I can write a letter in the cyrillic characterset on either my phone or computer. I can send the message via computer from the US to Eastern Europe or the other direction with few problems (especially if in Unicode). I can not send or receive cyrillic (or other alternet non-latin character sets) to or from Cingular with SMS, but while in Ukraine the same phone sends the same text without problems to other Ukraine phones. Worse, I can MMS a message from Ukraine to Cingular in cyrillic and it is garbled by Cingular, but on the way from US to Ukraine (starting on Cingular and ending on Kyivstar) the MMS message _sometimes_ arrives intact. Other times it is just replacement characters. So parts of Cingular are different than others (I have wondered if the ATT Wireless vs Cingular from the acquisition is the cause).
Did you ever consider that maybe the problem is with Cingular? I have T-Mobile and while it is a real bitch on my American mobile phone to type in Cyrillic, I do have a 3rd party application that lets me do it. Remember, my provider is T-Mobile. Cyrillic (or Latin character set) SMS to Ukraine - No problem Receiving SMS from Ukraine - character set is irrelevent, but some Ukrainian providers do NOT allow outgoing SMS to the USA in any character set. Cyrillic (or Latin character set) SMS to Russia - in theory it works, but in reality some Russian mobile phone providers (ie. Megafon) do not play nice with T-Mobile and block incoming SMS. Receiving SMS from Russia - no problems receiving Cyrillic or Latin based character sets, even from Megafon.
I haven't tried MMS but my understanding is that MMS should work.
I think competition alone at this point would gaurentee net neurality. That is if one company starts limiting access to the web then customers will switch to other providers. If they all try to do it at the same time I am sure they would be breaking some collusion / monopoly laws.
You must live in a major metropolitan area where there is competition. Do you have any idea what it is like in Small Town America? Let me tell you. My dad and step-mother live in a town of 50,000 or so people. It's BellSouth (soon to be AT&T) territory. BellSouth has not bothered to make DSL available in their area. In fact, there are no plans at all to do - ever. My dad's choices are dial up and cable modem through the local cable company, which is an effective monopoly since it has no competition. Let's say that my dad's cable company decides they aren't going to route traffic to Google very quickly since Google refused to pay their extortion fee. What EXACTLY does my dad do now? Go back to dial up? There is no other provider of broadband in his town.
SCO are flat out lying, whether just to the public, or to their lawyers as well. The only reason I think IBM are continuing with this is to get each and every claim SCO has specifically and individually struck down so when the house of cards finally does crumble they have no way to try it again.
Also, the longer this mess goes on, the more money it bleeds from SCO. Even the stock market is finally reluctantly starting to realize, years after Slashdotters, that SCO doesn't really have any ground to stand on. SCOX is currently valued at $2.51 a share, having lost about $1.50 or so in the past month. One source says that SCO is down to $18 million in cash. I think IBM is just trying to get them to run out of money by the time this is settled in IBM's favor so they won't be in a position to launch endless appeals of the verdict.
I don't think the main point is to find the Warez, but rather to "educate" the children by enlisting them in the battle.
I think this is quite right. Interestingly enough, I'm sure the local law enforcement is turning a blind eye to the illegal Versace and Gucci knockoffs in the local night market. I have forgotten the name of the street since it's been 9 years since I was in Hong Kong, but there's a famous night market on some street that is notorious for selling counterfeit goods. I bought what I'm sure was an unlicensed Bart Simpson tie there. I assume that pirate VCDs and DVDs are there as well, but I was last there before either of those formats really took off. I know that copying movies is a really big deal over there and the local film industry blames all of its woes on that, just like the MPAA does in America. The real problem with the Hong Kong film industry is that they have too many films and the quality has gone down a bit recently. It's not unheard of for big name actors over there to appear in 5 or more films a year. If you have enough time as an actor to do 5 or more films a year, I can guarantee you that all of those films are not going to be great ones.
Honestly, WHY do you think buying music on allofmp3 is different then pirating it? Why do you want to buy the music?
The RIAA has not sued anyone for buying through allofmp3 and despite all of their posturing it is not clear at all that it is "illegal" to do so. A court would have to rule on that and my gut feeling is that the RIAA would prefer not to challenge allofmp3 in court because if they lose, they lose everything. That would open the floodgates for Americans to buy without fear from allofmp3. So I think a very large reason people buy from allofmp3 is to get the songs without the fear that comes in doing P2P downloads. It's also worth pointing out that allofmp3 offers a variety of formats and bit rates unlike ITunes, etc. You want MP3 at 320 Kbps? No problem. MP3 at 256? OGG at 192? WMA at 224? FLAC? Uncompressed WAV? AAC? allofmp3 can give you those kinds of choices. Some people buy from allofmp3 because they can get their music in the format they want it in instead of having to, for example, buy from ITunes, burn to CD, rip that CD to a PC and then convert that to OGG.
There are lots of issues with this: Firstly, the UK High Court has no jurisdiction in Russia (unless you're British and then only for some crimes). Russian companys have no legal status in the UK. You can't sue them and they can't be prosecuted in the UK. I think what they might be doing is suing the operator of a Russian site in the UK for damages for operating in the UK without a legal licence.
