She's not going after RIAA as such, she's going after everyone that makes up the RIAA, read the article:
"Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet"
It looks like she plans to sue them to hell and beyond for all kinds of illegal behavior when it comes to how they handled the case against her.
Then there's just the minor problem of figuring out what pattern means what. Personally I think I prefer the idea of connecting people to external computerized memory then messing with the neural one. Brainwashing anyone?
So far the judge has decided it is unreasonable to expect users to have to go through Arbitration court since it gives all the benefits to the company and all the downsides to the user.
The case itself though will most likely be lost by the user since virtual property doesn't have any real value (if it had you would have to pay tax for it and I wouldn't want to do that).
What I would like to see is that admins get to keep their ability to ban people for whatever reason but that users get a fair chance to defend themselves if they feel they became unjustly banned.
The problem would be that for most other services there are "reasonable available market alternatives". The thing I wonder though is that if all the companies have the same crappy TOS does that then mean that there isn't any reasonable option and all the TOS's get invalidated?
Wow, me that's completely uneducated in wireless chip design put forward the exact idea that is patented there o.O
Seriously they've patented everything that can use a battery and reduces power usage by modifying the frequency of scanning for access ports. And then they further patented the ability to shut down unneeded parts of a wireless chip.
Unless I'm reading the patent wrong which I hope I am.
I don't know what the patented way to do it is but the obvious way would just to be checking if you can find the wireless network and if you can't shut down the wireless chip for an interval (user option?) and then power up to do another check.
Or you could divide the chip into two parts where one only checks for the presence of the wireless network and activates the other part to actually use it.
or both.
If the patent covers this isn't it an too obvious of an implementation to patent since that's what anyone would come up with if asked to solve that problem?
"You don't own this car, you have a licence to use this car under these massive conditions that you'll never bother to read and we are in no way responsible for anything that happens to you while using our car"
While I've seen that allot in the software/entertainment industry.
The buyer of a car will usually get a very good service agreement and plenty of guarantees not to mention he can legally sell the car when he no longer have use of it. For your three examples for the car theif: 1)You probably want insurance since if something happens and you don't have it you'll be rather screwed economically. 2)The gas is a very temporary benefit, what if you stole a car with a close to empty tank? 3)Instead when you get stopped by the police for speeding you'll be looking forward to living in a cell instead of just a ticked.
The pirate seems to have it allot better then the thief since his service is better in every single way, it would be as if stealing the car would make it run faster, have unlimited fuel and never break down.
If I get hurt thanks to the malfunction of the security systems of a car I can sue the car company for damages. If DRM trashes my computer it's my own fault. If my car breaks down within the guarantee time they'll fix it for me, if my DRM'd entertainment media breaks they'll tell me to buy a new one.
The car buyer is allot better off then the entertainment media/software buyer.
According to the article it covers 25% of all imported mobile phones and the patent is about a technology that saves battery power when you're outside of wireless range.
I'm kinda curious as to how obvious a technology can still be and get patented. Power saving features on wireless chips seems like something any engineer set on the task would be able to come up with.
This reminds me of the story of the person that tried to patent boiling water, no one had done it before so it was worth a try wasn't it?
If anyone at the patent office lets this pass he/she should get whacked with the giant hammer of reason. You can't go around getting patents for entire fields of science.
Normally an ombudsman is appointed by the government/company to represent the interests of the citizens/customers. Never heard of anyone getting elected as ombudsman before.
They're normally supposed to be professionals so they can pursue issues that the normal citizen don't have the knowledge/resources to do.
Also aren't ombudsmen normally meant to represent the interests of the persons they represent and not some kind of watch force?
My favorite game in the Caesar series is probably Caesar 2, could just be nostalgic memories of the joy I felt the first time my city didn't go bankrupt. Caesar IV just wasn't as fun as Caesar 3, this is 100% opinion though, not some kind of truth.
If Moore's Law applies to consoles they should halve in price every 2 years.
