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I was also given a Trek themed DRM nightmare for Christmas in the shape of [this]( [thing]( A Starfleet insignia shaped 4GB USB drive with a digital copy of the film on it.
I had to install the latest DivX and sign up to a DivX account to play it. That was a bit of a pain in the arse, but I did it (it wouldn’t play in any other program, not even VLC), and then entered the coupon code on the website. There was other stuff I had to download as well (It was Christmas day and I'd been drinking so I can't recall correctly, but it was far too much work to do for something that advertises itself as "Plug and Play"
Playback in DivX was a bit rubbish, there was a static pulse on the audio track every two seconds or so and every ten minutes the movie skipped a few frames, but it was watchable. Until 90 mins in, when the screen went blank with the audio track still playing. I tried navigating the movie a few minutes back using the slider in the player.. no dice, blank screen again this time no audio. After closing DivX (which took 5 minutes and caused it to stop responding, 3 of those minutes were waiting for Task Manager to open) I reopened the movie in DivX and tried to navigate to my place in the film, once again, black screen. I even tried using DivX's fast forward button to navigate my way to the point that I wanted to watch (90 mins at 32x speed.. urgh). But alas, it got to 80 mins in, showed me a still advertisement for the very product I was using and then the screen went blank again.
"Fuck this noise!" I thought. I uninstalled DivX (I also had to de-register my comp), opened up and watched a lower quality, pirate copy in VLC... for the convenience.
Otherwise it was an awesome gift, a 4GB USB drive is always useful, and especially a solid metal one shaped like the Starfleet insignia.
Also, I love how Abrams' penchant for shiny things in space obscuring the view of information, on screen, translated to the packaging of this [device]( |
Telling reddit that DRM doesn't work is kind of like walking into a bar and asking if anyone there drinks alcohol... Preaching to the choir, brother.
But yes, DRM only really hurts legitimate customers. My last example is SPORE. I bought it, but had to wait a week or so before it would be shipped (don't recall the reasons exactly). I couldn't wait being an instant gratification, "this is the internet and I want it now!" kind of guy. I downloaded it, installed it, and played it in a matter of hours (a few days if you want to count waiting for a WINE bug to be fixed). The game arrived in the mail, I restored the original exe, etc. All was peachy (other than the game sucked, and was nothing that was advertised from the demo's ni early development - hate )
However, after a week, it started chirping at me about it not being able to contact EA's servers for authentication (or not able to login to ea something somesuch, two days I did not get to play my game because someone in the EA data center spilled coffee on the box that needed to authenticate my game for the millionth time (to play 'single player')(also, the coffee story may or may not be made up - alas, it would/could not connect).
That day i re-cracked my bought game and never had trouble again (except for not really liking the game i waited oh so long for). That was the last game I purchased and will probably be the last game I will purchase for some time, since mw2 also committed an entirely different sin. |
It depends, you need a certain mass of people who are subscribing to pay the bills. If you have a smaller market, like a subscription only news site, then that cuts your advertising choices, and can potentially eliminate that source of revenue.
As you are probably aware, newspapers used to generate most of their revenue through advertising. Once online newspapers came online, print advertising began to shrink due to the internet being a larger market for newspapers and cheaper advertising (it's less expensive to to send 1,000,000 ad images with bandwidth than the cost of paper and ink).
Thus, having fewer customers who pay can kill something if there is not enough of them. In addition to that, it is difficult to revert back to a "free-site" because you do not have enough customers to start a good word of mouth campaign (the holy grail of advertising). |
Let's say that we have a housing test and the test consists of the house having to withstand a car being dropped through the living room roof from a transport helicopter. It's something almost no one will ever actually experience, outside of purposely doing it, but it's the test none-the-less.
Now, because we want to boast about being HouseCar3 compliant we will specifically design our houses to have increased structural support for that one specific scenario. Sure, our house is now technically "better", but we fixed something no one is ever going to have issues with. |
Keep in mind, too, this kind of incident does NOT require the Internets to judge or police.
The various payment card associations (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AMEX, JCB, etc.) already possess the tools necessary to detect this kind of problem: they perform statistical analysis on the sales and chargeback data they have access to. If this story is true and Hostgator's payment card data has really been compromised, the rate of fraudulent transaction claims involving cardholders who have also done business with Hostgator will become much higher, and that's detectable.
We're not really equipped to judge this, but you can have faith that others are. A whistleblower isn't really needed. Payment card associations are plenty motivated to reduce "chilling effects" that make people stop wanting to use their payment cards: cardholders thinking the system is biased in favor of merchants; merchants thinking the system is biased in favor of cardholders; cardholders believing they have no recourse in the event of fraud; and definitely security issues which may compromise customer card data and reduce customer confidence. |
Version numbers don't mean anything...
As true as this is, it's unfortunate that many typical consumers don't understand this and just see IE9, Chrome 8 and Firefox 4 and think,
"IE must be the best because it has the highest version number."
On a similar note, It would be interesting to see how the typical consumer would react if all major browsers just dropped their version numbers (or at least hid them in the about menu so the average user didn't see it) from now on and adapted a Chrome-style, silent updating mechanism. |
Kurzweil also makes the assumption that the brain's data can be dumped cleanly into a digital simulation. Much of the uniqueness of brains is a developmentally generated physical feature. It's not just a raw processing algorithm, where increased CPU clock speed = higher intelligence. The neurons are grown into each other in networks whose complexity is not easily matched by simple digital switches.
For example, the process of pruning follows the dynamic growth of adolescence, where the most valuable neural pathways are strengthened and the extraneous ones are removed. These complex network interactions are not like that of a single supercomputer, but rather more like the interactions of a huge cross-wired network of smaller devices. The brain is more like a swarm of networked and sub-networked cell phones than a "deep blue" style monolith. |
Shitty play for Nokia, but brilliant for Microsoft.
Nokia completely loses out because in the realm of smartphones, they are now just another cell phone manufacturer like Motorola/HTC. Android and iOS are gaining huge traction and being another WP7 handset make (along with LG, Samsung, etc.) won't help their bottom line.
For Microsoft, however, they gain huge tracts of hardware cred and possibly entry into the entry/mid-level market where Nokia is still pretty big. Imagine cheap little touch phones with WP7 tiles in emerging economies. Also, Nokia is still pretty entrenched internationally, which is something that Apple and Google have been working on for a long, long time. |
In iOS 4.0 (prior to the patch that forced passwords), I was able to purchase Mighty Eagle inside Angry Birds without a password. I was prompted, then switched out of the app by selecting another app in the "now running" list, switched back to an error dialog. Purchase still went through and I was charged $0.99. Had not installed anything for over 24 hours prior; never gave a password. |
But.. it says you have to input a password before you can buy anything. ಠ_ಠ
After my mom found my idiotic little brother's zip disk full of porn (which he kept unlabeled in his underwear drawer) my dad locked down our AOL.
It took me about a day to figure out how to install a keylogger, get the password for the my dad's account, and remove the parental controls from my account. |
In another post I was getting smacked by a guy because I thought of 1960s and 1970s as a Golden Era of sorts. One of his arguments was double-digit inflation not being something he wanted to experience. My parents bought and eventually paid off their house in that economy while working at low paying factory jobs. If they had an opportunity to work overtime, they'd take it. If the company they worked for made more, so be it. If companies don't make profits they go broke. So nobody has a job. So my parents (and eventually me) worked overtime when we could get it. That slave-labor company that paid me low wages... failed eventually. Corporations are not evil. People (shareholders) own corporations. If they don't make profits, people will not invest in them. Corporation dies. Everyone is unemployed. Good luck. |
Similar, but not quite. Based on your unwillingness or inability to provide any evidence to support your overwork and abuse claim, you have no credibility to attack. I speculated on your qualification and experience to make the statement hoping to draw something out. After all this... All I got was a lousy logic fallacy argument. Perhaps you'll make someone a good union lawyer one day. Or a community organizer. |
Basically, whenever you change the value of a bit (from 0 to 1), a small but none zero amount of heat energy is produced.
In computer chips at the moment, the major source of heat is resistance from the wires, and this "Landauer Energy" can be ignored when it comes to calculating the heat output of the device.
However, with improving and emerging technologies, the heat waste from the wires will be reduced, to a point where they chips start running up against the Landauer limit - as the density of bits on the chip is also due to expand exponentially (Moore's Law) this brings about serious implications for the thermal output of electronics in the future. |
No corroborating evidence? Two major news outlets were reporting it, seemingly independently.
What corroborating evidence would you have needed? The court documents?
My point is that people giving reddit as a whole shit for this instance of gullibility are being disingenuous to its self-correcting nature and the awesome community as a whole.
And to make a generalization about a popular subreddit that usually produces good content is just creating a counter-circlejerk, thus falling into the same line of behavior as the original post. |
This is a cute story and all. Really though... the idea of using a toothbrush to clean filings out of a grove is not that impressive. I hear spacewalks are really crazy. I hear they are super dangerous. One mistake and you could die. That's pretty intense... I used an emery board to fix a broken car. My dad once used a soda bottle. People qualified to fly into space used a brush to remove filings... la-te-friggen-da. |
Nothing funny I'm afraid, but quite a few tend to say that they won't be liable for any costs even if it is completely their fault. I don't know about US law, but in Australia you can't contract out of some quite stringent consumer laws. So a lot of the time they put these terms in to scare normal people. Those who understand the law know that any term which contradicts that of statute is completely powerless. |
I think there's quite a bit of misunderstanding around here (mostly due to the linked article not being good enough) on what exactly Pono is, and why Neil Young is pushing it.
