'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'
Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'
I can understand the viewpoint given in the summary - how can a 5th grader possibly know the answer to such a challenging question? After all, are not all children ranked by their grade and set to be equal to their peers in that same approximately 1 year category? It defies their understanding of "abstract though begins at age x", and they forget that their is variance within that spectrum. There may be a child in 5th grade that understands advanced scientific topics, but since the probability of that is far, far lower than the probability of selecting the answer at random when given 1 of 4 or 1 of 5 choices, they have assumed the child just guessed.
However, there is something frightening about assessing the right answer as incorrect. Perhaps the testing needs to be redesigned to eliminate the ease at which randomly guessed right answers can be assessed. Unfortunately, scantrons are cheap ways of correcting thousands of tests - thus the write your answer and have a human correct will probably never be reimplemented. (Sorry for the ramblings - I'm cramming for a Linear Algebra midterm while slashdotting.)
I think companies go to other countries to sue because they multinational forces now. Motorola isn't just in the US with branch offices in other countries; instead, like most corporate entities, they have full legal recognition in many nations. The same applies to Microsoft. The same applies to Apple. To quote Pink Floyd's The Dogs of War: "One world, it's a battleground" - you kick your global opponents where ever you can.
Since I am seeing this same reaction in several threads, I'll do the legwork and post it in each one... From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
I agree with you, Germany is a sovereign country - the US should restrict its recourse to "we will engage in sanctions if you do this", not "our courts find you must do this".
Since I am seeing this same reaction in several threads, I'll do the legwork and post it in each one... From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
Again, I disagree with this viewpoint - it is just an explanation of why they are trying to override German sovereignty
Since I am seeing this same reaction in several threads, I'll do the legwork and post it in each one... From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
However, I do agree - in no way should the US be able to dictate to another country their legal system beyond the standard actions of imposing sanctions and/or embargoes. After all, I don't think anyone would say a state that violates human rights (for example, only certain types of citizens are legally defined as human and the rest are 'livestock' or 'property') should be allowed to operate without consequence. This means petty reasons could be used as justification, for to deny a country a right to apply an embargo or sanction would also be a violation of a state's sovereign rights.
IANAL, so can someone explain to me why a US court thinks it has any effect in Germany? Or is this some kind of 'threat'/'international business' thing that has some legal basis for multinational companies?
From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
So, basically, they are arguing they have jurisdiction because the dispute originated in the US - and it sounds like the US justice system feels that the Motorola suit was more retaliation against Microsoft for bringing up the case than a preplanned and poorly timed execution.
Personally, however, I believe the US would never tolerate another country making the same claim. Instead, the US would claim sovereign rights and not bow to any court, national or international (yes, the US has refused to recognize the proceedings of the International Criminal Court - showing how much it believes in having other powers meddle in its governance). Thus the US should respect the sovereignty of other nations to manage their own legal proceedings since we have no jurisdiction over Germany.
14 years of support is generous, but I think Microsoft is missing the point - there is an opportunity here to make money. They should calculate the cost of continuing to support the product, figure out what they want their margin to be, then crunch the numbers to see where supply and demand intersect to meet that income. Basic capitalism - there sound like their is a market, so try it out for a year. For anyone who wants to continue to use XP and wishes to continue receiving patches and updates for it, they can pay for the service, and for those that don't? Well, that is their choice. If the numbers predicted fall well below the numbers of expected, then they have an argument that it is unreasonable to continue supporting a 'legacy' product.
Just got done watching a Research Channel vid on youtube with Neil deGrasse Tyson. In it he told a story about Titanic where he talked about Cameron using a sub to check out the details of the Titanic to keep it authentic. However, with the scene near the end why the kid chooses to drown, he noticed that the night sky was not only wrong but the left side was a mirror of the right side. Thus, Tyson wrote Cameron a letter about it. Later, he met up with Cameron and decided to bring up the point, and Cameron mentioned how many billions it made and asked how much more the right sky would make him. Yet, that is not the end of the story. Years later Tyson gets a call - its some Hollywood type who says he's working with Cameron on updating Titanic and that Tyson would have a night sky for him. His next words had so much heartfelt emotion in them "YES!".
So, I guess anyone who wants to see Tyson's accurate night sky will go and see it...
Or find out that is has been building castles in the sky...
Keep in mind, that for Monsato to have such utter control means that the government is giving that control away. I don't think that the US government wants to give up that sort of power.
Of course, they may also follow Canada's lead - look into the Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser case. This is not a unique case, as Monsanto has been known to target farmers who bank their own seeds (which is why the machinery and the farmers who offer those services have been disappearing). Monsanto's contention is they own the gene, and if that gene is introduced to a farmer's crops then they owe them licensing fees - and ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. Heck, natural processes of cross-pollination from a neighboring field does not excuse one from requiring a license. The notion is if this gene even gets into a back-yard garden, a fee is owed and the seeds of those plants also cannot be used unless licensed.
