1. Identify a specific application of a technology well-known so painfully obvious and easy to implement that nobody would even think it was worth distinguishing from any other use.
2. Quietly file patent, putting enough spin on it to make it sound special enough, but still broad enough to apply to every application of aforementioned technology
3. Reveal existence of patent once independently developed infrastructure becomes so ubiquitous, it would be impossible for an entire industry to exist without and proceed to charge up the nose or destroy the industry in the process.
Once again someone confuses liberty with gratis. We'll make our own "free" content thank you very much. However, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are in a position to dictate what that content can be. Bad MPAA!
The story, and the links themselves, was written by someone from IDG, and was simply reposted on CNN.com. They also have some litle disclaimer: "External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive", blah, blah, blah. That famous Time-Warner media synergy finally kicked in and link appears to be gone now. This was probably just the doing of some retarded news script that doesn't understand the hypocrisy it just commited on behalf of its owners.
If the MPAA should sue anyone, it's the CCA, who conned them into believing that CSS actually works to prevent copying. This case should have been thrown out long ago on the grounds that CSS isn't a copy protection system, but apparently if you lie and call one thing something that it isn't over and over, it (legally) becomes true.
if they even come close to the writing and characterization that the animated series (beyond and "present") had, you won't be dissapointed. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, among the numerous others who have worked on Batman, know it better than anyone else. Check out this book which Paul Dini wrote, it really captures the essence of who Batman is in a way that few others have. The artwork is excellent too. It's short, so you might want to just take a quick read through it at your local bookstore if you can find it.
Hopefully Stephenson will bring a sense of reality and plausibility to the "future", and not just the usual gimmicky technology you see in near-future stuff like this (something that i felt hurt the cartoon, but not by much).
Do you believe that some of the more extreme proponents of DeCSS, who advocate the "Information wants to be free (as in speech AND beer, whether the person who made it wants it to be or not)" philosiphy and the 1337 warez m0nkeys who take pride in being assholes towards authority are being used as a scapegoat to ignore those who are legitimately concerned over their right to fair use? The ruling did a decent job of typecasting everyone invloved in the former category, one which I don't wish to be included in.
Ultimately, they want to install compulsary implants into everyone's brains that detect watermarks in copyrighted stimuli and bill the victim accordingly.
People vote for what they've heard of
on
Voteauction.com
·
· Score: 1
The simple act of getting attention and letting people know that you exist is all that is neccesary to get elected. My roommate put up a bunch ofposters all over campus with his name in big, bold white on pblack background letters. Upon closer inspection, the poster didn't even say what office he was running for. zNow he's this year's student senate president.
The only reason we have a 2 party system is that those 2 parties are the only one's capable of making enough noise. Independents in local elections stand a better chance, but on a national level, you need complete national recognition, and that only comes if you can get the attention of the media to do our campaigning for you. Tom Brokaw is free advertizing.
That's why this year I'm voting for Doty (if you watch the Daily Show, you know who I'm talking about)
GMC was supposed to be a "temporary" solution anyway. They've stretched the original as far as its going to goto meet the needs of a Gnome file manager, and its time to move on
I was watching Silicon Spin, John C. Dvorak's (the C stands for Windbag) pundit show on ZDTV a few weeks ago, and they had the president of Be as one of their pundits. At one point he claimed that some of the developers he knew in the applications department were very enthusiastic about porting their crap t Linux, but the high-and-mighty OS people wouldn't have it, and kept that project down.
Personally, I don't even want to see Microsoft anything on Linux. Can they be trusted to behave and conform to Unix conventions like directory structure, or are they going to Windowize everything to fit their application-centric worldview?
Oh, yeah, pressing the enter key once to ignore all those evil suggested packages was really that hard:) (then again, maybe they've changed stuff between the time you stopped and I started using Debian, but I found dselect, albeit a tad nonintuitive, far easier than rpm based systems which just bitch if you don't have a dependency and force you to hunt it down yourself)
Remember, the point is to fix the security holes. It may be fun to make Microsoft look bad, but that doesn't plug up the holes that have been made widely obvious on millions of systems. Waiting for the developer to find out about the hole when it appears on the front page of the New York Times isn't going to get it fixed any faster. Prompt disclosure is still necessary, though, to keep companies like Microsoft from sweeping it under the rug, and to alert affected users that they have holes to plug.