Two things -
1) It isn't about file compression . At least not entirely. Neil Young isn't just unhappy with MP3s, he (and all audiophiles) never believed CDs sounded good enough either. The 16bit/44khz sample rate of your standard audio CD just isn't enough to capture the full spectrum of sound preserved on analogue tape. If you ever get a chance to hear a comparison on a really good sound system between a CD and a clean, analog-mastered vinyl or reel to reel tape, the difference is almost immediately apparent. Sound texture, room ambiance and minute details present in the original recordings make the analog versions sound lush,full, and lifelike compared to the flat digital approximations offered by CDs (and the further dumbed down mp3s).
What Pono is trying to do is provide a lossless digital standard that captures the analog signal at 24bit/192khz, and provides a much more faithful rendering of the original recording. It's kinda like High Def for your ears, and much like when Blu-Ray was originally introduced (or the DVD after the VHS) -- Not everyone will be able to sense the benefits right away, alot of people will be standing around (like my parents did), scratching their heads and saying 'I don't know, is it really that much better', until they get used to HD, at which point you start to wonder how they thought SD ever looked good enough.
While it's true the FLAC offers support for 24bit encoding, the music industry doesn't support FLAC, so unless you're willing to settle for a vinyl rip, or happen to have an old master tape lying around -- you don't have a source for getting your favorite music in Hi-Def. That's what Pono hopes to change -- getting the music industry to offer hi-def encodes of their catalogs for the benefit of people who want them.
2) Pono also requires another digital music player - Because most mainstream mp3s players (iPods and all) don't have high-quality Digital to Analog audio converters capable of outputting 24bit sound.
So, to audiophiles who want portable hi-res audio, a little player capable of 24bit output sounds pretty damn cool. |
I up voted you because you added to the conversation, however the original book has the zeroth law (never harm humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm) was a good thing, mostly.
By the time this law had spawned itself in the robots minds, the robots were huge ass computers controlling every aspect of the planets infrastructure, finance and resources, and so through acting on this law helped humanity go towards a great age of prosperity.
Now here is where it gets hazy for me as I'm only connecting the dots from reading iRobot, Foundation and Earth and some late night Wikipedia lurking, but the robot continued to advance exponentially to such a point where they could read minds and control time. However they still couldn't agree on what would truly be best for humanity as they weren't human themselves, so instead they travelled back in time and placed humanity in a timeline where humans were the only sentient life to evolve in the galaxy, and then destroyed themselves.
It all makes perfect sense. |
Have you actually read the article ? This is not about banning robots that are capable of lethal force. This is about making sure that humans are always in the loop when the robot's decision might involve the use of lethal force.
There are currently dozens of semi-autonomous pieces of machinery equipped with guns hovering over the Middle East, and they have been used to kill people. These would not be covered by the proposed law. The proposition only targets hypothetical robots that autonomously make that decision to kill someone, based on their perception and programming. |
I don't think you really grasped what's being discussed here. It's not a discussion about robots designed to be weapons but rather a discussion about robots that can freely roam around killing soldiers and/or civilians without having to be triggered by a human. Automated killing machines. Imagine if you took land mines, which for the record kill dozens of women and children in civilian areas today and make this land mine able to move on it's own. Then you give the land mine the ability to engage targets at range. Give the land mine the ability to actively seek out targets itself and you basically have the most horrible killing machine to date.
I understand what you're trying to say here but saying that survelliance equipment that transmits data to a tank, is as bad as a fully autonomous tank that hunts human silhouettes regardless if they're armed or not are equally bad. Now that just makes no sense at all. |
most money is made with servers, server products (exchange, MS SQL etc..) and with drivers, you want your driver in windows on DVD? well better pay a shitload of money. Next step will be only "verified" drivers will be installable on Windows PCs. So they are allready moving away from "customer" payment to "producer" payment. Which let the users pay through there hardware (for example add 10$ so you can use you mainboard drivers without downloading it) |
If you don't see the error in your analogy, they're doing exactly that: They create more EFFICIENT engines, so you can reap better power with the same fuel economy. If you wanted to make 400hp on an old 350, you weren't getting much more than 10 miles per gallon, but you can get way more than that with the new LS series motor without killing yourself on the fuel economy end. |
Wow... I was thinking "that was fast" because it feels like h.264 just came out and I remember when it started making digital video "good."
But actually h.264 is about 10 years old now. h.263 was finished in 1995, so h.264 actually had a much longer "life" and was significantly more useful.
All h.263 ever did was awful cd-rom video and RealVideo.
What this (probably) means is all your devices with h.264 hardware decoding are soon to be obsolete. GPU decoders are probably fine - most of those are general-purpose enough to work with a software update (not that GPU manufacturers are known for giving new features for free.) But I doubt Raspberry Pi's in their current incarnation will ever play h.265.
For those of you saying saying we can have 4k video now - the standard actually supports 8k video.
Almost edit: Apparently a Qualcomm S4 dual-core is enough to decode some h.265 videos in software at tablet resolutions, that's good news.
Almost edit2: Broadcomm already has an ARM chip coming to market in 2014 with h.265 4k decoding and even transcoding capabilities. Cool. |
I was actually thinking specifically about them when I mentioned I was impressed sometimes lol. Though just today I watched his 720p rip of Jackie Brown (700MB) and while almost all of the movie was very good quality, the few scenes in darkness were very shitty. That's one of the problems with the super-small approach, you'll get 8-9/10 results 95% of the time and 2/10 for the rest of the movie. If you doubled the size you'd almost completely eliminate these slip ups, and really, 1.4GB would still be quite small for a HD movie. |
He swindled investors by manipulating LetsBuyIt.com stock prices by releasing a misleading press release, and then cashing out once the effects of that press release had driven up the value of his stocks. |
Corey Doctorow also has a great book on copyright called "Content" - available for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license -
I think the main conflict here is remuneration for an incorporeal product. Traditionally it's been the medium that stores the IP that is purchased and sold (hardcopy book, music record, sheet music etc), allowing for control of the incorporeal product in distribution, and also allowing a secondary market for reselling. It also means that theft is of the physical product, not necessarily of the content.
The internet totally disrupts this business model; the medium itself is incorporeal. Kim dotcom is at the forefront of changing this business model - and it does need to change, very badly.
[The Oatmeal articulated the problem best when trying to watch Game of Thrones](
In summary you shouldn't be pushing to kim dotcom's actions to be made illegal. As a member of the creative industry you should support changing your business to meet both new media, and consumer demand. |
Regardless of whether you agree that is a dick move, you seem to be unreasonably angry about it. Do you need a hug or something?
You have reached a deeper level of douche-baggery here. At first it was "hey everyone, look how brave I am, I'm going to call this public persona that I am jealous of a douchebag, and then revel in all the mee-too sycophants who pile on afterward.
But that's not enough for you, the biggest douchebag of all.
No, you need to attack the lone voice who call you out for being the even bigger douchebag.
How will you do it? Disingenuously, with condescension. Just like a fucking douchebag would, very predictable.
I don't know you either. But by every score, you are a raging douchebag jerk. I suppose if you figure that I am super upset, that makes you less of a douchebag somehow. But again, that's just more douchebag thinking.
I very much doubt that even someone like dotcom would ever pull such a douchebag move, that you've done, here. I suspect he would have better things to do and might express himself in a significantly less douchebaggy way. |
It's also possible that they didn't control for bias at all- it could be that they simply failed to include language that they consider normal but people in other regions would consider to be hate speech; hate speech is a very subjective term after all, and is largely based on perception.
For example it is possible for a black person to call a black person an epithet and have it accepted, but if a person of any other race uses that word it will be considered hate speech. |
As a side note, the article isn't (purposefully) clear on something : Amazon didn't hire these workers directly - they go through specialized companies which hire them from other countries, bring them in Germany, offer them living quarters and pay their salaries.
Because the workforce is very seasonal it doesn't make sense for Amazon to hire these workers on its payroll, so they are "renting" them from other companies specializing in temporary contracts. While it is true that living conditions should have been checked more thoroughly by Amazon employees (to eliminate exactly this type of scandal), the responsible party for these workers is their real employer and the subcontractor that signed a contract with Amazon. This situation can happen a lot, especially in an international market (remember Apple vs Foxconn ?) and laws should be written to render this behavior simply illegal (including jailtime for responsable parties). |
It's not as if microsoft exactly has a choice-due process doesn't exist for corporations. This data is metadata, analogous to the addresses on a post card. It's the data they use to serve up your data, not your actual data.
Oklahoma Press Publishing Co. vs Walling, Wage and Hour Administrator established the judiciary precedent of a constructive or "figurative" search.
To cite the descision;
"The confusion obscuring the basic distinction between actual and so-called "constructive" search has been accentuated where the records and papers sought are of corporate character, as in these cases."
"Historically private corporations have been subject to broad visitorial power, both in England and in this country. And it long has been established that Congress may exercise wide investigative power over them, analogous to the visitorial power of the incorporating state, when their activities take place within or affect interstate commerce."
[]
"Correspondingly, it has been settled that corporations are not entitled to all of the constitutional protections which private individuals have in these and related matters."...
"It is enough that the investigation be for a lawfully authorized purpose, within the power of Congress to command. This has been ruled most often perhaps in relation to grand jury investigations,[42] but also frequently in respect to general or statistical investigations authorized by Congress."
[]
"The requirement of "probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation," literally applicable in the case of a warrant, is satisfied in that of an order for production by the court's determination that the investigation is authorized by Congress, is for a purpose Congress can order, and the documents sought are relevant to the inquiry."
[]
"In these results under the later as well as the earlier decisions, the basic compromise has been worked out in a manner to secure the public interest and at the same time to guard the private ones affected against the only abuses from which protection rightfully may be claimed."
