How about CONSUMERS pay for new TVs or converters themselves? They don't get cable free. They don't get a free CD palyer when cassettes go out of style.
Broadcast TV didn't stop working when cable became available. Cassettes didn't magically vanish when CD players were introduced. But analog broadcasts are ending, and people who don't upgrade won't be able to watch TV at all.
That said, I agree with you that it's stupid to spend public money to help people watch TV. Given all the other shit that's happening — war, natural disaster, the rising cost of fuel — this problem just doesn't rate.
Unfortunately, the politicos can't ignore it. All those disgruntled TV viewers make up a big consituency. And when you have a consituency, you get funding. That's why Congress can't balance the budget.
The smart thing to do would be to abandon the mandatory changeover to digital TV. This might mean that HD television will never catch on — but that's not exactly a disaster either.
Except to all the broadcasters who've spent a fortune on HD transmitters. And the entertainment moguls who are hoping to revive lagging sales with HD programming. And the hardware companies who had been hoping to make a lot of money selling HD stuff. And they, alas, are also a big consituency.
Composed chiefly of carbon dioxide, Venus' atmosphere generates intense greenhouse warming, whereby trapped solar radiation heats the surface of the planet to an average of temperature of 467C.
Of course, this is a purely natural phenomenon, so no Venusian needs to give up his SUV!
But with the technology infrastructure in place, what happens if congress decides to relax court order requirements in the future 'in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies?
Civil Libertarians worry too much about infrastructure. Not that the treat to privacy isn't real. But not having an evesdropping infrastructure in place doesn't buy us much.
Consider the phone system. Not so long ago, you tapping a phone was hard. You had to make a physical connection to the specific phone line. ("Hey Bugsy! What's that clicking sound!?") But it was a lot harder for a pre-Patriot Act FBI agent to get permission to push that button than it was for his 1960s counterpart to get permission to plant a tape recorder in your basement.
The real threat to civil liberties is not the enabling technology. It's legal and political policies that authorize such threats.
I would suggest that people who need to work uninterrupted unplug the phone. And if you want to participate in Slashdot, you need to unplug your inner Language Nazi.
Most people call all warships "battleships". I see/hear it all the time. That might be irritating to the Naval professional or the nit-picking Naval History buff. But it's the way people talk. Jargon is always used imprecisely by outsiders.
The important thing here is that the Yorktown was stranded by a software crash. That crash might not have been due to a flaw in NT, but that wasn't the poster's main point. Which was that the contractor responsible for that software system, MITRE, dropped the ball. As they certainly did. Despite garbling a few peripheral facts, the central point is valid.
No matter how quiet they did it, it would get back to Microsoft — and the repercussions would be extreme. The Mac still relies heavily on Microsoft's goodwill.
The idea of running Wine on Intel Macs probably occurred to every WINE enthusiast roughly 300 milliseconds after Apple announced they were abandoning POWER. No doubt many people are working on it, including Codweavers. But forget about financial support from Apple.
Thing is, paying "conscience money" doesn't legalize your original action. Copying restrictions are as much about controlling the release of content as they are about getting a payment for each copy of the content. You might say that's nonsensical: media companies are entitled to a reasonable profit on each copy, but aren't entitled to play games with distribution in order to maximize that profit. I would certainly agree with that — but the law doesn't.
Which leads me to a question that probably seems lame to iTunes users (can't afford it myself): what's to prevent an Aussie from using iTunes, even if there's no Australian iTunes server? Does the software check packet routing or something?
The same goes for TV series and DVDs.
That pisses me off too. Even in the U.S., there are movies and TV shows that you can't watch even though DVDs for them are available. (Of course, you can get a region-free player, but not cheaply.) And it leads to some bizarre situations. Like in 1999, I dropped a Farscape reference in an email to an Australian colleague. He didn't get it. Even though the show was produced in Australia with Aussie writers, locations, and mostly Aussie actors, it was financed by the Jim Henson Company — which took years to get around to releasing it in the country in which it was made!
I wasn't trying to describe a typical transaction (the blivet market is remarkably small). I was simply illustrating the disadvantages a business has when it's open at the same time as its market. Yes, any given business is only going to see a small effect — but multiply that by thousands of businesses, and you have a significant impact on the economy.
In some parts of the U.S., where it's densely populated and impossible to draw time zone boundaries that don't intersect heavily populated areas, epic battles have been fought over what zone you get to be in. It's not a small matter.
Last time I checked, both Canada and the US did trade with countries other than each other.
So what? The U.S. is not just another trading partner for Canada. The U.S. buys 85% of Canada's exports! And exports account for one-third of the Canadian economy. Do the math: for every dollar earned by a Canadian, 28 cents comes from selling stuff to the U.S.
Hell, there's a 3h discepancy between here (BC) and Ontario, and I live in the same country.
