You assume you control the zone of the connecting client. If you want people with a browser to connect to you securely from out there anywhere, SSL is your choice.
It's a big step up, but there is still distance
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Java2 SDK v. 1.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been working on a server that takes a lot of connections in Java, and you can finally do it with the support of "select" in Java 1.4. But no support for SSL. I undertand why it happens, but this "we'll get around to doing the security later" is why we don't have a lot of security.
Java will always present a dilemma. With the push for portability, you often have to wait for the platform itself to support things like this (select) or kludge it in very non portable ways. But that portability leaves the system behind which hurts it in competition with other systems more tolerant of innovation and the fracturing it brings.
A good philosophy would be to rule that every time a system library or feature needs to do something that an ordinary user can't do, they don't just build it in, they make a way that an ordinary user could write it. That paves the way for more innovation.
Sicne the world isn't quite ready for the eBooks yet, the more intersting question is what if HP5 could be self-published and only available online.
She probably has a lock-up with her publishers, otherwise Joanne Rowling would be well advised to consider it.
She would do it by also cutting a deal with amazon.com or bn.com as EXCLUSIVE distributor for the first while. If you wanted to get the book, you would have to order it online from them.
In fact, this would deprive nobody of the book, except bookstores, since I doubt there is anybody who buys a children's book in hardcover who can't find a friend able to place an online order if they can't do it themselves.
However, Rowling would get all $20 of the sale price, instead of the $3 she probably gets now. She would probably have to pay a few bucks for printing, but would otherwise have just Amazon's margin between her and the whole amount. I would estimate that Amazon might be quite willing to do this for very low margin.
(In fact, when I thought about this back in the boomtimes, I figured they would do it at a loss just for the publicity and getting so many new customers with accounts on amazon and used to ordering books there.)
As such, she might keep $15 instead of $3, and thus only need to sell 1/5th books to make the money, but I think should would sell almost as many and thus rake it in.
Later, bookstores could order it, she would have no problem cutting a special deal with the book distributors, though normally an author or new small publisher can't do that.
Unless they lived in fear of how she was turning the industry upside-down.
She would become a very rich woman, and make history in new ways that might be remembered well after Harry Potter.
The key, based on the supreme court, is does the technology have a substantial non-infringing use.
Things like 30 second skip, high speed FF, these have all sorts of valid uses, though of course they are good at skipping commercials.
Fully automatic commercial skip does nothing but skip commercials, so it could be ruled liable.
What confuses people here is they think the court is telling them they don't have the right to skip commercials. That's not what it would say.
What it would say is "You don't have the right to make a copy at all, except for purposes that fit the fair use rule."
Then it would rule on those purposes. One it ruled on was time-shifting. Another one recently ruled on was space shifting (moving a copy you have to another medium.)
However, it's actually unlikely they would rule "watching it without viewing the commercials whose exposure to you was the only reason it was broadcast in the first place" is a fair use.
That would mean that if you record it and watch without the commercials, your recording might be infringing. But that's you doing the infringing, not the company that made the PVR. And they can't do anything about what you do in your home.
It's like the idea that if you xerox a book, you are violating the copyright, but the xerox machine isn't.
Since 30 second skip has lots of valid uses (I love how it takes me from the end of an olympic event to the judging!) the 30 second skip is not liable. But in theory, though they could never do anything about it, the exclusive practice of watching shows without the commercials could be a violation by the consumer.
The thing to learn is that the decision was narrower than we might like. The court really sat down and asked "does the vcr hurt the market for TV studios?"
It decided that time-shifting did not hurt the market. It could easily have decided that library building does hurt the market for tapes. I've seen friends with a wall with every Star Trek, taped off the air, and they sell the same thing at the store.
Based on the read of this close 5 to 4 decision, I think they might well have ruled that building a library of off-air tapes is an infringement.
However, fortunately they would not have thus made the VCR illegal. That's because the time-shifting is still legal, so the device that does it is legal. In addition, the ruled that since taping certain PBS shows for a library is legal, the VCR is also legal.
However, it seems implied from their decision that if they were to decide that a device or feature had no fair use, that it could be illegal (ie. the maker held liable for contributory infringement)
As I read it, automatic commercial elimination might be held not a fair use, but program sharing actually should be (because of the C-SPAN and PBS shows.)
The law around these cases mostly derives from the famous Sony vs. Universal supreme court case, known as the "Betamax decision." It declared time-shifting a fair use, and that recorders which had a substantial non-infringing use (such as so noted time shifting) were legal.
