If DRM is brought in and incorporates enough leeway for good 'ol average Joe to burn compilation CD's for his car or transfer.oggs to his portable player, I don't see it having the impact that others fear.
The fear is that, in order to accomplish that, the technology (un-trustable hardware, euphemistically called 'trusted hardware' that has to be in place to really restrict anything) will be developed and the control of that technology put in the hands of folks like the RIAA, who most assuredly will not stop at such a reasonable level.
Once they have the power to determine what you can do with your hardware, they'll continuously find new and 'innovative' ways to restrict you. Sure, some will go too far and be withdrawn as a result of public backlash, but they'll just be laundered and brought out in new clothes in a year or three.
Ummm, according to the GPL, it's not theirs if they distributed it under the GPL (which they did).
Bullshit. If anything in there was really theirs to begin with, it's still theirs now. The one thing having distributed it under the GPL would do is simply to give everyone using it under the GPL a license for it.
I've got quite a functional sense of humour, thanks. Can't say the same for the writers, if this was his intention. First off, it's just not funny. Second, if it was intentional, the convention would be to write it in quotes.
As it is, they just made themselves look illiterate, or humour-impaired, take your pick.
I still don't quite believe this, so can someone come up with better numbers or a good reason why this isn't the case?
No, it's completely true. Caffeine is highly toxic. Another favourite comparison of mine is with cocaine. If you purified caffeine the way cocaine is purified, inhaling the tiniest little bump of it would kill you almost instantly.
That said, caffeine is normally consumed in extremely low concentrations, and it is, at least, filtered and excreted by the body much more quickly than plutonium can be.
While I'm not surprised that this got posted to slashdot with such a glaringly obvious misspelling, I am a bit surprised that the linked article makes the same mistake. Not that the Village Voice is necessarily the greatest reference in the world, but they do have a reputation for being literate. The article even gets it right throughout the text, but the headline reads like it was written by my 4 year old nephew. It's not like they would even need a spellchecker to notice it, not only does it stick out like a sore thumb on it's own, the word appears correctly throughout the article - how much more obvious could it be?
At first I was surprised that the slashdot crew hadn't fixed this yet, but maybe they hit the link, saw the same spelling in the VV title, and decided it was right?
Unfortunately I don't have that reference available, I might be able to get it by inter-library loan, but if so it will take awhile. I have been told that such reports, whenever actually investigated thouroughly (by dna for instance) did turn out to be mistaken, and that this makes sense because of the anomoly in the breeding cycles - that is that it is actually impossible for a first generation coy-dog to mate with a full blooded coyote (or wolf) which prevent them from ever being absorbed back into the coyote population. They can only breed with other coy-dogs or with domesticated dogs, not with coyotes or wolves. Does this reference provide actual proof to the contrary? Does he explain how this can happen, when the cross-breeds are documented to have their breeding cycle in the fall, while coyotes will only breed in late winter?
With respect to coyote-dog crosses it's very rare in the wild but there are some populations with dog blood.
As far as I know this is incorrect. It's been believed, but when cases are investigated they turn out to be wolf-coyote not dog-coyote mixes. Coydogs and coyotes can't mate.
more often than not, "coydog" means the abnormally large eastern coyote hybrid which was earlier thought to be a coyote-dog cross but is in fact a coyote-wolf cross.
I always thought taping and mixing off the radio and selling the tapes was illegal?
Selling them would be. Making the tapes is not. Giving them away is not. Or at least in previous times that was the line. The trouble is that technology has reached the point where you can give them away so cheaply record companies can't compete, and they have the money to buy laws, along with a welfare-hos sense of entitlement and lack of morality...
I'm not sure if it would be cheaper or not in the end. I am sure that a $150 pc would need adds before being usable though. Memory and NICs at the very least. Guesstimating it it seemed like the xbox would come to about the same price. Remember it's hard to find memory for old pcs these days, and the shops charge more for a dusty old simm than a brand new stick on account of that, at least around here. I hadn't thought about the mod chip, however. Thanks for your input. I'll keep it in mind.
I could spend around $20 on transport and a day going to Stockholm and searching and probably find a similar deal, yes, but again you're missing the point. A deal like that is still going to need extras before it's sufficient, and cost a little extra for transport and a lot extra in terms of time spent finding it. Time is money, and the xbox I can get in 20 minutes with no fuss, with all the necessary equipment built-in.
After being found guilty of illegally using their monopoly, they were told to pay a penalty that is less than 10% of what they made breaking the law. If the penalty for stealing $100 is paying a $10 fine, why on earth would you stop stealing $100?
