Merely publishing the patent documents instead of registering them as a patent is protection against "patent trolls" who could try to stop the documented inventions from being produced and even commercialized. These "defensive patents" are BS. I know, because I'm currently cutting through the patent BS on a specific project so we can spend our money developing unconstrained tech, rather than wasting it licensing patents before development. Or wasting it on patenting stuff rather than just developing it and selling it.
I don't think it's crass to make money on medical inventions. Lots of smart people take risks attempting inventing incremental/breakthroughs when they could do something else worth money with less risk. From which we often get better health. I just know that in this day and age their risks are more protected by quickly going to market with a working, tested safe invention to produce returns from a pent-up market studied at the outset for segmentation and delivery channels, than by investing time, money and effort in protecting exclusivity for a long time. The "first mover" advantage offers exclusivity and brand equity. Without artificial monopolies that hurt economics, which measure lost opportunities for better health.
The US Constitution specified limited time monopolies for protecting inventors from competitors who hadn't invested in the costly, risky development phase. It balanced rights to expression and knowledge against realities of competition in this imperfect world. But in the past couple of centuries, the world has changed to make required length of those limited times shorter and their scope narrower, while the law has made them longer and larger. Solely to increase the profitability to gargantuan degrees, subsidizing terrible waste elsewhere, at the cost of less benefit to people from the protected "science and the useful arts". It's worse than crass to keep a system where a cure for cancer will be sold to only the highest bidders, while millions of poorer people suffer unnecessarily with the disease. It's criminal - or should be.
Well, that worked to disarm Saddam's Iraq. While invading and occupying it has turned Iraq into an actual top-tier threat, and now has turned Saddam into a martyr inspiring crazy morons around the world to kill and die for insanity.
Back when we were using angry letters backed by "diplomacy" (political pressure on essential economics), we actually got N Korea to stop its nuke weapons development. Then we switched off the diplomacy, and switched on the empty threats. Meanwhile we shipped N Korea a nuke plant with Donald Rumsfeld's name on it, then dismissed the inspection requirements that would have kept it from being abused into weapons development - the same day he paid for it to be built. Pretty good business for Rumsfeld, but a disaster for live humans.
I used the word "we", but sometimes it was Clinton, and sometimes it was Bush. Guess which one made us safer, and the other threatened us more? Bonus points for guessing which one prizes a Star Wars "antimissile defense shield" above any other military program, and needs more WMD missile threats to scare us into paying for it.
How does Google monitor these sites for content updates to update the Google index? Does Google offer the public (or private subscribers) a way to register a website or URL to be polled ongoing? Notification that it's changed? Web services offering "uptime" monitors seem to do this, as does apparently Google News. Can mere mortals access the feature?
The group is taking the step of patenting the idea, as this new approach using sugars may hold real potential for the fight against cancer.
The logic contained in that "as" apparently dictates that curing cancer is more important for making money than for everyone's health. Apparently without any explanation needed, or question expected. Also unquestioned is the vast amount of money spent by the public (you and your family, for generations) subsidizing all the research these "inventors" used to produce their new idea.
There's a lot of discussion on Slashdot of justifications for piracy of media content. Fighting the arbitrary assignment of all value from medical inventions to the last people to use their predecessors to cross a commercial threshold seems not only more obviously moral, but more relevant to basic survival. And a stronger study in the arbitrary contrasts between the "robber" and the "robbed".
Best practices to protect personal data like IDs should be consistently supported in software if most people are to practice them.
I'm really annoyed every time I have to type my name/address/email into a Web form. How many times have I typed that info in the past 10 years of the Web? Why can't forms include either Javascript or even standardized APIs for requesting the same personal info? In increasing scopes with simple descriptive names. So I don't have to let my info sit cached at so many remote servers with which I do intermittent business, any one of which can leak my info at any time.
