Until we can make the jump to digital textbooks, regardless of where the money comes from, I don't think changing the licensing is going to make enough of the difference to shift the paradigm to more affordable/available textbooks.
I disagree. Case in point: public domain books.
Public domain books are dirt cheap, regardless of whether they are of the electronic or the dead tree variety. Why? Remember that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, and like all monopolies, the monopolist has the ability to set the price. But once the monopoly vanishes, suddenly market forces kick in, and books only cost what supply and demand dictate they should cost. Now, freely-licensed books are not exactly the same as public domain, but in practice they are similar, the biggest differences being attribution and the possibility of a copyleft. Neither one is as huge of a hurdle for a company who wishes to publish cheap books as the full-on copyright system is.
No, a bill such as this won't endanger publishing companies... publishing companies have endangered themselves by pissing off their customers with insanely high pricing.
No, they haven't. Every attempt to secure the cheaper alternative for textbooks fails for one of several reasons:
1. Planned obsolescence of the original edition (see the posts above me for a more elaborate explanation of this). In particular, the changing of textbook problems and the unwillingness of the professor to use an alternative way to assess students (such as custom problems written by the professor himself/herself), as well as online stuff that only works once and therefore kills any chance of resale of the textbook. regardless of its edition status. 2. So-called "cheap" textbook sites not having much difference at all in the price of the textbook verses that set in the bookstore, or even in some cases actually costing more than what the bookstore charges. 3. The unwillingness of the bookstore to make any real difference on pricing of used and new books, buying back books for less than 20% of what they cost new, or even outright refusing to buy or sell used books entirely.
The result: while theoretically students have a choice in where to purchase textbooks, in practice this is irrelevant because outside factors mandate the latest edition, and most places seem to charge the same amount.
To make college so that everyone can graduate, you need to dumb down the material significantly, so the truly gifted get screwed twice -- 1) Their degree means nothing because everyone else had one and 2) they got a lousy education because the professors had to simplify everything so that the dumbasses could pass.
The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.
As for your "safe" codecs, MPEG-1 may not be patentable my MPEG-LA's standards anymore, but that doesn't mean someone hasn't patented some part of the format at a later time than the standard came out, thus making the patent still valid today. Would such a patent pass the test of prior art? It depends on what they patented, but even if it didn't all it takes is for a patent grant by the USPTO to allow a lawsuit, and the patent must be invalidated afterwards. You still can get sued, even if the claim can be found baseless.
The BBC may have done research about Dirac and came up with nothing, but are they more open about what exactly they did than Xiph? If they are, please give a link showing what you considered acceptable for Dirac but not for Theora.
The same set will tune in both HD and ST content, so you can compare the two signals side-by-side... and the difference between SD and full HD is like night and day.
Apparently not to everyone. I have repeatedly demonstrated the different formats of the same channel on the same set to some people and the only thing they notice is the pillerboxing of the SD broadcast.
Seriously, do Apple give out free tee-shirts every time someone uses their trademarks to describe everyday items?
Quite the contrary. Apple is far more likely to send out free cease-and-desist letters. If everyone uses "iPod" to describe every single digital audio player on the market, there is no longer any trademark, hence why retailers are sure to always say "iPod and MP3 players" or "MP3 and iPod" or "digital audio and iPod" in their marketing.
No doubt Apple loves the free publicity, but that will swiftly end the moment people start referring to their Zunes as "iPods."
I never said that they couldn't receive an HD broadcast, just that most of them are hooked up to receive the SD broadcast, and probably most of the TV owners think that what they are watching is in fact HD. Just because they have the hardware doesn't mean they set it up correctly, and remember 18% of customers can't tell the difference anyway, so they probably will remain blissfully unaware until someone notices the hookup and tells them.
I mentioned the Baby Boomer generation in particular because they lived through the color transition, during which the purchase of a color set gave them the exact same channels they had before in glorious color, while making it painfully obvious which stations were still broadcasting in black and white. The digital transition is far different, requiring separate digital channels and only offering (compared to color anyway) far more subtle improvements in the picture. Also said generation is getting older, and their vision is starting to fade.
I have no idea how much power your AGP card used, but unless it was a gaming rig in its glory days, the CPU probably absorbs most of the power, especially since you mentioned that it is a Pentium 4. I would see if there are any power-saving features in your BIOS and enable them, undervolt your processor to just the speed that you need, and get a cheap PCI video card for when problems occur. I've never used the serial port for diagnostics, but I don't think it will help much if you ever run into a situation where your system won't boot.
