If somebody manages to design support circuits that don't work when dimmed, then that's a different matter.
That is EXACTLY the case. If you find some standard medium base (or candelabra base) LED bulbs that can be dimmed, and cost less than $20, please let me know, cause I'll buy a dozen.
Yeah, while well meaning, this bill is stupid. It assumes a number of things, such as CFL bulbs that FIT a fixture... I tried to replace my yard flood lights with CFL, but the huge-assed base wouldn't fit in my fixture. I also have some motion sensors that explicitly state that they do not work with CFL. So I went Home Despot and Lowes, and found that they don't carry any motion sensors that work with CFL. Nice.
I also tried to find dimmable CFL's. Not in my town - only on the internet for 5x the cost of a standard CFL bulb.
When all CFL's are dimmable, and the bulbs are the same form factor as regular bulbs, or we have cost-effective LED lamps that are also dimmable and fit, then this could work. I think this bill is a few years too early however. Maybe if it was one of those "reduce over the first 5 years, eliminate in 10" it would be viable. You can encourage reduction by putting a "penalty tax" on standard bulbs, and use that money to subsidize CFL / LED.
Most spammers ignore rejects, and just try another 10 times from other compromised Windows boxes. Bounces are REALLY bad because most spammers forge the sender address, and all those bounces are collateral damage (Google for "joe job.") In case a spammer is using a real address (which is unlikely) they just ignore bounces anyway. You can't get off their lists. It's a one-way trip.
I'm having serious doubts about eMachines computers.
Really? You are having doubts about the quality of one of the least expensive computers on the market???? I'm shocked. Totally shocked. I would have never expected in a million years that the quality of such a low-priced, low-end machine wasn't very good....
I think you should immediately turn over the machine to the Geek Squad, and pay them big bucks to tell you that, indeed, the eMachine is a pile of crap. Those guys know. They are experts after all...
Compusa was packed last night when I picked up my copy of Vista at midnight.
Why on earth would you feel the need to go to the store at midnight rather than 9 or 10 the next morning? Is Vista solving some kind of need so urgent and dire that you felt you had to have it NOW? Is your life lacking the stronger levels of DRM needed to calm your wild copy-infringing nature? Really, I want to know.
Releasing the information anonymously is easy. The problem comes for researchers who want to put their name on it. The problem this guy now has, is that if some anonymous person releases a crack, MS lawyers will get the MS purchased FBI / NSA to go after this researcher regardless of any "proof" that HE actually released it or not.
The problem is that Flash generally contributes to web cruft, making it harder for the user to get what he wants: information.
Yep.
Flash, when used sparingly, can be useful. It totally sucks however when a company does their entire site as flash. In many (most) cases you can't print, and the site is slow to navigate. I really don't want to sit through some loud 5 minute AV presentation every time I go a site's home page, looking for specific information.
Your partially right. You don't need a webmaster to edit CONTENT on a web site. Editing layout templates and scripts however isn't quite so simple - especially if you want it to look halfway decent on multiple different browsers (or even work at all if you are doing AJAX.)
But to address the main topic, the simple answer is that web isn't nearly as simple as it used to be. Now you don't just have a webmaster, you have a team... You have graphic designers, usability experts, programmers, system administrators, DBA's, domain (knowledge) experts, etc., and of course "content editors." Now that doesn't mean that Joe can't just download / install Drupal or some other CMS and implement it, but if Joe really wants to customize Drupal to work with his custom databases and brand it with his own look and feel, he needs a wide variety of skills. That's why there are companies that will customize Drupal for you.
The ultimate blame in this case falls on GoDaddy for pulling the trigger. They should have told myspace "not our problem and you don't have the authority to ask for this action andyway. Get a court order."
I have a few domains registered with godaddy at the moment. In about an hour, they no longer will be, with a letter to their CEO (US Mail) saying why.
actually all of the NEWER paving in the state of maine has involved rebuilding the road's surface
Not on most the state (numbered) roads around where I am, and in the rare case when they do rebuild, it's NOTHING like the rebuilding NH does. Different standards. I see them widening roads, moving power poles further back instead of 1 foot off the pavement, but they don't seem to be going down several feet to get under the frost line like NH does to fix the underlying problems. This also doesn't address the problem of grinding, repaving, and literally 2 weeks after completion, digging 30% of it up to do utility work (with the patch being horrible.)