They might also be gambling that if they win a judgement in court, they can use that to somehow force AllOfMP3 to block people with UK IP addresses from going to the site. I'm not saying that they will have any luck with that approach, just that this might be what their true goal is.
The 26.5M figure quoted is possible. The VA info quoted also suggests that data on 2.1M active-duty military folks was stolen. Take that figure and subtract. You get 14.1M vets. Now the US has been in the following wars since independence:
Boy your math is bad. Really bad. 26.5M minus 2.1M is 24.4M. How you got 14.1M out of that is beyond me. Also, consider that Uncle Sam has admitted he honestly doesn't know how many WWI veterans are still alive (a web search on WWI vets USA or something similar will get you the VA site where they admit that) and that there are no living veterans prior to WWI. So we don't really need to worry about counting WWI vets to get a decent total, but given that Uncle Sam can't even count our living WWI vets, it does make me wonder if any of the US government figures for numbers of veterans are anything more than just a guess.
When the studio fired the show's creator, sure. That was when it sucked. Hardly his finest hour.
You obviously didn't see the infamous Son Of Stimpy episode which played some role in the decision to fire the creator. I've never in my life seen a sorrier piece of animation than that episode. The episode was created only to stick it to Nickelodeon. Anyone who thinks this episode has any merit at all is quite blunty an idiot. Had I been an executive at Nickelodeon at the time and seen this episode, I not only would have fired creator John Kricfalusi for it, I would have tried to sue him to recover the costs of making it.
For those unfamilair with Ren And Stimpy you can consider this episode to be the forerunner of Mr. Handy on South Park , but made as devoid of humor and entertainment as possible.
Verifying age solely on-line is darn near impossible...
It certainly is when your policy is to not even try to verify. Frankly, I have no interest at all in MySpace. My 13 year old nephew is addicted to it. The amount of time he spends there is unreal. His dad, my brother, complains about it but seemingly does little to nothing to limit his time. Now in case you don't know this, MySpace has a rule that you have to be 14 years old to go onto it. So how do my 13 year old nephew and his 12-13 year old friends get on MySpace and set up their accounts? Simple. They say that they are 99 years old. I have no idea if this is even possible, but if you could search for people by age, I suspect that MySpace has a rather large number of supposed 99 year old members. When all you do to "verify" age is ask someone how old they are, yes, verification is darn near impossible.
What is even more frustrating is that Blu-ray titles could have been VC1 encoded. The Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards both support the same set of video codecs. But for some reason the Blu-ray camp decided to encode the first titles using MPEG-2. I don't follow closely enough the format war to know why such a decision has been taken, but I know this is a stupid decision because most non-technical people will have a bad first impression of Blu-ray. It is even more frustrating knowing that Blu-ray titles have the technical potential to look at least as good as HD-DVD titles.
I know exactly why this happened. It's because Blu-ray doesn't yet actually work with any codecs except MPEG-2. Sorry, I don't have the link, but a little more than a month ago I read that nobody really knows if VC1 will be working in Blu-ray by the end of the year even. They use MPEG-2 because right now they have to. They are hoping that eventually the technical problems with the other codecs and the format can be worked out, but for now if it's on Blu-ray, it will be MPEG-2.
My understanding is that currently a communications company can try to bill someone (like Google) whose traffic gets routed thru their network (and they do not provide the connectivity at the end points), but then Google can tell them to go to hell.
I've posted before to this argument, but perhaps it merits another mention since the message clearly is NOT getting through. My dad lives in a town of about 50,000 people that is more than 100 miles away from the nearest large metro area. Bellsouth, his provider, has been very upfront in saying that basically they have no plans to ever build DSL connections to where he lives. My had cable modem with his cable company. So if my dad gets pissed off that his cable company is throttling Google because Google won't pay them the extortion fee they want, exactly where does he go? There's no cable competition in his town. His local cable provider is the only high speed internet provider.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
My dad and step-mother live in a small town 120 miles from the nearest large metropolitan area in BellSouth territory. Here are there choices for high speed internet: The local cable company There is no 2nd choice. His 2nd choice is dialup. So suppose the cable company decideds to implement tiered bandwidth and my dad doesn't like it. He has no choice because going back to dialup is not a choice.
I suspect that a rather large number of Americans are in exactly the same position as my father. They have one choice for high speed internet where they live, so going with someone else isn't an option.
There is an excellent chance that something much much worse than time in a country club prison is going to happen to this guy.
From the article: Prosecutors say that starting in November 2004, the man arrested in Miami -- Edwin Andres Pena, 23, a Venezuelan who has permanent residency in the United States -- used two companies he created to offer wholesale phone connections at discounted rates to small Internet phone companies.
Actually, he stands almost a 100% chance of losing his permanent residency and being deported after he serves time in jail. If you a permanent resident and you are convicted of a crime, you can be deported for it. Prior to 9-11, this wasn't done so much, but these days Uncle Sam is looking for any excuse he can to deport permanent residents who violate the law. I've read many stories about permanent residents whove been in the US for 10+ years and then got convicted of a misdemeanor and were suddenly up for deportation. For example, a permanent resident could get convicted of a DUI and suddenly he is going to be deported for it. I've read about families being broken up where a mother or father was deported for a rather minor offense, so I don't think this guy has any chance of being allowed to remain in the US after he does his time, assuming he is convicted for it.
