Funny, then, that Kirby always ranks well below the major national brands (such as Hoover, Panasonic, Eureka, and even Dirt Devil) when reviewed by Consumer Reports or any other reviewers.
Kirby is no better than Electrolux. They're deeply overpriced and have no better cleaning capabilities than vacuums a tenth their cost. In fact, they usually have fewer features, are louder, and do a worse job cleaning than the other brands.
just like if a fireman pulls a victim from a burning building s/he's a hero, but if John Q. Passerby tries to help he's arrested for tresspassing.
Want to show a case proving this? Even vaguely?
In fact, most states have "Good Samaratin" laws which are specifically designed to protect anyone attempting to save someone else's life against prosecution -- this comes up most often in CPR training, since some bozos have had the gaul to try and prosecute the CPR giver for providing CPR and not saving the person's life.
I'd say you were just a troll, but your posting history doesn't show that. So I'm guessing you're either stupid or grumpy.
In response to the original question - as long as it's done purely for the purpose of removing the worm in the first place I'd say it's ethical. You could argue that they should also patch the holes that let the worm in in the first place (presuming there were some - I believe Fizzer is just executed by unsuspecting people), but I'd say that's crossing the line -- you have no idea if there was a valid reason for the user to not patch -- it may be that the patch causes issues with their computer. Uninstalling the worm is unlikely to cause problems though, as long as the uninstaller does the job right.
Don't forget to include all the components of that system in the calculation then -- I suspect you'll find that the manufacturing costs of the mirror, pipe, turbine, and other components will be greater than the energy you'll extract out of the system. No, it won't last forever. And when you need to replace a part you'll need to recoup the energy input from it too.
No, I'm not being unrealistic. If you want to suggest moving to another energy source it must be self-sustainable -- otherwise you're spending more energy than you're producing. The advantage fossil and nuclear fuels have is that a great deal of the input energy was done over the course of millenia by natural forces.
Solar energy can be efficient in this manner, but we're not there yet. Not by a considerable gap.
Incorrect. The Solarex plant in Fredrick, MA provides 200 kW of power, which is only a "significant" portion of the energy needed. It also doesn't do 100% of the manufacturing onsite -- which would be difficult since most of the rare metals needed for solar plants probably aren't found in quantity there, and the refining processes needed to extract them would be significantly more than the 200kW they generate.
Solar Cells still cost more energy to produce than they'll deliver in their lifetime too. It's a negative sum game.
Wind power is all well and good if you have the area to set it up in... in my area you wouldn't be able to set one up without removing a few dozen old growth trees in the first place.
It's supposed to... Carmack talked about a realistic physics engine and deformable environment long, long ago -- things like shooting boxes on a shelf would cause all of the boxes to fall and interact with each other on the way down (as well as with whatever else is nearby). There was also disucssion of monsters not being stopped by walls or doors and coming through them -- violently -- if need be. I believe there was also a question about "what if I shoot a bunch of rockets into the wall?", but I don't recall what the answer was.
Of course, there's been little said about this since - it's all been talk about the shadows (which are, frankly amazing -- especially if you've seen the older demo of a swinging fan changing the lighting on a room).
There are a couple of big problems with deformable landscapes. First, it requires a vast amount of CPU cycles to compute them and keep them synced between the server and all clients (for MP - for SP not such an issue) -- you can't just create static meshes to represent the terrain anymore. Second, as you mention the world becomes rubble - which is rather uninteresting really. It's a significant removal of strategy and tactics when you can be assured of killing someone just by throwing enough firepower at the wall they're behind. It also causes problems with games like CTF where level flow and choke points are key to the enjoyment of the map.
He's also responsible for setting up the Federal Banking system, which is a large reason for why the dollar has become a stable and respected form of currency.
So maybe it does make sense to have him on the currency after all.
Yeah, he was hardly the finest president. He was also hardly the worst... as with many great leaders he was very controversial.
No, because the problem doesn't lie with the card - it lies with EQ's wretched engine. You can keep throwing hardware at the problem, but it's a bottomless pit.
However, Apple hardware remains quite usable for years after x86 hardware becomes "obsolete and/or end of life".
That's entirely a personal perspective.
