No it isn't. Please refrain from criticizing other people's understanding of the law if you don't really know yourself.
Copyright exists for any creative work from the moment of creation. If I write a screenplay and lock it in a trunk and no human ever sees it but myself, it has a copyright. Publication has nothing to do with it.
AT&T was asserting that the Unix source code was a trade secret, and wasn't copyright
That was a separate issue -- is computer code a creative work? That's still to be debated conclusively in the courts, so ATT chose the path most likely to lead to success, which is the well-established ground of trade secrets.
A PDF document written about a technical issue is not computer code, and its protection under copyright law would be unquestioned by any court in the US. This is not a gray area of copyright law.
Newspapers don't really care very much about minor crimes,
Unless they have a deal with the local police to publish the names of johns soliciting prostitutes. Which is very common. And can fuck with your life big-time. Now people who commit this non-crime never get past it...
The company name is MP3.com, and that's who's in court and who will pay any penalties and make any deals. JonKatz has his facts in perfect order.
my.mp3.com is just the name of a service they provide.
Watching people jump at any opportunity to criticize JonKatz is about as entertaining (and compelling) as watching Republicans criticize Clinton, or Democrats criticize George W...
Geez, I'd pay $600 just for a decent MP3-playing car stereo (with 140 hours of playback). Voice control would be icing on the cake. I'd love to buy an EMPEG, but $1000+ just to get a small disk is asinine. It costs $2000 to get one that would hold my MP3 collection.
$600 is a great price point -- high enough that folks are serious about it (since it's new tech) but low enough that folks like me who don't have.com stock options lying around can afford it.
I suspect that's an UL -- the laser system was real, but certainly not free. But cheaper than a real T1 line from Nynex (the world's worst phone company, after some of the South American ones).
It may not exist any more, but I know a few SOHO type businesses running out of apartments that used it to get bandwidth without the landlords finding out about it...
would support Microsoft's right to behave so long as they don't iniate the use of force (which they haven't from what I've heard)
Aye, and there's the rub. Rand essentially says that the only force is "AT THE END OF A GUN!!!!"
But is that the only kind of force? What if I buy every plot of land around yours, and post that i will shoot trespassers. Certainly I have that right, as I purchased (and own) the land legitimately. You run out of food. What happens? You can't get out to get more food, and none can be delivered to you. I'm not directly applying force, but I'm certainly killing you (just not actively).
Now say that I'm a giant company that owns every store in town, as well as every house. I sell food to my workers and rent them rooms, but if they strike I fire them. Then they're kicked out of their home and I refuse to sell them food at the company store. What if they're not close enough to walk to the next town? Do they deserve to die simply because the company happened to own everything around?
Rand, IMHO, takes a very myopic view of how force may manifest itself. Only a weak person has to use a gun -- those in positions of true power/strength/influence can do far more damage through the press, by blacklisting you for employment, by bringing economic pressure to bear.
If you've spent your life building a company, worked hard and been successful, but MS comes along and steals your code, thereby destroying your company and your ability to make a living (with that company and your investments in it), is that not applying force? Ask Stac who the deck was stacked against, regardless of how "right" they were. Their ability to force in court was lesser than MS's ability to force in the market. The best they can say is that they were at least bought out in the end rather than forced to fight for 20 years in court so that their grandchildren could feel proud of them. But hey, no one pulled a gun, so it must be okay...
She had a great philosophy that doesn't deserve to be reduced to a stereotype
Hah! Her own writings reduced whatever complex ideas she may have had to a stereotype.
Here's a summation of every Ayn Rand book:
"If only those damn looters would leave us alone!"
"You must do what we tell you, creators, or we will kill you!" "You do everything at the end of a gun!"
"We do everything at the end of a gun...and LIKE IT!" "Good thing the looters destroyed themselves, as was inevitable! They only knew how to do things -- AT THE END OF A GUN!!!!!!!"
"If only we had more guns we would have crushed you, aaargh!"
When I was living in NYC a few years ago, there was a laser connection similar to this that was available to anyone with line-of-sight to the Empire State Building. It was about a T1 worth of bandwidth, but it's a lot harder to get line-pf-sight to the ESB than you'd think.
