First of all, ditto all comments on talking to a lawyer & not giving anything said here credence. That noted...
I recall a similar question recently being written in & answered in the LA Times's "Workplace" questions section. The employment professional who answered it said that the situation varies by state, but this is the legal situation in CA:
You are considered to be "working" and therefore must be paid if your movement or behavior is constrained in any meaningful way. That is, if your employer forces you to be at home to answer a call, he must pay you to stay at home because he's constraining your movement. Likewise, if you're on your lunch break yet not allowed to leave the property you must be paid for your lunch break. An example of behavior constraint is being allowed to do whatever you want but having to wear a shirt that advertises the company. You must be paid for being constrained. Thus, it comes down to individual cases for the court to decide if you are indeed meaningfully constrained.
Now, the courts have said that being forced to carry a beeper or cell is not a meaningful restraint on behavior, nor are reasonable localization constraints, where for example a person is told to be within an hour from work at all times should they get beeped. The intent as interpreted from the courts is that no constraint should make it difficult for you to live a normal daily life. The employer does NOT have to pay you for the time you're on-call, as long at they're not making you stay in a certain place or places to be on-call.
However when called in, even if it's just to answer a 5-minute question, they must pay you for the mandated minimum of 2 hours (this counteracts employers over-scheduling people on purpose then sending them off if it's not busy today without compensation). If they call you in they may also be liable to pay you from the moment they NOTIFY you to come in to the time you leave, as opposed to just the time you're there working on the problem.
Lastly, in CA no company can legally mandate overtime for hourly employees nor fire or punish you for not working overtime, though this law is largely flouted. It is always (legally at least) your choice to come in on short notice or not. If you do come in in addition to the standard 40-hr workweek, the requisite time and 1/2 must be paid.
Maybe I'm just a freak, but I don't want my office to look like an electronics warehouse. Of course to each their own, but I like the plain, easy to open sort of case. There's a reason you don't see any clear TVs, stereos, DVD players, etc. It's because it's gaudy & looks stupid.
And as mentioned all over the place here, there's the fact that if an acrylic case isn't made right you can kiss your components goodbye.
Problem with this is, they won't just sue Princeton - they'll sue Felten personally as well as his grad students who worked on it who I'm SURE wouldn't have been able to handle the cost, though the ACLU would most likely have picked them up.
Problem is, though, that RIAA went to mess with a pretty smart guy. As the Salon article says, he knows his article and the info on how to remove the watermarks is going to get disseminated even if he doesn't present it outright or publish it in a major journal. Looking at the situation, he knew the strongest position for the sake of fighting the DMCA would be to allow yourself to be knuckled under by RIAA's hardball tactics.
Now, every case being brought by RIAA/MPAA/etc based on the DMCA will have the defense pointing to this and saying:
"Look. Here's this law that the record/movie/software industry got congress to pass, saying they needed it to maintain the integrity of their product. But what are they actually using it for? As a method to stifle free expression. Here you have an academic, a man interested only in pursuing the Hack SDMI challenge from an intellectual standpoint, and RIAA is placing its hand over his mouth. This law is a violation not only of the basic tenets of copyright itself but of the Constitution because it's blocking free speech about publicly available materials, blocking education, and preventing the brightest minds in our country from disseminating knowledge. If this is what the court feels congress intended by this law then our client's guilty. If otherwise, the DMCA is simply a bad law that turns media producing corporations into media controlling corporations."
Hell, ever since I can remember, I was playing with IT. My earliest memories are of laying on my back in my crib, my parents' faces hovering overe me, and my mother gently moving my hands away from IT.
As I got older I got my first real computer, a piece of junk Tandy from Radio Shack. My best friend was this tomboy Shelby from down the street. She'd come over after school and we'd spend hours reveling in the wonders of IT. Before then it was only my guy-friends who showed any interest in IT, so that's when I first found out that girls could be just as into IT as boys were.
During middle school most of the other guys were into football or soccer while me & my friends spent most of our time in the dark corners of the computer lab, showing each other what IT could do to change the way we interacted with the world. High school was tougher though - both teachers and fellow students felt obsessing about IT all the time was having a warping effect on my brain. I won't go into it, but I pretty much spent all my high school years in my room reading magazines about and playing with IT.
College on the other hand was a different story. It was the 'net boom times, and all the girls seemed crazy about IT. It was like it was suddenly cool to be a geek. I was able both to excel and spend all the time I want playing around with IT with as many as 4 or 5 men & women with the same interests I had. Not only that, I discovered many other toys and was able to discover new uses of them with IT which has totally changed the way I approach my life.
And now, I've got a high-paying job with a secluded, windowless office where I can sit at my 24" monitor writing programs and playing with IT all day! Hallelujaih!
Hm, why is it that every time something like this gets posted to/. I'm reminded of the Five Minute's Hate from 1984? I wonder.
Of course about 90-95% of us recognize this for the stupidity it is, and a certain majority in the US at large is against censoring games as such. Combine that with the fact that there's not yet been a suit that I've heard of that's succeeded in assigning responsibility to media producers for the actions of those who consumed their product. The great majority get dismissed before trial. I am willing, right now, to make a bet with anyone on/. that this suit will not succeed and that the plaintiffs will get nothing. Nada. Zip. The attorneys and the foundations created to benefit the families of kids killed in Littleton will however get increased media attention, which leads to more money in donations.
