This is the kind of thing I was thinking of, where a random contributer gives something to an Alan Cox or other lieutentant of Linus and the patch gets rolled together whith a bunch of other patches into an "AC" patch and then the attribution gets muddled by Linus since he accepts the patch as a single block from Alan, with the assumption that he has written or at least vetted all the bits in it.
If what you say is true, then there is imperfect record keeping and its certainly is possible to substitute "Alan Cox" in the above paragraph for "IBM" or some other entity liable to submit a largish patch or patches where the submitter isn't necessarily the atomic entity that wrote the code.
It would also stand to reason that some plebian coder with access to the SCO source could use it as a basis for 'fixes' to the kernel and submit them through some 2nd or 3rd tier person who might submit a patch rollup to Linus who just merges it in under their name.
It would also stand to reason that the above plebian coder, anonymously submitting code, could actually be acting on a malicious basis, trying to poison the code by submitting non-original work.
What I don't get is what could have SCO have coded that Linux either did poorly or not at all, and was drop-in compatible with Linux? I would have presumed that the SCO code was architected entirely different and that perhaps there were some *algorithms* superior that those in Linux, actual code that could be copied line-by-line would have been next to impossible.
Is it possible to submit a patch to some backwater part of the kernel that improves upon something rather mundane, the kind of thing that doesn't get your picture on the "Top 10 Kernel Gurus" list and then have the identity of the submitter slowly slip away into the ether?
Or are the kernel submitters kept in some kind of list someplace along with the stuff they submitted?
Our parent entity moved to Peoplesoft a couple of years ago, which was basically good for us as it enabled us to stop using the DOS application from 1991 that we were still using.
While on a business trip to Orange County I ran into a "Peoplesoft struggles" newspaper article that detailed some horror stories I'd heard about Peoplesoft at the University of Minnesota and other Big 10 schools.
Essentially the University and the other schools were teaming up to tell Peoplesoft that it didn't work, they wouldn't pay, and they'd demand fixes and refunds as well -- it was *that* bad.
AFAIK, every huge software application has suck factors -- how the client software runs on desktops, bad scalability, weak performance, complicated and limited customization, terrible documentation, bad support and the chaotic process change required to work with the software.
But from what I had read, it sounded like Peoplsoft had not only those things but had completely *lied* about the capabilities and scalability of their software, but had run into institutions with the manpower, skill and time to document it against the claims made in writing by Peoplesoft.
Our own 'implenetation' of Peoplesoft is very limited and very ASP oriented (we run the client on about 5 PCs and it connects to the server in NYC or someplace) and hasn't been that bad, although I'm told by some of the suits that it's laughable because we have only a handful of even the HR modules available.
It does look cheap. You'd think that Corel Draw sales alone would make that investment worthwhile, although perhaps that's all that's of any real value there once you subtract Corel's debts.
Most of the outsourcing questions tend to hinge on obvious things like the direct wages paid to employees and "do they speak English" without focusing on the many hidden or hard to denominate costs on Western business doing business with non-Western countries, particularly outsourcing.
India has a number of advantages over many countries in direct labor costs and English proficiency, but a number of cultural liabilities as well. While the Czech Republic isn't Wisconsin, most Americans could easily go there or to any of the other east-bloc nations and conduct business far more easily than they could in India since there's a lot more cultural similarity.
The east bloc also has a stable political and military climate compared to India. The Czech Republic isn't on the edge of nuclear annihilation with Slovakia over some disputed border region. This is increasingly important in a world where fears of terrorism are on everyone's mind (even if the fears are entirely wrong).
Many meat-space classes are no different than online classes in terms of interaction with the class and instructors. Little or none usually, unless the class is small (less than 40) or breaks down into sessions (lectures MWF, small groups TuTh, which are usually TA led).
I had very few undergrad classes where there was actual classroom interaction with an actual professor and other students (like less than 5), because most had at least 50-75 students.