But that is all it said. Most notably, the court ruled that based on the time of the suit, studies showed that few people were fast forwarding over commercials when they time-shifted, because it was a pain to do. (Back then all you could do was go into FF with big mechanical buttons) and try to aim for the end of commercial. There was no on-screen scan, no commercial skip, no 30 second advance button.
The court used this to conclude that the time-shifters weren't taking money from the studios pockets, in fact they were giving them more because more people could watch a show thanks to their betamax.
Unfortunately, this logic is all but gone. Everbody commercial skips now because it's easy, and on a PVR it's really, really easy, and so you always do it. I see 1 commercial out of 100, if that, thanks to my Tivo. The court, looking at that, could rule quite differently.
This wasn't all the ruling, however. One other important part was that because there were free programs on TV like PBS shows (today they would also talk about C-SPAN) that clearly vcrs should be legal for people who want to tape those and do whatever they want (including make libraries.)
But that doesn't bear on commercial elimination, just on the recoder's right to exist as a linear recorder.
The studios will argue that the 1982 Betamax court did not know about 2002 technology, and would not have come to the same conclusion about how today's recorders are not hurting the commercial prospects of studios.
It was a 5-4 decision, and the chief justice was on the minority side, by the way.
It's important as well to understand what the time-shifting ruling meant.
Copying a tv show off the air is copying in the sense that copyright law defines it. It is an infringement under normal analysis of the studio's exclusive right to make such copies.
What the court did was say that "If the reason you're making the copy is just to watch it later -- including probably watching the commercials too -- then this copy is a fair use, not an infringement.
If, for example, you were taping off the air to sell the copies, that would not be a fair use, it would be a very clear infringement.
And if you tape off the air to build a library -- well, the court never said that was OK. People just took the time-shifting logic to imply this. We don't really know what the court felt about that.
So this is a complex issue with much left to resolve.
It's not that simple. Not all Canadian jobs pay the same number of CDN dollars as U.S equivalents pay in US$.
I would not be surprised if Rogers, like many of the largest Canadian ISPs buys much of its bandwith in the form of peering points to U.S. and overseas ISPs too.
Do you really want it to be written as ($15 US but Canadians are poorer so it feels more like $25?)
I know what it is, and perhaps the ISP can be blamed to some extent for promoting the illusion of what they are selling you.
But the truth has always been that they're selling you a shared pipe. Everybody doesn't have the right to saturate their pipe because its physically impossible for everybody to do this. It's an illusion if you think they sold you that right.
Sharing a pipe is a great win for both customer and supplier. It lets them sell access to the pipe for far, far less than they would have to charge if people saturated. With totally flat pricing, the low users subsidise the heavy users. That's fine, even good to a limited extent. But how far?
When you say "how dare they not give me all the bandwidth all the time for the same price as the grandmother who logs in once a day?" what you're saying is not that you should pay as much as her, but that she should be forced to pay as much as you.
They can price everybody the same, and that makes grandma pay for your heavy usage. Or they can have level of pricing and balance it out. If they can give people lower data flow with the same bandwidth for $25 CDN (just $15 USD, think about that) I think it's a great thing, and those who oppose it are selfish.
Having to pay to buy the whole pipe is the old way. Sharing is the internet way.
Now I know why people are upset. The flat rate deal had some interesting positive consequences. When grandma subsidzed the heavy user, it allowed heavy users to experiment and do things that might never have been done if people had to pay for their own usage. That's why per packet charging is bad, it goes too far the other way. But nor is entirely flat rate the fairest answer.
My example is not made up. My mother (who is a grandmother) won't buy a cable modem. She thinks the dial-up using her existing phone lines is just fine for the 3 times a week she goes to check mail. Why shouldn't she have a chance at high speed for a similar price?
What if, as many have supposed, the upload requires a destructive scan? People would do that on an ape many years before it would ever be permitted on a human, and the number of humans willing to do a destructive scan upload is highly limited anyway.
In short, we'll experiment on animals, all the way up to apes, long before we upload humans. It's possible that in that gap, an "open source" ape brain scan will be released, and people will hack it and enhance it, giving it the abilities humans have over apes plus a lot more.
The result -- an uploaded ape superbeing.
If we're lucky, our pets will keep us as pets. Read the essay for full details.
It's meant to be a bit strong. To put it another way, compared to what you do in the old world of TV and VCR, you hardly ever watch live TV.