I've seen them patch and patch and repatch the same damn pothole 5 times during a summer, and they always do the work in the rain when they know DAMN well that any patch done in the rain won't hold. The level of incompetence is astounding.
I've lived in many different areas of the country, and I have never seen such poor planning and execution as Maine, at all levels of government, has.
It has everything to do with the coin issue, because the government keeps making new coins out of those metals, and it's costing the government more than the coins are worth to do it. The government also just doesn't work fast. Once major problems like this arise, it takes new laws, regulations, years of planning, etc. to resolve (such as the process of eliminating the penny.) Due to automation (counting machines, etc.,) the government also just can't change their minting process or materials overnight like they used to be able to do.
Olympia Snowe is also considered to be the most powerful woman in congress in terms of influence. I had a nice chat with her one day waiting for a flight to DC in Portland. Her moderate stance is why, in a far-left "nanny and welfare" state, she keeps blowing away her democratic opponents with a 3 to 1 margin.
The Maine turnpike (one of the few roads that receives federal funds) is just fine. The vast majority of it has been repaved in the last 3 years during the widening project.
That said, non-freeway/tollway NH roads are a LOT better than Maine roads. When they need to be fixed, NH frequently rebuilds the road base - NH has higher standards when it comes to how roads are built. Maine just puts a 1" think skim coat of new asphalt down, sometimes grinding first. NH also has more people, and a dramatically fewer miles of roads. Maine is also a welfare state, and most money goes to social programs. NH hardly has any social programs. It's a matter of size and priorities.
That's a fair question - fortunately the answer is fairly simple.
The value of the metals used to make pennies didn't just increase along a gentle slope, they jumped. A lot. According to kitco.com, zinc went from 40-50 cents per pound in 2003-04, to over $2 per pound this month.
Copper is similar (although pennies don't use much copper anymore.)
As everyone knows, the government does not move fast. They knew the day was coming, they had no idea it was going to happen this fast. Now they are scrambling, and that scrambling could take a few years yet.
The easiest thing to do is not to "re-base" the penny, but simply pull it from market and eliminate it. Re-basing would make the penny the same value as the nickel, which would cause havoc.
Nickels have the same problem actually, the price of nickel has nearly tripled in the last year. We probably need to get rid of both the penny and nickel, or at least make nickels out of much less expensive metals (which will fuck up machines that take coins.)
I'm not going to argue how obviously irrelevant the slope of a cliff is to the quality of the view
Tossing mod points to the side for a moment, I have to take exception to this. The slope of the cliffs are exactly what make the Grand Canyon so spectacular. Of course if you have never been there (pictures just can't substitute the experience) you may not understand. Without those sheer cliffs, it would be an ordinary river valley. Houses on a steep hill can have a dramatic view that increases property values (google for the New Hampshire "view tax"), where those on a gentle slope generally don't (as the view is generally not dramatic.) The view from my office window overlooks the entire city - picture a bowl where my office is on the rim (as a side note, I can pick up nearly a hundred WIFI access points:-) I picked that office because of the view. The other option is just looking at other buildings.
I do agree with you on your other point however: the definition of the word "vista", while related to "view" is a certain type of view ("a view through or between intervening objects") that has nothing to do with an overlook, or the slope angle related to that overlook.
I may be able to relate things back to MS Vista however... Let's say that you do have a great "vista": looking out you see a beautiful field of flowers visable between two quaint old houses. As you walk closer and your view opens up, then you can see that next to that beautiful field is a nasty looking garbage dump.
if we can get back on topic for a moment, this situation should make it VERY clear to web developers that coding to a single vendor proprietary browser, with a closed proprietary language is a bad idea. The reality though is that things that are very clear to many of us are not at all clear to others. From a narrow focused viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with it. It looks great. You get a consistent platform with great development tools. As you look closer and see the bigger picture, it no longer looks so good.
And damned if those C++ programs I write aren't sitting on top of a C++ runtime.
