Assume that they (the media corporations) are successful at preventing copying of new shows in HDTV, and new music on copy-protected audio CDs.
The old content which is not copy-protected becomes more valuable and more in demand among the people who won't be 'consuming' new product because of the effective copy restrictions.
Old content is more profitable for the corporations because the cost of creating it has already be amortized. Any revenue from its sale is pure profit, even if the numbers of sales are much lower than new product. Plus there is no expense developing artists and audience interest in new shows when marketing old product. Why spend a million dollars for publicity on Boobies & Shoes or Two-Penny PsychoNigga when you can just release another Greatest Hits of some Classic Rock One-Hit-Wonder Band?
Television is a phosphorus screen that presents a ever changing pattern of light onto your eyes.
Heroin is a biochemical that blocks active extreme pain in the brain. When there is no pain, heroin makes the same brain receptors feel great relief and well-being, regardless of the external conditions.
Please be more precise with your metaphors.
Continous use of heroin results in a biochemical change of the brain receptors that it acts on. The receptors begin to require heroin to function normally. Not replenishing them with heroin results in pain and convultions in the user to the point where they will engage in high crimes and other anti-social behavoirs in order to obtain more of this illegal chemical.
Absence of television will induce extreme boredom in people who have been spending long periods of time watching it.
There is a major difference between extreme pain with convultions and boredom.
What we really need is a photovoltaic material that is extremely hard. Something that can take repeated stresses of thousands of kilos per square centimeter and still produce a small amount of electricity from sunlight. It should have a high friction coefficient also.
Then we can replace the asphalt in road surfaces with this material. Roads take up a huge amount of land surface in inhabited areas and they are always facing direct sunlight. They go where the people are, which is where the electricity is needed.
In a sense this research is all too little, too late. It should have been done thirty years ago when the Arabs invaded Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calander, and cut off America's oil supplies. At that time, America couldn't respond to the seizure of the oil supplies because it had just been defeated in the incredibly stupid and wasteful Vietnam war. They basically had to surrender to the Arabs on the terms that they demanded through their front organization OPEC.
Actually it is the Arabs who should have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in alternative energy research. Their primary vision is the defense of Islam, and no one in the West would hesitate to allow the destruction of Islam and its holy places if it were a choice between Islam and oil. By investing hundred of billions in energy studies, they could have developed technology and infrastructure by now that would have removed the necessity for having Westerners occupy militarily the Gulf oil fields and the holy cities that are in the area. But they chose to instead just buy jets and expensive automobiles and then just toss them away like used tissues.
Eventually it will be small companies like this one who develop the technology to move out of the oil era. And it will be done first in remote and unnoticed places where the Western media pays no attention. The situation will someday reach the point where the bankrupt 'superpowers' who believe that they are are in control of the world's destiny become only entertainment for people in places who have developed their economies outside of the oil-military power matrix run by the Arabs and the Americans.
Gore Vidal was working on his surrealistic follow-up to Myra Breckinridge when the US Supreme Court ruled that 'communities could set local standards' for naughty words. Since the same book would be on sale everywhere, this presented a problem of being exposed to legal action on the whim of any local prosecutor.
He approached this problem by substituing the names of the Supreme Court judges for the naughty words. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun became nouns and verbs for, well, you know.
Brilliant. Text came out like this:
"He Burgered her lustfully. His mighty Rehnquist thrusting deep into her forbidden, intimate Blackmum. She tried to stop him by grabbing his Powell's. She enjoyed it in the Whizzer White, but detested Burgering as against nature..."
Future versions of Myron, and foreign editions, lacked this feature. But it was wild in the original hardback.
My experience with the American legal system leads me to believe that this guy is crazy.
Brilliant, but crazy.
He...(I assume that it was a he, just as everyone on Slashdot assumes that I'm male. I'm happy to be an "honorary male" for Slashdot, just like I was an "honorary White" when visiting South Africa in the Apartheit era)... is assuming that by coming up with a way to break the letter of the law in a way that contradicts the spirit of the law then he can affect the letter of the law.
But, in America (and, for that matter, all other places) the law can be very dangerous to play with. The legal system is like a large, dangerous, and unpredictable animal. This guy could easily be found guilty by a judge who just doesn't like him, and end up being sentenced to a long period in a American prison where homosexual rape is systematic and beatings, maimings, and AIDS are common.
I can all but guarantee you that this guy is white, middle or upper-middle class, and has never been arrested. No one in a minority, with limited financial resources, or with a criminal record would never "poke a sleeping dragon" with a case like this.
The consequences of failure are far too great, the advantages of success are all but nonexistant, and there is too much randomness and raw brutality in the 'justice' system to play games like this.
Yes, eBay seems to be a good place to sell. I have sold about 30 items on eBay in the past year. Most items bring more than I expect by about 20 percent. About 10 percent of the items sold bring a lower price than I had wanted.
I've also had three (of 30 items) bidders who didn't pay after winning the auction. If they contact me and agree to cancel the sale, I give positive feedback. If they don't contact me after about five days from the auction ending, I leave them NEUTRAL feedback, not negative.
I'll ask people to use money orders or cash instead of PayPal because of the 3 percent PayPal fee. There is also an eBay sellers and lister's fee, another 3 percent or so. And if the buyer uses a credit card on PayPal, the seller gets hit with another $3 fee on top of all the others.
Shipping fees will wipe out any gains that you make from buying low and selling high. I'm toying with doing used goods buying locally on CraigsList.
Still, eBay is good for trying new things. I find that with electronic musical instruments, eBay is like a low-cost long-term rental service. Since the instrument will almost always sell for the same amount as it was purchased, the only fee for using it is the charge for shipping it from the previous owner.
Even if the software is 100% accurate, students who use it rather than work on assignments are more likely to fail exams.
There is the possibility that by having advanced and seemingly 'intelligent' machines, the need for structured education can be questioned. If people don't need to master facts and figures to be productive, then there is no need for structured education to get this knowledge into people.
We can not judge people by their educational achievement if inexpensive machines allow 'uneducated' people to have the same or even greater levels of productivity than people who have mastered academic knowledge.
This is the fundamental and revolutionary implication of language translation software, should that it reache the point where it functions well enough to be productive. If it is cheap enough to be available to people who are in the working class and don't have access to academic educational resources, it will neutralize the arguments that people who have mastered academic material deserve to be in a higher social class than those who haven't acheived high GPA's.
This message brings up some excellent points about dealing with disruptive technology. A teacher whose job it is to get students to master material in a certain subject realizes that there is a machine that provide the same function that previously could only be gained by hard study.
