People exaggerate its flaws and underplay its usefulness, but everyone secretly knows it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information.
People will propose stuff like what you've done. Some will, however, respond by pointing out that Wikipedia's fluidity and usefulness is actually directly proportional to the ease of access, and so any attempt to moderate it is doomed to failure. Others will run off and start their own forks, which will have all the heavy handed moderation supposedly necessary, and each will fail miserably.
Then, over time, the spammers and others with a commercial interest in vandalising Wikipedia will rise. Wikipedia's usefulness will start to drop. People will be turned off by it as a useful resource. And, many, hopefully many, many, years from now, it'll live on as a wasteland, a sad relic of an idealistic age.
But for now, it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information, and just like Google Groups keeps the good in Usenet alive today, archives of Wikipedia will be awesome for "those in the know" in 2018.
If, however, you're having an affair with my wife, then it's an issue between me, my wife, and you. If any of us chose to make it a public issue, then it's not a private issue, but until then, this is between the three of us, and it's a private issue. Which would involve me kicking your ass, FWIW.
I certainly wouldn't expect you to 'fess up about a consenting affair with my wife if you were on trial for sexually harassing (that's non-consensual, BTW, it's apparent you don't know the difference) a fourth party, something that had nothing to do with the consensual affair you were having with my wife.
Here's the deal: Paula Jones made an allegation that Clinton sexually harassed her. Clinton was having a consensual affair with Lewinsky. Unless Clinton turned around and started sexually harassing Lewinsky too, Lewinsky was entirely irrelevent to the picture, and that question should absolutely, never, have been asked.
Those schools are, assuming their rules against prayer are specific and not general, violating the first amendment as much as a school that tries to have organized prayer is doing.
The problem, fundamentally, is that there are a lot of morons in this world, who responded to the entire "Schools not allowed to promote/organize prayer" as "Prayer banned in schools". And those people seem to speak the loudest, and cause the most amount of problems, whichever side of the fence they sit from the point of view of whether religion should or shouldn't be promoted by the state.
As far as I know the 3G cell phone standard *explicitly* requires that phones can be remotely activated, even when the user turned it "off". Unfortunately I never got hold of a copy of the standards (they are rather expensive and I'm not close enough to that business to have it floating around in the vicinity. Plus, I'd probably just get lost in the thousands of pages).
What a lock of crock.
First, which 3G standard? UMTS? CDMA2000? DECT? I mean, seriously, unless you're suggesting ITU-2000 has this, which is improbable given it deals with air interfaces, then why are you resorting to generic marketing terms rather than specifics?
Secondly, mobile phones of all standards and generations drain their batteries when turned off. It takes a while, but most phones at least need some power to power the "On" button. The functionality you're talking about would result in mobile phones draining power at close to the rate they do normally, when idle.
Third, any attempt to "tap" a cellphone microphone in the way you describe would be immediately noticable to the person whose phone is being tapped. Battery usage would be the same as if the phone was engaged in a phone call. No, "store now and forward later" doesn't result in any significant battery life savings, as all you're doing is breaking the same amount of effort (compression and transmission) into two steps.
Finally, the standards are not expensive, they're a free download. Go to the 3GPP or 3GPP2 sites to download the various UMTS and CDMA2000 standards respectively. If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that.
They're all jammable. CDMA has a "noise floor" above which it's impossible for a cellphone to decode the received signal. DSSS is, essentially, the same concept, and if you've used a digital 2.4GHz DSSS cellphone next to an operating microwave oven (which "transmits" on the same frequency) you'll know what I mean.
GSM can also use frequency hopping (this is optional, but widely used, it's how GSM deals with static conditions and, to some extent, multipath interference) which means in practice it can be as hard as CDMA based systems to jam.
Essentially you can jam them all by blasting noise on all available AWS/PCS/Cellular frequencies. It's hard for me, though, to see how that's possible to do without also causing problems for people nearby (but not actually in your building) who innocently using their phones. You can contain the jammed signal by screening your building, but if you can do that, then you don't need to jam anything in the first place.
Again though, this is something that might be better dealt with by operators cooperating with theaters and using their E911 systems (which provide operators with exact phone locations) to disable voice calling (ie allow text messaging and Internet services) for phones in theaters.
If the cellphone operators are bothered by the risk of jammers being made legal, it shouldn't be too hard for them to use the E911 hardware they have now to automatically prevent cellphones from being used within movie theaters for anything but text messaging and 911. It just takes a little coordination.
Thanks. Yeah, I took a look at that and added a CT2 entry into Wikipedia. Surprised it wasn't already there, but I guess it's pretty much an obsolete technology. CT2 begat DECT, and had the system been based on DECT (complete with handover and incoming calls) it might have gone somewhere - PHS, which has better range but is otherwise completely comparable to DECT, is/was a hit in Japan.)
Also it's not a net increase in profit for Sony Studios if the BR disc merely displaces a sale that would have been HD-DVD or even just DVD in the absense of the PS3.
