People, you are not seeing the "cream of the crop" on SciFi channel, because the best cheap movies have sex in them. No, they're not porn, but they're not prude either.
Yes, they are porn. More sex than you can show on TV = porn, even if you don't write it that way. (Note that FX has a show that's practically all about sex, and several times has shown sex, albeit on a PG-13 style with everything covered.)
Any company who builds a device as heavy as the treo with features and what not, while not including wi-fi is lshort-sighted at best, despicable at worst
The Treo is a cell phone. How many cell phones have you seen with WiFi?
Palm DOES make WiFi enabled PDAs. And those all either have bluetooth or can connect via a cable to a dedicated cell phone.
In fact, come to think of it, Palm's venerable Tungsten C is a WiFi device, comparable to the Treo for everything but voice and a bit of antiquity.
Also, the newest Palms have enough spare speed to run Skype -- they're reportedly creating a client for it, which will presumably run via WiFi.
Honestly, the OS restarting on an application crash isn't that big of a deal, anyway. All programs save their state when you switch out of them, so even after a reboot, you don't lose your work in the programs. And the reboot takes only about 10 seconds--so it's really not bad at all... when it happens.
FWIW, if you have a Lifedrive -- Palm's new top-level device with an internal HDD -- you can have some of the built-in applications crash. Especially if you switch back and forth a lot.
And, in addition to the Treo 650, both the LD and the Tungsten III have Non-Volitale Flash Ram, which wards against losing your battery power.
Oh, and every device Palm has made in the last three years includes a SD Memory slot, which can easily hold the entire RAM state from any Palm.
(Now, I do have a LD, and it's dramatically better than my old Zire--and in many ways less aggrivating than my home PC. But it can be made to crash--but then again, it's also very easy to fix that problem.)
In many areas (at least California, I believe), the power company will "credit" excess energy against your balance, but if you pump in more energy than you consume, they aren't required to and won't buy the difference from you.
It works the other way in NY--if your home generates current, NiMo buys it and, hopefully, sells it as they would the power from anyone else.
In NY--at least in the Upstate/Albany area--the company that owns and runs the wires isn't exactly the same company that runs the power plants. At one time they didn't even own any power plants, although Niagara Mohawk was boughty by National Grid a few years back, and AFAIK NG does own a few plants.
Where do these people come from? Do they exist in the real world? I've never met anyone who actually thinks like this. This HAS to be a troll, there's no way it can be real.
Don't say that. A side effect of a free and creative society is that a lot of very weird ideas show up. Some of them go away, and others are adopeted becasue they really do make more sense.
And why should tax-payers pay for this? Do you know how much corporations make? You're talking about maybe DOUBLING the tax burden just so cheapskates like you don't have to pay to licence patented technology.
I believe you can more articulately argue your objection by noting that the proposed system would place a burden of paying for an invention upon those that do not directly profit from it--thus, as I noted, going against capitalist principals.
The value should be computed (and retroactively applied, if necessary) by a formula that is refined as we gain more experience with the system so as to encourage creativity without stifling freedom.
Interesting. It might work better if it was a larger economic model--i.e., applied to normal wages and not simply creative expression.
But, really, the best thing if you want to aborgate the "make and hide" scheme of IP law is mandatory licensing -- a patent must be licensed by anyone who wishes it for a percentage of gross revenues not more than, oh, 25%. Do the same thing for copyright--"at a cost not more than the cost of original publication" and you've just matched the "I want to use that" and "I want to be paid for it" sides perfectly.
Btw:
Current IP laws are evil, in my opinion.
Economics are evil. Money is evil. Laws are even evil. But they're all necessary and tame evils.
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it.
We don't buy that line for ANYTHING, least of all our sources of caffeene.
Not to mention that the invention of instant coffee added a whole new "ready in the front line" class to the beverage.
And, of course, the fact is that since we're the land of the free and capitalism and all that, if your "well trained barrista" and whatnot could manage to sell coffee, they'd smack Starbucks around.
Starbucks et al exist because they make coffee that people drink. Simple story.
I'm not an expert in any of this, but it's obvious power technology is being suppressed.
If I had an energy source that generated any voltage, at all, at a cheaper cost than what comes out of my wall, you'd better beleive I would use it. And I would likely expand it as much as I could, because once I have my power paid for, then I get to start selling the voltage.
Energy technology is NOT being suppressed. Unless, of course, by "supprsed" you mean "forced out of the market by cheaper alternatives."