AFAIK, it never really caught on, but it may still exist. I suspect the line-of-sight is the biggest issue it faced (I might have gotten it if my apt was on the correct side of my building to see the ESB). You'd have to put up a lot of these to solve the last mile in this way. Probably this would be a better solution for getting to the last mile -- ie, mount these on cell towers and then run fiber from them to the area buildings...
I only mean that current law recognizes that some trademarks are so widely recognized that they essentially do have exclusive control of the word in any industry. That's how Sony can keep a restaurant from using the name "Sony's" (even though the lady who owns the restaurant is named "Sony".
I'm not saying it's right (although I don't think it's wrong, either) only recognizing that having 100,000 domains would still be compatible with current trademark law, which acknowledges the existence of some "supertrademarks" like Coke, McDonalds, & Sony. It would take a company of that size to afford registering all of the possibilities, and only a company of that size would legally own the trademark to such an extent anyways.
But to answer your question, Coke would be able to prevent the use of the word "Coke" as a trade name for a drug, soft drink, or smokeless fuel. Saying something is "coke" when you sell a smokeless fuel is different from selling "Coke (tm) brand Smokeless Fuel". Although for just that reason of confusion, most companies prefer to make up a word (like "Kodak") so that they never have to face the issue...
This is a great way for NSI to make more money from people protecting their trademarks, but the only way to *increse* the truly available number of TLDs is to make the TLDs too numerous for anyone to desire or afford owning all permutations.
If we had 100,000 TLDs, and each cost $50, then only a huge company like McDonald's or Coke (who have a good case for exlusive Trademark protection across all industries) would even consider buying them all. But even they wouldn't need to, because the obvious one for McDonalds (.com,.food,.res, whatever) would be theirs, and they've little need to protect an oddball one like mcdonalds.xyz.
The only way to stop abuse and squatting is to dilute the value of any single TLD so that it's up to the company to make their domain stand out, rather than counting on (or worrying about) people guessing or stumbling across a domain.
Unfortunately the side-effect of this is that people won't realize they're taking a big performance hit.
Software modems, for the driver problems, aren't that big of a deal on windows because the Modem isn't using much processor time anyways.
But this thing sounds like a real hog -- they couldn't implement it until now because anything below a P3-550 couldn't run it? This sounds like a great way for Intel to sell more processors.
The folks who really appreciate high-speed access (other than Warez d00ds and Pr0n Kings) are gamers, and this is really gonna suck for folks who think they're getting a great deal, only to boot up and wonder why their new P3-1000 is slower playing Diablo 2 than their old P2-233 on a dial-up.
And then of course the driver issues, when Loki comes out with Diablo 2/Linux (maybe?)...
Heh. You learned that in public school, didn't you?
No, I learned it by travelling the world and seeing how good we have it. People elsewhere on this planet marvel at what we can accomplish by simply writing letters to a representative, by the idea that we can share our thoughts without any serious concern for well-being. I've found that people who are cynical about the US have either never left it or never lived there (depending on their origin).
No, the "state" (in the US) is an institution formed to represent the citizenry (we live in a republic, not a democracy). As such, it is vulnerable to being co-opted by private interests.
Technically, it's a Constitutional Democratic Republic, but we'll just assume from here on out that the other person actually does have a clue what he's talking about, 'kay?
Indeed, the government and agencies therin are vulnerable to undue influence (indeed, corruption) of the power we have granted them. That doesn't make them any less a function of the people, only a corrupted function of the people. As such, "we the people" have the ability to correct that corruption or eliminate the agency.
Just because we don't spend as much time as we could making sure to eliminate every pocket of inefficiency or graft in our mutlti-trillion dollar organization doesn't invalidate our control over it.
No, the state educating our children is a convenient and efficient way for those people who have the power to make sure the children of those people who oppose them agree with them
"The people who have power" are us. Go to your school board and you will be able to influence trmendously, because no one else is there. So don't criticize others simply because they participate and you don't. Don't say it doesn't represent you simply because you expected a psychic event to occur for the board members to understand your desires.
If you get outcoted, then your voice was at least heard. And you still have many options -- take your kid out of school if you really dislike the policy.
No one forces your kid to go to THAT school, we only mandate (collectively, through the Governement as our executor) that chidren be schooled. We made the moral decision years ago that having children working the in the coal mines at age seven was probably a bad idea for the long-term efficacy of our society. If you disagree, work to change the policy or find a society that agrees with you, but don't delude yourself into thinking that your voice is silent.