As I recall in the case of Schmeiser, he use to bank his own rapeseed (canola) and would help other farmers bank seeds. These seeds were genetically diverse and were contaminated by Monsanto, who trespassed onto his property to collect evidence of his violation. He was a target because he helped farmers bank their own seeds, and the Canadian supreme court basically said "yup, Monsanto own's that gene and you didn't license it - destroy your seed bank as per Monsanto's demand."
Do you really think the US is going to be any different? After all, the gene is Monsanto's intellectual property and it is said in the US that ignorance of the law does not excuse one from obeying it. Does it matter that wind-borne and natural processes carried the gene into your crops with no way of you knowing? (Maybe your neighbor didn't disclose what he used, maybe Monsanto "spilled" some of their seed on your fields before trespassing to gather evidence to sue your seed-banking butt, maybe the neighbor didn't now his banked seeds were contaminated and thus had no way to warn you about contamination - still, the law is the law.)
In the end, Monsanto argues that is this all about IP rights. I can very easily see this going in their favor. Then again, with the recent decision that human genes can't be patented there might be hope (but I'm going to chock that one up to Human exceptionalism and say that plants, like animals, won't be given the same courtesy).
1) Doesn't it bother anyone that by having the choice of what to see and when, you simply reinforce your own interests/prejudices, rather than open your mind to new ideas? This is probably the Internet's greatest sin.
Actually, that is why I like my Netflix subscription. I watch it... a lot. I've seen almost all the things I want to see on it, and the rate of new content is slower than I would like - but I do only pay $8 a month, so I don't expect a lot. However, when it is 3 am on a sleepless night off with nothing to do (everything is closed and I don't think my neighbors would appreciate me cutting the lawn or building a shed at that hour), I will turn on Netflix and watch a show before going to bed. I find myself often going into sections I normally wouldn't, loading up something I don't think I'd normally watch, and finding out I really enjoyed it. Then I follow the suggestions based on that film until I run out of content - only to repeat the exploration again when I run out of stuff a few months down the road.
Think of it this way - its like internet browsing. I look up something on wikipedia, a blue link of an interesting word (or unknown word) gets followed, then an article link at the bottom takes me to a new web page, and so forth, until I am on a totally unrelated topic - a topic that I would have thought of looking into without that flow of links taking me there. I sort of do the same thing on Netflix as I do on my web browsing. So, no, I don't think the Internet and personal choice simply reinforces my own interest/prejudices - however, exploring one's interests is not always a bad thing. Just as I make it a point to go to new restaurants and places in my life, I also find it acceptable to go to my favorite diner or place frequently. The trick is balancing likes with new experiences.
People have hit on two major issues as to why cable is dying: first, the on-demand issue (who wants to have to be in front of a TV on a weekday at 7pm to catch their show - or what if it only comes on at 2 am?); second, the cost (paying for Netflix and internet can be a lot cheaper than extended cable and internet, and it can offer more variety of shows).
However, I want to expand on the cost issue. For me it isn't just the rising cost, but the cost for comparable goods. Who here remembers when over-the-air (OTA) television stations when off the air in the wee hours of the morning? Ah, I fondly remember the "Indian" crying or the waving flag/bald eagle playing at sign-off. To fill their late night blocks, many stations (especially the independents) would buy up whatever was cheap - old movies, B movies, or whatever was in the equivalent of the discount bin for TV. Eventually cable took over with its 24 hour schedule of reruns - and TV viewing was good for insomniacs.
However, things have changed significantly in cable land. Late night shifted from a "lets fill the airwaves with cheap shows" to "lets make money by selling ad time to people who make 30-60 minute commercials - score!!!".
I am a night owl, I am most likely going to watch TV between 10pm and 4am. Not their main market, I know, but I've watched infomercials take over the wee hours of the morning, creep into the just after midnight hour, and now see the bloody things as early as 9pm. Heck, they are even creeping into the daytime hours now.
TL;DR Long story short - I dumped cable not only because the price kept were going up, I dumped it the minute I realized they were asking me to pay to watch commercials (infomercials) rather than entertainment shows during the hours I was most likely to watch! As mentioned, the shortening of shows due to increasing ads is hard enough to swallow - but when most of the channels of expensive extended cable are nothing but ads on the late night, why the heck should I keep paying more for less?!? This is why I dumped cable and even have to avoid many OTA channels. Thankfully, ad-free Netflix and Amazon Prime is there for us night owls.
