A tax moratorium to encourage space development would be great... if companies actually paid taxes. Enron never paid a dime of federal taxes. Tyco International dodged $400 million in taxes last year by incorporating in Bermuda. Etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam. There are too many tax shelters already that are a hell of a lot easier to establish than an asteroid mine.
Heh, I noticed my mistake after I posted - was wondering if anyone would pick up on it. Both are in my collection, though obviously on different media (vinyl vs. VHS).
If none of you know where to look, the case that established that unauthorized samples were always copyright violations is called Grand Upright Music Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records, Inc.
The injunction handed down on December 17, 1991 forced Biz Markie's hit album, "I Need a Haircut," off the shelves for including a sample of Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)." This case marked the end of sound collage in popular music, since it firmly established that the number of notes that may be sampled without permission is zero.
The US Supreme Court was a little bit looser in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc (the 2 Live Crew / Roy Orbison "Pretty Woman" case), and allowed 2 Live Crew the affirmative defense of fair use, overturning past decisions that had held commercial appropriation to be presumptively infringing.
These are probably the cases of the early '90s to which Mr. Vaidhyanathan is referring.
I don't know you or how much you understand about the type of music you listen too, but I do know that "Rap" is something that occurs in (and is merely one component of) "Hip-Hop" music. A rapper may be one component of a Hip-Hop song. "Hip-Hop" is a type of music, culture, and lifestyle. When you talk about Jazz, do you say, "I listen to Trumpet music?"
You do, if that's the kind of jazz you like. Perhaps you particularly like jazz that features trumpets, as opposed to, say, a piano trio.
Rap music has rap over a backing track (or sometimes over nothing, though an older generation might simply call that poetry). It is a form of hip-hop. Consider Timo Maas, who makes some of the freshest beats today - are his releases hip-hop? Sure! They're not rap music, however, because . . . there's no rap! Afrika Bambaataa was a pioneer of electro-funk, another genre that we might include under the general rubric of hip-hop, but it would not be heresy to refer to his music as electro-funk, even though it is also hip-hop.
Face it, "rap music" is a genre of hip-hop. You may not like rap music, you may think that the MC gets too much attention in rap music, but to say that rap music is not itself a genre is simply wrong. It is at least an identifiable genre or subgenre of hip-hop.
By saying that you like "rap" music, are you trying to say that it was the rappers who turned you on to explore the history of Copyright?
Perhaps this is exactly what Siva is saying - and what is wrong with this? He's not talking about the people that pushed the bounds of copyright the furthest - in a legal sense, it is arguably Biz Markie, since he was the artist whose albums were pulled from the shelves because he used, without clearance, a sample from Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again, Naturally", and whose court case established the principle that the number of notes that may be sampled without permission is zero. He is talking about how his personal experience with rap music got him interested in the law of copyright. Your posts seem to be nothing more than showy attempts to berate Mr. Vaidhyanathan for liking Ice Cube - the insufferable MO of the hip-hopper-than-thou - and offer nothing nearly so informative as Siva's observations about how changes in copyright law and jurisprudence were reflected in popular music.
For what it's worth, I think he's right - the era of the aggressive sound collage largely vanished from popular rap music in the post-1991 era. Now, I wouldn't condemn all modern rap music or hip-hop generally as being mere "jeep beats and heavy bass" - I think the "Nathaniel Merriwether" projects of Dan the Automator and Prince Paul are genuinely creative. They are not, however, collages of samples in the same style as, say, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Hat, which is composed entirely of samples, carefully assembled, and which predates Grand Upright Music v. Warner Brothers Music (the Biz Markie case).
Siva and Lawrence Lessig (regarding L.L.'s comments about "rap" from THE FUTURE OF IDEAS) both need to understand that RAP is just one part of a larger culture of Hip-Hop. Vocalists and MC's are just one fragment of a culture that includes DJ's, artists, dancers, etc...
Perhaps Siva is not a fan of the larger culture of hip-hop, but rather of rap music in particular, and YOU are actually the one conflating "rap" with "hip-hop." This makes sense, given that the Mr. Vaidhyanathan is speaking about the music - specifically, the density and complexity of the backing tracks of rap music - and not about dancers or MC's.
