Not to the hardware. I have stuff un-powered all of the time, mostly because I shuffle bigger and bigger drives around and have them hanging by their IDE and power cables outside my tower since I'm too lazy to install them properly for a temporary job. I've used a dead cd-r drive as a scsi terminator too.
I suppose some controllers might get confused if there is the extra wire length that goes to dead circuits instead of nowhere, but I'm sure that will only bother anything if you have your drives set to "cable select" instead of master or slave.
You obviously have no idea how much money it takes to make and broadcast TV ads consisting of people standing on top of a mountain and screaming your product's name at the top of their lungs. A significant chunk of expenditure is for advertising (of debatable ethical properties) to patients and doctors.
Beyond that, as companies whose purpose is to save and improve human life, they must show more responsibility beyond doubling their shareholders' investments. I don't have anything against turning a profit, however, I hardly believe that "billions of dollars a year for about a decade" is required to keep the company afloat. The current economy of the US (let alone the poorer nations of the world) can't support these inflated prices, as the number of uninsured people rise and the number of insurance policies covering these expensive medicines drop the number of people needing these medicines and not getting them are rising.
If you're poor and have AIDS, and you can't scrape together the $5000 a month for drugs to keep you alive, well, I suppose you just sit back, wait for a cold to come and kill you. You can at least be happy that the CEO of MegaPharm is enjoying his personal jet ride to his exclusive country club.
It isn't just AIDS drugs that are expensive. Many of the most effective clotbusters which are used to save stroke victim's lives are incredibly expensive. Needless to say, if you're not insured, you don't get these drugs.
I believe that the pattern scanned is the pattern of blood vessels in the eyes, which is more random than genetically determined except possibly in cases where the eye is malformed.
Probably to maintain a reasonable sized database they would stick to right eye or left eye, and assume that the person knows which eye to scan.
I would suppose that they would have a backup ID system in place for people with eye injuries or fake eyes, or whatever other problems.
Not to mention people who use drive through ATMs... how far away can the iris be to get a good picture of it to compare? Maybe they'll have goggles or something on a cord that you can pull into your car and put on your eyes for the verification (and hope nobody drives off with them)
My goal was to present a possibly successful methodology for fixing the patent system to a state where it would at least be tolerable.
Simply abolishing software/business patents would be impossible because the instant it would come up, our greed-addled representatives and senators would suddenly find themselves upgraded to an even better country club, and conveniently "forget" to pass the legislation.
I also forgot to mention prohibiting patent camping, like we saw with the MS-SQL case a few days back. If a company possesses a patent and knows that others are infringing, it must immediately notify these people of their infringement status (lawsuits and such may wait, as long as they have contacted the individuals) Failure to do so will be considered in bad faith, and will prevent any attempts from claiming extra damages/court fees/etc. in the event of a win in court (ie, only fair royalty fees can be awarded). It must be shown that the patent holder was aware of the infringer and failed to contact the infringer.
Its *obvious* that the company in this case knew its patents were being infringed since they gave the broken license to microsoft in the first place, and they sat back and did nothing to ensure the maximum number of people would be infringing on the patent.
The problem with the patent system today (in my view) isn't whether or not software should be patented, it is the complete crap that comes out of the PTO. They have no incentive to do things right, no disincentive against doing things wrong, so they just grant patents on crap.
What needs to be done is first: fix the backlog so that it no longer takes years to grant a patent. Open new patent courts, hire more people, charge more for the patents, whatever it takes.
Second: The USPTO needs to be responsible for its output. If a patent is overturned as invalid, court fees and the original cost of filing the patent should come out of its pocket.
Third: Mandatory implementation. For a patent to be valid it must be implemented by someone, somewhere. If the holder of the patent is unable to implement the patent, it must accept at least one request to license the patent for implementation under generally accepted RAND practices. This prevents people from patenting something with no intention of ever producing that invention, for the purpose of preventing that invention from being produced.
Fourth: establish a class of patents specifically for software. Things not in this class of patents cannot be used to claim software infringes. Turnaround must be quick, and part of the patent process should be "does someone else sell this product already" which should be relatively easy, compared to looking through millions of patents.