I found that when I use my cable box I only received the x.1 channels - but when I plug the cable in directly I receive them all. Eventually I explored the higher number digital channels and found most are replicated. In other words, x.1 was 112-2, x.2 was on 84-7, x.3 was 83-2. (Okay, those numbers are made up, but essentially how Charter seems to do it for my area - breaking up the sequentially tiered known 2-digit network numbers into weird randomly placed 3-digit channels.) Still, frustrating but an easy work-around when you only want to get local channels (I live far enough out of town that I need a roof antenna, and I haven't looked into my local ordinances or installation costs - otherwise I can't seem to pull any in over-the-air even though I am only about 20-30 miles away.)
Thank Apple and its development of the iPad for that... there was a company called Plasticlogic that was developing an eReader called the Que. It was a flexible plastic display, and in one demo they slammed a boot on it to show its durability. Refresh rates were poor compared to most eInk displays, but with a plastic-based technology it would have been a leap forward. Problem is they pulled out of the market when the iPad was announced and the Que vaporized. (However, I wonder if LG bought the right or is licensing this technology, or did they develop independently and a patent war lies in the near future...)
Dunno - how about asking how much the total life cycle cost of 5MW of wind power vs total life cycle cost of 5MW of coal power? In these costs, include all subsidies or their fractional equivalents. Don't forget the cost of transporting feedstock, the cost of mining the materials for construction of the initial plant, the subsidies included in the fuel to transport the feedstock, and so forth. Shall we get into potential health costs - both to those living near the power generators and those who mine the materials and feedstock? Often I find people exclude a lot from the costs of one source of power (coal) to skew the results. Now, I'm not saying wind power is cheap - but I am saying it is like a comparing an MMO to a stand-alone game... one you have to pay over the lifetime of use, the other you pay mainly up-front costs.
Agreed. Sorry, I'd much rather buy the physical book, photo each page, throw it into OCR, and create my own DRM free copy of the book for my personal use before I'd buy a DRMed e-book and use utilities to strip it. Of course, the added benefit is I have a physical copy to fall back on should my eReader ever become damaged or broken. (Also, my wife is a book-aholic who prefers the physicality of a printed book to an eReader - but she likes cheap books, so Gutenburg Project and free book sections are getting her access to books she never would have read.)
Interesting side note - Tabletop RPGs have been going to PDF format (check out RPGNow.com to see how many games are available), and not only are they affordable but they have avoided the whole Kindle/Nook/etc DRM format. I buy a pdf and can move it around as much as I want, can print it out if I so choose, and save significantly over the printed book. I find I am far more likely to buy an RPG pdf due to these reasons. Of course, it is a niche market so piracy rates are not the same (us old gamers are less likely to steal the stuff because we recognize many game companies are struggling, so buying it keeps a good game alive) - and the market seems to be exploding due to this freedom (out of print books coming back to market, unit sales slowly increasing, etc).
After leaving the tabletop gaming market for the electronics game market, I find myself slowly returning to the tabletop gaming. Sure, there aren't as many good solo games (Lord of the Rings "living card game", Arkham Horror, etc). Sure, the cost is about the same - $50 to $100 plus $25 to $60 per expansion - and many of them are designed to only work in multiplayer mode. However, I don't have to activate over the internet each time I start the game, I never have to worry about a service going down for a month and preventing me from even opening my game, and I never have to worry about servers shutting down and causing my game to become non-functional. True, sometimes when I buy a used game there are components that are missing that can render it non-functional, so I have to be careful and check that the game is complete. Still, the best part is being able to play my game when my power is out. (Wish I had gotten back into the tabletop gaming before Heroscape got cancelled - that one looked fun, but its pricey to buy it used.)
Seriously, I was looking forward to a real sequel to SimCity, but this DRM scheme is something I want to avoid. At this point I think I'd rather head down to my local game shop during game night and have several hours of fun that way. With game companies also churning out the boardgames with great visuals (plastic figures, sometimes painted figures, colorful map tiles, tons of chipboard markers, higher quality art work, etc), the lack of DRM in tabletop games is a welcome relief from the electronic game lockdown. Heck, as fun as video games are, nothing beats a nice tense game of Pandemic + Over the Brink with my wife - best coop play I've ever seen in tabletop or electronic gaming!
