"Copyright Bill could Stifle Innovation" - well, no shit! That's the point!
Innovation is what's destroying the business models of the MPAA/RIAA, just like the affordable, mass-produced automobile destroyed the markets for carriage-builders and buggy-whip makers.
A good deal of the political wrangling that goes on in the world centers around the legal protection of business models. This is true of trade policy, agricultural policy, copyright and patent policy, fiscal and monetary policy, defense policy, and on and on.
Monied entities that face loss of income due to changes (technological, social, or otherwise) will fight hard to reverse, halt, or at least slow said changes. They will fight hard on every front they can, including through the systems of political patronage. That's reality.
Here's hoping that in this instance the much larger side (the tech and consumer electronics industries) fights back and wins. It's worth remembering that IBM alone takes in more revenue than the MPAA and RIAA combined. The latter just has celebrity appeal and a devestatingly effective political machine - not to mention the power of the media to make or break political candidacies.
Thank you for responding to this disinformation. Try taking any common antidepressant (Prozac, Zoloft, etc) or anti-ADD medication (Ritalin, Adderall) or having any minor ear condition. The FAA is (as far as I know) unique in its irrational fear of antidepressant drugs.
SSRI anti-depressants carry the risk of seizure. It's a rare side-effect, but it does happen. The FAA is justifiably cautious about medications capable of inducing a seizure.
-Isaac
They're not talking about DRM!
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It doesn't appear TMBG has taken any position on DRM in this article!
The question from the interviewer was "Is this the way you see things going in the future--artists securing digital rights?"
This is a question about getting the rights to distribute their work online, not about DRM. Record companies usually own the exclusive rights to distribute an artist's work in any format. The answer John Flansburgh gave speaks to the difficulty they had in securing (in the sense of "obtaining") the rights to distribute TMBG's music online themselves, independently of their label and distributors:
"It was a strange negotiation. Extracting them was not as simple as it sounds, and most people don't go to the effort of holding on to that stuff..."
Now, TMBG doesn't bother with DRM (their music has been available for years in unrestricted MP3 format on emusic), but this interview doesn't really speak to the question of DRM.
CBSA are notorious for holding up packages for weeks for customs clearance. Sometimes things "go missing."
Cross-border claims for goods damaged/missing in shipment are a giant hassle. In certain high-value businesses (like computer parts), there are plenty of fraudsters who take advantage of this, claiming goods never arrived and disputing the charges.
It doesn't matter to the merchant whether the recipient has committed fraud or the item has been stolen or destroyed in shipment or customs clearance - they still end up eating cost. Apparently this happens sufficiently often with trans-border shipments that a lot of computer vendors won't ship to foriegn countries, or even to "America Junior".;)
Compounding the issue are territorial reseller agreements - some manufacturers limit a reseller to domestic sales only. If you sell some items that you can't sell to a foreign buyer, it's often easier to reject all foreign orders than to have to check each order for said items.
I stopped by today to catch Bruce Schneier's talk on my lunch break, and enjoyed it. I plan to hit Steve Wozniak's keynote, the Retrocomputing panel, and a few of the more esoteric technical talks. I'm not really interested in hearing Jello Biafra's rants - I've heard them before and the similarities in rhetoric and careless disregard of fact to Rush Limbaugh are striking.
Yeah, there's a lot of political theater at HOPE - some of the posturing is really tiresome - but there are also a lot of very smart people. I'm going for the latter.
It's not going to be a Bush love-in, because guess what: the dominant groupthink in the self-declared "hacker" world is anti-authoritarian. I don't remember much love for the government being expressed at hacker conventions back when Clinton was president either - Clipper chip, DMCA, you name it.
This article has nothing to do with Akamai, other than pointing out that Akamai DNS is vulnerable to DOS.
Most of this "article" is a puff-piece (or paid advert) for one "CloudShield Technologies," pimping their (vaporware) "server for applications that do deep packet processing at gigabit-per-second rates."
A good Computer Science program will cover everything in GEB with more depth and without all the stupid-writing-tricks and dumbing down that Hofstadter employs. As someone who forced myself through GEB (to see what all the fuss was about) after graduating from a good CS program, I would describe it as a must-read book only for highschool-educated Perl hackers without any exposure to theoretical computing.
