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Comment Re:You damm kids. (Score 1) 159

Anyone who doesn't have a sculpture of pivoting 10base2 connectors, and know how to turn them into a replica USS Enterprise, is insufficiently senior to talk to.

I have a small sculpture of those connectors. It's a very lame replica of the Enterprise. If I had more connectors, I certainly could improve it.

Comment Re:THERE IS NO LIMIT (Score 2) 573

There is no way that Verizon can say that baby monitors are against TOS :)

Technically, the baby monitor is a server, so is against the TOS.

Well, maybe. Depends on the monitor. Some of the internet enabled monitors use a service provided by the vendor. This is similar to "print from anywhere" services offered by HP (and others) for their printers.

Practically, ISPs would get a huge amount of flak if they did not allow these monitors - including the ones that do not rely on an external service provider.

Comment Re:Sheesh (Score 1) 318

How about our law enforcement agencies going back to the good old-fashioned police work they used to do, before all this modern technology enabled their lazy work style? In order to tap a phone in the old days, they had to send a man with alligator clips climbing up the nearest phone pole after they received a lawful order from a judge.

That would require hiring more agents, which would require increasing their budgets.

Comment Re:Lots of good reasons. (Score 1) 684

Without DRM, how do we compensate Jackson? I am not happy with DRM – but I can’t figure out a better idea.

I think that more enough of his fan base are happy enough to continue to pay to see his movies even without DRM (or other copy protection), that he won't have a problem.

There are indy artists out there who manage to make a living off their creations without using DRM or other copy protection. They are good enough to have a large enough fan base. My own fan base is very tiny by comparison, but their are people who pay me for my creations - not because I use DRM or such, but because they like it enough to choose to pay. And I am not talking about the SW my employer pays me to develop. My artistic works are a hobby. That some people actually pay me for copies is just a bonus. I want big media to keep their siphons out of what royalties I do get.

Comment Re:Flying Cars (Score 2) 629

A practical and affordable flying car? Yes, we seem to have missed the mark on that. But even if we hadn't, there are a lot of collateral obstacles to actually "putting one in every garage". For example, I know far too many people who should not be driving a car, let alone an aircraft.

Moon base? I think the obstacles were much more political than technological. It's been almost 44 years since the first maned Moon landing (and safe return on the first try). Politics shut that program down Realistically, we only did Skylab because we already had almost all the hardware needed - but NASA's engineers and contractors did it. If nothing else, I'm sure they could have successfully and safely landed a Saturn third stage on the Moon.

Implanting computers in/near our brains? We already have implanted devices to grant vision to the blind and we are making a lot of progress with using brain signals to control devices. Don't know about you, but I know some people who are already trying to volunteer for a brain implant. Maybe not all who now claim they want such an implant would actually go through with it, but I'm sure some of them really would. Not that I think this is a good idea, I just see politics as the main obstacle to this.

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Comment Re:LOL "music locker" (Score 1) 139

Who the fuck even owns a camcorder or CD player boombox anymore?

I own and still use a 5 disk CD boombox. I even still have a CD collection. I also use the box's aux input with a cheap MP3 player (or sometimes with my Android tablet)

And a friend of mine owns and uses 2 different camcorders. The older one (with a large, high quality lens) records to digital tape. The newer one records to SD card.

Comment Re:And it was through this (Score 1) 139

States used to have their own copyright laws. The 1976 copyright act nullified them going forward but they may still apply for older works.

Congress (and big media) assert that it has the power to extend the duration of these state issued copyrights. Is the scope of preemption by the federal copyright law really so limited that the DMCA would not apply to those works?

Worse, selective application of the DMCA to those early works would create an even more difficult situation not only for customers, but also for independent artists. The way things have been going for the last few decades, it will soon be impossible for artists to legally distribute their works without a big media contract. Big media has already gotten the Copyright Royalty Board to rule that blanket licenses are defacto statutory licenses, so requiring royalties under a blanket license to be paid to them. Then indy artists must pay a fee to them for the privilege of applying for some percentage (less then 100%) of the royalties collected. Now indy artists must license each work (or, possibly, each defined collection/album/portfolio) to be able to collect royalties without big media siphoning a portion of it.

Comment Re:What do they actually want? (Score 1) 394

I really don't see the need for adding EME to HTML5. What are the actual use cases that don't have simple solutions without it?

I agree. I don't see the need for EME. The existing media tags already support alternate codecs, so encryption could be added as simply as creating a wrapper for an existing codec, include the crypto in the wrapper and call the wrapper a codec. The wrapper would, of course, need to be designed to work properly with streaming, but then so would the EME. No need to further pollute the HTML specification.

Comment Re:Getting the rates (Score 1) 434

I suspect it would cost the state more to investigate the problem than it could collect in fines.

Also, the merchants are collecting and remitting the tax in good faith, therefor any court judgement - if it went to court - would be in favor of the merchant - even if the evidence that the merchant where informed of the error was irrefutable.

Besides, except in the case of income tax where tax payers file a form showing what they owe vs what they paid, the government has no motivation to refund overages of collected taxes..

If it were shown that the merchants were keeping overages in collected sales tax rather than remitting all collected tax (minus the amount they are allowed to keep to cover the cost of remitting the taxes), then the government would have motivation. But most likely, any tax and fines reclaimed from the merchant would be kept by the state.

Comment Re:RTFA (Score 1) 976

He doesn't say that bicycles produce more CO2 than cars, he says that:

  • Cycling increases your respiration rate so produces more CO2 than not cycling.

Both of these are true. ... the second point is refuting the point that bikes are environmentally friendly. The second point is debatable: it's a question of what the basic comparison is. Cycling is more polluting than staying at home, less polluting than driving a car.

Depends on what you are doing at home, how many lights are on, PC, TV, game console, other devices. If all that is on, even a couch potato could indirectly be producing more CO2 and other greenhouse gasses and pollutents.

(some other congress person: CO2 is used by plants, so is not a pollutent.)

(rephrasing: Excess CO2 is a pollutent.)

Comment Re:Your VCS should manage this (Score 1) 384

More likely it would be the linker detecting that one or more symbols is unreferenced.

The linker my team is using in our current projects has an option to log warnings about unreferenced symbols. We enable this because it provides an extra line of defense against coding errors - and documentation errors.

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