They want people to stop sharing RIAA-licensed music over the Internet, or in the alternative, they want those who do share RIAA-licensed music to pay them for the privilege. Like it or not, that part really isn't so unreasonable. Unfortunately, the other thing they want is a monopoly in music publishing and distribution, and they're happy to use over-reaching, heavy-handed tactics to get it. That part is completely unreasonable.
There's a real lack of understanding on the RIAA's part -- they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the world has changed, that production and distribution of music now is so cheap and easy that you no longer need to be annointed by them or represented by them to create, record, produce, and distribute music. They still see themselves as the gatekeepers of the music industry. And the fact that a huge volume of RIAA-licensed music is in fact traded illegally over the Internet feeds their belief that they deserve to recover licensing fees by any means necessary.
Also, their tactics have worked in the past to help them control other media. This covenant not to sue scheme seems an awful lot like a blank media surcharge to me. A blank media charge combined with RIAA-mandated DRM worked to effectively kill digital audio tape (DAT) for recording purposes, and I understand that they get some sort of blank media charge on at least some CD-R media, so they won in both cases.
I don't see why a small number of IR sensors placed around the site couldn't instantly detect and locate the TV-B-Gone signal (which is just a sequence of TV shut-off codes for a number of different manufacturers). At that point, it shouldn't take more than a few milliseconds to aim and fire a pair of high powered lasers, thus incapacitating either the device or its owner.
A high failure rate could indicate a willingness to take risks and try new things. The fact (at least according to TFA) that the rate of project failures is half the 1994 rate could mean that project management has improved across the industry, but I think it's much more likely that the cause is just a change in the nature of the projects. Project managers in a post-dot-bomb world may be less willing to take risks. At the same time, there now exist best practices for many business-oriented computing tasks where there were none in 1994.
If I were a CEO and my CIO told me that he'd gotten the software project success rate up to 100%, I'd be strongly inclined to fire the guy and replace him with somebody more willing to try things that might not always work out.
Given the contributions that IBM has made to Linux and other open source projects and the fine work that IBM and its lawyers are currently doing to reduce SCO to a small pile of quivering ectoplasm, I hardly think that IBM needs to be held up as an example of a corporation that lacks serious commitment to open source software.
Even if SoundExchange can somehow make its claim to be able to collect royalties for nonmember artists stick (seems pretty dubious), one would think that they'd run into some serious antitrust issues if they then try to use that power to compel nonmember artists to become members. Essentially, they're claiming a monopoly on royalty collections, and then using that monopoly to reinforce their position. You're not supposed to do that...
According to both the article and Groklaw, it's not so much that Judge Kimball threw out SCO's case as it is that he affirmed Magistrate Judge Wells' order that threw out the claims that SCO couldn't or wouldn't substantiate. That does indeed include most of SCO's claims, but it's not true that the whole case was dismissed. SCO does have a few claims remaining, and IBM has multiple counterclaims. Nevertheless, SCO's goose is completely cooked, and we're now just waiting for IBM to finish them off.
Frankly, I'm more worried about what'll happen to the atmosphere as we continue to burn more and more fossil fuels than I'm worried about the possibility of oil scarcity. Running out of oil could be the best thing to happen to the planet in a long time.
That's got to be one of the worst article summaries I have ever read
I think that's because it's one of the very worst "articles" I've ever read. I don't think it contains a single actual fact, and I'm not sure it contains any opinions either. It's just vague, inconclusive, hand waving blog.
It's bad enough that/. readers don't bother to RTFA before commenting. These days, it's pretty clear that neither/. editors nor/. submitters don't read the articles before posting them.
You pay for more than the bandwidth you use.
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As I see it, the real problem here is that ISP's bank on the fact that you'll use a lot less bandwidth than what you think you're paying for. The broadband connection to your house is (almost) always on, and if you wanted you could download stuff at a pretty decent clip 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Nobody really does that, though... most subscribers probably only use their connections for a few hours each day, and even then they probably don't get anywhere close to capacity. ISP's count on that behavior, which is one of the reasons that they usually prohibit running a server.
That's really not the case so much for Google and other big content providers. They pay for a certain level of service and expect to use that much all the time, and they pay for a guarantee that they'll have it.