Truth is, the prosecuting attorney, DeCamp, is taking these people for a ride for his own aggrandizement, and rather than seek to address what's wrong in their community some people in Littleton have chosen to go along. Combine that with a strong conservative christian fundamentalist streak in the Littleton community and you end up with a class of people, convinced with the certainly that only religious faith can provide, that the devil in the form of electronic media had taken control of those kids' minds.
In my mind, the shooting was a terrible tragedy that could have been prevented. The larger cataclysm however will only be visible in the future, through a historical lens, and that is how everyone is choosing to use the event to achieve a personal, political, religious, or social aim. Some want to use it to outlaw guns. Some want to use it to further legalize guns in classrooms. Some have used it to alter the government's stance toward teacher-led preyer in schools. Some have used it as a call to go & believe in their religion. Some want to use it to regulate movies, music, and games they find objectionable, and others are using it to promote the idea that women should stay at home "where they belong". Some are just out for a buck. Depending on who you ask, some aims are sound and some are nuts. It's just a vulture-like feast of people and organizations that before the incident had an agenda & see Columbine as another tool, an emotional prop against which they can play their scene.
We get caught up in this idea that there's a thing out there we can change that'll make all our kids safe, solve all our prolems, and let us get back to our lives, and that's simply not the case. It requires all of us to personally make the changes in our own family and public lives that we see as pertinent to averting such horrific events, and that's for each of us to decide on our own. Get more involved with our kids? Rent or not rent that action flick? Go to church on Sunday? Decide for yourself, but don't let entrenched interests with obvious agendas tell you what's right and wrong here.
Ellen, as a fellow Californian I'd advice you to ignore the naysayers and futilists who'll sit hunched over their keyboards, tapping the "Delete" key furiously and saying it's either too much hassle or not a big enough deal to worry about.
Exercising one's right as an individual not to be bothered by hucksters large or small in your email account, mailbox or phone is always going to be a hassle. I'm sure it felt like more trouble than it was worth too, to put together all you documents, go to court, and plead your case so that the law passed to protect you could mean something.
Sorry to run up the flag on/.ers, but ensuring the validity and usefulness of the laws that are passed to help you is YOUR job, not the government's. If spam is flooding your mailbox and pissing you off but you don't want to exercise your rights & priveleges enough to get rid of it and recoup damages to you (meager though they may be) then you simply deserve every piece that sits there eating disk space & bandwidth.
More than any mass-mailing program, spammers use your apathy for profit. No apathy, no profit.
The federal government badly needs to curtail MSFT's continual use of the OS as a crowbar to work its way into a market as it did with the browser, has done with the audio player, and continues to do. It's not MSFT that's bad. It's just a company acting as companies do - doing everything it can to extend market share. Until we have a government that takes antitrust seriously we're simply allowing them to walk all over us. As things get worse & worse (which they very well may) remember that it's you and I that are electing a government that tells them there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's our fault.
According to the WSJ article, XP manages to "kinda break" other player/encoders (like I assume MusicMatch, WinAmp, etc) yet provide a perfectly functional one of their own using their proprietary "secure" format. And then MSFT notes that they don't work because those apps "aren't optimized for XP". Of course they arent, because MSFT is controlling the competitive space.
It's as if you have a baseball game between, let's say the MSFT team and the MusicMatch team, only it's completely skewed. MSFT is the refs' employer and they have to answer to them for the calls. MSFT alone gets to make the rules as far as the dimensions of the field (after all, they built and retain ownership of all the stadia anyway), how many balls get you a walk to 1st base, and how many men are allowed on the field. The kicker is that they're not obligated by any means to inform the MusicMatch team what these rules are and how they'll be enforced. MSFT's response to this unfairness in the rules is that MusicMatch "should have known", even though there was no way to know until the game started.
This all plays into a larger and more important issue, that of the definition of the OS - a realm where MSFT has turned misrepresentation into an art form. To most of you computer literates I assume you feel that at its base an OS is the central piece of software that controls communication between software applications and a computer's hardware. Most would also add the software utilities that allow you to do hardware maintenance, disk defrag & formatting, a control panel-type system to do basic settings, and other basic programs. A GUI is also commonly considered (by non-*nix types) to be a portion of the OS, providing an intuitive environment in which to use programs.
There is, however, no stretch of the imagination that makes a media player part of the OS in other than an artificial way. This is also true for solitaire and other games, the internet browser, a video editor, and any number of other "improvements" coincidentally introduced to Windows soon after another company has popularized that same use for a computer. I fear for software makers, because MSFT seems to see no space in the software industry in which it doesn't want to be a player, and it can quickly rise to dominance because it's making the rules. Any corporation that writes software that isn't tied into the MSFT hegemony should be pushing for a consumer-accesible open source OS if only to level the playing field. For the software makers programming for the Windows OS is like drinking arsenic tainted water - sure it sates your thirst and makes you money for now, but it's certain not to be good for you in the end.