What is more important, the knowledge gained through rigorous study or the ablility to acomplish what the studing provides through a machine.
Being technical oriented, I have to say the machine. But I am not being disrespectful of all the hard work that goes into learning a language. I'm saying that if people don't want to bother to learn a language, then use the machine if you need a translation. This is a difficult position to defend when colleges still require a few years of a foreign language to get a liberal arts degree and students couldn't care less.
But I still defend the position. Use the translation software to do your homework. It's more important to master the translation software or machine than it is to master the actual language. Even if you study hard and get an 'A', in a few years you will forget it. And the machines are only going to get better and cheaper. It's your education, your life, your (or your parent's) tution.
George Gilder once said that the languages that you need to know to be successful are English and C++.
Still for the most part, the language translation software still sucks and depending on it can put you into some truly embarrassing positions. I think that language translation software (for text) comes in five rough levels:
1 Word substitution.
2 Phrase and sentence.
3 Paragraphs and idioms.
4 Magazines, full-speed conversations, light literature.
5 Legal, diplomacy, allegory, and classical literature.
Each level being at least an order-of-magnitude more difficult to translate than the previous.
I think that most shrink-wrap translation software today is between levels 2 and 3. (for example-www.systransoft.com) BabelFish and Google site translation is between levels 1 and 2. With non-european languages, BabelFish and Google are incomprehensible and useless.
It would be interesting to see if in a few hundred years whether language translators work to perserve liguistic diversity or create a global 'pidgin' language.
This is not a nonsense excuse, it's a real reason not to pay for television.
I've watched television since my parents got their first set in 1964. I was watching eight hours a day in the early 1970's.
But no more. Television is an extremely limited medium. there are only five things:
1: Sentimental pseudo-dramas with endless close-up shots of actors overacting under heavy lights and heavy make-up.
2: Canned laughter situation-comedies that are rarely if ever actually funny.
3. Talking heads going on endlessly; saying nothing.
4. The Game. Televising 'da game, man' hasn't changed much in fifty years. Turn on a TV and within a half-second you know if you have on 'the game'. It never stops; it never changes. You either like it or not.
5. Commercials. They used to be 60 seconds, now they are all 30 or 15 seconds. Some people consider them to be a unique American art form; some people consider pissing on a electric wire to be an art form. Nearly everyone thinks commercials suck and trys to avoid them.
That's it. That's all television is. And, it is all that it will ever be. Because of its institutional structure and technical limitations, it is all television can ever be.
Myself, I would rather watch DVDs, ride bicycle, write code, dance, make love, or eat pizza than watch television.
Nothing that the television industry can do could make me go back to watching television. It's not hatred or contempt. It's just that television is simply too limited for me anymore. I've seen everything that it can possibly do. I've just gone beyond it. It doesn't matter any more how cheap that it is or what format it is.
5.
I remember seeing recently a program that could retrieve the data from WAV files of early home computer programs. This program was specifically for the Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer and MC-10.
The program examined the ampltitude of the data sample (from the ADC conversion for creating the WAV file). It counted the number of samples above a certain value until the sample values fell back below that value. Then it recreated the bytes according to the home computer's frequency-shift- keying strategy.
There might be another program to create WAV files from home computer data and programs.
While this data conversion across media is interesting, I doubt that there is much worth saving from these old home computers. Except, of course, the Apple II and some Trash 80s (the affectionate and appropriate name for early Tandy-Radio Shack Z80-based micros) that were used for business records. Most of the stuff that really worth saving was transfered to the PC or the Mac, or was printed and could be retrieved through optical character recognition.
A more complex challenge would be getting large amounts of data from the thousands of 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies that can't be read because of soft errors, but were never backed up because people assumed that their data was safe.
The Dalles, Oregon, is not really all that attractive of a place to live. It has more than its share of meth tweekers, gun freaks, and broke-ass rednecks. It can be a miserable little place. There is nothing near it except Portland. The nearest Fry's Electronics is 90 miles away to the West.
It is right on the geographic change line between the green and wet Pacific Northwest zone and the vast American 'empty quarter' that extends about 800 miles to the East, and to the South, and to the North.
The drive to Portland is quite beautiful through the Columbia River Gorge. And there are two exquisite mountains nearby; Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams.
Still, Google might have difficulty getting people to stay in The Dalles, OR.
"Geez, guys!" "All that work and trouble, and what you give me is an arm?" "You could have made me a new thought-controlled five-axix huge super-fine dick!" "But no, you gotta make some silly monkey-ass arm!" "What do supposed to do with this extra new arm? "I already have two good ones". "Hey, what are you doing with that saw?" "Holy shit! Someone call PETA fast! These white-coats are fuckin' nuts!"
Congratulations to the engineering team that produced such powerful processors with low electrical power requirements.
Now let's take a brief microsecond to consider the impact that this technology will have on our lives. And specifically what types of conflicts will it create.
In very general terms, every advance in digital technology increases the level of conflict between the people who 'own' ideas, recordings, works-of-art, and other ethereal cultural commodities that can be now more easily distributed by the new digital technology.
Creating a machine (a microprocessor in this case) that removes video processing from a fixed location and makes it handheld portable will invoke a backlash by the content owners. And this backlash will be a renewed and more focused effort to get laws passed to detain, fine, and imprison people for viewing, manipulating, and distributing video content that is primarily, at the present time, pre-recorded and copyrighted 'property' of the media corporations.
In another application, I see these handhelds being used the lower the cost of advanced language translators by at least an order of magnitude.
I can see governments in 10-20 years claiming that they own their national language and either attempting to ban these translators outright, or demanding a huge tax on them 'in the interests of preserving the national government's control of the nation's language and culture'. I can see places like Singapore banning handheld language translators when schoolchildren start refusing to memorize how to write thousands of Chinese characters when the handheld translator can do the interpretation of the written character into the spoken word (and vice versa).
In an era of rapid technological change such as this one, it is important to take a little time to at least try to predict the disruptive impact that any new type of technology will have.
There might be life on Mars?!? Small microscopic organisms with enough DNA info to fill a floppy disk.
So What? We got lots of life here on earth. Earth is the life planet. So would you cut the health care and education budgets to spend billions of dollars to find out if there is or isn't life on Mars?
Maybe these guys are just a plant for Steven Spielberg's big new movie where the life on Mars comes to Earth with hostile intent. But good-ol' Tom Cruise kicks their rubber-masked ass back home where they belong.
