There has been much argument about whether CDs or vinyl sound better. Here's some actual facts.
* Vinyl stores more information than CDs do. Quite a bit more.
* CDs are digital. When you convert from digital to analog or vice versa, you lose information. So any recording made on analog equipment (pretty much any recording more than 15 years old) then put on CD is hemorrhaging data when you put it on the disc and again when you listen to it.
Good post and I would say that you are correct, but I have to ask - are you a vinylphile? Maybe the correct term should really be "vinylphilac" or something like that to describe a person with a bit too strong a love for vinyl. It's really debatable as to what "more information" means that vinyl supposedly stores. Yes, to get into a digital format, the audio must be sampled and the digital copy is not a perfect copy of the original sound. But how many people can tell a difference? One in 10,000? One in a million? It might really be that low.
You hurt yourself by saying that the "CD is hemorrhaging data". What you mean, for those who don't know, is that since the CD isn't a perfect copy of the original source, it never plays exactly the same data as the original source, but it's not any worse with multiple plays - what you hear is always the same on each CD play, so it doesn't hemorrhage any more data than it ever did from the day it was created. To bring up what I said before, while the CD copy isn't 100% identical to the original source, it is so close that almost nobody can honestly tell a difference. However, that's the nature of digital sampling. It is impossible to convert sound into a digital media and have it be 100% identical to the source, but I can't stress this enough, it close enough. It's probably 99.99999999% identical.
People who love vinyl never mention the side effects. The relatively low signal to noise ratio of vinyl. CD's got you beat here - badly! Surface noise. CD wins here too. Signal compression. Oops! Forgot to mention that many LPs were mastered with the audio compressed so that there wasn't too vast a difference between the lows and highs. Is LP even capable of storing and playing back the full range of human hearing? I don't know. But I know that CD can.
Back in the early 1990s, I used to play in chess tournaments. I wasn't very good though and I didn't play at a high level, but I did play in official tournaments that the USCF (United States Chess Federation) sanctioned. My goal at the time was to try to make grand master. I gave up because of 2 reasons. The first was that I wasn't very good. I had serious problems in the middle game. My opening play and end game play were sound, but inevitably I would get beat in the middle game through carelessness. The second reason I gave up was because I realized that computers were ruining chess. Keep in mind that I am talking 1990-1993 here (I stopped playing in tournaments in 1993). In the old days, if you learned a chess opening, the moves might go 7 moves deep or so in most openings where the moves for the white and black pieces were known and any deviations from these set moves got you "out of book" as they say. If you deviated on, say, move 4 in a 7 move sequence, the odds were that your move was bad because if it was so good, it would have been known and used by other players and then be part of the book. At this time being "in book" was already starting to change because of computer analysis. Then you could go 10 moves or more in many openings and still be "in book". The amount of time and memory required to memorize these much deeper opening sequences was overwhelming. One day I realized that it just wasn't worth it and I'd rather devote my time and brain power to other things that I actually had some talent for, like learning other languages.
Chess is said to be "solvable". My understanding is that it can be proven mathematically that chess has a finite series of moves. If this is correct, then at some point computers will be powerful enough to be able win every game because they'll be able to analyze every possible opening all the way to the end and only pick the moves that will win. No human will ever be able to duplicate this feat. So it is inevitable that computers will eventually be unbeatable. I think just a few weeks ago Slashdot had an article that a computer program has been designed that is now at the point where it cannot lose at checkers - ever. Checkers is quite a bit less complex than chess and it has only now been solved. Whether it takes 10, 20, 50 or more years to solve chess, the day will come when computers simply cannot be beaten at chess under the current rules.
Should we care? Well, maybe not. Computers are better than humans at a lot of things, like mathematical calculations, so it's inevitable that they will be better than humans at chess. The downside is that once all chess games are solvable, it will ruin chess at the professional level. It will make it almost impossible for any game to be postponed until the next day because once there is a postponement, a player could, in theory, simply use a PC to analyze his game and find a sequence of moves where he cannot lose if he plays them correctly. At that point, there's no more human element in the game - it's simply a matter who can more accurately remember computer analysis. Computers ruined chess for me in the early 1990s. Can you imagine how much worse things are now? And how much worse they will be when the day comes that everybody can use a PC to analyze his game and find a way to never lose? At that point, I suspect that either chess will change to Fischer Random Chess as mentioned in the article or people who would have played chess will simply move on and play the game of go instead. Go is beyond the ability of current computers to solve and even the best computer programs can't beat strong human players.
I can understand everyone wanting to sell it. I don't understand anyone buying almost 6 millions shares of it today.
You and me both. This is a perfect illustration of how the stock market makes no sense at all sometimes. Think about the following 2 points.
