Some people would pay less. Others would pay more. On average, people would probably pay more because of the extra overhead of monitoring bandwidth. There are also the issues of having to pay more money because somebody else wants to ping you. I think the fairest approach is to pay for the width of your pipe, the way most DSL companies work.
What happens to the hundreds of dollars you shelled out to by a nice, shiny new TiVo system? It's pretty useless without the service, and there's no way you'd be able to recoup all of your losses selling it. Even worse, as someone else pointed out, what if you purchased a lifetime subscription? The worst thing that could happen to them in this case is that you suck up less of their resources or someone else gets your unit and pays them again for a subscription. You can cancel their service in protest, but it doesn't even touch their revenue stream.
The changes seem fairly harmless, but I don't think it's ethical to change something like this. I don't know much about torts, but could something like this even be considered a breach of contract?
Ideally, TiVo should give all existing customers the opportunity to opt-in to a broadening of the rights TiVo wants to reserve. If they want to send a customer a T-Shirt, as RB cites as an example, they should ask that customer's permission to give their partner the personal information, not simply assume that the customer won't mind. If they want to offer DirecTV and TiVo charges on a single bill, they should ask the customer's permission.
Privacy Policies should be binding contracts between companies and their consumers, and should not change except by mutual consent of both parties.
I respect TiVo for being one of the few companies that seems to want to do right by their customers in this regard, but their policies aren't perfect. It doesn't take a genius to see that innocuous changes like these could lead to a slippery slope where what a company promises is meaningless.
Not necessarily. Judges don't like frivolous lawsuits any more than anybody else. DC has yet to say what it is they want people to stop doing or what the legal justification is. The important thing is to know your legal rights. DC could have any case summarily dismissed and then find themselves on the wrong end of counter-litigation if they pursue this. For that matter, they might even be accused of harassment if they continue with the threats. The bad publicity wouldn't help, either. DC's lawyers know they haven't got a legal leg to stand on, which is why the C&D letters are so vaguely worded. I don't think it would take much time or money to fight off a legal case, and you may even be able to retain a lawyer simply by allowing them to represent you in a countersuit.
I live in Tucson as well, but went with cable because of the DSL stories I've heard, plus my one bad experience on the west coast. US West customer relations has never been good, and I doubt that moving to Qwest helps much. @Home service doesn't seem to be as blazingly fast around here as it was at my last apartment, supposedly because they want a few hundred more subscribers before they upgrade the line (sorry, I have no hard numbers since I'm at work). Still, in my experience, for personal use cable headaches aren't nearly as bad as DSL ones.
A black hole isn't just a homogeneous mass. Theoretically, all the mass collapses to a singularity. The "boundary" of a black hole is the event horizon, or the distance where light can no longer escape the black hole's gravitational pull.
The answer is that Google is spidering Yahoo!. Google provides a free way for people to submit URLs to be spidered. Yahoo! is entitled to make use of this just like everybody else.
You're making unproven accusations based on someone's potential to misuse information? Isn't that exactly what the MPAA is doing with DeCSS? Or is it OK because Amazon is the Bad Guy and geeks are the Good Guys? The fact of the matter is that Amazon did something entirely within their rights, and you have no way of knowing whether they were going to do something wrong with the information they gathered.
Personally, I think the information was more likely gathered to find optimal price points for their products and had nothing to do with profiling. Why? Because it would be a PR disaster if it became permanent policy to price based on profiles, and the guys at Amazon are smart enough to know that it would be discovered. It may very well be that they experimented with both overcharging and undercharging, and that everybody wound up getting an undercharged price. Boo hoo.
They conducted a pricing experiment and they ensured that nobody was adversely affected by it. That's all we know for sure right now. If you don't like the price they charge, it's your right as a consumer to shop somewhere else.
The vector->raster:: polygon->voxel doesn't hold very well in most rendering cases.
The reason raster graphics are superior to vector graphics is that you can see filled regions in raster graphics that can't be rendered in vector graphics. Moving to the polygon->voxel relationship extends this to 3D, but you're still relying on representing a visual response, which remains a 2D domain.
In plainer English, you can't tell whether an opaque object is filled or hollow by just looking at it. All you will see is its surface. Since the vast majority of objects represented in a typical 3D scene are opaque objects, so voxels by themselves don't buy you much.
Terrain represented as voxels is a bit of a special case. You typically only have one boundary between landscape and air, so the data set compresses very nicely. There are also all kinds of speedups you can use if you know you're rendering terrain. Rendering general voxels is generally a lot more expensive.
There are other phenomena that are better rendered with voxels than polygons. Trees and clouds come immediately to mind. Nevertheless, it's hard to beat polygons as the best representation of most objects.
- Mike
Moreover, if you have a lower-priced ticket but need the flexibility of a higher-priced ticket, you don't need to pay the full price of the the higher-priced ticket. You just pay the difference.