Sometimes, people mean what they say, and not more.
Just aside, crimes may not require a mental state - consider the crime of unlawful possession of a controlled substance. As defined by most statutes, the elements are:
-possession of a controlled substance (result element) -without permission. (attendant circumstance)
No mens rea there, though there may be an affirmative defense that one did not know one possessed a controlled substance, or that one had an honest and reasonable belief that one had permission to possess the substance.
Knowledge is not an element of the crime - no guilty state of mind is required. Felony murder is similar - it requires only the killing of a human being during the commission of a felony, not that one has malice aforethought as in the usual common-law definition of murder.
I still have my PC110, and it still works well. I don't carry it around much anymore, but it still blows people away when I do. (All the moreso when I tell them that it's an 8-year-old computer).
Right now I'm working on turning mine into a sort of desk clock/weather station/wireless AP, since it doesn't really have the oomph to do much else anymore (esp. w/ only 8 megs of RAM), and my P-series Lifebook is at least an order of magnitude more powerful and only twice the size.
Anyhow, thanks, Alan, for putting/keeping the PC110 touchpad driver in the kernel! I still crack a smile every time I do 'make menuconfig' and see that option, even when I'm not on the wee beastie.
-Isaac
xplanet rocks!
on
Paintable LCDs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Be sure to check out xplanet (xplanet.sourceforge.net) - it is basically XEarth++, and it is awesome. Works in *nix and windoze, and with simple scripts it will download near-live satellite cloud imagery (updated every ~6 hrs, I think) for rendering the earth. It also supports loading and displaying weather data from the net (like XEarth displays city names), which in combination with the live clouds makes for a fun way to get an intuitive grasp of weather and weather forecasting by watching the whole world over time.
I keep hearing this old saw about how it is not a crime for a minor to sneak into an R or NC-17 flick, or how it is not a crime for the movie theatre to sell minors tickets to same. It's wrong. Let's look at the law of Florida, since it's close at hand:
Florida Statute 847.013. Exposing minors to harmful motion pictures, exhibitions, shows, presentations, or representations
(2) Offenses and penalties.--
(a) It is unlawful for any person knowingly to exhibit for a monetary consideration to a minor or knowingly to sell or rent a videotape of a motion picture to a minor or knowingly sell to a minor an admission ticket or pass or knowingly admit a minor for a monetary consideration to premises whereon there is exhibited a motion picture, exhibition, show, representation, or other presentation which, in whole or in part, depicts nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, sexual battery, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse and which is harmful to minors.
(b) It is unlawful for any person knowingly to rent or sell, or loan to a minor for monetary consideration, a videocassette or a videotape of a motion picture, or similar presentation, which, in whole or in part, depicts nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, sexual battery, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse and which is harmful to minors.
(c) The provisions of paragraph (a) do not apply to a minor when the minor is accompanied by his or her parents or either of them.
(d) It is unlawful for any minor to falsely represent to the owner of any premises mentioned in paragraph (a), or to the owner's agent, or to any person mentioned in paragraph (b), that such minor is 17 years of age or older, with the intent to procure such minor's admission to such premises, or such minor's purchase or rental of a videotape, for a monetary consideration.
(e) It is unlawful for any person to knowingly make a false representation to the owner of any premises mentioned in paragraph (a), or to the owner's agent, or to any person mentioned in paragraph (b), that he or she is the parent of any minor or that any minor is 17 years of age or older, with intent to procure such minor's admission to such premises or to aid such minor in procuring admission thereto, or to aid or enable such minor's purchase or rental of a videotape, for a monetary consideration.
(f) A violation of any provision of this subsection constitutes a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.
This seems to cut out most "R" or "NC-17" rated movies, dunnit? Well, at least all excepting the very few that feature no nudity or sex.