Video and other services obviously mean that consumers are going to use a lot more bandwidth than they currently do. Content providers will pay for their end, but the consumer end of the system is still going to be swamped. ISP's will have to deliver the sort of bandwidth to consumers that consumers already think they're paying for. Raising consumer prices therefore means ISP's will have to confess their bait-and-switch ways, so that's not appealing. The only other option is to squeeze content providers.
One wonders why the ISP's can't simply turn on some portion of the zillions of miles of dark fiber that's already in place. I'm sure there's hardware to be purchased and all, but upgrading networks this time around ought to be pretty inexpensive compared to previous upgrades. That cost seems like a small price to pay to cover up the fact that they've been overselling their networks for years.
(BTW, go here [visualware.com] if you want to see what your speeds are... It's a test site to see if your connection speed supports VOIP. Mine BARELY could.)
I have a feeling that that's not the test that ISP's use to measure their systems. I tried it three times in a row and got fairly different results each time. The one thing that was consistent was that it told me that my connection has too much "jitter" to use VOIP. And yet, I replaced my POTS line with Vonage a year ago and haven't noticed any problem. I do get a garbled word in a conversation every once in a while, but that was true with the POTS line too. So I'm not convinced that the visualware.com test is all that useful.
'Why don't they go and tell the oil companies what they should charge for their damn gas?'
You can bet that "they" would be looking to do just exactly that if the oil companies started selling their gas at different prices depending on the make of your car.
Abandoning net neutrality seems like it might well be a fast path to an antitrust investigation.
Light-up outerwear is already easy and cheap. You can power 10 feet of EL wire with two AA batteries and a tiny portable inverter. That's more than enough to light up a jacket.
I'm all for space exploration, but maybe we should figure out how to pay for all the spending that the current administration has been doing (tax cut, prescription drug benefit, war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and so on) before we spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on pie in the sky.
Even just talking about colonizing the moon or Mars or space gives people an excuse, no matter how lame, to act as though protecting our own environment here on Earth doesn't matter.
The point is that any data of any kind even if it was created by the employee for the employee's own use, was at one point on a company owned resource (the laptop), and hence owned by the company.
That seems overly broad. My phone number is in my employer's phone directory, stored on a company server. Does my employer own my phone number, then? HR has my résumé in both electronic form and hard copy. Think they'll mind if I borrow it for a bit if I decide to search for a new job? And suppose I find a new job... will I have wrongfully transferred company data to a competitor by showing them my salary history?
I've got a picture of my wife in a frame on my desk. Did I unwittingly transfer the copyright on that image to the company when I put it there? What if I scan the it and use it as a background image on the computer on my (er, the company's) desk?
And what's so special about data, anyway? I fail to see a significant difference between my résumé, which is stored on a company server, and my car, which is parked on a company parking lot. Would the company be upset if I willfully sent the car off to a crusher? Or worse, what will they do to me if I sell the car and keep the profit?
That settles it... on Monday, I'll be parking across the street.
I usually pay pretty close attention to the products Apple introduces, and I have to say that I nearly missed the most recent introduction entirely. I may have been a bit inattentive, but when there's a really big announcement coming from Apple, everybody knows about it. For one thing, Apple generally introduces important products at major events, such as MacWorld or WWDC. This time, though, they just invited a bunch of reporters to show up and see their new products.
Wow, great! The thing will apparently even control interfaces for household robots! Boy, that's a compelling application. I mean, we've all been waiting for household robots since maybe 1935 or so. It's now clear that the major holdup has been the availability of touch screens that can control the interfaces for these robots. Terrific! Now we can all have, and indeed, control, our household robots. I think I'll name mine "Rosie."
Now then, what does a guy have to do to get a flying car?
...maybe we should all actually do something to help. There are lots of ways to help. Groklaw is a pretty good model for how to get the word out in a clear way and really motivate people.
It wouldn't hurt to help the EFF out with a donation in this holiday giving season. If the EFF is losing cases that it ought to be winning, I don't imagine that it's for lack of a clue. It's probably just outgunned by the huge, deep-pocketted corporations and industry associations that it takes on. EFF and ACLU seem like the two best organized outfits that are standing up for our rights, so search your sofa for loose change and help 'em both out.