As mentioned in the summary - the first attempt at legislation along these lines is being challenged in court because it was, well, absolutely idiotic and probably completely unconstitutional.
Here's a little background on why this happened. There was a rather infamous so-called "mail order bride" murder in Washington state in late 2000. An American man living there went to Krygystan to meet an ethnic Russian girl, probably in 1999 I think. He was in his late 30's, fat, balding and extremely unattractive. The girl he met was in her very early 20s and looked like a budding supermodel. In short, there was no way at all she would be interested in him. He had previously married a Russian woman who divorced him and took him to the cleaners. So being an idiot, he decided that he would get a woman much younger and hotter than he deserved and she would be so desperate to leave her country (by the way, Russians are a minority in Krygystan, which is an important fact in the story) that she would marry him. Plus, in his delusional state, he honestly believed that his sparkling personalty would triump and this woman would fall in love with him and they would live together happily ever after.
He went to Krygystan because he knew that since Russians are a minitory there, a girl from there might be pretty willing to leave and overlook his ugliness and this guy was REALLY ugly. What he didn't count on was that she and her parents hatched a plan that she would list herself on the internet with marriage agencies and she would marry the first guy to come along. It was a long shot because only about 5% of the women on these sites ever find a husband this way and the odds of someone in Krygystan are even lower. However, sure enough, the guy wrote to her and came to visit. The plan was that she would come over to America on a K-1 (fiancee) visa, they would get married and if the marriage worked out, great. If not, she would stay in it for 2 years, get her green card, divorce him and then after a few more years apply for American citizenship and then sponsor her parents for immigration. The plan was not ever for her to have a successful marriage. If that happened that was great, but the plan was for her to legally immigrate and then sponsor her parents to immigrate as soon as she became a citizen. So you see already we have a dishonest young woman whose motivation for marriage is to get the hell out of her country.
What she didn't count on was that her future husband was just as dishonest. Instead of having his own house and a good job like he told her, he lived in a rented house and barely got by. His first wife cleaned him out and he had basically almost nothing left as I said earlier. They got married quickly after this young lady arrived in America and when she found out that she had been lied to, she began to sleep around on him and didn't do much to hide it. The marriage went downhill quickly and at some point, he woke up and realized that after she got her green card (it takes at least 2 years of marriage to the person who applied for the K-1 visa before the green card is given), she was going to divorce him. He didn't feel like he could go through that again, so he hired someone to kill her. Her body was found and he was sent away to prison for life.
So if you're still with me, we have a story of two dishonest people who found each other and it ended in the death of one and the imprisonment of the other. To make things worse, the young lady's parents used every excuse in the book to try to exploit her death to be allowed to immigrate to America. They were not successful.
Now you're wondering, how on earth did this tale of 2 dishonest people lead to the IMBRA? Well, some of the Washington press told the truth about the story and mentioned how the young lady was having affairs on her husband. Most did not. It makes a better story to ignore that and paint her as an innocent victim who did nothing wrong and was killed by an American wacko. Now enter some Congresswoman
You know, this really gets old. Since this comment is almost always from someone living in some part of the former British empire, usually the UK or Australia, I'm going to explain it to you in a way you might be able to understand.
The best baseball players in the world play Major League Baseball in the league by that name that has 29 teams in the USA and 1 in Canada. Yes, there are good players in Cuba and Japan who for various reasons do not play in MLB (political for Cuba, personal choice for the most part in the Japanese league), but the very best, the cream of the crop, play in MLB. The competition outside of MLB is at what we would call a "minor league level", which for you soccer/football fans would mean basically that MLB is equivalent to the English Premier League and other national leagues, such as those in Japan, Cuba and other countries are at a talent level somewhat like those soccer/football leagues in the UK that play below the Premier League. So when we talk about a "World Series" it is for the championship of the highest calibre baseball league on the planet bar none. Perhaps today the name is a bit of an acronym, but the first World Series started in 1903 and the name isn't going to change.
I know that some of you Brits and Aussies will point to the Cuba Olympic medals or the Japanese win at this year's World Baseball Classic as "proof" that somehow the World Series is bogus, but you are comparing apples to oranges. In the Olympics, since MLB refuses to allow its players to play, the Olympics are the bogus championship of the best minor league (2nd division if you will for soccer/football fans) players in the world. That is exactly why baseball has been dropped, probably permanently, from the Olympics. It's not really a championship of anything. With regards to the World Baseball Classic, that was basically the World Cup of baseball. It was for national teams. The World Series could be looked at as the championship of the best "club teams" (to use a soccer/football term) in the world, which are in MLB. Now do you understand?
I've heard that in many places of the former Soviet Union, the "local law enforcement" only enforces laws when it suits their financial needs. I've talked to people from places like Lithuania and Russia and one of the many reasons they left was because justice has a price on the streets.
While I'm sure this was true of Lithuania, I can assure you that they would not have been accepted into the EU if it was still true. I'm not saying that there aren't crooked cops anywhere in Lithuania, but EU membership is conditional on cracking down on this kind of corruption and driving it down to levels where it's not noticeable. That's one of the specific things that may delay Bulgaria's membership in the EU - they haven't done enough to crack down on corruption.
