Right now Indie film makers are embracing the standard DVD players that support Divx 6 pro HD codecs. Giving you full 1080i HD pleasure on a standard DVD disc and on a player that costs around $99.00 and honestly does a fantastic job at it.
BluRay has no plans for supporting a consumer created Disk format. HDDVD can in theory be burned at home and played on standalone players but nobody has their hands on a HDDVD player yet to try it. All of these consortiums are intentionally ignoring the home and indie user and that is incredibly dangerous.
It truly saddens me that so much disinformation gets 5 points.
First of all, almost NONE of the DVD players that support Divx support Divx in HD. To imply otherwise is just wrong. There are a very few expensive ($200 US minimum) DVD/media players that support the format such as the Avel I-O Link Player and some Helios players, but ZERO players under $100 US that can play HD Divx files. Right now, you can count on one hand the number of standalone players that are even capable of playing the format.
Secondly, while you may not know anything about people with HD-DVD players burning and playing their own discs, people on the Doom9 forums have reported being able to burn HD-DVD format to burnable media (usually DVD-9 as HD-DVD media is very expensive) and play them back correctly on HD-DVD players. And there certainly are plans for BluRay to be supported as a consumer format. There are recorders available right now, but they are very expensive.
The actual overflights however were usually conducted by much less spectacular aircraft that remarkably enough seem to have gone mostly unnoticed by the public in the US and Europe. This strategic recon force was known as Aeroflot. It seems Soviet airliners frequently made the most illogical flights simply in order to fly as close to as possible to sensitive sites or even right over them if they thought they could get away with it. They were even known to fake mechanical problems simply to be able to land in restricted areas.
The Warsaw Pact countries demonstrated a willingness to shoot down civilian aircraft, unlike the Western powers. A civilian plane going from Vienna to Tel Aviv was shot down after straying into Bulgarian airspace in July of 1955. And of course we have the infamous Korean Airlines Flight 007 in September of 1983 that was shot down by the Soviet Union after apparently straying into Soviet airspace. You can find a little more information at Wikipedia in the list of notable accidents on commercial aircraft
Actually, he did do this at one time and for all I know may still be doing it. Some of you may not remember, but he has not had a very good relationship with his labels over the years. At one time he painted the word "slave" on his cheek when he performed in public and he was very vocal in saying that this was in reference to how his record company was treating him. It had nothing at all to do with race but was merely a statement of how he felt he was being treated.
I have a friend who is big fan and through my friend I understand that for many years Prince only sold his music through the internet and via the mail. I read an interview with Prince where he was asked how this worked out for him and he said it worked out great. He said that sales were lower than when he was in stores, but there was a giant benefit to him in that he made 100% of the profit on every sale whereas when he was with a label, they made most of the money on every sale. I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, but let's say Prince sells a CD for $15 and it costs $2 to make it. That means he gets $13. All that money goes to him. If a record company sold it for $15, he probably gets $1 per CD. He said that he made a lot more money selling his own music even though sales were down over selling CDs in stores.
I was surprised when Prince went back to having a major label sell his stuff. All I can figure is that he got a better royalty rate than in the past and maybe he was just tired of having to manage selling it himself and wanted to a label to do it so he'd have less hassle. In any event, I can tell you that Prince does not let The Man tell him what to do and I would not be surprised to see this backfire big time on his label.
I thought I explained it pretty well. It's a known problem - a "sleeping on a non-sleepable lock" panic. You can do a web search on it and find some discussion about others who have it, but nobody seems sure about what causes it (a lot of writes is the best guess) and nobody knows how to fix it.
Long story short - 32 bit mode won't work for us as we have to move to 64 bits for growth and future scalability. Using 32 bit FreeBSD is not an option for us. We'll just move to 64 bit Linux rather than move backwards to 32 bit FreeBSD. 64 bit OSes work a lot faster for us than 32 bit. Fast response keeps out customers happy.
Another guy asked why we didn't just fall back to version 6.1 of the kernel. We felt that we needed bug fixes that came out in 6.2 and indeed 6.2 did fix those problems, it just opened up something worse with the panics. Going back to 6.1 will once again give us the bugs we wanted fixed. Again, we might as well just go to Linux as it doesn't have the bugs we faced and it doesn't have the panics on 64 bit AMD that FreeBSD 6.2 does.
AMD64 doesn't like FreeBSD 6.2 at all. We use FreeBSD and Linux in our business. FreeBSD is very important to us. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the senior management here in our IT department borders on being fanboys of FreeBSD. We were running various versions of FreeBSD on our AMD64 servers from 6.1 down to 5.something and we (foolishly in hindsight) decided that we had to upgrade to version 6.2 because it had some bug fixes we thought we needed. Oh they did fix those bugs, but they opened up a huge one that apparently nobody knows what causes it and nobody has any idea how to fix. What happens is that AMD64 systems will panic with some sort of a "sleeping on a non-sleepable lock" panic. Some people think that this is being caused by a large number of writes. Given how our servers work, this is certainly possible for us. The bottom line for us is that FreeBSD on AMD64 is so unstable that we are probably going to have to go to Linux instead for our web servers. Nobody wants to do that, but we simply can't have our webservers going down every day with the same panic and we lose one server a day on average to this problem. We've even had boxes crash within minutes of being brought up with the exact same panic.
Once we move to Linux, I don't think we'll go back to FreeBSD. My best guess is that because the problem has apparently been going on for months with no resolution that we'll start moving servers from FreeBSD to Linux when we can. We don't have this problem under Linux. The fact is that whether we like it or not, more people use Linux and if stuff is seriously broken under Linux, someone will fix it soon enough. With FreeBSD nobody seems to have any idea what to do for this problem and I'm not sure that it will even be fixed this year, let alone soon enough to keep us from moving to Linux.
"The onus is on Reiser to come up with evidence - where is the chair? explain the blood, why was the car washed?"
Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.