My hope is that between Hailstorm's co-opting of your personal info and the overt tendency of MSFT to seek dominance in every use of computers using its OS people would ignore XP upon release. The only thing short of government regulation that'd stop MSFT is a public humbling in the marketplace. I'd hope people would look before they buy. I'd hope they would be smart in thinking about how this OS might limit their right to do as they wish with their computers.
In the end however none of us can stop people from making the decision to buy an OS that limits their capabilities rather than extends them. Many people just want to do some desktop publishing, play games and email their friends and they don't care how they do it or what they're giving up to do it. It's certainly fine to feel that way and go & use an OS like XP if you do. We do need, however, to maintain a viable open alternative where MSFT and other companies as well as industry organizations (like RIAA) can't curtail our use of our own property. I really do think that as computers reach ubiquity in our lives people will see the democratic value of an open OS and a free information space, but it'll take time.
A bunch of hardware and software companies get together to decide whether or not we get to keep control over our own property and benevolently ordain that yes, we do get to maintain our own control over what's on our computers (for now) and somehow this is a win for us?
If this is the status of our opposition to CPRM, we're doomed. The customer badly needs a voice in these discussions.
As a molecular biologist this seems too rife with problems both ethical and biological.
Let's start with the moral: should the government be permitted to throw modified animal species into the wild? If so, then why can't Monsanto? Why not me on my own in a garage lab? Since it really is impossible to know what these moths will do in unexpected situations in the wild, should we even be doing this? Also, should we as a government, society, or profession take on the task of eliminating "annoying" species? Safe application of pesticides to bring down local populations is one thing, taking on species extermination is another. Hell, and they talk about the guy who wants to clone people as being unethical.
Scientifically, it would be statistically impossible to completely eliminate the offending moths. Sure, you let out your engineered moths, they have sterile offspring, but in no way could EVERY male moth females mate with be one of the sterile-offspring providing ones. Such selection would create only increased rates of survival for second-generation moths that CAN reproduce. The moth population may be affected, but trust that it'll only be temporary.
Further down the line, continuous injections of the sterile moths would theoretically cause natural selection amongst the species toward an aversion to the sterile moths, creating a sort of Dept of Agriculture/Cotton Moth arms race, where the government is forced to continually develop new sorts of sterile moths. All in all, waste of time.
Granted, I'm not a moth/agricultural biologist, but this sounds like the mother of dumb ideas.
Does your $250 CPU come with 64MB of DDR RAM? Did you notice that the GPU has more transistors, and is on a.15u process? Are
you aware that nVidia doesn't have the economies of scale that AMD, Moto and Intel enjoy? Just wondering...
No (32MB), yes, and yes. This doesn't prevent the two from colluding to corner the 3D graphics market so they can maintain primacy as a platform for game programming, which despite what many home users like to profess is a major reason they buy computers.
I think my post may have been a bit off-topic since it was about my own worries regarding the level of collusion between MS & nvidia. I was just wondering if anyone else was having the same thoughts though. It wouldn't be the first time a hardware & software company have colluded to reinforce each other's market share to the detriment of innovation and consumer's pocketbooks (wintel, anyone?).
And what the hell does "economies of scale" mean? Each computer worth its salt sold these days comes with a graphics card just as it comes with a CPU. Hence, nvidia should have the same "economies of scale" (that is, available market and scope of exposure) for its product as a CPU company. I actually wouldn't take issue with nvidia gaining a monopoly in the GPU market - they do a good job and I love their products. What I'd be against though, and what's against the law, is colluding with others such as MS that gives nvidia's GPU a priveleged relationship to DirectX and/or the OS that ends up excluding other GPU companies.
Such a state would effectively end the possibility of competition in this market, which'd be a shame. It'd be as if MS engineered Windows such that it ran 50% slower on an AMD vs. Intel CPU.
Don't get me wrong here. I love nvidia's work, have a GeForce2 Pro in my computer as we speak, and think they do a great job. My worry is that MS & nvidia might be collaborating to an extent where they create a problem similar to the wintel situation of not so long ago, where the government had to step in to stop the high level of exclusionary collaboration in that relationship. Software + Hardware = a lock on the market.
All that has to happen is that they become good enough buddies such that MS is customizing DirectX & their OS to work best with nvidia processors and nvidia works with MS to customize it's hardware to work best with DirectX & Windows. Together they end up creating an "industry standard" that through patents & IP locks out or inhibits competitors. Anyone else thinking something like this is possible or already in the works? I'd hope that nvidia, being as innovative as it is, will examine history and try not to let itself get tied too closely to this beast.
Oh, and as for the price thing, I'm avowed not to pay more for my GPU than my CPU. $5-600? As much as a technophile that I am, it's just too dear for me. I'll be sticking to a $250 maximum, thanks.
It's unfortunate that NASA amongst others are so eager to publicize this as a finding of the cause of the permian extinction. This wouldn't be the first time they've been prone to Time Magazine-like exaggeration.
