Not to troll, but this was posted on CNN on Sunday Night. I somehow find it hard to believe that no one submitted this for 48 hours. Are the editors just slow? No one is really interested in old news, I think.
1. Pricing in the US is different. All phone calls cost the same. 2. Changing phone numbers involves telling all the people who have your phone number that you have a different one. I, for one, do not relish the thought of having to contact 50+ people and saying "hey, use this new number".
Let me tell ya, this is true. I went to UIUC for Computer engineering. I knew that it was downright impossible to get an F and I took blatant advantage of it the second semester of my senior year.
So I'm taking this VLSI class. 3 design projects. I only do 1. 1 midterm and 1 final. I didn't do well on the midterm (can't remember what I got) During the final, for every question that I didn't know, I wrote "I like cheese". I wrote "I like cheese" at LEAST 5 times on what was probably a 30 question final.
I got a D. If that wasn't F quality work, I don't know what is.
When I went to vegas last month, there were still several places that still host single deck tables. Although those weren't "high roller" tables (I didn't even bother looking at those). You can't make a killing at these tables, but you could win a couple of hundred bucks, I guess.
Ok, I'll say that I liked Spider-man. I did, it was a good, fun way to spend 2 hours. But how in the world could you "dumb down" Spider-Man? Geez, a movie with such deep lines as "I swear on my father's grave, Spider-Man will pay!", couldn't be dumbed down, could it?
1. From what I can tell, the great thing about this invention is that you don't NEED to learn how to use it. It is supposed to read your "body language" to figure out how you want to go, as if you were walking! So who needs training then?
2. It's going to be expensive like the first product of everything is expensive. Like the first computers, pdas, etc. If you want if first, you shell out the cash. prices should go down with time.
One of the FIRST things? I totally disagree. The FIRST things that the government should be doing is caring for the PHYSICAL well-being of it's citizens. This includes making sure that the skies are safe, that a car bomb doesn't explode outside your building, and some biological agent doesn't kill you. AFTER that, maybe they can worry about things like virii. Computer viruses do hamper the running of the US economic machine, but by no means is that more important than the lives of people.
The real possible impact of this
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 3
The author of the article mentions probably the most important possible impact of this, but so far I don't see anyone who recognizes this. By putting one of these in major bookstores across the nation, publishers can now eliminate all the waste that comes from printing too many copies of books.
As I understand the current system, bookstores have a "return policy" with the major publishers. If they buy a book from the publishers, and it sits on the shelf for too long, they can return it. This is a HUGE loss for the publishers, not only because they lose the price of printing the book, but because of the overhead of shipping it out.
As the article mentions, if these machines become widespread, it has great potential to streamline the publishing industry and reduce cost for the consumer.
Oh, and for all those people who are harping on the security concerns, who said that these books had to be on an open network? ATMs talk to each other all the time, and hacking of those networks are minimal. I don't see why they couldn't implement something similar for books.
While I'll agree with you that price does make a big difference, don't forget that branding is important too. Intel, with the Pentium (tm), has one of the strongest brands out there, probably on par with big names like Coca Cola. That is one of the reasons that Intel continues to have a big market share even though Althons have been higher performance + lower cost.
Dude, that's really funny!...that is until you consider all the people that are killed by drunk drivers who are totally innocent. And the people who are accidently shot every day. Oh yeah, real funny.
hey homeboy, it's not like going to MIT is as cheap as going to your local community college. If you can through some means afford to pay that tuition, I'm sure you can find some way to have a computer at home.
It seems to me that you are incorrect in number 7. That is, in my opinon, the most important part of this decision.