In particular, I do not consider it watching live TV when you are watching a program that is being recorded to disk which happens to be "still on." You could watch that show any time, but you happen to be watching it now (probably even at lower quality) because you are there or because you are eager to see it.
Watching live TV means watching from the 30 minute buffer, or channel surfing. That's something I hardly do at all these days, and like you, when I do it, I pause it, switch to watch another show for 20 minutes, and go back to it so I can commercial skip etc.
The only downside is not being able to go into tv discussion chatrooms for live watchers. Somehow I'll live without that.
Indeed, and Tivo owners all know about this and how it changes the watching pattern. The question is how to convey that to the public so that they will buy before they have owned one.
One answer might be to offer a free month trial, with a guy who comes to your house and installs it. This would work well, as after you have it you won't give it up -- but the margins on the boxes are not high enough to pay for something like this.
As for how much TV you watch, I found that after I got the Tivo I started watching more (which is bad) but that over time it settled out. The problem is movies, there are all these good movies that the box picks up no matter what time of day they are on.
Indeed, the vendors have not figured out how to "position" the product yet. Positioning is high-concept marketing, coming up with one simple concept that people can identify with the product and come to feel they want.
The original positioning of pausing live TV was a mistake. It was chosen, I think, because it was a feature that was simple to understand. What the public doesn't get is that real users of the boxes hardly ever pause live TV because they hardly ever watch live TV.
"Hardly ever watch live TV" isn't a great positioning either because it might actually scare people away.
They also tried "skip the stuff you don't want to see" implying commercial skipping, but tread a fine line here at annoying the networks. Since the average household watches some 7 hours of TV per day, including about 2 hours of advertising, "get back 60 hours of your life every month" might be a good positioning but it can't last because there's no free lunch, and commercial skip is a temporary free lunch.
They ended up on "TV, your way" which doesn't say a whole lot.
The answer may simply be the only way these market is word of mouth, and they do market very well by word of mouth. Every buyer is a giant fan who pushes it on his friends. But that's slow, not the huge success story people expect from new high tech.
Re:Who cares? Transparent tanks are a plot point
on
Transparent Concrete
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· Score: 2
Indeed. But one of the reasons people read science fiction, and go to SF movies, is because they like seeing an interesting and coherent imagined world presented. And sure, Star Trek could do a far better job at it, but back in 1967, it was actually way ahead of most of the other media SF, so it got its fans.
This is not just SF. With a mystery, the clues and resolution need to be consistent or the viewers will be annoyed. You can't tell them it's just a story.
So it is just a movie, but viewers want it to be a better movie, so when it does something stupid, something not just outside of the rules of its own imagined world but outside the rules of reason, expect people to be annoyed, even if it's just a movie.
Re:Who cares? Transparent tanks are a plot point
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Transparent Concrete
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· Score: 2
The tanks, as I said, are not the plot point. In fact they have no real need for them.
The plot point is the time they spend hunting around for money and other means to get the tanks. Kirk sells his glasses and Scott hands over a major new piece of chemistry.
That's the part that was bogus. They didn't need transparent tanks. And frankly, I'm amazed the Klingons didn't have a waterproof hold anyway, or one that could be made waterproof enough for the trip. But if they didn't, they would have affected the past far less by just transporting plates from a yard, stealing though it would be. They just wanted to have a cute scene where Scott tries to talk to a mouse.
(And yet somehow is able to then handle a molecular modelling package like a master.)
Daresay this is alomst as silly. Changing history in a major way to raise some money? If people came in and offered an invention worth hundreds of millions to get a few thousand dollars worth of plexiglass in a rush, I can't see anybody going for it no matter how good it looked in the computer models.
There are so many other ways they could have raised cash than this (or selling eyeglasses.)
Not the first time this strange plothole shows up in an SF movie, since we saw it again in Star Wars 1, where a Jedi with all his mind powers couldn't find anybody in a whole city who might trade him imperial credits for local currency.
(Note, fun watching how the moderation has gone up and down on my original post!)
A little off topic, but germane to the item noted in the summary for this topic.
He refers to transparent aluminum from the Star Trek IV movie. In that film, they risk rewriting history by giving the technology for transparent aluminum to a 20th century factory.
They never answer the basic question of why did the aluminum have to be transparent? Why not regular aluminum or any other such material? Do the whales need a view of the Klingon starship? Do they have no cameras or sensors to let them see the whales?