How else can you explain our cars still using the same exact fuel they always have while my 5 year old computer is consider ancient.
Your five year old computer (1) has the same basic archetecture as a 25 year old computer (2) likely has interchangeable hardware and software with a brand-new comptuer and (3) has an artifically increased innovation curve due to the newness of the technology.
It is an artificial infringement on liberty and just plain stupid.
No, it's a way to ensure that the first person to get a chance to profit from an invention is the inventor.
Figure out a way to get "chance" into that automatic-restitution scheme of yours, and you'll have a workable replacement. But if a crappy invention and a great invention both get rewarded the same, well, then you've just re-invented communism.
No, you just have to come up with all-new descriptions. They cannot have a monopoly over the idea of an elf or a magician.
No, they can't. But they can have a copyright on a specific elf. Or a specific kind of elf. Or a specific, original, and named elven characteristic.
And, again, "writing it all over again" is the sort of work that just wastes time, when all you want is "D&D but with superheroes." (Not to mention the rather common sentiment that the OGL is a "good thing".)
That said...
Second, if you look at the license, there's no real quality control standards or ways to implement them.
The license is a requirement to join their fan-club, which itself has standards and a review process. $20/year gets you access to their group of folk to run the LARP how WW thinks it should be ran, along with a few other small things.
And among the WW LARP crowd, "what White Wolf thinks" actually goes quite a long way.
It's like phone books: the arrangement of names in alphabetical order by surname isn't original, and thus is unprotectable. A very creatively designed rpg might be able to avoid this, but I doubt it.
There's no cleverness requirement for copyrightability, AFAIK. There's a fair torrent of original ideas in RPGs these days--and, if the systems were ever copyrightable, then the long length of copyright and the lack of a duty to police mean that they're still enforceable.
D&D, Storyteller, and GURPS may all be old hat now, but they weren't when they were first published--and each one is still published by a corporate entity with rights to the original publisher.
To say otherwise would be to say that A cannot derive the rules of poker from B's copyrighted book about poker; he can only derive some of the rules, such as calling, alone. That's just stupid.
Yes, it would be--except that (1) poker has been around long enough to be public domain even if it had been copyrightable and (2) RPG games are more complex than any other game out there.
Even the most similar RPGs have distinct differences, in both how the various numbers are taken, how they interact, and what the range of possibilities is. It's arguable that even if the "system" of D&D isn't copyrightable, the individual and collective widgets that partake of the system are.
And if you have to come up with all-new races, classes, feats, skills, spells, and items, then you're doing a lot of work that the OGL can save you from.
(Not to mention that, while it's not part of WotC's OGL offering, the very-copyrightable settings that RPGs such as White Wolf use are quite applicable to the OGL.)
And, of course, to get back on topic, the OGL serves the same purpose as White Wolf's new policy. It's part scary document that the company can use against people who do things with their games that they'd like to curtail, and part easy license for those that just want to play the game.
$20/year just to use White Wolf's rules is silly. $20/year to run games with an "official White Wolf seal of approval" is more than a fair price.
Meh. Pen and pencil games aren't a huge profit sector.
Yes, exactly. All the more reason not to even chance it.
Those are unrelated to what we're talking about, though.
IIRC, a federal judge found not too long ago that a five-note chord that was unconciously inseted into a song was copyrightable infringement. It's exactly what we're talking about--the courtroom is not a certain place, and being able to stay far away from it is a worthwhile thing, the benefits of the OGL notwithstanding.
The objective measure is that there are more games on the market and less hard feelings in the four year block between 2001 and now than in the four-year block between 1996 and 2000. The OGL, quite unlike the GPL, did exactly what it set out to do.
Hardly a "worthless" license.
As for the compilation issue--it's enough to be raised in court, which means more than likely enough to keep from being summarily dismissed. And considering that those who play pen and paper RPGs find differences ad nauseum between different "systems", I wouldn't put my money on any court saying that they're not distinct.
In the city, where your "stop and go" driving ensures that you're running the car at its most effeciient rather than its least.
Hybrids don't do as advertised partly because the EPA tests don't make sense for them, and mostly because they weren't designed for the long and steady runs of an American highway system.
Sure you can -- you can still just GPL the text, or whatever.
GPL'ing a roleplaying game text has about as much utility as GPLing a contribution to the Mach kernel. Sure, you get to look down your nose at impure licenses, but you'll never see your work used anywhere else.