It's even worse than that. They're essentially getting to pay the $10 in gift certificates to be used to buy their own products, whose marginal cost is nearly nil. So in reality they're paying more like $.20 for the $100, in a way that amounts to an investment in their own future market share.
This whole fiasco is absolutely proving me right on this one - I've said all along that expecting the government to reign in microsoft was naïve at best. Fox, hen house...
There's no way you could make a rocket that would fly for a mile and then hit a weather balloon.
Oh please. I made rockets with nearly that range when I was 9. The range we're talking about here is not difficult at all. Accuracy is more of an issue, let's get to that. But do mark, we're not talking about a 'weather balloon' here but a blimb, a much larger target.
That takes guidance and control -- there's no doubt that the rocket would just be blown off course if it even was able to fly that far.
There are actually several different approaches to hitting a difficult target. One would be guidance and control, yes. That's hardly impossible, small light RC units are relatively inexpensive these days... that approach could work.
But it's not the only approach at all. If I was going to try to do something like this, and I'll repeat, I'm not, although sadly someone else probably will eventually if these things take off, I'd probably go with a different approach. A large number of unguided rockets. Don't think of the build-your-own cruise missile the other guy linked, although that might work too, but probably cheaper and easier would be a swarm of small rockets weighing only a few ounces each, just finned tubes with propellant and a small explosive charge. They wouldn't even have to hit to accomplish their purpose, just as long as some of them managed to explode reasonably close to the target.
Windage can be measured and compensated for quite accurately, the math involved is very old hat, perfected by the beginning of the last century at the latest. And given the low cost of such devices, you wouldn't need to be all that accurate anyway, you could throw a couple hundred of them in a cloud several times the size of the blimp.
In addition to the errors the other poster pointed out in your logic, I really must point out that you don't have to have a legally obtained hunting rifle to poke holes in a balloon like that. It wouldn't be all that difficult to assemble a weapon with the requisite capabilities from materials easily available in any little hamlet. A hunting rifle, actually, would be far from the best choice. Rockets that can reach that far with sufficient accuracy can be made cheaply and easily, and they could even be rigged with incendiary/explosive payloads to bring the thing down in a hurry, whereas even a large number of holes from a hunting rifle would likely just cause it to gently float to the ground.
I'm not sure why you would want to do such a thing, I certainly wouldn't, but anyone with some basic knowledge of physics and chemistry could do it if they wanted to. And, I suppose given the state of the world today someone will, eventually.
As long as you're using a BIOS like Cromwell the issue of their IP in XBox bios is nill.
The notion that this otherwise perfectly legal act is illegal under the DMCA because it makes it possible to then go and 'circumvent' some games looks to me to be on very shaky grounds in context of the US legal tradition - not that I'm a lawyer or that I'd have the money to fight such a fight against a corporation with virtually endless resources, of course. But I wouldn't take that threat too seriously, because I think MS knows how shaky a test-case that would make, and they have a LOT to lose if a test-case goes against them. I expect them to make noise, but when it comes to taking action - they'll be looking for someone actually 'circumventing' games on a massive scale, I think, not someone using their precious little box as a dedicated linux box.
The DMCA is unspeakably evil, god just thinking about this is making me sick.
That's hardly a good analogy. Welfare is consistent but will grow somewhat as unemployment grows.
I was referring to the earlier argument that said this was good for the economy since it took money away from those who would save it and give it to those who would spend it. The bag of sugar is indeed a good analogy to that argument. Savings, in a modern economy, is the stuff from which loans come from, and that's how infrastructure gets built, new business start, etc.
Right. People get sick just to cash in on the health system.
People are more likely to seek medical attention for less serious conditions when they don't have to pay for it.
Seeing the doctor too often is much better than not enough.
Not really. Either is bad. Seeing one too often raises the demand for his services, which is one of the reasons I have to wait 2 weeks to get a simple xray done here in the peoples republic of sweden...
And the last time I looked, places like the US had skyrocketing health costs.
Exactly my point. Thanks for supporting it.
Government health systems control health costs because the industry essentially has one customer - the government. The government sets how much it will pay for services and the doctors can like it or go without customers.
And that's not an effective system, because of the calculation problem. The level of knowledge necessary for the government to set such policies rationally are entirely beyond the ability of even the best organised and best staffed organisation conceivable - let alone of a government. This is the basic flaw that caused the entire communist block to go bankrupt a few years back, it's a shame the so-called 'free world' seems so intent on emulating them.
