According to a DOJ press release, he is also the copyright holder on his program, so any distribution should be going on only with his full consent -- which is likely given the nature of his presentation
Goodness. Hope you've never granted anybody else the rights to use a piece of code or writing, because you will be held accountable for everything that person does with it.
Yes, these are pretty amazing. I was taking the PATH from Hoboken to Manhattan last night, and my friend was telling me about seeing this "spooky ad on the subway walls", and not being sure if it was it was just in his imagination. Sure enough, just before we reached Christopher Street, this almost-holographic moving image appears outside on the wall.
It's great to know how they did it-- and now my friend doesn't have to worry about his mental health (though others would disagree:)
Haven't you seen warehouses near railway lines, with their own railway track going into them?
Warehouses are one thing. Deliveries of goods to individual businesses is quite another. One imagines that while most of the cargo leaves the warehouse by train, a lot of it arrives at its final destination aboard a truck.
why force people underground to travel quickly and clog the streets above with trucks full of cargo?
All I know is I wouldn't wanna be the delivery boy responsible for dragging heavy cargo from the subway line to its destination...
Re:Maybe some straw will help break the camel's ba
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
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· Score: 1
If someone voluntarily gives up certain rights to obtain the book, how can this be a violation of the doctrine of first sale? I think thats the whole point of having the contract. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to license the book.
At the point where the copyright holder sells or gives you the book, that person may require a contract. Once the book has been obtained, however, you shouldn't have to give up any rights in order to use it. That's the way I see it, at least.
Has it occured to anyone that maybe Toho is bringing up this suit only to comply with the requirement that you have to actively defend a trademark in order to keep the exclusive rights to the trademark
And the solution to that is to arrange a simple licensing agreement (details confidential), where AOL/TW gives them $3 and a jar of pimento olives in exchange for the rights to use the trademark. (Or better yet, agrees not to do something nasty, like ban Toho's products from all of their media outlets.)
Problem solved.
Of course, they should have done this a while ago, rather than letting the 'infringement' go unprosecuted for so long.
Antique rings are about more than just the price. I couldn't stand the look of a lot of the modern stuff-- it's all boring chunky gold or platinum with a few diamonds thrown on top. The antique styles are so much more attractive and unique. And you shouldn't worry about the rings being 'secondhand', anymore than you'd worry about a vintage rolls-royce being a 'used car'. Would you rather buy a new Hyundai for the same price?
If you're anywhere near New York, go down to 47th street (between 5th and 6th avenues), and scour the diamond exchanges. Skip the obnoxious folks who try to force stuff into your hand and look at the smaller booths with art-deco and 30s/40s rings. You'll see more beautiful antique rings in one place than you'll find in all the antique stores in most cities.
Incidentally, I'm going to plug this guy because he was really good to us when we were shopping (no, I don't get a kickback from him.) The site gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.
Even better yet, buy an antique ring. Not only are they more beautiful (in my opinion) than most of the crap that's being put out on the market, but they're unique and affordable.
Go down to the various markets in the Diamond District in NYC (or whatever the equivalent is in your city) and go through the stalls. Avoid antique stores, as they will be far more expensive (they often shop in the same place you'll be looking.)
A new root DNS. A new set of policies. Explicit disregard for precedents and policies created by American lawyers and (paid-for) politicians. Slightly lower bar for the Internet Death Penalty. IPv6 only. Standards-based. Vendor neutral. Consumer and techie friendly, megacorp neutral. Rational domain-name dispute policy. No ICANN.
All of this would be wonderful. With enough gateways to the rest of the Internet, of course, it would probably even be transparent to most users (after all, the Internet is just a network of networks.)
The gateway problem is the rub, of course. There wouldn't be enough gateways, and they'd probably be carefully controlled by governments. 'Course, tighter government control is really the point of the whole exercise; it's not about building a nicer technical solution.
And next thing you know, you'd just be complaining about the restrictive policies of Europe's equivalent of ICANN and so on.
under the current Copyright Cartels (is there any doubt in anyone's mind who is calling the shots in D.C. these days?), we, or rather America, are by far the worst offendors.
