There doesn't have to be a single "login server". You can gain entry to the distributed network either from a central seed node (there's one run by the Azureus developers, and presumably another one for Bram's client), or from a compatible peer you met while downloading another torrent.
At least with iTunes when you buy a song you allways have the option to burn an audio or Mp3 cd.
You can't burn MP3 CDs from iTunes songs unless you crack the DRM (either directly with Hymn/DeDRMS, or indirectly by burning an audio CD and re-ripping).
The vast majority of the times sex is used in the world is not for fun. Unless you consider making a woman fat for 9 months just to create a new person fun then yes sex is recreational.
Except the vast majority of sexual encounters don't result in pregnancy, even without contraception - a woman is only fertile a few days out of the month.
Too much work. I use a Presto PowerPop, which is a plastic bowl with microwave concentrators in the base and in little disposable cups that go inside the bowl. Add popcorn kernels and oil, place in microwave, enjoy. Very few unpopped kernels. The only downside is you have to replace the cups.. they come in packs of 8 for $2, and each cup is good for about 3-5 uses.
Of course, I get full control over the additives this way. Canola oil, butter, and table salt are all I use, but I've thought about trying powdered white cheddar.
It's plain old jive-ass radio; the same as you would get (and from which you would want to get away) from Clear Channel. Irritating announcers, insufferable commercials, lame music. Just coming to you through the wire instead of the air.
Actually, the music stations on Sirius and XM don't have commercials. Fact check on aisle 6.
You would also need an inexpensive DVD writer for your computer, which is about $70.
Uh huh. And how are you going to listen to those DVDs in your car? I see you neglected to mention the price of a DVD/hard drive player for the car, because they're ridiculously expensive. You could listen to satellite radio for a year with the money you'd spend just on that head unit.
You can get all the other radio functions, weather, sport scores, traffic reports, celib news from the web.
You're going to check sports scores and traffic reports on the web while you're driving? I hope you don't live in my city, dude, because that's dangerous.
Or you mean you're going to wait until you get home? Sorry, that doesn't cut it for many people. A traffic report is most useful when you're, you know, driving. Truckers are some of the biggest fans of satellite radio, because they can get all this information and entertainment while they're driving. They can follow games as they happen, sharing that experence with everyone else in the country, instead of just seeing the score and a couple photos hours after the game has ended.
BTW, how does your model deal with talk radio? Should listeners download old shows (if they're even available) and listen to them weeks after they aired, when there's no chance of calling in? Or do you think blogs and internet message boards are a suitable replacement for all those millions of people who enjoy talk radio?
One big missing link though witrh streaming media.... driving. It's sort of hard to get wifi access countrywide.
Especially while you're moving. Even if there were WiFi coverage on every interstate freeway, it couldn't possibly all be one big network. WiFi doesn't hand off smoothly as you move from one network to another, both for technical and social reasons (e.g. you paid AT&T for a day's access, but their network stopped 1500 feet behind you, now you have to pay T-Mobile for a day's access too).
But there is hope: cellular data. Cell phones smoothly hand off from one cell to the next; that's the whole point. In many cases it is possible to keep a data connection running throughout an entire road trip. CDMA2000 1xRTT is available nationwide, and it's fast enough to listen to a medium quality internet radio station (32-64 kbps streams - the connection can actually burst up to 144 kbps, but not for long). The next step is 1xEV-DO, which is in the Mbps range, enough to listen to the highest quality streams. Verizon claims they'll have nationwide EV-DO coverage by the end of this year, IIRC.
But the big issue of cost remains. It's crazy expensive to keep up a data connection for very long during the day, if you're paying per minute, and monthly unmetered access is $80-$100 a month, last I checked. Compare that to $10 a month for satellite radio.
It's not just about Howard Stern. Sirius also has exclusive coverage of just about every American sport. XM has, what, Major League Baseball? Sirius has NFL, NHL, NBA, NASCAR, and the list is growing. Don't underestimate the importance many consumers place on being able to listen to any game/event live.
What people around here just don't seem to get is that it is the performer that owns the performance and it is thier consent that is required to allow the copies to be made.
No. They own their instruments and equipment, and you could even say they own the time and effort they put into that performance. But the sound waves that they produce during the performance are owned by no one. The idea is ridiculous on its face: owning a sound is like owning a size or a color.
In most venues the unauthorized recording of a live show is grounds for removal from the premesis and is a violation of the agreement you entered into when you purchased and used the ticket to the event.
