Aarrrggghhh. This was pointed out before, in an article a month or two ago. I guess it wasn't moderated high enough fast enough soon enough to educate everyone... I saw it, but it seems like most people did not.
This seems like a pretty clear case of '3rd party helping me excercise my fair use rights' to all of us. HOWEVER, that exact circumstance, having a 3rd party help you utilize your fair use rights which involves them physcially replicating copyright works in your name, was specifically made illegal (excluded from the tecnical definition of fair use) a long time ago, in a cassette-tape / something-or-other type case.
Basically, it was along the lines of the DMCA. They slipped one by you in the legislative system, you're screwed, I'm screwed, and so is MP3.com.
Of course I am not intimately familiar with the details, I just remember reading the post I mentioned above a month or two ago.
Can someone else please dig up the exact reference, or can someone who knows the real details that I am painfully trying to explain without the details myself, post them, and some nice people will moderate you all the way to the top?
I had initial troubles with the.au uLaw version, but got it to go with a little work in an old version of goldwave.
Thus I've converted Bowie's.au file to 8KHz 32bit MP3. The full 1.2 MB file (4+ minutes) as well as a quarter meg 60 second snippet are available here.
Hmmm, shouldn't have called the page filename 'Moog' I guess. Oh, 15KB/s maximum bandwidth, from my home ADSL box. Be gentle:)
But this is the first time the 'all Europeans descend from 7 women 180,000 years ago' aspect was pointed out. ( Not that I'm advocating dups per se, perhaps this story could have simply pointed out this aspect of the previous... )
This strikes me much differently than what seems to be indicated by most of the posts here already.
This awes me. That we've actually scientifically confirmed that one little tribe (or the roots of 7 little tribes) managed to fight their way though what passed for life for them, and the end result has been a large chunk of modern civilization.
For some reason it takes something like this to make me feel the wonder of something that could have been logically surmised and proposed beforehand.
I mean, logically you know that if our civilization manages to survive, it implies that:
We will have millions of millenia to do whatever we decide to do. With that span of time, and a little enlightenment, we'll be able to make the pyramids and metropolis' of today look like straw huts and tinker toys.
You're lineage will eventually include one hundred million billion individuals, spread over the span of time.
But when is the last time something made your mouth drop open and think seriously and deeply about things like the above? When is the last time something happened and made it feel real?
I hope I've adequately expressed how this story makes me feel:)
Holy c_*p. Stuff that had been modded to 5 has been 'lost'? Ok, ok, nothing is forever, let alone a semi-vaporous medium like this, but still, for posterity's sake it would be nice to keep much of this stuff around. Especially since it's so possible. Especially the 5's. Have you tried Google's caches? Another (unfortunately less reachable) cache of information are the personal saved files of individuals. I occasionally save pages for my own future reference, and it includes a pair of hellmouth snippets ( Dec 15th ones... ).
My read on the article is that they are making their *own* array out of off the shelf like dishes, in order to keep costs way down. I do not see anything that says they are going to be doing 'distributed data acquisition' by linking together your and my satelite dishes. But the latter is a damn neat idea eh?!! I wonder what the challenges would be for such a thing? Probably 'tracking' and 'electronics', with everyone having different dishes and gains and stuff... It sounds like they had to do some work in order to make these things do what they want for their purposes, and now they're testing all of that... attempting to put together something that would work for all of our backyard dishes would be a lot more complicated, and there would likely be some extra cost (for someone) to 'upgrade' our dishes...
Phhht. Interesting how you suddenly started posting with this story. User number 176528 huh?
Ok, quickly now: What direction does the student center's doors face, where most students exit to get to a bus? In winter when you approach those doors, from your arts course, what is the last thing you likely 'rode'? In what direction does it run? From where? What is the big green space called? What is the number of the basic Chemistry course that all first years take? What was the name of the building it was taken in (no longer in existence)? What river runs by the U? What is between the South side of the U and the River? How many times in the last 15+ years has the Football team won the 'whole meatball'? What is the thing that I am referring to as the 'whole meatball'?
If you aren't he, this'll be here for posterity in case he discovers it some day.
BTW: How does one find out what the current 'max-user-number' is? I don't want to have to go and create a junk account just to find this out... that would sort of skew the results:)
So did I. The e-mail immediately bounced back, with 'garnet.hertz@shaw.wave.ca' is unknown.
Hey! This was done at the UofS! I went there! Interesting how this was done years ago and supposedly received wide acclaim (if you go to the end and read the 'about' page or whatever...), I usually come across stuff like this sooner than this...
I like to think that I work at a small progressive company, one composed mostly of techies and engineers that would appreciate the advantages of Open Source / Free software. One that would show willingness to accept and use such outside tools and code.
However within the past 6 months a 'marketing' group has appeared, composed entirely of respected programmers and techies.
I was recently in a meeting/review of a new product, one for which we were considering various open-source databases and tools, and was quite taken aback when the head of marketing, a real tech head and respected software engineer, asked "So who supports this? There is a company out there that provides patches and support right?".
( To me this seems like an idiotic question. In the past 6 months we ourselves, a 'real' company, have abandoned ("end-of-life'd" in marketspeak) a product and left our best customers hanging, and here was the person who had made that 'end-of-life' product decision, demanding that another company exist to 'support' (for free) the free software we were considering using. )
What is the 'killer' counter to that question? What is the most effective retort? Remember, we're not speaking to engineers and techies here any more. (Even if they were formerly). They're now marketing droids. What has been the most effective way to approach this question with them? Have you ever managed to successfully counter or convert a marketing droid? Be concise:)
>Satellites at any altitude take *no* fuel to stay in orbit.
Actually no. Theoretically yes. But earth's atmosphere actually extends way way up there. I mean, it's a gas, and the molecules in a gas move, well, damn fast. The distribution of molecular speeds in the gas is stoichastic (pertaining to a random process), and also the upper layers can be, well, a bit warmer than down here. (Some are much colder too... don't ask me how it all works).
Anyways, the atmosphere doesn't just 'stop' at 100 miles, and so there is a big region where satelites will orbit for N years ( N being anywhere from 0 to infinity) while their orbits degrade... Certain events (solar, etc) can 'puff out' the atmosphere, causing a bit of variability in the decay of some orbits.