Copland was a poor idea that was really the wrong solution to the problem, and failed largely because it was designed around a system with a lot of baggage. Mac OS X was the right way of doing this (as was Windows NT) - build the system again from the ground up, provide a "proper" way of doing things preferably in a way that's easy to port to and write software for both old and new platforms under (Cocoa/Carbon [ok, Carbon only for cross-platform], Win32) and keep old applications running in a sectioned off "compatability" layer (Classic, Win16) that can crash without taking down the whole system.
For those who don't remember, Copland implemented pre-emptive multitasking with memory protection, but the only applications that could make use of this weren't allowed to directly interact with the user. Instead, developers were supposed to develop a stub that ran in the same space as all the Mac OS applications, that communicated with the "secure" part. All the applications that crashed Mac OS would also have the same devastating affect on Copland, and if you limited yourself to all-new Copland-only applications, which wouldn't be written for a while because there was no way to write applications that made use of the new features and ran on Mac OS 7, there was still the possibility of one application taking down the whole system if it had some kind of bug that was present in the GUI.
With no incentive to write native Copland apps, and stability that would have been almost as bad as Mac OS 7 even if the bugs in the OS had been sorted out, the system would have been a disaster if it had been finished and released.
Sounds like BeBop was a CT2 (or earlier) operator. A similar service in the UK was operated by Rabbit, which in a roundabout way became Orange. The CT2 standard itself ended up being evolved into DECT, which is the primary cordless phone standard in Europe (and has finally just become available in the US.) CT2 phones and base stations are much prized by their owners apparently.
The major disadvantage, aside from the lack of incoming calls, was the poor range and lack of hand-off. If you wanted to make a call within range of a Rabbit (or presumably BeBop, assuming I'm correct) base station, you had to stay within a few yards of it throughout the duration of the call. Rabbit itself didn't last as long as BeBop, a little over a year, but then it was formed around the time GSM started being rolled out and the UK government had done a lot to open the two UK networks up to the equivalent of MNVOs so Rabbit faced a lot of competition.
I think you'll need to go way south of 486 for a "small screen" in the way you describe. My first "PC" was a 386 (a 386DX, not the newer and cheaper SX), and it had a 15" screen and the graphics card (a Tseng) ran 1024x768 out of the box.
Given it wasn't until recently that people moved from 800x600 as their default Windows desktops to something higher) it strikes me as improbable that there are that many websites out there that use a screen size that'll be difficult to read on a 486 generation PC.
The main problem with running Opera mini on the slower hardware is actually going to be Java. Given J2SE's ideal memory/CPU requirements don't really overlap with the type of hardware you're talking about (and J2ME isn't really available in an optimized form for those platforms), you're probably better off running IE or "regular" Opera. I'm not saying it will not run, it's just you'll be using a slower browser than you have to, with pages overly reformatted, zero Flash support, and close to zero Javascript support, when there's no need to.
Now read the responses to the article. Whenever something comes up where someone disagrees with the premise, take a quick look.
I'm finding the matches are 1:1 right now in every case I've looked. Yesterday, there were differences, but he's "fixed" them now. The guy not only cannot handle people disagreeing with his "The RIAA will sue you, eat your babies, and drink your blood" thesis, but even "Now, hold on a moment, I just read the article, and that's not quite what happened" stuff is enough for him to want to foe you - to mark you as someone he can't "reason" with.
Would you hire a lawyer so bad he cannot even listen to the facts if they appear to contradict what he's claimed in public?
How does this guy stay in business? Other than constantly shilling for his work on Slashdot I mean?
I suspect the latter, because it's true. If you're able to get your product out the door and make a profit, and not die in the marketplace, you're a winner. Apple is a winner. Apple barely has 2-3% of the market (ignoring recent spikes), but they make money hand over fist, so nobody doubts any more that they're a winner in the market. Many PC makers, by comparison, have gone under (usually by being bought out before they collapse, eg Compaq, etc) with much higher market shares and an apparently far more sustainable platform.
The PS3 isn't making a profit, and it looks like Sony will have to sell a lot of games, far more than average (and they're already above-average in price) before the average console bought this round actually starts to be profitable.
The lesson of the last war is it's possible to win the battle but lose the war. Microsoft won a much larger marketshare than Nintendo, yet the X-Box was a business failure (except, possibly, in establishing a brand) and the Gamecube was an outright commercial success. Nintendo certainly appears to have learnt that lesson. What Microsoft and Sony does in the next year or two will be interesting, it's not believable that neither have learnt anything from the previous round.
Leaving aside the major exaggerations in the article (well, ok, let's not leave them aside: you managed to leave out the part where the guy being served was clearly playing games with the RIAA's lawyers leaving people with the impression his employer had been contacted out of the blue, rather than because they'd tried seven times to serve the summons at his home, and were now taking the next step, as is perfectly normal...)
The point, as I made, is that despite your over-all characterization of the RIAA as some gigantic international conspiracy that is going to pull out all the stops and, as such, no-one is safe, it's actually a relatively minor group that's suing a few hundred people at a time because that's all the resources it has, and because those hundred people were, for the most part (except when mis-identified, obviously) stupid enough to be offering RIAA member's music for download. Oh, and occasionally they've admitted to downloading something they weren't authorized to download, which is similarly stupid. Given the many millions, if not tens of millions, of estimated Kazaa/Napster/etc users at its peak, it's doubtful they've even theatened 1% of the users of those networks.