My mother is still using the same system she bought in 1998. I suspect she'll continue using it until it dies. I know people using 386's as firewalls/routers, mail servers, file servers, etc. Heck, I used a PC as a gaming platform for 2.5 years without doing anything more than upgrading the memory - I finally replaced it last November.
There are people at my company using computers that are at least 4 years old, if not older. And are likely to continue using them since there's no reason to upgrade them.
You do not get twice the lifespan out of your hardware - thinking that is bullshit. If you don't upgrade your software than - surprise - your hardware needs are unlikely to increase and you can keep using it.
Should I even mention how quickly PC hardware decreases in price relative to Apple hardware? A mere three months can result in half the price for the same system. That certainly can't be said for Apple hardware, and it's not a matter of it holding its value better - it's called artificial price inflation.
If you invested in Apple 15 years ago, they still honor your investment
Huh. And if you invested in PCs then MS didn't? You realize that people can still run most MS-DOS programs that were developed (and compiled) 20 years ago under WinXP, right? No, not all - most. And not all 68000 apps run on PPC, nor do all Mac Classic apps run under OS-X.
different versions of Office don't even like to talk to each other
Yeah, there have been problems here, but that's hardly limited to MS. Apple has released apps with the same problems, and they've fixed them just like MS did. No, in general you can't get Word'95 to read a WordXP document. So what? You can't possibly expect forward compatibility to hold true - if it did we'd all be stuck using EBCDIC still.
BTW, I can read a Word'95 doc into Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. It's really a non-issue.
constantly pushing for their customers to spend more money
Uh... what world are you living in? Apple charges for point releases to OS-X. And their hardware is still 1.5-2x the price of PC hardware, for less performance. Don't even try to indicate that Apple isn't raping their customers as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft.
Hint, they're both corporations. They're both out to make money. Apple's been a bit more benevolent than MS, in general, but they're starting to adopt DRM and other "evil" concepts as well. They're just not as absolutely brain dead as MS is about marketing them.
No, most companies/endpoints haven't adopted it, but most of the major equipment manufacturers (Cisco, Lucent, etc) have and have equipment available for it. It's in use by the University/Research-only "Internet2" currently. The major backbone providers are in the process of slowly switching to it.
Sure, it'd be cheaper to invent another standard now and move to that on a widescale basis than to adopt IPv6, switch to it, and then adopt a new standard and switch to THAT, but you're talking about another decade at this point, minimum.
Developing new standards takes awhile, and having people actually implement them in a non-buggy fashion takes even longer. Develop IPv10 right now (yes, v7, v8, and v9 are already in development) and you're probably talking about implementation in 20 years. By which time we'll know enough about what's broken with it to make the same argument about implementation.
If you know how to do serious web searches via Google then you're already searching at least 2 locations - the main Google search and the Google Groups search. You may also search Google News separately (although the info from there is usually in the main search as well).
I'm looking forward to this, since most of the stuff Google hits in blogs is completely and utterly irrelevant to what I'm actually trying to find. Google will probably just have another tab to click on, or perhaps a few top links to blog-specific searches if they think it's relevant (like they do with cross links to Google News searches currently). Perhaps even a configurable "Include Blogs" on the preferences page. Whatever, I don't care, just let me exclude the damn things.
If I don't get what I'm looking for in regular search then may go search Blogs as well. After newsgroups.
Whether "Enoch" is an ancestor to Root in Crypto, or is (ahem) something entirely different remains to be seen
Well, there was certainly a fair bit of indication that Enoch in Crypto wasn't quite... normal... and even in this brief excerpt there's a line that could be read to mean the same.
I'm willing to see where he's going with this, but rather wary at the same time. Is a Lazarous Long type character really necessary?
Re:Season Pass anomolies
on
TiVo Basic
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· Score: 3, Informative
To my knowledge information on what season is what is not available from Tribune, which is who TiVo gets their guide data from.
Heck, TiVo has to make guesses on whether or not it's even a rerun, since not all shows have even that information (it bases it off of first air date, and occasionally gets it wrong because of this).
It's not a bad suggestion though - when www.tivocommunity.com is back up next week I'd recommend suggesting it in the Suggestions forum. TiVo does read them, and has implemented ideas on occasion.
Posts like this one make me wish we'd criminalize adultery.