Just out of curiosity, how many of these households actually received HD programming as well as owned an HD set? I'm willing to bet that most of the Baby Boomer houses with HDTVs in them actually are hooked up to analog cable or to an STB via composite video or even RF, especially since every other TV upgrade in the lives of these customers was a hack to the existing NTSC system, requiring no further upgrades then the set itself.
The huge percentage of HDTVs does not surprise me, given the heavy (and somewhat misleading) marketing, the digital switchover confusion, and the inability to find any SD sets in most big box stores.
By 1991 composite inputs on TV's were common enough that nintendo included a composite cable by default with the SNES, any RF connection was separate, but they still sold plenty of those since as I've mentioned in this discussion that many game machines are connected to a cheaper, less technically capable set than a family's main set
What SNES did you buy? Mine only came with an RF switch.
If prisoners are profitable or even pay for themselves then it becomes easier and perhaps more profitable to lock people up rather than carefully evaluate the laws that put them there.
No need for that. The feelgoods people get for "putting another man behind bars" already makes it easier.
You make a good point, except you wouldn't be protecting society by putting people in jail for 6 months if they're caught texting, you'd be bankrupting society because it's so expensive to put someone in jail.
Not that the possibility of bankrupting society for putting non-violent offenders in prison has caused people to stop arguing for such things in the past.
Which is why every GPS receiver for the car I have come across has a disclaimer that tells you that you should not adjust this thing while driving the car, and require you to acknowledge the warning by tapping the "accept" button every tine it turns on.
Disabling input while moving doesn't take into account the possibility that someone other than the driver is entering information into the device.
A lot of the time you can't pull over. Unless it's on a freeway, a lot of the time there isn't enough space to pull over, so the only option is to ignore the call.
I don't think it's very fair to judge based on the action itself, but whether said action is causing obvious problems, such as swerving. If they are doing distracting things and it isn't affecting their driving at all (they key phrase being "at all"), is there a problem? What if they are doing it at a traffic stop? For that matter, how do you know they were doing it, other than taking your own eyes off the road to see into their windows?
Plus, I honestly don't understand why receiving calls is considered so dangerous while on the road. Text messaging is a different beast entirely, one that requires your full attention, especially when they are being sent. But unless you are one of those people who can't drive and listen to a conversation in the car or the sound system, then I don't see why receiving a phone call is any more dangerous. The most dangerous part is getting the phone out in the first place, which is easily solved by putting the thing somewhere easily accessible. Placing calls is a bit riskier, but knowing the number and where your thumb is for dialing it without having to look at the phone, as well as things like voice dialing, make this less of a problem.
I have heard many claims about the OTA signal being better. I have seen the signal from OTA stations in my area and a local cable provider, and I honestly can't tell the difference. They both look like crap, especially the SD channels.
Maybe it's the local affiliate. Or maybe it's just my expectations of an artifact-free picture after a decade of DVDs.
Easy for an experienced computer user, yes. We can just look up on the internet which registry key needs to be changed, and to what, and then we do it. For most users this is too much, and the registry is pretty scary to them.
Of course, you could also just hold down the shift key.
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
You are assuming competence in a public high school administration.
It's still a problem because now your recordings will suffer from generation loss due to the conversion to analog and back again.
Not to mention that fact that it will now become impossible to watch any channels from cable the way people have been doing so for the last 2 decades: plug the cable straight into the set. "Cable-ready" TV sets started coming into existence precisely so that people could avoid the stupid box and watch the channels right on the set. It appears that cable companies are poised to take that away, even for sets that are perfectly capable of receiving the digital signal. Almost every ATSC TV set made and sold today works with clear QAM, since it isn't much of a hassle to implement and it's beneficial to do so for the customer. Cable companies have always been adamant about encrypting their signals on the digital tier, but until now you could still get the analog feed on any set or tuner you choose. Now it appears they want to take that away too.
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Does this mean that my Windows 3.1 box will finally get the DST update?
3) I'm a snake
5) I live in a data-center
Huh?
Until we can make the jump to digital textbooks, regardless of where the money comes from, I don't think changing the licensing is going to make enough of the difference to shift the paradigm to more affordable/available textbooks.
I disagree. Case in point: public domain books.
