For all of its monopolizing and vendor lock-in, a Windows PC is still a much more open platform than any game console. For god's sake, every console game pays a license fee to the console manufacturer. If he wants to make the Xbox360 more similar to a Windows PC, that would definitely make it more Free than any other console.
A Mac Mini is basically the guts of an iBook without a screen or keyboard. Ok, I know it's not quite that simple, but it's laptop-style hardware repackaged into a square case. There's no reason a PC manufacturer can't repackage x86 laptop hardware into a similar case. Mini-ITX is small, but it's just not minituarized to the same degree as a laptop motherboard.
I know copyright gives the author specific rights, and I agree with you on the facts. It was more your phrasing. When you say "Metallica has the right to do whatever they want with their property" it sounds like an absolute property right, like they own the song. Metallica doesn't own the song or performance. They own the exclusive right to make copies of their songs and performances (minus fair use).
"You are paying for the concert, not the CD. And Metallica has a right to do whatever they want with their property and their events."
Your statement presumes that copyright is an absolute property right, which it is not. It's a limited property right that has been legislated, rather arbitrarily, to the point where it resembles an absolute property right. However, it still has limits. They can't charge me for quietly humming one of their melodies. Under the copyright regime of the original founding fathers, Metallica's first album would already be public domain (and foreign works like Ozzy would have no copyrights at all). If you want to go back to the good old days of the 19th Century before income taxes, it's only fair to roll back copyright laws to the 19th Century terms too.
I'll have to agree too. I think a big part of US dominance in science was because we could attract the best foreign talent. We had a high standard of living, many of the world's best universities and research labs, and it was a pretty pleasant place to live, for both citizens and foreigners. I think the quality of local talent has slipped too, but fixing US science education by itself won't make up for the loss of foreign scientists.
In most cases, government documents are public domain. Some exceptions would be for national security or privacy of personal records. Our tax dollars paid for them, and they are a public good. The difference here is the transit authority is a hybrid public-private organization. It seems here they're asserting copyright in their capacity as a private, commercial entitiy.
Yeah, the Geode GX is pretty slow, even compared to the Via C3. It's based on the Cyrix MediaGX chip which was based on their 5x86 CPU (how's that for some retro computing?). More info here.
Correct. I remember back in the 80s I flew on one of the early 767's. After we landed the captain bragged about the plane landing itself on autopilot. It felt as smooth as any other landing.
Maybe so. There's a lot of room for improvement. The portable video players from Creative are little more than a PocketPC with hard drive storage. Over two years ago, I could rip movies to a 320x240 WMV file and play them on a PDA. They shrank down to 100MB, so you could fit two full length movies on a 256MB flash card. The problem with recoding video is it takes hours even on a fast PC, and it's illegal to rip them from DVDs.
Right now the most popular portable video players are those $150 portable DVD players. It's like we're back to 1995 with the Discman.
This is easy enough to test. Try dazzling a camcorder by shining a flashlight at it. You'll probably get a washed out picture just like the article describes. A flashlight in your eyes is annoying, but perfectly harmless.
Are you talking about employees losing their pensions if they leave IBM? Some pension plans may be structured that way; if you leave before retirement age, you forfeit the whole pension. With other plans, you keep your pension benefits if you're fully vested by the time you leave. You still begin collecting at the specified retirement age, but you could leave to work somewhere else until age 65. TFA doesn't say anything about pensions.
So how does that explain why CD's cost 50% more than cassettes of the same music when CD's are cheaper to produce? (I'm talking about 6 years ago when cassettes were still sold in stores)
In the U.S. those people don't count in the unemployment rate. The BLS only counts people as unemployed if they've actively sought employment in the past four weeks. There are other exclusions too. Wikipedia article here.
Brings back some old memories. Our lab at college had lots of Macs. Viruses like nVIR spread through floppies all the time. If the Classic environment still does 68K emulation it should still be able to spread.
The "source code" of a car is called the blueprints plus whatever other instructions is needed to build and assemble the vehicle.
Although most cars and proprietary, blueprints and engineering studies on public works projects like bridges are public record. So you could say bridges and highways are "open source".
All true, and that's why many companies start by outsourcing less advanced work like call centers and grunt level programming. The rural U.S. has long been home to outsourced call centers, either telemarketing or customer service. It usually works like this: the company gets big tax concessions from the local governments, and maybe even free land, in exchange for promising lots of jobs. When the incentives expire, many times so do the jobs. It's nice to have to jobs while they last, but don't consider it any kind of stable long-term employment. Here's a story of one town's deal with one of these call center operators (from here:
In Kansas, the city of Manhattan and the state offered Sykes a subsidy package of about $6.2 million in 1998 based on its promise to create an estimated 432 jobs. From the city came a $2.6 million cash grant, free land, $500,000 for site improvements, and property tax reductions for five years. The state provided $550,000 from an "Economic Opportunity" fund, enterprise zone tax breaks worth nearly $1.8 million, and a project and training grant of $800,000. In June 2004, the remaining 256 workers lost their jobs when Sykes moved the work to Asia and Latin America. The Manhattan plant closed only six months after the enterprise zone tax breaks expired.
There's only one advantage now to seeing the movie in theaters, and it's the only thing studios are banking on: You get to see the movie first.
If you wait a few months you can see it in the second-run theaters, then the rentals, then on the premium movie channels. Lately, there have been very few movies good enough that I had to pay $15 to see *right now* on the big screen.
Umm, no. I was talking about scary and violent movies too. Sure, if you were watching Legends of the Fall, the kids would get bored and leave, but would you really want them to see Scream, Reservoir Dogs or Saving Private Ryan?