Several states still have movie classification boards that review films to determine whether they are harmful to minors - one may safely assume that these boards by and large are rubber-stamp bodies that follow the MPAA ratings. Some states have a film classification board and still use codify the MPAA's ratings explicitly into law. Check out this Tennessee statute:
Tennessee Statute 39-17-907. Theaters; regulation of showings
(b) Each theater at which two (2) or more motion pictures are shown in the same building shall maintain adequate supervision of the customers to prevent minors from purchasing a ticket or admission pass to a motion picture designated by the rating board of the Motion Picture Association of America by the letter "G" for general audiences or "PG" for all ages, parental guidance advised, and then viewing a motion picture designated "R" for restricted audiences, persons under eighteen (18) years of age not admitted unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian, or "X," persons under eighteen (18) years of age not admitted.
(c) A violation of this statute is a Class A misdemeanor.
Finally, lots of states require videos to display an MPAA rating (or "not rated" if they are, well, not rated), and then have statutes that explicitly claim not to adopt the MPAA rating system, but which in effect bar the rental of R, X, or NC-17 movies to minors.
Finally, there are plenty of local ordinances around the country that bar the showing of R or NC-17 flicks to minors explicitly. These may not be constitutional, but any statute is presumed constitutional until it is challenged. Do you have the time and money to challenge such a law in your town? I don't.
Bottom line, MPAA ratings might as well be law. Don't even get me started on zoning ordinances that automatically classify any theater that shows an NC-17 or unrated film as a porno house, to be zoned out of existence.
Or if I want a good BSD system, like the song says, "Boom...there it is."
Uhh... that's "Whoop there it is"...
Actually, it's "Whoot! There it is!" (by 95 South) or "Whoomp! There it is!" by Tag Team, who followed up their smash hit with the underwhelming "Here it is, Bam!" and "Whoomp! There it went!" (Seriously, I'm not joking.)
I hope I don't sound like I'm trolling but really where do you get charged for getting rear ended at a stoplight? I'd like to know so I can avoid living in that state.
Good luck.
AFAIK, insurance companies in every state may offer discounts to people who never file claims. If you go 10 or 20 years without filing a claim, you get lower rates than the guy who was unlucky enough to be rear-ended by an uninsured motorist (or even potentially by any motorist, if they count claims filed against other policies). Giving discounts for filing no claims is congruent to charging higher rates to people who have been in accidents where they were not at fault.
The points system is all about setting a level at which the state may take away your license - I guarantee if you get a speeding ticket and go to traffic school to avoid the points on your license, your insurance rates will still go up. It does not restrain what insurance companies may charge.
How explicit a disclaimer do you need? It's obvious that not only does IEEE have no intention to stand up to DMCA claims brought against papers submitted for publication or presentation, but that if such claims are brought, that IEEE fully intends to recover (from the offending author) any costs they incur in the process of kowtowing to the offended media concern.
Why else would they make authors warrant that their work does not conflict with the DMCA? If the IEEE finds themselves named in a DMCA suit, they will go after the author (more probably, the author's employer) to recover their costs in a breach of contract action.
Bottom line, IEEE is folding like a full-service laundry. (Boo, hiss as appropriate)
People don't care, but they are not stupid. Even though mass media hasn't covered this topic in great depth yet, people aren't going to be buying new hardware that limits them when they already have old stuff that works. I for one isn't going to buy any lame locked hardware. This doesn't mean that MS and the media companies aren't going to try. In fact, they will try and burn through a couple billion dollars to realize, "we really can't control people as much as we like or think we can."
Agreed that they probably won't succeed ultimately - but they could really hose the computer industry by trying. Like you, I wouldn't buy a new PC that limited how I manipulate my data. This wouldn't just hurt Microsoft, but also the manufacturers of new PCs, etc. This could all get very messy indeed.
Though I don't doubt that Microsoft had trouble interesting others in Hailstorm, I don't think Microsoft's push to get a piece of every transaction has been abandoned. My gut instinct is that they think that they can have better success with using DRM for this purpose.
Consider: Hailstorm required the cooperation of other companies, who were reluctant for many good reasons to pay for the privilege of placing Microsoft between themselves and their customers. (Customers were also none too thrilled about the idea, either.) There are companies that might find Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly a sufficiently compelling reason to justify such a move, though - companies selling bits (media and software). Only Microsoft has the leverage over desktop users to foist user-hateful "digital rights management" technologies upon them. (I don't just mean technology to prevent copying of "protected" media, but also watermark detection/embedding, etc.)