I don't knock the TA led small groups or even small classes, because often the TAs are more current on the material being taught than the profs can be, especially when its more basic undergrad stuff.
The thing online classes can never have, IMHO, though is the magic that can take place when a talented professor lectures. Not only do you learn stuff, but they can make even tedious sounding material come alive ("Germany During the Reformation"). Reading books and doing online busywork can't compare.
Take RICO. Most conservatives loved RICO as it let them bust criminal enterprises that previously had been relatively immune to prosecution due to their organizational structure.
Now they dislike it because abortion rights groups had begun to use it against anti-abortion groups that were blockading or disrupting abortion clinics.
Maybe finally we have something ridiculous enough to finally overturn or rewrite the DMCA.
No. It's a little weird, but the DMCA is actually functioning as its supposed to in this case: allowing corporations to go after the little guy to make the little guy spend more money on their products.
What will change the DMCA will be a successful application of it *against* the corporations. Since it's "their" law, they will demand it be revised to eliminate their vulnerability.
Hopefully the vulnerability can't be resolved without rendering the law inert, which will require corporations to remain vulnerable or just advocate for scrapping it.
It's a great idea, but the lag in production and ordering would be staggering, and your "up-to-date" install CDs would be behind constantly.
A better solution would be one or both of the following:
(1) A checkbox in the install sequence which would say "Apply user-supplied patch kit during install" which would then prompt you for a CD that had the patch kit.
(2) A way to re-burn the CD to include the patch kit on the install CD so that installs from the new CD are automatically patched to the right level. This would require MS to provide a disk image suitable for making the CDs bootable.
I vote for the latter, but the former would be usable as well.
The thing that drives me nuts about most Windows patching isn't that its hard, but that most of the time the patching process relies too much on computers that are online to a fairly high speed connection and involves too many individual patch files.
I updated a Win2K machine from SP2 (fsck'n help desk too lazy/braindead to upgrade the image) yesterday and it took nearly 200MB of patches to get it updated and three reboots to get it to a current state.
What'd I'd like to see is:
1) Post-service pack patches consolidated into a single patch executable, available for download and offline installation.
2) A tool that would allow someone to build their own current SP file from both past Service Packs and available individual patches.; essentially a patch linker that downloads the patch files and merges them together into a single executable. This will allow a machine running at any patch state to be updated to current in a single step.
#1 would be useful for most people, and #2 would be useful to people who want to eliminate specific patches for stability/manageability concerns.
Back when I was into building speakers, there were a number of designs that emphasized using really dense materials or unusual shapes.
Sonotubing (the cardboard tubes shoved into the ground to make concrete footings) was one, others suggested pentagonal shapes, and I think a more "doable" project was using MDF for the box, with some advocating lining the inside of the MDF box with Buildrite for its energy absorbancy.
The Matrix badly needs a backstory sequence that explains how "we" got into that situation to begin with. Part of the trouble with the Matrix is that it's just "there" as if it always had been, and there's no aspect to the (often overdone) philosophizing that emphasizes it was "our" mistake originally to create these machines.
The Terminator movies have done a fair job of exploiting the backstory to both drive the plot (change the present to change the future) as well as explain what's happening.
Although I thought (and am still a little confused by) the sequence with Keaneu and the guy in the room with all the TVs showing Keaneu talking about all the other Neos that had come before him. I couldn't tell if it was a trick, or if the Matrix was in a matrix or something.
Another impossible-to-live-with arrangement that I found made for excellent sound out of a pair of cheap speakers was hanging them from the the pipes in my basement room ceiling with some twine.
I can only guess that the lack of mechanical connection between the speakers and a hard surface allowed for better bass resonance.
I think the basement helped as well, since the ceiling was some kind of cheap cardboard-like material (harder than cardboard, softer than masonite) and the fact that that the floor was carpeting over concrete. The walls were paneling over foam board on concrete.