Software patents will expire after two years, renewable once (at the price of the original patent) for another year. This better matches the reality of software development. It provides people a head start without granting them an essentially perpetual monopoly.
Come to think of it, it would be FAR more productive if you sued the bogus patent holder for attempting to extort money from you on false pretenses. (The definition of FRAUD)
This would definitely turn far more heads than whining at the USPTO.
You could, but you have to get permission from the DoJ first. Of course, you *could* turn the process into a huge media circus to expedite things. Especially when you start pulling out the names of people who screwed things up so bad.
Obviously you need to manage this very well to avoid being SOL during an actual recovery situation.
Not only is the key needed, the original drive is needed too according to the interex article. Not good for recovering from offsite backups after the place (and the original drive) burns down.
Nice math. Shame it doesn't actually work that way. If it did, nobody would ever have 100k CD's sold because one person would front the $12 (or whatever albums sell for nowadays) and everyone else would download it.
Since it doesn't happen now. I see no reason to believe it would happen the way you envision.
Aside from the high probability of downloading the files from elsewhere, what about giving the users the instructions on how to generate the datafiles given that they own the books? That way they would have paid for the IP already (by buying the books).
It could be used for that (assuming you have a way to rebroadcast the signal later? Without the FCC hunting your signal down?), but the purpose of the software is to provide signal-processing software targeted at radio signal processing. If that signal is an HDTV signal, than so be it, but it could just as easily be X-Ray signals from space (assuming your sampling device could capture them) or some AM Radio talk show.
If you look at the site you can see a number of other examples. Since you are no longer limited by a standard radio's hardware, you can do completely different stuff like receive two different frequencies at the same time.
From my understanding this is exactly what the project is about: Developing a radio-wave processor that can be modified freely to do whatever you want to the radio waves you capture.
This way you could have just as easily turned the radio waves into music (although it might just come out random static, depending on how you performed the conversion) or done any number of other transforms on the signal.
we only have about 2 hours of serious game time and the rest is just goofing off and having fun.
Man, I had tons of fun in HS with my D&D group, and our sessions were exactly like this. We'd explore random places ("The road through the center of this town has been paved by flagstones, to make wagon travel easier" "There must be something under them! I try to lift each stone to see whats under it."), do completely random things ("This house offends me. I take the initiative and attack the wall."), and generally bug the DM (Occasionally the DM would roll something privately to see if something was going to happen or not. One session we started jumping up and looking over the screen to see what he rolled, and would bug him to tell us what it meant. So he started rolling random dice every few seconds. In response we started rolling all the dice we had, which eventually degraded to throwing the dice at each other to see how much damage we could do. After an hour, we got it worked out of our system, dealt a handfulD4 damage to each other and went back to campaigning seriously. It wasn't a complete waste of time, during all that we developed formal rules for dice rolling in-game.)
When we graduated, we all split up, so I was on my own finding a new group to play with in college. I must have been looking in all the wrong places, since everyone I saw was dead serious about the whole game, and cracking a joke was an offense to the holy game or something. Haven't gamed in a group since then, I stick to console based RPGs now.
There aren't that many places left in the world where it would be legal. Escalate the ones where they aren't legal to the FBI, escalate the ones where it is legal to the US diplomat living there, to see if they can nudge the country for laws against it.
Another concern would be whether attempts to access the sites would be logged. Are they going to arrest people for "attempting to view child porn"? Do they get a warning that they're attempting to view porn or anything like that? Or do they get a blank screen and the cops come knocking the next day? What if the person followed a random link without knowing what was on the other end?
We should all pick one OOP recording from an RIAA member. Then, we should all go to the RIAA headquarters and demand that they take our $10 for it.
Of course like all other protests, for this to actually turn any heads, about 10000 people or so would have to show up. When the news shows up, people tell them that the RIAA gets all these laws passed to protect their right to silence music, and the protest is because the musicians have the right to have their music heard for a fair price, however the RIAA companies are refusing to take our money.
Its entirely possible that they may give him a special award. Its not like they announce nominations for special awards, since it takes the suprise out...
My psychic powers have given me a look at the dialog box of the future, found in Microsoft Palladium OS 2005:
Error downloading mysong.mp3:
This file does not contain a valid DRM certificate. This may indicate that it has been tampered with, contain a virus, or was illegally produced. Are you sure you want to download this?