-=snip=-
B. Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Napster also interposes a statutory limitation on liability by asserting the protections of the "safe harbor" from copyright infringement suits for "Internet service providers" contained in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. ß 512. See Napster, 114 F. Supp. 2d at 919 n.24. The district court did not give this statutory limitation any weight favoring a denial of temporary injunctive relief. The court concluded that Napster "has failed to persuade this court that subsection 512(d) shelters contributory infringers." Id.We need not accept a blanket conclusion that ß 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will never protect secondary infringers. See S. Rep. 105-190, at 40 (1998) ("The limitations in subsections (a) through (d) protect qualifying service providers from liability for all monetary relief for direct, vicarious, and contributory infringement."), reprinted in Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright: Congressional Committee Reports on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Concurrent Amendments (2000); see also Charles S. Wright, Actual Versus Legal Control: Reading Vicarious Liability for Copyright Infringement Into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, 75 Wash. L. Rev. 1005, 1028-31 (July 2000) ("[T]he committee reports leave no doubt that Congress intended to provide some relief from vicarious liability"). We do not agree that Napster's potential liability for contributory and vicarious infringement renders the Digital Millennium Copyright Act inapplicable per se. We instead recognize that this issue will be more fully developed at trial. At this stage of the litigation, plaintiffs raise serious questions regarding Napster's ability to obtain shelter under ß 512, and plaintiffs also demonstrate that the balance of hardships tips in their favor. See Prudential Real Estate, 204 F.3d at 874; see also Micro Star v. Formgen, Inc. 154 F.3d 1107, 1109 (9th Cir. 1998) ("A party seeking a preliminary injunction must show . . . 'that serious questions going to the merits were raised and the balance of hardships tips sharply in its favor.'"). Plaintiffs have raised and continue to raise significant questions under this statute, including: (1) whether Napster is an Internet service provider as defined by 17 U.S.C. ß 512(d); (2) whether copyright owners must give a service provider "official" notice of infringing activity in order for it to have knowledge or awareness of infringing activity on its system; and (3)
whether Napster complies with ß 512(i), which requires a service provider to timely establish a detailed copyright compliance policy. See A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., No. 99-05183, 2000 WL 573136 (N.D. Cal. May 12, 2000) (denying summary judgment to Napster under a different subsection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ß 512(a)). The district court considered ample evidence to support its determination that the balance of hardships tips in plaintiffs' favor: Any destruction of Napster, Inc. by a preliminary injunction is speculative compared to the statistical evidence of massive, unauthorized downloading and uploading of plaintiffs'
copyrighted works-as many as 10,000 files per second by defendant's own admission. See Kessler Dec. ? 29. The court has every reason to believe that, without a preliminary injunction, these numbers will mushroom as Napster users, and newcomers attracted by the publicity, scramble to obtain as much free music as possible before trial.
-=/snip=-
What this means (IMO, IANAL, etc) is that what I think is Napster's most important defense (Common Carrier), is really still alive and kicking, according to the Appeals Court. What they conclude is that while they don't think that Napster's contribitory infringement necessarily procludes it from protection under the DCMA. HOWEVER, considering that they left the issue to be resolved at trial (remember this is only a trial on an injunction), NOT granting an injunction would potentiall cause more harm to the plantiffs (the record companies) than to the defendants (Napster).
So, even if Napster gets smacked down with an injunction, it doesn't mean that it's down for the count!
Playing devil's advocate here, but you and I (and definately the publishers) both know that it will not always be the case that reading 30 pages on a screen will make your eyes bleed. It's all a matter of the correct technology becoming cheap enough so that eventually reading material on screen will be BETTER for your eyes than on paper.
Have you ever noticed how Jon Katz is really free with the term Luddite? I mean, it doesn't really seem to be a fair comparision between the presidential canidates and some mad candlemen smashing things, does it?
This is an old argument that is brought up time and time again. The truth is, no body feels bad for the top 10%. Why? Because for the top 10%, living expenditures account of a DRASTICALLY smaller amount of the income than the bottom 50%. The people in the bottom 10% have next to no disposible income.
In a sense, it's a attitude of "pay more if you have more". The top 10% have more, why shouldn't they pay more? We're all citizens here, no? And can they honestly say that they're going hungry becuase of these taxes?
