Christianity doesn't have the same true/untrue bright line that science does. That's not a slight against religion, I'm just saying there's a lot more grey area.
Additionally, he became well known enough that people simply stopped questioning him. Seeing "oh, it's Essjay" would lead people to not look as deeply into the factual basis, trusting him to "source it tomorrow".
My problem, however, is that his bio didn't even make sense. He claimed to be a pre-eminent Catholic scholar at a private university, but he also claimed to be gay. He claimed to be a double-PhD professor, but also claimed double-digit daily hours on Wikipedia. I've got nothing against either Catholics or gays, but I imagine most private universities wouldn't hire open gays who work on Wikipedia 10-12 hours daily.
In fact, it was his 4th edit ever (backing up his 1st edit) that he first used his fake credentials to win a dispute. That implies that he created the fake credentials for that reason in the first place (a claim he denies).
I remember when bands could fill up football stadiums in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Today, its tough to sell out a 10,000 to 20,000 venue, and when that happens, its an older band playing their greatest hits from a decade or more ago.
While I agree with like 99% of what you said about payola, that's an exaggeration. I spend a lot of time doing concert promotion and production, and even in a small market (mid-size college town), I have seen shows around 10k fill up without major difficulty. You're correct in that long-running bands have a large advantage, but you can sell a 10k show for plenty of artists.
I think the problem here is that if a prominent member of the Wikipedia community can lie about something like that, then there's not much stock placed in truth in the organization. I'm not asking for real names or anything, but claiming to have a PhD when you don't ought to be a no-no in any community.
The problem isn't checking each spot for any of a given set of watermarks, it's identifying all the watermarks and all the spots they could be. You need to do a lot of work to build that database. You'd need tens of thousands of music files to even get started.
Is this true? Does anyone have sales or statistics?
Who cares if it's true? They say it is, and there's not exactly a pirate's lobby to refute them. Truth is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's not a question of what's right or wrong, it's a question of what you say and how loud you say it. And the media cartels own the conventional news sources.
Assuming the watermarks are public or traceable. If all you're doing is identifying the fact that it's copyrighted, you could have a thousand different watermarks. Their location at any of half a dozen places in the audio stream would indicate infringement. That means that the pirate needs to search for any of 6000 possible spots for the watermark, and remove it. If the watermarks don't try to distinguish some copies of the work from other copies of the work, you can't use a simple diff to root them out.
Portable Music Players will play whatever it's cheapest to get hardware for. Hardware decoders for WMA, AAC, and MP3 are easy to find and often high-quality because they're sold in high-volume. By contrast, decoders for Ogg Vorbis are harder to come by, and are less efficient because they're not high-volume (and thus competitively improved). Thus it may be worth it to just take a few-cent royalty hit as opposed to switching to a more expensive, less-efficient hardware decoder.
How about this - the office of the student group I volunteer with has a photocopier that any of us can freely use. Similarly, we've got dozens of copyrighted magazines lying about (mostly Rolling Stone, since we do music stuff). By "making available" copyrighted material and a method of copying it, are we violating the law every time we don't have an advisor monitoring the office (about 12-16 hours a day, and all weekend)?
You can get a Santa Rosa platform Centrino chipset in May, which will allow for 4 GB of RAM, with 2 x 2 GB sticks. However, 2 GB SODIMMs aren't cheap...
I've got a two-year old iBook, and I have few if any sluggishness issues. Sure, it doesn't run Core Image or Quartz Extreme, but it draws more stares visually than Vista or XP, and I have few responsiveness problems. Sure, if I open every application on my Dock, I've got problems, but 5-6 apps open at a time is easy.
CC-by-SA and GFDL are very similar licenses, but because you can't combine them, or move content from one of them to the other, they create a divide in the free-content world, since a site under a CC licenses can't take GFDL stuff and vice-versa. This even has negative repercussions for Wikimedia sites - Wikitravel and Wikipedia are under the same stewardship, but can't share content, because they're under different licenses.
I'm capable of performing medical procedures, in the sense that I can pick up a sharp object, and I don't faint at the sight of blood. But you really don't want me fixing your appendicitis, now do you?
