I definitely agree with you here. Extending copyright is ridiculous. I'd favor reducing it, or at least setting it at 50 years after the creation of the copyrighted material instead of 50 (or 75) years after the author's death. It seems crazy that something I'd write today wouldn't be available to re-use by the general public for another 100-125 years or longer (depending on how long I live).
I have no love for the music industry, but I don't think we should ignore certain forms of illegal activity simply because we don't agree with the enforcement approach taken by it's sponsors.
How else would you suggest they stop the problem? No matter how you cut it, downloading copyrighted music without paying for it is a crime. It's no different than someone taping a new movie with a video camera and selling it (or, more analagously, giving it away) on the street the next day. Was it "stubborn headed ignorance" when Giuliani, and now Bloomberg, decided to crack down on illegal sales of bootleg DVD and VHS tapes on NYC streets? Sure it still happens, but it's not as bad as 10 years ago. I don't think it would be any different, or receive any lower penalty, if instead of selling dozens of DVDs these vendors were giving them away.
Now compare this with kids who setup their copyrighted music collections to be shared online. Instead of giving away dozens of copies, they could be giving away thousands or tens of thousands of songs per computer. Somehow this needs to stop. Law enforcement is trying, as is the RIAA (obviously), but their methods are not effective.
In my opinion, the tech community needs to help law enforcement stop illegal downloads. I believe there must be some technical means to stop illegal sharing without the annoyances of DRM, and only brilliant developers/designers will come up with an alternative. Instead, we complain about their methods, and about how unfair and litigious the RIAA is being.
I never thought about burnout the way the article describes it, but I wholeheartily agree. If I am working on something where I see great results that positively impact my company's clients, I feel great... even if I'm working 80 hour weeks. If I am doing something that I view as trivial or unnecessary (but cannot get out of doing it), I quickly feel burned out within a few weeks.
If this truly is the reason people get burned out, it shows that all the money spent on fancy work environments, extra-curricular events, and other perks is largely wasted.
I can't help thinking "why?". At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research? How much does it benefit us to know what happened.3 seconds after the big bang vs. 3 seconds vs. 10 million years? I'd rather see all this money fund research into advanced propulsion systems, robotics, and solar power technologies that will help us explore the Universe, rather than just gaze at it with ever more powerful equipment.
For larger companies, Vista and Office 2007 will probably be rolled out pretty early, at least to some divisions/groups. Microsoft typically makes upgrade licenses available very cheap (or free) for these organizations, and also uses other incentives/ploys to convince these organizations to upgrade. It's in Microsoft's best interest to get these companies to convert first to start the "trickle down" ball rolling, particularly when it comes to Office 2007.
As far as other companies are concerned, everyone is right - it could be 5 or 10 years before they upgrade. I'm the CIO of a small/medium business, and we are still running Windows 98 on some of our non-networked machines. Smaller companies won't invest a penny in upgrades until they're forced to do so, which won't be until Microsoft stops creating XP security updates, or until enough applications are released that only run on Vista.
We originally just had conveyor belts for tread (our machine was like a small tank with a crane on top), which slid on our test steps at the high school. So we added these silly wooden treads. In our tests, we used carpeted, cement, and hardwood stairs (we didn't know how the obstacle course would be laid out at the competition). In these tests, the treads still slid and made goofy noises as well. So we added small nails to help "grab" the carpet.
These new reinforcements worked great in our tests, but at the competition they had built softwood steps with no carpet. These were no match for our 300 lb machine with treads and metal spikes... the spikes kept ripping off the edge of the steps on the way up until enough was ripped off that it had a larger surface area exposed to climb. Then about halfway up the wooden treads started flying off. It finally made it to the top, but the stairs were basically demolished... luckily we were the last team to go. It was a real hoot for us and the entire audience though.
So basically you're saying we count the votes twice, once on the computer and once on the paper ballots? I completely understand the need for a paper trail, and actually think the Forbes article idea is good, but wonder if the government would go for it. For all intensive purposes, the author is proposing we go back to the old paper system, with a different machine (the computer) to replace the paper punch and pull-down-tab machines of the past.
Here's one of the slashdot articles on the spying scandal. Basically their new CEO was trying to stop press leaks so started spying on folks, his success at turning around HP's finances is really the only thing keeping him around.