I don't know what kind of funny C++ system you use, but mine compiles down to a native machine code binary that does not require any kind of "runtime" such as a bytecode interpreter, or any other kind of massive framework.
CGI's can be native, static binaries and when they are, there is very little that can go wrong compared to PHP and JSP, where the interpreter can be changed / upgraded out from under your application. In fact, I have some static binaries that were compiled on an ancient slackware system 10 years ago that still work fine on a new machine with the latest Ubuntu release.
On that note, while some people do use C or C++ to write web applications, it's not common anymore outside of embedded web appliances and such (think management interfaces on SOHO routers...) There are also suid applications that really should be static binaries if you care about security at all.
And when your entire system fries when hit by lightning, how do you "deauthorize?"
The answer is that there is no magic bullet. There are no "DRM solutions" that don't, in some way, inconvenience the user, or ultimately cost the user more in time and money spent dealing with it.
Some of you probably don't care about copy protection, DRM, or just REALLY REALLY like MS operating systems - that's fine, but it gets old listening to all the whining about Activation, WGA, Play's for shit DRM, needing to run corporate license servers, limitations on hi-def content, etc. Don't like it? Use something else.
This whole WGA and activation crap should be no surprise to anyone - the people who didn't have their heads buried in the sand saw this coming over 10 years ago. Those with foresight found alternatives to MS based software and are no longer locked in to copy protection and DRM hell. Yes, some of those alternative don't have the spit and polish that you may be used to, and some may not quite have all the features either. But sometimes it's worth doing without, and there is no reason to believe that in the next 10 years the situation won't be resolved. History and current events are also screaming to you that MS's behavior and restrictions are going to get a LOT worse in the next 10 years. Again, it's your choice.
The only documents that get legit signatures from me are legal documents, checks, etc. All of those "sign on the screen" and other credit card slips get a jumbled mess. In fact, it's not remotely like what is on the back of my credit cards. Even when cashiers compare what I wrote to what is on the card, they never question it.
I've even tried some of the goofy signatures I read about... Nobody cares.
Anyway, UPS / FedEx rarely even ask for a signature from me, even on expensive items such as $250,000 worth of computer equipment that filled most of a truck that I was integrating in my garage for a client. I think out of 100 or so packages in the last year, I had to sign once.
Back to the topic at hand however (since this thread is wandering) blacklists and other scanning can still do quite well on this spam. Blocking dynamic space alone is the number one most effective, least CPU utilizing methods out there, and seems to block 90%+ of the delivery attempts. I haven't found it necessary to resort to any kind of OCR to keep the volume down to a manageable level, although I don't know if this will continue. If the problem gets much worse I may use greylisting on non-whitelisted emails that look suspicious (contain a single image with a little text) or as a last resort, challenge / response (which I really don't like.)
I don't like to use greylisting normally due to the delay in email, and the increased server load it causes me and the sender (and it just plain doesn't work with some screwed up hosts.) Restricting it to suspect email seems like a good compromise.
Alice decides to sell her iTunes watermarked movie to Bob. She logs into iTunes and fills out Bob's address.
This assumes that in 10 years iTunes is still around, and that they maintain a record of what I purchased "forever". There are so many issue with this scenario that I can think off off the top of my head that I see no way this could ever work in "real life".
I'm a much bigger fan of this than streaming solutions or DRM solutions because here I own my copy and can do whatever I want with it quite legally.
So what happens if you decide you no longer like the movie, and sell it to someone on ebay who then decides to upload it on a torrent site? Are you still responsible? What if you sell it for cash to some kid down the street? What if THEY sell it again and the third person then uploads it? Are you liable?
From what I understand, Novell is claiming that it did NOT sell the rights to Unix to SCO, only the right to sell additional licenses, of which Novell gets a part of the revenue. Of course, this is still in court too, and Novell wants a chunk of SCO's remaining cash (read "all of it".)
It wouldn't surprise me if IBM spent over $50M at this point. It can never recover that amount of money, as the entire value of SCO is considerably less than that. I don't think the stockholders of IBM will really be satisfied with just bankrupting SCO.
This is one of the problems with the US legal system. Someone with no case can drag things out in court for years, causing financial hardship to another company. It's: "We are dead in the market, and partially blame IBM for that. Since we are dead and going down in flames, we are going to extract our pound of flesh even though the end result is the same."