I want to see a Web GUI show submittable form sections tagged by their target org. I'd like to subscribe to a service that rates forms by their risk, demonstrated by proven vulnerabilities in distributed reporting databases (or whatever my selected advisor uses to decide its ratings). Many people would pay for such a service to advise how much info to disclose to a given recipient. And many organizations would pay to make using them free, like insurance and bank corps, not to mention governments with insight into the preventive value of informing consumers of disclosure risks, without slowing down acceptable transactions.
People can protect ourselves even more than with just tech fixes. We have the right to privacy in our "papers and effects": our personal data. We produce a government to protect that privacy. We should specify how they protect it, like requiring all disclosed personal data to be redistributed only within the context of the transaction into which it was delivered, unless explicitly agreed otherwise by the sender. Maybe even a Constitutional Amendment, to make more clear the privacy rights implicit in the Constitution, explicit in the 4th Amendment, but still not protected enough for adequate security in the modern age.
x86 CPUs are by far the cheapest per performance CPU that will run all the old software. For awhile it looked like Transmeta was pioneering a transitional architecture with enough raw power in its backwards-incompatible native operation to waste emulating legacy CPUs like x86 or PPC. But Intel adopted successful Transmeta tech strategies to make new x86es faster than new Transmetas. Meanwhile, PC/server/workstation makers didn't take the risk investing in the transitional tech.
However, the x86 arch is already running into limits new strategies can't jump without real transformation. Transmeta's approach might prove to have been merely premature. Meanwhile, software is increasingly designed for parallelism to scale. Which incidentally can open system architectures to new CPU architectures, especially for special purpose processing.
Telephony and other integrated networked multimedia apps offer lots of chances for new architectures. Lots of new SW is needed that can use whichever HW offers the best solution. DSP, mobility, scalability and other niche requirements mean that
And with projects like uCLinux and even the lingering NetBSD, we have a fairly consistent platform for continuing to use existing tools and techniques to move more people into connection with each other.
Yes, it's now undeniable that fascist sleepwalking Republicans like you can't tell the difference between monarchial "signing statements" that contradict the explicit law passed by your own outgoing Republican Congress, and some kind of theoretical rationalization for them.
If Bush signed a law saying that in some kind of "emergency" (defined however he chooses at the moment) he would execute everyone who didn't vote for every Republican ever offered them, I suppose you'd find a way to shrug it off. Until they came for you.
Of course, any suggestion of what this means will be met with your insistence that "it's all hypothetical". Because you don't understand that a just government is a system of laws, not just people to whom we give power and hope for the best. You live in a purely hypothetical world of your own creation. Built in lies and denial of the endless list of real abuse and damage you're stil promoting every chance you get.
Stop your insane partisan chuckleheading for a second and stare at your post. Notice how it treats Bush like a benevolent dictator we should trust until the moment when we cannot. I don't really care whether you're proud of yourself, because you slaves are an endangered species. But out of simple respect for a member of my species, I'm offering you one more chance to pretend that you're human, and that you can scrape together some dignity. Blow it at your own peril.
How many of you people who still voted Republican in 2002, 2004 and 2006 are still claiming that your president is "conservative" or stands for liberty in any way but his own, and his bribers/friends?
If we used your partisan rules of governance to actually run this country in every way, not just the most profitable, you'd all be tortured in secret now that the majority of the government is controlled by the party you've fought like a criminal mob.
Instead, we're probably back on track to democracy. Have you learned anything?
This is the perfect opportunity for OpenOffice.org to grab lots of marketshare. Especially if bundled with a UI that maps absolutely exactly the familiar MSOffice menus/items/hotkeys.
MS file formats and GUI skills are 90% of the reason users upgrade to MS without even considering switching to something else/better. Let 'er rip!
I would have been really surprised if the government would have allowed a critical article co-written by a government official to be published.
Since you've apparently grown up in a country where the government controls people writing criticism of itself, I'll explain the United States government to you. First, we have a Constitution that creates the government with only explicitly assigned powers. Controlling criticism is not among them. For good measure, that Constitution includes a section that explicitly makes clear that the government is required to protect such criticism, especially in print.
