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User: bcilfone

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  1. Trademark infringement on 60GHz Uber-WiFi Proposed By New WiGig Group · · Score: 1

    Uber-WiFi? I'll sue your friggin' asses.

  2. Wasn't this discovered a long time ago? on MIT Finds Cure For Fear · · Score: 1

    And isn't it called religious fundamentalism?

  3. It's Fuddruckers on Fuddruckers Called Out on Hotlinking · · Score: 1

    Fuddruckers.com is not a high traffic site in any sense of the word "high" or "traffic". Do you or anyone you know frequent fuddruckers.com?

    This is "The Internet". The idea is that you link from one page to another. While the whole thing is mildly amusing, this guy is a jackass.

  4. This is asinine, even for Slashdot on Dept. of Homeland Security Enforces Expired Patent · · Score: 1

    Which is it? A copyright, trademark, or patent?

    Lumping them all together in a jumbled mess like this only helps confuse the issues that surround each.

  5. FCC, is there anything you can't do? on Disney Suggests Mandating DRM On All Media · · Score: 1

    I want the FCC to do my laundry.

    I want the FCC to feed the poor.

    I want the FCC to give me a blanket when I'm cold and give me a glass of water when I'm thirsty.

    I love you, you love me, we all love the FCC!

    FCC, is there anything you can't do?

  6. Re:What is harmful to minors? on Supreme Court Rules Against Anti-Porn Law · · Score: 1

    That specifically defined topic is in regards to the depiction of minors in sexual situations.

    While the other items can vary from time to time or from community to community, the law would permanently outlaw pedophilia even in a community of pedophiles.

    As a side note, the simple notion of "community standards" should be enough to invalidate a federal law when you consider that communities are generally at the local level and not federal.

  7. Exploiting P2P on P2P News Syndication? · · Score: 1

    Here's a story titled Exploiting Peer to Peer Networking.

    It's presented as a funny story, but it's a real world example of what could happen.

  8. CSS Doesn't Make Your Site Look Better on CSS for the LDP? · · Score: 1

    Stylesheets don't make your site look better any more than buying an expensive camera makes you take better pictures.

    As much as the geek in me would like to think that appearance is something you just slap on after the fact, the truth is that creating a simple visually pleasant and easy to use interface is a very complicated thing. You wouldn't trust a designer to write C, but you trust a developer to build a user interface?

    The problem with the LDP site is not that it doesn't use stylesheets. The problems are that it uses a horrid color scheme, bad fonts, and cryptic navigation. Sure, with stylesheets I could reconfigure my browser or make my own user stylesheet, but why make me the user go through so much trouble just to have something that looks even mildly professional?

  9. Re:To Mr. Nielsen on Tiny Sites Aren't Small Potatoes · · Score: 1

    Mozilla: View -> Text Zoom -> 200%

  10. Stupid metric system on The Changing Definition Of 'Kilogram' · · Score: 1

    The metric system is the tool of the
    devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

  11. "This is getting very interesting!" ??? on Firebird Name Debate Enters a New Stage · · Score: 1

    Must be a slow day.

  12. Or as Homer would say on The Universe May Be Shaped Like a Doughnut · · Score: 1

    Mmmmm.... the universe....

  13. Not the RIAA's realm on Instant Concert CDs? · · Score: 1

    I understand that everyone wants to rip on the RIAA at every available opportunity, however the record labels only own the copyrights to the *recordings* of songs, not the to the the music and lyrics.

    Companies in the NMPA own the publishing rights to most commercial music. The publishing rights are compulsory, meaning you don't need explicit permission to record your own version of the song, you just have to pay for it.

  14. Re:Editors on crack... on All schools In Denmark switching to Linux · · Score: 1

    But if you consider the way that large institutions work, by virtue of the fact that everyone is offered StarOffice for free, it will become the defacto standard.

    Think about it... if you're the teacher and 50% of your students have Microsoft Office and 50% of your students have StarOffice, you are going to standardize on using StarOffice. After all, the kids who don't have it can go get it for free instead of having to shell out a couple hundred bucks for MS Office.

  15. Great way to make money on BMG Stops Producing CDs · · Score: 1

    1. Alienate your customer base by suing them and their ISPs into the ground
    2. Add copy protection to your CDs to prevent anyone from copying, hearing, or ogling your valuable intellectual property
    3. Watch as sales plummet; blame on piracy
    4. ???
    5. PROFIT!

