VHS destroys Hollywood. Horseless carriage destroys buggywhip biz. Craigslist kills newspaper classifieds. Rise of city-states and domesticated livestock reduces esteem of hunters. And many more...
When I was in dial-up tech support in the late 90s, we would occasionally get customers who were furious because "my business depends on the internet". Of course we couldn't tell customers what we really thought, so we would all stand outside on break, and be like "your business ha-hah, depends on ha-ha, the INTERNET???". "Well then, you should not have depended on a single provider, if it was really that critical".
It's one thing for some idiot pre-bubble day trader who fancied himself a "business man" to not understand that. In this case, it's a whole region. OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Maybe they're where we were in the 90s. It seems like the whole network would go dark every few weeks or so back then. In the call center they would put up a big sign that said something like "MAE East is down". I haven't seen anything like that for a while. Maybe they'll put in some redundant routes after this, which is probably what happened here.
If I had two strands of magnets, arranged with random orders of polarity, identical strands would be able to stick together along the entire length in a "head to tail" fashion. Dissimilar strands would have "weak spots" where they didn't want to stick together. If you wiggled them, they'd be more likely to come aparts.
At the molecular level, electrical forces (analogous to the magetic attraction above) and thermal forces (analogous to the wiggling) dominate but the analogy is similar. This just doesn't seem like such an amazing thing to me.
Come on, let's try it. It probably won't be as cool as using mouse traps and ping-pong balls to demonstrate chain reactions; but it might still be interesting.
Convert the C&D to plain text and run diff against a stock C&D previously published by the same firm. Can they copyright that? I bet they can't. And if they start writing unique C&Ds to make it harder, then fine. Let the lawyers get a taste of their own medicine, namely that of being forced to do a lot of extra work for no good reason.
Truer words never spoken. I was at UVa from 1990-1993, as this case wound its way through the court. I was a fairly strong "Campus Christian" at the time, and have saved two of the several thousand copies of the subject material among my collectable items, which reminds me that I should probably put them in envelopes and label them because if you didn't know what they were you'd just toss them.
3. Death of the registered person means death of the copyright (you can't encourage dead people to make new works no matter how hard you try)
Do you hear that? It's the sound of hired goons stroking their weapons. What creative person in their right mind would want to provide a motive for their own murder? BTW, I didn't write any of this. I left my laptop for a few minutes in the coffee shop and some homeless guy came up and used it.
IIRC, the standard excuse for life+70 was that it was the Berne convention. The phrase "harmonization with Europe" was used to defend it. So what's all this about the US being the one driving life+70? Yes, it was Bono, Valenti et. al., who drove it; but life+70 wasn't their original creation, was it?
Feh. If it isn't worth my time to raise another support issue, it's definitely not worth my time to sue. I'm disinclined towards litigiousness anyway. I think it's a big part of what's wrong with the US.
OK, I'll bite. Because, in my case, a Yahoo music subscription allows me to have thousands of tracks for a little over $100/yr, and it would have cost $0.99/track to buy them. It made good sense for me because otherwise I wouldn't have much of a music collection. I fit into that part of the market that's willing to pay less than the supply price for music. Before the advent of online subscription, I had only a handful of CDs that I picked up for $3/each at the Salvation Army thrift store.
There just isn't that much music or video that I actually want to pay very much for, just to have it lying around all the time.
Now, why did I say "made good sense"?
Well, let me tell you about Yahoo's software. It's really just a skin over Windows Media Player, and they can't get it right. There are tracks on my PC, and they mysteriously revert from Subscription to Stream at the drop of a hat. This is the latest problem. Before that, It was an "upgrade" that simply broke the whole system. I had to kvetch on an online forum before Yahoo sent me their magic link to revert.
This latest glitch is it for me. I am DONE with YM. It was good while it lasted. When I tried the logical step of "update license", it did nothing. The only way to "fix" the problem is to re-download all those tracks.
Fortunately, the true value for most of my content is in the metadata--the artists, songs, years of publication, etc. and the playlists. There are ways to backup this metadata, and if I ever find another service that has RELIABLE software, or better yet, something without any DRM at all, I will be able to restore the list. I still think it was better than paying $0.99/track to Apple. Those $0.99/tracks are DRM'd too, aren't they? At least, AFAIK, Apple's implementation isn't as brain-dead as Yahoo's; but their price point is too high for me. I just can't see spending $2000+ to get the collection I want. I gambled something like $200 over the course of my Yahoo subscription, and lost; but it didn't seem like such a bad bet.
