This decision preserves 200 or so years of judicial protocol where the SC is the *last* court of appeals, in which they hear only cases that merit there attention. They could very well decide *not* to hear this case if they believe the Court of Appeals came to the right decision. This is a process the entire Judicial system would be extremely reluctant to tinker with.
Except that for most of the 20th century, the Supreme Court heard *all* antitrust cases by direct appeal. The SUpreme COurt is also the court of original jurisdiction for a certain class of cases. The dispute between New Jersey and New York over whether the landfills at Ellis Island were in New York or New Jersey (having sales tax implications) was heard *directly* by the Supreme Court as the court of original jurisdiction.
Why is it always that "we" are right and "them companies" are wrong when it comes to finding smart ways to do business or break other people's businesses.
The free marketplace is a jungle. Businesses should expect that consumers will act to maximize their utility. Businesses have a right to expect that consumers won't do illegal things. Consumers have a right to expect that Businesses won't similarly violate the law. Other than that business models that expect that consumers are too stupid to maximize their utility are broken as designed and deserve no special respect.
DC has appeared to give away a device when they've actually tried to retain ownership and control of the item. The text implementing this is buried on an EULA which is possibly not a legal contract with at least some people who have acquired the device. I'd like to see them prove that I've agreed to any contract.
Netpliance also sold devices and attempted to retroactively apply a user agreement that required purchasing their service. On one hand, they wanted to make it easy for people to buy the device (hey just plunk down your credit card and don't bother with any silly contracts) but they also wanted to hold people to contractual requirements. When this is done in other areas of commerce, it's often called fraud.
Virginconnect had a similar scheme and a similarly hackable product, but that haven't had the same problems as Netpliance becuase all of the terms of the agreement are spelled out at the beginning. You have to agree to them before you get your device. You are free to pay the cancellation fees and keep your device and use it as a doorstop if you want. They treated their customers with respect. (Now they may have GPL problems, but that's a different issue.)
Just because someone has a business model, Economics in gerneral or any economy in specific does not guarantee them a profit. Relying on the stupidity of the consumer is a particularly bad way to design a business plan.
Yep, this is called a self-selecting population, and it's really bad for your statistics. This becomes worse in things like political polls where people are self-selecting. You end up getting situations where vocal minorities who really do care about an issue can completely outweigh moderate or even apathetic majorities.
It's also a problem in other self-selecting poll situations like elections. Especially the part about vocal minorities.
to the extent that it tries to cover GPLed software. It could never be upheld in court, so don't worry about it. Some property deeds include restrictive covenants that the property can't be sold to blacks or Jews, but it is illegal to enforce such a covenant.
Don't lose sleep over leagally meaningless verbage.
Would it be reasonable to make an optional extention to the GPL requiring all devices running Linux (or any other GPL'd software) to include instructions on how to extract and modify the source?
It's so much easier to go to the TiVo website and download the code.
If you don't care about voiding your warranty, the instructions on how to remove the hard drive, mount it in another PC and modify the system are available.
Some guy had to send some books into the future so that he could use them to resurrect civilization. It sems to me that he dried out his books in an oven before sealing them up with additional dessicant.
This is what happens when you have ivory tower academics weighing in on things. I've been with companies that have serveral thousand of their own internal applications... entire history of the industry indeed.
The NYTimes report I read on this study implied that they are just counting commercial applications. Your thosands of internal applications and all the other internal apps aren't in the figure.
The.us domain uses the USPS Zip Code guide to decide what is a locality. I can't register murphy.stewart-manor.ny.us or stthomas.bellrose-village.ny.us (for my church) because the USPS *thinks* I live in Garden City and my church is in Floral Park. They are wrong.
Right, most electricity currently requires fossil fuels. But, I have a hard time believing that large electric generators are that much less efficient than the average gasoline motor on the street even with transmission losses. It's the varying load on a gasoline engine that causes most of the ineffieiencies.
Re: global warming. I tend to get most of my information on this subject from Scientific American. The historic pattern of warming over the last 150 years is undenyable. We know a lot more about the climate of the Earth than we did in the 70s. Global satellite coverage in just the last ten years is providing a wealth of important data. Our atmospheric models are still relatively crude. We just don't know enough about the feedback loops. But the emerging data is clear.
Microsoft send a Cease and Desist demand to Slashdot becuase the contents of their documentation to their implementation to Kerberos had been posted to Slashdot. Slashdot publically thumbed their corporate noses at MS.
Normally when a C&D letter is ignored, a lawsuit and, sometimes, in a motion for a preliminary injunction quickly follows. In this case, Microsoft undoubtedly saw the huge PR debacle in the making just as they were fighting the antitrust case and made the decision not to persue the issue.
They still have a period of time in which to file a suit (until the statute of limitations runs out in 1 year AFAIK) but there is absolutely no chance of them prevailing in a motion for a preliminary injunction.