They're both pretty useless, IMO.
I didn't point out the other big, huge reason why the OGL makes sense. It's a "get out of court free" card. If hasbro wanted to, they could smack around a little guy in 1999 who tried to follow the letter of copyright--they may lose the case, but they would certainly make the little guy lose his lifetime profit for his game.
After 2000, hasbro can't do a darn thing--and everyone in the industry knows it.
Rules are totally uncopyrightable.
A rules is, yes. So is a single line of code, or a single attribute of a character. But the more small uncopyrightable things you add together, the more copyrightable your creation becomes.
And with the stricter and stricter interpretations of the courts with regards to copyright recently, it's probably not a safe bet to presume that you'll win in court.
In fact, that's never a safe bet. Even if you've got videotape of the other guy beating you senseless.
Of course, the d20 license is stupid too -- if you're careful, it's perfectly legal to make unauthorized modules and such for the commercial market.
Yes, but it's harder. And you don't get the ability to copy at-will from certain of their rulebooks, and you don't get the feel-good sensation of contriuting to copyleft.
And, to be pendatic, you're confusing the d20 System Trademark license with the OGL. The latter is the copyleft-inspired free-to-all one; the former is the one that lets you use the "d20 System" trademark.
(Not to mention that if you want to do MORE than modules--like, oh, make your own RPG game that's simliar to but different from D&D--the law gets a heck of a lot fuzzier.)
No. It is explicity legal--the court IS a triad of the government, and in its purview it has every bit as much say as the other branches have in theirs.
Abortion, right to a lawyer, right of privacy, criminality of segregation, and a whole slew of other things are law ONLY because the Supreme Court said so.
Explicity, clearly, black-letter legal.
(And as others have pointed out--in the USA, if no one says it's illegal, then it ISN'T. See Amendments 10 and 14.)
Oh, damn, you mean this guy is the moron who thought up the damn "Singularity?"
Let me sum up my objection simply: I doubt that we're going to be able to make a quantum-state realtime adaptive intelligence that's significantly better than the one between your ears.
Way to dismiss the billions who don't have interenet access. And the hundreds of millions who respect the law.
Oh, and it's not "so-called illegal downloading." Copyright infringement to avoid buying the album was fairly recently made a federal crime.
What the Real Criminals don't realize is that when there is a war- anything goes, and the victor goes to the people who are willing to IGNORE laws written by the enemies:)
Nooo. When there is a war, things get violent. And victor goes to the side that's better able to organize, gather, and execute its forces.
I've heard repeatedly that this is not the case, as in there is no law that makes copying for personal use legal. It's only the Betamax ruling that makes it legal.
That "Betamax ruling" was the US Supreme Court interpreting federal law to say "there's no rule against time-shifting, and it should be allowed."
And since Congress hasn't succeeding in baring the practice, it's legal. Sterling legal.
Last I recalled, a jury trial only happened in criminal cases, not civil cases.
WRONG. I mean, dead wrong. As in, any time you wind up before a judge on a question of fact (i.e, "I was going over the speed limit", "He didn't pay me the money he owed me"), you have the right to demand a jury.
The "trials" you sometimes see, such as Judge Judy on TV, where there isn't a Jury are really "arbitrations" or "hearings." In the TV show's case, the parties explicitly agreed to this form of arbitration because they wanted to save on legal fees and get an answer quickly.
BTW, if there are no disputed FACTS, then don't count on a jury trial--because that's all that juries decide, facts. The legal ramification of facts (like, "bob killed his wife so he wouldn't have to pay alimony") are decdied by a judge.
(Things like the MS trial are special cases, not common run-of-the-mill instruments. And we'll also note that the "trial" had nothing to do whatsoever with any crime or tort...)
Slashdot Mirror
People, you are not seeing the "cream of the crop" on SciFi channel, because the best cheap movies have sex in them. No, they're not porn, but they're not prude either.
Yes, they are porn. More sex than you can show on TV = porn, even if you don't write it that way. (Note that FX has a show that's practically all about sex, and several times has shown sex, albeit on a PG-13 style with everything covered.)
Any company who builds a device as heavy as the treo with features and what not, while not including wi-fi is lshort-sighted at best, despicable at worst
The Treo is a cell phone. How many cell phones have you seen with WiFi?
Palm DOES make WiFi enabled PDAs. And those all either have bluetooth or can connect via a cable to a dedicated cell phone.
