I know the question already touched on this somewhat, but multiplexing is basically the way to go with this... CDMA can already squeeze more than 12 times the bandwidth out of a frequency and it's bound to only get better.
I'd say the only problem with this is that it makes the hardware more intricate and more expensive. CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) requires precise power regulation because nothing can be louder than another sender... This means that your power has to be ramped as your distance from a cell changes and handshaking with new cells is more complex as well.
I also think that there are a lot of bands which are currently allocated that should be scrapped for newer tech or at least re-appropriated... Nextel, the wireless company, for example operates on what used to be a 2-way business radio band. Because of this they're in almost every major market but didn't have to bother with licensing. At the same time, their frequencies aren't necessarily guaranteed either. I could definitely see a lot of the PDA stuff getting into this band if a standard's ever developed.
Check out alt.cellular for a lot of good info on this stuff...
So when are we going to get the PNG of the MP3 world? I can't believe how ridiculous companies are thinking that they can milk money out of near-standard formats like this. You think they would've learned from Unisys that people just won't go for stuff like this.
This is somewhat amusing but I don't get what they're really trying to prove. It seems they think they're fighting some sort of actual crusade this way. I agree that child pornography is a terrible thing, but this is just silly. It would be much worse, of course, if anybody tried to do anything with these lists (which I'm sure is not far off). Maybe I should set one up that logs the IP of everybody who downloads faked Country or Boy Band MP3s from me.:)
I wrote up a batch script in SoundForge to run my WAVs through an EQ and a Normalize them... You can have it apply any number of effects with certain settings to a batch of files, which is pretty nice... I just queue up a bunch of them and leave, and I come back with a bunch of nice sounding WAVs... I even do this on a lot of the music I make. (http://www.mp3.com/atomly/)
Then I'd recommend you try soundtracker (http://www.soundtracker.org) or ecasound. Do some searches for dance music on Linux and check out some Linux demoscene articles and you'll find a lot of Modplug-like programs. Maybe we should even start a project to port Modplug.
How do you feel about the fact that the Norwegian police essentially played the part of hired goon to a large corporate conglomerate? It's bad enough when this happens in the United States, but the fact that the Norwegians did this has to surprise you quite a bit.
With the advent of e-commerce on the net and things like debit cards outside of it, it seems that your name is being tied to every transaction you make. Even when you get cash, you usually get it from a cash machine, which logs the transaction.
Do you see any way to allow for anoynmous transactions in the future of electronic commerce (not just e-commerce as it's used today, but the move of every aspect of commerce to the electronic medium)?
I think this is terribly important for a multitude of reasons, the most important being sheer personal freedom, so it is an issue that must be tackled before we allow laws to be passed that will affect us profoundly for years.
We need to defend the right to intellectual property like the Open Source(tm) trademark. Hate to be a bitch, but isn't this sentence a contradiction? Admittedly I'm all for protecting the OSD from abuse and dillution at the hands of companies like Microsoft, but intellectual property is bad. And yes, exclusion of certain people from the license does make it not technically Open Source(tm).
Public keys are used for encryption programs so that other users can, by using your public key, read things that you send them or confirm you digital signature... A search on this would surely turn up many interesting and helpful pages.
It's kind of sad that Mozilla is just turning into one giant, bloated behemoth... I just hate it when products start to take on anything that they possibly can, until they eventually become unusable and crash all of the time. Remember: Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.
And all of these people keep arguing that you can recompile without these components, but is it really possibly to recompile Mozilla and still maintain the SSL and such? If I can truly separate these out it'd be great (from the looks of the screenshots, the IRC client is in JavaScript so that won't really add bloat (but JavaScript is the most evil language and will most definitely cause crashes and quite possibly open up security holes) but I can't say the same about Jabber).
Jabber is a good idea, but from what I've heard their security model isn't exactly tip top. (You can't stop somebody from talking to you, for example). But I can't confirm this, as I said. Regardless, there are plenty of RTM protocols out there (though ICQ does blow and I don't like the implementation of AIM, so this may have been necessary).
What if, instead of MM, we just defined a "bad" moderator to be someone whose use of points is contrary to other moderators'? For example, if one moderator loved an article and many others hated it, then the moderator who loved the article is doing a bad job.
I don't really buy this... I think that it's really important that moderators are chosen randomly and given equal say, thus representing a diverse cross-section of Slashdot users (or as diverse as possible).
