One of the coolest web forms I've ever seen was the one for the United Airlines frequent flyer program. They had a dropdown menu with something like 100 possible titles to choose from, with everything from the standard Mr/Mrs/Dr through less common ones like Swami and Vice Adm all the way up to very rare ones like Prince and Cardinal. Somebody must have had a lot of fun compiling the list of possible titles.
It might also be amusing to use this as a way of tracking who's sold your address. So when you get a letter addressed to "Lord High Poobah Public" you know that it was real.com that sold your name but when it's addressed to "Darth Public" it was porn.com.
I'm starting to have problems because of server-based virus scanning and Klez. Some server-based scanners will helpfully send a return email to anyone who sent a virus containing email so that they can fix their system. Unfortunately, they apparently haven't figured out yet that Klez is forging the From: field, so I've started receiving emails erroneously informing me that I've sent someone an infected attachment.
But they can still link the club card to you via the info on your credit/debit card.
So pay cash. It's not that hard, you know, and if you keep your receipt you can still have records of your spending habits. If you really value your privacy, cash is definitely the way to go.
Exactly! Everyone seems to accept that there are prettier looking icon sets out there than the current defaults. Just change to a better looking set and the problem is solved. You could do this very easily at zero performance cost, as long as the new icons were the same size and graphics type as the current butt ugly set.
Good Icons, window decoration, styles, fonts, everything, at the expense of more memory and cpu usage. A bit like windows, really, but simple and elegant, like windows 2000, not garish and irritating like XP.
I'm not sure if I'd describe Win2000 as simple and elegant, though I think that the icons are a distinct improvement from the old NT set. The menus fading in instead of appearing is simply obnoxious. It looks cool the first time it happens, but after than it just slows me down waiting for the menu to show up. Turning menu fading off is the second thing I do with Win2000 when I start working on a new box, after setting the file manager to sane settings (classic style, open folders in the same window, show hidden files, always show extensions, use the toolbar, show full path, detail view).
Is it just me, or is this whole thing about KDE being ugly a tempest in a teapot? I thought that it was quite clear from Mr. Decrem's comments that his biggest objection to KDE was that the icons were ugly, not that the software itself was in any way bad. He specifically said that he thought that KDE could improve itself a lot just by making the icons prettier. I'm inclined to agree, and I'll even admit that one reason that I chose (and since have stuck with) GNOME over KDE was that I thought that KDE just wasn't aesthetically pleasing. Is there really a need to write an elaborate reply article just to answer the complaint that the icons could use some work?
Unless Linux's setup has gotten astronomically better since Red Hat 5.0 (which, btw, was very easy to use), I don't see how it competes with Microsoft's 'inferior' setup.
So you're basing your opinion of Linux installers on a system from 4 years ago? Things have changed so radically since then it's difficult to make a comparison. I installed both Windows and Linux on my current machine, and I personally found the Red Hat 7.2 installer to be at least as easy to use, if not easier, than the XP installer. It didn't hiccup once, autodetected hardware that I had to set up manually in XP, and didn't require a reboot until the one into the finished system. That's the expected norm for Linux systems these days, and most distributions live up to it.
... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation...
which part of that clause did you miss? the BSA, if we go by the letter of the constitution, would have to have definite knowledge of infringement to be able to swear an oath to it--in EVERY CASE, they have none (else why would they need to do an audit?).
I think that you're the one who's missing how things work. Probable cause means only that they have a good reason to think that something illegal is taking place. It does not require conclusive evidence. That is, after all, the whole point of a search warrant- to gather evidence. The authorities discover evidence that there's more evidence to be found at a particular location. They get a warrant and search for that additional evidence. The quality of information they need can vary quite a bit, but as long as it's done in good faith they won't get in trouble even if they find nothing.
When the BSA does it, their evidence that there's been a violation is likely to be from an insider. The BSA simply swears that a current or former employee has told them that there's unlicensed software being used in location X. They then ask for a warrant to search for that violation. Sadly, the chances are pretty good that they can swear to that completely honestly, too. They vigorously encourage disgruntled employees to rat out their employers, and I have little doubt that there are plenty of people who are happy to do so. The BSA has limited resources, so they can pursue only cases where they actually do have cause in the form of an anonymous tip.
But really, how bizarre, posting something in a low level printer file format. We'll have people posting documents in PCL5 next.
