After switching to Speakeasy DSL from Verizon (formerly BellAtlantic), I can verify that the difference between the two is like night and day. My experience with Verizon/BellAtlantic was absolutely, positively the worst customer service nightmare I've ever had (and it continues to be because they are still billing me for the service even though I cancelled at the end of August and have called multiple times to verify my cancellation). Avoid Verizon/BellAtlantic if at all possible. Speakeasy, on the other hand, has been a truly pleasant experience for me. I suspect that the horror story that the original article described was due to the fact that the person worked at a baby bell. All the baby bells seem to have very poor customer service across the board (if only I could switch my phone service from Verizon now).
3) People borrow other people's CDs and use them to beam into their accounts. Very few people I know who used my.mp3.com hadn't done that. Thats illegal, and MP3.com has a legal responsibility given their situation and agreements to prevent that. Asking me to reinsert a CD that I legitimately own isn't a big deal.
I agree with your first two points, but not this third one. I had around 150 CDs beamed to my.mp3.com before it was originally shut down and they were all my own and all very legal. Re-inserting these CDs would be a royal pain for me for several reasons:
I have a lot of CDs and if the number of re-insertions that it asks for is proportional to the number of CDs I have then this is a lot of work for me.
What if I'm at work when it asks me to re-insert a particular CD? That completely defeats the purpose of using my.mp3.com so that I don't have to lug all my CDs around.
Worst of all (in the sense that this is more than just an annoyance), this defeats one of the big advantages of having something like my.mp3.com. Before, if I happened to scratch or otherwise destroy a CD that I owned I was at least assured that I would still be able to listen to it on my.mp3.com. Now, my.mp3.com can no longer be used as a backup for my collection.
That's OK though, because after my.mp3.com got shut down I started using mp3.com to find indie music and I started converting my existing CD collection to mp3s using Grip. I also picked up an MPTrip which lets you listen to CD-Rs with MP3s on them! Grip and MPTrip are taking the place of my.mp3.com for me (but I still use mp3.com because there is a lot of good indie music on there).
TiVo hired a Chief Privacy Officer about two months ago. TiVo may or may not have been the first (I don't know), but IBM was not the first as seems to be the implication here. It's good to see a big company picking up on this, though.
...forgive me, for I am not a TiVo owner, but is that all it would take to get your TiVo information from your broadband connection? Seems unlilkely to me that the TiVo is making a PPP or SLIP connection to the net and downloading it's info via some TCP/IP protocol... am i wrong about this?
I'm pretty sure it is just a TCP connection over PPP or SLIP. It's actually a very good solution to the problem of getting program listing, software updates, and other things to TiVo subscribers. Rather than having to set up an extensive network of dial-in numbers all over the country or spending way too much on 800 numbers, it makes a lot more sense for TiVo to partner with an existing ISP to leverage their existing network of telephone numbers. This also means that TiVo doesn't have to waste time developing and maintaining proprietary protocols - they can just use the standard protocols that come with Linux. It also means that moving to other communication channels which use the same higher level protocol (TCP) will be a snap for them if they decide to sell boxes with ethernet cards, for example. I'm sure this benefitted them when they released the DirectTV/TiVo combination units recently.
this is to download the TiVo scheduling information. It has to know what's on in your area before it can record stuff.
It's also for downloading software updates and for resetting your TiVo's internal clock to atomic time. I've found that the built in modem is very unintrusive (it was well designed in this respect), but I'm going to upgrade to an ethernet version the moment they release one (if they ever do). I know TiVo has some VOD plans in the works (e.g., their deal with Blockbuster) and taking advantage of my DSL would be one way to accomplish that.
This is simply not possible. I have friends that have worked at MSFT and they state unequivocably that viewing source code from competing Open Source projects is expressly prohibited so that there is no risk of GPLed code making its way into MSFT products either accidentally or intentionally.