Aren't we overreacting just a little bit here? I'd hardly conclude that the government is "spying upon the web browsing habits of people viewing its site," based merely on the fact that Doubleclick ads are served. There is no evidence that Doubleclick is giving any information to the federal government. I have no use for Doubleclick or Big Brother(tm), but let's not start swinging at shadows here.
IANAL (are we sick of hearing that yet?), but my understanding is this. Entrapment occurs if you actually provide someone with incentive to do something illegal ("Hey, here's $1000. Go buy me some crack with half of it, and you can keep the other half for yourself!"). If you give someone a chance to commit a crime, but don't provide them with any incentive beyond just the opportunity, it's not entrapment.
This will fix some problems, but not all. Some problems can't be fixed by a hot patch. The code that applies the hot patches, the native ISA, something that causes the chip to catch fire after 100 hours of use...
As I remember, back in their early days, McAfee (later Network Associates), paid money for previously undiscovered viruses. They may have been doing exactly what you described, though with (arguably) better intentions.
Or, for that matter, from looking at the URL for the Kerberos document. Supposedly the way to exchange files is through something like FTP now, but exactly how would that work if URLs are disabled as well?
Is there any legal reason an OSS Kerberos implementor simply couldn't implement the M$ extensions? That isn't a republication of the spec as far as I can tell...
To the best of my knowledge, Amazon hasn't really changed its online music samples in the last couple of years. How can they claim Amazon was in violation of a 1999 patent without shooting themselves in the foot and showing prior art?
I can't agree with this sentiment in this case. The person asking the question isn't asking anybody to do his homework for him. If a student walked into a library and asked the librarian where to find some books, should the librarian tell him to 'do his own homework'? Asking people for information is a perfectly valid form of research, as long as the person writing it up cites sources appropriately. Expecting someone to do their own homework is one thing, but expecting them to work in a vacuum really isn't necessary.
You never mentioned what kind of software you are developing.
Personally, I'd probably go with Java, or C/C++ and OpenGL if you're looking for broad support. Others have mentioned some toolkits, such as Qt, that exist on multiple platforms. Naturally, if you want to use one of those, make sure it's ported to all of your targets.
Another alternative is to roll your own toolkit for OS-specific services and build your apps on top of that. This has the advantage that the library is no larger or more complex than you need it to be
Slashdot Mirror
Greenoch strikes again!
Some people would pay less. Others would pay more. On average, people would probably pay more because of the extra overhead of monitoring bandwidth. There are also the issues of having to pay more money because somebody else wants to ping you. I think the fairest approach is to pay for the width of your pipe, the way most DSL companies work.
What happens to the hundreds of dollars you shelled out to by a nice, shiny new TiVo system? It's pretty useless without the service, and there's no way you'd be able to recoup all of your losses selling it. Even worse, as someone else pointed out, what if you purchased a lifetime subscription? The worst thing that could happen to them in this case is that you suck up less of their resources or someone else gets your unit and pays them again for a subscription. You can cancel their service in protest, but it doesn't even touch their revenue stream.
Ideally, TiVo should give all existing customers the opportunity to opt-in to a broadening of the rights TiVo wants to reserve. If they want to send a customer a T-Shirt, as RB cites as an example, they should ask that customer's permission to give their partner the personal information, not simply assume that the customer won't mind. If they want to offer DirecTV and TiVo charges on a single bill, they should ask the customer's permission.
Privacy Policies should be binding contracts between companies and their consumers, and should not change except by mutual consent of both parties.
I respect TiVo for being one of the few companies that seems to want to do right by their customers in this regard, but their policies aren't perfect. It doesn't take a genius to see that innocuous changes like these could lead to a slippery slope where what a company promises is meaningless.
Not necessarily. Judges don't like frivolous lawsuits any more than anybody else. DC has yet to say what it is they want people to stop doing or what the legal justification is. The important thing is to know your legal rights. DC could have any case summarily dismissed and then find themselves on the wrong end of counter-litigation if they pursue this. For that matter, they might even be accused of harassment if they continue with the threats. The bad publicity wouldn't help, either. DC's lawyers know they haven't got a legal leg to stand on, which is why the C&D letters are so vaguely worded. I don't think it would take much time or money to fight off a legal case, and you may even be able to retain a lawyer simply by allowing them to represent you in a countersuit.
I live in Tucson as well, but went with cable because of the DSL stories I've heard, plus my one bad experience on the west coast. US West customer relations has never been good, and I doubt that moving to Qwest helps much. @Home service doesn't seem to be as blazingly fast around here as it was at my last apartment, supposedly because they want a few hundred more subscribers before they upgrade the line (sorry, I have no hard numbers since I'm at work). Still, in my experience, for personal use cable headaches aren't nearly as bad as DSL ones.