Jeez. $250 million remakes of cheezy $40,000 movies of the 1950's. Or 1930's, "King Kong" anyone? Aren't you just pissing in your pants in anticipation of these once-in-a-lifetime millenium-event movie blockbusters?
More Jeez and crackers. Some scientist quote-unquote who is about to lose his government grant because he can't think of new and expensive ways to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap, forms a committee of other poor white-coat schumcks in the same position in order to concoct a weird theory that life may exist on Mars. (and if you only give me another $200 million in research funds...I won't ever have to go back to teaching undergrads, er.. what I mean to say is "Our team will be able to confirm whether this theory will lead to the most exciting discovery in human history!"
When you become a solder, you give up your family.
You give up your friends.
You give up your career.
You do something different now.
You kill. And you get killed.
If you can't accept this, or deal with it, then you shouldn't be a solder.
Because you're not doing anyone any good by going to the other side of the world and pretending to be one.
Look, if you sign up for this shit (and you did), then tell your friends and your co-workers, and above all your family, that you no longer exist in their world. And tell them that it would probably be best if they were to assume that you never did.
You aren't going to understand war if you are more interested in how you are going to get pictures of your dog and your kid's baseball games while you're in 'the service'.
Face it, if you are more interested in how you are going to get pictures of your dog and your kid's baseball games, then you aren't a solder.
And you don't understand war.
War means that you give all that up. War means that you chose to give up most of what makes you a decent and civilized human being. And it means that you aren't going to get it back when you come back from your 'tour of duty'.
You aren't coming back. Even if you do live. You are now different...you can't go back to the way that things were.
Again, If you can't accect this or don't believe it, then don't sign up to be a solder. Because you aren't doing yourself or your country any 'service' by pretending to be one.
The Viet Cong understood this;
The Mujaadeen understand this:
and you can't defeat them until you understand this and accept it as well.
otherwise, you're just pissing away billions after billions of your people's wealth for a war that you are just going to lose anyway.
Region coding is based on the idea that pricing entertainment at American prices regardless of the local income level is the best way to maximize Hollywood profits.
That's completely absurd regardless of whether or not the product is pirated.
Entertainment is a product that has a high fixed initial production cost and a next-to-nothing copying and distribution cost. So Hollywood would be getting all the money that the pirates are currently getting if they would just lower the price of the legal DVDs to the price that the pirates are selling them for.
They could regionalize these low cost DVDs (that is, keep them from coming to America and other high price countries) by dubbing them into the local language and providing bonus features on the local DVD from people in the local country.
But they won't do this. Hollywood is stubborn and stupid. They want the world to change to their own L.A. fantasy. Until they get out of their own little 'reality distortion field', then they will continue to lose all potential developing world profits to the video pirates. Regardless of what laws and treaties they manage to pass.
What you say is true now because the local governments believe that the pirates are providing a valuable service to the country. A service that is worth more than Hollywood's claim that they are being defrauded by the local people who aren't paying the American price for entertainment.
That will change when Hollywood agrees to provide product at the price that the local people can afford. Then the local authorities will work with Hollywood against the pirates for a percentage of the profit (in taxes). Even in areas where the government is weak they still have the ability to harass and influence.
But in the current situation, the amount the government receives in payoffs from the pirates is greater than the amount they would receive in taxes if the product were only sold locally at American prices.
Hollywood is too dumb and too greedy to figure this out.
Libraries are often the largest buyers of an individual book.
Say a new author writes an incredible first novel. A publisher puts $40,000 into an author's advance, some promotional ads in New York Review of Books and other magazines, and the printing costs of 5,000 hardback copies.
And they sell 500 copies in the first six months of release. They have to store all the other copies, or pulp them.
Or they send several copies to influential library societies. These librarians read the book and write positive recommendations in the library journals.
A thousand libraries throughout the country buy one to five copies each. Thousands of people read the book "for free" through the library and recommend it to their friends. Word of mouth promotion builds and the author's next book has an advance printing of 50,000 copies and a thousand libraries buy five copies each (at full price).
Libraries and book publishers have a symbiotic relationship that each understands and appreciates. Hollywood has nothing that compares to this long and trusted relationship between publishers and libraries. And never will.
The studios have no idea of how to deal with the vast differences of average incomes in various parts of the world.
They need to accept that people will only pay a certain percentage of their income for an entertainment product. The fact that is percentage is a much larger absolute amount in the wealthy parts of the world doesn't mean that the people in the poorer parts of the world are stealing product. They are paying the same percentage of their income for entertainment.
The studios should make deals with the 'pirates' in the poorer parts of the world. The 'pirates' would provide reproduction, marketing, distribution, and promotion in the local market and the studios would get a percentage of the price for the product that the local market will bear.
The studios get a stable payment and continued market share that will grow in absolute financial value as the local economy gets wealthier. The 'pirates' get legal legitimacy and market placement. They agree to only distribute at low cost a certain Hollywood studio's movies and to prevent the distribution of low-cost DVDs into the wealthy sections of the world.
Everybody wins; everyone makes money now and more money in the future.
Hollywood wants globalization of its products, but remains embarrassingly clueless about what this means in real-world terms.
What Hollywood is having a really difficult time understanding is that digital technology is causing a great transformation in how people think of their entertainment purchases.
The old 20th-century way, which Hollywood is based, is strictly pay-per-view. This is either through individual theater movie admissions or individual media (VCR or DVD) limited time period rentals. People select individual entertainment products (particular films) from multiple competing sources that offer products at the same price per view. Each theater and video store basically charges the same, but has completely different selections (the film currently showing at that theater) or genre specialization (theme-oriented video outlets).
The 21st century will probably have people getting unlimited entertainment from a single provider at a subscription price. This is what we're beginning to see now with NetFlix and will most likely continue when NetFlix begins to offer films that can't be seen through any other outlet. That would happen if NetFlix distributed through DVD the films of SunDance and/or Gaumont. Films that couldn't support the costs of wide theatrical release, but would be profitable through DVD subscription.
Another example is the public library. Libraries buy and distribute lots of DVDs. It is a subscription service in the sense that it is supported by a tax and freely available for all people in the tax-base. If you don't go to theaters or rent movies through video stores, then the library is the sole subscription service referred to above.
With 21st century models, encrypting and copy-prevention doesn't make any economic sense. The reproduction cost for individual copying of a single product is next-to-nothing and its distribution encourages people to join the subscriber base (which is like a fan club).
Furthermore, 21st century entertainment will be much more focused and consumer exclusive than 20th century mass entertainment products.