Just because I think something is funny that other people don't doesn't make me a bad moderator, it just means that it's not as widely funny as I thought. Thus, if I liked it, two others ignored it (and didn't moderate it) and one called it flaimbait, it would be at it's default score (most likely 1 if they were a user), which is the perfect spot for it to be at.
The karma system is a really great addition to this, helping make the default rating make more sense.
But this is just a step in that direction. The fact that your company can use the excuse that because they paid for the bandwidth they own the mail is scary. If my company buys me a notebook and I write something offensive in it, can I be fired for it? Do they have the right to search a bag if they buy me one?
I thought that I'd never make it without the Onion. I mean, seriously, it's the funniest stuff on the Internet. I am kind of sad that they don't put *any* extra stuff in the print version that's not on the webpage anymore. Now I feel like I'm wasting my money on my subscription. Still good to have a hardcopy archive, though, since they only archive the really blatantly funny stories... Speaking of which, what is everybody's favorite Onion article? Here are a few of mine.
Keep your fucking shit off my desk Does this cockring make me look fat? Ask a gutshot policeman. Ask Sir Mix-A-Lot Bantu Tribesman uses modem to crush nut Evil Genius Gates drops Windows 98 in NY Water Suplly Bill Gates Grants Self 23(?) Dexterity, 21(?) Charm RC Cola Celebrates 10th Sale Study Reveals: Babies are Dumb GM Halts Production of Neck Belts. Supercomputer beaten up by more popular computer. Rwanda gets plant. "It totally ligthens up the place."
These are just off the top of my head, there are a lot more great ones that everybody should read in the archives.
I feel like an old fart every time I start trying to explain the beauty of the BBS scene to people, even though I'm only 19. Everything was so great back then, such a better sense of community, and such cooler people.
There are still people out there releasing ANSIs, MODs and assorted computer demos. Just check out www.scene.org or www.assembly.org for some examples.
Anyway, I think now I'll go write that Java BBS I always talked about coding but never bothered to. (Would there be a demand for this if I wrote it?)
This is awesome, now I can make some donations to the SPI and at the same time put all of that (former) tax money to actual use:)
I don't get why GNOME is under SPI, though, why isn't it just part of the FSF (or am I being ignorant here)?
Anyway, I think it is really important that people either start donating money if they can't donate code. I really can't think of any good reason why people wouldn't being that tax deductible basically means that you get to donate for free (up to a point and with certain restrictions of course).
Also, they still haven't resolved that whole Open Source trademark issue, huh? That's too bad, because it must really appear ugly to outside observers of the Free Software/Open Source community.
Your naivete is kind of refreshing, but, at the same time, naive. It doesn't matter that WinAMP is a successfull product, they just bought it for, as you said, the name recognition. SHOUTCast and WinAMP give AOL a big name in the MP3 market, but that doesn't mean that they won't be murdered with a quickness. It's standard corporate fare; buy a superior product, milk it for a little while, and then turn it into crap.
And, as far as Spinner is concerned, I'd be amazed if they didn't turn into crap. AOL isn't seeking to do this, but it's the sort of thing that happens when a big company who fears its customers begins to run a radio station. It's just like the consolidation in the real radio market right now, it just leads to mediocrity. Why would they focus on Drum and Bass or Acid Jazz when 78% of their listeners prefer Britney Spears because all of their traffic will be surfing in from AOL? It's the Almighty Buck and AOL anything but ignores that. AOL isn't scared of "selling out" or anything to that effect, they're just in it for the quick dollar.
WinAMP will be turned into crap, SHOUTCast will probably remain good, and Spinner will slowly get shitty as some CEO realizes "I don't like that rap music, we need more 50's" or something to that effect.
And, well, as for Nullsoft being the little guy, they just gave up. If Justin Frankel is still at AOL in two years I'd be amazed. It's like Netscape selling out to AOL; sure, they revolutionized the world, but this is like admitting defeat. AOL will bring in their better trained, better brainwashed coders and Nullsoft will be worked out of the mix slowly. Or if not, the Nullsoft people will go nuts because they're unable to handle the corporate structure above them. I don't see how anybody could go from running their own startup to working at AOL; it'd be complete culture shock. I know that I, working at a startup, would quit the day that we sold out to a company like AOL.
I really hope that Justin (Frankel) knows what he's getting himself and his company into. I really doubt that they'll be allowed any sort of control over their product from this point out. I wouldn't be shocked if WinAMP got taken off of the market completely or turned into some sort of AOL-only beast. At the very least, I'm guessing he (from the little bit that I talked to him on comp.os.msdos.djgpp) won't be able to handle the huge corporate structure.