It becomes more apparent with wear, but you can just rub them between finger and thumb and tell immediately.
There's a vote on it coming up again, it failed last time and it'll probably fail again, but you know how the EU is, they just keep making you vote until you vote the way they want you to...
Although it would be a lot more convenient for me too, traveling a lot, I honestly hope they don't. The EU scares me, I see it becoming exactly the kind of crap I left the US to get away from. And I don't have any confidence at all in their ability to keep the currency solid. Not that I have any more faith in the swedish authorities, but at least with more currencies the chance of a disaster affecting all of europe is minimised... I shudder to think of what will happen once all of europe is on the euro and it dives.
After disclaiming socialism you go on to make it clear that is exactly what you're promoting. From each according to his means, to each according to his need, that was the socialist mantra. You ask 'who do you think needs the money more?' and thus implicitly base your analysis on that same tired mantra.
The 'rich' people get more relief under any fair tax cut, because they're the ones who're getting soaked more under the status quo.
And the people we're talking about aren't really 'rich' either, that's a big fallacy that the promoters of national socialism in the US always hide behind - but the fact is the truly rich pay little to no taxes and always have. The people that pay high taxes are the most productive workers - not the people that are rich and don't need to work for wages to begin with.
No, it won't be good for either you or the economy. This is the broken window fallacy which says that somebody going around throwing rocks through windows helps the economy by increasing the business of window repairmen. The flaw is that it ignores that the money spent on repairs would otherwise have been put to more productive uses.
Completely true. And it's exactly the same fallacy at work in the parent posters claim that welfare is good for the economy as well.
I think you're the one that's drinking some crazy kool-aid.
I know what I'm talking about firsthand, I live in Sweden, and I have recently developed a need for medical attention.
Europeans are healthier for a host of reasons, attitude, diet, and lifestyle come to mind. It has absolutely nothing to do with the absolutely god-awful excuses for health care services that prevail here however. Except, perhaps, in an indirect way - knowing that health care is so worthless here does give one a bit of an extra incentive to eat right and exercise more.
Actually, things like welfare and universal health coverage are good for the economy.
Not at all.
The former does things like flatten out the business cycle by increasing spending counter-cyclicly (to people who will spend all the money on goods and services instead of saving it)
This is 'good for the economy' in the same way that eating a big bag of sugar is good for your body. Yes, it can produce a short term energetic boost, but only at the expense of longterm well-being.
and the latter reduces costs to the overall economy by improving health standards (it's cheaper to prevent illness than cure it)
Again untrue. In fact it does exactly the opposite. By decoupling the decision to consume from the obligation to pay, these schemes explicitly destroy the mechanisms which previously kept cost low and quality high, and have resulted in skyrocketing health care costs.
It's not the newness, still feels cheap to me next to brand new crown notes... cheap is of course a subjective word. but it's the best to describe how it feels to me. US notes, and the Swedish ones to a little less degree, have a sort of clothelike texture, while the euro just feels like funny paper. I'm sure exactly matching the texture would be difficult, but just matching it close enough to pass normal attention doesn't seem that tough to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The fear is that, in order to accomplish that, the technology (un-trustable hardware, euphemistically called 'trusted hardware' that has to be in place to really restrict anything) will be developed and the control of that technology put in the hands of folks like the RIAA, who most assuredly will not stop at such a reasonable level.
Once they have the power to determine what you can do with your hardware, they'll continuously find new and 'innovative' ways to restrict you. Sure, some will go too far and be withdrawn as a result of public backlash, but they'll just be laundered and brought out in new clothes in a year or three.
Bullshit. If anything in there was really theirs to begin with, it's still theirs now. The one thing having distributed it under the GPL would do is simply to give everyone using it under the GPL a license for it.
I've got quite a functional sense of humour, thanks. Can't say the same for the writers, if this was his intention. First off, it's just not funny. Second, if it was intentional, the convention would be to write it in quotes.
As it is, they just made themselves look illiterate, or humour-impaired, take your pick.
Ahh, ok, that makes sense then. Thanks for the clarification.
No, it's completely true. Caffeine is highly toxic. Another favourite comparison of mine is with cocaine. If you purified caffeine the way cocaine is purified, inhaling the tiniest little bump of it would kill you almost instantly.
That said, caffeine is normally consumed in extremely low concentrations, and it is, at least, filtered and excreted by the body much more quickly than plutonium can be.
Wait a sec, let me get this straight. You favour nuclear rocketry, but you're afraid of power plants? Do you realise how utterly insane that sounds?