OK, I'll bite. Unlike what appears to be the majority of Slashdotters, I actually am a Christian and yes I do go to a church that you would call "fundamentalist". While we don't use that description ourselves, it is accurate. So I think I am qualified to give a non-troll answer.
Yes, you are being ridiculous. Nobody would consider such rice to be "human". I feel sorry for you because you are either stupid enough to actually think we might think a few human genes makes something human or you are just a sadly misinformed person with regards to how religious people think.
Personally, while I am not in particular in favor of genetically modified food for reasons that have nothing at all to do with religion, I would not be surprised if some Christians objected to this rice. Not because it is "human" but because the creators are "playing God" or some such nonsense. Personally, I think that God gave us brains to use to make our lives better through advances in science and medicine. If I was going to get on board with genetically modified food, this would probably the be the one I'd support.
I had no problem getting Cingular to give me unlock codes the day after activation (that was a business acct, FWIW).
If true, you are possibly the first person anywhere Cingular has unlocked a phone for. I have never read anything anywhere about Cingular that has shown a willingness to unlock a phone. In fact, everything, and I do really mean everything, I have ever read about Cingular has stated that they will not under any circumstances unlock a phone. I'm curious to know if: 1) This represnts a change in Cingular's policy. 2) You just got lucky from someone who didn't know they aren't supposed to unlock it. 3) Cingular has different policies for business and personal use customers. 4) You are lying because we have no way to verify what you are saying.
No offense, but pardon my disbelief when Cingular has had a very firm policy for years of not unlocking their phones, so it's a little hard to believe it when some guy says they unlocked it the day after activation.
While I will wholeheartedly agree that the price is about $100 too much on the PS3, is it really THAT big of a deal?
It just might be. My brother and sister-in-law have 3 boys. They own every freakin' game system there is and at least 2 if not 3 of every portable one because God knows we can't have the kids unable to play a game for even a second. At the price listed for the PS3, I can say with certainty that there is no chance at all my brother and sister-in-law will be buying it for their kids.
Memory sticks come from many vendors. Perhaps you are confusing memory sticks with memory cards . They're not compatible you know. Where exactly are these vendors of which you speak? I think maybe Crucial, Kingston and the like might make knock offs, but just to try to ruin the format even further, Sony then took a memory stick and put some sort of DRM crap on it to keep you from copying anything you put on it. Yeah, that really made the format take off.
He also likes to get into flame wars with Linus Torvalds when he gets bored.
Really? And what exactly do you base this on? According to the article, which it's clear that you did not read, Tanenbaum simply had a recent article printed in IEEE Computer and someone on Slashdot posted a link to it, which caused Linus to weigh in with his 2 cents about something that was never directed at him. It sounds more to me like Linus is obsessed with proving that macrokernels are the only way to go. Why does he even care? It's not like Minix is a threat to Linux. If he believes so strongly that microkernels are wrong, he should just let Tanenbaum and company waste their time on them instead of endlessing arguing the same points he made years ago.
From the FA, which again a Slashdot submitter seems to have not actually read:
... a proposed federal law that would effectively require most schools and libraries to render those Web sites inaccessible to minors...
Note the use of the word minors here. If you want to argue whether or not minors should be prevented from accessing sites like Slashdot, that's fine, but the article doesn't say at all that adults will be prevented from accessing those sites.
So what happens when they find that homemade video a friend is sending you from their trip overseas?
This is ridiculously easy to answer. Bootleggers deal in LARGE QUANTITIES folks. They don't ship DVDs one at a time. They ship them in quantities of hundreds at a time.
I regularly buy DVDs and sometimes VCDs (Video CDs, an older, lesser quality video format on CD discs, for those who don't know) from foreign suppliers. Not all the time, but several times a year. I usually buy 2 or 3 discs at a time so the postage costs are worthwhile. I have NEVER, not once had a shipment held up in customs. Why? Simple. You are legally allowed in the USA to buy a single copy of any music CD, DVD or VCD that you want for personal use. If you buy in small quantities, say 3 or less, US Customs is not interested in your purchases at all. I have, however, read of idiots who bought over 100 VCDs or DVDs at a time from Asian suppliers. In some cases, the goods were legitimate. However, US Customs is very interested in large shipments of goods and those do get scrutinized. If you are dumb enough to buy more than one copy of anything at the same time, US Customs can argue that you are a dealer since the law allows for one copy for personal use. When you buy in large quantities, the odds are good that US Customs will be "interested" in your shipment and may seize it. If they seize it, in theory you can go to court to get it back, but in reality, it will cost so much time and so much money that it's not really worth it, considering that even if you go to court, you may lose. It's a valid argument that if you buy in large quantities that you are intending to re-sell them and may be avoiding paying duties on them. I've read more than once about a few guys who thought they could sell cheap DVDs or VCDs from Asia in a small mom and pop store and they get real surprised when US Customs seizes their shipment. The truth is that once US Customs decides it's counterfeit, whether it is or not in reality, you have lost the merchandise, most likely forever.