1. We on Slashdot and Groklaw have known for years that eventually SCOX would get the smackdown in court. When faced with the threat of being delisted earlier this year, SCOX did a reverse split. Reverse splits rarely work. They are a desperation measure to artificially inflate stock value. That should have been a clear sign to anyone that SCOX was in big big trouble, yet it took until today for the market smackdown to occur. 2. SCOX is still worth over 40 cents a share as I write this. While that's not a lot of money, it shows that some people, somewhere, still think SCOX has value. Does that make any rational sense? No it does not.
Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.
Sigh.
Here we go again. Another Brit using British slang and just expecting the rest of the world to understand. I had to go to dictionary.com, but for those of us who aren't Brits cosh = bludgeon
China's essentially cheating, but due to their size and their strategic importance, there's not much we can do about it.
They are indeed, but why on earth should anyone be surprised by that? Let's reduce the complexity of this to an argument everyone can understand.
USA: China, we want you to stop manipulating your currency. China: What's in it for you if we stop? USA: It could help our economy in a lot of ways. Things would probably turn out great for us if you do that. China: What will happen to me if we stop? USA: Well, uh, honestly you'll make less money and sell less goods. Your currency will increase in value, which is good, but you'll have less of it. Overall, you'll come out behind. By a lot. China: And we should take this step that is only to our detriment and your benefit because...?
Why does the US government act so surprised that China doesn't want to do this? Until China gets some sort of compensation that offsets the economic losses that will come with doing this or the price of not doing it (not necessarily in money, but perhaps lost trade, etc.) is worse than what happens when they do it, they will never have any reason to stop manipulating the yuan.
Believe it or not, there actually could be an answer here..."fair use" does have specific provisions for how long clips can be
No, it does not . That's one of the reasons that the whole "fair use" concept isn't enough to keep you out of the courts because there are no specific provisions for how long clips can be. In fact, in the so-called "Betamax decision", the US Supreme Court held that recording an entire TV show fell under "fair use". You should lose mod points for saying that when it's completely false.
who is this guy and why does he control what happens with my internets?
That was my thinking too. I'm very curious to see if the rest of the world is going to ignore this if for no other reason that to show the USA that it can't tell everybody else what to do. I'm American by the way and I'm seeing an awful lot of "You can't tell us what to do!" attitudes from the rest of the world right now. I'm not saying that those attitudes are wrong, I'm just pointing out that they exist.
Windows Media DRM is not totally cracked
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 1
It's very wrong to imply that Windows Media DRM is cracked. What has been done is that if and only if you have a valid license to something protected with Windows Media DRM, it is possible to remove the DRM. If you don't have a valid license, then you can't remove the DRM. If I give you a Windows Media file protected via DRM and I don't give you a valid license, that file is totally protected and you can't do anything to remove the DRM.
BluRay discs will very soon have a new form of protection that is different from AACS and because of the way this new system works at the disc level, some have theorized that it may be uncrackable. I suspect if it is cracked at all that it will be only because the implementation was botched. If this new system is properly implemented, it may be the first DRM success story for the industry and will no doubt lead to similar methods for other media.
To answer your question, US consumers are keeping phones in the "stone age." The *vast* majority of US cell phone users buy the phones and use them as - get this - phones .
I would like to second this. Honestly, I get really really tired of the constant bitching by people on Slashdot, of all places, on how they "want a cell phone that's just a cell phone and nothing else". Geez, this is supposed to be a place where people who understand technology come, but based on what I've seen here constantly over the years, there are a large number of cell phone luddites in the USA. I work in IT and among my co-workers in my department, we all, every single one of us (more than 12 in the department) have smart phones on which we use non-phone features. However, I can honestly say that among my friends and family, I have one friend who has a smart phone and none of my other friends and none of my family members are interested in anything but low function "cell phone that is just a phone" type cell phones.
Considering that most terrorists are Muslim, somewhat ironic that anti-terrorism laws are being used to silence those who "insult Islam." How else is Islam going to be civilized and reformed from within if criticism and debate on the state of Islam in the modern world is crushed in a major Muslim nation, Malaysia, keeping in mind most of the world's Muslims live in Asia?
Malaysia is 62% Malay, 24% Chinese, 8% Indian and the remaining 6% "something else". Malaysia has some strange laws that only apply to Malays. For example, by law all Malays are considered Muslim at birth. Malaysia issues identity cards that identify the religion of the holder. In theory, a person has the right to change their religion in Malaysia, but in reality it cannot be done if the holder is Malay and therefore a Muslim. Converts to Christianity have lost law suits over this. I am sure that this law is not directed at Malays but is actually a way to keep the 38% non-Malay population in line, very few of whom are Muslim.
I dunno, if the remaining Beatles survive another 6 years then their early work will be out of copyright in their lifetime.
You are right, but it's worth noting that this applies ONLY to the UK. Paul and Ringo's stuff is still locked up tight under copyright in the USA (that's where the REAL money is, not the much smaller UK market), Australia and various other places.