While I'm not surprised that this got posted to slashdot with such a glaringly obvious misspelling, I am a bit surprised that the linked article makes the same mistake. Not that the Village Voice is necessarily the greatest reference in the world, but they do have a reputation for being literate. The article even gets it right throughout the text, but the headline reads like it was written by my 4 year old nephew. It's not like they would even need a spellchecker to notice it, not only does it stick out like a sore thumb on it's own, the word appears correctly throughout the article - how much more obvious could it be?
At first I was surprised that the slashdot crew hadn't fixed this yet, but maybe they hit the link, saw the same spelling in the VV title, and decided it was right?
Unfortunately I don't have that reference available, I might be able to get it by inter-library loan, but if so it will take awhile. I have been told that such reports, whenever actually investigated thouroughly (by dna for instance) did turn out to be mistaken, and that this makes sense because of the anomoly in the breeding cycles - that is that it is actually impossible for a first generation coy-dog to mate with a full blooded coyote (or wolf) which prevent them from ever being absorbed back into the coyote population. They can only breed with other coy-dogs or with domesticated dogs, not with coyotes or wolves. Does this reference provide actual proof to the contrary? Does he explain how this can happen, when the cross-breeds are documented to have their breeding cycle in the fall, while coyotes will only breed in late winter?
As far as I know this is incorrect. It's been believed, but when cases are investigated they turn out to be wolf-coyote not dog-coyote mixes. Coydogs and coyotes can't mate.
Exactly.
Selling them would be. Making the tapes is not. Giving them away is not. Or at least in previous times that was the line. The trouble is that technology has reached the point where you can give them away so cheaply record companies can't compete, and they have the money to buy laws, along with a welfare-hos sense of entitlement and lack of morality...
At least if it was in RA it would be cross platform. Apparently they are using some form of WMA? Idiotic.
I'm not sure if it would be cheaper or not in the end. I am sure that a $150 pc would need adds before being usable though. Memory and NICs at the very least. Guesstimating it it seemed like the xbox would come to about the same price. Remember it's hard to find memory for old pcs these days, and the shops charge more for a dusty old simm than a brand new stick on account of that, at least around here. I hadn't thought about the mod chip, however. Thanks for your input. I'll keep it in mind.
I could spend around $20 on transport and a day going to Stockholm and searching and probably find a similar deal, yes, but again you're missing the point. A deal like that is still going to need extras before it's sufficient, and cost a little extra for transport and a lot extra in terms of time spent finding it. Time is money, and the xbox I can get in 20 minutes with no fuss, with all the necessary equipment built-in.
No.
I'm sure they would rather be doing that, but it's still a hardware sale.
It's even worse than that. They're essentially getting to pay the $10 in gift certificates to be used to buy their own products, whose marginal cost is nearly nil. So in reality they're paying more like $.20 for the $100, in a way that amounts to an investment in their own future market share.
This whole fiasco is absolutely proving me right on this one - I've said all along that expecting the government to reign in microsoft was naïve at best. Fox, hen house...
Oh please. I made rockets with nearly that range when I was 9. The range we're talking about here is not difficult at all. Accuracy is more of an issue, let's get to that. But do mark, we're not talking about a 'weather balloon' here but a blimb, a much larger target.
There are actually several different approaches to hitting a difficult target. One would be guidance and control, yes. That's hardly impossible, small light RC units are relatively inexpensive these days... that approach could work.
But it's not the only approach at all. If I was going to try to do something like this, and I'll repeat, I'm not, although sadly someone else probably will eventually if these things take off, I'd probably go with a different approach. A large number of unguided rockets. Don't think of the build-your-own cruise missile the other guy linked, although that might work too, but probably cheaper and easier would be a swarm of small rockets weighing only a few ounces each, just finned tubes with propellant and a small explosive charge. They wouldn't even have to hit to accomplish their purpose, just as long as some of them managed to explode reasonably close to the target.
Windage can be measured and compensated for quite accurately, the math involved is very old hat, perfected by the beginning of the last century at the latest. And given the low cost of such devices, you wouldn't need to be all that accurate anyway, you could throw a couple hundred of them in a cloud several times the size of the blimp.
In addition to the errors the other poster pointed out in your logic, I really must point out that you don't have to have a legally obtained hunting rifle to poke holes in a balloon like that. It wouldn't be all that difficult to assemble a weapon with the requisite capabilities from materials easily available in any little hamlet. A hunting rifle, actually, would be far from the best choice. Rockets that can reach that far with sufficient accuracy can be made cheaply and easily, and they could even be rigged with incendiary/explosive payloads to bring the thing down in a hurry, whereas even a large number of holes from a hunting rifle would likely just cause it to gently float to the ground.