[No] [Cancel]
So you see, all palladium has to do to kill off the mp3 users is hook the network code to check and make sure your files are approved for transfers. Makes it a little harder to trade your mp3s with total strangers.
And what CD ripping software are you going to use? To stop that, all Palladium has to do is require that software has to be signed ("trusted") to directly engage the cdrom, and then withhold signatures from anything that can produce mp3s.
Who knows, maybe everyone will switch to Linux. Then it can get banned since microsoft will claim that the OS itself is being used as a circumvention device.
The usage of a single ON/OFF bit isn't access control or copy control as defined by the DMCA, so this was a bad example.
The rest of my rant was doom&gloom prophesy, based on the following very logical slope: Realistically, to avoid the one-bit-no-IP-applied problem, there would be an encrypted header, which you could not change without decrypting it, and THAT would not be permissible under the DMCA.
This information may or may not be part of the file. If the file lacks this information, there has to be some default, and it is possible that the RIAA and MPAA could convince microsoft that all pre-existing mp3's and avi's without this header should default to No-Copy.
You could add the proper header yourself, but this would be achived through some signing scheme: a header is generated specifically for your file from some key.
So, how much do you have to pay for that key to sign the material you produce to give it a header that will let you copy them? You could probably buy a palladium-aware recording studio package, but I wonder if it would let you record to anything other than.wma (especially given microsoft's current track record (They would declare that their DRM technology is only properly implementable with their own format, naturally))?
It is illegal to circumvent a technological method for protecting access to a copyrighted work.
Right. I don't seem to see what part of that sentence makes what I suggested legal.
Read the actual DMCA, and you'll see that there is no mention of an exemption from the law for the copyright holder, since again, this is about protecting the container, not the copyrighted material.
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Not to the hardware. I have stuff un-powered all of the time, mostly because I shuffle bigger and bigger drives around and have them hanging by their IDE and power cables outside my tower since I'm too lazy to install them properly for a temporary job. I've used a dead cd-r drive as a scsi terminator too.
I suppose some controllers might get confused if there is the extra wire length that goes to dead circuits instead of nowhere, but I'm sure that will only bother anything if you have your drives set to "cable select" instead of master or slave.
I wonder if you feel the same way about RMS
Ironically, there are quite a few people who do.
You obviously have no idea how much money it takes to make and broadcast TV ads consisting of people standing on top of a mountain and screaming your product's name at the top of their lungs. A significant chunk of expenditure is for advertising (of debatable ethical properties) to patients and doctors.
Beyond that, as companies whose purpose is to save and improve human life, they must show more responsibility beyond doubling their shareholders' investments. I don't have anything against turning a profit, however, I hardly believe that "billions of dollars a year for about a decade" is required to keep the company afloat. The current economy of the US (let alone the poorer nations of the world) can't support these inflated prices, as the number of uninsured people rise and the number of insurance policies covering these expensive medicines drop the number of people needing these medicines and not getting them are rising.
If you're poor and have AIDS, and you can't scrape together the $5000 a month for drugs to keep you alive, well, I suppose you just sit back, wait for a cold to come and kill you. You can at least be happy that the CEO of MegaPharm is enjoying his personal jet ride to his exclusive country club.
It isn't just AIDS drugs that are expensive. Many of the most effective clotbusters which are used to save stroke victim's lives are incredibly expensive. Needless to say, if you're not insured, you don't get these drugs.
I believe that the pattern scanned is the pattern of blood vessels in the eyes, which is more random than genetically determined except possibly in cases where the eye is malformed.
Probably to maintain a reasonable sized database they would stick to right eye or left eye, and assume that the person knows which eye to scan.
I would suppose that they would have a backup ID system in place for people with eye injuries or fake eyes, or whatever other problems.
Not to mention people who use drive through ATMs... how far away can the iris be to get a good picture of it to compare? Maybe they'll have goggles or something on a cord that you can pull into your car and put on your eyes for the verification (and hope nobody drives off with them)
My goal was to present a possibly successful methodology for fixing the patent system to a state where it would at least be tolerable.
