If a terrorist were dumb enough to do that, it sure as hell wouldn't be in english.
If terrorists were that dumb, then we wouldn't [truthiness]need new laws[/truthiness] to catch them.
From what I understand, none of the new laws have actually paid off for any of the announced 'terrorist' cells they've caught. It's always been normal cops doing what they do.
Potentially dangerous to allow "anyone" to do it... it would be much better to have some type of ACL that allows specific users/group and/or perhaps specific programs to be reniced outside of root's control.
The principle is that Skype/Kphone/FPS register themselves with a 'loader' type function requesting a nice level of -10 at install. Daemons that don't care about latency can register themselves as +10. Anything that doesn't care, doesn't register.
Since only Root should be able to perform a systemwide install & consequentially have access to the 'loader', Root would be determining the runlevel, but any user can use it. If the program were installed locally by a non-Root user, then it wouldn't be able to access the 'loader' to configure it & would run normally at nice 0.
The current model, limits any normal user to nice 0 and above, with everything defaulting to 0. Lets face it, most daemons aren't time sensative enough to require a nice of 0 - the 10mS difference in mounting the CD is totally overwhelmed by the 2 seconds it takes the tray to close & the disk to spin up anyway - a perfect candidate for a nice of 10.
On the other side of the coin, dropping Skype or Kphone into nice 0 is bad. As audio systems, pretty much any delay is a recipee for poor audio quality. They need control when they need it - not 10mS later. The same with GUIs, because they directly interact with people, they need to have the snappy response of a negative nice program - not as negative as multimedia, but better than the baseline.
Someone (Con Kolivas?) suggested a "pluggable" scheduler API. [snip] Linus Torvalds rejected the proposal - I think he said that the benefits would be outweighed by the need to maintain multiple schedulers.
ISTR, the actual issue was the overhead needed to put the scheduler in an API instead of in the kernel was unacceptably high. That said, there are modules for compiling in the different schedulers.
It's been stated a couple of places that the different schedulers have different strengths & weaknesses and the differences are mostly seen on fringe cases where your specific need will probably dictate which one is best for you anyway.
back when the scheduler issue first popped up there were a few suggestions about developing a method to preset nice levels for software - IE, kphone & skype could be niced to -10 & most daemons to 10 with a start rather than having to reset them after launch with 'renice'. The advantage of that is that launching with preset negative nice numbers could be done by anyone rather than only by the superuser. That would show some benefits for interactive/latency sensative software without creating any problems for software that doesn't report a need - they would still default to 0.
Depends, there are a lot of US states that require that a product be suitable for usage in order to be sold - unless MS would like to sell Vista as a novelty for amusement value only. The EU has even stronger consumer protection laws. If someone brings the suit against MS in terms of violating the CP laws, then the remedy is either accept liability or stop selling the product. I don't see MS not selling to the state of NY, and I don't see the US mil buying things for amusement value only.
Also if you check the fine print, there is a statement about local laws may alter the EULA. So, in order to bring the suit, you would have to:
have a valid suit where a defect in Windows caused a problem suitable for a tort suit.
live in a jurisdiction where the EULA liability release is expanded by local laws.
live in a jurisdiction where the expansion is suitable for a tort suit.
have MS rebuff your complaint under the strict terms of the EULA.
If the local laws are not persuable under tort law, then the govt has to persue them - not likely to happen. Unfortunately, IIRC most of the CP laws can only be brought into play by the govt, but they might provide enough coverage to pursue a private suit even if the govt won't.
According to some of these companies there is NO profit in the game. The accounting methods of the Media giants is only slighly better(legal?) than that used by the Mafia. Per the Jackson's audit over LOTR(1), New Line understated the profits by between 10 & 20%.
It's an open secret in the music industry that the numbers aren't right, never have been, and probably never will be. There are people out there who've had top 10 records who've never seen a penny of royalty because the record still isn't in the black according to the publisher.
