The Land's End has just announced an enormous order for several tens of billions of parkas and other winter clothing from a Mr. Bill ze Bub. Film at eleven.:)
But seriously, this sounds like it's on the level and as a result represents an tremendous validation for the impact of open-source software. I'm all for it, and just hope that other open-source projects get invited to discuss Vista's changes and features besides Firefox. Just to name one: Samba.
Actually, it probably didn't even need altogether that much stuff. If you take a look at the I2Hub website, they have a link called Press, which details where the I2Hub software has been publicized online. They list (among other bits) a prior Slashdot listing, a News.Com article and even an article on Grammy.com! So all they probably did was once they were aware of the existance of I2Hub, they talked to the various universities that are a part of Internet2 until they found one who would allow RIAA access to Net2, then deployed the same tools they use against regular P2P applications.
And oh, the articles first appeared on April 29/04, April 30/04 and May 3/04 respectively.
If these nit-pickers don't like how LOTR came out on screen, they can always raise the funds to film a fresh movie doing everything exactly as Tolkien wrote it. It'll only cost them... around $400 million dollars US (as reported here
Here's the webpage of the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office listing the patent application. Unfortunately, it does not appear to have online the most crucial thing we're all looking for - nitty-gritty details of the patent.
Hell, as I type this my email intray is getting blasted by this f'n virus. Fortunately, between Norton and Pegasus Mail, it's hard for the virus to affect me.
And based on the headers I'm seeing here, my bad karma list now includes a certain Mr S*****y at an unnamed Texas based university...
It's going to be difficult for non-Canadians to understand what's going on here...
The NDP (of which Peter Stoffer is a member) is largely a rump party (holding only 13 seats of 301). So the amount of influence it has in Canadian politics at the moment is minimal beyond criticism.
Since the NDP does not hold power, this means that Mr Stoffer's bill is a private members bill. These very rarely become law. Often what happens is these bills go into commitees and don't come out.
I'd say the chances of this bill getting passed are about as good as Larry Ellison & Bill Gates becoming bosum buddies.
If you want to learn more about how the Canadian political system works, try these links:
Try surfing www.1wrestling.com with Norton Internet Security's Ad Blocking feature switched on... you get shunted to a No Access page saying:
"We're sorry, but our site relies on the revenue we get from advertisers to bring you the quality content you see each day. Consequently, we no longer permit access from users who use Ad blocking software."
Well it's not so paranoid a thought... I have both Media Player 6.4 and 7 on my system. I originally installed 7 to get the drivers to view the latest versions of Microsoft-specific media (WMV, etc), but I use 6.4 to play all these items as I find the interface to be better for me (using the space bar for pause/play is much more intuitive). So imagine my surprise when I ran the update for 7 and it summarily assigned all the video stuff to 7 and not to 6.4. Fortunately it was easy to switch everything back (View/Options/Format), but it does leave me to wonder...
Hmmm... we have all these multimedia folks talking about "synergies" - how stuff from one place will drive another will drive another and so on... for instance, the music division will feed the internet division, which in turn will enhance the television division...
Isn't this merely another form of the corporate conglomerate? And wasn't the concept of the conglomerate pretty much disproven by all these large corporations in the sixties and seventies experiencing difficulty in operating because no-one had the background, skill and knowledge set to properly run all of these divisions?
Viewed in that light, small wonder AOL-Time Warner ran into difficulty. The skill set needed to run AOL is fundamentally different from that of Time-Warner. Hell, I'm curious as to how efficient Time and Warner were together prior to AOL coming into the mix...
There will be a dramatic split-up or disinvestment coming in the future to AOL-Time Warner - it doesn't matter how they spin it. They need to get a central vision of what the business is and should be, and remove what doesn't fit into it.
I find it rather laughable that Jack Valenti says "...because making movies is so expensive, only two in 10 films ever retrieve their production and marketing investment from domestic theatrical exhibition." The problem I have is that Hollywood is notorious for cooking the books... take for instance the concept of "Net Profit". Take a look at here for a page that shows how Hollywood calculates "net profit" so that a movie like Coming to America can show no profit.
Don't stop at those two pages... look here or here or here... or if you don't mind reading a PDF file, try here
Hello... they're trying to set the CDs up so it's uncopyable... yet Phillips (the guys who invented the CD spec) has said here that it intends to try and make its next CD burner able to circumvent the copy mechanisms. And since these guys created the CD, I reckon they'll have an edge in any court battles that occur as a result. So why (other than to piss off the consumer) are the record companies doing this???
My dad was complaining bitterly about the volume of spam he was getting as a result of signing up to get a online greeting card (no I don't remember which site) since he's on a dialup account with fixed number of free hours each month. Downloading and deleting the spam effectively ate into his hours. A quick installation of Mailwasher (which serves to send messages back marking it as undeliverable) served to quiet him afterwards since he now feels like he's doing something to stop it.
