jvc introduced the d-vhs about two and a half years ago. the fact that you are only discovering it now shows how popular it is. one major drawback is no analog to digital. analog sources are recorded analog, giving you about a 50% degradation of source material.
given the new law requiring filtering software on all library and school computers, this law would prevent the state from developing, maintaining, or testing said software, so the state of Virginia will by default be in violation of the new law, and therefore should lose all federal funding for their schools and libraries.
the bigger question is, what constitutes nazi memorabilia? a motorcycle with a maltese cross? a american indian artifact that displays a swastika? a video tape of "battle of the bulge"? recordings of wagner or beethovan? since the french won this battle so easily, what's the next step, do they ban searches to forbidden subjects? what happens when other countries follow suit? there are countries where an uncovered female face is considered offensive. there are countries where the american flag is considered offensive. do we ban all historical artifacts? all religious or political artifacts? is there anything that wouldn't be banned?
in the long run, this will only hurt yahoo, people will be forced to stop using there auction sites in favor of less restrictive sites. unfortunately there are better and more reliable alternatives. yahoo could have just blocked french access to their auction sites, and set up a mirror site for the french, it wouldn't be a hundred percent, but nothing would be.
gee, and isp that want's to protect itself and it's users from hackers, spammers and thieves, that's just wrong. by the way, there is no mention of porno in the entire tos agreement, and nobody's going to let you set up a server or a commercial site, for $44 a month. Only a script kiddie, or pirate server would object to this tos agreement.
In fact, the innovations of the second half of the 19th century, had significantly more impact than the innovations of the first half of the 20th century. Let's see, there's the railroads, the self contained cartridge, the revolver, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, electricity, the light bulb, radio, photography, the automobile, the department store, the vacuum tube, the automatic pistol, armor clad warships, the submarine, and robotics just to mention a few. And let's not even talk about the first half of the 19th century, the move from an agricultural society to and industrial society.
Part of their reasoning is that if I am refusing the appointment, I must not be qualified for the job
You are unwilling to take on the responsiblity which is part of the job, therefore by definition you are unqualified. Unfortunately their logic gets a little fuzzy after that. Most companies have a problem with employees who are not ambitious, and don't want to rise to their level of incompetence. To people who have the mind set that makes them leaders of companies, people who have other mind sets are incomprehensible. (If you aren't ambitious, there must be something wrong with you, or you must be just lazy, and therefore not putting a hundred percent into your job.) My suggestion is, if you are truely qualified, ie: able to take the pressure, then take the job, invest the extra money and retire early.
actually, almost a non issue, it just means that the almost non existant market for digital vcr's will go away. When the FCC eventually puts a halt to NTSC broadcasts, digital tuners with analog outputs for conventional tv's, vcr's, and dvd recorders will be readily available.
Actually, this could be easily overturned as unconstitutional, assuming the attorneys are savy enough to approach it the right way. After all, no such software exists, unless congress cuts off funding to all schools and libraries, they have violated the law. And as far as I can tell, no such software is possible. First it would require a definition of what is harmful to children. As far as I know, no internet content has been proven to be harmful to children, and you would be lucky to find two people who agree on what is obscene. Furthermore, any filter software required by law to be installed would have to be regulated by the government, otherwise, what filtering software qualifies. I could make software that filters all websites that use the color pink, after all, I find that obscene (well, I would probably throw in any sites that refer to Barney also, as that has to be harmful to children), and sell it as filtering software to schools and libraries. Of course, the Supreme Court did just decide that the votes of 20,000 people didn't matter, when the election came down to less than 300 votes. And the next President will most likely deemphasize technology in education in favor of privatization of schools, and the whole issue will become a moot point.
The small power companies do alright because they a essencially brokers, they buy large lots of electricty from the larger power companies at a group discount, and pass the savings onto the consumer. All the switching and connectivity is leased from the larger power co. With local phone service it's different. You can lease the lines from the larger tel co, but you have to provide all your own switching. Local tel co service doesn't pay for itself, it has to be subsidized by long distance service, or you have to have a large infrastructure already in place. This is why you see very little improvement in local phone service. This is essencially what was behind the ATT break up and deregulation. By divorcing themselves from the local tel co.s and local service, ATT was able to compete with the upstart long distance services such as Sprint and MCI. We in LA are lucky enough that ATT completely modernized and upgrade our phone system before the break up.
This is not a particularly difficult technology, all you have to do is bond the aluminum to mylar rather than polycarbonate, but I see a couple of problems. First you would have a short life span, the discs would get pretty scratched up in just regular use, but this is really not an issue for a disposable disc format. Secondly, and more importantly, the discs would not be compatible with all drives, and would be prone to read errors, and jamming drives during ejection. I can see the tech support calls already, "Hi, I installed your software, and it hosed my drive, please send me xxx dollars to replace it.