Now the two sides (and many factions) are at war over who gets to promulgate their propaganda next.
And of course you can pull your children out of public school at any time, so long as they are schooled somewhere.
But even more than that, having sides fighting over the resolution -- well, that's what we're all about in the US. We have the adversarial system entrenched in everything we do. Maybe it shouldn't be that way (I don't know) but it does seem to make us wind up in the middle ground most of the time. There are many places on Earth where people don't fight over ideology because it means being killed in the middle of the night. Given the choices, I suppose I'll live in a place where the admittedly slow-moving processes usually leave us with a reasonable comprimise. For short periods we may wind up with ridiculous things being done in our name, but in the long haul it always shifts back because for all our laziness, we are the most righteously indignant people on the planet...
Thank you for parroting moronic platitude number 37.
You're welcome -- thank you for assuming that you're more intelligent than I by virtue of the fact that we disagree.
Even if you assume that the state generally implements the will of the majority (a tough assumption to defend), the idea that a majority can speak for everybody is morally indefensible
Nobody said it speaks for everybody -- that would be logically imnpossible (it would be E Pluribus Unum, literally!). It speaks for the majority of people who bother to take part in the activities and are even moderately capable of debating policy. If you don't believe that, you've obviously never involved yourself. When they count the votes at the end of the day, that's who wins. Whether or not our particular implementation of voting and representation is ideal or efficient is of course debatable, but it seems to be more effective than other methods attempted.
The state is not the citizens. The state is an organization with its own dynamics, set up to implement an at-best-poor approximation to the consensus desires of a (possibly large, possibly small) subset of the citizens
The state is an organization with the dynamics of whatever citizens participate in it. If you don't participate, you're correct that it won't represent you. What do you expect, voting by telepathy? That you will make your views known to representatives and school boards by complaining on Slashdot? Minimal participation yields tremendous gains, that's exactly why the Moral Majority managed to have such influence over school boards. Participate and you will be heard. feel free to ignore me, though -- I like having multiple votes.
In the case of schools in the US, this includes systematically inculcating consensus ideas, many of which are nonsense, and systematically suppressing independent thought
Which is a wonderful reason for you to take your child out of school. Feel free to do it, no one is stopping you (despite what communal pressures you feel "the state" is putting on you)...
Okay, the facts are they sue people left and right who say anything desparaging about them. That's bad enough for me, before you get into the kidnapping and other things. Just check out alt.scientology and they'll be happy to provide plenty of factual evidence (newspaper reports, court records). It's tough to not give an opinion when you see something so clearly evil, though...
The idea that it's the state's job -- even the state's prerogative -- to advance every social good is the very pretext by which they usurp the rights of citizens.
The "state" IS the citizens.
"The state" educating our children is merely a convenient and efficient way for us to educate our children. It may not work as well as it would individually, but it's cheaper and less time-consuming than on an individual level. If you don't want to make that tradeoff, then homeschool your kids or send them to private school.
The system of mandatory schooling in the US is despicably corrupt.
Why is this? It's probably not as good as it could be, but then again few people participate in school board meetings, where the decisions are made. But that doesn't make it corrupt, just not as representative as it could (should) be.
If Mr. X has a gun, and he showed it to me at school, do I want him to ever be able to find out who turned him in?
So dial 911 from school, and report it. Or call crimestoppers.
being anonymous to report a crime (having a gun at school) is no problem.
This is akin to calling a rape hotline and telling them you thing your neighbor is really creepy and might rape someone someday. There's a big difference between alerting the authorities to a problem that needs to be addressed and doing profiling in your spare time under the aegis of school safety.
Everything the WAVE program purports to do would be better served by the police. Anything short of that standard shouldn't be reported anonymously, because it's just as likely to be hot air...
Well, Einstein did do very poorly in mathematics (possibly failing, don't recall) until his (uncle?) tutored him in Algebra and showed him the "interesting" side of solving problems with Math rather than rote memorization...
I'm certain that disclaiming themselves as Big Brother helps employees sleep at night, but it doesn't change reality.
No one wakes up in the morning deciding to become Big Brother, they don't set out to do evil. Evil is achieved only through consistent application of indifference and misguided idealism. ("The world would be better without _____")
Justifying immoral activity by saying that "someone" would do it anyway is the ultimate cop-out. You aren't even willing to defend it, only stating that others are even less moral than yourself. ("Well, someone will turn in these Jews, it might as well be me.")