This is what I love about the digitization of the tabletop rpg market. If I go to drivethrurpg or rpgnow, I can buy plain old pdfs of many games. No DRM, no copy protection, no crap - buy it, download my own copy, move it from system to system, and never have to deal with it connecting to a server to verify my usage. If I want to print it out, sure - probably just as expensive as ordering a good quality print on demand book from the company. (Still, pdfs to create the old Arms Law and Claw Law tables on parchment paper is awesome notion.) Heck, if I really want, I can use OCR on them or copy/paste and create my own custom version of the books into my own "house rule" version. There is even some that are following the Blender model of going from for-profit to the free-to-all model - like one of my classic favorites Talislanta (now free to download all editions, because the original designer kept hold of all the rights for all 5 editions). I hate DRMed stuff... that is why I'd rather buy a book, OCR it for my personal use, and then put that pdf on my ereader. Of course, gamers are more like the people of Japan after the tidal wave... they don't go looting their own house, they pay the developers so that good stuff will keep coming out.
I enjoy a good science fiction story as much or even more than science fantasy - the difference? Science fiction is based on our current understanding of science and stays within the realm of possibility. However, both science fiction and science fantasy spur the imaginations of our future innovators, so lets hope the next generation of inventors will be reading these stories (or at least hope they read something, even if it is Harry Potter).
Here was the idea my wife and I came up with: Follow the original terms of copyright (20 years) for exclusive production, then after that time allow derivative works but allow the original to be retained for whatever term is chosen (for example, the current 70 years after death). What does this mean? Star Wars would have been in public domain. Allow Lucas to keep the rights to the original and the manipulation of it, but the setting and characters become public domain. A simple addendum to this: derivative works have limited copyright protection - direct replicas of the work cannot be produced, but derivative works can be produced from a derivative work (ie, a word-for-word book of a derivative film might classify as a direct copy, but a sequel to the book would not).
For a serious question to the legally savvy: If a corporation gains the copyright to a product, and since the corporation has personhood status, does that mean the copyright is retained by the corporation for 70 years after it is dissolved? If so, where do the profits go since corporations don't have offspring - or are subsidiaries considered offspring in this case?
Take a look at the astounding usefulness of social media over the past year in assisting overthrowing governments. Plain and simple: knowledge has always been the enemy of the ruling class, and an unregulated and uncontrolled internet that focuses on decentralized dissemination of knowledge is their chief threat. Do you think the Western powers are going to just roll over after such a powerful demonstration of what the internet can do? Fortunately, they have cannon fodder like Wikileaks and extremist web sites as well as the fear-mongering pretext of terrorism to justify their seizure of basic rights. I was reading the book On Private Property, which talked about how once in the USA the closure of land and detainment of a person was a grave issue because you were depriving those individuals locked out or detained of their liberty and freedom. Now we have reverse that, where we view someone who builds on a previous idea as a thief who violated the liberty and freedom of the original owner of the idea - even if they have been dead for nearly 70 years! Talk about a dramatic shift in viewpoint. The same is now happening with the internet, where once it was viewed at a liberty to partake in the free exchange of information, governments now want us to think that freedom is actually a violation of another's rights and close down the exchange.
Apparently not far at all. More demand=price goes up.
Doesn't more demand = price goes up only apply when there is some constraint on the supply? Theoretically a digital good can be replicated as many times as needed (only the bandwidth is restricted), and thus in this case all music on the service should have gone up due to bandwidth consumption (because it doesn't matter what song you are buying if the bandwidth is limited, all songs suffer from the limitation and not just Whitney Houston's songs).
Also, I purchase my share of niche goods. Often it is explained to me that because of the low volume of sales, prices are higher. That is also the explanation for the cost of my college text books - since there is such a small market, they have to charge more due to higher production costs (the scales of economy I mentioned).
Thus I am left in the situation where you tell me more demand = price goes up, and others have told me (and so does the real world) that less demand = price goes up. This leaves us with a case where price will never go down based on shifting demand. Somehow, that seems incorrect.
My current tablet is a TM2 - not as good as my TX2 in pen function but it has swappable ATI/Intel graphics. Use a Toshiba T400 and T200 for their display size ($150 and $300 on eBay, they were decent buys), but they were underpowered in the graphics (loved the 1400x1050 resolution that it had, and decent responsiveness - too slow when I tried to play around with ToonBoom Animate Pro). All these tablet PCs were just as good to me as buying a 12.1" Cintiq, and if I had $2500 or $3500 to drop on the Cintiq HD that just came out I would (but that isn't portable - just wonderfully large and high res to draw on). Tried out the Asus EEE Slate that came out, but without the graphics the TM2 on ebay was a much better buy. I even used an old gateway that had a finepoint pen - I will never touch anything without a Wacom digitizer in it unless it is proven by some 3rd party to be reliable and as good. Glad to see there are still people out there utilizing tablet PCs for digital art.
Slashdot Mirror
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'
Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'
I can understand the viewpoint given in the summary - how can a 5th grader possibly know the answer to such a challenging question? After all, are not all children ranked by their grade and set to be equal to their peers in that same approximately 1 year category? It defies their understanding of "abstract though begins at age x", and they forget that their is variance within that spectrum. There may be a child in 5th grade that understands advanced scientific topics, but since the probability of that is far, far lower than the probability of selecting the answer at random when given 1 of 4 or 1 of 5 choices, they have assumed the child just guessed.
