No, it means it's illegal to do so for somebody else (and charge for it) for one of the reasons enumerated under the applicable statue (as posted above). Or simply get a license to do so.
I don't think anybody really understands the reason Polaroid is still a popular medium. I'll give you a hint, it's got nothing to do with any of the bloody technical aspects of the film. It's not about megapixels or instant gratification. More than anything, Polaroids have a quirkiness and charm to them that isn't reproduced by anything else.
I'm a hobbyist photographer and even though most of my gear is digital, there's something to be said for some of the old school methods. Every once in a while I'll go out on a nice day and run a roll or two of slide film through my camera. Generally I'll take just one prime lens out for the afternoon and I won't finish until I'm out of film. Send the film out for development, wait several days, and get back about 98% crap. There's no cloning, airbrushing, leveling or curving. The exposure has to be spot on or it'll turn our too dark to see through or virtually transparent. Why do I do this? The one or two keepers you do get are something special. The tonal range, the color saturation: there's nothing digital that can compete.
Polaroids are even neater. Sure you can get functionally the same thing with any consumer point and shoot digital camera (take picture, check LCD, print later), but in comparison, the images you get can only be described as bland and mechanical. Not to mention watching your picture develop almost magically as you shake it. It's a great date idea too if you can find the equipment. Unfortunately, the film is now prohibitively expensive for shooting casually.
There are still enthusiasts who scour ebay only for long-expired Polaroids because of the unique color shifts that they give. There's also unexpired film still selling on ebay for well over $1/exposure. That's for a 3" square image that's got virtually no redeeming technical qualities to it. Again, there's NOTHING digital that compares.
It may sound hokey, but TFA puts it pretty bluntly:
âoeIt used to be something you use for a lighting test,â Ms. Bukowska said. âoeNow it is the art itself.â
Women often say no to men. Men have had to...[snip]... write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.
At this time, we are not including any support for proprietary audio or video codecs that are not already distributed with Ubuntu 7.04. These include MPEG 1/2/3/4, WMA, WMV, DVD, Quicktime, etc. We are evaluating options for providing this support in the future.
I personally don't like this idea at all. If there's serious corporate backing behind Linux, I feel like Dell would do best to pay the license fee for at least some particular codecs (e.g. mp3). However, I don't feel like it would be a failure by any stretch of the imagination that these codecs are not provided standard. For anyone intelligent enough to purposely buy an Ubuntu box will be able to find their answer in google rather trivially. Anyone who can't manage that is likely not going to be able to download mp3s onto the box in the first place.
Another (slightly tangential) thing I'd be curious to see would be whether or not samba is running by default on an Ubuntu box. While having Windows networking available by default would be nifty, I don't know if the patent/security issues would permit it. Anyone with insight on this?
If we use dual layer blu-ray discs at 50gb/disc that comes to 3.07 petabytes (x10^15). I'll use your 200 hour delivery time, which means we have an overall speed of 269.09GB/s (3467250000000000 bytes / 12000 seconds). You can keep your internet2, although I -will- cede that it gets better gas mileage.
You sure have a funny definition of "hour." Last I checked, there were 3,600 seconds to an hour, not 60. Redoing your calculations with a value of 720,000 seconds gives us roughly 4.48GB/s or nearly 36Gbps. While this is still a good bit faster than the 9Gbps demonstrated by this Internet2, however, researchers believe that Internet8 is not far away and will roughly equal the total bandwidth of the current demonstration. Alternately, there's a senator from Alaska with a relatively large truck that can fit at far more than four Internets, thus surpassing your station wagon methods.
Now I would also like to posit a theorem: Analogies that attempt to determine bandwidth rates in volkswagen beetles, station wagons of dvds or libraries of congress will inevitably fail due to a improper rounding or estimation, mistaken conversion, misplaced decimal points, or a fatal misunderstanding between the nature of bits and bites.
Close, but not quite. I think you have your definitions backwards. Replace "electrical" with "physical" and "lanes of signaling" with "electrical lanes" and you've got it. The Wikipedia article explains it better that I would be able to.