This sounds pretty bad, until you look at the insider trading history for HP. It appears that, with the exception of Mark Hurd, most insider trades were fairly normal for the officers involved. It's not surprising that Mark Hurd was selling 200,000 shares during this timeframe, as 1/2 were exercising an option and the other half was only ~15,000 shares above his prior disposition in April.
Unless there really was insider trading (and someone comes forward to prove it), I imagine HP will get out of this suit pretty easily.
Seems like this was his plan from the beginning. I can't imagine he would risk his clients' security by releasing all these bugs... he already got tons of publicity from/. and elsewhere.
It's also a matter of what is classified as a defect in a Lego. I've used Lego that are not 100% aligned, or that don't stay together real well all the time. My son's set falls apart when certain shapes are connected. I consider this a defect, but obviously they don't. One easy way to achieve such low defect rates is simply to redefine 'defect'.
Historically and mathematically Google's claim just doesn't add up. Apple's iPod site claims that their 80GB video iPod can store "up to 6 1/2 hours" of video. Let's be very aggressive and assume that hard drives continue doubling in capacity every 2 years for the next decade. Here's where'd we be after 10 years:
A 2.56 TB iPod would be quite impressive, but wouldn't even hold every season of The Simpsons, let alone "All the video in the world". Even if they ignored power/size requirements and used full 3.5 inch desktop drives, capacity would only be ~25.6TB or 2080 hours. This isn't even enough space to hold 1 year's worth of network soap operas.
It's unlikely that Verizon would be implicated in copyright infringement lawsuits, they are just a carrier and probably won't be doing any the filtering of the videos (just as your ISP and your computer manufacturer would not be liable for content you viewed at home in the event of copyright infringement litigation against YouTube).
I'm curious to see how YouTube/Google will limit the number of videos available. Will they hand edit the top videos to ensure no copyrighted material is available (in which case the service probably wouldn't be popular), or just post all videos under a certain duration or above a certain view count threshhold.
Snail mail would be private if it got to the desired recipient 100% of the time. About 1/2 of my mail ends up in a neighbor's mailbox (and vice versa). I can't tell you how many times I've had an important bill (such as property tax) delivered by a neighbor who accidentally received it. Every time we call the post office, they ask us to file a report (which we do), but nothing changes. Luckily we live in a pretty trustworthy neighborhood, or I'd be in trouble.
While the # of vulnerabilities is unacceptable, Oracle is right... just comparing the # of bugs is not really valid. Now if Oracle has had more Severe security violations that Microsoft, it would be a different (and far more interesting) story. Oracle is still a more robust database, so one would expect there to be more bugs than another app with fewer modules and lines of code.
Pure and simple, Microsoft needs a clearer direction on its UI and feature set if it's to continue developing new releases of Windows. Vista development continually failed because Microsoft could never agree on what they were trying to bring the consumer, and left too much in the hands of its development teams. It never had a clear roadmap from the beginning, and was always chasing features that were introduced by competitors along the way.
In the future, competitors will continue getting more creative, and keeping up with them will someday become prohibitively expensive for Microsoft. To survive, Microsoft must innovate instead of duplicating their competition... a tall order for a company with thousands of developers. As we're seeing from Apple's small but significant resurgence in popularity, customers are demanding more than ubiquitous driver support and backwards compatibility, they are demanding an experience... and it's increasingly one that Microsoft refuses to deliver.
'Mobile phone' is certainly more descriptive of our phones' usage, but to say that we no longer use cells is just plain uninformed. Until we are all communicating to each other via satellite, the world will be divided into small cells for mobile phones to utiliize. While the density of these cells may be much greater than 10 years ago, they still exist (as anyone who has driven off a major road or through the country can attest), and phones still negotiate with many different towers while moving from cell to cell during a call.
Even if we were using satellite, there would still need to be cells of sorts, they would just be much larger (e.g. thousands or even millions of square miles instead of 5 to 100's of square miles for today's cells).
Companies have their employees delete copies of source code all the time, particularly when they change projects or switch departments. It isn't in a company's best interest to have proprietary software in too many places at once, which was probably why IBM instructed these employees to delete it. This isn't destruction of evidence at all, since IBM almost certainly did not delete EVERY copy of AIX.
Now if these were the last copies of AIX source, then IBM is by far the dumbest company in existence... who would ever delete source code for products clients are still using? I'm sure even Microsoft would never delete all source copies of Windows 3.1...