Given a DRM system integrated sufficiently into the OS, some control over unauthorized data manipulation may be possible - at least, enough to deter most users. The legal billy-club of the DMCA (combined with Microsoft's practically infinite legal budget) is already in place to deter companies or individuals enabling circumvention, and patents are likewise in place to thwart competitors and open-source alternatives. When Microsoft's ubiquitous rollout of DRM is complete, they may be able to play to the paranoia of media companies desperately grasping for something, anything, to tame the very nature of the bit - to make it uncopyable. This again places Microsoft in the revenue stream (and customer data stream), but by offering something more compelling than mere data aggregation.
Their quiet backing of the SSSCA/CBDTPA is only the beginning, I think of this new push. Hailstorm was unappealing to companies and a magnet for criticism, but DRM leverages Microsoft's existing monopoly so I think they'll translate their goal of skimming off every transaction to this arena.
3D doesn't fit this system at all. I suppose if anybody could make it work, it'd be Sega. Boy would I be surprised, though.
Download a demo of Race Fever. Note the excellent graphics (admittedly not 3d like quake - Pole Position style) and smooth gameplay on color palm devices.
The real clincher is the control input - instead of futzing around with the buttons like too many games, they turn the graffiti area into an analog controller - the vertical axis controls speed (top of the area is max acceleration, bottom is brake), the horizontal controls steering.
When more game developers start finding control and gameplay models more suitable to the medium, I think 3d or quasi-3d games will become more popular.
There are a few different 3D LCD systems - the one in this article is just 2 lcd panels stacked on each other for a multiplane effect. Others have referred to a system that uses lenticular lenses and a special pattern of illumination to deliver stereoscopic images without glasses, but this only works if you're in one of the "sweet spots" that aren't very large. The polarization idea, though, I think is the one that will really catch on.
Yes, I know how LCDs work, so bear with me - instead of using filters that polarize every pixel the same way, one could use filters that polarized every other line at 90 degrees to the previous. Now, manufacturing such filters and fitting them to LCDs is more expensive than current LCDs, but the advantage is that a simple pair of polarizing glasses (with one lens polarizing at 90 degrees to the other) would enable stereoscopic viewing of the LCD from any distance within the field of view of the LCD. I believe there is a company out there already claiming to have developed such displays, but I don't recall the name - they were touting their micropolarizer filter technology, anyhow, which is the hard part of making such a display.
If Discreet were to port those apps over to Linux, I don't think any of the artists would notice or care. The underlying OS is invisible-- and irrelevant-- at that point.
Of course, Discreet's next-generation product is going to be based on Windows XP. So it's kind of a moot point.
Really? Hmm. I agree to a certain extent that the OS doesn't matter to the artist, insofar as the application takes over the interface, but in my experience, no x86 system has the bandwidth to keep up with Discreet's bigger apps (well, at least flame and inferno).
Background: In 1999 I worked for a major FX house, where I rolled out (as sysadmin, along with the video engineers and facilities people) a bunch of flame seats on dual-R10K octanes. These were, according to the artists, 20% faster in practice than the 8-way R4400 onyx/inferno systems they replaced.
Anyhow, these systems worked so smoothly because of their phenominal internal bandwidth. IIRC we had 8 ultra scsi channels multiplexed with discreet's stone filesystem - for a few minutes of uncompressed video - and 800 Mb/s (with a much higher real throughput than gig-e) serial HIPPI to sling frames around.
I'm not aware of any x86 systems yet with the bandwidth of these (really 4-year-old) systems. The R10K onyx inferno systems they kept still had much life in them.
Now, I could see these apps ending up on linux at some point, but flame or inferno on linux/x86 (or xp/x86) doesn't strike me as a near-term proposition. (If I'm horribly out of date here, let me know - I have been out of that industry since late 1999. What attention I've paid, though, suggests pc's just aren't there yet for high-end applications.)
But there are risks in putting so much behind Linux. For starters, there are legal implications. Does anybody own the intellectual property of the "open-source" software? How exposed are companies to patent violation?