What's so strange about it? Postscript has the great advantage that it's actually designed to describe exactly what's on the page. That lets you produce very nicely formatted documents that will render exactly the same way on any computer, which makes it the output format of choice for programs like TeX. It's great because it's easy to print, so people who prefer to see things in dead tree format can do so easily. It can be processed into PDF very easily, too, so people who like PDFs won't have any problems. Sounds like a good choice to me.
Of course the big point that's missed in all of this is that the RIAA continues to mislead people and lie outright about the legality of copying. Non-commercial duplication of CDs is specifically allowed under current copyright law, and the CDs used in stand-alone CD copiers even include a royalty payment in their cost that goes to the RIAA. But Hillary Rosen continues to make it sound as though copying for your friends is illegal. But the mentions of the fact that it actually is legal gets only a short mention down at the bottom of the article.
If they BSA/MS is going to come knocking on my door they better come with a federal warrant to search everything or all they are going to get is my middle finger in there face. And I don't even have anything to hide, it is just a matter of principal.
Fine, they'll have one the next day. Check out those Microsoft license agreements. When you agree to them, you agree to give MS the right to enter your property and search for license compliance. All they have to do is to get one person to say that there's some Microsoft software installed anywhere in your organization and they can charge right in and check you for compliance. After all, if there's MS software on your box, you either accepted the license agreement (which gives them the right to audit you) or you installed it illegitimately (which is illegal). Either way you lose.
Not really, because this is enforced from the purchaser's end, not from the manufacturers end. It's not whether software written in country X will have the rules applied to it but whether software sold there will. It doesn't matter where the writer is, just where the user is. Of course if a country that's a small player in the software purchasing market tries this it probably won't work because companies will simply refuse to sell there. But if the United States or the European Union decide to try it, there will be a huge impact. The US and EU are a big enough markets that all of the big players would be forced to bring up their quality because they couldn't afford to be shut out.
I know this will probably get modded into the ground, but what about Microsoft? Nimda and Code Red, which exclusively affected IIS on Win2K did "millions of dollars" in damage. If software companies are found to be liable for their hole-laden sotware, I would think Microsoft should be on the top of the list.
Bad example. The patch for this was available for a month before the exploits started rolling in.
It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of test case that needs to be looked at when discussing legal liability for software. If the patch is available, how much of the responsibility is on the administrator to apply it and how much is on the software company not to have written the buggy code in the first place? You can certainly argue that the availability of the patch should exempt the manufacturer from liability, but just how long does the patch have to be available to count? Is it acceptable if the patch is only available one month before the exploiting code shows up? One week? One day? One hour? Or should software authors have an affirmative responsibility to send patches to users, the same way that car manufacturers have to contact their buyers in the event of a recall? Who is liable when the patch is available but unapplied is the really interesting issue, not who is liable when no patch is available.
Prior art is a nice theory, but unfortunately it seems to be dying in practice. Look at how many patents are discussed on Slashdot where there's clearly prior art but the patent examiners granted the patent anyway. Having a previously granted patent seems like about the only way that you can fight against that.
I would be interested to know whether a childs ability to learn how to use computers (or other technology) is to do with their natural inquisitiveness and readiness to try new things(as opposed to the technophobia that many older people show), or whether there is some sort of 'critical period' (such as for syntax) after which it becomes more difficult to learn such things.
I'm pretty sure that it's the inquisitiveness, rather than something structural. I find that I learn a hell of a lot more than my coworkers about just about everything that we do at my work, and it's because I learn differently. Like those kids, I spend time poking around at things trying to figure out what they can do, while most other people only try to learn something new when they need it to accomplish some goal or other. Then it winds up that when they need to learn, they usually come to me because either I'll know it already or I'll be willing to poke around a bit and figure out how to do it. If you maintain that childlike love of new things and willingness to spend time exploring them, you can keep learning that way well into your adulthood.
Please allow the irony nazi to point out that, by filing for a patent, NIIT has made deploying kiosks in third world countries even less simple.
Not necessarily. It will only cause problems if they adopt an obnoxious licensing policy. OTOH, if they pass out royalty free licenses to anyone who asks, they make things much simpler because then nobody else can patent the things and start charging outrageous fees. Defensive patents (i.e. ones used to prevent others from attacking you with their patents) are not a bad thing.
Its for the package, not just the hardware. It could even include tax and shipping.