To do anything about this, you'll need to isolate a lot more than just Europe's computer networks. Though the guy is quick to yell DMCA, European nations have passed exactly the same sorts of copyright laws that we have. Maybe the author is just too timid to point out that his favorite governments are more to blame than an inanimate computer network.
What I don't get about telecom, esp. the telecom in my area, QWest, is how the hell they are rolling in money
In the case of QWest, I think it has something to do with all the fancy fiber-optic cable they laid back in the 90s. The monopoly portion of the company (local) is just keeping the long-distance and data parts afloat.
UMTS will be fully operational and tested before anyone has covered even the major cities with WiFi access. So WiFi is 11Mbps, but still UMTS is 2Mbps. Do you need more on your laptop/PDA?
1) UMTS cells are generally much larger than WiFi hotspots, meaning that the bandwidth may be shared between a larger number of people. Microcells are generally far less cost-effective than 802.11.
2) UMTS is a much more expensive technology in general. The rollout costs are mindboggling, and they're going to be paid off by service fees. High adoption would mean better rates, but also more competition for the bandwidth.
3) Where do I need coverage? If there are fast, inexpensive WiFi hotspots in a lot of the places I need to go, it might be not be worth the extra dough to get coverage in every nook and cranny.
GPRS ? It will get faster and cheaper as more people start to use it.
If I'm not mistaken, GPRS uses ganged-together GSM bands. That implies that there's a fundamental limit to how inexpensive it can be, at least until someone comes up with a whole lot more spectrum, or starts building thousands and thousands of GSM microcells (very expensive).
The advantage of 802.11 is that the base-station technology is cheap (given that it's roughly the same as the client technology), and that it's designed to operate over a fairly short range. This means it's not going to be the preferred solution for rural or even (possibly) suburban areas, but it'll be a much better investment than things like GPRS in high-density areas.
I don't imagine that the final solution will actually be 802.11, but I think the Telecom companies will eventually adopt something that's more closely related to 802.11 than to traditional mobile systems, at least in the cities. Your phone (or PDA or computer, whatever) will be flexible enough to switch to a much slower, more traditional cellular network only when you're out of range.
according to this [google.com] whitepaper, when developers are given their preferance of language to use to implement a solution, they're most productive.
I'm fairly proficient in C++ (it's been my primary language for years), and I'm more comfortable using it than just about any other language. However, while I would use C++ for a production application every time, I recognize the advantages of using Java for building prototypes and simple test apps. Between the much simpler library, thread support and garbage collection, you can really do a lot more in a short time without planning or worrying about memory.
A friend of mine said it best, when we were forced to use Java for a compilers class: Java is like candy. Meaning that so many of the details are taken care of by the language that it's almost effortless. You can do things quick and dirty, in a way you wouldn't in C++. Of course, all of that ease and sloppiness comes at a cost, and in some instances that's acceptable.
Besides, Java and C++ are so similar anyway. If you're comfortable with C++, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be comfortable in Java. You might not be as proficient as a full-time Java coder, but you're not exactly going to be lost without a paddle. Going the other way, I'm not so sure.
It is more likely that a sound equipment company or 3rd party will come up with a better Linux dist for these purposes, ie. someone who understands the market better.
The problem is that most of the music/recording software companies would probably want to keep a lot of the more interesting applications proprietary, which would result in a very different end product. Most of the industry has years of experience trying to stay alive in a competitive niche market, where a good percentage of their customers are (through no fault of their own) not burdened with lots of extra cash. Consequently, they see less advantage in giving important things away (you also see a lot more copy-protection in this industry, and less openness with file formats, etc.)
That's not to say that these companies would have a problem with using Linux as a platform on which to base their software, or that they couldn't produce a pretty good distro. But I wouldn't expect them to Open Source a lot of their code, even if they did contribute to such a distro. And since even hardware manufacturers are often in the software business, it's not certain that you would see a major difference there.
If any standardization starts to happen, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes about as a gradual stone-soup kind of thing, where commercial businesses gradually start to see the advantages this project as a platform for their proprietary products only after a lot of the ground-work has been done by dedicated volunteers.
The real point of high-resolution TV isn't to augment your existing experience with a little more detail (though that's a side-effect.) In the long run, HDTV is all about size. If you want to go with a small picture (say less than 30"), then stick with a high-quality NTSC set. It's a lot cheaper.
