I have to admit, I saw this coming. The RIAA and others may be able to extort money by writing scary letters, but when it finally comes down to a courtroom there's no way this would hold up. Making ISPs liable for network traffic would be like making FedEx and UPS liable for the content of the boxes they ship. It's a ridiculous idea. I personally think attorneys who cooperate in filing suits with such obvious lack of merit should be prosecuted themselves for wasting the public's money, and should risk losing their license to practice law.
Overloading the DOJ servers at this crucial time during the War on Terror could bring critical network communications to a halt, making America vulnerable to terrorist activity.
To justify anything nowadays you have to use the "t" word.
This seems like it was designed by Microsoft -- let's make the system more secure by adding ways to bypass it in the name of convenience! I feel much better about flying now.
I have been trying to find this article off and on for many years. It's not listed on the SciAm website. The closest I can get is that it was probably between 1980 and 1985.
The music the SA article was talking about was any form of popular music, whether it's classical or rock or whatever. Not recordings of rainstorms, bird songs, etc. that a few people regard as music. There's no issue about whose taste is right. The point is that musical compositions that appeal to large numbers of people tend to have a fractal component, and that fact could reflect something interesting about how our brains work.
It is rather a mere coincidence of two symptoms or characteristics.
Really? I would say it might or might not be a mere coincidence, unless you have some data you didn't mention. Certainly an interesting avenue for further research.
I'm surprised there is no mention of fractal mathematics in all this. Back in the 80s there was a big article in Scientific American trying to explain why music sounds good. Music doesn't sound like anything in nature. Individual notes might, but melodies don't. So what does it sound like? Popular music, whether classical, jazz, rock or whatever, tends to have a fractal mathematical property. It's in the middle between brown noise, in which each sound is highly dependent on the preceding sound, and white noise, in which there is no relationship. This pattern seems to mimic something about the way we perceive changes in the world around us. If you take two radar scans of an organic landscape -- trees waving, people walking around -- and subtract one from the other, the difference is fractal. If you measure nerve activity with electrical probes you will get white noise on the peripheral nerves, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal the signal becomes, as if our nervous systems filter out random noise and let the fractal component of our perceptions pass through. Patterns in music might mimic the patterns used by our brains store memories and emotions. This would explain why a piece of music can make you feel a certain way.
Not because he's wealthy, but because he seems like just one of the many high energy, ego-driven assholes who inhabit the business world. He seems to have treated his peers just as poorly as they've treated him.
I've looked around on Google for info about building an actual digital camera but came up with nothing. Wouldn't it be cool to build an extremely minimal digital camera that could survive a kite crash? Building a digital camera from scratch seems daunting, but what about cannibalizing a low-priced camera, removing nonessential parts? Anybody done anything like this?
Sony is also developing ultra-flat screen TVs based on carbon nanotube technology that are supposed to be thinner (3/4 inch) and substantially cheaper than (3-inch thick) plasma flat screen TVs. These will be in the 50-inch range. I can't imagine wanting a bigger television in a house, let alone a projector hanging from the ceiling. But apparently Sony thinks there's a home market for humongous projector systems too.
treat the race to scramble and descramble content as a kind of market competition that should be unfettered by the DMCA--or new FTC rules
This is the most intelligent thing I've heard anybody say about the copy protection controversy.
Back in the 70s and early 80s HBO was broadcast through the air like DirecTV. People used to build their own receivers using antennas made out of coffee cans (I know -- I had one). After HBO had harassed and threatened antenna owners for several years, the courts finally ruled that the company couldn't control what people did with the broadcast signal in their own homes. HBO's next move was to scramble the signal, which was easily defeated by those with access to spectrum analyzers but largely stymied the coffee-can community. The eventual solution was for HBO to join the cable world.
I always thought this was the sensible way to handle the controversy. Make companies do business in the real world, rather than letting them reshape it to their needs. Lately our government has gone in the opposite direction, with legislators tailoring laws to suit the demands of their financial backers.
One thing that must be repeated over and over is that copyright infringement is not stealing, because copyright is not property. It's a temporary restriction imposed on everybody except the copyright holder. Copyright holders don't "own" anything, and copyright doesn't give them any extra rights, it takes rights away from everybody else for a limited time. Copyright infringement may cause financial losses, but so do lots of other things -- arson, vandalism, assault, murder, for example -- and we don't call those things theft.