*GROAN*
I couldn't disagree more. To me, Gödel, Escher, Bach is not a book about theoretical computing. Yes, recursion, incompleteness, and set theory are fundamental topics in computer science. Yes, GEB discusses these topics. Yes, a college CS grad from a solid program will have covered these topics in greater depth and in other contexts.
I see GEB more as a rumination on the nature of consciousness and creativity. It's a fine introduction to the the topics mentioned above but to see this as an introductory CS text is I think to miss the point (and Escher, and Bach).
I'd love to use Desktop Manager instead of Codetek Virtual Desktop which has always felt iffy and bloated to me.
Alas, multimonitor support is still pending, and Codetek gives me what I need even more than virtual desktops - Focus Follows Mouse!
I sorely miss good focus-follows-mouse support; I know it's possible to enable it for X11 and Terminal.app, but only CTVD seems to allow enabling focus-follows-mouse across the whole system.
Your posting doesn't really give much in the way of requirements.
Do you need for all the data to be online at once? If not, consider a small LTO tape autoloader - a 24-slot loader will run you about $13k when loaded with LTO Ultrium 2 media, but you get 4.6 TB of storage, assuming you fill 23 slots with tape (you should always have a cleaning cart in the library to run at regular intervals). If you're really cheap, you can write a set of perl or shell scripts to operate the library with mtx and mt, rather than buying expensive software.
If you absolutely need all the data to be online forever and ever (amen), then you're going to need a fat wallet. An ever-growing homebuilt solution will rapidly become unmaintainable.
Consider an off-the-shelf NAS or hardware raid solution. Apple's XServe RAID boxes are surprisingly cheap for fiber-attached hardware RAID - $11k gets you 2.5TB of RAID5 (and that's with 2 drives reserved for hot spares, you could squeeze 3TB out of it with no hot spares, but i don't recommend it.)
If you don't think you'll need to expand forever, you can start looking at homebrew options. A 12-port 3WARE SATA controller with 12 250GB SATA disks should run you less than $3000 and give you 2.5TB of raid5 with one hot spare. (Of course you'll need a system with the case and power supply(supplies) to handle them. Next year, twice the storage might cost the same or less - 400GB SATA drives are already shipping, though still cost more per gig.
Basically, you're not the common man. Like another poster said, you need to consider what the data are worth, and buy your storage accordingly.
Just remeber, if Microsoft is held liable for it's products in spite of the EULA, it's only a matter of time before other software comapanies and eventually open source authors will be sued for the same.
Of course there's a big difference between the GPL and a EULA. A EULA imposes additional terms upon the buyer after a sale! This is, of course, redonkulous and utterly unenforceable. The consumer software buying process goes like this - you go to store, you pay your money, you walk out with a box of software.
Only when you get home and open the box do you get to read the EULA (and by the way, no retailer will accept returns of opened software!).
Now, if the terms of the sale were clearly specified on outside of the package, and you had to signify your assent to the terms before taking the software from the store, then the EULA might be enforceable. (Even then it would probably contain unenforceable terms, but that's a separate discussion.)
Of course, no software vendor or retailer is actually willing to do this because it would totally kill impulse purchases that are the backbone of retail software sales.
The GPL is a different sort of license, covering redistribution; if you buy a cd of GPL'ed software, the GPL allows you to redistribute it subject to certain conditions. If you don't assent to its terms by redistributing it, I can't think of a reason why the seller would not be liable for the software. Of course, if you just download GPL'ed software for free, the site you downloaded the code from may not be liable because, hey, you got it for free!
For example, what do you call the island approximately 120 miles southeast of China? Do you call it Taiwan or do you call it the Republic of China? The name you choose tells us about your politics. Or if you were doing an article about it would you refer to it as "That Island off the Coast of China" to avoid the various human viewpoints?
I'd probably call it Formosa if I was doing an article about the island itself (e.g. about the island's geology) in order to exclude the obvious political dimension. Yes, I realize Formosa was the name given to the island by the Portuguese, but the possible colonial taint of using that name is probably less distracting than the alternatives.