It certainly is possible. Say Microsoft had a disgruntled employee who wanted to do some damage. He could insert some GPLed code into whatever he was working on as a way to frame Microsoft. Just because he's not supposed to do it doesn't mean he can't. What's to stop him from bringing a disk from home with the banned code on it? How would anybody at Microsoft ever find out that he had used GPLed code? If nobody there is supposed to look at the code, they would need to do something elaborate such as having a third party audit their code in order to guarantee compliance with this policy without looking at the code GPLed code themselves. Even that wouldn't guarantee that some GPLed code couldn't be snuck in (with a little obfuscation). Anyway, Microsoft is too big to control everything all of their employees do, so it's certainly not impossible that one of their employees might decide to disobey their official policies. (Note, I am in no way advocating that somebody should do this - this would be a very bad idea, in fact. I'm just pointing out that it is definitely possible.)
I recently moved into a new apartment and ordered Speakeasy DSL for it. I previously had Verizon's/BellAtlantic's DSL at my old place. All I can say is Speakeasy has totally blown Verizon out of the water in every single category so far (except maybe price, but the extra $10 per month is definitely worth having a service which actually works). I have yet to switch my main email address to forward to my Speakeasy account, but I will do so before the end of the year and if their email service is anything like their DSL service I'll have nothing to worry about because their DSL service flat out rocks.
I know they have both web and pop access to your email account and I think you get two totally separate email accounts with the DSL service. I also know that you can at least log in securely to the web based interface (I forget if the entire thing is over https or not). Perhaps they offer this as a stand-alone service as well.
I'd switch from TD anyway if I were you, if they're the ones that own TD Waterhouse (I'm pretty sure they are). While their TD Waterhouse interface has never given me any problems for running Linux, it's given me plenty of other problems because something there apparently doesn't scale well. What's worse is that their customer service doesn't scale well either.
A few weeks ago I attempted to place an order for a few shares of a stock and their webserver kept returning errors (some of which stated that the load was too high). Well, I tried calling their tech support line to see if my order had gone through but after being on hold for several minutes I was redirected to a message saying that I had reached a "non-existant telephone number at TD Waterhouse". Why their phone tree at their customer service line would redirect me to a non-existant number is beyond me. After unsuccessfully trying my order two more time and trying their customer service line again with the same results, I called their research line in an attempt talk with any human there and tell them their tech support line wasn't working. I received exceedingly rude service and the person I spoke with vehemently denied that their system was having any problems (his justification was that I got through to him, so how could their phone system be experiencing problems - I hate stupid people). Well, it turned out that three orders had been placed for the stock when I only wanted one and he also refused to let me cancel two of the orders because I hadn't spoken to an account representative first (regardless of the fact that I couldn't get through to a representative and the fact that the orders never showed up on my pending orders page). I've actually had other serious problems with TD Waterhouse in the past, but this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Suffice is to say, those were the last buy orders TD Waterhouse is ever going to see from me. I've opened up an account with BuyAndHold.com and the difference has just been amazing so far. I'm buying all new stock through BuyAndHold.com and slowly liquidating my TD Waterhouse holding as it becomes time to sell them.
On a different and better note, I've been using Fleet Homelink on Linux since it was BankBoston Homelink and it has always worked well for me. It seems like a well designed app and I've never seen it too heavily loaded to deal with me. It doesn't work in Mozilla M18 with PSM, but I suspect that may be a Mozilla problem and not Fleet's fault. A lot of people complain about Fleet in general for various reasons (I haven't had problems, personally), but their home banking website is one thing they definitely did right.
So no treatment didn't do shit to shop crack and pot.
That's probably because treatment was targetted at heroin users. The government had the attitude that pot was a recreational drug on the level of alcohol and as such focused their attention on drugs which were actually causing problems (or which were at least correlated with problems). They (Nixon's administration) found a high degree of correlation between heroin use and people arrested for other crimes in DC jails and once they began treating heroin use in DC crime was reduced by 40% almost immediately. So treatment did work on the drugs that were targetted. Of course treatment didn't reduce pot usage - pot usage wasn't targetted until after the government's policy had strayed from treatment to punishment.