However, TV becomes a different experience when it takes up a larger area of your vision. There's study upon study documenting the responses of viewers watching screens of varying sizes, and a common observation is that the viewing experience becomes significantly different when the viewing area reaches a certain percentage of your frame of vision.
The problem with the current system is that it doesn't have the resolution to provide an enjoyable experience when it's projected that large. And HDTV does. The difference is dramatic. I don't know if I'd care much about HDTV on a 24" screen. But I do care on a larger screen.
So, you ask, what do I care, as long as I don't intend to buy a large screen TV? And the answer is, if you've made that assumption, then you needn't worry about HDTV-- but you should consider that your precondition is something of an artificial choice. The question you might ask is "why do I want to watch TV on a small screen?" Thanks to CRTs and the cost (not to mention space-consuming nature) of larger TVs, we've become used to the idea of the average TV being a tiny rectangle, so it seems normal to us. With plasma displays and high-resolution LCD projecters dropping steadily in price, the whole notion of watching a small-screen TV may soon be a thing of the past. I'm sure if most people could go back in time and watch the first movies, projected on tiny screens because of limitations in the technology, they'd find the experience unsatisfactory. But at the time people were content with the experience.
And that's why HDTV will catch on-- because now that we're moving beyond the artificial limitations of the CRT, peoples' expectations of what the TV-watching experience will change. Some people will be content with the more limited experience, because they're used to it or they don't want to upgrade. But those people will be making an increasingly unusual choice-- kind of like sticking with black-and-white rather than switching to color.
On the other hand, once you get HDTV you start wishing everything looked like that.
It's the same argument that people use against every technology that they haven't spent time adjusting to. For instance, I was fine with a dialup network connection until I got a cable modem. Now I couldn't imagine waiting 30 seconds for a web page to load (unless it's Slashdot on a busy day, I suppose.)
It is very clear to everybody over the age of 5 that when you go to the airport you consent to have your bags searched, you walk through a metal detector, and you have to show ID. If you don't like it you don't have to be there. The court wil see it that way.
If you don't like it you certainly have other options. Take a bus, or a train. Drive your car. Fly on a charter flight, heck learn to fly yourself.
This is exactly the argument the government will make, and the courts will buy it out of necessity. Problem is, it's not a very good argument. The courts routinely find constitutional violations in laws and procedures that take a similar, indirect approach.
Case in point: Congress wanted to deny funding to schools and libraries that didn't install net filters. The government argued that they weren't forcing the schools to install the filters-- that would be a violation of the 1st amendment. Instead, they were simply depriving the schools of a "privilege"; the schools were free to ignore the request, they would just have to find another way to make their budgets.
The court ruled, quite reasonably, that it was unconstitutional for Congress to use its clout this way. They made that decision because the 1st amendment enjoys particularly strong protection, and because, well, a little online smut never crashed into the World Trade Center.
Personally, I think it'd be nuts to take away the gov'ts ability to screen and search airline passengers. I just think the typicical "you could take a bike instead" argument is an lousy one, and is typically only used when a court needs wiggle-room to get out of an unpleasant Constitutional corner. Let's grin and bear it when the decision comes down, but not be so foolish as to take it seriously... or someday we may find ourselves living in a wooden shack with no running water or electricity, because access to basic identification and government currency is a "privilege" that requires us to surrender our constitutional rights.
A suprisingly large segment of the population doesn't have competition, or any meaningful competition. Even here in my Manhattan neighborhhod, there are only a couple of choices. My parents, who live in rural New England, have exactly one.
Anyway, it's not the feds fault if you don't have a choice for local service, it's your state. Go hound your version of what we call the Public Services Commission.
As far as I know, the Bill of Rights sees government as monolithic. For instance, if a hired agent of your home state illegally searched your house, the results wouldn't be allowable as evidence in a Federal trial.
If you could convince a court that the local phone company was the creation of any government, you would have a shot at getting your phone records declared inadmissable in a court. Or, at least that's the theory. Chances are you couldn't convince any judge to do that, though the argument's not without merit.