True enough, but you don't necessarily need a lot of evidence to get a conviction. Look up Michael Skakel, a Kennedy relative, and you'll find a guy who was convicted of murder on incredibly thin evidence. In the past, people have been convicted of murder and executed when no body was ever found. In my old hometown, a doctor got convicted of murder some years ago on completely circumstantial evidence. Basically they could tie him to a dead woman because he had an affair with her, but there was no hard evidence to tie him to her body. He still got convicted, but because of various reasons he got a retrial and, lucky for him, the DA died and the DA's replacement botched the re-trial and the guy walked. Do I think he killed the lady? I sure do, but I also completely understand why the jury foreman was quoted after the re-trial was over as saying the DA had nothing and that's why they voted for not guilty. Reiser may legally be "innocent until proven guilty" but what they have may be enough to convince a jury that he did it.
5. Soundtrack by Vangelis. Who better to do scifi soundtracks? Orchestral sound tracks are overrated, and the modern approach of using pop music is lame.
The one guy I think who might have been better is Russian film composer Eduard Artemyev. Artemyev worked on 3 of Andrei Tarkvovsky's films - Solaris, Mirror and Stalker. The first and last were sci-fi films. Artemyev was certainly capable of composing normal type film music and often did so, but these 3 films are an amazing partnership of director and composer. Tarkovsky was very interested in film music and gave some directions/suggestions to Artemyev, with Artemyev providing an electronic soundtrack to all 3 films rather than normal film music. I still think Solaris (the original that Tarkovsky directed) is the perfect synthesis of film and music and Artemyev's work would not have been out of place in Blade Runner. I'm not knocking Vangelis at all, just pointing out the work of someone else just as worthy but who has been overlooked because he had the misfortune of working in the USSR. How many people connected to film in the USSR or Russia can you name? See what I mean?
Just trying to set the debate straight here. If it is wrong, and if the current countermeasures aren't sufficiently deterrent, than stricter measures must be introduced.
Is it wrong to copy somebody else's work despite the owner's objections? Stick to this point...
The point, which you have missed, is not about copying and whether it is right or wrong. The point is - how does Canada benefit from a law designed to protect American business interests?
After all, who thinks we'd have the copyright terms we do now if it wasn't for Disney buying off congressmen?
Myself for one. I think lobbying is very destructive in general, but it's never quite as cut-and-dried as "buying off" people. First of all, even with all the loopholes, it's very difficult for one donor to give enough money to a member of congress to severely sway them. I mean, these people are usually start out being comfortably well-off, even with the frequent pay cuts you get when you move from the private sphere to the public one.
Very few members of congress are going to let themselves be bought for a few thousand dollars. Just not worth it.
I think we have a couple of things going on here. While I agree that probably nobody is being "bought", per se, for a few thousand dollars, you get enough "few thousand dollars" from people and it adds up. There's a general idea of "You donate money and I'll be more interested in your concerns", but outright buying? I don't think that goes on.
Copyrights got extended because most of Congress is lawyers and there is great sympathy in the legal profession for extending copyrights, even when the lawyers themselves aren't copyright holders. I had a conversation a few months ago with my longtime best friend, who is a lawyer, and he was completely unable to understand why copyrights shouldn't be passed on as an inheritance basically forever and why having stuff in the public domain is a good thing. He saw nothing wrong with the future descendants of today's rock stars making money off song copyrights that were written by people who died before they were born. It would be something like having Shakespeare's kin making money today from copyrights for stuff written hundreds of years in the past by him, an ancestor they never met. I suspect most lawyers agree with this viewpoint. Then you have Sony Bono, who as a published songwriter had a good reason to want copyrights extended. He was making money from his old song copyrights and he wanted that gravy train to last as long as possible. If Disney benefitted too, that was fine with him, but I think Sony was motivated by his own desires here. He was apparently well liked in Congress, so you have a mixture of a well liked guy, Congressmen who are lawyers who in turn see nothing wrong at all with extending copyrights as it is "the right thing to do" (from their perspective at least), and legislation that "hurts no one", so I can't say I'm surprised at all it passed. The biggest mistake though was that it allows for automatic copyright extension, which was never done in the past. Things went into public domain up until the 1950s because people forgot to apply for copyright extension. That's how it should be. If your copyright is so valuable, then you should be forced to remember to apply for it to be extended.
Indeed, but Americans are bad to have mad love for brands and you might be surprised at what kind of consumer rape they'll take just to stick with certain companies. It's kind of like being the abused party in an abusive relationship who doesn't want to leave. In this case the consumer just can't change companies no matter how bad he/she is treated because "things might be worse elsewhere".
One of my good friends runs a small business and he told me "Never again" would he buy a Dell because of their tech support. Of course the original poster could just buy a Windoze PC from his beloved Dell and install Ubuntuu on it himself, but I guess that kind of thinking is too "out of the box" for many people. By God he wants a solution where Dell sells him an Ubuntuu box AND accepts the business credit card to pay for and he's going to hold his breath until that happens even though he has many other options (other vendors, self-install Ubuntuu over Windoze, etc.).
Sigh. So, making crap up gets this 4 points for "insightful"? In fact in the USA, all (this includes phonographs) works published before 1923 are in the public domain. So it's in the public domain. And the term of expiration of copyrights here is death of the author plus either 50 or 70 years, but just assume 70 because that's probably going to be the case. I couldn't find any explanation as to why sometimes it's only supposed to be life of the author plus 50 years and we all know that certainly doesn't apply to any major corporation like Disney, who will definitely get life plus 70 years.