They're out to scare people away from P2P piracy. You're all too happy to buy into, and even promote, that image of them with your talk of "reigns of terror". You've talked about them going after downloaders, despite the fact only the self-admitted downloaders have actually faced such attacks.
Should I be scared of the RIAA? Of course not. The vast majority of people on the Internet use an account they have control over and do not run P2P software, and if they do run it, they have the ability to turn off the "sharing" feature, so actually there are very few people who should be frightened. As for me I do not use such software myself, I've used BitTorrent on occasion, but in order to download GNU/Linux distributions. It's not difficult to stay legal. And by now, anyone who seriously thinks using P2P software to redistribute, without permission, other people's music is in some way legal deserves to lose a few thousand dollars proving their cases. Which, because of volume of numbers, is highly improbable.
I have to say that the only reasons I can think of why a lawyer specialising in such cases might actually want to help the RIAA promote the image of itself as an omnipresent monster don't exactly reflect well on them or lawyers in general. As my mother is a criminal justice solicitor in Wales, who I know is very consciencious about her work, I don't particularly like promoting that image of lawyers, and I sincerely hope that your reasons for exaggerating the AWESOME POWER of RIAAMAN!!1! is for something more positive.
My, what a large number of assumptions for someone criticizing me for making so many.
There were seven attempts to serve him at home. They failed. They then tried serving him at work. This is standard procedure. It's hard for me to see how this is wrong. It's also hard for me to see why you believe the RIAA lawyer would have been talking to the guy's boss without good reason. Oh! I know! Maybe the lawyer was cackling gleefully, waiting for the guy to leave his home before "trying to serve him at home", just so he could contact his boss. Riiiiiight.
Exactly. The RIAA gains from harassing and terrorizing innocent people, like a fascist regime.
The RIAA gains from tools like you and NYCL pretending they're omnipresent monsters, prepared to stoop to any level. Including, apparently reading the above, rounding up pirates and gassing them in concentration camps.
Get a sense of proportion and you'll understand why these descents into lunacy from the freeloading apologists do little but cement the position of the RIAA, and do nothing to actually prevent the lawsuits. The more you scream about how monsterous the RIAA is, the longer this campaign will continue.
Want to really do something about it? Encourage people to download legal, authorized, music. Or make some yourself. Being a tool for the RIAA is hardly the best way to fight them.
Please re-read the article. It's a spoof. The MPAA is not forbidding you from watching a DVD on a large screen. The subdiscussion you're responding to was discussing the viewing of DVDs in schools.
However, in this case they basically decided to go for the gold and [the RIAA] made a bold argument claiming that merely making files available on the internet is in and of itself a copyright infringement.
Did someone seriously say that, or did they say "Making our member's music available on the Internet without authorization is copyright infringement".
Because if it's the latter, it's probably true. (Unless you're able to make the music available on the Internet without, at some point, making a copy. You know, hooking up the CD player directly or something, but not actually doing the copying until the request to download the music comes in.)
I don't really see the problem with that statement, and I fail to see how it can be interpreted as "shutting down the entire Internet" unless the author sincerely believes that Peer-to-Peer Piracy is the Internet.
The RIAA called his employer. This alone is a call for concern (no pun intended)...seriously, defaming someone to their employer? For fucks sake.
The RIAA contacted his employer so they'd be able to serve a subpoena that they hadn't been able to serve at the person's home, having tried seven times.
This is perfectly legal, fair, and it's hardly defamatory. The reason this was worded the way it was is because the submitter, quite honestly, is an utter knobhead who, like the RIAA itself, has an interest in making the RIAA look like an out-of-control bunch of bastards.
Let's ignore what I said, as you did, about the example being a "poor little rich kid". You've totally missed the point of what I was saying.
These are not lawsuits to get money. They're lawsuits to make people know they're going to be screwed with if they screw with the RIAA's members (by making their music available to download without authorization.)
And money won in lawsuits can't be waived away with a bankruptsy either. So our 20-something zit-faced P2P user isn't going to wiggle out of this by declaring bankruptsy. This will be hanging over him for as long as it takes to pay back the money. And in the meantime, he'll be a bankrupt.
You want to show me how this isn't a deterent? How the average P2P user isn't going to be worried by the prospect of the RIAA coming after them?
The story is that a guy deliberately avoided getting served with papers at home, so they served him them at work. You describe this as a "reign of terror" when actually it's a guy playing games (and losing that game.)
So, let's check off the number of problems with this story:
1. It's fundamentally misleading. The employer wasn't contacted out of the blue.
2. The guy being served actually was in the wrong
3. A summons is no cause for an employer to believe his employee has done something wrong
4. There's no "reign of terror", metaphorically or otherwise, in this particular case
5. You've compared a bunch of legal suits largely correctly aimed at pirates to campaigns of torture and murder
6. But the RIAA gains from the story anyway! "Oh noes! I just heard they'll intimidate my children if I use Kazaa! They're so evil! I better stop!"
Can the pro-freeloading wagon please be detached from the copyright-reform train?