This sounds a lot like those electronic wireless coasters that restaurants have been using for years. You're re-purposing a general-purpose device (a phone) to do what the special-purpose device (the coaster) already does.
Usually the coasters are used to buzz you at the bar or wherever, to let you know your table is ready. I've also seen them used after you've paid to let you know your food has been prepared. All they're doing is replacing the register with a web site, and programming the coaster functionality into a phone.
Just imagine living on a planet orbiting a star, so far from any galaxy or other stars that the night sky has no visible objects in it. What if your planet was the only one and you had no moon? Yeah, the odds are low, but there's nothing that says it's impossible. Imagine civilization without the inspiration of stars and astronomy--unless somebody invented a telescope powerful enough for astronomy, but without stars to inspire them in the first place, would that happen? And even if it did, they'd only see galaxies, not other stars. Would such a society be able to figure out where they were, and come to grips with it? Would they conclude that life could only form far away from galactic centers? Would they ever come up with "Star Trek" or "Star Wars".
At least we can conceive of a multi-generation ship voyaging to the nearest stars at attainable speeds. The poor souls on that isolated world, if it existed, would have a much more daunting task.
They're worried about competition? As in BUSINESS competition? This kind of tech makes me worry more about competition in the true Darwinian sense of the word. What happens when "the Microsoft of DNA" codes an airborn AIDS virus into the system? Kinda puts all that Wall Street crap into perspective, doesn't it?
Much more subtle than the aforementioned rifle, not as tricky as a crossbow. There's no projectile left behind. The downside is that if you start a fire you're an arsonist.
Really, they should just update local noise ordinances to stop this. In fact, if the noise ordinance has language that refers to the distance at which the sound is audible, these devices may already be illegal.
My first computer was a TI-99/4A in Jr. High or very early HS. The BASIC was apparently compiled and then executed, so long programs took a while (I couldn't verify that, see below). There was none of the PEEK and POKE to memory that I read about in magazines. The long interpretation phase didn't matter, because I couldn't save programs. Allegedly, you could unlock the memory and gain the ability to add peripherals, but only by purchasing a bulky "expansion box" that cost $1000. The TI had been a Christmas present, IIRC. I tried to love it, and failed. I spent a significant ammount of time just *begging* my folks for a C-64. When the price fell to $399, I got one, and the rest is history.
Unless your folks had money to burn and shelled out for the full system, you missed out.
PEEK, POKE, assembly language, interpreted BASIC (it really made more sense for those systems), and the wonderful graphics and sound that you could *control* without having to have any special keys to unlock the machine. Oh, and you could buy a fat little book (The C-64 Programmer's Reference Manual?) that told you more than you would ever need to know about what was mapped to what inside the machine. It even described the 6502 instruction set. God bless them! There was nothing like that for the TI. The C-64 was a work of art. The TI was like, trying to bring the world of business or something to the home. Even the name sounded like some kind of government form.
I happily hacked on the C-64 for several years all through highschool, and a bit into college.
It's hard enough to find *people* who are interesting. Not impossible, mind you; but there are an awful lot of dolts out there. We'll have to *surpass* the quality of humanity before we produce robots that don't fail the "intesting" QC check at unacceptable levels. It's not a total loss though. The failures might be useful as politicians, supermodels, talk-show hosts, morning DJs, etc.
It implies that in order to detect spam, you are relying on "the spam target". Thus, in order for the system to "work", some people have to "do their duty" and receive lots of spam. It reminds me of using the cigarette tax to pay for health care. To improve the overall health of the population, "just smoke more".
You might argue that if they can increae the accuracy of detection, it's good. It seems likely that the spammers will just increase the volume of spam, bringing us back to square one.
Homer: [gasps] Look at these low, low prices on famous brand-name electronics! Bart: Don't be a sap, Dad. These are just crappy knock-offs. Homer: Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny.
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Suits get to uphold two abuse-prone causes for action in one fell swoop. Well done, ol' pal, well done. See you at Davos.
I use WPA. I know it can't be GEt V1AgrA N()W cracked. I made sure this thing was set up GET YOUR p3n!s enlarged NOW!!! as it should be.