The scientists who've done this work have certainly done a good job in showing that there were interstellar asteroid collisions with the earth at that time which is interesting. However, there are also many other factors that could have played into the permian collapse (where an estimated 90% of species were eliminated), namely a tromendous amount of volcanic activity which I've heard would have been enough to bury the entire planet in 30ft of lava if it were spread evenly. As it is, the ash clouds could have blotted out the sky and killed plants, leaving animal species to wither. then again, there also could have been a fatal cross-species virus that wouldn't be detected in geological surveys. Who knows, really?
As the scientists who've done this work themselves would be happy to point out, it's relatively easy to prove that asteroid collisions and the permian extinction were coincident when compared to the daunting task of proving it was a major cause, if a cause at all. As of now we have knowledge of a number of catastrophic occurences at the end of the permian era along with an extinction, but what's needed is evidence other than perjorative that links the two and describes to what extent each catastrophe was playing a role, if any.
Just because the sun rises when I get up in the morning doesn't mean I make the sun rise by getting up in the morning.
The game software industry seems much smarter than knee-jerk reactionaries, both on this forum and in congress. If you think voluntary prohibitions on advertising from the ISDA (which is run by the game makers) are going to have ANY effect on the popularity or ability to sell these games you're off your nut.
Information and advertising about how good (or bad) a game is spreads 10x faster & more efficiently through a high school hallway than software dealers could ever acheive through advertising. Combine that with the fact that kids that're into these games are usually anticipating them months if not years in advance of release, checking up for the latest info on them from websites & such and you find that nothing essentially will change.
Many kids who play Quake / UT know more than their parents about computers. Hell, if you can kick ass on multiplayer Starcraft or Age of Empires you sure as hell can strategize a way to get your paws on the game you desire.
I do research for a major pharma company, & last year David Baltimore (famed Nobel Prize winning geneticist & human genome project mucky-muck) came to give a speech on life in the post-genome world. Below I sum up a few of his points (which I quite agreed with) on the health care industry, the genome, and genetic diagnosis technologies.
Of primary importance regarding the human genome and genetic technologies, he noted, is the prevention of its misuse by those who would seek to use it for discrimination, and at the top of the list of possible malefactors were health & life insurance companies. These are institutions designed first around making money and THEN around insuring patients receive needed care. Insuring patients' privacy rights comes even further down the line.
Thus, in a crunch the health/life insurance industry will always choose to make money rather than care for a patient or insure a person's privacy. Due to this Baltimore considers the concept of a for-profit health insurance industry to be fundamentally flawed. In his summation he predicts that there will nationalized health care in this country soon in the future and that it'll be driven not by a drive for better or more affordable health care but by a need to control people's medical privacy against various, widespread attempts by the existing industry to take advantage of the tools available to discriminate.
----------
All I add to this is, what is the difference between telling someone you won't insure them because a test of their genes shows the possibility of alzheimers in their future and telling a black person you won't insure them because they have a higher prediliction to develop sickle-cell anemia? The answer for me is that there's little to no difference, and no one should be punished or forced to pay additional costs for things they cannot control. Possibly what is needed is a constitutional amendment preventing "discrimination based on genetic complement"? I don't know. What is clear, both in my mind and apparently in David Baltimore's, is that there's a need to educate ourselves and clarify our stance on these issues both socially and legally before such issues are clarified for us by insurance interests.
But as another poster noted, ginger means light on one's feet, so there could be a relationship there.
GINGER is an anagram and I guess what she is...
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
I suppose a bit of incredulity and cynicism is to be expected of virtually anything posted to this forum, but nevertheless my looking into this shows that this invention may very well be, if not revolutionary, then a profound change in how we get ourselves around.
Kamen has busied himself with personal transportation devices, and has two patents (5971091 & 5975225) with regard to such devices that balance themselves on 2-4 wheels and move a load (with or without people) over irregular terrain. Now this in and of itself would be just an interesting invention, but reference to the Sept. 2000 Wired article cited here previously would show that Kamen's also worked on the Sterling engine. Here I posit that the name he gives his invention, Ginger, is actually a part of an anagram, shown here:
A STERLING ENGINE = GINGER ISNT A LIE
IF Mr. Kamen has perfected the Sterling engine to a maximum of efficiency and minimum of pollution and incorporated it into his patented personal transportation devices he will have created an easy way for anyone to locomote themselves around their neighborhoods, work site, or campus. It would be a fun, interesting way to travel. In short, this conclusion meets all of the suggestions provided for in the articles on the book deal, coordinates with one of Kamen's main areas of study and invention, and has some speculative evidence to prove itself. I haven't seen a better explanation yet.
In order to protect intellectual property associated with the development and distribution of high-quality, executable software, I have taken the step of buttressing our standing with regard to our digital media resources by filing for patent protection for the "one" and "zero".
My work using these two mathematical constructs extends back to the very earliest years of my development, and remain the bedrock of my knowledge base. To allow other entities free use of such integral resources is to trade away one of my basic advantages in the marketplace.
I highly anticipate approval of my patents on these works, and thus urge others to avoid infringment, either by developing in analog environments or entering into talks with me regarding licensing of said inventions.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, ditto all comments on talking to a lawyer & not giving anything said here credence. That noted...