Except that one of the principals of the project, Jeff Merkey, already contributes scads of code to Linux and is very active on the lkml. He's already worked on lots of filesystems and he's contributed a new open source debugger for debugging a running kernel. It seems that Linux has already benefited.
The file format is MPEG, but the MPEG files are stored on a hard disk partition which uses a proprietary filesystem. You can pop the HD out of a TiVo today and (noting that it is of a different endian order than i86) put that HD in a PC, but you can't mount the partitions containing the MPEG... today.
Guy gets tomorrow's newspaper today and goes out and tries to prevent the bad things from happening (rather than, say, making a killing in the market).
Now that you have tomorrow's Slashdot stories today, how would you improve the world?
I think I'll go let the air out of Shawn Fanning's tires.
Preferences.com now has an opt-out (the cookie name is "PreferencesID" and the value is "OPT-OUT" in the root path, if you want to set it manually).
I don't get it. People know not to reply to "opt-out" spam. Why would I want to put an opt-out cookie in my browser? I just don't trust Doubleclick.com or Preferences.com that much.
I browse with cookies set to ask (and reject if from different domain if that's available) and I use the Esc key (or the N key in IE) to reject cookies. Sites with too many cookies are ones I don't visit much. I'll sometimes accept a cookie valid only for the session, but I'm very unlikely to accept a persistant cookie especially one with an expiration date out in 2047.
The Picturebook line of Vaios doesn't sell very well - it's too small to be useful as a "real" laptop.
I disagree that it's too small. My usual computer is a similar mini-notebook. The low weight makes it something I don't think twice about throwing in my briefcase *everyday*. Now the market for weight-conscious mobile computing is small, but that dosn't make the device "not useful".
Slashdot Mirror
This decision preserves 200 or so years of judicial protocol where the SC is the *last* court of appeals, in which they hear only cases that merit there attention. They could very well decide *not* to hear this case if they believe the Court of Appeals came to the right decision. This is a process the entire Judicial system would be extremely reluctant to tinker with.
Except that for most of the 20th century, the Supreme Court heard *all* antitrust cases by direct appeal. The SUpreme COurt is also the court of original jurisdiction for a certain class of cases. The dispute between New Jersey and New York over whether the landfills at Ellis Island were in New York or New Jersey (having sales tax implications) was heard *directly* by the Supreme Court as the court of original jurisdiction.
Why is it always that "we" are right and "them companies" are wrong when it comes to finding smart ways to do business or break other people's businesses.
The free marketplace is a jungle. Businesses should expect that consumers will act to maximize their utility. Businesses have a right to expect that consumers won't do illegal things. Consumers have a right to expect that Businesses won't similarly violate the law. Other than that business models that expect that consumers are too stupid to maximize their utility are broken as designed and deserve no special respect.
DC has appeared to give away a device when they've actually tried to retain ownership and control of the item. The text implementing this is buried on an EULA which is possibly not a legal contract with at least some people who have acquired the device. I'd like to see them prove that I've agreed to any contract.
Netpliance also sold devices and attempted to retroactively apply a user agreement that required purchasing their service. On one hand, they wanted to make it easy for people to buy the device (hey just plunk down your credit card and don't bother with any silly contracts) but they also wanted to hold people to contractual requirements. When this is done in other areas of commerce, it's often called fraud.
Virginconnect had a similar scheme and a similarly hackable product, but that haven't had the same problems as Netpliance becuase all of the terms of the agreement are spelled out at the beginning. You have to agree to them before you get your device. You are free to pay the cancellation fees and keep your device and use it as a doorstop if you want. They treated their customers with respect. (Now they may have GPL problems, but that's a different issue.)
Just because someone has a business model, Economics in gerneral or any economy in specific does not guarantee them a profit. Relying on the stupidity of the consumer is a particularly bad way to design a business plan.
Yep, this is called a self-selecting population, and it's really bad for your statistics. This becomes worse in things like political polls where people are self-selecting. You end up getting situations where vocal minorities who really do care about an issue can completely outweigh moderate or even apathetic majorities.
It's also a problem in other self-selecting poll situations like elections. Especially the part about vocal minorities.
to the extent that it tries to cover GPLed software. It could never be upheld in court, so don't worry about it. Some property deeds include restrictive covenants that the property can't be sold to blacks or Jews, but it is illegal to enforce such a covenant.
Don't lose sleep over leagally meaningless verbage.
Anyway... just wanted to say that it is DEFINITELY not vapourware
Does it allow for fair use of DVD content?
Does it ignore region coding?
Does it allow you to skip trailers and ads
If the answer to any of these is no, this isn't the DVD player that we want.
Would it be reasonable to make an optional extention to the GPL requiring all devices running Linux (or any other GPL'd software) to include instructions on how to extract and modify the source?
It's so much easier to go to the TiVo website and download the code.
