correction dk1 units sel for $470 dk2 are not even on ebay yet. and dk1 weren't hd capable... they were more to just test game engines.

i guess if dogs can smell memory sneakernets into dictatorships to provide outside information is doomed. i wonder can they smell a blu-ray too? cause 25 GB is a lot of storage...

mark, the oculus rift2 devkit can play a few game engines, but it is not released to the public yet! it's not about shipping a full retail model in china, it is that chinese companies are requiring their employees to buy (at $350) the one per custom limit then selling them on ebay or like sites for $470 http://www.ebay.com/itm/BRAND-NEW-Oculus-Rift-DK1-Virtual-Reality-Headset-NEVER-USED-/151342637965?pt=US_Video_Glasses&hash=item233cb9638d

$120 profit at posting time. to compound the issue the devkit includes chips that have been discontinued, and are no longer available unlike a 'retail' model which will use custom chips, from a vendor like intel or amd or someone else.

no landfills are very dry. to avoid contaminating local water they tend to have a 500 year plastic liner, and what little moisture is there from the garbage itself. i know they put off methane but that is largely from organics not plastics.
sorry i was lazy that day here is a link http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm

plastic can be made of corn and sugar. that does not make 'plastic' a viable food. however we have been requiring biodegradable plastics for decades now, they don't degrade in landfills but they do in the wild. also recycling has been vastly improved and that means less plastic in landfills and in the wild. scientists thought they'd see more plastic but people have suggested this is based on the amount of plastic produced, without even considering possible reasons like more recycling. also some pretty bright people have figured out where in the ocean to place nets that capture all the floating garbage, without having to use ships to 'drag' all across the ocean. perhaps that information is old, perhaps someone has been harvesting ocean plastic to recycle it.

"The difficulty with anonymous cowards is knowing when one is the same person. The coward to which Chrisq was responding was appeal to Descartes. The problem with Descartes is that you can only prove your own existence to yourself. In the event of some higher power deceiving you, the only proof you have is of your own existence. So even though you and others say that there's no evidence that I'm existing in a dream or simulation there's no way for me to verify their existence."

while i can't prove that i exist to you, surely i can reference data that suggests that corporations will do almost anything to raise the bottom line, and that includes lying, cheating, and stealing.

red dwarf mocked virtual reality in it's 5th season(1993), yet it took the japanese 2 years later to build a mono-chromatic(red lcd) despite red dwarf mocking full immersion which i think there are finally ps4 vr headsets as well as the oculus rift.

technically flat screens are old tech was it in 1989 was my first handheld with a lcd was a gameboy, and my first laptop in 1997 came with a color lcd screen and technically there was no barrier to an oculus rift after lcds became reliable. other than bandwidth related to high definition signaling.

now we 'see' these bluetooth smart watches when people said we'd never have a radio watch that could be used to call people even if it's radio range is literally measured in feet.

what does all this prove? it proves that companies are greedy and have screwed people over time and time again with garbage tech designed to last fewer years.

i can also prove that laserprinters are still using 1994 processors to handle the buffers of the print queue. when a watch has a chip that can drive a low def screen and digital radio transmission 'proven' 1994 tech is still preferred over energy saving modern chips.

As J. Scalia points out, the 'standard' the Court has chosen is unclear. Maybe that would be legal, maybe it wouldn't be. We'll never know until either 1) Congress amends the law to be clear about that; 2) Someone tries it and the Court reverses this opinion in a useful way; or 3) Someone tries it and the Court rules squarely on that in light of this opinion.

One thing is for sure: Only someone with lots of resources and a lot of daring will even attempt to find out by actually trying it.

Yes. Sorry about the fucked up apostrophes, quotation marks, etc. I just copied and pasted from the opinion without previewing the post, like everyone does. I can't believe it's 2014 and this sort of thing still isn't automatically handled properly.

This case boiled down to one major issue: Whether the allegedly infringing conduct in this case was engaged in by either Aereo, or by its users. Don't get hung up on the public performance v. private performance issue; it was really certain that if Aereo was liable, that the performance was public; if it were the users, it would be private.

J. Scalia's dissent does a good job of explaining the issue:

There are two types of liability for copyright infringement: direct and secondary. As its name suggests, the former applies when an actor personally engages in infringing conduct. Secondary liability, by contrast, is a means of holding defendants responsible for infringement by third parties, even when the defendants âoehave not themselves engaged in the infringing activity.â It applies when a defendant âoeintentionally induc[es] or encourag[es]â infringing acts by others or profits from such acts âoewhile declining to exer- cise a right to stop or limit [them].â

Most suits against equipment manufacturers and service providers involve secondary-liability claims. For example, when movie studios sued to block the sale of Sonyâ(TM)s Betamax videocassette recorder (VCR), they argued that Sony was liable because its customers were making unauthorized copies. Record labels and movie studios relied on a similar theory when they sued Grokster and StreamCast, two providers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software.