It's important to keep repeating this because the content industry has essentially hijacked the concepts of property ownership and theft. They play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher, and they label critics of current copyright laws as socialists threatening the whole concept of private property.
Exactly. The Robot Hall of Fame is a media event generator, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, etc. It's kind of interesting that you can create one of these Hall of Fame institutions out of thin air, and it somehow automatically becomes the authority in its field. I'm surprised nobody's created a Geek Hall of Fame yet.
That's something people used to say when I was growing up in the 1960s, when somebody complained about the way our American system worked. In Russia you couldn't do things like travel without a permit, and the Secret Police could whisk you off if you said or did anything the government considered a threat. They could question you and detain you for as long as they wanted. That couldn't happen Over Here, because this is the Land of the Free.
Our government seems to have developed the same level of paranoia, and is seeking and getting the same level of power to swoop down on anybody at any time. I'm very afraid that people in other countries will one day discourage their kids from whining about their system by asking them that if they would rather live in America.
Hard to believe Slasdotters haven't seen this already, but nobody seems to be saying they have. New Voyages Episode One has been available on the web since January.
I sort of enjoyed it. Yes most of the acting is pretty bad, but the story is very much in the TOS mold, and the sets and effects are very well done. Using the original Star Trek theme and incidental music gave it a nice feel. Nice CG Enterprise too, I thought.
On their site (when it's not horked) they explain their decision to use the original characters and ship rather than create new ones. They see the crew of the original Enterprise as classic characters, like Robin Hood and his men or the Knights of the Round Table, that can be played by different actors and still be appreciated for what they are.
I think that's kind of an interesting point. Television shows are hardly ever redone, but that seems to have changed in the last 10 or 15 years... the Addams Family, the Brady Bunch, Dragnet, Scooby Doo, the Flintstones, Battlestar Galactica... Star Trek was one of the first TV shows to be made into a movie, perhaps The first.
New Voyages could use better acting, but as the original Star Trek cast dies off I think we should try to accept new versions of the old characters.
Don't buy recorded music. Listen to live music and download songs. The musicians get your money, the record companies don't, and your computer is safe.
That's how American pseudodemocracy works. Legislators work for their financial backers, not their voters. In other news: WWF wrestling isn't real either.
I just skimmed through the article looking for information about the Palladium-like DRM stuff that was supposed to be embedded down to the hardware level within the next few years. I couldn't find anything. Not being a hardware/firmware person, a lot of the stuff in the article is over my head, but I expected something about DRM to shine through, if not to be the overriding theme.
DRM has already been mentioned in a few comments in this thread (perhaps by people who didn't RTFA). But where is it???
When you sign a purchase contract, staple a note to it containing 3 pages of legal verbiage. Somewhere near the bottom say, "customer reserves the right to void any terms of this contract at any time, and/or withhold payment for an indefinite period of time while assessing the value of the product or service." Then when the collections people come knocking, show them the contract with your clause highlighted and tell them to have a nice day.
Interesting. They know that merely buying a black box is not illegal, because courts have specifically and repeatedly told them so, yet they are telling people that it is illegal and attempting to extort money from them. I would call that fraud, which is a crime, and they're doing it all over the country, so it's a federal crime. So again, why does a citizen group have to file a lawsuit instead of federal marshalls arresting DirecTV executives for fraud?
Some will say that a story like this renews their faith in the system. For me it reinforces the belief that the system is broken. Notice that our wonderful government, of the people, by the people and for the people, did absolutely nothing to step in and slap DirecTV down. It took a dedicated group of individuals and the money that others donated to support them. Without their intervention the government would have happily let DirecTV continue to act as judge, jury and cashier. Our civil legal system still works through trial by combat. Only the weapons have changed.
While the potential for having windows viewing into cubes is there, it seems like security cameras already do this.
Right. A nosy PHB, police or anybody else can already spy on people wherever there are cameras in place. Viewing the pictures on a fake window instead of a normal video monitor has no scary privacy implications.
Central theme of the article: preferring a spatial file manager UI is right and not preferring it is wrong, because spatial is good interface design and web-browser style is bad interface design.
Thanks for the religion lesson. Spatial interface fans are the True and Faithful, critics are the Infidels. I get it.
Looking at it another way, some people want the UI itself to act like as much as possible like a collection of objects, while others want it to be more of a viewscreen into the world of objects. I don't see any right or wrong about any of this. The only thing that seems wrong is deciding that there can be only one right way.