Yes, that's fine. The venue owner has every right to eject people from his premises if they're violating the rules he sets. It's his property. That, however, says nothing about the sounds being produced by the band. Sounds are not property, they're information--an attribute of something else--and no one has any legitimate claim to them.
Traditional MSM are scared because of such scandals like Dan Rather's Forged Memo story. Before blogs, the fact that there were some serious questions about the authenticity of those national guard memos would have never seen a wide audience and would have been largely relegated to the lore of right-wing conspiracy theorists.
More importantly: Before blogs, the public might never have found out there were holes in the President's military record to begin with.
Those particular memos were only part of the story. The scandal over the fake documents has overshadowed the rest of it, including the fact that the people who were around for the original events corroborated the content of the fake memos.
And where did that story develop? Who did the research that the MSM was unwilling to do? Blogs. CBS's memos were something the bloggers hadn't seen yet (which turned out to be because they were written recently), but the story itself had been common knowledge on the blogs for ages.
What I'm trying to figure out is why one of these European or Asian cellular providers doesn't come over here and start releasing these awesome phones and wonderful service.
Even if you're content to use GSM(*), you can't just bring any random foreign phone into the US and start using it. The European mobile phone frequency bands are 900 and 1800 MHz; in the US, they're 800 and 1900 MHz.
(* = There are many technical reasons why you might prefer CDMA, which is what Sprint and Verizon use. Soft handoffs is one: dropped calls are less likely because your phone can talk to multiple towers at once. Better privacy is another: using a radio receiver to eavesdrop on a CDMA call is next to impossible.)
What if the alternative is not being able to download legally at all?
Then we'll see who's bluffing, won't we?
Look, no matter what the status of copyright law and DRM might be at any given time, you can always argue that if we just ceded a little more control, we'd have a few more products available to buy. Conversely, you can always argue that if we took back a little control (by weakening copyright law, defeating DRM, etc.), we'd have fewer products available to buy.
The problem is, having more products available to buy isn't the only thing that's important. There comes a point when having a little wider selection is worth less than the control we're giving up. I would happily say goodbye to iTMS if it meant every music file I ever obtained in the future would play everywhere I wanted it to.
And make no mistake, the demise of DRM services like iTMS wouldn't mean the end of music, or legally available music on the internet. It would mean a smaller selection, but those bands who continued to offer their music for sale in open formats (like many are doing now) would flourish, because they'd still be offering what consumers want.
There already is one, and you can try it yourself. Visual Studio.NET 2003 and above comes with a compiler for the "J#" language, which is basically Java. You can also download Visual J# Express for free from MS's web site.
ummm yeah.... it makes more sense to pay for the part that you have total control over. I decided who and when I call. I can't control who calls me... that would just suck to have to pay for something you can't control - oh wait, I could switch the phone off, but then what would be the point of having the thing?
But you do have control: you decide whether or not to answer a call. You're using airtime (a limited resource) whether you're making or receiving the call, so it makes sense to pay in both cases. If I don't want to pay to answer a call, I can let it go to voice mail, and retrieve the message at night or from a landline for free.
What really sucks is some plans that charge when people leave a voice mail message, because you really do have no control over that. Verizon's "FreeUP" prepaid plan is one example. If someone calls and leaves a message, you pay for that time, and then when you call from your mobile phone to listen to the message, you pay again.
yea but you have to pay to RECEIVE a call, how fsked up is that? At least we in Europe do it properly, we pay to make a call just like we do for our landlines.
You have to pay every time you make a call with your landline? And you call that doing it "properly"?;)
Well, for one, doing 128 kbps on a GPRS network isn't exactly possible.
Huh. People are still using GPRS? CDMA2000 has been doing 100+ kbps data transfers for years now with no special equipment. The speed does go up and down, but a 56k or 64k internet radio station is entirely listenable with a modern cell phone and a PDA/laptop.
I read the link, and it's obvious that the/. comment was a parody of that blog post, but... so what? Is that a famous blog post or something? WTF is kottke?
Sounds like the SmartJoy FRAG is better overall than the XFPS. It lets you remap your keys at will, and it works with a headset - there's no hole for the Communicator, just a connector on top that you can stick it in, making an upside down T shape.
It has the same problem with driving, though. You can turn up the "deadzone" setting, which is better in a vehicle (or turret) but worse on foot. It seems a lot more sensitive to vertical motion than horizontal motion when I'm in a turret, but I suspect that's a problem with Halo 2, not the adapter.