It made no sense at all but it was a major plot point for the whole film. Sigh. Ok, mod me off topic now.
I think it's sad that it won't happen. Red Hat was the wrong distro for them to buy, of course, since it is highly priced because it has a brand name. AOL doesn't need the brand name in the slightest, and would not pay a premium to get it.
AOL/TW has a giant brand, and it would make sense for them to buy or start a linux distro, and produce a bundle with OS, browser, AOL software, basic applications suite, photo/video/media suite and some games.
This could happily run on older PCs, too but the AOL PC, based on one of those all in one motherboards would be dirt cheap and a serious competitor.
And it would do wonders for Linux. As millions of these units got deployed, there would finally be a user base and market for Linux products, and a stronger demand for hardware vendors to provide linux drivers.
Everybody, including Alan Cox, should welcome AOL pushing linux.
Re:On the subject of Vinge, get the annotated AFUT
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True Names
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· Score: 2
Making something like this is a ton of work, as much work as preparing all the items for publication in any other media, if not more, and eBook sales don't financially justify it, at least they did not back then. Perhaps in a few years.
Also, I doubt you could get the rights in the same way these days.
On the subject of Vinge, get the annotated AFUTD
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True Names
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· Score: 2
Since we're talking Vinge, I will make a blatant ad for the fact that I have put up 6 copies of the
now rare "1993 Hugo and Nebula Anthology" CD-ROM up for Charity Auction on eBay.
This CD is the world's first major eBook project with current fiction, and became famous because the novel "A Fire Upon the Deep," is in hypertext, linked to 400kb of the author's notes, written as the novel was being developed. You really get to see Vinge's mind at work.
Anyway, Vinge fans love these, so from time to time they show up for charity auction. In this case, the proceeds go to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which you can read about elsewehre on/. today.
I've sued phone spammers, the type who use a machine that calls people and plays a recording, which as been blatantly illegal for almost 10 years.
I've won, but it takes more work than the $500 you win is worth even when you do win, and on average it's something you do only on principle and not for money.
And thus few do it. When I have been in court the judges/commissioners have said they don't often (if at all) see these cases.
Laws are not the answer to spam. In spite of what people say it is not just a question of "it's not a free speech issue it's a property issue."
Spam involves rights in conflict. It's a free speech issue AND a property issue AND a privacy issue, all in one. The answers are not so simple as these laws suggest.
There were no binaries in the early days. First there were the net.sources groups where you would find new Unix programs, notably the lastest updates of USENET software.
Binaries groups showed up a bit later, mostly after the great renaming, mostly for IBM PC Shareware and freeware binaries. No Warez or photos, not until a lot later.
O'Reilly Network article on the same theme
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How Google Saved USENET
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· Score: 4, Informative
This is a popular theme this month, with no surprises. O'Reilly Network also asked me to do an article on the history of USENET and things discovered in the archives. At the same time I also did an article on the history of some popular net terms like spam and net surfing.
Again, don't confuse the ruling in this particular law with the general principle being laid down. That principle is the state gets to define that you are acting in the state because you sent E-mail there, even if you didn't know you were sending E-mail there.
In this case, it's about "doing business" because you e-mailed an advertisement. What about other forms of doing business that states might want to regulate? What about non-business activities?
What about a state that wants to regulate decency and says you violated its law because the indecent mail you sent to that person you met on the newsgroup happened to go into that state?
What about the state that regulates what you can say even to an existing customer (this law does not) if, in the interests of privacy, you don't ask your electronic customers for their physical address or state?
This ruling does not say that only spam law can reach out of a state and grab you in another. The problem is that it says E-mail law can do that.
(All this without also pointing out that it's not a good spam law. That only helps illustrate the problem more directly by letting you imagine 50 not very good spam laws.)
It was a hyperbolic statement and I don't mean to imply that this law stops you from sending mail without knowing where it's going.
But the ruling does that because the ruling says "you are subject to the laws of the states you send E-mail to."
The ruling is about just one particular law that you're not afraid of being subject to. But in law, rulings set precedents that cover all laws, and so this ruling means far more than everybody is subject to California's spam law. It says everybody is subject to every state's E-mail laws.
(Or rather, if it is not struck down at a higher level it says this.)
I don't read this ruling as saying that California's long arm is limited to the exact wording of the law in question.
Imagine that California decides to pass a law saying that all E-mail sent into California has to have a string in the subject line that says whether it is personal, business, institutional, religious, charitable, governmental and whether it is angry or polite. Or any other classification rule you can imagine.