Simply abolishing software/business patents would be impossible because the instant it would come up, our greed-addled representatives and senators would suddenly find themselves upgraded to an even better country club, and conveniently "forget" to pass the legislation.
I also forgot to mention prohibiting patent camping, like we saw with the MS-SQL case a few days back. If a company possesses a patent and knows that others are infringing, it must immediately notify these people of their infringement status (lawsuits and such may wait, as long as they have contacted the individuals) Failure to do so will be considered in bad faith, and will prevent any attempts from claiming extra damages/court fees/etc. in the event of a win in court (ie, only fair royalty fees can be awarded). It must be shown that the patent holder was aware of the infringer and failed to contact the infringer.
Its *obvious* that the company in this case knew its patents were being infringed since they gave the broken license to microsoft in the first place, and they sat back and did nothing to ensure the maximum number of people would be infringing on the patent.
The problem with the patent system today (in my view) isn't whether or not software should be patented, it is the complete crap that comes out of the PTO. They have no incentive to do things right, no disincentive against doing things wrong, so they just grant patents on crap.
What needs to be done is first: fix the backlog so that it no longer takes years to grant a patent. Open new patent courts, hire more people, charge more for the patents, whatever it takes.
Second: The USPTO needs to be responsible for its output. If a patent is overturned as invalid, court fees and the original cost of filing the patent should come out of its pocket.
Third: Mandatory implementation. For a patent to be valid it must be implemented by someone, somewhere. If the holder of the patent is unable to implement the patent, it must accept at least one request to license the patent for implementation under generally accepted RAND practices. This prevents people from patenting something with no intention of ever producing that invention, for the purpose of preventing that invention from being produced.
Fourth: establish a class of patents specifically for software. Things not in this class of patents cannot be used to claim software infringes. Turnaround must be quick, and part of the patent process should be "does someone else sell this product already" which should be relatively easy, compared to looking through millions of patents.
Software patents will expire after two years, renewable once (at the price of the original patent) for another year. This better matches the reality of software development. It provides people a head start without granting them an essentially perpetual monopoly.
Come to think of it, it would be FAR more productive if you sued the bogus patent holder for attempting to extort money from you on false pretenses. (The definition of FRAUD)
This would definitely turn far more heads than whining at the USPTO.
You could, but you have to get permission from the DoJ first. Of course, you *could* turn the process into a huge media circus to expedite things. Especially when you start pulling out the names of people who screwed things up so bad.
Obviously you need to manage this very well to avoid being SOL during an actual recovery situation.
Not only is the key needed, the original drive is needed too according to the interex article. Not good for recovering from offsite backups after the place (and the original drive) burns down.
Oddly enough, BSD still lives despite the Linux binary compatibility.
Nice math. Shame it doesn't actually work that way. If it did, nobody would ever have 100k CD's sold because one person would front the $12 (or whatever albums sell for nowadays) and everyone else would download it.
Since it doesn't happen now. I see no reason to believe it would happen the way you envision.
Aside from the high probability of downloading the files from elsewhere, what about giving the users the instructions on how to generate the datafiles given that they own the books? That way they would have paid for the IP already (by buying the books).
The page says the images were exported from xine using its snapshot, so maybe the user had the window stretched or something?
It could be used for that (assuming you have a way to rebroadcast the signal later? Without the FCC hunting your signal down?), but the purpose of the software is to provide signal-processing software targeted at radio signal processing. If that signal is an HDTV signal, than so be it, but it could just as easily be X-Ray signals from space (assuming your sampling device could capture them) or some AM Radio talk show.
If you look at the site you can see a number of other examples. Since you are no longer limited by a standard radio's hardware, you can do completely different stuff like receive two different frequencies at the same time.
From my understanding this is exactly what the project is about: Developing a radio-wave processor that can be modified freely to do whatever you want to the radio waves you capture.
This way you could have just as easily turned the radio waves into music (although it might just come out random static, depending on how you performed the conversion) or done any number of other transforms on the signal.
some one with a Nobel Prize calls it an eye opener?
See, I told you they would listen to Reason.
we only have about 2 hours of serious game time and the rest is just goofing off and having fun.