People will try to keep their culture and entertainments private, lest they get stolen by the global media corporations that will slap unbreakable DRM on them. The best stuff will be guarded, invitation-only, and restricted by mutual agreement of the private subscription society. Works of art will be privately commissioned by wealthy patrons and selectively distributed through P2P, like in 15th century Florence. This will be to avoid censorship and the political effects that all great works of art invoke.
People will be writing books and Master's degree thesises on this topic. So the ideas presented will seem disjointed and hanging in a Slashdot message.
But I don't think that there's any real future for film DVD copy-protection.
Instead of going on for a hundred messages about the miniscule details of P2P, encryption, and the rest, let's assume that the MPAA can stop P2P and think of what the effects would be and the unintended consequences.
So... Assume that someday,
Super DRM is in place on Hollywood movies. When you download a Hollywood film, they have a record of the film and the PC address that it went to.
Now what are they going to do? Will they just have an automatic robot prosecutor (like the photo-radar that automaticly sends you a speeding ticket)? What will the fine be? $100,000 per movie? And what if no one pays? Do they automatically link to your bank account and deduct $100,000; or $10,000; or maybe just 50% of whatever's in the account? Will they have the ability to automatically garnish your wages so that 35% of whatever you earn for the rest of your life goes to them before taxes?
And just exactly how many people do they think that they are going to do this to in a country that has more guns than people before the leader of MPAA gets his pointy-little head blown off?
There are millions of people out there trading movies. Not one thinks that there is anything wrong with doing it. Not one thinks that the movie that they just spent hours downloading for a crappy little image is worth paying hundreds of dollars for, never mind hundreds of thousands of dollars. If they did, then they would pay $20 for the DVD. Or ten dollars to go to the theater and watch it.
So, what are they going to do? Have a lottery? They gather data on 100,000 movie downloads and then pick one at random. Throw every lawyer in Hollywood and this poor schmuck, destroy his life, and require you to watch a five minute summary of it in the theater between the Pepsi ads and movie previews?
And if they did do this? Would it make their basic product any better? Would you be more willing to shell out $12 to go see White Cop, SmartAss Black Cop XXXIV and the local 12 screen multiplex? Or the latest braindead-on-arrival CGI cliche-ridden mess from a film industry on auto-pilot?
There are thousands of movies made each year. Hundreds of them are good and some are mind-boggling excellent. Most will never get seen by the people would be willing to pay real money for the opportunity to enjoy them.
P2P is the only way that Hollywood is going to get this vast reservoir of good movies together with the willing and eager audience. Frankly, P2P is the only way that Hollywood is going to be around fifty years from now.
I wish I could say to these people to just take their head out their ass, stop trying to fight the future, and start paying attention to all the people who are seriously interested in keeping the Hollywood entertainment industry in good health through this period of epic change.
But I don't really have much hope for them anymore. Hollywood is its own worst enemy, not the P2P film freaks.
They sure have a difficult time understanding
on
The Death of the Music CD
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· Score: 4, Interesting
They sure have a difficult time understanding that the old 20th century way of buying music is pretty much over.
The old way being you pay them 30-50% of the hourly minimum wage for a three to five minute recording on a stable physical medium.
They keep squeezing their heads to come up with new ways to keep this old form of business going, but it's fading every day.
The new music transaction format is much different. There is a completely different amount of music that the consumer gets for the same amount of money.
Now you buy an old hard disk that has 10 to 100 Gigabytes of MP3 or OGG compressed format audio of hundreds of albums in a certain genre or era of music. Some of it you keep, some of it you discard, some of it you will never listen to, some of it you pass on to others, some of it you alter, sample, or mix, and some of it you never know who the artist is.
Of course, you don't buy or trade these old hard disks full of unknown music from the music industry companies. It's not their business model. They couldn't even conceive of selling music in this way. They are doing everything that they can think of to actually put people in prison for selling or tranactioning music in this format.
But it doesn't matter. There has been a fundamental change in the nature of the distribution and storage format for audio in the past ten years. The music industry, which is a contradiction of terms in this new era, will have to come to terms with it.
Our terms.
One last thing, guys, don't put anyone in prison for listening to music. It will have long term nasty consequences, even including bloodshed when the penality for copying and listening to illegal music begins to approach the penality for kidnapping and killing music industry executives. And it won't stop or change the transformation that is happening in the entertainment industry. the new technology is a marketing challenge, not a criminal act that requires inprisonment.
We'd like to think that you won't let all this tough talk and macho posturing about putting people in jail and conficating their life savings for listening to music get out of control. But, frankly, we're losing our confidence in your ability to think rationally.
multi-lane highway that stretches straight as an arrow from my windshield out to the horizon that has a speed limit under 85 miles per hour is just a maddening waste of time and a dangerous source of boredom.
If you're bored driving 85 miles per hour then I suggest that you start smoking some stronger weed while you're driving.
Or get a motorcycle.
De nouveau, les cours de Français et le gouvernement nous étonnent avec la stupidité et le manque de justesse. Pouvez-vous imaginer une compagnie française mettre un traducteur libre de langue sur la web? Pouvez-vous imaginer une conception égale de gouvernement français du besoin d'une telle chose ?
Peut-être ils devraient se limiter à la nourriture et à la philosophie et laisser le vrai monde aux gens qui peuvent le manipuler.
Once again, the French courts and government astonish us with stupidity and ineptitude. Can you imagine a French company putting a free language translator on the web? Can you imagine a French government even conceiving of the need for such a thing? Perhaps they should restrict themselves to food and philosophy and leave the real world to people who can handle it.
Translation by www.systransoft.com, which to my knowledge, is not a French company.
We already have sub-$100 laptops. They are used obselete PCs from ten to fifteen years ago. Stuff that gets given away as too old, slow, and embarrassing for anyone to be associated with today.
The point is; all these sub-$100 laptops are unique. They all have individual things wrong with them. Dead pixels, dead floppy, one burned- out bit on a parallel port, flakey loose power connector, etc... They aren't shiny new shrink-wrapped machines. Unless you consider a 'GameBoy' to be a laptop. After all, it has a computer chip, keys, and an LCD screen.
Plus there is no central place where you can go with '$100 in my hand' (shades of the Velvet Underground) and get one on these old laptops. They aren't even worth the eBay shipping charge.
But, to get technical about it, yes we do already have sub-$100 laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
Assume that they (the media corporations) are successful at preventing copying of new shows in HDTV, and new music on copy-protected audio CDs.
