TheCarp said:
"Funny, and I thought patents were designed to give inventors a limited monopoly to encourage them to publish ideas, rather than keeping them as trade secrets. So you could make money selling your own product, or licensing it to someone who can."
not anymore. the supreme court decided that only lawyers had the training to determine whether a product was infringing on a patent. since the penalties for infringing on a patent are greater if it's done willfully, engineers are no longer allowed to look at patents. if they did, then anything they make afterward could be construed as a willful patent violation.
clearly, microsoft's attitude is that if windows is going to be insecure, then all other oses ought to be insecure also. and they'll use their near monopoly on web browsers to make sure.
ah, but the new legislation the government is threatening to foist on us, the sssca, will do exactly that. it will ultimatly force a uniform digital rights management system down the throat of the computer industry.
when one of my collegues reviewed microtest's "zerver" products (they have a few with that name) back in june of 1999, the company was quite forthright in admitting it was a linux based device. check out one of our reviews here:
this is probably off topic but the efficient speedstream reminded me...
what should i do with my old speedstream dsl bridge? i was left with it after my dsl provider went belly up. i'm using a cable modem now and the speedstream is gathering dust and taking up space (good thing i kept the box). i don't supposed there's much of a market for these things on e-bay.
and i am too, since the broadcasters are collectively more powerful than the record manufacturers, particularly as more radio stations are owned by fewer companies.
record companies are VERY dependent on radio broadcasts in order to make hits. it's safe to say that without heavy airplay, even really good original songs can't rise on the charts. and radio broadcasters have forced the record companies to acknowledge their supremacy several times.
read these articles: http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/
now if radio stations have that much power, why are they whining about the RIAA and DMCA and all that crap? they ould get any record company to knuckle under by simply pulling new songs off the air for a few weeks. i can just see how the broadcasters could methodically go through each record company, denying them the airplay they need to generate hit songs until the company agrees to the radio stations' terms for internet streaming.
not that i agree that radio broadcasters should have that kind of power. concentration of power, political and economic, is going to be the core of all the controversial issues in the coming years.
still, i wonder what the big radio broadcasters are complaining about. they control the airwaves and the means by which most of the public is made aware of new music. they get paid promotional fees for putting songs on the air. maybe they're just waiting to see if the record companies catch on before pulling out their big guns.
anyone can clearly see this particular butter palm is the non-fuctioning display demo they use in comp usa. the real butter palms are kept in a refrigerator under the counter.
it is perfectly legal to make a copy of a record you own and burn that copy to cd.
however, and this is what one of the many suits against mp3.com was about, you have to make the copy from the record you own, not copy a recording made by someone else.
you know, this doesn't make much sense even if you say it twice.
if you own a recording of a song and your buddy owns a recording of the same song, you cannot legally have a copy of your buddy's recording. you can make a copy of the song, but you have to make it from your own copy.
and with the playstation's superior graphics, nethack could be fully rendered in 3d and i can live my dream of being chased through a dungeon by a huge 3d rendered ampersand.
Re:Star Trek similarities unsurprising.
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
i teleported home one night
with pam and sid and meg.
pam stole meggie's heart away
and i got sidney's leg.
thank you douglas adams.
funny thing is, gillette spent the better part of 15 years convincing everyone that a two bladed razor is the best thing. now they are telling us that two blades are no good and that three are better.
i think i'll wait 15 years for them to come out with their four blade razor.
ballmer's absolutely correct. government should not fund open source research. instead government should charge a license fee to companies that take advantage of government funded research.
i think the article got accc's complaint a little mixed up. the complaint is probably not about australian filmmakers not being able to distribute their product around the world. they can always remove regional coding to do that.
the complaint is about the fact that how commercial product is always coded and that australia's region 4 gets short shrift on releases and availablity. so australia only gets 750 dvd titles versus north america's 5000+ titles and region 4 dvds are relatively expensive because of the smaller quantities and the 'protected' market.