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I can write a letter in the cyrillic characterset on either my phone or computer. I can send the message via computer from the US to Eastern Europe or the other direction with few problems (especially if in Unicode). I can not send or receive cyrillic (or other alternet non-latin character sets) to or from Cingular with SMS, but while in Ukraine the same phone sends the same text without problems to other Ukraine phones. Worse, I can MMS a message from Ukraine to Cingular in cyrillic and it is garbled by Cingular, but on the way from US to Ukraine (starting on Cingular and ending on Kyivstar) the MMS message _sometimes_ arrives intact. Other times it is just replacement characters. So parts of Cingular are different than others (I have wondered if the ATT Wireless vs Cingular from the acquisition is the cause).
Did you ever consider that maybe the problem is with Cingular? I have T-Mobile and while it is a real bitch on my American mobile phone to type in Cyrillic, I do have a 3rd party application that lets me do it. Remember, my provider is T-Mobile.
Cyrillic (or Latin character set) SMS to Ukraine - No problem
Receiving SMS from Ukraine - character set is irrelevent, but some Ukrainian providers do NOT allow outgoing SMS to the USA in any character set.
Cyrillic (or Latin character set) SMS to Russia - in theory it works, but in reality some Russian mobile phone providers (ie. Megafon) do not play nice with T-Mobile and block incoming SMS.
Receiving SMS from Russia - no problems receiving Cyrillic or Latin based character sets, even from Megafon.
I haven't tried MMS but my understanding is that MMS should work.
I think competition alone at this point would gaurentee net neurality. That is if one company starts limiting access to the web then customers will switch to other providers. If they all try to do it at the same time I am sure they would be breaking some collusion / monopoly laws.
You must live in a major metropolitan area where there is competition. Do you have any idea what it is like in Small Town America? Let me tell you. My dad and step-mother live in a town of 50,000 or so people. It's BellSouth (soon to be AT&T) territory. BellSouth has not bothered to make DSL available in their area. In fact, there are no plans at all to do - ever. My dad's choices are dial up and cable modem through the local cable company, which is an effective monopoly since it has no competition. Let's say that my dad's cable company decides they aren't going to route traffic to Google very quickly since Google refused to pay their extortion fee. What EXACTLY does my dad do now? Go back to dial up? There is no other provider of broadband in his town.
Neanderthals were hated by other humanoids, and were killed off due to their annoying, high-pitched voices.
The thought occurs that you substituted "French" for "Neanderthals" and changed "killed off" to "killed" it would still be true.
SCO are flat out lying, whether just to the public, or to their lawyers as well. The only reason I think IBM are continuing with this is to get each and every claim SCO has specifically and individually struck down so when the house of cards finally does crumble they have no way to try it again.
Also, the longer this mess goes on, the more money it bleeds from SCO. Even the stock market is finally reluctantly starting to realize, years after Slashdotters, that SCO doesn't really have any ground to stand on. SCOX is currently valued at $2.51 a share, having lost about $1.50 or so in the past month. One source says that SCO is down to $18 million in cash. I think IBM is just trying to get them to run out of money by the time this is settled in IBM's favor so they won't be in a position to launch endless appeals of the verdict.
I don't think the main point is to find the Warez, but rather to "educate" the children by enlisting them in the battle.
I think this is quite right. Interestingly enough, I'm sure the local law enforcement is turning a blind eye to the illegal Versace and Gucci knockoffs in the local night market. I have forgotten the name of the street since it's been 9 years since I was in Hong Kong, but there's a famous night market on some street that is notorious for selling counterfeit goods. I bought what I'm sure was an unlicensed Bart Simpson tie there. I assume that pirate VCDs and DVDs are there as well, but I was last there before either of those formats really took off. I know that copying movies is a really big deal over there and the local film industry blames all of its woes on that, just like the MPAA does in America. The real problem with the Hong Kong film industry is that they have too many films and the quality has gone down a bit recently. It's not unheard of for big name actors over there to appear in 5 or more films a year. If you have enough time as an actor to do 5 or more films a year, I can guarantee you that all of those films are not going to be great ones.
Honestly, WHY do you think buying music on allofmp3 is different then pirating it? Why do you want to buy the music?
The RIAA has not sued anyone for buying through allofmp3 and despite all of their posturing it is not clear at all that it is "illegal" to do so. A court would have to rule on that and my gut feeling is that the RIAA would prefer not to challenge allofmp3 in court because if they lose, they lose everything. That would open the floodgates for Americans to buy without fear from allofmp3. So I think a very large reason people buy from allofmp3 is to get the songs without the fear that comes in doing P2P downloads. It's also worth pointing out that allofmp3 offers a variety of formats and bit rates unlike ITunes, etc. You want MP3 at 320 Kbps? No problem. MP3 at 256? OGG at 192? WMA at 224? FLAC? Uncompressed WAV? AAC? allofmp3 can give you those kinds of choices. Some people buy from allofmp3 because they can get their music in the format they want it in instead of having to, for example, buy from ITunes, burn to CD, rip that CD to a PC and then convert that to OGG.
There are lots of issues with this: Firstly, the UK High Court has no jurisdiction in Russia (unless you're British and then only for some crimes). Russian companys have no legal status in the UK. You can't sue them and they can't be prosecuted in the UK. I think what they might be doing is suing the operator of a Russian site in the UK for damages for operating in the UK without a legal licence.
