I'm from the future. Century City was cancelled after 3 episodes, resurrected in 2005 after a fan email campaign, then cancelled again after the campaign proved to be the work of a lone haxx04 named dl3374, whose brain as of 2047 was still serving a 200,000-hour sentence as the CPU of the Volograd sewage treatment facility.
Television ceased to be a commercial medium after the Copyright Wars of 2019, when the Distributed Fiction Experiment proved that all copyrighted material could be randomly generated.
Meanwhile, back on topic...
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 2
Forgetting for a moment about trashing the poster's mentality or politics, and focusing instead on the actual STORY...
The idea of an ice-melting probe seems pretty interesting to me. I wonder how it would communicate with an orbiting mother ship or with a lander on the surface. Is it possible to use radio or something else through thousands of feet of ice? The article mentions the possibility of a spherical probe turning around and melting its way back up. It probably wouldn't have to be spherical -- they could turn it upside down by shifted ballast -- but anyway, does that imply that the probe would be incommunicado until it could return to the surface?
Soto may be a off toward the end of the curve, but the general prevalence of his type of behavior is the basis for a multibillion dollar advertising industry, not just spam. If average, normal people didn't act this way, at least to some extent, modern advertising as we know it wouldn't exist.
This story isn't about giving government officials money, although most likely that was part of the process. It's about a government official acting on behalf of a special interest group to the extent of presenting their words as his own. At that point, Lockyear ceased to be the Attorney General. The MPAA vice president was the Attorney General, and Lockyear was just a messenger boy. That's not what he's there for.
There's a federal law against giving money, favors or anything else to any government official to influence an official act. California no doubt has a simliar law. I know it happens all the time. It's called Campaign Financing. Whether we are used to it or not, it's illegal, and the politicians who do it are criminals.
There's no easy solution, but life is full of problems with no easy solution. Lots of people manage to get through them anyway, without breaking the law or betraying the trust of others. It's called honor. We are governed by dishonorable criminals who sometimes, when it doesn't conflict with the bribes they've taken, do the right thing. When they get caught they deserve no sympathy and no respect.
In my opinion Lockyear deserves a long prison term. I'm sure many of the inmates would welcome him with open arms.
It says Congress has taken away $750 million in revenue since 1992. That's less than $70 million per year. Adding that $70 million back into the patent office's $1 billion budget is only a 7% increase. Should we expect a huge difference?
So far this story doesn't appear to be getting a lot of mainstream press, but Forbes Magazine does cover it in this article. A lobbyist for the MPAA confirms that they had something to do with it, but the MPAA VP denies authorship: "They sought our input. We didn't write the letter." Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much media interest. Not at all surprising.
Side observation: In the excerpts from the letter, the attorney general uses the term "consumer" 7 times to refer to the general public. He uses the term "citizen" only once, urging the business audience to be "good corporate citizens." Our government increasingly refers to us as "consumers." Apparently they recognize who the actual "citizens" are, whose rights they diligently strive to enforce.
I am trying to figure out the cheapest way to build a futuristic-looking video intercom system for a large house. What I have in mind is an LCD screen with a small speaker and webcam next to it, a microphone, and a fingerpad for a pointing device. There has to be a UI for selecting where you want to talk to etc.
Has anybody seen any projects along these lines? I have looked and looked on the web.
So the have right-wing Republicans in India too?
on
Need a Job? Move to India
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a "wake-up call" for U.S. workers to redouble their efforts at education and research
Yeah, right. As usual, it's up to the people who do the actual work to figure out how to cope with these market forces. When U.S. employers have trouble making money because of foreign competition, the government is happy to step in and help them out with subsidies, tariffs and trade agreements. But when they find a bunch of smart people on the other side of the world who can live well on $20,000/year, well, then the story changes. Realities of global competition... free market forces at work... you're lucky to have that job... you don't want the government to run your life, do you? Now get back to flipping those burgers.
As usual, American businesses can't see very far ahead because they're bent over picking up dimes. The average American family has more than $8000 in credit card debt. That doesn't include mortgages or our individual share of the national debt, which is more than a typical Indian programmer's annual salary. As American incomes drop, I don't know how these businesses expect us to buy all the spendy crap they are continually shoving at us.
The answers seem to be more advertising and easier credit. Or maybe they expect a flood of online orders from customers in India. Like that will happen.
So, by limiting musicians' rights - by partially pirating their creative work - record producers and the public benefit.