Man, I had tons of fun in HS with my D&D group, and our sessions were exactly like this. We'd explore random places ("The road through the center of this town has been paved by flagstones, to make wagon travel easier" "There must be something under them! I try to lift each stone to see whats under it."), do completely random things ("This house offends me. I take the initiative and attack the wall."), and generally bug the DM (Occasionally the DM would roll something privately to see if something was going to happen or not. One session we started jumping up and looking over the screen to see what he rolled, and would bug him to tell us what it meant. So he started rolling random dice every few seconds. In response we started rolling all the dice we had, which eventually degraded to throwing the dice at each other to see how much damage we could do. After an hour, we got it worked out of our system, dealt a handfulD4 damage to each other and went back to campaigning seriously. It wasn't a complete waste of time, during all that we developed formal rules for dice rolling in-game.)
When we graduated, we all split up, so I was on my own finding a new group to play with in college. I must have been looking in all the wrong places, since everyone I saw was dead serious about the whole game, and cracking a joke was an offense to the holy game or something. Haven't gamed in a group since then, I stick to console based RPGs now.
There aren't that many places left in the world where it would be legal. Escalate the ones where they aren't legal to the FBI, escalate the ones where it is legal to the US diplomat living there, to see if they can nudge the country for laws against it.
Another concern would be whether attempts to access the sites would be logged. Are they going to arrest people for "attempting to view child porn"? Do they get a warning that they're attempting to view porn or anything like that? Or do they get a blank screen and the cops come knocking the next day? What if the person followed a random link without knowing what was on the other end?
How do they block it without knowing what the sites are?
If they know where the sites are, why haven't they been shut down?
We should all pick one OOP recording from an RIAA member. Then, we should all go to the RIAA headquarters and demand that they take our $10 for it.
Of course like all other protests, for this to actually turn any heads, about 10000 people or so would have to show up. When the news shows up, people tell them that the RIAA gets all these laws passed to protect their right to silence music, and the protest is because the musicians have the right to have their music heard for a fair price, however the RIAA companies are refusing to take our money.
Its entirely possible that they may give him a special award. Its not like they announce nominations for special awards, since it takes the suprise out...
My psychic powers have given me a look at the dialog box of the future, found in Microsoft Palladium OS 2005:
Error downloading mysong.mp3:
This file does not contain a valid DRM
certificate. This may indicate that it has
been tampered with, contain a virus, or was
illegally produced. Are you sure you want
to download this?
[No] [Cancel]
So you see, all palladium has to do to kill off the mp3 users is hook the network code to check and make sure your files are approved for transfers. Makes it a little harder to trade your mp3s with total strangers.
And what CD ripping software are you going to use? To stop that, all Palladium has to do is require that software has to be signed ("trusted") to directly engage the cdrom, and then withhold signatures from anything that can produce mp3s.
Who knows, maybe everyone will switch to Linux. Then it can get banned since microsoft will claim that the OS itself is being used as a circumvention device.
The usage of a single ON/OFF bit isn't access control or copy control as defined by the DMCA, so this was a bad example.
.wma (especially given microsoft's current track record (They would declare that their DRM technology is only properly implementable with their own format, naturally))?
The rest of my rant was doom&gloom prophesy, based on the following very logical slope:
Realistically, to avoid the one-bit-no-IP-applied problem, there would be an encrypted header, which you could not change without decrypting it, and THAT would not be permissible under the DMCA.
This information may or may not be part of the file. If the file lacks this information, there has to be some default, and it is possible that the RIAA and MPAA could convince microsoft that all pre-existing mp3's and avi's without this header should default to No-Copy.
You could add the proper header yourself, but this would be achived through some signing scheme: a header is generated specifically for your file from some key.
So, how much do you have to pay for that key to sign the material you produce to give it a header that will let you copy them? You could probably buy a palladium-aware recording studio package, but I wonder if it would let you record to anything other than
It is illegal to circumvent a technological method for protecting access to a copyrighted work.
Right. I don't seem to see what part of that sentence makes what I suggested legal.
Read the actual DMCA, and you'll see that there is no mention of an exemption from the law for the copyright holder, since again, this is about protecting the container, not the copyrighted material.
Oh, and by the way DMCA threats have been used for exactly this: DMCA vs. changing the "embed" font bit. There was a post here a while back about it.