The issue of patent use by government agencies in the U.S. has been settled by court cases, and is basically dependent on whether it's a state government or the Federal government. For states, a party can get an injunction to stop them from using a patent, but they can't get monetary damages; in the case of the Federal government, they can get monetary damages but they cannot get an injunction to stop continued use. Now, some of this may have changed but this was the status the last time I heard about the issue.
Contrary to your uninformed opinion,.GIF was never "on the way out" and is not likely to do so any time soon. The.PNG format was developed as an alternative because of Unisys' RIAA-style strong-arm tactics on those who were using the LZW compression method either on websites or in programs they developed, because Unisys owned the patent on that compression method. That patent expired some time ago, which means that the original reason for using.PNG is no longer as important.
Same reason.OGG was developed, because of Fraunhauffer's threats over its patents that involve the use of the.MP3 file format compression strategies.
"I had never even heard of Oasis before this article."
So, when DID you get back from your trip to the outer planets.
I find your putdown of the other poster quite insulting. I personally have been fairly familiar with a lot of the open source and open document concepts and proposals, and I've never heard of OASIS before either. They're not exactly really famous or well known.
As for one of the people involved, Nathaniel Borenstein is one of the people who created the original MIME format for documents to be sent over the Internet.
BSD licensed code isn't a problem in any application; the BSD license allows you to take modifications private (without having to release the source to them) and thus you can use BSD-licensed code in a proprietary application.
The issue is over use of Gnu Public License (GPL) code which requires that use (beyond that permissible as fair use) of the GPL code in a proprietary (non-GPL) application used by the public requires the proprietary application's source to be released under the GPL. It is for this reason - companies wanting to keep their code proprietary - that they want to be sure they are not using GP licensed code; it doesn't matter if they use BSD licensed code.
Come to think of it, I think it probably was Elle McPherson rather than Cindy Crawford, but when someone has a really good quote it sometimes gets slightly mangled in the process.
I don't think the premise is provable one way or the other
I was referring to the concept of time travel being something which is in general theoretical and not proven until such time as it is actually proven by the creation of a device or capability that actually does so.
One way to prove it is to actually travel in time. Then it would be proven "one way", now wouldn't it?
True, but until someone is able to do it, it hasn't been proven and is mere conjecture one way or the other. Until Marconi developed a means to communicate through the air, the idea of such a thing as wireless was pure conjecture.
If he was trying to create something like this, he should have started publicizing it at least a year ago, in order for there to be lots of buzz. It's the sort of wacky idea that you can get all sorts of interest in, like UFO nuts and others. Perhaps get some corporate sponsors, or do something to give lots of lead time for something like this.
I'm granting the validity of the premise here (I don't think it is arguable that you can't travel in time, I don't think the premise is provable one way or the other), but he should have started publicizing this last April, not wait until a week or two before the event, or start publicizing it less than two weeks before it happens.
I am, of course, reminded of the humorous tag line, "The seminar on time travel will be held last week."
As Dennis Miller is reported to have said, "When some unemployed punk in Trenton, New Jersey can buy a plug-in for $29.95 that allows him to make love to Cindy Crawford, Virtual Reality is going to make crack look like Sanka."
I agree with the parent poster in principle; OGG just really isn't all that popular yet. They [the people operating the station] might not even be aware of the format; unless you are extremely cognizant of the Open Source movement you probably wouldn't even know about OGG Vorbis. Also, they may not have the equipment, software or people with the technical knowledge to be able to handle it at this time. Or they might feel that it is so small in terms of its interest it's not worth bothering with, or that it's too technical for use by the "vast unwashed masses" of people who would download songs from the station.
I disagree with the parent regarding one comment:
Every time I hear a but they don't support OGG comment, I just roll my eyes. If we want to ever make other people other than geeks aware of podcasting, we have to support the audio formats they know about.