BSD wouldn't help. The argument here is over patents, and so in theory, any company without a MS patent license could be sued. The companies with MS patent licenses (or enough patents to keep MS from suing them) are Apple, Sun, Novell, and IBM.
This is a (xeno-)psychology thought experiment, not a science experiment. The difference between radio and DNA is that "suspicious" (non-random) radio signals would be of interest regardless of the source of the transmission. If the non-random radio source is some sort of cosmological (non-intelligent) event, then it would still warrant extra-terrestrial research. The presence of non-random signals implies that something is going on, but not what. Similarly, we can determine through study of DNA that DNA is non-random, but there likely won't be any proof of what causes that non-randomness.
Assuming the connectors and the voltages and stuff match up (which I doubt), the handcrank doesn't produce a lot of power. Sure, it's a decent amount in relation to the ultra-low-power OLPC, but it's not gonna do much compared to a Merom or Turion with 1-2 GB of RAM and a HDD with a full color display. I mean, I bet the crank-time-to-powered-time ratio would be essentially reversed at best (you'd spend twice the time cranking that you'd get in battery time).
There is no HDD. There's like 128 MB of RAM, and 512 MB of Flash (expandable). You couldn't sell a 128 MB stick of RAM for any sort of large profit (most retail sticks start at 256 MB or 512 MB), and a removing the flash and consolidating it into something useable to any other product would exceed the costs of bulk flash in the first place. The displays probably need a custom driver. The only thing really useful is the battery, and even that's low-end.
The fact remains that when you take into account the costs of stripping the OLPCs for parts and selling the parts on the black market, you quickly exceed the possible resale value of the parts.
Slashdot Mirror
sounds a lot like citizendium.
Christianity doesn't have the same true/untrue bright line that science does. That's not a slight against religion, I'm just saying there's a lot more grey area.
Additionally, he became well known enough that people simply stopped questioning him. Seeing "oh, it's Essjay" would lead people to not look as deeply into the factual basis, trusting him to "source it tomorrow".
My problem, however, is that his bio didn't even make sense. He claimed to be a pre-eminent Catholic scholar at a private university, but he also claimed to be gay. He claimed to be a double-PhD professor, but also claimed double-digit daily hours on Wikipedia. I've got nothing against either Catholics or gays, but I imagine most private universities wouldn't hire open gays who work on Wikipedia 10-12 hours daily.
In fact, it was his 4th edit ever (backing up his 1st edit) that he first used his fake credentials to win a dispute. That implies that he created the fake credentials for that reason in the first place (a claim he denies).
I remember when bands could fill up football stadiums in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Today, its tough to sell out a 10,000 to 20,000 venue, and when that happens, its an older band playing their greatest hits from a decade or more ago.
While I agree with like 99% of what you said about payola, that's an exaggeration. I spend a lot of time doing concert promotion and production, and even in a small market (mid-size college town), I have seen shows around 10k fill up without major difficulty. You're correct in that long-running bands have a large advantage, but you can sell a 10k show for plenty of artists.
Yeah, if you can deal with Clippy saying "G'day mate, how 'bout some letter-writing?"
I think the problem here is that if a prominent member of the Wikipedia community can lie about something like that, then there's not much stock placed in truth in the organization. I'm not asking for real names or anything, but claiming to have a PhD when you don't ought to be a no-no in any community.
The problem isn't checking each spot for any of a given set of watermarks, it's identifying all the watermarks and all the spots they could be. You need to do a lot of work to build that database. You'd need tens of thousands of music files to even get started.
See, this is audio, not image, and if you obscure all the potential sites, you wreck the audio (or at least make it noticeably suckier).
Is this true? Does anyone have sales or statistics?
Who cares if it's true? They say it is, and there's not exactly a pirate's lobby to refute them. Truth is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's not a question of what's right or wrong, it's a question of what you say and how loud you say it. And the media cartels own the conventional news sources.
Blur the watermark and they are screwed.
Assuming the watermarks are public or traceable. If all you're doing is identifying the fact that it's copyrighted, you could have a thousand different watermarks. Their location at any of half a dozen places in the audio stream would indicate infringement. That means that the pirate needs to search for any of 6000 possible spots for the watermark, and remove it. If the watermarks don't try to distinguish some copies of the work from other copies of the work, you can't use a simple diff to root them out.