The message the RIAA wants to send you is that you WILL be hurt if you're involved in P2P piracy. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The RIAA isn't going to lay-off the stereotypical (but improbable) 80 year old grandma suffering cancer and a missing limb who's never touched a computer in their lives. They want you to know they're going to go after her. They want "you" to know, as a 20-something poor-little-rich-kid zit-faced P2P user who has been caught bang-to-rights redistributing their member's content and has barely any moral credibility whatsoever, that there's pretty much nothing you can do about it, they will go after you, after all, they're prepared to go after Mother Theresa, why the hell wouldn't they go after you?
Of course it's terrible. It's supposed to be. The truth, which NYCL and others kind of gloss over (and there's a reason for that), is that the practical powers of the RIAA are strictly limited, so the entire deal is to make themselves look like the biggest bastards possible. They look for people redistributing, they get the only identifying information available (the ISP logs), they sue, and they hope there's enough publicity that other users of P2P networks will be sufficiently scared enough to avoid fighting back. And sometimes the best way to generate that publicity is to sue grandma and a few unrelated parties and let "Good cop" (a few radio DJs and artists) cry out about it.
And if Good Cop's not available, there's always an ambulance-chasing lawyer around with a silky populistic patter who also has plenty of incentives to play up the "Monster, out-of-control, can do anything and will" image of the RIAA who'll faithfully repeat the message and scare the pirates just a little bit more.
I don't agree with you. I used to, but there's an issue with the argument. If it's simple, the chances are someone will think of it. Just because it's non-obvious doesn't mean that only the "inventor" would have thought of it independently. And if it's simple, the chances are that the majority of people who think of and use it will not believe it's patentable. And they'll rely upon that in their assumptions afterwards.
And they'll get screwed. Because, as we all know, independent invention is not a defense against patent infringement. That's the entire point of patents. First past the post wins the game, even though most of us never realised there was a race or anything to win in the first place.
The bigger problem isn't that the criteria for determining "obviousness" isn't narrow enough, it's that it's far too wide. Even programmers using what they think are advanced concepts are frequently using very obvious improvements upon existing techniques and concepts, or concepts that look like they're amazing new inventions when they're simply reflections of general technological advances. The most obvious, in my mind, is TiVo. It looks like an extraordinary new idea. Nothing like it existed before TiVo did it.
Well, of course nothing like it existed before TiVo did it. Nobody was going to spend thousands of dollars on a low quality video recorder. TiVo came about almost immediately upon disk capacities and general compression techniques becoming suitable for producing a product in the $400 range that could record live video automatically in quantity, and could do a variety of very obvious things with that recording, including show it delayed to the user. Before the PVR, the technology to implement a PVR was too expensive.
When you look at TiVo, you immediately realise that once the core concept - recording video onto a hard drive - is implemented, absolutely everything else - timers, pausing and rewinding live video, etc - are actually exactly what you'd get after playing with the design for a few days. They just follow on from the invention. You start by implementing something to do the recording, implementing obvious extensions of the VCR and computing technology like schedules. Then you think "Well, I don't want to actually wait until this is finished, can I start watching it now?" So you implement that, and implement the obvious features of being able to rewind and fast forward and pause up to the point at which it is recording. Then you play with that for a few days, and realise that there's no reason why the recorder can't be recording everything by default on the current tuner, so you can pause and rewind at any time, not just when you've prescheduled a recording.
And lo, you have a very non-obvious looking invention where all you've done is actually follow the paths and the logic to its logical conclusion.
Much of the "complex looking" patents today have to do with people determining what problems are going to need to be solved in the future, and then doing the research now. Usually the solutions are exactly what would have been invented when the problem was actually encountered, which means the patenter can then jump out and slap patent fees upon anyone who encounters the problem.
What is the purpose of that reward? What did they add to society? If their entire model was based upon the notion that, in the future, when the problem is encountered, other people will solve the problem, independently, the same way, then how is their solution non-obvious? Is it non-obvious simply because they knew the problem would arise?
In the end, the only conclusion you can draw is that patents are a farce. We need better ways of encouraging people to document their inventions. The kind of landgrabs that patents encourage are unhealthy, and they merely make the obvious more difficult.
How would you compare the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and customer service of the US Post Office with Fed X and UPS?
Customer service at the USPS has always been excellent in my experience. And given they're covering the costs while charging a pittance for delivery, I'd be surprised if their efficieny or cost effectiveness is worse than the other two.
In my experience, they deliver faster than UPS Ground too. I've never used FedEx ground so can't comment on that.
They told me at the store where I ordered it that their biggest problem and expense and headache was renting space on the towers. They sad the cell phone guys who own the towers hated to give up the space and just stalled/delayed/obstructed for a long time, as can be expected as it is a threat totheir business in general terms.
I can believe that. It takes quite a bit of time and money to actually get a tower erected in the first place which means once such a thing is approved, very few operators are going to be happy about providing them to "competitors" and a mom-and-pop operation is going to have great difficulty erecting their own.
Personally, I think this is where the FCC needs to step in in the same way as it has over Wifi and satellite antennas. Every tower that goes up gets opposed by a bunch of residents groups. There should be some way to bypass that as long as the towers furfill some basic criteria. And, obviously, the people who own them should be required to, within reason, make them open and available to all-comers.