They might also be gambling that if they win a judgement in court, they can use that to somehow force AllOfMP3 to block people with UK IP addresses from going to the site. I'm not saying that they will have any luck with that approach, just that this might be what their true goal is.
The 26.5M figure quoted is possible. The VA info quoted also suggests that data on 2.1M active-duty military folks was stolen. Take that figure and subtract. You get 14.1M vets. Now the US has been in the following wars since independence:
Boy your math is bad. Really bad. 26.5M minus 2.1M is 24.4M. How you got 14.1M out of that is beyond me. Also, consider that Uncle Sam has admitted he honestly doesn't know how many WWI veterans are still alive (a web search on WWI vets USA or something similar will get you the VA site where they admit that) and that there are no living veterans prior to WWI. So we don't really need to worry about counting WWI vets to get a decent total, but given that Uncle Sam can't even count our living WWI vets, it does make me wonder if any of the US government figures for numbers of veterans are anything more than just a guess.
When the studio fired the show's creator, sure. That was when it sucked. Hardly his finest hour.
You obviously didn't see the infamous Son Of Stimpy episode which played some role in the decision to fire the creator. I've never in my life seen a sorrier piece of animation than that episode. The episode was created only to stick it to Nickelodeon. Anyone who thinks this episode has any merit at all is quite blunty an idiot. Had I been an executive at Nickelodeon at the time and seen this episode, I not only would have fired creator John Kricfalusi for it, I would have tried to sue him to recover the costs of making it.
For those unfamilair with Ren And Stimpy you can consider this episode to be the forerunner of Mr. Handy on South Park , but made as devoid of humor and entertainment as possible.
Verifying age solely on-line is darn near impossible ...
It certainly is when your policy is to not even try to verify. Frankly, I have no interest at all in MySpace. My 13 year old nephew is addicted to it. The amount of time he spends there is unreal. His dad, my brother, complains about it but seemingly does little to nothing to limit his time. Now in case you don't know this, MySpace has a rule that you have to be 14 years old to go onto it. So how do my 13 year old nephew and his 12-13 year old friends get on MySpace and set up their accounts? Simple. They say that they are 99 years old. I have no idea if this is even possible, but if you could search for people by age, I suspect that MySpace has a rather large number of supposed 99 year old members. When all you do to "verify" age is ask someone how old they are, yes, verification is darn near impossible.
What is even more frustrating is that Blu-ray titles could have been VC1 encoded. The Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards both support the same set of video codecs. But for some reason the Blu-ray camp decided to encode the first titles using MPEG-2. I don't follow closely enough the format war to know why such a decision has been taken, but I know this is a stupid decision because most non-technical people will have a bad first impression of Blu-ray. It is even more frustrating knowing that Blu-ray titles have the technical potential to look at least as good as HD-DVD titles.
I know exactly why this happened. It's because Blu-ray doesn't yet actually work with any codecs except MPEG-2. Sorry, I don't have the link, but a little more than a month ago I read that nobody really knows if VC1 will be working in Blu-ray by the end of the year even. They use MPEG-2 because right now they have to. They are hoping that eventually the technical problems with the other codecs and the format can be worked out, but for now if it's on Blu-ray, it will be MPEG-2.
My understanding is that currently a communications company can try to bill someone (like Google) whose traffic gets routed thru their network (and they do not provide the connectivity at the end points), but then Google can tell them to go to hell. I've posted before to this argument, but perhaps it merits another mention since the message clearly is NOT getting through. My dad lives in a town of about 50,000 people that is more than 100 miles away from the nearest large metro area. Bellsouth, his provider, has been very upfront in saying that basically they have no plans to ever build DSL connections to where he lives. My had cable modem with his cable company. So if my dad gets pissed off that his cable company is throttling Google because Google won't pay them the extortion fee they want, exactly where does he go? There's no cable competition in his town. His local cable provider is the only high speed internet provider.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
My dad and step-mother live in a small town 120 miles from the nearest large metropolitan area in BellSouth territory. Here are there choices for high speed internet:
The local cable company
There is no 2nd choice. His 2nd choice is dialup. So suppose the cable company decideds to implement tiered bandwidth and my dad doesn't like it. He has no choice because going back to dialup is not a choice.
I suspect that a rather large number of Americans are in exactly the same position as my father. They have one choice for high speed internet where they live, so going with someone else isn't an option.
There is an excellent chance that something much much worse than time in a country club prison is going to happen to this guy.
From the article:
Prosecutors say that starting in November 2004, the man arrested in Miami -- Edwin Andres Pena, 23, a Venezuelan who has permanent residency in the United States -- used two companies he created to offer wholesale phone connections at discounted rates to small Internet phone companies.
Actually, he stands almost a 100% chance of losing his permanent residency and being deported after he serves time in jail. If you a permanent resident and you are convicted of a crime, you can be deported for it. Prior to 9-11, this wasn't done so much, but these days Uncle Sam is looking for any excuse he can to deport permanent residents who violate the law. I've read many stories about permanent residents whove been in the US for 10+ years and then got convicted of a misdemeanor and were suddenly up for deportation. For example, a permanent resident could get convicted of a DUI and suddenly he is going to be deported for it. I've read about families being broken up where a mother or father was deported for a rather minor offense, so I don't think this guy has any chance of being allowed to remain in the US after he does his time, assuming he is convicted for it.
