Guh. Just because something is commerically driven does not mean it's void of merit. Of course this particular show, which I didn't see, may be devoid of merit. Here's why:
Fox News is arguably a news channel. This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news. You, for example, may think less of it. As their demographic changes from a news wanting audience to an entertainment wanting audience they'll move farther and farther into the trash that you decry. That's what their audience will demand and that's what they'll have to provide.
Now, channels like CNN want to remain a news based channel and they mostly act accordingly. You respect them for their news and even though they are commerically driven they're fairly respectable.
It's all just a question of news versus entertainment. It seems that Fox News is heading more down the "A Current Affair" entertainment route. Don't decry it for that.
My god, did anybody even READ the Commuications Decency Act? I know we got part of it thrown out in court (that whole wholesome thing), but the other sections of it held some great stuff. For example ISPs ARE EXEMPT FROM THIS SORT OF THING.
Guh... why aren't the courts looking at the laws? I don't really understand that.
I've never been clear as to why people with learning disabilities were granted extra time on tests.
I've always looked at it this way. Part of the test IS the test itself. In order to get a good grade there are many things that are required beyond merely intelligence and logic. Firstmost you need to be able to read. Inability to read, or inability to read well, will greatly diminish your ability to perform well on the test; and this is part of the test.
I don't know about you, but when I took the SATs I had a reading passage from Thoreau. I turned the page, saw the name Thoreau, and let out an audible groan. I hate Thoreau, I hate plowing through his words. My inability to read Thoreau probably negatively affected my grade negatively, and I accept that. It was part of the test. A different author would have given me a different result, but it wasn't on my test. Thoreau was built into this test, and it hurt me. That's fine.
Things like dislexia will always hurt the person with it. It's not as if the real world opens up and slows down for the person with dislexia to take his time and do his or her job at his or her own pace. As a dislexic you're probably not going to make it as a book review for the New York Times... it's just unlikely. You'll also probably have a hard time with all written tests and written work for the rest of your life. This is not the fault of the SATs, this is just something about how you perform on tests and written work.
I have a hard time with Thoreau and since Thoreau was on my test I did less well. You have a hard time reading... this will always negatively affect you, and since it was on your test you performed less well. It accurately displays your ability to take a written test. It's accurate. I don't quite understand how it should be handled differently, or why.
This article refrences the fact that many people consider the SATs to be racist:
Dr. Atkinson's decision, which would apply to both in-state and out-of-state students, came several years after a university faculty committee urged that the SAT's be made optional to increase the number of black and Hispanic students gaining admission. Earlier, California had banned the use of race and ethnicity for college admission. Like other school officials around the country Dr. Atkinson has sought to balance the values of diversity and academic quality.
Why, I wonder, is this considered? What about the SATs make them unbalanced... favored AGAINST minority students? It's not like the math questions involve how much insurance on Bentley's will cost, or finding the average price of Evian water over a three year period. I've always thought that these accusations of standardized testing being racist were unfounded.
Does anybody out there actually understand why they're often considered racist? I can't think of one solid reason.
I've never understood what it was that people so clearly despised about standardized testing. Sure, it doesn't neccessarily ascertain the exact value of each and every individual taking the test, but there really is no good means of doing that in a single classroom, let alone nation wide. I've always found that SAT scores, while not neccessarily reflective of classroom grades, do fairly accurately depict the intelligence of test taker.
There are people who are very smart, but don't do tremendously well in school either because it bores them, or because they simply don't work hard. These people will have bad grades, but are still very intelligent and still can add to your institutes of higher learning. SAT scores, for this type of student, are traditionally quite high. These are the people you want around, even if they have goofed off in the past... the smart ones.
On the other hand there are people who get tremendously high grades, but are in general incompetent. I know you can all think of one of your friends or associates from high school or college who did extremely well on every test, but was otherwise a goof. Any conversation would leave them confused and befuddled. Even the most simple arguement would quite them with nothing more than a few fading protestations. These people do less well on the SATs... and rightfully so. They may work very hard, but they're not clever.
I guess it just depends what you consider more important. If you want someone who works hard but is unintelligent, then you go for someone with high grades and a low SAT. If you want someone clever but unmotivated, you choose high SAT but low grades.
Or you could just compare all available information and choose the best person. Why they don't just do this is beyond me.
