or change the music everywhere.
These things are thin terminals and the "server" box can remain in one out-of-sight location to serve files.
One poster said you can get an XBox to do the same thing. Sure, but not in sync with other XBoxes (out of the box). And not wirelessly. Sure, you can buy the wireless adapter, but then you're exceeding the price of the Squeezebox, aren't you?
It's not for everyone. Fine. Neither is the iPod, or the XBox, for that matter.
Binary is the only method for storing digital numerical data.
A recorded sound exceeds human hearing at a 44,100 Hz sample rate.
A recorded image exceeds human sight at 8 bits per R, G, B channeled luminance values.
Products are designed to fill or solve a known niche or problem.
Moore's Law is some kind of law instead of a gedanken observation.
Um, the site in question isn't interesting for any individual FILE, but in the browsable nature of his gallery. He doesn't even post the full size version of any of his artwork, where a bittorrent might make sense. When the majority of web browsers can torrent many small files invisibly, then your post becomes interesting.
Unfortunately, the image feature detection algorithm, called SIFT, is patented and it doesn't look like we'll be able to make use of the method. Some people are looking at ways to go past SIFT to get the same auto-stitching functionality.
Hugin on Linux (or Windows) works similarly to Max Lyons' PTAssembler on Windows. They both use Helmut Dersch's panotools for an optimizing engine.
The image Max Lyons is discussing was (in part) assembled using the panotools back-end. Max also wrote the PTAssembler front-end which helps to set up the alignments and other features. It's still a HELL of a manual job. For Linux, see the Hugin project which is an Open Source tool now in fully-functional beta.
Of course, Photoshop CS also requires activation, and is published by a company which directs government agents to arrest visiting foreign nationals during security conventions, but I digress...
Check out the http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ project for a portable, standalone pano stitching gui. We'd love to have you contribute time and effort.
Well, if you wait a few days for the site to calm down, you can READ his site to get a LOT of information about his processes.
The free-as-in-beer panotools libraries itself is closed-source, and not supported anymore. IPIX(tm) apparently was one of several companies chasing Helmut for patent issues, the resolution of which I am not sure. New work is being done today to open the process up with Open Source equivalents. Otherwise, it's the top tool since it can stitch images taken from any orientation into several projections into several image formats with high quality.
I use (and help develop) the Hugin tool for my front-end; I've done a few 25 MP images, but nothing so large or as diverse as Max Lyons' works.
Actually, it's kinda sad-- Max doesn't post any of his originals anywhere, because the bandwidth would eat him alive. His site has hundreds of panoramic stitch images, at much-reduced size to let you browse the collection for free. But now he's facing a slashdotting. If you're a fan of his art, I suggest you wait a week, find a photo you really enjoy, and BUY A PRINT from him.
If I leave my dinner on the coffee table to get something out of the kitchen, I know my dog will eat it. When he does, I punish him. By punishing him, he learns not to eat my dinner when I'm away. Sure I'm setting a trap for him, but it's needed in order to train him. It's still his own free will to eat the food, but he's very predictable. To God, we're very predictable.
But you see, I didn't create my dog. So of course he has free will which is independent of my plan. He might decide to eat, and he might decide not to eat. To me, his behavior is not 100% deterministic, but to God, everything I do is pre-ordained. Why? Because He designed me, He designed my world, and even the theory of chaos breaks down when discussing His ability to predict my outcomes.
If God is all-creator, then He created Satan.
If God is all-knowing, then He knew what Satan would be.
If God is all-capable, then He chose to create Satan the way He did.
If God is all-supreme, then He created Hell and designed it for Satan.
If God is all-perfect, then His plan for the world requires a fallen Satan.
If Satan, Satan's fall, and Hell are requirements for the Universe to unfold in the way God intends, then everything Satan does is with God's blessing. I don't see how Satan's arrogance or pride is wrong, if his role in God's plan is as great as it seems by all stretch of religion. Fate itself is irrelevant, and choice is false.
God created all possible choices I could make.
God knows what choices I will make before I even know my choices.
Perhaps choice is merely illusory: I make the choice, but the other course of action also exists as a different branch of possible universes. An infinite God could surely imagine and create all possible universes. But He still knows which choices I will make. A world with an all-knowing God is pre-ordained, with all fates sealed, by definition, so I have no choice.
Therefore, if I ignore God in my day-to-day decision-making, am I being arrogant as was Satan? Or am I merely the puppet who has no choices to make? If I know I cannot really make choices, how can I be arrogant? Conversely, if I am given a real choice, and I think I have an important role to make good choices, how is having a sense of self-importance and a pride in my role in that plan a sin?
What encryption? RFID as it stands has no challenge-response, it's just a static barcode readable by radio interference. When my number is stolen, do I get a new government-sponsored surgery to change numbers?
The problem is, bytes only fit integers from 0 to 255. Some situations (like DNS entries) only allow a subset of those byte values. Larger numbers must be described with more than one byte. That's where the encodings come in. How will you refer to the number 10000 if you can only use A-Z, a-z, 0-9 ASCII values? How will you refer to the number 10000 if you can use any bit pattern, on a little-endian computer? If you always use four bytes to allow for any legal Unicode number, do you waste 80% of the space when you have a text file that's *almost* entirely composed of plain old ASCII characters?
Punycode *is* a Unicode encoding.
Unicode has many encodings; UTF-8 is one encoding and Punycode is another. UTF-8 aims for efficiency when the majority of the text is ASCII, and Punycode aims for completeness when you must fit in 64 characters and use only the ASCII characters to do it.
Any Internet RFC which includes the phrase, -with-SUPER-MONKEYS, has GOT to be good. (And in case you think I'm trolling, check the link.)
I throw out all the packing materials, but keep all the extra cables, driver disks, replacement rubber feet, instruction manuals, disposable headphones, and other cruft in separate ziplock baggies. All sizes; the 1 Gallon freezer bags can contain a spare five-port ether hub, a DC brick, and two short cat-5s. Then I can toss the baggies into a crate without worrying about them getting too intermingled. I have dozens of clear stackable containers I use for everything, including such electronics junk. And I mean, everything. http://www.halley.cc/pix/?f=portraits/naptime
Now information has to maintain its own relevance in order to be permanent... and I for one welcome our new transiently relevant overlords.
Not a flame.
If you're thinking of retooling the slash engine itself, I hope you consider some of the oft-complained areas for the most improvement. Things get mixed up in any random-access submission "queue" engine, but slash seems to suffer from these things often. Even editors have grumbled about not seeing other editors' status on various stories.
So you're saying that if you were the outgoing President (you're in charge), you would declare that your successor (who beat you and/or your political party in an election) must go through an unnecessary surgery? Thanks, but I'll keep the current policy guidelines as written into the Constitution.
The router is the new favorite device for censorship. It's the last single-point-of-diversion before the network spreads out again, into the home or office department.
How long before libraries are forced to use scary, sealed products with cuddly names like RouterNanny or RightRoute or PopCop? Where librarians can't adjust or override those kill lists?
It's already beyond its original expected mission lifetime. It's worth maintaining, if it were just a matter of money and labor and willpower.
However, the very real issues of the unforeseen logistics hurdles can really shift the equation. Shuttles don't fly this year. Congress is in a cut-taxes, cut-spending mode. Space Station gets the focus of any meager space program priorities in the interim.
That's the clause that allows a device to operate as designed to play the music. To operate, the signal is buffered between the original and the speakers, but buffering is "making a copy." This clause allows that.
Backups are neither integral nor essential in the data path; they may be obvious and appropriate, but that's not what the clause describes.