Now lawmakers and the "content" industries can claim they've already answer criticism and given ground, without actually changing much of anything.
Portable Music Players will play whatever it's cheapest to get hardware for. Hardware decoders for WMA, AAC, and MP3 are easy to find and often high-quality because they're sold in high-volume. By contrast, decoders for Ogg Vorbis are harder to come by, and are less efficient because they're not high-volume (and thus competitively improved). Thus it may be worth it to just take a few-cent royalty hit as opposed to switching to a more expensive, less-efficient hardware decoder.
How about this - the office of the student group I volunteer with has a photocopier that any of us can freely use. Similarly, we've got dozens of copyrighted magazines lying about (mostly Rolling Stone, since we do music stuff). By "making available" copyrighted material and a method of copying it, are we violating the law every time we don't have an advisor monitoring the office (about 12-16 hours a day, and all weekend)?
You can get a Santa Rosa platform Centrino chipset in May, which will allow for 4 GB of RAM, with 2 x 2 GB sticks. However, 2 GB SODIMMs aren't cheap...
I've got a two-year old iBook, and I have few if any sluggishness issues. Sure, it doesn't run Core Image or Quartz Extreme, but it draws more stares visually than Vista or XP, and I have few responsiveness problems. Sure, if I open every application on my Dock, I've got problems, but 5-6 apps open at a time is easy.
CC-by-SA and GFDL are very similar licenses, but because you can't combine them, or move content from one of them to the other, they create a divide in the free-content world, since a site under a CC licenses can't take GFDL stuff and vice-versa. This even has negative repercussions for Wikimedia sites - Wikitravel and Wikipedia are under the same stewardship, but can't share content, because they're under different licenses.
I'm capable of performing medical procedures, in the sense that I can pick up a sharp object, and I don't faint at the sight of blood. But you really don't want me fixing your appendicitis, now do you?
HP has no guts w/r/t suing MS, and SGI isn't in the Linux game. Now, it'd be interesting if someone like Red Hat bought SGI...
WHY? Microsoft source isn't at issue here. If MS never produced Windows, they'd still have the patents, and the patents are what counts.
BSD wouldn't help. The argument here is over patents, and so in theory, any company without a MS patent license could be sued. The companies with MS patent licenses (or enough patents to keep MS from suing them) are Apple, Sun, Novell, and IBM.
This is a (xeno-)psychology thought experiment, not a science experiment. The difference between radio and DNA is that "suspicious" (non-random) radio signals would be of interest regardless of the source of the transmission. If the non-random radio source is some sort of cosmological (non-intelligent) event, then it would still warrant extra-terrestrial research. The presence of non-random signals implies that something is going on, but not what. Similarly, we can determine through study of DNA that DNA is non-random, but there likely won't be any proof of what causes that non-randomness.
Assuming the connectors and the voltages and stuff match up (which I doubt), the handcrank doesn't produce a lot of power. Sure, it's a decent amount in relation to the ultra-low-power OLPC, but it's not gonna do much compared to a Merom or Turion with 1-2 GB of RAM and a HDD with a full color display. I mean, I bet the crank-time-to-powered-time ratio would be essentially reversed at best (you'd spend twice the time cranking that you'd get in battery time).
There is no HDD. There's like 128 MB of RAM, and 512 MB of Flash (expandable). You couldn't sell a 128 MB stick of RAM for any sort of large profit (most retail sticks start at 256 MB or 512 MB), and a removing the flash and consolidating it into something useable to any other product would exceed the costs of bulk flash in the first place. The displays probably need a custom driver. The only thing really useful is the battery, and even that's low-end.
The fact remains that when you take into account the costs of stripping the OLPCs for parts and selling the parts on the black market, you quickly exceed the possible resale value of the parts.
For some reason, they don't take orders from somebody on Slashdot with a 900k+ user ID.
Does that imply that there exists a person on Slashdot with a sufficiently low UID to give orders to NASA?
No, no, no, no, no!
8) ???
9) Profit!
It's not that hard to understand, people!