On the other hand, perhaps we should go by profit with an govt auditor going over all the books. Might see a bit of change in the way the accounting is done:)
When you have to use an affermative defense, you have to go to the expense of going through the courts. When it's codified as a right, it can't be sued over to begin with. In many cases, you can 'win' at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars - and just not have to pay more. You don't actually get any money back from the people suing you to cover your lawyer. Yeah! that was a wonderful win now wasn't it.
It's probably true that the court initially didn't have jurisdiction, but according to the article, Spamhaus made an initial appearance in the case. Generally, if you make an appearance, you have submitted to the jurisdiction of the court.
FWIR, Spamhause showed up in state court & said, 'you have no jurisdiction, the US court system has no jurisdiction & even if it did, it would have to be a Federal court'. The state judge threw it out properly judging that with no presense or assets in his district, he didn't have jurisdiction. 360 then went to a Federal Judge to redo the case & Spamhause's lawyers in the UK rightly asserted that "fuck the US court system, they have no jurisdiction, don't waste your money." or words to that effect. The problem is that the Federal Judge forgot that US law applies in the US not the world and ruled that being in another country doing things that are perfectly legal & not tortable (is that a word?) in that country is no reason that US law shouldn't be applied to them. In accordance with the new ruling on spyware, 360's case isn't actionable in the US anymore either, but that didn't seem to bother the appeals judge at all in denying the appeal of the ruling.
need an excuse. "I searched him for shoplifting, but when I found out he hadn't, I pulled him in anyway," usually doesn't cut it. There needs to be some legal basis for the detention - reasonable suspicion that something hinkey is going on. Failure to show ID has been rejected multiple times by lower courts & SCOTUS as being that reasonable suspicion.
Are you seriously saying that if I bundle mkfsiso with my app and shell out to call it, I have to release my source code too?
No, we are saying that you have to include a copy of the GPL & an address/url where they can get the source of mkfsiso. Your code is your code, but msfsiso isn't yours so you have to follow the rules it's authors established on how it can be used.
Now assuming that the violation is only with the lack of a copy of the GPL & the URL, it's a 2 minute fix to add those to the liscense.txt file that nobody reads for the next run of CDs. I don't think that anyone would argue that that type of fix is an excessive request by the copyright holders in exchange for the volumes of work put into creating mkfsiso.
This reminds me of the big argument the founder of Slackware got into, when he announced he was going to sell distributions. Yes, sell! Oh my god, the horrors of actually charging for somehthing!
Funny doesn't seem like that at all to me. Charge for the work he put into building the distro vs require that he follow the licenses on the works he included in the distro. Two very distinct issues at hand. Seeing as I am almost certain I have seen that software & I believe it comes with a copyright notice on it declairing copyright belongs to the company selling it, I do feel this is a touch different than selling a distro with notices that the copyright belongs to the individual owners.
The ODF supporters are trying to block OOXML from becoming a standard ONLY because they've lobbied governments into passing open standards laws that will REQUIRE those governments to use their format if OOXML fails.
I think that you will find that people are trying to block OOXML from becoming a standard because it fails on technical merits to be worthy of being a standard. Any standard that defines half it's structures as:
<compatibility_tag_name1> - to behave like [software][version][function]
is defective if [software][version][function] isn't defined someplace else.
OOXML isn't implimentable by anyone except Microsoft, because only MS knows how [software][version][function] is supposed to work. That fact alone should be causing it to fail ISO certification.
However, let us not forget that MS can't tell time either - rather than impliment the correct ISO implimentation of leap year determination, MS continues to enjoy the singular distinction of defining 1900 as a leap year - in defiance of both reality & other ECMA standards. Again, this fact is supposed to be causing the standard to fail.
Moving on, OOXML's inclusion of binary data blobs which contain parts of the document formating is in violation of the ECMA definition of XML standard. Again, it's supposed to fail.