It probably also includes the cost of the engineers to install it, the building it's going to be put in, the power conditioning and backup, and a service contract.
They were cracking down on cheating. What the student did in this case was against the academic rules for the course. Now it's possible, even probably, that those rules are arbitrary and unfair, but what he did violated them. The proposed punishment, failing him in the class for cheating on one assignment that constituted 2% of his final grade, sounds excessive to me, but there does need to be some punishment for cheating.
I haven't had the opportunity to use Galeon or any of the other Gecko spin-offs, but I wonder (aloud) whether these projects adequately address this central concern and suitably differentiate themselves by targeting distinct user populations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't most of these spin-offs begun to slim down Mozilla (in terms of required install packages, memory load, etc.) and haven't most retained that goal as their chief objective?
I can only speak about Galeon, which is the only spin-off that I've used, but to some extent the way that they slim down Mozilla does result in differentiation. One of the very heavyweight features of Mozilla is the XUL interface design. It's great for what Mozilla is trying to do- be as cross-platform as possible- but it means that Moz doesn't use native widgets. A lot of the slimming down is simply wrapping Gecko in the native widget set for whatever environment it's being adapted to, but that does tend to make the derivative distinct from other derivatives.
I love Galeon- and use it almost exclusively on my home system- because it's fast and consistent with the rest of my desktop. It sounds like a stupid little thing, and maybe it is, but the consistency is valuable to me. I like having the exact same file dialogs, buttons, and other behavior as the rest of the system. It's one less thing that I have to learn.
Rei's voice is really weird in that part, however... it sounds like a man talking or something, not the regular Rei voice.
Actually, I really liked the change in Rei's voice. That voice is much closer to the rest of Megumi Hayashibara's roles. If you've heard her as Ranma Saotome, Faye Valentine, etc. it's as though she's flashing a "Hi! This really is me." Amazing.
FWIW, I'm not a lawywer; I'm a scientist (as you could find out by bothering to check my user info).
The world would be far better off if you all died and people reverted back to common sense.
You miss the point, though. Lawyers are the result of people lacking common "sense" (I'd say common decency is more like it) not the cause. If all of the lawyers died tomorrow, there would still be people trying to weasel out of their promises and screw their neighbors. As my.sig points out, the problem is not slimy lawyers, it's slimy non-lawyers who hire lawyers to do their dirty work.
Nice to see a lawyer doing something community-oriented for a change (even if they are just trying to make a profit from it)."
Is it too much to ask for people to drop the incessant lawyer bashing? Lawyers as a group spend a lot of time working on "community-oriented" work. They are expected to devote at least part of their time and effort doing pro bono work, i.e. representing cases in the public interest, frequently for people who otherwise couldn't afford representation. The law is one of the last careers where this is an ordinary expectation.
Just out of curiosity, how many copies of the human genome would anyone currently be trying to store on one computer at this time?
A whole bunch. One of the difficulties of sequencing the genome is that it's somewhat error prone, which requires that the same region be sequenced several times to make sure that you've gotten it right. The chunks that can be sequenced conveniently are also very small compared to the whole thing, so it's necessary to sequence in overlapping chunks and put it together like a puzzle. The combination of those things means that each base in the genome must be sequenced something like 10 times to get a reliable result. That gets you up to 10 genomes off the bat. Add in the fact that each bit of sequencing information will have meta-data (i.e. where that snippet came from, which machine generated it and when, etc.) associated with it and things fluff up even more. When you start piecing the data together it will require a lot of processing power, so it may wind up being a good idea to use algorithms that trade storage space for processing time, and that can inflate your storage needs even more.
Even once you have the genome as a finished product, you may very well want to have more than one genome available. An important, but less well publicised, part of the genome project was the decision to sequence the complete genomes of several other organisms at the same time. Those include four species particularly popular among biologists: the mouse, the fruit fly, a round worm used in a lot of research, and baker's yeast. Doing genome to genome comparisons is a very good way of finding the areas that are biologically important because they'll remain similar across organisms. As you can imagine, doing a complete chunk by chunk comparison between two 3 GB data sets can chew up a lot of resources, and having fast access to a huge memory space like that is going to make it a lot easier and faster.
But why use the humane genome as a reference? Is that REALLY more intuitive to most people? Does anyone (besides geneticists) really understand how much information is in the human genome?