That kind of defense of liberty, rather than government tyranny, surprised the British king when we kicked him and his army out of our country at its beginning. It still surprises many people who familiar with only tyranny, strangers to liberty. At least now you can't be surprised from any claim of ignorance.
What about LCDs of metamaterial crystals? Any way to use their refraction for multidimensional, or just higher efficiency, light modulation? What about a liquid metamaterial suspending optically normal crystals?
No, they are giving up privileges or prerogatives lawyers also call "rights", but which are not the inalienable ones in the Constitution. Unconstitutional contracts are void.
Waiving protections of those actual rights does not alienate those rights from a person. They're inalienable.
Of course, some moral relativists disagree with the fundamental philosophy on which America was founded. That's their right: the right to be wrong.
Prohibitive fees, whether for a spectrum license, minimum royalties or any other arbitrary basis that keeps publishing in the hands of "the club", is the barrier that favors "official publishers".
I've now taught you enough, including manners, whether or not you've got the sense to learn it. Goodbye.
As that article to which I linked noted, Tesla transmitted and received radio signals with informational content as late as 1895, over a decade before the 1906 demos this story celebrates. All radio is broadcast unless attenuated into a beam - Tesla's was no exception.
FWIW, Westinghouse got all its tech, including radio, from Tesla's brain. The Westinghouse ripoff of Tesla is one of the main reasons Tesla isn't celebrated as inventor of so many of these extraordinary inventions.
Well, apparently there is some agreement they're willing to abide by, because their article is not being published.
Are you arguing whether Bush/Cheney are effective at infringing free speech/press, or whether it's right? And who said this is new? After all, Cheney worked for Nixon, and many of Bush's brains worked for Bush Sr and Reagan.
So let's not pretend that we're talking about any of the Republican fallacies you're rolling out. Let's talk about how Bush/Cheney are stomping on free speech/press to avoid public humiliation from an authority on how badly they're damaging the country in still other ways, like militarily and strategically. And while we're at it, let's talk about how you and the rest of the "nothing new here" crowd are helping them.
You don't get what I'm saying. I'm not talking about freely copying other people's works. I'm talking about a rate structure arbitrary and prohibitive to anyone but commercial publishers of existing work. Which is a completely legitimate way to work without being commercial, if it's small enough scale, especially in today's "remix culture". Even at the rate of $0.0007:listen, which was established by a completely unsupportable basis of the stock price of Broadcast.com purchased by Yahoo in stock, not cash, as if the sale was the cost for Yahoo to play all of B.c's licensed songs once per listener. A legitimate price would be something like $0.00001 per listen. But again, I'm not saying that the compensation to the copyright owners is prohibitive (not in this discussion) - that's a strawman you're floating.
What I'm saying is that $500:y minimum is a fee designed to keep multicasters commercial, corporate, like the existing publishers. That's bound to increase in cost and complexity (therefore more costs) as streaming goes to video. Which is a parallel to how the FCC raised rates on some other arbitrary basis to exclude hobbyists from radio and other broadcast. To dumb it down into a corporate, one-way broadcast, instead of P2P among people.
You want to debate whether the minimum license fees (and more to come) will keep the Internet from delivering a P2P medium, to noncorporate interests as well as corporate, let's do it. Don't just say obnoxious assertions like "patently ridiculous", or create strawman arguments, if you want to discuss it with me. That's a way to turn this medium into a P2 medium, without me.
Are you defending a rule (uncited) that lets a White House squash the free speech/press of the authors and the NYT, even though the article contains no secrets, as proven by the CIA review clearance? In what is deductively certain to be a purely political move by Bush/Cheney, not to have public info endorsed in the NYT by a credible authority?
Rights cannot be surrendered. People can waive protections of them, but the rights to free speech and the press are inalienable.
RAW STORY has examined these sources and has attempted to connect the previously published materials to the redacted paragraphs in the op-ed. What the information reveals is a series of events in which US-Iran dialogue broke down. In the aftermath of 9/11, the cooperative spirit around the world sparked by America's victimhood encouraged Iran to collaborate with the United States in its effort to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the goodwill that might have been sustained by those early negotiations was undermined by a series of disputes between the US and Iran.