However, there is something frightening about assessing the right answer as incorrect. Perhaps the testing needs to be redesigned to eliminate the ease at which randomly guessed right answers can be assessed. Unfortunately, scantrons are cheap ways of correcting thousands of tests - thus the write your answer and have a human correct will probably never be reimplemented. (Sorry for the ramblings - I'm cramming for a Linear Algebra midterm while slashdotting.)
I think companies go to other countries to sue because they multinational forces now. Motorola isn't just in the US with branch offices in other countries; instead, like most corporate entities, they have full legal recognition in many nations. The same applies to Microsoft. The same applies to Apple. To quote Pink Floyd's The Dogs of War: "One world, it's a battleground" - you kick your global opponents where ever you can.
Since I am seeing this same reaction in several threads, I'll do the legwork and post it in each one... From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
I agree with you, Germany is a sovereign country - the US should restrict its recourse to "we will engage in sanctions if you do this", not "our courts find you must do this".
Since I am seeing this same reaction in several threads, I'll do the legwork and post it in each one... From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
Again, I disagree with this viewpoint - it is just an explanation of why they are trying to override German sovereignty
Since I am seeing this same reaction in several threads, I'll do the legwork and post it in each one... From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
However, I do agree - in no way should the US be able to dictate to another country their legal system beyond the standard actions of imposing sanctions and/or embargoes. After all, I don't think anyone would say a state that violates human rights (for example, only certain types of citizens are legally defined as human and the rest are 'livestock' or 'property') should be allowed to operate without consequence. This means petty reasons could be used as justification, for to deny a country a right to apply an embargo or sanction would also be a violation of a state's sovereign rights.
IANAL, so can someone explain to me why a US court thinks it has any effect in Germany? Or is this some kind of 'threat'/'international business' thing that has some legal basis for multinational companies?
From the source article:
The U.S. court should be the one to rule on that issue, Microsoft argued, because Microsoft filed its lawsuit against Motorola over the terms of a licensing deal before Motorola filed its suit in Germany.
So, basically, they are arguing they have jurisdiction because the dispute originated in the US - and it sounds like the US justice system feels that the Motorola suit was more retaliation against Microsoft for bringing up the case than a preplanned and poorly timed execution.
Personally, however, I believe the US would never tolerate another country making the same claim. Instead, the US would claim sovereign rights and not bow to any court, national or international (yes, the US has refused to recognize the proceedings of the International Criminal Court - showing how much it believes in having other powers meddle in its governance). Thus the US should respect the sovereignty of other nations to manage their own legal proceedings since we have no jurisdiction over Germany.
14 years of support is generous, but I think Microsoft is missing the point - there is an opportunity here to make money. They should calculate the cost of continuing to support the product, figure out what they want their margin to be, then crunch the numbers to see where supply and demand intersect to meet that income. Basic capitalism - there sound like their is a market, so try it out for a year. For anyone who wants to continue to use XP and wishes to continue receiving patches and updates for it, they can pay for the service, and for those that don't? Well, that is their choice. If the numbers predicted fall well below the numbers of expected, then they have an argument that it is unreasonable to continue supporting a 'legacy' product.
I wonder how many millions of dollars bonus the CEO will earn by cutting the workforce so drastically...
I don't have to go to the movies to see an accurate night sky.
True, but you do have to go to the movies if you want to see an accurate night sky on the night the Titanic sank. ;)
I'd much rather see Rodents of Unusual Size in 3D.... but then again, they don't exist. ;)
Just got done watching a Research Channel vid on youtube with Neil deGrasse Tyson. In it he told a story about Titanic where he talked about Cameron using a sub to check out the details of the Titanic to keep it authentic. However, with the scene near the end why the kid chooses to drown, he noticed that the night sky was not only wrong but the left side was a mirror of the right side. Thus, Tyson wrote Cameron a letter about it. Later, he met up with Cameron and decided to bring up the point, and Cameron mentioned how many billions it made and asked how much more the right sky would make him. Yet, that is not the end of the story. Years later Tyson gets a call - its some Hollywood type who says he's working with Cameron on updating Titanic and that Tyson would have a night sky for him. His next words had so much heartfelt emotion in them "YES!".
So, I guess anyone who wants to see Tyson's accurate night sky will go and see it...
Or find out that is has been building castles in the sky...
Keep in mind, that for Monsato to have such utter control means that the government is giving that control away. I don't think that the US government wants to give up that sort of power.