I eventually added two home-made subs and some surround speakers and haven't had a stereo setup that sounded that good since, in spite of spending more money.
The next time Jack's son's friend was over to play, Jack son lured him to try the ouchy-outlet. This time there was no 9V battery behind it, but 2,300 watts of hair-curling, finger-burning, nuclear-produced utility power behind it.
Jack's son's friend was electrocuted and died. Jack was forced to admit under intense questioning that he had rigged up the "safe" shock his son recieved and assigned sole liability for the son's friend's death.
A civil judgement beyond the homeowner's insurance policy coverage forced Jack's family to sell the house and posessions to pay the judgement.
Homeless and destitute, Jack was forced to pimp his wife on the street. 38 and a little saggy from childbearing, she was forced to start getting it up the ass to make decent money.
Thereafter, Jack had a healthy fear of Skinnerian Conditioning.
Am I the only one who thinks that the extreme "privacy" fringe is doing a lot to discredit legitimate privacy concerns.
Yes and no.
They would counter that they have to be 100% opposed to the marketers, because the marketers will stop at nothing less than total invasion of privacy. And true or not, in pursuit of the almighty dollar, we've seen marketers do some pretty appalling things.
The bigger problem is that no one is willing to work for a consensus ON ANY ISSUE, and this "total victory at all costs" mentality makes everything into a zero-sum game requiring aboslute zealotry. Microsoft isn't content with most of the market because they fear their competitors will try to run them out of business, pro-choicers aren't content with mostly legal abortion because they're afraid that anti-abortion foes won't stop there, and so on and so on.
Everything has been ratcheted up to this zero-sum, winner-take-all level and it's really hard to back down because if your opponent won't, you've effectively lost everything.
It doesn't help that even when people are seeking consensus, they utilize zero-sum rhetoric -- if you're against affirmative action, you're a card-carrying KKK member, if you're for gay rights you're a moral degenerate who can't be trusted with children, and so on.
We've lost the ability to reason and see the middle ground.
More diverse webcasting could partly offset reduced diversity in over-the-air broadcasting, and drive sales.
Webcasting is not the same as over-the-air broadcasting. The RIAA has a notorious aversion to transmitting music over the internet. As soon as they like it, Napster opens up again as a "self-programmed, asynchronous streaming music system."
Small, non-commercial broadcasting they probably vaguely opposed to; not enough listeners to make money off of, and they wouldn't play the product de jour the majors are pushing. The counter-argument would be that these kinds of stations wouldn't attract enough listeners to adversely affect them.
I know the radio sucks, but I had no idea that the record industry felt the same way.
The music industry hates radio monopoly for the same reason consumers do -- if you own all the stations, it's a lot easier to demand more payola^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing support from the record companies, since they can't shop their product around to other stations as easily.
But don't worry, someone *cough*Disney*cough*AOL-TW*cough* will figure out that if you own the labels and the stations, it's an even better deal.
Wireless isn't the solution to anything. As soon as wireless vendors ramp up to userbases approaching the normal telco world, expect increased regulation (in addition to the spectrum regulation and local tower-size/placement hurdles) at the local level as well.
Of course, being government regulated is only half the problem, the rest is the problem associated with customer service generally, which is falling to abyssmal levels overall. I remember when you could get a remote circuit test of a residential POTS line after 8 PM *on the weekend* from good ol' Northwestern Bell.
Now I have to work extra hard just to talk to someone at Qwest with a pulse during the week, during business hours.
Boutique ISPs offering high speed IP may feel great today, but don't worry, they have a long way to fall.
It said it was two weeks away, but I implied that it was two *episodes* away, when in fact, it was one episode two weeks away.
I'm really curious to see if there will be closure on Lisa's (Nate's wife) disappearance. The rift between Claire and Russel isn't terribly interesting, and neither is the one between David and Keith.
You can totally see Brenda coming back into the picture.