Carmack gives a good explanation on why wee need more than jsut 32 bit color.
Basically, he's saying that with higher fill rates, more multipass rendering is possible (dispaly resolutions aren't going to increase to match by that much, and getting 5000 FPS is kind of a waste, so more multipass rendering is the most effective use of it), but with that many more passes comes more error, even at 32 bit. It may not matter now on most consumer cards, but on a machine like this it's going to show up if you push it to its limits.
The hope of a better life is what has driven our species to explore our world, and better make use of our environment through technology. To give up that instinct to stretch ourselves and push the limits of what we can accomplish and what we can discover, to limit what we hope to accomplish by our own ignorance, is to give up that hope which makes our life worth continuing. Maybe we can't bring the benefits of our success to everyone on this world, but that is no reason to give up on ever reaching beyond what we have already.
Maybe finding other civilizations won't have any direct benefit. They might not be able to feed our hungry, or cure our diseases, or end our wars. They might even be a bunch of assholes. Assholes or not, it isn't enough for me or the thousands of others who run SETI@Home to simply guess if we are alone in the universe, and we won't be satisfied until we know for certian.
I keep hearing people calling UNIX obselete, but can't recall hearing exactly why it's obsolete? Could you direct me to these superior technologies that should have displaced UNIX?
I think King means well, but he's got the percentage thing all wrong. Not that peole who read it and like it won't pay, but there is probably going to be a large group of people who are going to see what the buzz is about, download the thing, scan through it a bit maybe, but don't intend to actually read the whole thing. Many more will take the "try before you buy" approach, and might decide that they don't like it enough to want to finish it. How many people who watch PBS actually make donations? A fixed level or a more conservative ratio would be more effective of measuring its success. Instead of focusing on each person paying their share, the attention sould be given to making it free for all, and the more generous patrons contributing to its advancement.
I think Stephen King has maybe figured the right formula for "free" (as in speech) content. Release a part of the work for free, no strings attached, but promise further installments if readers pay voluntarily. The work becomes free for all after the payments are met, and the artist still gets paid. Tying payment directly to the promise of more from the artist is a lot more direct than the nebulous claims of "if we can't make money then the artists can't work and our culture will die" claims that the movie studios and recording companies make. In a way its like the patronage system, where someone contracts a work form an artist for a significant sum, but the work is made for all to enjoy (and the patron gets some recognition for their name getting attached to the credits). The trick will be to get it so it's relatively painless for many people to pay small amounts, and the incentive is made obvious, but not naggingly repetitive to the point of PBS beg-a-thons. I really hope King's effort succeeds, and becomes a model for more ventures like this.
They're probably just trying to avoid ugly situations that might occur if someone misses the bills on BigAssSite.com and some squatter jumps on it faster than you can say Yet Another Precedent Setting Domain Name Related Lawsuit. Imagine if that domain that microsoft forgot to pay the bills for last christmas was snatched up by someone else. It doesn't make it right, but it could get really ugly if some high profile site let their domain slip and lost it to some idiot squatter.
No... but you can make a better and more valuable use for something that was worth less before you modified it. How much do you think a 1Ghz Athlon is worth in raw materials?
Also, stuff like patents and copyright make nothing into something. Until recently, the nothing was printed on something, but now the nothing can be sent over the Internet without the something, and the something is worthless without the nothing. So now the nothing must be considered something even though nothing costs nothing to reproduce and distribute.
The Crusoe's tuned more for (energy) efficiency, rather than raw performance. On a desktop, this might not be so much of a priority, but for a laptop it makes a difference. I think your average laptop user (i.e. me) would be more concerned with getting a few more hours of battery life out of his or her laptop than getting a few more frames per second out of Quake. Burning through laptop batteries at 1 GHz of x86 performance isn't quite as cool as it sounds when you have a dead battery in 45 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Identify a specific application of a technology well-known so painfully obvious and easy to implement that nobody would even think it was worth distinguishing from any other use.
