Buzz is like Twitter with privacy settings. If you post a public buzz, it is _public_ - even people who don't even have gmail accounts can read it. And yes, everyone following you gets your public buzzes. Just like everyone following you gets your twitter messages. And everyone on your friend lists gets everything you do on Facebook, even if you're posting on someone else's page. Welcome to social networking. If you don't like how that works, either use the privacy settings, which at least on Buzz are fairly obvious, or don't use it at all.
(and inciting the overthrow of the government isn't just simple free speech folks. If you think it is maybe you're so messed up this law will work on you)
_inciting_ the overthrow isn't free speech, no. But _advocating_ it certainly is. And that's one of the things this law requires registering. And "subversive" is a quite vague word - by some definitions simply saying "Obama is a terrible president" could be considered subversive.
Reminds me of the many sedition acts we've had here in the U.S. - all of which were eventually ruled unconstitutional.
Um, you know you can use POP or IMAP with gmail extremely easily, right? I don't personally, their web interface is far more convenient (one less program to always be running), but really, just use POP or IMAP and your client of choice if the interface bothers you that much. That way you get all the great benefits of Gmail storage, you get the ability to access your mail from anywhere, and you still get the interface you want.
This reminds me of the time when I was in Nuremberg and the batteries for my camera died.
I ran into some random shop and managed to get a new pack of AAs without even needing to speak the language (I speak _some_ German, but I have no clue how to say 'AA batteries')
So, say you're in some random city outside and the batteries die. Where do you plan on plugging in? Sure, a laptop is a bit different than a camera, but still. You can't plug in everywhere. You _can_ usually find batteries everywhere. What if you're taking a 12 hour flight? Sure is nice to have extra batteries to switch out in such a case (I carry a spare for my laptop in such occasions). Or if you're on a train? Or even a coffeehouse without public outlets or where the public outlets are all in use or far away.
Let's see, this week alone I've been in the following situations where I would _like_ to be able to charge my laptop but no outlet was available: Running a table for a student organization on my campus. There are no outlets where they place the tables, and I can't exactly just move. And hell, in the summer we do those things outside. Attending a meeting. Yes, there are outlets in the room. Two of them. No, there weren't any open chairs near the outlets. Hosting a meeting. For some reason they didn't think to install a power outlet anywhere near the VGA input for the projector... Just sitting outside doing work.
And this is on a college campus, where everyone has laptops with them damn near all the time. What about third world countries, which is what this laptop is really _designed_ for? You really expect children in a third world country to have access to a power outlet absolutely everywhere that they go?
They should also not alienate their users by changing the UI on every damn release. I liked the way it was back in 2.2. I can barely use 2.4. I'm quite afraid of how horrible 2.8 is going to be. Every time they move shit around to be 'more like photoshop' they end up putting things in places that make absolutely no sense. I know on one of the older versions when they first started this crap, to manage layers you went not to the 'layers' menu but to the 'dialogs' menu. WTF? Now I don't even know how anymore. It usually takes me 20 minutes of digging through menus to finally find the layer manager.
This isn't a serious problem, and taxpayers _aren't_ paying for it.
But if it _was_ a serious problem, then yes, taxpayers should pay for it. Just like taxpayers pay for it if my house catches on fire. And taxpayers would pay for it if a wind turbine collapsed, and taypayers pay to clean up the pollution left by coal plants and coal mining. You do realize that cleaning up the acid mine drainage from coal mines is mostly paid by taxes, right?
If it's a small leak or a small accident, then yes, the plant should and will pay for it. But in a serious emergency, do you really _want_ them to take care of it? The government has more training in disaster management, and they have more resources. Plus I'm not really gonna trust the people that caused the problem to fix it properly. So yes, taxes pay for disaster relief. That's the way it's always been. But when was the last time there was a disaster at a nuclear plant in the US? I can give you several places where the government is paying to clean up after coal just within a few miles of my house. But the only instance of them cleaning up after nuclear that I can think of is Three Mile Island. And that wasn't exactly expensive.