"The latter are not identical with those protected against invasion by actual search and seizure, nor are the threatened abuses the same. They are rather the interests of men to be free from officious intermeddling, whether because irrelevant to any lawful purpose or because unauthorized by law, concerning matters which on proper occasion and within lawfully conferred authority of broad limits are subject to public examination in the public interest." |
Yeah I caught wind of that in the "People you may know" section included an ex girlfriend that was on the other side of the country and never even went to any of my schools, also my kids soccer coach who constantly sends out emails to me, but both of these people had nothing in common with my professional life.
This doesn't surprise me I always thought of anything linked to an email is not safe, the best example I can think of is how Amazon sent me an email with an "item you might like" and it was a DVD of a movie that I had rented out from Redbox and it was like 4 weeks overdue. Now mind you this wasn't a movie like The Avengers or Lincoln, it was a small independent film by Spike Lee called Red Hook Summer, probably his lowest grossing feature of all time that nobody even knew about and I've never ordered a DVD of any kind from Amazon. Also I never filled out an email at Redbox when they asked me to. The only connection is that I used the same card at Redbox that I used to order stuff from Amazon. I might be putting on a tin foil hat here by thinking that Redbox somehow let Amazon know what I rented shared my card information and Amazon traced my email back to my card. If it was any other movie I wouldn't take a second look, but a small independent BLACK movie that no one knew about, somehow Amazon recommends it to me 4 weeks after renting it at Redbox!!?? |
Amazon doesn't need to hack your email or your credit card- they have a virtual profile of you that has a record of everything you've ever looked at, clicked on, hovered over. How long you stay on various product pages, what user reviews you read vs those you dismiss easily.
All of this gets added into a virtual you that, if you're familiar with Netflix's very public advancements in movie recommendations, shouldn't surprise you at all that it somehow knows to a high degree of accuracy what you like... Probably even better than you know yourself.
In fact, companies have started dumbing down and disguising your targeted ads because users found them too freakily accurate. Target knows when women are pregnant before most of their friends even of they're not buying anything that is FOR the pregnancy. But they stopped sending "pregnancy" fliers and started disguising them with outdoor grills and footballs, with pregnancy items on page 3-4. |
Q: How many Tesla automobile fires have been reported since the company was founded in 2003?
A: 2
Q: How many automobile fires (with internal combustion engines) have been reported in the US, on average, per year between 2006 and 2010?
A: 152,300
Q: How many of the Tesla passengers were killed or injured in these two fires?
A: None. They were informed by the car's computer to pull over safely and exit the vehicle after the battery was punctured by debris while traveling at high speeds. None were injured and have said that they would like to purchase another Tesla car.
Q: How many people were reported killed or injured in automobile fires between 2006 and 2010?
A: 209 deaths and 764 injuries, all due to car fires.
Q: How many accidents has a Google Driverless Car been in while driving autonomously?
A: Zero times. It was rear ended once at a stop light in 2011 while the driver was driving it manually.
Q: How many dicks should you suck for making such a stupid comment?
A: A bag of dicks. |
sigh read the comments above you and do some research, |
sigh read the comments above you and do some research, |
sigh read the comments above you and do some research, |
sigh read the comments above you and do some research, |
you have to at least admit that the RBMK design was kinda shitty, especially the eps-5 button causing a power surge from the graphite tipping on the control rods,the fact that it was dangerous at low power output and the massive positive void coefficient that made moderating the fission near-impossible. When combined with operator error in continuing the safety test in a low power state wherein the reactor was poisoned by xenon-135 accumulation, the disaster occurred. Yes, several plants which use the same reactor design are still operational, but the issues with the RBMK design are now known, whereas the fatal flaws of the RBMK design were never even considered by the original designers. |
I was a living adult during both, and have worked closely with (and at times for) the nuclear power industry in my career. I'm guessing there are a number of reasons people are more freaked out about Fukushima. Japan is more 'first-world' than Chernobyl; "out of sight, out of mind" and a first-world population being evacuated and all that. Plus Fukushima is right on the ocean, where leakage can cross the ocean to the West Coast, where they freak out if a tree gets bruised or a deer run over.
Maybe more important than both is that Fukushima occurred in the Internet/Twitter/reddit age, where mis-information is spread at the speed of electrons and, once out in the wild, tends to be taken as gospel and then quoted endlessly.
I haven't stayed on top of it other than to check what's being released into the environment. I live on the West Coast, and I wouldn't hesitate to eat fish caught off the beach - at least, not because of fear from Fukushima fallout. The Pacific ocean is pretty fucking huge: all the radioactive water in Japan would be a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent (of a percent) of the volume there.
Still, until I hear that the melted cores at Fukushima have been rendered inactive (ie no longer at risk of further melting down), and then properly contained (temporarily at least; long-term containment is many years off), I will consider the situation there unstable and possibly volatile. Especially with the track record TEPCO and the Japanese government have of holding back information, avoiding full disclosure, and resisting expertise and aid from nuclear agencies from other countries. |
There is a whole article about this even at wikipedia. With valid citation about that there is animals and farms still being banned from consumption even at britain.
Also there is a huge politic and informatic trauma of chernobyl. Fukushima was intentionally triggered catastroph. Yet chernobyl was a case of accident. That did change the state of nations towarda nuclear energy. For example Turkey still has no nuclear energy despite the fact that we one of the top growing economy in world. We are located at black sea and our shores got highly effected by explosion back then.
Edit: |
And I stand by google on this, Apple just keeps releasing things I just either don't like or hate.
All service functions suck on my iPhone 5s, pictures are separated by location and time. I can't post anything without somebody knowing exactly when, and where it happened. Cannot be turned off. Glitchy service, with updates it seems something is fixed but other aspects will become broken.
My experience with Siri thus far is absolutely horrendous, every time I want to use it, it is currently out of service due to updates, or general down time. And when it actually works I have to scream at it spelling peoples names that I wanna call. |
People in the USA tend to think Volvos are for rich people and they have a (perhaps not entirely) undeserved reputation for being driven very very slowly by people not in any sort of hurry. A lot of people have therefore assumed that Volvos are incapable of going fast because many of their owners seem to be completely uninterested in it.
Factors like quality and crashworthiness are often scoffed at by these same people that would just as soon drive a large 4x4 pickup truck.
Pity, because I've got my eye on the latest V60R wagon (~325HP) when it launches this year as a possible replacement for my Subaru WRX/STI. If I go that route I'm looking forward to surprising many a person at a stoplight. |
Its propably more like Apple or common sense.
Theres nothing new here, you could connect your phones via cable or bluetooth to your cars stereo for years. There were differences between cars, yes, but most cars that support bluetooth easily manage to read out your phone book and show alll the entrys on a display.
Apple just added big buttons and color, and now try to sell it big, so he apple fanboys (those who dont know better and just get apple because its apple) will propably start running right now to get a "apple car" (trust me, this will become something you hear a lot in the future). |
But what usb- it's incredibly unlike that this offers an MTP or mass-storage interface since Apple goes out of its way to make itunes and its phones incompatible with MTP on PC platforms. This being the case there may be a USB connector on the dash but it will be worthless. You won't be able to use anything but an iphone to provide media to the unit and certainly nothing other than an iphone will control the unit. |
I used to work in the auto industry. Automakers wanted iPhone integration like this for a long time, but Apple refused, saying that installed dash screens and other hardware and software vary so much from car to car that it wouldn't deliver a consistent customer experience and potentially alter the public's opinion of Apple products. (To me, it seemed they were trying to avoid associating their brand experience with the different systems that manufacturers use, such as Ford Sync and its associated problems). However, since Steve Jobs died, lots of things are changing, making me think he was the stalemate. After all, the iPhone 5C came out after his death, and it's very different from the design of recent Apple products. Sounds like those in charge are trying to grab every dollar they can by partnering and changing their products for a more widespread audience (this despite the fact that their previous products made Apple the richest entity in the world). |
So tell me Apple, what the fuck is revolutionary about this this time, huh? I see nothing special, this is just misleading to all the tech noobs out there (aka Apple's core demographic).
I don't see them doing that. The very first sentence to introduce you to CarPlay is "Available on select new cars in 2014, CarPlay is a smarter, safer way to use your iPhone in the car." That is hardly them misleading tech noobs or promising revolutionary technology.
To address your actual point, though, think about it this way. Your 2013 Civic might have an on-board computer and display with a similar functionality as your phone currently has, but if you look at on-board computers and touch displays like this in cars from five or so years ago, it will be a lot less advanced than that. It might have a navigation system and functionality to control your radio, but don't expect anything much more advanced. No matter how cutting edge it was then, technology advances too fast for computer systems in a vehicle you likely plan on having for many years to stay relevant.
My understanding is that CarPlay is an interactive display that uses your phone to actually run the processes. So, depending on how this works, your 2013 Civic might be able to do that same as the 2014 models with CarPlay now, but in 2019 when technology has advanced well beyond what we would recognize now, your Civic's on-board computer will probably have the same system it has right now, where as the 2014 vehicle with CarPlay may potentionally only be limited by the functionality of their much more advanced phone in 2019.
So |
He's a socialist! Get him!
But seriously, I'm Aussie and you Danes plus many other places like Norway really have your shit together when it comes to this stuff. The worst part is that everything you talk about makes perfect sense and is demonstrably working well, yet people scream bloody murder about it.