I just got a keyboard/mouse adapter for my Xbox this past weekend, and I'm pretty disappointed in how well it works with Halo2. And Halo, for that matter.
I must disagree. I have a SmartJoy FRAG too, and after tweaking the key mappings and sensitivity a bit, I'm very pleased with it. It's almost as natural as playing Halo on PC, just a tiny bit slower.
The one problem I have is with operating vehicles and turrets. A sensitivity setting that works fine on foot is way too slow to move a turret, and if I turn up the deadzone to drive or shoot, I have to turn it back down when I'm on foot again. Also, the vertical sensitivity seems much higher than the horizontal sensitivity--again, only in a vehicle or turret--so the movement is never quite normal.
But switching back and forth is easy enough with the FRAG's presets (something that the "MagicBox XFPS" apparently lacks), and a medium deadzone setting works OK for both walking and driving.
Besides, Halo and Halo2 are pretty lame FPS games. Good for a console, pretty mediocre in general.
I used to think that, before I bought the original Halo for PC. When I could really compare it to Quake and UT, instead of struggling to play an FPS on a gamepad, I found it was actually pretty good. It doesn't have the best graphics, sound, weapons, or maps, but it's second best in nearly every aspect. Like the "Greatest Hits" album of first person shooters.
I'm gonna risk the moderators' wrath and agree with you. I rented some Firefly DVDs after hearing it recommended, and upon viewing the show, I was not impressed.
Firefly was a space western, a show about wannabe cowboys in space - whoopie. Some of us actually live in the west near real live wannabe cowboys, and lemme tell you, they get old really fast. I like a little science in my science fiction.
And, yes, if the government is spending tax dollars to fund your education, then they at least have the right to know when and whether you are in school or not.
And hey, if the government is spending tax dollars to prevent crime, then they at least have the right to install cameras to know whether there's any criminal activity going on in your bedroom. If you're not a criminal, you have nothing to hide, right?
There are limits to what can be justified in the name of education, just as there are limits to what can be justified in the name of stopping crime / fighting terrorists / waging war on drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
There doesn't have to be a single "login server". You can gain entry to the distributed network either from a central seed node (there's one run by the Azureus developers, and presumably another one for Bram's client), or from a compatible peer you met while downloading another torrent.
PRQ? You mean the tracker that's down 50% of the time? I can see why these other sites aren't using the same host... ;)
At least with iTunes when you buy a song you allways have the option to burn an audio or Mp3 cd.
You can't burn MP3 CDs from iTunes songs unless you crack the DRM (either directly with Hymn/DeDRMS, or indirectly by burning an audio CD and re-ripping).
The vast majority of the times sex is used in the world is not for fun. Unless you consider making a woman fat for 9 months just to create a new person fun then yes sex is recreational.
Except the vast majority of sexual encounters don't result in pregnancy, even without contraception - a woman is only fertile a few days out of the month.
Too much work. I use a Presto PowerPop, which is a plastic bowl with microwave concentrators in the base and in little disposable cups that go inside the bowl. Add popcorn kernels and oil, place in microwave, enjoy. Very few unpopped kernels. The only downside is you have to replace the cups.. they come in packs of 8 for $2, and each cup is good for about 3-5 uses.
Of course, I get full control over the additives this way. Canola oil, butter, and table salt are all I use, but I've thought about trying powdered white cheddar.
He is an extremley conservative senator
More importantly, he's rabidly anti-gay. *That's* why Dan Savage is pissed at him.
It's plain old jive-ass radio; the same as you would get (and from which you would want to get away) from Clear Channel. Irritating announcers, insufferable commercials, lame music. Just coming to you through the wire instead of the air.
Actually, the music stations on Sirius and XM don't have commercials. Fact check on aisle 6.
You would also need an inexpensive DVD writer for your computer, which is about $70.
Uh huh. And how are you going to listen to those DVDs in your car? I see you neglected to mention the price of a DVD/hard drive player for the car, because they're ridiculously expensive. You could listen to satellite radio for a year with the money you'd spend just on that head unit.
You can get all the other radio functions, weather, sport scores, traffic reports, celib news from the web.
You're going to check sports scores and traffic reports on the web while you're driving? I hope you don't live in my city, dude, because that's dangerous.
Or you mean you're going to wait until you get home? Sorry, that doesn't cut it for many people. A traffic report is most useful when you're, you know, driving. Truckers are some of the biggest fans of satellite radio, because they can get all this information and entertainment while they're driving. They can follow games as they happen, sharing that experence with everyone else in the country, instead of just seeing the score and a couple photos hours after the game has ended.