Nothing unconstitutional about the government infringing the freedom of the press of the NYT, or the speech of the two authors? With even the usual BS "national security" excuse obviously bogus, after the CIA released them?
What kind of "Constitution" do you have, that doesn't have a First Amendment? You praying for some kind of corporate anarchy?
I just mentioned, in two sentences, a basic "cognitive-radio infrastructure". Known to real people as "listen politely before you speak".
Anonymous Coward is spewing gibberish, like starting out with a declaration that their post is "just nuts". OK, then keep it to yourself.
Why would anyone get into a discussion with an anonymous jerk about scrapping the FCC now that we can? You're obnoxious, have no imagination, and are just wrong.
From what I can tell, Tesla was mad to capitalize on his inventions. He patented many (hundreds) of them. But he trusted corporate industrialists of his day, robber barons like Westinghouse and Morgan, to take care of him like royal patrons would a court wizard. They ripped him off when he couldn't play their game as well as they.
I have invented a wireless power transmission system, but it's lossy (like all radio). Once I've gotten rich off this Internet telco, I'll roll out my lossless long-distance (wired) power transmission company. I hope to make up in wired distance efficiency what I can afford to lose in nearby lossy power, especially for low-power digital devices.
As JP Morgan once apocryphally asked Tesla, after Tesla's pitch for funding wireless power: "OK, but where do you put the meter?"
Tesla also demonstrated, in a famous demo, how he could grab the electrode while holding a bulb in his other hand, lighting the bulb brightly. Edison was trying to set up Tesla's AC technique to power NY state's new "electric chair" executions, to scare the public away from letting AC be chosen to carry Niagara Falls hydroelectic (generated by Tesla's generators) down to NYC. But Tesla's demo showed everyone that "AC is safe", and the rest is history.
In its early days, radio was a 2-way, peer-to-peer medium. It was instantaneous (zero latency), hifi (plus noise), and global. It could transmit pictures (by wiring it to a pantograph or fancier device). Everyone into the hobby thought it would become what we like to think the Internet is becoming today.
But after a couple of decades, radio was reduced to a one-way, broadcast medium dominated by commercial corporate interests.
The main way this shutdown was executed was by the new US agency, the "FCC". The early tech made necessary a central registry of unique frequencies assigned to "stations", or multiple stations would "interfere", or really just all be heard by a receiver tuned to that frequency. A signaling protocol for yielding could have avoided that centralized control. A transceiver attempting a frequency could have first listened to the frequency for a signal:noise ratio above some standardized threshold before using it as a clear channel, and group comms could have signalled with a "heartbeat" above the threshold of human hearing. Or some other approach either automatic or negotiated. But the US Federal government legislated instead of letting tech solve the real problem. Which also let them control the content of the public airwaves, eventually requiring broadcasters to be officially licensed as publishers. Which now costs $millions, forcing mere hobbyists out of the market.
We can already see this same pattern repeating. Publishing streams of copyrighted material on the Net costs not only a ridiculous $0.0007 per "song" per listener (therefore 10K listeners costs $7, thousands of times more than broadcast, though the tech is cheaper). But the license requires a minimum $500 per year. Which is the cost of about 6 listeners continuously 24x7, to 4 minute average length songs. Or really more like 25 listeners, who'd have to pay $20 a year to listen (or $95 for each of 6) - just for the royalties. That minimum fee puts radio out of the reach of most hobbyists to even reach their friends. It forces streaming to go commercial. The first step towards the really expensive licenses that keep the official publishers in the same billionaire's club, with mostly the same agenda. Purely "political": controlling the people to ensure only rich commercial interests can publish.
And that's all before video streaming is really regulated. They'll surely increase the license fee for that, and probably raise the audio fees "now that the industry has gotten on its feet".