I disagree on this point; if those who are concerned want to encourage them to do so, you need to let them know you're interested; bitching about it here doesn't do a damn thing toward getting them to support OGG as well as the more popular formats. People could send them suggestions that they also accept OGG format files as well. Maybe even offer uploads or URLs of OGG supporting music player programs as well as MP3 and other formats so the station can provide them as downloads or include the links.
He's making a comment relating to outsourcing, the first name is Indian, and the second name is a mangling of the phrase 'I got your job.' I have a feeling you don't get irony.
I have noticed many places which advertise have no interest in whether you can do the work. It's all about paperwork. Their emphasis is on a laundry list of skills - which is fine - and begins with a BS degree. There are a whole lot of people - like myself - who can do the work and do it satisfactorily, but were too busy scratching out a living to get a degree. And a lot of these people would be less expensive. But by setting the minimums as high as they can, I suspect either they get no responses (and thus complain about being unable to find anyone), are writing the spec in order to hire one specific person and don't want to worry about possible complaints of discrimination, or are doing this because they're too stupid to know that you don't ask for more than the market can offer.
I have over 24 years of experience. I went so far as to offer to work for a place for free for a month to show what I could do. Apparently even that isn't good enough, if I didn't have the exact skill set, they couldn't use me and were so overloaded they had no one free to explain to me what I needed to know!
I've heard most places who advertise do so because they're trolling to see who's around, not because they have real assignments needing people. Or basically they prefer to hire someone from some other company as opposed to spending money to train someone, afraid (correctly) that they'll move to some other place once they are trained (because of the unpleasant people they have as managers).
Here in the Washington, DC area there are a lot of places who advertise for people with Secret or Top Secret clearances, (which generally means you must be a U.S. citizen), and apparently aren't seeing much responses. Sure, it costs $50,000 to get someone a security clearance, but do you think they consider hiring less expensive people over a long-term basis and pay the difference? Not a chance.
There are lots of ways companies could get the work they need done for less money without having to resort to outsourcing or importing H1Bs. But that would require management know what it was doing, a standard most companies would find very difficult to attain.
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The advantage to the incompetence of most company management is that it doesn't take much effort to run an outstanding company, you just have to be slightly better than a moron. Most companies find even doing that to be difficult.
Say we go back to the basics, set copyright back to the original 14 yrs. doesn't that mean that GPL'd code would be dumped unprotected into the public domain? doesn't that also mean that larger companies that manage to stay around for a while (ie Microsoft) would be able to take those 14 yr old projects and impliment them in closed source packages?
14 years ago is 1990. That means there isn't one package that runs on 32-bit Windows (because it wouldn't exist for 5 more years) and almost all of the software that is used to implement recent developments such as USB, digital cameras and electronic storage chips such as Smartmedia did not exist, because the devices did not, either.
There is lots of software which was created over 15 years ago, most of which is quite potentially useless because it would require more effort to revise it to be useful than it would be to quite potentially develop the same software from scratch.
Any serious software that is potentially valuable is under continuous maintenance in order to keep up with regular demands to change things. And those new changes all become separately copyrightable material with new expiration as of the end of the copyright period (whether it's 14 years or life plus 70) and are not released into the public domain along with the original work. If you want to look at a 15-year-old application, it's going to use very old technology, very old algorithms which may or may not be updated, and has not had the benefits of what has been learned since it was developed.
There are some very important developments that are useful and usable even if they are very old: the Shell sort and some other sorts; Zeller's congruence for determining the day of the week from a date; and other such things. For utility developments old code could be very useful, but new development requires the code be maintained to take advantage of that development.
In 1990, 14 years before that would have been 1976, and most applications were written for batch processing on mainframes. Most of that code would have been of very little use for someone writing programs to run on a terminal. So it really wouldn't have been all that useful.
The point that only 4% of all works have any value after 20 years is well taken, and perhaps what is necessary is to allow that which has value to be given some extra protection, and the rest not.
Many works - I think the number was more than half - which were copyrighted went into the public domain in the U.S. because nobody bothered to renew it. Returning to a requirement to require renewal, say, every ten years, at a nominal fee (someone once suggested $1), would help to fix part of the problem of the vast majority of works getting lots of protection when they aren't even available.