Uh, adultery and/or fornication (sex outside of marraige - which generally includes adultery as a subclassification) was illegal in England and most of the US until fairly recently. The most recent US state to repeal it's fornication law is Georgia, and there are still 10 states with it on the book (as of that article). Georgia has a separate adultery law, however, and I believe that still stands.
As best I can tell most states have laws against adultery - either felony or misdemeanor. Having difficulty getting info out of Google on this, and most of the pages I did find are outdated (still listing Georgia as having a fornication law for instance).
Re:Could someone please...
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
Lifetime is $299, not $249. The price increase went into effect in February as I recall.
There used to be an annual service option, but it went bye-bye.
Previously without a subscription any box that did not originally have the 1.3 software on it (which had different T&C) became a boat anchor -- with an older series 1 box that had 1.3 on it you could still do manual recordings, but that was it.
Re:Season Pass anomolies
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I know a title wishlist would have grabbed both of these, but it'd be nice if a season pass would follow channels
God no. I'd hate to have to filter out the bazillion Simpsons episodes being syndicated if I just want to record what's on Fox. Or Friends or any other popular show that's in syndication.
If you know a Wishlist would do it, then why don't you set one up and do it the right way?
Oddly, I have a Season Pass for Saturday Night Live and the local affialiate runs full-length re-reuns
Uh, because it's the same show on the same channel? If you don't want reruns, then set the SP for "First Run Only". If it's still picking up reruns then you'll have to email TiVo about it, who will contact Tribune, who will contact the station. Odds are, however, that the station won't do anything to fix their guide data -- which is what the root problem is (if and only if you've already got the SP set FRO).
There must be an upper limit - simply because otherwise you have to pass a Constitutional amendment (in the US).
And realize I said things about personal vs corporate for a reason -- your plan just handed corporations a ton of IP with very little downside. If I write a book I might be able to pay for the copyright fees for a few years at most... after that it's unlikely I'll recoup my costs. And if a corporation would like to market a toy, make a movie, etc. out of the book then they're almost certainly better off waiting for it to fall into the public domain when the fees get too high than they are paying me anything while it's still copyrighted.
Oh, and don't worry - they'll be able to copyright their work for considerably longer than you could've. And have fun fighting off the lawsuits about any other works based on the original work, since they'll claim that it was actually derivative of their work and not the public domain original.
The personal to corporate assignation fine is to avoid stupid things like having a corporation assign rights to the CEO/CFO shortly before the copyright expires, have them pay the individual fee, and then assign it back.
Copyrights are entirely reasonable if they're done for a short enough period of time (10-30 years as a rough guess). The current laws have gone way off the deep end though. In all likelihood we need different terms for different types of IP (books vs movies vs music vs code vs whatever), but I'm not going to step into that yet.
Actually originally fourteen years with an extention to twenty eight if you filed for it.
Filing for copyright extentions is actually a fairly reasonable thing - as long as there is an upper limit. That way if you want to preserve your copyright you have to keep paying (presumably more) to keep the work out of the public domain. In theory it would ensure that only works of substantive value to the copyright holder kept their copyright while the vast majority of works fell into the public domain.
Yeah, you can make an argument that it only really helps corporations, but if an individual author feels that the work has value either in current form or in derivative form (say, a movie or game about a book) then they could continue renewing copyright. Toss in some rules about different cost structures for individual vs corporate filings, a penalty for assignation of copyright from personal to corporate status, etc. and you might just start getting things back on the right track.
How short is a sample? What if I recreate the notes on my own instead of actually using a sample? Is that still covered by copyright?
In actuality there have been court rulings on all of the above - and the answer is 4 notes, doesn't matter, and yes. Which leads to something like an absurdly small number of harmonies available (~96k? I don't recall, but it's silly) before everything is copyrighted. Odds are, if you write a song now, you've violated someone else's copyright.
Perhaps the real question is whether or not the sample is a substantive portion of the song -- if so then it's probably a derivative work. Otherwise it's not. What the hell is a substantive portion? It's just like the legal definition of pornography - I'll know it when I hear it. There are shades of grey, not everything is black and white, and not everything should be, otherwise you paint yourself into silly little corners and do more harm than good.
Remember, just because the answers are out there - be it on Google, in the court system, or public opinion - doesn't mean that they're the right ones. Ask any minority group (not just blacks) in the Southeastern US prior to 1960.