In fact, come to think of it, Palm's venerable Tungsten C is a WiFi device, comparable to the Treo for everything but voice and a bit of antiquity.
Also, the newest Palms have enough spare speed to run Skype -- they're reportedly creating a client for it, which will presumably run via WiFi.
how come Palm, and for that matter anyone else, don't make a unit that shape and size any more?
Because it didn't sell as well as it could have.
Not to mention that the Palm V shape isn't really all that great--it's too squarish, with a lot of unneeded horizontal area.
OTOH, a Palm V-shaped palm with a 5-way navigator, 320x480 screen, and some more add-ons would be interesting.
Honestly, the OS restarting on an application crash isn't that big of a deal, anyway. All programs save their state when you switch out of them, so even after a reboot, you don't lose your work in the programs. And the reboot takes only about 10 seconds--so it's really not bad at all... when it happens.
FWIW, if you have a Lifedrive -- Palm's new top-level device with an internal HDD -- you can have some of the built-in applications crash. Especially if you switch back and forth a lot.
And, in addition to the Treo 650, both the LD and the Tungsten III have Non-Volitale Flash Ram, which wards against losing your battery power.
Oh, and every device Palm has made in the last three years includes a SD Memory slot, which can easily hold the entire RAM state from any Palm.
(Now, I do have a LD, and it's dramatically better than my old Zire--and in many ways less aggrivating than my home PC. But it can be made to crash--but then again, it's also very easy to fix that problem.)
However, you are forgetting one important - perhaps the most important - side of copyright: "I don't want others to fuck around with my work".
Good point. But That's easily remedied by not requiring mandatory licensing for derivitve works--just copies or use of patents.
Much as I am loathe to quote Michael Moore, we all know capitalism selects the "ruthless but mediocre few."
That's for the jobs where a ruthless but mediocre choice is the cheapest.
Best example to counter your quote: Apple. While arguably ruthless, they don't make their dollars by being mediocre.
In many areas (at least California, I believe), the power company will "credit" excess energy against your balance, but if you pump in more energy than you consume, they aren't required to and won't buy the difference from you.
It works the other way in NY--if your home generates current, NiMo buys it and, hopefully, sells it as they would the power from anyone else.
In NY--at least in the Upstate/Albany area--the company that owns and runs the wires isn't exactly the same company that runs the power plants. At one time they didn't even own any power plants, although Niagara Mohawk was boughty by National Grid a few years back, and AFAIK NG does own a few plants.
Where do these people come from? Do they exist in the real world? I've never met anyone who actually thinks like this. This HAS to be a troll, there's no way it can be real.
Don't say that. A side effect of a free and creative society is that a lot of very weird ideas show up. Some of them go away, and others are adopeted becasue they really do make more sense.
And why should tax-payers pay for this? Do you know how much corporations make? You're talking about maybe DOUBLING the tax burden just so cheapskates like you don't have to pay to licence patented technology.
I believe you can more articulately argue your objection by noting that the proposed system would place a burden of paying for an invention upon those that do not directly profit from it--thus, as I noted, going against capitalist principals.
The value should be computed (and retroactively applied, if necessary) by a formula that is refined as we gain more experience with the system so as to encourage creativity without stifling freedom.
Interesting. It might work better if it was a larger economic model--i.e., applied to normal wages and not simply creative expression.
But, really, the best thing if you want to aborgate the "make and hide" scheme of IP law is mandatory licensing -- a patent must be licensed by anyone who wishes it for a percentage of gross revenues not more than, oh, 25%. Do the same thing for copyright--"at a cost not more than the cost of original publication" and you've just matched the "I want to use that" and "I want to be paid for it" sides perfectly.
Btw:
Current IP laws are evil, in my opinion.
Economics are evil. Money is evil. Laws are even evil. But they're all necessary and tame evils.
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it.
We don't buy that line for ANYTHING, least of all our sources of caffeene.
Not to mention that the invention of instant coffee added a whole new "ready in the front line" class to the beverage.
And, of course, the fact is that since we're the land of the free and capitalism and all that, if your "well trained barrista" and whatnot could manage to sell coffee, they'd smack Starbucks around.
Starbucks et al exist because they make coffee that people drink. Simple story.
I'm not an expert in any of this, but it's obvious power technology is being suppressed.
