While strictly true (once you attach a microcontroller chip to a PCB board, it's no longer just a microcontroller), there isn't much to an Arduino board aside from the controller. Most include some basic power management and a USB-to-serial chip for programming and comms, but those are just common features rather than requirements to be considered an Arduino. IMO, what defines an Arduino is its software package... Or is that what you were getting at? ^_^
Sorry, editing mistake: "you have control over the ideas NOT as a result of ownership, but as a result of other protections". Yeah, yeah... preview. -_-
>If you have an unpublished manuscript, you own that. Destroy it, toss it in a fire, do whatever you like with it; it's yours. The moment you publish, you give up your ownership. You have no rights to recall, revoke, or destroy the copy of your published manuscript that is in my head. That's mine, not yours.
That strikes me as a sort of sloppy description. The fact is, nobody owns ideas. If you think up something new, you have the option of never writing it down, or never publishing or selling your manuscript. In those cases you have control over the ideas as a result of ownership, but as a result of other protections. Nobody can force you to write your ideas down, which gives you absolute control over them. If you choose to record them in some form, you still own the paper and ink (or whatever) the manuscript is composed of... Nobody can force you to show or disclose the contents of your personal property. You still have ownership-control over the manuscript, but the ideas are a merely a hostage in that they only exist in your head and on the manuscript. Once you have sold one or more copies of your manuscript, you no longer have ownership-control over the physical media the ideas have been recorded upon, as it has been sold to another party. As such, you lose the protections surrounding ownership of that property. Copyright simply gives the idea's creator a window of time in which they can continue producing and selling copies without worry of competition from individuals they have already sold copies to... An artificial, time-limited monopoly. Once the time window expires, individuals are free to make as many copies of copies as they like.
> I guess he means "not allowing people to read/share/copy a book is like keeping people as slaves". > This sounds like "the content wants to be free".
Or simply people want to be free. Not in a physical sense as the classical concept of slavery implies, but a mental one. Exposure to new ideas expands one's ability to think and understand - to draw meaning from events. A public deprived of these expanded abilities is easier to control and oppress. This is why maximizing the number of works freely available to the public is important in maintaining the freedom of The People as a whole. In this light, "not allowing people to read/share/copy a book is like keeping people as slaves", yes.
It's not even the idling that's the biggest problem... Accelerating once the light turns green uses far more fuel than either idling or cruising through a green light. When you step on the brakes to stop at a red light, you're converting your car's kinetic energy into waste heat via friction between the brake pads/shoes and the brake disks/drums. That wasted energy has to be replaced once the light turns green, or the car won't move. The faster the traffic flow, the greater the kinetic energy of each car and energy wasted by each red light that catches a wave of cars. Regenerative braking systems found in hybrid cars help to some degree, but they still have limitations and conversion losses that waste energy. The battery can only be charged so fast, which leads to falling back on the mechanical brakes (assuming driving style isn't altered to compensate) in situations calling for anything more than casual brake application. Mechanical losses (additional load causing increased friction in axles, transmission, etc), conversion from mechanical to electrical energy (resistance in the generator windings and power conditioning), and conversion from electrical to chemical (battery internal resistance and chemical process efficiency) all take a two-fold toll on efficiency: Once when using braking energy to charge the battery, and again when using the battery to accelerate the vehicle. It's better than just letting the energy blow away on the wind, but still far from perfect.
It's a lot easier to put big, heavy, expensive emissions reducing and filtering equipment on a stationary power plant than it is to equip every single car on the roads. Further, more efficient engines can be built when they aren't restricted to weighing a ton or less, and when they don't have to stand up to the pounding and harsh environmental conditions that car engines experience.
Actually, engineers have refined product failure time to something of an art. My two-ish year old (out of warranty of course) 19" Princeton LCD monitor started having trouble waking from sleep mode, then finally wouldn't wake up at all. I opened it up and discovered a few capacitors in the backlight inverter circuit had overheated and blown their tops. It's not that these caps had been somehow overworked... No, no, they had been boxed in on five sides so there was no ventilation. Not only that, but the bottom and one side of this box consisted of a sheet metal aluminum heat sink for a couple of hefty power transistors. These capacitors had been carefully baked to death. Several other caps just inside the open face of this oven were showing a little bulge, while ones outside the box (a distance of about two inches from the failed caps) looked perfectly normal.