Another thing is the copyright office's rule that full deposit of source code is not required when a deposit is made, is another issue that needs to be changed. Placing small and minor hurdles such as mandating deposit and mandating complete deposit would also help to ensure that for the monopoly that the copyright owner is getting is balanced by full disclosure, as it should be. As the currently (bought and paid for) system works, copyright owners are getting more and more protections while the public is losing more and more of the benefits they are supposed to be getting for granting to copyright owners their monopoly.
The real reason for this state of affairs is that the content producers have the money to buy politicians to create these laws, most of the hardware makers are on the fence because they either implement what the law requires or they get licenses, and since the public doesn't have access to them and do not know about these changes in the laws - no lobbying groups to protect their interests like the AARP allegedly protects seniors - they get put into effect with often disastrous consequences to the public. There is no consumers lobby but there is a well-funded content lobby. Guess who wins? You don't have to, you can just see the results.
Yahoo was all over the 1gig free e-mail but hasn't said much in regards to Google's 2gig offering.
Yahoo!'s free e-mail went from 5 meg to 250 meg. I know this as a fact as I have a Yahoo! e-mail account. The 1 gb service is a charged service, it is not free.
Thank you for your correction, I was wrong, and Yahoo will be raising the limit from 250 meg to 1gb.
I don't think extra space above that really makes much difference, unless you're archiving spam most people wouldn't use 1gb of space for mere text-based e-mail in a lifetime. Now, mail including rich attachments is another matter.
This lack of semantic connection is something being worked upon by the founder of the Web himself (Sir Tim Breners-Lee, at MIT) in a radical re-design of how the Web is structured and an update of the communication protocols that hold it all together.
The man who invented the World Wide Web is "Sir Tim Berners-Lee", not "Sir Tim Breners-Lee".
Yahoo was all over the 1gig free e-mail but hasn't said much in regards to Google's 2gig offering.
Yahoo!'s free e-mail went from 5 meg to 250 meg. I know this as a fact as I have a Yahoo! e-mail account. The 1 gb service is a charged service, it is not free.
Could some one please explain? I'm not talking about internet access but broadband specifically.
I've heard this statistic in one form or another for a while now. Is it "America just has to be better?" or is there something more important going on?
With the increased size of files and media being used over the Internet, broadband becomes important to be able to use the new and enhanced capacities of multimedia, File Sharing and P2P applications, and so on.
If all you are going to use the Internet for is to send mail and look at small, static web pages (and are willing to accept long download times to do so) then you do not need broadband, you can get by with a telephone connection at 53Kbps.
But if you prefer faster loading web pages (a web page generally takes about 3 seconds on my DSL connection, it can take anything from 12 to 45 seconds or longer on a phone line), and the ability to send (and receive) audio and/or video in real-time or near-real time, broadband is essential.
Oh, there are things you can do on a regular phone line and you might be able to get by with that. I ran an experiment using a webcam and some software to talk to a friend 2,000 miles away over a telephone line, and it did work. (I don't know how it looked, the other person did not have a camera, but having seen examples on TV of people connecting by webcam I figure the picture was choppy.)
A typical good quality video with sound uses about 10MB per minute (from my own work capturing video). MP3 compressed audio uses about 1MB per minute. If you wanted to watch a movie which you had downloaded, it would take about 12GB of space if it ran for 2 hours. On a 1MBps DSL line, it will take maybe 1 hour or so to download and you could conceivably watch it as streaming video. On a 53K phone line, it will take 99 1/4 hours.
If you can get broadband at 3Mbps, you can get live video at DVD quality streamed in real time, which means you could be sent a movie directly from a server and view it to your TV set, possibly in High Definition. No waiting for delivery of DVDs or having to wait for a movie to start, and if something like BitTorrent were used, a server would not need a huge amount of bandwidth as other receivers could send you pieces as they got them.
That is the reason broadband is so important, because with faster connections, we can develop new services and new technology to take advantage of them, just like faster processors allowed development of applications previously unavailable to personal computers.