That $50M or so is just gone. It can never be used to increase company value, or do other nice things like spend that $50M on further linux development instead of legal costs.
It would be a whole different story if the judges (and appeal judges) said right off the bat, "You have no proof and therefore no case. Get the fuck out of my courtroom." Instead, the judges have cost IBM millions that they can never recover. Not that I'm a big IBM fan, but this is just wrong. Think if this kind of thing happened to RedHat, MySQL, Ubuntu, etc. It probably will anyway (patent troll.)
If you RTFA, you will note that the RFID tag is only readable from "Up to four feet away". Somehow I don't think that really counts as a great distance.
I think 4 feet is plenty. Someone doesn't have to "wand" you, they just need to walk past you with a reader in their pocket. Also think about readers at entrances to subways, on the "walk" button poll at every street corner, entrances to buildings, on the money collector on the bus, etc.
The whole RFID thing is pretty disturbing when you look at the behavior of governments throughout history, and the behavior of the US government recently. The trend towards tracking and investigating everyone in more and more detail every month is not encouraging at all. I'm not concerned too much about today or tomorrow, but 20 years from now when the cost of readers is $2, and they can communicate wireless to a central reporting system - all in the name of anti-terrorism. I used to think that this was all tin-foil hat stuff, but recent (past 4 years) actions by the government have changed my mind.
GB isn't much better at the moment with tracking cameras everywhere, automated license plate readers, etc.
OK, so since the lawyers were paid up front, probably with a contract that says that they must see this thing through to the very end, appealing as many times as they can, what does IBM do to recover it's costs once SCO has zero assets left and the case still continues?
Can IBM request that the court order SCO to put IBM's legal costs in escrow or something (not sure if this is possible, IANAL?)
It seems to me that a case could be made that SCO has very little chance of winning at this point.
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If somebody manages to design support circuits that don't work when dimmed, then that's a different matter.
That is EXACTLY the case. If you find some standard medium base (or candelabra base) LED bulbs that can be dimmed, and cost less than $20, please let me know, cause I'll buy a dozen.
Yeah, while well meaning, this bill is stupid. It assumes a number of things, such as CFL bulbs that FIT a fixture... I tried to replace my yard flood lights with CFL, but the huge-assed base wouldn't fit in my fixture. I also have some motion sensors that explicitly state that they do not work with CFL. So I went Home Despot and Lowes, and found that they don't carry any motion sensors that work with CFL. Nice.
I also tried to find dimmable CFL's. Not in my town - only on the internet for 5x the cost of a standard CFL bulb.
When all CFL's are dimmable, and the bulbs are the same form factor as regular bulbs, or we have cost-effective LED lamps that are also dimmable and fit, then this could work. I think this bill is a few years too early however. Maybe if it was one of those "reduce over the first 5 years, eliminate in 10" it would be viable. You can encourage reduction by putting a "penalty tax" on standard bulbs, and use that money to subsidize CFL / LED.
Most spammers ignore rejects, and just try another 10 times from other compromised Windows boxes. Bounces are REALLY bad because most spammers forge the sender address, and all those bounces are collateral damage (Google for "joe job.") In case a spammer is using a real address (which is unlikely) they just ignore bounces anyway. You can't get off their lists. It's a one-way trip.
I'm having serious doubts about eMachines computers.
Really? You are having doubts about the quality of one of the least expensive computers on the market???? I'm shocked. Totally shocked. I would have never expected in a million years that the quality of such a low-priced, low-end machine wasn't very good....
I think you should immediately turn over the machine to the Geek Squad, and pay them big bucks to tell you that, indeed, the eMachine is a pile of crap. Those guys know. They are experts after all...
What? Was that a little too sarcastic?
Compusa was packed last night when I picked up my copy of Vista at midnight.
Why on earth would you feel the need to go to the store at midnight rather than 9 or 10 the next morning? Is Vista solving some kind of need so urgent and dire that you felt you had to have it NOW? Is your life lacking the stronger levels of DRM needed to calm your wild copy-infringing nature? Really, I want to know.