PBS is currently running an excellent documentary on the drug wars on their Frontline program. Having grown up in the Nancy Reagan era I always thought that the war on drugs was a moral issue and yet another area where the government introduced Draconian measures to satisfy its ever growing lust for power. I was fascinated to learn that the whole war on drugs was initially started by Nixon as a means of treating people with addiction problems rather than locking them up so that the rest of us could forget about them (and this treatment rather than punishment strategy actually worked extremely well). I was also fascinated to learn that Carter campaigned on the promise of marijuana legalization (and made efforts to bring that about when elected). The policies of just 20 years ago seem so much more sane than what we have today. Today, multiple orders of magnitude more is spent combatting drugs and if there has been an additional benefit it is unclear.
Check out
The Frontline website for more info on this two part series. I still have both parts sitting on my TiVo and haven't watched the second part yet, but the first part has been a excellent eductional experience for me and will probably be good for anybody who doesn't remember a US president before Reagan. I think PBS is re-running both parts soon so prep your VCRs/TiVos if you're interested.
I thought the color scheme for the new VIAOs looks an awful lot like the Slashdot website. The picture wasn't exactly of the highest resolution, but it looked like it was blue-ish green, black, and white. Did anybody else see the resemblance?
This is in addition to the larger problem it creates for health care -- it distorts the risk pools. We'll have insurance
carriers that only accept genetically healthy people -- those who would pay in more than they get out.
If you have insurance you are (or your employer is) is almost definitely already paying more in than you will get out. Back when I looked into getting health insurance for myself it was something like $400 a month. I figured I'm young and healthy and while I might go to the doctor once a year for a checkup it certainly wouldn't cost me $5k for a checkup. I figured that if I put the $5k each year into savings then I'd have more than enough for medical expenses in 20 years when I might need it. I saw no good reason for having insurance.
That said, I've been reading up on probability theory recently and it occurred to me the other day that there is a rationale for having insurance. While having insurance increases the expected value of what you will pay for medical expenses, it decreases the variance. In other words, if something catastrophic happens to you physically it won't be as catastrophic financially. So even now, insurance only helps you in worst case scenerios, but that is useful in itself.
Unfortunately niether the article (Free reg. req.) nor Corvis' own Web site explains
what the winning technology was. There are a lot of competing ideas out there on how
to switch optical signals. Is it MEMs? Liquid crystals? Curious minds want to know...
It's something which when revealed will be "obvious" to everyone on./ and which has plenty of prior art. Just kidding (I agree that most patents which appear on./ are absurd, but if this company patents the technique that they used to make their switch it at least sounds like it would be a good use of the patent system for once).
.I signed up for DSL service through SpeakEasy.net a few weeks ago, but they have yet to call me back to set up an installation time.
OK, I finally read the email Speakeasy sent me when I ordered the service, and it turns out that my order status has been available through their web page all this time. There is a very detailed and very nice looking order status page which I'm looking at right now which says that the phone company was supposed to come by today to install the line. D'oh! Oh well, I guess it's my fault this time for not being home, but I wish they would have called me first about the order date. Anyway, Speakeasy looks far better than BellAtlantic so far (2 static ips, a very polished customer account website complete with order status, and Linux support!), but the service isn't up yet so the jury is still out.
I had BellAtlantic's Infospeed service for about a year and it was the absolute worst customer service experience I have ever had. They sent me the wrong type of DSL modem and after they sent a replacement to correct their error I was billed six (!) times on my credit card for a modem (with each charge being over $100 by itself). They also made it next to impossible for me to return the original modem which they sent me in error (it was six months and a far too many phone calls later before I was eventually able to return it).
After my service was installed it worked for the first 15 minutes and then dropped dead for the next two months. It took two months of me constantly calling them on the phone for them to actually fix it. And the way they fixed the problem was scary. The problem affected the whole "tree" that I was on at their central office, which means that a couple hundred other customers were probably having the same problem. Did they fix the root of the problem? Of course not. They physically moved my phone line to a different tree that wasn't having problems - I felt sorry for all the other people left on my old tree. Oh, and this physical line swithcing caused a host of other problems, such as my long distance service not being switched properly and my being billed twice for long distance and at higher rates than I was signed up for.