Anyone out there got a paper or graph of orbital decay physics? I know personally that I've seen writups showing lists of satelites, their orbital paths, and their expected decay times (which ranged from 10 years to 100,000 or more)..
> By what natural right does someone take whatever IP you have created, and do whatever they want freely?
My poor little brain is still trying to sort out 'natural rights', logic, and self-interest.
But there is one incontrovertible fact that I can point out: Copyrights are not forever.
Copyrights used to only last for 56 years, and that was only if you remembered to renew it on the 28th year. But the media industry has managed to get law after law passed, extending copyrights all the way out to 90 years. It's even worse for stuff made since 1978, which will be copyrighted for the life of the creator PLUS 70/95/120 years. See this.
Now for the logic: WHY? Why aren't copyrights forever? They must have had a reason? What were those reasons? What ARE the 'natural rights' that apply to IP?
The only reason most people consider 'copyrights' to be unalienable is that, well, how often do you seen one expire? And so we've become used to the idea that IP is a God given right that an individual can posess.
Notice I'm not arguing one way or the other. I haven't researched this, I don't think many of us have. We're all familiar with the results of the development of human thought on a myriad of things over a few thousand years of human history, but we've never taken part in the development of one! How long ago have we had something so fundamental to re-consider? Our ideas and opinions are going to be warped by the status-quo of recent history, by what we're used to, and by self interest...
I'd like to find out, what *are* all of the historical thoughts on the subject of the posession of IP. Why were the first copyright laws set up the way they were, with such short terms.
Yes, we're almost getting into the area of philosophy. We're going to be considering *utility*, what is best for mankind, the rights of society, etc...
This could be kind of interesting. Unfortunately, it took hundreds of years for all our other 'fundamental' ideas to gel, and I doubt our society is so advanced as to do any better with this one. We'd better get used to the idea that it might take a while before things get 'officially' straightened out... Especially with all the powerful corporations running around, and all the average shmoe's making the decisions in the legislative bodies. You know, maybe 50, 100 years.
Of course this time it might be a little different. This time, we, the people, have the net. And we can route it around 'damage' as we see fit.
Of course, who are we to think we have all the philisophical issues sorted out?
-NH
PS: Don't whine at me for my spelling of unalienable/inalienable - do you know how long it took me to track down the right spelling? I was stuck on inalieable and unalleable for ages:) Eventually went to the Declaration of Independence where I found the former version, but the latter is given more weight in some dictionaries.
PPS: Gosh it's such a shame a good post like this will be buried in a day old article.
> IF this guy was spamming ads for his site, why did you post a link to it on the front page of Slashdot?
So he'd get slashdotted?
Admit it, it's almost a punishment. There's no worry of him getting any business, his site is pathetic. Hell, that made it funny from my point of view.
Ahhhh, doesn't it make you feel all warm inside, to think that the fate of the 'net' is now left in the hands of some idiots and all their commoner idiot friends?
Good thing the net always routes around damage. I couldn't care less what ICANN and Netwerk-Solushunz do. We can always go off by ourselves and create 'Internet-2', and like Usenet-2 this time we'll put it together so the idiots can't get in.
*All* of their CGI is top notch. If you watch Reboot from it's first season through to it's third, which spans the real world years from the fall of 1994 to the summer of 1999, you can see the effect of increasing hardware speeds and experience in the quality of the CGI.
Starship Troopers is the *only* other TV CGI which I've seen that approaches the quality that Mainframe turns out. You say it's done by Foundation Imaging? Hmmm, a quick look at their website doesn't clearly indicate to me what other series they currently have under production. Can anyone familiar with the company tell us what other shows (with good CGI and storylines) they are making, other than the Starship Troopers stuff?
Finally, are there any other CGI houses out there doing work of the quality of Mainframe and Foundation?
>Nowhere does the original poster mention banning Napster. He/She seems more outraged about music piracy then banning some silly program.
I guess I took the following quote as 'anti' Napster, but basically you're right.
>>> You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a.. site such as Slashdot.
His comments hit quite close to home, and I started out trying to see what I could write if I tried very hard to eliminate my self interest bias. In the end I had a bunch of less than coherent rehash of what others have said so well, (which I discarded except for the item you noted), and the other insights that I eventually left in my post, which I've never seen anyone really bring up..
I guess I could have taken my post and put it somewhere else, as it ended up being not so much of a 'reply' to his post, but rather some thoughts on the marketplace aspect of things, the inevetability of the shift, and the only potential counter to Napster like technology being the advancement of societies morals...
You are right about 'rationalizing it away', there is a lot of 'conflict of self interest' when I try and think rationally about such things...
I won't repeat what others have said so wonderfully (pointing out that this tool is no different than FTP, Usenet, etc, other than it's popularity and effectiveness).
Now I know that if we don't make these highly effective tools illegal, you (the music industry and artists) will be at the utter mercy of the ethics and morals of the masses. But I think you're beginning to be at the mercy of something else that will have almost as big an effect:
Who says the amount of music being produced in this world today is the right amount? Or not enough? Clearly not the people listening to music, they're not screaming out loud willing to pay more and more money for it.
Furthermore, with technology making it possible for *ALL* music made worldwide to be available to *ANYONE* *ANYWHERE*, with *NO* distribution costs (I mean no packaging, middlemen, etc, I'm not talking about pirating), well, suddenly even if you didn't have Napster and ftp and usenet, you are faced with a MONUMENTAL increase in competition, AND decreased revenue due to the technological efficiencies introduced.
With such strains, something has to give. A lot of people in the industry have to lose their jobs, change careers, or find new niches or entirely new business models (or earn $50 million instead of 150 - admit it, both starving artists and superstars exist, and everything in between). Just like the industrial revolution, new efficiencies cause short term displacements and hardships.
Society will just have to come into equilibrium between supply and demand, where the 'demand' expressed in dollars spent is a LOT less than currently, and the supply has been suddenly vastly increased. The increased competition and decreased costs are fait accompli. And I'm afraid that nothing is going to stop the technology. It routes around damage all by itself. You're only hope is if a large enough percentage of the population don't pirate music, whether through lack of interest, skills, or favorable morals. We already have some data that's applicable to trying to predict how that will turn out - look towards current figures on software pirating.
Basically, I'm saying that:
a) You're screwed for sure,
b) and you're screwed some more, unless society finds it's morals, or develops a greater appreciation for your product and becomes naturally willing to pay as much as you would like for it.