Releasing the information anonymously is easy. The problem comes for researchers who want to put their name on it. The problem this guy now has, is that if some anonymous person releases a crack, MS lawyers will get the MS purchased FBI / NSA to go after this researcher regardless of any "proof" that HE actually released it or not.
The problem is that Flash generally contributes to web cruft, making it harder for the user to get what he wants: information.
Yep.
Flash, when used sparingly, can be useful. It totally sucks however when a company does their entire site as flash. In many (most) cases you can't print, and the site is slow to navigate. I really don't want to sit through some loud 5 minute AV presentation every time I go a site's home page, looking for specific information.
Your partially right. You don't need a webmaster to edit CONTENT on a web site. Editing layout templates and scripts however isn't quite so simple - especially if you want it to look halfway decent on multiple different browsers (or even work at all if you are doing AJAX.)
But to address the main topic, the simple answer is that web isn't nearly as simple as it used to be. Now you don't just have a webmaster, you have a team... You have graphic designers, usability experts, programmers, system administrators, DBA's, domain (knowledge) experts, etc., and of course "content editors." Now that doesn't mean that Joe can't just download / install Drupal or some other CMS and implement it, but if Joe really wants to customize Drupal to work with his custom databases and brand it with his own look and feel, he needs a wide variety of skills. That's why there are companies that will customize Drupal for you.
The ultimate blame in this case falls on GoDaddy for pulling the trigger. They should have told myspace "not our problem and you don't have the authority to ask for this action andyway. Get a court order."
I have a few domains registered with godaddy at the moment. In about an hour, they no longer will be, with a letter to their CEO (US Mail) saying why.
GoDaddy is now known as GoAwayDaddy in my book.
actually all of the NEWER paving in the state of maine has involved rebuilding the road's surface
Not on most the state (numbered) roads around where I am, and in the rare case when they do rebuild, it's NOTHING like the rebuilding NH does. Different standards. I see them widening roads, moving power poles further back instead of 1 foot off the pavement, but they don't seem to be going down several feet to get under the frost line like NH does to fix the underlying problems. This also doesn't address the problem of grinding, repaving, and literally 2 weeks after completion, digging 30% of it up to do utility work (with the patch being horrible.)
I've seen them patch and patch and repatch the same damn pothole 5 times during a summer, and they always do the work in the rain when they know DAMN well that any patch done in the rain won't hold. The level of incompetence is astounding.
I've lived in many different areas of the country, and I have never seen such poor planning and execution as Maine, at all levels of government, has.
and it has nothing to do with the coin issue..
It has everything to do with the coin issue, because the government keeps making new coins out of those metals, and it's costing the government more than the coins are worth to do it. The government also just doesn't work fast. Once major problems like this arise, it takes new laws, regulations, years of planning, etc. to resolve (such as the process of eliminating the penny.) Due to automation (counting machines, etc.,) the government also just can't change their minting process or materials overnight like they used to be able to do.
Olympia Snowe is also considered to be the most powerful woman in congress in terms of influence. I had a nice chat with her one day waiting for a flight to DC in Portland. Her moderate stance is why, in a far-left "nanny and welfare" state, she keeps blowing away her democratic opponents with a 3 to 1 margin.
The Maine turnpike (one of the few roads that receives federal funds) is just fine. The vast majority of it has been repaved in the last 3 years during the widening project.
That said, non-freeway/tollway NH roads are a LOT better than Maine roads. When they need to be fixed, NH frequently rebuilds the road base - NH has higher standards when it comes to how roads are built. Maine just puts a 1" think skim coat of new asphalt down, sometimes grinding first. NH also has more people, and a dramatically fewer miles of roads. Maine is also a welfare state, and most money goes to social programs. NH hardly has any social programs. It's a matter of size and priorities.
That's a fair question - fortunately the answer is fairly simple.
The value of the metals used to make pennies didn't just increase along a gentle slope, they jumped. A lot. According to kitco.com, zinc went from 40-50 cents per pound in 2003-04, to over $2 per pound this month.
Copper is similar (although pennies don't use much copper anymore.)
As everyone knows, the government does not move fast. They knew the day was coming, they had no idea it was going to happen this fast. Now they are scrambling, and that scrambling could take a few years yet.