$54k is CERTAINLY excessive. As is $25k. This is not a criminal case. The payment is not a fine to discourage crime, it's a payment to cover the damages. She shared 24 songs. At $54k, that's more than $2k per song. And when you can buy those songs for $1 each, that's saying that she was personally and directly responsible for 2,000 people not buying each one of those songs. How is that in any way even possible? A single person sharing a single song will NEVER be directly responsible for _thousands_ of lost sales. It just doesn't work that way. And the RIAA has certainly not proven such a loss. And again, this is a civil case. The fine is not a punishment or deterrent, it is pure and simple restitution.
For a reference: http://www.rbs2.com/cc.htm#anchor111111 "In general, a losing defendant in civil litigation only reimburses the plaintiff for losses caused by the defendant's behavior."
Basically - there's no way to store more information in a given area than what it already contains. In order to fully simulate the universe, at full (or greater) speed, you would have to know absolutely everything about absolutely every particle and subatomic particle, etc. And that includes the particles that make up the processor itself.
It's like this: Say you have a 300 DPI printer. You print out a full page of text. Now, you want to fit all the information about that page into some sub-region of the page, printed on the same printer. Ok, so you say you can just shrink the text or encode it in binary or something, which is fine - except somehow also fit the information about the shrunken/encoded text in there. As you can see, you enter a recursive nightmare. And as your printer is a fixed resolution, you would quickly reach a point where any attempts to fit more information results in a blurred pixelated mess.
It seems to me that you are assuming that this outside universe obeys some basic laws of our own. Why make such an assumption? I mean, if we're going to go so far as to hypothesize a computer built outside of our own universe, why couldn't this outside place obey radically different rules than our own universe? Suppose that outside our universe, there is no such thing as time. Calculations are put into the computer and the result returns instantly. While it is true that theoretically you could still never completely match the universe, as your results would change it and then you would need to recalculate, each run of the calculations would surely get you closer to a true solution. And, if it turns out that our universe is just slightly "grainy" at extremely small distances - if the Planck length or something along those lines ends up quantizing distance in our universe - you would eventually reach the correct answer. Just as the pattern of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8... will eventually reach 1 if you assume you are rounding the final answer to the nearest thousandth.
Yea, I'm in IT as well and I use a Dell Vostro. Why? Because it's cheap. The only difference between any laptop you buy other than the base specs is the software. And if you're in IT, you should be able to get the software however you want it regardless of the hardware. The hardware on a mac really isn't that much different - they just hide their flaws better. I've seen just as many macs die in 8 months as I have PCs. And the macs are usually harder to get covered under warranty. Hell I've had PCs a year out of warranty still be replaced. And macs that get fried 6 months in because they don't have decent heat dissipation get refused service.
You know, everyone always uses MMOs as an example of a game where you can't have any other servers - but guess what? You can. There are THOUSANDS of alternate servers out there for World of Warcraft. Most of them free (i.e. you don't have to pay any monthly fees to Blizz or to the server.) And there's very easy to set up. I mean obviously they're not as easy as just selecting another server - this is a game that intended to only have official servers. But it's a matter of opening a config file and changing two lines - the only two lines in that file. Anyone can do it. And Blizzard has made no attempts to stop it. So why don't more games go this route?
That's not at all how public domain works. Should I have all my copyrights to everything I've ever done revoked just because I can't manage to produce a copy of a picture I drew in kindergarten that happens to be public domain now? After all, everything you create automatically has copyright.
Just because it's public domain, that doesn't mean they are required to GIVE you a copy of it, or do anything at all to facilitate that copying. It only means that if you happen to have a copy of it, you can freely distribute it. Or you can make your own copies and distribute those. But they don't have to help. That would just be stupid. Almost as stupid as copyright is right now....Actually, no, it would be _stupider_ than current copyright laws. But not by much.
To put it one other way: Yes, the footage is public domain. The media it is stored on is not. They can do whatever they want to that media. It is theirs. It is physical property, they own it.
Half of your argument is that things are recorded in MPEG-4 and people aren't going to convert before uploading. But that doesn't matter. Youtube _already_ converts your video when you upload if it's in the wrong format. Hell even if it's in the right format I think they still convert it to make sure it's the right size and bitrate and such. So why does it matter if they're converting MPEG-4 into MPEG-4 or MPEG-4 into Ogg?