God I love those HBO series. Fortunately the new The Wire series starts soon, although I'm totally caught up on all my HBO series epsides, except for a few odd Oz episodes from seasons 2 and 3.
Re:Losing between $3-4B a year???
on
A Tour of Pixar
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· Score: 1
The first thing you do is presume that every pirated copy of anything is a lost sale. That's the golden rule of "piracy loss calculation" and without it piracy is a non-cost to IP sellers (erm, licensors, sorry..) since no one is stealing something of physical value. It's similar to the police catching a coke or heroin wholesaler and listing the value of the narcotics at the end-user cost instead of the wholesale cost -- they show 8 kilos of coke and call it $10M in coke, when the wholesale price is $15k per kilo!
Now if they were hijacking trucks full of DVDs and selling those on some black market, there's a real loss of a material good (although it may not be a lost sale since the DVD in question may end up being like a torn-cover book or a cutout LP).
I wish someone would do a reputable economic study of piracy that actually interviewed people who pirated some piece of IP and determined how many would have bought it at retail prices if they couldn't have pirated it. If they wouldn't have bought at retail, at what price would they have bought it at?
This would both undermine the FUD that all pirated copies are lost sales, as well as provide evidence that lower prices == more people willing to actually buy them through legit channels. Instead they jack up the prices to "offset piracy costs" and then use the elevated prices to increase the piracy losses, which enables them to jack up the prices to offset....lather, rinse, repeat.
Personally, I don't know much about Indian politics, but from what I do know about U.S. politics, this statement isn't very defensible:
Is the US perfect? Absolutely not -- but its flaws are well known, well talked about, and even the leadership class is willing to do something about many of them.
McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform
Microsoft Antitrust Suit
Prosecution of Enron, Worldcom Execs
Fines imposed on Wall Street Brokerages
All recent initiatives of the federal government. Some took place under Bush administration or with its support.
Personally, I don't know much about Indian politics,
Of course you don't. If you did, you'd be scared to death of a racist, corrupt government of a billion apparently willing to go nuclear with another corrupt government over a patch of land.
You're experiencing the same illusion that the US is evil and that everyone else is saintly. The US is not saintly, but in comparison to most other places it is much more so.
Criticize the US government all you want, but please at least judge everyone else by the same criteria.
Living in a country with corrupt politics doesn't disqualify someone from commenting on corruption wherever and whenever they see it. You speak as if rooting out corruption was as simple as taking a stand against it as an individual.
I'm just sick and tired of the sanctimonious tone taken about the American government, when, for all intents and purposes it is dramatically better than just about any other government on the planet. Usually the same sanctimony comes from people grossly misleading or outright lying about other countries own problems, which are orders of magnitude worse than those in the US.
Is the US perfect? Absolutely not -- but its flaws are well known, well talked about, and even the leadership class is willing to do something about many of them.
Another example I liked was some Mexican government official recently complaining about the police treatment of illegal aliens caught while *fleeing* border patrol agents during illegal border crossings -- I just laughed, are we now taking lessons in police procedure and suspect treatment from the *Mexican* government, notorious for bribery, extortion and torture?
Basic: I think this one sucks pretty bad and never record anything with it. However, I would get like 130+ hours of recording time on my 120GB TiVo if I used it all the time. Some people are satisfied with it, but I suspect those people have smaller TV sets.
I have a 27" Sony Trinitron and my Tivo hooked up via S-Video and for the most part I'm really quite satisfied with Basic Quality.
I have noticed that BQ really varies with the source, though. Stuff that's really high quality to begin with (digital channel content like HBO) seems really good on Basic. Things off of analog channels fare less well, especially if its a "noisy" analog channel. It also seems that filmed content, even OLD filmed content like Rockford Files, fares better than videotaped content for some reason.
When we finally get that big TV I may change my opinion, but for now I'm more satisfied with greater storage and retention (which means more variety) at the price of a few artifacts than I am with having a ton of quality and less storage.