Obviously Lisa DiCarlo really understands the comcepts in the story she just wrote. Yeah.
If you're just being sarcastic, she seems to have a better grasp on the risks of using Linux than you do. The question of ownership is sticky - the owner of any particular bit of code might be difficult to determine and impossible to track down. This has some bearing on her question about patent violations which is frankly quite legitimate. Consider a company that is using open source software and has made changes to it to meet internal requirements. Suppose then a software company comes along claiming infringement of patented methods in that software package - is the company using the software liable if the software is found to be infringing because in changing the source they have become authors of the software? (Obviously not the sole authors, but said company may have much deeper pockets than the original authors.) I don't think this situation has yet been litigated, making the risk of liability difficult to quantify.
Basically, if you think current copyright law has a chilling effect on open source development, wait until the big dogs break out their patent portfolios. It's gonna get ugly.
But isn't part of the reason for this that many legislatures have a disproportionate number of lawyers amongst their members.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? No. I think most laws result from someone with a greivance saying "there oughtta be a law!" and lobbying the legislature. Usually this is a party with a financial stake on the outcome of the law, but occasionally a motivated individual with a popular cause can get their cause validated by legislators pandering for votes. I'm not defending this practice, just calling it as I see it. I don't think lawyers are the reason why legislatures pass bad laws.
Even companies that aren't doing anything wrong need to hire lawyers to make sure they're not running afowl of any technicalities, and to defend themselves when they are falsely accused of wrongdoing.
Businesses consult and retain legal counsel because ignorance of the law is no excuse. Now, legislatures could draft laws that give persons who did not know about a given law an affirmative defense. They don't. Why? First, how do you prove the defendant did not know about the law they were charged with violating? The defendant's testimony to that effect? Nevermind the fact that such a defense creates an incentive for the defendant to be as ignorant as possible about the law, subverting its intent entirely. I think this is a pretty good rationale for ignorance of the law being no excuse.
If you're suggesting, rather, that the problem is that we have too many laws on the books, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. That's a problem with the law, not lawyers per se.
I'm not sure I think it's unreasonable, in any case, that a company might need in-house counsel - large businesses are complex beasts with all sorts of contractual relationships, insurance and tax requirements, etc. Not every business transaction can be handled with an oral agreement and a handshake - we're talking about long-term contracts, construction contracts, fabrication or equipment supply, etc. etc. and somebody has to draft them.
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A tax moratorium to encourage space development would be great... if companies actually paid taxes. Enron never paid a dime of federal taxes. Tyco International dodged $400 million in taxes last year by incorporating in Bermuda. Etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam. There are too many tax shelters already that are a hell of a lot easier to establish than an asteroid mine.
-Isaac
Heh, I noticed my mistake after I posted - was wondering if anyone would pick up on it. Both are in my collection, though obviously on different media (vinyl vs. VHS).
The injunction handed down on December 17, 1991 forced Biz Markie's hit album, "I Need a Haircut," off the shelves for including a sample of Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)." This case marked the end of sound collage in popular music, since it firmly established that the number of notes that may be sampled without permission is zero.
The US Supreme Court was a little bit looser in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc (the 2 Live Crew / Roy Orbison "Pretty Woman" case), and allowed 2 Live Crew the affirmative defense of fair use, overturning past decisions that had held commercial appropriation to be presumptively infringing.
These are probably the cases of the early '90s to which Mr. Vaidhyanathan is referring.
-Isaac
You do, if that's the kind of jazz you like. Perhaps you particularly like jazz that features trumpets, as opposed to, say, a piano trio.
Rap music has rap over a backing track (or sometimes over nothing, though an older generation might simply call that poetry). It is a form of hip-hop. Consider Timo Maas, who makes some of the freshest beats today - are his releases hip-hop? Sure! They're not rap music, however, because . . . there's no rap! Afrika Bambaataa was a pioneer of electro-funk, another genre that we might include under the general rubric of hip-hop, but it would not be heresy to refer to his music as electro-funk, even though it is also hip-hop.