Yeah, I know... "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity", but to not only fail to notice such a cooling flaw but put some of the displays most heat sensitive components in this area... It's just too much to believe, especially when profit is involved.
>What free software for iphones? Did you mean the pirate software?
The legitimate software made available for free through Cydia or Icy perhaps? Software can only be pirated if the creator expects to be compensated for it.
Yes, but incandescent bulbs have no means of regulating how much heat they release, resulting in waste. A separate heating element can be switched or regulated independently from the light, based on a thermostat of some sort. That way, just enough energy is used to keep the lens above freezing, minimizing waste. One could even add a relatively inexpensive set of photo cells to measure the amount of light being reflected back at the lamp, so that the heater only kicks on when snow buildup is actually present.
Who says it needs to re-enter? If the bits of junk are all lodged in a larger net structure which behaves in a predictable manner, it could just be left up there as a sort of orbital junkyard. The proposed designs for a space elevator require a chunk of ballast to keep the tether taught... Why not a bunch of discarded booster shells and such, tacked together? It took a lot of energy to get that stuff up there... Why waste it?
From Oxford American Dictionaries: "affirmative action noun an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, esp. in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination."
the point of traditional radio stations seems to me that you can listen to X genre in Y area
The point of traditional radio stations is to cover costs (and preferably make a profit) with revenue from advertisers by distributing their material to the populace. The populace generally isn't interested in listening to advertisements all day long, so the radio stations must provide material the populace is interested in, with advertisements thrown in periodically.
Range "Y" is an artifact of radio broadcasting and power limitations imposed by the FCC to allow wider use of radio spectrum. I agree that the internet's nearly infinite supply of spectrum eliminates the need for any kind of range limitations. Genre "X" limitations are similarly a radio spectrum issue and need not exist on the internet.
Why do we need a large station like last.fm alongside a smaller internet radio station? What can the small one offer that the larger cannot if they are both free?
Try turning that around: "What can the large one offer that the smaller one cannot if they are both free?" Really, I would expect a larger entity to develop into a far more bureaucratic system, making it slow to respond to listener's changing interests and requests. Further, large entities are somewhat resilient to legal action and more difficult to reconstruct, making them more easily controlled by external parties such as large copyright holders. Such legal action on a small entity would likely crush it, but a new one could quickly sprout up in the hole left by the original.
Going back to the original question: "What can the small one offer that the larger cannot i they are both free?" Simply put, adaptability and resistance against external corruption. These qualities do not mesh well with the music industry's legacy business model, thus the attempt to eliminate them with a $25,000 minimum charge. I would be interested to see what kind of logical knots they try to tie in their attempts to defend this minimum.
GameStop doesn't sell used PC games because they have install restrictions. PC game producers admit to using said restrictions to limit or eliminate the resale value that businesses such as GameStop capitalize on. If these restrictions weren't in place, used PC games would have resale value, so GameStop would (in theory anyway) be interested in selling them. I agree that a case filed by GameStop doesn't make much sense... PC game producers aren't legally obligated to follow GameStop's business model. On the other hand, a class action case on the behalf of PC game consumers may be in order if these restrictions and corresponding elimination of resale value weren't fully disclosed prior to sale.
The only way the content-owners can regain control is to give better access to the material than the pirates do. This means streaming services.
The thought of subscription-based streaming service does not impress me. Such a service seems like it would combine the worst of several existing solutions - the mobile connectivity issues (and associated fees) of internet radio, playlist formation from a large music collection, and the subscription fees of satellite radio.
I think you pointed out the real issue: Content owners are trying to regain control. Control over a market means the ability to exploit it - something corporations will do at the drop of a hat. Any [individual/consumer/non-corporate entity] who recognizes these links would try to resist assertion of such control (that is, unless they want to be exploited). That diametric opposition of interests leads to the big business vs. the public situation seen today.
It may not be traditional economics, but there is an optimal price for every song that will make the most money.