If only it were that easy. The laws that would result from such a treaty would probably only provide further restrictions, not guarantee freedoms.
Better still, copyright whatever information is encoded in the barcode. Then accuse DC of violating the DMCA.
A black hole isn't just a homogeneous mass. Theoretically, all the mass collapses to a singularity. The "boundary" of a black hole is the event horizon, or the distance where light can no longer escape the black hole's gravitational pull.
The answer is that Google is spidering Yahoo!. Google provides a free way for people to submit URLs to be spidered. Yahoo! is entitled to make use of this just like everybody else.
Personally, I think the information was more likely gathered to find optimal price points for their products and had nothing to do with profiling. Why? Because it would be a PR disaster if it became permanent policy to price based on profiles, and the guys at Amazon are smart enough to know that it would be discovered. It may very well be that they experimented with both overcharging and undercharging, and that everybody wound up getting an undercharged price. Boo hoo.
They conducted a pricing experiment and they ensured that nobody was adversely affected by it. That's all we know for sure right now. If you don't like the price they charge, it's your right as a consumer to shop somewhere else.
The vector->raster :: polygon->voxel doesn't hold very well in most rendering cases.
The reason raster graphics are superior to vector graphics is that you can see filled regions in raster graphics that can't be rendered in vector graphics. Moving to the polygon->voxel relationship extends this to 3D, but you're still relying on representing a visual response, which remains a 2D domain.
In plainer English, you can't tell whether an opaque object is filled or hollow by just looking at it. All you will see is its surface. Since the vast majority of objects represented in a typical 3D scene are opaque objects, so voxels by themselves don't buy you much.
Terrain represented as voxels is a bit of a special case. You typically only have one boundary between landscape and air, so the data set compresses very nicely. There are also all kinds of speedups you can use if you know you're rendering terrain. Rendering general voxels is generally a lot more expensive.
There are other phenomena that are better rendered with voxels than polygons. Trees and clouds come immediately to mind. Nevertheless, it's hard to beat polygons as the best representation of most objects.
- Mike
Moreover, if you have a lower-priced ticket but need the flexibility of a higher-priced ticket, you don't need to pay the full price of the the higher-priced ticket. You just pay the difference.
Aren't we overreacting just a little bit here? I'd hardly conclude that the government is "spying upon the web browsing habits of people viewing its site," based merely on the fact that Doubleclick ads are served. There is no evidence that Doubleclick is giving any information to the federal government. I have no use for Doubleclick or Big Brother(tm), but let's not start swinging at shadows here.
IANAL (are we sick of hearing that yet?), but my understanding is this. Entrapment occurs if you actually provide someone with incentive to do something illegal ("Hey, here's $1000. Go buy me some crack with half of it, and you can keep the other half for yourself!"). If you give someone a chance to commit a crime, but don't provide them with any incentive beyond just the opportunity, it's not entrapment.
This will fix some problems, but not all. Some problems can't be fixed by a hot patch. The code that applies the hot patches, the native ISA, something that causes the chip to catch fire after 100 hours of use...
The naming sounds like a tribute to Terry Pratchett. Vorbis and Nanny Ogg are characters in his Discworld series.
- Mike
As I remember, back in their early days, McAfee (later Network Associates), paid money for previously undiscovered viruses. They may have been doing exactly what you described, though with (arguably) better intentions.
Or, for that matter, from looking at the URL for the Kerberos document. Supposedly the way to exchange files is through something like FTP now, but exactly how would that work if URLs are disabled as well?
Is there any legal reason an OSS Kerberos implementor simply couldn't implement the M$ extensions? That isn't a republication of the spec as far as I can tell...
It's open source. Moreover, the back-end and front-end are separated. Why not write a better front-end if you don't like the current one?
Now the satellite is going to get slashdotted, and the whole thing is going to come crashing down on our heads.
To the best of my knowledge, Amazon hasn't really changed its online music samples in the last couple of years. How can they claim Amazon was in violation of a 1999 patent without shooting themselves in the foot and showing prior art?
I can't agree with this sentiment in this case. The person asking the question isn't asking anybody to do his homework for him. If a student walked into a library and asked the librarian where to find some books, should the librarian tell him to 'do his own homework'? Asking people for information is a perfectly valid form of research, as long as the person writing it up cites sources appropriately. Expecting someone to do their own homework is one thing, but expecting them to work in a vacuum really isn't necessary.
Personally, I'd probably go with Java, or C/C++ and OpenGL if you're looking for broad support. Others have mentioned some toolkits, such as Qt, that exist on multiple platforms. Naturally, if you want to use one of those, make sure it's ported to all of your targets.
Another alternative is to roll your own toolkit for OS-specific services and build your apps on top of that. This has the advantage that the library is no larger or more complex than you need it to be
Of course, that's more work...