Afer the initial two months, the service went down again approximately every two to three months for about a week at a time. When I called their tech support they always claimed that they would fix it within 72 hours (or at least contact me) and they never did. I had to constantly call them every day before they took any action.
And those are only a few of the problems I had with BellAtlantic.
I moved a month ago and I decided that I spent far too much time on the phone with BellAtlantic to make signing up for their service worth it again. I desperately wish there was cable modem service available in Boston, but their isn't. I signed up for DSL service through SpeakEasy.net a few weeks ago, but they have yet to call me back to set up an installation time. I'm hoping I didn't pick another BellAtlantic.
I don't think that you having to sign your inventions over to them means that you are obligated to assist them in doing anything they want with those inventions. If you worked for a paperclip company and designed a blue paperclip, the company may own the rights to your blue paperclip, but if they attempted to patent paperclips in general, why would you be obligated to assist them?
If I were you I would tell them that you can't sign the patent application because you don't think that the idea is patentable, and make it clear that if they give you a hard time you will send them a detailed letter stating why it is not patentable. Their lawyers would absolutely hate to have such a letter on record and will probably do a great deal to avoid this. If the need arises, send them a letter stating all the reasons why you don't think the system is patentable. Look for prior art and list all the examples you can find. Also outline why you as a professional in your field feel that the idea is obvious. (Both prior-art and obviousness can be used to invalidate patents.)
I am not a lawyer and I don't even play one on TV, so you should consult a lawyer for some real advice (and don't base your decision on what I say). I've used the people at kcslegal before with great results, and I'm happy to recommend them.
If there is no monopoly situation (and it doesn't seem like it) then why in the world should anybody be prevented from making a product (even if you believe it's bad) and trying to sell it?
There certainly is a monopoly situation. The particular work is owned exclusively by the author or whoever hired him and if they only want to sell it in a pay per use form then you have no competitors you can run to for the same work and you must pay per use. Now, this doesn't matter in general because competitors can sell similar works as the ideas themselves within the work aren't owned, but in this particular case of textbooks it matters a lot because we're talking about a textbook which is required for a course. You cannot easily substitute one textbook for another within a course because courses are often structured around a particular text. To make things worse, homework assignments are generally taken right out of the specific required text and if you don't have the specific text book that is required then there's no way you can do the homework because you can't see the problems. When I was in college I used to by older editions of the required texts to save money since the content doesn't change significantly, but it was always a hassle when it came time to do problem sets because I would have to borrow a friend's more recent text or go to the library to get the appropriate problems. If the publisher decides to only release a required text in pay per use form then students pretty much have no choice but to buy the license (or "steal" the text). That most definitely is a case of the publisher having monopoly power.
Now, whether this means that publishers shouldn't be allowed to do this is another issue. I personally think that publishers should be allowed to do this because, like you said, they have freedom of contract. I also think that I won't be paying for any such books and I will personally choose the books which I can purchase outright. I would also hope that most professors would be clueful enough to select texts which are not time limitted, at the very least as alternatives to the required texts (but I'm probably hoping for too much).
Am I the only one who immediately thought of all the evil applications these things could be used for? Want to rob a bank but not get caught? Just send a couple of these things in to do your dirty work and don't worry about being caught. Want to overthrow your government? Just get a beowulf cluster of... ah, forget it.
Do you have any links to something like a news article which would back up the claim that Microsoft announced office applications for the JavaStation? I'm trying to start a list of Microsoft's vaporware and this sounds like it would make an excellent example.
So far, the best link I've found has been the Caldera court brief regarding DR DOS which does a terrific job of explaining how Microsoft uses vaporware to harm competitors at the expense of consumers, but I could use some more examples, and this JavaStation announcement sounds perfect. If you have a link to a reference on this (or any other vaporware for that matter) please email it to me or post it here. Thanks.