I think what you're describing is a maximization of exploitation. As the GP suggested, supply is nearly infinite so the price should be nearly zero. So that begs the question: What are they really selling here? Why are people willing to spend money on something that has no appreciable value? Fear. The music industry isn't selling music... They're selling umbrellas to shield oneself from their showers of FUD.
Just like you are free to buy internet access from someone who hasn't made a similar arrangement.
And who might that be? It seems the RIAA is deliberately keeping that list private, minimizing the public's ability to intelligently make such a decision.
You do realize that the current generation of Apple laptops use the same multi-touch technology on their trackpads as they have employed on the iPhone and iPod touch, don't you? In addition to pressing the pad down with one finger to click, or two fingers to right-click, it also recognizes (quoted from apple's website) "two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag". Those last three have been built into apple laptops as far back as I can remember (back in the motorola 68000 days)... It's just buttonless click functionality.
Are you saying the Dell's higher resolution display also has an LED backlight? The whole apple lineup has them, so it's not a unique feature. That goes for the backlit keyboard as well.
Really? I assume you're including the substantial weight of a diesel engine to drive said generator, as a quick google search turns up the Winco EC75PSB4G-17 - a 75 kilowatt emergency backup generator head (just the part that turns shaft movement into AC power) that weighs in at 605 lbs. That's a unit intended for stationary use, not to be mounted to a vehicle. I'm sure a similar device intended for mobile use could be constructed from less massive materials.
In fact, may I direct you to look over the specifications page for the Honda FCX Clarity: link. There you will find that power from the vehicle's fuel cell stack and lithium ion battery is converted to motive force by a 100kW (134 hp) AC electric motor with integrated transaxle. While the page lacks a weight listing for said motive unit, I doubt it exceeds 400 lbs.
Why is that? I have an old Garmin GPS-12 that will run for 24+ hours on a set of 4 alkaline AAs. The newer, more advanced revisions will apparently run for 36. While the added power draw would obviously affect whatever battery life the manufacturer is quoting, I think your statement is a bit over-dramatic.
Eh, well... Watts = Volts * Amps. Residences generally have between 100 and 200 amp service. That is, the circuit breaker box in your basement is set up to carry a maximum of 100 to 200 amps of power at any given time. Voltage is generally 240 (though it's two-phase so it can be easily divided into two 120V circuits), so 100 amps * 240 volts = 24,000 watts, or double that for 200 amp service.
The real issue is usage. Yeah, your breaker box can handle 24 kilowatts running through it, but how often do you actually approach that number? Designing the system around your maximum load means it can handle anything you throw at it (assuming it's a nice, sunny day), but at least some of that capacity will be sitting idle 99% of the time. The trick is to figure out your average power usage, build your solar panel system around that number (or maybe slightly exceeding it) and then implement some method of storage or compensation for high-load periods. One such method is to stay on the power grid. That is, set up your solar panel system so that when it would otherwise be sitting idle, it's actually pumping power back out on to the electrical grid -- running your electrical meter backwards if you will. The utility company is required to pay you back for power you generate, so if you're using less than you're generating in a given month, you get a check in the mail rather than a bill. If your usage exceeds what your solar panels are producing, you pull the difference from the existing electrical grid.
Yeah, no joke. I haven't taken apart a computer power supply recently, but most wall-wart power adapters use a good old-fashioned transformer to step the voltage down before rectifying, filtering and regulating it. If you feed DC into a transformer, you'll get a static magnetic field and heat, but no voltage on the output leads. And then there's your major appliances, which often use AC motors. Similar to transformers, AC motors depend on the alternating magnetic field produced by running AC power though the windings of an electromagnet. So, similarly, if you run DC through an AC motor, you'll get heat and a static magnetic field.
One could argue that they profit substantially from the copyrighted material, since it brings in revenue from page (and thus ad) views. If that theory flies in court, I hope someone will similarly prosecute the countless news agencies that benefit on a daily basis from the assorted illegal acts on which they report. After all, the crimes that they benefit from are often far more heinous than TPB's alleged copyright infringement.
It should have been an absolute walk in the park for him to sink the case.
I think you greatly underestimate the think of the children factor present in the circumstances of the case. Sadly, it seems that when ever a minor is involved, rational decision-making becomes the exception, rather than the rule. Such a mentality could easily explain the existing laws being stretched to try to cover an unfortunate incident.