I looked into getting either a verizon cellphone based data account or t-mobile, both were unacceptzble due to cost and availability. The verizon guys were the worst, they didn't even know verizon had such a thing! I kid thee not, I had to tell them that their company could do internet connections/data. T-mobile just doesn't offer their data plan around here.
And then you get the latency with either... Don't get me wrong, I don't think now's the time to go with mobile data. I just think that in a few years, the problems will be sorted out, and high speed, low latency, data will be widely available wirelessly.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia is the 1994 USENET in 2006.
People exaggerate its flaws and underplay its usefulness, but everyone secretly knows it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information.
People will propose stuff like what you've done. Some will, however, respond by pointing out that Wikipedia's fluidity and usefulness is actually directly proportional to the ease of access, and so any attempt to moderate it is doomed to failure. Others will run off and start their own forks, which will have all the heavy handed moderation supposedly necessary, and each will fail miserably.
Then, over time, the spammers and others with a commercial interest in vandalising Wikipedia will rise. Wikipedia's usefulness will start to drop. People will be turned off by it as a useful resource. And, many, hopefully many, many, years from now, it'll live on as a wasteland, a sad relic of an idealistic age.
But for now, it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information, and just like Google Groups keeps the good in Usenet alive today, archives of Wikipedia will be awesome for "those in the know" in 2018.
No, you can't.
If, however, you're having an affair with my wife, then it's an issue between me, my wife, and you. If any of us chose to make it a public issue, then it's not a private issue, but until then, this is between the three of us, and it's a private issue. Which would involve me kicking your ass, FWIW.
I certainly wouldn't expect you to 'fess up about a consenting affair with my wife if you were on trial for sexually harassing (that's non-consensual, BTW, it's apparent you don't know the difference) a fourth party, something that had nothing to do with the consensual affair you were having with my wife.
Here's the deal: Paula Jones made an allegation that Clinton sexually harassed her. Clinton was having a consensual affair with Lewinsky. Unless Clinton turned around and started sexually harassing Lewinsky too, Lewinsky was entirely irrelevent to the picture, and that question should absolutely, never, have been asked.
Those schools are, assuming their rules against prayer are specific and not general, violating the first amendment as much as a school that tries to have organized prayer is doing.
The problem, fundamentally, is that there are a lot of morons in this world, who responded to the entire "Schools not allowed to promote/organize prayer" as "Prayer banned in schools". And those people seem to speak the loudest, and cause the most amount of problems, whichever side of the fence they sit from the point of view of whether religion should or shouldn't be promoted by the state.
Replying to the AC:
What a lock of crock.
First, which 3G standard? UMTS? CDMA2000? DECT? I mean, seriously, unless you're suggesting ITU-2000 has this, which is improbable given it deals with air interfaces, then why are you resorting to generic marketing terms rather than specifics?
Secondly, mobile phones of all standards and generations drain their batteries when turned off. It takes a while, but most phones at least need some power to power the "On" button. The functionality you're talking about would result in mobile phones draining power at close to the rate they do normally, when idle.
Third, any attempt to "tap" a cellphone microphone in the way you describe would be immediately noticable to the person whose phone is being tapped. Battery usage would be the same as if the phone was engaged in a phone call. No, "store now and forward later" doesn't result in any significant battery life savings, as all you're doing is breaking the same amount of effort (compression and transmission) into two steps.
Finally, the standards are not expensive, they're a free download. Go to the 3GPP or 3GPP2 sites to download the various UMTS and CDMA2000 standards respectively. If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that.
They're all jammable. CDMA has a "noise floor" above which it's impossible for a cellphone to decode the received signal. DSSS is, essentially, the same concept, and if you've used a digital 2.4GHz DSSS cellphone next to an operating microwave oven (which "transmits" on the same frequency) you'll know what I mean.
GSM can also use frequency hopping (this is optional, but widely used, it's how GSM deals with static conditions and, to some extent, multipath interference) which means in practice it can be as hard as CDMA based systems to jam.
Essentially you can jam them all by blasting noise on all available AWS/PCS/Cellular frequencies. It's hard for me, though, to see how that's possible to do without also causing problems for people nearby (but not actually in your building) who innocently using their phones. You can contain the jammed signal by screening your building, but if you can do that, then you don't need to jam anything in the first place.
Again though, this is something that might be better dealt with by operators cooperating with theaters and using their E911 systems (which provide operators with exact phone locations) to disable voice calling (ie allow text messaging and Internet services) for phones in theaters.
If the cellphone operators are bothered by the risk of jammers being made legal, it shouldn't be too hard for them to use the E911 hardware they have now to automatically prevent cellphones from being used within movie theaters for anything but text messaging and 911. It just takes a little coordination.
Thanks. Yeah, I took a look at that and added a CT2 entry into Wikipedia. Surprised it wasn't already there, but I guess it's pretty much an obsolete technology. CT2 begat DECT, and had the system been based on DECT (complete with handover and incoming calls) it might have gone somewhere - PHS, which has better range but is otherwise completely comparable to DECT, is/was a hit in Japan.)
Also it's not a net increase in profit for Sony Studios if the BR disc merely displaces a sale that would have been HD-DVD or even just DVD in the absense of the PS3.
