"...too stupid to investigate before they make charges, and who likes being in a position of authority where they can try to make those charges stick..."
Sounds perfectly qualified to be working for the NSA in modern-day America if you ask me...
Gordian Knot's a pig of a thing to use. However, if you've got a Linux system (maybe it works on BSD or what have you as well, I don't know) then there's a program called DVD::Rip which does the same job and is an absolute joy to use. I'd thoroughly recommend it.
Car stereos incorporating DAB are only really coming in now. That's your big market, just as it is currently with analogue broadcasts. As they drop in price, it'll take off.
DAB radio in the UK's marvellous. The benefit's not so much in the higher quality, it's in the trimmings. There's far more stations to pick from, so you don't have to put up with the usual four stations of BBC taking up half the spectrum plus two shite cheesy commercial stations with a playlist of seven songs, all of which are utter drivel. Plus Classic FM. Instead you get nice things like 1Xtra, a far wider choice of shite cheesy commercial stations and 5live so you can listen to Scousers moaning about Houllier on their mobile phones in crystal clear stereo instead of AM.
But most importantly, when you're listening to Britain's favourite 60-something John Peel playing his usual blend of 78s from the 1930s, nosebleed techno and whimsical folk-rock, it displays the names of the tracks so you can saunter down to your local record shop and see the look of utter bemusement on the shop assistant's face when you ask for something you heard on his show.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Not really, considering that the Taliban had offered to hand bin Laden over for trial if America could provide evidence linking him with the attacks. Could've all been settled nice and neatly and legally that way. But there was no way they were going to pass up a gift-wrapped opportunity to parachute in a friendly govenrnment so they could get that big oil pipeline installed. So instead we got a ham-fisted invasion which has done fuck all either to improve things in Afghanistan or to quell terrorism. Thanks for that, boys.
Plus, if bin Laden had been taken in, who would they have cast as their Emmanuel Goldstein? He's far too valuable alive and on the loose. They had him cornered in the Tora Bora and let him go for some reason, remember.
Fear. That's all it was in the end. At first it was a reaction to the state Germany was in, then it was fear of the consequences of not agreeing with Hitler's followers, who were for the most part Angry Young Men who could be talked into beating people up at the drop of a hat. I once heard an old German lady sum it up very neatly: "If you're standing in a stadium with 50,000 people all shouting Heil Hitler, you'll shout it too".
Yeah, "OK" and "Cancel" are fine with statements, but not (well, not always) with questions. Maybe we could rewrite the statements to make them questions in every case? Just to keep me off the Night Nurse, you understand. I'm getting terrible bags under my eyes these days.
It's a very small thing, this, but "OK" and "Cancel" buttons really get on my nerves. A lot of the time they appear in response to a question, and usually the appropriate response to this question will be either "yes" or "no". I mean, if Johnny No-Stars asks you whether you want fries with that in McDonald's, you don't say "cancel" in reply, do you? So can we be dispensing with the herd mentality which forces people to give essentially nonsensical answers to questions posed by computers? It'll help me sleep better.
That's exactly why in any sensible democratic society the government, police and judiciary are all operationally independent from one another. The government may set the laws, but it is usually the police who decide how they are enforced, and the judges who decide how they are interpreted. In this case, the DMCA may make such activity illegal (I say may because thankfully I don't live in America and don't know much about it), but if nobody is pursuing the lawbreakers, it is effectively irrelevant what the law says on the matter. Of course, there is always the possibility of more stringent law enforcement at a future date, but it is then the responsibility of the judiciary to ensure that the law acts in the public interest, and judges have the power to overturn laws which are perceived to be impracticable or harmful, and they often do. So if "everybody" was flouting the DMCA law in a fairly small way, they could be left to it at the discretion of the authorities, but large-scale naughtiness could be dealt with under already existing legislation.
Although these institutions are operationally independent, there is usually much to be gained from cooperation and interaction between them. For example, in the UK cannabis is currently classified as a class B drug, possession of any quantity of which could, according to the statutes, result in a very hefty fine or a custodial sentence of up to five years. In practice, however, most police forces turn a blind eye to possession of small amounts in order to concentrate resources on cracking down on dealers. Because of this, cannabis in small quantities had been effectively decriminalised. The government has therefore reacted to this and changed its classification from B to C effective from a few weeks' time, meaning that the legislation will basically reflect current police practices.