I recall a similar question recently being written in & answered in the LA Times's "Workplace" questions section. The employment professional who answered it said that the situation varies by state, but this is the legal situation in CA:
You are considered to be "working" and therefore must be paid if your movement or behavior is constrained in any meaningful way. That is, if your employer forces you to be at home to answer a call, he must pay you to stay at home because he's constraining your movement. Likewise, if you're on your lunch break yet not allowed to leave the property you must be paid for your lunch break. An example of behavior constraint is being allowed to do whatever you want but having to wear a shirt that advertises the company. You must be paid for being constrained. Thus, it comes down to individual cases for the court to decide if you are indeed meaningfully constrained.
Now, the courts have said that being forced to carry a beeper or cell is not a meaningful restraint on behavior, nor are reasonable localization constraints, where for example a person is told to be within an hour from work at all times should they get beeped. The intent as interpreted from the courts is that no constraint should make it difficult for you to live a normal daily life. The employer does NOT have to pay you for the time you're on-call, as long at they're not making you stay in a certain place or places to be on-call.
However when called in, even if it's just to answer a 5-minute question, they must pay you for the mandated minimum of 2 hours (this counteracts employers over-scheduling people on purpose then sending them off if it's not busy today without compensation). If they call you in they may also be liable to pay you from the moment they NOTIFY you to come in to the time you leave, as opposed to just the time you're there working on the problem.
Lastly, in CA no company can legally mandate overtime for hourly employees nor fire or punish you for not working overtime, though this law is largely flouted. It is always (legally at least) your choice to come in on short notice or not. If you do come in in addition to the standard 40-hr workweek, the requisite time and 1/2 must be paid.
Maybe I'm just a freak, but I don't want my office to look like an electronics warehouse. Of course to each their own, but I like the plain, easy to open sort of case. There's a reason you don't see any clear TVs, stereos, DVD players, etc. It's because it's gaudy & looks stupid.
And as mentioned all over the place here, there's the fact that if an acrylic case isn't made right you can kiss your components goodbye.
Problem with this is, they won't just sue Princeton - they'll sue Felten personally as well as his grad students who worked on it who I'm SURE wouldn't have been able to handle the cost, though the ACLU would most likely have picked them up.
Problem is, though, that RIAA went to mess with a pretty smart guy. As the Salon article says, he knows his article and the info on how to remove the watermarks is going to get disseminated even if he doesn't present it outright or publish it in a major journal. Looking at the situation, he knew the strongest position for the sake of fighting the DMCA would be to allow yourself to be knuckled under by RIAA's hardball tactics.
Now, every case being brought by RIAA/MPAA/etc based on the DMCA will have the defense pointing to this and saying:
"Look. Here's this law that the record/movie/software industry got congress to pass, saying they needed it to maintain the integrity of their product. But what are they actually using it for? As a method to stifle free expression. Here you have an academic, a man interested only in pursuing the Hack SDMI challenge from an intellectual standpoint, and RIAA is placing its hand over his mouth. This law is a violation not only of the basic tenets of copyright itself but of the Constitution because it's blocking free speech about publicly available materials, blocking education, and preventing the brightest minds in our country from disseminating knowledge. If this is what the court feels congress intended by this law then our client's guilty. If otherwise, the DMCA is simply a bad law that turns media producing corporations into media controlling corporations."
And that, Friends, is a powerful argument.
Hell, ever since I can remember, I was playing with IT. My earliest memories are of laying on my back in my crib, my parents' faces hovering overe me, and my mother gently moving my hands away from IT.
As I got older I got my first real computer, a piece of junk Tandy from Radio Shack. My best friend was this tomboy Shelby from down the street. She'd come over after school and we'd spend hours reveling in the wonders of IT. Before then it was only my guy-friends who showed any interest in IT, so that's when I first found out that girls could be just as into IT as boys were.
During middle school most of the other guys were into football or soccer while me & my friends spent most of our time in the dark corners of the computer lab, showing each other what IT could do to change the way we interacted with the world. High school was tougher though - both teachers and fellow students felt obsessing about IT all the time was having a warping effect on my brain. I won't go into it, but I pretty much spent all my high school years in my room reading magazines about and playing with IT.
College on the other hand was a different story. It was the 'net boom times, and all the girls seemed crazy about IT. It was like it was suddenly cool to be a geek. I was able both to excel and spend all the time I want playing around with IT with as many as 4 or 5 men & women with the same interests I had. Not only that, I discovered many other toys and was able to discover new uses of them with IT which has totally changed the way I approach my life.
And now, I've got a high-paying job with a secluded, windowless office where I can sit at my 24" monitor writing programs and playing with IT all day! Hallelujaih!
Hm, why is it that every time something like this gets posted to /. I'm reminded of the Five Minute's Hate from 1984? I wonder.
Of course about 90-95% of us recognize this for the stupidity it is, and a certain majority in the US at large is against censoring games as such. Combine that with the fact that there's not yet been a suit that I've heard of that's succeeded in assigning responsibility to media producers for the actions of those who consumed their product. The great majority get dismissed before trial. I am willing, right now, to make a bet with anyone on /. that this suit will not succeed and that the plaintiffs will get nothing. Nada. Zip. The attorneys and the foundations created to benefit the families of kids killed in Littleton will however get increased media attention, which leads to more money in donations.