There is no "social contract" or any kind of agreement, moral requirement or legal obligation to view or accept ads from a website, any more than there is a social contract, agreement or legal obligation to view or accept ads from a television station. If there is any "contract" it is between the website owner and the advertiser, not with the person using the site, who has not agreed to such terms when connecting.
Any website that claims as part of its "terms of service" that one is required to view ads in order to use the site is, in my opinion as a non-lawyer, making a requirement not supported by law and not enforceable as well as quite possibly being an unconsionable requirement which is illegal to begin with.
Since the terms of service are an adhesion contract (one imposed unilaterally by one side), one could impose an adhesion contract in response of one's own and reject such terms, and perhaps send them notice to the effect. Further it's questionable whether a TOS would be enforceable if you can simply access a site without agreeing to it.
Might be interesting to have, say, 7,000 visitors send notice (by snail mail) informing the website owner of the rejection of their terms and stating that if they do not agree to the change in terms, to mail them notice specifically rejecting their change of terms and requesting them not to use their site. Unless they send specific notice back the last form wins, which is the one sent to them.
..Same with online content, with an almost zero distribution cost.
Do you know how much it costs to run an web-server that can provide consistantly reliable service to millions of subscribers? If it was cheap or easy the Slashdot effect wouldn't exist. There are hardware costs, bandwidth costs, data center maintenance/lease costs, staffing costs, including security, server admins, db admins, middleware admins, application devolopers, web designers, etc.
First, it's not "millions of subscribers," it's 750,000. Let me ask you: how much connectivity can you buy for $1,750 a month? A hell of a lot.
I have two domains hosted at the largest hosting company in the United States, one that allows 500MB of disk space, one Mysql database and 2,000 mb of data transfers per month with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The cost: a whopping $3.95 a month. Less than $4 a month. The other domain there costs me $9.95 a month for 2GB of disk space, 10 MySQL databases and 100,000 mb of traffic per month. WSJ isn't running a porno site, they don't need that kind of connectivity. And $1,750 a month is 1/4c per subscriber per month, near enough to be zero.
Or let's raise it to a penny per subscriber per month. How much connectivity, service and bandwidth from a professional hosting company can you buy for $7 grand a month? On a per-subscriber basis, the cost is almost zero and yet it's not cheap to buy.
I worked for a small company, where we were profiled in WSJ.... We wanted to put the article on our website. WSJ informed us, licensing the article was about $500/mo.
I suspect using a single article, since it referred to your company, might have qualified as fair use (use as commentary) and been usable for free; a good copyright lawyer might have negotiated a lower rate than $500 a month for use of one article.
The public shouldn't be forced to pay for a service that will compete against private sector alternatives.
This presumes that there are any private sector alternatives.
Socialized internet services will only lower the quality of the service in general where they are implemented because people will go to them for the price: free or near free.
In which case, the private company would have to offer something more than the publicly offered service: static IP, or higher bandwidth, or some other services in order to compete. The availability of advertiser-supported free television has not stopped the growth of cable TV and satellite dishes.
It's one thing to provide broadband for free in public libraries or to subsidize a charity's computer lab for those without the money to own their own computer and broadband service. It's quite another to provide an entire service that competes against real providers.
That would be a reasonable argument except that in many cases those who could be providing the service will not - because it's too expensive to offer it - and want to prevent local agencies from offering it when they will not. Also, the phone companies are not innocent here; they have used various methods to prevent competition, including making it virtually impossible for anyone else to provide service, creating excuses and delays to prevent competition, and artificially inflating rates and costs necessary for interconnection, in an effort to cripple competitors.
Companies that are public utilities hate competition and will do anything they can think of to stop it, including rigging the laws to do so when they can.
I already pay $45 a month for Adelphia's cable service and it would make me quite mad to have to pay more taxes to subsidize someone else's connection to their home. I would mind a buck or two going to buy cable access for the local library since that is totally open to the public. Free wireless though, is something that people can use in their own homes and thus I oppose it. If they are going to get free access then it should be only in a public place where the government can scrutinize their use. The last thing I want to pay taxes for is a connection that lets some mooch run file sharing software off the public dime all day.
