I think that one in a thousand is actually a pretty high rate. Considering the rather dubious ground that the law-suits are actually resting on, and the fact that this dubious ground has been at least mentioned in a lot of media, I'm not at all surprised to hear that 99.9% of people are at least waiting long enough to talk to their lawyers before caving in.
All us "geeks" know better than to jump at the chance to prostrate ourselves before the RIAA, let's give the rest of the world a little credit for common sense too.
which is the reason I specified "computer books." Of course, I could use the internet for word definitions as well, but I'm not always at the computer when I need them, so I own a dictionary.
Perhaps I should have been more specific and said "networking books." When the topic is Internet Security, chances are pretty good you have a network connection available to you at the time when you are asking the questions.
In connection with a system for simplifying the use of a plurality of credit cards, check cards, customer cards, or the like, it is proposed to provide an electronic multi-function card comprising a storage accommodating a plurality of individual data sets representing individual single-purpose cards.
What we have here is a patent on a extremely specific type of device for a single, specific purpose. It so happens that palmtop PCs are general Turing machines and are capable of reproducing this behavior as well as MANY MANY others. Can the the patent holders of a piece of software now go after the manufacturers of any programming language which would be capable of instantiating that program?
I mean come on, I would like to see anyone make an argument that the MAIN purpose of PDAs is strooing credit card information.
I hate to tell you that the salaries of everyone involved and the cost of renting the studios FROM THE COMPANY PRODUCING THE FILM and everything else you can think of has already been included in the production budget. If they FAIL to meet the production budget in revenue, THEN they have sustained a lost.
Anything over the production budget is a gain, return on investment, dividend money for the shareholders. Maybe they didn't make as big of a return on investment as they hoped, but they still made a net gain.
Concerts were once the primary source of revenue for musicians and going further back in the past, public performances (or patrons) were the ONLY source of revenue for musicians. The thing which changed that was the existence of an infrastructure which allowed for music from any given place to be marketed simultaneously worldwide.
That being the case, here is my question:
"Do you think that there is any creedence to the argument that today's multi-billion dollar entertainment industry is an un-natural and perhaps un-maintainable state for the world of art? It seems that the "theft" and "piracy" everyone keeps talking about is only diverting potential revenue away from entertainers who get paid orders of magnitude more than what their skills could reasonably be said to be worth to society and away from those who make their living packaging and selling these over-paid individuals. Is it not possible that what filesharing and internet media is bringing about is not "theft", but rather the natural and expected deflation and re-distribution of an unnaturally inflated and concentrated industry?"
I use voice recognition on a regular basis at my place of work. If you train yourself properly you can dictate for upwards of four hours a day with no vocal chord strain.
Also, there exist language sets for most common programming languages allowing you do dictate:
@head =;
as
"array head equals diamond header stop"
It takes some getting used to, but it is totally workable. That said, I still use the keyboard for all my coding.
Various eye and head tracking mice exist (check out this page for alternative mouse devices). They are used extensively by the disabled community, particularly by people with mobility impairments. The reason they haven't caught on more in the mainstream is primarily that using your head or eyes to control a pointer is a lot less convenient than most people think. First off, your hands are actually more precise and dextrous, secondly, you have several fingers which allows for a variety of clicking and scrolling type motions. With a head mouse, you have to dwell the pointer for a period of time in order to click (sure, there are external switches you can use, but that defeats your purpose of not having to use your hands). Also, because eye movements are often instinctive and because we also use our eyes to identify and read content on the screen, it can be difficult to control the mouse and unwanted selections are frustatingly common without long practise. I think the mouse is here to stay in one form or another (until VR style gloves become common or hand motions in open air are detected by lasers).
It is the keyboard we are for more likely to find ourselves disposing of as voice recognition gets rapidly better and better. Of course, I highly doubt that we will actually get rid of it either as many people find that they think better with the keys than with their voice and because so many programs, including games, have learned to take such advantage of the tremendous variety of input the keyboard offers.
Yeah, there exist lock-picking guns with internal memories which actually make doing this a relative snap if you have a little experience and a budget, but it doesn't make for as good a paranoia story.
Unless you get multiple copies of the same MD5 from different people with whom you have had previous contact and which are sent in PGP signed messages.
If this doesn't satisfy you than you may have trouble leaving your apartment without wondering if someone is going to break in, disassemble all your locks, take impressions, make keys, re-assemble and re-install the locks while you are out.
horrible misinterpretations abound. I guess it is my fault for using a violent and politically charged example. What I was trying to say is that whether the actions of a person or corporation may or may not 'merit' or 'deserve' some sort of illegal or immoral action does not mean that when someone goes about applying that action to them that they have a moral leg to stand on.
Looking at my original comment, it was pretty poorly worded and does make me look insensitive, selfish and violent. I assure you that was not the intent. What I meant to imply is that GWB's foreign policy has caused a lot of (IMO) unneccesary deaths and that in a certain karmic sense one could say that if he came to a violent end he deserved it. That certainly wouldn't make it right for someone to assassinate him. I meant it to be a statement on vigilante justice and objectivity of law in general. Just because you don't like the victim doesn't mean what happened to them isn't wrong.