If you look at their price cut per month scale it seems to fit pretty neatly in there with a 50% price cut at the 24 month mark. However there it stabilities, I suppose there are minimum costs involved with logistics and whatnot that prevent further price drops.
The point would be that franchises should stay mostly the same and you should innovate with new franchises. That way if the innovations fail it won't reflect poorly upon the franchise.
Most of the people that liked Game 1 will probably like Game 2 even if it's just a marginally improved Game 1 with better gfx. Some game play doesn't need to be innovated or improved, it's already good as it is. The problem arises when Game 2 has Worse gameplay then Game 1, sadly that seems to happen often.
Actually all that was in Sim City 4. It basically simulated the lives of every single little Sim in your city. You could even place up to five Sims for you to keep track of personally.
Isn't it somehow deceiving to take an established franchise, just increase the number counter and then completely change the very core of the franchise?
I thought normal decency at least demanded you use a naming convention like Sim City: XXX.
I love the Sim City series and hope that it won't get dragged in the mud now in the newest installment. Caesar IV wasn't a very good game but there's always hope that a developer can improve isn't there?
I was under the impression that the GPL license is mostly meant for "hobby" developers that want to make sure no one abuses their code to earn money on time they donate for the good of mankind. Not industry developers that want to earn money from their code. I might just have gotten it all wrong though.
Any developers willing to comment on what they want out of a license?
Sadly if you buy the physical medium you don't get access to the download able one:(
Ideally you would want the service to work the same way regardless if you bought a physical copy or not.
An example: You buy a music album/movie/game in a store. In the dvd case(everything comes in dvd cases nowadays) you get a unique code that you can add to an online account you have connected to the company. When you give them the code they give you access to download a digital copy of the object you purchased as many times as you want (possibly a limit like 2 times a week for any unique object to prevent abuse). Then you'll have both a physical copy and unlimited digital copies that you preferably should be able to backup on CD as much as you want. It all of course need to be completely DRM free.
I think a service like this would do very well as long as you can get the companies involved to understand that.
The largest problem with DRM as I see it (except the impossibility issue) is that the paying customer gets worse service then the pirate.
Customer goes and pays $10 dollars for his album and notices the can't play it on any machine except the ones approved by the company that sold the album and he can't backup the album in case it breaks so he has to buy it all over again if it does.
The pirate on the other hand happily buys a cheap cd for $1, goes online and downloads the album, burns it to cd and now has a cd that can be played on any machine and be backupped easily.
The basic idea of successfully selling anything is to provide better service then you can get for free.
When it comes to music/movies/games bought online I propose that you let people download the items as many times they want at high speeds. This means that it will be alot faster/comfier then doing it illegally through the relatively slow pirate networks.
I'm currently enjoying this to a great extent with games I've bought through EA. After a format or whatever I just need to tell the EA downloader to download the game for me instead of me having to hunt down the bloody cd that is forgotten in some bookcase somewhere.
I think downloaded music/movies should do it similarly so I easily can move my collection between computers without any fuzz at all making all my movies/music basically immortal. Good service at a good price is better then pirating.
I think the service you are paying for is education and not free internet access. It could be argued that it is the universities responsibility to educate you to use the legal alternatives instead of illegal downloading if possible. If you want free internet access you should access the internet from outside the university network, it's better for both you and the university since the university can't be held responsible anymore.
I would argue that using bit torrent is a more efficient way to handle distribution of files you have created yourself then Kazaa and similar P2P networks are since it's easier to spread a.torrent file around then telling people to log into your specific network and search for the file.
Slashdot Mirror
She's not going after RIAA as such, she's going after everyone that makes up the RIAA, read the article: "Atlantic, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG and BMG -- the RIAA itself, the Settlement Support Center, and SafeNet" It looks like she plans to sue them to hell and beyond for all kinds of illegal behavior when it comes to how they handled the case against her.
I'm fairly sure I saw almost that exact quote on Slashdot about a month ago. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/28/183 5250
Then there's just the minor problem of figuring out what pattern means what. Personally I think I prefer the idea of connecting people to external computerized memory then messing with the neural one. Brainwashing anyone?