Public domain books are dirt cheap, regardless of whether they are of the electronic or the dead tree variety. Why? Remember that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, and like all monopolies, the monopolist has the ability to set the price. But once the monopoly vanishes, suddenly market forces kick in, and books only cost what supply and demand dictate they should cost. Now, freely-licensed books are not exactly the same as public domain, but in practice they are similar, the biggest differences being attribution and the possibility of a copyleft. Neither one is as huge of a hurdle for a company who wishes to publish cheap books as the full-on copyright system is.
No, a bill such as this won't endanger publishing companies... publishing companies have endangered themselves by pissing off their customers with insanely high pricing.
No, they haven't. Every attempt to secure the cheaper alternative for textbooks fails for one of several reasons:
1. Planned obsolescence of the original edition (see the posts above me for a more elaborate explanation of this). In particular, the changing of textbook problems and the unwillingness of the professor to use an alternative way to assess students (such as custom problems written by the professor himself/herself), as well as online stuff that only works once and therefore kills any chance of resale of the textbook. regardless of its edition status.
2. So-called "cheap" textbook sites not having much difference at all in the price of the textbook verses that set in the bookstore, or even in some cases actually costing more than what the bookstore charges.
3. The unwillingness of the bookstore to make any real difference on pricing of used and new books, buying back books for less than 20% of what they cost new, or even outright refusing to buy or sell used books entirely.
The result: while theoretically students have a choice in where to purchase textbooks, in practice this is irrelevant because outside factors mandate the latest edition, and most places seem to charge the same amount.
To make college so that everyone can graduate, you need to dumb down the material significantly, so the truly gifted get screwed twice -- 1) Their degree means nothing because everyone else had one and 2) they got a lousy education because the professors had to simplify everything so that the dumbasses could pass.
See also: American public high school.
Well, it's not like they haven't tried before.
The MPEG-LA license only protects you against the MPEG-LA members. In no way does it provide any sort of guarantee that someone who isn't in MPEG-LA won't start suing at any point in time. The argument against Theora in this regard can really be made against any codec.
As for your "safe" codecs, MPEG-1 may not be patentable my MPEG-LA's standards anymore, but that doesn't mean someone hasn't patented some part of the format at a later time than the standard came out, thus making the patent still valid today. Would such a patent pass the test of prior art? It depends on what they patented, but even if it didn't all it takes is for a patent grant by the USPTO to allow a lawsuit, and the patent must be invalidated afterwards. You still can get sued, even if the claim can be found baseless.
The BBC may have done research about Dirac and came up with nothing, but are they more open about what exactly they did than Xiph? If they are, please give a link showing what you considered acceptable for Dirac but not for Theora.
CAPTCHAs can be defeated right now by using mechanical turk or social engineering to get humans to solve the CAPTCHAs for the spammers.
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
How so? The ability to modify your software and study the source code isn't useful to non-developers, but everyone can distribute.
The same set will tune in both HD and ST content, so you can compare the two signals side-by-side ... and the difference between SD and full HD is like night and day.
Apparently not to everyone. I have repeatedly demonstrated the different formats of the same channel on the same set to some people and the only thing they notice is the pillerboxing of the SD broadcast.
Seriously, do Apple give out free tee-shirts every time someone uses their trademarks to describe everyday items?
Quite the contrary. Apple is far more likely to send out free cease-and-desist letters. If everyone uses "iPod" to describe every single digital audio player on the market, there is no longer any trademark, hence why retailers are sure to always say "iPod and MP3 players" or "MP3 and iPod" or "digital audio and iPod" in their marketing.
No doubt Apple loves the free publicity, but that will swiftly end the moment people start referring to their Zunes as "iPods."
I never said that they couldn't receive an HD broadcast, just that most of them are hooked up to receive the SD broadcast, and probably most of the TV owners think that what they are watching is in fact HD. Just because they have the hardware doesn't mean they set it up correctly, and remember 18% of customers can't tell the difference anyway, so they probably will remain blissfully unaware until someone notices the hookup and tells them.
I mentioned the Baby Boomer generation in particular because they lived through the color transition, during which the purchase of a color set gave them the exact same channels they had before in glorious color, while making it painfully obvious which stations were still broadcasting in black and white. The digital transition is far different, requiring separate digital channels and only offering (compared to color anyway) far more subtle improvements in the picture. Also said generation is getting older, and their vision is starting to fade.
I have no idea how much power your AGP card used, but unless it was a gaming rig in its glory days, the CPU probably absorbs most of the power, especially since you mentioned that it is a Pentium 4. I would see if there are any power-saving features in your BIOS and enable them, undervolt your processor to just the speed that you need, and get a cheap PCI video card for when problems occur. I've never used the serial port for diagnostics, but I don't think it will help much if you ever run into a situation where your system won't boot.