Let us examine your argument that "Death tax destorys capital". Irregardless of wether or not you think that these farmers in question have to sell their land, do you honestly think that selling their land is "destroying their capital"? For one, them selling their land merely means that someone else now has land (more capital for someone else!). Now, suppose these fictional farmers can't support their farm becuase of the inheritence tax. So they sell their farm. I bet they make a hefty sum of cash (liquidifying their capital). THERE IS NOTHING PREVENTING THEM FROM BUYING ANOTHER BUSINESS. So suppose they do buy another business. What do we have then? Capital->Cash->Capital! Minus some money out for taxes, of course. My point being, just selling land does not "destroy" capital. Capital can be bought and sold, sometimes for a profit, sometimes for a loss, but that's just the way the market works. The only way to "destroy" capital is 1. through depreciation (that's an entirely different book alltogether), and 2. bad investments (i.e. investing in a company that tanks, another subject that should have its' own book alltogether)
Think about where we were 1000 years ago, and think about where we can be in 1000 years. Hell, think about where we were 100 years ago, and extra-terrestial colonization doesn't seem so very far-fetched, does it?
Man. You guys complain too much. One of the best things about/. is that people who are like us (i.e. CmdrTaco, Hemos, et al), can post whatever it is that they like. We come back becuase their intrests mostly coincide with ours.
But the truth of the matter is:
THEY CAN POST WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT I think that's rather refreshing, compared to the editoral mess that most 'news' is.
Ok. Having said that, of course it was wrong of Intel to release a chip that was unstable to the point of not being able to boot a kernel (that should be one of the first tests). But, you have to be realistic about these things...You don't expect any moderately large piece of software to be bug free, do you? Of course not. These chips designs are HUGE. The best that these companies can do is to find as many bugs as they can in design phase and do some rather extensive testing after taping out. The should've caught this bug, of course, but to expect every chip to be bug free is unreasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, don't forget the 1.5 BILLION dollars Bush is proposing for "Defense of Marriage" spending.
Not to troll, but this was posted on CNN on Sunday Night. I somehow find it hard to believe that no one submitted this for 48 hours. Are the editors just slow? No one is really interested in old news, I think.
1. Pricing in the US is different. All phone calls cost the same.
2. Changing phone numbers involves telling all the people who have your phone number that you have a different one. I, for one, do not relish the thought of having to contact 50+ people and saying "hey, use this new number".
Let me tell ya, this is true. I went to UIUC for Computer engineering. I knew that it was downright impossible to get an F and I took blatant advantage of it the second semester of my senior year.
So I'm taking this VLSI class. 3 design projects. I only do 1. 1 midterm and 1 final. I didn't do well on the midterm (can't remember what I got) During the final, for every question that I didn't know, I wrote "I like cheese". I wrote "I like cheese" at LEAST 5 times on what was probably a 30 question final.
I got a D. If that wasn't F quality work, I don't know what is.
"One researcher recalls a student, a vegan, who asked if she could just biopsy herself, grow up a steak and eat it."
gross. sorta like cutting off your leg and knawing on it.
When I went to vegas last month, there were still several places that still host single deck tables. Although those weren't "high roller" tables (I didn't even bother looking at those). You can't make a killing at these tables, but you could win a couple of hundred bucks, I guess.
Ok, I'll say that I liked Spider-man. I did, it was a good, fun way to spend 2 hours. But how in the world could you "dumb down" Spider-Man? Geez, a movie with such deep lines as "I swear on my father's grave, Spider-Man will pay!", couldn't be dumbed down, could it?
1. From what I can tell, the great thing about this invention is that you don't NEED to learn how to use it. It is supposed to read your "body language" to figure out how you want to go, as if you were walking! So who needs training then?
2. It's going to be expensive like the first product of everything is expensive. Like the first computers, pdas, etc. If you want if first, you shell out the cash. prices should go down with time.
One of the FIRST things? I totally disagree. The FIRST things that the government should be doing is caring for the PHYSICAL well-being of it's citizens. This includes making sure that the skies are safe, that a car bomb doesn't explode outside your building, and some biological agent doesn't kill you. AFTER that, maybe they can worry about things like virii. Computer viruses do hamper the running of the US economic machine, but by no means is that more important than the lives of people.