In general, any period of time where there is massive stress on a population would likely see rapid evolutionary changes. Whether it's volcanos, or asteroids hitting the planets, an ice age, or interstellar radiation, the effect is basically the same - an initial decimation of existing populations with amazing biodiversification thereafter.
It doesn't seem that this tool will be available before a while. The researchers have "found that the welds were the weakest point of the nanoknife, and they are now experimenting with alternative welding techniques."
Wouldn't it be better to wrap or tie the carbon nanotube to a specially shaped tungsten needles rather than trying to weld them? Given the small size, welding directly to the needles seems like it could never work... better to rely on the strength of the nanotube than on the adhesive capacity of some other material.
Oh, are RFID tags common now in S Korea? That's a different story if they are.
I know they're years away from being included in single grocery items in the U.S. due to the relatively high cost (~$.05/tag). If some countries use RFID for everything, not just 1 per each case shipped to the stores (as is now becoming standard in the U.S.), then some of this smart technology makes a lot more sense. Even the creepy talking mirror is a marketable product if clothes in S. Korea come implanted with a descriptive RFID chip.
Unfortunately the article didn't give an estimate of the price for one of these hi-tech homes. Would the average (or even the techie) find the incremental cost worth it? I doubt it. We now have much of this technology available to us in the U.S., but few people choose to buy it. The only big difference is that the hi-tech "flats" are being sold as a package deal, instead of the buyer needing to request the upgrades.
How much would such a home be worth to you? Would you pay the $50-100K or so that the extra features would likely cost? Considering the only way that my fridge would know that my yogurt is spoiled is if I told the fridge I just bought yogurt, it doesn't seem like that big of a convenience (who wants to type in everything you buy into a console on the fridge?). Also, do you really need fashion advice from a hi-tech mirror? I don't trust my own fashion sense, so I'm certainly not going to trust a computer's. My wife suits me just perfectly in that capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if they could work together to create The Battle of the Network Stars 30 years ago, they can work together again, right?
I definitely agree with you here. Extending copyright is ridiculous. I'd favor reducing it, or at least setting it at 50 years after the creation of the copyrighted material instead of 50 (or 75) years after the author's death. It seems crazy that something I'd write today wouldn't be available to re-use by the general public for another 100-125 years or longer (depending on how long I live).
I have no love for the music industry, but I don't think we should ignore certain forms of illegal activity simply because we don't agree with the enforcement approach taken by it's sponsors.
How else would you suggest they stop the problem? No matter how you cut it, downloading copyrighted music without paying for it is a crime. It's no different than someone taping a new movie with a video camera and selling it (or, more analagously, giving it away) on the street the next day. Was it "stubborn headed ignorance" when Giuliani, and now Bloomberg, decided to crack down on illegal sales of bootleg DVD and VHS tapes on NYC streets? Sure it still happens, but it's not as bad as 10 years ago. I don't think it would be any different, or receive any lower penalty, if instead of selling dozens of DVDs these vendors were giving them away.
Now compare this with kids who setup their copyrighted music collections to be shared online. Instead of giving away dozens of copies, they could be giving away thousands or tens of thousands of songs per computer. Somehow this needs to stop. Law enforcement is trying, as is the RIAA (obviously), but their methods are not effective.
In my opinion, the tech community needs to help law enforcement stop illegal downloads. I believe there must be some technical means to stop illegal sharing without the annoyances of DRM, and only brilliant developers/designers will come up with an alternative. Instead, we complain about their methods, and about how unfair and litigious the RIAA is being.
I never thought about burnout the way the article describes it, but I wholeheartily agree. If I am working on something where I see great results that positively impact my company's clients, I feel great ... even if I'm working 80 hour weeks. If I am doing something that I view as trivial or unnecessary (but cannot get out of doing it), I quickly feel burned out within a few weeks.
If this truly is the reason people get burned out, it shows that all the money spent on fancy work environments, extra-curricular events, and other perks is largely wasted.
I can't help thinking "why?". At some point, doesn't it make sense to stop spending Billions of dollars of taxpayer money on Big Bang research? How much does it benefit us to know what happened .3 seconds after the big bang vs. 3 seconds vs. 10 million years? I'd rather see all this money fund research into advanced propulsion systems, robotics, and solar power technologies that will help us explore the Universe, rather than just gaze at it with ever more powerful equipment.