There's an old joke, probably from WWII (or maybe the Cold War era), about a German translator. A guy I used to work with who spoke fluent German told it to me. It goes like this:
A translator is listening to a German radio broadcast and busily writing down what he hears. He says nothing for a long time, but keeps writing. A nearby woman is growing impatient for the translation. Woman: What are they saying? What are they saying? Translator: Just a minute, ma'am. I'm still waiting for the verb.
German really seems to be like this. For what it's worth, Russian, also an inflected language, would not simply stick a negative at the end of a sentence to negative the information that preceded it. The negative would be right in front of the verb, just like in English.
1) MiniDisc was never intended to replace audio CDs. It was intended to replace audio tapes . Yes, certainly Sony mismanaged the format, but what killed it mostly was the availability of small, portable CD players and the eventual availability of cheap CD burners and burnable discs. 2) DTS lost, sort of, but since a rather large number of DVDs have DTS soundtracks, it's not a terrible loss as DTS is still in business. Plus, it's not entirely correct to say that DTS uses "fractionally more space on a disc" unless 100 to 400% more meets your idea of "fractionally more". However, given the size of dual-layer DVDs, it's sort of accurate in that there's enough space to put a DTS soundtrack out there on most movies if they don't have too many extras on the disc. 3) As far as high definition audio goes, it does still survive, although many don't know that. SACD was horribly bungled by Sony, again, who at first said that it was "impossible" (I believe that is an exact quote) to make hybrid SACD discs which would also play in normal audio CD players. Strangely, smaller independent labels managed to make such discs almost from the beginning of the format. Lack of product, price, and lack of hybrid discs on Sony owned labels had strongly negative impacts on the format. SACD still survives in classical, jazz and some European pop recordings. DVD-Audio is still alive on some classical and jazz labels, but it's not doing well. The lack of compatibility with CD audio players seems to have really hurt it. While the Dolby AC-3 part of a DVD-Audio disc is easily rippable and convertible to audio CD format, most consumers don't know that and just viewed it as another incompatible format.
The language is a bit vague, but calling this a defeat of the Fifth Amendment is overly hyperbolic.
Indeed. Until the Supreme Court rules on it, and they certainly will see a case about it if it is used in practice, we don't know if it will actually be proven to be legal or another case of the government overstepping its constitution boundaries.
Should have thought to put this in the ORignal post, Yes, you should have.
A. She already has a plan, options involving getting a new plan to get another crappy free phone like she already has is not an option. OK.
B. She is replacing a POS sony Ericcson flip-phone that has horrible reception, sometimes it never rings then it will buzz telling her she has voice-mail...
C. She uses the phone for work, she's in the medical field and is on call a lot, so the phone does get regular use. No they didn't give her a phone from work that isn't the question. Just need a good GSM phone that doesn't cost 300+ dollars to buy unlocked and is ready to use.
The phone may indeed by a POS, but that may have nothing to do with her reception. Since she has a GSM phone, you should be aware that both T-Mobile (my provider) and AT&T don't work everywhere. It's probably a reception issue rather than a phone issue. It's a very long story I won't go into, but on my last job we had corporate cell phones on AT&T's ancient, barely supported non-GSM network and reception was bad everywhere in our town. Our stupid company signed some long term deal to get a break on the phones and billing charges and we were unable to move to AT&T's GSM network because either AT&T wouldn't give us the same rates or our company was too stupid to know how to make the change. Either is possible. By the way, you may not know this, but as a US GSM customer, your mom is definitely using either T-Mobile or AT&T. Unfortunately, evil Verizon probably has the best reception of any US carrier, but they offer only a few GSM compatible phones that are bastardized GSM-CDMA hybrids. I have no idea how they work on GSM, but they are OK for use in the USA for sure. They aren't cheap though.
http://www.1800mobiles.com/ offers a few unlocked GSM phones for cheap that have few functions outside of phone stuff.
I surmise that the way the service works is that you can have an application on your Internet (3G or EDGE) enabled mobile phone, which can make calls to other mobile phones using only the internet connection on your end. Since in Europe, you're not responsible for the cost of incoming phone calls, this would render the calls in question totally free for the people making them.
Actually, this is not true in all of Europe. In non-Soviet Russia, cell phone company charges YOU! - for both incoming and outgoing calls, just like in the good old USA. Sorry to resort to that old joke, but it is true that Russian mobile phone companies do charge customers for both incoming and outgoing calls.
That can be really annoying. I remember listening to over the air radio in Brasil, in the middle nineties.
I live in the USA and I love Brazilian music. I have to say that a few years ago I used to try to listen to Brazilian radio stations on the web and I gave up. When I could find a station that I could actually listen to, the bit rate was so low (try 32 Kbps or 64 Kbps and almost always mono) that I really didn't enjoy the experience. I guess from your post I didn't miss much except for the same songs being played over and over.
Never mind that there's no compelling reason to ditch NTSC broadcasts, or that it will cost billions for consumers to convert their TVs to HD.