Who believes that "wireless networks", really just digital radio, will stay P2P, unregulated content, when the rest of the industry has the worst history of forcing regulations to define its limited competition? For those who do believe that, look at your radio dial. And, if you can stand it, try listening to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Merely publishing the patent documents instead of registering them as a patent is protection against "patent trolls" who could try to stop the documented inventions from being produced and even commercialized. These "defensive patents" are BS. I know, because I'm currently cutting through the patent BS on a specific project so we can spend our money developing unconstrained tech, rather than wasting it licensing patents before development. Or wasting it on patenting stuff rather than just developing it and selling it.
I don't think it's crass to make money on medical inventions. Lots of smart people take risks attempting inventing incremental/breakthroughs when they could do something else worth money with less risk. From which we often get better health. I just know that in this day and age their risks are more protected by quickly going to market with a working, tested safe invention to produce returns from a pent-up market studied at the outset for segmentation and delivery channels, than by investing time, money and effort in protecting exclusivity for a long time. The "first mover" advantage offers exclusivity and brand equity. Without artificial monopolies that hurt economics, which measure lost opportunities for better health.
The US Constitution specified limited time monopolies for protecting inventors from competitors who hadn't invested in the costly, risky development phase. It balanced rights to expression and knowledge against realities of competition in this imperfect world. But in the past couple of centuries, the world has changed to make required length of those limited times shorter and their scope narrower, while the law has made them longer and larger. Solely to increase the profitability to gargantuan degrees, subsidizing terrible waste elsewhere, at the cost of less benefit to people from the protected "science and the useful arts". It's worse than crass to keep a system where a cure for cancer will be sold to only the highest bidders, while millions of poorer people suffer unnecessarily with the disease. It's criminal - or should be.
Well, that worked to disarm Saddam's Iraq. While invading and occupying it has turned Iraq into an actual top-tier threat, and now has turned Saddam into a martyr inspiring crazy morons around the world to kill and die for insanity.
Back when we were using angry letters backed by "diplomacy" (political pressure on essential economics), we actually got N Korea to stop its nuke weapons development. Then we switched off the diplomacy, and switched on the empty threats. Meanwhile we shipped N Korea a nuke plant with Donald Rumsfeld's name on it, then dismissed the inspection requirements that would have kept it from being abused into weapons development - the same day he paid for it to be built. Pretty good business for Rumsfeld, but a disaster for live humans.
I used the word "we", but sometimes it was Clinton, and sometimes it was Bush. Guess which one made us safer, and the other threatened us more? Bonus points for guessing which one prizes a Star Wars "antimissile defense shield" above any other military program, and needs more WMD missile threats to scare us into paying for it.
How does Google monitor these sites for content updates to update the Google index? Does Google offer the public (or private subscribers) a way to register a website or URL to be polled ongoing? Notification that it's changed? Web services offering "uptime" monitors seem to do this, as does apparently Google News. Can mere mortals access the feature?
The logic contained in that "as" apparently dictates that curing cancer is more important for making money than for everyone's health. Apparently without any explanation needed, or question expected. Also unquestioned is the vast amount of money spent by the public (you and your family, for generations) subsidizing all the research these "inventors" used to produce their new idea.
There's a lot of discussion on Slashdot of justifications for piracy of media content. Fighting the arbitrary assignment of all value from medical inventions to the last people to use their predecessors to cross a commercial threshold seems not only more obviously moral, but more relevant to basic survival. And a stronger study in the arbitrary contrasts between the "robber" and the "robbed".
Best practices to protect personal data like IDs should be consistently supported in software if most people are to practice them.
I'm really annoyed every time I have to type my name/address/email into a Web form. How many times have I typed that info in the past 10 years of the Web? Why can't forms include either Javascript or even standardized APIs for requesting the same personal info? In increasing scopes with simple descriptive names. So I don't have to let my info sit cached at so many remote servers with which I do intermittent business, any one of which can leak my info at any time.