What I think I might want to check is to see if it can't also directly forward the original email to that ftc mail address...
Take a close look at what the last comment was in law.com article... Ms Annette Hurst says "It's basically going to do away with linking or framing without permission." The key thing to consider there is the little word "OR". Ms Hurst seems to be stating that it's illegal to LINK without permission. It's only the action of INLINE LINKING which the court found to be objectionable. Putting a link from my web page to your is still perfectly legal (unless I've missed a case somewhere).
For $80 per month, I'd pay that if I had good usenet service. The old @Home service had an excellent feed locally, and good retention (about 3 or 4 days in binaries). The new Rogers feed has a wider choice of newsgroups, but the retention is short (about a day in binaries) and the completeness of any group is markedly lower. Good thing I have an account with Newscene to help me complete the stuff.
And yes, my bandwidth usage was high enough to get clipped by their cap of about 3 gig per day.
Okay... I've looked over this and have a concern about the strength of this suit...
We look at the post at politechbot and it says that "Fahrenheit and Music City never disclosed on the shrink-wrap of certain "impaired" CD(s) that consumers couldn't listen to music on their computers anonymously". Yet there is a statement on the outside plus further info on the inside(as mentioned by bigdavex) though neither spot mentions logging as being required. There IS at least some warning...
The Politechbot post says that it "will not work on standard audio CD players found on millions of personal computers", yet the warning on the outside says that "(i)t is designed to play in stardard Audio CD players only"...
Politechbot says that "electronic music files made available for download pursuant to purchase of its CD are proprietary in nature, that such electronic music files will not work on portable MP3 players". The warning on the outside says that "(l)icensed copies of all music on this CD are available for downloading." There is no statement that the files in question are MP3 format.
While I'm still attempting to bend my mind around the PDF file of the actual suit (lawyerese is not the same as English IMOBO), my concern is that there may have been sufficient errors made by the filing attorney to have his case been fatally flawed from the start. What is to prevent the defendant from failing to have the suit dismissed at the start, and by following through to the end, achieving a favorable precedent for this technology?
The existance of a precendent (which all lawyers just love) makes it that much harder to fight this technology since any future suits against it will see the defendants simply standing up and saying "Your Honor, we have a precedant saying X, this suit is sifficiently similar as to be covered by X, we would like it to be summarily dismissed."
Is there a lawyer out there who can put my fears to rest??
How about we put a stop to a lot of these privacy concerns about Big Brother... why not shove through an old-fashioned constitutional amendment which says something like:
"No institution, whether governmental, corporate or charitable, may take actions which would unduly intrude upon the privacy of an individual citizen against their express consent, save the minimum effort required to maintain law and order at a reasonable level."
That would allow for things like criminal wiretaps, IRS tax databases. It ought to keep things like email monitoring out. now the actual language might need to be changed into something that would hold up, but what about the idea?? Should privacy be a constitutional right equal to free speech and freedom of religion?
Okay... tons of books there but they're not all Hard SF (most yes, but not all). Both Barrayar and The Vor game (but to name a pair) are NOT hard SF, but definately soft SF.
SPOILERS below (albeit generic)
The Vor Game has as its central twist the notion of the central character's (Miles Vorkosigan) multiple identities conflicting with one another... albeit abetted by a clone of himself running around. Multiple identities in conflict is an old staple of fiction (especially true in comic super-heroes) and clones is an idea which only counts as SF since we haven't quite managed to do it in real life - well to any creature more sosphisicated than a sheep;)
And Barrayar shows a civil war/insurrection/coup (gee, A Tale of Two Cities anyone?) set in the future and having its main "new" idea artificial wombs (or at least to me anyway... it's a notion that the author first brought up long ago in her books).
I think Jim CLark is doing a relatively sane thing to do. He's showing folks that this act by George Bush Juvenile has consequences by waving his pocketbook about, and by not moving dollars out of it.
Besides, he's not just acting to show Bush, but also Congress... and didn't I hear some noise about some senators proposing to broaden Bush's proposed limits???
Ah... but things like counselling and adult faculty supervision requires (horror of horrors) resources, people with the time and the training to do such a thing. Yes, I know there are things such as guidance counsellors but would they be able to properly handle this kid in an age where most governments seem to feel compelled to cut back the funding in our school systems for the sake of providing a tax cut to Joe Average??
Please, someone prove me wrong on this.
Slashdot Mirror
The Land's End has just announced an enormous order for several tens of billions of parkas and other winter clothing from a Mr. Bill ze Bub. Film at eleven. :)
But seriously, this sounds like it's on the level and as a result represents an tremendous validation for the impact of open-source software. I'm all for it, and just hope that other open-source projects get invited to discuss Vista's changes and features besides Firefox. Just to name one: Samba.