I also hope that AOL knows what they're getting themselves into. I mean, I don't know the details of it fully, but Nullsoft is being sued by Play Media and from what I know they probably deserve it. I remember Justin ported AMP to DOS (DosAMP) and then ported that to Windows (WinAMP), so I find it hard to believe that he has all original code in there.
Plus I'm sure AOL's going to make Spinner.com into some sort of Top 40 crap station now, and I used to listen to their Drum and Bass channel a lot. Or at least they'll fill it full of advertisements and associated schlock.
I think that I, along with anybody else of the personality type who would read Slashdot, am damn neard giddy about the idea of warp drive.
The method, as the author himself points out, does have quite a few problems, though. First off, it's a microscopic bubble. He says that the walls can initially be only a few hundred Planck's lengths thick at the start. And as you slow it down, the "warp bubble" will expand, thus making the walls thinner until they actually shrink to lenghts less than Planck's constant, which would cause unpredictable results to say the least.
Also, the authors says that though this is orders of magnitudes less energy, it still requires "unreasonably large energy densities."
And, as another comment said, negative energy isn't exactly something that you can just buy at Amoco, and until a method to easily create it is developed, none of this is realistic.
Still, this is damn cool to say the least. I can't wait to get to work in seconds. And this could possibly do wonders for communication. A superluminal link would be just a little bit faster than my Ethernet connection, I'd guess:)
Yea, I agree completely. This seems to be a marketing stunt that's being passed around from marketing department to marketing department at conferences or something. I guess if Flash does get ported, it would be worth using, as long as it was an open standard. I guess it'll be the duel of not-quite open Java with almost-open Flash. Why can't the computing industry develop open standards any more? Hopefully people won't bow to an inferior technology that isn't truly platform independent.
I just hope that, as you said, W3 doesn't adopt this for a standard if it's not open. That'd be almost as bad as when they (W3C) went with a proprietary key exchange for SSL (Diffie-Helman) thus making it an unopen standard.
And, as said below, I hope that they open up some of their other products, like Director, since they're required to view a lot of pages.
Bah, who cares about any of this anyway, I still browse with Lynx.:)
This seems to apply more to load balancing than simply redirecting. I mean, the company couldn't patent a simple REFRESH tag (although I'm sure people will try).
It seems they're claiming that they have a patent on the process of pushing web requests off to other servers which reside in a pool of available servers in a manner such that no server is overloaded. Hence load balancing.
Even though this is more specific than redirecting or spawning new threads, it is still a very obvious process. I can't understand why the patent office is letting things like this slide. Why is such a simple process considered new when you put the word "web" in there somewhere?
This exact thing has been done for years, but now that it's a web server (ooh, new technology!) it's patentable. I wish that the patent office would realize what all this technology they're reviewing means and what the implications of these broad patents are.
My main problem with this movie is that it seems George Lucas has made the transition from Eastern Mysticism to Christianity, removing the mythical side of the Force by using Medichloridians and at the same time introducing a Messiatic character and multiple blatant "chosen one" references. One theory that I have, though, is that this Medichloridian stuff was around with the Jedi, but as all of the Jedi were wiped out but Yoda and Obi Wan, who were both very spiritual, the scientific side died out as well.
Anyway, it really bothers me that they would cheapen the force so much by using microbes as "communicators with the force." I guess he's not saying that they represent the force, but act as an intermediary. But then couldn't somebody become a Jedi master by getting a blood transfusion? I guess that maybe it's a way of setting up for the clone wars; it would allow for Jedis to clone themselves and easily give the clones their powers.
Also, it kind of bothered me that Qui Gonn didn't disappear when he was killed by Darth Maul like Obi Wan and Yoda did. I guess the explanation could be that he wasn't as close to the force as they were, and it's always neat to see a funeral pyre.
Also, I had a really neat idea- wouldn't it be cool if Senator Palpatine weren't really Darth Sidius? I mean, they kind of shove it down your throat that he is throughout the entire movie, so it'd be a huge plot twist (ala "Luke, I am your father.") if Darth Sidius turned out to be somebody else.