Piracy? Setting a standard fee by law isn't "partially pirating," it's just regulating. Why is it now piracy to reuse any idea without paying somebody? Building on the earlier work of others is basic human behavior, without which civilization could never have happened. The modern artificial concept of copyright as property has been thrown at us so much that it's getting to be impossible to discuss the subject rationally. It's like talking about religion.
The normal human tendency to imitate and copy has been transformed into an act of evil, almost the way the normal human sex drive was turned into sin by various bead-rattling religious cults. Are we building a religion around the ownership of ideas, with a patch-eyed pirate replacing the horned devil as bogeyman du jour?
You have the right to remain silent, and be held without bail at secret facilities for an unlimited time. If you wish to give up these rights, well that's too bad.
I guess if there's no legal use for an iPod in Germany, then Apple is trafficking in technology whose sole use is to steal intellectual property. Are they looking down the barrel of the European DMCA?
Exactly. Human errors can be fatal. Duh. Missed phone calls can kill. One too many beers can kill. Editorial errors can kill -- my sister in law almost died from an overdose of malaria medication because the doctors misread an ambiguously worded PDR entry. Software mistakes are like mistakes of any other kind. We live with them like we live with all other human failings.
I would argue that the cost of research and development should be borne by whoever wants to bear it, whether for profit or not. Giving away something is no crime just because someone else wants to sell it. But it can become a crime if big business controls the government, and it can become immoral if big business controls the media.
The ultimate goal of programmers is to eliminate the need for programmers, through intelligent software that reprograms itself according to need. I think the ultimate goal of business should be to eliminate the need business. I think we will reach a point, through commodification and automation, where the necessities of life are trivial and at least some of the luxuries are cheap. The only people capable of making that happen are open-source types who create because they want to improve the world.
The business world in general is going to become like the music industry, keeping prices high through artificial scarcity, enforced essentially at gunpoint by a bought government. An ominous undertone of the free and opensource software controversy is the theme that only businesses should be allowed to threaten other businesses. The idea that providing jobs is more important than eliminating the need to do the work itself may be disguised as morality, but the real motive is to keep a few people in castles no matter where the rest of us have to live.
Well, that was a nice trip down memory lane. Vote! Make a difference! Spend a few moments pretending that carefully crafted advertising, paid for by corporate money that will dictate the winner's actions, isn't steering thousands of votes into the ballot box for every one cast by someone who actually thinks. Ahhh, democracy in America. 1960 was quite a good year, wasn't it?
The fate of all this DRM really lies in the hands of innovators outside the US, because the American public isn't going to bat an eyelash about this. Fifty years ago anybody who even suggested a universal plan to so equip all televisions or radios would have faced angry public protests, boycotts, and probably accusations of being communist. Nowadays such announcements are greeted with [yawn] consumption-as-usual, by people who are mere consumers rather than citizens.
The American public today is an amorphous mass of market share, whose job is to respond to advertising and other stimuli, not to complain or initiate any meaningful action. So don't expect the masses to jump up and say, "NO, I don't want a crippled television!" Expect them to say, "Does it have SurroundSound?" and, "How much is the Big one?"
I have a hard time making sense of all the complaints about pay. Back in 1992 I was making about $42k/year as a run of the mill programmer for a company. I became a contractor and immediately started making $45/hour. Six months later my original company hired me back as an independent consultant at $50/hr to do the same job as before, sitting at the exact same desk. Unfortunately all the reasons I had left the job were still there, so after 6 months I left for other contracts. I have never made less than $40/hr since. Based on the many other programmers I've talked to, $40/hr or better seems pretty normal.
But you don't get any benefits! The value of a health plan, paid time off and other benefits (for me at least) works out to about $16k/year, or $8/hour. When you're self employed, half the cost of your health insurance is deductible.
But you pay higher taxes. Yeah, when you make more money you pay more tax, but you still have more money.
But you don't have job security. And I did before? Hah!
I know not every contractor's experience is the same as mine, but the point is, if you're stuck working for a company at a dead-end job, there's at least one major avenue you should explore before feeling hopeless.
"This robot is not merely for research. It is for commercial sale, and we want it to enter people's homes."
And do What, exactly?? It walks, it talks, it's 15 inches tall and it costs $4000. I'll grant that mass producing a walking robot is a milestone, but this is a silly toy for gadget-happy people with too much money.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm from the future. Century City was cancelled after 3 episodes, resurrected in 2005 after a fan email campaign, then cancelled again after the campaign proved to be the work of a lone haxx04 named dl3374, whose brain as of 2047 was still serving a 200,000-hour sentence as the CPU of the Volograd sewage treatment facility.