Well, in theory the freed up spectrums might result in additional wireless services that consumers will want. I think it's also fair to say that there is no compelling reason to keep NTSC broadcasts, which is using technology over 50 years old. Consumers do not have to convert their TVs to HD. All they need do is buy a conversion box and Uncle Sam is supposed to subsidize the cost to those who will need them. I've heard talk of $50 vouchers being given, which should about cover it.
I fail to see even one argument as to how keeping the spectrum will benefit anybody. Your post seems to be kind of a luddite thing.
People consume poisons all the time - capsaicin (in spicy foods), cyanide (in almonds)
Partly untrue for almonds. The common "sweet almond" does not contain the substance that can be converted to cyanide and it is only in the "bitter almond" that you find it. Bitter almonds are specialty products and are sold as such. In fact, in the USA you have to do some searching to find them at all. The almonds that you can buy in stores in the USA are always sweet almonds.
I've heard several of my colleagues say that they will get their iPhones in two years when they are $50.
I've explained to these colleagues that there is no way this will happen.
You are correct. I don't see the iPhone ever selling for less than $300 - not a new one anyway. I'm not sure Apple should even go for the under $100 market nor do I think they plan to do so. I took a look just to see what is out there for under $100. The only phones you can get for $100 are giant sized piece of crap phones or you can get a decent phone with a 2 year contract. You can't buy a good unlocked phone for $100 or less. At least not from any of the people I trust who sell phones. The cheapskate and the crybaby "I just want a phone that's a phone" people will never, ever buy iPhones anyway. I don't think it makes good business sense to try to sell to this market anyway. A dumbed down iPhone that could sell for under $100 seems pointless to me. Isn't the point that you can do cool stuff with it? The people who want cheap, featureless phones are a segment Apple would be wise to ignore.
Because of Doom9's policy on links, I can't provide a direct link, but in the June news at the Doom9 website, Doom9 himself said that until the BD+ discs come out, nobody knows what will happen, but based on the spec, it is possible that it will be uncrackable. My best guess at this time is that the only way it will be cracked is if either the implementation has a gigantic hole nobody thought of (always possible) or someone gets an illegal peek at the hardware specs for the VM and is able to implement it in software. I'm not optimistic at all that BD+ will be cracked.
If any of you care at all about DVD on HD formats and you want to be able to convert your future purchases in that format to other formats to watch on other devices you own such as video iPods, you better hope that BluRay fails.
Is all this DRM on BlueRay and HD-DVD optional? Yes. Just like CSS on DVD, consumers will not have access to this kind of DRM on discs they burn themselves. Content protection is reserved only for the big media companies.
Ie. if I were to release a movie under the creative commons liscence, could I put it on one of the new formats in a way that it would be playable on a Linux box?
The word "Linux" is key here. My answer to this would be "No" as I don't believe the parties who license HD-DVD and BluRay will license Linux for playback of these discs. If you want to make a disc that would be playable under Windows, that's a different story and my answer to that would be "Yes".
Sorry to bring this up, but that unit just strikes me as absolutely ridiculous (mg/12 oz).
The article was probably written by an American. In school, we do actually learn and work with the metric system in science classes, so identifying mg of caffeine does make sense to us. Unfortunately, we aren't very familiar with metric liquid measurements once we get outside of school except maybe for 2 liters, because soft drinks (Coke, Pepsi, etc.) are sold in 2 liter bottles. However, cans are 12 ounces and are sold as such in vending machines and convenience stores (7-11, etc.). I have no idea at all offhand how many ml are the same as 12 ounces, but I know how much 12 ounces is. So basically it's the amount of caffeine in mg, which we do sort of understand, in a common US 12 ounce can. I just looked it up and 12 ounces is 354 ml. All I can tell you is that if the article talked about mg of caffeine/354 ml, almost everybody here in the USA would say "What the...?" as we would have no idea that 354 ml is a 12 ounce can of a soft drink.
This is the 3rd time I've tried to post on this. My first 2 posts were apparently not allowed by Slashdot for some reason. I've never been censored before. I'll have to watch what I say very carefully I guess.
The Nokia 3161 was tested in the USA this year by one of the US cell phone providers. A few user reports were good. It was rumored to be available nationwide by May, then nothing. Nobody seems to know what happened. Try to do a web search to see if you can buy the phone if you don't live in Europe and you'll come up with some interesting results.
Whether or not you believe what AllOfMp3.com was doing was illegal or unethical, it has got to be at least a little worrisome that a group of American corporations can effectively control the legal system of another major nation.
I don't think that is the right way to look at the situation. What is worrisome is that a group of American corporations convinced the US government that issues that are unique to the entertainment industry were such a big deal that the US government better care about them and in turn they became such a big deal that they were able to force Russia to care about them. I can assure you that Russia does not give in to bullying. They acted because they either got something under the table for doing so or the government concluded that there was some benefit that they would gain by shutting down one website that would outweigh the perception of giving in to US pressure. Russia does not do something for nothing so they are getting something out of the deal, but what they are getting I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
There has been much argument about whether CDs or vinyl sound better. Here's some actual facts.