Pretty soon you'll have forced commercials in DVDs too. The feature is called User Operation Prohibition (UOP). It's mainly used now to stop you from skipping the FBI warning, but you could imagine it being used to make unskippable trailers and commercials. It can be circumvented by patching the player, but technically that violates the DMCA.
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For all of its monopolizing and vendor lock-in, a Windows PC is still a much more open platform than any game console. For god's sake, every console game pays a license fee to the console manufacturer. If he wants to make the Xbox360 more similar to a Windows PC, that would definitely make it more Free than any other console.
A Mac Mini is basically the guts of an iBook without a screen or keyboard. Ok, I know it's not quite that simple, but it's laptop-style hardware repackaged into a square case. There's no reason a PC manufacturer can't repackage x86 laptop hardware into a similar case. Mini-ITX is small, but it's just not minituarized to the same degree as a laptop motherboard.
"I was arguing based on copyright law."
I know copyright gives the author specific rights, and I agree with you on the facts. It was more your phrasing. When you say "Metallica has the right to do whatever they want with their property" it sounds like an absolute property right, like they own the song. Metallica doesn't own the song or performance. They own the exclusive right to make copies of their songs and performances (minus fair use).
"You are paying for the concert, not the CD. And Metallica has a right to do whatever they want with their property and their events."
Your statement presumes that copyright is an absolute property right, which it is not. It's a limited property right that has been legislated, rather arbitrarily, to the point where it resembles an absolute property right. However, it still has limits. They can't charge me for quietly humming one of their melodies. Under the copyright regime of the original founding fathers, Metallica's first album would already be public domain (and foreign works like Ozzy would have no copyrights at all). If you want to go back to the good old days of the 19th Century before income taxes, it's only fair to roll back copyright laws to the 19th Century terms too.
Because advertisers pay to send paper junkmail, about $.20 per mail.
I'll have to agree too. I think a big part of US dominance in science was because we could attract the best foreign talent. We had a high standard of living, many of the world's best universities and research labs, and it was a pretty pleasant place to live, for both citizens and foreigners. I think the quality of local talent has slipped too, but fixing US science education by itself won't make up for the loss of foreign scientists.
In most cases, government documents are public domain. Some exceptions would be for national security or privacy of personal records. Our tax dollars paid for them, and they are a public good. The difference here is the transit authority is a hybrid public-private organization. It seems here they're asserting copyright in their capacity as a private, commercial entitiy.
Yeah, the Geode GX is pretty slow, even compared to the Via C3. It's based on the Cyrix MediaGX chip which was based on their 5x86 CPU (how's that for some retro computing?). More info here.
Correct. I remember back in the 80s I flew on one of the early 767's. After we landed the captain bragged about the plane landing itself on autopilot. It felt as smooth as any other landing.
Maybe so. There's a lot of room for improvement. The portable video players from Creative are little more than a PocketPC with hard drive storage. Over two years ago, I could rip movies to a 320x240 WMV file and play them on a PDA. They shrank down to 100MB, so you could fit two full length movies on a 256MB flash card. The problem with recoding video is it takes hours even on a fast PC, and it's illegal to rip them from DVDs.
Right now the most popular portable video players are those $150 portable DVD players. It's like we're back to 1995 with the Discman.
That's what I thought too from that picture. It's 1968 all over again!
This is easy enough to test. Try dazzling a camcorder by shining a flashlight at it. You'll probably get a washed out picture just like the article describes. A flashlight in your eyes is annoying, but perfectly harmless.
Are you talking about employees losing their pensions if they leave IBM? Some pension plans may be structured that way; if you leave before retirement age, you forfeit the whole pension. With other plans, you keep your pension benefits if you're fully vested by the time you leave. You still begin collecting at the specified retirement age, but you could leave to work somewhere else until age 65. TFA doesn't say anything about pensions.
So how does that explain why CD's cost 50% more than cassettes of the same music when CD's are cheaper to produce? (I'm talking about 6 years ago when cassettes were still sold in stores)
In the U.S. those people don't count in the unemployment rate. The BLS only counts people as unemployed if they've actively sought employment in the past four weeks. There are other exclusions too. Wikipedia article here.
Brings back some old memories. Our lab at college had lots of Macs. Viruses like nVIR spread through floppies all the time. If the Classic environment still does 68K emulation it should still be able to spread.
The "source code" of a car is called the blueprints plus whatever other instructions is needed to build and assemble the vehicle.
Although most cars and proprietary, blueprints and engineering studies on public works projects like bridges are public record. So you could say bridges and highways are "open source".
"Severe beatings and years in a miserable prison are likely."
And that's just waiting for your trial!
Hey don't look at me, but some of my friends do spoil their kids.
There's only one advantage now to seeing the movie in theaters, and it's the only thing studios are banking on: You get to see the movie first.
If you wait a few months you can see it in the second-run theaters, then the rentals, then on the premium movie channels. Lately, there have been very few movies good enough that I had to pay $15 to see *right now* on the big screen.
Umm, no. I was talking about scary and violent movies too. Sure, if you were watching Legends of the Fall, the kids would get bored and leave, but would you really want them to see Scream, Reservoir Dogs or Saving Private Ryan?
Pretty soon you'll have forced commercials in DVDs too. The feature is called User Operation Prohibition (UOP). It's mainly used now to stop you from skipping the FBI warning, but you could imagine it being used to make unskippable trailers and commercials. It can be circumvented by patching the player, but technically that violates the DMCA.
And how do you watch an R-rated movie with the kids running around the house? Tell them it's a scary movie and to stay out of the room?
Umm... any chemistry lab has bottles that can hold concentrated acid without burning through. Glass or plastic will do.