If I had an energy source that generated any voltage, at all, at a cheaper cost than what comes out of my wall, you'd better beleive I would use it. And I would likely expand it as much as I could, because once I have my power paid for, then I get to start selling the voltage.
Energy technology is NOT being suppressed. Unless, of course, by "supprsed" you mean "forced out of the market by cheaper alternatives."
How else can you explain our cars still using the same exact fuel they always have while my 5 year old computer is consider ancient.
Your five year old computer (1) has the same basic archetecture as a 25 year old computer (2) likely has interchangeable hardware and software with a brand-new comptuer and (3) has an artifically increased innovation curve due to the newness of the technology.
It is an artificial infringement on liberty and just plain stupid.
No, it's a way to ensure that the first person to get a chance to profit from an invention is the inventor.
Figure out a way to get "chance" into that automatic-restitution scheme of yours, and you'll have a workable replacement. But if a crappy invention and a great invention both get rewarded the same, well, then you've just re-invented communism.
No, you just have to come up with all-new descriptions. They cannot have a monopoly over the idea of an elf or a magician.
No, they can't. But they can have a copyright on a specific elf. Or a specific kind of elf. Or a specific, original, and named elven characteristic.
And, again, "writing it all over again" is the sort of work that just wastes time, when all you want is "D&D but with superheroes." (Not to mention the rather common sentiment that the OGL is a "good thing".)
That said...
Second, if you look at the license, there's no real quality control standards or ways to implement them.
The license is a requirement to join their fan-club, which itself has standards and a review process. $20/year gets you access to their group of folk to run the LARP how WW thinks it should be ran, along with a few other small things.
And among the WW LARP crowd, "what White Wolf thinks" actually goes quite a long way.
It's like phone books: the arrangement of names in alphabetical order by surname isn't original, and thus is unprotectable. A very creatively designed rpg might be able to avoid this, but I doubt it.
There's no cleverness requirement for copyrightability, AFAIK. There's a fair torrent of original ideas in RPGs these days--and, if the systems were ever copyrightable, then the long length of copyright and the lack of a duty to police mean that they're still enforceable.
D&D, Storyteller, and GURPS may all be old hat now, but they weren't when they were first published--and each one is still published by a corporate entity with rights to the original publisher.
To say otherwise would be to say that A cannot derive the rules of poker from B's copyrighted book about poker; he can only derive some of the rules, such as calling, alone. That's just stupid.
Yes, it would be--except that (1) poker has been around long enough to be public domain even if it had been copyrightable and (2) RPG games are more complex than any other game out there.
Even the most similar RPGs have distinct differences, in both how the various numbers are taken, how they interact, and what the range of possibilities is. It's arguable that even if the "system" of D&D isn't copyrightable, the individual and collective widgets that partake of the system are.
And if you have to come up with all-new races, classes, feats, skills, spells, and items, then you're doing a lot of work that the OGL can save you from.
(Not to mention that, while it's not part of WotC's OGL offering, the very-copyrightable settings that RPGs such as White Wolf use are quite applicable to the OGL.)
And, of course, to get back on topic, the OGL serves the same purpose as White Wolf's new policy. It's part scary document that the company can use against people who do things with their games that they'd like to curtail, and part easy license for those that just want to play the game.
$20/year just to use White Wolf's rules is silly. $20/year to run games with an "official White Wolf seal of approval" is more than a fair price.
Bah. Real men play GURPS.
;)
Y'know, I should have figured GURPS would be your game of choice.
Meh. Pen and pencil games aren't a huge profit sector.
Yes, exactly. All the more reason not to even chance it.
Those are unrelated to what we're talking about, though.
IIRC, a federal judge found not too long ago that a five-note chord that was unconciously inseted into a song was copyrightable infringement. It's exactly what we're talking about--the courtroom is not a certain place, and being able to stay far away from it is a worthwhile thing, the benefits of the OGL notwithstanding.
The objective measure is that there are more games on the market and less hard feelings in the four year block between 2001 and now than in the four-year block between 1996 and 2000. The OGL, quite unlike the GPL, did exactly what it set out to do.
Hardly a "worthless" license.
As for the compilation issue--it's enough to be raised in court, which means more than likely enough to keep from being summarily dismissed. And considering that those who play pen and paper RPGs find differences ad nauseum between different "systems", I wouldn't put my money on any court saying that they're not distinct.
So, where does a hybrid make sense?
In the city, where your "stop and go" driving ensures that you're running the car at its most effeciient rather than its least.