* Vinyl stores more information than CDs do. Quite a bit more.
* CDs are digital. When you convert from digital to analog or vice versa, you lose information. So any recording made on analog equipment (pretty much any recording more than 15 years old) then put on CD is hemorrhaging data when you put it on the disc and again when you listen to it.
Good post and I would say that you are correct, but I have to ask - are you a vinylphile? Maybe the correct term should really be "vinylphilac" or something like that to describe a person with a bit too strong a love for vinyl. It's really debatable as to what "more information" means that vinyl supposedly stores. Yes, to get into a digital format, the audio must be sampled and the digital copy is not a perfect copy of the original sound. But how many people can tell a difference? One in 10,000? One in a million? It might really be that low.
You hurt yourself by saying that the "CD is hemorrhaging data". What you mean, for those who don't know, is that since the CD isn't a perfect copy of the original source, it never plays exactly the same data as the original source, but it's not any worse with multiple plays - what you hear is always the same on each CD play, so it doesn't hemorrhage any more data than it ever did from the day it was created. To bring up what I said before, while the CD copy isn't 100% identical to the original source, it is so close that almost nobody can honestly tell a difference. However, that's the nature of digital sampling. It is impossible to convert sound into a digital media and have it be 100% identical to the source, but I can't stress this enough, it close enough. It's probably 99.99999999% identical.
People who love vinyl never mention the side effects. The relatively low signal to noise ratio of vinyl. CD's got you beat here - badly! Surface noise. CD wins here too. Signal compression. Oops! Forgot to mention that many LPs were mastered with the audio compressed so that there wasn't too vast a difference between the lows and highs. Is LP even capable of storing and playing back the full range of human hearing? I don't know. But I know that CD can.
Back in the early 1990s, I used to play in chess tournaments. I wasn't very good though and I didn't play at a high level, but I did play in official tournaments that the USCF (United States Chess Federation) sanctioned. My goal at the time was to try to make grand master. I gave up because of 2 reasons. The first was that I wasn't very good. I had serious problems in the middle game. My opening play and end game play were sound, but inevitably I would get beat in the middle game through carelessness. The second reason I gave up was because I realized that computers were ruining chess. Keep in mind that I am talking 1990-1993 here (I stopped playing in tournaments in 1993). In the old days, if you learned a chess opening, the moves might go 7 moves deep or so in most openings where the moves for the white and black pieces were known and any deviations from these set moves got you "out of book" as they say. If you deviated on, say, move 4 in a 7 move sequence, the odds were that your move was bad because if it was so good, it would have been known and used by other players and then be part of the book. At this time being "in book" was already starting to change because of computer analysis. Then you could go 10 moves or more in many openings and still be "in book". The amount of time and memory required to memorize these much deeper opening sequences was overwhelming. One day I realized that it just wasn't worth it and I'd rather devote my time and brain power to other things that I actually had some talent for, like learning other languages.
Chess is said to be "solvable". My understanding is that it can be proven mathematically that chess has a finite series of moves. If this is correct, then at some point computers will be powerful enough to be able win every game because they'll be able to analyze every possible opening all the way to the end and only pick the moves that will win. No human will ever be able to duplicate this feat. So it is inevitable that computers will eventually be unbeatable. I think just a few weeks ago Slashdot had an article that a computer program has been designed that is now at the point where it cannot lose at checkers - ever. Checkers is quite a bit less complex than chess and it has only now been solved. Whether it takes 10, 20, 50 or more years to solve chess, the day will come when computers simply cannot be beaten at chess under the current rules.
Should we care? Well, maybe not. Computers are better than humans at a lot of things, like mathematical calculations, so it's inevitable that they will be better than humans at chess. The downside is that once all chess games are solvable, it will ruin chess at the professional level. It will make it almost impossible for any game to be postponed until the next day because once there is a postponement, a player could, in theory, simply use a PC to analyze his game and find a sequence of moves where he cannot lose if he plays them correctly. At that point, there's no more human element in the game - it's simply a matter who can more accurately remember computer analysis. Computers ruined chess for me in the early 1990s. Can you imagine how much worse things are now? And how much worse they will be when the day comes that everybody can use a PC to analyze his game and find a way to never lose? At that point, I suspect that either chess will change to Fischer Random Chess as mentioned in the article or people who would have played chess will simply move on and play the game of go instead. Go is beyond the ability of current computers to solve and even the best computer programs can't beat strong human players.
I can understand everyone wanting to sell it. I don't understand anyone buying almost 6 millions shares of it today.
You and me both. This is a perfect illustration of how the stock market makes no sense at all sometimes. Think about the following 2 points.
1. We on Slashdot and Groklaw have known for years that eventually SCOX would get the smackdown in court. When faced with the threat of being delisted earlier this year, SCOX did a reverse split. Reverse splits rarely work. They are a desperation measure to artificially inflate stock value. That should have been a clear sign to anyone that SCOX was in big big trouble, yet it took until today for the market smackdown to occur.