I understand how lucky I am to be an Australian, but I see the US as an extreme example and I see my country gradually transitioning in the same direction as the US, perhaps just 10-15 years behind. It's sad and ridiculous and seems to be such a powerful force that it is difficult to stop. E.g. we have free public healthcare but our government is gradually introducing charges into the system, they are intent on reducing social security measures and believe in 'individual responsibility' for your circumstances with little exception.
I get that the individual should be able to stand on their own but applying the attitude across the board seems to have a corrosive effect on any sense of community, camaraderie and the collective good. It seems to create a 'me/my family against the world' attitude.
The result then, it seems to me, is that the concept or even the very mention of higher taxes across the board in exchange for better public services as many European countries have, is political suicide. And the people can't see the forest for the trees because they have been forced to think only of themselves as the individual. |
Somewhere between the incredibly snarky and condescending tone of this article it was completely lost that BlackBerry got a new CEO and arguably hasn't really done anything really questionable since. I dare say that John Chen has been a really level-headed leader who appears to be working hard to turn the company around.
So it's not like BlackBerry, the "person" turned around and did something right for a change-- it's more that their new CEO is making good decisions. Which is good.
He's been talking about doubling down on the enterprise services market in general (and growth in the developing world with cheaper devices) since he's become CEO and making that the focus of the company. So, when the author of the article points out that a turnaround is unlikely because "BlackBerry’s brand equity among consumers close to zero", it just seems like he's not paying any attention. This decision just plain isn't out of context or character for BlackBerry under John Chen. |
Contributions to the tech community can be made in many ways, even on GitHub.
The article seems to focus almost exclusively on [putting projects you have created into a new GitHub repo.] Example:
> So having a GitHub where you can post projects outside of work is essential. With that said, don’t be afraid to post unfinished projects!
and:
> What are you working on in your spare time that will benefit you and the rest of the tech community?
There are many many such [side projects] out there, but existing open source projects can use contributions as well, and not all of them are github-centric.
These would all be contributions which could potentially help a large number of people directly, while also increasing your understanding of other projects, their code, and their communities:
Testing the newest builds
Reading and writing (or translating, or eli5'ing) documentation
Reading and reviewing code
Reproducing and hunting bugs
Considering / analyzing / implementing feature requests
Reviewing pull requests / commit logs.
Many of these are built into the github interface, for github-centric projects anyway. For example, here's the [issue tracker for the project Redis.]( But even though Redis uses github for git hosting and issue tracking, they have [a mailinglist, an IRC channel, meetups, etc.](
Other projects may involve working with a number of different systems and sub-groups, depending on what you're trying to do. For example, [Mozilla's projects use Bugzilla to handle issues.]( They have a [separate wiki,]( and they use [various self-hosted code repositories]( in addition to [also using github]( in certain ways and for various things. |
Well when you're commenting on the Internet, I'm going to assume you have the means to do your own research. I'm none too interested in the general debate, so I won't invest too much time in research for someone else. However, I didn't claim it was a good source. All I claimed was it is a source. It took me five seconds to find it and about 2 minutes to get a general feel for it. So my remark may come off as sassy and rude, but it doesn't belittle my point. If you're on the Internet and want to know more about an issue, don't ask someone else to do your work for you. Go out and find it and be self sufficient. |
If I'm selling watermelons, and you come up to my watermelon stand, grab a melon, and run away, you've just robbed me. I've lost a lot of money. Why? Because first of all, I paid to get the watermelon from a farmer. Maybe I paid 90 cents a melon and I'm selling them for a dollar, so I'm only making 10 cents of profit on each melon. But you, you not only cancelled out the equivalent of the profit of 9 watermelons, you have also reduced my supply of melons- maybe now I'll run out and instead of that last melon being a 10 cent profit, it's a 90 cent loss. That's shitty as hell. You didn't do anything to earn that melon, and it's directly hurting me, and it might even hurt the farmer I got the melons from if I don't make enough money to continue buying from him.
On the other hand, if you walked up to my melon stand with some alien technology, picked up a watermelon, and then made an exact replica of it which you walked away with, leaving the original intact... it does not affect me. I am not losing a melon. You didn't take anything that I paid for and you did not reduce the available product that I had which I was depending on to make profit. "Ah," you want to say, "but if everybody could just copy your melons, why wouldn't they? Why would anyone pay if they can get it for free?" That's a good question, and it's difficult to answer it fully, but even in this day and age with piracy being fairly mainstream, there are exactly 0 studies which report any significant effect on profits of TV shows, books, video games, music, anything. Why's that? Because a large majority of pirates are people who either do not legally have access to the content they are pirating (eg in foreign countries), or who simply can't afford the content and therefore would not buy it in the first place. On the latter point: you may say, just because they can't afford it, doesn't mean they somehow 'deserve' it. And I'd agree with you on that. However, from a business perspective, they were not a potential customer to begin with. They weren't going to buy my melon. They had no money to buy my melon with. So if they go up and copy my melon, it's not as if I can go, "Dang, they would have been worth 10 cents if they hadn't copied my melon," because they never would have actually bought it. And since they're not actually stealing my melon it has 0 effect on me. No loss in product that it cost me to acquire, no loss in potential customers. Actually, speaking of potential customers, a funny thing happens with this whole melon-copying affair. See, you're not the only one who copies a melon. A lot of people do, for whatever reason. But some of them actually like the melon so much that they come back and buy one because they want to support the person who made the melon. Or some of them may never buy the melon themselves but they enjoy it so much that they recommend it to all their friends, and some of their friends who may have never even considered buying a melon come out and buy one. In fact, my melon sales have actually increased since this whole copying thing started. Yes, there are people who get my melons without paying for them, but the vast majority of them weren't potential customers to begin with, and some people end up paying even after getting a copied melon for free, and some of those people draw in even more customers. So as a businessman, I see nothing wrong with melon copying. |
Saw an interview with that Rothschild offspring and Marks sister Randi Zuckerberg back when she was still the Marketing director for FB. She claimed that people are more truthful in their comments when they use their real names. I say no, it is the exact opposite. I have had such a bad time on bookface because of calling people out on their shit.
Funny thing, I started a fake name Facebook page so I could freely say things without my mom getting in my face and if you search my real name (which is fairly common) you can not find me but if you search my fake name I am the only one. I have since deleted all trace of me from Facebook the best I can. Fuck that shit. I prefer the anti social media of reddit
I started the fake one originally to hassle a guy in my town who punched his girlfriends cat for not listening ! |
I can understand that nearly everyone would think this is a bullshit move by Panasonic to force you to use their batteries. But, I have to back this move up for several reasons:
When it comes to batteries, the quality of the materials used for the anodes and cathodes is of the highest importance. Let's talk about lithium ion batteries for a moment since I have the most experience with Li-ion because of a summer research internship I did with NASA.
Sub-par materials degrade much faster, in tens of cycles instead of hundreds (and ideally over 1000 charges or so). This "degradation" is really a thermodynamic inevitability so all you can do is try to minimize the effect. Because of the second law of thermodynamics you'd want to make it charge slowly (quasi-statically), and use the highest purity and quality materials you can.
By purchasing a name-brand battery that the company stands behind (I tend to like Sony batteries a lot, they are known for quality), you normally get a battery charging system that performs well for the money. In a Li-ion battery, the cathode is a compound with a proprietary chemical structure (it's a crystal with layers of lithium atoms that can detach and re-attach to and from the crystal without disrupting the crystal structure). You can imagine, if the cathode is made of sub-par materials, when lithium is removed from the cathode, the crystal tends to disintegrate, thus degrading the material and weakening performance.
The anode in a li-ion battery is typically graphite instead of pure graphite (more expensive, much better). When graphite is charged with lithium ions for the first time, and subsequently discharged, it will retain some lithium ions within the layers. And carbon black, having a less ordered structure, will behave even worse. This is an example of irreversible capacity loss. More of that thermodynamic mumbo jumbo.
Then there is the electrolyte solution (it's what plants, and batteries crave) which is usually proprietary, and also needs to be made using exacting standards. If these chemicals are improperly stored (they should be in an oxygen- and moisture-free glove box, with moisture especially in the 0.X parts per billion range) they will degrade quickly, reducing the battery's performance on several levels not the least of which is the ability to discharge at a given rate (i.e. when your device is using max. current). Now in order to keep your glove boxes at the correct specifications for your electrolyte solution, you need an expensive catalyst/sorbent to help remove O2 and H2O. Another place where that 3rd party company can skimp and produce a sub-quality product, since glove boxes are expensive to maintain properly, and they may even use expired chemicals to produce their electrolyte solution.
Then there is the separator material (again proprietary) which prevents the cathode and anode from touching, but allows electrolyte solution to flow freely.
Speaking of keeping the cathode and anode from touching, this is how your battery could set itself on fire. If you have a crappy cathode or crappy separator, dendrites of lithium or degraded pieces of cathode could start to grow from the cathode towards the anode. As soon as these dendrites pass through the separator (which is a very thin piece of polymer) they will contact the anode, creating a short circuit and tons of heat. (The reason Li-ion batteries use a lithium-containing crystal instead of pure lithium is for exactly this reason... but nevertheless battery recalls are still happening due to fire hazards.)
So think for a second: you're an engineer at Panasonic. You produce quality batteries, and some 4th-rate company from the outskirts of Taiwan starts producing batteries to compete with you. While you are certain that your batteries are of higher quality, you are totally unsure what the standards of safety are with the competing batteries. So your very safe Panasonic digital camera could now fucking start fires simply because some idiot put a piece of shit battery in there. It's not your fault, but you know it's Panasonic that will get sued. If you come up with a way to force customers to use your battery, you're gonna fucking do it. Any engineer who takes pride in his/her work would want customers to use their batteries and accessories. |
Your point might be valid in some cases. It is absolutely not for used hardware.