Actually, it probably didn't even need altogether that much stuff. If you take a look at the I2Hub website, they have a link called Press, which details where the I2Hub software has been publicized online. They list (among other bits) a prior Slashdot listing, a News.Com article and even an article on Grammy.com! So all they probably did was once they were aware of the existance of I2Hub, they talked to the various universities that are a part of Internet2 until they found one who would allow RIAA access to Net2, then deployed the same tools they use against regular P2P applications.
And oh, the articles first appeared on April 29/04, April 30/04 and May 3/04 respectively.
If these nit-pickers don't like how LOTR came out on screen, they can always raise the funds to film a fresh movie doing everything exactly as Tolkien wrote it. It'll only cost them... around $400 million dollars US (as reported here
Here's the webpage of the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office listing the patent application. Unfortunately, it does not appear to have online the most crucial thing we're all looking for - nitty-gritty details of the patent.
Hell, as I type this my email intray is getting blasted by this f'n virus. Fortunately, between Norton and Pegasus Mail, it's hard for the virus to affect me.
And based on the headers I'm seeing here, my bad karma list now includes a certain Mr S*****y at an unnamed Texas based university...
And I don't even think there's a site there anymore...
It's going to be difficult for non-Canadians to understand what's going on here...
k ly /aa030902a.htmh tml
The NDP (of which Peter Stoffer is a member) is largely a rump party (holding only 13 seats of 301). So the amount of influence it has in Canadian politics at the moment is minimal beyond criticism.
Since the NDP does not hold power, this means that Mr Stoffer's bill is a private members bill. These very rarely become law. Often what happens is these bills go into commitees and don't come out.
I'd say the chances of this bill getting passed are about as good as Larry Ellison & Bill Gates becoming bosum buddies.
If you want to learn more about how the Canadian political system works, try these links:
http://frenchcaculture.miningco.com/library/wee
http://www.parlcent.ca/canada/mg.
Try surfing www.1wrestling.com with Norton Internet Security's Ad Blocking feature switched on... you get shunted to a No Access page saying:
"We're sorry, but our site relies on the revenue we get from advertisers to bring you the quality content you see each day. Consequently, we no longer permit access from users who use Ad blocking software."
Prediction: Lance Bass starts buying Pepsi in trailer load quantities, hoping to win.... :)
Well it's not so paranoid a thought... I have both Media Player 6.4 and 7 on my system. I originally installed 7 to get the drivers to view the latest versions of Microsoft-specific media (WMV, etc), but I use 6.4 to play all these items as I find the interface to be better for me (using the space bar for pause/play is much more intuitive). So imagine my surprise when I ran the update for 7 and it summarily assigned all the video stuff to 7 and not to 6.4. Fortunately it was easy to switch everything back (View/Options/Format), but it does leave me to wonder...
Hmmm... we have all these multimedia folks talking about "synergies" - how stuff from one place will drive another will drive another and so on... for instance, the music division will feed the internet division, which in turn will enhance the television division...
Isn't this merely another form of the corporate conglomerate? And wasn't the concept of the conglomerate pretty much disproven by all these large corporations in the sixties and seventies experiencing difficulty in operating because no-one had the background, skill and knowledge set to properly run all of these divisions?
Viewed in that light, small wonder AOL-Time Warner ran into difficulty. The skill set needed to run AOL is fundamentally different from that of Time-Warner. Hell, I'm curious as to how efficient Time and Warner were together prior to AOL coming into the mix...
There will be a dramatic split-up or disinvestment coming in the future to AOL-Time Warner - it doesn't matter how they spin it. They need to get a central vision of what the business is and should be, and remove what doesn't fit into it.
I find it rather laughable that Jack Valenti says "...because making movies is so expensive, only two in 10 films ever retrieve their production and marketing investment from domestic theatrical exhibition." The problem I have is that Hollywood is notorious for cooking the books... take for instance the concept of "Net Profit". Take a look at here for a page that shows how Hollywood calculates "net profit" so that a movie like Coming to America can show no profit.
Don't stop at those two pages... look here or here or here... or if you don't mind reading a PDF file, try here
Hello... they're trying to set the CDs up so it's uncopyable... yet Phillips (the guys who invented the CD spec) has said here that it intends to try and make its next CD burner able to circumvent the copy mechanisms. And since these guys created the CD, I reckon they'll have an edge in any court battles that occur as a result. So why (other than to piss off the consumer) are the record companies doing this???