This ruling says California has the power to do this. That the particular law bans spam is not the point. With the above hypothetical law,
everybody in the USA would have to know of the law, and either comply or check to see that they aren't mailing California. Which means redesigning E-mail.
Worse, let's say Texas also requires a classification system but uses different classificaitons, so you can't use both at once.
Slashdot Mirror
You assume you control the zone of the connecting client. If you want people with a browser to connect to you securely from out there anywhere, SSL is your choice.
I've been working on a server that takes a lot of connections in Java, and you can finally do it with the support of "select" in Java 1.4. But no support for SSL. I undertand why it happens, but this "we'll get around to doing the security later" is why we don't have a lot of security.
Java will always present a dilemma. With the push for portability, you often have to wait for the platform itself to support things like this (select) or kludge it in very non portable ways. But that portability leaves the system behind which hurts it in competition with other systems more tolerant of innovation and the fracturing it brings.
A good philosophy would be to rule that every time a system library or feature needs to do something that an ordinary user can't do, they don't just build it in, they make a way that an ordinary user could write it. That paves the way for more innovation.
Sicne the world isn't quite ready for the eBooks yet, the more intersting question is what if HP5 could be self-published and only available online.
She probably has a lock-up with her publishers, otherwise Joanne Rowling would be well advised to consider it.
She would do it by also cutting a deal with amazon.com or bn.com as EXCLUSIVE distributor for the first while. If you wanted to get the book, you would have to order it online from them.
In fact, this would deprive nobody of the book, except bookstores, since I doubt there is anybody who buys a children's book in hardcover who can't find a friend able to place an online order if they can't do it themselves.
However, Rowling would get all $20 of the sale price, instead of the $3 she probably gets now. She would probably have to pay a few bucks for printing, but would otherwise have just Amazon's margin between her and the whole amount. I would estimate that Amazon might be quite willing to do this for very low margin.
(In fact, when I thought about this back in the boomtimes, I figured they would do it at a loss just for the publicity and getting so many new customers with accounts on amazon and used to ordering books there.)
As such, she might keep $15 instead of $3, and thus only need to sell 1/5th books to make the money, but I think should would sell almost as many and thus rake it in.
Later, bookstores could order it, she would have no problem cutting a special deal with the book distributors, though normally an author or new small publisher can't do that.
Unless they lived in fear of how she was turning the industry upside-down.
She would become a very rich woman, and make history in new ways that might be remembered well after Harry Potter.
The key, based on the supreme court, is does the technology have a substantial non-infringing use.
Things like 30 second skip, high speed FF, these have all sorts of valid uses, though of course they are good at skipping commercials.
Fully automatic commercial skip does nothing but skip commercials, so it could be ruled liable.
What confuses people here is they think the court is telling them they don't have the right to skip commercials. That's not what it would say.
What it would say is "You don't have the right to make a copy at all, except for purposes that fit the fair use rule."
Then it would rule on those purposes. One it ruled on was time-shifting. Another one recently ruled on was space shifting (moving a copy you have to another medium.)
However, it's actually unlikely they would rule "watching it without viewing the commercials whose exposure to you was the only reason it was broadcast in the first place" is a fair use.
That would mean that if you record it and watch without the commercials, your recording might be infringing. But that's you doing the infringing, not the company that made the PVR. And they can't do anything about what you do in your home.
It's like the idea that if you xerox a book, you are violating the copyright, but the xerox machine isn't.
Since 30 second skip has lots of valid uses (I love how it takes me from the end of an olympic event to the judging!) the 30 second skip is not liable. But in theory, though they could never do anything about it, the exclusive practice of watching shows without the commercials could be a violation by the consumer.
I'm not saying they will manage to ban it.
The thing to learn is that the decision was narrower than we might like. The court really sat down and asked "does the vcr hurt the market for TV studios?"
It decided that time-shifting did not hurt the market. It could easily have decided that library building does hurt the market for tapes. I've seen friends with a wall with every Star Trek, taped off the air, and they sell the same thing at the store.
Based on the read of this close 5 to 4 decision, I think they might well have ruled that building a library of off-air tapes is an infringement.
However, fortunately they would not have thus made the VCR illegal. That's because the time-shifting is still legal, so the device that does it is legal. In addition, the ruled that since taping certain PBS shows for a library is legal, the VCR is also legal.