The easiest thing to do is not to "re-base" the penny, but simply pull it from market and eliminate it. Re-basing would make the penny the same value as the nickel, which would cause havoc.
Nickels have the same problem actually, the price of nickel has nearly tripled in the last year. We probably need to get rid of both the penny and nickel, or at least make nickels out of much less expensive metals (which will fuck up machines that take coins.)
I'm not going to argue how obviously irrelevant the slope of a cliff is to the quality of the view
:-) I picked that office because of the view. The other option is just looking at other buildings.
Tossing mod points to the side for a moment, I have to take exception to this. The slope of the cliffs are exactly what make the Grand Canyon so spectacular. Of course if you have never been there (pictures just can't substitute the experience) you may not understand. Without those sheer cliffs, it would be an ordinary river valley. Houses on a steep hill can have a dramatic view that increases property values (google for the New Hampshire "view tax"), where those on a gentle slope generally don't (as the view is generally not dramatic.) The view from my office window overlooks the entire city - picture a bowl where my office is on the rim (as a side note, I can pick up nearly a hundred WIFI access points
I do agree with you on your other point however: the definition of the word "vista", while related to "view" is a certain type of view ("a view through or between intervening objects") that has nothing to do with an overlook, or the slope angle related to that overlook.
I may be able to relate things back to MS Vista however... Let's say that you do have a great "vista": looking out you see a beautiful field of flowers visable between two quaint old houses. As you walk closer and your view opens up, then you can see that next to that beautiful field is a nasty looking garbage dump.
if we can get back on topic for a moment, this situation should make it VERY clear to web developers that coding to a single vendor proprietary browser, with a closed proprietary language is a bad idea. The reality though is that things that are very clear to many of us are not at all clear to others. From a narrow focused viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with it. It looks great. You get a consistent platform with great development tools. As you look closer and see the bigger picture, it no longer looks so good.
And damned if those C++ programs I write aren't sitting on top of a C++ runtime.
I don't know what kind of funny C++ system you use, but mine compiles down to a native machine code binary that does not require any kind of "runtime" such as a bytecode interpreter, or any other kind of massive framework.
CGI's can be native, static binaries and when they are, there is very little that can go wrong compared to PHP and JSP, where the interpreter can be changed / upgraded out from under your application. In fact, I have some static binaries that were compiled on an ancient slackware system 10 years ago that still work fine on a new machine with the latest Ubuntu release.
On that note, while some people do use C or C++ to write web applications, it's not common anymore outside of embedded web appliances and such (think management interfaces on SOHO routers...) There are also suid applications that really should be static binaries if you care about security at all.
And when your entire system fries when hit by lightning, how do you "deauthorize?"
The answer is that there is no magic bullet. There are no "DRM solutions" that don't, in some way, inconvenience the user, or ultimately cost the user more in time and money spent dealing with it.
Some of you probably don't care about copy protection, DRM, or just REALLY REALLY like MS operating systems - that's fine, but it gets old listening to all the whining about Activation, WGA, Play's for shit DRM, needing to run corporate license servers, limitations on hi-def content, etc. Don't like it? Use something else.
This whole WGA and activation crap should be no surprise to anyone - the people who didn't have their heads buried in the sand saw this coming over 10 years ago. Those with foresight found alternatives to MS based software and are no longer locked in to copy protection and DRM hell. Yes, some of those alternative don't have the spit and polish that you may be used to, and some may not quite have all the features either. But sometimes it's worth doing without, and there is no reason to believe that in the next 10 years the situation won't be resolved. History and current events are also screaming to you that MS's behavior and restrictions are going to get a LOT worse in the next 10 years. Again, it's your choice.
The only documents that get legit signatures from me are legal documents, checks, etc. All of those "sign on the screen" and other credit card slips get a jumbled mess. In fact, it's not remotely like what is on the back of my credit cards. Even when cashiers compare what I wrote to what is on the card, they never question it.
I've even tried some of the goofy signatures I read about... Nobody cares.
Anyway, UPS / FedEx rarely even ask for a signature from me, even on expensive items such as $250,000 worth of computer equipment that filled most of a truck that I was integrating in my garage for a client. I think out of 100 or so packages in the last year, I had to sign once.