Let's try a rephrasing of your argument:
I already pay $12 a trip for toll roads and it would make me quite mad to have to pay more taxes to subsidize someone else's street to their home. I would mind a buck or two going to buy roads for the local library since that is totally open to the public. Free roadways, though is something that people can use from their own homes and thus I oppose it. If they are going to get free access then it should be only in a public place where the government can scrutinize their use. The last thing I want to pay taxes for is a roadway that lets some mooch run a private automobile off the public dime all day.
I think most of us would argue that having free local roads paid for by property taxes is better than constantly paying tolls for every use of the public roads. Now, maybe a private company would do a better job for less, but I think collecting a flat fee from every property takes less overhead to collect the amounts needed than collecting tolls on a per-use basis. I think we all benefit from free local roads over imposing tolls for every road we use. Sure, those that used roads less would pay less, but I think the overhead would kill us and might make traveling to see others prohibitively expensive.
Oh and if the government is running the wireless service you can pretty much bet safely that the government will let the police play around with the ISP. They'll be free to log everything and scrutinize everything you do on it because it's a government resource owned and operated by a local government, not a private cor
Dating when Google's Satellite Images occurred
on
Satellite Easter Eggs
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· Score: 1
I found a way to determine an approximate date of when Google's satellite images occurred, by using a well-known landmark less than four miles away from where I live in my home town of Arlington, Virginia.
If you look at this link, you will see the Pentagon building, and you will see there is a repair going on at the time. This was the repair of the September 11 attack, which was completed within one year. That dates these images to sometime before September 11, 2002 when the repairs were completed.
In one of the articles for this small computer it was noted you can get a "Happy Hacking keyboard" to use with it instead of a regular sized one. I looked at the price of the Happy Hacking keyboard and was shocked. Can anyone explain why someone would pay upwards of US$125.00 for a keyboard which is slightly smaller than usual ones when a typical regular size keyboard, brand new, sells for US$3.95? (That's what I paid about a month ago at Micro Center for the brand-new keyboard I am using right now and that they are still selling.) Are the esthetics of a smaller keyboard worth 30 times the price? And why someone would pay over $125.00 for a keyboard for a machine that costs $495.00?
MAPS isn't doing anything wrong, they simply gather findings and make them available to their subscribers. They exist to serve the interests of those subscribers, not the interests of some random nobodies who wish to send mail to those subscribers. MAPS is under no obligation to provide 24/7 assistance to the ``unfairly'' blacklisted domains. What exactly would be the business case for doing that? Who would pay those operators who wake up at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday to service a complain?
@on all change "MAPS" to "<b>The Credit Reporting Companies</b>"
@on all change "send mail to those subscribers" to "<b>obtain credit</b>"
@on all change "domains" to "<b>people</b>"
@print
The Credit Reporting Companies isn't doing anything wrong, they simply gather findings and make them available to their subscribers. They exist to serve the interests of those subscribers, not the interests of some random nobodies who wish to obtain credit. The Credit Reporting Companies is under no obligation to provide 24/7 assistance to the ``unfairly'' blacklisted people. What exactly would be the business case for doing that? Who would pay those operators who wake up at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday to service a complain?
I think Experian, Equifax and Trans Union would love to be able to make the same argument. But we realize that when someone is providing third-party information we usually hold them to a slightly higher standard due to the potential for damage or injury to others if they provide incorrect or inaccurate information about them.
It can take upwards of a week or more for some RAID systems to be fully repaired. (See Fark.com), so if your business is dependent on a single RAID array you should just have to close up for a week because mother nature zapped your server room into tiny bits? Who pays for the week your business is down? If it happens again, then what?
Then you invest in a backup.