Of course the government is involved in this. The Bell companies are a government-regulated monopoly. If they weren't, I might be able to pick from three or four local phone companies and find one that doesn't sell my info.
By allowing the Bells to operate as a monopoly, the Bells became a quasi-government operation.
If you can't visualize why this might matter, imagine that phone companies were actually government agencies and private companies were legally banned from competing with them.
Ebola is terrifying, but it's not all powerful. Any kind of pathogen has to balance infectivity with lethality, and Ebola is too far on the lethal side to be massively infective right now, thankfully.
Every virus expert whose work I've read takes the prospect of a global Ebola outbreak pretty seriously. So far the thing has been limited to a relatively small number of people and places by sheer luck and geography. If it did get begin spreading via the air transit system, it could kill millions of people. Yes, it probably wouldn't wipe out more than a few percent of the world's population... But that's not comforting.
Except that it still costs tens of thousands of dollars to run a lab capable of doing this. This isn't mix-and-match with chemicals from the local drugstore. It costs a lot of money to buy vectors, kits, reagents, perform sequencing, etc....
If you think in the very short-term, you may be right. If your vision extends a decade or two into the future, you might have cause to be a little worried. The cost of the equipment and knowledge necessary to carry this sort of thing out is inevitably going to plummet.
It's sort of like somebody in 1968 saying nobody could ever build a computer virus in their house because computers are too big and expensive...
When 10-15% of the nation's power is being generated from renewable sources like wind and hydro, I'll be open to considering new nuclear plants. In the mean time, we can solve our immediate energy needs using cheaper and less hazardous energy solutions. As a side benefit, the cost of these technologies will plummet as a result of our investment.
This is one of the primary reasons that I don't take the pro-nuclear crowd very seriously. Anyone who places the construction of new nuke plants ahead of these alternative energy sources is foolish, economically, politically, and morally.
Slashdot Mirror
Goodness. Hope you've never granted anybody else the rights to use a piece of code or writing, because you will be held accountable for everything that person does with it.
Go to law school, Stonehand.
On re-reading the article, I realize that it must have been the one between 14th and 23rd, not Christopher Street. Just a couple of stops further.
It's great to know how they did it-- and now my friend doesn't have to worry about his mental health (though others would disagree :)
Warehouses are one thing. Deliveries of goods to individual businesses is quite another. One imagines that while most of the cargo leaves the warehouse by train, a lot of it arrives at its final destination aboard a truck.
All I know is I wouldn't wanna be the delivery boy responsible for dragging heavy cargo from the subway line to its destination...
At the point where the copyright holder sells or gives you the book, that person may require a contract. Once the book has been obtained, however, you shouldn't have to give up any rights in order to use it. That's the way I see it, at least.
And the solution to that is to arrange a simple licensing agreement (details confidential), where AOL/TW gives them $3 and a jar of pimento olives in exchange for the rights to use the trademark. (Or better yet, agrees not to do something nasty, like ban Toho's products from all of their media outlets.)
Problem solved.
Of course, they should have done this a while ago, rather than letting the 'infringement' go unprosecuted for so long.
If you're anywhere near New York, go down to 47th street (between 5th and 6th avenues), and scour the diamond exchanges. Skip the obnoxious folks who try to force stuff into your hand and look at the smaller booths with art-deco and 30s/40s rings. You'll see more beautiful antique rings in one place than you'll find in all the antique stores in most cities.
Incidentally, I'm going to plug this guy because he was really good to us when we were shopping (no, I don't get a kickback from him.) The site gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.
Go down to the various markets in the Diamond District in NYC (or whatever the equivalent is in your city) and go through the stalls. Avoid antique stores, as they will be far more expensive (they often shop in the same place you'll be looking.)
All of this would be wonderful. With enough gateways to the rest of the Internet, of course, it would probably even be transparent to most users (after all, the Internet is just a network of networks.)
The gateway problem is the rub, of course. There wouldn't be enough gateways, and they'd probably be carefully controlled by governments. 'Course, tighter government control is really the point of the whole exercise; it's not about building a nicer technical solution.
And next thing you know, you'd just be complaining about the restrictive policies of Europe's equivalent of ICANN and so on.