BTW, how does your model deal with talk radio? Should listeners download old shows (if they're even available) and listen to them weeks after they aired, when there's no chance of calling in? Or do you think blogs and internet message boards are a suitable replacement for all those millions of people who enjoy talk radio?
One big missing link though witrh streaming media.... driving. It's sort of hard to get wifi access countrywide.
Especially while you're moving. Even if there were WiFi coverage on every interstate freeway, it couldn't possibly all be one big network. WiFi doesn't hand off smoothly as you move from one network to another, both for technical and social reasons (e.g. you paid AT&T for a day's access, but their network stopped 1500 feet behind you, now you have to pay T-Mobile for a day's access too).
But there is hope: cellular data. Cell phones smoothly hand off from one cell to the next; that's the whole point. In many cases it is possible to keep a data connection running throughout an entire road trip. CDMA2000 1xRTT is available nationwide, and it's fast enough to listen to a medium quality internet radio station (32-64 kbps streams - the connection can actually burst up to 144 kbps, but not for long). The next step is 1xEV-DO, which is in the Mbps range, enough to listen to the highest quality streams. Verizon claims they'll have nationwide EV-DO coverage by the end of this year, IIRC.
But the big issue of cost remains. It's crazy expensive to keep up a data connection for very long during the day, if you're paying per minute, and monthly unmetered access is $80-$100 a month, last I checked. Compare that to $10 a month for satellite radio.
It's not just about Howard Stern. Sirius also has exclusive coverage of just about every American sport. XM has, what, Major League Baseball? Sirius has NFL, NHL, NBA, NASCAR, and the list is growing. Don't underestimate the importance many consumers place on being able to listen to any game/event live.
What people around here just don't seem to get is that it is the performer that owns the performance and it is thier consent that is required to allow the copies to be made.
No. They own their instruments and equipment, and you could even say they own the time and effort they put into that performance. But the sound waves that they produce during the performance are owned by no one. The idea is ridiculous on its face: owning a sound is like owning a size or a color.
In most venues the unauthorized recording of a live show is grounds for removal from the premesis and is a violation of the agreement you entered into when you purchased and used the ticket to the event.
Yes, that's fine. The venue owner has every right to eject people from his premises if they're violating the rules he sets. It's his property. That, however, says nothing about the sounds being produced by the band. Sounds are not property, they're information--an attribute of something else--and no one has any legitimate claim to them.
Now we have a fiscal problem where none existed before, and must destroy valuable federal programs. This is their long term plan coming to fruition.
That's what they call starving the beast.
Traditional MSM are scared because of such scandals like Dan Rather's Forged Memo story. Before blogs, the fact that there were some serious questions about the authenticity of those national guard memos would have never seen a wide audience and would have been largely relegated to the lore of right-wing conspiracy theorists.
More importantly: Before blogs, the public might never have found out there were holes in the President's military record to begin with.
Those particular memos were only part of the story. The scandal over the fake documents has overshadowed the rest of it, including the fact that the people who were around for the original events corroborated the content of the fake memos.
And where did that story develop? Who did the research that the MSM was unwilling to do? Blogs. CBS's memos were something the bloggers hadn't seen yet (which turned out to be because they were written recently), but the story itself had been common knowledge on the blogs for ages.
What I'm trying to figure out is why one of these European or Asian cellular providers doesn't come over here and start releasing these awesome phones and wonderful service.
Even if you're content to use GSM(*), you can't just bring any random foreign phone into the US and start using it. The European mobile phone frequency bands are 900 and 1800 MHz; in the US, they're 800 and 1900 MHz.
(* = There are many technical reasons why you might prefer CDMA, which is what Sprint and Verizon use. Soft handoffs is one: dropped calls are less likely because your phone can talk to multiple towers at once. Better privacy is another: using a radio receiver to eavesdrop on a CDMA call is next to impossible.)
What if the alternative is not being able to download legally at all?
Then we'll see who's bluffing, won't we?
Look, no matter what the status of copyright law and DRM might be at any given time, you can always argue that if we just ceded a little more control, we'd have a few more products available to buy. Conversely, you can always argue that if we took back a little control (by weakening copyright law, defeating DRM, etc.), we'd have fewer products available to buy.
The problem is, having more products available to buy isn't the only thing that's important. There comes a point when having a little wider selection is worth less than the control we're giving up. I would happily say goodbye to iTMS if it meant every music file I ever obtained in the future would play everywhere I wanted it to.