The old content which is not copy-protected becomes more valuable and more in demand among the people who won't be 'consuming' new product because of the effective copy restrictions.
Old content is more profitable for the corporations because the cost of creating it has already be amortized. Any revenue from its sale is pure profit, even if the numbers of sales are much lower than new product. Plus there is no expense developing artists and audience interest in new shows when marketing old product. Why spend a million dollars for publicity on Boobies & Shoes or Two-Penny PsychoNigga when you can just release another Greatest Hits of some Classic Rock One-Hit-Wonder Band?
Chaps, the TV is like heroin.
Television is a phosphorus screen that presents a ever changing pattern of light onto your eyes.
Heroin is a biochemical that blocks active extreme pain in the brain. When there is no pain, heroin makes the same brain receptors feel great relief and well-being, regardless of the external conditions.
Please be more precise with your metaphors.
Continous use of heroin results in a biochemical change of the brain receptors that it acts on. The receptors begin to require heroin to function normally. Not replenishing them with heroin results in pain and convultions in the user to the point where they will engage in high crimes and other anti-social behavoirs in order to obtain more of this illegal chemical.
Absence of television will induce extreme boredom in people who have been spending long periods of time watching it.
There is a major difference between extreme pain with convultions and boredom.
What we really need is a photovoltaic material that is extremely hard. Something that can take repeated stresses of thousands of kilos per square centimeter and still produce a small amount of electricity from sunlight. It should have a high friction coefficient also.
Then we can replace the asphalt in road surfaces with this material. Roads take up a huge amount of land surface in inhabited areas and they are always facing direct sunlight. They go where the people are, which is where the electricity is needed.
In a sense this research is all too little, too late. It should have been done thirty years ago when the Arabs invaded Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calander, and cut off America's oil supplies. At that time, America couldn't respond to the seizure of the oil supplies because it had just been defeated in the incredibly stupid and wasteful Vietnam war. They basically had to surrender to the Arabs on the terms that they demanded through their front organization OPEC.
Actually it is the Arabs who should have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars in alternative energy research. Their primary vision is the defense of Islam, and no one in the West would hesitate to allow the destruction of Islam and its holy places if it were a choice between Islam and oil. By investing hundred of billions in energy studies, they could have developed technology and infrastructure by now that would have removed the necessity for having Westerners occupy militarily the Gulf oil fields and the holy cities that are in the area. But they chose to instead just buy jets and expensive automobiles and then just toss them away like used tissues.
Eventually it will be small companies like this one who develop the technology to move out of the oil era. And it will be done first in remote and unnoticed places where the Western media pays no attention. The situation will someday reach the point where the bankrupt 'superpowers' who believe that they are are in control of the world's destiny become only entertainment for people in places who have developed their economies outside of the oil-military power matrix run by the Arabs and the Americans.
Gore Vidal was working on his surrealistic follow-up to Myra Breckinridge when the US Supreme Court ruled that 'communities could set local standards' for naughty words. Since the same book would be on sale everywhere, this presented a problem of being exposed to legal action on the whim of any local prosecutor.
He approached this problem by substituing the names of the Supreme Court judges for the naughty words. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun became nouns and verbs for, well, you know.
Brilliant. Text came out like this:
"He Burgered her lustfully. His mighty Rehnquist thrusting deep into her forbidden, intimate Blackmum. She tried to stop him by grabbing his Powell's. She enjoyed it in the Whizzer White, but detested Burgering as against nature..."
Future versions of Myron, and foreign editions, lacked this feature. But it was wild in the original hardback.
My experience with the American legal system leads me to believe that this guy is crazy.
...(I assume that it was a he, just as everyone on Slashdot assumes that I'm male. I'm happy to be an "honorary male" for Slashdot, just like I was an "honorary White" when visiting South Africa in the Apartheit era)... is assuming that by coming up with a way to break the letter of the law in a way that contradicts the spirit of the law then he can affect the letter of the law.
Brilliant, but crazy.
He
But, in America (and, for that matter, all other places) the law can be very dangerous to play with. The legal system is like a large, dangerous, and unpredictable animal. This guy could easily be found guilty by a judge who just doesn't like him, and end up being sentenced to a long period in a American prison where homosexual rape is systematic and beatings, maimings, and AIDS are common.
I can all but guarantee you that this guy is white, middle or upper-middle class, and has never been arrested. No one in a minority, with limited financial resources, or with a criminal record would never "poke a sleeping dragon" with a case like this.
The consequences of failure are far too great, the advantages of success are all but nonexistant, and there is too much randomness and raw brutality in the 'justice' system to play games like this.
Yes, eBay seems to be a good place to sell. I have sold about 30 items on eBay in the past year. Most items bring more than I expect by about 20 percent. About 10 percent of the items sold bring a lower price than I had wanted.
I've also had three (of 30 items) bidders who didn't pay after winning the auction. If they contact me and agree to cancel the sale, I give positive feedback. If they don't contact me after about five days from the auction ending, I leave them NEUTRAL feedback, not negative.
I'll ask people to use money orders or cash instead of PayPal because of the 3 percent PayPal fee. There is also an eBay sellers and lister's fee, another 3 percent or so. And if the buyer uses a credit card on PayPal, the seller gets hit with another $3 fee on top of all the others.
Shipping fees will wipe out any gains that you make from buying low and selling high. I'm toying with doing used goods buying locally on CraigsList.
Still, eBay is good for trying new things. I find that with electronic musical instruments, eBay is like a low-cost long-term rental service. Since the instrument will almost always sell for the same amount as it was purchased, the only fee for using it is the charge for shipping it from the previous owner.
Even if the software is 100% accurate, students who use it rather than work on assignments are more likely to fail exams.
There is the possibility that by having advanced and seemingly 'intelligent' machines, the need for structured education can be questioned. If people don't need to master facts and figures to be productive, then there is no need for structured education to get this knowledge into people.
We can not judge people by their educational achievement if inexpensive machines allow 'uneducated' people to have the same or even greater levels of productivity than people who have mastered academic knowledge.
This is the fundamental and revolutionary implication of language translation software, should that it reache the point where it functions well enough to be productive. If it is cheap enough to be available to people who are in the working class and don't have access to academic educational resources, it will neutralize the arguments that people who have mastered academic material deserve to be in a higher social class than those who haven't acheived high GPA's.
This message brings up some excellent points about dealing with disruptive technology. A teacher whose job it is to get students to master material in a certain subject realizes that there is a machine that provide the same function that previously could only be gained by hard study.