Nice argument, but in today's modern world, there are alternatives to whale meat. It's not like they would starve if they weren't allowed to hunt whales, and you may not know this, but they weren't allowed to hunt whales until recent years. Even in Japan, which does an awful lot of whale hunting for "scientific research", the fact is that whale meat is not very popular. The post WWII generation ate because they had to. Japan was ravaged in the war and protein sources were scarce. Almost nobody in Japan actually likes whale meat except a few old people. I read an article where they were basically force feeding it to school kids to get rid of it (again, almost nobody really wants to eat it) and the kids said essentially it tastes like crap. There are people in Japan who eat it and there are places that proudly advertise it on menus, but most people don't like it. Heck, even here in America almost nobody I know will eat a McRib, but McDonalds brings it back almost every year and I know a guy who gets genuinely excited when they come back, yet the fact that some diehards love the stuff a lot doesn't mean that everybody will eat it. Maybe 80 or more years ago they hunted whales because they didn't have a choice. Perhaps it should be allowed as some sort of cultural thing, but please don't delude yourself into thinking these poor Eskimos would starve and die out if not allowed to hunt whales, because that's not true.
Both Firefox and Opera are available on OS X as well yet most people use Safari.
You're right, but I'll give you my perspective. I have an OS X laptop (pre-Intel). I don't like laptops very much and rarely use it. I has nothing to do with OS X or the Apple laptop design. I just don't like laptops - at all. I am seriously unimpressed with Safari on its native platform. So much so that I quickly installed Firefox because Safari drove me nuts. Opera would have been OK with me too. As a not frequent user of OS X, I fail to understand why people love Safari, but then again, I know plenty of people who won't use anything but IE under Windows and I don't understand that one either.
Actually, it's not. I can understand why you would think so. You are a rational human being. You also probably have never worked for the US government. Some years ago I did work for the US government as a computer programmer and I can promise you that what you think is going to happen is not going to happen.
Government bureaucrats excell at protecting themselves. Think about it. The Patent Office makes money. It's not like, say, the FBI where they just spend tax dollars. We can argue about whether or not the FBI is spending it's dollars on the right things, but at the end of the day, it is a consumer of money. The Patent Office brings in revenue and a lot of it. Uncle Sam is addicted and his drug of choice is money. Read the article again and I can promise you that all this will do is speed up the approval of more patents, not less. There's a lot of emphasis on this idea of speeding up the process and the whole idea behind this is really to approve more patents quicker and make more money for the Patent Office. The Patent Office doesn't care at all if the courts get bogged down in patent disputes. In fact, from a certain point of view, that could actually be a Good Thing. More patent disputes means a need for more judges, for more courts, for more support people (bailiffs, court reporters, aides to judges, etc.) so from a certain warped perspective, having more patent disputes is actually putting people to work. I can promise you that the US government really doesn't care how this shakes out as long as jobs are created and the Patent Office keeps bringing in money. They will care only when people in Congress or upper level bureaucrats feel the pain, like they did with the Blackberry patent disputes, in which case the Patent Office magically found problems with the patents used against Blackberry because it made life difficult for Crackberry addicts in Congress and the upper reaches of the US government. Until there is an economic incentive to the US government to change the patent system, it will never change and will only get worse.
This website has been debunked for a long time. See http://biffovision.blogspot.com/2006/06/chernobyl- diary-part-six.html and scroll down a few paragraphs. The Kid of Speed girl used props to enhance her photos, but she didn't ride her motorcycle as claimed through the exclusion zone.
To follow up on this excellent post, I'd like to point out that I'm American and I've spent a good deal of time in Ukraine in the past. My Ukrainian ex-girlfriend had 2 great-grandparents who were murdered by Stalin's henchmen while her grandfather was forced to watch for the "crime" of supposedly being Ukrainian nationalists. Putin is drunk with power and money thanks to Russia's oil and gas reserves. Times are more or less good in Russia for people who live in bigger cities. Even for common people. They're making more money than ever before and they credit Putin. He not only has little real opposition, but what little there is has been suppressed by him and he's stacked the deck to be sure that his party and his eventual hand picked successor will become the next president. Putin is an ex-KGB guy and he laments the breakup of the USSR. His wet dream is to rebuild the USSR, but I think at some level he knows that won't happen, so he'd prefer to have vassal states that pay homage to him and give him a virtual USSR to rule. He flipped out when Ukraiane protested the bogus presidential elections in late 2004 and eventually elected Yushchenko in a fair election. He wasn't happy with what happened in Georgia first in the Rose Revolution, but I think until Ukraine elected Yushchenko, he thought he could just bully Georgia back into line. I have little doubt that Putin would love to tell all of the old Warsaw Pact countries what to do just like in the "good old days". The US has stated that they intend to put 10, yes, 10 interceptor missles in Poland. Since Russia has well over 1000 nuclear missles, this is just more of Putin's nonsense that such interceptor missles are a "threat" to Russia. My ex-girlfriend and her family knew first hand what kind of "love" Mother Russia gives to her children and I can't say I blame thelima for not being interested in falling under Russian influence again.
I'm pretty sure I read a while ago that one of the differences between HD DVD and BluRay is that this managed copy stuff is mandatory for HD DVD and optional for BluRay. If it's mandatory for HD DVD, and HD DVDs are already shipping, why are licensing agreements still being worked on?
Good question, but the situation is like this: HD-DVD - theoretical support for managed copy, but it has yet to be implemented. I don't think "mandatory" is the correct word, it's more like a "supported option". BluRay - ZERO support for managed copy, which is how they got almost every studio in Hollywood to sign up for it. Hollywood loves the idea of not allowing copies.
Yes these days Chernobyl is in Ukraine, which is not in Russia, but in 1986 when the melt down occurred, it was in Russia and back then it was Soviet Russia, the the GP was correct:
I'm going to say this in a way that even a geographically challenged American can understand. Ignorance is sad. You need to work on this. This is how things were in 1986.
USSR = country USA = country
Russia != country Tennessee != country
Russia = state Tennessee = state Ukraine = state
Russia = state within a country, that is, it's a state within the USSR. Tennessee = state within a country, that is, it's a state within the USA Ukraine = state within a country, that is, it's a state within the USSR.
Nashville = city within a state, Tennessee Chernobyl = city within a state, Ukraine
Chernobyl was not a city within Russia, when Russia was part of the USSR. You might as well insist that Nashville is a city in Florida because Florida is part of the USA, therefore Florida is the USA.
