So many memories of those early /. days have come flooding back.

RIP Roblimo.

Happy Birthday /.

It is difficult to fathom that the site has been around for 20 years, because I've "only" been online for 25 or so and I can't possibly be that old. Right? Right??

The electric company subscription service provides the voltage and amperage I need (all the time) when I need it (right now.) Without it, life would be very difficsy8907^#!Z NO CARRIER

I view streaming content on a variety of devices off of a perfectly acceptable cable internet connection and I still see the compression, but the worst of it is seen on the "main" family TV. Netflix offers the best experience (followed by Amazon Video, followed by the truly horrific Google Play), but it's still there.

I fully admit that I am not a hardcore video guy and not obsessed with tweaking a bunch of TV settings so there is indeed room to make adjustments. That said, I'm very happy with up-scaled DVDs of the same movies on the same TV. Adjusting contrast/brightness would only force the shadows even deeper for disk-based video and that's not an acceptable trade-off.

I should clarify my previous statement above. When I wrote "Visible gradients ruin every single scene always" I didn't meant to imply I'm seeing gradients all the time. I'm only seeing them in scenes containing large percentages of darkness/black.

Call it anything you want: "Netflix uses bagels to compress video" I don't really care. I just wish they would take a closer look at the darkest parts of a scene and stop compressing the hell out of it. Visible gradients ruin every single scene always.

I too read this when I was young, as a part of a science fiction anthology book we had in school. It is the one story from that time that has always stuck with me. The over-shadowing sense of futility and loss in the story really triggered something in my brain.

2005 wasn't that long ago, was it?

http://it.slashdot.org/story/0...

Congress can only exercise the powers that the constitution grants it. In some areas (like the ACA mandate) there is legitimate disagreement about the proper scope for that grant of power (does commerce clause allow Congress to pass laws regulating economic inactivity? I think Raich and Wickard were wrongly decided too, but the fact that I don't disagree with the law doesn't give me license to disobey it).

There is no meaningful dispute that Congress can impeach its own members. It can't. The impeachment power may be exercised over the following persons: (let's read it together now, Article 2 section 4): "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors."

senators (and ex-senators) are not Article 2 "civil Officers." This clause is commonly understood to apply to executive branch persons appointed by the president. It also applies to federal judges, who are (guess what?) appointed by the president.

Congress members are not subject to the impeachment powers of their own house, because the constitution doesn't grant that power to the House or the Senate.

Impeachment is not available as a remedy against Article 1 elected officials. Impeachment is a power granted to Article 1 as a tool to be used against Article 2 and Article 3.

See Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5 and Article 1, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7.

Article 1 gives both houses of Congress the power to police and sanction their own members, but good luck getting them to use it.

We'd be damn lucky to see only 8%. Food costs went up 4% month over month in February alone, the greatest monthly increase since 1974. Assume the February increase is double the "actual" rate and we'd still be looking at 25% year-over-year inflation.

Core inflation in 1974 was about 12% over the entire year. It was
over 30% for the period from 1973-1975. This is significant because
there is general agreement about the causes of the violent inflation
of the early 70s: The global financial order fundamentally changed in
1971 and 1972, when Nixon ended the Bretton Woods agreement and took
the US entirely off the gold standard. We had to go off gold because
we were printing too much money to pay for the war in Vietnam, which
devalued the dollar.

Sound familiar?

Spending on Vietnam created an arbitrage opportunity for [french]
people to buy dollars, exchange them for gold at the US-pegged price
of $35 per oz of gold, and then sell the gold on the market for
$40ish. When the US went off gold and floated our currency, there was
a long (5-10 year) period of economic shock while everyone had to work
out what happened. Part of the consequence was widespread price
inflation in the US. This turned out to be a good thing for
people who had 30-yr fixed mortgage payments, but not such a great thing for profits at banks.

The spot price for an ounce of gold today is hovering around $1400 /oz.

Last month's food and energy price increases will not show up in
CPI-based adjustments to wages and durable-goods prices because the US
bureau of labor statistics excludes those costs from its calculations.

Good thing people don't include the cost of food or gas in their
estimated cost of living.

again, no. OP and the rest of this thread is about a ruling in a civil case, where the cause of action is civil copyright infringement. here's a link to the entire docket. Notice how there are no state parties involved? That's because infringement for non-commercial use is a civil violation.

17 USC 506 provides for criminal penalties in cases of infringement for commercial purposes or for financial gain. No one is accusing the downloaders in this case of selling their copies, so 506 is not relevant to this conversation.

no. copyright infringement is a civil violation.

Your personal information is not "private." Your ISP can easily relate your IP address back to your personal information, and they will happily happily do so and then release the information to comply with a subpoena.

I don't know enough about Tor to say whether it might help to conceal your identity from other nodes on the internet... but if it does, that might be enough to avoid this kind of problem.

Read it yourself before you leap to judgment. It's actually pretty easy to grok, as these things go.

If it was a criminal case, you'd have real 4th-Amendment and 1st-Amendment issues. As it is, we're talking about a civil matter, and those constraints don't apply to non-state plaintiffs.

Judge Collyer isn't breaking new ground here- it's generally accepted by US courts that individuals can have no expectation that information they freely give to other persons is "private." I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing "personal" with "private." Your personal information is not necessarily "private," in either the ordinary sense or in the technical legal sense.

Your name is not private. Your street address is not private. Your vehicle license plate number is not private. In many states, your driver's license number and your driving records are not private.

In this case, the USCG is asking the ISP to give up the names and mailing addresses of people who were using certain IP addresses at a given time on a given date. Since names and mailing addresses are not private, neither the ISP nor the people using those addresses can claim "privacy" as a reason not to comply with this request.

That's just how it is. People who are reacting to this with surprise are wrong to blame the judge in this case- her ruling was made according to well-settled law. She cited this portion of her analysis to cases in the 4th and 6th circuit courts of appeals, and there are similar decisions from several of the other circuits as well.

You can read the whole order here: Order denying motion to quash.

Now, if the question was whether your ISP could turn over your DNS logs, effectively showing the list of sites you were connected to and the dates and times of connection... well, that's a very different sort of thing.

(why yes, I am a lawyer working on some of these cases).