Excuse me, as far as I know, cd sales have gone up since Napster went into business. MP3's have cost the music industry nothing, it just represents a piece of the pie they aren't getting. Unrealized profits from a technology you had nothing to do with are not losses, just missed opportunities.
The reason for releasing director's cuts, or re-releasing old vinyl recordings on cd, is so that you will buy them again. It is strictly a marketing issue. The reason Microsoft offers upgrades at a discount, is also a marketing issue. People with a working OS, are not as willing or likely to pay top dollar for a new OS with marginal improvements, as people with no OS are. As to the copyright issue, it has been decided by our benevolent government, that when you purchase copyrighted materials, that you have limited rights to transfer those materials to different medias for convenience of personal use, but to distribute copies to other persons is a clear violation of copyright. As to pricing, that is strictly up to the copyright holder and is not covered under copyright law. If you buy a book, and decide you want another copy of that book, there is no onus or benefit for the publisher to give a discount on the second book.
Coming from the hi end audio field, there are many electronically sound reasons for ribbon cables, induction being the primary reason. Rounding the cables may not damage your computer, but it will most likely slow down the data transfer, and increase data corruption.
Quashing all alternative forms of medicine that don't conform to the voodoo science (IE: if its broke cut it out, the pill of the month club, and treat symtoms not problems)of western medicine. A better answer would be a WHO seal of approval. If a site isn't approved by WHO, then the consumer would know to investigate further before acting.
The problem being, even if they switch to Linux, they still have to pay the licensing for past use of the software. This is true of all commercial use of software. On the plus side, a court of law would not require the production of the individual licenses, just the financial records showing that they were paid.
As to the private individual, there is no feasible way to police licensing.
and say so little. Actually my only complaint is your constant assertion that everything was invented in the last twenty years. Norman Spinrad, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and many others were all writing about cyberspace in the 50's and 60's. As for the world view your talking about, that can be traced back to Orwell, Huxley and Wells. While admittedly, future vision is much more accurate in detail when you only look 3 years in the future as opposed to a hundred years, the framework remains the same. The other problem with Gibson and cyberspace is, though he is a great writer, he doesn't know a thing about computers, how they work, and how people interface with them. I would be willing to guess that he has never owned one.
This seems like an abuse of the judicial system
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
It is, if the suit is filed just to get your identity, that is a nonsense law suit. You can counter sue for frivolous prosecution.
On the other hand, if you want true anonymity, you only need to access the web through a public access provider (IE: the library, internet cafe', local school), set up a excite mail, or hot mail account with false info. If nobody knows who you are, no amount of legal gymnastics is going to make a difference.
Then again, you could just be intelligent about what you say.
In what way will this benifit consumers, I find it very hard to believe that this disease is rampant enough to make an impact on premiums, and even if it was, there is very little chance that the added profits would be passed on to the consumer.
If you look in the dictionary under flame bait, I think you will find Jon Katz. Sometimes I think he lives in his own virtual world, because it usually bares little resemblance to the one the rest of us live in.
We generally don't attack other people unless we covet their land or property, are enraged by unreasonable provocation, or paid to do it. But online, people continuously attack others for less obvious reasons.
This is completely untrue, the reasons people flame are completely obvious and exactly the same reasons people attack other people outside of cyberspace, including the ones listed above. The primary reason is a perceived offence (whether real or imagined), as most of Jon's articles are designed to offend, flaming should come as little surprise. The second major reason, completely ignored by Jon, is to get attention. This is why children have tantrums, teens vandalize, crazies stalk and kill celebrities, and flamers flame.
Flamers invariably know better, at least in real life (otherwise the homicide rate would be going up, not down), but the virtual world serves as a kind of free zone for the nervous, discontented, quarrelsome and meticulous. Invective has always provided some of the best and most inventive writing online, the nerd's literal revenge.
Jon has obviously spent very little time with young people. Young people are angry, the world is not perfect (not even well executed), and the young take it as a personal affront. This is why they yell, scream, swear, vandalize, fight, destroy, speed, use drugs, demonstrate, and try to change the world in general. As usual, Jon's article is verbose, and entertaining, but not particularly well thought out or researched.
Something to add to the general level of paranoia in the work place. Get real, nobody has the time to waste reading all of your email.
On the other hand, an employer is responsible for the actions of their employees at the work place, and therefore have an obligation to monitor their activities. The real question is; do the benefits of said monitoring outweigh all the resources spent doing the monitoring?