You should ask him how he feels about institutional memory.
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you're approaching 50, you should be worried about being shitcanned and replaced by 2 jr. engineers fresh out of school, each making half your salary.
Whether such a replacement is a good idea or not is dependent upon the circumstances, but repeated purging of senior engineers for junior ones leads to engineering departments that repeatedly blunder into the mistakes of the past.
Ironically, if you're in that 45+ age range, you've probably just given up your best chance both to save your paycheck and to propagate institutional memory. Once you pass 50, you'll probably never get another engineering job should you lose your current one - you'll be too expensive to hire compared to someone a few years out of school (not to mention less attractive - physical appearance has been shown to be a major factor in hiring decisions).
The sad truth about engineering is that you can't do it forever. At some point, you have to step up to management or else you'll find yourself jettisoned at some point with no hope of finding another good-paying job. I've watched my father's career arc and seen a lot of his colleagues fall by the wayside (and through the cracks) because they didn't understand this reality. He's now on the cusp of retirement and is one of the last survivors from his generation of engineers at his company because he was willing to make that move to management.
Having removed yourself from consideration for this managerial role, it's in your interest for whoever's coming in to have an understanding of the importance of striking a balance between cost efficiency in terms of dollars-per-head and the importance of retaining experienced people (e.g. you) who are capable of larnin' them youngsters who will be coming in as your division grows.
And just what, may I ask, is wrong with a 80x25 basic text only serial dumb term with clacky keyboard and green mono CRT?
Poor support for decent baud rates coupled with the high latency (from a human-factors standpoint) of a serial connection.
I used ADM3A's extensively in the '80s (without the optional lower case ROMs) and only last year got rid of the custom-painted VT330 and VT340 I'd been dragging around for years. They're fine for some uses, but man, I sure don't miss paging through long files at 9600 bps.
We evaluated several render-queue management systems, and decided on Rush. The most persuasive arguments for using Rush were the very good experience we have heard from other users, and the simplicity of extending it to manage a variety of different tasks.
I'd add that Greg Ercolano is a very smart guy with a lot of experience in render queue management - he wrote (in the '90s) the Race render queue management system used at Digital Domain. Productive use of computing resources was perhaps more important then as compared to the cheap cpu cycles you have now. (In addition to dedicated render machines, virtually every workstation in the company was used for rendering when not in use.)
Rush, though I haven't used it, seems to incorporate a lot of the same ideas as Race. It's been a long time since I've administered a renderfarm, but it doesn't surprise me that Erco's software would be on the shortlist.
3ware cards work a treat in amd64 systems with one caveat - using the PATA Escalade 7500-series cards on the Tyan Thunder K8W (opteron) MB is asking for trouble. The SATA cards work fine.
Promise is junk anyhow; it's not a hardware raid controller, just a dumb ATA controller card with software RAID drivers.
Just do your own software raid in Linux or buy a real (e.g 3ware) controller.
Chinese economic growth in the future is dependent on the same thing US economic growth is dependent on.
Cheap Oil.
China is actually a coal-fueled country, to a much greater degree than the US. Fortunately for them, they happen to have the largest coal reserves in the world. (Unfortunately for them, the coal they have is really dirty, and pollution is the biggest constraint on growth they face.)
I don't see where copyrights enter into it. This is clearly fair use.
Fair use is established as a defense to a claim of copyright infringement in Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 107 of the US Code. Fair use as a concept only exists as a limitation on the scope of the copyright monopoly.
The DMCA is broken. Rep. Boucher isn't trying to change copyright law, he's trying to fix a broken amendment.
...an amendment to copyright law. I support Reps. Boucher and Doolittle on this bill; I just don't rate its chances very highly.
While the comment is funny, it doesn't have much to do with reality. The reason there are so many passenger ferries sailing between Stockholm and Helsinki is the tax-free shopping. You get the cheap booze from the ship, not from ashore.