Saying that you know how things are when you don't know anything at all makes you look like a moron.
Why not just (common sense)reform the patent system, thus crushing this holding companies?
I've explained this before. I used to work for the US government many years ago. Look at it from Uncle Sam's perspective.
1) The patent office makes money. A lot of it. Unlike other government agencies who consume tax dollars, the patent office makes a profit. Profit = good. Why would you "reform" an agency who is making you a ton of money and thus make less money? 2) Businesses have yet to scream en masse that patent reform = a good thing. Until Microsoft and IBM and Cisco and Intel and lots of Fortune 500 companies say "The system is hurting us and costing us more money than you are making under the current system. A reform would actually bring you more money." then it will never happen. 3) Government bureaucrats are outstandingly good at protecting their own turf. Expect patent office mangement to fight tooth and nail against reforms. 4) The government is convinced that this is win-win for everyone because it's like Mutual Assured Destruction. Everyone has patents, so nobody will use them unfairly. Unfortunately, the reality is that Shuttlesworth is right. The company everyone should fear is the company that has nothing but patents, like the guys who went after BlackBerry. 5) Most people in Congress are lawyers. Most lawyers like patents. It provides easy work for other lawyers on both the "infringing" companies and the IP holders doing the suing. If everybody is being sued, lawyers have lots of work and earn lots of money. Win-win!
He didn't know he was breaking the law The COP didn't know he was breaking the law The STORE OWNER didn't know he was breaking the law
So how exactly did he wind up getting a $400 fine, community service, and a diversion sentence out of it?
I guess you were asleep or out sick on that day in school oh so many years ago when they said, and I quote:
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Note how that applies to everything you listed above. I think it would be more accurate to state that the cop didn't know for sure that he was breaking the law but suspected he might be.
However, the music industry has cleverly bankrolled legislation to make sure they don't have to uphold their end of the deal, to wit, placing the copyrighted material into the public domain after a limited time.
The US Supreme Court, ruling on the legality of the Bono copyright extension of a few years ago, very clearly stated that while their ruling should not in any way be interpreted to mean that copyright extension was a good idea, that "life of the author plus 70 years" (or is it 75 years?) did indeed meet the definition of "limited time" and was therefore constitutional. Until a court is willing to establish limits on what "limited time" means, there is no legal reason why this can't be extended. I fully expect Disney in roughly 30 or so years (whenever Steamboat Willie will be in threat of losing copyright) to push for 50 more years and get it.
One of the best ideas I heard was a compromise that copyright be extended, but that it require companies to actually apply for it in order to be extended. That way Disney, etc. could protect everything they wanted to and stuff that is forgotten about, like old photos from many decades ago, could fall into the public domain. Unfortunately the current law provides for a "do nothing" automatic extension of copyright for everything, which means that truly nothing will fall into the public domain again, maybe ever (assuming copyright keeps getting extended, as it probably will).
My best friend is an attorney and in fact he has nothing to do with copyright stuff at all in his legal specialty. I mentioned to him how bad this was and he was unable to understand why people and companies shouldn't be able to copyright stuff forever and have people over a 100 years from now make a living on stuff that they inherited copyrights for and had no role in creating. This illustrates exactly why copyright will be continuously extended. The US Congress is mostly attorneys and attorneys see nothing wrong with this.
And in the last few presidential elections, I have concluded that our system is almost defunct. BOTH sides tend to nominate candidates that cater to the most extreme elements of their respective party. We end up with a executive who doesn't represent the people.
Actually, I think this is how things used to be rather than how they are now. You could make a strong argument that the Repulican Party's presidential victories in 1968, 1972, 1984 and 1988 were as a result of the Democratic candidate winning the primary with a platform that insured that he would lose a general election rather handily. However, as much as I disliked him a president, Jimmy Carter was, at the time, a bit of a centrist compared to McGovern who ran in 1972. Bill Clinton was shockingly centrist for a Democratic candidate, being a pro-death penalty kind of guy and in favor of reforming welfare benefits. I doubt that anyone who's objective would consider Al Gore to be anything but centrist. Even the current president, George W. Bush, was thought in the 2000 primary to maybe not be conservative enough to win. People today who hate him tend to think of him as an evil right winger, but in fact he was seriously considered by many Republicans to be maybe "too liberal" to win the primary in 2000. I think in recent years there has been a real tendency for candidates in both parties to move towards the center and the public has shown an interest in such candidates. Rudi Guillani, generally considered to be the front runner for the Repulican presidential candidates, is anything but a "Reagan conservative", holding positions on the issues of abortion and gay marriage that would be completely at home in a traditional liberal Democratic candidate. When I think of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the first thing that comes to mind for me is NOT that they are from the Teddy Kennedy-Nancy Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party.
As in "Saw Palmetto is used to treat prostate enlargement not prostate cancer ". They aren't the same.
Re:Stop with the Johnny Depp nonsense
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Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
If an album has just one or two good songs on it then you don't buy it, it's that simple - and you never buy a CD or DVD until you are sure that it is worth the money.
How exactly does someone become "sure that it is worth the money"? That would seemingly involve some sort of preview. While there are websites, such as Amazon, that will let you hear brief low quality samples of music on CD releases, exactly how do you decide that a DVD is "worth the money" through some legal means? I suppose you could rent it or go to the theatre, but that raises the question as to whether or not a person who does that really will buy it after already seeing it.
The solution is simple - if it's not worth the money, don't buy it. If it has DRM on it, don't buy it.
All commercial DVDs have DRM on them. Macrovision and CSS at a minimum. Some have other copy-protection schemes as well, such as ARCCOS. According to you, nobody should ever buy another DVD again. That certainly makes things simple, even if you are hypocritical enough to not follow your own advice.
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Right now Indie film makers are embracing the standard DVD players that support Divx 6 pro HD codecs. Giving you full 1080i HD pleasure on a standard DVD disc and on a player that costs around $99.00 and honestly does a fantastic job at it.