A connection between any two PCIe devices is known as a "link", and is built up from a collection of 1 or more lanes. All devices must minimally support single-lane (x1) link. Devices may optionally support wider links composed of 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, or 32 lanes. This allows for very good compatibility in two ways: A PCIe card will physically fit (and work correctly) in any slot that is at least as large as it is (e.g. an x1 sized card will work in any sized slot), and a slot of a large physical size (e.g. x16) can be wired electrically with fewer lanes (e.g. x1 or x8) as long as it provides the power and ground connections required by the larger physical slot size. In both cases, PCIe will negotiate the highest mutually supported number of lanes. It is not possible to place a physically larger PCIe card (e.g. a 16x sized card) into a smaller slot, even though the two would be signal-compatible if it were possible.
That way when new hard-drives get released, reviewers can pull them apart and judge them on something other than read/write performance, heat, and acoustics...
You forgot one metric of comparison: the warranty. As far as I'm concerned, this number alone is the most important in determining the reliability of the hard drive. If the manufacturer is willing to say "This drive will last for X years or we replace it free," it speaks volumes about their confidence behind their product. When buying hard drives, I actively seek out drives with at least a 3 (preferably 5) year warranty (some Hitachis and Seagates IIRC) and explicitly avoid those with only a 1 year warranty period (I'm looking at you WD).
For a website dedicated to the tech crowd, you'd think somebody had tried to dig up the actual policy (it's the first PDF link). The policy in question is likely number 22 on page 3. It states:
The following is prohibited conduct for any individual using ITS managed computers or
networks:
...
22. Anonymous use, or use of pseudonyms on a computer system or computer network
to escape responsibility. No person shall use a computer system or computer
network anonymously or use pseudonyms to attempt to escape from prosecution of
laws or regulations, or otherwise to escape responsibility for their actions.
Obviously using Tor qualifies as "anonymous use," but whether or not it's being used "to escape responsibility for [an individual's] actions" is certainly a judgment call. It's entirely likely that the writer(s) of the policy simply never took into account either explicitly allowing or preventing the use of Tor as a matter of policy.
In my experience, in-game ads haven't been terribly burdensome to look at, and in many cases they blend in reasonably well so as not to detract from the overall experience (TFA mentions NBA Live, where banner ads can even add to the realism as seen on TV). On the bright side, selling advertisements subsidizes the cost of the game for the consumer at the expense of the product being advertised. For those of you feeling smugly superior because you intentionally disregard the ads, congratulations, your game was made cheaper because of them.
Also, if you think about your comment for a moment, the idea that an advertisement costs the consumer twice is illogical. If the advertisements are avoided (and precious brainpower is consumed to NOT buy the product being marketed), the costs incurred by the marketing department AREN'T passed on to the consumer (who doesn't buy the product after all). If the consumer does buy the product, it's unlikely s/he spent a great deal of time avoiding the ad.
Furthermore, I'd like to point out that advertisements aren't inherently good or bad. It's entirely possible that an advertisement made a consumer aware of a product that a producer was producing. It's possible that said consumer now enjoys a greater economic utility per dollar than with whatever alternative s/he was using prior to seeing the advertisement.
Finally, (and I think we/. folk seem to forget this) many people actually prefer the higher priced name brand product to the lesser known generic. Whether it be spiffier packaging, clever marketing, or simply the fact that "everyone else does it," many people make purchasing decisions on more than simply price/performance or whatever similar metric you care to devise. Believe it or not, something as simple as the container a beverage comes in can unconsciously affect the taste. Try serving cheap plastic bottle vodka in a handle of Grey Goose to your friends and see if they can tell the difference. (note: great for college parties!) Bonus points for swapping the good stuff into the plastic bottle and seeing whether its the beverage they prefer, or just the packaging. (For a much better perspective, check out the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The Wikipedia entry doesn't do it justice, but the book is a great read.)
IANAL, but something about this tells me that a decent lawyer could find something to get this evidence dismissed against both parties due to improper police handling of evidence.
Check out Rakas v. Illinois. Specifically, scroll down to II.A for the real juicy part.