Copland was a poor idea that was really the wrong solution to the problem, and failed largely because it was designed around a system with a lot of baggage. Mac OS X was the right way of doing this (as was Windows NT) - build the system again from the ground up, provide a "proper" way of doing things preferably in a way that's easy to port to and write software for both old and new platforms under (Cocoa/Carbon [ok, Carbon only for cross-platform], Win32) and keep old applications running in a sectioned off "compatability" layer (Classic, Win16) that can crash without taking down the whole system.
For those who don't remember, Copland implemented pre-emptive multitasking with memory protection, but the only applications that could make use of this weren't allowed to directly interact with the user. Instead, developers were supposed to develop a stub that ran in the same space as all the Mac OS applications, that communicated with the "secure" part. All the applications that crashed Mac OS would also have the same devastating affect on Copland, and if you limited yourself to all-new Copland-only applications, which wouldn't be written for a while because there was no way to write applications that made use of the new features and ran on Mac OS 7, there was still the possibility of one application taking down the whole system if it had some kind of bug that was present in the GUI.
With no incentive to write native Copland apps, and stability that would have been almost as bad as Mac OS 7 even if the bugs in the OS had been sorted out, the system would have been a disaster if it had been finished and released.
Sounds like BeBop was a CT2 (or earlier) operator. A similar service in the UK was operated by Rabbit, which in a roundabout way became Orange. The CT2 standard itself ended up being evolved into DECT, which is the primary cordless phone standard in Europe (and has finally just become available in the US.) CT2 phones and base stations are much prized by their owners apparently.
The major disadvantage, aside from the lack of incoming calls, was the poor range and lack of hand-off. If you wanted to make a call within range of a Rabbit (or presumably BeBop, assuming I'm correct) base station, you had to stay within a few yards of it throughout the duration of the call. Rabbit itself didn't last as long as BeBop, a little over a year, but then it was formed around the time GSM started being rolled out and the UK government had done a lot to open the two UK networks up to the equivalent of MNVOs so Rabbit faced a lot of competition.
I think you'll need to go way south of 486 for a "small screen" in the way you describe. My first "PC" was a 386 (a 386DX, not the newer and cheaper SX), and it had a 15" screen and the graphics card (a Tseng) ran 1024x768 out of the box.
Given it wasn't until recently that people moved from 800x600 as their default Windows desktops to something higher) it strikes me as improbable that there are that many websites out there that use a screen size that'll be difficult to read on a 486 generation PC.
The main problem with running Opera mini on the slower hardware is actually going to be Java. Given J2SE's ideal memory/CPU requirements don't really overlap with the type of hardware you're talking about (and J2ME isn't really available in an optimized form for those platforms), you're probably better off running IE or "regular" Opera. I'm not saying it will not run, it's just you'll be using a slower browser than you have to, with pages overly reformatted, zero Flash support, and close to zero Javascript support, when there's no need to.
I'm not seeing the advantage.
That's a nice thought, the idea that NewYorkCountryLawyer might be an elaborate joke that only one or two of us have failed to cotton on to.
Want to play a game?
Here's his foe list.
Now read the responses to the article. Whenever something comes up where someone disagrees with the premise, take a quick look.
I'm finding the matches are 1:1 right now in every case I've looked. Yesterday, there were differences, but he's "fixed" them now. The guy not only cannot handle people disagreeing with his "The RIAA will sue you, eat your babies, and drink your blood" thesis, but even "Now, hold on a moment, I just read the article, and that's not quite what happened" stuff is enough for him to want to foe you - to mark you as someone he can't "reason" with.
Would you hire a lawyer so bad he cannot even listen to the facts if they appear to contradict what he's claimed in public?
How does this guy stay in business? Other than constantly shilling for his work on Slashdot I mean?
I suspect the latter, because it's true. If you're able to get your product out the door and make a profit, and not die in the marketplace, you're a winner. Apple is a winner. Apple barely has 2-3% of the market (ignoring recent spikes), but they make money hand over fist, so nobody doubts any more that they're a winner in the market. Many PC makers, by comparison, have gone under (usually by being bought out before they collapse, eg Compaq, etc) with much higher market shares and an apparently far more sustainable platform.
The PS3 isn't making a profit, and it looks like Sony will have to sell a lot of games, far more than average (and they're already above-average in price) before the average console bought this round actually starts to be profitable.
The lesson of the last war is it's possible to win the battle but lose the war. Microsoft won a much larger marketshare than Nintendo, yet the X-Box was a business failure (except, possibly, in establishing a brand) and the Gamecube was an outright commercial success. Nintendo certainly appears to have learnt that lesson. What Microsoft and Sony does in the next year or two will be interesting, it's not believable that neither have learnt anything from the previous round.
Leaving aside the major exaggerations in the article (well, ok, let's not leave them aside: you managed to leave out the part where the guy being served was clearly playing games with the RIAA's lawyers leaving people with the impression his employer had been contacted out of the blue, rather than because they'd tried seven times to serve the summons at his home, and were now taking the next step, as is perfectly normal...)