Regarding that last point - personally I think that music never WAS worth more than a couple dollars per albumn. Hey, that's all the artists ever got. It's only now with real competition, choice, and market dynamics that the price of the product may reach it's natural level.
I mean, economies of scale have to come into it at some point, with *ANY* digital medium(*). If we can produce an nearly infinite number of widgets and give them to a nearly infinite number of people with nearly no cost.... how much should the widget be priced in the market? Software should be getting cheaper, better, faster, and offering more!! Not still stuck where it was 10 years ago, buggy as hell. And music sure shouldn't be costing me $20 per CD. Not if 5,000,000 of us have bought it. (Of course there has to be some markup for it's UNIQUENESS... the pure market goes a little wonky when you're talking about something unique...)
A now famous Canadian once said decades ago: "The medium is the message". I've never really been sure what it meant. But I might be a bit closer now.
Yes yes, I'm rationalizing it all away. Bite me.
I do know one thing for certain that isn't affected by my self interest:
IT'S COMING. YOU CAN'T STOP IT. NEITHER CAN I.
-NH
(*) - If all 100,000,000 of us can take and publish high quality digital pictures, how long before Bill Gates' expensive "digital photo archive" becomes worthless? The only thing in it worth anything will be the ones that can't be taken by one of us, and that means pictures of the past!
But it's not libel/slander, copyright, or porn that I'm worried about.
Libel/slander can be overcome by the things mentioned by the other replies to your post.
Copyright, well, it's been abused a bit too much by certain groups, and I like to think that this will force society to develop morally, or suffer less choice/product... of course with distribution being 'free', there might be too much competition globally for the current plethora of copyrightable products even without this... (I'm still not completely happy with my thoughts on being able to violate *all* copyrights. Sure the music/etc communities have abused us a bit, as well as the software communities, but I'm not so sure about others...)
And porn? Hell, that's 100% natural 'Mother-Nature' Made-by-God. Anyone with a problem with it, well, that's their problem.
But, the thing that people are sticking their heads in the sand about, and as you rightly pointed out - utterly ignoring - are the *really* nefarious things.
kiddy/rape/snuff/torture.
I do not like the idea of providing an untraceable channel for that stuff. Not at all.
The only thing the proponents are left with is quoting 'philosophy' and 'dogma'. Now the thing is I understand and feel for these philosophical urges, they are beautiful intellectual concepts, straight out of some Utopia, but only if one utterly ignores the real world, the darkest side. As Adam Lillith pointed out, "trying to deny that some of us are good, evil, or indifferent is insufferable." Technology may be inherently neutral, but that does NOT mean that there is an inherent reason to allow unfettered use of all forms of technology with no recourse.
So what am I left with? I am left with trying to evaluate the pro and cons from the view of a Realist.
Cars kill, what, 50,000 people per year in North America? Guns another 10,000. Just two of the most obvious examples.
How many people would be hurt (and how badly) by the existence of the darkest side? How does that weigh against the benefits over what we have now?
Remember, we're being realists. I want quantified answers.
There you have it. We're damned if we do, damned if we don't.
The one thing that screws up even myself when trying to think realistically, and what probably causes so much of the negative in others, is that when one tries to consider *any* kiddy/rape/snuff/torture content... well, it seems to outweigh things enourmously. Even the possibility of it is a big burden to consider...
> I don't like the fact that these companies are being penalized for selling a product that is legal to sell.
>If, as you say, the tobacco executives are murderers, then prosecute them as such. However, If the government is willing to let tobacco be legal for the reason that this is a free country people are free to consume products they know to be dangerous, then the tobacco executives are not murderers and the government should let the companies alone.
I agree, but have some perspectives to share as well.
Instead of saying 'government', I would rather use a term such as 'society' or 'all the lazy idiots in this country'. It's not some nefarious invisible un-touchable organization that allows things to exist or is responsible for the status quo or how things were, it is the collective actions of all of the people involved in society.
Also, instead of 'corporation', I like to think of a 'group of self interested executives with extremely limited terms', reflecting the fact that 'punishing' tobacco companies today is utterly idiotic. Who are 'tobacco companies'? They are publicly held corporations, whose executives were not in charge 20 years ago. It doesn't "punish" anyone effectivly! It's just all so idiotic.
Oddly, it's what I expect from a world full of idiots.
Ok, I'll calm down now and have a go at your points in detail -
1. Everyone is bound to do *something* a little bit right. Does that mean they should get away with murder, and the rest of us deal with all the OTHER consequences?
2. Damn straight. I wish I had the option of VB, Word, and Excell on every half decent OS from the start of the OS wars. The lack of it hasn't hurt me, but it has "forced" all the idiots in the world to think that they HAD to buy MS for home, to inter-operate with Work/Friends...
3. I don't think so. If I were the business manager of 'Application MS', I would want Word on every half decent OS on the planet, which would secure my market position even more.
4. You can't use NT here. We need to focus on MS's consumer OS, the one that affects the most people in the world. The one that has resulted in holding back "where computers should be and be capable of" by 10 years. I can't use my computer in the ways that I want because the OS would vaporize. What's that, get another OS? Due to the effects of MS's monopoly position, that immediately eliminates a LOT of what I can do (currently). We're all screwed until Linux catches up with MS, and admit it, we're just damn lucky that Linux ever came along, let alone lucky enough that I can dream of it catching MS. If it wasn't free, it wouldn't exist.
Punhishing MS for being too successful? Like we punish people for breaking the law really well? Lots of people that break the law have solid day jobs, should that excuse them? The Nazi's did a lot of good things for Germany...
We're not punishing them for being too successful. If they were really successful, everyone in the world would love them, and have nothing but nice things to say about their products. That is CLEARLY not the case. They've definitely being doing MANY other things WRONG, and some of those include breaking the law in ways that increase 'BAD THINGS' in this world, and I'm saying *I* am/will suffer because of it. ... .. . You know, if their consumer OS was *STABLE* (LAST year, or years past, not 2 years from now), I wouldn't be complaining. That they aren't selling Windows 2000 to the home user for a "home use" price is a horrific mistake. Win95 I understand. Win98 and WinMillenium are completely un-necessarilly foisting unstabillity and frustration on hundreds of millions of people. Bastards.