If AOL is to ever make a net-appliance, what do you think they would have it run?
AOL already has a net-appliance imaginitively titled AOLTV. I don't know much about the specifics of what it runs, nor do I care very much, but I do know that AOL has licensed TiVo's technology for use in their boxes and guess what TiVo runs on right now? That's right, Linux. That's not to say that TiVo couldn't port their service to some other OS (and they would if AOL asked them to as AOL owns a good chunk of TiVo), just that this tips the scales even more in favor of AOL using Linux.
In related news, AOL Time Warner is suing MP3Board.com for a service that is very similar to one offered by AOL. The full story is available at http://www.upside.com/News/398f5056 0_yahoo.html . Michael Roberston of MP3.com had some very insightful things to say in the article about AOL's Winamp service, calling it possibly the most aggressive in promoting what Time Warner considers piracy. For instance, unlike Napster which just acts as a directory service, AOL's service provides actual storage for songs you find.
This gives a lot of leverage to the media content providers, if they don't like a feature that JVC or TiVo adds to a product
because it can hurt ad revenue then they can stop giving them access to the data. If ad revenue is significant enough.
How could they possibly stop TiVo from accessing television shows (that's what you mean by "the data", right)? Even if they started delivering shows in some proprietary, encyrpted, digital format they would still need to broadcast in the existing format for backward compatibility because of the enormous installed user base. Changing entirely to a different format would make practically all TV's out there useless, and that just wouldn't fly with consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
After switching to Speakeasy DSL from Verizon (formerly BellAtlantic), I can verify that the difference between the two is like night and day. My experience with Verizon/BellAtlantic was absolutely, positively the worst customer service nightmare I've ever had (and it continues to be because they are still billing me for the service even though I cancelled at the end of August and have called multiple times to verify my cancellation). Avoid Verizon/BellAtlantic if at all possible. Speakeasy, on the other hand, has been a truly pleasant experience for me. I suspect that the horror story that the original article described was due to the fact that the person worked at a baby bell. All the baby bells seem to have very poor customer service across the board (if only I could switch my phone service from Verizon now).
I agree with your first two points, but not this third one. I had around 150 CDs beamed to my.mp3.com before it was originally shut down and they were all my own and all very legal. Re-inserting these CDs would be a royal pain for me for several reasons:
That's OK though, because after my.mp3.com got shut down I started using mp3.com to find indie music and I started converting my existing CD collection to mp3s using Grip. I also picked up an MPTrip which lets you listen to CD-Rs with MP3s on them! Grip and MPTrip are taking the place of my.mp3.com for me (but I still use mp3.com because there is a lot of good indie music on there).
TiVo hired a Chief Privacy Officer about two months ago. TiVo may or may not have been the first (I don't know), but IBM was not the first as seems to be the implication here. It's good to see a big company picking up on this, though.
I'm pretty sure it is just a TCP connection over PPP or SLIP. It's actually a very good solution to the problem of getting program listing, software updates, and other things to TiVo subscribers. Rather than having to set up an extensive network of dial-in numbers all over the country or spending way too much on 800 numbers, it makes a lot more sense for TiVo to partner with an existing ISP to leverage their existing network of telephone numbers. This also means that TiVo doesn't have to waste time developing and maintaining proprietary protocols - they can just use the standard protocols that come with Linux. It also means that moving to other communication channels which use the same higher level protocol (TCP) will be a snap for them if they decide to sell boxes with ethernet cards, for example. I'm sure this benefitted them when they released the DirectTV/TiVo combination units recently.
It's also for downloading software updates and for resetting your TiVo's internal clock to atomic time. I've found that the built in modem is very unintrusive (it was well designed in this respect), but I'm going to upgrade to an ethernet version the moment they release one (if they ever do). I know TiVo has some VOD plans in the works (e.g., their deal with Blockbuster) and taking advantage of my DSL would be one way to accomplish that.