BluRay has no plans for supporting a consumer created Disk format. HDDVD can in theory be burned at home and played on standalone players but nobody has their hands on a HDDVD player yet to try it. All of these consortiums are intentionally ignoring the home and indie user and that is incredibly dangerous.
It truly saddens me that so much disinformation gets 5 points.
First of all, almost NONE of the DVD players that support Divx support Divx in HD. To imply otherwise is just wrong. There are a very few expensive ($200 US minimum) DVD/media players that support the format such as the Avel I-O Link Player and some Helios players, but ZERO players under $100 US that can play HD Divx files. Right now, you can count on one hand the number of standalone players that are even capable of playing the format.
Secondly, while you may not know anything about people with HD-DVD players burning and playing their own discs, people on the Doom9 forums have reported being able to burn HD-DVD format to burnable media (usually DVD-9 as HD-DVD media is very expensive) and play them back correctly on HD-DVD players. And there certainly are plans for BluRay to be supported as a consumer format. There are recorders available right now, but they are very expensive.
The actual overflights however were usually conducted by much less spectacular aircraft that remarkably enough seem to have gone mostly unnoticed by the public in the US and Europe. This strategic recon force was known as Aeroflot. It seems Soviet airliners frequently made the most illogical flights simply in order to fly as close to as possible to sensitive sites or even right over them if they thought they could get away with it. They were even known to fake mechanical problems simply to be able to land in restricted areas.
The Warsaw Pact countries demonstrated a willingness to shoot down civilian aircraft, unlike the Western powers. A civilian plane going from Vienna to Tel Aviv was shot down after straying into Bulgarian airspace in July of 1955. And of course we have the infamous Korean Airlines Flight 007 in September of 1983 that was shot down by the Soviet Union after apparently straying into Soviet airspace. You can find a little more information at Wikipedia in the list of notable accidents on commercial aircraft
Prince should just open his own online store.
Actually, he did do this at one time and for all I know may still be doing it. Some of you may not remember, but he has not had a very good relationship with his labels over the years. At one time he painted the word "slave" on his cheek when he performed in public and he was very vocal in saying that this was in reference to how his record company was treating him. It had nothing at all to do with race but was merely a statement of how he felt he was being treated.
I have a friend who is big fan and through my friend I understand that for many years Prince only sold his music through the internet and via the mail. I read an interview with Prince where he was asked how this worked out for him and he said it worked out great. He said that sales were lower than when he was in stores, but there was a giant benefit to him in that he made 100% of the profit on every sale whereas when he was with a label, they made most of the money on every sale. I'm pulling these numbers out of the air, but let's say Prince sells a CD for $15 and it costs $2 to make it. That means he gets $13. All that money goes to him. If a record company sold it for $15, he probably gets $1 per CD. He said that he made a lot more money selling his own music even though sales were down over selling CDs in stores.
I was surprised when Prince went back to having a major label sell his stuff. All I can figure is that he got a better royalty rate than in the past and maybe he was just tired of having to manage selling it himself and wanted to a label to do it so he'd have less hassle. In any event, I can tell you that Prince does not let The Man tell him what to do and I would not be surprised to see this backfire big time on his label.
what issues are you seeing?
I thought I explained it pretty well. It's a known problem - a "sleeping on a non-sleepable lock" panic. You can do a web search on it and find some discussion about others who have it, but nobody seems sure about what causes it (a lot of writes is the best guess) and nobody knows how to fix it.
Long story short - 32 bit mode won't work for us as we have to move to 64 bits for growth and future scalability. Using 32 bit FreeBSD is not an option for us. We'll just move to 64 bit Linux rather than move backwards to 32 bit FreeBSD. 64 bit OSes work a lot faster for us than 32 bit. Fast response keeps out customers happy.
Another guy asked why we didn't just fall back to version 6.1 of the kernel. We felt that we needed bug fixes that came out in 6.2 and indeed 6.2 did fix those problems, it just opened up something worse with the panics. Going back to 6.1 will once again give us the bugs we wanted fixed. Again, we might as well just go to Linux as it doesn't have the bugs we faced and it doesn't have the panics on 64 bit AMD that FreeBSD 6.2 does.
How do AMD, VIA, Motorola, IBM, etc. fare?
AMD64 doesn't like FreeBSD 6.2 at all. We use FreeBSD and Linux in our business. FreeBSD is very important to us. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the senior management here in our IT department borders on being fanboys of FreeBSD. We were running various versions of FreeBSD on our AMD64 servers from 6.1 down to 5.something and we (foolishly in hindsight) decided that we had to upgrade to version 6.2 because it had some bug fixes we thought we needed. Oh they did fix those bugs, but they opened up a huge one that apparently nobody knows what causes it and nobody has any idea how to fix. What happens is that AMD64 systems will panic with some sort of a "sleeping on a non-sleepable lock" panic. Some people think that this is being caused by a large number of writes. Given how our servers work, this is certainly possible for us. The bottom line for us is that FreeBSD on AMD64 is so unstable that we are probably going to have to go to Linux instead for our web servers. Nobody wants to do that, but we simply can't have our webservers going down every day with the same panic and we lose one server a day on average to this problem. We've even had boxes crash within minutes of being brought up with the exact same panic.
Once we move to Linux, I don't think we'll go back to FreeBSD. My best guess is that because the problem has apparently been going on for months with no resolution that we'll start moving servers from FreeBSD to Linux when we can. We don't have this problem under Linux. The fact is that whether we like it or not, more people use Linux and if stuff is seriously broken under Linux, someone will fix it soon enough. With FreeBSD nobody seems to have any idea what to do for this problem and I'm not sure that it will even be fixed this year, let alone soon enough to keep us from moving to Linux.
"The onus is on Reiser to come up with evidence - where is the chair? explain the blood, why was the car washed?"
Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.