--------- Appendix A - What I initially wrote before I calmed down.
Breaking up Microsoft might result in all of the software that runs on Win9x and NT being ported to lots of other operating systems, without which no *average* idiot is going to seriously consider the alternate OS. ('Oooh, I can't buy that OS/system, I need to work on a Word document from work once in a blue moon').
Increasing competition in OSs might force MS to finally release a consumer OS that is a lot more extensible, stable, stable, and stable. Notice that last word. Currently, after 10+ years of effort, MS's consumer OS costs as much as it ever did (with more people than ever buying it, and software re-use a major part of any well built piece of software, shouldn't I be getting more for less?), and still crashes my system 2-3 times a day.
Don't give me any bull about "it's not MS's OS crashing", MS's consumer OS is allowing other software to crash it, and I can't even tell what causes it. It's a full blown crapshoot that burns down the entire city. No one little mistake should burn down the entire city. It should only burn down one house, and the fire-department should be able to contain even that level of damage.
It doesn't look like Nasa has a press release out for this one yet. Well, at least I can't find one on the page you quote. (Thanks none-the-less, now I have an afternoon's catching up to do:)
Providing convenient links to external sources of information is one thing that some news-sites are good at, and some are really bad at. There is one way down at the bottom of the MSNBC story that goes to a press releas from the researchers themselves (at Ohio State) that has slightly better images, but I had to hunt for the links and know what I was looking for.
I give MSNBC a 4 out of 10. A couple points for having links at all, a couple points for having more than one link, but no points for visibility or integration with the story, and I'm deducting a point because they never ever have click-throughs to decent sized images.
> Don't forget to include you cannot be running httpd on port 80
Au contraire. On my Win98 box before I had a webserver on port 80, MANY webpages would take forever to finish loading and wouldn't show anything while it was loading, just as if the 'ad' was taking longer to load and delaying the page (half the reason I added all these places to my hosts file). Eventually my browser would figure out that the 127.0.0.1 was 'unreachable' and finish loading the page.
Only when I started a webserver on port 80 would pages immediately finish loading, with my webserver feeding the 'ad spaces' with 404's.
The problem you describe, of occasional pages snapping to a full page 404, only happens due to javascript tricks some advertisers use. Turning javascript off fixes the problem.
I would LOVE to do what Chris Hiner and crow have described, so then I can leave JS on (although I often have it turned off anyways for security/control concerns), and there wouldn't be all those ad-sub-boxes and ad-frames with the big 404 messages in them (hmmm, I should change my 404 page to something pretty instead!).
I tried to do what Chris and crow described, but I'm not using apache and didn't get as far as finding out whether or not I could do something similar to what he describes with my webserver (Xitami). And I couldn't get a plain 404 page to work, nor replacing it with an image. There was this one page/site that I go to regularly whose Javascript was validating what it got back... I didn't bash my head on it too long anyways, as I just decided to go with javascript turned off for such places.
I really need a convenient button that turns on and off Javascript... Or better yet a rules based evaluator that I could configure to let certain types of javascript run but not others.. (writing the rules for that would be fun:)
> Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses).
Hey.. We can get that precious 'first to market' advantage!
Unfortunately there is also that horrible 'premature-technology thus low-cost-effectiveness' thing that slaughters those who run too far ahead.
All kidding aside, just a week or two ago there was a news-clip on one of the news/space channels up here in Canada which announced a Canadian mining company's joint venture with some US firm to mine an astoroid, IN A FEW YEARS.
Yeah yeah, hold on a sec. They're not planning on any orbital changes for the roid nor space-smelting:) The idea is to probe the roid in a few years, and if they find what they want, then they'll send the 'miner' sat/probe to extract the product and bring it back to earth orbit, where they'll sell it for hundreds to thousands of dollars per pound. (I forget the exact figure, but that range...).
They're goingn to sell it to NASA. In orbit.
Figured out what they're mining yet?
Yup, H20. Sure, on earth it's cheap, but in orbit, it's worth a lot more. And easy to mine from a snowy ball in space too! Just melt/vaporize in-situ and condense at the storage point, then ship.
The vid-clip showed a 3-d animation illustrating what is proposed. Both the initial probe and the subseequent miner bot looked smallish. I think the perceived cost was on the order of 2-500 million, and the payoff a couple hundred million, or was it 2-300% profit... Gosh I forget. It definitely wasn't $1-5 billion dollar range.
Yes yes, I immediately thought "aha! Slashdot fodder! Finally I get to submit a story", but un-fortunately I was completely unable to find any web based record of the 'story' or 'announcement'. And based on what I saw behind the guy being intervewed (it looked like he was at a booth or display at a trade show), I now think that they still might be looking for a backer, although that doesn't explain why it thus ended up being a 'joint-venture announced' type story...
So anyways, it might only be "one person or small company or research arm of a company with an animation of an idea looking for Mr Angel", akin to all the 'serious' Japanese/other corporate interest/'plans' to open up space and moon hotels:)
Anyone else see the clip I'm talking about? I think it might have been on the Canadain Discovery channel, or Cable Pulse 24, or the 'Space' channel. I never saw it repeated. Anyone know of a secondary source?
That's true. But as your geometry gets smaller, so does your vulnerability to smaller bits of dust and smaller defects / imperfections.
Of course there are other things: we know they've gotten yields up higher and higher per transistor, because they keep packing so many on... I think another poster implied that it must have simply been more cost/performance effective to design more complex single core chips than to try and do multi-cpu chips with the less complex cores...
There must be a technical/trade paper/review out there somewhere which details not only what all the issues, sub-issues, and permutations of issues have been over the past 10 years on this, but what the actual numbers/progress on each item have been, and how the math actually worked out along the way, and thus show what things were actually important in getting the yields high enough to do this. It would be an interesting read.
-NH
Hey zzg: Are you saying that the 486 SX's were chips which had defects/failures in their caches, and thus 'selected' for cache-disabling? (I knew they had their caches disabled, but I don't think I knew/figured that it was a by-product of the yield failures... I think I just figured it was a corporate decision to hobble and sell into the lower cost market...)
Slashdot Mirror
Aarrrggghhh. This was pointed out before, in an article a month or two ago. I guess it wasn't moderated high enough fast enough soon enough to educate everyone... I saw it, but it seems like most people did not.