Reminds me of Battlefield Earth (soon to be a bad new movie) -- Earth was owned by aliens who had conquered it, and the bank was going to sell Humanity into slavery when they reposessed it. Over and over they would say, "It's just business, humans. Sorry. Nothing personal, just business."
Don't worry, it's just business here at Pinkerton. Gotta satisy the market. If we don't someone else will, so it may as well be us. Nothing personal, hope we don't ruin your kid's life, but if we do, sorry, nothing personal. Just business...
Yes, the workarounds of mutliple files are exactly what i was referring to by "proprietary workarounds".
I know many people still believe and practice SCSI RAID -- it's a mantra. The simple fact is that IDE (UATA66) is plenty fast for video editing. I've got about three thousand hours of 720x480 @ 25Mb/sec footage without a single dropped frome to prove it. I could have spent $5k more to get SCSI, but it would have to do a lot more than be "a little faster" to make up for the price difference. SCSI isn't cheap when you're talking about 100 gigs of space.
MPEG is just fine for editing as long as your hardware system supports IBP-frame editing. If you don't have the hardware to do it, you're screwed...
I was referring specifically to video files, which can't be more than 2/4 gigs depending on your video format. Apparently the new quicktime spec supports more, but I don't know of any hardware or software (other than FCP) that supports the greater file sizes -- usually there is a workaround invoked to make large pseudo-files.
Whatever you might think of Apple otherwise, it is manifestly clear that they are willing to do almost anything to own the DV market
Except allow people to use the "firewire" trademark, which would do a lot to reduce consumer confusion about device compatibility. They want to control the standard if they have to destroy it in the process...
Try capturing a file past the 2 gig file mark (without a special file format converter).
Quicktime is limited to 2 Gigs, as is AVI. New versions will get around this (with the OpenDMI spec), but for the moment you need a proprietary solution to this problem...
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Copyright is for published material.
No it isn't. Please refrain from criticizing other people's understanding of the law if you don't really know yourself.
Copyright exists for any creative work from the moment of creation. If I write a screenplay and lock it in a trunk and no human ever sees it but myself, it has a copyright. Publication has nothing to do with it.
AT&T was asserting that the Unix source code was a trade secret, and wasn't copyright
That was a separate issue -- is computer code a creative work? That's still to be debated conclusively in the courts, so ATT chose the path most likely to lead to success, which is the well-established ground of trade secrets.
A PDF document written about a technical issue is not computer code, and its protection under copyright law would be unquestioned by any court in the US. This is not a gray area of copyright law.
Newspapers don't really care very much about minor crimes,
Unless they have a deal with the local police to publish the names of johns soliciting prostitutes. Which is very common. And can fuck with your life big-time. Now people who commit this non-crime never get past it...
The company name is MP3.com, and that's who's in court and who will pay any penalties and make any deals. JonKatz has his facts in perfect order.
my.mp3.com is just the name of a service they provide.
Watching people jump at any opportunity to criticize JonKatz is about as entertaining (and compelling) as watching Republicans criticize Clinton, or Democrats criticize George W...
Geez, I'd pay $600 just for a decent MP3-playing car stereo (with 140 hours of playback). Voice control would be icing on the cake. I'd love to buy an EMPEG, but $1000+ just to get a small disk is asinine. It costs $2000 to get one that would hold my MP3 collection.
$600 is a great price point -- high enough that folks are serious about it (since it's new tech) but low enough that folks like me who don't have
I suspect that's an UL -- the laser system was real, but certainly not free. But cheaper than a real T1 line from Nynex (the world's worst phone company, after some of the South American ones).
It may not exist any more, but I know a few SOHO type businesses running out of apartments that used it to get bandwidth without the landlords finding out about it...
would support Microsoft's right to behave so long as they don't iniate the use of force (which they haven't from what I've heard)
Aye, and there's the rub. Rand essentially says that the only force is "AT THE END OF A GUN!!!!"
But is that the only kind of force? What if I buy every plot of land around yours, and post that i will shoot trespassers. Certainly I have that right, as I purchased (and own) the land legitimately. You run out of food. What happens? You can't get out to get more food, and none can be delivered to you. I'm not directly applying force, but I'm certainly killing you (just not actively).