The point, as I made, is that despite your over-all characterization of the RIAA as some gigantic international conspiracy that is going to pull out all the stops and, as such, no-one is safe, it's actually a relatively minor group that's suing a few hundred people at a time because that's all the resources it has, and because those hundred people were, for the most part (except when mis-identified, obviously) stupid enough to be offering RIAA member's music for download. Oh, and occasionally they've admitted to downloading something they weren't authorized to download, which is similarly stupid. Given the many millions, if not tens of millions, of estimated Kazaa/Napster/etc users at its peak, it's doubtful they've even theatened 1% of the users of those networks.
They're out to scare people away from P2P piracy. You're all too happy to buy into, and even promote, that image of them with your talk of "reigns of terror". You've talked about them going after downloaders, despite the fact only the self-admitted downloaders have actually faced such attacks.
Should I be scared of the RIAA? Of course not. The vast majority of people on the Internet use an account they have control over and do not run P2P software, and if they do run it, they have the ability to turn off the "sharing" feature, so actually there are very few people who should be frightened. As for me I do not use such software myself, I've used BitTorrent on occasion, but in order to download GNU/Linux distributions. It's not difficult to stay legal. And by now, anyone who seriously thinks using P2P software to redistribute, without permission, other people's music is in some way legal deserves to lose a few thousand dollars proving their cases. Which, because of volume of numbers, is highly improbable.
I have to say that the only reasons I can think of why a lawyer specialising in such cases might actually want to help the RIAA promote the image of itself as an omnipresent monster don't exactly reflect well on them or lawyers in general. As my mother is a criminal justice solicitor in Wales, who I know is very consciencious about her work, I don't particularly like promoting that image of lawyers, and I sincerely hope that your reasons for exaggerating the AWESOME POWER of RIAAMAN!!1! is for something more positive.
My, what a large number of assumptions for someone criticizing me for making so many.
There were seven attempts to serve him at home. They failed. They then tried serving him at work. This is standard procedure. It's hard for me to see how this is wrong. It's also hard for me to see why you believe the RIAA lawyer would have been talking to the guy's boss without good reason. Oh! I know! Maybe the lawyer was cackling gleefully, waiting for the guy to leave his home before "trying to serve him at home", just so he could contact his boss. Riiiiiight.
The RIAA gains from tools like you and NYCL pretending they're omnipresent monsters, prepared to stoop to any level. Including, apparently reading the above, rounding up pirates and gassing them in concentration camps.
Get a sense of proportion and you'll understand why these descents into lunacy from the freeloading apologists do little but cement the position of the RIAA, and do nothing to actually prevent the lawsuits. The more you scream about how monsterous the RIAA is, the longer this campaign will continue.
Want to really do something about it? Encourage people to download legal, authorized, music. Or make some yourself. Being a tool for the RIAA is hardly the best way to fight them.
(Responding to the AC)
Please re-read the article. It's a spoof. The MPAA is not forbidding you from watching a DVD on a large screen. The subdiscussion you're responding to was discussing the viewing of DVDs in schools.
Did someone seriously say that, or did they say "Making our member's music available on the Internet without authorization is copyright infringement".
Because if it's the latter, it's probably true. (Unless you're able to make the music available on the Internet without, at some point, making a copy. You know, hooking up the CD player directly or something, but not actually doing the copying until the request to download the music comes in.)
I don't really see the problem with that statement, and I fail to see how it can be interpreted as "shutting down the entire Internet" unless the author sincerely believes that Peer-to-Peer Piracy is the Internet.
The RIAA contacted his employer so they'd be able to serve a subpoena that they hadn't been able to serve at the person's home, having tried seven times.
This is perfectly legal, fair, and it's hardly defamatory. The reason this was worded the way it was is because the submitter, quite honestly, is an utter knobhead who, like the RIAA itself, has an interest in making the RIAA look like an out-of-control bunch of bastards.
That's assuming he's not working for the RIAA.
Let's ignore what I said, as you did, about the example being a "poor little rich kid". You've totally missed the point of what I was saying.
These are not lawsuits to get money. They're lawsuits to make people know they're going to be screwed with if they screw with the RIAA's members (by making their music available to download without authorization.)
And money won in lawsuits can't be waived away with a bankruptsy either. So our 20-something zit-faced P2P user isn't going to wiggle out of this by declaring bankruptsy. This will be hanging over him for as long as it takes to pay back the money. And in the meantime, he'll be a bankrupt.
You want to show me how this isn't a deterent? How the average P2P user isn't going to be worried by the prospect of the RIAA coming after them?
Hardly.
The story is that a guy deliberately avoided getting served with papers at home, so they served him them at work. You describe this as a "reign of terror" when actually it's a guy playing games (and losing that game.)
So, let's check off the number of problems with this story:
1. It's fundamentally misleading. The employer wasn't contacted out of the blue.
2. The guy being served actually was in the wrong
3. A summons is no cause for an employer to believe his employee has done something wrong
4. There's no "reign of terror", metaphorically or otherwise, in this particular case
5. You've compared a bunch of legal suits largely correctly aimed at pirates to campaigns of torture and murder
6. But the RIAA gains from the story anyway! "Oh noes! I just heard they'll intimidate my children if I use Kazaa! They're so evil! I better stop!"
Can the pro-freeloading wagon please be detached from the copyright-reform train?