This seems like a pretty clear case of '3rd party helping me excercise my fair use rights' to all of us. HOWEVER, that exact circumstance, having a 3rd party help you utilize your fair use rights which involves them physcially replicating copyright works in your name, was specifically made illegal (excluded from the tecnical definition of fair use) a long time ago, in a cassette-tape / something-or-other type case.
Basically, it was along the lines of the DMCA. They slipped one by you in the legislative system, you're screwed, I'm screwed, and so is MP3.com.
Of course I am not intimately familiar with the details, I just remember reading the post I mentioned above a month or two ago.
Can someone else please dig up the exact reference, or can someone who knows the real details that I am painfully trying to explain without the details myself, post them, and some nice people will moderate you all the way to the top?
I had initial troubles with the
Thus I've converted Bowie's .au file to 8KHz 32bit MP3. The full 1.2 MB file (4+ minutes) as well as a quarter meg 60 second snippet are available here.
Hmmm, shouldn't have called the page filename 'Moog' I guess. Oh, 15KB/s maximum bandwidth, from my home ADSL box. Be gentle :)
---
Send him a URL with the following parameters tacked on to the end:
"&commentsort=3&mode=thread"
Then he'll see it threaded with the highest ranked articles first.
---
But this is the first time the 'all Europeans descend from 7 women 180,000 years ago' aspect was pointed out. ( Not that I'm advocating dups per se, perhaps this story could have simply pointed out this aspect of the previous... )
This strikes me much differently than what seems to be indicated by most of the posts here already.
This awes me. That we've actually scientifically confirmed that one little tribe (or the roots of 7 little tribes) managed to fight their way though what passed for life for them, and the end result has been a large chunk of modern civilization.
For some reason it takes something like this to make me feel the wonder of something that could have been logically surmised and proposed beforehand.
I mean, logically you know that if our civilization manages to survive, it implies that:
But when is the last time something made your mouth drop open and think seriously and deeply about things like the above? When is the last time something happened and made it feel real?
I hope I've adequately expressed how this story makes me feel :)
Holy c_*p. Stuff that had been modded to 5 has been 'lost'? Ok, ok, nothing is forever, let alone a semi-vaporous medium like this, but still, for posterity's sake it would be nice to keep much of this stuff around. Especially since it's so possible. Especially the 5's. Have you tried Google's caches? Another (unfortunately less reachable) cache of information are the personal saved files of individuals. I occasionally save pages for my own future reference, and it includes a pair of hellmouth snippets ( Dec 15th ones... ).
My read on the article is that they are making their *own* array out of off the shelf like dishes, in order to keep costs way down. I do not see anything that says they are going to be doing 'distributed data acquisition' by linking together your and my satelite dishes. But the latter is a damn neat idea eh?!! I wonder what the challenges would be for such a thing? Probably 'tracking' and 'electronics', with everyone having different dishes and gains and stuff... It sounds like they had to do some work in order to make these things do what they want for their purposes, and now they're testing all of that... attempting to put together something that would work for all of our backyard dishes would be a lot more complicated, and there would likely be some extra cost (for someone) to 'upgrade' our dishes...
Phhht. Interesting how you suddenly started posting with this story. User number 176528 huh?
Ok, quickly now: What direction does the student center's doors face, where most students exit to get to a bus? In winter when you approach those doors, from your arts course, what is the last thing you likely 'rode'? In what direction does it run? From where? What is the big green space called? What is the number of the basic Chemistry course that all first years take? What was the name of the building it was taken in (no longer in existence)? What river runs by the U? What is between the South side of the U and the River? How many times in the last 15+ years has the Football team won the 'whole meatball'? What is the thing that I am referring to as the 'whole meatball'?
*** U of S Slashdot Forum ***
Anyways 'Garnet', if in fact that is your real name, here is the contents of my failed 'post' operation:
"SimulatorJournal=Bwaaaaaha+ha+ha+ha+ha+%21%21%21% 21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21%21++This+is+t he+funniest+most+in+depth+thing+I%27ve+seen+on+the +net+in+AGES%21%21%21"
If you aren't he, this'll be here for posterity in case he discovers it some day.
BTW: How does one find out what the current 'max-user-number' is? I don't want to have to go and create a junk account just to find this out... that would sort of skew the results :)
Hey! This was done at the UofS! I went there! Interesting how this was done years ago and supposedly received wide acclaim (if you go to the end and read the 'about' page or whatever...), I usually come across stuff like this sooner than this...
I like to think that I work at a small progressive company, one composed mostly of techies and engineers that would appreciate the advantages of Open Source / Free software. One that would show willingness to accept and use such outside tools and code.
However within the past 6 months a 'marketing' group has appeared, composed entirely of respected programmers and techies.
I was recently in a meeting/review of a new product, one for which we were considering various open-source databases and tools, and was quite taken aback when the head of marketing, a real tech head and respected software engineer, asked "So who supports this? There is a company out there that provides patches and support right?".
( To me this seems like an idiotic question. In the past 6 months we ourselves, a 'real' company, have abandoned ("end-of-life'd" in marketspeak) a product and left our best customers hanging, and here was the person who had made that 'end-of-life' product decision, demanding that another company exist to 'support' (for free) the free software we were considering using. )
What is the 'killer' counter to that question? What is the most effective retort? Remember, we're not speaking to engineers and techies here any more. (Even if they were formerly). They're now marketing droids. What has been the most effective way to approach this question with them? Have you ever managed to successfully counter or convert a marketing droid? Be concise :)
Actually no. Theoretically yes. But earth's atmosphere actually extends way way up there. I mean, it's a gas, and the molecules in a gas move, well, damn fast. The distribution of molecular speeds in the gas is stoichastic (pertaining to a random process), and also the upper layers can be, well, a bit warmer than down here. (Some are much colder too... don't ask me how it all works).
Anyways, the atmosphere doesn't just 'stop' at 100 miles, and so there is a big region where satelites will orbit for N years ( N being anywhere from 0 to infinity) while their orbits degrade... Certain events (solar, etc) can 'puff out' the atmosphere, causing a bit of variability in the decay of some orbits.
Here is a graph on the ionosphere.
And one on the temperature range of the atmosphere, with the exosphere going past 500 KM.
And a nice general NASA page on the atmosphere, focusing mostly on stuff below the exosphere.