  16. Re:Great! on That Link Is Illegal · · Score: 1
    FARC Agenda for the Week:
    • Launch preemptive strike against government troops massing near Betania.
    • Kidnap foreigners and hold for ransom to raise capital.
    • Buy more stinger missiles on the black market.
    • Bombmaking training with assistance of IRA experts.
    • Implement Slashdot filter on website
    you forgot the obligatory:
    • ???
    • PROFIT!
  17. Copying will be allowed, but taxed on Predicting The End Of Digital Copying · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You *cannot* prevent copying. You can't make it illegal and you can't prevent it technically.

    I would however expect that we will see more **AA taxes such as the ones already in place on CD-R and radio broadcasts. 5% on your cable modem bill, 3% of your hard drive, 6% of your compactflash card.

    If this money were actually distributed to all affected copyright holders and not just those that belong to the **AA, this wouldn't be the worst solution in the world.

  18. Not so fast on The Music Biz Is the New Book Industry · · Score: 1

    While I would agree that music will cease to exist in its current form, that does not mean the industry will go the way of the book.

    The main reason is that music itself is exciting. Reading a book takes at least a several hour time investment, most of which is time spent alone. Music on the other hand takes just a few minutes to enjoy and is best when shared with hundreds or thousands of other people at the same moment.

    Screaming, jumping, dancing... sound waves travelling through thousands of people simulatenously... sorry, but you can't reproduce that with a book.

    For anyone interested, Shepard Fairey, the kick ass artist who designed the Mozilla logo has written on his site about this very topic.

    Over time, CD sales may decline, but people will still want to share music with their friends. Concert sales will increase as people are exposed to a wider variety of music via better distribution channels. Personal music will take shape with the creation of high quality online services like FullAudio. But, to say that music will ever become anything like the book industry is totally off base.

  19. Re:And so it begins on Surveillance Update · · Score: 1

    Starting sometime in the early 20th century, the unsuccessful started believing that they were owed something by the successful.

    What, like income tax?

  20. Re:Strikes me as fishy (pun unintended) on DARPA Project Babylon: Universal Translator · · Score: 1

    I guess if you can find people who:

    a) Know all these languages
    b) Have the abilities to build this machine
    c) Have a deep interest in the actions of DARPA

    then you have a pretty good suspect list for the next time a terrorist attack comes around.

  21. Re:My thoughts on reading this article on Tech Industry Versus Content Industry · · Score: 1

    If you buy a CD, and immediately rip an mp3 of it, which you then make available on the net, the "finite limit" to the number of people who can use that mp3 is the number of computer users with access to the internet. And furthermore, because the mp3 is readily reproducable, it may be used by many of them all at once.

    Not entirely true... assuming that the mp3 is about 4 MB and you are on a 500 kbps pipe, under perfect conditions, it would take roughly one minute to copy the mp3 from one PC to another. That's 60 copies/hour or 144 copies/day. At that rate it would take a long time to copy it to "all the computers in the world".

    What you're saying sounds like big media propaganda. Bandwidth, disk space, and cpu cycles are all "finite" resources, especially in the scope of an individual. One person cannot rip a CD and get an mp3 to "all the computers in the world". It would take a massive coordinated effort to achieve that. And each of those computers would have to have a user on it who would rather obtain the mp3 through these means using his or her own resources than pay the record industry for a physical CD.

    A mass of individuals using their own time and resources to obtain an item in the format they want instead of paying an illegal cartel a monstrous tax for a product they don't want... this is a bad thing?

  22. Go for it! on India Plans A Supercomputing Grid · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hopefully they can pull it off... maybe then the US government will encourage its tech workers instead of threatening to throw them in jail in the name of a cartoon mouse.

  23. Re:*RIP*, Mix , Burn on Disney Blames Apple For Music Piracy · · Score: 1

    More fundamentally, shouldn't a device that can rip, mix, and burn be classified as "arms" and receive 2nd amendment protection? The RIAA claims that all these various programs and devices are weapons of piracy. Guns are (or can be) weapons of death and yet the right to own them is guaranteed in the Consitution.

  24. Culmination of technology on (Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta · · Score: 1

    The culmination of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of human civilization...
    "Frankenstein: The College Years".

    Terrorists are now the least of my worries.

  25. Why CGI? on CGI About to Boom In Hollywood · · Score: 1

    They should try using mod_perl or tomcat to avoid spawning off a system process for every request...