If you don't care about voiding your warranty, the instructions on how to remove the hard drive, mount it in another PC and modify the system are available.
This would be similar to saying that it's OK to steal towles from a hotel room, since part of the rates you pay are to cover stolen towles.
If my bill includes an itemized charge labelled "Towel Replacement", I will be taking what I have purchased; I will not be stealing.
to duplicate copyrighted works? If we've paid a royalty by buying media in Canada or computer equiptment in Germany?
World-class cryptography is pretty useless, Schneier notes, if the administrator's password is set to "password."
Doh! There goes my carefully planned security system. Thanks, Bruce.
I think you may have to wait until UINs grow to seven digits before your six digit number looks low.
I find it really, really scary when someone of Bruce Schneier's reputaion has seeming given up on the idea of secure software.
Wasn't it that great political philosopher, Thomas Paine, who said that the price of a secure network is eternal vigilance? Or something like that.
Some guy had to send some books into the future so that he could use them to resurrect civilization. It sems to me that he dried out his books in an oven before sealing them up with additional dessicant.
HTH.
This is what happens when you have ivory tower academics weighing in on things. I've been with companies that have serveral thousand of their own internal applications... entire history of the industry indeed.
The NYTimes report I read on this study implied that they are just counting commercial applications. Your thosands of internal applications and all the other internal apps aren't in the figure.
Even if it's corrent, the statistic is useless.
The .us domain uses the USPS Zip Code guide to decide what is a locality. I can't register murphy.stewart-manor.ny.us or stthomas.bellrose-village.ny.us (for my church) because the USPS *thinks* I live in Garden City and my church is in Floral Park. They are wrong.
Right, most electricity currently requires fossil fuels. But, I have a hard time believing that large electric generators are that much less efficient than the average gasoline motor on the street even with transmission losses. It's the varying load on a gasoline engine that causes most of the ineffieiencies.
Re: global warming. I tend to get most of my information on this subject from Scientific American. The historic pattern of warming over the last 150 years is undenyable. We know a lot more about the climate of the Earth than we did in the 70s. Global satellite coverage in just the last ten years is providing a wealth of important data. Our atmospheric models are still relatively crude. We just don't know enough about the feedback loops. But the emerging data is clear.
Lawsuit? What lawsuit?
Microsoft send a Cease and Desist demand to Slashdot becuase the contents of their documentation to their implementation to Kerberos had been posted to Slashdot. Slashdot publically thumbed their corporate noses at MS.
Normally when a C&D letter is ignored, a lawsuit and, sometimes, in a motion for a preliminary injunction quickly follows. In this case, Microsoft undoubtedly saw the huge PR debacle in the making just as they were fighting the antitrust case and made the decision not to persue the issue.
They still have a period of time in which to file a suit (until the statute of limitations runs out in 1 year AFAIK) but there is absolutely no chance of them prevailing in a motion for a preliminary injunction.
Except that one of the principals of the project, Jeff Merkey, already contributes scads of code to Linux and is very active on the lkml. He's already worked on lots of filesystems and he's contributed a new open source debugger for debugging a running kernel. It seems that Linux has already benefited.
The file format is MPEG, but the MPEG files are stored on a hard disk partition which uses a proprietary filesystem. You can pop the HD out of a TiVo today and (noting that it is of a different endian order than i86) put that HD in a PC, but you can't mount the partitions containing the MPEG... today.
Guy gets tomorrow's newspaper today and goes out and tries to prevent the bad things from happening (rather than, say, making a killing in the market).
Now that you have tomorrow's Slashdot stories today, how would you improve the world?
I think I'll go let the air out of Shawn Fanning's tires.
Especially when you don't clot and stop bleeding.
I fire it up a couple of times a year.
Do you use lighter fluid or gasoline?
The story times are posted in GMT. When this story was posted, it was the 16 in GMT, but still the 15th in the US.
Preferences.com now has an opt-out (the cookie name is "PreferencesID" and the value is "OPT-OUT" in the root path, if you want to set it manually).
I don't get it. People know not to reply to "opt-out" spam. Why would I want to put an opt-out cookie in my browser? I just don't trust Doubleclick.com or Preferences.com that much.
I browse with cookies set to ask (and reject if from different domain if that's available) and I use the Esc key (or the N key in IE) to reject cookies. Sites with too many cookies are ones I don't visit much. I'll sometimes accept a cookie valid only for the session, but I'm very unlikely to accept a persistant cookie especially one with an expiration date out in 2047.
Since when has alpha been different than 1/137? Man this really bums my day.
The Picturebook line of Vaios doesn't sell very well - it's too small to be useful as a "real" laptop.
I disagree that it's too small. My usual computer is a similar mini-notebook. The low weight makes it something I don't think twice about throwing in my briefcase *everyday*. Now the market for weight-conscious mobile computing is small, but that dosn't make the device "not useful".