See, legality is really a matter of opinion, and these mechanisms protect us from one group's interests becoming pervasive to the detriment of the general populace. Cherish them.
I got this book. It sure is weird all right. Pretty hysterically funny, too. I think my favourite has to be the one where a woman who looks like she's just gone twelve rounds with a van der Graaf generator is sitting in an armchair whilst a little bunny loads a copy of Fatal Attraction into the VCR...
Well, here in the land of the Daily Mail (I'd love to give a link, but they don't actually have a website yet, presumably because they've been telling there readers for years that there's nowt on the internet but paedophiles and stalkers), the supply's probably gone down, because Asylum seekers eat them. No, really, they do.
Just imagine how much better it could be if it didn't have more managers than hospital beds, though. This whole obsession with meeting targets is at the heart of everything that's wrong with Britain at the minute. Here's what their targets should consist of: Make people better. That's all. Now get on with your job and don't worry about pandering to stat-obsessed idiots who care about nothing beyond next year's bonus.
I'll tell you what's particularly awful - when you're watching a music show where the live act has lots of multicoloured stage lights around them. The codec in use just can't cope with these lights at all for some reason - the screen just degenerates into a mass of enormous blocks of colour. If digital TV is going to be the only way forward, they're really going to have to do something about this. It's just unacceptable. But what can they do?
I don't get this bit. How can the technology be too expensive to be accessible to tinpot local stations? Here in the UK the Sky Digital satellites are crammed full of channels which look like they're broadcasting out of the back room of somebody's house (and in all honesty they could probably fit all their viewers at any one time in the front room of the house). It looks to me as if all they need is a decent DV camera or two and a computer to plug it into. The computer can provide graphical overlays, play ads, mix sound, etc. etc and supply the signal to Sky down a leased line. Cost: Bugger all.
Compare that with what it would've cost even ten years ago to set up something equally as crap broadcasting on analogue. I'd imagine it's about a tenth the cost. So what's the problem in Japan? Is HDTV stuff crushingly expensive?
Yeah, yeah, I can see you screwing your face up and saying "but I'm a fat, pizza-loving geek, I hate exercise and I hate the idea of people looking at me with contempt because I'm a fat, pizza-loving geek". But it's not like that. Or at least, it needn't be.
I go to a nice place with a swimming pool, sauna, tennis courts, and the likes. All sorts of people go there - it's far from a haven for steroid-saturated meatheads or aerobics obsessives, in fact I'd say a majority of members are families. There are a few fairly hefty fellas there, but they're not intimidating in the least - in fact, you'll find that if they spot you struggling or looking lost, they'll help you out (even if you're not a good-looking girl in a skimpy outfit...). People of all shapes, sizes and abilities attend, and nobody looks down on anybody else. There's classes in many disciplines covering all levels of ability, so you can be sociable and meet new people that way if you want.
For me, it fits the bill perfectly. When you're pissed off, you can go and shift some serious weights. If you're feeling lethargic, go for a run or a row or whatever and you'll soon liven up. If you just want to unwind, have a nice soak in the Jacuzzi. There's something to fit any mood, and you soon realise that that mental image you had of what it would be like, the one that kept you away all that time, is far from the reality. It needn't be a chore if you find a place that suits you, and your subsription won't be wasted if you find, as you may well do, that you start enjoying yourself.
God - I sound like a salesman, don't I? Back to work...
Maybe not as passenger-carrying vessels, but as a way of transporting freight faster, cheaper and in greater quantities than trucks, and being pretty environmentally friendly to boot, since it uses very little fuel compared to the admittedly faster traditional method of heavier-than-air flight.
A couple of years ago in the New Scientist there was an article about new designs of airship. As I remember, rather than the old-fashioned blimp, these things stayed in the air partly through light weight and partly through aerodynamic lift. The advantage of this is that they could take off and land in a sensible manner, instead of needing to be tethered to the ground and have people disembark by rope ladders or whatever it was they used to do. Something like 30% of the lift came from the wing-like shape of the balloon. Anyway, these things were being designed to carry absolutely massive payloads - they were talking about a thousand tons. Think how many trucks that could take off the road, and it can move twice as fast.