It certainly is possible. Say Microsoft had a disgruntled employee who wanted to do some damage. He could insert some GPLed code into whatever he was working on as a way to frame Microsoft. Just because he's not supposed to do it doesn't mean he can't. What's to stop him from bringing a disk from home with the banned code on it? How would anybody at Microsoft ever find out that he had used GPLed code? If nobody there is supposed to look at the code, they would need to do something elaborate such as having a third party audit their code in order to guarantee compliance with this policy without looking at the code GPLed code themselves. Even that wouldn't guarantee that some GPLed code couldn't be snuck in (with a little obfuscation). Anyway, Microsoft is too big to control everything all of their employees do, so it's certainly not impossible that one of their employees might decide to disobey their official policies. (Note, I am in no way advocating that somebody should do this - this would be a very bad idea, in fact. I'm just pointing out that it is definitely possible.)
I recently moved into a new apartment and ordered Speakeasy DSL for it. I previously had Verizon's/BellAtlantic's DSL at my old place. All I can say is Speakeasy has totally blown Verizon out of the water in every single category so far (except maybe price, but the extra $10 per month is definitely worth having a service which actually works). I have yet to switch my main email address to forward to my Speakeasy account, but I will do so before the end of the year and if their email service is anything like their DSL service I'll have nothing to worry about because their DSL service flat out rocks.
I know they have both web and pop access to your email account and I think you get two totally separate email accounts with the DSL service. I also know that you can at least log in securely to the web based interface (I forget if the entire thing is over https or not). Perhaps they offer this as a stand-alone service as well.
I'd switch from TD anyway if I were you, if they're the ones that own TD Waterhouse (I'm pretty sure they are). While their TD Waterhouse interface has never given me any problems for running Linux, it's given me plenty of other problems because something there apparently doesn't scale well. What's worse is that their customer service doesn't scale well either.
A few weeks ago I attempted to place an order for a few shares of a stock and their webserver kept returning errors (some of which stated that the load was too high). Well, I tried calling their tech support line to see if my order had gone through but after being on hold for several minutes I was redirected to a message saying that I had reached a "non-existant telephone number at TD Waterhouse". Why their phone tree at their customer service line would redirect me to a non-existant number is beyond me. After unsuccessfully trying my order two more time and trying their customer service line again with the same results, I called their research line in an attempt talk with any human there and tell them their tech support line wasn't working. I received exceedingly rude service and the person I spoke with vehemently denied that their system was having any problems (his justification was that I got through to him, so how could their phone system be experiencing problems - I hate stupid people). Well, it turned out that three orders had been placed for the stock when I only wanted one and he also refused to let me cancel two of the orders because I hadn't spoken to an account representative first (regardless of the fact that I couldn't get through to a representative and the fact that the orders never showed up on my pending orders page). I've actually had other serious problems with TD Waterhouse in the past, but this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Suffice is to say, those were the last buy orders TD Waterhouse is ever going to see from me. I've opened up an account with BuyAndHold.com and the difference has just been amazing so far. I'm buying all new stock through BuyAndHold.com and slowly liquidating my TD Waterhouse holding as it becomes time to sell them.
On a different and better note, I've been using Fleet Homelink on Linux since it was BankBoston Homelink and it has always worked well for me. It seems like a well designed app and I've never seen it too heavily loaded to deal with me. It doesn't work in Mozilla M18 with PSM, but I suspect that may be a Mozilla problem and not Fleet's fault. A lot of people complain about Fleet in general for various reasons (I haven't had problems, personally), but their home banking website is one thing they definitely did right.
See, Super Mario Brothers 2 didn't suck, it was really a end-of-world prophecy.
Oh thanks! I hadn't seen the movie yet and now you've ruined it for me! You should really put a SPOILER WARNING in your subject heading next time.
(I am joking, of course. Who hasn't seen SMB2?)