Slashdot Mirror
jvc introduced the d-vhs about two and a half years ago. the fact that you are only discovering it now shows how popular it is. one major drawback is no analog to digital. analog sources are recorded analog, giving you about a 50% degradation of source material.
the problem with your plan is, by converting hdtv to mpeg, you lose all the advantages of hdtv.
given the new law requiring filtering software on all library and school computers, this law would prevent the state from developing, maintaining, or testing said software, so the state of Virginia will by default be in violation of the new law, and therefore should lose all federal funding for their schools and libraries.
the bigger question is, what constitutes nazi memorabilia? a motorcycle with a maltese cross? a american indian artifact that displays a swastika? a video tape of "battle of the bulge"? recordings of wagner or beethovan? since the french won this battle so easily, what's the next step, do they ban searches to forbidden subjects? what happens when other countries follow suit? there are countries where an uncovered female face is considered offensive. there are countries where the american flag is considered offensive. do we ban all historical artifacts? all religious or political artifacts? is there anything that wouldn't be banned?
in the long run, this will only hurt yahoo, people will be forced to stop using there auction sites in favor of less restrictive sites. unfortunately there are better and more reliable alternatives. yahoo could have just blocked french access to their auction sites, and set up a mirror site for the french, it wouldn't be a hundred percent, but nothing would be.
gee, and isp that want's to protect itself and it's users from hackers, spammers and thieves, that's just wrong. by the way, there is no mention of porno in the entire tos agreement, and nobody's going to let you set up a server or a commercial site, for $44 a month. Only a script kiddie, or pirate server would object to this tos agreement.
In fact, the innovations of the second half of the 19th century, had significantly more impact than the innovations of the first half of the 20th century. Let's see, there's the railroads, the self contained cartridge, the revolver, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, electricity, the light bulb, radio, photography, the automobile, the department store, the vacuum tube, the automatic pistol, armor clad warships, the submarine, and robotics just to mention a few. And let's not even talk about the first half of the 19th century, the move from an agricultural society to and industrial society.
Part of their reasoning is that if I am refusing the appointment, I must not be qualified for the job
You are unwilling to take on the responsiblity which is part of the job, therefore by definition you are unqualified. Unfortunately their logic gets a little fuzzy after that. Most companies have a problem with employees who are not ambitious, and don't want to rise to their level of incompetence. To people who have the mind set that makes them leaders of companies, people who have other mind sets are incomprehensible. (If you aren't ambitious, there must be something wrong with you, or you must be just lazy, and therefore not putting a hundred percent into your job.) My suggestion is, if you are truely qualified, ie: able to take the pressure, then take the job, invest the extra money and retire early.
actually, almost a non issue, it just means that the almost non existant market for digital vcr's will go away. When the FCC eventually puts a halt to NTSC broadcasts, digital tuners with analog outputs for conventional tv's, vcr's, and dvd recorders will be readily available.
Actually, this could be easily overturned as unconstitutional, assuming the attorneys are savy enough to approach it the right way. After all, no such software exists, unless congress cuts off funding to all schools and libraries, they have violated the law. And as far as I can tell, no such software is possible. First it would require a definition of what is harmful to children. As far as I know, no internet content has been proven to be harmful to children, and you would be lucky to find two people who agree on what is obscene. Furthermore, any filter software required by law to be installed would have to be regulated by the government, otherwise, what filtering software qualifies. I could make software that filters all websites that use the color pink, after all, I find that obscene (well, I would probably throw in any sites that refer to Barney also, as that has to be harmful to children), and sell it as filtering software to schools and libraries. Of course, the Supreme Court did just decide that the votes of 20,000 people didn't matter, when the election came down to less than 300 votes. And the next President will most likely deemphasize technology in education in favor of privatization of schools, and the whole issue will become a moot point.
The small power companies do alright because they a essencially brokers, they buy large lots of electricty from the larger power companies at a group discount, and pass the savings onto the consumer. All the switching and connectivity is leased from the larger power co. With local phone service it's different. You can lease the lines from the larger tel co, but you have to provide all your own switching. Local tel co service doesn't pay for itself, it has to be subsidized by long distance service, or you have to have a large infrastructure already in place. This is why you see very little improvement in local phone service. This is essencially what was behind the ATT break up and deregulation. By divorcing themselves from the local tel co.s and local service, ATT was able to compete with the upstart long distance services such as Sprint and MCI. We in LA are lucky enough that ATT completely modernized and upgrade our phone system before the break up.
This is not a particularly difficult technology, all you have to do is bond the aluminum to mylar rather than polycarbonate, but I see a couple of problems. First you would have a short life span, the discs would get pretty scratched up in just regular use, but this is really not an issue for a disposable disc format. Secondly, and more importantly, the discs would not be compatible with all drives, and would be prone to read errors, and jamming drives during ejection. I can see the tech support calls already, "Hi, I installed your software, and it hosed my drive, please send me xxx dollars to replace it.