Truth is, the prosecuting attorney, DeCamp, is taking these people for a ride for his own aggrandizement, and rather than seek to address what's wrong in their community some people in Littleton have chosen to go along. Combine that with a strong conservative christian fundamentalist streak in the Littleton community and you end up with a class of people, convinced with the certainly that only religious faith can provide, that the devil in the form of electronic media had taken control of those kids' minds.
In my mind, the shooting was a terrible tragedy that could have been prevented. The larger cataclysm however will only be visible in the future, through a historical lens, and that is how everyone is choosing to use the event to achieve a personal, political, religious, or social aim. Some want to use it to outlaw guns. Some want to use it to further legalize guns in classrooms. Some have used it to alter the government's stance toward teacher-led preyer in schools. Some have used it as a call to go & believe in their religion. Some want to use it to regulate movies, music, and games they find objectionable, and others are using it to promote the idea that women should stay at home "where they belong". Some are just out for a buck. Depending on who you ask, some aims are sound and some are nuts. It's just a vulture-like feast of people and organizations that before the incident had an agenda & see Columbine as another tool, an emotional prop against which they can play their scene.
We get caught up in this idea that there's a thing out there we can change that'll make all our kids safe, solve all our prolems, and let us get back to our lives, and that's simply not the case. It requires all of us to personally make the changes in our own family and public lives that we see as pertinent to averting such horrific events, and that's for each of us to decide on our own. Get more involved with our kids? Rent or not rent that action flick? Go to church on Sunday? Decide for yourself, but don't let entrenched interests with obvious agendas tell you what's right and wrong here.
Ellen, as a fellow Californian I'd advice you to ignore the naysayers and futilists who'll sit hunched over their keyboards, tapping the "Delete" key furiously and saying it's either too much hassle or not a big enough deal to worry about.
Exercising one's right as an individual not to be bothered by hucksters large or small in your email account, mailbox or phone is always going to be a hassle. I'm sure it felt like more trouble than it was worth too, to put together all you documents, go to court, and plead your case so that the law passed to protect you could mean something.
Sorry to run up the flag on /.ers, but ensuring the validity and usefulness of the laws that are passed to help you is YOUR job, not the government's. If spam is flooding your mailbox and pissing you off but you don't want to exercise your rights & priveleges enough to get rid of it and recoup damages to you (meager though they may be) then you simply deserve every piece that sits there eating disk space & bandwidth.
More than any mass-mailing program, spammers use your apathy for profit. No apathy, no profit.
The federal government badly needs to curtail MSFT's continual use of the OS as a crowbar to work its way into a market as it did with the browser, has done with the audio player, and continues to do. It's not MSFT that's bad. It's just a company acting as companies do - doing everything it can to extend market share. Until we have a government that takes antitrust seriously we're simply allowing them to walk all over us. As things get worse & worse (which they very well may) remember that it's you and I that are electing a government that tells them there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's our fault.
According to the WSJ article, XP manages to "kinda break" other player/encoders (like I assume MusicMatch, WinAmp, etc) yet provide a perfectly functional one of their own using their proprietary "secure" format. And then MSFT notes that they don't work because those apps "aren't optimized for XP". Of course they arent, because MSFT is controlling the competitive space.
It's as if you have a baseball game between, let's say the MSFT team and the MusicMatch team, only it's completely skewed. MSFT is the refs' employer and they have to answer to them for the calls. MSFT alone gets to make the rules as far as the dimensions of the field (after all, they built and retain ownership of all the stadia anyway), how many balls get you a walk to 1st base, and how many men are allowed on the field. The kicker is that they're not obligated by any means to inform the MusicMatch team what these rules are and how they'll be enforced. MSFT's response to this unfairness in the rules is that MusicMatch "should have known", even though there was no way to know until the game started.
This all plays into a larger and more important issue, that of the definition of the OS - a realm where MSFT has turned misrepresentation into an art form. To most of you computer literates I assume you feel that at its base an OS is the central piece of software that controls communication between software applications and a computer's hardware. Most would also add the software utilities that allow you to do hardware maintenance, disk defrag & formatting, a control panel-type system to do basic settings, and other basic programs. A GUI is also commonly considered (by non-*nix types) to be a portion of the OS, providing an intuitive environment in which to use programs.
There is, however, no stretch of the imagination that makes a media player part of the OS in other than an artificial way. This is also true for solitaire and other games, the internet browser, a video editor, and any number of other "improvements" coincidentally introduced to Windows soon after another company has popularized that same use for a computer. I fear for software makers, because MSFT seems to see no space in the software industry in which it doesn't want to be a player, and it can quickly rise to dominance because it's making the rules. Any corporation that writes software that isn't tied into the MSFT hegemony should be pushing for a consumer-accesible open source OS if only to level the playing field. For the software makers programming for the Windows OS is like drinking arsenic tainted water - sure it sates your thirst and makes you money for now, but it's certain not to be good for you in the end.