I want to see a Web GUI show submittable form sections tagged by their target org. I'd like to subscribe to a service that rates forms by their risk, demonstrated by proven vulnerabilities in distributed reporting databases (or whatever my selected advisor uses to decide its ratings). Many people would pay for such a service to advise how much info to disclose to a given recipient. And many organizations would pay to make using them free, like insurance and bank corps, not to mention governments with insight into the preventive value of informing consumers of disclosure risks, without slowing down acceptable transactions.
People can protect ourselves even more than with just tech fixes. We have the right to privacy in our "papers and effects": our personal data. We produce a government to protect that privacy. We should specify how they protect it, like requiring all disclosed personal data to be redistributed only within the context of the transaction into which it was delivered, unless explicitly agreed otherwise by the sender. Maybe even a Constitutional Amendment, to make more clear the privacy rights implicit in the Constitution, explicit in the 4th Amendment, but still not protected enough for adequate security in the modern age.
x86 CPUs are by far the cheapest per performance CPU that will run all the old software. For awhile it looked like Transmeta was pioneering a transitional architecture with enough raw power in its backwards-incompatible native operation to waste emulating legacy CPUs like x86 or PPC. But Intel adopted successful Transmeta tech strategies to make new x86es faster than new Transmetas. Meanwhile, PC/server/workstation makers didn't take the risk investing in the transitional tech.
However, the x86 arch is already running into limits new strategies can't jump without real transformation. Transmeta's approach might prove to have been merely premature. Meanwhile, software is increasingly designed for parallelism to scale. Which incidentally can open system architectures to new CPU architectures, especially for special purpose processing.
Telephony and other integrated networked multimedia apps offer lots of chances for new architectures. Lots of new SW is needed that can use whichever HW offers the best solution. DSP, mobility, scalability and other niche requirements mean that
And with projects like uCLinux and even the lingering NetBSD, we have a fairly consistent platform for continuing to use existing tools and techniques to move more people into connection with each other.
Yes, it's now undeniable that fascist sleepwalking Republicans like you can't tell the difference between monarchial "signing statements" that contradict the explicit law passed by your own outgoing Republican Congress, and some kind of theoretical rationalization for them.
If Bush signed a law saying that in some kind of "emergency" (defined however he chooses at the moment) he would execute everyone who didn't vote for every Republican ever offered them, I suppose you'd find a way to shrug it off. Until they came for you.
Of course, any suggestion of what this means will be met with your insistence that "it's all hypothetical". Because you don't understand that a just government is a system of laws, not just people to whom we give power and hope for the best. You live in a purely hypothetical world of your own creation. Built in lies and denial of the endless list of real abuse and damage you're stil promoting every chance you get.
Stop your insane partisan chuckleheading for a second and stare at your post. Notice how it treats Bush like a benevolent dictator we should trust until the moment when we cannot. I don't really care whether you're proud of yourself, because you slaves are an endangered species. But out of simple respect for a member of my species, I'm offering you one more chance to pretend that you're human, and that you can scrape together some dignity. Blow it at your own peril.
How many of you people who still voted Republican in 2002, 2004 and 2006 are still claiming that your president is "conservative" or stands for liberty in any way but his own, and his bribers/friends?
If we used your partisan rules of governance to actually run this country in every way, not just the most profitable, you'd all be tortured in secret now that the majority of the government is controlled by the party you've fought like a criminal mob.
Instead, we're probably back on track to democracy. Have you learned anything?
This is the perfect opportunity for OpenOffice.org to grab lots of marketshare. Especially if bundled with a UI that maps absolutely exactly the familiar MSOffice menus/items/hotkeys.
MS file formats and GUI skills are 90% of the reason users upgrade to MS without even considering switching to something else/better. Let 'er rip!
Since you've apparently grown up in a country where the government controls people writing criticism of itself, I'll explain the United States government to you. First, we have a Constitution that creates the government with only explicitly assigned powers. Controlling criticism is not among them. For good measure, that Constitution includes a section that explicitly makes clear that the government is required to protect such criticism, especially in print.
That kind of defense of liberty, rather than government tyranny, surprised the British king when we kicked him and his army out of our country at its beginning. It still surprises many people who familiar with only tyranny, strangers to liberty. At least now you can't be surprised from any claim of ignorance.