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This is the kind of thing I was thinking of, where a random contributer gives something to an Alan Cox or other lieutentant of Linus and the patch gets rolled together whith a bunch of other patches into an "AC" patch and then the attribution gets muddled by Linus since he accepts the patch as a single block from Alan, with the assumption that he has written or at least vetted all the bits in it.
If what you say is true, then there is imperfect record keeping and its certainly is possible to substitute "Alan Cox" in the above paragraph for "IBM" or some other entity liable to submit a largish patch or patches where the submitter isn't necessarily the atomic entity that wrote the code.
It would also stand to reason that some plebian coder with access to the SCO source could use it as a basis for 'fixes' to the kernel and submit them through some 2nd or 3rd tier person who might submit a patch rollup to Linus who just merges it in under their name.
It would also stand to reason that the above plebian coder, anonymously submitting code, could actually be acting on a malicious basis, trying to poison the code by submitting non-original work.
What I don't get is what could have SCO have coded that Linux either did poorly or not at all, and was drop-in compatible with Linux? I would have presumed that the SCO code was architected entirely different and that perhaps there were some *algorithms* superior that those in Linux, actual code that could be copied line-by-line would have been next to impossible.
Do they?
Is it possible to submit a patch to some backwater part of the kernel that improves upon something rather mundane, the kind of thing that doesn't get your picture on the "Top 10 Kernel Gurus" list and then have the identity of the submitter slowly slip away into the ether?
Or are the kernel submitters kept in some kind of list someplace along with the stuff they submitted?
Our parent entity moved to Peoplesoft a couple of years ago, which was basically good for us as it enabled us to stop using the DOS application from 1991 that we were still using.
While on a business trip to Orange County I ran into a "Peoplesoft struggles" newspaper article that detailed some horror stories I'd heard about Peoplesoft at the University of Minnesota and other Big 10 schools.
Essentially the University and the other schools were teaming up to tell Peoplesoft that it didn't work, they wouldn't pay, and they'd demand fixes and refunds as well -- it was *that* bad.
AFAIK, every huge software application has suck factors -- how the client software runs on desktops, bad scalability, weak performance, complicated and limited customization, terrible documentation, bad support and the chaotic process change required to work with the software.
But from what I had read, it sounded like Peoplsoft had not only those things but had completely *lied* about the capabilities and scalability of their software, but had run into institutions with the manpower, skill and time to document it against the claims made in writing by Peoplesoft.
Our own 'implenetation' of Peoplesoft is very limited and very ASP oriented (we run the client on about 5 PCs and it connects to the server in NYC or someplace) and hasn't been that bad, although I'm told by some of the suits that it's laughable because we have only a handful of even the HR modules available.
It does look cheap. You'd think that Corel Draw sales alone would make that investment worthwhile, although perhaps that's all that's of any real value there once you subtract Corel's debts.
Most of the outsourcing questions tend to hinge on obvious things like the direct wages paid to employees and "do they speak English" without focusing on the many hidden or hard to denominate costs on Western business doing business with non-Western countries, particularly outsourcing.
India has a number of advantages over many countries in direct labor costs and English proficiency, but a number of cultural liabilities as well. While the Czech Republic isn't Wisconsin, most Americans could easily go there or to any of the other east-bloc nations and conduct business far more easily than they could in India since there's a lot more cultural similarity.
The east bloc also has a stable political and military climate compared to India. The Czech Republic isn't on the edge of nuclear annihilation with Slovakia over some disputed border region. This is increasingly important in a world where fears of terrorism are on everyone's mind (even if the fears are entirely wrong).
With a name like that he should be a rock star or a porn star, not a suit with a fucked up career.
Many meat-space classes are no different than online classes in terms of interaction with the class and instructors. Little or none usually, unless the class is small (less than 40) or breaks down into sessions (lectures MWF, small groups TuTh, which are usually TA led).