ISO is supposed to be killing badly developed standards before they are born. OOXML is one of the worst I have seen having done 8 years of working with industrial standards, on it's merits it should be in the trash. According to the ECMA rules on creating standards, it should be in the trash. According to the ISO rules, it should be in the trash. The fact that it's not only not in the trash but being fast tracked is has got anyone who has ever handled submitting, implimenting, or reviewing a standard standing around going WTF?!
Reading about the games with voting rule changes, blocking entry to the voting meeting, stuffing the voting meetings at the last minute, etc is really just the icing on the cake. The fact that this "standard" is even up for consideration is evidence enough that MS has bought the system.
Did they cheat somehow?
No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees.
Is there some reason that these companies should NOT have been allowed to vote?
They failed to participate in any of the discussions leading up to the vote & in fact most have not partecipated previously in any discussions on any ISO related standards.
Are any of them not legitimate companies? No? Then STFU and stop whining.
You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.
This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as
Consensus to approve - vote to approve
majority approve - vote to approve
no majority - vot to approve
majority to dis-approve - vote to approve with comments
consensus to dis-approve - abstain
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
Damn that's slow, why not build a live Flash drive & run that. Not only do you get all the advantages of a live CD, you can actually update it as patches come out without having to completely reburn it and it's shitloads faster than a CD.
> What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity.
So turn down the volume knob.
That doesn't bring back the clipped or restore the dampened portions of the music. Worse, as the midline rises, more and more gets clipped and damped.
If you do not like music which uses the full dynamic range available, that's fine - I recommend classical guitar & string quartet music with or without vocals, the blues, and folk music from the 12th century on should also be to your taste as they follow the same pattern of a few tonally similar instruments within a limited dynamic range.
However, to say that compressing the dynamic range is a 'good thing'(tm) because it prevents artists from straying outside your comfort zone is about as close as you can get to sacralige in the music world. As for "playing stupid games with the loudness", the use of piano vs forte is as important a factor as lento vs presto. I do like classical music and your right, using the dynamic range is "playing games" - exactly the same as using the full range of notes & meter is 'playing games' - games without which, music would be much duller & homogenized. Hmm, interestingly, it would sound a lot like the crap being pushed out as pop music today.
And online poker, and craps, and just about any other form of gambling - yes, including sports betting on MLB, NBA, and NFL games - but principly European Football (Soccer) & horse & dog races.
To say that they were only running a sports book is to ignore the fact that the vast majority of the money was going into online card games. Next it also ignores the fact that Antiguan gambling makes up about 30% of the GNP of Antigua & is highly regulated.
The point is, the US allows online gambling within the US, but not outside the US. That's a no-no according to the WTO. If gambling were morally repugnant to the US, we wouldn't allow it at all. We do, It's not, case closed. The US has 2 courses of action, allow international online gambling, or prohibit all online gambling in the US. They should not & rightfully have not been allowed to claim a 'moral exemption' while writing bills to expand the permissable forms of online gambling inside the US.
The US would have a legitimate 'moral exemption' claim to blocking sites which permit gambling on cockfights or dogfights because both activities are outlawed within the US at the federal level. However, even in your example of sports betting, it is not prohibited on a federal level. If it were, Vegas & Atlantic City wouldn't be able to do it.
The Federal Govt has barred interstate banking transactions covering gambling, but it then proceeded to carve out several exceptions - Dog & Horse racing being the 2 most prominent ones. Without those 2 exemptions, the US may have been able to win this case. However, the exemptions clearly show that online gambling itself is not repugnant to the US.
To be honest, if you examine the history of the laws that block online gambling, the money for the lobying came from 1 source - B&M casinos. This isn't about morality, it's about a fight over who's getting more of your finite entertainment dollars.
They are complaining that they can't instigate transactions online that they would be arrested for here.
Actually, what they are complaining about is that the US is blocking commercial transactions with Antiguan businesses that would be legal if the were businesses physically located inside the US. The WTO says that's a big no-no.
The US has claimed the moral exemption allowed by the WTO - That the morals of the US do not permit online gambling. However, as Antigua pointed out, the US does permit online gambling - OTB on dog & horse racing is legal interstate, and most forms of gambling are legal intrastate - in those states which have legalized gambling of any nature.