Overall, though, I really liked the movie except that Anakin's luck (or "Fate," if you must) was annoying, Jar Jar was annoying, Medichloridians were annoying, and there weren't enough space battles or mysticism. That and the pod race was too damned long. The movie moved like a bad Sci-Fi novel, with lots of choppy scenes in the beginning, an overly long and somewhat unimportant scene in the middle (it did nothing but establish Anakin's techno-knowhow and Jedi reflexes) and then a bunch of choppy scenes at the end. Worth the money, but Episode II (Braveheart with Jedi) and Episode III (The Empire destroying the Republic) are going to rock a lot if Lucas doesn't wuss out.
Elimination of intellectual property does not mean instant death. Just look at the Linux model. Anybody can contribute to it and change it, but they must keep it public. This is essentially the same way that I deal with my music, I say right in there that people are free to copy it as much as they want or sample it or whatever, as long as they give me credit. They can buy a CD of mine, if they want, but I highly advise against it. And I'm by no means starving- many people do buy my CDs and tapes as a matter of convenience, much like people buy the Slackware CD instead of just downloading it.
If you want some instances of bands giving away some of their intellectual property and profiting from it, just look at touring bands like Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the late Grateful Dead, etc.
Though I don't really like many of these bands, I do respect the fact that they let people tape their live shows and distribute them freely because it simply spread them further than a proprietary viewpoint would have.
And as for people being lazy, so be it. Most creative people create because they want to. I make music because it makes me happy- I write code because it makes me happy. Why shouldn't I let other people enjoy my music too? Does it make it any less of a creative outlet? Would I feel more fulfilled if I were writing proprietary code or if my soul were owned by a record company? I actually get more enjoyment out of opening up my music and my code and sharing them with the community. Intellectual property is outdated and useless, get over it.
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I know the question already touched on this somewhat, but multiplexing is basically the way to go with this... CDMA can already squeeze more than 12 times the bandwidth out of a frequency and it's bound to only get better.
I'd say the only problem with this is that it makes the hardware more intricate and more expensive. CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) requires precise power regulation because nothing can be louder than another sender... This means that your power has to be ramped as your distance from a cell changes and handshaking with new cells is more complex as well.
I also think that there are a lot of bands which are currently allocated that should be scrapped for newer tech or at least re-appropriated... Nextel, the wireless company, for example operates on what used to be a 2-way business radio band. Because of this they're in almost every major market but didn't have to bother with licensing. At the same time, their frequencies aren't necessarily guaranteed either. I could definitely see a lot of the PDA stuff getting into this band if a standard's ever developed.
Check out alt.cellular for a lot of good info on this stuff...
So when are we going to get the PNG of the MP3 world? I can't believe how ridiculous companies are thinking that they can milk money out of near-standard formats like this. You think they would've learned from Unisys that people just won't go for stuff like this.
This is somewhat amusing but I don't get what they're really trying to prove. It seems they think they're fighting some sort of actual crusade this way. I agree that child pornography is a terrible thing, but this is just silly. It would be much worse, of course, if anybody tried to do anything with these lists (which I'm sure is not far off). Maybe I should set one up that logs the IP of everybody who downloads faked Country or Boy Band MP3s from me. :)
I'd imagine those support lines will be about as busy as the Dixie Cup tech support line.
I wrote up a batch script in SoundForge to run my WAVs through an EQ and a Normalize them... You can have it apply any number of effects with certain settings to a batch of files, which is pretty nice... I just queue up a bunch of them and leave, and I come back with a bunch of nice sounding WAVs... I even do this on a lot of the music I make. (http://www.mp3.com/atomly/)
Then I'd recommend you try soundtracker (http://www.soundtracker.org) or ecasound. Do some searches for dance music on Linux and check out some Linux demoscene articles and you'll find a lot of Modplug-like programs. Maybe we should even start a project to port Modplug.
How do you feel about the fact that the Norwegian police essentially played the part of hired goon to a large corporate conglomerate? It's bad enough when this happens in the United States, but the fact that the Norwegians did this has to surprise you quite a bit.
Do you see any way to allow for anoynmous transactions in the future of electronic commerce (not just e-commerce as it's used today, but the move of every aspect of commerce to the electronic medium)?
I think this is terribly important for a multitude of reasons, the most important being sheer personal freedom, so it is an issue that must be tackled before we allow laws to be passed that will affect us profoundly for years.
We need to defend the right to intellectual property like the Open Source(tm) trademark.
Hate to be a bitch, but isn't this sentence a contradiction? Admittedly I'm all for protecting the OSD from abuse and dillution at the hands of companies like Microsoft, but intellectual property is bad.
And yes, exclusion of certain people from the license does make it not technically Open Source(tm).