2. Quietly file patent, putting enough spin on it to make it sound special enough, but still broad enough to apply to every application of aforementioned technology
3. Reveal existence of patent once independently developed infrastructure becomes so ubiquitous, it would be impossible for an entire industry to exist without and proceed to charge up the nose or destroy the industry in the process.
Hey, it's working for Rambus
damn I can't type :)
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.dvdcca.org
Once again someone confuses liberty with gratis. We'll make our own "free" content thank you very much. However, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you are in a position to dictate what that content can be. Bad MPAA!
Not that it wasn't fun calling them on it, of course ;)
The story, and the links themselves, was written by someone from IDG, and was simply reposted on CNN.com. They also have some litle disclaimer: "External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive", blah, blah, blah. That famous Time-Warner media synergy finally kicked in and link appears to be gone now. This was probably just the doing of some retarded news script that doesn't understand the hypocrisy it just commited on behalf of its owners.
If the MPAA should sue anyone, it's the CCA, who conned them into believing that CSS actually works to prevent copying. This case should have been thrown out long ago on the grounds that CSS isn't a copy protection system, but apparently if you lie and call one thing something that it isn't over and over, it (legally) becomes true.
um, it is a live-action movie. You're probably thinking of the direct to video "return of the joker". This is something else
if they even come close to the writing and characterization that the animated series (beyond and "present") had, you won't be dissapointed. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, among the numerous others who have worked on Batman, know it better than anyone else. Check out this book which Paul Dini wrote, it really captures the essence of who Batman is in a way that few others have. The artwork is excellent too. It's short, so you might want to just take a quick read through it at your local bookstore if you can find it.
Hopefully Stephenson will bring a sense of reality and plausibility to the "future", and not just the usual gimmicky technology you see in near-future stuff like this (something that i felt hurt the cartoon, but not by much).
Do you believe that some of the more extreme proponents of DeCSS, who advocate the "Information wants to be free (as in speech AND beer, whether the person who made it wants it to be or not)" philosiphy and the 1337 warez m0nkeys who take pride in being assholes towards authority are being used as a scapegoat to ignore those who are legitimately concerned over their right to fair use? The ruling did a decent job of typecasting everyone invloved in the former category, one which I don't wish to be included in.
Ultimately, they want to install compulsary implants into everyone's brains that detect watermarks in copyrighted stimuli and bill the victim accordingly.
The simple act of getting attention and letting people know that you exist is all that is neccesary to get elected. My roommate put up a bunch ofposters all over campus with his name in big, bold white on pblack background letters. Upon closer inspection, the poster didn't even say what office he was running for. zNow he's this year's student senate president.
The only reason we have a 2 party system is that those 2 parties are the only one's capable of making enough noise. Independents in local elections stand a better chance, but on a national level, you need complete national recognition, and that only comes if you can get the attention of the media to do our campaigning for you. Tom Brokaw is free advertizing.
That's why this year I'm voting for Doty (if you watch the Daily Show, you know who I'm talking about)
GMC was supposed to be a "temporary" solution anyway. They've stretched the original as far as its going to goto meet the needs of a Gnome file manager, and its time to move on
I was watching Silicon Spin, John C. Dvorak's (the C stands for Windbag) pundit show on ZDTV a few weeks ago, and they had the president of Be as one of their pundits. At one point he claimed that some of the developers he knew in the applications department were very enthusiastic about porting their crap t Linux, but the high-and-mighty OS people wouldn't have it, and kept that project down.
Personally, I don't even want to see Microsoft anything on Linux. Can they be trusted to behave and conform to Unix conventions like directory structure, or are they going to Windowize everything to fit their application-centric worldview?
Oh, yeah, pressing the enter key once to ignore all those evil suggested packages was really that hard :) (then again, maybe they've changed stuff between the time you stopped and I started using Debian, but I found dselect, albeit a tad nonintuitive, far easier than rpm based systems which just bitch if you don't have a dependency and force you to hunt it down yourself)
Remember, the point is to fix the security holes. It may be fun to make Microsoft look bad, but that doesn't plug up the holes that have been made widely obvious on millions of systems. Waiting for the developer to find out about the hole when it appears on the front page of the New York Times isn't going to get it fixed any faster. Prompt disclosure is still necessary, though, to keep companies like Microsoft from sweeping it under the rug, and to alert affected users that they have holes to plug.