Haha, I'm currently at Penn State. They just upped the bandwidth limit this year - we now get a whole 10GB:)
And yea, there are all kinds of ways to get around the system. I'm not sure about Comcast and how they're measuring it, but Penn State only measured bandwidth out of their network - and they also had a proxy run by 'Academic Services and Emerging Technology', so people always just use that. Since your traffic is only going to the proxy, which is on the PSU network, anything that goes through that proxy doesn't count against your limit. And then there's always the wireless network - they try to make it unavailable in the residence halls, but you can get it in a lot of them, and they don't count your bandwidth on the wireless network.
As a final thought: What I thought they meant when I read the article was that they were creating a physical broadband meter. That I would actually think would be a good idea. I mean if you're going to limit how much people can use, you should give them a simple way to measure it. And what's better than something similar to the water/gas/electric meter they're already used to? Of course it'd be inside near their computer, but if you're going to limit or charge for bandwidth, that's the only fair thing to do.
When you post something on facebook, you don't just give that information to the people you are friends with, you also grant facebook permission to use that information. And if they want to then give that information to the police, that's their right. Just like if you tell your friend something and they go and tell the cops, that's perfectly fine also.
They pay you for just showing the ads too...they just don't pay you very much. But still, I got a couple fractions of a cent from my blog off of straight impressions, and my blog only had about a hundred visitors, so if you run a highly visited site you could get a decent bit of money off of that.
Have you looked into NVidia's offering? If you've got a good enough monitor (needs 120Hz) and a decent NVidia card already, the glasses are only 200USD, and I'd imagine you could find somewhere in the UK selling them as well. But again, that assumes you already have the graphics card (probably not _too_ expensive) and a 120Hz monitor (more expensive)
Slashdot Mirror
I purchased two 80GB WD Caviar drives - one about 5 years ago, the other 3 years ago. Neither one lasted more than a year.
Buzz is like Twitter with privacy settings. If you post a public buzz, it is _public_ - even people who don't even have gmail accounts can read it. And yes, everyone following you gets your public buzzes. Just like everyone following you gets your twitter messages. And everyone on your friend lists gets everything you do on Facebook, even if you're posting on someone else's page. Welcome to social networking. If you don't like how that works, either use the privacy settings, which at least on Buzz are fairly obvious, or don't use it at all.
Yes. But not just by passing a law. That's what an amendment is.
(and inciting the overthrow of the government isn't just simple free speech folks. If you think it is maybe you're so messed up this law will work on you)
_inciting_ the overthrow isn't free speech, no. But _advocating_ it certainly is. And that's one of the things this law requires registering. And "subversive" is a quite vague word - by some definitions simply saying "Obama is a terrible president" could be considered subversive.
Reminds me of the many sedition acts we've had here in the U.S. - all of which were eventually ruled unconstitutional.
Um, you know you can use POP or IMAP with gmail extremely easily, right? I don't personally, their web interface is far more convenient (one less program to always be running), but really, just use POP or IMAP and your client of choice if the interface bothers you that much. That way you get all the great benefits of Gmail storage, you get the ability to access your mail from anywhere, and you still get the interface you want.
This reminds me of the time when I was in Nuremberg and the batteries for my camera died.
I ran into some random shop and managed to get a new pack of AAs without even needing to speak the language (I speak _some_ German, but I have no clue how to say 'AA batteries')
So, say you're in some random city outside and the batteries die. Where do you plan on plugging in? Sure, a laptop is a bit different than a camera, but still. You can't plug in everywhere. You _can_ usually find batteries everywhere. What if you're taking a 12 hour flight? Sure is nice to have extra batteries to switch out in such a case (I carry a spare for my laptop in such occasions). Or if you're on a train? Or even a coffeehouse without public outlets or where the public outlets are all in use or far away.
Let's see, this week alone I've been in the following situations where I would _like_ to be able to charge my laptop but no outlet was available:
Running a table for a student organization on my campus. There are no outlets where they place the tables, and I can't exactly just move. And hell, in the summer we do those things outside.
Attending a meeting. Yes, there are outlets in the room. Two of them. No, there weren't any open chairs near the outlets.
Hosting a meeting. For some reason they didn't think to install a power outlet anywhere near the VGA input for the projector...
Just sitting outside doing work.
And this is on a college campus, where everyone has laptops with them damn near all the time. What about third world countries, which is what this laptop is really _designed_ for? You really expect children in a third world country to have access to a power outlet absolutely everywhere that they go?