Of course, they may also follow Canada's lead - look into the Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser case. This is not a unique case, as Monsanto has been known to target farmers who bank their own seeds (which is why the machinery and the farmers who offer those services have been disappearing). Monsanto's contention is they own the gene, and if that gene is introduced to a farmer's crops then they owe them licensing fees - and ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. Heck, natural processes of cross-pollination from a neighboring field does not excuse one from requiring a license. The notion is if this gene even gets into a back-yard garden, a fee is owed and the seeds of those plants also cannot be used unless licensed.
As I recall in the case of Schmeiser, he use to bank his own rapeseed (canola) and would help other farmers bank seeds. These seeds were genetically diverse and were contaminated by Monsanto, who trespassed onto his property to collect evidence of his violation. He was a target because he helped farmers bank their own seeds, and the Canadian supreme court basically said "yup, Monsanto own's that gene and you didn't license it - destroy your seed bank as per Monsanto's demand."
Do you really think the US is going to be any different? After all, the gene is Monsanto's intellectual property and it is said in the US that ignorance of the law does not excuse one from obeying it. Does it matter that wind-borne and natural processes carried the gene into your crops with no way of you knowing? (Maybe your neighbor didn't disclose what he used, maybe Monsanto "spilled" some of their seed on your fields before trespassing to gather evidence to sue your seed-banking butt, maybe the neighbor didn't now his banked seeds were contaminated and thus had no way to warn you about contamination - still, the law is the law.)
In the end, Monsanto argues that is this all about IP rights. I can very easily see this going in their favor. Then again, with the recent decision that human genes can't be patented there might be hope (but I'm going to chock that one up to Human exceptionalism and say that plants, like animals, won't be given the same courtesy).
1) Doesn't it bother anyone that by having the choice of what to see and when, you simply reinforce your own interests/prejudices, rather than open your mind to new ideas? This is probably the Internet's greatest sin.
Actually, that is why I like my Netflix subscription. I watch it... a lot. I've seen almost all the things I want to see on it, and the rate of new content is slower than I would like - but I do only pay $8 a month, so I don't expect a lot. However, when it is 3 am on a sleepless night off with nothing to do (everything is closed and I don't think my neighbors would appreciate me cutting the lawn or building a shed at that hour), I will turn on Netflix and watch a show before going to bed. I find myself often going into sections I normally wouldn't, loading up something I don't think I'd normally watch, and finding out I really enjoyed it. Then I follow the suggestions based on that film until I run out of content - only to repeat the exploration again when I run out of stuff a few months down the road.
Think of it this way - its like internet browsing. I look up something on wikipedia, a blue link of an interesting word (or unknown word) gets followed, then an article link at the bottom takes me to a new web page, and so forth, until I am on a totally unrelated topic - a topic that I would have thought of looking into without that flow of links taking me there. I sort of do the same thing on Netflix as I do on my web browsing. So, no, I don't think the Internet and personal choice simply reinforces my own interest/prejudices - however, exploring one's interests is not always a bad thing. Just as I make it a point to go to new restaurants and places in my life, I also find it acceptable to go to my favorite diner or place frequently. The trick is balancing likes with new experiences.
People have hit on two major issues as to why cable is dying: first, the on-demand issue (who wants to have to be in front of a TV on a weekday at 7pm to catch their show - or what if it only comes on at 2 am?); second, the cost (paying for Netflix and internet can be a lot cheaper than extended cable and internet, and it can offer more variety of shows).
However, I want to expand on the cost issue. For me it isn't just the rising cost, but the cost for comparable goods. Who here remembers when over-the-air (OTA) television stations when off the air in the wee hours of the morning? Ah, I fondly remember the "Indian" crying or the waving flag/bald eagle playing at sign-off. To fill their late night blocks, many stations (especially the independents) would buy up whatever was cheap - old movies, B movies, or whatever was in the equivalent of the discount bin for TV. Eventually cable took over with its 24 hour schedule of reruns - and TV viewing was good for insomniacs.
However, things have changed significantly in cable land. Late night shifted from a "lets fill the airwaves with cheap shows" to "lets make money by selling ad time to people who make 30-60 minute commercials - score!!!".
I am a night owl, I am most likely going to watch TV between 10pm and 4am. Not their main market, I know, but I've watched infomercials take over the wee hours of the morning, creep into the just after midnight hour, and now see the bloody things as early as 9pm. Heck, they are even creeping into the daytime hours now.
TL;DR Long story short - I dumped cable not only because the price kept were going up, I dumped it the minute I realized they were asking me to pay to watch commercials (infomercials) rather than entertainment shows during the hours I was most likely to watch! As mentioned, the shortening of shows due to increasing ads is hard enough to swallow - but when most of the channels of expensive extended cable are nothing but ads on the late night, why the heck should I keep paying more for less?!? This is why I dumped cable and even have to avoid many OTA channels. Thankfully, ad-free Netflix and Amazon Prime is there for us night owls.