Yes, I know. That's what I was humorously implying vis-a-vis the "Swedish Navy." One generally doesn't take the trip on one of the numerous ferries for the purpose of actually going to the destination; it's all about the tax-free shopping on the ship. Certainly the fleet of Baltic ferries serving this market exceeds the tonnage of the real Swedish Navy. That's why the joke was funny (I thought, anyhow).
Jag hoppas att Isaac är amerikan, då må han vara förlåten för sin särskrivning, särkilt av svenska ord, men må hin håle äta levern på den svensk som ägnar sig åt dylikt förbannat ofog!
Yes, I'm an American. I forgot it was spelled Systembolaget. My bad.
I didn't catch the rest - something about swedish people with holes eaten in their liver?
This bill isn't going anywhere. The consumer protection subcommittee (where this is being introduced) has no jurisdiction over copyright law, meaning this will never make it to the House floor.
Stealth is a waste of money for the Swedish Navy anyhow; it seems this ship's mission, like all other seagoing Swedish vessels, is to sail back and forth between Stockholm and Helsinki in order to give Swedish people a place to buy cheaper booze than System Bolaget.
You must mean "dust-proof coating". Given that there is no water on Mars and almost no oxygen, rust would not be much of a problem.
Actually, Mars is red precisely because of rust - iron oxide. Quite a bit of the dust, particularly the hematite-bearing stuff at the Opportunity site, is composed of iron oxides - the dust is rust!
Incidentally, it's suspected that the reason there's not significant molecular oxygen in the Martian atmosphere is precisely because it's been locked up in the iron-rich surface.
I think the general idea of shipping machines with an operating system and, indeed, applications that are tuned to the specific hardware of the machine is a sound one.
I've installed more operating systems in the last 20 years than I can count. My main home system is a Fujitsu P2040 laptop that currently dual-boots Win2k and Mandrake 9.2, and I've probably spent 60-80 hours installing and tweaking and tuning both of these operating systems just to get everything working to my liking in both operating systems - all the hardware buttons (even the "email" button and notification light), cd-burning, region-free DVD playback, trackpoint sensitivity & z-axis support, 3d acceleration (albeit pathetic on this Mach64-based Rage Mobility) under linux, cygwin in win2k, Crusoe-tuned power management and monitoring, remapped keyboard (caps=ctrl, winkeys useful), separate partitions for my data and OS (and a swap partition used by both operating systems). I can recover this clean, custom load of either OS with bootable CD sets I made. I replaced the fujitsu logo on the top of the lid with a metal plate I screen printed with tiny C version of DeCSS (efdtt.c, props to Charles Hannum and Phil Carmody). It's a great little computer and works a treat - but I'll probably sell it soon because I've come to prefer my girlfriend's G3 ibook. It's got that UNIX-fresh flavor I crave right out of the box, and doesn't come loaded from the factory with bullshit like a PC, and it took all of 5 minutes to configure to my liking when I installed Panther on it.
A company that can deliver a no-bullshit PC running linux with Apple-grade hardware/software integration might get my business. I'm not convinced that Element is that company, but we'll see.
Slashdot Mirror
"Copyright Bill could Stifle Innovation" - well, no shit! That's the point!
Innovation is what's destroying the business models of the MPAA/RIAA, just like the affordable, mass-produced automobile destroyed the markets for carriage-builders and buggy-whip makers.
A good deal of the political wrangling that goes on in the world centers around the legal protection of business models. This is true of trade policy, agricultural policy, copyright and patent policy, fiscal and monetary policy, defense policy, and on and on.
Monied entities that face loss of income due to changes (technological, social, or otherwise) will fight hard to reverse, halt, or at least slow said changes. They will fight hard on every front they can, including through the systems of political patronage. That's reality.
Here's hoping that in this instance the much larger side (the tech and consumer electronics industries) fights back and wins. It's worth remembering that IBM alone takes in more revenue than the MPAA and RIAA combined. The latter just has celebrity appeal and a devestatingly effective political machine - not to mention the power of the media to make or break political candidacies.
-Isaac
SSRI anti-depressants carry the risk of seizure. It's a rare side-effect, but it does happen. The FAA is justifiably cautious about medications capable of inducing a seizure.