Personally, I don't want to see violence come to anyone if it can be at all avoided, whether it be GWB, my mom or Saddam Hussein.
Maybe they do or maybe they don't deserve it. That doesn't change whether the fact that it happened is good or bad news.
Maybe the GWB deserves a bullet in the head, but I would be tremendously unhappy to see someone give it to him and get away with it. Mostly, because it would set a tremendously bad precedent for when someone decides that I deserve one.
for an entertaining and somewhat informative (if fictional) treatment of the difference between working for a big company and a small one, read Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs".
Of course, if you are about to graduate, I'm sure you've already read it. It's on the required reading list, isn't it?
You mean that there are people whose job it is to come up with these stupid acronyms?
That makes my life so much easier. I thought I was going to have to break into each organization one by one and go through old memos to figure out which weenie first proposed each one before I could cleanly and silently exterminate them.
If these people actually congregate and have offices, I can get a group rate. Awesome.
It also depends on whether it can do it across all different kinds of terrain and with some level of reliability.
I built an autonomous rover out of a Tonka dumptruck once. It could also travel a kilometer on one command. The command just happened to be the ignition switch to the rocket I had strapped to it.
Actually there is a pretty common pidgin spoken in Quebec, particularly in the cities, which goes (half-jokingly) by the name Franglais. It goes way beyond the use of Anglicisms. Both French and English vocabulary mix together, but even more interestingly, the grammars seem to mix seamlessly, resulting in utterences like:
Had Sakamura decided to charge even one cent to each user of TRON, he would easily be a dollar billionaire by now, possibly even rivalling Gates, reputed to be the world's richest man with a fortune estimated at $43 billion by Forbes magazine.
This is a pretty unfounded claim. The truth is that this is a relatively simple system we are talking baout here. If Sakamura had been charging for TRON it seems relatively likely that either hundreds of competitors would have sprung up to grab a slice of the pie or that someone else would simply have released a similar open source product. In either case, although Sakamura would probably have made some money, assuming $43 billion is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that one in a thousand is actually a pretty high rate. Considering the rather dubious ground that the law-suits are actually resting on, and the fact that this dubious ground has been at least mentioned in a lot of media, I'm not at all surprised to hear that 99.9% of people are at least waiting long enough to talk to their lawyers before caving in.
All us "geeks" know better than to jump at the chance to prostrate ourselves before the RIAA, let's give the rest of the world a little credit for common sense too.
which is the reason I specified "computer books." Of course, I could use the internet for word definitions as well, but I'm not always at the computer when I need them, so I own a dictionary.
Perhaps I should have been more specific and said "networking books." When the topic is Internet Security, chances are pretty good you have a network connection available to you at the time when you are asking the questions.
when talking about computer books is:
What does this book offer that I can't easily find by asking google or google groups?
What we have here is a patent on a extremely specific type of device for a single, specific purpose. It so happens that palmtop PCs are general Turing machines and are capable of reproducing this behavior as well as MANY MANY others. Can the the patent holders of a piece of software now go after the manufacturers of any programming language which would be capable of instantiating that program?
I mean come on, I would like to see anyone make an argument that the MAIN purpose of PDAs is strooing credit card information.
If the majority of the cost comes from cleaning the system, I would recommend (in my professional opinion) simply letting the systems remain infected.
um... this means a small gain.
I hate to tell you that the salaries of everyone involved and the cost of renting the studios FROM THE COMPANY PRODUCING THE FILM and everything else you can think of has already been included in the production budget. If they FAIL to meet the production budget in revenue, THEN they have sustained a lost.
Anything over the production budget is a gain, return on investment, dividend money for the shareholders. Maybe they didn't make as big of a return on investment as they hoped, but they still made a net gain.
And remember also that they said MILLIONS which implies two million at least, yet there are only 1.7 million new lines of code in 2.4
Concerts were once the primary source of revenue for musicians and going further back in the past, public performances (or patrons) were the ONLY source of revenue for musicians. The thing which changed that was the existence of an infrastructure which allowed for music from any given place to be marketed simultaneously worldwide.
That being the case, here is my question:
"Do you think that there is any creedence to the argument that today's multi-billion dollar entertainment industry is an un-natural and perhaps un-maintainable state for the world of art? It seems that the "theft" and "piracy" everyone keeps talking about is only diverting potential revenue away from entertainers who get paid orders of magnitude more than what their skills could reasonably be said to be worth to society and away from those who make their living packaging and selling these over-paid individuals. Is it not possible that what filesharing and internet media is bringing about is not "theft", but rather the natural and expected deflation and re-distribution of an unnaturally inflated and concentrated industry?"
reiterating old and tired point:
Just because it's not against the law, doesn't mean it's not censorship.
There's a reason they call them censors in the movie industry.
I use voice recognition on a regular basis at my place of work. If you train yourself properly you can dictate for upwards of four hours a day with no vocal chord strain.