So the time is finally here that the script kiddies will raise to the upper echelon of society.
Since I think we all know Napster and the RIAA will not introduce any competant means of blocking copyrighted songs beyond a simple name check on the title of the MP3, the day has finally arrived when that stupid script kiddie hacker type will come in handy. Sure, Napster will block any songs that have Metallica in the filename (ignoring the fact someone might write a song called "I hate Metallica") but will their filters catch:
|\/|3T4||C4
?
No, they certainly will not. In the future the only people who will be able to use and understand the songs available through napster will be these ever-present script kiddies.
I've been trying to look at that site since it got mentioned on kuro5hin the other day and every time I've tried it's been down. I don't know if it's a slashdot / kuro5hin effect (does kuro5shin have an effect?) but I'm not entirely certain that that's a real website which actually functions.
Well, I guess other people have used it otherwise it wouldn't keep showing up. Maybe it's just me. I'll go try again.
What we need is something that I've only seen mentioned about other countries a couple of times (mostly in connection with one of the infamous virus writers) is pre-payed ineternet cards, similar to pre-payed phone cards. You go to the local K-Mart (oops, make that Walmart) and pick up a card good for 100 hours of Internet time. You're given a dialup number, a username and a password... all good for 100 hours. After that time you buy another card.
Thegreat thing about this is, no names. They don't have your name, they don't have your credit card number, they don't have your address, they don't have you SS#; they don't have anything. The only problem with it is that they can still, if they want to, track your phone number using caller ID. I suppose a legal solution to this (assuming we're not into Blue Boxes here) is to simply call the phone company and ask for that twenty dollars a month (or whatever the fee is) service which blocks caller ID from identifying your phone. Or, if you want, you can do it for free by dialing *67. And hell, since it's your computer dialing every time, not you, you can simply add it the beginning of the dialup number the first time and forget it.
Instant quasi anonymous internet usage. The flaw is that the ISPs could, if they wanted, not accept phone calls from blocked customers... but why would they bother?
But how is it possible to live in a world without metaphors?
Ok, sure, metaphors simplify the situation. I'm sure that everybody who reads the New York Times (and most of the people who read slashdot minus the Natalie Portman/grits/Goatsex contingent) is a fairly intelligent person. With that it mind, even the extremely intelligent will not be able to fully grasp and articulate all the intricasies of the privacy battle today. The situation is simply too complex and too fluid in order to explain coherantly. Would you really want someone to go through a forty five minutes introductory speech everytime someone wanted to discuss a point of privacy? Of course not.
This is why we have metaphors. We use them as a cognative shortcut. We can't possible go through the world and understand everything about so in order to allow ourselves to have any opinion at all about most things we accept and utilize these metaphors. To most people (at least most people who read Slashdot and the New York Times) saying the phrase "Big Brother" is not simply referencing a metaphor. We instantly begin to reference everything we know about Big Brother, 1984, Winston Smith, George Orwell, fascism, totalitarianism, distopias and everything else. We combine it into a single phrase: "Big Brother" but it's really just a very large collections of concept from a fictional world that are combined with our experiences in the real world in order to make sense of everything.
Brazil is a twisted world so full of bureaucracy and fear that nothing ever gets accomplished. The only person who understands how things works and to fix things is a renegad plumber (he'd be a hacker today) who travels by darkness in a dark suit stealing orders from the official state plumbing agency... or some such.
It's twisted and strange, but i don't really see it as a good example of why we need electronic privacy. That movie was more about the idiocy of being a faceless number or file in the system then it was about the system taking more from you than it ought to have.
Both Orwell and Kafka are much better examples, but Brazil is certainly the best movie (the 1984 movie was no good, I've never seen a Kafka film).
As much as I like to see people putting more energy into the exploration and exploitation of space, doesn't India have a lot of infrastructure to work toward building up before worrying about the cosmos? They've just had an earthquake that killed thousands and thousands of people. How many of those people could have been saved by importing American building standards and restrictions and adding more support to the current buildings?
It just seems that a country that has constant problems with nature as well as their difficulty in even maintaining basic power for their population makes me wary that they may best be spending their money elsewhere.
And yes yes, I realize that these claims might also be applicable to the United States, that we could best be spending the space money elsewhere, but at least we're theoretically on the cutting edge and any of our space development leads into new territory, whereas India is merely exploring territory that is twenty or even thirty years old.