To do anything about this, you'll need to isolate a lot more than just Europe's computer networks. Though the guy is quick to yell DMCA, European nations have passed exactly the same sorts of copyright laws that we have. Maybe the author is just too timid to point out that his favorite governments are more to blame than an inanimate computer network.
In the case of QWest, I think it has something to do with all the fancy fiber-optic cable they laid back in the 90s. The monopoly portion of the company (local) is just keeping the long-distance and data parts afloat.
1) UMTS cells are generally much larger than WiFi hotspots, meaning that the bandwidth may be shared between a larger number of people. Microcells are generally far less cost-effective than 802.11.
2) UMTS is a much more expensive technology in general. The rollout costs are mindboggling, and they're going to be paid off by service fees. High adoption would mean better rates, but also more competition for the bandwidth.
3) Where do I need coverage? If there are fast, inexpensive WiFi hotspots in a lot of the places I need to go, it might be not be worth the extra dough to get coverage in every nook and cranny.
If I'm not mistaken, GPRS uses ganged-together GSM bands. That implies that there's a fundamental limit to how inexpensive it can be, at least until someone comes up with a whole lot more spectrum, or starts building thousands and thousands of GSM microcells (very expensive).
The advantage of 802.11 is that the base-station technology is cheap (given that it's roughly the same as the client technology), and that it's designed to operate over a fairly short range. This means it's not going to be the preferred solution for rural or even (possibly) suburban areas, but it'll be a much better investment than things like GPRS in high-density areas.
I don't imagine that the final solution will actually be 802.11, but I think the Telecom companies will eventually adopt something that's more closely related to 802.11 than to traditional mobile systems, at least in the cities. Your phone (or PDA or computer, whatever) will be flexible enough to switch to a much slower, more traditional cellular network only when you're out of range.
I'm fairly proficient in C++ (it's been my primary language for years), and I'm more comfortable using it than just about any other language. However, while I would use C++ for a production application every time, I recognize the advantages of using Java for building prototypes and simple test apps. Between the much simpler library, thread support and garbage collection, you can really do a lot more in a short time without planning or worrying about memory.
A friend of mine said it best, when we were forced to use Java for a compilers class: Java is like candy. Meaning that so many of the details are taken care of by the language that it's almost effortless. You can do things quick and dirty, in a way you wouldn't in C++. Of course, all of that ease and sloppiness comes at a cost, and in some instances that's acceptable.
Besides, Java and C++ are so similar anyway. If you're comfortable with C++, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be comfortable in Java. You might not be as proficient as a full-time Java coder, but you're not exactly going to be lost without a paddle. Going the other way, I'm not so sure.
The problem is that most of the music/recording software companies would probably want to keep a lot of the more interesting applications proprietary, which would result in a very different end product. Most of the industry has years of experience trying to stay alive in a competitive niche market, where a good percentage of their customers are (through no fault of their own) not burdened with lots of extra cash. Consequently, they see less advantage in giving important things away (you also see a lot more copy-protection in this industry, and less openness with file formats, etc.)
That's not to say that these companies would have a problem with using Linux as a platform on which to base their software, or that they couldn't produce a pretty good distro. But I wouldn't expect them to Open Source a lot of their code, even if they did contribute to such a distro. And since even hardware manufacturers are often in the software business, it's not certain that you would see a major difference there.
If any standardization starts to happen, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes about as a gradual stone-soup kind of thing, where commercial businesses gradually start to see the advantages this project as a platform for their proprietary products only after a lot of the ground-work has been done by dedicated volunteers.
But who knows-- I could be wrong.
However, TV becomes a different experience when it takes up a larger area of your vision. There's study upon study documenting the responses of viewers watching screens of varying sizes, and a common observation is that the viewing experience becomes significantly different when the viewing area reaches a certain percentage of your frame of vision.
The problem with the current system is that it doesn't have the resolution to provide an enjoyable experience when it's projected that large. And HDTV does. The difference is dramatic. I don't know if I'd care much about HDTV on a 24" screen. But I do care on a larger screen.