This suit, or rather the portion of it before us here, is fundamentally different. The Networks claim that Aereo directly infringes their public-performance right. Accordingly, the Networks must prove that Aereo âoeperform[s]â copyrighted works, Â106(4), when its subscribers log in, select a channel, and push the âoewatchâ button. That process undoubtedly results in a performance; the question is who does the performing. If Aereoâ(TM)s subscribers perform but Aereo does not, the claim necessarily fails.
The Networksâ(TM) claim is governed by a simple but profoundly important rule: A defendant may be held directly liable only if it has engaged in volitional conduct that violates the Act. ...

A comparison between copy shops and video-on-demand services illustrates the point. A copy shop rents out photocopiers on a per-use basis. One customer might copy his 10-year-oldâ(TM)s drawingsâ"a perfectly lawful thing to doâ" while another might duplicate a famous artistâ(TM)s copyrighted photographsâ"a use clearly prohibited by Â106(1). Either way, the customer chooses the content and activates the copying function; the photocopier does nothing except in response to the customerâ(TM)s commands. Because the shop plays no role in selecting the content, it cannot be held directly liable when a customer makes an infringing copy.

Video-on-demand services, like photocopiers, respond automatically to user input, but they differ in one crucial respect: They choose the content. When a user signs in to Netflix, for example, âoethousands of . . . movies [and] TV episodesâ carefully curated by Netflix are âoeavailable to watch instantly.â That selection and arrangement by the service provider constitutes a volitional act directed to specific copyrighted works and thus serves as a basis for direct liability.

The distinction between direct and secondary liability would collapse if there were not a clear rule for determining whether the defendant committed the infringing act. The volitional-conduct requirement supplies that rule; its purpose is not to excuse defendants from accountability, but to channel the claims against them into the correct analytical track. Thus, in the example given above, the fact that the copy shop does not choose the content simply means that its culpability will be assessed using secondary-liability rules rather than direct-liability rules.

So which is Aereo: the copy shop or the video-on-demand service? In truth, it is neither. Rather, it is akin to a copy shop that provides its patrons with a library card. Aereo offers access to an automated system consisting of routers, servers, transcoders, and dime-sized antennae. Like a photocopier or VCR, that system lies dormant until a subscriber activates it. When a subscriber selects a pro- gram, Aereoâ(TM)s system picks up the relevant broadcast signal, translates its audio and video components into digital data, stores the data in a user-specific file, and transmits that fileâ(TM)s contents to the subscriber via the Internetâ"at which point the subscriberâ(TM)s laptop, tablet, or other device displays the broadcast just as an ordinary television would. ...

The only question is whether those performances are the product of Aereoâ(TM)s volitional conduct.

They are not. Unlike video-on-demand services, Aereo does not provide a prearranged assortment of movies and television shows. Rather, it assigns each subscriber an antenna thatâ"like a library cardâ"can be used to obtain whatever broadcasts are freely available. Some of those broadcasts are copyrighted; others are in the public do- main. The key point is that subscribers call all the shots: Aereoâ(TM)s automated system does not relay any program, copyrighted or not, until a subscriber selects the program and tells Aereo to relay it. Aereoâ(TM)s operation of that system is a volitional act and a but-for cause of the resulting performances, but, as in the case of the copy shop, that degree of involvement is not enough for direct liability.

In sum, Aereo does not âoeperformâ for the sole and simple reason that it does not make the choice of content. And because Aereo does not perform, it cannot be held directly liable for infringing the Networksâ(TM) public-performance right.

However, that's not the decision that the Court reached. Instead, J. Scalia describes the Court's opinion as:

The Courtâ(TM)s conclusion that Aereo performs boils down to the following syllogism: (1) Congress amended the Act to overrule our decisions holding that cable systems do not perform when they retransmit over-the-air broadcasts;4 (2) Aereo looks a lot like a cable system; therefore (3) Aereo performs. ...