The author of the article mentions probably the most important possible impact of this, but so far I don't see anyone who recognizes this. By putting one of these in major bookstores across the nation, publishers can now eliminate all the waste that comes from printing too many copies of books.
As I understand the current system, bookstores have a "return policy" with the major publishers. If they buy a book from the publishers, and it sits on the shelf for too long, they can return it. This is a HUGE loss for the publishers, not only because they lose the price of printing the book, but because of the overhead of shipping it out.
As the article mentions, if these machines become widespread, it has great potential to streamline the publishing industry and reduce cost for the consumer.
Oh, and for all those people who are harping on the security concerns, who said that these books had to be on an open network? ATMs talk to each other all the time, and hacking of those networks are minimal. I don't see why they couldn't implement something similar for books.
Errr, so does Mutt. And it sucks less.
While I'll agree with you that price does make a big difference, don't forget that branding is important too. Intel, with the Pentium (tm), has one of the strongest brands out there, probably on par with big names like Coca Cola. That is one of the reasons that Intel continues to have a big market share even though Althons have been higher performance + lower cost.
So, in a sense, Marketing is King.
Dude, that's really funny!...that is until you consider all the people that are killed by drunk drivers who are totally innocent. And the people who are accidently shot every day. Oh yeah, real funny.
hey homeboy, it's not like going to MIT is as cheap as going to your local community college. If you can through some means afford to pay that tuition, I'm sure you can find some way to have a computer at home.
It seems to me that you are incorrect in number 7. That is, in my opinon, the most important part of this decision.
-=snip=-
B. Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Napster also interposes a statutory limitation on liability by asserting the protections of the "safe harbor" from copyright infringement suits for "Internet service providers" contained in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. ß 512. See Napster, 114 F. Supp. 2d at 919 n.24. The district court did not give this statutory limitation any weight favoring a denial of temporary injunctive relief. The court concluded that Napster "has failed to persuade this court that subsection 512(d) shelters contributory infringers." Id.We need not accept a blanket conclusion that ß 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will never protect secondary infringers. See S. Rep. 105-190, at 40 (1998) ("The limitations in subsections (a) through (d) protect qualifying service providers from liability for all monetary relief for direct, vicarious, and contributory infringement."), reprinted in Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright: Congressional Committee Reports on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Concurrent Amendments (2000); see also Charles S. Wright, Actual Versus Legal Control: Reading Vicarious Liability for Copyright Infringement Into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, 75 Wash. L. Rev. 1005, 1028-31 (July 2000) ("[T]he committee reports leave no doubt that Congress intended to provide some relief from vicarious liability"). We do not agree that Napster's potential liability for contributory and vicarious infringement renders the Digital Millennium Copyright Act inapplicable per se. We instead recognize that this issue will be more fully developed at trial. At this stage of the litigation, plaintiffs raise serious questions regarding Napster's ability to obtain shelter under ß 512, and plaintiffs also demonstrate that the balance of hardships tips in their favor. See Prudential Real Estate, 204 F.3d at 874; see also Micro Star v. Formgen, Inc. 154 F.3d 1107, 1109 (9th Cir. 1998) ("A party seeking a preliminary injunction must show . . . 'that serious questions going to the merits were raised and the balance of hardships tips sharply in its favor.'"). Plaintiffs have raised and continue to raise significant questions under this statute, including: (1) whether Napster is an Internet service provider as defined by 17 U.S.C. ß 512(d); (2) whether copyright owners must give a service provider "official" notice of infringing activity in order for it to have knowledge or awareness of infringing activity on its system; and (3)
whether Napster complies with ß 512(i), which requires a service provider to timely establish a detailed copyright compliance policy. See A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., No. 99-05183, 2000 WL 573136 (N.D. Cal. May 12, 2000) (denying summary judgment to Napster under a different subsection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ß 512(a)). The district court considered ample evidence to support its determination that the balance of hardships tips in plaintiffs' favor: Any destruction of Napster, Inc. by a preliminary injunction is speculative compared to the statistical evidence of massive, unauthorized downloading and uploading of plaintiffs'
copyrighted works-as many as 10,000 files per second by defendant's own admission. See Kessler Dec. ? 29. The court has every reason to believe that, without a preliminary injunction, these numbers will mushroom as Napster users, and newcomers attracted by the publicity, scramble to obtain as much free music as possible before trial.