Anyone out there got a paper or graph of orbital decay physics? I know personally that I've seen writups showing lists of satelites, their orbital paths, and their expected decay times (which ranged from 10 years to 100,000 or more)..
My poor little brain is still trying to sort out 'natural rights', logic, and self-interest.
But there is one incontrovertible fact that I can point out: Copyrights are not forever.
Copyrights used to only last for 56 years, and that was only if you remembered to renew it on the 28th year. But the media industry has managed to get law after law passed, extending copyrights all the way out to 90 years. It's even worse for stuff made since 1978, which will be copyrighted for the life of the creator PLUS 70/95/120 years. See this.
Now for the logic: WHY? Why aren't copyrights forever? They must have had a reason? What were those reasons? What ARE the 'natural rights' that apply to IP?
The only reason most people consider 'copyrights' to be unalienable is that, well, how often do you seen one expire? And so we've become used to the idea that IP is a God given right that an individual can posess.
Notice I'm not arguing one way or the other. I haven't researched this, I don't think many of us have. We're all familiar with the results of the development of human thought on a myriad of things over a few thousand years of human history, but we've never taken part in the development of one! How long ago have we had something so fundamental to re-consider? Our ideas and opinions are going to be warped by the status-quo of recent history, by what we're used to, and by self interest...
I'd like to find out, what *are* all of the historical thoughts on the subject of the posession of IP. Why were the first copyright laws set up the way they were, with such short terms.
Yes, we're almost getting into the area of philosophy. We're going to be considering *utility*, what is best for mankind, the rights of society, etc...
This could be kind of interesting. Unfortunately, it took hundreds of years for all our other 'fundamental' ideas to gel, and I doubt our society is so advanced as to do any better with this one. We'd better get used to the idea that it might take a while before things get 'officially' straightened out... Especially with all the powerful corporations running around, and all the average shmoe's making the decisions in the legislative bodies. You know, maybe 50, 100 years.
Of course this time it might be a little different. This time, we, the people, have the net. And we can route it around 'damage' as we see fit.
Of course, who are we to think we have all the philisophical issues sorted out?
PS: Don't whine at me for my spelling of unalienable/inalienable - do you know how long it took me to track down the right spelling? I was stuck on inalieable and unalleable for agesPPS: Gosh it's such a shame a good post like this will be buried in a day old article.
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So he'd get slashdotted?
Admit it, it's almost a punishment. There's no worry of him getting any business, his site is pathetic. Hell, that made it funny from my point of view.
Ahhhh, doesn't it make you feel all warm inside, to think that the fate of the 'net' is now left in the hands of some idiots and all their commoner idiot friends?
Good thing the net always routes around damage. I couldn't care less what ICANN and Netwerk-Solushunz do. We can always go off by ourselves and create 'Internet-2', and like Usenet-2 this time we'll put it together so the idiots can't get in.
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The Beast Wars and Machines are produced by Mainframe Entertainment of Vancouver. They also create 'War Planets/Shadow Raiders', and did (and will do more) Reboot.
*All* of their CGI is top notch. If you watch Reboot from it's first season through to it's third, which spans the real world years from the fall of 1994 to the summer of 1999, you can see the effect of increasing hardware speeds and experience in the quality of the CGI.
Starship Troopers is the *only* other TV CGI which I've seen that approaches the quality that Mainframe turns out. You say it's done by Foundation Imaging? Hmmm, a quick look at their website doesn't clearly indicate to me what other series they currently have under production. Can anyone familiar with the company tell us what other shows (with good CGI and storylines) they are making, other than the Starship Troopers stuff?
Finally, are there any other CGI houses out there doing work of the quality of Mainframe and Foundation?
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>Nowhere does the original poster mention banning Napster. He/She seems more outraged about music piracy then banning some silly program.
I guess I took the following quote as 'anti' Napster, but basically you're right.
>>> You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a .. site such as Slashdot.
His comments hit quite close to home, and I started out trying to see what I could write if I tried very hard to eliminate my self interest bias. In the end I had a bunch of less than coherent rehash of what others have said so well, (which I discarded except for the item you noted), and the other insights that I eventually left in my post, which I've never seen anyone really bring up..
I guess I could have taken my post and put it somewhere else, as it ended up being not so much of a 'reply' to his post, but rather some thoughts on the marketplace aspect of things, the inevetability of the shift, and the only potential counter to Napster like technology being the advancement of societies morals...
You are right about 'rationalizing it away', there is a lot of 'conflict of self interest' when I try and think rationally about such things...
I won't repeat what others have said so wonderfully (pointing out that this tool is no different than FTP, Usenet, etc, other than it's popularity and effectiveness).
Now I know that if we don't make these highly effective tools illegal, you (the music industry and artists) will be at the utter mercy of the ethics and morals of the masses. But I think you're beginning to be at the mercy of something else that will have almost as big an effect:
Who says the amount of music being produced in this world today is the right amount? Or not enough? Clearly not the people listening to music, they're not screaming out loud willing to pay more and more money for it.
Furthermore, with technology making it possible for *ALL* music made worldwide to be available to *ANYONE* *ANYWHERE*, with *NO* distribution costs (I mean no packaging, middlemen, etc, I'm not talking about pirating), well, suddenly even if you didn't have Napster and ftp and usenet, you are faced with a MONUMENTAL increase in competition, AND decreased revenue due to the technological efficiencies introduced.
With such strains, something has to give. A lot of people in the industry have to lose their jobs, change careers, or find new niches or entirely new business models (or earn $50 million instead of 150 - admit it, both starving artists and superstars exist, and everything in between). Just like the industrial revolution, new efficiencies cause short term displacements and hardships.
Society will just have to come into equilibrium between supply and demand, where the 'demand' expressed in dollars spent is a LOT less than currently, and the supply has been suddenly vastly increased. The increased competition and decreased costs are fait accompli. And I'm afraid that nothing is going to stop the technology. It routes around damage all by itself. You're only hope is if a large enough percentage of the population don't pirate music, whether through lack of interest, skills, or favorable morals. We already have some data that's applicable to trying to predict how that will turn out - look towards current figures on software pirating.
Basically, I'm saying that:
a) You're screwed for sure,
b) and you're screwed some more, unless society finds it's morals, or develops a greater appreciation for your product and becomes naturally willing to pay as much as you would like for it.