The WTO courts have rightly held that you can't claim a moral exemption for international activities, when it is permitted within your country. Either online gambling is morally offensive to the US & it's not to be allowed at all or it's not and the US has to open up the practice to everyone. The US doesn't get to pick & choose which types of gambling are offensive - it's either morally offensive or it's not.
As a case directly on point, it is currently perfectly legal to place a bet on the Kentucky Derby through the OTB website, it is however illegal to place the same bet on the same Kentucky Derby race through an Antiguan online site. This is why the US lost the case, they were claiming that the an action was morally repugnant to the US when done with an Antiguan business, but perfectly acceptable when done through a US based one.
Personally, I think you would have seen a bigger stink if they had gone for patents instead of copyright. The cries of anguish by the US pharmaceutical companies alone should be clearly audible on Antiguan beaches.
As it is, I would like to put in my request for a legal copy of Antiguan Vistas(tm) to run on my computer - just so I can smack the next BSA person I see with it. "Why yes, it is a perfect copy of Windows Vista - without all the DRM crap & calling home. OOh look here, I see that the source code has been released by the Antiguan Software Coalition."
Dynamic range & volume are only vaguely related in that they both are measured in dB.
Volume is the average 'loudness' of a work - IE volume setting of 5 on the stereo will generate a 50dB tone when input with a 50dB tone. a 4 will generate a 45dB tone & a 6 will generate a 60Db tone.
Dynamic range is the difference between the intensities of the midline & peak sounds of the track. IE the midline vs the crash of a cymbal or the midline vs 1/2 second of absolute silence. On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set to the maximum; an effect known as clipping. What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity. Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music.
Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable, the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder than the brass section. The same with shifts between strings & brass - the instruments were chosen for the specific tonal qualities & the music writen to embrace the differences.
The NID & his cronies have layed down a lot of depositions & testemony in court where they've claimed that confirming/denying these allegations would aid terrorists. So do we get to charge them with purjury since the NID just confirmed it within a week of spouting the line in court, or do we get to send the NID to Gitmo for aiding terrorists?
Why can't you just make it work? It worked fine like this before when the switch was in the other closet, I'm tired of spending money replacing these things.
Surely management understands that redundancy is good.
I'm on my 3rd switch in 18 months because the closet it's kept in doesn't vent properly. When the switch goes down, half the phones go down - I can't get the switch moved, and I can't get the closet ventilated. The management solution was to go with cheaper switches so they can write them off without paying so much. I expect to be making a run to one of the stores sometime around the end of next month trying to find a 24port switch in stock.
Management doesn't understand redundancy, nor do they understand preventative maintenance when it comes to electronics. I'm down to scavenging carcasses for HDs from systems with burned (MB || PS) because management won't let me buy new ones to have on hand when one fails. Amazingly, 5yr old HDs scavenged from already failed systems don't seem to have an exceedingly long lifespan.
The whole fucking point of HTML is to CATEGORIZE DATA in a way that can be meaningfully interpreted regardless of context.
Actually, the purpose of HTML is to create Hyper Text documents Marked up in a common Language. A markup language is for formatting in terms of a print pre-process. The original goals of HTML were based around graphical appearance of the documents & a common means of linking specific aspects of a document to other documents which expounded on the current topic.
The concept that the content should be isolated & structured is more of a function of XML than HTML. XML takes the traditional print oriented concept of a markup language & applies it to data structuring instead of output formatting.
It just gets me up in arms that HTML was designed for a very specific purpose (that all content could be a cross-referenced and easily indexable and presentable in any way)
Again, the cross referencing wasn't designed to be done in an automated fasion, hyper text links were designed to be manually embedded into a document - footnotes on steroids. The [b,i,u,strike] tags were just about your only formatting options, because they were understood by the NCurses libraries. Beyond that, presentation wasn't really even a consideration with the orginal formats for HTML, because LYNX was your friend - pretty much your only friend.