2. SCOX is still worth over 40 cents a share as I write this. While that's not a lot of money, it shows that some people, somewhere, still think SCOX has value. Does that make any rational sense? No it does not.
Sigh.
Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.
Sigh.
Here we go again. Another Brit using British slang and just expecting the rest of the world to understand. I had to go to dictionary.com, but for those of us who aren't Brits
cosh = bludgeon
China's essentially cheating, but due to their size and their strategic importance, there's not much we can do about it.
...?
They are indeed, but why on earth should anyone be surprised by that? Let's reduce the complexity of this to an argument everyone can understand.
USA: China, we want you to stop manipulating your currency.
China: What's in it for you if we stop?
USA: It could help our economy in a lot of ways. Things would probably turn out great for us if you do that.
China: What will happen to me if we stop?
USA: Well, uh, honestly you'll make less money and sell less goods. Your currency will increase in value, which is good, but you'll have less of it. Overall, you'll come out behind. By a lot.
China: And we should take this step that is only to our detriment and your benefit because
Why does the US government act so surprised that China doesn't want to do this? Until China gets some sort of compensation that offsets the economic losses that will come with doing this or the price of not doing it (not necessarily in money, but perhaps lost trade, etc.) is worse than what happens when they do it, they will never have any reason to stop manipulating the yuan.
Believe it or not, there actually could be an answer here..."fair use" does have specific provisions for how long clips can be
No, it does not . That's one of the reasons that the whole "fair use" concept isn't enough to keep you out of the courts because there are no specific provisions for how long clips can be. In fact, in the so-called "Betamax decision", the US Supreme Court held that recording an entire TV show fell under "fair use". You should lose mod points for saying that when it's completely false.
who is this guy and why does he control what happens with my internets?
That was my thinking too. I'm very curious to see if the rest of the world is going to ignore this if for no other reason that to show the USA that it can't tell everybody else what to do. I'm American by the way and I'm seeing an awful lot of "You can't tell us what to do!" attitudes from the rest of the world right now. I'm not saying that those attitudes are wrong, I'm just pointing out that they exist.
It's very wrong to imply that Windows Media DRM is cracked. What has been done is that if and only if you have a valid license to something protected with Windows Media DRM, it is possible to remove the DRM. If you don't have a valid license, then you can't remove the DRM. If I give you a Windows Media file protected via DRM and I don't give you a valid license, that file is totally protected and you can't do anything to remove the DRM.
BluRay discs will very soon have a new form of protection that is different from AACS and because of the way this new system works at the disc level, some have theorized that it may be uncrackable. I suspect if it is cracked at all that it will be only because the implementation was botched. If this new system is properly implemented, it may be the first DRM success story for the industry and will no doubt lead to similar methods for other media.
To answer your question, US consumers are keeping phones in the "stone age." The *vast* majority of US cell phone users buy the phones and use them as - get this - phones .
I would like to second this. Honestly, I get really really tired of the constant bitching by people on Slashdot, of all places, on how they "want a cell phone that's just a cell phone and nothing else". Geez, this is supposed to be a place where people who understand technology come, but based on what I've seen here constantly over the years, there are a large number of cell phone luddites in the USA. I work in IT and among my co-workers in my department, we all, every single one of us (more than 12 in the department) have smart phones on which we use non-phone features. However, I can honestly say that among my friends and family, I have one friend who has a smart phone and none of my other friends and none of my family members are interested in anything but low function "cell phone that is just a phone" type cell phones.
Considering that most terrorists are Muslim, somewhat ironic that anti-terrorism laws are being used to silence those who "insult Islam." How else is Islam going to be civilized and reformed from within if criticism and debate on the state of Islam in the modern world is crushed in a major Muslim nation, Malaysia, keeping in mind most of the world's Muslims live in Asia?
Malaysia is 62% Malay, 24% Chinese, 8% Indian and the remaining 6% "something else". Malaysia has some strange laws that only apply to Malays. For example, by law all Malays are considered Muslim at birth. Malaysia issues identity cards that identify the religion of the holder. In theory, a person has the right to change their religion in Malaysia, but in reality it cannot be done if the holder is Malay and therefore a Muslim. Converts to Christianity have lost law suits over this. I am sure that this law is not directed at Malays but is actually a way to keep the 38% non-Malay population in line, very few of whom are Muslim.
I dunno, if the remaining Beatles survive another 6 years then their early work will be out of copyright in their lifetime.
You are right, but it's worth noting that this applies ONLY to the UK. Paul and Ringo's stuff is still locked up tight under copyright in the USA (that's where the REAL money is, not the much smaller UK market), Australia and various other places.
There's an old joke, probably from WWII (or maybe the Cold War era), about a German translator. A guy I used to work with who spoke fluent German told it to me. It goes like this:
A translator is listening to a German radio broadcast and busily writing down what he hears. He says nothing for a long time, but keeps writing. A nearby woman is growing impatient for the translation.