the question we should be asking now is whether we can expect chris carter to do any more series for fox after this.
think of all the things fox has done to carter. they sold the series to a fox owned cable network for a song (reducing carter's residuals in the process.) and cancelled a couple of his series without having given them even half a chance.
after those fiascos, i'd expect he's very reluctant to continue working for fox. so the next season of x-files may turn out to be the last one with carter's input. i wonder what he'll do next.
the strangest thing about what you're saying is that microsoft would very much like to sue users who switch to linux/bsd etc. but they couldn't get away with it and they know it. so what they do instead is send thinly veiled threats to peecee box builders so as to make sure every peecee box customer gets a licensed copy of windows.
look at how this bureaucrat hides a bad decision behind procedure...
"But district Superintendent John Fitzsimons said school officials followed disciplinary policies in this case, and although teachers and sdministrators are grieving the loss, they aren't responsible."
bureaucrats love "policies" for handling things. it lets them weasel out of bad decisions.
"it's not my fault the project went $30 billion over budget. we gave the contract to the lowest bidder." "it's not our fault 40 families got evicted. we followed our eviction procedure." "it's not our fault a sensitive little boy felt his life was ruined and commited suicide. we followed disciplinary procedure."
which is why things like "zero-tolerance" rules and "three strikes and your out" rules have to be abandoned. they are arbitary and have no relationship to how things actually work in the real world while at the same time let decision makers off the hook.
with all the bureaucrats doing their damndest to act like robots, we might as well let computers run the country.
"Shell decides to start selling gas for.30 per gallon. Great! Consumers love it, Ma and Pa love it, everyone's happy except for Shell's competition. They have to lower their prices to.30 per gallon in order to sell ANY gas at all. Now everyone knows that Shell is bleeding money because of this practice, but nobody cares because gas is so cheap. Soon, however, when the petro companies that don't have the cash to weather the storm are wiped out, Shell is going to raise the price of gas to $5.00 per gallon to make up it's losses. It's the oldest trick in the book. The company with the most reserves can engage in corporate attrition, knowing that their money will hold out longer than everyone elses. In then end, you will be sorry."
in fact, this has happened. or at least a variation of it. at the close of the 19th century standard oil managed to gain control of the delivery infrastructure for oil, eventually forcing nearly all its competitors out of business. that's what prompted the first anti-trust laws to be passed (you know, the ones that are not supposed to apply to microsoft).
if an industry ever got so concentrated as a result of price wars, then the anti-trust laws are supposed to kick in to break up the large companies and return competition to that industry.
it's a sure bet that as soon as internet explorer acheives a 90% or 95% market share and microsoft succeeeds in forcing the most significant websites to support only internet explorer then internet explorer will stop being a free add-on.
remember back in the early '90s when just about every computer came with the full microsoft office suite for "free"? once microsoft office became established as a monopoly, it stopped being free and became and $500 application suite.
what annoys me about tivo is not that they are agregating and selling viewer information, but that they make you pay for the priviledge - $10 per month or $120 per year. if our viewing habits are so important to them, they should give you the program information for free or pay you for the right to sell our viewing habits.
the other major change i want to see is a tivo with an ethernet port instead of a modem. i have a broadband line and would rather the gadget download the tv listings over that than make a phone call. i want to get rid of the plain old phone line and rely solely on my broadband line and cell phone instead.
i think you're forgetting about the copycode system being developed by cbs music shortly before the company was acquired by sony. as i recall, the system used a narrow notch filter to remove the sound at some high audio frequency, somewhere up around 14 khz i think. electronics manufacturers were to be required to install a detection circuit that would shut the recorder down when the copy code notch was detected.
until sony killed it, the only things preventing copy code from being forced on the consumer were objections from the audio electronics industry who didn't want to have to install additional electronics in their gadgets (and increase costs), a number of critics who noted that the copy code circuit could be activated by legitimate recordings (like a home recording of a piano solo) and the audiophile industry who complained about the audibility and poor sound quality of the supposedly inaudible notch.