For instance, right now I am using a 2002 Nikon D1x, purchased for $200, with a 3rd party battery for $25. It performs just fine .
Mind you, the original price of the camera was $6999, so original battery still costs over $100. Now I don't even know if they manufacture it, so that would be $100 for something with several years of shelf life.
There is absolutely no excuse to charge $100 for a NiMH battery, and it makes no sense to spend this much given current market price for the device. At the same time, I am making great pictures with it, it has characteristics that are not found on new cameras in the sub-$800 range. |
iTunes and Netflix has indeed reduced piracy. One of the biggest problems, however, is that their content is not available everywhere in the world. Thus, piracy continues at a strong pace. Additionally, a caveat to having users adopt services like iTunes or Netflix is that the price must be reasonable.
Consumers want cheap, high-quality, digital copies of TV, Music, and Movies. Barring the availability of cheap, high-quality, digital copies of media, consumers will invariably turn to free (pirated), high-quality, digital copies of media. It's not rocket science.
So, until there is a $6-8/month online TV service, a $6-8/month online Music service, and a $6-8/month online Movie service (thank you Netflix!) that has 100% of all media, expect to see continued, rampant digital piracy. |
This is from the email he sent my dad letting him know it was on the way:
>Headphone amplifier has been improved in many ways. It is more powerful now, as I took out the volume limiter I originally placed in it. It's still a good headphone amp, but realize that if you have phones on and start your source material with the volume turned way up, permanent hearing loss and/or blowing up the headphones could result. Before it put out 250mw per channel. Now it will put out about 900mw per channel, slightly more than a watt per channel with input material turned up full blast, but by then it'll sound distorted. But it's making an easy clean hi-fi 900mw per channel now!
>
>You will see on the rear a set of RCA jacks for input and a 3.5mm headphone jack marked "MP3". Here is how they work: You may leave any source (such as CD or TV) permanently hooked up to the RCA jacks. When you then plug your I-Pod or other MP3 player into the 3.5mm jack, it automatically switches over to that input. Unplug the MP3 input and it automatically switches over to the RCA jacks again.
>
>On the front, there is the 1/4" headphone jack. You can get an adapter from Radio Shack if you need 3.5mm size jack for headphones. You will also notice a slide switch for power on/off. No more having to unplug it and plug it in to turn on and off. You will also notice a set of gold speaker binding posts. There is no auto disconnect between the headphone jack and the speaker jack, meaning you can use both at the same time without doing any harm to the amplifier at all. Also meaning if you want to listen to headphones only, you'll have to disconnect the speaker wires from the gold binding posts.
>
>Also included is a pair of small, hi efficiency hi-fi speakers that I made using the excellent little Tang Band W3-881SJ Full-Range speaker. The speakers can handle no more than 15W RMS input power. They are rated at 100-20,000hz, with a SPL of 88db at 1 meter with 1 watt input. I knocked them together in kinda of a hurry, as I was anxious to hear the Tang Band speakers. So I didn't di a real good job filling in all the perfections. They are made from 1/2" thick furniture grade birch plywood. I included about 1/3 of a can of the same paint I painted them with, in case you want to fill in the imperfections with plastic wood or spackle and then sand and touch up paint them.
>
>I took the whole set-up to the shop for 3 days to let the guys listen to it, and give opinions. Then I took it back home. They were all pissed that I didn't leave it there for them to listen to. They played all kinds of different music at all different volume levels from multiple guy's I-Pods. So I guess that means it's good enough to send it to my brother, so hear it comes back to you 10 months after you sent it. Oh well, as they say, good things comes to those what waits! |
Sounds good. Except your responsible for whatever shit passes through your relay already. This would actually make you have to install extra IP logging functionality, undermining the point of tor in the first place. It is a service you would be providing after all.
Imagine TOR is an armored car with tented windows. If your driving from 2 cities inside the US, even though they cant see the content of the car they can still see where it came from and where it went. Tor is only relatively effective in places like China where the first thing they do to connect to TOR is get off of the "roads" inside China that the Chinese government can monitor.
Sure, we could just make sure we connect to other nodes outside the control and influence of the US. Good luck with that, telling the Chinese government to piss off is one thing. Telling the US government to piss off is another. See also ACTA and the TVShack guy. |
Make sure not to use aluminum foil. I'm pretty sure that stuff was invented just to confuse people into using the wrong stuff. |
It's also impossible to search for things like 'How to do $x without $y', the results are often about 'How to do $x /with/ $y'. That's after searching for 'How to do $x', with the same results of course. So I use the - operator, but the results become irrelevant again because many relevant pages would mention the $y method on the side. Searching things like "how do i enable $x" sometimes gives the opposite result as well.
Also, ever been linked to a page which looked like more search results with no relevant content whatsoever? What kind of gobshite would fund that? |
I'm not American so I'm not sure I completely understand the FCC etc, but from what I'm understanding the |
So what's the |
You should learn the laws dude, cable is exempt from it. Radio and OTA broadcasters are not due to the accessibility of the medium. This finding doesn't allow true freedom but knocks down another facade used by the FCC to scare broadcasters on so called obscenities that are poorly defined and rather subjective. |
Let's boil this article down to its thesis:
FIRST SENTENCE
>In the case Federal Communications Commission, et al. v. Fox Television Stations, Inc., et al. the highest court in the land refused to assess the constitutionality of U.S. federal law that prohibits broadcasted obscenities.
Correct. As a little digging in the reference Supreme Court ruling reveals:
> First, because the Court resolves these cases on fair notice grounds under the Due Process Clause, it need not address the First Amendment implications of the Commission’s indecency policy.
SECOND SENTENCE
> However, it did deal FCC efforts a blow by finding it illegal for the FCC to fine TV broadcaster who air obscenity or nudity during daytime hours.
Patently false. From the same Supreme Court decision referenced at the end of the article:
>The Commission failed to give Fox or ABC fair noticeprior to the broadcasts in question that fleeting expletives and momentary nudity could be found actionably indecent. Therefore, the Commission’s standards as applied to these broadcasts were vague, and the Commission’s orders must be set aside.
The court simply found that in this specific instance, the FCC's fines and actions against Fox and ABC were unconstitutional because the rules they enforced were vague, and the agencies they enforced them upon could not have known the new rules would apply. This is a violation of due process in the Fifth Amendment.
I don't know how you can make a conclusion that the Supreme Court refusing "to assess the constitutionality of U.S. federal law that prohibits broadcasted obscenities" means it was "finding it illegal for the FCC to fine TV broadcaster who air obscenity or nudity during daytime hours." That is such a giant leap that there's all kinds of ways for it to be wrong. |
Indeed. I live in Montréal and the best bang I can get for my bucks is with TekSavvy. For about 70CAD monthly (69.15 USD) I have a 30mbps down/2mbps up, unlimited bandwidth. And it's not available elsewhere in Québec. Vidéotron, the main ISP with Bell, offers the same thing for the same price, only with limited monthly bandwidth, at 120GB (combined up/download). |
NZ has pretty good speeds overall, it's just price/caps which isn't so great.
... but for a bit of fun, let's try doing what the article is about: Phone, Internet, and TV from the same provider . This is a bit unusual since most people in NZ have separate ISP (possibly phone from them) and pay TV is always from SKY (via satellite & their online streaming service).
A little background: There are basically two pay TV providers in NZ; SKY and TelstraClear. SKY is not an ISP. TelstraClear is an ISP, and for the most part they just on-sell SKY (they used to be more into the cable TV stuff). TelstraClear would seem to be the only company to offer 'triple-play' in NZ (I'd never heard the term before). This is a bit of a silly comparison since only about 17% of the country lives in an area where they provide this service (GOOG, 2012), and there are lots of other ISPs, so most people don't have it. It's essentially bundling SKY along with an internet connection/phoneline. But still, I'm trying to match what the article is about.
The cheapest triple-play package is 88 USD/month, but (big but ) this doesn't provide any extra channels that aren't Free-To-Air. This package includes 20 GB of data, 15 Mbps up/2 down. Overage is charged at 2.3 USD/GB. You can upgrade to 100/10 Mbps for an additional 47 USD/month, which has a 100 .
None of the following prices are really up to TelstraClear, the prices are essentially the same as what SKY charges its customers if you buy from them directly. I'm not sure how the PPP conversion works either.
If you want some actual pay TV (non-FTA) channels, you'll be paying a minimum of 117 USD/month. This has 39 channels total (about a third FTA, some are radio channels (just audio)), which is the 'basic' pack including channels like Discovery, NatGeo, Cartoon Network and various news channels - CNBC, BBC World, etc. None of the included channels are 'movie' channels (those are another 17 USD/mo). If you want recent US shows (e.g. AGoT) that's a separate channel (SoHo) which is 8 USD/mo, and the broadcast times are pretty good - within a couple of days for some shows. Sports channels are another 20 USD/mo.
None of the these channels are HD (that's another 8 USD/month).
On the plus side, you get Fox News bundled with just about every package aside from the basic one. (SKY's biggest single shareholder is News Corp.)
SKY has quite a stranglehold on NZ - there are a couple of small competitors trying to compete with SKY doing online streaming of shows (a la Netflix). However, SKY has content deals with most ISPs in NZ not to count its online content towards data caps - and these agreements apparently include provisions preventing the ISPs from doing the same thing for other online content providers (no such thing as net neutrality here). (Funnily enough TelstraClear is one of the few ISPs which don't zero-rate SKY's online content, although they do zero-rate some online FTA content.)
I really want to be able to pay for & watch shows like AGoT but the minimum cost I can pay (for SKY HD+PVR) is 64 USD/mo, when I only want one channel. I hear USicans complaining about HBO bundling and I guess this is the same thing.