They should also not alienate their users by changing the UI on every damn release. I liked the way it was back in 2.2. I can barely use 2.4. I'm quite afraid of how horrible 2.8 is going to be. Every time they move shit around to be 'more like photoshop' they end up putting things in places that make absolutely no sense. I know on one of the older versions when they first started this crap, to manage layers you went not to the 'layers' menu but to the 'dialogs' menu. WTF? Now I don't even know how anymore. It usually takes me 20 minutes of digging through menus to finally find the layer manager.
This isn't a serious problem, and taxpayers _aren't_ paying for it.
But if it _was_ a serious problem, then yes, taxpayers should pay for it. Just like taxpayers pay for it if my house catches on fire. And taxpayers would pay for it if a wind turbine collapsed, and taypayers pay to clean up the pollution left by coal plants and coal mining. You do realize that cleaning up the acid mine drainage from coal mines is mostly paid by taxes, right?
If it's a small leak or a small accident, then yes, the plant should and will pay for it. But in a serious emergency, do you really _want_ them to take care of it? The government has more training in disaster management, and they have more resources. Plus I'm not really gonna trust the people that caused the problem to fix it properly. So yes, taxes pay for disaster relief. That's the way it's always been. But when was the last time there was a disaster at a nuclear plant in the US? I can give you several places where the government is paying to clean up after coal just within a few miles of my house. But the only instance of them cleaning up after nuclear that I can think of is Three Mile Island. And that wasn't exactly expensive.
$54k is CERTAINLY excessive. As is $25k. This is not a criminal case. The payment is not a fine to discourage crime, it's a payment to cover the damages. She shared 24 songs. At $54k, that's more than $2k per song. And when you can buy those songs for $1 each, that's saying that she was personally and directly responsible for 2,000 people not buying each one of those songs. How is that in any way even possible? A single person sharing a single song will NEVER be directly responsible for _thousands_ of lost sales. It just doesn't work that way. And the RIAA has certainly not proven such a loss. And again, this is a civil case. The fine is not a punishment or deterrent, it is pure and simple restitution.
For a reference:
http://www.rbs2.com/cc.htm#anchor111111
"In general, a losing defendant in civil litigation only reimburses the plaintiff for losses caused by the defendant's behavior."
http://www.currentdirections.com/hardware/fujitsu/ipad100.html ...What were you saying?
[note that I didn't find that link myself, someone else had already posted it several comments up from yours]
Basically - there's no way to store more information in a given area than what it already contains. In order to fully simulate the universe, at full (or greater) speed, you would have to know absolutely everything about absolutely every particle and subatomic particle, etc. And that includes the particles that make up the processor itself.
It's like this: Say you have a 300 DPI printer. You print out a full page of text. Now, you want to fit all the information about that page into some sub-region of the page, printed on the same printer. Ok, so you say you can just shrink the text or encode it in binary or something, which is fine - except somehow also fit the information about the shrunken/encoded text in there. As you can see, you enter a recursive nightmare. And as your printer is a fixed resolution, you would quickly reach a point where any attempts to fit more information results in a blurred pixelated mess.
It seems to me that you are assuming that this outside universe obeys some basic laws of our own. Why make such an assumption? I mean, if we're going to go so far as to hypothesize a computer built outside of our own universe, why couldn't this outside place obey radically different rules than our own universe? Suppose that outside our universe, there is no such thing as time. Calculations are put into the computer and the result returns instantly. While it is true that theoretically you could still never completely match the universe, as your results would change it and then you would need to recalculate, each run of the calculations would surely get you closer to a true solution. And, if it turns out that our universe is just slightly "grainy" at extremely small distances - if the Planck length or something along those lines ends up quantizing distance in our universe - you would eventually reach the correct answer. Just as the pattern of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8... will eventually reach 1 if you assume you are rounding the final answer to the nearest thousandth.
Yes.
Even natural diamonds aren't the slightest bit rare on Earth. It's just the diamond cartels that make it rare.