;
Also, there exist language sets for most common programming languages allowing you do dictate:
@head =
as
"array head equals diamond header stop"
It takes some getting used to, but it is totally workable. That said, I still use the keyboard for all my coding.
Various eye and head tracking mice exist (check out this page for alternative mouse devices). They are used extensively by the disabled community, particularly by people with mobility impairments. The reason they haven't caught on more in the mainstream is primarily that using your head or eyes to control a pointer is a lot less convenient than most people think. First off, your hands are actually more precise and dextrous, secondly, you have several fingers which allows for a variety of clicking and scrolling type motions. With a head mouse, you have to dwell the pointer for a period of time in order to click (sure, there are external switches you can use, but that defeats your purpose of not having to use your hands). Also, because eye movements are often instinctive and because we also use our eyes to identify and read content on the screen, it can be difficult to control the mouse and unwanted selections are frustatingly common without long practise. I think the mouse is here to stay in one form or another (until VR style gloves become common or hand motions in open air are detected by lasers).
It is the keyboard we are for more likely to find ourselves disposing of as voice recognition gets rapidly better and better. Of course, I highly doubt that we will actually get rid of it either as many people find that they think better with the keys than with their voice and because so many programs, including games, have learned to take such advantage of the tremendous variety of input the keyboard offers.
Yeah, there exist lock-picking guns with internal memories which actually make doing this a relative snap if you have a little experience and a budget, but it doesn't make for as good a paranoia story.
Unless you get multiple copies of the same MD5 from different people with whom you have had previous contact and which are sent in PGP signed messages.
If this doesn't satisfy you than you may have trouble leaving your apartment without wondering if someone is going to break in, disassemble all your locks, take impressions, make keys, re-assemble and re-install the locks while you are out.
I was thinking more along the lines of cloning him and building ourselves a clone caveman army wielding stone knives and arrows.
horrible misinterpretations abound. I guess it is my fault for using a violent and politically charged example. What I was trying to say is that whether the actions of a person or corporation may or may not 'merit' or 'deserve' some sort of illegal or immoral action does not mean that when someone goes about applying that action to them that they have a moral leg to stand on.
Looking at my original comment, it was pretty poorly worded and does make me look insensitive, selfish and violent. I assure you that was not the intent. What I meant to imply is that GWB's foreign policy has caused a lot of (IMO) unneccesary deaths and that in a certain karmic sense one could say that if he came to a violent end he deserved it. That certainly wouldn't make it right for someone to assassinate him. I meant it to be a statement on vigilante justice and objectivity of law in general. Just because you don't like the victim doesn't mean what happened to them isn't wrong.
Personally, I don't want to see violence come to anyone if it can be at all avoided, whether it be GWB, my mom or Saddam Hussein.
Maybe they do or maybe they don't deserve it. That doesn't change whether the fact that it happened is good or bad news.
Maybe the GWB deserves a bullet in the head, but I would be tremendously unhappy to see someone give it to him and get away with it. Mostly, because it would set a tremendously bad precedent for when someone decides that I deserve one.
for an entertaining and somewhat informative (if fictional) treatment of the difference between working for a big company and a small one, read Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs".
Of course, if you are about to graduate, I'm sure you've already read it. It's on the required reading list, isn't it?
Actually you get M.A.T.I.E. as in "Ahoy Matie!"
You see, secretly they are pirates and this whole MATRIX thing is just an elaborate cover-up.
You mean that there are people whose job it is to come up with these stupid acronyms?
That makes my life so much easier. I thought I was going to have to break into each organization one by one and go through old memos to figure out which weenie first proposed each one before I could cleanly and silently exterminate them.
If these people actually congregate and have offices, I can get a group rate. Awesome.
I think that would actually be $1398.
I'm sure there is a byte or two of infringing code on each CD.
(p.s. yes, i know it's a per CPU fee.)
Do Facists believe in the ruling of those without faces by those with faces?
It also depends on whether it can do it across all different kinds of terrain and with some level of reliability.
I built an autonomous rover out of a Tonka dumptruck once. It could also travel a kilometer on one command. The command just happened to be the ignition switch to the rocket I had strapped to it.
Actually there is a pretty common pidgin spoken in Quebec, particularly in the cities, which goes (half-jokingly) by the name Franglais. It goes way beyond the use of Anglicisms. Both French and English vocabulary mix together, but even more interestingly, the grammars seem to mix seamlessly, resulting in utterences like:
"Wanting you du biere?"
(translation: "Do you want some beer?")
With release 1.1 on the way, wouldn't it make sense to wait until after that release to buy a book about it?
I wouldn't want to miss out on all the yummy 1.1 goodies and it sounds like it will be a pretty significant change.
This is a pretty unfounded claim. The truth is that this is a relatively simple system we are talking baout here. If Sakamura had been charging for TRON it seems relatively likely that either hundreds of competitors would have sprung up to grab a slice of the pie or that someone else would simply have released a similar open source product. In either case, although Sakamura would probably have made some money, assuming $43 billion is just silly.