So is it impossible for poor people to make any financial decisions on their own, merely because they are poor?
By neccessity right now, I cannot buy a car. It's too expensive for me, I cannot afford it. Is this a social injustice? I would gladly trade some personal information in order to get a substancial discount... does this mean I'm being exploited? Should laws be made to right this wrong?
That's the point of the article. You can decide who you do and who you do not do business with depending upon whether you agree or disagree with their privacy policy and their treatment of the information they hold about you. If there are lots of people like you, then sites will cater to you and not collect information.
If, on the other hand, we all want free stuff and are willing to hand over our social security numbers to get free stuff, then you might have trouble finding your premium services online. And you know what, that's tough for you but good for society. The people are being provided with the services they want by the market, without help from the government and without help from any system besides the free market.
Uh, I don't know if you actually read the article, or just skimmed for something to karma whore and quote, but that was the same point made by the author. He said that that proposal, made by someone else, was a BAD idea. He said that they shouldn't need to ask your permission every step of the way because you quite frankly granted them some permission by participating in the system at all.
You should read the story before commenting on it.
The reason the power plants in California are in trouble is not because of anything EXCEPT too much government regulations. They were told that there was suddenly a free market for them to buy energy. This is good. However, they were told that they were not allowed to raise the price to consumers. This was bad.
When there's a free market for you to buy your basic neccessities of production, but not a free market to sell your output, what chances do you have to not go bankrupt when you're operating costs rise?
The fault for the situation in California rests entirely at the feet of the politicians who deregulated half, but not all, of the energy market. It was a foolish idea doomed to failure.
Why do you assume the poor will be willing to trade their privacy for cheaper products? And why would you dream of prohibiting them from doing so if they wish. These people are poor, but they're still rational. If they want to trade some information about themselves for a $100 off a computer, great! Cheaper computers for them and a better educated society.
To assume that you can make better decisions than someone who is poor, simply BECAUSE they are poor, is extraordinarily insulting.
Here's the question (which I'll follow by a little discussion of my one) but basically the point is how long do you think books, or other content, once given a copyright, should be able to maintain the exclusive rights to their work? It seems that books and music never enter the public domain anymore, why is this?
Anyway, here's some discussion (not part of the question and doesn't need to be forwarded):
Ok. I look at this situation and I'm torn. On one side is the fact that without copyright and trademark law, there is little or no incentive to create new works of art. On the other side, with trademarks and copyrights, we're living in an anti-capitalistic world meaning resources are being wasted.
So, we come to a middle ground.
The real problem, as I see it, is not that there are currently songs which are copyrighted and cannot be copied and sold. This is only fair and I, along with most other producers of content would be annoyed if, say, I wrote a book and tried to publish it only to find the next day that another company was giving a reprinted copy of my book away for free as a grab bag prize. Suddenly I cannot make a living (there are no performances for authors). So I do need copyright.
On the other hand, the blocking of others from selling something that they can produce and distribute more cheaply than I can is a shame, and there is no reason that after I'v been allowed to make my money from a product someone else can try to do a better job selling.
What we really have is a problem of time. For some reason it seems that copyright, unlike how it was originally intended, no longer expires. Patents on medines run out after 7 or so years to allow generic copies to be made, why can't the same hold true for content?
So, after 10 or so years, all content enters the public domain and can be reprinted or resold by anyone who wants. Anybody today could print up and sell Beatles albums at whatever cost they decided to charge. Suddenly there would be a true free market for Beatles recordings and the market would decide the price, instead of one company in an artificially controlled pricing system.
That's just my idea, but I truly believe it should be applied to all content: movies, music, books... everything. Give the authors ten years to make thier riches, then give them to the masses to use and reuse as they see fit. The public domain would once again be bountiful.
So let the governments try. Let them spend their money and resources on creating drugs and if they can do it better and faster than the companies, so be it. I think that they can't and it's misguided to try, but I'll give them a shot. But you can't blame the drug companies for wanting to make money. They're corporations. And that whole line about half the money not going to R and D is ridiculous, it doesn't matter where their money goes, it still goes somewhere and needs to be earned through profits on new drugs.