-Isaac
The question from the interviewer was "Is this the way you see things going in the future--artists securing digital rights?"
This is a question about getting the rights to distribute their work online, not about DRM. Record companies usually own the exclusive rights to distribute an artist's work in any format. The answer John Flansburgh gave speaks to the difficulty they had in securing (in the sense of "obtaining") the rights to distribute TMBG's music online themselves, independently of their label and distributors:
Now, TMBG doesn't bother with DRM (their music has been available for years in unrestricted MP3 format on emusic), but this interview doesn't really speak to the question of DRM.
-Isaac
Problems with shipping to Canada:
;)
CBSA are notorious for holding up packages for weeks for customs clearance. Sometimes things "go missing."
Cross-border claims for goods damaged/missing in shipment are a giant hassle. In certain high-value businesses (like computer parts), there are plenty of fraudsters who take advantage of this, claiming goods never arrived and disputing the charges.
It doesn't matter to the merchant whether the recipient has committed fraud or the item has been stolen or destroyed in shipment or customs clearance - they still end up eating cost. Apparently this happens sufficiently often with trans-border shipments that a lot of computer vendors won't ship to foriegn countries, or even to "America Junior".
Compounding the issue are territorial reseller agreements - some manufacturers limit a reseller to domestic sales only. If you sell some items that you can't sell to a foreign buyer, it's often easier to reject all foreign orders than to have to check each order for said items.
-Isaac
Whatever.
I stopped by today to catch Bruce Schneier's talk on my lunch break, and enjoyed it. I plan to hit Steve Wozniak's keynote, the Retrocomputing panel, and a few of the more esoteric technical talks. I'm not really interested in hearing Jello Biafra's rants - I've heard them before and the similarities in rhetoric and careless disregard of fact to Rush Limbaugh are striking.
Yeah, there's a lot of political theater at HOPE - some of the posturing is really tiresome - but there are also a lot of very smart people. I'm going for the latter.
It's not going to be a Bush love-in, because guess what: the dominant groupthink in the self-declared "hacker" world is anti-authoritarian. I don't remember much love for the government being expressed at hacker conventions back when Clinton was president either - Clipper chip, DMCA, you name it.
-Isaac
This article has nothing to do with Akamai, other than pointing out that Akamai DNS is vulnerable to DOS.
Most of this "article" is a puff-piece (or paid advert) for one "CloudShield Technologies," pimping their (vaporware) "server for applications that do deep packet processing at gigabit-per-second rates."
-Isaac
*GROAN*
I couldn't disagree more. To me, Gödel, Escher, Bach is not a book about theoretical computing. Yes, recursion, incompleteness, and set theory are fundamental topics in computer science. Yes, GEB discusses these topics. Yes, a college CS grad from a solid program will have covered these topics in greater depth and in other contexts.
I see GEB more as a rumination on the nature of consciousness and creativity. It's a fine introduction to the the topics mentioned above but to see this as an introductory CS text is I think to miss the point (and Escher, and Bach).
-Isaac
I'd love to use Desktop Manager instead of Codetek Virtual Desktop which has always felt iffy and bloated to me.
Alas, multimonitor support is still pending, and Codetek gives me what I need even more than virtual desktops - Focus Follows Mouse!
I sorely miss good focus-follows-mouse support; I know it's possible to enable it for X11 and Terminal.app, but only CTVD seems to allow enabling focus-follows-mouse across the whole system.
-Isaac Salpeter
iVillage Operations
Do you need for all the data to be online at once? If not, consider a small LTO tape autoloader - a 24-slot loader will run you about $13k when loaded with LTO Ultrium 2 media, but you get 4.6 TB of storage, assuming you fill 23 slots with tape (you should always have a cleaning cart in the library to run at regular intervals). If you're really cheap, you can write a set of perl or shell scripts to operate the library with mtx and mt, rather than buying expensive software.
If you absolutely need all the data to be online forever and ever (amen), then you're going to need a fat wallet. An ever-growing homebuilt solution will rapidly become unmaintainable. Consider an off-the-shelf NAS or hardware raid solution. Apple's XServe RAID boxes are surprisingly cheap for fiber-attached hardware RAID - $11k gets you 2.5TB of RAID5 (and that's with 2 drives reserved for hot spares, you could squeeze 3TB out of it with no hot spares, but i don't recommend it.)