Regarding that last point - personally I think that music never WAS worth more than a couple dollars per albumn. Hey, that's all the artists ever got. It's only now with real competition, choice, and market dynamics that the price of the product may reach it's natural level.
I mean, economies of scale have to come into it at some point, with *ANY* digital medium(*). If we can produce an nearly infinite number of widgets and give them to a nearly infinite number of people with nearly no cost.... how much should the widget be priced in the market? Software should be getting cheaper, better, faster, and offering more!! Not still stuck where it was 10 years ago, buggy as hell. And music sure shouldn't be costing me $20 per CD. Not if 5,000,000 of us have bought it. (Of course there has to be some markup for it's UNIQUENESS... the pure market goes a little wonky when you're talking about something unique...)
A now famous Canadian once said decades ago: "The medium is the message". I've never really been sure what it meant. But I might be a bit closer now.
Yes yes, I'm rationalizing it all away. Bite me.
I do know one thing for certain that isn't affected by my self interest:
IT'S COMING. YOU CAN'T STOP IT. NEITHER CAN I.
(*) - If all 100,000,000 of us can take and publish high quality digital pictures, how long before Bill Gates' expensive "digital photo archive" becomes worthless? The only thing in it worth anything will be the ones that can't be taken by one of us, and that means pictures of the past!I agree. Some of the stories may have merit, some were a little out there, and others were pathetic.
My favorite was the one about US soldiers 'killing and eating poor defenceless rabbits'... Bwah ha ha ha!!!
Seriously! It was #25 on the list.
> are burying their heads in the sand
Yes!
But it's not libel/slander, copyright, or porn that I'm worried about.
Libel/slander can be overcome by the things mentioned by the other replies to your post.
Copyright, well, it's been abused a bit too much by certain groups, and I like to think that this will force society to develop morally, or suffer less choice/product... of course with distribution being 'free', there might be too much competition globally for the current plethora of copyrightable products even without this... (I'm still not completely happy with my thoughts on being able to violate *all* copyrights. Sure the music/etc communities have abused us a bit, as well as the software communities, but I'm not so sure about others...)
And porn? Hell, that's 100% natural 'Mother-Nature' Made-by-God. Anyone with a problem with it, well, that's their problem.
But, the thing that people are sticking their heads in the sand about, and as you rightly pointed out - utterly ignoring - are the *really* nefarious things.
kiddy/rape/snuff/torture.
I do not like the idea of providing an untraceable channel for that stuff. Not at all.
The only thing the proponents are left with is quoting 'philosophy' and 'dogma'. Now the thing is I understand and feel for these philosophical urges, they are beautiful intellectual concepts, straight out of some Utopia, but only if one utterly ignores the real world, the darkest side. As Adam Lillith pointed out, "trying to deny that some of us are good, evil, or indifferent is insufferable." Technology may be inherently neutral, but that does NOT mean that there is an inherent reason to allow unfettered use of all forms of technology with no recourse.
So what am I left with? I am left with trying to evaluate the pro and cons from the view of a Realist.
Cars kill, what, 50,000 people per year in North America? Guns another 10,000. Just two of the most obvious examples.
How many people would be hurt (and how badly) by the existence of the darkest side? How does that weigh against the benefits over what we have now?
Remember, we're being realists. I want quantified answers.
There you have it. We're damned if we do, damned if we don't.
The one thing that screws up even myself when trying to think realistically, and what probably causes so much of the negative in others, is that when one tries to consider *any* kiddy/rape/snuff/torture content... well, it seems to outweigh things enourmously. Even the possibility of it is a big burden to consider...
>If, as you say, the tobacco executives are murderers, then prosecute them as such. However, If the government is willing to let tobacco be legal for the reason that this is a free country people are free to consume products they know to be dangerous, then the tobacco executives are not murderers and the government should let the companies alone.
I agree, but have some perspectives to share as well.
Instead of saying 'government', I would rather use a term such as 'society' or 'all the lazy idiots in this country'. It's not some nefarious invisible un-touchable organization that allows things to exist or is responsible for the status quo or how things were, it is the collective actions of all of the people involved in society.
Also, instead of 'corporation', I like to think of a 'group of self interested executives with extremely limited terms', reflecting the fact that 'punishing' tobacco companies today is utterly idiotic. Who are 'tobacco companies'? They are publicly held corporations, whose executives were not in charge 20 years ago. It doesn't "punish" anyone effectivly! It's just all so idiotic.
Oddly, it's what I expect from a world full of idiots.
Ok, I'll calm down now and have a go at your points in detail -
1. Everyone is bound to do *something* a little bit right. Does that mean they should get away with murder, and the rest of us deal with all the OTHER consequences?
2. Damn straight. I wish I had the option of VB, Word, and Excell on every half decent OS from the start of the OS wars. The lack of it hasn't hurt me, but it has "forced" all the idiots in the world to think that they HAD to buy MS for home, to inter-operate with Work/Friends...
3. I don't think so. If I were the business manager of 'Application MS', I would want Word on every half decent OS on the planet, which would secure my market position even more.
4. You can't use NT here. We need to focus on MS's consumer OS, the one that affects the most people in the world. The one that has resulted in holding back "where computers should be and be capable of" by 10 years. I can't use my computer in the ways that I want because the OS would vaporize. What's that, get another OS? Due to the effects of MS's monopoly position, that immediately eliminates a LOT of what I can do (currently). We're all screwed until Linux catches up with MS, and admit it, we're just damn lucky that Linux ever came along, let alone lucky enough that I can dream of it catching MS. If it wasn't free, it wouldn't exist.
Punhishing MS for being too successful? Like we punish people for breaking the law really well? Lots of people that break the law have solid day jobs, should that excuse them? The Nazi's did a lot of good things for Germany...
We're not punishing them for being too successful. If they were really successful, everyone in the world would love them, and have nothing but nice things to say about their products. That is CLEARLY not the case. They've definitely being doing MANY other things WRONG, and some of those include breaking the law in ways that increase 'BAD THINGS' in this world, and I'm saying *I* am/will suffer because of it.
...
..
.
You know, if their consumer OS was *STABLE* (LAST year, or years past, not 2 years from now), I wouldn't be complaining. That they aren't selling Windows 2000 to the home user for a "home use" price is a horrific mistake. Win95 I understand. Win98 and WinMillenium are completely un-necessarilly foisting unstabillity and frustration on hundreds of millions of people. Bastards.