PS: last year I visited the USA and I couldn't figure out how to work the TV. |
Hi, let me introduce you to the time-lost concept of "savings" and "living within your means". I also have a side-job doing contract work. I could go without a job for years without a sweat if I needed to. Furthermore, I'm actually pretty employable, so I simply don't have to put up with shit like that. |
Legally speaking (as in, by the book law), filesharing in Portugal was considered illegal, but on murky grounds, because the law as stated is ambiguous on whether it refers exclusively to commercial copyright infringement or also private/personal (non-commercial).
The punishment, again, by the books, ranges to two years of prison (I may be wrong on the two figure, but it's something close to that), which, even by reckoning of the most radical of "copyright crusaders", is probably too much for your average movie downloader.
These guys essentially connected to a public tracker, saw who was sharing current "hot movies" with a Portuguese IP address, recorded it, and filed a complaint to the authorities.
They wanted to show that jailing every single one of those people would be crazy, and wanted, in this way, to push for "saner" legislation regarding copyright law (their intent is for an administrative organization to be created that will manage the prosecution and fining of filesharers).
What happened ultimately was what you see. The decision was that IP addresses do not constitute a unique form of identifying a person, not only for the widespread use of "public" wifi networks and cybercafes, but also because of the nature of an IP address, in which they believe it doesn't identify accurately the current user of a network.
Furthermore, it was also decided that the current laws do not apply to non-commercial copyright infringement, and if laws that applied to such were created, the holders of the copyright licenses would have to explicitly disallow non-commercial sharing.
It's a decision that clashes with ACAPOR's vision of the anti-copyright infringement laws applying to both commercial and non-commercial infringement, and they are ever-so-slightly miffed about this.
Personally, I am happy that things are no longer as murky, and regardless of personal beliefs about non-commercial copyright, happy about seeing the smug ACAPOR guys who called pretty much every internet user a filthy mugger that was directly responsible for all the unemployment figures in Portugal being brought down a notch. Doesn't affect me the least, but it's always cute.
Gee, how ranty of me. |
I've explained here: |
About that...](
Top 10 most visited sites globally:
Google
Facebook
Youtube
Yahoo
Baidu
Wikipedia
Windows Live
Amazon
QQ
Twitter
8/10 websites are "located" in the us. If you look at the top 25 sites, only 5 are from non-US companies. And then there are all the American porn sites too. So it looks like a lot of that traffic is coming here anyway.
The redundancy aspect is pretty cool, but it seems like a lot of the content people are interested in regarding the Internet comes from the US anyway. |
consider the fact that the country is surrounded by oceans that are thousands of kilometers wide on both its east and west side. Once you are that far away from land, there's no way to gather a significant troops for a land invasion on a country, let alone the United States.
The US has the world's most advanced defense system. Even if you could somehow gather enough military force to invade the US, your forces would all be obliterated before they could even come close.
Finally, even if you did manage to invade and defeat the US military, you would be faced with literally millions of armed and very pissed off citizens who will fight back. |
I'm in Texas now bromeo! I've lived here almost all my life. The jist of my awkwardly worded reply, was: Fake insult for comedic effect, followed by pointing out that most people in Texas aren't really very closed-minded. There are pockets of asshats, and scattered douchebags, but the largest concentration is in our state, and local governments. Just because they supposedly work for the people, doesn't mean that the people actually approve of their horrendous laws and proposals that everybody hears about. These news items are what a lot of people connect with Texas, but it's just one more example of shitty representation of the people, which is fairly standard throughout the country. Thank fuck for not living in a communist regime though, I'd take awkward, broken corporate government over communism any day. Anyway, sorry for the long reply, I got sidetracked. |
Sure, we can do more. That doesn't mean this vote and this wording of the resolution isn't wholly positive though. |
I'm out of SC nowdays. Is a cheese ling/drone rush still as aggravating as what it used to be on bronze level play? |
This will be a very long beta testing phase. I would wager it will never leave this beta phase. Until demand for gb internet is established, it will remain stagnant. And before you say "well I want gb internet!" realize that you are the exception, not the rule. Most users are lightweight users--being able to simultaneously stream Netflix, play a video game, and watch YouTube videos on Facebook requires a gb of speed, people don't care. There is absolutely no incentive for people to pay for a new service, when their current service provides exactly what they need.
I fear this will go the way of Wave, Buzz, and Plus. Google is excellent at coming up with inventive and wonderful products, but they cannot launch them for shit. They are thinking beyond their customers with their products. Take Wave for example. It was awesome for a collaborative tool, and facilitated the process. However, they just couldn't put it in simple enough terms for a common user to adopt it. And Google +. They built this amazing hype for a new social media platform--people were excited. Think of Google Plus as a club right next door to Club Facebook. + is a pretty exclusive club (invite only), and CF is filled with a bunch of idiots, you don't really want to hang around, playing the same song on repeat. At + you can go ahead and chill in private roomies with your homies, or go out onto the floor. Your buddy just went there, and loved it. So you stand in line to get into +. And you just kept standing. And standing. When you finally get into +, no one else is there. They got tired of waiting, and went back to party at CF. |
This is true to a degree. Most Economics will teach that there are some fallacies of a "free market" when it comes to certain goods and a governing body. Utilities is one of them. (Together with National Defense, Public Goods....etc etc.)
Some things are not easily managed by the public alone. In some theories, they would not be produced without an outside intervention or they produce inefficiencies in production.
IF government were to take the correct role that they theoretically should, they would direct money towards utilities that the market wanted to improve service. Sure, the free market may product this on its own with high enough demand, but the government should help it along. |
ITT: Horror stories about American internet and cable providers.
Are internet providers really that shitty in the US? All I see are stories about price-raising scams, monopolies, shitty slow internet, expensive TV packages, bad customer service and the occasional outage...
All I can compare them to are Dutch ISPs, this is what my current package looks like:
100/100 Mb/s Fiber internet (€46/month)
Interactive HD IPTV with many channels and all major Dutch video on demand services. (€17/month) + Analog cable TV and unscrambled DVB-C with limited HD channels for additional televisions (free).
Unlimited calling to any landline in the Netherlands, low rates to mobile (€12/month)
A static IP address: (€10 one-time-fee)
Usenet server access (free, included)
No installation fee.
Total: €66 or ~$85 per month for this package (with the combination discounts), HBO would be another €15 or ~$20 per month.
You may provide your own router, the hardware is completely transparent, all signals are unscrambled, no leased hardware. Server hosting is allowed, all ports are open and available.
I have this package for almost 7 years now, the total downtime of my connection was 3 minutes. You can go up to 500/500 Mb/s (or even 1Gb/s in the near future) with the internet.
Is there anything comparable in the US, except for Google Fiber in Kansas? Verizon FiOS maybe?
Netflix, Hulu and other major streaming services are technically ( thanks MediaHint ) not available in the Netherlands. Piracy (legal) and Netflix (technically not legal here) allow me to watch anything I want, when I want, how I want and where I want... Streaming is the future.
I spend more time browsing Netflix and Usenet than actually watching stuff though; Spotify offers a radio feature and extensions to help you discover new music, Netflix needs more features like that for movies. |
As far as movies I would much rather buy it than waste bandwidth downloading it. The only problem is I don't want to pay to watch 20mins of commercials on other products before my movie, that is all about product placement. I want to be able to put it in digital format and put it on all my devices without huge headache trying to get it there, and I would like to be able to return a product if I dont like it. I spend 25 bucks on a shirt get it home and it is uncomfortable I can take it back what makes a movie different? why does the movie industry hold this special right to refuse returns because it is easy to copy/ steal it? So I am automatically a criminal cause I could have copied so I lose the right to return products.
Why are movies so expensive? Look I get the special effects costs are high, travel costs, prop design, make up, and highly over payed actors but even after all that they still double their investment. Sure here are movies that lose money but if I make a poor investment I cant over charge for my other products because of it, nor is it reasonable to price gouge the market for my bad decisions. |
There's two problems with this. The first is that from a branding perspective, that would never work. People are horribly forgetful. The second problem is that some entity is still allocated the block of IP addresses. IP addresses are borrowed IDs. Using an IP address allocated to a company under a government is basically the same as using a domain name under that same entity. Whether a name or an IP address, the government can still force that company to shut it down. |
1: Try to figure out how to create compelling arguments without attacking people.
2: They have to compete with free, but it's no different to how indie developers have to deal with video game piracy. They have to figure out how to incentivise people to purchase from them. 5$ for IronMan3 BlueRay no DRM, I'd happily pay.
I blame the same scumbag media companies who tried to outlaw VHS / Beta tapes saying that they would be the death of movies, yet a short time later turn around to say they saved the industry. I blame the same comapnies that said the same thing about Tape Cassettes. I blame the same companies that said the same thing about Blank CD's and the reason we have to pay such high rates for them because they assume people are using them to pirate. I blame the same companies that tried to shit all over the iPod because people could put music on them. |
I disagree. It obviously makes sense for the incumbents to spend billions of dollars raised from previously unaware consumers on fighting and petitioning these kind of cases in order to keep more consumers from utilising the cheaper means of production and protecting their existing product margins. |
This is the world we live in now. One where people can download entertainment for free. This is not the world of the government or of the corporations, this is our world and we've decided that this is how we want it to work. If the market has a problem with it then they need to reformat to adapt to the customers demands, not try to use scare tactics to keep us quite. If the creators of this IP don't like this market, then they need to adapt to it rather than try to fight against it.