Slashdot Mirror
While strictly true (once you attach a microcontroller chip to a PCB board, it's no longer just a microcontroller), there isn't much to an Arduino board aside from the controller. Most include some basic power management and a USB-to-serial chip for programming and comms, but those are just common features rather than requirements to be considered an Arduino. IMO, what defines an Arduino is its software package... Or is that what you were getting at? ^_^
Sorry, editing mistake: "you have control over the ideas NOT as a result of ownership, but as a result of other protections".
Yeah, yeah... preview. -_-
>If you have an unpublished manuscript, you own that. Destroy it, toss it in a fire, do whatever you like with it; it's yours. The moment you publish, you give up your ownership. You have no rights to recall, revoke, or destroy the copy of your published manuscript that is in my head. That's mine, not yours.
That strikes me as a sort of sloppy description. The fact is, nobody owns ideas. If you think up something new, you have the option of never writing it down, or never publishing or selling your manuscript. In those cases you have control over the ideas as a result of ownership, but as a result of other protections. Nobody can force you to write your ideas down, which gives you absolute control over them. If you choose to record them in some form, you still own the paper and ink (or whatever) the manuscript is composed of... Nobody can force you to show or disclose the contents of your personal property. You still have ownership-control over the manuscript, but the ideas are a merely a hostage in that they only exist in your head and on the manuscript.
Once you have sold one or more copies of your manuscript, you no longer have ownership-control over the physical media the ideas have been recorded upon, as it has been sold to another party. As such, you lose the protections surrounding ownership of that property. Copyright simply gives the idea's creator a window of time in which they can continue producing and selling copies without worry of competition from individuals they have already sold copies to... An artificial, time-limited monopoly. Once the time window expires, individuals are free to make as many copies of copies as they like.
> I guess he means "not allowing people to read/share/copy a book is like keeping people as slaves".
> This sounds like "the content wants to be free".
Or simply people want to be free. Not in a physical sense as the classical concept of slavery implies, but a mental one. Exposure to new ideas expands one's ability to think and understand - to draw meaning from events. A public deprived of these expanded abilities is easier to control and oppress. This is why maximizing the number of works freely available to the public is important in maintaining the freedom of The People as a whole.
In this light, "not allowing people to read/share/copy a book is like keeping people as slaves", yes.
It's not even the idling that's the biggest problem... Accelerating once the light turns green uses far more fuel than either idling or cruising through a green light. When you step on the brakes to stop at a red light, you're converting your car's kinetic energy into waste heat via friction between the brake pads/shoes and the brake disks/drums. That wasted energy has to be replaced once the light turns green, or the car won't move. The faster the traffic flow, the greater the kinetic energy of each car and energy wasted by each red light that catches a wave of cars.
Regenerative braking systems found in hybrid cars help to some degree, but they still have limitations and conversion losses that waste energy. The battery can only be charged so fast, which leads to falling back on the mechanical brakes (assuming driving style isn't altered to compensate) in situations calling for anything more than casual brake application. Mechanical losses (additional load causing increased friction in axles, transmission, etc), conversion from mechanical to electrical energy (resistance in the generator windings and power conditioning), and conversion from electrical to chemical (battery internal resistance and chemical process efficiency) all take a two-fold toll on efficiency: Once when using braking energy to charge the battery, and again when using the battery to accelerate the vehicle. It's better than just letting the energy blow away on the wind, but still far from perfect.
It's a lot easier to put big, heavy, expensive emissions reducing and filtering equipment on a stationary power plant than it is to equip every single car on the roads. Further, more efficient engines can be built when they aren't restricted to weighing a ton or less, and when they don't have to stand up to the pounding and harsh environmental conditions that car engines experience.
Actually, engineers have refined product failure time to something of an art.
My two-ish year old (out of warranty of course) 19" Princeton LCD monitor started having trouble waking from sleep mode, then finally wouldn't wake up at all. I opened it up and discovered a few capacitors in the backlight inverter circuit had overheated and blown their tops. It's not that these caps had been somehow overworked... No, no, they had been boxed in on five sides so there was no ventilation. Not only that, but the bottom and one side of this box consisted of a sheet metal aluminum heat sink for a couple of hefty power transistors. These capacitors had been carefully baked to death. Several other caps just inside the open face of this oven were showing a little bulge, while ones outside the box (a distance of about two inches from the failed caps) looked perfectly normal.