A person who is aggrieved by an illegal search and seizure only through the introduction of damaging evidence secured by a search of a third person's premises or property has not had any of his Fourth Amendment rights infringed.... And since the exclusionary rule is an attempt to effectuate the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment,... it is proper to permit only defendants whose Fourth Amendment rights have been violated to benefit from the rule's protections.
For more information, just start clicking on some of the links that Rehnquist cited in defense of his decision. It's pretty much a well held principle that you have no right to complain (i.e. no standing under the exclusionary rule) when SOMEBODY ELSE'S fourth amendment rights have been violated.
This has nothing to do with Public Domain and everything to do with WHO has the expectation of privacy.
An analogy if you will. Suppose you and I commit a crime, the evidence of which is stashed at your house. The police come busting down your door without a warrant and find said evidence. In this case, your right to privacy has been violated and the evidence found cannot be used against you. However, this evidence can still be used against me. Why? Because I had no expectation of privacy IN YOUR HOUSE. As far as the law is concerned, the evidence found against me is as legitimate as if you had turned it in yourself.
Back to the email thing, the minute you send an email to an outside party, you voluntarily concede your expectation of privacy as YOU were the one who freely divulged whatever information was in that email.
Halloween, however, is celebrated on October 31, therefore, it's only superstitious for those crazy Europeans who insist on writing the date backwards.
Ok guys, CUT THE SHIT!! It's four in the morning and the last thing I want to do is request a new password just to finish posting a comment and come back to find new comments that prompt me to need to go back to my email and login AGAIN
See, some of us just don't ever logout and everytime I come back to my computer Slashdot is waiting happily for me to return. but you couldn't just let that be, could you? nooooooooooo... every JACKASS WITH AN AGENDA and a COMPLETELY UNFUNNY SIG has to dick me around tonight instead of just letting me post in peace.
Anybody with a medical degree around here that can point to some definitive definition of the word "addiction" and what it means, medically?
I have no medical degree, but from what I gather, there is no universally medically accepted definition of "addiction." I believe practitioners prefer to use terms such as "habituation" "tolerance" and "dependence." Our friend Wikipedia outlines some of the different models and medical definition of addiction and drug addiction.
You all miss the point (I speak for the majority of replies to this post, as well as the parent). The problem with Microsoft's redefinition of "genuine" has little to do with counterfeit or pirated copies of Microsoft software. In all reality, Microsoft secretly loves the fact that their products are pirated. It costs them absolutely nothing, and the alternative is much more threatening to MS in the long term. While they may lose a few bucks to a kid in the US who may have bought a license if he couldn't pirate it, they stand to lose a lot more if the thousands of people who CANNOT afford a license (think third world countries in Asia) were to use the alternative (free) operating system.
Call me crazy, but I think that the real reason Microsoft is trying to play word games with consumers (and the biggest reason for the registering-one-copy-of-Windows-to-a-given-set-of- hardware-and-if-you-change-your-video-card-you're- a-pirate Advantage Tool) is to prevent the legitimate resale of "used" windows licenses. I know in the past it's been tried (with varied success) for certain companies to resell copies of Windows and Office that are no longer in use. IIRC, some of the dot-bombs were able to unload leftover software licenses, and eBay has taken issue with some perfectly legitimate software sales.
What I think has Microsoft really worried is the thought of the legitimate resale of "Genuine" Microsoft software. Imagine buying a $300 Dell with Vista preinstalled on it, wiping the drive, installing Linux and making a nice chunk of change on eBay with the leftover product key. Doctrine of First Sale anybody? This of course, could put a significant dent in MS's wallet, and as dictated by shareholders, the first rule of Corporate America states that this cannot be so. Ergo, Mr. Webster takes a backseat and by our new definition, any transaction that does not directly profit Microsoft can not and will not be "Genuine"(TM)
Shhhh.... Did you hear that? That's the sound of the lossy DRM quantum heisencompression encoding the grandparent used. What does that sound like exactly? It sounds just like a joke going right over your head.