If you don't think you'll need to expand forever, you can start looking at homebrew options. A 12-port 3WARE SATA controller with 12 250GB SATA disks should run you less than $3000 and give you 2.5TB of raid5 with one hot spare. (Of course you'll need a system with the case and power supply(supplies) to handle them. Next year, twice the storage might cost the same or less - 400GB SATA drives are already shipping, though still cost more per gig.
Basically, you're not the common man. Like another poster said, you need to consider what the data are worth, and buy your storage accordingly.
-Isaac
Of course there's a big difference between the GPL and a EULA. A EULA imposes additional terms upon the buyer after a sale! This is, of course, redonkulous and utterly unenforceable. The consumer software buying process goes like this - you go to store, you pay your money, you walk out with a box of software.
Only when you get home and open the box do you get to read the EULA (and by the way, no retailer will accept returns of opened software!).
Now, if the terms of the sale were clearly specified on outside of the package, and you had to signify your assent to the terms before taking the software from the store, then the EULA might be enforceable. (Even then it would probably contain unenforceable terms, but that's a separate discussion.)
Of course, no software vendor or retailer is actually willing to do this because it would totally kill impulse purchases that are the backbone of retail software sales.
The GPL is a different sort of license, covering redistribution; if you buy a cd of GPL'ed software, the GPL allows you to redistribute it subject to certain conditions. If you don't assent to its terms by redistributing it, I can't think of a reason why the seller would not be liable for the software. Of course, if you just download GPL'ed software for free, the site you downloaded the code from may not be liable because, hey, you got it for free!
-Isaac
I'd probably call it Formosa if I was doing an article about the island itself (e.g. about the island's geology) in order to exclude the obvious political dimension. Yes, I realize Formosa was the name given to the island by the Portuguese, but the possible colonial taint of using that name is probably less distracting than the alternatives.
Great post, btw.
-Isaac
You should ask him how he feels about institutional memory.
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you're approaching 50, you should be worried about being shitcanned and replaced by 2 jr. engineers fresh out of school, each making half your salary.
Whether such a replacement is a good idea or not is dependent upon the circumstances, but repeated purging of senior engineers for junior ones leads to engineering departments that repeatedly blunder into the mistakes of the past.
Ironically, if you're in that 45+ age range, you've probably just given up your best chance both to save your paycheck and to propagate institutional memory. Once you pass 50, you'll probably never get another engineering job should you lose your current one - you'll be too expensive to hire compared to someone a few years out of school (not to mention less attractive - physical appearance has been shown to be a major factor in hiring decisions).
The sad truth about engineering is that you can't do it forever. At some point, you have to step up to management or else you'll find yourself jettisoned at some point with no hope of finding another good-paying job. I've watched my father's career arc and seen a lot of his colleagues fall by the wayside (and through the cracks) because they didn't understand this reality. He's now on the cusp of retirement and is one of the last survivors from his generation of engineers at his company because he was willing to make that move to management.
Having removed yourself from consideration for this managerial role, it's in your interest for whoever's coming in to have an understanding of the importance of striking a balance between cost efficiency in terms of dollars-per-head and the importance of retaining experienced people (e.g. you) who are capable of larnin' them youngsters who will be coming in as your division grows.
Just my $0.02
-Isaac
Poor support for decent baud rates coupled with the high latency (from a human-factors standpoint) of a serial connection.
I used ADM3A's extensively in the '80s (without the optional lower case ROMs) and only last year got rid of the custom-painted VT330 and VT340 I'd been dragging around for years. They're fine for some uses, but man, I sure don't miss paging through long files at 9600 bps.
-Isaac
I'd add that Greg Ercolano is a very smart guy with a lot of experience in render queue management - he wrote (in the '90s) the Race render queue management system used at Digital Domain. Productive use of computing resources was perhaps more important then as compared to the cheap cpu cycles you have now. (In addition to dedicated render machines, virtually every workstation in the company was used for rendering when not in use.)