Now say that I'm a giant company that owns every store in town, as well as every house. I sell food to my workers and rent them rooms, but if they strike I fire them. Then they're kicked out of their home and I refuse to sell them food at the company store. What if they're not close enough to walk to the next town? Do they deserve to die simply because the company happened to own everything around?
Rand, IMHO, takes a very myopic view of how force may manifest itself. Only a weak person has to use a gun -- those in positions of true power/strength/influence can do far more damage through the press, by blacklisting you for employment, by bringing economic pressure to bear.
If you've spent your life building a company, worked hard and been successful, but MS comes along and steals your code, thereby destroying your company and your ability to make a living (with that company and your investments in it), is that not applying force? Ask Stac who the deck was stacked against, regardless of how "right" they were. Their ability to force in court was lesser than MS's ability to force in the market. The best they can say is that they were at least bought out in the end rather than forced to fight for 20 years in court so that their grandchildren could feel proud of them. But hey, no one pulled a gun, so it must be okay...
She had a great philosophy that doesn't deserve to be reduced to a stereotype
Hah! Her own writings reduced whatever complex ideas she may have had to a stereotype.
Here's a summation of every Ayn Rand book:
"If only those damn looters would leave us alone!"
"You must do what we tell you, creators, or we will kill you!"
"You do everything at the end of a gun!"
"We do everything at the end of a gun...and LIKE IT!"
"Good thing the looters destroyed themselves, as was inevitable! They only knew how to do things -- AT THE END OF A GUN!!!!!!!"
"If only we had more guns we would have crushed you, aaargh!"
It was very deep stuff...
When I was living in NYC a few years ago, there was a laser connection similar to this that was available to anyone with line-of-sight to the Empire State Building. It was about a T1 worth of bandwidth, but it's a lot harder to get line-pf-sight to the ESB than you'd think.
AFAIK, it never really caught on, but it may still exist. I suspect the line-of-sight is the biggest issue it faced (I might have gotten it if my apt was on the correct side of my building to see the ESB). You'd have to put up a lot of these to solve the last mile in this way. Probably this would be a better solution for getting to the last mile -- ie, mount these on cell towers and then run fiber from them to the area buildings...
I only mean that current law recognizes that some trademarks are so widely recognized that they essentially do have exclusive control of the word in any industry. That's how Sony can keep a restaurant from using the name "Sony's" (even though the lady who owns the restaurant is named "Sony".
I'm not saying it's right (although I don't think it's wrong, either) only recognizing that having 100,000 domains would still be compatible with current trademark law, which acknowledges the existence of some "supertrademarks" like Coke, McDonalds, & Sony. It would take a company of that size to afford registering all of the possibilities, and only a company of that size would legally own the trademark to such an extent anyways.
But to answer your question, Coke would be able to prevent the use of the word "Coke" as a trade name for a drug, soft drink, or smokeless fuel. Saying something is "coke" when you sell a smokeless fuel is different from selling "Coke (tm) brand Smokeless Fuel". Although for just that reason of confusion, most companies prefer to make up a word (like "Kodak") so that they never have to face the issue...
This is a great way for NSI to make more money from people protecting their trademarks, but the only way to *increse* the truly available number of TLDs is to make the TLDs too numerous for anyone to desire or afford owning all permutations.
.food, .res, whatever) would be theirs, and they've little need to protect an oddball one like mcdonalds.xyz.
If we had 100,000 TLDs, and each cost $50, then only a huge company like McDonald's or Coke (who have a good case for exlusive Trademark protection across all industries) would even consider buying them all. But even they wouldn't need to, because the obvious one for McDonalds (.com,
The only way to stop abuse and squatting is to dilute the value of any single TLD so that it's up to the company to make their domain stand out, rather than counting on (or worrying about) people guessing or stumbling across a domain.
Unfortunately the side-effect of this is that people won't realize they're taking a big performance hit.
Software modems, for the driver problems, aren't that big of a deal on windows because the Modem isn't using much processor time anyways.
But this thing sounds like a real hog -- they couldn't implement it until now because anything below a P3-550 couldn't run it? This sounds like a great way for Intel to sell more processors.
The folks who really appreciate high-speed access (other than Warez d00ds and Pr0n Kings) are gamers, and this is really gonna suck for folks who think they're getting a great deal, only to boot up and wonder why their new P3-1000 is slower playing Diablo 2 than their old P2-233 on a dial-up.