True enough, but you don't necessarily need a lot of evidence to get a conviction. Look up Michael Skakel, a Kennedy relative, and you'll find a guy who was convicted of murder on incredibly thin evidence. In the past, people have been convicted of murder and executed when no body was ever found. In my old hometown, a doctor got convicted of murder some years ago on completely circumstantial evidence. Basically they could tie him to a dead woman because he had an affair with her, but there was no hard evidence to tie him to her body. He still got convicted, but because of various reasons he got a retrial and, lucky for him, the DA died and the DA's replacement botched the re-trial and the guy walked. Do I think he killed the lady? I sure do, but I also completely understand why the jury foreman was quoted after the re-trial was over as saying the DA had nothing and that's why they voted for not guilty. Reiser may legally be "innocent until proven guilty" but what they have may be enough to convince a jury that he did it.
the HTC 6700 will do just about everything the iPhone does
Except make calls outside of the USA and Canada in places that use GSM. That's kind of important to some of us and iPhone will do that.
5. Soundtrack by Vangelis. Who better to do scifi soundtracks? Orchestral sound tracks are overrated, and the modern approach of using pop music is lame.
The one guy I think who might have been better is Russian film composer Eduard Artemyev. Artemyev worked on 3 of Andrei Tarkvovsky's films - Solaris, Mirror and Stalker. The first and last were sci-fi films. Artemyev was certainly capable of composing normal type film music and often did so, but these 3 films are an amazing partnership of director and composer. Tarkovsky was very interested in film music and gave some directions/suggestions to Artemyev, with Artemyev providing an electronic soundtrack to all 3 films rather than normal film music. I still think Solaris (the original that Tarkovsky directed) is the perfect synthesis of film and music and Artemyev's work would not have been out of place in Blade Runner. I'm not knocking Vangelis at all, just pointing out the work of someone else just as worthy but who has been overlooked because he had the misfortune of working in the USSR. How many people connected to film in the USSR or Russia can you name? See what I mean?
Just trying to set the debate straight here. If it is wrong, and if the current countermeasures aren't sufficiently deterrent, than stricter measures must be introduced.
Is it wrong to copy somebody else's work despite the owner's objections? Stick to this point...
The point, which you have missed, is not about copying and whether it is right or wrong. The point is - how does Canada benefit from a law designed to protect American business interests?
After all, who thinks we'd have the copyright terms we do now if it wasn't for Disney buying off congressmen?
Myself for one. I think lobbying is very destructive in general, but it's never quite as cut-and-dried as "buying off" people. First of all, even with all the loopholes, it's very difficult for one donor to give enough money to a member of congress to severely sway them. I mean, these people are usually start out being comfortably well-off, even with the frequent pay cuts you get when you move from the private sphere to the public one.
Very few members of congress are going to let themselves be bought for a few thousand dollars. Just not worth it.
I think we have a couple of things going on here. While I agree that probably nobody is being "bought", per se, for a few thousand dollars, you get enough "few thousand dollars" from people and it adds up. There's a general idea of "You donate money and I'll be more interested in your concerns", but outright buying? I don't think that goes on.
Copyrights got extended because most of Congress is lawyers and there is great sympathy in the legal profession for extending copyrights, even when the lawyers themselves aren't copyright holders. I had a conversation a few months ago with my longtime best friend, who is a lawyer, and he was completely unable to understand why copyrights shouldn't be passed on as an inheritance basically forever and why having stuff in the public domain is a good thing. He saw nothing wrong with the future descendants of today's rock stars making money off song copyrights that were written by people who died before they were born. It would be something like having Shakespeare's kin making money today from copyrights for stuff written hundreds of years in the past by him, an ancestor they never met. I suspect most lawyers agree with this viewpoint. Then you have Sony Bono, who as a published songwriter had a good reason to want copyrights extended. He was making money from his old song copyrights and he wanted that gravy train to last as long as possible. If Disney benefitted too, that was fine with him, but I think Sony was motivated by his own desires here. He was apparently well liked in Congress, so you have a mixture of a well liked guy, Congressmen who are lawyers who in turn see nothing wrong at all with extending copyrights as it is "the right thing to do" (from their perspective at least), and legislation that "hurts no one", so I can't say I'm surprised at all it passed. The biggest mistake though was that it allows for automatic copyright extension, which was never done in the past. Things went into public domain up until the 1950s because people forgot to apply for copyright extension. That's how it should be. If your copyright is so valuable, then you should be forced to remember to apply for it to be extended.
You do have alternitives.
Indeed, but Americans are bad to have mad love for brands and you might be surprised at what kind of consumer rape they'll take just to stick with certain companies. It's kind of like being the abused party in an abusive relationship who doesn't want to leave. In this case the consumer just can't change companies no matter how bad he/she is treated because "things might be worse elsewhere".
One of my good friends runs a small business and he told me "Never again" would he buy a Dell because of their tech support. Of course the original poster could just buy a Windoze PC from his beloved Dell and install Ubuntuu on it himself, but I guess that kind of thinking is too "out of the box" for many people. By God he wants a solution where Dell sells him an Ubuntuu box AND accepts the business credit card to pay for and he's going to hold his breath until that happens even though he has many other options (other vendors, self-install Ubuntuu over Windoze, etc.).
Sigh. So, making crap up gets this 4 points for "insightful"? In fact in the USA, all (this includes phonographs) works published before 1923 are in the public domain. So it's in the public domain. And the term of expiration of copyrights here is death of the author plus either 50 or 70 years, but just assume 70 because that's probably going to be the case. I couldn't find any explanation as to why sometimes it's only supposed to be life of the author plus 50 years and we all know that certainly doesn't apply to any major corporation like Disney, who will definitely get life plus 70 years.
This is a major source of food for these people.