Hybrids don't do as advertised partly because the EPA tests don't make sense for them, and mostly because they weren't designed for the long and steady runs of an American highway system.
Sure you can -- you can still just GPL the text, or whatever.
GPL'ing a roleplaying game text has about as much utility as GPLing a contribution to the Mach kernel. Sure, you get to look down your nose at impure licenses, but you'll never see your work used anywhere else.
They're both pretty useless, IMO.
I didn't point out the other big, huge reason why the OGL makes sense. It's a "get out of court free" card. If hasbro wanted to, they could smack around a little guy in 1999 who tried to follow the letter of copyright--they may lose the case, but they would certainly make the little guy lose his lifetime profit for his game.
After 2000, hasbro can't do a darn thing--and everyone in the industry knows it.
Rules are totally uncopyrightable.
A rules is, yes. So is a single line of code, or a single attribute of a character. But the more small uncopyrightable things you add together, the more copyrightable your creation becomes.
And with the stricter and stricter interpretations of the courts with regards to copyright recently, it's probably not a safe bet to presume that you'll win in court.
In fact, that's never a safe bet. Even if you've got videotape of the other guy beating you senseless.
From a strictly hedonistic point of view, no, there are much better things to do with the money.
Twelve passive years for 100% ROI is pretty good. Especially if the system lasts for longer than that.
Wind might be even better--although as I understand it you need a relatively considerable investment to achieve worthwhile current.
Of course, the d20 license is stupid too -- if you're careful, it's perfectly legal to make unauthorized modules and such for the commercial market.
Yes, but it's harder. And you don't get the ability to copy at-will from certain of their rulebooks, and you don't get the feel-good sensation of contriuting to copyleft.
And, to be pendatic, you're confusing the d20 System Trademark license with the OGL. The latter is the copyleft-inspired free-to-all one; the former is the one that lets you use the "d20 System" trademark.
(Not to mention that if you want to do MORE than modules--like, oh, make your own RPG game that's simliar to but different from D&D--the law gets a heck of a lot fuzzier.)
No. It is explicity legal--the court IS a triad of the government, and in its purview it has every bit as much say as the other branches have in theirs.
Abortion, right to a lawyer, right of privacy, criminality of segregation, and a whole slew of other things are law ONLY because the Supreme Court said so.
Explicity, clearly, black-letter legal.
(And as others have pointed out--in the USA, if no one says it's illegal, then it ISN'T. See Amendments 10 and 14.)
Oh, damn, you mean this guy is the moron who thought up the damn "Singularity?"
Let me sum up my objection simply: I doubt that we're going to be able to make a quantum-state realtime adaptive intelligence that's significantly better than the one between your ears.
Because nearly everyone on the earth
:)
Way to dismiss the billions who don't have interenet access. And the hundreds of millions who respect the law.
Oh, and it's not "so-called illegal downloading." Copyright infringement to avoid buying the album was fairly recently made a federal crime.
What the Real Criminals don't realize is that when there is a war- anything goes, and the victor goes to the people who are willing to IGNORE laws written by the enemies
Nooo. When there is a war, things get violent. And victor goes to the side that's better able to organize, gather, and execute its forces.
I've heard repeatedly that this is not the case, as in there is no law that makes copying for personal use legal. It's only the Betamax ruling that makes it legal.
That "Betamax ruling" was the US Supreme Court interpreting federal law to say "there's no rule against time-shifting, and it should be allowed."
And since Congress hasn't succeeding in baring the practice, it's legal. Sterling legal.
Last I recalled, a jury trial only happened in criminal cases, not civil cases.
WRONG. I mean, dead wrong. As in, any time you wind up before a judge on a question of fact (i.e, "I was going over the speed limit", "He didn't pay me the money he owed me"), you have the right to demand a jury.
The "trials" you sometimes see, such as Judge Judy on TV, where there isn't a Jury are really "arbitrations" or "hearings." In the TV show's case, the parties explicitly agreed to this form of arbitration because they wanted to save on legal fees and get an answer quickly.
BTW, if there are no disputed FACTS, then don't count on a jury trial--because that's all that juries decide, facts. The legal ramification of facts (like, "bob killed his wife so he wouldn't have to pay alimony") are decdied by a judge.
(Things like the MS trial are special cases, not common run-of-the-mill instruments. And we'll also note that the "trial" had nothing to do whatsoever with any crime or tort...)