Course nowadays you can buy relatively inexpensive 15-19" 1080i/720p sets with HDMI and component inputs that are basically monitors with a tuner.
Um, why? At that size, how could there be much benefit from having 1080i, other then sitting right in front of the TV?
Just out of curiosity, how many of these households actually received HD programming as well as owned an HD set? I'm willing to bet that most of the Baby Boomer houses with HDTVs in them actually are hooked up to analog cable or to an STB via composite video or even RF, especially since every other TV upgrade in the lives of these customers was a hack to the existing NTSC system, requiring no further upgrades then the set itself.
The huge percentage of HDTVs does not surprise me, given the heavy (and somewhat misleading) marketing, the digital switchover confusion, and the inability to find any SD sets in most big box stores.
By 1991 composite inputs on TV's were common enough that nintendo included a composite cable by default with the SNES, any RF connection was separate, but they still sold plenty of those since as I've mentioned in this discussion that many game machines are connected to a cheaper, less technically capable set than a family's main set
What SNES did you buy? Mine only came with an RF switch.
If prisoners are profitable or even pay for themselves then it becomes easier and perhaps more profitable to lock people up rather than carefully evaluate the laws that put them there.
No need for that. The feelgoods people get for "putting another man behind bars" already makes it easier.
You make a good point, except you wouldn't be protecting society by putting people in jail for 6 months if they're caught texting, you'd be bankrupting society because it's so expensive to put someone in jail.
Not that the possibility of bankrupting society for putting non-violent offenders in prison has caused people to stop arguing for such things in the past.
Which is why every GPS receiver for the car I have come across has a disclaimer that tells you that you should not adjust this thing while driving the car, and require you to acknowledge the warning by tapping the "accept" button every tine it turns on.
Disabling input while moving doesn't take into account the possibility that someone other than the driver is entering information into the device.
A lot of the time you can't pull over. Unless it's on a freeway, a lot of the time there isn't enough space to pull over, so the only option is to ignore the call.
I don't think it's very fair to judge based on the action itself, but whether said action is causing obvious problems, such as swerving. If they are doing distracting things and it isn't affecting their driving at all (they key phrase being "at all"), is there a problem? What if they are doing it at a traffic stop? For that matter, how do you know they were doing it, other than taking your own eyes off the road to see into their windows?
Plus, I honestly don't understand why receiving calls is considered so dangerous while on the road. Text messaging is a different beast entirely, one that requires your full attention, especially when they are being sent. But unless you are one of those people who can't drive and listen to a conversation in the car or the sound system, then I don't see why receiving a phone call is any more dangerous. The most dangerous part is getting the phone out in the first place, which is easily solved by putting the thing somewhere easily accessible. Placing calls is a bit riskier, but knowing the number and where your thumb is for dialing it without having to look at the phone, as well as things like voice dialing, make this less of a problem.
Punitive "justice" is not justice. Revenge makes nobody better. Will it deter even one crime?
I am extremely glad I live on another continent - you are not welcome to mine.
Isn't your last statement in reaction to the comment above you, as unenforceable as it may be, an act of revenge?
I have heard many claims about the OTA signal being better. I have seen the signal from OTA stations in my area and a local cable provider, and I honestly can't tell the difference. They both look like crap, especially the SD channels.
Maybe it's the local affiliate. Or maybe it's just my expectations of an artifact-free picture after a decade of DVDs.
Easy for an experienced computer user, yes. We can just look up on the internet which registry key needs to be changed, and to what, and then we do it. For most users this is too much, and the registry is pretty scary to them.
Of course, you could also just hold down the shift key.
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
You are assuming competence in a public high school administration.
It's still a problem because now your recordings will suffer from generation loss due to the conversion to analog and back again.
Not to mention that fact that it will now become impossible to watch any channels from cable the way people have been doing so for the last 2 decades: plug the cable straight into the set. "Cable-ready" TV sets started coming into existence precisely so that people could avoid the stupid box and watch the channels right on the set. It appears that cable companies are poised to take that away, even for sets that are perfectly capable of receiving the digital signal. Almost every ATSC TV set made and sold today works with clear QAM, since it isn't much of a hassle to implement and it's beneficial to do so for the customer. Cable companies have always been adamant about encrypting their signals on the digital tier, but until now you could still get the analog feed on any set or tuner you choose. Now it appears they want to take that away too.