There is a difference between being without connectivity because some organization decides to cut you off when they had the capacity to find out it was unreasonable before doing so, and a blackout because of failure in equipment. And what happens if MAPS blacklists both your providers? Or if you happen to use two separate connectivity operations from two different facilities of the same provider, but because of a MAPS boycott, you, who are innocent, are cut off due to a third party's decision to tar you with the same brush as someone else? Is it fair or reasonable? Or let's not even rise to that level of standard, let's just ask, is it just or honorable? Typically we as supposedly civilized people have held to a standard that we should let 10 guilty people go rather than punish one innocent. Now, it seems like, throw enough mud around on the grounds that it will stick to someone, never mind how many people unfairly get smeared.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue of patent use by government agencies in the U.S. has been settled by court cases, and is basically dependent on whether it's a state government or the Federal government. For states, a party can get an injunction to stop them from using a patent, but they can't get monetary damages; in the case of the Federal government, they can get monetary damages but they cannot get an injunction to stop continued use. Now, some of this may have changed but this was the status the last time I heard about the issue.
Just because YOU think they are well known, does not make it so. And being an insulting punk speaks volumes about your intelligence.
Same reason .OGG was developed, because of Fraunhauffer's threats over its patents that involve the use of the .MP3 file format compression strategies.
As for one of the people involved, Nathaniel Borenstein is one of the people who created the original MIME format for documents to be sent over the Internet.
The issue is over use of Gnu Public License (GPL) code which requires that use (beyond that permissible as fair use) of the GPL code in a proprietary (non-GPL) application used by the public requires the proprietary application's source to be released under the GPL. It is for this reason - companies wanting to keep their code proprietary - that they want to be sure they are not using GP licensed code; it doesn't matter if they use BSD licensed code.
Come to think of it, I think it probably was Elle McPherson rather than Cindy Crawford, but when someone has a really good quote it sometimes gets slightly mangled in the process.
I'm granting the validity of the premise here (I don't think it is arguable that you can't travel in time, I don't think the premise is provable one way or the other), but he should have started publicizing this last April, not wait until a week or two before the event, or start publicizing it less than two weeks before it happens.
I am, of course, reminded of the humorous tag line, "The seminar on time travel will be held last week."
As Dennis Miller is reported to have said, "When some unemployed punk in Trenton, New Jersey can buy a plug-in for $29.95 that allows him to make love to Cindy Crawford, Virtual Reality is going to make crack look like Sanka."
I disagree with the parent regarding one comment:
I disagree on this point; if those who are concerned want to encourage them to do so, you need to let them know you're interested; bitching about it here doesn't do a damn thing toward getting them to support OGG as well as the more popular formats. People could send them suggestions that they also accept OGG format files as well. Maybe even offer uploads or URLs of OGG supporting music player programs as well as MP3 and other formats so the station can provide them as downloads or include the links.He's making a comment relating to outsourcing, the first name is Indian, and the second name is a mangling of the phrase 'I got your job.' I have a feeling you don't get irony.
I have over 24 years of experience. I went so far as to offer to work for a place for free for a month to show what I could do. Apparently even that isn't good enough, if I didn't have the exact skill set, they couldn't use me and were so overloaded they had no one free to explain to me what I needed to know!
I've heard most places who advertise do so because they're trolling to see who's around, not because they have real assignments needing people. Or basically they prefer to hire someone from some other company as opposed to spending money to train someone, afraid (correctly) that they'll move to some other place once they are trained (because of the unpleasant people they have as managers).
Here in the Washington, DC area there are a lot of places who advertise for people with Secret or Top Secret clearances, (which generally means you must be a U.S. citizen), and apparently aren't seeing much responses. Sure, it costs $50,000 to get someone a security clearance, but do you think they consider hiring less expensive people over a long-term basis and pay the difference? Not a chance.
There are lots of ways companies could get the work they need done for less money without having to resort to outsourcing or importing H1Bs. But that would require management know what it was doing, a standard most companies would find very difficult to attain.
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The advantage to the incompetence of most company management is that it doesn't take much effort to run an outstanding company, you just have to be slightly better than a moron. Most companies find even doing that to be difficult.