Of course most non-biologists don't really understand just how big the human genome is. That's why they're using it as a reference. The genome is actually smaller than many people think (about 3 GB at one base per byte, but trivially compressible to 1/4 that), which means that expressing things in terms of the genome is a good way making your equipment sound more impressive than it actually is.
WTF are you talking about? The poster specifies that it's fine to use the new version as long as it's supported. That is to say that it's unreasonable to prevent him from using the new version as long as it's accessable to others. That's a completely different thing from what MS did, which was to implement a new way of doing things specifically to prevent others from supporting it. There's nothing at all hypocritical about saying 1 and not 2.
I recently wrote to my Congressman, and the point that I tried to stress was that Hollywood has already broken its promises on this score. To help get the DMCA passed, they said that the lack of digital copyright protections were preventing them from distributing content on-line. Once that was passed, they said, they'd be able to start the on-line revolution. Instead, they absolutely refused to do anything on line and only used the DMCA to shut down potential competitors. Today we have no idea whether legitimate on-line distribution channels would suffer from excessive piracy because there haven't been enough legitimate on-line distribution channels to find out. Before Hollywood demands more protections, they should have to follow through on their previous promises and see whether or not piracy is really a problem in the face of legitimate sources of on-line content.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the coolest web forms I've ever seen was the one for the United Airlines frequent flyer program. They had a dropdown menu with something like 100 possible titles to choose from, with everything from the standard Mr/Mrs/Dr through less common ones like Swami and Vice Adm all the way up to very rare ones like Prince and Cardinal. Somebody must have had a lot of fun compiling the list of possible titles.
It might also be amusing to use this as a way of tracking who's sold your address. So when you get a letter addressed to "Lord High Poobah Public" you know that it was real.com that sold your name but when it's addressed to "Darth Public" it was porn.com.
I'm starting to have problems because of server-based virus scanning and Klez. Some server-based scanners will helpfully send a return email to anyone who sent a virus containing email so that they can fix their system. Unfortunately, they apparently haven't figured out yet that Klez is forging the From: field, so I've started receiving emails erroneously informing me that I've sent someone an infected attachment.
So pay cash. It's not that hard, you know, and if you keep your receipt you can still have records of your spending habits. If you really value your privacy, cash is definitely the way to go.
Exactly! Everyone seems to accept that there are prettier looking icon sets out there than the current defaults. Just change to a better looking set and the problem is solved. You could do this very easily at zero performance cost, as long as the new icons were the same size and graphics type as the current butt ugly set.
I'm not sure if I'd describe Win2000 as simple and elegant, though I think that the icons are a distinct improvement from the old NT set. The menus fading in instead of appearing is simply obnoxious. It looks cool the first time it happens, but after than it just slows me down waiting for the menu to show up. Turning menu fading off is the second thing I do with Win2000 when I start working on a new box, after setting the file manager to sane settings (classic style, open folders in the same window, show hidden files, always show extensions, use the toolbar, show full path, detail view).
Is it just me, or is this whole thing about KDE being ugly a tempest in a teapot? I thought that it was quite clear from Mr. Decrem's comments that his biggest objection to KDE was that the icons were ugly, not that the software itself was in any way bad. He specifically said that he thought that KDE could improve itself a lot just by making the icons prettier. I'm inclined to agree, and I'll even admit that one reason that I chose (and since have stuck with) GNOME over KDE was that I thought that KDE just wasn't aesthetically pleasing. Is there really a need to write an elaborate reply article just to answer the complaint that the icons could use some work?
So you're basing your opinion of Linux installers on a system from 4 years ago? Things have changed so radically since then it's difficult to make a comparison. I installed both Windows and Linux on my current machine, and I personally found the Red Hat 7.2 installer to be at least as easy to use, if not easier, than the XP installer. It didn't hiccup once, autodetected hardware that I had to set up manually in XP, and didn't require a reboot until the one into the finished system. That's the expected norm for Linux systems these days, and most distributions live up to it.
I think that you're the one who's missing how things work. Probable cause means only that they have a good reason to think that something illegal is taking place. It does not require conclusive evidence. That is, after all, the whole point of a search warrant- to gather evidence. The authorities discover evidence that there's more evidence to be found at a particular location. They get a warrant and search for that additional evidence. The quality of information they need can vary quite a bit, but as long as it's done in good faith they won't get in trouble even if they find nothing.