Nice argument, but in today's modern world, there are alternatives to whale meat. It's not like they would starve if they weren't allowed to hunt whales, and you may not know this, but they weren't allowed to hunt whales until recent years. Even in Japan, which does an awful lot of whale hunting for "scientific research", the fact is that whale meat is not very popular. The post WWII generation ate because they had to. Japan was ravaged in the war and protein sources were scarce. Almost nobody in Japan actually likes whale meat except a few old people. I read an article where they were basically force feeding it to school kids to get rid of it (again, almost nobody really wants to eat it) and the kids said essentially it tastes like crap. There are people in Japan who eat it and there are places that proudly advertise it on menus, but most people don't like it. Heck, even here in America almost nobody I know will eat a McRib, but McDonalds brings it back almost every year and I know a guy who gets genuinely excited when they come back, yet the fact that some diehards love the stuff a lot doesn't mean that everybody will eat it. Maybe 80 or more years ago they hunted whales because they didn't have a choice. Perhaps it should be allowed as some sort of cultural thing, but please don't delude yourself into thinking these poor Eskimos would starve and die out if not allowed to hunt whales, because that's not true.
Both Firefox and Opera are available on OS X as well yet most people use Safari.
You're right, but I'll give you my perspective. I have an OS X laptop (pre-Intel). I don't like laptops very much and rarely use it. I has nothing to do with OS X or the Apple laptop design. I just don't like laptops - at all. I am seriously unimpressed with Safari on its native platform. So much so that I quickly installed Firefox because Safari drove me nuts. Opera would have been OK with me too. As a not frequent user of OS X, I fail to understand why people love Safari, but then again, I know plenty of people who won't use anything but IE under Windows and I don't understand that one either.
This is great progress.
Actually, it's not. I can understand why you would think so. You are a rational human being. You also probably have never worked for the US government. Some years ago I did work for the US government as a computer programmer and I can promise you that what you think is going to happen is not going to happen.
Government bureaucrats excell at protecting themselves. Think about it. The Patent Office makes money. It's not like, say, the FBI where they just spend tax dollars. We can argue about whether or not the FBI is spending it's dollars on the right things, but at the end of the day, it is a consumer of money.
The Patent Office brings in revenue and a lot of it. Uncle Sam is addicted and his drug of choice is money. Read the article again and I can promise you that all this will do is speed up the approval of more patents, not less. There's a lot of emphasis on this idea of speeding up the process and the whole idea behind this is really to approve more patents quicker and make more money for the Patent Office. The Patent Office doesn't care at all if the courts get bogged down in patent disputes. In fact, from a certain point of view, that could actually be a Good Thing. More patent disputes means a need for more judges, for more courts, for more support people (bailiffs, court reporters, aides to judges, etc.) so from a certain warped perspective, having more patent disputes is actually putting people to work. I can promise you that the US government really doesn't care how this shakes out as long as jobs are created and the Patent Office keeps bringing in money. They will care only when people in Congress or upper level bureaucrats feel the pain, like they did with the Blackberry patent disputes, in which case the Patent Office magically found problems with the patents used against Blackberry because it made life difficult for Crackberry addicts in Congress and the upper reaches of the US government. Until there is an economic incentive to the US government to change the patent system, it will never change and will only get worse.
This website has been debunked for a long time. See- diary-part-six.html
http://biffovision.blogspot.com/2006/06/chernobyl
and scroll down a few paragraphs. The Kid of Speed girl used props to enhance her photos, but she didn't ride her motorcycle as claimed through the exclusion zone.
To follow up on this excellent post, I'd like to point out that I'm American and I've spent a good deal of time in Ukraine in the past. My Ukrainian ex-girlfriend had 2 great-grandparents who were murdered by Stalin's henchmen while her grandfather was forced to watch for the "crime" of supposedly being Ukrainian nationalists. Putin is drunk with power and money thanks to Russia's oil and gas reserves. Times are more or less good in Russia for people who live in bigger cities. Even for common people. They're making more money than ever before and they credit Putin. He not only has little real opposition, but what little there is has been suppressed by him and he's stacked the deck to be sure that his party and his eventual hand picked successor will become the next president. Putin is an ex-KGB guy and he laments the breakup of the USSR. His wet dream is to rebuild the USSR, but I think at some level he knows that won't happen, so he'd prefer to have vassal states that pay homage to him and give him a virtual USSR to rule. He flipped out when Ukraiane protested the bogus presidential elections in late 2004 and eventually elected Yushchenko in a fair election. He wasn't happy with what happened in Georgia first in the Rose Revolution, but I think until Ukraine elected Yushchenko, he thought he could just bully Georgia back into line. I have little doubt that Putin would love to tell all of the old Warsaw Pact countries what to do just like in the "good old days". The US has stated that they intend to put 10, yes, 10 interceptor missles in Poland. Since Russia has well over 1000 nuclear missles, this is just more of Putin's nonsense that such interceptor missles are a "threat" to Russia. My ex-girlfriend and her family knew first hand what kind of "love" Mother Russia gives to her children and I can't say I blame thelima for not being interested in falling under Russian influence again.
I'm pretty sure I read a while ago that one of the differences between HD DVD and BluRay is that this managed copy stuff is mandatory for HD DVD and optional for BluRay. If it's mandatory for HD DVD, and HD DVDs are already shipping, why are licensing agreements still being worked on?
Good question, but the situation is like this:
HD-DVD - theoretical support for managed copy, but it has yet to be implemented. I don't think "mandatory" is the correct word, it's more like a "supported option".
BluRay - ZERO support for managed copy, which is how they got almost every studio in Hollywood to sign up for it. Hollywood loves the idea of not allowing copies.
Yes these days Chernobyl is in Ukraine, which is not in Russia, but in 1986 when the melt down occurred, it was in Russia and back then it was Soviet Russia, the the GP was correct:
I'm going to say this in a way that even a geographically challenged American can understand. Ignorance is sad. You need to work on this. This is how things were in 1986.
USSR = country
USA = country
Russia != country
Tennessee != country
Russia = state
Tennessee = state
Ukraine = state
Russia = state within a country, that is, it's a state within the USSR.
Tennessee = state within a country, that is, it's a state within the USA
Ukraine = state within a country, that is, it's a state within the USSR.