Yea, I'm in IT as well and I use a Dell Vostro. Why? Because it's cheap. The only difference between any laptop you buy other than the base specs is the software. And if you're in IT, you should be able to get the software however you want it regardless of the hardware. The hardware on a mac really isn't that much different - they just hide their flaws better. I've seen just as many macs die in 8 months as I have PCs. And the macs are usually harder to get covered under warranty. Hell I've had PCs a year out of warranty still be replaced. And macs that get fried 6 months in because they don't have decent heat dissipation get refused service.
You know, everyone always uses MMOs as an example of a game where you can't have any other servers - but guess what? You can. There are THOUSANDS of alternate servers out there for World of Warcraft. Most of them free (i.e. you don't have to pay any monthly fees to Blizz or to the server.) And there's very easy to set up. I mean obviously they're not as easy as just selecting another server - this is a game that intended to only have official servers. But it's a matter of opening a config file and changing two lines - the only two lines in that file. Anyone can do it. And Blizzard has made no attempts to stop it. So why don't more games go this route?
That's not at all how public domain works. Should I have all my copyrights to everything I've ever done revoked just because I can't manage to produce a copy of a picture I drew in kindergarten that happens to be public domain now? After all, everything you create automatically has copyright.
Just because it's public domain, that doesn't mean they are required to GIVE you a copy of it, or do anything at all to facilitate that copying. It only means that if you happen to have a copy of it, you can freely distribute it. Or you can make your own copies and distribute those. But they don't have to help. That would just be stupid. Almost as stupid as copyright is right now....Actually, no, it would be _stupider_ than current copyright laws. But not by much.
To put it one other way: Yes, the footage is public domain. The media it is stored on is not. They can do whatever they want to that media. It is theirs. It is physical property, they own it.
Half of your argument is that things are recorded in MPEG-4 and people aren't going to convert before uploading. But that doesn't matter. Youtube _already_ converts your video when you upload if it's in the wrong format. Hell even if it's in the right format I think they still convert it to make sure it's the right size and bitrate and such. So why does it matter if they're converting MPEG-4 into MPEG-4 or MPEG-4 into Ogg?
Yea, I'm at UP. The literature says 4GB, but it's been increased, they just haven't updated that yet.
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2009/12/27/university_doubles_bandwidth_l.aspx
Also go to the rescom 'bandwidth used' page - the scale now goes up to 10, rather than 4.
Haha, I know. But last year it was 4GB. Now _that_ was painful.
Haha, I'm currently at Penn State. They just upped the bandwidth limit this year - we now get a whole 10GB :)
And yea, there are all kinds of ways to get around the system. I'm not sure about Comcast and how they're measuring it, but Penn State only measured bandwidth out of their network - and they also had a proxy run by 'Academic Services and Emerging Technology', so people always just use that. Since your traffic is only going to the proxy, which is on the PSU network, anything that goes through that proxy doesn't count against your limit. And then there's always the wireless network - they try to make it unavailable in the residence halls, but you can get it in a lot of them, and they don't count your bandwidth on the wireless network.
As a final thought: What I thought they meant when I read the article was that they were creating a physical broadband meter. That I would actually think would be a good idea. I mean if you're going to limit how much people can use, you should give them a simple way to measure it. And what's better than something similar to the water/gas/electric meter they're already used to? Of course it'd be inside near their computer, but if you're going to limit or charge for bandwidth, that's the only fair thing to do.
Would you _want_ tanks from WWII to still be in service? They'd be dropping like flies if they ever got put into a real battle.
When you post something on facebook, you don't just give that information to the people you are friends with, you also grant facebook permission to use that information. And if they want to then give that information to the police, that's their right. Just like if you tell your friend something and they go and tell the cops, that's perfectly fine also.
The authenticators function the same as ones provided by most banks
What? What banks? I've _never_ heard of a bank using these things. My bank just uses account number, pin, and password...
They pay you for just showing the ads too...they just don't pay you very much. But still, I got a couple fractions of a cent from my blog off of straight impressions, and my blog only had about a hundred visitors, so if you run a highly visited site you could get a decent bit of money off of that.
Have you looked into NVidia's offering? If you've got a good enough monitor (needs 120Hz) and a decent NVidia card already, the glasses are only 200USD, and I'd imagine you could find somewhere in the UK selling them as well. But again, that assumes you already have the graphics card (probably not _too_ expensive) and a 120Hz monitor (more expensive)