VHS destroys Hollywood. Horseless carriage destroys buggywhip biz. Craigslist kills newspaper classifieds. Rise of city-states and domesticated livestock reduces esteem of hunters. And many more...
When I was in dial-up tech support in the late 90s, we would occasionally get customers who were furious because "my business depends on the internet". Of course we couldn't tell customers what we really thought, so we would all stand outside on break, and be like "your business ha-hah, depends on ha-ha, the INTERNET???". "Well then, you should not have depended on a single provider, if it was really that critical".
It's one thing for some idiot pre-bubble day trader who fancied himself a "business man" to not understand that. In this case, it's a whole region. OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Maybe they're where we were in the 90s. It seems like the whole network would go dark every few weeks or so back then. In the call center they would put up a big sign that said something like "MAE East is down". I haven't seen anything like that for a while. Maybe they'll put in some redundant routes after this, which is probably what happened here.
If I had two strands of magnets, arranged with random orders of polarity, identical strands would be able to stick together along the entire length in a "head to tail" fashion. Dissimilar strands would have "weak spots" where they didn't want to stick together. If you wiggled them, they'd be more likely to come aparts.
At the molecular level, electrical forces (analogous to the magetic attraction above) and thermal forces (analogous to the wiggling) dominate but the analogy is similar. This just doesn't seem like such an amazing thing to me.
Come on, let's try it. It probably won't be as cool as using mouse traps and ping-pong balls to demonstrate chain reactions; but it might still be interesting.
This is the worst ruling I've heard of this morning
Wow. What's the worst ruling you've heard all year? Haha, I know what you meant; but the set-up was too good to resist.
Convert the C&D to plain text and run diff against a stock C&D previously published by the same firm. Can they copyright that? I bet they can't. And if they start writing unique C&Ds to make it harder, then fine. Let the lawyers get a taste of their own medicine, namely that of being forced to do a lot of extra work for no good reason.
Truer words never spoken. I was at UVa from 1990-1993, as this case wound its way through the court. I was a fairly strong "Campus Christian" at the time, and have saved two of the several thousand copies of the subject material among my collectable items, which reminds me that I should probably put them in envelopes and label them because if you didn't know what they were you'd just toss them.
3. Death of the registered person means death of the copyright (you can't encourage dead people to make new works no matter how hard you try)
Do you hear that? It's the sound of hired goons stroking their weapons. What creative person in their right mind would want to provide a motive for their own murder? BTW, I didn't write any of this. I left my laptop for a few minutes in the coffee shop and some homeless guy came up and used it.
IIRC, the standard excuse for life+70 was that it was the Berne convention. The phrase "harmonization with Europe" was used to defend it. So what's all this about the US being the one driving life+70? Yes, it was Bono, Valenti et. al., who drove it; but life+70 wasn't their original creation, was it?
Feh. If it isn't worth my time to raise another support issue, it's definitely not worth my time to sue. I'm disinclined towards litigiousness anyway. I think it's a big part of what's wrong with the US.
OK, I'll bite. Because, in my case, a Yahoo music subscription allows me to have thousands of tracks for a little over $100/yr, and it would have cost $0.99/track to buy them. It made good sense for me because otherwise I wouldn't have much of a music collection. I fit into that part of the market that's willing to pay less than the supply price for music. Before the advent of online subscription, I had only a handful of CDs that I picked up for $3/each at the Salvation Army thrift store.
There just isn't that much music or video that I actually want to pay very much for, just to have it lying around all the time.
Now, why did I say "made good sense"?
Well, let me tell you about Yahoo's software. It's really just a skin over Windows Media Player, and they can't get it right. There are tracks on my PC, and they mysteriously revert from Subscription to Stream at the drop of a hat. This is the latest problem. Before that, It was an "upgrade" that simply broke the whole system. I had to kvetch on an online forum before Yahoo sent me their magic link to revert.
This latest glitch is it for me. I am DONE with YM. It was good while it lasted. When I tried the logical step of "update license", it did nothing. The only way to "fix" the problem is to re-download all those tracks.
Fortunately, the true value for most of my content is in the metadata--the artists, songs, years of publication, etc. and the playlists. There are ways to backup this metadata, and if I ever find another service that has RELIABLE software, or better yet, something without any DRM at all, I will be able to restore the list. I still think it was better than paying $0.99/track to Apple. Those $0.99/tracks are DRM'd too, aren't they? At least, AFAIK, Apple's implementation isn't as brain-dead as Yahoo's; but their price point is too high for me. I just can't see spending $2000+ to get the collection I want. I gambled something like $200 over the course of my Yahoo subscription, and lost; but it didn't seem like such a bad bet.