I had very few undergrad classes where there was actual classroom interaction with an actual professor and other students (like less than 5), because most had at least 50-75 students.
I don't knock the TA led small groups or even small classes, because often the TAs are more current on the material being taught than the profs can be, especially when its more basic undergrad stuff.
The thing online classes can never have, IMHO, though is the magic that can take place when a talented professor lectures. Not only do you learn stuff, but they can make even tedious sounding material come alive ("Germany During the Reformation"). Reading books and doing online busywork can't compare.
Take RICO. Most conservatives loved RICO as it let them bust criminal enterprises that previously had been relatively immune to prosecution due to their organizational structure.
Now they dislike it because abortion rights groups had begun to use it against anti-abortion groups that were blockading or disrupting abortion clinics.
Maybe finally we have something ridiculous enough to finally overturn or rewrite the DMCA.
No. It's a little weird, but the DMCA is actually functioning as its supposed to in this case: allowing corporations to go after the little guy to make the little guy spend more money on their products.
What will change the DMCA will be a successful application of it *against* the corporations. Since it's "their" law, they will demand it be revised to eliminate their vulnerability.
Hopefully the vulnerability can't be resolved without rendering the law inert, which will require corporations to remain vulnerable or just advocate for scrapping it.
It's a great idea, but the lag in production and ordering would be staggering, and your "up-to-date" install CDs would be behind constantly.
A better solution would be one or both of the following:
(1) A checkbox in the install sequence which would say "Apply user-supplied patch kit during install" which would then prompt you for a CD that had the patch kit.
(2) A way to re-burn the CD to include the patch kit on the install CD so that installs from the new CD are automatically patched to the right level. This would require MS to provide a disk image suitable for making the CDs bootable.
I vote for the latter, but the former would be usable as well.
Who cares?
Why is it important to do a story about some rockstar coder who is annoyed at working for some megabuck$ corporation? This is interesting *how*?
I'm sure that MOST slashdotters are annoyed at the megabucks corporation they work for. I know I am from time to time.
The thing that drives me nuts about most Windows patching isn't that its hard, but that most of the time the patching process relies too much on computers that are online to a fairly high speed connection and involves too many individual patch files.
I updated a Win2K machine from SP2 (fsck'n help desk too lazy/braindead to upgrade the image) yesterday and it took nearly 200MB of patches to get it updated and three reboots to get it to a current state.
What'd I'd like to see is:
1) Post-service pack patches consolidated into a single patch executable, available for download and offline installation.
2) A tool that would allow someone to build their own current SP file from both past Service Packs and available individual patches.; essentially a patch linker that downloads the patch files and merges them together into a single executable. This will allow a machine running at any patch state to be updated to current in a single step.
#1 would be useful for most people, and #2 would be useful to people who want to eliminate specific patches for stability/manageability concerns.
Back when I was into building speakers, there were a number of designs that emphasized using really dense materials or unusual shapes.
Sonotubing (the cardboard tubes shoved into the ground to make concrete footings) was one, others suggested pentagonal shapes, and I think a more "doable" project was using MDF for the box, with some advocating lining the inside of the MDF box with Buildrite for its energy absorbancy.
The Matrix badly needs a backstory sequence that explains how "we" got into that situation to begin with. Part of the trouble with the Matrix is that it's just "there" as if it always had been, and there's no aspect to the (often overdone) philosophizing that emphasizes it was "our" mistake originally to create these machines.
The Terminator movies have done a fair job of exploiting the backstory to both drive the plot (change the present to change the future) as well as explain what's happening.
Although I thought (and am still a little confused by) the sequence with Keaneu and the guy in the room with all the TVs showing Keaneu talking about all the other Neos that had come before him. I couldn't tell if it was a trick, or if the Matrix was in a matrix or something.
You're so right.
Another impossible-to-live-with arrangement that I found made for excellent sound out of a pair of cheap speakers was hanging them from the the pipes in my basement room ceiling with some twine.