Rush, though I haven't used it, seems to incorporate a lot of the same ideas as Race. It's been a long time since I've administered a renderfarm, but it doesn't surprise me that Erco's software would be on the shortlist.
-Isaac
I believe the word you're looking for is plutocracy.
Yes, someone else had this idea a long time ago.
-Isaac
3ware cards work a treat in amd64 systems with one caveat - using the PATA Escalade 7500-series cards on the Tyan Thunder K8W (opteron) MB is asking for trouble. The SATA cards work fine.
Promise is junk anyhow; it's not a hardware raid controller, just a dumb ATA controller card with software RAID drivers.
Just do your own software raid in Linux or buy a real (e.g 3ware) controller.
-Isaac
China is actually a coal-fueled country, to a much greater degree than the US. Fortunately for them, they happen to have the largest coal reserves in the world. (Unfortunately for them, the coal they have is really dirty, and pollution is the biggest constraint on growth they face.)
-Isaac
Fair use is established as a defense to a claim of copyright infringement in Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 107 of the US Code. Fair use as a concept only exists as a limitation on the scope of the copyright monopoly.
-Isaac
Yes, I know. That's what I was humorously implying vis-a-vis the "Swedish Navy." One generally doesn't take the trip on one of the numerous ferries for the purpose of actually going to the destination; it's all about the tax-free shopping on the ship. Certainly the fleet of Baltic ferries serving this market exceeds the tonnage of the real Swedish Navy. That's why the joke was funny (I thought, anyhow).
-Isaac
Yes, I'm an American. I forgot it was spelled Systembolaget. My bad.
I didn't catch the rest - something about swedish people with holes eaten in their liver?
-Isaac
This bill isn't going anywhere. The consumer protection subcommittee (where this is being introduced) has no jurisdiction over copyright law, meaning this will never make it to the House floor.
-Isaac
Stealth is a waste of money for the Swedish Navy anyhow; it seems this ship's mission, like all other seagoing Swedish vessels, is to sail back and forth between Stockholm and Helsinki in order to give Swedish people a place to buy cheaper booze than System Bolaget.
-Isaac
I'd be pretty surprised if any projector, DLP or otherwise, did not decrease in intensity as the inverse square of the distance.
-Isaac
Actually, Mars is red precisely because of rust - iron oxide. Quite a bit of the dust, particularly the hematite-bearing stuff at the Opportunity site, is composed of iron oxides - the dust is rust!
Incidentally, it's suspected that the reason there's not significant molecular oxygen in the Martian atmosphere is precisely because it's been locked up in the iron-rich surface.
-Isaac
I think the general idea of shipping machines with an operating system and, indeed, applications that are tuned to the specific hardware of the machine is a sound one.
I've installed more operating systems in the last 20 years than I can count. My main home system is a Fujitsu P2040 laptop that currently dual-boots Win2k and Mandrake 9.2, and I've probably spent 60-80 hours installing and tweaking and tuning both of these operating systems just to get everything working to my liking in both operating systems - all the hardware buttons (even the "email" button and notification light), cd-burning, region-free DVD playback, trackpoint sensitivity & z-axis support, 3d acceleration (albeit pathetic on this Mach64-based Rage Mobility) under linux, cygwin in win2k, Crusoe-tuned power management and monitoring, remapped keyboard (caps=ctrl, winkeys useful), separate partitions for my data and OS (and a swap partition used by both operating systems). I can recover this clean, custom load of either OS with bootable CD sets I made. I replaced the fujitsu logo on the top of the lid with a metal plate I screen printed with tiny C version of DeCSS (efdtt.c, props to Charles Hannum and Phil Carmody). It's a great little computer and works a treat - but I'll probably sell it soon because I've come to prefer my girlfriend's G3 ibook. It's got that UNIX-fresh flavor I crave right out of the box, and doesn't come loaded from the factory with bullshit like a PC, and it took all of 5 minutes to configure to my liking when I installed Panther on it.
A company that can deliver a no-bullshit PC running linux with Apple-grade hardware/software integration might get my business. I'm not convinced that Element is that company, but we'll see.
-Isaac