Yeah, I know... "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity", but to not only fail to notice such a cooling flaw but put some of the displays most heat sensitive components in this area... It's just too much to believe, especially when profit is involved.
>What free software for iphones? Did you mean the pirate software?
The legitimate software made available for free through Cydia or Icy perhaps?
Software can only be pirated if the creator expects to be compensated for it.
No, it isn't. The news release states the incident occurred on the 6th of February around 5 pm.
Or just wrap all the wiring harnesses with aluminum foil duct tape.
Yes, but incandescent bulbs have no means of regulating how much heat they release, resulting in waste. A separate heating element can be switched or regulated independently from the light, based on a thermostat of some sort. That way, just enough energy is used to keep the lens above freezing, minimizing waste. One could even add a relatively inexpensive set of photo cells to measure the amount of light being reflected back at the lamp, so that the heater only kicks on when snow buildup is actually present.
Who says it needs to re-enter? If the bits of junk are all lodged in a larger net structure which behaves in a predictable manner, it could just be left up there as a sort of orbital junkyard. The proposed designs for a space elevator require a chunk of ballast to keep the tether taught... Why not a bunch of discarded booster shells and such, tacked together? It took a lot of energy to get that stuff up there... Why waste it?
>Racist much?
From Oxford American Dictionaries:
"affirmative action
noun
an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, esp. in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination."
Yes. Yes it is.
The point of traditional radio stations is to cover costs (and preferably make a profit) with revenue from advertisers by distributing their material to the populace. The populace generally isn't interested in listening to advertisements all day long, so the radio stations must provide material the populace is interested in, with advertisements thrown in periodically. Range "Y" is an artifact of radio broadcasting and power limitations imposed by the FCC to allow wider use of radio spectrum. I agree that the internet's nearly infinite supply of spectrum eliminates the need for any kind of range limitations. Genre "X" limitations are similarly a radio spectrum issue and need not exist on the internet.
Try turning that around: "What can the large one offer that the smaller one cannot if they are both free?" Really, I would expect a larger entity to develop into a far more bureaucratic system, making it slow to respond to listener's changing interests and requests. Further, large entities are somewhat resilient to legal action and more difficult to reconstruct, making them more easily controlled by external parties such as large copyright holders. Such legal action on a small entity would likely crush it, but a new one could quickly sprout up in the hole left by the original. Going back to the original question: "What can the small one offer that the larger cannot i they are both free?" Simply put, adaptability and resistance against external corruption. These qualities do not mesh well with the music industry's legacy business model, thus the attempt to eliminate them with a $25,000 minimum charge. I would be interested to see what kind of logical knots they try to tie in their attempts to defend this minimum.
GameStop doesn't sell used PC games because they have install restrictions. PC game producers admit to using said restrictions to limit or eliminate the resale value that businesses such as GameStop capitalize on. If these restrictions weren't in place, used PC games would have resale value, so GameStop would (in theory anyway) be interested in selling them.
I agree that a case filed by GameStop doesn't make much sense... PC game producers aren't legally obligated to follow GameStop's business model. On the other hand, a class action case on the behalf of PC game consumers may be in order if these restrictions and corresponding elimination of resale value weren't fully disclosed prior to sale.
The thought of subscription-based streaming service does not impress me. Such a service seems like it would combine the worst of several existing solutions - the mobile connectivity issues (and associated fees) of internet radio, playlist formation from a large music collection, and the subscription fees of satellite radio.
I think you pointed out the real issue: Content owners are trying to regain control. Control over a market means the ability to exploit it - something corporations will do at the drop of a hat. Any [individual/consumer/non-corporate entity] who recognizes these links would try to resist assertion of such control (that is, unless they want to be exploited). That diametric opposition of interests leads to the big business vs. the public situation seen today.