Woman: What are they saying? What are they saying?
Translator: Just a minute, ma'am. I'm still waiting for the verb.
German really seems to be like this. For what it's worth, Russian, also an inflected language, would not simply stick a negative at the end of a sentence to negative the information that preceded it. The negative would be right in front of the verb, just like in English.
So much bad information. Where to begin? ...
1) MiniDisc was never intended to replace audio CDs. It was intended to replace audio tapes . Yes, certainly Sony mismanaged the format, but what killed it mostly was the availability of small, portable CD players and the eventual availability of cheap CD burners and burnable discs.
2) DTS lost, sort of, but since a rather large number of DVDs have DTS soundtracks, it's not a terrible loss as DTS is still in business. Plus, it's not entirely correct to say that DTS uses "fractionally more space on a disc" unless 100 to 400% more meets your idea of "fractionally more". However, given the size of dual-layer DVDs, it's sort of accurate in that there's enough space to put a DTS soundtrack out there on most movies if they don't have too many extras on the disc.
3) As far as high definition audio goes, it does still survive, although many don't know that. SACD was horribly bungled by Sony, again, who at first said that it was "impossible" (I believe that is an exact quote) to make hybrid SACD discs which would also play in normal audio CD players. Strangely, smaller independent labels managed to make such discs almost from the beginning of the format. Lack of product, price, and lack of hybrid discs on Sony owned labels had strongly negative impacts on the format. SACD still survives in classical, jazz and some European pop recordings.
DVD-Audio is still alive on some classical and jazz labels, but it's not doing well. The lack of compatibility with CD audio players seems to have really hurt it. While the Dolby AC-3 part of a DVD-Audio disc is easily rippable and convertible to audio CD format, most consumers don't know that and just viewed it as another incompatible format.
The language is a bit vague, but calling this a defeat of the Fifth Amendment is overly hyperbolic.
Indeed. Until the Supreme Court rules on it, and they certainly will see a case about it if it is used in practice, we don't know if it will actually be proven to be legal or another case of the government overstepping its constitution boundaries.
Should have thought to put this in the ORignal post,
Yes, you should have.
A. She already has a plan, options involving getting a new plan to get another crappy free phone like she already has is not an option.
OK.
B. She is replacing a POS sony Ericcson flip-phone that has horrible reception, sometimes it never rings then it will buzz telling her she has voice-mail...
C. She uses the phone for work, she's in the medical field and is on call a lot, so the phone does get regular use. No they didn't give her a phone from work that isn't the question. Just need a good GSM phone that doesn't cost 300+ dollars to buy unlocked and is ready to use.
The phone may indeed by a POS, but that may have nothing to do with her reception. Since she has a GSM phone, you should be aware that both T-Mobile (my provider) and AT&T don't work everywhere. It's probably a reception issue rather than a phone issue. It's a very long story I won't go into, but on my last job we had corporate cell phones on AT&T's ancient, barely supported non-GSM network and reception was bad everywhere in our town. Our stupid company signed some long term deal to get a break on the phones and billing charges and we were unable to move to AT&T's GSM network because either AT&T wouldn't give us the same rates or our company was too stupid to know how to make the change. Either is possible. By the way, you may not know this, but as a US GSM customer, your mom is definitely using either T-Mobile or AT&T. Unfortunately, evil Verizon probably has the best reception of any US carrier, but they offer only a few GSM compatible phones that are bastardized GSM-CDMA hybrids. I have no idea how they work on GSM, but they are OK for use in the USA for sure. They aren't cheap though.
http://www.1800mobiles.com/ offers a few unlocked GSM phones for cheap that have few functions outside of phone stuff.
I surmise that the way the service works is that you can have an application on your Internet (3G or EDGE) enabled mobile phone, which can make calls to other mobile phones using only the internet connection on your end. Since in Europe, you're not responsible for the cost of incoming phone calls, this would render the calls in question totally free for the people making them.
Actually, this is not true in all of Europe. In non-Soviet Russia, cell phone company charges YOU! - for both incoming and outgoing calls, just like in the good old USA. Sorry to resort to that old joke, but it is true that Russian mobile phone companies do charge customers for both incoming and outgoing calls.
That can be really annoying. I remember listening to over the air radio in Brasil, in the middle nineties.
I live in the USA and I love Brazilian music. I have to say that a few years ago I used to try to listen to Brazilian radio stations on the web and I gave up. When I could find a station that I could actually listen to, the bit rate was so low (try 32 Kbps or 64 Kbps and almost always mono) that I really didn't enjoy the experience. I guess from your post I didn't miss much except for the same songs being played over and over.
Never mind that there's no compelling reason to ditch NTSC broadcasts, or that it will cost billions for consumers to convert their TVs to HD.
Well, in theory the freed up spectrums might result in additional wireless services that consumers will want.