This sounds a lot like those electronic wireless coasters that restaurants have been using for years. You're re-purposing a general-purpose device (a phone) to do what the special-purpose device (the coaster) already does.
Usually the coasters are used to buzz you at the bar or wherever, to let you know your table is ready. I've also seen them used after you've paid to let you know your food has been prepared. All they're doing is replacing the register with a web site, and programming the coaster functionality into a phone.
I'm inclined to file this with "one-click".
Just imagine living on a planet orbiting a star, so far from any galaxy or other stars that the night sky has no visible objects in it. What if your planet was the only one and you had no moon? Yeah, the odds are low, but there's nothing that says it's impossible. Imagine civilization without the inspiration of stars and astronomy--unless somebody invented a telescope powerful enough for astronomy, but without stars to inspire them in the first place, would that happen? And even if it did, they'd only see galaxies, not other stars. Would such a society be able to figure out where they were, and come to grips with it? Would they conclude that life could only form far away from galactic centers? Would they ever come up with "Star Trek" or "Star Wars".
At least we can conceive of a multi-generation ship voyaging to the nearest stars at attainable speeds. The poor souls on that isolated world, if it existed, would have a much more daunting task.
Brilliant! We'll do the whole project with TDD. The Pb rocket is just part of the process.
They're worried about competition? As in BUSINESS competition? This kind of tech makes me worry more about competition in the true Darwinian sense of the word. What happens when "the Microsoft of DNA" codes an airborn AIDS virus into the system? Kinda puts all that Wall Street crap into perspective, doesn't it?
Much more subtle than the aforementioned rifle, not as tricky as a crossbow. There's no projectile left behind. The downside is that if you start a fire you're an arsonist.
Really, they should just update local noise ordinances to stop this. In fact, if the noise ordinance has language that refers to the distance at which the sound is audible, these devices may already be illegal.
I guess for the 2.0 version of Gandhi, they decided that passive resistance wasn't the best design.
My first computer was a TI-99/4A in Jr. High or very early HS. The BASIC was apparently compiled and then executed, so long programs took a while (I couldn't verify that, see below). There was none of the PEEK and POKE to memory that I read about in magazines. The long interpretation phase didn't matter, because I couldn't save programs. Allegedly, you could unlock the memory and gain the ability to add peripherals, but only by purchasing a bulky "expansion box" that cost $1000. The TI had been a Christmas present, IIRC. I tried to love it, and failed. I spent a significant ammount of time just *begging* my folks for a C-64. When the price fell to $399, I got one, and the rest is history.
Unless your folks had money to burn and shelled out for the full system, you missed out.
PEEK, POKE, assembly language, interpreted BASIC (it really made more sense for those systems), and the wonderful graphics and sound that you could *control* without having to have any special keys to unlock the machine. Oh, and you could buy a fat little book (The C-64 Programmer's Reference Manual?) that told you more than you would ever need to know about what was mapped to what inside the machine. It even described the 6502 instruction set. God bless them! There was nothing like that for the TI. The C-64 was a work of art. The TI was like, trying to bring the world of business or something to the home. Even the name sounded like some kind of government form.
I happily hacked on the C-64 for several years all through highschool, and a bit into college.
It's hard enough to find *people* who are interesting. Not impossible, mind you; but there are an awful lot of dolts out there. We'll have to *surpass* the quality of humanity before we produce robots that don't fail the "intesting" QC check at unacceptable levels. It's not a total loss though. The failures might be useful as politicians, supermodels, talk-show hosts, morning DJs, etc.
It implies that in order to detect spam, you are relying on "the spam target". Thus, in order for the system to "work", some people have to "do their duty" and receive lots of spam. It reminds me of using the cigarette tax to pay for health care. To improve the overall health of the population, "just smoke more".
You might argue that if they can increae the accuracy of detection, it's good. It seems likely that the spammers will just increase the volume of spam, bringing us back to square one.
The schedule will slip several years, and they will end up dealing with the Unix time problem half way through the mission.
Yeah, I'd seen those before; but I thought they were a bug in the system. I Guess not.
You haven't really achieved anything on Slashdot until you've ended up with a final moderation of (Score 4, Troll).