Mosaic from the NSCA changed things dramatically by adding graphics to the mix, but web design was still based around presentation not encapsulation of data. Data encapsulation on a web page is a slow starter, lagging far behind the transition to OOP. Javascript wasn't introduced until 1995, and DOM in 1998. Until IE5 was released in '99, CSS was pretty much worthless as neither IE nor NS4 supported a significant subset of the CSS spec. As late as 2002 it was still considered good practice to code the page for specific resolutions in order to ensure that anyone viewing the page got the same experience.
Overall, I would say that data encapsulation and the seperation of data & presentation really begins right around 2000. Once data begins being seperated in order to take the biggest advantages of CSS , you begin hearing about the symantic web. This is where you begin to really see data being classed & potentially fully indexable.
The only way such a tag would actually be implemented by people with advertising is if there were DRM-like restrictions on browsers forcing ads to be shown.
They'll still have a problem getting around my 127.0.0.1.tld lines in my hosts file:)
I honestly think my web browsing experiance is 2-3 times faster now that I added doubleclick & 2mdn to the list.
"Paris Hilton looks more like Paris Hilton than any Paris-Hilton look-alike"
Interestingly enough, Charley Chaplin once came in 3rd in a Charley Chaplin look alike contest. Sometimes the original isn't everything we think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand, none of the new laws have actually paid off for any of the announced 'terrorist' cells they've caught. It's always been normal cops doing what they do.
Steve Jackson is still trying to get New Line to allow the audit on LotR 2 & 3 after finding about $125M of funny accounting in LotR 1.
Since only Root should be able to perform a systemwide install & consequentially have access to the 'loader', Root would be determining the runlevel, but any user can use it. If the program were installed locally by a non-Root user, then it wouldn't be able to access the 'loader' to configure it & would run normally at nice 0.
The current model, limits any normal user to nice 0 and above, with everything defaulting to 0. Lets face it, most daemons aren't time sensative enough to require a nice of 0 - the 10mS difference in mounting the CD is totally overwhelmed by the 2 seconds it takes the tray to close & the disk to spin up anyway - a perfect candidate for a nice of 10.
On the other side of the coin, dropping Skype or Kphone into nice 0 is bad. As audio systems, pretty much any delay is a recipee for poor audio quality. They need control when they need it - not 10mS later. The same with GUIs, because they directly interact with people, they need to have the snappy response of a negative nice program - not as negative as multimedia, but better than the baseline.
It's been stated a couple of places that the different schedulers have different strengths & weaknesses and the differences are mostly seen on fringe cases where your specific need will probably dictate which one is best for you anyway.
back when the scheduler issue first popped up there were a few suggestions about developing a method to preset nice levels for software - IE, kphone & skype could be niced to -10 & most daemons to 10 with a start rather than having to reset them after launch with 'renice'. The advantage of that is that launching with preset negative nice numbers could be done by anyone rather than only by the superuser. That would show some benefits for interactive/latency sensative software without creating any problems for software that doesn't report a need - they would still default to 0.
Depends, there are a lot of US states that require that a product be suitable for usage in order to be sold - unless MS would like to sell Vista as a novelty for amusement value only. The EU has even stronger consumer protection laws. If someone brings the suit against MS in terms of violating the CP laws, then the remedy is either accept liability or stop selling the product. I don't see MS not selling to the state of NY, and I don't see the US mil buying things for amusement value only.
Also if you check the fine print, there is a statement about local laws may alter the EULA. So, in order to bring the suit, you would have to:
If the local laws are not persuable under tort law, then the govt has to persue them - not likely to happen. Unfortunately, IIRC most of the CP laws can only be brought into play by the govt, but they might provide enough coverage to pursue a private suit even if the govt won't.
According to some of these companies there is NO profit in the game. The accounting methods of the Media giants is only slighly better(legal?) than that used by the Mafia. Per the Jackson's audit over LOTR(1), New Line understated the profits by between 10 & 20%.