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I have to admit, I saw this coming. The RIAA and others may be able to extort money by writing scary letters, but when it finally comes down to a courtroom there's no way this would hold up. Making ISPs liable for network traffic would be like making FedEx and UPS liable for the content of the boxes they ship. It's a ridiculous idea. I personally think attorneys who cooperate in filing suits with such obvious lack of merit should be prosecuted themselves for wasting the public's money, and should risk losing their license to practice law.
Overloading the DOJ servers at this crucial time during the War on Terror could bring critical network communications to a halt, making America vulnerable to terrorist activity.
To justify anything nowadays you have to use the "t" word.
This seems like it was designed by Microsoft -- let's make the system more secure by adding ways to bypass it in the name of convenience! I feel much better about flying now.
I have been trying to find this article off and on for many years. It's not listed on the SciAm website. The closest I can get is that it was probably between 1980 and 1985.
The music the SA article was talking about was any form of popular music, whether it's classical or rock or whatever. Not recordings of rainstorms, bird songs, etc. that a few people regard as music. There's no issue about whose taste is right. The point is that musical compositions that appeal to large numbers of people tend to have a fractal component, and that fact could reflect something interesting about how our brains work.
It is rather a mere coincidence of two symptoms or characteristics.
Really? I would say it might or might not be a mere coincidence, unless you have some data you didn't mention. Certainly an interesting avenue for further research.
I'm surprised there is no mention of fractal mathematics in all this. Back in the 80s there was a big article in Scientific American trying to explain why music sounds good. Music doesn't sound like anything in nature. Individual notes might, but melodies don't. So what does it sound like? Popular music, whether classical, jazz, rock or whatever, tends to have a fractal mathematical property. It's in the middle between brown noise, in which each sound is highly dependent on the preceding sound, and white noise, in which there is no relationship. This pattern seems to mimic something about the way we perceive changes in the world around us. If you take two radar scans of an organic landscape -- trees waving, people walking around -- and subtract one from the other, the difference is fractal. If you measure nerve activity with electrical probes you will get white noise on the peripheral nerves, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal the signal becomes, as if our nervous systems filter out random noise and let the fractal component of our perceptions pass through. Patterns in music might mimic the patterns used by our brains store memories and emotions. This would explain why a piece of music can make you feel a certain way.
Not because he's wealthy, but because he seems like just one of the many high energy, ego-driven assholes who inhabit the business world. He seems to have treated his peers just as poorly as they've treated him.
I've looked around on Google for info about building an actual digital camera but came up with nothing. Wouldn't it be cool to build an extremely minimal digital camera that could survive a kite crash? Building a digital camera from scratch seems daunting, but what about cannibalizing a low-priced camera, removing nonessential parts? Anybody done anything like this?
Sony is also developing ultra-flat screen TVs based on carbon nanotube technology that are supposed to be thinner (3/4 inch) and substantially cheaper than (3-inch thick) plasma flat screen TVs. These will be in the 50-inch range. I can't imagine wanting a bigger television in a house, let alone a projector hanging from the ceiling. But apparently Sony thinks there's a home market for humongous projector systems too.
This is the most intelligent thing I've heard anybody say about the copy protection controversy.
Back in the 70s and early 80s HBO was broadcast through the air like DirecTV. People used to build their own receivers using antennas made out of coffee cans (I know -- I had one). After HBO had harassed and threatened antenna owners for several years, the courts finally ruled that the company couldn't control what people did with the broadcast signal in their own homes. HBO's next move was to scramble the signal, which was easily defeated by those with access to spectrum analyzers but largely stymied the coffee-can community. The eventual solution was for HBO to join the cable world.
I always thought this was the sensible way to handle the controversy. Make companies do business in the real world, rather than letting them reshape it to their needs. Lately our government has gone in the opposite direction, with legislators tailoring laws to suit the demands of their financial backers.
One thing that must be repeated over and over is that copyright infringement is not stealing, because copyright is not property. It's a temporary restriction imposed on everybody except the copyright holder. Copyright holders don't "own" anything, and copyright doesn't give them any extra rights, it takes rights away from everybody else for a limited time. Copyright infringement may cause financial losses, but so do lots of other things -- arson, vandalism, assault, murder, for example -- and we don't call those things theft.
It's important to keep repeating this because the content industry has essentially hijacked the concepts of property ownership and theft. They play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher, and they label critics of current copyright laws as socialists threatening the whole concept of private property.