Face it, "rap music" is a genre of hip-hop. You may not like rap music, you may think that the MC gets too much attention in rap music, but to say that rap music is not itself a genre is simply wrong. It is at least an identifiable genre or subgenre of hip-hop.
Perhaps this is exactly what Siva is saying - and what is wrong with this? He's not talking about the people that pushed the bounds of copyright the furthest - in a legal sense, it is arguably Biz Markie, since he was the artist whose albums were pulled from the shelves because he used, without clearance, a sample from Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again, Naturally", and whose court case established the principle that the number of notes that may be sampled without permission is zero. He is talking about how his personal experience with rap music got him interested in the law of copyright. Your posts seem to be nothing more than showy attempts to berate Mr. Vaidhyanathan for liking Ice Cube - the insufferable MO of the hip-hopper-than-thou - and offer nothing nearly so informative as Siva's observations about how changes in copyright law and jurisprudence were reflected in popular music.
For what it's worth, I think he's right - the era of the aggressive sound collage largely vanished from popular rap music in the post-1991 era. Now, I wouldn't condemn all modern rap music or hip-hop generally as being mere "jeep beats and heavy bass" - I think the "Nathaniel Merriwether" projects of Dan the Automator and Prince Paul are genuinely creative. They are not, however, collages of samples in the same style as, say, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Hat, which is composed entirely of samples, carefully assembled, and which predates Grand Upright Music v. Warner Brothers Music (the Biz Markie case).
-Isaac
Perhaps Siva is not a fan of the larger culture of hip-hop, but rather of rap music in particular, and YOU are actually the one conflating "rap" with "hip-hop." This makes sense, given that the Mr. Vaidhyanathan is speaking about the music - specifically, the density and complexity of the backing tracks of rap music - and not about dancers or MC's.
Sometimes, people mean what they say, and not more.
-Isaac
Just aside, crimes may not require a mental state - consider the crime of unlawful possession of a controlled substance. As defined by most statutes, the elements are:
-possession of a controlled substance (result element)
-without permission. (attendant circumstance)
No mens rea there, though there may be an affirmative defense that one did not know one possessed a controlled substance, or that one had an honest and reasonable belief that one had permission to possess the substance.
Knowledge is not an element of the crime - no guilty state of mind is required. Felony murder is similar - it requires only the killing of a human being during the commission of a felony, not that one has malice aforethought as in the usual common-law definition of murder.
-Isaac
I still have my PC110, and it still works well. I don't carry it around much anymore, but it still blows people away when I do. (All the moreso when I tell them that it's an 8-year-old computer).
Right now I'm working on turning mine into a sort of desk clock/weather station/wireless AP, since it doesn't really have the oomph to do much else anymore (esp. w/ only 8 megs of RAM), and my P-series Lifebook is at least an order of magnitude more powerful and only twice the size.
Anyhow, thanks, Alan, for putting/keeping the PC110 touchpad driver in the kernel! I still crack a smile every time I do 'make menuconfig' and see that option, even when I'm not on the wee beastie.
-Isaac
Be sure to check out xplanet (xplanet.sourceforge.net) - it is basically XEarth++, and it is awesome. Works in *nix and windoze, and with simple scripts it will download near-live satellite cloud imagery (updated every ~6 hrs, I think) for rendering the earth. It also supports loading and displaying weather data from the net (like XEarth displays city names), which in combination with the live clouds makes for a fun way to get an intuitive grasp of weather and weather forecasting by watching the whole world over time.
Slick stuff.
-Isaac
Pardon my mangled language - editing a post that long in a tiny textbox leads to silly mistakes.
-Isaac
This seems to cut out most "R" or "NC-17" rated movies, dunnit? Well, at least all excepting the very few that feature no nudity or sex.
Several states still have movie classification boards that review films to determine whether they are harmful to minors - one may safely assume that these boards by and large are rubber-stamp bodies that follow the MPAA ratings. Some states have a film classification board and still use codify the MPAA's ratings explicitly into law. Check out this Tennessee statute:
Finally, lots of states require videos to display an MPAA rating (or "not rated" if they are, well, not rated), and then have statutes that explicitly claim not to adopt the MPAA rating system, but which in effect bar the rental of R, X, or NC-17 movies to minors.