Again, so what? Ontario and New York State may be in different countries — but I'll bet that New York is a lot more important to the Ontarian economy than British Columbia.
Scenario: one fine summer morning a factory in upstate New York runs out of left handed blivets. There's a blivet warehouse across the border in Ontario, and there's another one further south. The Canadian warehouse offers a better price because of the weak Canadian dollar (I hear its not so weak these days, but this is a scenario) so the factory calls them first. No answer — it's an hour earlier in Ontario, so the warehouse office is closed. Guess who gets the order?
Re:Alternate Interfaces
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It had been my understanding that one could not copyright a collection of facts, though one could copyright a collection of facts organized and presented in a particular manner. Legally, is there any reason a person couldn't just take their data, import it into a format of their own design, and then do whatever they wanted with it?
That's always been my understanding. But the law is full of little subtlties a non-lawyer can't hope to anticipate. Before you go and flout IMDB's (or anybody else's) claim that they own a collection of material, you should definitely talk to a lawyer. Get a written opinion from him or her that you have a legal right to do what you want to do. Which will make it slightly harder for IMDB to hassle you, but not anything like impossible. Depending on what you do with the material, you might be in for a fight.
You might reasonably decide that fighting IMDB isn't worth the hassle, even if the law's on your side. Unfortunately, a lot of IP "ownership" consists simply of having more legal resources than anybody who want to challenge same.
Not necessarily. Many ISPs provide non-core services that they don't offer support for; for instance, my ISP runs an NTP server, but the only support they provide...
And policies like that just don't work. Maybe with ordinary schmos like you, your ISP help desk can hide behind "That's an unsupported service." But suppose a customer who buys a huge amount of bandwidth and pays them 6 or 7 figures calls up, and says, "I have a mission-critical ap running off your NTP server, and it's broken! Help me fix it or I'm jumping ship!" What do you think they're going to say?
I mostly work in tech pubs (when I'm working), and this has been a constant issue for me. At some badly managed companies, I've seen engineers add SuperKewl Features to the product without authorization, thinking they can just throw them over the wall to the customers and forget about them. Wrong. I have to document their damn features, and that costs. If I don't document their damn features, then tech support has to handle the resulting calls, and that costs even more. And if tech support tries to tell a big customer, "Oh, that's an unofficial feature, we don't support it," that really costs!
I am quite sick of Microsoft's media player telling me that my 'license is invalid', even on DVDs that I own.
Even so, you're more tolerant of Media Player's shortcomings than I am. When I watch a DVD, I usually just want to open the main menu and watch the DVD the way it was programmed to be watched. (One exception: stupid spammish DVDs that try to make you sit through a lot of commercials before the main menu.) No obvious way to do that in Media Player.
I almost always use Power DVD, which I would never buy (a tad buggy) but which came free with my DVD drive.
Same reason the Dvorak keyboard has never caught on -- nobody wants to learn to type all over again.
Display was never the issue with APL. There are implementations of APL that use keywords instead of symbols. It's just that turning everything into an operator makes for really dense, hard-to-maintain code.
I'm reminded of Forth, which lacks APL's weird symbols, but shares its reputation for dense code. In its heyday, Forth programmers justified using it by claiming it made them more productive. And that's true — if you define "productivity" as "number of lines of new code hacked out per day". But code isn't just written, it's maintained, and dense languages are not maintenance friendly.
Well, ignoring the fact that there _are_ ways to defeat NAT (although they usually require cooperation from hosts behind the NAT anyway),
That's a weakness that NATs share with firewalls. So you're hardly making a case for NATs being weaker than firewalls.
one notable weakness is that you're relying on your ISP to get things right, and relying on someone else's cluefulness is always bad.
Especially an ISP's — most of the ones I've dealt with are not particularly clueful. But NATs managed by ISPs is not what we were talking about. We were discussing home routers.
People, the most important rule in newswriting is what I call the WTF rule: in the first sentence, you make it clear WTF you're talking about, so people know whether they want to read further. As in "Mobility Email, the Thunderbird extension for virtual goat sex" or whatever.
...[NAT] basically acts like a firewall, but potentially a little weaker because it isn't designed to be a firewall.
Weaker how? If you can't address a node, how can you attack it? Not having your systems in the public IP space may limit your functionality (such as not being able to run P2P applications), but I don't see how it's less secure than the complicated (and thus fallible) filtering rules in a "real" firewall.
Recently Jennifer Garner did a recruiting commercial for the CIA. When I saw it, my first reaction was, "how do I know you're recruiting for the CIA and not for some other organization posing as the CIA?"
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That said, I agree with you that it's stupid to spend public money to help people watch TV. Given all the other shit that's happening — war, natural disaster, the rising cost of fuel — this problem just doesn't rate.