For larger companies, Vista and Office 2007 will probably be rolled out pretty early, at least to some divisions/groups. Microsoft typically makes upgrade licenses available very cheap (or free) for these organizations, and also uses other incentives/ploys to convince these organizations to upgrade. It's in Microsoft's best interest to get these companies to convert first to start the "trickle down" ball rolling, particularly when it comes to Office 2007.
As far as other companies are concerned, everyone is right - it could be 5 or 10 years before they upgrade. I'm the CIO of a small/medium business, and we are still running Windows 98 on some of our non-networked machines. Smaller companies won't invest a penny in upgrades until they're forced to do so, which won't be until Microsoft stops creating XP security updates, or until enough applications are released that only run on Vista.
Building your own bottling factory certainly is cool! Nice one
Great question.
... the spikes kept ripping off the edge of the steps on the way up until enough was ripped off that it had a larger surface area exposed to climb. Then about halfway up the wooden treads started flying off. It finally made it to the top, but the stairs were basically demolished ... luckily we were the last team to go. It was a real hoot for us and the entire audience though.
We originally just had conveyor belts for tread (our machine was like a small tank with a crane on top), which slid on our test steps at the high school. So we added these silly wooden treads. In our tests, we used carpeted, cement, and hardwood stairs (we didn't know how the obstacle course would be laid out at the competition). In these tests, the treads still slid and made goofy noises as well. So we added small nails to help "grab" the carpet.
These new reinforcements worked great in our tests, but at the competition they had built softwood steps with no carpet. These were no match for our 300 lb machine with treads and metal spikes
So basically you're saying we count the votes twice, once on the computer and once on the paper ballots? I completely understand the need for a paper trail, and actually think the Forbes article idea is good, but wonder if the government would go for it. For all intensive purposes, the author is proposing we go back to the old paper system, with a different machine (the computer) to replace the paper punch and pull-down-tab machines of the past.
Here's one of the slashdot articles on the spying scandal. Basically their new CEO was trying to stop press leaks so started spying on folks, his success at turning around HP's finances is really the only thing keeping him around.
This sounds pretty bad, until you look at the insider trading history for HP. It appears that, with the exception of Mark Hurd, most insider trades were fairly normal for the officers involved. It's not surprising that Mark Hurd was selling 200,000 shares during this timeframe, as 1/2 were exercising an option and the other half was only ~15,000 shares above his prior disposition in April.
Unless there really was insider trading (and someone comes forward to prove it), I imagine HP will get out of this suit pretty easily.
Seems like this was his plan from the beginning. I can't imagine he would risk his clients' security by releasing all these bugs ... he already got tons of publicity from /. and elsewhere.
It's also a matter of what is classified as a defect in a Lego. I've used Lego that are not 100% aligned, or that don't stay together real well all the time. My son's set falls apart when certain shapes are connected. I consider this a defect, but obviously they don't. One easy way to achieve such low defect rates is simply to redefine 'defect'.
This is just as funny as the story is ridiculous.
Historically and mathematically Google's claim just doesn't add up. Apple's iPod site claims that their 80GB video iPod can store "up to 6 1/2 hours" of video. Let's be very aggressive and assume that hard drives continue doubling in capacity every 2 years for the next decade. Here's where'd we be after 10 years:
2006 - 80 GB, 6.5 hours
2008 - 160 GB, 13 hours
2010 - 320 GB, 26 hours
2012 - 640 GB, 52 hours
2014 - 1.28 TB, 104 hours
2016 - 2.56 TB, 208 hours
A 2.56 TB iPod would be quite impressive, but wouldn't even hold every season of The Simpsons, let alone "All the video in the world". Even if they ignored power/size requirements and used full 3.5 inch desktop drives, capacity would only be ~25.6TB or 2080 hours. This isn't even enough space to hold 1 year's worth of network soap operas.
It's unlikely that Verizon would be implicated in copyright infringement lawsuits, they are just a carrier and probably won't be doing any the filtering of the videos (just as your ISP and your computer manufacturer would not be liable for content you viewed at home in the event of copyright infringement litigation against YouTube).
I'm curious to see how YouTube/Google will limit the number of videos available. Will they hand edit the top videos to ensure no copyrighted material is available (in which case the service probably wouldn't be popular), or just post all videos under a certain duration or above a certain view count threshhold.