And although it sounds tired, it never hurts to let your elected representatives know what you think. If they hear from enough of us, they really will do something about it.
I totally agree with you, but for some reason I always get twangs of guilt for committing to do something and not being able to do it.
To whom did you make this commitment to blog every n hours? If only to yourself, then you simply need to decide to write only when you actually have something to say. So many blogs are awful exactly because the authors think quantity is more important than quality. The blogs that are worth reading are generally written by those authors who know that it's always best to leave 'em wanting more. If you find that you have so few thoughts that are worth sharing that you can't get your blog off the ground then you should consider putting the blog on hold and reading a few books instead.
Gov't agencies can patent things?
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
For me, the big surprise here is that the NSA, an agency of the federal government, can apply for a patent in the first place. How does that work, exactly, when the NSA actually gets a patent? Since it's funded by tax dollars, can anyone use the invention? Do we need to apply for a license to use the invention? Is there a licensing fee? If so, where does that money go? Government agencies are neither people nor corporations, so do they have some sort of legal status that allows them to own things like patents? Could the FDA or the NIH start patenting drugs? Could the House of Representatives patent some novel method of voting and prevent the Senate from using it?
Perhaps they're trying to patent ideas in order to make them public and prevent anyone else from obtaining a patent on the same idea, and we're all free to use the idea. But then why not just publish the idea and make sure that the USPTO is aware of it?
This is a major boon to medicine because the crocodile serum can also fight things that are penicillin resistant such as staphylococcus aureus.
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it's a major boon to medicine because it fights off and kills HIV. Don't get me wrong... drug resistant strains of staph certainly seem to be an important problem and all. But HIV! Even if this research just provides a little more insight into new ways to deal with HIV, that's huge. And it seems like it's potentially more than that. From the article:
"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.
Slashdot Mirror
> it's just one of thousands of behavior markers Facebook is using
Seriously? There are *thousands* of behavior markers that Facebook tracks, and we're only talking about one of them?
They want people to stop sharing RIAA-licensed music over the Internet, or in the alternative, they want those who do share RIAA-licensed music to pay them for the privilege. Like it or not, that part really isn't so unreasonable. Unfortunately, the other thing they want is a monopoly in music publishing and distribution, and they're happy to use over-reaching, heavy-handed tactics to get it. That part is completely unreasonable.
There's a real lack of understanding on the RIAA's part -- they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the world has changed, that production and distribution of music now is so cheap and easy that you no longer need to be annointed by them or represented by them to create, record, produce, and distribute music. They still see themselves as the gatekeepers of the music industry. And the fact that a huge volume of RIAA-licensed music is in fact traded illegally over the Internet feeds their belief that they deserve to recover licensing fees by any means necessary.
Also, their tactics have worked in the past to help them control other media. This covenant not to sue scheme seems an awful lot like a blank media surcharge to me. A blank media charge combined with RIAA-mandated DRM worked to effectively kill digital audio tape (DAT) for recording purposes, and I understand that they get some sort of blank media charge on at least some CD-R media, so they won in both cases.
I don't see why a small number of IR sensors placed around the site couldn't instantly detect and locate the TV-B-Gone signal (which is just a sequence of TV shut-off codes for a number of different manufacturers). At that point, it shouldn't take more than a few milliseconds to aim and fire a pair of high powered lasers, thus incapacitating either the device or its owner.
Call it the TV-B-Gone-B-Gone.
What would I give you? Probably just a sign on your back that says "Kick me! I'm the ass that screwed up the demo!"
A high failure rate could indicate a willingness to take risks and try new things. The fact (at least according to TFA) that the rate of project failures is half the 1994 rate could mean that project management has improved across the industry, but I think it's much more likely that the cause is just a change in the nature of the projects. Project managers in a post-dot-bomb world may be less willing to take risks. At the same time, there now exist best practices for many business-oriented computing tasks where there were none in 1994.
If I were a CEO and my CIO told me that he'd gotten the software project success rate up to 100%, I'd be strongly inclined to fire the guy and replace him with somebody more willing to try things that might not always work out.
Given the contributions that IBM has made to Linux and other open source projects and the fine work that IBM and its lawyers are currently doing to reduce SCO to a small pile of quivering ectoplasm, I hardly think that IBM needs to be held up as an example of a corporation that lacks serious commitment to open source software.