However, it seems implied from their decision that if they were to decide that a device or feature had no fair use, that it could be illegal (ie. the maker held liable for contributory infringement)
As I read it, automatic commercial elimination might be held not a fair use, but program sharing actually should be (because of the C-SPAN and PBS shows.)
The law around these cases mostly derives from the famous Sony vs. Universal supreme court case, known as the "Betamax decision." It declared time-shifting a fair use, and that recorders which had a substantial non-infringing use (such as so noted time shifting) were legal.
But that is all it said. Most notably, the court ruled that based on the time of the suit, studies showed that few people were fast forwarding over commercials when they time-shifted, because it was a pain to do. (Back then all you could do was go into FF with big mechanical buttons) and try to aim for the end of commercial. There was no on-screen scan, no commercial skip, no 30 second advance button.
The court used this to conclude that the time-shifters weren't taking money from the studios pockets, in fact they were giving them more because more people could watch a show thanks to their betamax.
Unfortunately, this logic is all but gone. Everbody commercial skips now because it's easy, and on a PVR it's really, really easy, and so you always do it. I see 1 commercial out of 100, if that, thanks to my Tivo. The court, looking at that, could rule quite differently.
This wasn't all the ruling, however. One other important part was that because there were free programs on TV like PBS shows (today they would also talk about C-SPAN) that clearly vcrs should be legal for people who want to tape those and do whatever they want (including make libraries.)
But that doesn't bear on commercial elimination, just on the recoder's right to exist as a linear recorder.
The studios will argue that the 1982 Betamax court did not know about 2002 technology, and would not have come to the same conclusion about how today's recorders are not hurting the commercial prospects of studios.
It was a 5-4 decision, and the chief justice was on the minority side, by the way.
It's important as well to understand what the time-shifting ruling meant.
Copying a tv show off the air is copying in the sense that copyright law defines it. It is an infringement under normal analysis of the studio's exclusive right to make such copies.
What the court did was say that "If the reason you're making the copy is just to watch it later -- including probably watching the commercials too -- then this copy is a fair use, not an infringement.
If, for example, you were taping off the air to sell the copies, that would not be a fair use, it would be a very clear infringement.
And if you tape off the air to build a library -- well, the court never said that was OK. People just took the time-shifting logic to imply this. We don't really know what the court felt about that.
So this is a complex issue with much left to resolve.
It's not that simple. Not all Canadian jobs pay the same number of CDN dollars as U.S equivalents pay in US$.
I would not be surprised if Rogers, like many of the largest Canadian ISPs buys much of its bandwith in the form of peering points to U.S. and overseas ISPs too.
Do you really want it to be written as ($15 US but Canadians are poorer so it feels more like $25?)
I know what it is, and perhaps the ISP can be blamed to some extent for promoting the illusion of what they are selling you.
But the truth has always been that they're selling you a shared pipe. Everybody doesn't have the right to saturate their pipe because its physically impossible for everybody to do this. It's an illusion if you think they sold you that right.
Sharing a pipe is a great win for both customer and supplier. It lets them sell access to the pipe for far, far less than they would have to charge if people saturated. With totally flat pricing, the low users subsidise the heavy users. That's fine, even good to a limited extent. But how far?
When you say "how dare they not give me all the bandwidth all the time for the same price as the grandmother who logs in once a day?" what you're saying is not that you should pay as much as her, but that she should be forced to pay as much as you.
They can price everybody the same, and that makes grandma pay for your heavy usage. Or they can have level of pricing and balance it out. If they can give people lower data flow with the same bandwidth for $25 CDN (just $15 USD, think about that) I think it's a great thing, and those who oppose it are selfish.
Having to pay to buy the whole pipe is the old way. Sharing is the internet way.
Now I know why people are upset. The flat rate deal had some interesting positive consequences. When grandma subsidzed the heavy user, it allowed heavy users to experiment and do things that might never have been done if people had to pay for their own usage. That's why per packet charging is bad, it goes too far the other way. But nor is entirely flat rate the fairest answer.
My example is not made up. My mother (who is a grandmother) won't buy a cable modem. She thinks the dial-up using her existing phone lines is just fine for the 3 times a week she goes to check mail. Why shouldn't she have a chance at high speed for a similar price?
What if, as many have supposed, the upload requires a destructive scan? People would do that on an ape many years before it would ever be permitted on a human, and the number of humans willing to do a destructive scan upload is highly limited anyway.
Yes, the planet of the apes might be real!