somehow, i doubt that we'd end up with radically different processors.
on one hand, if everything electronic were zapped, we would have a chance at a fresh start, ignore all the mistakes, blind alleys and red herrings that have affected chip design in the last 50 years but...
there is still an enourmous body of knowledge and resources that has been built up around programming things like x86 processors and all the programming languages everyone has learned to hate. not to mention all the software on cd that would not get zapped by a big electromagnetic pulse. somehow, i think there would be a lot of resistance to the idea that all these resources should be abandoned in favor of completely new, albeit streamlined, designs.
actually, you can't be sued for slander (or libel) if it is clear that either your comments are your opinion only or if you can prove your comments are true facts.
on the other hand, if a former employer goes around making accusations to your current employer or prospective employer that causes you to lose a job or fail to get a job, then the former employer may be liable for damages. however, the threshold of prooof is high since you have to convince your current or prospective empolyer to testify and that your former employer behaved with malice.
readers may want to go to www.sorehands.com for a case study on someone dissing a former employer.
the blue riband is the award given to the fastest transatlantic ship. the subject of heated competition until the late 1950's, the blue riband is given only to real ships. they must be commercial vessels and have to complete the trip without refueling. this decision was made after a richard branson, owner of the virgin company, made a speedboat specifically designed to break the record. the virgin challanger ii had to be refuelled three times and had no purpose other that trying to take the blue riband.
the SS United States is the current westbound record holder. The record was set in July 1952 at 3days 12hours 12minutes at 34.51 knots.
The eastbound record was held by the ss United states for nearly 38 years until a hovercraft broke the record in 1990.
the current eastbound record holder is Catlink V, a 91 meter catamaran ferry which completed the trip in 2days 20hours 9minutes at 41.28 knots.
here's a site about the riband: http://www.blueriband.com/
Slashdot Mirror
TheCarp said:
"Funny, and I thought patents were designed to give inventors a limited monopoly to encourage them to publish ideas, rather than keeping them as trade secrets. So you could make money selling your own product, or licensing it to someone who can."
not anymore. the supreme court decided that only lawyers had the training to determine whether a product was infringing on a patent. since the penalties for infringing on a patent are greater if it's done willfully, engineers are no longer allowed to look at patents. if they did, then anything they make afterward could be construed as a willful patent violation.
clearly, microsoft's attitude is that if windows is going to be insecure, then all other oses ought to be insecure also. and they'll use their near monopoly on web browsers to make sure.
ah, but the new legislation the government is threatening to foist on us, the sssca, will do exactly that. it will ultimatly force a uniform digital rights management system down the throat of the computer industry.
when one of my collegues reviewed microtest's "zerver" products (they have a few with that name) back in june of 1999, the company was quite forthright in admitting it was a linux based device. check out one of our reviews here:
9 9/ june/4_2043.htm
http://www.imagingmagazine.com/db_area/archs/19
this is probably off topic but the efficient speedstream reminded me...
what should i do with my old speedstream dsl bridge? i was left with it after my dsl provider went belly up. i'm using a cable modem now and the speedstream is gathering dust and taking up space (good thing i kept the box). i don't supposed there's much of a market for these things on e-bay.
and i am too, since the broadcasters are collectively more powerful than the record manufacturers, particularly as more radio stations are owned by fewer companies.
record companies are VERY dependent on radio broadcasts in order to make hits. it's safe to say that without heavy airplay, even really good original songs can't rise on the charts. and radio broadcasters have forced the record companies to acknowledge their supremacy several times.
read these articles: http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/
now if radio stations have that much power, why are they whining about the RIAA and DMCA and all that crap? they ould get any record company to knuckle under by simply pulling new songs off the air for a few weeks. i can just see how the broadcasters could methodically go through each record company, denying them the airplay they need to generate hit songs until the company agrees to the radio stations' terms for internet streaming.
not that i agree that radio broadcasters should have that kind of power. concentration of power, political and economic, is going to be the core of all the controversial issues in the coming years.