My dad was complaining bitterly about the volume of spam he was getting as a result of signing up to get a online greeting card (no I don't remember which site) since he's on a dialup account with fixed number of free hours each month. Downloading and deleting the spam effectively ate into his hours. A quick installation of Mailwasher (which serves to send messages back marking it as undeliverable) served to quiet him afterwards since he now feels like he's doing something to stop it.
What I think I might want to check is to see if it can't also directly forward the original email to that ftc mail address...
Take a close look at what the last comment was in law.com article... Ms Annette Hurst says "It's basically going to do away with linking or framing without permission." The key thing to consider there is the little word "OR". Ms Hurst seems to be stating that it's illegal to LINK without permission. It's only the action of INLINE LINKING which the court found to be objectionable. Putting a link from my web page to your is still perfectly legal (unless I've missed a case somewhere).
For $80 per month, I'd pay that if I had good usenet service. The old @Home service had an excellent feed locally, and good retention (about 3 or 4 days in binaries). The new Rogers feed has a wider choice of newsgroups, but the retention is short (about a day in binaries) and the completeness of any group is markedly lower. Good thing I have an account with Newscene to help me complete the stuff.
And yes, my bandwidth usage was high enough to get clipped by their cap of about 3 gig per day.
Damn... I wish I had some Karma points so I could mod this statement up... oh well, hopefully others will do so too. :)
Okay... I've looked over this and have a concern about the strength of this suit...
We look at the post at politechbot and it says that "Fahrenheit and Music City never disclosed on the shrink-wrap of certain "impaired" CD(s) that consumers couldn't listen to music on their computers anonymously". Yet there is a statement on the outside plus further info on the inside(as mentioned by bigdavex) though neither spot mentions logging as being required. There IS at least some warning...
The Politechbot post says that it "will not work on standard audio CD players found on millions of personal computers", yet the warning on the outside says that "(i)t is designed to play in stardard Audio CD players only"...
Politechbot says that "electronic music files made available for download pursuant to purchase of its CD are proprietary in nature, that such electronic music files will not work on portable MP3 players". The warning on the outside says that "(l)icensed copies of all music on this CD are available for downloading." There is no statement that the files in question are MP3 format.
While I'm still attempting to bend my mind around the PDF file of the actual suit (lawyerese is not the same as English IMOBO), my concern is that there may have been sufficient errors made by the filing attorney to have his case been fatally flawed from the start. What is to prevent the defendant from failing to have the suit dismissed at the start, and by following through to the end, achieving a favorable precedent for this technology?
The existance of a precendent (which all lawyers just love) makes it that much harder to fight this technology since any future suits against it will see the defendants simply standing up and saying "Your Honor, we have a precedant saying X, this suit is sifficiently similar as to be covered by X, we would like it to be summarily dismissed."
Is there a lawyer out there who can put my fears to rest??
How about we put a stop to a lot of these privacy concerns about Big Brother... why not shove through an old-fashioned constitutional amendment which says something like:
"No institution, whether governmental, corporate or charitable, may take actions which would unduly intrude upon the privacy of an individual citizen against their express consent, save the minimum effort required to maintain law and order at a reasonable level."
That would allow for things like criminal wiretaps, IRS tax databases. It ought to keep things like email monitoring out. now the actual language might need to be changed into something that would hold up, but what about the idea?? Should privacy be a constitutional right equal to free speech and freedom of religion?
Okay... tons of books there but they're not all Hard SF (most yes, but not all). Both Barrayar and The Vor game (but to name a pair) are NOT hard SF, but definately soft SF.
;)
SPOILERS below (albeit generic)
The Vor Game has as its central twist the notion of the central character's (Miles Vorkosigan) multiple identities conflicting with one another... albeit abetted by a clone of himself running around. Multiple identities in conflict is an old staple of fiction (especially true in comic super-heroes) and clones is an idea which only counts as SF since we haven't quite managed to do it in real life - well to any creature more sosphisicated than a sheep
And Barrayar shows a civil war/insurrection/coup (gee, A Tale of Two Cities anyone?) set in the future and having its main "new" idea artificial wombs (or at least to me anyway... it's a notion that the author first brought up long ago in her books).
I think Jim CLark is doing a relatively sane thing to do. He's showing folks that this act by George Bush Juvenile has consequences by waving his pocketbook about, and by not moving dollars out of it.
Besides, he's not just acting to show Bush, but also Congress... and didn't I hear some noise about some senators proposing to broaden Bush's proposed limits???
Ah... but things like counselling and adult faculty supervision requires (horror of horrors) resources, people with the time and the training to do such a thing. Yes, I know there are things such as guidance counsellors but would they be able to properly handle this kid in an age where most governments seem to feel compelled to cut back the funding in our school systems for the sake of providing a tax cut to Joe Average?? Please, someone prove me wrong on this.