As mentioned in the summary - the first attempt at legislation along these lines is being challenged in court because it was, well, absolutely idiotic and probably completely unconstitutional.
Here's a little background on why this happened. There was a rather infamous so-called "mail order bride" murder in Washington state in late 2000. An American man living there went to Krygystan to meet an ethnic Russian girl, probably in 1999 I think. He was in his late 30's, fat, balding and extremely unattractive. The girl he met was in her very early 20s and looked like a budding supermodel. In short, there was no way at all she would be interested in him. He had previously married a Russian woman who divorced him and took him to the cleaners. So being an idiot, he decided that he would get a woman much younger and hotter than he deserved and she would be so desperate to leave her country (by the way, Russians are a minority in Krygystan, which is an important fact in the story) that she would marry him. Plus, in his delusional state, he honestly believed that his sparkling personalty would triump and this woman would fall in love with him and they would live together happily ever after.
He went to Krygystan because he knew that since Russians are a minitory there, a girl from there might be pretty willing to leave and overlook his ugliness and this guy was REALLY ugly. What he didn't count on was that she and her parents hatched a plan that she would list herself on the internet with marriage agencies and she would marry the first guy to come along. It was a long shot because only about 5% of the women on these sites ever find a husband this way and the odds of someone in Krygystan are even lower. However, sure enough, the guy wrote to her and came to visit. The plan was that she would come over to America on a K-1 (fiancee) visa, they would get married and if the marriage worked out, great. If not, she would stay in it for 2 years, get her green card, divorce him and then after a few more years apply for American citizenship and then sponsor her parents for immigration. The plan was not ever for her to have a successful marriage. If that happened that was great, but the plan was for her to legally immigrate and then sponsor her parents to immigrate as soon as she became a citizen. So you see already we have a dishonest young woman whose motivation for marriage is to get the hell out of her country.
What she didn't count on was that her future husband was just as dishonest. Instead of having his own house and a good job like he told her, he lived in a rented house and barely got by. His first wife cleaned him out and he had basically almost nothing left as I said earlier. They got married quickly after this young lady arrived in America and when she found out that she had been lied to, she began to sleep around on him and didn't do much to hide it. The marriage went downhill quickly and at some point, he woke up and realized that after she got her green card (it takes at least 2 years of marriage to the person who applied for the K-1 visa before the green card is given), she was going to divorce him. He didn't feel like he could go through that again, so he hired someone to kill her. Her body was found and he was sent away to prison for life.
So if you're still with me, we have a story of two dishonest people who found each other and it ended in the death of one and the imprisonment of the other. To make things worse, the young lady's parents used every excuse in the book to try to exploit her death to be allowed to immigrate to America. They were not successful.
Now you're wondering, how on earth did this tale of 2 dishonest people lead to the IMBRA? Well, some of the Washington press told the truth about the story and mentioned how the young lady was having affairs on her husband. Most did not. It makes a better story to ignore that and paint her as an innocent victim who did nothing wrong and was killed by an American wacko. Now enter some Congresswoman
World isn't just 2 countries huh?
You know, this really gets old. Since this comment is almost always from someone living in some part of the former British empire, usually the UK or Australia, I'm going to explain it to you in a way you might be able to understand.
The best baseball players in the world play Major League Baseball in the league by that name that has 29 teams in the USA and 1 in Canada. Yes, there are good players in Cuba and Japan who for various reasons do not play in MLB (political for Cuba, personal choice for the most part in the Japanese league), but the very best, the cream of the crop, play in MLB. The competition outside of MLB is at what we would call a "minor league level", which for you soccer/football fans would mean basically that MLB is equivalent to the English Premier League and other national leagues, such as those in Japan, Cuba and other countries are at a talent level somewhat like those soccer/football leagues in the UK that play below the Premier League. So when we talk about a "World Series" it is for the championship of the highest calibre baseball league on the planet bar none. Perhaps today the name is a bit of an acronym, but the first World Series started in 1903 and the name isn't going to change.
I know that some of you Brits and Aussies will point to the Cuba Olympic medals or the Japanese win at this year's World Baseball Classic as "proof" that somehow the World Series is bogus, but you are comparing apples to oranges. In the Olympics, since MLB refuses to allow its players to play, the Olympics are the bogus championship of the best minor league (2nd division if you will for soccer/football fans) players in the world. That is exactly why baseball has been dropped, probably permanently, from the Olympics. It's not really a championship of anything. With regards to the World Baseball Classic, that was basically the World Cup of baseball. It was for national teams. The World Series could be looked at as the championship of the best "club teams" (to use a soccer/football term) in the world, which are in MLB. Now do you understand?
I've heard that in many places of the former Soviet Union, the "local law enforcement" only enforces laws when it suits their financial needs. I've talked to people from places like Lithuania and Russia and one of the many reasons they left was because justice has a price on the streets.
While I'm sure this was true of Lithuania, I can assure you that they would not have been accepted into the EU if it was still true. I'm not saying that there aren't crooked cops anywhere in Lithuania, but EU membership is conditional on cracking down on this kind of corruption and driving it down to levels where it's not noticeable. That's one of the specific things that may delay Bulgaria's membership in the EU - they haven't done enough to crack down on corruption.