What is more important, the knowledge gained through rigorous study or the ablility to acomplish what the studing provides through a machine.
Being technical oriented, I have to say the machine. But I am not being disrespectful of all the hard work that goes into learning a language. I'm saying that if people don't want to bother to learn a language, then use the machine if you need a translation. This is a difficult position to defend when colleges still require a few years of a foreign language to get a liberal arts degree and students couldn't care less.
But I still defend the position. Use the translation software to do your homework. It's more important to master the translation software or machine than it is to master the actual language. Even if you study hard and get an 'A', in a few years you will forget it. And the machines are only going to get better and cheaper. It's your education, your life, your (or your parent's) tution.
George Gilder once said that the languages that you need to know to be successful are English and C++.
Still for the most part, the language translation software still sucks and depending on it can put you into some truly embarrassing positions. I think that language translation software (for text) comes in five rough levels:
1 Word substitution.
2 Phrase and sentence.
3 Paragraphs and idioms.
4 Magazines, full-speed conversations, light literature.
5 Legal, diplomacy, allegory, and classical literature.
Each level being at least an order-of-magnitude more difficult to translate than the previous.
I think that most shrink-wrap translation software today is between levels 2 and 3. (for example-www.systransoft.com) BabelFish and Google site translation is between levels 1 and 2. With non-european languages, BabelFish and Google are incomprehensible and useless.
It would be interesting to see if in a few hundred years whether language translators work to perserve liguistic diversity or create a global 'pidgin' language.
2. "I don't watch TV, why do I want a TiVo?"
This is not a nonsense excuse, it's a real reason not to pay for television.
I've watched television since my parents got their first set in 1964. I was watching eight hours a day in the early 1970's.
But no more. Television is an extremely limited medium. there are only five things:
1: Sentimental pseudo-dramas with endless close-up shots of actors overacting under heavy lights and heavy make-up.
2: Canned laughter situation-comedies that are rarely if ever actually funny.
3. Talking heads going on endlessly; saying nothing.
4. The Game. Televising 'da game, man' hasn't changed much in fifty years. Turn on a TV and within a half-second you know if you have on 'the game'. It never stops; it never changes. You either like it or not.
5. Commercials. They used to be 60 seconds, now they are all 30 or 15 seconds. Some people consider them to be a unique American art form; some people consider pissing on a electric wire to be an art form. Nearly everyone thinks commercials suck and trys to avoid them.
That's it. That's all television is. And, it is all that it will ever be. Because of its institutional structure and technical limitations, it is all television can ever be.
Myself, I would rather watch DVDs, ride bicycle, write code, dance, make love, or eat pizza than watch television.
Nothing that the television industry can do could make me go back to watching television. It's not hatred or contempt. It's just that television is simply too limited for me anymore. I've seen everything that it can possibly do. I've just gone beyond it. It doesn't matter any more how cheap that it is or what format it is.
5.
I remember seeing recently a program that could retrieve the data from WAV files of early home computer programs. This program was specifically for the Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer and MC-10.
The program examined the ampltitude of the data sample (from the ADC conversion for creating the WAV file). It counted the number of samples above a certain value until the sample values fell back below that value. Then it recreated the bytes according to the home computer's frequency-shift- keying strategy.
There might be another program to create WAV files from home computer data and programs.
While this data conversion across media is interesting, I doubt that there is much worth saving from these old home computers. Except, of course, the Apple II and some Trash 80s (the affectionate and appropriate name for early Tandy-Radio Shack Z80-based micros) that were used for business records. Most of the stuff that really worth saving was transfered to the PC or the Mac, or was printed and could be retrieved through optical character recognition.
A more complex challenge would be getting large amounts of data from the thousands of 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies that can't be read because of soft errors, but were never backed up because people assumed that their data was safe.
The Dalles, Oregon, is not really all that attractive of a place to live. It has more than its share of meth tweekers, gun freaks, and broke-ass rednecks. It can be a miserable little place. There is nothing near it except Portland. The nearest Fry's Electronics is 90 miles away to the West.
It is right on the geographic change line between the green and wet Pacific Northwest zone and the vast American 'empty quarter' that extends about 800 miles to the East, and to the South, and to the North.
The drive to Portland is quite beautiful through the Columbia River Gorge. And there are two exquisite mountains nearby; Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams.
Still, Google might have difficulty getting people to stay in The Dalles, OR.
"Geez, guys!"
"All that work and trouble, and what you give me is an arm?"
"You could have made me a new thought-controlled five-axix huge super-fine dick!"
"But no, you gotta make some silly monkey-ass arm!"
"What do supposed to do with this extra new arm?
"I already have two good ones".
"Hey, what are you doing with that saw?"
"Holy shit! Someone call PETA fast! These white-coats are fuckin' nuts!"
Congratulations to the engineering team that produced such powerful processors with low electrical power requirements.
Now let's take a brief microsecond to consider the impact that this technology will have on our lives. And specifically what types of conflicts will it create.
In very general terms, every advance in digital technology increases the level of conflict between the people who 'own' ideas, recordings, works-of-art, and other ethereal cultural commodities that can be now more easily distributed by the new digital technology.
Creating a machine (a microprocessor in this case) that removes video processing from a fixed location and makes it handheld portable will invoke a backlash by the content owners. And this backlash will be a renewed and more focused effort to get laws passed to detain, fine, and imprison people for viewing, manipulating, and distributing video content that is primarily, at the present time, pre-recorded and copyrighted 'property' of the media corporations.
In another application, I see these handhelds being used the lower the cost of advanced language translators by at least an order of magnitude.
I can see governments in 10-20 years claiming that they own their national language and either attempting to ban these translators outright, or demanding a huge tax on them 'in the interests of preserving the national government's control of the nation's language and culture'. I can see places like Singapore banning handheld language translators when schoolchildren start refusing to memorize how to write thousands of Chinese characters when the handheld translator can do the interpretation of the written character into the spoken word (and vice versa).
In an era of rapid technological change such as this one, it is important to take a little time to at least try to predict the disruptive impact that any new type of technology will have.
There might be life on Mars?!? Small microscopic organisms with enough DNA info to fill a floppy disk.
So What? We got lots of life here on earth. Earth is the life planet. So would you cut the health care and education budgets to spend billions of dollars to find out if there is or isn't life on Mars?
Maybe these guys are just a plant for Steven Spielberg's big new movie where the life on Mars comes to Earth with hostile intent. But good-ol' Tom Cruise kicks their rubber-masked ass back home where they belong.