In all seriousness though, this "Posture Minder" thing is nonsense. I'd be willing to bet it's nothing more then an overpriced motion sensor with a few health tips. My advice? Invest in a post-it note or two (or schedule a periodic alarm) and remember to get up and stretch every once in a while.
The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead.
How exactly is this a problem? I can speak from experience (and anecdotal evidence == cold hard data 'round these parts) that posting lectures online is certainly not going to prevent students from going to class. Furthermore, you're going to have students that don't want to go to class regardless of having the lectures online (I'm sure you're well aware of this, especially if you've had to teach an 8am class). What I think you should realize is that students not coming to class is NOT a personal knock on you, your teaching abilities, the size of your penis, or anything else.
Another thing that you should realize is that while some students [sarcasm]obviously[/sarcasm] have much better things to do than going to class, that doesn't mean they don't want to learn. One of my favorite classes last year was a psych class where the professor posted her powerpoint lecture notes before class. They were great to print out and bring to class (when I went) and great to print out and study from when 9am Monday morning just wasn't an option. Honestly, do you think you're benefitting the students that don't go to class by trying to withhold the lecture notes? If you're that hell-bent on having students attend, give extra points for attendance or class participation. Or *gasp* grade the students on what pertinent subject matter they actually learned. Let tests and quizzes speak for themselves. If studends can learn on their own with just the lecture notes, let them be. Some students left to their own devices can thumb through a book and listen to a class lecture at the gym and learn just as much as by attending classes. If they have questions on the material, they're perfectly capable of attending class or finding you during office hours.
As a student, I say don't be a hardass and let students learn how they feel they should. If they don't attend and fail, it's no skin off your back. If they don't attend and pass with flying colors, let them be. Don't try to DRM your class lectures just to encourage attendance. More than anything, I think you'll just alienate the ones that don't like coming to class anyway. Don't try to get cute and just post the flippin' podcasts.
My leftover burritos and uncooked ramen can "receive" the WiFi "signals" my microwave transmits very well (2.4 GHz and all that). The actual bill that TFA links to spells it out a bit better though. Among other things are this wonderful nugget:
(b) This section shall only apply to devices that include an
integrated and enabled wireless access point and that are used in a
federally unlicensed spectrum.
Funny enough, the word "receive" isn't present in the actual bill itself. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it means it's illegal to do so for somebody else (and charge for it) for one of the reasons enumerated under the applicable statue (as posted above). Or simply get a license to do so.
I don't think anybody really understands the reason Polaroid is still a popular medium. I'll give you a hint, it's got nothing to do with any of the bloody technical aspects of the film. It's not about megapixels or instant gratification. More than anything, Polaroids have a quirkiness and charm to them that isn't reproduced by anything else.
I'm a hobbyist photographer and even though most of my gear is digital, there's something to be said for some of the old school methods. Every once in a while I'll go out on a nice day and run a roll or two of slide film through my camera. Generally I'll take just one prime lens out for the afternoon and I won't finish until I'm out of film. Send the film out for development, wait several days, and get back about 98% crap. There's no cloning, airbrushing, leveling or curving. The exposure has to be spot on or it'll turn our too dark to see through or virtually transparent. Why do I do this? The one or two keepers you do get are something special. The tonal range, the color saturation: there's nothing digital that can compete.
Polaroids are even neater. Sure you can get functionally the same thing with any consumer point and shoot digital camera (take picture, check LCD, print later), but in comparison, the images you get can only be described as bland and mechanical. Not to mention watching your picture develop almost magically as you shake it. It's a great date idea too if you can find the equipment. Unfortunately, the film is now prohibitively expensive for shooting casually.
There are still enthusiasts who scour ebay only for long-expired Polaroids because of the unique color shifts that they give. There's also unexpired film still selling on ebay for well over $1/exposure. That's for a 3" square image that's got virtually no redeeming technical qualities to it. Again, there's NOTHING digital that compares.
It may sound hokey, but TFA puts it pretty bluntly:
âoeIt used to be something you use for a lighting test,â Ms. Bukowska said. âoeNow it is the art itself.â
Another (slightly tangential) thing I'd be curious to see would be whether or not samba is running by default on an Ubuntu box. While having Windows networking available by default would be nifty, I don't know if the patent/security issues would permit it. Anyone with insight on this?