I actually saw this in Boston about a year ago with the director on hand. It was a pretty entertaining experience (with the exception of an extraordinarily slow openning credit sequence which I suppose could have been altered before it was released to the general public, I don't know).
Anyway, just let it be known that DaFoe most asssuredly deserves the Academy Award for best supporting actor and if he doesn't win it it's only because enough people didn't see this movie. He's an absolutely tremendous vampire and all aspiring vampires should look to imitate him.
Malkovitch, also wonderful, was a slightly more confusing charachter. But that's fine, I won't talk about it because it gives away the plot, but he's great as well. But hell, he always is.
Drug Companies spend their money developing these product which save lives, of course they are going to charge money for them. Of course. By the logic of the poster, the companies should be expected to give thier product away for free because, well hey, the drugs save lives? If they don't have the ability to make money on the drugs that they invent and develop themselves they will never develop any new drugs and we'll be in a lot bigger trouble in the long run. I'd rather have AIDS drugs expensive today and have a cure for that plague that's coming tomorrow, than have them free today and nothing in the future.
Think ahead people, you're living in today and it's going to destroy your future.
I clicked on the link before seeing your warning, it was just a webpage for a lavalamp graphic means for producing random numbers. I didn't find it very exciting, but it certainly wasn't anything like goatsex... what am i missing?
That really isn't much of an article. Ok, so there's plans for the Playstation 3 that seem to involve it being able to do everything from downloading music to landing the space shuttle from the privacy of your own home.
Well, yeah. Of course they're going to say that. Like every other company in the world they don't want to look like they've got nothing in the pipe so they come out and announce their newest product, which isn't even really designed yet, will be able to do everything imaginable.
"Hey, don't buy the XBox, in a year or two we'll have a system that can actually categorize your porn for you! None of that tedious self-sorting."
It's nothing. There's no specs, there's no hard information, there's nothing. Not even really worth reading.
Similar item already for Palm Pilots
on
Digital Doodling
·
· Score: 1
There's already an attachment to palm pilots which allows you to write on what appears to be a standard, ordinary notebook (the old paper sort) and have it captured by the palm. From this site:
The Seiko Instruments SmartPad(TM) is a zippered notepad portfolio, whichcaptures handwritten notes on an ordinary pad of paper and instantly sends them to your Palm Organizer via its infrared port. Using the enhanced SmartPad Palm applications, save your notes, drawings, and maps in any of the four major Palm applications. Using an optional modem and third party software, you can email your notes directly from your Palm.
SmartPad is the first product that lets you capture anything you write or draw, with the natural feel of pen on paper. Take notes and store them in your Datebook. Attach a map to a contact in the Address Book. Easily write down To Do's or Memos and save them for future reference.
there's a lot of other info about it at the above linked site. It looks like a really cool add-on... unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with my Visor so I'm out of luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Fox News is arguably a news channel. This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news. You, for example, may think less of it. As their demographic changes from a news wanting audience to an entertainment wanting audience they'll move farther and farther into the trash that you decry. That's what their audience will demand and that's what they'll have to provide.
Now, channels like CNN want to remain a news based channel and they mostly act accordingly. You respect them for their news and even though they are commerically driven they're fairly respectable.
It's all just a question of news versus entertainment. It seems that Fox News is heading more down the "A Current Affair" entertainment route. Don't decry it for that.
--
Guh... why aren't the courts looking at the laws? I don't really understand that.
--
I've always looked at it this way. Part of the test IS the test itself. In order to get a good grade there are many things that are required beyond merely intelligence and logic. Firstmost you need to be able to read. Inability to read, or inability to read well, will greatly diminish your ability to perform well on the test; and this is part of the test.
I don't know about you, but when I took the SATs I had a reading passage from Thoreau. I turned the page, saw the name Thoreau, and let out an audible groan. I hate Thoreau, I hate plowing through his words. My inability to read Thoreau probably negatively affected my grade negatively, and I accept that. It was part of the test. A different author would have given me a different result, but it wasn't on my test. Thoreau was built into this test, and it hurt me. That's fine.
Things like dislexia will always hurt the person with it. It's not as if the real world opens up and slows down for the person with dislexia to take his time and do his or her job at his or her own pace. As a dislexic you're probably not going to make it as a book review for the New York Times... it's just unlikely. You'll also probably have a hard time with all written tests and written work for the rest of your life. This is not the fault of the SATs, this is just something about how you perform on tests and written work.