Jeez. $250 million remakes of cheezy $40,000 movies of the 1950's. Or 1930's, "King Kong" anyone? Aren't you just pissing in your pants in anticipation of these once-in-a-lifetime millenium-event movie blockbusters?
More Jeez and crackers. Some scientist quote-unquote who is about to lose his government grant because he can't think of new and expensive ways to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap, forms a committee of other poor white-coat schumcks in the same position in order to concoct a weird theory that life may exist on Mars. (and if you only give me another $200 million in research funds...I won't ever have to go back to teaching undergrads, er.. what I mean to say is "Our team will be able to confirm whether this theory will lead to the most exciting discovery in human history!"
You are a solder.
You Kill.
You get killed.
That is what you do.
When you become a solder, you give up your family.
You give up your friends.
You give up your career.
You do something different now.
You kill. And you get killed.
If you can't accept this, or deal with it, then you shouldn't be a solder.
Because you're not doing anyone any good by going to the other side of the world and pretending to be one.
Look, if you sign up for this shit (and you did), then tell your friends and your co-workers, and above all your family, that you no longer exist in their world. And tell them that it would probably be best if they were to assume that you never did.
You aren't going to understand war if you are more interested in how you are going to get pictures of your dog and your kid's baseball games while you're in 'the service'.
Face it, if you are more interested in how you are going to get pictures of your dog and your kid's baseball games, then you aren't a solder.
And you don't understand war.
War means that you give all that up. War means that you chose to give up most of what makes you a decent and civilized human being. And it means that you aren't going to get it back when you come back from your 'tour of duty'.
You aren't coming back. Even if you do live. You are now different...you can't go back to the way that things were.
Again, If you can't accect this or don't believe it, then don't sign up to be a solder. Because you aren't doing yourself or your country any 'service' by pretending to be one.
The Viet Cong understood this;
The Mujaadeen understand this:
and you can't defeat them until you understand this and accept it as well.
otherwise, you're just pissing away billions after billions of your people's wealth for a war that you are just going to lose anyway.
So forget about phoning home.
You signed up...war is your home now.
Not really,
Region coding is based on the idea that pricing entertainment at American prices regardless of the local income level is the best way to maximize Hollywood profits.
That's completely absurd regardless of whether or not the product is pirated.
Entertainment is a product that has a high fixed initial production cost and a next-to-nothing copying and distribution cost. So Hollywood would be getting all the money that the pirates are currently getting if they would just lower the price of the legal DVDs to the price that the pirates are selling them for.
They could regionalize these low cost DVDs (that is, keep them from coming to America and other high price countries) by dubbing them into the local language and providing bonus features on the local DVD from people in the local country.
But they won't do this. Hollywood is stubborn and stupid. They want the world to change to their own L.A. fantasy. Until they get out of their own little 'reality distortion field', then they will continue to lose all potential developing world profits to the video pirates. Regardless of what laws and treaties they manage to pass.
Hello,
What you say is true now because the local governments believe that the pirates are providing a valuable service to the country. A service that is worth more than Hollywood's claim that they are being defrauded by the local people who aren't paying the American price for entertainment.
That will change when Hollywood agrees to provide product at the price that the local people can afford. Then the local authorities will work with Hollywood against the pirates for a percentage of the profit (in taxes). Even in areas where the government is weak they still have the ability to harass and influence.
But in the current situation, the amount the government receives in payoffs from the pirates is greater than the amount they would receive in taxes if the product were only sold locally at American prices.
Hollywood is too dumb and too greedy to figure this out.
Libraries are often the largest buyers of an individual book.
Say a new author writes an incredible first novel. A publisher puts $40,000 into an author's advance, some promotional ads in New York Review of Books and other magazines, and the printing costs of 5,000 hardback copies.
And they sell 500 copies in the first six months of release. They have to store all the other copies, or pulp them.
Or they send several copies to influential library societies. These librarians read the book and write positive recommendations in the library journals.
A thousand libraries throughout the country buy one to five copies each. Thousands of people read the book "for free" through the library and recommend it to their friends. Word of mouth promotion builds and the author's next book has an advance printing of 50,000 copies and a thousand libraries buy five copies each (at full price).
Libraries and book publishers have a symbiotic relationship that each understands and appreciates. Hollywood has nothing that compares to this long and trusted relationship between publishers and libraries. And never will.
The studios have no idea of how to deal with the vast differences of average incomes in various parts of the world.
They need to accept that people will only pay a certain percentage of their income for an entertainment product. The fact that is percentage is a much larger absolute amount in the wealthy parts of the world doesn't mean that the people in the poorer parts of the world are stealing product. They are paying the same percentage of their income for entertainment.
The studios should make deals with the 'pirates' in the poorer parts of the world. The 'pirates' would provide reproduction, marketing, distribution, and promotion in the local market and the studios would get a percentage of the price for the product that the local market will bear.
The studios get a stable payment and continued market share that will grow in absolute financial value as the local economy gets wealthier. The 'pirates' get legal legitimacy and market placement. They agree to only distribute at low cost a certain Hollywood studio's movies and to prevent the distribution of low-cost DVDs into the wealthy sections of the world.
Everybody wins; everyone makes money now and more money in the future.
Hollywood wants globalization of its products, but remains embarrassingly clueless about what this means in real-world terms.
What Hollywood is having a really difficult time understanding is that digital technology is causing a great transformation in how people think of their entertainment purchases.
The old 20th-century way, which Hollywood is based, is strictly pay-per-view. This is either through individual theater movie admissions or individual media (VCR or DVD) limited time period rentals. People select individual entertainment products (particular films) from multiple competing sources that offer products at the same price per view. Each theater and video store basically charges the same, but has completely different selections (the film currently showing at that theater) or genre specialization (theme-oriented video outlets).
The 21st century will probably have people getting unlimited entertainment from a single provider at a subscription price. This is what we're beginning to see now with NetFlix and will most likely continue when NetFlix begins to offer films that can't be seen through any other outlet. That would happen if NetFlix distributed through DVD the films of SunDance and/or Gaumont. Films that couldn't support the costs of wide theatrical release, but would be profitable through DVD subscription.
Another example is the public library. Libraries buy and distribute lots of DVDs. It is a subscription service in the sense that it is supported by a tax and freely available for all people in the tax-base. If you don't go to theaters or rent movies through video stores, then the library is the sole subscription service referred to above.
With 21st century models, encrypting and copy-prevention doesn't make any economic sense. The reproduction cost for individual copying of a single product is next-to-nothing and its distribution encourages people to join the subscriber base (which is like a fan club).