I think it's also fair to say that there is no compelling reason to keep NTSC broadcasts, which is using technology over 50 years old. Consumers do not have to convert their TVs to HD. All they need do is buy a conversion box and Uncle Sam is supposed to subsidize the cost to those who will need them. I've heard talk of $50 vouchers being given, which should about cover it.
I fail to see even one argument as to how keeping the spectrum will benefit anybody. Your post seems to be kind of a luddite thing.
People consume poisons all the time - capsaicin (in spicy foods), cyanide (in almonds)
Partly untrue for almonds. The common "sweet almond" does not contain the substance that can be converted to cyanide and it is only in the "bitter almond" that you find it. Bitter almonds are specialty products and are sold as such. In fact, in the USA you have to do some searching to find them at all. The almonds that you can buy in stores in the USA are always sweet almonds.
I've heard several of my colleagues say that they will get their iPhones in two years when they are $50.
I've explained to these colleagues that there is no way this will happen.
You are correct. I don't see the iPhone ever selling for less than $300 - not a new one anyway. I'm not sure Apple should even go for the under $100 market nor do I think they plan to do so. I took a look just to see what is out there for under $100. The only phones you can get for $100 are giant sized piece of crap phones or you can get a decent phone with a 2 year contract. You can't buy a good unlocked phone for $100 or less. At least not from any of the people I trust who sell phones. The cheapskate and the crybaby "I just want a phone that's a phone" people will never, ever buy iPhones anyway. I don't think it makes good business sense to try to sell to this market anyway. A dumbed down iPhone that could sell for under $100 seems pointless to me. Isn't the point that you can do cool stuff with it? The people who want cheap, featureless phones are a segment Apple would be wise to ignore.
Because of Doom9's policy on links, I can't provide a direct link, but in the June news at the Doom9 website, Doom9 himself said that until the BD+ discs come out, nobody knows what will happen, but based on the spec, it is possible that it will be uncrackable. My best guess at this time is that the only way it will be cracked is if either the implementation has a gigantic hole nobody thought of (always possible) or someone gets an illegal peek at the hardware specs for the VM and is able to implement it in software. I'm not optimistic at all that BD+ will be cracked. If any of you care at all about DVD on HD formats and you want to be able to convert your future purchases in that format to other formats to watch on other devices you own such as video iPods, you better hope that BluRay fails.
Is all this DRM on BlueRay and HD-DVD optional?
Yes. Just like CSS on DVD, consumers will not have access to this kind of DRM on discs they burn themselves. Content protection is reserved only for the big media companies.
Ie. if I were to release a movie under the creative commons liscence, could I put it on one of the new formats in a way that it would be playable on a Linux box?
The word "Linux" is key here. My answer to this would be "No" as I don't believe the parties who license HD-DVD and BluRay will license Linux for playback of these discs. If you want to make a disc that would be playable under Windows, that's a different story and my answer to that would be "Yes".
Sorry to bring this up, but that unit just strikes me as absolutely ridiculous (mg/12 oz).
...?" as we would have no idea that 354 ml is a 12 ounce can of a soft drink.
The article was probably written by an American. In school, we do actually learn and work with the metric system in science classes, so identifying mg of caffeine does make sense to us. Unfortunately, we aren't very
familiar with metric liquid measurements once we get outside of school except maybe for 2 liters, because soft drinks (Coke, Pepsi, etc.) are sold in 2 liter bottles. However, cans are 12 ounces and are sold as such in vending machines and convenience stores (7-11, etc.). I have no idea at all offhand how many ml are the same as 12 ounces, but I know how much 12 ounces is. So basically it's the amount of caffeine in mg, which we do sort of understand, in a common US 12 ounce can. I just looked it up and 12 ounces is 354 ml. All I can tell you is that if the article talked about mg of caffeine/354 ml, almost everybody here in the USA would say "What the
This is the 3rd time I've tried to post on this. My first 2 posts were apparently not allowed by Slashdot for some reason. I've never been censored before. I'll have to watch what I say very carefully I guess.
The Nokia 3161 was tested in the USA this year by one of the US cell phone providers. A few user reports were good. It was rumored to be available nationwide by May, then nothing. Nobody seems to know what happened. Try to do a web search to see if you can buy the phone if you don't live in Europe and you'll come up with some interesting results.
Whether or not you believe what AllOfMp3.com was doing was illegal or unethical, it has got to be at least a little worrisome that a group of American corporations can effectively control the legal system of another major nation.
I don't think that is the right way to look at the situation. What is worrisome is that a group of American corporations convinced the US government that issues that are unique to the entertainment industry were such a big deal that the US government better care about them and in turn they became such a big deal that they were able to force Russia to care about them. I can assure you that Russia does not give in to bullying. They acted because they either got something under the table for doing so or the government concluded that there was some benefit that they would gain by shutting down one website that would outweigh the perception of giving in to US pressure. Russia does not do something for nothing so they are getting something out of the deal, but what they are getting I don't know.