I've been wondering for quite some time why most rock music doesn't have any punch to it anymore. Now I know.
When you compress the dynamic range of song with drums you seem to completely destroy the feeling of the music and it just comes out flat.
I think you missed what the judge decided.
So far the judge has decided it is unreasonable to expect users to have to go through Arbitration court since it gives all the benefits to the company and all the downsides to the user.
The case itself though will most likely be lost by the user since virtual property doesn't have any real value (if it had you would have to pay tax for it and I wouldn't want to do that).
What I would like to see is that admins get to keep their ability to ban people for whatever reason but that users get a fair chance to defend themselves if they feel they became unjustly banned.
The problem would be that for most other services there are "reasonable available market alternatives". The thing I wonder though is that if all the companies have the same crappy TOS does that then mean that there isn't any reasonable option and all the TOS's get invalidated?
Wow, me that's completely uneducated in wireless chip design put forward the exact idea that is patented there o.O
Seriously they've patented everything that can use a battery and reduces power usage by modifying the frequency of scanning for access ports. And then they further patented the ability to shut down unneeded parts of a wireless chip.
Unless I'm reading the patent wrong which I hope I am.
Let's patent the algorithm converting binary to hex and back :P
I don't know what the patented way to do it is but the obvious way would just to be checking if you can find the wireless network and if you can't shut down the wireless chip for an interval (user option?) and then power up to do another check.
Or you could divide the chip into two parts where one only checks for the presence of the wireless network and activates the other part to actually use it.
or both.
If the patent covers this isn't it an too obvious of an implementation to patent since that's what anyone would come up with if asked to solve that problem?
I still haven't seen a car company try and go:
"You don't own this car, you have a licence to use this car under these massive conditions that you'll never bother to read and we are in no way responsible for anything that happens to you while using our car"
While I've seen that allot in the software/entertainment industry.
The buyer of a car will usually get a very good service agreement and plenty of guarantees not to mention he can legally sell the car when he no longer have use of it. For your three examples for the car theif:
1)You probably want insurance since if something happens and you don't have it you'll be rather screwed economically.
2)The gas is a very temporary benefit, what if you stole a car with a close to empty tank?
3)Instead when you get stopped by the police for speeding you'll be looking forward to living in a cell instead of just a ticked.
The pirate seems to have it allot better then the thief since his service is better in every single way, it would be as if stealing the car would make it run faster, have unlimited fuel and never break down.
If I get hurt thanks to the malfunction of the security systems of a car I can sue the car company for damages. If DRM trashes my computer it's my own fault. If my car breaks down within the guarantee time they'll fix it for me, if my DRM'd entertainment media breaks they'll tell me to buy a new one.
The car buyer is allot better off then the entertainment media/software buyer.
According to the article it covers 25% of all imported mobile phones and the patent is about a technology that saves battery power when you're outside of wireless range.
I'm kinda curious as to how obvious a technology can still be and get patented. Power saving features on wireless chips seems like something any engineer set on the task would be able to come up with.
It would be nice if he managed to once and for all break the legality of EULAs. Most likely won't happen but one can indulge in fantasy.
The whole concept of a contract no one ever bothers to read is silly. Not to mention that often allot of the clauses break the law.
I think we probably need new laws against noise pollution fast. I really don't look forward to billboards speaking to me.
This reminds me of the story of the person that tried to patent boiling water, no one had done it before so it was worth a try wasn't it?
If anyone at the patent office lets this pass he/she should get whacked with the giant hammer of reason. You can't go around getting patents for entire fields of science.
Won't this just turn into a popularity contest?
Normally an ombudsman is appointed by the government/company to represent the interests of the citizens/customers. Never heard of anyone getting elected as ombudsman before.
They're normally supposed to be professionals so they can pursue issues that the normal citizen don't have the knowledge/resources to do.
Also aren't ombudsmen normally meant to represent the interests of the persons they represent and not some kind of watch force?