And make no mistake, the demise of DRM services like iTMS wouldn't mean the end of music, or legally available music on the internet. It would mean a smaller selection, but those bands who continued to offer their music for sale in open formats (like many are doing now) would flourish, because they'd still be offering what consumers want.
There already is one, and you can try it yourself. Visual Studio .NET 2003 and above comes with a compiler for the "J#" language, which is basically Java. You can also download Visual J# Express for free from MS's web site.
EVDO is also widely available in Korea and China.
Contrary to what some Europeans might think, the US isn't the only country where systems other than GSM are used.
ummm yeah.... it makes more sense to pay for the part that you have total control over. I decided who and when I call. I can't control who calls me... that would just suck to have to pay for something you can't control - oh wait, I could switch the phone off, but then what would be the point of having the thing?
But you do have control: you decide whether or not to answer a call. You're using airtime (a limited resource) whether you're making or receiving the call, so it makes sense to pay in both cases. If I don't want to pay to answer a call, I can let it go to voice mail, and retrieve the message at night or from a landline for free.
What really sucks is some plans that charge when people leave a voice mail message, because you really do have no control over that. Verizon's "FreeUP" prepaid plan is one example. If someone calls and leaves a message, you pay for that time, and then when you call from your mobile phone to listen to the message, you pay again.
yea but you have to pay to RECEIVE a call, how fsked up is that? At least we in Europe do it properly, we pay to make a call just like we do for our landlines.
;)
You have to pay every time you make a call with your landline? And you call that doing it "properly"?
Well, for one, doing 128 kbps on a GPRS network isn't exactly possible.
Huh. People are still using GPRS? CDMA2000 has been doing 100+ kbps data transfers for years now with no special equipment. The speed does go up and down, but a 56k or 64k internet radio station is entirely listenable with a modern cell phone and a PDA/laptop.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate."
I read the link, and it's obvious that the /. comment was a parody of that blog post, but... so what? Is that a famous blog post or something? WTF is kottke?
Sounds like the SmartJoy FRAG is better overall than the XFPS. It lets you remap your keys at will, and it works with a headset - there's no hole for the Communicator, just a connector on top that you can stick it in, making an upside down T shape.
It has the same problem with driving, though. You can turn up the "deadzone" setting, which is better in a vehicle (or turret) but worse on foot. It seems a lot more sensitive to vertical motion than horizontal motion when I'm in a turret, but I suspect that's a problem with Halo 2, not the adapter.
I just got a keyboard/mouse adapter for my Xbox this past weekend, and I'm pretty disappointed in how well it works with Halo2. And Halo, for that matter.
I must disagree. I have a SmartJoy FRAG too, and after tweaking the key mappings and sensitivity a bit, I'm very pleased with it. It's almost as natural as playing Halo on PC, just a tiny bit slower.
The one problem I have is with operating vehicles and turrets. A sensitivity setting that works fine on foot is way too slow to move a turret, and if I turn up the deadzone to drive or shoot, I have to turn it back down when I'm on foot again. Also, the vertical sensitivity seems much higher than the horizontal sensitivity--again, only in a vehicle or turret--so the movement is never quite normal.
But switching back and forth is easy enough with the FRAG's presets (something that the "MagicBox XFPS" apparently lacks), and a medium deadzone setting works OK for both walking and driving.
Besides, Halo and Halo2 are pretty lame FPS games. Good for a console, pretty mediocre in general.
I used to think that, before I bought the original Halo for PC. When I could really compare it to Quake and UT, instead of struggling to play an FPS on a gamepad, I found it was actually pretty good. It doesn't have the best graphics, sound, weapons, or maps, but it's second best in nearly every aspect. Like the "Greatest Hits" album of first person shooters.
I'm gonna risk the moderators' wrath and agree with you. I rented some Firefly DVDs after hearing it recommended, and upon viewing the show, I was not impressed.
Firefly was a space western, a show about wannabe cowboys in space - whoopie. Some of us actually live in the west near real live wannabe cowboys, and lemme tell you, they get old really fast. I like a little science in my science fiction.
And, yes, if the government is spending tax dollars to fund your education, then they at least have the right to know when and whether you are in school or not.
And hey, if the government is spending tax dollars to prevent crime, then they at least have the right to install cameras to know whether there's any criminal activity going on in your bedroom. If you're not a criminal, you have nothing to hide, right?
There are limits to what can be justified in the name of education, just as there are limits to what can be justified in the name of stopping crime / fighting terrorists / waging war on drugs.