I'm not sure why you would want to do such a thing, I certainly wouldn't, but anyone with some basic knowledge of physics and chemistry could do it if they wanted to. And, I suppose given the state of the world today someone will, eventually.
As long as you're using a BIOS like Cromwell the issue of their IP in XBox bios is nill.
The notion that this otherwise perfectly legal act is illegal under the DMCA because it makes it possible to then go and 'circumvent' some games looks to me to be on very shaky grounds in context of the US legal tradition - not that I'm a lawyer or that I'd have the money to fight such a fight against a corporation with virtually endless resources, of course. But I wouldn't take that threat too seriously, because I think MS knows how shaky a test-case that would make, and they have a LOT to lose if a test-case goes against them. I expect them to make noise, but when it comes to taking action - they'll be looking for someone actually 'circumventing' games on a massive scale, I think, not someone using their precious little box as a dedicated linux box.
The DMCA is unspeakably evil, god just thinking about this is making me sick.
I was referring to the earlier argument that said this was good for the economy since it took money away from those who would save it and give it to those who would spend it. The bag of sugar is indeed a good analogy to that argument. Savings, in a modern economy, is the stuff from which loans come from, and that's how infrastructure gets built, new business start, etc.
People are more likely to seek medical attention for less serious conditions when they don't have to pay for it.
Not really. Either is bad. Seeing one too often raises the demand for his services, which is one of the reasons I have to wait 2 weeks to get a simple xray done here in the peoples republic of sweden...
Exactly my point. Thanks for supporting it.
And that's not an effective system, because of the calculation problem. The level of knowledge necessary for the government to set such policies rationally are entirely beyond the ability of even the best organised and best staffed organisation conceivable - let alone of a government. This is the basic flaw that caused the entire communist block to go bankrupt a few years back, it's a shame the so-called 'free world' seems so intent on emulating them.
It becomes more apparent with wear, but you can just rub them between finger and thumb and tell immediately.
There's a vote on it coming up again, it failed last time and it'll probably fail again, but you know how the EU is, they just keep making you vote until you vote the way they want you to...
Although it would be a lot more convenient for me too, traveling a lot, I honestly hope they don't. The EU scares me, I see it becoming exactly the kind of crap I left the US to get away from. And I don't have any confidence at all in their ability to keep the currency solid. Not that I have any more faith in the swedish authorities, but at least with more currencies the chance of a disaster affecting all of europe is minimised... I shudder to think of what will happen once all of europe is on the euro and it dives.
After disclaiming socialism you go on to make it clear that is exactly what you're promoting. From each according to his means, to each according to his need, that was the socialist mantra. You ask 'who do you think needs the money more?' and thus implicitly base your analysis on that same tired mantra.
The 'rich' people get more relief under any fair tax cut, because they're the ones who're getting soaked more under the status quo.
And the people we're talking about aren't really 'rich' either, that's a big fallacy that the promoters of national socialism in the US always hide behind - but the fact is the truly rich pay little to no taxes and always have. The people that pay high taxes are the most productive workers - not the people that are rich and don't need to work for wages to begin with.
Completely true. And it's exactly the same fallacy at work in the parent posters claim that welfare is good for the economy as well.
I think you're the one that's drinking some crazy kool-aid.
I know what I'm talking about firsthand, I live in Sweden, and I have recently developed a need for medical attention.
Europeans are healthier for a host of reasons, attitude, diet, and lifestyle come to mind. It has absolutely nothing to do with the absolutely god-awful excuses for health care services that prevail here however. Except, perhaps, in an indirect way - knowing that health care is so worthless here does give one a bit of an extra incentive to eat right and exercise more.
Not at all.
This is 'good for the economy' in the same way that eating a big bag of sugar is good for your body. Yes, it can produce a short term energetic boost, but only at the expense of longterm well-being.
Again untrue. In fact it does exactly the opposite. By decoupling the decision to consume from the obligation to pay, these schemes explicitly destroy the mechanisms which previously kept cost low and quality high, and have resulted in skyrocketing health care costs.
It's not the newness, still feels cheap to me next to brand new crown notes... cheap is of course a subjective word. but it's the best to describe how it feels to me. US notes, and the Swedish ones to a little less degree, have a sort of clothelike texture, while the euro just feels like funny paper. I'm sure exactly matching the texture would be difficult, but just matching it close enough to pass normal attention doesn't seem that tough to me.