--------- Appendix A - What I initially wrote before I calmed down.
Breaking up Microsoft might result in all of the software that runs on Win9x and NT being ported to lots of other operating systems, without which no *average* idiot is going to seriously consider the alternate OS. ('Oooh, I can't buy that OS/system, I need to work on a Word document from work once in a blue moon').
Increasing competition in OSs might force MS to finally release a consumer OS that is a lot more extensible, stable, stable, and stable. Notice that last word. Currently, after 10+ years of effort, MS's consumer OS costs as much as it ever did (with more people than ever buying it, and software re-use a major part of any well built piece of software, shouldn't I be getting more for less?), and still crashes my system 2-3 times a day.
Don't give me any bull about "it's not MS's OS crashing", MS's consumer OS is allowing other software to crash it, and I can't even tell what causes it. It's a full blown crapshoot that burns down the entire city. No one little mistake should burn down the entire city. It should only burn down one house, and the fire-department should be able to contain even that level of damage.
Certainly. A quick google search finds us these two existing references.
This from canadanews.about.com
and
another from www.indiatribune.com
It doesn't look like Nasa has a press release out for this one yet. Well, at least I can't find one on the page you quote. (Thanks none-the-less, now I have an afternoon's catching up to do
Providing convenient links to external sources of information is one thing that some news-sites are good at, and some are really bad at. There is one way down at the bottom of the MSNBC story that goes to a press releas from the researchers themselves (at Ohio State) that has slightly better images, but I had to hunt for the links and know what I was looking for.
I give MSNBC a 4 out of 10. A couple points for having links at all, a couple points for having more than one link, but no points for visibility or integration with the story, and I'm deducting a point because they never ever have click-throughs to decent sized images.
My solution was to turn off Javascript.
> Don't forget to include you cannot be running httpd on port 80
Au contraire. On my Win98 box before I had a webserver on port 80, MANY webpages would take forever to finish loading and wouldn't show anything while it was loading, just as if the 'ad' was taking longer to load and delaying the page (half the reason I added all these places to my hosts file). Eventually my browser would figure out that the 127.0.0.1 was 'unreachable' and finish loading the page.
Only when I started a webserver on port 80 would pages immediately finish loading, with my webserver feeding the 'ad spaces' with 404's.
The problem you describe, of occasional pages snapping to a full page 404, only happens due to javascript tricks some advertisers use. Turning javascript off fixes the problem.
I would LOVE to do what Chris Hiner and crow have described, so then I can leave JS on (although I often have it turned off anyways for security/control concerns), and there wouldn't be all those ad-sub-boxes and ad-frames with the big 404 messages in them (hmmm, I should change my 404 page to something pretty instead!).
I tried to do what Chris and crow described, but I'm not using apache and didn't get as far as finding out whether or not I could do something similar to what he describes with my webserver (Xitami). And I couldn't get a plain 404 page to work, nor replacing it with an image. There was this one page/site that I go to regularly whose Javascript was validating what it got back... I didn't bash my head on it too long anyways, as I just decided to go with javascript turned off for such places.
I really need a convenient button that turns on and off Javascript... Or better yet a rules based evaluator that I could configure to let certain types of javascript run but not others.. (writing the rules for that would be fun :)
> Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses).
Hey.. We can get that precious 'first to market' advantage!
Unfortunately there is also that horrible 'premature-technology thus low-cost-effectiveness' thing that slaughters those who run too far ahead.
All kidding aside, just a week or two ago there was a news-clip on one of the news/space channels up here in Canada which announced a Canadian mining company's joint venture with some US firm to mine an astoroid, IN A FEW YEARS.
Yeah yeah, hold on a sec. They're not planning on any orbital changes for the roid nor space-smelting :) The idea is to probe the roid in a few years, and if they find what they want, then they'll send the 'miner' sat/probe to extract the product and bring it back to earth orbit, where they'll sell it for hundreds to thousands of dollars per pound. (I forget the exact figure, but that range...).
They're goingn to sell it to NASA. In orbit.
Figured out what they're mining yet?
Yup, H20. Sure, on earth it's cheap, but in orbit, it's worth a lot more. And easy to mine from a snowy ball in space too! Just melt/vaporize in-situ and condense at the storage point, then ship.
The vid-clip showed a 3-d animation illustrating what is proposed. Both the initial probe and the subseequent miner bot looked smallish. I think the perceived cost was on the order of 2-500 million, and the payoff a couple hundred million, or was it 2-300% profit... Gosh I forget. It definitely wasn't $1-5 billion dollar range.
Yes yes, I immediately thought "aha! Slashdot fodder! Finally I get to submit a story", but un-fortunately I was completely unable to find any web based record of the 'story' or 'announcement'. And based on what I saw behind the guy being intervewed (it looked like he was at a booth or display at a trade show), I now think that they still might be looking for a backer, although that doesn't explain why it thus ended up being a 'joint-venture announced' type story...
So anyways, it might only be "one person or small company or research arm of a company with an animation of an idea looking for Mr Angel", akin to all the 'serious' Japanese/other corporate interest/'plans' to open up space and moon hotels :)
Anyone else see the clip I'm talking about? I think it might have been on the Canadain Discovery channel, or Cable Pulse 24, or the 'Space' channel. I never saw it repeated. Anyone know of a secondary source?
That's true. But as your geometry gets smaller, so does your vulnerability to smaller bits of dust and smaller defects / imperfections.
Of course there are other things: we know they've gotten yields up higher and higher per transistor, because they keep packing so many on... I think another poster implied that it must have simply been more cost/performance effective to design more complex single core chips than to try and do multi-cpu chips with the less complex cores...
There must be a technical/trade paper/review out there somewhere which details not only what all the issues, sub-issues, and permutations of issues have been over the past 10 years on this, but what the actual numbers/progress on each item have been, and how the math actually worked out along the way, and thus show what things were actually important in getting the yields high enough to do this. It would be an interesting read.
-NH
Hey zzg: Are you saying that the 486 SX's were chips which had defects/failures in their caches, and thus 'selected' for cache-disabling? (I knew they had their caches disabled, but I don't think I knew/figured that it was a by-product of the yield failures... I think I just figured it was a corporate decision to hobble and sell into the lower cost market...)