Making matters worse, the Court provides no criteria for determining when its cable-TV-lookalike rule applies. Must a defendant offer access to live television to qualify? If similarity to cable-television service is the measure, then the answer must be yes. But consider the implications of that answer: Aereo would be free to do exactly what it is doing right now so long as it built mandatory time shifting into its âoewatchâ function. Aereo would not be providing live television if it made subscribers wait to tune in until after a showâ(TM)s live broadcast ended. A subscriber could watch the 7 p.m. airing of a 1-hour program any time after 8 p.m. Assuming the Court does not intend to adopt such a do-nothing rule (though it very well may), there must be some other means of identifying who is and is not subject to its guilt-by-resemblance regime.

Two other criteria come to mind. One would cover any automated service that captures and stores live television broadcasts at a userâ(TM)s direction. That canâ(TM)t be right, since it is exactly what remote storage digital video recorders (RSâ"DVRs) do, and the Court insists that its âoelimited holdingâ does not decide the fate of those devices. The other potential benchmark is the one offered by the Gov- ernment: The cable-TV-lookalike rule embraces any entity that âoeoperates an integrated system, substantially dependent on physical equipment that is used in common by [its] subscribers.â The Court sensibly avoids that approach because it would sweep in Internet service providers and a host of other entities that quite obviously do not perform.
That leaves as the criterion of cable-TV-resemblance nothing but thâ(TM)olâ(TM) totality-of-the-circumstances test (which is not a test at all but merely assertion of an intent to perform test-free, ad hoc, case-by-case evaluation). It will take years, perhaps decades, to determine which automated systems now in existence are governed by the traditional volitional-conduct test and which get the Aereo treatment. (And automated systems now in contemplation will have to take their chances.)

The Court's opinion states that it doesn't have an effect beyond Aereo and Aereo-like services:

Aereo and many of its supporting amici argue that to apply the Transmit Clause to Aereoâ(TM)s conduct will impose copyright liability on other technologies, including new technologies, that Congress could not possibly have wanted to reach. We agree that Congress, while intending the Transmit Clause to apply broadly to cable companies and their equivalents, did not intend to discourage or to control the emergence or use of different kinds of technologies. But we do not believe that our limited holding today will have that effect.

For one thing, the history of cable broadcast transmis- sions that led to the enactment of the Transmit Clause informs our conclusion that Aereo âoeperform[s],â but it does not determine whether different kinds of providers in different contexts also âoeperform.â For another, an entity only transmits a performance when it communicates contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds of a work. ...

And we have not considered whether the public performance right is infringed when the user of a service pays primarily for something other than the transmission of copyrighted works, such as the remote storage of content.

But, as J. Scalia points out:

The Court vows that its ruling will not affect cloud-storage providers and cable- television systems, but it cannot deliver on that promise given the imprecision of its result-driven rule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
486 computers had 'mp3' codecs and they were around in 1991 and was standardized in 1994. standardized means many people had access to working code by then.

"What he means, I think, is that most computer companies make "consumer grade" machines and "commercial grade" machines. I've not has an Asus or Lenovo, but I've had Toshiba, HP, and Dell. With respect to Dell, I've had both consumer and commercial grade machines, built to higher specifications."

i have owned and used packard bell, HP, dell, compaq(before hp bought em), and a lenovo. the first computer i bought with my own income was a packardbell 80486 dx2 75mhz. that was built like a tank, and was about as useful as a paperweight. it took the thing about 40 minutes to encode a 4 minute song to mp3. and yes i did that on that machine. anyways that was the most reliable piece of hardware i ever owned. it spent 4 years as a desktop and about 11 years as a server, though the hdds failed on it 3 times in the same timeframe. my laptop a compaq pentium 120, ran for 13 years until i hid it in a dumpster, but it had the F00F bug so was never reliable. from there on all my parts lasted less long, the quality went down. my first dell laptop lasted about 5 years less than the pentium120 and my recent alienware rig had a motherboard failure in 3 weeks and a psu issue another month later. that makes it qualify as my least reliable pc ever. alienware laptops aren't even designed by the main fab producers for dell, and still a bad MB. anyways consumer and commercial grade isn't real at dell, and i doubt it is real elsewhere. if you research parts you can build a desktop that is fast and will last a decade, and for only a little more than the 'fast enough for windows8/debianwheezy' laptop. seriously the default WM for debian wheezy is slower than windows 8 i timed them. on the same computer.

" Most recently I purchased a Dell Latitude 5000 series laptop--in Dell's explanation of this computer in comparison to the 7000 series, it gave the 5000 series a build quality of 3 out of 4 stars, it gave the 3000 series 2 out of 4 stars (still Latitude--which implies the consumer grade stuff is 1 out of 4 stars for build quality). The consumer grade machines seem to be designed to last about 2 years or less. The commercial grade machines are designed to last more like 4 years."

i have a laptop that was built like trash grade and it has been more reliable than alienware. of course its running linux with a lighter wm than the default one in wheezy... but it is going to last me another 6 years, as all it does is internet when main rig is in install/update/backup discs mode, and is used as a second layer of virus detection and removal for windows machines not all of which belong to me, and i have no say as to the os on those windows machines.