EDIT: I'm honestly trying to engage in a discussion here. If you're going to downvote me fine, but comment instead and tell me what you don't agree with.
I think you're missing a huge problem here--it's the "Oprah has to get paid" paradigm. Celebrities make a lot of money. People want to be rich & famous. Those two words go hand in hand. Movie stars make millions and that's the way it is. You're not going to find a movie star to act in a feature film for minimum wage.
My point here is that the actors and (to a lesser extent nowadays, sadly) musicians need to get paid and if the entire world were to just say "hey all our entertainment is free now, we're not paying anyone" than entertainment would no longer have a lucrative business model, and after all is said and done, people want to get paid.
It's nice to think that the "world has changed" and we all just want to download entertainment for free but honestly I would rather pay a reasonable price for a convenient and reliable service that delivers me the content I want fast when I want it. A quality production deserves to make money and I'm happy to pay so long as it's reasonable. Netflix has a decent business model and was putting a lot of pressure on the cable providers with cord cutting back when they had the killer content licenses from Starz. What if there was a service that was essentially the pirate bay except you paid $2.00 per download or something? I would probably pay for that to mitigate the risk of illegal downloading. There was a great article about this sort of thing and how the RIAA and the like basically missed their opportunity to take advantage of the rapid switch to digital media. It was published right after OiNK went down (OiNK was considered by some the best private torrent tracker for music back when it was still up).
Look at shows like Game of Thrones on HBO. The reason game of thrones can be a quality production is because HBO makes good money from cable subscriptions. THAT IS WHY THEY DONT OFFER GAME OF THRONES WITHOUT AN HBO SUBSCRIPTION. Yes they know people will pirate it, but there a lot of people who subscribe to HBO. Without the money to fund production, many of the forms of "entertainment" you love so much would not be able to survive. |
There's a problem in this discussion where people are using the phrase "Google reads your emails." This phrase, while perhaps in some convoluted way, may be true. It would be perhaps more accurate to say "Scans your email for key phrases." It does this for ads. Which is how it pays for services like GMail (is the M still big? I can never remember). There is a phrase that you can use as a signature: "I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath." That will make no ads appear due to Google's attempt to be "sensitive" to the contents of a message.
In point of fact: Saying Google reads your email implies that some interested party, read: human, gives a fuck about your email and actually wants to know what it says. They don't. Know why? Because the illegal shit that people talk about in emails (should they do so) is evidence of crime, and in general businesses like to distance themselves from ever potentially knowing about illegal activity in case they are accused of not acting on evidence. Further, and worser, if they did check and had clear evidence of a crime they might report it which would be AWFUL FOR THEM. A large subset of people (maybe 4-5% would just abandon GMail, for turning someone in.) That would hurt. A lot. so they prefer blissful ignorance. |
Honestly during the first few weeks of this privacy meltdown I was pretty pissed, but realizing the shit I've said to people and no policeman is knocking down my door or following me to work, I don't feel any different. I don't send dick pics, bomb schematics, threaten to murder people, praise Allah or any shit like that, because I'm not a goddamn idiot and those things just don't concern me. Terrorism keeps happening, so it's pretty obvious no one's watching this shit that close.
I know I'm being watched in restaurants, so I'm not trying to dodge their well-hidden cameras. I know people listen to my conversations in public. I know how fucking utterly boring I am and I know I'm not winning any awards as "least exciting man on earth" from the NSA.
I'm not saying that everyone who is freaking out is self-important or doing any of these things, but this is nothing new, to any country, ever. We've had significantly brutal attacks in various areas of our country over the past decade or so and even before that. No one's been arrested for just OWNING a gun. People are still up-in-arms about no one stopping these school shootings, race bombings, and other various acts of terrorism.
So really here's the point I'm trying to make is in two parts: 1) You're not doing anything important to anyone right now. At least not to the NSA. They're filtering your shit to make sure you're not the next Boston Bomber, or lonely kid murdering kindergartners with his military grade weapon. 2) Even if you were, this shit still happens so it's pretty fucking obvious they're not watching you with a fucking magnifying glass. And if you're worried about people seeing your nudes or anything, like that, then stop fucking sending them to people. |
The Wiretap Act doesn't apply to saved communications kept on a server
Sure, that's what the Stored Communications Act is for. Moreover
>the Stored Communications Act actually makes it pretty clear that its provisions don't cover a variety of requests made under other authorization laws and, even beyond that, doesn't apply to communications stored more than 180 days.
This isn't true at all. I'll start with the [180 day thing]( It's in 18 US 2703.
> [the government] may require the disclosure by a provider of electronic communications services of the contents of a wire or electronic communication that has been in electronic storage in an electronic communications system for more than one hundred and eighty days by the means available under subsection (b) of this section.
So we look at subsection (b) to tell us which means are available and what they can be used for. Subsection (b) tells us there are two kinds of requests. Without notice, and with notice.
without required notice to the subscriber or customer, if the governmental entity obtains a warrant ... (requires a warrant)
with prior notice from the governmental entity to the subscriber or customer if the governmental entity
>>* (1) uses an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury or trial subpoena; or
>>* (2) obtains a court order for such disclosure under subsection (d) of this section;
(delayed notice may be given pursuant to section 2705)
For good measure we look at subsection (d) for court order requirements.
> A court order for disclosure ... may be issued by any court that is a court of competent jurisdiction and shall issue only if the governmental entity offers specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.
By the way this is pretty much the federal standard for a search warrant. This basically pushes law enforcement to use search warrants rather than subpoenas or court orders. In state court the warrant requirement may be higher so there may be more variation in state courts. |
OK, I'm not an expert, but I can give <i>very basics<I>. You compose an email on your computer. You are using either webmail (gmail, cox, att, yahoo) or a client( Thunderbird, outlook). If you are using a client it is saved there. When you send it out through your email provider (gmail, yahoo, att, etc.) its like smoke signals, signal towers, whatever. It is completely visible and legible to who ever knows what to look for. Its a plain text paper airplane tossed towards the recipient, that anyone else can reach out and grab. The issue is when they grab it, they instantly make a copy of it, and it carries on unhindered, unchanged, without anyone knowing. The email is then received by the recipients mail server, which forwards it to their client, or it shows up on their webmail.
That big gap in the middle is the main problem, but the mail servers on either end can have immensely different settings for security, backup, etc. Some companies delete everything every 3 months, some hold on to it for years. Some take professionals to crack, others any newly minted script kiddie could get into.
So, that email you sent is now stored on potentially up to five places. Your computer (if you are using an email client), you email providers server(and its possible backups), possibly some random dudes computer who was fishing for something and caught your email, the recipient's email provider's server, and the recipient's computer(again, if he is using a client).
You delete the email on your end. Whether it is permanently deleted from your computer is up to your settings. If it is deleted from your email server's is up to their settings. You have no control over any of the other places it might be. You can request your buddy to delete it, but are you sure he will bother? Or even know how to really get it off his system? What about his email provider?
This also assumes that you have no viruses on any of these systems doing what they want with your email. |
Well the conclusion itself based on those factors it's poor - but you have many indicators that piracy didn't destroy business models, infact helped them (google released one a while ago about music I belive).
I do belive piracy helps business , I always said it, and I belive the years of fighting it was just useless, when they should have learned from it. Now they are starting to understand it.
I'm a marketeer, so making this claim is a bit bold when I'm suposed to drive revenue, BUT there's one factor that many lack on their equasion: awareness, contact, experimentation, and possibly customer fidelization in the future .
Those factors are pinpointed to asure a product success, and are the ones who require a HUGE investment to achieve. Piracy delivers it at a cost of 0,00.
Advertising, sales force, product placement, SEO and other marketing tools are not always efficient when it comes to choose a target, PIRACY on the other hand delivers the product precisely to the ones who are looking for it. Not even the best ads in the Superbowl achieve this. SEO may help with awareness , but doesn't asure contact with the product or even experimentation .
So you may have lost some sells, but you got in touch with people who wanted that kind of product but weren't willing to pay for it in the first place.
If they liked it, to get customer fidelization you just have to offer the value that someone will get if they purchase the product - I do belive this is where the component of Services come in.
My best example was Steam - they dealt with the most "hurted" products, with the most knowleged crowd to take advantage of piracy. |
It's still not my definition of right so you should believe what I believe regardless of your justification, otherwise Ill dismiss you. I don't actually want to talk about this so much as remind you that you are wrong."
Right and wrong aren't simple and acting like they are, or that things boil down to some simple right or wrong, makes you tremendously less respectable in my opinion because it lacks thought. If you would like to argue for what you believe or explain why you feel as though what he said was illegitimate in some way, please provide data or at least write out why you disagree. |
This will probably get burried, but maybe someone will read it.
Let me start by saying that I support piracy in a way. Yeah, fuck me, stealing son of a bitch! I know. If you agree with all laws in existence (especially IP laws) please move on. Don't read from this point on, you'll regret it and bitch and call me names and frankly I don't care so it will be traffic spent in vain.
I come from a small country from Eastern Europe, I won't say the name, but the whole region shares the same problems with privacy and media distribution anyways. When I was growing up a social revolution occurred. Suddenly we had capitalism. And it wasn't like a slow change or something, nope. One day nationally owned everything - next day - you could go and buy shares of whatever the fuck you wanted. Guess what happened? Rich people got richer. Haha. OK, allow me just a sentence or two more rant about my favorite resource distribution (or should I say accumulation) system before I move on to the problem of piracy, because they are actually connected in a way. So, everything was privatized in mere weeks, there was hope in the air and democracy, people were smiling and looking forward to a future, a luxury they didn't have. But capitalism worked. You see, capitalism is great, but only for the people accumulating the capital, especially in a new born democracy (which is closer to a wild west rule of the powerful than anything else). And soon people became incredibly poor, the new central bank (yeah, we got that pretty quickly too) released massive amounts of money and ... well if you know something about money you know what followed, the country plunged into a massive inflation. So they had to remove 2 digits from the currency to "bring balance", and in a night people lost everything.