Of course, the catch was that they'd be a bit expensive. And who were they targetting as the people with deep enough pockets to shell out for a thousand-ton airship? Why, the military, of course. I mean, just think how many tanks you could get in one of those babies. Balls to alleviating traffic congestion, easing pollution and generally making the world a better place - let's flatten stuff!
I dunno about that. It'll do 1MB/sec in theory, and most devices seem comfortable at 750k/sec. Now, I'm not absolutely sure off the top of my head, but wouldn't that be enough bandwidth to stream a losslessly-encoded audio file in FLAC or something?
You could've just downloaded one of their Live CD evaluation packages for a cost of nought pence, and found out it was crap that way (not that I think it is crap, in fact I think there's none better). Unless you're on a dialup connection, in which case you'd have to be mad to try that.
Been at it for a while. Some suggestions for good places to attack:
1) Nightclubs. It's dark, there's hundreds of potential victims on the dancefloor, and there's always somebody faffing with their phone so the likelihood of you getting caught is fairly slim. Plus, if your receiver turns out to be a tasty member of the opposite sex, well, it's an inroad, isn't it?
2) Gym locker rooms. All those lockers around you with phones safely locked away while their owners are off exercising. Send something appropriately spooky and put the shits up them when they come back. It's unlikely that you'll see their reaction to the message, of course, but the mere prospect of it's amusing enough for me.
Of course, one drawback is the potential for shops etc. to set up a bluetooth-enabled PC in the window and spam everybody walking past...
It's a start, isn't it? Do you think when the first computers were being knocked together out of valves and punched-card readers, and filling up a room, their creators shouldn't have bothered because they were so expensive that the masses couldn't afford them? Or are you glad that they did, and that continuous innovation's put ever more powerful tools in the hands of an ever increasing proportion of the world's population?
Slashdot Mirror
"...too stupid to investigate before they make charges, and who likes being in a position of authority where they can try to make those charges stick..."
Sounds perfectly qualified to be working for the NSA in modern-day America if you ask me...
Gordian Knot's a pig of a thing to use. However, if you've got a Linux system (maybe it works on BSD or what have you as well, I don't know) then there's a program called DVD::Rip which does the same job and is an absolute joy to use. I'd thoroughly recommend it.
Car stereos incorporating DAB are only really coming in now. That's your big market, just as it is currently with analogue broadcasts. As they drop in price, it'll take off.
DAB radio in the UK's marvellous. The benefit's not so much in the higher quality, it's in the trimmings. There's far more stations to pick from, so you don't have to put up with the usual four stations of BBC taking up half the spectrum plus two shite cheesy commercial stations with a playlist of seven songs, all of which are utter drivel. Plus Classic FM. Instead you get nice things like 1Xtra, a far wider choice of shite cheesy commercial stations and 5live so you can listen to Scousers moaning about Houllier on their mobile phones in crystal clear stereo instead of AM.
But most importantly, when you're listening to Britain's favourite 60-something John Peel playing his usual blend of 78s from the 1930s, nosebleed techno and whimsical folk-rock, it displays the names of the tracks so you can saunter down to your local record shop and see the look of utter bemusement on the shop assistant's face when you ask for something you heard on his show.
Not really, considering that the Taliban had offered to hand bin Laden over for trial if America could provide evidence linking him with the attacks. Could've all been settled nice and neatly and legally that way. But there was no way they were going to pass up a gift-wrapped opportunity to parachute in a friendly govenrnment so they could get that big oil pipeline installed. So instead we got a ham-fisted invasion which has done fuck all either to improve things in Afghanistan or to quell terrorism. Thanks for that, boys.
Plus, if bin Laden had been taken in, who would they have cast as their Emmanuel Goldstein? He's far too valuable alive and on the loose. They had him cornered in the Tora Bora and let him go for some reason, remember.
Fear. That's all it was in the end. At first it was a reaction to the state Germany was in, then it was fear of the consequences of not agreeing with Hitler's followers, who were for the most part Angry Young Men who could be talked into beating people up at the drop of a hat. I once heard an old German lady sum it up very neatly: "If you're standing in a stadium with 50,000 people all shouting Heil Hitler, you'll shout it too".