So, you ask, what do I care, as long as I don't intend to buy a large screen TV? And the answer is, if you've made that assumption, then you needn't worry about HDTV-- but you should consider that your precondition is something of an artificial choice. The question you might ask is "why do I want to watch TV on a small screen?" Thanks to CRTs and the cost (not to mention space-consuming nature) of larger TVs, we've become used to the idea of the average TV being a tiny rectangle, so it seems normal to us. With plasma displays and high-resolution LCD projecters dropping steadily in price, the whole notion of watching a small-screen TV may soon be a thing of the past. I'm sure if most people could go back in time and watch the first movies, projected on tiny screens because of limitations in the technology, they'd find the experience unsatisfactory. But at the time people were content with the experience.
And that's why HDTV will catch on-- because now that we're moving beyond the artificial limitations of the CRT, peoples' expectations of what the TV-watching experience will change. Some people will be content with the more limited experience, because they're used to it or they don't want to upgrade. But those people will be making an increasingly unusual choice-- kind of like sticking with black-and-white rather than switching to color.
It's the same argument that people use against every technology that they haven't spent time adjusting to. For instance, I was fine with a dialup network connection until I got a cable modem. Now I couldn't imagine waiting 30 seconds for a web page to load (unless it's Slashdot on a busy day, I suppose.)
Here.
If you don't like it you certainly have other options. Take a bus, or a train. Drive your car. Fly on a charter flight, heck learn to fly yourself.
This is exactly the argument the government will make, and the courts will buy it out of necessity. Problem is, it's not a very good argument. The courts routinely find constitutional violations in laws and procedures that take a similar, indirect approach.
Case in point: Congress wanted to deny funding to schools and libraries that didn't install net filters. The government argued that they weren't forcing the schools to install the filters-- that would be a violation of the 1st amendment. Instead, they were simply depriving the schools of a "privilege"; the schools were free to ignore the request, they would just have to find another way to make their budgets.
The court ruled, quite reasonably, that it was unconstitutional for Congress to use its clout this way. They made that decision because the 1st amendment enjoys particularly strong protection, and because, well, a little online smut never crashed into the World Trade Center.
Personally, I think it'd be nuts to take away the gov'ts ability to screen and search airline passengers. I just think the typicical "you could take a bike instead" argument is an lousy one, and is typically only used when a court needs wiggle-room to get out of an unpleasant Constitutional corner. Let's grin and bear it when the decision comes down, but not be so foolish as to take it seriously... or someday we may find ourselves living in a wooden shack with no running water or electricity, because access to basic identification and government currency is a "privilege" that requires us to surrender our constitutional rights.
Anyway, it's not the feds fault if you don't have a choice for local service, it's your state. Go hound your version of what we call the Public Services Commission.
As far as I know, the Bill of Rights sees government as monolithic. For instance, if a hired agent of your home state illegally searched your house, the results wouldn't be allowable as evidence in a Federal trial.
If you could convince a court that the local phone company was the creation of any government, you would have a shot at getting your phone records declared inadmissable in a court. Or, at least that's the theory. Chances are you couldn't convince any judge to do that, though the argument's not without merit.
Of course the government is involved in this. The Bell companies are a government-regulated monopoly. If they weren't, I might be able to pick from three or four local phone companies and find one that doesn't sell my info.
By allowing the Bells to operate as a monopoly, the Bells became a quasi-government operation.
If you can't visualize why this might matter, imagine that phone companies were actually government agencies and private companies were legally banned from competing with them.
Every virus expert whose work I've read takes the prospect of a global Ebola outbreak pretty seriously. So far the thing has been limited to a relatively small number of people and places by sheer luck and geography. If it did get begin spreading via the air transit system, it could kill millions of people. Yes, it probably wouldn't wipe out more than a few percent of the world's population... But that's not comforting.
If you think in the very short-term, you may be right. If your vision extends a decade or two into the future, you might have cause to be a little worried. The cost of the equipment and knowledge necessary to carry this sort of thing out is inevitably going to plummet.
It's sort of like somebody in 1968 saying nobody could ever build a computer virus in their house because computers are too big and expensive...
This is one of the primary reasons that I don't take the pro-nuclear crowd very seriously. Anyone who places the construction of new nuke plants ahead of these alternative energy sources is foolish, economically, politically, and morally.