Snail mail would be private if it got to the desired recipient 100% of the time. About 1/2 of my mail ends up in a neighbor's mailbox (and vice versa). I can't tell you how many times I've had an important bill (such as property tax) delivered by a neighbor who accidentally received it. Every time we call the post office, they ask us to file a report (which we do), but nothing changes. Luckily we live in a pretty trustworthy neighborhood, or I'd be in trouble.
While the # of vulnerabilities is unacceptable, Oracle is right ... just comparing the # of bugs is not really valid. Now if Oracle has had more Severe security violations that Microsoft, it would be a different (and far more interesting) story. Oracle is still a more robust database, so one would expect there to be more bugs than another app with fewer modules and lines of code.
Pure and simple, Microsoft needs a clearer direction on its UI and feature set if it's to continue developing new releases of Windows. Vista development continually failed because Microsoft could never agree on what they were trying to bring the consumer, and left too much in the hands of its development teams. It never had a clear roadmap from the beginning, and was always chasing features that were introduced by competitors along the way.
... a tall order for a company with thousands of developers. As we're seeing from Apple's small but significant resurgence in popularity, customers are demanding more than ubiquitous driver support and backwards compatibility, they are demanding an experience ... and it's increasingly one that Microsoft refuses to deliver.
In the future, competitors will continue getting more creative, and keeping up with them will someday become prohibitively expensive for Microsoft. To survive, Microsoft must innovate instead of duplicating their competition
'Mobile phone' is certainly more descriptive of our phones' usage, but to say that we no longer use cells is just plain uninformed. Until we are all communicating to each other via satellite, the world will be divided into small cells for mobile phones to utiliize. While the density of these cells may be much greater than 10 years ago, they still exist (as anyone who has driven off a major road or through the country can attest), and phones still negotiate with many different towers while moving from cell to cell during a call.
Even if we were using satellite, there would still need to be cells of sorts, they would just be much larger (e.g. thousands or even millions of square miles instead of 5 to 100's of square miles for today's cells).
Companies have their employees delete copies of source code all the time, particularly when they change projects or switch departments. It isn't in a company's best interest to have proprietary software in too many places at once, which was probably why IBM instructed these employees to delete it. This isn't destruction of evidence at all, since IBM almost certainly did not delete EVERY copy of AIX.
... who would ever delete source code for products clients are still using? I'm sure even Microsoft would never delete all source copies of Windows 3.1 ...
Now if these were the last copies of AIX source, then IBM is by far the dumbest company in existence
In general, any period of time where there is massive stress on a population would likely see rapid evolutionary changes. Whether it's volcanos, or asteroids hitting the planets, an ice age, or interstellar radiation, the effect is basically the same - an initial decimation of existing populations with amazing biodiversification thereafter.
Wouldn't it be better to wrap or tie the carbon nanotube to a specially shaped tungsten needles rather than trying to weld them? Given the small size, welding directly to the needles seems like it could never work
Oh, are RFID tags common now in S Korea? That's a different story if they are.
I know they're years away from being included in single grocery items in the U.S. due to the relatively high cost (~$.05/tag). If some countries use RFID for everything, not just 1 per each case shipped to the stores (as is now becoming standard in the U.S.), then some of this smart technology makes a lot more sense. Even the creepy talking mirror is a marketable product if clothes in S. Korea come implanted with a descriptive RFID chip.
Unfortunately the article didn't give an estimate of the price for one of these hi-tech homes. Would the average (or even the techie) find the incremental cost worth it? I doubt it. We now have much of this technology available to us in the U.S., but few people choose to buy it. The only big difference is that the hi-tech "flats" are being sold as a package deal, instead of the buyer needing to request the upgrades.
How much would such a home be worth to you? Would you pay the $50-100K or so that the extra features would likely cost? Considering the only way that my fridge would know that my yogurt is spoiled is if I told the fridge I just bought yogurt, it doesn't seem like that big of a convenience (who wants to type in everything you buy into a console on the fridge?). Also, do you really need fashion advice from a hi-tech mirror? I don't trust my own fashion sense, so I'm certainly not going to trust a computer's. My wife suits me just perfectly in that capacity.
And to think, only 3 weeks ago Chinese officials tried to convince the UN that the Chinese government does not censor the internet.