Television ceased to be a commercial medium after the Copyright Wars of 2019, when the Distributed Fiction Experiment proved that all copyrighted material could be randomly generated.
Forgetting for a moment about trashing the poster's mentality or politics, and focusing instead on the actual STORY...
The idea of an ice-melting probe seems pretty interesting to me. I wonder how it would communicate with an orbiting mother ship or with a lander on the surface. Is it possible to use radio or something else through thousands of feet of ice? The article mentions the possibility of a spherical probe turning around and melting its way back up. It probably wouldn't have to be spherical -- they could turn it upside down by shifted ballast -- but anyway, does that imply that the probe would be incommunicado until it could return to the surface?
The marketing, not the product, is what they are designing for women.
Soto may be a off toward the end of the curve, but the general prevalence of his type of behavior is the basis for a multibillion dollar advertising industry, not just spam. If average, normal people didn't act this way, at least to some extent, modern advertising as we know it wouldn't exist.
A Beowulf cluster of those, attached to Rush Limbaugh.
This story isn't about giving government officials money, although most likely that was part of the process. It's about a government official acting on behalf of a special interest group to the extent of presenting their words as his own. At that point, Lockyear ceased to be the Attorney General. The MPAA vice president was the Attorney General, and Lockyear was just a messenger boy. That's not what he's there for.
There's a federal law against giving money, favors or anything else to any government official to influence an official act. California no doubt has a simliar law. I know it happens all the time. It's called Campaign Financing. Whether we are used to it or not, it's illegal, and the politicians who do it are criminals.
There's no easy solution, but life is full of problems with no easy solution. Lots of people manage to get through them anyway, without breaking the law or betraying the trust of others. It's called honor. We are governed by dishonorable criminals who sometimes, when it doesn't conflict with the bribes they've taken, do the right thing. When they get caught they deserve no sympathy and no respect.
In my opinion Lockyear deserves a long prison term. I'm sure many of the inmates would welcome him with open arms.
It says Congress has taken away $750 million in revenue since 1992. That's less than $70 million per year. Adding that $70 million back into the patent office's $1 billion budget is only a 7% increase. Should we expect a huge difference?
So far this story doesn't appear to be getting a lot of mainstream press, but Forbes Magazine does cover it in this article. A lobbyist for the MPAA confirms that they had something to do with it, but the MPAA VP denies authorship: "They sought our input. We didn't write the letter." Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much media interest. Not at all surprising.
I wonder how many of Lockyear's words in this DVD decryption case also came out of the mouth of the MPAA.
Side observation:
In the excerpts from the letter, the attorney general uses the term "consumer" 7 times to refer to the general public. He uses the term "citizen" only once, urging the business audience to be "good corporate citizens." Our government increasingly refers to us as "consumers." Apparently they recognize who the actual "citizens" are, whose rights they diligently strive to enforce.
I am trying to figure out the cheapest way to build a futuristic-looking video intercom system for a large house. What I have in mind is an LCD screen with a small speaker and webcam next to it, a microphone, and a fingerpad for a pointing device. There has to be a UI for selecting where you want to talk to etc.
Has anybody seen any projects along these lines? I have looked and looked on the web.
This is a "wake-up call" for U.S. workers to redouble their efforts at education and research
Yeah, right. As usual, it's up to the people who do the actual work to figure out how to cope with these market forces. When U.S. employers have trouble making money because of foreign competition, the government is happy to step in and help them out with subsidies, tariffs and trade agreements. But when they find a bunch of smart people on the other side of the world who can live well on $20,000/year, well, then the story changes. Realities of global competition... free market forces at work... you're lucky to have that job... you don't want the government to run your life, do you? Now get back to flipping those burgers.
As usual, American businesses can't see very far ahead because they're bent over picking up dimes. The average American family has more than $8000 in credit card debt. That doesn't include mortgages or our individual share of the national debt, which is more than a typical Indian programmer's annual salary. As American incomes drop, I don't know how these businesses expect us to buy all the spendy crap they are continually shoving at us.
The answers seem to be more advertising and easier credit. Or maybe they expect a flood of online orders from customers in India. Like that will happen.
So, by limiting musicians' rights - by partially pirating their creative work - record producers and the public benefit.
Piracy? Setting a standard fee by law isn't "partially pirating," it's just regulating. Why is it now piracy to reuse any idea without paying somebody? Building on the earlier work of others is basic human behavior, without which civilization could never have happened. The modern artificial concept of copyright as property has been thrown at us so much that it's getting to be impossible to discuss the subject rationally. It's like talking about religion.