Unfortunately, the politicos can't ignore it. All those disgruntled TV viewers make up a big consituency. And when you have a consituency, you get funding. That's why Congress can't balance the budget.
The smart thing to do would be to abandon the mandatory changeover to digital TV. This might mean that HD television will never catch on — but that's not exactly a disaster either.
Except to all the broadcasters who've spent a fortune on HD transmitters. And the entertainment moguls who are hoping to revive lagging sales with HD programming. And the hardware companies who had been hoping to make a lot of money selling HD stuff. And they, alas, are also a big consituency.
Consider the phone system. Not so long ago, you tapping a phone was hard. You had to make a physical connection to the specific phone line. ("Hey Bugsy! What's that clicking sound!?") But it was a lot harder for a pre-Patriot Act FBI agent to get permission to push that button than it was for his 1960s counterpart to get permission to plant a tape recorder in your basement.
The real threat to civil liberties is not the enabling technology. It's legal and political policies that authorize such threats.
Well, Microsoft obviously has different definitions of "alpha," and "beta" than, say, Google.
None of which comes even close to funding Wine for Mac development.
I call sloppy moderation. That's an "offtopic", not a "troll"!
I would suggest that people who need to work uninterrupted unplug the phone. And if you want to participate in Slashdot, you need to unplug your inner Language Nazi.
The important thing here is that the Yorktown was stranded by a software crash. That crash might not have been due to a flaw in NT, but that wasn't the poster's main point. Which was that the contractor responsible for that software system, MITRE, dropped the ball. As they certainly did. Despite garbling a few peripheral facts, the central point is valid.
The idea of running Wine on Intel Macs probably occurred to every WINE enthusiast roughly 300 milliseconds after Apple announced they were abandoning POWER. No doubt many people are working on it, including Codweavers. But forget about financial support from Apple.
Which leads me to a question that probably seems lame to iTunes users (can't afford it myself): what's to prevent an Aussie from using iTunes, even if there's no Australian iTunes server? Does the software check packet routing or something?
That pisses me off too. Even in the U.S., there are movies and TV shows that you can't watch even though DVDs for them are available. (Of course, you can get a region-free player, but not cheaply.) And it leads to some bizarre situations. Like in 1999, I dropped a Farscape reference in an email to an Australian colleague. He didn't get it. Even though the show was produced in Australia with Aussie writers, locations, and mostly Aussie actors, it was financed by the Jim Henson Company — which took years to get around to releasing it in the country in which it was made!In some parts of the U.S., where it's densely populated and impossible to draw time zone boundaries that don't intersect heavily populated areas, epic battles have been fought over what zone you get to be in. It's not a small matter.
Scenario: one fine summer morning a factory in upstate New York runs out of left handed blivets. There's a blivet warehouse across the border in Ontario, and there's another one further south. The Canadian warehouse offers a better price because of the weak Canadian dollar (I hear its not so weak these days, but this is a scenario) so the factory calls them first. No answer — it's an hour earlier in Ontario, so the warehouse office is closed. Guess who gets the order?
You might reasonably decide that fighting IMDB isn't worth the hassle, even if the law's on your side. Unfortunately, a lot of IP "ownership" consists simply of having more legal resources than anybody who want to challenge same.
OK, that's informative. Thanks.
I mostly work in tech pubs (when I'm working), and this has been a constant issue for me. At some badly managed companies, I've seen engineers add SuperKewl Features to the product without authorization, thinking they can just throw them over the wall to the customers and forget about them. Wrong. I have to document their damn features, and that costs. If I don't document their damn features, then tech support has to handle the resulting calls, and that costs even more. And if tech support tries to tell a big customer, "Oh, that's an unofficial feature, we don't support it," that really costs!
I almost always use Power DVD, which I would never buy (a tad buggy) but which came free with my DVD drive.
Display was never the issue with APL. There are implementations of APL that use keywords instead of symbols. It's just that turning everything into an operator makes for really dense, hard-to-maintain code.
I'm reminded of Forth, which lacks APL's weird symbols, but shares its reputation for dense code. In its heyday, Forth programmers justified using it by claiming it made them more productive. And that's true — if you define "productivity" as "number of lines of new code hacked out per day". But code isn't just written, it's maintained, and dense languages are not maintenance friendly.
People, the most important rule in newswriting is what I call the WTF rule: in the first sentence, you make it clear WTF you're talking about, so people know whether they want to read further. As in "Mobility Email, the Thunderbird extension for virtual goat sex" or whatever.
Everybody seems to think that the added costs of a new software product end with deployment. Not so.
... don't forget that it's charityware.
The ease with which they pull switcheroos like that is the reason I rarely watch Alias.
Recently Jennifer Garner did a recruiting commercial for the CIA. When I saw it, my first reaction was, "how do I know you're recruiting for the CIA and not for some other organization posing as the CIA?"