It's an open secret in the music industry that the numbers aren't right, never have been, and probably never will be. There are people out there who've had top 10 records who've never seen a penny of royalty because the record still isn't in the black according to the publisher.
On the other hand, perhaps we should go by profit with an govt auditor going over all the books. Might see a bit of change in the way the accounting is done :)
When you have to use an affermative defense, you have to go to the expense of going through the courts. When it's codified as a right, it can't be sued over to begin with. In many cases, you can 'win' at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars - and just not have to pay more. You don't actually get any money back from the people suing you to cover your lawyer. Yeah! that was a wonderful win now wasn't it.
FWIR, Spamhause showed up in state court & said, 'you have no jurisdiction, the US court system has no jurisdiction & even if it did, it would have to be a Federal court'. The state judge threw it out properly judging that with no presense or assets in his district, he didn't have jurisdiction. 360 then went to a Federal Judge to redo the case & Spamhause's lawyers in the UK rightly asserted that "fuck the US court system, they have no jurisdiction, don't waste your money." or words to that effect. The problem is that the Federal Judge forgot that US law applies in the US not the world and ruled that being in another country doing things that are perfectly legal & not tortable (is that a word?) in that country is no reason that US law shouldn't be applied to them. In accordance with the new ruling on spyware, 360's case isn't actionable in the US anymore either, but that didn't seem to bother the appeals judge at all in denying the appeal of the ruling.
need an excuse. "I searched him for shoplifting, but when I found out he hadn't, I pulled him in anyway," usually doesn't cut it. There needs to be some legal basis for the detention - reasonable suspicion that something hinkey is going on. Failure to show ID has been rejected multiple times by lower courts & SCOTUS as being that reasonable suspicion.
Technically while you are at school, the school is your guardian - as a guardian their rights extend quite a bit farther than a shopkeepers.
No, we are saying that you have to include a copy of the GPL & an address/url where they can get the source of mkfsiso. Your code is your code, but msfsiso isn't yours so you have to follow the rules it's authors established on how it can be used.
Now assuming that the violation is only with the lack of a copy of the GPL & the URL, it's a 2 minute fix to add those to the liscense.txt file that nobody reads for the next run of CDs. I don't think that anyone would argue that that type of fix is an excessive request by the copyright holders in exchange for the volumes of work put into creating mkfsiso.
Funny doesn't seem like that at all to me. Charge for the work he put into building the distro vs require that he follow the licenses on the works he included in the distro. Two very distinct issues at hand. Seeing as I am almost certain I have seen that software & I believe it comes with a copyright notice on it declairing copyright belongs to the company selling it, I do feel this is a touch different than selling a distro with notices that the copyright belongs to the individual owners.
I think that you will find that people are trying to block OOXML from becoming a standard because it fails on technical merits to be worthy of being a standard. Any standard that defines half it's structures as :
<compatibility_tag_name1> - to behave like [software][version][function]
is defective if [software][version][function] isn't defined someplace else.
OOXML isn't implimentable by anyone except Microsoft, because only MS knows how [software][version][function] is supposed to work. That fact alone should be causing it to fail ISO certification.
However, let us not forget that MS can't tell time either - rather than impliment the correct ISO implimentation of leap year determination, MS continues to enjoy the singular distinction of defining 1900 as a leap year - in defiance of both reality & other ECMA standards. Again, this fact is supposed to be causing the standard to fail.
Moving on, OOXML's inclusion of binary data blobs which contain parts of the document formating is in violation of the ECMA definition of XML standard. Again, it's supposed to fail.
ISO is supposed to be killing badly developed standards before they are born. OOXML is one of the worst I have seen having done 8 years of working with industrial standards, on it's merits it should be in the trash. According to the ECMA rules on creating standards, it should be in the trash. According to the ISO rules, it should be in the trash. The fact that it's not only not in the trash but being fast tracked is has got anyone who has ever handled submitting, implimenting, or reviewing a standard standing around going WTF?!