-=/snip=-
What this means (IMO, IANAL, etc) is that what I think is Napster's most important defense (Common Carrier), is really still alive and kicking, according to the Appeals Court. What they conclude is that while they don't think that Napster's contribitory infringement necessarily procludes it from protection under the DCMA. HOWEVER, considering that they left the issue to be resolved at trial (remember this is only a trial on an injunction), NOT granting an injunction would potentiall cause more harm to the plantiffs (the record companies) than to the defendants (Napster).
So, even if Napster gets smacked down with an injunction, it doesn't mean that it's down for the count!
Playing devil's advocate here, but you and I (and definately the publishers) both know that it will not always be the case that reading 30 pages on a screen will make your eyes bleed. It's all a matter of the correct technology becoming cheap enough so that eventually reading material on screen will be BETTER for your eyes than on paper.
It's idioitic to worry about something that's billions of years away. Who knows if mankind will survive this next Bush Administration? :)
I'd like to see someone copy/paste tens of millions of lines of code from an x-term.
Have you ever noticed how Jon Katz is really free with the term Luddite? I mean, it doesn't really seem to be a fair comparision between the presidential canidates and some mad candlemen smashing things, does it?
This is an old argument that is brought up time and time again. The truth is, no body feels bad for the top 10%. Why? Because for the top 10%, living expenditures account of a DRASTICALLY smaller amount of the income than the bottom 50%. The people in the bottom 10% have next to no disposible income.
In a sense, it's a attitude of "pay more if you have more". The top 10% have more, why shouldn't they pay more? We're all citizens here, no? And can they honestly say that they're going hungry becuase of these taxes?
Let us examine your argument that "Death tax destorys capital". Irregardless of wether or not you think that these farmers in question have to sell their land, do you honestly think that selling their land is "destroying their capital"? For one, them selling their land merely means that someone else now has land (more capital for someone else!). Now, suppose these fictional farmers can't support their farm becuase of the inheritence tax. So they sell their farm. I bet they make a hefty sum of cash (liquidifying their capital). THERE IS NOTHING PREVENTING THEM FROM BUYING ANOTHER BUSINESS. So suppose they do buy another business. What do we have then? Capital->Cash->Capital! Minus some money out for taxes, of course. My point being, just selling land does not "destroy" capital. Capital can be bought and sold, sometimes for a profit, sometimes for a loss, but that's just the way the market works. The only way to "destroy" capital is 1. through depreciation (that's an entirely different book alltogether), and 2. bad investments (i.e. investing in a company that tanks, another subject that should have its' own book alltogether)
Think about where we were 1000 years ago, and think about where we can be in 1000 years. Hell, think about where we were 100 years ago, and extra-terrestial colonization doesn't seem so very far-fetched, does it?
Man. You guys complain too much. One of the best things about /. is that people who are like us (i.e. CmdrTaco, Hemos, et al), can post whatever it is that they like. We come back becuase their intrests mostly coincide with ours.
But the truth of the matter is:
THEY CAN POST WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT
I think that's rather refreshing, compared to the editoral mess that most 'news' is.
Let's repeat after me...
NO CHIP IS EVER BUG FREE
Ok. Having said that, of course it was wrong of Intel to release a chip that was unstable to the point of not being able to boot a kernel (that should be one of the first tests). But, you have to be realistic about these things...You don't expect any moderately large piece of software to be bug free, do you? Of course not. These chips designs are HUGE. The best that these companies can do is to find as many bugs as they can in design phase and do some rather extensive testing after taping out. The should've caught this bug, of course, but to expect every chip to be bug free is unreasonable.
Thank you Jon Katz.