Nashville = city within a state, Tennessee
Chernobyl = city within a state, Ukraine
Chernobyl was not a city within Russia, when Russia was part of the USSR. You might as well insist that
Nashville is a city in Florida because Florida is part of the USA, therefore Florida is the USA.
Saying that you know how things are when you don't know anything at all makes you look like a moron.
Moron = you
Do you understand now?
Why not just (common sense)reform the patent system, thus crushing this holding companies?
I've explained this before. I used to work for the US government many years ago. Look at it from Uncle Sam's perspective.
1) The patent office makes money. A lot of it. Unlike other government agencies who consume tax dollars, the patent office makes a profit. Profit = good. Why would you "reform" an agency who is making you a ton of money and thus make less money?
2) Businesses have yet to scream en masse that patent reform = a good thing. Until Microsoft and IBM and Cisco and Intel and lots of Fortune 500 companies say "The system is hurting us and costing us more money than you are making under the current system. A reform would actually bring you more money." then it will never happen.
3) Government bureaucrats are outstandingly good at protecting their own turf. Expect patent office mangement to fight tooth and nail against reforms.
4) The government is convinced that this is win-win for everyone because it's like Mutual Assured Destruction. Everyone has patents, so nobody will use them unfairly. Unfortunately, the reality is that Shuttlesworth is right. The company everyone should fear is the company that has nothing but patents, like the guys who went after BlackBerry.
5) Most people in Congress are lawyers. Most lawyers like patents. It provides easy work for other lawyers on both the "infringing" companies and the IP holders doing the suing. If everybody is being sued, lawyers have lots of work and earn lots of money. Win-win!
Ok - let me get this straight.
He didn't know he was breaking the law
The COP didn't know he was breaking the law
The STORE OWNER didn't know he was breaking the law
So how exactly did he wind up getting a $400 fine, community service, and a diversion sentence out of it?
I guess you were asleep or out sick on that day in school oh so many years ago when they said, and I quote:
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Note how that applies to everything you listed above. I think it would be more accurate to state that the cop didn't know for sure that he was breaking the law but suspected he might be.
However, the music industry has cleverly bankrolled legislation to make sure they don't have to uphold their end of the deal, to wit, placing the copyrighted material into the public domain after a limited time.
The US Supreme Court, ruling on the legality of the Bono copyright extension of a few years ago, very clearly stated that while their ruling should not in any way be interpreted to mean that copyright extension was a good idea, that "life of the author plus 70 years" (or is it 75 years?) did indeed meet the definition of "limited time" and was therefore constitutional. Until a court is willing to establish limits on what "limited time" means, there is no legal reason why this can't be extended. I fully expect Disney in roughly 30 or so years (whenever Steamboat Willie will be in threat of losing copyright) to push for 50 more years and get it.
One of the best ideas I heard was a compromise that copyright be extended, but that it require companies to actually apply for it in order to be extended. That way Disney, etc. could protect everything they wanted to and stuff that is forgotten about, like old photos from many decades ago, could fall into the public domain. Unfortunately the current law provides for a "do nothing" automatic extension of copyright for everything, which means that truly nothing will fall into the public domain again, maybe ever (assuming copyright keeps getting extended, as it probably will).
My best friend is an attorney and in fact he has nothing to do with copyright stuff at all in his legal specialty. I mentioned to him how bad this was and he was unable to understand why people and companies shouldn't be able to copyright stuff forever and have people over a 100 years from now make a living on stuff that they inherited copyrights for and had no role in creating. This illustrates exactly why copyright will be continuously extended. The US Congress is mostly attorneys and attorneys see nothing wrong with this.
And in the last few presidential elections, I have concluded that our system is almost defunct. BOTH sides tend to nominate candidates that cater to the most extreme elements of their respective party. We end up with a executive who doesn't represent the people.
Actually, I think this is how things used to be rather than how they are now. You could make a strong argument that the Repulican Party's presidential victories in 1968, 1972, 1984 and 1988 were as a result of the Democratic candidate winning the primary with a platform that insured that he would lose a general election rather handily. However, as much as I disliked him a president, Jimmy Carter was, at the time, a bit of a centrist compared to McGovern who ran in 1972. Bill Clinton was shockingly centrist for a Democratic candidate, being a pro-death penalty kind of guy and in favor of reforming welfare benefits. I doubt that anyone who's objective would consider Al Gore to be anything but centrist. Even the current president, George W. Bush, was thought in the 2000 primary to maybe not be conservative enough to win. People today who hate him tend to think of him as an evil right winger, but in fact he was seriously considered by many Republicans to be maybe "too liberal" to win the primary in 2000. I think in recent years there has been a real tendency for candidates in both parties to move towards the center and the public has shown an interest in such candidates. Rudi Guillani, generally considered to be the front runner for the Repulican presidential candidates, is anything but a "Reagan conservative", holding positions on the issues of abortion and gay marriage that would be completely at home in a traditional liberal Democratic candidate. When I think of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the first thing that comes to mind for me is NOT that they are from the Teddy Kennedy-Nancy Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party.
Saw Palmetto
Here are my two words:
Different condition
As in "Saw Palmetto is used to treat prostate enlargement not prostate cancer ". They aren't the same.
If an album has just one or two good songs on it then you don't buy it, it's that simple - and you never buy a CD or DVD until you are sure that it is worth the money.
How exactly does someone become "sure that it is worth the money"? That would seemingly involve some sort of preview. While there are websites, such as Amazon, that will let you hear brief low quality samples of music on CD releases, exactly how do you decide that a DVD is "worth the money" through some legal means? I suppose you could rent it or go to the theatre, but that raises the question as to whether or not a person who does that really will buy it after already seeing it.
The solution is simple - if it's not worth the money, don't buy it. If it has DRM on it, don't buy it.
All commercial DVDs have DRM on them. Macrovision and CSS at a minimum. Some have other copy-protection schemes as well, such as ARCCOS. According to you, nobody should ever buy another DVD again. That certainly makes things simple, even if you are hypocritical enough to not follow your own advice.