What about LCDs of metamaterial crystals? Any way to use their refraction for multidimensional, or just higher efficiency, light modulation? What about a liquid metamaterial suspending optically normal crystals?
No, they are giving up privileges or prerogatives lawyers also call "rights", but which are not the inalienable ones in the Constitution. Unconstitutional contracts are void.
Waiving protections of those actual rights does not alienate those rights from a person. They're inalienable.
Of course, some moral relativists disagree with the fundamental philosophy on which America was founded. That's their right: the right to be wrong.
Prohibitive fees, whether for a spectrum license, minimum royalties or any other arbitrary basis that keeps publishing in the hands of "the club", is the barrier that favors "official publishers".
I've now taught you enough, including manners, whether or not you've got the sense to learn it. Goodbye.
As that article to which I linked noted, Tesla transmitted and received radio signals with informational content as late as 1895, over a decade before the 1906 demos this story celebrates. All radio is broadcast unless attenuated into a beam - Tesla's was no exception.
FWIW, Westinghouse got all its tech, including radio, from Tesla's brain. The Westinghouse ripoff of Tesla is one of the main reasons Tesla isn't celebrated as inventor of so many of these extraordinary inventions.
Well, apparently there is some agreement they're willing to abide by, because their article is not being published.
Are you arguing whether Bush/Cheney are effective at infringing free speech/press, or whether it's right? And who said this is new? After all, Cheney worked for Nixon, and many of Bush's brains worked for Bush Sr and Reagan.
So let's not pretend that we're talking about any of the Republican fallacies you're rolling out. Let's talk about how Bush/Cheney are stomping on free speech/press to avoid public humiliation from an authority on how badly they're damaging the country in still other ways, like militarily and strategically. And while we're at it, let's talk about how you and the rest of the "nothing new here" crowd are helping them.
You don't get what I'm saying. I'm not talking about freely copying other people's works. I'm talking about a rate structure arbitrary and prohibitive to anyone but commercial publishers of existing work. Which is a completely legitimate way to work without being commercial, if it's small enough scale, especially in today's "remix culture". Even at the rate of $0.0007:listen, which was established by a completely unsupportable basis of the stock price of Broadcast.com purchased by Yahoo in stock, not cash, as if the sale was the cost for Yahoo to play all of B.c's licensed songs once per listener. A legitimate price would be something like $0.00001 per listen. But again, I'm not saying that the compensation to the copyright owners is prohibitive (not in this discussion) - that's a strawman you're floating.
What I'm saying is that $500:y minimum is a fee designed to keep multicasters commercial, corporate, like the existing publishers. That's bound to increase in cost and complexity (therefore more costs) as streaming goes to video. Which is a parallel to how the FCC raised rates on some other arbitrary basis to exclude hobbyists from radio and other broadcast. To dumb it down into a corporate, one-way broadcast, instead of P2P among people.
You want to debate whether the minimum license fees (and more to come) will keep the Internet from delivering a P2P medium, to noncorporate interests as well as corporate, let's do it. Don't just say obnoxious assertions like "patently ridiculous", or create strawman arguments, if you want to discuss it with me. That's a way to turn this medium into a P2 medium, without me.
Workplace rules are trumped by the Constitution.
Are you defending a rule (uncited) that lets a White House squash the free speech/press of the authors and the NYT, even though the article contains no secrets, as proven by the CIA review clearance? In what is deductively certain to be a purely political move by Bush/Cheney, not to have public info endorsed in the NYT by a credible authority?
Rights cannot be surrendered. People can waive protections of them, but the rights to free speech and the press are inalienable.
Nothing unconstitutional about the government infringing the freedom of the press of the NYT, or the speech of the two authors? With even the usual BS "national security" excuse obviously bogus, after the CIA released them?
What kind of "Constitution" do you have, that doesn't have a First Amendment? You praying for some kind of corporate anarchy?