And then of course the driver issues, when Loki comes out with Diablo 2/Linux (maybe?)...
Heh. You learned that in public school, didn't you?
No, I learned it by travelling the world and seeing how good we have it. People elsewhere on this planet marvel at what we can accomplish by simply writing letters to a representative, by the idea that we can share our thoughts without any serious concern for well-being. I've found that people who are cynical about the US have either never left it or never lived there (depending on their origin).
No, the "state" (in the US) is an institution formed to represent the citizenry (we live in a republic, not a democracy). As such, it is vulnerable to being co-opted by private interests.
Technically, it's a Constitutional Democratic Republic, but we'll just assume from here on out that the other person actually does have a clue what he's talking about, 'kay?
Indeed, the government and agencies therin are vulnerable to undue influence (indeed, corruption) of the power we have granted them. That doesn't make them any less a function of the people, only a corrupted function of the people. As such, "we the people" have the ability to correct that corruption or eliminate the agency.
Just because we don't spend as much time as we could making sure to eliminate every pocket of inefficiency or graft in our mutlti-trillion dollar organization doesn't invalidate our control over it.
No, the state educating our children is a convenient and efficient way for those people who have the power to make sure the children of those people who oppose them agree with them
"The people who have power" are us. Go to your school board and you will be able to influence trmendously, because no one else is there. So don't criticize others simply because they participate and you don't. Don't say it doesn't represent you simply because you expected a psychic event to occur for the board members to understand your desires.
If you get outcoted, then your voice was at least heard. And you still have many options -- take your kid out of school if you really dislike the policy.
No one forces your kid to go to THAT school, we only mandate (collectively, through the Governement as our executor) that chidren be schooled. We made the moral decision years ago that having children working the in the coal mines at age seven was probably a bad idea for the long-term efficacy of our society. If you disagree, work to change the policy or find a society that agrees with you, but don't delude yourself into thinking that your voice is silent.
Now the two sides (and many factions) are at war over who gets to promulgate their propaganda next.
And of course you can pull your children out of public school at any time, so long as they are schooled somewhere.
But even more than that, having sides fighting over the resolution -- well, that's what we're all about in the US. We have the adversarial system entrenched in everything we do. Maybe it shouldn't be that way (I don't know) but it does seem to make us wind up in the middle ground most of the time. There are many places on Earth where people don't fight over ideology because it means being killed in the middle of the night. Given the choices, I suppose I'll live in a place where the admittedly slow-moving processes usually leave us with a reasonable comprimise. For short periods we may wind up with ridiculous things being done in our name, but in the long haul it always shifts back because for all our laziness, we are the most righteously indignant people on the planet...
Thank you for parroting moronic platitude number 37.
You're welcome -- thank you for assuming that you're more intelligent than I by virtue of the fact that we disagree.
Even if you assume that the state generally implements the will of the majority (a tough assumption to defend), the idea that a majority can speak for everybody is morally indefensible
Nobody said it speaks for everybody -- that would be logically imnpossible (it would be E Pluribus Unum, literally!). It speaks for the majority of people who bother to take part in the activities and are even moderately capable of debating policy. If you don't believe that, you've obviously never involved yourself. When they count the votes at the end of the day, that's who wins. Whether or not our particular implementation of voting and representation is ideal or efficient is of course debatable, but it seems to be more effective than other methods attempted.
The state is not the citizens. The state is an organization with its own dynamics, set up to implement an at-best-poor approximation to the consensus desires of a (possibly large, possibly small) subset of the citizens
The state is an organization with the dynamics of whatever citizens participate in it. If you don't participate, you're correct that it won't represent you. What do you expect, voting by telepathy? That you will make your views known to representatives and school boards by complaining on Slashdot? Minimal participation yields tremendous gains, that's exactly why the Moral Majority managed to have such influence over school boards. Participate and you will be heard. feel free to ignore me, though -- I like having multiple votes.
In the case of schools in the US, this includes systematically inculcating consensus ideas, many of which are nonsense, and systematically suppressing independent thought
Which is a wonderful reason for you to take your child out of school. Feel free to do it, no one is stopping you (despite what communal pressures you feel "the state" is putting on you)...