I found that when I use my cable box I only received the x.1 channels - but when I plug the cable in directly I receive them all. Eventually I explored the higher number digital channels and found most are replicated. In other words, x.1 was 112-2, x.2 was on 84-7, x.3 was 83-2. (Okay, those numbers are made up, but essentially how Charter seems to do it for my area - breaking up the sequentially tiered known 2-digit network numbers into weird randomly placed 3-digit channels.) Still, frustrating but an easy work-around when you only want to get local channels (I live far enough out of town that I need a roof antenna, and I haven't looked into my local ordinances or installation costs - otherwise I can't seem to pull any in over-the-air even though I am only about 20-30 miles away.)
Thank Apple and its development of the iPad for that... there was a company called Plasticlogic that was developing an eReader called the Que. It was a flexible plastic display, and in one demo they slammed a boot on it to show its durability. Refresh rates were poor compared to most eInk displays, but with a plastic-based technology it would have been a leap forward. Problem is they pulled out of the market when the iPad was announced and the Que vaporized. (However, I wonder if LG bought the right or is licensing this technology, or did they develop independently and a patent war lies in the near future...)
Dunno - how about asking how much the total life cycle cost of 5MW of wind power vs total life cycle cost of 5MW of coal power? In these costs, include all subsidies or their fractional equivalents. Don't forget the cost of transporting feedstock, the cost of mining the materials for construction of the initial plant, the subsidies included in the fuel to transport the feedstock, and so forth. Shall we get into potential health costs - both to those living near the power generators and those who mine the materials and feedstock? Often I find people exclude a lot from the costs of one source of power (coal) to skew the results. Now, I'm not saying wind power is cheap - but I am saying it is like a comparing an MMO to a stand-alone game... one you have to pay over the lifetime of use, the other you pay mainly up-front costs.
Agreed. Sorry, I'd much rather buy the physical book, photo each page, throw it into OCR, and create my own DRM free copy of the book for my personal use before I'd buy a DRMed e-book and use utilities to strip it. Of course, the added benefit is I have a physical copy to fall back on should my eReader ever become damaged or broken. (Also, my wife is a book-aholic who prefers the physicality of a printed book to an eReader - but she likes cheap books, so Gutenburg Project and free book sections are getting her access to books she never would have read.)
Interesting side note - Tabletop RPGs have been going to PDF format (check out RPGNow.com to see how many games are available), and not only are they affordable but they have avoided the whole Kindle/Nook/etc DRM format. I buy a pdf and can move it around as much as I want, can print it out if I so choose, and save significantly over the printed book. I find I am far more likely to buy an RPG pdf due to these reasons. Of course, it is a niche market so piracy rates are not the same (us old gamers are less likely to steal the stuff because we recognize many game companies are struggling, so buying it keeps a good game alive) - and the market seems to be exploding due to this freedom (out of print books coming back to market, unit sales slowly increasing, etc).
After leaving the tabletop gaming market for the electronics game market, I find myself slowly returning to the tabletop gaming. Sure, there aren't as many good solo games (Lord of the Rings "living card game", Arkham Horror, etc). Sure, the cost is about the same - $50 to $100 plus $25 to $60 per expansion - and many of them are designed to only work in multiplayer mode. However, I don't have to activate over the internet each time I start the game, I never have to worry about a service going down for a month and preventing me from even opening my game, and I never have to worry about servers shutting down and causing my game to become non-functional. True, sometimes when I buy a used game there are components that are missing that can render it non-functional, so I have to be careful and check that the game is complete. Still, the best part is being able to play my game when my power is out. (Wish I had gotten back into the tabletop gaming before Heroscape got cancelled - that one looked fun, but its pricey to buy it used.)
Seriously, I was looking forward to a real sequel to SimCity, but this DRM scheme is something I want to avoid. At this point I think I'd rather head down to my local game shop during game night and have several hours of fun that way. With game companies also churning out the boardgames with great visuals (plastic figures, sometimes painted figures, colorful map tiles, tons of chipboard markers, higher quality art work, etc), the lack of DRM in tabletop games is a welcome relief from the electronic game lockdown. Heck, as fun as video games are, nothing beats a nice tense game of Pandemic + Over the Brink with my wife - best coop play I've ever seen in tabletop or electronic gaming!