My favorite game in the Caesar series is probably Caesar 2, could just be nostalgic memories of the joy I felt the first time my city didn't go bankrupt. Caesar IV just wasn't as fun as Caesar 3, this is 100% opinion though, not some kind of truth.
a r4?q=caesar%20IV#critics
Although if you read the reviews Caesar IV wasn't greeted as anywhere close to a game of the year competitor. http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/caes
If Moore's Law applies to consoles they should halve in price every 2 years.
If you look at their price cut per month scale it seems to fit pretty neatly in there with a 50% price cut at the 24 month mark. However there it stabilities, I suppose there are minimum costs involved with logistics and whatnot that prevent further price drops.
The point would be that franchises should stay mostly the same and you should innovate with new franchises. That way if the innovations fail it won't reflect poorly upon the franchise.
Most of the people that liked Game 1 will probably like Game 2 even if it's just a marginally improved Game 1 with better gfx. Some game play doesn't need to be innovated or improved, it's already good as it is. The problem arises when Game 2 has Worse gameplay then Game 1, sadly that seems to happen often.
Actually all that was in Sim City 4. It basically simulated the lives of every single little Sim in your city. You could even place up to five Sims for you to keep track of personally.
I'm probably one of the few people that liked Fallout Tactics, although it had almost nothing to do with the previous games.
Isn't it somehow deceiving to take an established franchise, just increase the number counter and then completely change the very core of the franchise?
I thought normal decency at least demanded you use a naming convention like Sim City: XXX.
I love the Sim City series and hope that it won't get dragged in the mud now in the newest installment. Caesar IV wasn't a very good game but there's always hope that a developer can improve isn't there?
I was under the impression that the GPL license is mostly meant for "hobby" developers that want to make sure no one abuses their code to earn money on time they donate for the good of mankind. Not industry developers that want to earn money from their code. I might just have gotten it all wrong though.
Any developers willing to comment on what they want out of a license?
Sadly if you buy the physical medium you don't get access to the download able one :(
Ideally you would want the service to work the same way regardless if you bought a physical copy or not.
An example:
You buy a music album/movie/game in a store.
In the dvd case(everything comes in dvd cases nowadays) you get a unique code that you can add to an online account you have connected to the company.
When you give them the code they give you access to download a digital copy of the object you purchased as many times as you want (possibly a limit like 2 times a week for any unique object to prevent abuse).
Then you'll have both a physical copy and unlimited digital copies that you preferably should be able to backup on CD as much as you want. It all of course need to be completely DRM free.
I think a service like this would do very well as long as you can get the companies involved to understand that.
The largest problem with DRM as I see it (except the impossibility issue) is that the paying customer gets worse service then the pirate.
Customer goes and pays $10 dollars for his album and notices the can't play it on any machine except the ones approved by the company that sold the album and he can't backup the album in case it breaks so he has to buy it all over again if it does.
The pirate on the other hand happily buys a cheap cd for $1, goes online and downloads the album, burns it to cd and now has a cd that can be played on any machine and be backupped easily.
The basic idea of successfully selling anything is to provide better service then you can get for free.
When it comes to music/movies/games bought online I propose that you let people download the items as many times they want at high speeds. This means that it will be alot faster/comfier then doing it illegally through the relatively slow pirate networks.
I'm currently enjoying this to a great extent with games I've bought through EA. After a format or whatever I just need to tell the EA downloader to download the game for me instead of me having to hunt down the bloody cd that is forgotten in some bookcase somewhere.
I think downloaded music/movies should do it similarly so I easily can move my collection between computers without any fuzz at all making all my movies/music basically immortal. Good service at a good price is better then pirating.
I think the service you are paying for is education and not free internet access. It could be argued that it is the universities responsibility to educate you to use the legal alternatives instead of illegal downloading if possible. If you want free internet access you should access the internet from outside the university network, it's better for both you and the university since the university can't be held responsible anymore.
.torrent file around then telling people to log into your specific network and search for the file.
I would argue that using bit torrent is a more efficient way to handle distribution of files you have created yourself then Kazaa and similar P2P networks are since it's easier to spread a