I think what you're describing is a maximization of exploitation. As the GP suggested, supply is nearly infinite so the price should be nearly zero. So that begs the question: What are they really selling here? Why are people willing to spend money on something that has no appreciable value? Fear. The music industry isn't selling music... They're selling umbrellas to shield oneself from their showers of FUD.
And who might that be? It seems the RIAA is deliberately keeping that list private, minimizing the public's ability to intelligently make such a decision.
You do realize that the current generation of Apple laptops use the same multi-touch technology on their trackpads as they have employed on the iPhone and iPod touch, don't you? In addition to pressing the pad down with one finger to click, or two fingers to right-click, it also recognizes (quoted from apple's website) "two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag". Those last three have been built into apple laptops as far back as I can remember (back in the motorola 68000 days)... It's just buttonless click functionality.
Are you saying the Dell's higher resolution display also has an LED backlight? The whole apple lineup has them, so it's not a unique feature. That goes for the backlit keyboard as well.
A 100hp generator weighs 1500 pounds.
Really? I assume you're including the substantial weight of a diesel engine to drive said generator, as a quick google search turns up the Winco EC75PSB4G-17 - a 75 kilowatt emergency backup generator head (just the part that turns shaft movement into AC power) that weighs in at 605 lbs. That's a unit intended for stationary use, not to be mounted to a vehicle. I'm sure a similar device intended for mobile use could be constructed from less massive materials.
In fact, may I direct you to look over the specifications page for the Honda FCX Clarity: link. There you will find that power from the vehicle's fuel cell stack and lithium ion battery is converted to motive force by a 100kW (134 hp) AC electric motor with integrated transaxle. While the page lacks a weight listing for said motive unit, I doubt it exceeds 400 lbs.
Why is that? I have an old Garmin GPS-12 that will run for 24+ hours on a set of 4 alkaline AAs. The newer, more advanced revisions will apparently run for 36. While the added power draw would obviously affect whatever battery life the manufacturer is quoting, I think your statement is a bit over-dramatic.
Eh, well... Watts = Volts * Amps.
Residences generally have between 100 and 200 amp service. That is, the circuit breaker box in your basement is set up to carry a maximum of 100 to 200 amps of power at any given time. Voltage is generally 240 (though it's two-phase so it can be easily divided into two 120V circuits), so 100 amps * 240 volts = 24,000 watts, or double that for 200 amp service.
The real issue is usage. Yeah, your breaker box can handle 24 kilowatts running through it, but how often do you actually approach that number? Designing the system around your maximum load means it can handle anything you throw at it (assuming it's a nice, sunny day), but at least some of that capacity will be sitting idle 99% of the time. The trick is to figure out your average power usage, build your solar panel system around that number (or maybe slightly exceeding it) and then implement some method of storage or compensation for high-load periods. One such method is to stay on the power grid. That is, set up your solar panel system so that when it would otherwise be sitting idle, it's actually pumping power back out on to the electrical grid -- running your electrical meter backwards if you will. The utility company is required to pay you back for power you generate, so if you're using less than you're generating in a given month, you get a check in the mail rather than a bill. If your usage exceeds what your solar panels are producing, you pull the difference from the existing electrical grid.
Yeah, no joke.
I haven't taken apart a computer power supply recently, but most wall-wart power adapters use a good old-fashioned transformer to step the voltage down before rectifying, filtering and regulating it. If you feed DC into a transformer, you'll get a static magnetic field and heat, but no voltage on the output leads.
And then there's your major appliances, which often use AC motors. Similar to transformers, AC motors depend on the alternating magnetic field produced by running AC power though the windings of an electromagnet. So, similarly, if you run DC through an AC motor, you'll get heat and a static magnetic field.
One could argue that they profit substantially from the copyrighted material, since it brings in revenue from page (and thus ad) views. If that theory flies in court, I hope someone will similarly prosecute the countless news agencies that benefit on a daily basis from the assorted illegal acts on which they report. After all, the crimes that they benefit from are often far more heinous than TPB's alleged copyright infringement.
I think you greatly underestimate the think of the children factor present in the circumstances of the case. Sadly, it seems that when ever a minor is involved, rational decision-making becomes the exception, rather than the rule. Such a mentality could easily explain the existing laws being stretched to try to cover an unfortunate incident.