The normal human tendency to imitate and copy has been transformed into an act of evil, almost the way the normal human sex drive was turned into sin by various bead-rattling religious cults. Are we building a religion around the ownership of ideas, with a patch-eyed pirate replacing the horned devil as bogeyman du jour?
You're under arrest.
You have the right to remain silent, and be held without bail at secret facilities for an unlimited time. If you wish to give up these rights, well that's too bad.
I guess if there's no legal use for an iPod in Germany, then Apple is trafficking in technology whose sole use is to steal intellectual property. Are they looking down the barrel of the European DMCA?
Uh-oh.
oh never mind.
Exactly. Human errors can be fatal. Duh. Missed phone calls can kill. One too many beers can kill. Editorial errors can kill -- my sister in law almost died from an overdose of malaria medication because the doctors misread an ambiguously worded PDR entry. Software mistakes are like mistakes of any other kind. We live with them like we live with all other human failings.
I would argue that the cost of research and development should be borne by whoever wants to bear it, whether for profit or not. Giving away something is no crime just because someone else wants to sell it. But it can become a crime if big business controls the government, and it can become immoral if big business controls the media.
The ultimate goal of programmers is to eliminate the need for programmers, through intelligent software that reprograms itself according to need. I think the ultimate goal of business should be to eliminate the need business. I think we will reach a point, through commodification and automation, where the necessities of life are trivial and at least some of the luxuries are cheap. The only people capable of making that happen are open-source types who create because they want to improve the world.
The business world in general is going to become like the music industry, keeping prices high through artificial scarcity, enforced essentially at gunpoint by a bought government. An ominous undertone of the free and opensource software controversy is the theme that only businesses should be allowed to threaten other businesses. The idea that providing jobs is more important than eliminating the need to do the work itself may be disguised as morality, but the real motive is to keep a few people in castles no matter where the rest of us have to live.
Bath takes you!
Saying a Microsoft OS update could break apps is kind of like saying people could fall off bicycles.
There's no need for a single open cookbook because finding recipes for anything you want is so easy, trivial in fact.
Well, that was a nice trip down memory lane. Vote! Make a difference! Spend a few moments pretending that carefully crafted advertising, paid for by corporate money that will dictate the winner's actions, isn't steering thousands of votes into the ballot box for every one cast by someone who actually thinks. Ahhh, democracy in America. 1960 was quite a good year, wasn't it?
The fate of all this DRM really lies in the hands of innovators outside the US, because the American public isn't going to bat an eyelash about this. Fifty years ago anybody who even suggested a universal plan to so equip all televisions or radios would have faced angry public protests, boycotts, and probably accusations of being communist. Nowadays such announcements are greeted with [yawn] consumption-as-usual, by people who are mere consumers rather than citizens.
The American public today is an amorphous mass of market share, whose job is to respond to advertising and other stimuli, not to complain or initiate any meaningful action. So don't expect the masses to jump up and say, "NO, I don't want a crippled television!" Expect them to say, "Does it have SurroundSound?" and, "How much is the Big one?"
Baaaaaa, baaaaaaa... Moooooo....
The question is, Will You Have Any Choice? If governments eventually decide that this is a good idea for business, then you won't.
You don't need to scan the copyright database.
These aren't the files you're looking for.
Move along.
I have a hard time making sense of all the complaints about pay. Back in 1992 I was making about $42k/year as a run of the mill programmer for a company. I became a contractor and immediately started making $45/hour. Six months later my original company hired me back as an independent consultant at $50/hr to do the same job as before, sitting at the exact same desk. Unfortunately all the reasons I had left the job were still there, so after 6 months I left for other contracts. I have never made less than $40/hr since. Based on the many other programmers I've talked to, $40/hr or better seems pretty normal.
But you don't get any benefits! The value of a health plan, paid time off and other benefits (for me at least) works out to about $16k/year, or $8/hour. When you're self employed, half the cost of your health insurance is deductible.
But you pay higher taxes. Yeah, when you make more money you pay more tax, but you still have more money.
But you don't have job security. And I did before? Hah!
I know not every contractor's experience is the same as mine, but the point is, if you're stuck working for a company at a dead-end job, there's at least one major avenue you should explore before feeling hopeless.
"This robot is not merely for research. It is for commercial sale, and we want it to enter people's homes."
And do What, exactly?? It walks, it talks, it's 15 inches tall and it costs $4000. I'll grant that mass producing a walking robot is a milestone, but this is a silly toy for gadget-happy people with too much money.