Excuse me, as far as I know, cd sales have gone up since Napster went into business. MP3's have cost the music industry nothing, it just represents a piece of the pie they aren't getting. Unrealized profits from a technology you had nothing to do with are not losses, just missed opportunities.
Just remember, $6 at the manufacturer side equals about $100 at the consumer end.
The reason for releasing director's cuts, or re-releasing old vinyl recordings on cd, is so that you will buy them again. It is strictly a marketing issue. The reason Microsoft offers upgrades at a discount, is also a marketing issue. People with a working OS, are not as willing or likely to pay top dollar for a new OS with marginal improvements, as people with no OS are. As to the copyright issue, it has been decided by our benevolent government, that when you purchase copyrighted materials, that you have limited rights to transfer those materials to different medias for convenience of personal use, but to distribute copies to other persons is a clear violation of copyright. As to pricing, that is strictly up to the copyright holder and is not covered under copyright law. If you buy a book, and decide you want another copy of that book, there is no onus or benefit for the publisher to give a discount on the second book.
Coming from the hi end audio field, there are many electronically sound reasons for ribbon cables, induction being the primary reason. Rounding the cables may not damage your computer, but it will most likely slow down the data transfer, and increase data corruption.
Quashing all alternative forms of medicine that don't conform to the voodoo science (IE: if its broke cut it out, the pill of the month club, and treat symtoms not problems)of western medicine. A better answer would be a WHO seal of approval. If a site isn't approved by WHO, then the consumer would know to investigate further before acting.
The problem being, even if they switch to Linux, they still have to pay the licensing for past use of the software. This is true of all commercial use of software. On the plus side, a court of law would not require the production of the individual licenses, just the financial records showing that they were paid.
As to the private individual, there is no feasible way to police licensing.
and say so little. Actually my only complaint is your constant assertion that everything was invented in the last twenty years. Norman Spinrad, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and many others were all writing about cyberspace in the 50's and 60's. As for the world view your talking about, that can be traced back to Orwell, Huxley and Wells. While admittedly, future vision is much more accurate in detail when you only look 3 years in the future as opposed to a hundred years, the framework remains the same. The other problem with Gibson and cyberspace is, though he is a great writer, he doesn't know a thing about computers, how they work, and how people interface with them. I would be willing to guess that he has never owned one.
It is, if the suit is filed just to get your identity, that is a nonsense law suit. You can counter sue for frivolous prosecution.
On the other hand, if you want true anonymity, you only need to access the web through a public access provider (IE: the library, internet cafe', local school), set up a excite mail, or hot mail account with false info. If nobody knows who you are, no amount of legal gymnastics is going to make a difference.
Then again, you could just be intelligent about what you say.
In what way will this benifit consumers, I find it very hard to believe that this disease is rampant enough to make an impact on premiums, and even if it was, there is very little chance that the added profits would be passed on to the consumer.
I put in pacman and it ate my sweater
If you look in the dictionary under flame bait, I think you will find Jon Katz. Sometimes I think he lives in his own virtual world, because it usually bares little resemblance to the one the rest of us live in.
We generally don't attack other people unless we covet their land or property, are enraged by unreasonable provocation, or paid to do it. But online, people continuously attack others for less obvious reasons.
This is completely untrue, the reasons people flame are completely obvious and exactly the same reasons people attack other people outside of cyberspace, including the ones listed above. The primary reason is a perceived offence (whether real or imagined), as most of Jon's articles are designed to offend, flaming should come as little surprise. The second major reason, completely ignored by Jon, is to get attention. This is why children have tantrums, teens vandalize, crazies stalk and kill celebrities, and flamers flame.
Flamers invariably know better, at least in real life (otherwise the homicide rate would be going up, not down), but the virtual world serves as a kind of free zone for the nervous, discontented, quarrelsome and meticulous. Invective has always provided some of the best and most inventive writing online, the nerd's literal revenge.
Jon has obviously spent very little time with young people. Young people are angry, the world is not perfect (not even well executed), and the young take it as a personal affront. This is why they yell, scream, swear, vandalize, fight, destroy, speed, use drugs, demonstrate, and try to change the world in general. As usual, Jon's article is verbose, and entertaining, but not particularly well thought out or researched.
Something to add to the general level of paranoia in the work place. Get real, nobody has the time to waste reading all of your email.
On the other hand, an employer is responsible for the actions of their employees at the work place, and therefore have an obligation to monitor their activities. The real question is; do the benefits of said monitoring outweigh all the resources spent doing the monitoring?
Gee, I didn't know Al Gore worked for Red Hat
It's nice to know that all those cheezy sci fi movies were right.