Reading about the games with voting rule changes, blocking entry to the voting meeting, stuffing the voting meetings at the last minute, etc is really just the icing on the cake. The fact that this "standard" is even up for consideration is evidence enough that MS has bought the system.
You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.
This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
Damn that's slow, why not build a live Flash drive & run that. Not only do you get all the advantages of a live CD, you can actually update it as patches come out without having to completely reburn it and it's shitloads faster than a CD.
That doesn't bring back the clipped or restore the dampened portions of the music. Worse, as the midline rises, more and more gets clipped and damped.
If you do not like music which uses the full dynamic range available, that's fine - I recommend classical guitar & string quartet music with or without vocals, the blues, and folk music from the 12th century on should also be to your taste as they follow the same pattern of a few tonally similar instruments within a limited dynamic range.
However, to say that compressing the dynamic range is a 'good thing'(tm) because it prevents artists from straying outside your comfort zone is about as close as you can get to sacralige in the music world. As for "playing stupid games with the loudness", the use of piano vs forte is as important a factor as lento vs presto. I do like classical music and your right, using the dynamic range is "playing games" - exactly the same as using the full range of notes & meter is 'playing games' - games without which, music would be much duller & homogenized. Hmm, interestingly, it would sound a lot like the crap being pushed out as pop music today.
And online poker, and craps, and just about any other form of gambling - yes, including sports betting on MLB, NBA, and NFL games - but principly European Football (Soccer) & horse & dog races.
To say that they were only running a sports book is to ignore the fact that the vast majority of the money was going into online card games. Next it also ignores the fact that Antiguan gambling makes up about 30% of the GNP of Antigua & is highly regulated.
The point is, the US allows online gambling within the US, but not outside the US. That's a no-no according to the WTO. If gambling were morally repugnant to the US, we wouldn't allow it at all. We do, It's not, case closed. The US has 2 courses of action, allow international online gambling, or prohibit all online gambling in the US. They should not & rightfully have not been allowed to claim a 'moral exemption' while writing bills to expand the permissable forms of online gambling inside the US.
The US would have a legitimate 'moral exemption' claim to blocking sites which permit gambling on cockfights or dogfights because both activities are outlawed within the US at the federal level. However, even in your example of sports betting, it is not prohibited on a federal level. If it were, Vegas & Atlantic City wouldn't be able to do it.
The Federal Govt has barred interstate banking transactions covering gambling, but it then proceeded to carve out several exceptions - Dog & Horse racing being the 2 most prominent ones. Without those 2 exemptions, the US may have been able to win this case. However, the exemptions clearly show that online gambling itself is not repugnant to the US.
To be honest, if you examine the history of the laws that block online gambling, the money for the lobying came from 1 source - B&M casinos. This isn't about morality, it's about a fight over who's getting more of your finite entertainment dollars.
Actually, what they are complaining about is that the US is blocking commercial transactions with Antiguan businesses that would be legal if the were businesses physically located inside the US. The WTO says that's a big no-no.
The US has claimed the moral exemption allowed by the WTO - That the morals of the US do not permit online gambling. However, as Antigua pointed out, the US does permit online gambling - OTB on dog & horse racing is legal interstate, and most forms of gambling are legal intrastate - in those states which have legalized gambling of any nature.
The WTO courts have rightly held that you can't claim a moral exemption for international activities, when it is permitted within your country. Either online gambling is morally offensive to the US & it's not to be allowed at all or it's not and the US has to open up the practice to everyone. The US doesn't get to pick & choose which types of gambling are offensive - it's either morally offensive or it's not.
As a case directly on point, it is currently perfectly legal to place a bet on the Kentucky Derby through the OTB website, it is however illegal to place the same bet on the same Kentucky Derby race through an Antiguan online site. This is why the US lost the case, they were claiming that the an action was morally repugnant to the US when done with an Antiguan business, but perfectly acceptable when done through a US based one.
Personally, I think you would have seen a bigger stink if they had gone for patents instead of copyright. The cries of anguish by the US pharmaceutical companies alone should be clearly audible on Antiguan beaches.