Public keys are used for encryption programs so that other users can, by using your public key, read things that you send them or confirm you digital signature... A search on this would surely turn up many interesting and helpful pages.
And all of these people keep arguing that you can recompile without these components, but is it really possibly to recompile Mozilla and still maintain the SSL and such? If I can truly separate these out it'd be great (from the looks of the screenshots, the IRC client is in JavaScript so that won't really add bloat (but JavaScript is the most evil language and will most definitely cause crashes and quite possibly open up security holes) but I can't say the same about Jabber).
Jabber is a good idea, but from what I've heard their security model isn't exactly tip top. (You can't stop somebody from talking to you, for example). But I can't confirm this, as I said. Regardless, there are plenty of RTM protocols out there (though ICQ does blow and I don't like the implementation of AIM, so this may have been necessary).
I don't really buy this... I think that it's really important that moderators are chosen randomly and given equal say, thus representing a diverse cross-section of Slashdot users (or as diverse as possible).
Just because I think something is funny that other people don't doesn't make me a bad moderator, it just means that it's not as widely funny as I thought. Thus, if I liked it, two others ignored it (and didn't moderate it) and one called it flaimbait, it would be at it's default score (most likely 1 if they were a user), which is the perfect spot for it to be at.
The karma system is a really great addition to this, helping make the default rating make more sense.
But this is just a step in that direction. The fact that your company can use the excuse that because they paid for the bandwidth they own the mail is scary. If my company buys me a notebook and I write something offensive in it, can I be fired for it? Do they have the right to search a bag if they buy me one?
And, to be pedantic, you don't roll cigars with papers; cigars are rolled in a tobacco leaf while cigarettes are in papers.
first comment. :)
Keep your fucking shit off my desk
Does this cockring make me look fat?
Ask a gutshot policeman.
Ask Sir Mix-A-Lot
Bantu Tribesman uses modem to crush nut
Evil Genius Gates drops Windows 98 in NY Water Suplly
Bill Gates Grants Self 23(?) Dexterity, 21(?) Charm
RC Cola Celebrates 10th Sale
Study Reveals: Babies are Dumb
GM Halts Production of Neck Belts.
Supercomputer beaten up by more popular computer.
Rwanda gets plant. "It totally ligthens up the place."
These are just off the top of my head, there are a lot more great ones that everybody should read in the archives.
There are still people out there releasing ANSIs, MODs and assorted computer demos. Just check out www.scene.org or www.assembly.org for some examples.
Anyway, I think now I'll go write that Java BBS I always talked about coding but never bothered to. (Would there be a demand for this if I wrote it?)
I don't get why GNOME is under SPI, though, why isn't it just part of the FSF (or am I being ignorant here)?
Anyway, I think it is really important that people either start donating money if they can't donate code. I really can't think of any good reason why people wouldn't being that tax deductible basically means that you get to donate for free (up to a point and with certain restrictions of course).
Also, they still haven't resolved that whole Open Source trademark issue, huh? That's too bad, because it must really appear ugly to outside observers of the Free Software/Open Source community.
And, as far as Spinner is concerned, I'd be amazed if they didn't turn into crap. AOL isn't seeking to do this, but it's the sort of thing that happens when a big company who fears its customers begins to run a radio station. It's just like the consolidation in the real radio market right now, it just leads to mediocrity. Why would they focus on Drum and Bass or Acid Jazz when 78% of their listeners prefer Britney Spears because all of their traffic will be surfing in from AOL? It's the Almighty Buck and AOL anything but ignores that. AOL isn't scared of "selling out" or anything to that effect, they're just in it for the quick dollar.
WinAMP will be turned into crap, SHOUTCast will probably remain good, and Spinner will slowly get shitty as some CEO realizes "I don't like that rap music, we need more 50's" or something to that effect.
And, well, as for Nullsoft being the little guy, they just gave up. If Justin Frankel is still at AOL in two years I'd be amazed. It's like Netscape selling out to AOL; sure, they revolutionized the world, but this is like admitting defeat. AOL will bring in their better trained, better brainwashed coders and Nullsoft will be worked out of the mix slowly. Or if not, the Nullsoft people will go nuts because they're unable to handle the corporate structure above them. I don't see how anybody could go from running their own startup to working at AOL; it'd be complete culture shock. I know that I, working at a startup, would quit the day that we sold out to a company like AOL.