And eventually, we will see a similar exploit on Sun's Liberty system as well.
While we will undoubtably see exploits on any system large enough to atract interest, I don't think Sun would code something this brain-dead stupid.
The industry standard is to ask for a passphrase when you forget your password. MS didn't even do this. I'm still wondering what junior level coder came up with this one though... I can't even express how stupid this is.
The whole single sign on concept is flawed at present. Far too many potential holes, no matter what the tool, or who the builder.
So we work to make it better... abandoning the concept entirely isn't going to happen. It's a worthwhile concept IMO, and while there's a lot of issues to be worked out that's not to say that they can't be. Most people would be willing to use a "strong" password if they only had to remember one. When you have to remember a dozen then forget it - the vast majority of people are going to use something like "password" or an easily guessable word from their personal life. Remembering "df783N:pa04uYG" and another dozen variants just isn't going to happen.
Why do you think that they're going to be anything other than in-house apps?
Heck, I expect to write a Linux app in the next year. Frankly, I expect to be doing it in under 6 months. And nobody will ever see it since it's the core infrastructure for a service my company is offering. Pure backend stuff.
The vast majority of software written is not written for the commercial marketplace. It's written for inhouse use.
People were complaining about the improper matting in Oz shortly after the release. Go read the HTF thread (referenced off Digital Bits) if you care for info.
And no, it doesn't take all that much time to fix the screw up. Frankly, if Universal had bothered listening then they could've saved themselves quite a bit of money fixing the busted region 1 release -- because that's costing them a good bit more than what it would've cost to just fix it in the first place.
It has been fixed. Oh, and it's Universal, not Paramount.
Want info? Go read The Digital Bits which is one (of many) websites that kept on top of this debacle.
Heck, my BTTF DVDs are still in shrinkwrap because of this...
The real debacle isn't that they aren't fixed - it's that the disks were released in other regions first (such as Australia) and were defective then. It wasn't until Universal released the movies in region 1 that they listened to the hue and cry about defective transfers -- and agreed to fix them. Note that they were released in Oz 4 months before release to region 1.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, then, that Kirby always ranks well below the major national brands (such as Hoover, Panasonic, Eureka, and even Dirt Devil) when reviewed by Consumer Reports or any other reviewers.
Kirby is no better than Electrolux. They're deeply overpriced and have no better cleaning capabilities than vacuums a tenth their cost. In fact, they usually have fewer features, are louder, and do a worse job cleaning than the other brands.
just like if a fireman pulls a victim from a burning building s/he's a hero, but if John Q. Passerby tries to help he's arrested for tresspassing.
Want to show a case proving this? Even vaguely?
In fact, most states have "Good Samaratin" laws which are specifically designed to protect anyone attempting to save someone else's life against prosecution -- this comes up most often in CPR training, since some bozos have had the gaul to try and prosecute the CPR giver for providing CPR and not saving the person's life.
I'd say you were just a troll, but your posting history doesn't show that. So I'm guessing you're either stupid or grumpy.
In response to the original question - as long as it's done purely for the purpose of removing the worm in the first place I'd say it's ethical. You could argue that they should also patch the holes that let the worm in in the first place (presuming there were some - I believe Fizzer is just executed by unsuspecting people), but I'd say that's crossing the line -- you have no idea if there was a valid reason for the user to not patch -- it may be that the patch causes issues with their computer. Uninstalling the worm is unlikely to cause problems though, as long as the uninstaller does the job right.
Don't forget to include all the components of that system in the calculation then -- I suspect you'll find that the manufacturing costs of the mirror, pipe, turbine, and other components will be greater than the energy you'll extract out of the system. No, it won't last forever. And when you need to replace a part you'll need to recoup the energy input from it too.
No, I'm not being unrealistic. If you want to suggest moving to another energy source it must be self-sustainable -- otherwise you're spending more energy than you're producing. The advantage fossil and nuclear fuels have is that a great deal of the input energy was done over the course of millenia by natural forces.
Solar energy can be efficient in this manner, but we're not there yet. Not by a considerable gap.
