By "demos" I mean the programs you would download and run for no other purpose than to see how far your computer could be pushed in the sound & graphics department. It was a fun time (80s and early 90s). Like this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg
That's what hackers used to create, in addition to cracking disks and sharing illegal music. Today's hackers rarely create this unique piece of art.
Even though this is a non-issue (not conclusive by the study's authors), the folks over at CNN talked about the cellphone risk as if it was Certain to cause harm. They left me with the impression that cellphones are irradiating my hip, and they are a definite carcinogen. The one guy even compared cellphone to cigarettes ("People say they can't live without cigarettes either, but they should give up both those and cellphones if they are dangerous."). They even had people texting to say, 'No I won't use my cellphone anymore. I'm getting a landline.' or 'I'm using speakerphone from now on. I don't want to hold it against my head.'
Piss-poor reporting (aka fear-mongering). I wonder how MSNBC and FOX News are covering it.
50 million is a ripoff compared to the billions owed in backpay. That's equivalent to your boss saying, "I'll pay your $50 an hour," waiting years for your paycheck, and then he hands you a measly $5 an hour and says "Oops sorry." I would not have accepted it.
Worse - Since there are lawyers involved, the 50 million will probably shrink to 20 million that has to be distributed amongst the ~1 million singers owed money.
And these nonpaying a-holes in RIAA screw the singers, but they have the nerve to demand WE the customers pay for every single song we make a copy of - $1 if we download it, $1 if we burn it to a CD-R, $1 if we duplicate it across a 2nd PC, and so on.
GRRRR.
(I am a little bitter. Can you tell?)
Better to CYA and say, "I don't know if ____ will happen," then to guess and say, "Oh you're safe. Don't worry." The latter will come back to bite you if you're later proved wrong.
The sites merely have to be ACCUSED of being copyright infringers. Remember when Homeland Security yanked thousands of websites off the net, including several that were merely personal blogs or news sites?
This is no good. We have courts for a reason - to protect the citizenry from overzealous leaders assuming guilt and enacting punishment against innocent persons.
The quality is basically perfect, and the laser printer is cheaper overall (the toner lasts 5000 pages, not a mere 100 like inkjet carts). I'll never go back to my old Commodore dot-matrix, or an inkjet like my brother got. It's worth it to get the Laser.
>>>The casks are...a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.
Yes true. I've heard that the explosion threw some of those pellets into the surrounding neighborhood, therefore getting them converted to stable "casks" is certainly better.
But the *safest* place would be somewhere not subject to earthquakes or drownings by tsunami. Like the Nevada or Sahara desert. That's where Japan should be storing its nuclear waste products for the next 1000 years.
No.
More likely customers will start telling ISPs "fuck you" and refuse to pay the overage fees (i.e. $1 per gig over 150GB). Then the ISPs will move to metered billing, just like how water and electricity providers operate, in order to avoid pissing-off their base.
Then customers will eschew HD videos in favor of smaller-sized DVD and VHS-quality vids to cut their costs (like I do). It's a price battle in the making.
Clearly Sony is not a company you can trust with your credit card information. Hell you can't even trust a Sony Music CD (it will install crap on your computer without telling you).
I think Sony was decent when they were the newbie-on-the-block with the PS1, and also the PS2, but sometime around 2004 they turned into a clone of Microsoft. (Meanwhile MS actually improved.) Goodbye sony because PS2 will be the last of your equipment that I ever buy. You shot yourself in the foot, and are headed towards becoming the next Commodore or Atari (fell from #1 to bankruptcy).
FIGHT!
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called repeatedly for Internet regulation and more copyright protection.....
I really, really hate these guys. They are censoring our right to free expression of ideas, and hiding it behind copyright and child "protection".
Of course it's really all about control of the masses, in order to silent dissent. Last "great idea" I heard coming out of the US District of Chaos is that citizens will be required to get licenses to log on and speak their minds. Hopefully this idea dies immediately.
The world is confusing enough w/o having multiple formats to deal with. Imagine if, instead of DVD, we would have had another Betamax vs. VHS war. (Call it DVD vs. BetaDVD.) Nothing good comes out of these things, at least not for consumers.
And I don't see any benefit from a JPEG v. Webp war either. GIF, JPEG, and PNG works just fine for us casual web surfers.
I also found this part of the article informative:
Muizelaar's complaints about Google's WebP testing methodology are familiar because they echo some of the concerns that were raised early on by other WebP critics like x264 developer Jason Garret-Glaser. The gist of it is that Google [1] used peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as its basis for quality comparisonsâ"a technical benchmark that experts say fails to account for how images are actually perceived. Another problem is that Google [2] recompressed existing JPEG images rather than starting with uncompressed source files..... WebP's lack of basic feature parity with JPEG in areas like metadata handling and ICC color profiles is identified by Muizelaar as another major problem with Google's format..... [Muizelaar says] the time that Google is putting into WebP would be better spent by improving JPEG encoders or contributing to existing next-generation image format efforts.
College just isn't the same anymore.
>>>Weee! Free market at its finest!
A patent-based market, by definition, is not a "free" market. A free market would not have any patents/artificial government-created monopolies, and people would copy each other liberally without restriction. i.e. free
More likely LOSE volument. I discovered I don't really need PlayStation Network. I bet other users have also found more productive things they can do (reading, playing solo games, watching hulu.com) during this downtime too.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