This is what I love about the digitization of the tabletop rpg market. If I go to drivethrurpg or rpgnow, I can buy plain old pdfs of many games. No DRM, no copy protection, no crap - buy it, download my own copy, move it from system to system, and never have to deal with it connecting to a server to verify my usage. If I want to print it out, sure - probably just as expensive as ordering a good quality print on demand book from the company. (Still, pdfs to create the old Arms Law and Claw Law tables on parchment paper is awesome notion.) Heck, if I really want, I can use OCR on them or copy/paste and create my own custom version of the books into my own "house rule" version. There is even some that are following the Blender model of going from for-profit to the free-to-all model - like one of my classic favorites Talislanta (now free to download all editions, because the original designer kept hold of all the rights for all 5 editions). I hate DRMed stuff... that is why I'd rather buy a book, OCR it for my personal use, and then put that pdf on my ereader. Of course, gamers are more like the people of Japan after the tidal wave... they don't go looting their own house, they pay the developers so that good stuff will keep coming out.
I enjoy a good science fiction story as much or even more than science fantasy - the difference? Science fiction is based on our current understanding of science and stays within the realm of possibility. However, both science fiction and science fantasy spur the imaginations of our future innovators, so lets hope the next generation of inventors will be reading these stories (or at least hope they read something, even if it is Harry Potter).
Here was the idea my wife and I came up with: Follow the original terms of copyright (20 years) for exclusive production, then after that time allow derivative works but allow the original to be retained for whatever term is chosen (for example, the current 70 years after death). What does this mean? Star Wars would have been in public domain. Allow Lucas to keep the rights to the original and the manipulation of it, but the setting and characters become public domain. A simple addendum to this: derivative works have limited copyright protection - direct replicas of the work cannot be produced, but derivative works can be produced from a derivative work (ie, a word-for-word book of a derivative film might classify as a direct copy, but a sequel to the book would not).
For a serious question to the legally savvy: If a corporation gains the copyright to a product, and since the corporation has personhood status, does that mean the copyright is retained by the corporation for 70 years after it is dissolved? If so, where do the profits go since corporations don't have offspring - or are subsidiaries considered offspring in this case?
Take a look at the astounding usefulness of social media over the past year in assisting overthrowing governments. Plain and simple: knowledge has always been the enemy of the ruling class, and an unregulated and uncontrolled internet that focuses on decentralized dissemination of knowledge is their chief threat. Do you think the Western powers are going to just roll over after such a powerful demonstration of what the internet can do? Fortunately, they have cannon fodder like Wikileaks and extremist web sites as well as the fear-mongering pretext of terrorism to justify their seizure of basic rights. I was reading the book On Private Property, which talked about how once in the USA the closure of land and detainment of a person was a grave issue because you were depriving those individuals locked out or detained of their liberty and freedom. Now we have reverse that, where we view someone who builds on a previous idea as a thief who violated the liberty and freedom of the original owner of the idea - even if they have been dead for nearly 70 years! Talk about a dramatic shift in viewpoint. The same is now happening with the internet, where once it was viewed at a liberty to partake in the free exchange of information, governments now want us to think that freedom is actually a violation of another's rights and close down the exchange.
Apparently not far at all. More demand=price goes up.
Doesn't more demand = price goes up only apply when there is some constraint on the supply? Theoretically a digital good can be replicated as many times as needed (only the bandwidth is restricted), and thus in this case all music on the service should have gone up due to bandwidth consumption (because it doesn't matter what song you are buying if the bandwidth is limited, all songs suffer from the limitation and not just Whitney Houston's songs).
Also, I purchase my share of niche goods. Often it is explained to me that because of the low volume of sales, prices are higher. That is also the explanation for the cost of my college text books - since there is such a small market, they have to charge more due to higher production costs (the scales of economy I mentioned).
Thus I am left in the situation where you tell me more demand = price goes up, and others have told me (and so does the real world) that less demand = price goes up. This leaves us with a case where price will never go down based on shifting demand. Somehow, that seems incorrect.
My current tablet is a TM2 - not as good as my TX2 in pen function but it has swappable ATI/Intel graphics. Use a Toshiba T400 and T200 for their display size ($150 and $300 on eBay, they were decent buys), but they were underpowered in the graphics (loved the 1400x1050 resolution that it had, and decent responsiveness - too slow when I tried to play around with ToonBoom Animate Pro). All these tablet PCs were just as good to me as buying a 12.1" Cintiq, and if I had $2500 or $3500 to drop on the Cintiq HD that just came out I would (but that isn't portable - just wonderfully large and high res to draw on). Tried out the Asus EEE Slate that came out, but without the graphics the TM2 on ebay was a much better buy. I even used an old gateway that had a finepoint pen - I will never touch anything without a Wacom digitizer in it unless it is proven by some 3rd party to be reliable and as good. Glad to see there are still people out there utilizing tablet PCs for digital art.