Exactly. The Robot Hall of Fame is a media event generator, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, etc. It's kind of interesting that you can create one of these Hall of Fame institutions out of thin air, and it somehow automatically becomes the authority in its field. I'm surprised nobody's created a Geek Hall of Fame yet.
That's something people used to say when I was growing up in the 1960s, when somebody complained about the way our American system worked. In Russia you couldn't do things like travel without a permit, and the Secret Police could whisk you off if you said or did anything the government considered a threat. They could question you and detain you for as long as they wanted. That couldn't happen Over Here, because this is the Land of the Free.
Our government seems to have developed the same level of paranoia, and is seeking and getting the same level of power to swoop down on anybody at any time. I'm very afraid that people in other countries will one day discourage their kids from whining about their system by asking them that if they would rather live in America.
Hard to believe Slasdotters haven't seen this already, but nobody seems to be saying they have. New Voyages Episode One has been available on the web since January.
I sort of enjoyed it. Yes most of the acting is pretty bad, but the story is very much in the TOS mold, and the sets and effects are very well done. Using the original Star Trek theme and incidental music gave it a nice feel. Nice CG Enterprise too, I thought.
On their site (when it's not horked) they explain their decision to use the original characters and ship rather than create new ones. They see the crew of the original Enterprise as classic characters, like Robin Hood and his men or the Knights of the Round Table, that can be played by different actors and still be appreciated for what they are.
I think that's kind of an interesting point. Television shows are hardly ever redone, but that seems to have changed in the last 10 or 15 years... the Addams Family, the Brady Bunch, Dragnet, Scooby Doo, the Flintstones, Battlestar Galactica... Star Trek was one of the first TV shows to be made into a movie, perhaps The first.
New Voyages could use better acting, but as the original Star Trek cast dies off I think we should try to accept new versions of the old characters.
Don't buy recorded music. Listen to live music and download songs. The musicians get your money, the record companies don't, and your computer is safe.
That's how American pseudodemocracy works. Legislators work for their financial backers, not their voters. In other news: WWF wrestling isn't real either.
I just skimmed through the article looking for information about the Palladium-like DRM stuff that was supposed to be embedded down to the hardware level within the next few years. I couldn't find anything. Not being a hardware/firmware person, a lot of the stuff in the article is over my head, but I expected something about DRM to shine through, if not to be the overriding theme.
DRM has already been mentioned in a few comments in this thread (perhaps by people who didn't RTFA). But where is it???
I wonder if this would work:
When you sign a purchase contract, staple a note to it containing 3 pages of legal verbiage. Somewhere near the bottom say, "customer reserves the right to void any terms of this contract at any time, and/or withhold payment for an indefinite period of time while assessing the value of the product or service." Then when the collections people come knocking, show them the contract with your clause highlighted and tell them to have a nice day.
Interesting. They know that merely buying a black box is not illegal, because courts have specifically and repeatedly told them so, yet they are telling people that it is illegal and attempting to extort money from them. I would call that fraud, which is a crime, and they're doing it all over the country, so it's a federal crime. So again, why does a citizen group have to file a lawsuit instead of federal marshalls arresting DirecTV executives for fraud?
Some will say that a story like this renews their faith in the system. For me it reinforces the belief that the system is broken. Notice that our wonderful government, of the people, by the people and for the people, did absolutely nothing to step in and slap DirecTV down. It took a dedicated group of individuals and the money that others donated to support them. Without their intervention the government would have happily let DirecTV continue to act as judge, jury and cashier. Our civil legal system still works through trial by combat. Only the weapons have changed.
Yep, that's why I capitalized Road Ahead ;-)
I don't think he knows either.
While the potential for having windows viewing into cubes is there, it seems like security cameras already do this.
Right. A nosy PHB, police or anybody else can already spy on people wherever there are cameras in place. Viewing the pictures on a fake window instead of a normal video monitor has no scary privacy implications.
Yikes! More proof that the ancient Martians had space travel.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1941
Nobody knows what lies on the Road Ahead.
Central theme of the article: preferring a spatial file manager UI is right and not preferring it is wrong, because spatial is good interface design and web-browser style is bad interface design.
Thanks for the religion lesson. Spatial interface fans are the True and Faithful, critics are the Infidels. I get it.
Looking at it another way, some people want the UI itself to act like as much as possible like a collection of objects, while others want it to be more of a viewscreen into the world of objects. I don't see any right or wrong about any of this. The only thing that seems wrong is deciding that there can be only one right way.