In short, we'll experiment on animals, all the way up to apes, long before we upload humans. It's possible that in that gap, an "open source" ape brain scan will be released, and people will hack it and enhance it, giving it the abilities humans have over apes plus a lot more.
The result -- an uploaded ape superbeing.
If we're lucky, our pets will keep us as pets. Read the essay for full details.
It's meant to be a bit strong. To put it another way, compared to what you do in the old world of TV and VCR, you hardly ever watch live TV.
In particular, I do not consider it watching live TV when you are watching a program that is being recorded to disk which happens to be "still on." You could watch that show any time, but you happen to be watching it now (probably even at lower quality) because you are there or because you are eager to see it.
Watching live TV means watching from the 30 minute buffer, or channel surfing. That's something I hardly do at all these days, and like you, when I do it, I pause it, switch to watch another show for 20 minutes, and go back to it so I can commercial skip etc.
The only downside is not being able to go into tv discussion chatrooms for live watchers. Somehow I'll live without that.
Indeed, and Tivo owners all know about this and how it changes the watching pattern. The question is how to convey that to the public so that they will buy before they have owned one.
One answer might be to offer a free month trial, with a guy who comes to your house and installs it. This would work well, as after you have it you won't give it up -- but the margins on the boxes are not high enough to pay for something like this.
As for how much TV you watch, I found that after I got the Tivo I started watching more (which is bad) but that over time it settled out. The problem is movies, there are all these good movies that the box picks up no matter what time of day they are on.
Indeed, the vendors have not figured out how to "position" the product yet. Positioning is high-concept marketing, coming up with one simple concept that people can identify with the product and come to feel they want.
The original positioning of pausing live TV was a mistake. It was chosen, I think, because it was a feature that was simple to understand. What the public doesn't get is that real users of the boxes hardly ever pause live TV because they hardly ever watch live TV.
"Hardly ever watch live TV" isn't a great positioning either because it might actually scare people away.
They also tried "skip the stuff you don't want to see" implying commercial skipping, but tread a fine line here at annoying the networks. Since the average household watches some 7 hours of TV per day, including about 2 hours of advertising, "get back 60 hours of your life every month" might be a good positioning but it can't last because there's no free lunch, and commercial skip is a temporary free lunch.
They ended up on "TV, your way" which doesn't say a whole lot.
The answer may simply be the only way these market is word of mouth, and they do market very well by word of mouth. Every buyer is a giant fan who pushes it on his friends. But that's slow, not the huge success story people expect from new high tech.
Indeed. But one of the reasons people read science fiction, and go to SF movies, is because they like seeing an interesting and coherent imagined world presented. And sure, Star Trek could do a far better job at it, but back in 1967, it was actually way ahead of most of the other media SF, so it got its fans.
This is not just SF. With a mystery, the clues and resolution need to be consistent or the viewers will be annoyed. You can't tell them it's just a story.
So it is just a movie, but viewers want it to be a better movie, so when it does something stupid, something not just outside of the rules of its own imagined world but outside the rules of reason, expect people to be annoyed, even if it's just a movie.
The tanks, as I said, are not the plot point. In fact they have no real need for them.
The plot point is the time they spend hunting around for money and other means to get the tanks. Kirk sells his glasses and Scott hands over a major new piece of chemistry.
That's the part that was bogus. They didn't need transparent tanks. And frankly, I'm amazed the Klingons didn't have a waterproof hold anyway, or one that could be made waterproof enough for the trip. But if they didn't, they would have affected the past far less by just transporting plates from a yard, stealing though it would be. They just wanted to have a cute scene where Scott tries to talk to a mouse.
(And yet somehow is able to then handle a molecular modelling package like a master.)
Daresay this is alomst as silly. Changing history in a major way to raise some money? If people came in and offered an invention worth hundreds of millions to get a few thousand dollars worth of plexiglass in a rush, I can't see anybody going for it no matter how good it looked in the computer models.
There are so many other ways they could have raised cash than this (or selling eyeglasses.)
Not the first time this strange plothole shows up in an SF movie, since we saw it again in Star Wars 1, where a Jedi with all his mind powers couldn't find anybody in a whole city who might trade him imperial credits for local currency.
(Note, fun watching how the moderation has gone up and down on my original post!)
A little off topic, but germane to the item noted in the summary for this topic.
He refers to transparent aluminum from the Star Trek IV movie. In that film, they risk rewriting history by giving the technology for transparent aluminum to a 20th century factory.