Okay, the facts are they sue people left and right who say anything desparaging about them. That's bad enough for me, before you get into the kidnapping and other things. Just check out alt.scientology and they'll be happy to provide plenty of factual evidence (newspaper reports, court records). It's tough to not give an opinion when you see something so clearly evil, though...
The idea that it's the state's job -- even the state's prerogative -- to advance every social good is the very pretext by which they usurp the rights of citizens.
The "state" IS the citizens.
"The state" educating our children is merely a convenient and efficient way for us to educate our children. It may not work as well as it would individually, but it's cheaper and less time-consuming than on an individual level. If you don't want to make that tradeoff, then homeschool your kids or send them to private school.
The system of mandatory schooling in the US is despicably corrupt.
Why is this? It's probably not as good as it could be, but then again few people participate in school board meetings, where the decisions are made. But that doesn't make it corrupt, just not as representative as it could (should) be.
If Mr. X has a gun, and he showed it to me at school, do I want him to ever be able to find out who turned him in?
So dial 911 from school, and report it. Or call crimestoppers.
being anonymous to report a crime (having a gun at school) is no problem.
This is akin to calling a rape hotline and telling them you thing your neighbor is really creepy and might rape someone someday. There's a big difference between alerting the authorities to a problem that needs to be addressed and doing profiling in your spare time under the aegis of school safety.
Everything the WAVE program purports to do would be better served by the police. Anything short of that standard shouldn't be reported anonymously, because it's just as likely to be hot air...
Well, Einstein did do very poorly in mathematics (possibly failing, don't recall) until his (uncle?) tutored him in Algebra and showed him the "interesting" side of solving problems with Math rather than rote memorization...
I'm certain that disclaiming themselves as Big Brother helps employees sleep at night, but it doesn't change reality.
No one wakes up in the morning deciding to become Big Brother, they don't set out to do evil. Evil is achieved only through consistent application of indifference and misguided idealism. ("The world would be better without _____")
Justifying immoral activity by saying that "someone" would do it anyway is the ultimate cop-out. You aren't even willing to defend it, only stating that others are even less moral than yourself. ("Well, someone will turn in these Jews, it might as well be me.")
Reminds me of Battlefield Earth (soon to be a bad new movie) -- Earth was owned by aliens who had conquered it, and the bank was going to sell Humanity into slavery when they reposessed it. Over and over they would say, "It's just business, humans. Sorry. Nothing personal, just business."
Don't worry, it's just business here at Pinkerton. Gotta satisy the market. If we don't someone else will, so it may as well be us. Nothing personal, hope we don't ruin your kid's life, but if we do, sorry, nothing personal. Just business...
You already know what the lawyers will say:
"This patent is not novel and is obvious to anyone practiced in the art, therefore it is invalid".
How does that go, He who lives by the sword dies by the sword?...
Have you tried buying a Ford OEM-sized radio? It doesn't matter how screwy the dash is, someone makes a perfect fitting 3rd party stereo for it...
Well as long as MS wants to sell software to people in the United States, it doesn't matter where their headquarters are...
Yes, the workarounds of mutliple files are exactly what i was referring to by "proprietary workarounds".
I know many people still believe and practice SCSI RAID -- it's a mantra. The simple fact is that IDE (UATA66) is plenty fast for video editing. I've got about three thousand hours of 720x480 @ 25Mb/sec footage without a single dropped frome to prove it. I could have spent $5k more to get SCSI, but it would have to do a lot more than be "a little faster" to make up for the price difference. SCSI isn't cheap when you're talking about 100 gigs of space.
MPEG is just fine for editing as long as your hardware system supports IBP-frame editing. If you don't have the hardware to do it, you're screwed...
I was referring specifically to video files, which can't be more than 2/4 gigs depending on your video format. Apparently the new quicktime spec supports more, but I don't know of any hardware or software (other than FCP) that supports the greater file sizes -- usually there is a workaround invoked to make large pseudo-files.
Whatever you might think of Apple otherwise, it is manifestly clear that they are willing to do almost anything to own the DV market
Except allow people to use the "firewire" trademark, which would do a lot to reduce consumer confusion about device compatibility. They want to control the standard if they have to destroy it in the process...
Well this is great news for Patrick Naughton!...
Try capturing a file past the 2 gig file mark (without a special file format converter).
Quicktime is limited to 2 Gigs, as is AVI. New versions will get around this (with the OpenDMI spec), but for the moment you need a proprietary solution to this problem...