My hope is that between Hailstorm's co-opting of your personal info and the overt tendency of MSFT to seek dominance in every use of computers using its OS people would ignore XP upon release. The only thing short of government regulation that'd stop MSFT is a public humbling in the marketplace. I'd hope people would look before they buy. I'd hope they would be smart in thinking about how this OS might limit their right to do as they wish with their computers.
In the end however none of us can stop people from making the decision to buy an OS that limits their capabilities rather than extends them. Many people just want to do some desktop publishing, play games and email their friends and they don't care how they do it or what they're giving up to do it. It's certainly fine to feel that way and go & use an OS like XP if you do. We do need, however, to maintain a viable open alternative where MSFT and other companies as well as industry organizations (like RIAA) can't curtail our use of our own property. I really do think that as computers reach ubiquity in our lives people will see the democratic value of an open OS and a free information space, but it'll take time.
Us 1. Corporate 0.
A bunch of hardware and software companies get together to decide whether or not we get to keep control over our own property and benevolently ordain that yes, we do get to maintain our own control over what's on our computers (for now) and somehow this is a win for us?
If this is the status of our opposition to CPRM, we're doomed. The customer badly needs a voice in these discussions.
Guess we know who to boycott now.
As a molecular biologist this seems too rife with problems both ethical and biological.
Let's start with the moral: should the government be permitted to throw modified animal species into the wild? If so, then why can't Monsanto? Why not me on my own in a garage lab? Since it really is impossible to know what these moths will do in unexpected situations in the wild, should we even be doing this? Also, should we as a government, society, or profession take on the task of eliminating "annoying" species? Safe application of pesticides to bring down local populations is one thing, taking on species extermination is another. Hell, and they talk about the guy who wants to clone people as being unethical.
Scientifically, it would be statistically impossible to completely eliminate the offending moths. Sure, you let out your engineered moths, they have sterile offspring, but in no way could EVERY male moth females mate with be one of the sterile-offspring providing ones. Such selection would create only increased rates of survival for second-generation moths that CAN reproduce. The moth population may be affected, but trust that it'll only be temporary.
Further down the line, continuous injections of the sterile moths would theoretically cause natural selection amongst the species toward an aversion to the sterile moths, creating a sort of Dept of Agriculture/Cotton Moth arms race, where the government is forced to continually develop new sorts of sterile moths. All in all, waste of time.
Granted, I'm not a moth/agricultural biologist, but this sounds like the mother of dumb ideas.
Does your $250 CPU come with 64MB of DDR RAM? Did you notice that the GPU has more transistors, and is on a .15u process? Are
you aware that nVidia doesn't have the economies of scale that AMD, Moto and Intel enjoy? Just wondering...
No (32MB), yes, and yes. This doesn't prevent the two from colluding to corner the 3D graphics market so they can maintain primacy as a platform for game programming, which despite what many home users like to profess is a major reason they buy computers.
I think my post may have been a bit off-topic since it was about my own worries regarding the level of collusion between MS & nvidia. I was just wondering if anyone else was having the same thoughts though. It wouldn't be the first time a hardware & software company have colluded to reinforce each other's market share to the detriment of innovation and consumer's pocketbooks (wintel, anyone?).
And what the hell does "economies of scale" mean? Each computer worth its salt sold these days comes with a graphics card just as it comes with a CPU. Hence, nvidia should have the same "economies of scale" (that is, available market and scope of exposure) for its product as a CPU company. I actually wouldn't take issue with nvidia gaining a monopoly in the GPU market - they do a good job and I love their products. What I'd be against though, and what's against the law, is colluding with others such as MS that gives nvidia's GPU a priveleged relationship to DirectX and/or the OS that ends up excluding other GPU companies.
Such a state would effectively end the possibility of competition in this market, which'd be a shame. It'd be as if MS engineered Windows such that it ran 50% slower on an AMD vs. Intel CPU.
Don't get me wrong here. I love nvidia's work, have a GeForce2 Pro in my computer as we speak, and think they do a great job. My worry is that MS & nvidia might be collaborating to an extent where they create a problem similar to the wintel situation of not so long ago, where the government had to step in to stop the high level of exclusionary collaboration in that relationship. Software + Hardware = a lock on the market.
All that has to happen is that they become good enough buddies such that MS is customizing DirectX & their OS to work best with nvidia processors and nvidia works with MS to customize it's hardware to work best with DirectX & Windows. Together they end up creating an "industry standard" that through patents & IP locks out or inhibits competitors. Anyone else thinking something like this is possible or already in the works? I'd hope that nvidia, being as innovative as it is, will examine history and try not to let itself get tied too closely to this beast.
Oh, and as for the price thing, I'm avowed not to pay more for my GPU than my CPU. $5-600? As much as a technophile that I am, it's just too dear for me. I'll be sticking to a $250 maximum, thanks.
It's unfortunate that NASA amongst others are so eager to publicize this as a finding of the cause of the permian extinction. This wouldn't be the first time they've been prone to Time Magazine-like exaggeration.