There is lots of software which was created over 15 years ago, most of which is quite potentially useless because it would require more effort to revise it to be useful than it would be to quite potentially develop the same software from scratch.
Any serious software that is potentially valuable is under continuous maintenance in order to keep up with regular demands to change things. And those new changes all become separately copyrightable material with new expiration as of the end of the copyright period (whether it's 14 years or life plus 70) and are not released into the public domain along with the original work. If you want to look at a 15-year-old application, it's going to use very old technology, very old algorithms which may or may not be updated, and has not had the benefits of what has been learned since it was developed.
There are some very important developments that are useful and usable even if they are very old: the Shell sort and some other sorts; Zeller's congruence for determining the day of the week from a date; and other such things. For utility developments old code could be very useful, but new development requires the code be maintained to take advantage of that development.
In 1990, 14 years before that would have been 1976, and most applications were written for batch processing on mainframes. Most of that code would have been of very little use for someone writing programs to run on a terminal. So it really wouldn't have been all that useful.
The point that only 4% of all works have any value after 20 years is well taken, and perhaps what is necessary is to allow that which has value to be given some extra protection, and the rest not.
Many works - I think the number was more than half - which were copyrighted went into the public domain in the U.S. because nobody bothered to renew it. Returning to a requirement to require renewal, say, every ten years, at a nominal fee (someone once suggested $1), would help to fix part of the problem of the vast majority of works getting lots of protection when they aren't even available.
Another thing is the copyright office's rule that full deposit of source code is not required when a deposit is made, is another issue that needs to be changed. Placing small and minor hurdles such as mandating deposit and mandating complete deposit would also help to ensure that for the monopoly that the copyright owner is getting is balanced by full disclosure, as it should be. As the currently (bought and paid for) system works, copyright owners are getting more and more protections while the public is losing more and more of the benefits they are supposed to be getting for granting to copyright owners their monopoly.
The real reason for this state of affairs is that the content producers have the money to buy politicians to create these laws, most of the hardware makers are on the fence because they either implement what the law requires or they get licenses, and since the public doesn't have access to them and do not know about these changes in the laws - no lobbying groups to protect their interests like the AARP allegedly protects seniors - they get put into effect with often disastrous consequences to the public. There is no consumers lobby but there is a well-funded content lobby. Guess who wins? You don't have to, you can just see the results.
I don't think extra space above that really makes much difference, unless you're archiving spam most people wouldn't use 1gb of space for mere text-based e-mail in a lifetime. Now, mail including rich attachments is another matter.
They clearly spelled his name worng. :)
If all you are going to use the Internet for is to send mail and look at small, static web pages (and are willing to accept long download times to do so) then you do not need broadband, you can get by with a telephone connection at 53Kbps.
But if you prefer faster loading web pages (a web page generally takes about 3 seconds on my DSL connection, it can take anything from 12 to 45 seconds or longer on a phone line), and the ability to send (and receive) audio and/or video in real-time or near-real time, broadband is essential.
Oh, there are things you can do on a regular phone line and you might be able to get by with that. I ran an experiment using a webcam and some software to talk to a friend 2,000 miles away over a telephone line, and it did work. (I don't know how it looked, the other person did not have a camera, but having seen examples on TV of people connecting by webcam I figure the picture was choppy.)
A typical good quality video with sound uses about 10MB per minute (from my own work capturing video). MP3 compressed audio uses about 1MB per minute. If you wanted to watch a movie which you had downloaded, it would take about 12GB of space if it ran for 2 hours. On a 1MBps DSL line, it will take maybe 1 hour or so to download and you could conceivably watch it as streaming video. On a 53K phone line, it will take 99 1/4 hours.
If you can get broadband at 3Mbps, you can get live video at DVD quality streamed in real time, which means you could be sent a movie directly from a server and view it to your TV set, possibly in High Definition. No waiting for delivery of DVDs or having to wait for a movie to start, and if something like BitTorrent were used, a server would not need a huge amount of bandwidth as other receivers could send you pieces as they got them.