Incorrect. The Solarex plant in Fredrick, MA provides 200 kW of power, which is only a "significant" portion of the energy needed. It also doesn't do 100% of the manufacturing onsite -- which would be difficult since most of the rare metals needed for solar plants probably aren't found in quantity there, and the refining processes needed to extract them would be significantly more than the 200kW they generate.
Solar Cells still cost more energy to produce than they'll deliver in their lifetime too. It's a negative sum game.
Wind power is all well and good if you have the area to set it up in... in my area you wouldn't be able to set one up without removing a few dozen old growth trees in the first place.
It's supposed to... Carmack talked about a realistic physics engine and deformable environment long, long ago -- things like shooting boxes on a shelf would cause all of the boxes to fall and interact with each other on the way down (as well as with whatever else is nearby). There was also disucssion of monsters not being stopped by walls or doors and coming through them -- violently -- if need be. I believe there was also a question about "what if I shoot a bunch of rockets into the wall?", but I don't recall what the answer was.
Of course, there's been little said about this since - it's all been talk about the shadows (which are, frankly amazing -- especially if you've seen the older demo of a swinging fan changing the lighting on a room).
There are a couple of big problems with deformable landscapes. First, it requires a vast amount of CPU cycles to compute them and keep them synced between the server and all clients (for MP - for SP not such an issue) -- you can't just create static meshes to represent the terrain anymore. Second, as you mention the world becomes rubble - which is rather uninteresting really. It's a significant removal of strategy and tactics when you can be assured of killing someone just by throwing enough firepower at the wall they're behind. It also causes problems with games like CTF where level flow and choke points are key to the enjoyment of the map.
He's also responsible for setting up the Federal Banking system, which is a large reason for why the dollar has become a stable and respected form of currency.
So maybe it does make sense to have him on the currency after all.
Yeah, he was hardly the finest president. He was also hardly the worst... as with many great leaders he was very controversial.
The flaw there is that he's still alive. You cannot use a living figure on US currency or stamps.
No, because the problem doesn't lie with the card - it lies with EQ's wretched engine. You can keep throwing hardware at the problem, but it's a bottomless pit.
However, Apple hardware remains quite usable for years after x86 hardware becomes "obsolete and/or end of life".
That's entirely a personal perspective.
My mother is still using the same system she bought in 1998. I suspect she'll continue using it until it dies. I know people using 386's as firewalls/routers, mail servers, file servers, etc. Heck, I used a PC as a gaming platform for 2.5 years without doing anything more than upgrading the memory - I finally replaced it last November.
There are people at my company using computers that are at least 4 years old, if not older. And are likely to continue using them since there's no reason to upgrade them.
You do not get twice the lifespan out of your hardware - thinking that is bullshit. If you don't upgrade your software than - surprise - your hardware needs are unlikely to increase and you can keep using it.
Should I even mention how quickly PC hardware decreases in price relative to Apple hardware? A mere three months can result in half the price for the same system. That certainly can't be said for Apple hardware, and it's not a matter of it holding its value better - it's called artificial price inflation.
If you invested in Apple 15 years ago, they still honor your investment
Huh. And if you invested in PCs then MS didn't? You realize that people can still run most MS-DOS programs that were developed (and compiled) 20 years ago under WinXP, right? No, not all - most. And not all 68000 apps run on PPC, nor do all Mac Classic apps run under OS-X.
different versions of Office don't even like to talk to each other
Yeah, there have been problems here, but that's hardly limited to MS. Apple has released apps with the same problems, and they've fixed them just like MS did. No, in general you can't get Word'95 to read a WordXP document. So what? You can't possibly expect forward compatibility to hold true - if it did we'd all be stuck using EBCDIC still.
BTW, I can read a Word'95 doc into Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. It's really a non-issue.
constantly pushing for their customers to spend more money
Uh... what world are you living in? Apple charges for point releases to OS-X. And their hardware is still 1.5-2x the price of PC hardware, for less performance. Don't even try to indicate that Apple isn't raping their customers as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft.
Hint, they're both corporations. They're both out to make money. Apple's been a bit more benevolent than MS, in general, but they're starting to adopt DRM and other "evil" concepts as well. They're just not as absolutely brain dead as MS is about marketing them.
since ipv6 still has not been adopted
Not been adopted by whom?