That's probably because treatment was targetted at heroin users. The government had the attitude that pot was a recreational drug on the level of alcohol and as such focused their attention on drugs which were actually causing problems (or which were at least correlated with problems). They (Nixon's administration) found a high degree of correlation between heroin use and people arrested for other crimes in DC jails and once they began treating heroin use in DC crime was reduced by 40% almost immediately. So treatment did work on the drugs that were targetted. Of course treatment didn't reduce pot usage - pot usage wasn't targetted until after the government's policy had strayed from treatment to punishment.
Check out The Frontline website for more info on this two part series. I still have both parts sitting on my TiVo and haven't watched the second part yet, but the first part has been a excellent eductional experience for me and will probably be good for anybody who doesn't remember a US president before Reagan. I think PBS is re-running both parts soon so prep your VCRs/TiVos if you're interested.
I thought the color scheme for the new VIAOs looks an awful lot like the Slashdot website. The picture wasn't exactly of the highest resolution, but it looked like it was blue-ish green, black, and white. Did anybody else see the resemblance?
If you have insurance you are (or your employer is) is almost definitely already paying more in than you will get out. Back when I looked into getting health insurance for myself it was something like $400 a month. I figured I'm young and healthy and while I might go to the doctor once a year for a checkup it certainly wouldn't cost me $5k for a checkup. I figured that if I put the $5k each year into savings then I'd have more than enough for medical expenses in 20 years when I might need it. I saw no good reason for having insurance.
That said, I've been reading up on probability theory recently and it occurred to me the other day that there is a rationale for having insurance. While having insurance increases the expected value of what you will pay for medical expenses, it decreases the variance. In other words, if something catastrophic happens to you physically it won't be as catastrophic financially. So even now, insurance only helps you in worst case scenerios, but that is useful in itself.
It's something which when revealed will be "obvious" to everyone on ./ and which has plenty of prior art. Just kidding (I agree that most patents which appear on ./ are absurd, but if this company patents the technique that they used to make their switch it at least sounds like it would be a good use of the patent system for once).
OK, I finally read the email Speakeasy sent me when I ordered the service, and it turns out that my order status has been available through their web page all this time. There is a very detailed and very nice looking order status page which I'm looking at right now which says that the phone company was supposed to come by today to install the line. D'oh! Oh well, I guess it's my fault this time for not being home, but I wish they would have called me first about the order date. Anyway, Speakeasy looks far better than BellAtlantic so far (2 static ips, a very polished customer account website complete with order status, and Linux support!), but the service isn't up yet so the jury is still out.
I had BellAtlantic's Infospeed service for about a year and it was the absolute worst customer service experience I have ever had. They sent me the wrong type of DSL modem and after they sent a replacement to correct their error I was billed six (!) times on my credit card for a modem (with each charge being over $100 by itself). They also made it next to impossible for me to return the original modem which they sent me in error (it was six months and a far too many phone calls later before I was eventually able to return it).
After my service was installed it worked for the first 15 minutes and then dropped dead for the next two months. It took two months of me constantly calling them on the phone for them to actually fix it. And the way they fixed the problem was scary. The problem affected the whole "tree" that I was on at their central office, which means that a couple hundred other customers were probably having the same problem. Did they fix the root of the problem? Of course not. They physically moved my phone line to a different tree that wasn't having problems - I felt sorry for all the other people left on my old tree. Oh, and this physical line swithcing caused a host of other problems, such as my long distance service not being switched properly and my being billed twice for long distance and at higher rates than I was signed up for.
Afer the initial two months, the service went down again approximately every two to three months for about a week at a time. When I called their tech support they always claimed that they would fix it within 72 hours (or at least contact me) and they never did. I had to constantly call them every day before they took any action.
And those are only a few of the problems I had with BellAtlantic.
I moved a month ago and I decided that I spent far too much time on the phone with BellAtlantic to make signing up for their service worth it again. I desperately wish there was cable modem service available in Boston, but their isn't. I signed up for DSL service through SpeakEasy.net a few weeks ago, but they have yet to call me back to set up an installation time. I'm hoping I didn't pick another BellAtlantic.