Carmack gives a good explanation on why wee need more than jsut 32 bit color.
Basically, he's saying that with higher fill rates, more multipass rendering is possible (dispaly resolutions aren't going to increase to match by that much, and getting 5000 FPS is kind of a waste, so more multipass rendering is the most effective use of it), but with that many more passes comes more error, even at 32 bit. It may not matter now on most consumer cards, but on a machine like this it's going to show up if you push it to its limits.
The hope of a better life is what has driven our species to explore our world, and better make use of our environment through technology. To give up that instinct to stretch ourselves and push the limits of what we can accomplish and what we can discover, to limit what we hope to accomplish by our own ignorance, is to give up that hope which makes our life worth continuing. Maybe we can't bring the benefits of our success to everyone on this world, but that is no reason to give up on ever reaching beyond what we have already.
Maybe finding other civilizations won't have any direct benefit. They might not be able to feed our hungry, or cure our diseases, or end our wars. They might even be a bunch of assholes. Assholes or not, it isn't enough for me or the thousands of others who run SETI@Home to simply guess if we are alone in the universe, and we won't be satisfied until we know for certian.
That is why I run a screen saver.
I keep hearing people calling UNIX obselete, but can't recall hearing exactly why it's obsolete? Could you direct me to these superior technologies that should have displaced UNIX?
heh, the Slashdot effect alone could murder this thing.
I think King means well, but he's got the percentage thing all wrong. Not that peole who read it and like it won't pay, but there is probably going to be a large group of people who are going to see what the buzz is about, download the thing, scan through it a bit maybe, but don't intend to actually read the whole thing. Many more will take the "try before you buy" approach, and might decide that they don't like it enough to want to finish it. How many people who watch PBS actually make donations? A fixed level or a more conservative ratio would be more effective of measuring its success. Instead of focusing on each person paying their share, the attention sould be given to making it free for all, and the more generous patrons contributing to its advancement.
I think Stephen King has maybe figured the right formula for "free" (as in speech) content. Release a part of the work for free, no strings attached, but promise further installments if readers pay voluntarily. The work becomes free for all after the payments are met, and the artist still gets paid. Tying payment directly to the promise of more from the artist is a lot more direct than the nebulous claims of "if we can't make money then the artists can't work and our culture will die" claims that the movie studios and recording companies make. In a way its like the patronage system, where someone contracts a work form an artist for a significant sum, but the work is made for all to enjoy (and the patron gets some recognition for their name getting attached to the credits). The trick will be to get it so it's relatively painless for many people to pay small amounts, and the incentive is made obvious, but not naggingly repetitive to the point of PBS beg-a-thons. I really hope King's effort succeeds, and becomes a model for more ventures like this.
They're probably just trying to avoid ugly situations that might occur if someone misses the bills on BigAssSite.com and some squatter jumps on it faster than you can say Yet Another Precedent Setting Domain Name Related Lawsuit. Imagine if that domain that microsoft forgot to pay the bills for last christmas was snatched up by someone else. It doesn't make it right, but it could get really ugly if some high profile site let their domain slip and lost it to some idiot squatter.
No... but you can make a better and more valuable use for something that was worth less before you modified it. How much do you think a 1Ghz Athlon is worth in raw materials?
Also, stuff like patents and copyright make nothing into something. Until recently, the nothing was printed on something, but now the nothing can be sent over the Internet without the something, and the something is worthless without the nothing. So now the nothing must be considered something even though nothing costs nothing to reproduce and distribute.
The Crusoe's tuned more for (energy) efficiency, rather than raw performance. On a desktop, this might not be so much of a priority, but for a laptop it makes a difference. I think your average laptop user (i.e. me) would be more concerned with getting a few more hours of battery life out of his or her laptop than getting a few more frames per second out of Quake. Burning through laptop batteries at 1 GHz of x86 performance isn't quite as cool as it sounds when you have a dead battery in 45 minutes.