Furthermore, 21st century entertainment will be much more focused and consumer exclusive than 20th century mass entertainment products.
People will try to keep their culture and entertainments private, lest they get stolen by the global media corporations that will slap unbreakable DRM on them. The best stuff will be guarded, invitation-only, and restricted by mutual agreement of the private subscription society. Works of art will be privately commissioned by wealthy patrons and selectively distributed through P2P, like in 15th century Florence. This will be to avoid censorship and the political effects that all great works of art invoke.
People will be writing books and Master's degree thesises on this topic. So the ideas presented will seem disjointed and hanging in a Slashdot message.
But I don't think that there's any real future for film DVD copy-protection.
Instead of going on for a hundred messages about the miniscule details of P2P, encryption, and the rest, let's assume that the MPAA can stop P2P and think of what the effects would be and the unintended consequences.
So... Assume that someday,
Super DRM is in place on Hollywood movies. When you download a Hollywood film, they have a record of the film and the PC address that it went to.
Now what are they going to do? Will they just have an automatic robot prosecutor (like the photo-radar that automaticly sends you a speeding ticket)? What will the fine be? $100,000 per movie? And what if no one pays? Do they automatically link to your bank account and deduct $100,000; or $10,000; or maybe just 50% of whatever's in the account? Will they have the ability to automatically garnish your wages so that 35% of whatever you earn for the rest of your life goes to them before taxes?
And just exactly how many people do they think that they are going to do this to in a country that has more guns than people before the leader of MPAA gets his pointy-little head blown off?
There are millions of people out there trading movies. Not one thinks that there is anything wrong with doing it. Not one thinks that the movie that they just spent hours downloading for a crappy little image is worth paying hundreds of dollars for, never mind hundreds of thousands of dollars. If they did, then they would pay $20 for the DVD. Or ten dollars to go to the theater and watch it.
So, what are they going to do? Have a lottery?
They gather data on 100,000 movie downloads and then pick one at random. Throw every lawyer in Hollywood and this poor schmuck, destroy his life, and require you to watch a five minute summary of it in the theater between the Pepsi ads and movie previews?
And if they did do this? Would it make their basic product any better? Would you be more willing to shell out $12 to go see White Cop, SmartAss Black Cop XXXIV and the local 12 screen multiplex? Or the latest braindead-on-arrival CGI cliche-ridden mess from a film industry on auto-pilot?
There are thousands of movies made each year. Hundreds of them are good and some are mind-boggling excellent. Most will never get seen by the people would be willing to pay real money for the opportunity to enjoy them.
P2P is the only way that Hollywood is going to get this vast reservoir of good movies together with the willing and eager audience. Frankly, P2P is the only way that Hollywood is going to be around fifty years from now.
I wish I could say to these people to just take their head out their ass, stop trying to fight the future, and start paying attention to all the people who are seriously interested in keeping the Hollywood entertainment industry in good health through this period of epic change.
But I don't really have much hope for them anymore. Hollywood is its own worst enemy, not the P2P film freaks.
They sure have a difficult time understanding that the old 20th century way of buying music is pretty much over.
The old way being you pay them 30-50% of the hourly minimum wage for a three to five minute recording on a stable physical medium.
They keep squeezing their heads to come up with new ways to keep this old form of business going, but it's fading every day.
The new music transaction format is much different. There is a completely different amount of music that the consumer gets for the same amount of money.
Now you buy an old hard disk that has 10 to 100 Gigabytes of MP3 or OGG compressed format audio of hundreds of albums in a certain genre or era of music. Some of it you keep, some of it you discard, some of it you will never listen to, some of it you pass on to others, some of it you alter, sample, or mix, and some of it you never know who the artist is.
Of course, you don't buy or trade these old hard disks full of unknown music from the music industry companies. It's not their business model. They couldn't even conceive of selling music in this way. They are doing everything that they can think of to actually put people in prison for selling or tranactioning music in this format.
But it doesn't matter. There has been a fundamental change in the nature of the distribution and storage format for audio in the past ten years. The music industry, which is a contradiction of terms in this new era, will have to come to terms with it.
Our terms.
One last thing, guys, don't put anyone in prison for listening to music. It will have long term nasty consequences, even including bloodshed when the penality for copying and listening to illegal music begins to approach the penality for kidnapping and killing music industry executives. And it won't stop or change the transformation that is happening in the entertainment industry. the new technology is a marketing challenge, not a criminal act that requires inprisonment.
We'd like to think that you won't let all this tough talk and macho posturing about putting people in jail and conficating their life savings for listening to music get out of control. But, frankly, we're losing our confidence in your ability to think rationally.
After all, it's only rock'n'roll.
multi-lane highway that stretches straight as an arrow from my windshield out to the horizon that has a speed limit under 85 miles per hour is just a maddening waste of time and a dangerous source of boredom.
If you're bored driving 85 miles per hour then I suggest that you start smoking some stronger weed while you're driving.
Or get a motorcycle.
De nouveau, les cours de Français et le gouvernement nous étonnent
avec la stupidité et le manque de justesse. Pouvez-vous imaginer une
compagnie française mettre un traducteur libre de langue sur
la web? Pouvez-vous imaginer une conception égale de gouvernement français
du besoin d'une telle chose ?
Peut-être ils devraient se limiter à la nourriture et à la
philosophie et laisser le vrai monde aux gens qui peuvent le
manipuler.
Once again, the French courts and government astonish us with stupidity and ineptitude.
Can you imagine a French company putting a free language translator on the web?
Can you imagine a French government even conceiving of the need for such a thing?
Perhaps they should restrict themselves to food and philosophy and leave the real world to people who can handle it.
Translation by www.systransoft.com, which to my knowledge, is not a French company.
We already have sub-$100 laptops. They are used obselete PCs from ten to fifteen years ago. Stuff that gets given away as too old, slow, and embarrassing for anyone to be associated with today.
The point is; all these sub-$100 laptops are unique. They all have individual things wrong with them. Dead pixels, dead floppy, one burned- out bit on a parallel port, flakey loose power connector, etc... They aren't shiny new shrink-wrapped machines. Unless you consider a 'GameBoy' to be a laptop. After all, it has a computer chip, keys, and an LCD screen.
Plus there is no central place where you can go with '$100 in my hand' (shades of the Velvet Underground) and get one on these old laptops. They aren't even worth the eBay shipping charge.
But, to get technical about it, yes we do already have sub-$100 laptops.