If I were you I would tell them that you can't sign the patent application because you don't think that the idea is patentable, and make it clear that if they give you a hard time you will send them a detailed letter stating why it is not patentable. Their lawyers would absolutely hate to have such a letter on record and will probably do a great deal to avoid this. If the need arises, send them a letter stating all the reasons why you don't think the system is patentable. Look for prior art and list all the examples you can find. Also outline why you as a professional in your field feel that the idea is obvious. (Both prior-art and obviousness can be used to invalidate patents.)
I am not a lawyer and I don't even play one on TV, so you should consult a lawyer for some real advice (and don't base your decision on what I say). I've used the people at kcslegal before with great results, and I'm happy to recommend them.
Next week on Slashdot: the Roadrunner sues Russia over patent infringement.
There certainly is a monopoly situation. The particular work is owned exclusively by the author or whoever hired him and if they only want to sell it in a pay per use form then you have no competitors you can run to for the same work and you must pay per use. Now, this doesn't matter in general because competitors can sell similar works as the ideas themselves within the work aren't owned, but in this particular case of textbooks it matters a lot because we're talking about a textbook which is required for a course. You cannot easily substitute one textbook for another within a course because courses are often structured around a particular text. To make things worse, homework assignments are generally taken right out of the specific required text and if you don't have the specific text book that is required then there's no way you can do the homework because you can't see the problems. When I was in college I used to by older editions of the required texts to save money since the content doesn't change significantly, but it was always a hassle when it came time to do problem sets because I would have to borrow a friend's more recent text or go to the library to get the appropriate problems. If the publisher decides to only release a required text in pay per use form then students pretty much have no choice but to buy the license (or "steal" the text). That most definitely is a case of the publisher having monopoly power.
Now, whether this means that publishers shouldn't be allowed to do this is another issue. I personally think that publishers should be allowed to do this because, like you said, they have freedom of contract. I also think that I won't be paying for any such books and I will personally choose the books which I can purchase outright. I would also hope that most professors would be clueful enough to select texts which are not time limitted, at the very least as alternatives to the required texts (but I'm probably hoping for too much).
Am I the only one who immediately thought of all the evil applications these things could be used for? Want to rob a bank but not get caught? Just send a couple of these things in to do your dirty work and don't worry about being caught. Want to overthrow your government? Just get a beowulf cluster of... ah, forget it.
Do you have any links to something like a news article which would back up the claim that Microsoft announced office applications for the JavaStation? I'm trying to start a list of Microsoft's vaporware and this sounds like it would make an excellent example. So far, the best link I've found has been the Caldera court brief regarding DR DOS which does a terrific job of explaining how Microsoft uses vaporware to harm competitors at the expense of consumers, but I could use some more examples, and this JavaStation announcement sounds perfect. If you have a link to a reference on this (or any other vaporware for that matter) please email it to me or post it here. Thanks.
AOL already has a net-appliance imaginitively titled AOLTV. I don't know much about the specifics of what it runs, nor do I care very much, but I do know that AOL has licensed TiVo's technology for use in their boxes and guess what TiVo runs on right now? That's right, Linux. That's not to say that TiVo couldn't port their service to some other OS (and they would if AOL asked them to as AOL owns a good chunk of TiVo), just that this tips the scales even more in favor of AOL using Linux.
I vote for "Insightful".
In related news, AOL Time Warner is suing MP3Board.com for a service that is very similar to one offered by AOL. The full story is available at http://www.upside.com/News/398f5056 0_yahoo.html . Michael Roberston of MP3.com had some very insightful things to say in the article about AOL's Winamp service, calling it possibly the most aggressive in promoting what Time Warner considers piracy. For instance, unlike Napster which just acts as a directory service, AOL's service provides actual storage for songs you find.
How could they possibly stop TiVo from accessing television shows (that's what you mean by "the data", right)? Even if they started delivering shows in some proprietary, encyrpted, digital format they would still need to broadcast in the existing format for backward compatibility because of the enormous installed user base. Changing entirely to a different format would make practically all TV's out there useless, and that just wouldn't fly with consumers.