I have a hard time with Thoreau and since Thoreau was on my test I did less well. You have a hard time reading... this will always negatively affect you, and since it was on your test you performed less well. It accurately displays your ability to take a written test. It's accurate. I don't quite understand how it should be handled differently, or why.
--
Why, I wonder, is this considered? What about the SATs make them unbalanced... favored AGAINST minority students? It's not like the math questions involve how much insurance on Bentley's will cost, or finding the average price of Evian water over a three year period. I've always thought that these accusations of standardized testing being racist were unfounded.
Does anybody out there actually understand why they're often considered racist? I can't think of one solid reason.
--
There are people who are very smart, but don't do tremendously well in school either because it bores them, or because they simply don't work hard. These people will have bad grades, but are still very intelligent and still can add to your institutes of higher learning. SAT scores, for this type of student, are traditionally quite high. These are the people you want around, even if they have goofed off in the past... the smart ones.
On the other hand there are people who get tremendously high grades, but are in general incompetent. I know you can all think of one of your friends or associates from high school or college who did extremely well on every test, but was otherwise a goof. Any conversation would leave them confused and befuddled. Even the most simple arguement would quite them with nothing more than a few fading protestations. These people do less well on the SATs... and rightfully so. They may work very hard, but they're not clever.
I guess it just depends what you consider more important. If you want someone who works hard but is unintelligent, then you go for someone with high grades and a low SAT. If you want someone clever but unmotivated, you choose high SAT but low grades.
Or you could just compare all available information and choose the best person. Why they don't just do this is beyond me.
--
Since I think we all know Napster and the RIAA will not introduce any competant means of blocking copyrighted songs beyond a simple name check on the title of the MP3, the day has finally arrived when that stupid script kiddie hacker type will come in handy. Sure, Napster will block any songs that have Metallica in the filename (ignoring the fact someone might write a song called "I hate Metallica") but will their filters catch:
|\/|3T4||C4
?
No, they certainly will not. In the future the only people who will be able to use and understand the songs available through napster will be these ever-present script kiddies.
It's kind of like encryption, for the stupid.
--
I've been trying to look at that site since it got mentioned on kuro5hin the other day and every time I've tried it's been down. I don't know if it's a slashdot / kuro5hin effect (does kuro5shin have an effect?) but I'm not entirely certain that that's a real website which actually functions.
Well, I guess other people have used it otherwise it wouldn't keep showing up. Maybe it's just me. I'll go try again.
What we need is something that I've only seen mentioned about other countries a couple of times (mostly in connection with one of the infamous virus writers) is pre-payed ineternet cards, similar to pre-payed phone cards. You go to the local K-Mart (oops, make that Walmart) and pick up a card good for 100 hours of Internet time. You're given a dialup number, a username and a password... all good for 100 hours. After that time you buy another card.
Thegreat thing about this is, no names. They don't have your name, they don't have your credit card number, they don't have your address, they don't have you SS#; they don't have anything. The only problem with it is that they can still, if they want to, track your phone number using caller ID. I suppose a legal solution to this (assuming we're not into Blue Boxes here) is to simply call the phone company and ask for that twenty dollars a month (or whatever the fee is) service which blocks caller ID from identifying your phone. Or, if you want, you can do it for free by dialing *67. And hell, since it's your computer dialing every time, not you, you can simply add it the beginning of the dialup number the first time and forget it.
Instant quasi anonymous internet usage. The flaw is that the ISPs could, if they wanted, not accept phone calls from blocked customers... but why would they bother?
But how is it possible to live in a world without metaphors?
Ok, sure, metaphors simplify the situation. I'm sure that everybody who reads the New York Times (and most of the people who read slashdot minus the Natalie Portman/grits/Goatsex contingent) is a fairly intelligent person. With that it mind, even the extremely intelligent will not be able to fully grasp and articulate all the intricasies of the privacy battle today. The situation is simply too complex and too fluid in order to explain coherantly. Would you really want someone to go through a forty five minutes introductory speech everytime someone wanted to discuss a point of privacy? Of course not.