I can only guess that the lack of mechanical connection between the speakers and a hard surface allowed for better bass resonance.
I think the basement helped as well, since the ceiling was some kind of cheap cardboard-like material (harder than cardboard, softer than masonite) and the fact that that the floor was carpeting over concrete. The walls were paneling over foam board on concrete.
I eventually added two home-made subs and some surround speakers and haven't had a stereo setup that sounded that good since, in spite of spending more money.
The next time Jack's son's friend was over to play, Jack son lured him to try the ouchy-outlet. This time there was no 9V battery behind it, but 2,300 watts of hair-curling, finger-burning, nuclear-produced utility power behind it.
Jack's son's friend was electrocuted and died. Jack was forced to admit under intense questioning that he had rigged up the "safe" shock his son recieved and assigned sole liability for the son's friend's death.
A civil judgement beyond the homeowner's insurance policy coverage forced Jack's family to sell the house and posessions to pay the judgement.
Homeless and destitute, Jack was forced to pimp his wife on the street. 38 and a little saggy from childbearing, she was forced to start getting it up the ass to make decent money.
Thereafter, Jack had a healthy fear of Skinnerian Conditioning.
Am I the only one who thinks that the extreme "privacy" fringe is doing a lot to discredit legitimate privacy concerns.
Yes and no.
They would counter that they have to be 100% opposed to the marketers, because the marketers will stop at nothing less than total invasion of privacy. And true or not, in pursuit of the almighty dollar, we've seen marketers do some pretty appalling things.
The bigger problem is that no one is willing to work for a consensus ON ANY ISSUE, and this "total victory at all costs" mentality makes everything into a zero-sum game requiring aboslute zealotry. Microsoft isn't content with most of the market because they fear their competitors will try to run them out of business, pro-choicers aren't content with mostly legal abortion because they're afraid that anti-abortion foes won't stop there, and so on and so on.
Everything has been ratcheted up to this zero-sum, winner-take-all level and it's really hard to back down because if your opponent won't, you've effectively lost everything.
It doesn't help that even when people are seeking consensus, they utilize zero-sum rhetoric -- if you're against affirmative action, you're a card-carrying KKK member, if you're for gay rights you're a moral degenerate who can't be trusted with children, and so on.
We've lost the ability to reason and see the middle ground.
More diverse webcasting could partly offset reduced diversity in over-the-air broadcasting, and drive sales.
Webcasting is not the same as over-the-air broadcasting. The RIAA has a notorious aversion to transmitting music over the internet. As soon as they like it, Napster opens up again as a "self-programmed, asynchronous streaming music system."
Small, non-commercial broadcasting they probably vaguely opposed to; not enough listeners to make money off of, and they wouldn't play the product de jour the majors are pushing. The counter-argument would be that these kinds of stations wouldn't attract enough listeners to adversely affect them.
I know the radio sucks, but I had no idea that the record industry felt the same way.
The music industry hates radio monopoly for the same reason consumers do -- if you own all the stations, it's a lot easier to demand more payola^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing support from the record companies, since they can't shop their product around to other stations as easily.
But don't worry, someone *cough*Disney*cough*AOL-TW*cough* will figure out that if you own the labels and the stations, it's an even better deal.
Wireless isn't the solution to anything. As soon as wireless vendors ramp up to userbases approaching the normal telco world, expect increased regulation (in addition to the spectrum regulation and local tower-size/placement hurdles) at the local level as well.
Of course, being government regulated is only half the problem, the rest is the problem associated with customer service generally, which is falling to abyssmal levels overall. I remember when you could get a remote circuit test of a residential POTS line after 8 PM *on the weekend* from good ol' Northwestern Bell.
Now I have to work extra hard just to talk to someone at Qwest with a pulse during the week, during business hours.
Boutique ISPs offering high speed IP may feel great today, but don't worry, they have a long way to fall.
It said it was two weeks away, but I implied that it was two *episodes* away, when in fact, it was one episode two weeks away.