Back to the topic at hand however (since this thread is wandering) blacklists and other scanning can still do quite well on this spam. Blocking dynamic space alone is the number one most effective, least CPU utilizing methods out there, and seems to block 90%+ of the delivery attempts. I haven't found it necessary to resort to any kind of OCR to keep the volume down to a manageable level, although I don't know if this will continue. If the problem gets much worse I may use greylisting on non-whitelisted emails that look suspicious (contain a single image with a little text) or as a last resort, challenge / response (which I really don't like.)
I don't like to use greylisting normally due to the delay in email, and the increased server load it causes me and the sender (and it just plain doesn't work with some screwed up hosts.) Restricting it to suspect email seems like a good compromise.
Alice decides to sell her iTunes watermarked movie to Bob. She logs into iTunes and fills out Bob's address.
This assumes that in 10 years iTunes is still around, and that they maintain a record of what I purchased "forever".
There are so many issue with this scenario that I can think off off the top of my head that I see no way this could ever work in "real life".
I'm a much bigger fan of this than streaming solutions or DRM solutions because here I own my copy and can do whatever I want with it quite legally.
So what happens if you decide you no longer like the movie, and sell it to someone on ebay who then decides to upload it on a torrent site? Are you still responsible? What if you sell it for cash to some kid down the street? What if THEY sell it again and the third person then uploads it? Are you liable?
Oh, I wasn't saying that GB was worse, just that the US isn't alone in people tracking activities.
As a side note, statistics show that cameras don't deter crime in SF. Crime in areas with cameras went up at the same rate as areas without.
From what I understand, Novell is claiming that it did NOT sell the rights to Unix to SCO, only the right to sell additional licenses, of which Novell gets a part of the revenue. Of course, this is still in court too, and Novell wants a chunk of SCO's remaining cash (read "all of it".)
It wouldn't surprise me if IBM spent over $50M at this point. It can never recover that amount of money, as the entire value of SCO is considerably less than that. I don't think the stockholders of IBM will really be satisfied with just bankrupting SCO.
This is one of the problems with the US legal system. Someone with no case can drag things out in court for years, causing financial hardship to another company. It's: "We are dead in the market, and partially blame IBM for that. Since we are dead and going down in flames, we are going to extract our pound of flesh even though the end result is the same."
That $50M or so is just gone. It can never be used to increase company value, or do other nice things like spend that $50M on further linux development instead of legal costs.
It would be a whole different story if the judges (and appeal judges) said right off the bat, "You have no proof and therefore no case. Get the fuck out of my courtroom." Instead, the judges have cost IBM millions that they can never recover. Not that I'm a big IBM fan, but this is just wrong. Think if this kind of thing happened to RedHat, MySQL, Ubuntu, etc. It probably will anyway (patent troll.)
If you RTFA, you will note that the RFID tag is only readable from "Up to four feet away". Somehow I don't think that really counts as a great distance.
I think 4 feet is plenty. Someone doesn't have to "wand" you, they just need to walk past you with a reader in their pocket. Also think about readers at entrances to subways, on the "walk" button poll at every street corner, entrances to buildings, on the money collector on the bus, etc.
The whole RFID thing is pretty disturbing when you look at the behavior of governments throughout history, and the behavior of the US government recently. The trend towards tracking and investigating everyone in more and more detail every month is not encouraging at all. I'm not concerned too much about today or tomorrow, but 20 years from now when the cost of readers is $2, and they can communicate wireless to a central reporting system - all in the name of anti-terrorism. I used to think that this was all tin-foil hat stuff, but recent (past 4 years) actions by the government have changed my mind.
GB isn't much better at the moment with tracking cameras everywhere, automated license plate readers, etc.
"We don't need to see your papers or ID. We already know who you are, and where you have been."
OK, so since the lawyers were paid up front, probably with a contract that says that they must see this thing through to the very end, appealing as many times as they can, what does IBM do to recover it's costs once SCO has zero assets left and the case still continues?
Can IBM request that the court order SCO to put IBM's legal costs in escrow or something (not sure if this is possible, IANAL?)
It seems to me that a case could be made that SCO has very little chance of winning at this point.