still, i wonder what the big radio broadcasters are complaining about. they control the airwaves and the means by which most of the public is made aware of new music. they get paid promotional fees for putting songs on the air. maybe they're just waiting to see if the record companies catch on before pulling out their big guns.
anyone can clearly see this particular butter palm is the non-fuctioning display demo they use in comp usa. the real butter palms are kept in a refrigerator under the counter.
it is perfectly legal to make a copy of a record you own and burn that copy to cd.
however, and this is what one of the many suits against mp3.com was about, you have to make the copy from the record you own, not copy a recording made by someone else.
you know, this doesn't make much sense even if you say it twice.
if you own a recording of a song and your buddy owns a recording of the same song, you cannot legally have a copy of your buddy's recording. you can make a copy of the song, but you have to make it from your own copy.
excuse me, but my head is beginning to hurt.
on the other hand, nobody knows how to fly it and it doesn't really go anywhere of interest to non-zeppelinux fliers.
and with the playstation's superior graphics, nethack could be fully rendered in 3d and i can live my dream of being chased through a dungeon by a huge 3d rendered ampersand.
i teleported home one night with pam and sid and meg. pam stole meggie's heart away and i got sidney's leg. thank you douglas adams.
for more history, try univac memories http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/
an interesting site on the last days of big iron before the ascendency of minicomputers.
funny thing is, gillette spent the better part of 15 years convincing everyone that a two bladed razor is the best thing. now they are telling us that two blades are no good and that three are better.
i think i'll wait 15 years for them to come out with their four blade razor.
ballmer's absolutely correct. government should not fund open source research. instead government should charge a license fee to companies that take advantage of government funded research.
i think the article got accc's complaint a little mixed up. the complaint is probably not about australian filmmakers not being able to distribute their product around the world. they can always remove regional coding to do that.
the complaint is about the fact that how commercial product is always coded and that australia's region 4 gets short shrift on releases and availablity. so australia only gets 750 dvd titles versus north america's 5000+ titles and region 4 dvds are relatively expensive because of the smaller quantities and the 'protected' market.
the question we should be asking now is whether we can expect chris carter to do any more series for fox after this.
think of all the things fox has done to carter. they sold the series to a fox owned cable network for a song (reducing carter's residuals in the process.) and cancelled a couple of his series without having given them even half a chance.
after those fiascos, i'd expect he's very reluctant to continue working for fox. so the next season of x-files may turn out to be the last one with carter's input. i wonder what he'll do next.
the strangest thing about what you're saying is that microsoft would very much like to sue users who switch to linux/bsd etc. but they couldn't get away with it and they know it. so what they do instead is send thinly veiled threats to peecee box builders so as to make sure every peecee box customer gets a licensed copy of windows.
look at how this bureaucrat hides a bad decision behind procedure...
"But district Superintendent John Fitzsimons said school officials followed disciplinary policies in this case, and although teachers and sdministrators are grieving the loss, they aren't responsible."
bureaucrats love "policies" for handling things. it lets them weasel out of bad decisions.
"it's not my fault the project went $30 billion over budget. we gave the contract to the lowest bidder." "it's not our fault 40 families got evicted. we followed our eviction procedure." "it's not our fault a sensitive little boy felt his life was ruined and commited suicide. we followed disciplinary procedure."
which is why things like "zero-tolerance" rules and "three strikes and your out" rules have to be abandoned. they are arbitary and have no relationship to how things actually work in the real world while at the same time let decision makers off the hook.
with all the bureaucrats doing their damndest to act like robots, we might as well let computers run the country.