Finally, there are plenty of local ordinances around the country that bar the showing of R or NC-17 flicks to minors explicitly. These may not be constitutional, but any statute is presumed constitutional until it is challenged. Do you have the time and money to challenge such a law in your town? I don't.
Bottom line, MPAA ratings might as well be law. Don't even get me started on zoning ordinances that automatically classify any theater that shows an NC-17 or unrated film as a porno house, to be zoned out of existence.
-Isaac
Actually, it's "Whoot! There it is!" (by 95 South) or "Whoomp! There it is!" by Tag Team, who followed up their smash hit with the underwhelming "Here it is, Bam!" and "Whoomp! There it went!" (Seriously, I'm not joking.)
Yes, I went to High School in the early 90s.
-Isaac
Good luck.
AFAIK, insurance companies in every state may offer discounts to people who never file claims. If you go 10 or 20 years without filing a claim, you get lower rates than the guy who was unlucky enough to be rear-ended by an uninsured motorist (or even potentially by any motorist, if they count claims filed against other policies). Giving discounts for filing no claims is congruent to charging higher rates to people who have been in accidents where they were not at fault.
The points system is all about setting a level at which the state may take away your license - I guarantee if you get a speeding ticket and go to traffic school to avoid the points on your license, your insurance rates will still go up. It does not restrain what insurance companies may charge.
-Isaac
Why else would they make authors warrant that their work does not conflict with the DMCA? If the IEEE finds themselves named in a DMCA suit, they will go after the author (more probably, the author's employer) to recover their costs in a breach of contract action.
Bottom line, IEEE is folding like a full-service laundry. (Boo, hiss as appropriate)
-Isaac
Agreed that they probably won't succeed ultimately - but they could really hose the computer industry by trying. Like you, I wouldn't buy a new PC that limited how I manipulate my data. This wouldn't just hurt Microsoft, but also the manufacturers of new PCs, etc. This could all get very messy indeed.
-Isaac
Consider: Hailstorm required the cooperation of other companies, who were reluctant for many good reasons to pay for the privilege of placing Microsoft between themselves and their customers. (Customers were also none too thrilled about the idea, either.) There are companies that might find Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly a sufficiently compelling reason to justify such a move, though - companies selling bits (media and software). Only Microsoft has the leverage over desktop users to foist user-hateful "digital rights management" technologies upon them. (I don't just mean technology to prevent copying of "protected" media, but also watermark detection/embedding, etc.)
Given a DRM system integrated sufficiently into the OS, some control over unauthorized data manipulation may be possible - at least, enough to deter most users. The legal billy-club of the DMCA (combined with Microsoft's practically infinite legal budget) is already in place to deter companies or individuals enabling circumvention, and patents are likewise in place to thwart competitors and open-source alternatives. When Microsoft's ubiquitous rollout of DRM is complete, they may be able to play to the paranoia of media companies desperately grasping for something, anything, to tame the very nature of the bit - to make it uncopyable. This again places Microsoft in the revenue stream (and customer data stream), but by offering something more compelling than mere data aggregation.
Their quiet backing of the SSSCA/CBDTPA is only the beginning, I think of this new push. Hailstorm was unappealing to companies and a magnet for criticism, but DRM leverages Microsoft's existing monopoly so I think they'll translate their goal of skimming off every transaction to this arena.
Just MHO,
-Isaac
Q.E.D.
-Isaac
Race Fever is for PalmOS.
Download a demo of Race Fever. Note the excellent graphics (admittedly not 3d like quake - Pole Position style) and smooth gameplay on color palm devices.
The real clincher is the control input - instead of futzing around with the buttons like too many games, they turn the graffiti area into an analog controller - the vertical axis controls speed (top of the area is max acceleration, bottom is brake), the horizontal controls steering.
When more game developers start finding control and gameplay models more suitable to the medium, I think 3d or quasi-3d games will become more popular.