The scientists who've done this work have certainly done a good job in showing that there were interstellar asteroid collisions with the earth at that time which is interesting. However, there are also many other factors that could have played into the permian collapse (where an estimated 90% of species were eliminated), namely a tromendous amount of volcanic activity which I've heard would have been enough to bury the entire planet in 30ft of lava if it were spread evenly. As it is, the ash clouds could have blotted out the sky and killed plants, leaving animal species to wither. then again, there also could have been a fatal cross-species virus that wouldn't be detected in geological surveys. Who knows, really?
As the scientists who've done this work themselves would be happy to point out, it's relatively easy to prove that asteroid collisions and the permian extinction were coincident when compared to the daunting task of proving it was a major cause, if a cause at all. As of now we have knowledge of a number of catastrophic occurences at the end of the permian era along with an extinction, but what's needed is evidence other than perjorative that links the two and describes to what extent each catastrophe was playing a role, if any.
Just because the sun rises when I get up in the morning doesn't mean I make the sun rise by getting up in the morning.
The game software industry seems much smarter than knee-jerk reactionaries, both on this forum and in congress. If you think voluntary prohibitions on advertising from the ISDA (which is run by the game makers) are going to have ANY effect on the popularity or ability to sell these games you're off your nut.
Information and advertising about how good (or bad) a game is spreads 10x faster & more efficiently through a high school hallway than software dealers could ever acheive through advertising. Combine that with the fact that kids that're into these games are usually anticipating them months if not years in advance of release, checking up for the latest info on them from websites & such and you find that nothing essentially will change.
Many kids who play Quake / UT know more than their parents about computers. Hell, if you can kick ass on multiplayer Starcraft or Age of Empires you sure as hell can strategize a way to get your paws on the game you desire.
I do research for a major pharma company, & last year David Baltimore (famed Nobel Prize winning geneticist & human genome project mucky-muck) came to give a speech on life in the post-genome world. Below I sum up a few of his points (which I quite agreed with) on the health care industry, the genome, and genetic diagnosis technologies. Of primary importance regarding the human genome and genetic technologies, he noted, is the prevention of its misuse by those who would seek to use it for discrimination, and at the top of the list of possible malefactors were health & life insurance companies. These are institutions designed first around making money and THEN around insuring patients receive needed care. Insuring patients' privacy rights comes even further down the line. Thus, in a crunch the health/life insurance industry will always choose to make money rather than care for a patient or insure a person's privacy. Due to this Baltimore considers the concept of a for-profit health insurance industry to be fundamentally flawed. In his summation he predicts that there will nationalized health care in this country soon in the future and that it'll be driven not by a drive for better or more affordable health care but by a need to control people's medical privacy against various, widespread attempts by the existing industry to take advantage of the tools available to discriminate. ---------- All I add to this is, what is the difference between telling someone you won't insure them because a test of their genes shows the possibility of alzheimers in their future and telling a black person you won't insure them because they have a higher prediliction to develop sickle-cell anemia? The answer for me is that there's little to no difference, and no one should be punished or forced to pay additional costs for things they cannot control. Possibly what is needed is a constitutional amendment preventing "discrimination based on genetic complement"? I don't know. What is clear, both in my mind and apparently in David Baltimore's, is that there's a need to educate ourselves and clarify our stance on these issues both socially and legally before such issues are clarified for us by insurance interests.
Excuse my error.
The GINGER anagram is not exact.
But as another poster noted, ginger means light on one's feet, so there could be a relationship there.
I suppose a bit of incredulity and cynicism is to be expected of virtually anything posted to this forum, but nevertheless my looking into this shows that this invention may very well be, if not revolutionary, then a profound change in how we get ourselves around.
Kamen has busied himself with personal transportation devices, and has two patents (5971091 & 5975225) with regard to such devices that balance themselves on 2-4 wheels and move a load (with or without people) over irregular terrain. Now this in and of itself would be just an interesting invention, but reference to the Sept. 2000 Wired article cited here previously would show that Kamen's also worked on the Sterling engine. Here I posit that the name he gives his invention, Ginger, is actually a part of an anagram, shown here:
A STERLING ENGINE = GINGER ISNT A LIE
IF Mr. Kamen has perfected the Sterling engine to a maximum of efficiency and minimum of pollution and incorporated it into his patented personal transportation devices he will have created an easy way for anyone to locomote themselves around their neighborhoods, work site, or campus. It would be a fun, interesting way to travel. In short, this conclusion meets all of the suggestions provided for in the articles on the book deal, coordinates with one of Kamen's main areas of study and invention, and has some speculative evidence to prove itself. I haven't seen a better explanation yet.
NOTICE
In order to protect intellectual property associated with the development and distribution of high-quality, executable software, I have taken the step of buttressing our standing with regard to our digital media resources by filing for patent protection for the "one" and "zero".
My work using these two mathematical constructs extends back to the very earliest years of my development, and remain the bedrock of my knowledge base. To allow other entities free use of such integral resources is to trade away one of my basic advantages in the marketplace.
I highly anticipate approval of my patents on these works, and thus urge others to avoid infringment, either by developing in analog environments or entering into talks with me regarding licensing of said inventions.
Sincerely,
Gregory Dyas
Whatever man. No pressure. Just take it easy and do a quality job. Ignore the whining masses. --G