Yeah, "OK" and "Cancel" are fine with statements, but not (well, not always) with questions. Maybe we could rewrite the statements to make them questions in every case? Just to keep me off the Night Nurse, you understand. I'm getting terrible bags under my eyes these days.
It's a very small thing, this, but "OK" and "Cancel" buttons really get on my nerves. A lot of the time they appear in response to a question, and usually the appropriate response to this question will be either "yes" or "no". I mean, if Johnny No-Stars asks you whether you want fries with that in McDonald's, you don't say "cancel" in reply, do you? So can we be dispensing with the herd mentality which forces people to give essentially nonsensical answers to questions posed by computers? It'll help me sleep better.
That's exactly why in any sensible democratic society the government, police and judiciary are all operationally independent from one another. The government may set the laws, but it is usually the police who decide how they are enforced, and the judges who decide how they are interpreted. In this case, the DMCA may make such activity illegal (I say may because thankfully I don't live in America and don't know much about it), but if nobody is pursuing the lawbreakers, it is effectively irrelevant what the law says on the matter. Of course, there is always the possibility of more stringent law enforcement at a future date, but it is then the responsibility of the judiciary to ensure that the law acts in the public interest, and judges have the power to overturn laws which are perceived to be impracticable or harmful, and they often do. So if "everybody" was flouting the DMCA law in a fairly small way, they could be left to it at the discretion of the authorities, but large-scale naughtiness could be dealt with under already existing legislation.
Although these institutions are operationally independent, there is usually much to be gained from cooperation and interaction between them. For example, in the UK cannabis is currently classified as a class B drug, possession of any quantity of which could, according to the statutes, result in a very hefty fine or a custodial sentence of up to five years. In practice, however, most police forces turn a blind eye to possession of small amounts in order to concentrate resources on cracking down on dealers. Because of this, cannabis in small quantities had been effectively decriminalised. The government has therefore reacted to this and changed its classification from B to C effective from a few weeks' time, meaning that the legislation will basically reflect current police practices.
See, legality is really a matter of opinion, and these mechanisms protect us from one group's interests becoming pervasive to the detriment of the general populace. Cherish them.
I got this book. It sure is weird all right. Pretty hysterically funny, too. I think my favourite has to be the one where a woman who looks like she's just gone twelve rounds with a van der Graaf generator is sitting in an armchair whilst a little bunny loads a copy of Fatal Attraction into the VCR...
Well, here in the land of the Daily Mail (I'd love to give a link, but they don't actually have a website yet, presumably because they've been telling there readers for years that there's nowt on the internet but paedophiles and stalkers), the supply's probably gone down, because Asylum seekers eat them. No, really, they do.
I mean, Christ.
Oh, you need SpamBayes. Plugs right into Outlook and filters away like a good 'un. Trust me here, it's the ticket.
Get it here
Just imagine how much better it could be if it didn't have more managers than hospital beds, though. This whole obsession with meeting targets is at the heart of everything that's wrong with Britain at the minute. Here's what their targets should consist of: Make people better. That's all. Now get on with your job and don't worry about pandering to stat-obsessed idiots who care about nothing beyond next year's bonus.
They're both enormously bloated and inefficient, plagued by hard-to-stop bugs and apt to absorb gigantic amounts of money in return for very little...
Make 'em all look up and point at the sky and hopefully they won't notice they're standing in a river of shite.
America: "Blah blah economy blah blah lies blah blah phoney enemies etc etc"
Dubya: "Look! Up in the sky! A bit shiny rocket!"
America "Oooooooooh, isn't it pretty?"
I'll tell you what's particularly awful - when you're watching a music show where the live act has lots of multicoloured stage lights around them. The codec in use just can't cope with these lights at all for some reason - the screen just degenerates into a mass of enormous blocks of colour. If digital TV is going to be the only way forward, they're really going to have to do something about this. It's just unacceptable. But what can they do?
I don't get this bit. How can the technology be too expensive to be accessible to tinpot local stations? Here in the UK the Sky Digital satellites are crammed full of channels which look like they're broadcasting out of the back room of somebody's house (and in all honesty they could probably fit all their viewers at any one time in the front room of the house). It looks to me as if all they need is a decent DV camera or two and a computer to plug it into. The computer can provide graphical overlays, play ads, mix sound, etc. etc and supply the signal to Sky down a leased line. Cost: Bugger all.