Why?
The message the RIAA wants to send you is that you WILL be hurt if you're involved in P2P piracy. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The RIAA isn't going to lay-off the stereotypical (but improbable) 80 year old grandma suffering cancer and a missing limb who's never touched a computer in their lives. They want you to know they're going to go after her. They want "you" to know, as a 20-something poor-little-rich-kid zit-faced P2P user who has been caught bang-to-rights redistributing their member's content and has barely any moral credibility whatsoever, that there's pretty much nothing you can do about it, they will go after you, after all, they're prepared to go after Mother Theresa, why the hell wouldn't they go after you?
Of course it's terrible. It's supposed to be. The truth, which NYCL and others kind of gloss over (and there's a reason for that), is that the practical powers of the RIAA are strictly limited, so the entire deal is to make themselves look like the biggest bastards possible. They look for people redistributing, they get the only identifying information available (the ISP logs), they sue, and they hope there's enough publicity that other users of P2P networks will be sufficiently scared enough to avoid fighting back. And sometimes the best way to generate that publicity is to sue grandma and a few unrelated parties and let "Good cop" (a few radio DJs and artists) cry out about it.
And if Good Cop's not available, there's always an ambulance-chasing lawyer around with a silky populistic patter who also has plenty of incentives to play up the "Monster, out-of-control, can do anything and will" image of the RIAA who'll faithfully repeat the message and scare the pirates just a little bit more.
I don't agree with you. I used to, but there's an issue with the argument. If it's simple, the chances are someone will think of it. Just because it's non-obvious doesn't mean that only the "inventor" would have thought of it independently. And if it's simple, the chances are that the majority of people who think of and use it will not believe it's patentable. And they'll rely upon that in their assumptions afterwards.
And they'll get screwed. Because, as we all know, independent invention is not a defense against patent infringement. That's the entire point of patents. First past the post wins the game, even though most of us never realised there was a race or anything to win in the first place.
The bigger problem isn't that the criteria for determining "obviousness" isn't narrow enough, it's that it's far too wide. Even programmers using what they think are advanced concepts are frequently using very obvious improvements upon existing techniques and concepts, or concepts that look like they're amazing new inventions when they're simply reflections of general technological advances. The most obvious, in my mind, is TiVo. It looks like an extraordinary new idea. Nothing like it existed before TiVo did it.
Well, of course nothing like it existed before TiVo did it. Nobody was going to spend thousands of dollars on a low quality video recorder. TiVo came about almost immediately upon disk capacities and general compression techniques becoming suitable for producing a product in the $400 range that could record live video automatically in quantity, and could do a variety of very obvious things with that recording, including show it delayed to the user. Before the PVR, the technology to implement a PVR was too expensive.
When you look at TiVo, you immediately realise that once the core concept - recording video onto a hard drive - is implemented, absolutely everything else - timers, pausing and rewinding live video, etc - are actually exactly what you'd get after playing with the design for a few days. They just follow on from the invention. You start by implementing something to do the recording, implementing obvious extensions of the VCR and computing technology like schedules. Then you think "Well, I don't want to actually wait until this is finished, can I start watching it now?" So you implement that, and implement the obvious features of being able to rewind and fast forward and pause up to the point at which it is recording. Then you play with that for a few days, and realise that there's no reason why the recorder can't be recording everything by default on the current tuner, so you can pause and rewind at any time, not just when you've prescheduled a recording.
And lo, you have a very non-obvious looking invention where all you've done is actually follow the paths and the logic to its logical conclusion.
Much of the "complex looking" patents today have to do with people determining what problems are going to need to be solved in the future, and then doing the research now. Usually the solutions are exactly what would have been invented when the problem was actually encountered, which means the patenter can then jump out and slap patent fees upon anyone who encounters the problem.
What is the purpose of that reward? What did they add to society? If their entire model was based upon the notion that, in the future, when the problem is encountered, other people will solve the problem, independently, the same way, then how is their solution non-obvious? Is it non-obvious simply because they knew the problem would arise?
In the end, the only conclusion you can draw is that patents are a farce. We need better ways of encouraging people to document their inventions. The kind of landgrabs that patents encourage are unhealthy, and they merely make the obvious more difficult.
Customer service at the USPS has always been excellent in my experience. And given they're covering the costs while charging a pittance for delivery, I'd be surprised if their efficieny or cost effectiveness is worse than the other two.
In my experience, they deliver faster than UPS Ground too. I've never used FedEx ground so can't comment on that.
I can believe that. It takes quite a bit of time and money to actually get a tower erected in the first place which means once such a thing is approved, very few operators are going to be happy about providing them to "competitors" and a mom-and-pop operation is going to have great difficulty erecting their own.
Personally, I think this is where the FCC needs to step in in the same way as it has over Wifi and satellite antennas. Every tower that goes up gets opposed by a bunch of residents groups. There should be some way to bypass that as long as the towers furfill some basic criteria. And, obviously, the people who own them should be required to, within reason, make them open and available to all-comers.
And then you get the latency with either... Don't get me wrong, I don't think now's the time to go with mobile data. I just think that in a few years, the problems will be sorted out, and high speed, low latency, data will be widely available wirelessly.