I also hope that AOL knows what they're getting themselves into. I mean, I don't know the details of it fully, but Nullsoft is being sued by Play Media and from what I know they probably deserve it. I remember Justin ported AMP to DOS (DosAMP) and then ported that to Windows (WinAMP), so I find it hard to believe that he has all original code in there.
Plus I'm sure AOL's going to make Spinner.com into some sort of Top 40 crap station now, and I used to listen to their Drum and Bass channel a lot. Or at least they'll fill it full of advertisements and associated schlock.
The method, as the author himself points out, does have quite a few problems, though. First off, it's a microscopic bubble. He says that the walls can initially be only a few hundred Planck's lengths thick at the start. And as you slow it down, the "warp bubble" will expand, thus making the walls thinner until they actually shrink to lenghts less than Planck's constant, which would cause unpredictable results to say the least.
Also, the authors says that though this is orders of magnitudes less energy, it still requires "unreasonably large energy densities."
And, as another comment said, negative energy isn't exactly something that you can just buy at Amoco, and until a method to easily create it is developed, none of this is realistic.
Still, this is damn cool to say the least. I can't wait to get to work in seconds. And this could possibly do wonders for communication. A superluminal link would be just a little bit faster than my Ethernet connection, I'd guess :)
I just hope that, as you said, W3 doesn't adopt this for a standard if it's not open. That'd be almost as bad as when they (W3C) went with a proprietary key exchange for SSL (Diffie-Helman) thus making it an unopen standard.
And, as said below, I hope that they open up some of their other products, like Director, since they're required to view a lot of pages.
Bah, who cares about any of this anyway, I still browse with Lynx. :)
It seems they're claiming that they have a patent on the process of pushing web requests off to other servers which reside in a pool of available servers in a manner such that no server is overloaded. Hence load balancing.
Even though this is more specific than redirecting or spawning new threads, it is still a very obvious process. I can't understand why the patent office is letting things like this slide. Why is such a simple process considered new when you put the word "web" in there somewhere?
This exact thing has been done for years, but now that it's a web server (ooh, new technology!) it's patentable. I wish that the patent office would realize what all this technology they're reviewing means and what the implications of these broad patents are.
One theory that I have, though, is that this Medichloridian stuff was around with the Jedi, but as all of the Jedi were wiped out but Yoda and Obi Wan, who were both very spiritual, the scientific side died out as well.
Anyway, it really bothers me that they would cheapen the force so much by using microbes as "communicators with the force." I guess he's not saying that they represent the force, but act as an intermediary. But then couldn't somebody become a Jedi master by getting a blood transfusion? I guess that maybe it's a way of setting up for the clone wars; it would allow for Jedis to clone themselves and easily give the clones their powers.
Also, it kind of bothered me that Qui Gonn didn't disappear when he was killed by Darth Maul like Obi Wan and Yoda did. I guess the explanation could be that he wasn't as close to the force as they were, and it's always neat to see a funeral pyre.
Also, I had a really neat idea- wouldn't it be cool if Senator Palpatine weren't really Darth Sidius? I mean, they kind of shove it down your throat that he is throughout the entire movie, so it'd be a huge plot twist (ala "Luke, I am your father.") if Darth Sidius turned out to be somebody else.
Overall, though, I really liked the movie except that Anakin's luck (or "Fate," if you must) was annoying, Jar Jar was annoying, Medichloridians were annoying, and there weren't enough space battles or mysticism. That and the pod race was too damned long. The movie moved like a bad Sci-Fi novel, with lots of choppy scenes in the beginning, an overly long and somewhat unimportant scene in the middle (it did nothing but establish Anakin's techno-knowhow and Jedi reflexes) and then a bunch of choppy scenes at the end. Worth the money, but Episode II (Braveheart with Jedi) and Episode III (The Empire destroying the Republic) are going to rock a lot if Lucas doesn't wuss out.
If you want some instances of bands giving away some of their intellectual property and profiting from it, just look at touring bands like Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the late Grateful Dead, etc.
Though I don't really like many of these bands, I do respect the fact that they let people tape their live shows and distribute them freely because it simply spread them further than a proprietary viewpoint would have.
And as for people being lazy, so be it. Most creative people create because they want to. I make music because it makes me happy- I write code because it makes me happy. Why shouldn't I let other people enjoy my music too? Does it make it any less of a creative outlet? Would I feel more fulfilled if I were writing proprietary code or if my soul were owned by a record company? I actually get more enjoyment out of opening up my music and my code and sharing them with the community. Intellectual property is outdated and useless, get over it.