-Isaac
Yes, I know how LCDs work, so bear with me - instead of using filters that polarize every pixel the same way, one could use filters that polarized every other line at 90 degrees to the previous. Now, manufacturing such filters and fitting them to LCDs is more expensive than current LCDs, but the advantage is that a simple pair of polarizing glasses (with one lens polarizing at 90 degrees to the other) would enable stereoscopic viewing of the LCD from any distance within the field of view of the LCD. I believe there is a company out there already claiming to have developed such displays, but I don't recall the name - they were touting their micropolarizer filter technology, anyhow, which is the hard part of making such a display.
-Isaac
<HOMER SIMPSON>I think it's perfectly obvious that I didn't.</HOMER SIMPSON>
Ah the perils of reading at +2 with reparenting...
-Isaac
Um, bollocks.
Cancer exists in societies that don't vaccinate - it's just that in these societies one rarely lives long enough to die of cancer.
-Isaac
Really? Hmm. I agree to a certain extent that the OS doesn't matter to the artist, insofar as the application takes over the interface, but in my experience, no x86 system has the bandwidth to keep up with Discreet's bigger apps (well, at least flame and inferno).
Background: In 1999 I worked for a major FX house, where I rolled out (as sysadmin, along with the video engineers and facilities people) a bunch of flame seats on dual-R10K octanes. These were, according to the artists, 20% faster in practice than the 8-way R4400 onyx/inferno systems they replaced.
Anyhow, these systems worked so smoothly because of their phenominal internal bandwidth. IIRC we had 8 ultra scsi channels multiplexed with discreet's stone filesystem - for a few minutes of uncompressed video - and 800 Mb/s (with a much higher real throughput than gig-e) serial HIPPI to sling frames around.
I'm not aware of any x86 systems yet with the bandwidth of these (really 4-year-old) systems. The R10K onyx inferno systems they kept still had much life in them.
Now, I could see these apps ending up on linux at some point, but flame or inferno on linux/x86 (or xp/x86) doesn't strike me as a near-term proposition. (If I'm horribly out of date here, let me know - I have been out of that industry since late 1999. What attention I've paid, though, suggests pc's just aren't there yet for high-end applications.)
-Isaac
If you're just being sarcastic, she seems to have a better grasp on the risks of using Linux than you do. The question of ownership is sticky - the owner of any particular bit of code might be difficult to determine and impossible to track down. This has some bearing on her question about patent violations which is frankly quite legitimate. Consider a company that is using open source software and has made changes to it to meet internal requirements. Suppose then a software company comes along claiming infringement of patented methods in that software package - is the company using the software liable if the software is found to be infringing because in changing the source they have become authors of the software? (Obviously not the sole authors, but said company may have much deeper pockets than the original authors.) I don't think this situation has yet been litigated, making the risk of liability difficult to quantify.
Basically, if you think current copyright law has a chilling effect on open source development, wait until the big dogs break out their patent portfolios. It's gonna get ugly.
-Isaac
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? No. I think most laws result from someone with a greivance saying "there oughtta be a law!" and lobbying the legislature. Usually this is a party with a financial stake on the outcome of the law, but occasionally a motivated individual with a popular cause can get their cause validated by legislators pandering for votes. I'm not defending this practice, just calling it as I see it. I don't think lawyers are the reason why legislatures pass bad laws.
-Isaac
Businesses consult and retain legal counsel because ignorance of the law is no excuse. Now, legislatures could draft laws that give persons who did not know about a given law an affirmative defense. They don't. Why? First, how do you prove the defendant did not know about the law they were charged with violating? The defendant's testimony to that effect? Nevermind the fact that such a defense creates an incentive for the defendant to be as ignorant as possible about the law, subverting its intent entirely. I think this is a pretty good rationale for ignorance of the law being no excuse.
If you're suggesting, rather, that the problem is that we have too many laws on the books, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. That's a problem with the law, not lawyers per se.
I'm not sure I think it's unreasonable, in any case, that a company might need in-house counsel - large businesses are complex beasts with all sorts of contractual relationships, insurance and tax requirements, etc. Not every business transaction can be handled with an oral agreement and a handshake - we're talking about long-term contracts, construction contracts, fabrication or equipment supply, etc. etc. and somebody has to draft them.
-Isaac