They never answer the basic question of why did the aluminum have to be transparent? Why not regular aluminum or any other such material? Do the whales need a view of the Klingon starship? Do they have no cameras or sensors to let them see the whales?
It made no sense at all but it was a major plot point for the whole film. Sigh. Ok, mod me off topic now.
I think it's sad that it won't happen. Red Hat was the wrong distro for them to buy, of course, since it is highly priced because it has a brand name. AOL doesn't need the brand name in the slightest, and would not pay a premium to get it.
AOL/TW has a giant brand, and it would make sense for them to buy or start a linux distro, and produce a bundle with OS, browser, AOL software, basic applications suite, photo/video/media suite and some games.
This could happily run on older PCs, too but the AOL PC, based on one of those all in one motherboards would be dirt cheap and a serious competitor.
And it would do wonders for Linux. As millions of these units got deployed, there would finally be a user base and market for Linux products, and a stronger demand for hardware vendors to provide linux drivers.
Everybody, including Alan Cox, should welcome AOL pushing linux.
Making something like this is a ton of work, as much work as preparing all the items for publication in any other media, if not more, and eBook sales don't financially justify it, at least they did not back then. Perhaps in a few years.
Also, I doubt you could get the rights in the same way these days.
This CD is the world's first major eBook project with current fiction, and became famous because the novel "A Fire Upon the Deep," is in hypertext, linked to 400kb of the author's notes, written as the novel was being developed. You really get to see Vinge's mind at work.
Anyway, Vinge fans love these, so from time to time they show up for charity auction. In this case, the proceeds go to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which you can read about elsewehre on /. today.
To see the auctions go to my eBay page or to the CD's web page
I've sued phone spammers, the type who use a machine that calls people and plays a recording, which as been blatantly illegal for almost 10 years.
I've won, but it takes more work than the $500 you win is worth even when you do win, and on average it's something you do only on principle and not for money.
And thus few do it. When I have been in court the judges/commissioners have said they don't often (if at all) see these cases.
Laws are not the answer to spam. In spite of what people say it is not just a question of "it's not a free speech issue it's a property issue."
Spam involves rights in conflict. It's a free speech issue AND a property issue AND a privacy issue, all in one. The answers are not so simple as these laws suggest.
There were no binaries in the early days. First there were the net.sources groups where you would find new Unix programs, notably the lastest updates of USENET software.
Binaries groups showed up a bit later, mostly after the great renaming, mostly for IBM PC Shareware and freeware binaries. No Warez or photos, not until a lot later.
You can read the article I wrote on the O'Reilly site
Again, don't confuse the ruling in this particular law with the general principle being laid down. That principle is the state gets to define that you are acting in the state because you sent E-mail there, even if you didn't know you were sending E-mail there.
In this case, it's about "doing business" because you e-mailed an advertisement. What about other forms of doing business that states might want to regulate? What about non-business activities?
What about a state that wants to regulate decency and says you violated its law because the indecent mail you sent to that person you met on the newsgroup happened to go into that state?
What about the state that regulates what you can say even to an existing customer (this law does not) if, in the interests of privacy, you don't ask your electronic customers for their physical address or state?
This ruling does not say that only spam law can reach out of a state and grab you in another. The problem is that it says E-mail law can do that.
(All this without also pointing out that it's not a good spam law. That only helps illustrate the problem more directly by letting you imagine 50 not very good spam laws.)
It was a hyperbolic statement and I don't mean to imply that this law stops you from sending mail without knowing where it's going.
But the ruling does that because the ruling says "you are subject to the laws of the states you send E-mail to."
The ruling is about just one particular law that you're not afraid of being subject to. But in law, rulings set precedents that cover all laws, and so this ruling means far more than everybody is subject to California's spam law. It says everybody is subject to every state's E-mail laws.
(Or rather, if it is not struck down at a higher level it says this.)
I don't read this ruling as saying that California's long arm is limited to the exact wording of the law in question.
Imagine that California decides to pass a law saying that all E-mail sent into California has to have a string in the subject line that says whether it is personal, business, institutional, religious, charitable, governmental and whether it is angry or polite. Or any other classification rule you can imagine.
This ruling says California has the power to do this. That the particular law bans spam is not the point. With the above hypothetical law,
everybody in the USA would have to know of the law, and either comply or check to see that they aren't mailing California. Which means redesigning E-mail.
Worse, let's say Texas also requires a classification system but uses different classificaitons, so you can't use both at once.
Having fun yet?