I just mentioned, in two sentences, a basic "cognitive-radio infrastructure". Known to real people as "listen politely before you speak".
Anonymous Coward is spewing gibberish, like starting out with a declaration that their post is "just nuts". OK, then keep it to yourself.
Why would anyone get into a discussion with an anonymous jerk about scrapping the FCC now that we can? You're obnoxious, have no imagination, and are just wrong.
From what I can tell, Tesla was mad to capitalize on his inventions. He patented many (hundreds) of them. But he trusted corporate industrialists of his day, robber barons like Westinghouse and Morgan, to take care of him like royal patrons would a court wizard. They ripped him off when he couldn't play their game as well as they.
I have invented a wireless power transmission system, but it's lossy (like all radio). Once I've gotten rich off this Internet telco, I'll roll out my lossless long-distance (wired) power transmission company. I hope to make up in wired distance efficiency what I can afford to lose in nearby lossy power, especially for low-power digital devices.
As JP Morgan once apocryphally asked Tesla, after Tesla's pitch for funding wireless power: "OK, but where do you put the meter?"
Maybe not. Did you read how he did it?
Tesla also demonstrated, in a famous demo, how he could grab the electrode while holding a bulb in his other hand, lighting the bulb brightly. Edison was trying to set up Tesla's AC technique to power NY state's new "electric chair" executions, to scare the public away from letting AC be chosen to carry Niagara Falls hydroelectic (generated by Tesla's generators) down to NYC. But Tesla's demo showed everyone that "AC is safe", and the rest is history.
In its early days, radio was a 2-way, peer-to-peer medium. It was instantaneous (zero latency), hifi (plus noise), and global. It could transmit pictures (by wiring it to a pantograph or fancier device). Everyone into the hobby thought it would become what we like to think the Internet is becoming today.
But after a couple of decades, radio was reduced to a one-way, broadcast medium dominated by commercial corporate interests.
The main way this shutdown was executed was by the new US agency, the "FCC". The early tech made necessary a central registry of unique frequencies assigned to "stations", or multiple stations would "interfere", or really just all be heard by a receiver tuned to that frequency. A signaling protocol for yielding could have avoided that centralized control. A transceiver attempting a frequency could have first listened to the frequency for a signal:noise ratio above some standardized threshold before using it as a clear channel, and group comms could have signalled with a "heartbeat" above the threshold of human hearing. Or some other approach either automatic or negotiated. But the US Federal government legislated instead of letting tech solve the real problem. Which also let them control the content of the public airwaves, eventually requiring broadcasters to be officially licensed as publishers. Which now costs $millions, forcing mere hobbyists out of the market.
We can already see this same pattern repeating. Publishing streams of copyrighted material on the Net costs not only a ridiculous $0.0007 per "song" per listener (therefore 10K listeners costs $7, thousands of times more than broadcast, though the tech is cheaper). But the license requires a minimum $500 per year. Which is the cost of about 6 listeners continuously 24x7, to 4 minute average length songs. Or really more like 25 listeners, who'd have to pay $20 a year to listen (or $95 for each of 6) - just for the royalties. That minimum fee puts radio out of the reach of most hobbyists to even reach their friends. It forces streaming to go commercial. The first step towards the really expensive licenses that keep the official publishers in the same billionaire's club, with mostly the same agenda. Purely "political": controlling the people to ensure only rich commercial interests can publish.
And that's all before video streaming is really regulated. They'll surely increase the license fee for that, and probably raise the audio fees "now that the industry has gotten on its feet".
Who believes that "wireless networks", really just digital radio, will stay P2P, unregulated content, when the rest of the industry has the worst history of forcing regulations to define its limited competition? For those who do believe that, look at your radio dial. And, if you can stand it, try listening to it.
Nikola Tesla, ubergenius, invented radio over a decade before these demonstrations. He even transmitted electric power by radio, to power light bulbs. And probably the robot submarine he also invented - all in the 1800s.
What is it about Tesla that his pioneering inventions are usually ignored in favor of later copycats?