That is the reason broadband is so important, because with faster connections, we can develop new services and new technology to take advantage of them, just like faster processors allowed development of applications previously unavailable to personal computers.
Paul Robinson
Any website that claims as part of its "terms of service" that one is required to view ads in order to use the site is, in my opinion as a non-lawyer, making a requirement not supported by law and not enforceable as well as quite possibly being an unconsionable requirement which is illegal to begin with.
Since the terms of service are an adhesion contract (one imposed unilaterally by one side), one could impose an adhesion contract in response of one's own and reject such terms, and perhaps send them notice to the effect. Further it's questionable whether a TOS would be enforceable if you can simply access a site without agreeing to it.
Might be interesting to have, say, 7,000 visitors send notice (by snail mail) informing the website owner of the rejection of their terms and stating that if they do not agree to the change in terms, to mail them notice specifically rejecting their change of terms and requesting them not to use their site. Unless they send specific notice back the last form wins, which is the one sent to them.
I have two domains hosted at the largest hosting company in the United States, one that allows 500MB of disk space, one Mysql database and 2,000 mb of data transfers per month with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The cost: a whopping $3.95 a month. Less than $4 a month. The other domain there costs me $9.95 a month for 2GB of disk space, 10 MySQL databases and 100,000 mb of traffic per month. WSJ isn't running a porno site, they don't need that kind of connectivity. And $1,750 a month is 1/4c per subscriber per month, near enough to be zero.
Or let's raise it to a penny per subscriber per month. How much connectivity, service and bandwidth from a professional hosting company can you buy for $7 grand a month? On a per-subscriber basis, the cost is almost zero and yet it's not cheap to buy.
This presumes that there are any private sector alternatives.
In which case, the private company would have to offer something more than the publicly offered service: static IP, or higher bandwidth, or some other services in order to compete. The availability of advertiser-supported free television has not stopped the growth of cable TV and satellite dishes.
That would be a reasonable argument except that in many cases those who could be providing the service will not - because it's too expensive to offer it - and want to prevent local agencies from offering it when they will not. Also, the phone companies are not innocent here; they have used various methods to prevent competition, including making it virtually impossible for anyone else to provide service, creating excuses and delays to prevent competition, and artificially inflating rates and costs necessary for interconnection, in an effort to cripple competitors.
Companies that are public utilities hate competition and will do anything they can think of to stop it, including rigging the laws to do so when they can.
Let's try a rephrasing of your argument:
I think most of us would argue that having free local roads paid for by property taxes is better than constantly paying tolls for every use of the public roads. Now, maybe a private company would do a better job for less, but I think collecting a flat fee from every property takes less overhead to collect the amounts needed than collecting tolls on a per-use basis. I think we all benefit from free local roads over imposing tolls for every road we use. Sure, those that used roads less would pay less, but I think the overhead would kill us and might make traveling to see others prohibitively expensive.
If you look at this link, you will see the Pentagon building, and you will see there is a repair going on at the time. This was the repair of the September 11 attack, which was completed within one year. That dates these images to sometime before September 11, 2002 when the repairs were completed.
In one of the articles for this small computer it was noted you can get a "Happy Hacking keyboard" to use with it instead of a regular sized one. I looked at the price of the Happy Hacking keyboard and was shocked. Can anyone explain why someone would pay upwards of US$125.00 for a keyboard which is slightly smaller than usual ones when a typical regular size keyboard, brand new, sells for US$3.95? (That's what I paid about a month ago at Micro Center for the brand-new keyboard I am using right now and that they are still selling.) Are the esthetics of a smaller keyboard worth 30 times the price? And why someone would pay over $125.00 for a keyboard for a machine that costs $495.00?
@on all change "send mail to those subscribers" to "<b>obtain credit</b>"
@on all change "domains" to "<b>people</b>"
@print
I think Experian, Equifax and Trans Union would love to be able to make the same argument. But we realize that when someone is providing third-party information we usually hold them to a slightly higher standard due to the potential for damage or injury to others if they provide incorrect or inaccurate information about them.