When the BSA does it, their evidence that there's been a violation is likely to be from an insider. The BSA simply swears that a current or former employee has told them that there's unlicensed software being used in location X. They then ask for a warrant to search for that violation. Sadly, the chances are pretty good that they can swear to that completely honestly, too. They vigorously encourage disgruntled employees to rat out their employers, and I have little doubt that there are plenty of people who are happy to do so. The BSA has limited resources, so they can pursue only cases where they actually do have cause in the form of an anonymous tip.
What's so strange about it? Postscript has the great advantage that it's actually designed to describe exactly what's on the page. That lets you produce very nicely formatted documents that will render exactly the same way on any computer, which makes it the output format of choice for programs like TeX. It's great because it's easy to print, so people who prefer to see things in dead tree format can do so easily. It can be processed into PDF very easily, too, so people who like PDFs won't have any problems. Sounds like a good choice to me.
Of course the big point that's missed in all of this is that the RIAA continues to mislead people and lie outright about the legality of copying. Non-commercial duplication of CDs is specifically allowed under current copyright law, and the CDs used in stand-alone CD copiers even include a royalty payment in their cost that goes to the RIAA. But Hillary Rosen continues to make it sound as though copying for your friends is illegal. But the mentions of the fact that it actually is legal gets only a short mention down at the bottom of the article.
Fine, they'll have one the next day. Check out those Microsoft license agreements. When you agree to them, you agree to give MS the right to enter your property and search for license compliance. All they have to do is to get one person to say that there's some Microsoft software installed anywhere in your organization and they can charge right in and check you for compliance. After all, if there's MS software on your box, you either accepted the license agreement (which gives them the right to audit you) or you installed it illegitimately (which is illegal). Either way you lose.
Not really, because this is enforced from the purchaser's end, not from the manufacturers end. It's not whether software written in country X will have the rules applied to it but whether software sold there will. It doesn't matter where the writer is, just where the user is. Of course if a country that's a small player in the software purchasing market tries this it probably won't work because companies will simply refuse to sell there. But if the United States or the European Union decide to try it, there will be a huge impact. The US and EU are a big enough markets that all of the big players would be forced to bring up their quality because they couldn't afford to be shut out.
It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of test case that needs to be looked at when discussing legal liability for software. If the patch is available, how much of the responsibility is on the administrator to apply it and how much is on the software company not to have written the buggy code in the first place? You can certainly argue that the availability of the patch should exempt the manufacturer from liability, but just how long does the patch have to be available to count? Is it acceptable if the patch is only available one month before the exploiting code shows up? One week? One day? One hour? Or should software authors have an affirmative responsibility to send patches to users, the same way that car manufacturers have to contact their buyers in the event of a recall? Who is liable when the patch is available but unapplied is the really interesting issue, not who is liable when no patch is available.
Prior art is a nice theory, but unfortunately it seems to be dying in practice. Look at how many patents are discussed on Slashdot where there's clearly prior art but the patent examiners granted the patent anyway. Having a previously granted patent seems like about the only way that you can fight against that.
I'm pretty sure that it's the inquisitiveness, rather than something structural. I find that I learn a hell of a lot more than my coworkers about just about everything that we do at my work, and it's because I learn differently. Like those kids, I spend time poking around at things trying to figure out what they can do, while most other people only try to learn something new when they need it to accomplish some goal or other. Then it winds up that when they need to learn, they usually come to me because either I'll know it already or I'll be willing to poke around a bit and figure out how to do it. If you maintain that childlike love of new things and willingness to spend time exploring them, you can keep learning that way well into your adulthood.
Not necessarily. It will only cause problems if they adopt an obnoxious licensing policy. OTOH, if they pass out royalty free licenses to anyone who asks, they make things much simpler because then nobody else can patent the things and start charging outrageous fees. Defensive patents (i.e. ones used to prevent others from attacking you with their patents) are not a bad thing.
It probably also includes the cost of the engineers to install it, the building it's going to be put in, the power conditioning and backup, and a service contract.
They were cracking down on cheating. What the student did in this case was against the academic rules for the course. Now it's possible, even probably, that those rules are arbitrary and unfair, but what he did violated them. The proposed punishment, failing him in the class for cheating on one assignment that constituted 2% of his final grade, sounds excessive to me, but there does need to be some punishment for cheating.