Compare that with what it would've cost even ten years ago to set up something equally as crap broadcasting on analogue. I'd imagine it's about a tenth the cost. So what's the problem in Japan? Is HDTV stuff crushingly expensive?
Yeah, yeah, I can see you screwing your face up and saying "but I'm a fat, pizza-loving geek, I hate exercise and I hate the idea of people looking at me with contempt because I'm a fat, pizza-loving geek". But it's not like that. Or at least, it needn't be.
I go to a nice place with a swimming pool, sauna, tennis courts, and the likes. All sorts of people go there - it's far from a haven for steroid-saturated meatheads or aerobics obsessives, in fact I'd say a majority of members are families. There are a few fairly hefty fellas there, but they're not intimidating in the least - in fact, you'll find that if they spot you struggling or looking lost, they'll help you out (even if you're not a good-looking girl in a skimpy outfit...). People of all shapes, sizes and abilities attend, and nobody looks down on anybody else. There's classes in many disciplines covering all levels of ability, so you can be sociable and meet new people that way if you want.
For me, it fits the bill perfectly. When you're pissed off, you can go and shift some serious weights. If you're feeling lethargic, go for a run or a row or whatever and you'll soon liven up. If you just want to unwind, have a nice soak in the Jacuzzi. There's something to fit any mood, and you soon realise that that mental image you had of what it would be like, the one that kept you away all that time, is far from the reality. It needn't be a chore if you find a place that suits you, and your subsription won't be wasted if you find, as you may well do, that you start enjoying yourself.
God - I sound like a salesman, don't I? Back to work...
Shame, that. The guy did some great albums.
Maybe not as passenger-carrying vessels, but as a way of transporting freight faster, cheaper and in greater quantities than trucks, and being pretty environmentally friendly to boot, since it uses very little fuel compared to the admittedly faster traditional method of heavier-than-air flight.
A couple of years ago in the New Scientist there was an article about new designs of airship. As I remember, rather than the old-fashioned blimp, these things stayed in the air partly through light weight and partly through aerodynamic lift. The advantage of this is that they could take off and land in a sensible manner, instead of needing to be tethered to the ground and have people disembark by rope ladders or whatever it was they used to do. Something like 30% of the lift came from the wing-like shape of the balloon. Anyway, these things were being designed to carry absolutely massive payloads - they were talking about a thousand tons. Think how many trucks that could take off the road, and it can move twice as fast.
Of course, the catch was that they'd be a bit expensive. And who were they targetting as the people with deep enough pockets to shell out for a thousand-ton airship? Why, the military, of course. I mean, just think how many tanks you could get in one of those babies. Balls to alleviating traffic congestion, easing pollution and generally making the world a better place - let's flatten stuff!
I dunno about that. It'll do 1MB/sec in theory, and most devices seem comfortable at 750k/sec. Now, I'm not absolutely sure off the top of my head, but wouldn't that be enough bandwidth to stream a losslessly-encoded audio file in FLAC or something?
You could've just downloaded one of their Live CD evaluation packages for a cost of nought pence, and found out it was crap that way (not that I think it is crap, in fact I think there's none better). Unless you're on a dialup connection, in which case you'd have to be mad to try that.
Been at it for a while. Some suggestions for good places to attack:
1) Nightclubs. It's dark, there's hundreds of potential victims on the dancefloor, and there's always somebody faffing with their phone so the likelihood of you getting caught is fairly slim. Plus, if your receiver turns out to be a tasty member of the opposite sex, well, it's an inroad, isn't it?
2) Gym locker rooms. All those lockers around you with phones safely locked away while their owners are off exercising. Send something appropriately spooky and put the shits up them when they come back. It's unlikely that you'll see their reaction to the message, of course, but the mere prospect of it's amusing enough for me.
Of course, one drawback is the potential for shops etc. to set up a bluetooth-enabled PC in the window and spam everybody walking past...
Blimey. Stanley Unwin isn't dead after all.
It's a start, isn't it? Do you think when the first computers were being knocked together out of valves and punched-card readers, and filling up a room, their creators shouldn't have bothered because they were so expensive that the masses couldn't afford them? Or are you glad that they did, and that continuous innovation's put ever more powerful tools in the hands of an ever increasing proportion of the world's population?