And so begins the Ten-Laptops-Per-Child campaign
You sure have a funny definition of "hour." Last I checked, there were 3,600 seconds to an hour, not 60. Redoing your calculations with a value of 720,000 seconds gives us roughly 4.48GB/s or nearly 36Gbps. While this is still a good bit faster than the 9Gbps demonstrated by this Internet2, however, researchers believe that Internet8 is not far away and will roughly equal the total bandwidth of the current demonstration. Alternately, there's a senator from Alaska with a relatively large truck that can fit at far more than four Internets, thus surpassing your station wagon methods.
Now I would also like to posit a theorem: Analogies that attempt to determine bandwidth rates in volkswagen beetles, station wagons of dvds or libraries of congress will inevitably fail due to a improper rounding or estimation, mistaken conversion, misplaced decimal points, or a fatal misunderstanding between the nature of bits and bites.
QED
640 post-its should be enough for anybody
*ducks*
In my experience, in-game ads haven't been terribly burdensome to look at, and in many cases they blend in reasonably well so as not to detract from the overall experience (TFA mentions NBA Live, where banner ads can even add to the realism as seen on TV). On the bright side, selling advertisements subsidizes the cost of the game for the consumer at the expense of the product being advertised. For those of you feeling smugly superior because you intentionally disregard the ads, congratulations, your game was made cheaper because of them.
/. folk seem to forget this) many people actually prefer the higher priced name brand product to the lesser known generic. Whether it be spiffier packaging, clever marketing, or simply the fact that "everyone else does it," many people make purchasing decisions on more than simply price/performance or whatever similar metric you care to devise. Believe it or not, something as simple as the container a beverage comes in can unconsciously affect the taste. Try serving cheap plastic bottle vodka in a handle of Grey Goose to your friends and see if they can tell the difference. (note: great for college parties!) Bonus points for swapping the good stuff into the plastic bottle and seeing whether its the beverage they prefer, or just the packaging. (For a much better perspective, check out the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The Wikipedia entry doesn't do it justice, but the book is a great read.)
Also, if you think about your comment for a moment, the idea that an advertisement costs the consumer twice is illogical. If the advertisements are avoided (and precious brainpower is consumed to NOT buy the product being marketed), the costs incurred by the marketing department AREN'T passed on to the consumer (who doesn't buy the product after all). If the consumer does buy the product, it's unlikely s/he spent a great deal of time avoiding the ad.
Furthermore, I'd like to point out that advertisements aren't inherently good or bad. It's entirely possible that an advertisement made a consumer aware of a product that a producer was producing. It's possible that said consumer now enjoys a greater economic utility per dollar than with whatever alternative s/he was using prior to seeing the advertisement.
Finally, (and I think we
For more information, just start clicking on some of the links that Rehnquist cited in defense of his decision. It's pretty much a well held principle that you have no right to complain (i.e. no standing under the exclusionary rule) when SOMEBODY ELSE'S fourth amendment rights have been violated.
This has nothing to do with Public Domain and everything to do with WHO has the expectation of privacy.
An analogy if you will. Suppose you and I commit a crime, the evidence of which is stashed at your house. The police come busting down your door without a warrant and find said evidence. In this case, your right to privacy has been violated and the evidence found cannot be used against you. However, this evidence can still be used against me. Why? Because I had no expectation of privacy IN YOUR HOUSE. As far as the law is concerned, the evidence found against me is as legitimate as if you had turned it in yourself.
Back to the email thing, the minute you send an email to an outside party, you voluntarily concede your expectation of privacy as YOU were the one who freely divulged whatever information was in that email.
; )
Well I think it's even more annoying...
Halloween, however, is celebrated on October 31, therefore, it's only superstitious for those crazy Europeans who insist on writing the date backwards.