Even if SoundExchange can somehow make its claim to be able to collect royalties for nonmember artists stick (seems pretty dubious), one would think that they'd run into some serious antitrust issues if they then try to use that power to compel nonmember artists to become members. Essentially, they're claiming a monopoly on royalty collections, and then using that monopoly to reinforce their position. You're not supposed to do that...
According to both the article and Groklaw, it's not so much that Judge Kimball threw out SCO's case as it is that he affirmed Magistrate Judge Wells' order that threw out the claims that SCO couldn't or wouldn't substantiate. That does indeed include most of SCO's claims, but it's not true that the whole case was dismissed. SCO does have a few claims remaining, and IBM has multiple counterclaims. Nevertheless, SCO's goose is completely cooked, and we're now just waiting for IBM to finish them off.
Frankly, I'm more worried about what'll happen to the atmosphere as we continue to burn more and more fossil fuels than I'm worried about the possibility of oil scarcity. Running out of oil could be the best thing to happen to the planet in a long time.
That's got to be one of the worst article summaries I have ever read
/. readers don't bother to RTFA before commenting. These days, it's pretty clear that neither /. editors nor /. submitters don't read the articles before posting them.
I think that's because it's one of the very worst "articles" I've ever read. I don't think it contains a single actual fact, and I'm not sure it contains any opinions either. It's just vague, inconclusive, hand waving blog.
It's bad enough that
As I see it, the real problem here is that ISP's bank on the fact that you'll use a lot less bandwidth than what you think you're paying for. The broadband connection to your house is (almost) always on, and if you wanted you could download stuff at a pretty decent clip 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Nobody really does that, though... most subscribers probably only use their connections for a few hours each day, and even then they probably don't get anywhere close to capacity. ISP's count on that behavior, which is one of the reasons that they usually prohibit running a server.
That's really not the case so much for Google and other big content providers. They pay for a certain level of service and expect to use that much all the time, and they pay for a guarantee that they'll have it.
Video and other services obviously mean that consumers are going to use a lot more bandwidth than they currently do. Content providers will pay for their end, but the consumer end of the system is still going to be swamped. ISP's will have to deliver the sort of bandwidth to consumers that consumers already think they're paying for. Raising consumer prices therefore means ISP's will have to confess their bait-and-switch ways, so that's not appealing. The only other option is to squeeze content providers.
One wonders why the ISP's can't simply turn on some portion of the zillions of miles of dark fiber that's already in place. I'm sure there's hardware to be purchased and all, but upgrading networks this time around ought to be pretty inexpensive compared to previous upgrades. That cost seems like a small price to pay to cover up the fact that they've been overselling their networks for years.
(BTW, go here [visualware.com] if you want to see what your speeds are... It's a test site to see if your connection speed supports VOIP. Mine BARELY could.)
I have a feeling that that's not the test that ISP's use to measure their systems. I tried it three times in a row and got fairly different results each time. The one thing that was consistent was that it told me that my connection has too much "jitter" to use VOIP. And yet, I replaced my POTS line with Vonage a year ago and haven't noticed any problem. I do get a garbled word in a conversation every once in a while, but that was true with the POTS line too. So I'm not convinced that the visualware.com test is all that useful.
'Why don't they go and tell the oil companies what they should charge for their damn gas?'
You can bet that "they" would be looking to do just exactly that if the oil companies started selling their gas at different prices depending on the make of your car.
Abandoning net neutrality seems like it might well be a fast path to an antitrust investigation.
Light-up outerwear is already easy and cheap. You can power 10 feet of EL wire with two AA batteries and a tiny portable inverter. That's more than enough to light up a jacket.
Silly Suits' Prejudices Behind Slow Linux Adoption
I'm all for space exploration, but maybe we should figure out how to pay for all the spending that the current administration has been doing (tax cut, prescription drug benefit, war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and so on) before we spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on pie in the sky.
Even just talking about colonizing the moon or Mars or space gives people an excuse, no matter how lame, to act as though protecting our own environment here on Earth doesn't matter.
The point is that any data of any kind even if it was created by the employee for the employee's own use, was at one point on a company owned resource (the laptop), and hence owned by the company.