This is why we have metaphors. We use them as a cognative shortcut. We can't possible go through the world and understand everything about so in order to allow ourselves to have any opinion at all about most things we accept and utilize these metaphors. To most people (at least most people who read Slashdot and the New York Times) saying the phrase "Big Brother" is not simply referencing a metaphor. We instantly begin to reference everything we know about Big Brother, 1984, Winston Smith, George Orwell, fascism, totalitarianism, distopias and everything else. We combine it into a single phrase: "Big Brother" but it's really just a very large collections of concept from a fictional world that are combined with our experiences in the real world in order to make sense of everything.
Eh, whatever, I like metaphors.
Brazil.
Good reference.
Brazil is a twisted world so full of bureaucracy and fear that nothing ever gets accomplished. The only person who understands how things works and to fix things is a renegad plumber (he'd be a hacker today) who travels by darkness in a dark suit stealing orders from the official state plumbing agency... or some such.
It's twisted and strange, but i don't really see it as a good example of why we need electronic privacy. That movie was more about the idiocy of being a faceless number or file in the system then it was about the system taking more from you than it ought to have.
Both Orwell and Kafka are much better examples, but Brazil is certainly the best movie (the 1984 movie was no good, I've never seen a Kafka film).
As much as I like to see people putting more energy into the exploration and exploitation of space, doesn't India have a lot of infrastructure to work toward building up before worrying about the cosmos? They've just had an earthquake that killed thousands and thousands of people. How many of those people could have been saved by importing American building standards and restrictions and adding more support to the current buildings?
It just seems that a country that has constant problems with nature as well as their difficulty in even maintaining basic power for their population makes me wary that they may best be spending their money elsewhere.
And yes yes, I realize that these claims might also be applicable to the United States, that we could best be spending the space money elsewhere, but at least we're theoretically on the cutting edge and any of our space development leads into new territory, whereas India is merely exploring territory that is twenty or even thirty years old.
Do with this what you will.
So is it impossible for poor people to make any financial decisions on their own, merely because they are poor?
By neccessity right now, I cannot buy a car. It's too expensive for me, I cannot afford it. Is this a social injustice? I would gladly trade some personal information in order to get a substancial discount... does this mean I'm being exploited? Should laws be made to right this wrong?
That's the point of the article. You can decide who you do and who you do not do business with depending upon whether you agree or disagree with their privacy policy and their treatment of the information they hold about you. If there are lots of people like you, then sites will cater to you and not collect information.
If, on the other hand, we all want free stuff and are willing to hand over our social security numbers to get free stuff, then you might have trouble finding your premium services online. And you know what, that's tough for you but good for society. The people are being provided with the services they want by the market, without help from the government and without help from any system besides the free market.
This was a good article.
Uh, I don't know if you actually read the article, or just skimmed for something to karma whore and quote, but that was the same point made by the author. He said that that proposal, made by someone else, was a BAD idea. He said that they shouldn't need to ask your permission every step of the way because you quite frankly granted them some permission by participating in the system at all.
You should read the story before commenting on it.
The reason the power plants in California are in trouble is not because of anything EXCEPT too much government regulations. They were told that there was suddenly a free market for them to buy energy. This is good. However, they were told that they were not allowed to raise the price to consumers. This was bad.
When there's a free market for you to buy your basic neccessities of production, but not a free market to sell your output, what chances do you have to not go bankrupt when you're operating costs rise?
The fault for the situation in California rests entirely at the feet of the politicians who deregulated half, but not all, of the energy market. It was a foolish idea doomed to failure.
He addresses this in the article.
Why do you assume the poor will be willing to trade their privacy for cheaper products? And why would you dream of prohibiting them from doing so if they wish. These people are poor, but they're still rational. If they want to trade some information about themselves for a $100 off a computer, great! Cheaper computers for them and a better educated society.
To assume that you can make better decisions than someone who is poor, simply BECAUSE they are poor, is extraordinarily insulting.
Here's the question (which I'll follow by a little discussion of my one) but basically the point is how long do you think books, or other content, once given a copyright, should be able to maintain the exclusive rights to their work? It seems that books and music never enter the public domain anymore, why is this?
Anyway, here's some discussion (not part of the question and doesn't need to be forwarded):
Ok. I look at this situation and I'm torn. On one side is the fact that without copyright and trademark law, there is little or no incentive to create new works of art. On the other side, with trademarks and copyrights, we're living in an anti-capitalistic world meaning resources are being wasted.