"The problem is, you have to pay a premium for the commercial grade machines."

there was a day when a computer was $5,000 and was a calculator at massive size. remember the dx2 75mhz? it was about 100 times faster than the $5000 machine i am thinking of and can't recall the specs or useful links right now.

"With Apple, there is no "consumer grade" and "commercial grade"--they're all made to high specifications."

apple products are all one grade of materials. however, they are not any more immune to faulty boards caps etc. their parts are notorious for being high profit, http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/24/iphone-5s-5c-teardowns-suggest-199-183-build-costs-for-apple they buy $183 worth of parts sell it for $1,000 $600 of which the cell phone has you pay over 12 months roughly. the mac lineup is in a similar situation and really if apple gets the chips for that price i doubt samsung pays higher ditto with dell. apple gets by on reputation. they wouldn't have that reputation if they hadn't been in schools or have numerous graphics stuff like photoshop, and the new ipad commercial where they make a whole symphony from one ipad. windows can't buy that reputation. they are the 'buggy, but just works and can game too even if the people you game with are hacking you' reputation that windows has earned, as well as 'benivolent dictator' cause there can be only one survivor of the os wars according to gates philosophy. glad he is gone maybe their recent attempts to be 'apple did it so we can too, almost but without the same apps, so no really its not the same we just had to follow marekting which said copy apple' kind of aura.

then there is gnu. smart people know that free software (though not necisarily $0 'free') is the only way to avoid vendor lockin, and a slew of other problems that closed source software can't address. there is a lot of interesting things going on with open hardware and open source software and custom fabs and xray verification of chips adhering to doing what they were built to look like etc. really knowing what the compiler is doing is as important as using free open knowledge to make the world a better more secure and fun place. someday soon they are going to announce the first 3d printed microchip, and from there hobbiests can build a 3d printer from the 3d printer that is capable of printing itself and all the hardware for an advanced computer, and hobby x-ray gear and a nice hardcopy of the specs for the processor and you can then in theory have a 3d printer where one person knows all the code and can audit it for making a chip in their basement or garage. all the open hardware and open software and new 3d printers make it all possible. to geniunely know that there are 0 backdoors in both the hardware and the software you are using. and still be fast enough to protect the 'rest' of your less secure equipment.

tar sands produce a vile sludge that can literally be used like agent orange.

methanol and ethanol production from municipal waste is taking trash out of the 'too dry to rot too much gas to oxidize' landfill and instead produce useful chemical some of which can be safely used to operate machinery like cars, and produce fewer noxious fumes.

if the world was run by clones in thought of you, there wouldnt be a living being on this planet for at least half a million years -- assuming that the colapse of organic life including human life by using pestacides that kill bees (after which humans would live another 4 years) and all the carbon heating the planet from all the pricks driving cars using up the worlds 200 year supply of fossile fuels at the consumption and production levels predicted for humans, based on your view that making a city 0 impact on the environment is some how wrong, and that consuming every molecule of carbon in fire until the skys rain acid like they do on venus, is the 'right thing to do' well we would never survive the consumption of all the fossil fuels, as bees would die first.

yes hydrothermal life can resist an autoclave but... "However, Strain 121 is non-infectious because it cannot grow at temperatures near 37 ÂC.[citation needed]"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121
also flame throwers are considerably hotter than an autoclave, but they might be able to grow again after being flame thrown we won't know til someone tests it out.

i believe the information is here https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ and yes i realize it's just a 'plan comparison' page, and that only 2 of the 4 tiers include a phone plan

"Do you know any large system where this works? The big gotcha is that of all the programs you run, you can only code a tiny % of them. And you canâ(TM)t audit everything else."

if you can't audit 7mb of code you're retarded. who has a 7 mb of code to audit it? try openbsd http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html

even for the full iso is only 230MB. plop it on open hardware and you can audit the hardware and the software. someday get a 3d printer and an x-ray camera and you can audit the hardware to see if it followed specs or not. have a password generated to be impossible to remember and requires a hardware decrypter to reform the password but can do so in multiple ways with only the one true way remembered by you, and you're golden against attacks on your setup, which then allows you to run fast computers that maybe have backdoors that are completely blocked by your secure machine, which you know is secure because you did it yourself.