That seems overly broad. My phone number is in my employer's phone directory, stored on a company server. Does my employer own my phone number, then? HR has my résumé in both electronic form and hard copy. Think they'll mind if I borrow it for a bit if I decide to search for a new job? And suppose I find a new job... will I have wrongfully transferred company data to a competitor by showing them my salary history?
I've got a picture of my wife in a frame on my desk. Did I unwittingly transfer the copyright on that image to the company when I put it there? What if I scan the it and use it as a background image on the computer on my (er, the company's) desk?
And what's so special about data, anyway? I fail to see a significant difference between my résumé, which is stored on a company server, and my car, which is parked on a company parking lot. Would the company be upset if I willfully sent the car off to a crusher? Or worse, what will they do to me if I sell the car and keep the profit?
That settles it... on Monday, I'll be parking across the street.
I usually pay pretty close attention to the products Apple introduces, and I have to say that I nearly missed the most recent introduction entirely. I may have been a bit inattentive, but when there's a really big announcement coming from Apple, everybody knows about it. For one thing, Apple generally introduces important products at major events, such as MacWorld or WWDC. This time, though, they just invited a bunch of reporters to show up and see their new products.
Overhyped? More like hardly hyped at all.
The United States, has 'very serious concerns' about the protection of privacy and data throughout the Internet globally...
Hey, there's some progress. Next thing you know, the US will be voicing it's "very serious concerns" about warrantless searches.
Wow, great! The thing will apparently even control interfaces for household robots! Boy, that's a compelling application. I mean, we've all been waiting for household robots since maybe 1935 or so. It's now clear that the major holdup has been the availability of touch screens that can control the interfaces for these robots. Terrific! Now we can all have, and indeed, control, our household robots. I think I'll name mine "Rosie."
Now then, what does a guy have to do to get a flying car?
...maybe we should all actually do something to help. There are lots of ways to help. Groklaw is a pretty good model for how to get the word out in a clear way and really motivate people.
It wouldn't hurt to help the EFF out with a donation in this holiday giving season. If the EFF is losing cases that it ought to be winning, I don't imagine that it's for lack of a clue. It's probably just outgunned by the huge, deep-pocketted corporations and industry associations that it takes on. EFF and ACLU seem like the two best organized outfits that are standing up for our rights, so search your sofa for loose change and help 'em both out.
And although it sounds tired, it never hurts to let your elected representatives know what you think. If they hear from enough of us, they really will do something about it.
I totally agree with you, but for some reason I always get twangs of guilt for committing to do something and not being able to do it.
To whom did you make this commitment to blog every n hours? If only to yourself, then you simply need to decide to write only when you actually have something to say. So many blogs are awful exactly because the authors think quantity is more important than quality. The blogs that are worth reading are generally written by those authors who know that it's always best to leave 'em wanting more. If you find that you have so few thoughts that are worth sharing that you can't get your blog off the ground then you should consider putting the blog on hold and reading a few books instead.
For me, the big surprise here is that the NSA, an agency of the federal government, can apply for a patent in the first place. How does that work, exactly, when the NSA actually gets a patent? Since it's funded by tax dollars, can anyone use the invention? Do we need to apply for a license to use the invention? Is there a licensing fee? If so, where does that money go? Government agencies are neither people nor corporations, so do they have some sort of legal status that allows them to own things like patents? Could the FDA or the NIH start patenting drugs? Could the House of Representatives patent some novel method of voting and prevent the Senate from using it?
Perhaps they're trying to patent ideas in order to make them public and prevent anyone else from obtaining a patent on the same idea, and we're all free to use the idea. But then why not just publish the idea and make sure that the USPTO is aware of it?
Programming isn't maths.. maybe simple algebra, but it's a lot more about creativity and logically solving problems.
Yeah, math is nothing like 'logically solving problems'.
This is a major boon to medicine because the crocodile serum can also fight things that are penicillin resistant such as staphylococcus aureus.
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it's a major boon to medicine because it fights off and kills HIV. Don't get me wrong... drug resistant strains of staph certainly seem to be an important problem and all. But HIV! Even if this research just provides a little more insight into new ways to deal with HIV, that's huge. And it seems like it's potentially more than that. From the article:
"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.
That sounds like good news to me.