As it is, I would like to put in my request for a legal copy of Antiguan Vistas(tm) to run on my computer - just so I can smack the next BSA person I see with it. "Why yes, it is a perfect copy of Windows Vista - without all the DRM crap & calling home. OOh look here, I see that the source code has been released by the Antiguan Software Coalition."
Dynamic range & volume are only vaguely related in that they both are measured in dB.
Volume is the average 'loudness' of a work - IE volume setting of 5 on the stereo will generate a 50dB tone when input with a 50dB tone. a 4 will generate a 45dB tone & a 6 will generate a 60Db tone.
Dynamic range is the difference between the intensities of the midline & peak sounds of the track. IE the midline vs the crash of a cymbal or the midline vs 1/2 second of absolute silence. On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set to the maximum; an effect known as clipping. What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity. Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music.
Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable, the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder than the brass section. The same with shifts between strings & brass - the instruments were chosen for the specific tonal qualities & the music writen to embrace the differences.
The NID & his cronies have layed down a lot of depositions & testemony in court where they've claimed that confirming/denying these allegations would aid terrorists. So do we get to charge them with purjury since the NID just confirmed it within a week of spouting the line in court, or do we get to send the NID to Gitmo for aiding terrorists?
Why can't you just make it work? It worked fine like this before when the switch was in the other closet, I'm tired of spending money replacing these things.
I'm on my 3rd switch in 18 months because the closet it's kept in doesn't vent properly. When the switch goes down, half the phones go down - I can't get the switch moved, and I can't get the closet ventilated. The management solution was to go with cheaper switches so they can write them off without paying so much. I expect to be making a run to one of the stores sometime around the end of next month trying to find a 24port switch in stock.
Management doesn't understand redundancy, nor do they understand preventative maintenance when it comes to electronics. I'm down to scavenging carcasses for HDs from systems with burned (MB || PS) because management won't let me buy new ones to have on hand when one fails. Amazingly, 5yr old HDs scavenged from already failed systems don't seem to have an exceedingly long lifespan.
Actually, the purpose of HTML is to create Hyper Text documents Marked up in a common Language. A markup language is for formatting in terms of a print pre-process. The original goals of HTML were based around graphical appearance of the documents & a common means of linking specific aspects of a document to other documents which expounded on the current topic.
The concept that the content should be isolated & structured is more of a function of XML than HTML. XML takes the traditional print oriented concept of a markup language & applies it to data structuring instead of output formatting.
Again, the cross referencing wasn't designed to be done in an automated fasion, hyper text links were designed to be manually embedded into a document - footnotes on steroids. The [b,i,u,strike] tags were just about your only formatting options, because they were understood by the NCurses libraries. Beyond that, presentation wasn't really even a consideration with the orginal formats for HTML, because LYNX was your friend - pretty much your only friend.
Mosaic from the NSCA changed things dramatically by adding graphics to the mix, but web design was still based around presentation not encapsulation of data. Data encapsulation on a web page is a slow starter, lagging far behind the transition to OOP. Javascript wasn't introduced until 1995, and DOM in 1998. Until IE5 was released in '99, CSS was pretty much worthless as neither IE nor NS4 supported a significant subset of the CSS spec. As late as 2002 it was still considered good practice to code the page for specific resolutions in order to ensure that anyone viewing the page got the same experience.
Overall, I would say that data encapsulation and the seperation of data & presentation really begins right around 2000. Once data begins being seperated in order to take the biggest advantages of CSS , you begin hearing about the symantic web. This is where you begin to really see data being classed & potentially fully indexable.
They'll still have a problem getting around my 127.0.0.1 .tld lines in my hosts file :)
I honestly think my web browsing experiance is 2-3 times faster now that I added doubleclick & 2mdn to the list.
Interestingly enough, Charley Chaplin once came in 3rd in a Charley Chaplin look alike contest. Sometimes the original isn't everything we think it is.