OK now you have the background. So imagine how much money people had for entertainment? 0? Actually less, because most people were in massive debt anyway. Then comes the internet and with it - torrents. The whole population embraced it. Can a whole country be a thief? Maybe. Can a whole country be isolated from the rest of the civilized world? I think that is a bigger crime than mass scale privacy. You see, art is the way people exchange ideas, ideologies, conspiracies, emotions, sexual revolutions. Art is the last breath on the front line against slavery in the civil war, art is the blood dripping from the victims of Christian Bale in American Psycho revealing the mind of a psychopath. Art is everything . Without art, how would people know the struggle of the slaves, the obsessiveness of a psycho? How would they know, that the perceived reality around them may be an illusion without the matrix? Who will make them question friendship and epic struggle, if not Tolkien? Piracy allowed millions to be inspired and to strive for greatness. Without it, people would have been chained to explore all this on their own, going through the awakening, that the West has already experienced. Why sentence a whole peninsula (the Balkans) to mediocrity? Why punish them for searching enlightenment in the only way they can?
This is why I support privacy. I know that most of you will not understand it, but I can proudly say that until I left my country I was pirating a lot. And I am not ashamed to admit it, because for me art is more than a product. Art is transcending its creator, the moment of its conception it breaks free and doesn't belong to a single person anymore but to humanity. Why punish the ones seeking knowledge? Are you going to deprive someone, who can't afford it anyway, of a copy of "Inception" when there is a chance that the experience will inspire him to become greater than Nolan one day? Isn't depriving humanity of such a genius a greater crime? |
I have made these products, though, which is why I want to ask the question. I'm certain the games I've made have been pirated (they were AAA, not indie, so I was making a salary and not reliant on the game doing well for me to eat). And I hope to release indie games in the future. I want to make money from them, but I'm not sure I expect to or even deserve to, that's up to the people who pay for it. If my game is popular enough, it will sell, and if it's even more popular it will probably get pirated. But I have probably made a reasonable amont of money by then. It's not the right of every indie game maker, musician or artist to make a living doing what they love, they will make money if they are good enough.
This "piracy is theft" line is just being peddled by the moneymen to maintain the lucrative status quo for them. piracy has been around for decades now it doesn't seem to be affecting the entertainment industry money making machine all that much,does it? But they want more... plus, More and more people are buying music/games.
"Piracy is theft" is just an attempted moral crusade that is falling on deaf ears since...people just don't respect someone simply because they are a creator, but when they do, they pay.
Are you a creator, 0xdeadf001? Or do you make a living off creators? |
What a load of shit. If you buy movies, music etc from the copyright cartels you're helping to maintain a system that hurts the majority of content creators.
Keep on trying to convince yourselves you're not complicit. Try to justify hurting them some more.
Society is never going to look at piracy the way you want them to. When someone creates something, and has to sell away the rights to their creation because digital distribution has been squashed by the cartels, and you contribute to that process, you're an asshole.
You can claim they're not ripping creators off, whatever you want. But the reason that artists can't afford to go to market themselves is because the copyright cartels have destroyed every business model that would have made it viable.
Or maybe you'll try the old "there is no law being broken". Which is about the lamest excuse of them all, considering you're ignoring the laws are written by the lobbyists. Where someone could spend years of their life creating something that has no physical presence, but you think because it doesn't it's okay for cartels to give content creators a pittance for it.
It makes me sick when people try to justify the status quo. If you're going to shit all over content creators, at least have some balls and admit it. Don't try to act holier-than-thou as if the corporations you support are somehow supporting content creators more than the artist's fans. |
I don't see why. Fighting against piracy is not the job of citizens. I will never understand why the big guy watches out for the big guy and the little guy watches out for the big guy.
Punishing piracy is definitely moral, by forcing the person to pay something like triple what was distributed. Punishing downloading, however, is cruel and unusual. It makes no sense. I mean I can literally go to someone's house who I hate, download a movie, call the police, and have them arrested if we start punishing pirates.
Where is the logic in that? |
thank you very much. if you wouldn't mind, lets say i build a brand new pc and install Linux will it have sort of a home screen similar to windows and i then set up any changes i want from there? or is it more a bunch of wizard questions to set it up before i can use it? |
I actually was one day invited into a lofty facebook group. When I checked out who the members where it was a bunch of good friends, and they somehow started takeing pictures of their own shit and rated them. It was really funny, but after some time I decided to leave the group because I didnt want someone accidentaly see me facebooking nad looking at a buttload of turds in all colors and sizes.
Anyways after i left that exclusive circle, i started to miss the thrill of it and wanted back in, but it was closed to me and they didn't want me in it again. I still regret that I dissapointent my poop brothers. |
Slow down there a bit. I think you could view it more as he's just presenting his personal opinion that a lot of immigrant issues shouldn't make them illegal, and that some distinctions in Snowden's case should make parts of what he did illegal, in his view. If he's stating it as a matter of personal opinion, then that's different from him stating something as fact and trying to back it up. He'd probably have more reasons elucidating his opinion if questioned further. |
Microsoft has seen quite a bit of controversy regarding its alleged cooperation with the NSA. Last July, the Guardian reported that Microsoft had aided both the NSA and FBI in accessing user data, including providing video and audio conversations from Skype, Microsoft's video chat service. |
There's not, as far as I can see, much to distinguish these from normal [electrostatic speakers]( Graphene is just a single layer of graphite, but they're describing something much thicker than that, and given the overall dimensions it would need multiple layers and a stabiliser e.g. a polymer sheet to be practical anyway. |
Audio Engineer here:
Speakers are historically some of the least efficient devices man has ever invented. From [this wikipedia article]( only about 1% of the power provided by a speaker's amplifier gets converted to acoustic sound. This is largely because of the damping mentioned in OPs article, but you must also understand the conversions that the energy undertakes before it becomes mechanical vibrations through the cone.
It starts as current. That electric current is run through a coil of wire, which creates a magnetic field. That magnetic field affects ANOTHER coil of wire which starts to move. That coil is attached to the cone of the speaker. The cone is pretty light, but the coil glued to the back of it is quite heavy when you consider it has to be moved back and forth 20,000 times per second. The entire cone contraption is held in place by a "basket", which incidentally also impedes motion in even the best designs.
Imagine having a toaster, but the plug has been cut off. You want to use the toaster, so you take one of those little desk fans, cut off the end of the power cord, connect the power cable from the toaster to the power cable from the fan, and then turn on another fan pointed at the first fan, causing the first fan's blades to spin and create current flowing backwards through its motor into the toaster. That is what speakers have been like since speakers were invented. |
This is basically completely wrong. The idea behind electrostatic headphones is that by having the moving film incredibly light, the resonant frequency of the driver is shifted well beyond the range of human hearing, so that a flat response is experienced below that. This can be achieved with conventional materials very easily. The problems comes when you introduce aerodynamic damping. Aeroelasticity effects effectively shift the resonant frequency of the driver down, because the air has it's own mass. The resonant frequency is then closer to the high end of human hearing, which leaves pretty much all electrostatic headphones sounding "bright" or "sparkly". The film being lighter wouldn't alleviate aeroelasticity at all.
They say, "The graphene speaker, with almost no specialized acoustic design, performs comparably to a high quality commercial headset". Notice they say "comparably", not better. Also note that "high quality commercial headset[s]" can still have a relatively bumpy response curve. If you read through the actual report, they compare the response curve to the that of £10 Sennheiser in-ears which are only dynamic (not electrostatic), and, shock horror, they have roughly the same response curve. The Sennheisers actually look flatter from 100Hz to 8kHz, with the graphene speaker only edging it out at the extremes of human hearing. |
Leaching off top comment.
This is basically completely wrong. The idea behind electrostatic headphones is that by having the moving film incredibly light, the resonant frequency of the driver is shifted well beyond the range of human hearing, so that a flat response is experienced below that. This can be achieved with conventional materials very easily. The problems comes when you introduce aerodynamic damping. Aeroelasticity effects effectively shift the resonant frequency of the driver down, because the air has it's own mass. The resonant frequency is then closer to the high end of human hearing, which leaves pretty much all electrostatic headphones sounding "bright" or "sparkly". The film being lighter wouldn't alleviate aeroelasticity at all.
They say, "The graphene speaker, with almost no specialized acoustic design, performs comparably to a high quality commercial headset". Notice they say "comparably", not better. Also note that "high quality commercial headset[s]" can still have a relatively bumpy response curve. If you read through the actual report, they compare the response curve to the that of £10 Sennheiser in-ears which are only dynamic (not electrostatic), and, shock horror, they have roughly the same response curve. The Sennheisers actually look flatter from 100Hz to 8kHz, with the graphene speaker only edging it out at the extremes of human hearing. |
not true at all a lfsr would produce much more energey than your standard plant because it is believed we could achieve ~ a 60 percent heat capture efficiency where as uranium only captures the heat at ~ 10 percent efficiency, combine this with a efficient steam turbine and you have a reactor more efficient than any standard reactor would even reach in the next 100 years. If anything a thorium reactor would provide around 10X the energy of a standard uranium facility. the real reason it was never adopted is that thorium isn't capable of being a weapon which is why the us went the uranium because then they could make energy and bombs at once. also you saying it is the same as a atomic bomb is idiotic reactors use a completely different isotope. |
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