At last, someone who understands exactly why Cisco, 3M, etc. would write such a letter. Mod this up!
OK, I'll bite. Unlike what appears to be the majority of Slashdotters, I actually am a Christian and yes I do go to a church that you would call "fundamentalist". While we don't use that description ourselves, it is accurate. So I think I am qualified to give a non-troll answer.
Yes, you are being ridiculous. Nobody would consider such rice to be "human". I feel sorry for you because you are either stupid enough to actually think we might think a few human genes makes something human or you are just a sadly misinformed person with regards to how religious people think.
Personally, while I am not in particular in favor of genetically modified food for reasons that have nothing at all to do with religion, I would not be surprised if some Christians objected to this rice. Not because it is "human" but because the creators are "playing God" or some such nonsense. Personally, I think that God gave us brains to use to make our lives better through advances in science and medicine. If I was going to get on board with genetically modified food, this would probably the be the one I'd support.
I had no problem getting Cingular to give me unlock codes the day after activation (that was a business acct, FWIW).
If true, you are possibly the first person anywhere Cingular has unlocked a phone for. I have never read anything anywhere about Cingular that has shown a willingness to unlock a phone. In fact, everything, and I do really mean everything, I have ever read about Cingular has stated that they will not under any circumstances unlock a phone. I'm curious to know if:
1) This represnts a change in Cingular's policy.
2) You just got lucky from someone who didn't know they aren't supposed to unlock it.
3) Cingular has different policies for business and personal use customers.
4) You are lying because we have no way to verify what you are saying.
No offense, but pardon my disbelief when Cingular has had a very firm policy for years of not unlocking their phones, so it's a little hard to believe it when some guy says they unlocked it the day after activation.
While I will wholeheartedly agree that the price is about $100 too much on the PS3, is it really THAT big of a deal?
It just might be. My brother and sister-in-law have 3 boys. They own every freakin' game system there is and at least 2 if not 3 of every portable one because God knows we can't have the kids unable to play a game for even a second. At the price listed for the PS3, I can say with certainty that there is no chance at all my brother and sister-in-law will be buying it for their kids.
Memory sticks come from many vendors.
Perhaps you are confusing memory sticks with memory cards . They're not compatible you know. Where exactly are these vendors of which you speak? I think maybe Crucial, Kingston and the like might make knock offs, but just to try to ruin the format even further, Sony then took a memory stick and put some sort of DRM crap on it to keep you from copying anything you put on it. Yeah, that really made the format take off.
He also likes to get into flame wars with Linus Torvalds when he gets bored.
Really? And what exactly do you base this on? According to the article, which it's clear that you did not read, Tanenbaum simply had a recent article printed in IEEE Computer and someone on Slashdot posted a link to it, which caused Linus to weigh in with his 2 cents about something that was never directed at him. It sounds more to me like Linus is obsessed with proving that macrokernels are the only way to go. Why does he even care? It's not like Minix is a threat to Linux. If he believes so strongly that microkernels are wrong, he should just let Tanenbaum and company waste their time on them instead of endlessing arguing the same points he made years ago.
From the FA, which again a Slashdot submitter seems to have not actually read:
... a proposed federal law that would effectively require most schools and libraries to render those Web sites inaccessible to minors ...
Note the use of the word minors here. If you want to argue whether or not minors should be prevented from accessing sites like Slashdot, that's fine, but the article doesn't say at all that adults will be prevented from accessing those sites.
So what happens when they find that homemade video a friend is sending you from their trip overseas?
This is ridiculously easy to answer. Bootleggers deal in LARGE QUANTITIES folks. They don't ship DVDs one at a time. They ship them in quantities of hundreds at a time.
I regularly buy DVDs and sometimes VCDs (Video CDs, an older, lesser quality video format on CD discs, for those who don't know) from foreign suppliers. Not all the time, but several times a year. I usually buy 2 or 3 discs at a time so the postage costs are worthwhile. I have NEVER, not once had a shipment held up in customs. Why? Simple. You are legally allowed in the USA to buy a single copy of any music CD, DVD or VCD that you want for personal use. If you buy in small quantities, say 3 or less, US Customs is not interested in your purchases at all. I have, however, read of idiots who bought over 100 VCDs or DVDs at a time from Asian suppliers. In some cases, the goods were legitimate. However, US Customs is very interested in large shipments of goods and those do get scrutinized. If you are dumb enough to buy more than one copy of anything at the same time, US Customs can argue that you are a dealer since the law allows for one copy for personal use. When you buy in large quantities, the odds are good that US Customs will be "interested" in your shipment and may seize it. If they seize it, in theory you can go to court to get it back, but in reality, it will cost so much time and so much money that it's not really worth it, considering that even if you go to court, you may lose. It's a valid argument that if you buy in large quantities that you are intending to re-sell them and may be avoiding paying duties on them. I've read more than once about a few guys who thought they could sell cheap DVDs or VCDs from Asia in a small mom and pop store and they get real surprised when US Customs seizes their shipment. The truth is that once US Customs decides it's counterfeit, whether it is or not in reality, you have lost the merchandise, most likely forever.
Now I can die.
Or if you use Emacs you can wish you were dead.
(ducks)