So, we come to a middle ground.
The real problem, as I see it, is not that there are currently songs which are copyrighted and cannot be copied and sold. This is only fair and I, along with most other producers of content would be annoyed if, say, I wrote a book and tried to publish it only to find the next day that another company was giving a reprinted copy of my book away for free as a grab bag prize. Suddenly I cannot make a living (there are no performances for authors). So I do need copyright.
On the other hand, the blocking of others from selling something that they can produce and distribute more cheaply than I can is a shame, and there is no reason that after I'v been allowed to make my money from a product someone else can try to do a better job selling.
What we really have is a problem of time. For some reason it seems that copyright, unlike how it was originally intended, no longer expires. Patents on medines run out after 7 or so years to allow generic copies to be made, why can't the same hold true for content?
So, after 10 or so years, all content enters the public domain and can be reprinted or resold by anyone who wants. Anybody today could print up and sell Beatles albums at whatever cost they decided to charge. Suddenly there would be a true free market for Beatles recordings and the market would decide the price, instead of one company in an artificially controlled pricing system.
That's just my idea, but I truly believe it should be applied to all content: movies, music, books... everything. Give the authors ten years to make thier riches, then give them to the masses to use and reuse as they see fit. The public domain would once again be bountiful.
So let the governments try. Let them spend their money and resources on creating drugs and if they can do it better and faster than the companies, so be it. I think that they can't and it's misguided to try, but I'll give them a shot. But you can't blame the drug companies for wanting to make money. They're corporations. And that whole line about half the money not going to R and D is ridiculous, it doesn't matter where their money goes, it still goes somewhere and needs to be earned through profits on new drugs.
Eh, this is a stinky subject for debate.
I actually saw this in Boston about a year ago with the director on hand. It was a pretty entertaining experience (with the exception of an extraordinarily slow openning credit sequence which I suppose could have been altered before it was released to the general public, I don't know).
Anyway, just let it be known that DaFoe most asssuredly deserves the Academy Award for best supporting actor and if he doesn't win it it's only because enough people didn't see this movie. He's an absolutely tremendous vampire and all aspiring vampires should look to imitate him.
Malkovitch, also wonderful, was a slightly more confusing charachter. But that's fine, I won't talk about it because it gives away the plot, but he's great as well. But hell, he always is.
That is all.
Drug Companies spend their money developing these product which save lives, of course they are going to charge money for them. Of course. By the logic of the poster, the companies should be expected to give thier product away for free because, well hey, the drugs save lives? If they don't have the ability to make money on the drugs that they invent and develop themselves they will never develop any new drugs and we'll be in a lot bigger trouble in the long run. I'd rather have AIDS drugs expensive today and have a cure for that plague that's coming tomorrow, than have them free today and nothing in the future.
Think ahead people, you're living in today and it's going to destroy your future.
I clicked on the link before seeing your warning, it was just a webpage for a lavalamp graphic means for producing random numbers. I didn't find it very exciting, but it certainly wasn't anything like goatsex... what am i missing?
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a copy of the Cease and Desist letter online, but you can see the patent here.
Funny, things are already changing though, if you look at this bake-off/cache-off page
That really isn't much of an article. Ok, so there's plans for the Playstation 3 that seem to involve it being able to do everything from downloading music to landing the space shuttle from the privacy of your own home.
Well, yeah. Of course they're going to say that. Like every other company in the world they don't want to look like they've got nothing in the pipe so they come out and announce their newest product, which isn't even really designed yet, will be able to do everything imaginable.
"Hey, don't buy the XBox, in a year or two we'll have a system that can actually categorize your porn for you! None of that tedious self-sorting."
It's nothing. There's no specs, there's no hard information, there's nothing. Not even really worth reading.
SmartPad is the first product that lets you capture anything you write or draw, with the natural feel of pen on paper. Take notes and store them in your Datebook. Attach a map to a contact in the Address Book. Easily write down To Do's or Memos and save them for future reference.
there's a lot of other info about it at the above linked site. It looks like a really cool add-on... unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with my Visor so I'm out of luck.
I've got dibbs on being the sole licensor of the
Comon, you guys know it's going to come to this, now that congress is going to decide it... pork barrell politics at it's weirdest.