No, most companies/endpoints haven't adopted it, but most of the major equipment manufacturers (Cisco, Lucent, etc) have and have equipment available for it. It's in use by the University/Research-only "Internet2" currently. The major backbone providers are in the process of slowly switching to it.
Sure, it'd be cheaper to invent another standard now and move to that on a widescale basis than to adopt IPv6, switch to it, and then adopt a new standard and switch to THAT, but you're talking about another decade at this point, minimum.
Developing new standards takes awhile, and having people actually implement them in a non-buggy fashion takes even longer. Develop IPv10 right now (yes, v7, v8, and v9 are already in development) and you're probably talking about implementation in 20 years. By which time we'll know enough about what's broken with it to make the same argument about implementation.
If you know how to do serious web searches via Google then you're already searching at least 2 locations - the main Google search and the Google Groups search. You may also search Google News separately (although the info from there is usually in the main search as well).
I'm looking forward to this, since most of the stuff Google hits in blogs is completely and utterly irrelevant to what I'm actually trying to find. Google will probably just have another tab to click on, or perhaps a few top links to blog-specific searches if they think it's relevant (like they do with cross links to Google News searches currently). Perhaps even a configurable "Include Blogs" on the preferences page. Whatever, I don't care, just let me exclude the damn things.
If I don't get what I'm looking for in regular search then may go search Blogs as well. After newsgroups.
Whether "Enoch" is an ancestor to Root in Crypto, or is (ahem) something entirely different remains to be seen
Well, there was certainly a fair bit of indication that Enoch in Crypto wasn't quite... normal... and even in this brief excerpt there's a line that could be read to mean the same.
I'm willing to see where he's going with this, but rather wary at the same time. Is a Lazarous Long type character really necessary?
To my knowledge information on what season is what is not available from Tribune, which is who TiVo gets their guide data from.
Heck, TiVo has to make guesses on whether or not it's even a rerun, since not all shows have even that information (it bases it off of first air date, and occasionally gets it wrong because of this).
It's not a bad suggestion though - when www.tivocommunity.com is back up next week I'd recommend suggesting it in the Suggestions forum. TiVo does read them, and has implemented ideas on occasion.
Posts like this one make me wish we'd criminalize adultery.
Uh, adultery and/or fornication (sex outside of marraige - which generally includes adultery as a subclassification) was illegal in England and most of the US until fairly recently. The most recent US state to repeal it's fornication law is Georgia, and there are still 10 states with it on the book (as of that article). Georgia has a separate adultery law, however, and I believe that still stands.
As best I can tell most states have laws against adultery - either felony or misdemeanor. Having difficulty getting info out of Google on this, and most of the pages I did find are outdated (still listing Georgia as having a fornication law for instance).
Lifetime is $299, not $249. The price increase went into effect in February as I recall.
There used to be an annual service option, but it went bye-bye.
Previously without a subscription any box that did not originally have the 1.3 software on it (which had different T&C) became a boat anchor -- with an older series 1 box that had 1.3 on it you could still do manual recordings, but that was it.
I know a title wishlist would have grabbed both of these, but it'd be nice if a season pass would follow channels
God no. I'd hate to have to filter out the bazillion Simpsons episodes being syndicated if I just want to record what's on Fox. Or Friends or any other popular show that's in syndication.
If you know a Wishlist would do it, then why don't you set one up and do it the right way?
Oddly, I have a Season Pass for Saturday Night Live and the local affialiate runs full-length re-reuns
Uh, because it's the same show on the same channel? If you don't want reruns, then set the SP for "First Run Only". If it's still picking up reruns then you'll have to email TiVo about it, who will contact Tribune, who will contact the station. Odds are, however, that the station won't do anything to fix their guide data -- which is what the root problem is (if and only if you've already got the SP set FRO).
There must be an upper limit - simply because otherwise you have to pass a Constitutional amendment (in the US).
And realize I said things about personal vs corporate for a reason -- your plan just handed corporations a ton of IP with very little downside. If I write a book I might be able to pay for the copyright fees for a few years at most... after that it's unlikely I'll recoup my costs. And if a corporation would like to market a toy, make a movie, etc. out of the book then they're almost certainly better off waiting for it to fall into the public domain when the fees get too high than they are paying me anything while it's still copyrighted.