I can only speak about Galeon, which is the only spin-off that I've used, but to some extent the way that they slim down Mozilla does result in differentiation. One of the very heavyweight features of Mozilla is the XUL interface design. It's great for what Mozilla is trying to do- be as cross-platform as possible- but it means that Moz doesn't use native widgets. A lot of the slimming down is simply wrapping Gecko in the native widget set for whatever environment it's being adapted to, but that does tend to make the derivative distinct from other derivatives.
I love Galeon- and use it almost exclusively on my home system- because it's fast and consistent with the rest of my desktop. It sounds like a stupid little thing, and maybe it is, but the consistency is valuable to me. I like having the exact same file dialogs, buttons, and other behavior as the rest of the system. It's one less thing that I have to learn.
Actually, I really liked the change in Rei's voice. That voice is much closer to the rest of Megumi Hayashibara's roles. If you've heard her as Ranma Saotome, Faye Valentine, etc. it's as though she's flashing a "Hi! This really is me." Amazing.
FWIW, I'm not a lawywer; I'm a scientist (as you could find out by bothering to check my user info).
You miss the point, though. Lawyers are the result of people lacking common "sense" (I'd say common decency is more like it) not the cause. If all of the lawyers died tomorrow, there would still be people trying to weasel out of their promises and screw their neighbors. As my .sig points out, the problem is not slimy lawyers, it's slimy non-lawyers who hire lawyers to do their dirty work.
Is it too much to ask for people to drop the incessant lawyer bashing? Lawyers as a group spend a lot of time working on "community-oriented" work. They are expected to devote at least part of their time and effort doing pro bono work, i.e. representing cases in the public interest, frequently for people who otherwise couldn't afford representation. The law is one of the last careers where this is an ordinary expectation.
A whole bunch. One of the difficulties of sequencing the genome is that it's somewhat error prone, which requires that the same region be sequenced several times to make sure that you've gotten it right. The chunks that can be sequenced conveniently are also very small compared to the whole thing, so it's necessary to sequence in overlapping chunks and put it together like a puzzle. The combination of those things means that each base in the genome must be sequenced something like 10 times to get a reliable result. That gets you up to 10 genomes off the bat. Add in the fact that each bit of sequencing information will have meta-data (i.e. where that snippet came from, which machine generated it and when, etc.) associated with it and things fluff up even more. When you start piecing the data together it will require a lot of processing power, so it may wind up being a good idea to use algorithms that trade storage space for processing time, and that can inflate your storage needs even more.
Even once you have the genome as a finished product, you may very well want to have more than one genome available. An important, but less well publicised, part of the genome project was the decision to sequence the complete genomes of several other organisms at the same time. Those include four species particularly popular among biologists: the mouse, the fruit fly, a round worm used in a lot of research, and baker's yeast. Doing genome to genome comparisons is a very good way of finding the areas that are biologically important because they'll remain similar across organisms. As you can imagine, doing a complete chunk by chunk comparison between two 3 GB data sets can chew up a lot of resources, and having fast access to a huge memory space like that is going to make it a lot easier and faster.
Of course most non-biologists don't really understand just how big the human genome is. That's why they're using it as a reference. The genome is actually smaller than many people think (about 3 GB at one base per byte, but trivially compressible to 1/4 that), which means that expressing things in terms of the genome is a good way making your equipment sound more impressive than it actually is.
WTF are you talking about? The poster specifies that it's fine to use the new version as long as it's supported. That is to say that it's unreasonable to prevent him from using the new version as long as it's accessable to others. That's a completely different thing from what MS did, which was to implement a new way of doing things specifically to prevent others from supporting it. There's nothing at all hypocritical about saying 1 and not 2.
I recently wrote to my Congressman, and the point that I tried to stress was that Hollywood has already broken its promises on this score. To help get the DMCA passed, they said that the lack of digital copyright protections were preventing them from distributing content on-line. Once that was passed, they said, they'd be able to start the on-line revolution. Instead, they absolutely refused to do anything on line and only used the DMCA to shut down potential competitors. Today we have no idea whether legitimate on-line distribution channels would suffer from excessive piracy because there haven't been enough legitimate on-line distribution channels to find out. Before Hollywood demands more protections, they should have to follow through on their previous promises and see whether or not piracy is really a problem in the face of legitimate sources of on-line content.