"Shell decides to start selling gas for .30 per gallon. Great! Consumers love it, Ma and Pa love it, everyone's happy except for Shell's competition. They have to lower their prices to .30 per gallon in order to sell ANY gas at all. Now everyone knows that Shell is bleeding money because of this practice, but nobody cares because gas is so cheap. Soon, however, when the petro companies that don't have the cash to weather the storm are wiped out, Shell is going to raise the price of gas to $5.00 per gallon to make up it's losses. It's the oldest trick in the book. The company with the most reserves can engage in corporate attrition, knowing that their money will hold out longer than everyone elses. In then end, you will be sorry."
in fact, this has happened. or at least a variation of it. at the close of the 19th century standard oil managed to gain control of the delivery infrastructure for oil, eventually forcing nearly all its competitors out of business. that's what prompted the first anti-trust laws to be passed (you know, the ones that are not supposed to apply to microsoft).
if an industry ever got so concentrated as a result of price wars, then the anti-trust laws are supposed to kick in to break up the large companies and return competition to that industry.
it's a sure bet that as soon as internet explorer acheives a 90% or 95% market share and microsoft succeeeds in forcing the most significant websites to support only internet explorer then internet explorer will stop being a free add-on.
remember back in the early '90s when just about every computer came with the full microsoft office suite for "free"? once microsoft office became established as a monopoly, it stopped being free and became and $500 application suite.
what annoys me about tivo is not that they are agregating and selling viewer information, but that they make you pay for the priviledge - $10 per month or $120 per year. if our viewing habits are so important to them, they should give you the program information for free or pay you for the right to sell our viewing habits.
the other major change i want to see is a tivo with an ethernet port instead of a modem. i have a broadband line and would rather the gadget download the tv listings over that than make a phone call. i want to get rid of the plain old phone line and rely solely on my broadband line and cell phone instead.
i think you're forgetting about the copycode system being developed by cbs music shortly before the company was acquired by sony. as i recall, the system used a narrow notch filter to remove the sound at some high audio frequency, somewhere up around 14 khz i think. electronics manufacturers were to be required to install a detection circuit that would shut the recorder down when the copy code notch was detected.
until sony killed it, the only things preventing copy code from being forced on the consumer were objections from the audio electronics industry who didn't want to have to install additional electronics in their gadgets (and increase costs), a number of critics who noted that the copy code circuit could be activated by legitimate recordings (like a home recording of a piano solo) and the audiophile industry who complained about the audibility and poor sound quality of the supposedly inaudible notch.
somehow, i doubt that we'd end up with radically different processors.
on one hand, if everything electronic were zapped, we would have a chance at a fresh start, ignore all the mistakes, blind alleys and red herrings that have affected chip design in the last 50 years but...
there is still an enourmous body of knowledge and resources that has been built up around programming things like x86 processors and all the programming languages everyone has learned to hate. not to mention all the software on cd that would not get zapped by a big electromagnetic pulse. somehow, i think there would be a lot of resistance to the idea that all these resources should be abandoned in favor of completely new, albeit streamlined, designs.
actually, you can't be sued for slander (or libel) if it is clear that either your comments are your opinion only or if you can prove your comments are true facts.
on the other hand, if a former employer goes around making accusations to your current employer or prospective employer that causes you to lose a job or fail to get a job, then the former employer may be liable for damages. however, the threshold of prooof is high since you have to convince your current or prospective empolyer to testify and that your former employer behaved with malice.
readers may want to go to www.sorehands.com for a case study on someone dissing a former employer.
the blue riband is the award given to the fastest transatlantic ship. the subject of heated competition until the late 1950's, the blue riband is given only to real ships. they must be commercial vessels and have to complete the trip without refueling. this decision was made after a richard branson, owner of the virgin company, made a speedboat specifically designed to break the record. the virgin challanger ii had to be refuelled three times and had no purpose other that trying to take the blue riband.
the SS United States is the current westbound record holder. The record was set in July 1952 at 3days 12hours 12minutes at 34.51 knots.
The eastbound record was held by the ss United states for nearly 38 years until a hovercraft broke the record in 1990.
the current eastbound record holder is Catlink V, a 91 meter catamaran ferry which completed the trip in 2days 20hours 9minutes at 41.28 knots.
here's a site about the riband: http://www.blueriband.com/