I'm really curious to see if there will be closure on Lisa's (Nate's wife) disappearance. The rift between Claire and Russel isn't terribly interesting, and neither is the one between David and Keith.
You can totally see Brenda coming back into the picture.
God I love those HBO series. Fortunately the new The Wire series starts soon, although I'm totally caught up on all my HBO series epsides, except for a few odd Oz episodes from seasons 2 and 3.
The first thing you do is presume that every pirated copy of anything is a lost sale. That's the golden rule of "piracy loss calculation" and without it piracy is a non-cost to IP sellers (erm, licensors, sorry..) since no one is stealing something of physical value. It's similar to the police catching a coke or heroin wholesaler and listing the value of the narcotics at the end-user cost instead of the wholesale cost -- they show 8 kilos of coke and call it $10M in coke, when the wholesale price is $15k per kilo!
Now if they were hijacking trucks full of DVDs and selling those on some black market, there's a real loss of a material good (although it may not be a lost sale since the DVD in question may end up being like a torn-cover book or a cutout LP).
I wish someone would do a reputable economic study of piracy that actually interviewed people who pirated some piece of IP and determined how many would have bought it at retail prices if they couldn't have pirated it. If they wouldn't have bought at retail, at what price would they have bought it at?
This would both undermine the FUD that all pirated copies are lost sales, as well as provide evidence that lower prices == more people willing to actually buy them through legit channels. Instead they jack up the prices to "offset piracy costs" and then use the elevated prices to increase the piracy losses, which enables them to jack up the prices to offset....lather, rinse, repeat.
- McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform
- Microsoft Antitrust Suit
- Prosecution of Enron, Worldcom Execs
- Fines imposed on Wall Street Brokerages
All recent initiatives of the federal government. Some took place under Bush administration or with its support.Personally, I don't know much about Indian politics,
Of course you don't. If you did, you'd be scared to death of a racist, corrupt government of a billion apparently willing to go nuclear with another corrupt government over a patch of land.
You're experiencing the same illusion that the US is evil and that everyone else is saintly. The US is not saintly, but in comparison to most other places it is much more so.
Criticize the US government all you want, but please at least judge everyone else by the same criteria.
Living in a country with corrupt politics doesn't disqualify someone from commenting on corruption wherever and whenever they see it. You speak as if rooting out corruption was as simple as taking a stand against it as an individual.
I'm just sick and tired of the sanctimonious tone taken about the American government, when, for all intents and purposes it is dramatically better than just about any other government on the planet. Usually the same sanctimony comes from people grossly misleading or outright lying about other countries own problems, which are orders of magnitude worse than those in the US.
Is the US perfect? Absolutely not -- but its flaws are well known, well talked about, and even the leadership class is willing to do something about many of them.
Another example I liked was some Mexican government official recently complaining about the police treatment of illegal aliens caught while *fleeing* border patrol agents during illegal border crossings -- I just laughed, are we now taking lessons in police procedure and suspect treatment from the *Mexican* government, notorious for bribery, extortion and torture?
Basic: I think this one sucks pretty bad and never record anything with it. However, I would get like 130+ hours of recording time on my 120GB TiVo if I used it all the time. Some people are satisfied with it, but I suspect those people have smaller TV sets.
I have a 27" Sony Trinitron and my Tivo hooked up via S-Video and for the most part I'm really quite satisfied with Basic Quality.
I have noticed that BQ really varies with the source, though. Stuff that's really high quality to begin with (digital channel content like HBO) seems really good on Basic. Things off of analog channels fare less well, especially if its a "noisy" analog channel. It also seems that filmed content, even OLD filmed content like Rockford Files, fares better than videotaped content for some reason.
When we finally get that big TV I may change my opinion, but for now I'm more satisfied with greater storage and retention (which means more variety) at the price of a few artifacts than I am with having a ton of quality and less storage.