; D
Ok guys, CUT THE SHIT!! It's four in the morning and the last thing I want to do is request a new password just to finish posting a comment and come back to find new comments that prompt me to need to go back to my email and login AGAIN
See, some of us just don't ever logout and everytime I come back to my computer Slashdot is waiting happily for me to return. but you couldn't just let that be, could you? nooooooooooo... every JACKASS WITH AN AGENDA and a COMPLETELY UNFUNNY SIG has to dick me around tonight instead of just letting me post in peace.
My apologies, I seriously need some sleep.
--
Forget your password? Have your password mailed to you by entering your nickname, uid, or email address.
You all miss the point (I speak for the majority of replies to this post, as well as the parent). The problem with Microsoft's redefinition of "genuine" has little to do with counterfeit or pirated copies of Microsoft software. In all reality, Microsoft secretly loves the fact that their products are pirated. It costs them absolutely nothing, and the alternative is much more threatening to MS in the long term. While they may lose a few bucks to a kid in the US who may have bought a license if he couldn't pirate it, they stand to lose a lot more if the thousands of people who CANNOT afford a license (think third world countries in Asia) were to use the alternative (free) operating system.
- hardware-and-if-you-change-your-video-card-you're- a-pirate Advantage Tool) is to prevent the legitimate resale of "used" windows licenses. I know in the past it's been tried (with varied success) for certain companies to resell copies of Windows and Office that are no longer in use. IIRC, some of the dot-bombs were able to unload leftover software licenses, and eBay has taken issue with some perfectly legitimate software sales.
Call me crazy, but I think that the real reason Microsoft is trying to play word games with consumers (and the biggest reason for the registering-one-copy-of-Windows-to-a-given-set-of
What I think has Microsoft really worried is the thought of the legitimate resale of "Genuine" Microsoft software. Imagine buying a $300 Dell with Vista preinstalled on it, wiping the drive, installing Linux and making a nice chunk of change on eBay with the leftover product key. Doctrine of First Sale anybody? This of course, could put a significant dent in MS's wallet, and as dictated by shareholders, the first rule of Corporate America states that this cannot be so. Ergo, Mr. Webster takes a backseat and by our new definition, any transaction that does not directly profit Microsoft can not and will not be "Genuine"(TM)
**insert obligatory ascii diagram here**
; )
In all seriousness though, this "Posture Minder" thing is nonsense. I'd be willing to bet it's nothing more then an overpriced motion sensor with a few health tips. My advice? Invest in a post-it note or two (or schedule a periodic alarm) and remember to get up and stretch every once in a while.
How exactly is this a problem? I can speak from experience (and anecdotal evidence == cold hard data 'round these parts) that posting lectures online is certainly not going to prevent students from going to class. Furthermore, you're going to have students that don't want to go to class regardless of having the lectures online (I'm sure you're well aware of this, especially if you've had to teach an 8am class). What I think you should realize is that students not coming to class is NOT a personal knock on you, your teaching abilities, the size of your penis, or anything else.
Another thing that you should realize is that while some students [sarcasm]obviously[/sarcasm] have much better things to do than going to class, that doesn't mean they don't want to learn. One of my favorite classes last year was a psych class where the professor posted her powerpoint lecture notes before class. They were great to print out and bring to class (when I went) and great to print out and study from when 9am Monday morning just wasn't an option. Honestly, do you think you're benefitting the students that don't go to class by trying to withhold the lecture notes? If you're that hell-bent on having students attend, give extra points for attendance or class participation. Or *gasp* grade the students on what pertinent subject matter they actually learned. Let tests and quizzes speak for themselves. If studends can learn on their own with just the lecture notes, let them be. Some students left to their own devices can thumb through a book and listen to a class lecture at the gym and learn just as much as by attending classes. If they have questions on the material, they're perfectly capable of attending class or finding you during office hours.
As a student, I say don't be a hardass and let students learn how they feel they should. If they don't attend and fail, it's no skin off your back. If they don't attend and pass with flying colors, let them be. Don't try to DRM your class lectures just to encourage attendance. More than anything, I think you'll just alienate the ones that don't like coming to class anyway. Don't try to get cute and just post the flippin' podcasts.
They're redeemable for bragging rights at the Google ePenis Store (Beta).