Oh, and don't worry - they'll be able to copyright their work for considerably longer than you could've. And have fun fighting off the lawsuits about any other works based on the original work, since they'll claim that it was actually derivative of their work and not the public domain original.
The personal to corporate assignation fine is to avoid stupid things like having a corporation assign rights to the CEO/CFO shortly before the copyright expires, have them pay the individual fee, and then assign it back.
Copyrights are entirely reasonable if they're done for a short enough period of time (10-30 years as a rough guess). The current laws have gone way off the deep end though. In all likelihood we need different terms for different types of IP (books vs movies vs music vs code vs whatever), but I'm not going to step into that yet.
Actually originally fourteen years with an extention to twenty eight if you filed for it.
Filing for copyright extentions is actually a fairly reasonable thing - as long as there is an upper limit. That way if you want to preserve your copyright you have to keep paying (presumably more) to keep the work out of the public domain. In theory it would ensure that only works of substantive value to the copyright holder kept their copyright while the vast majority of works fell into the public domain.
Yeah, you can make an argument that it only really helps corporations, but if an individual author feels that the work has value either in current form or in derivative form (say, a movie or game about a book) then they could continue renewing copyright. Toss in some rules about different cost structures for individual vs corporate filings, a penalty for assignation of copyright from personal to corporate status, etc. and you might just start getting things back on the right track.
So any sample is a derivative work?
How short is a sample? What if I recreate the notes on my own instead of actually using a sample? Is that still covered by copyright?
In actuality there have been court rulings on all of the above - and the answer is 4 notes, doesn't matter, and yes. Which leads to something like an absurdly small number of harmonies available (~96k? I don't recall, but it's silly) before everything is copyrighted. Odds are, if you write a song now, you've violated someone else's copyright.
Perhaps the real question is whether or not the sample is a substantive portion of the song -- if so then it's probably a derivative work. Otherwise it's not. What the hell is a substantive portion? It's just like the legal definition of pornography - I'll know it when I hear it. There are shades of grey, not everything is black and white, and not everything should be, otherwise you paint yourself into silly little corners and do more harm than good.
Remember, just because the answers are out there - be it on Google, in the court system, or public opinion - doesn't mean that they're the right ones. Ask any minority group (not just blacks) in the Southeastern US prior to 1960.
And eventually, we will see a similar exploit on Sun's Liberty system as well.
While we will undoubtably see exploits on any system large enough to atract interest, I don't think Sun would code something this brain-dead stupid.
The industry standard is to ask for a passphrase when you forget your password. MS didn't even do this. I'm still wondering what junior level coder came up with this one though... I can't even express how stupid this is.
The whole single sign on concept is flawed at present. Far too many potential holes, no matter what the tool, or who the builder.
So we work to make it better... abandoning the concept entirely isn't going to happen. It's a worthwhile concept IMO, and while there's a lot of issues to be worked out that's not to say that they can't be. Most people would be willing to use a "strong" password if they only had to remember one. When you have to remember a dozen then forget it - the vast majority of people are going to use something like "password" or an easily guessable word from their personal life. Remembering "df783N:pa04uYG" and another dozen variants just isn't going to happen.
Why do you think that they're going to be anything other than in-house apps?
Heck, I expect to write a Linux app in the next year. Frankly, I expect to be doing it in under 6 months. And nobody will ever see it since it's the core infrastructure for a service my company is offering. Pure backend stuff.
The vast majority of software written is not written for the commercial marketplace. It's written for inhouse use.
People were complaining about the improper matting in Oz shortly after the release. Go read the HTF thread (referenced off Digital Bits) if you care for info.
And no, it doesn't take all that much time to fix the screw up. Frankly, if Universal had bothered listening then they could've saved themselves quite a bit of money fixing the busted region 1 release -- because that's costing them a good bit more than what it would've cost to just fix it in the first place.
It has been fixed. Oh, and it's Universal, not Paramount.
Want info? Go read The Digital Bits which is one (of many) websites that kept on top of this debacle.
Heck, my BTTF DVDs are still in shrinkwrap because of this...
The real debacle isn't that they aren't fixed - it's that the disks were released in other regions first (such as Australia) and were defective then. It wasn't until Universal released the movies in region 1 that they listened to the hue and cry about defective transfers -- and agreed to fix them. Note that they were released in Oz 4 months before release to region 1.