Unfortunately, no one clicks these ads, forcing sites to deploy ever larger and more intrusive banners.
Absolutely. My bank now sports ads that require the latest version of Flash. As I don't have it installed on my machine, I get to see a nice annoying "this page requires you download a plugin" dialog every time I go there. And this is a company I'm actually doing real business with!
DMCA or no, I doubt that AOL/TW will permit its Instant Messaging network to piss off it's record division.
You're probably right. On the other hand, AIM is wildly successful and right now AOL has a virtual monopoly on Instant Messenging (and they paid an obscene amount for it). If they go messing the client and protocol up too much (and they would have to do a lot to get Aimster off their back), they might just push people off to some other IM service. For whatever that's worth.
It'd be interesting to see how the encryption protections provided by copyright law (doesn't Europe have something equivalent to the DMCA?) stand up to anti-encryption laws like the ones they're passing in the UK. Apparently the government is allowed to monitor your encrypted communication, and if you fail to disclose encryption keys you get to spend time in jail.
Interesting article in Salon (a couple years old) about how Federal Judges are cozied up to by foundations with business interests. This particular article is about antitrust legislation, but it does make you think that perhaps judges who accept $5000 vacations and attend "educational" seminars on law and economics... might not be completely impartial.
but the word is "browserless" not "embedded" so you miss the point?
I don't think so... A "browserless operating system" is very different from a "browserless computer" or "browserless installation", wouldn't you agree? "Browserless operating system" implies that the browser is not a part of the Operating System. "Browserless computer" implies that there is no browser present on the machine, either as an embedded part of the OS or as a separate app. Would seem to be a fairly straightforward bit of language.
the value of a 'browserless operating system'. In 2001, there is none
Sure there are. That is, there are other OSes out there that don't consider the browser to be built-in to the operating system, and rather bundle it as a separate application. New MacOS machines include IE as an app, and various Linux distributions include Netscape and other browsers. Just because people connect their machines to the internet doesn't mean they need an OS with an embedded browser.
Radio spectral ranges are a natural resource that could be used at least 100 times more than there is available bandwidth.
Sure, but at the moment they're not being used very efficiently. A lot of the services that use those radio bands would benefit from a global/national high-speed wireless access network. And think of all those channels being wasted for UHF and VHF. I live in a very large city and most of them are unused. Imagine how many go to waste in Cleveland, OH. So there are a lot of uses for the bandwidth, but many of the existing services could be rolled into high-efficiency digital systems.
...CableTV providers talking about brining in 45+ Mbit access to subscriber home with an average thruput of over 20 Mbit.
Each (6Mhz) cable channel dedicated to Cable Modem service can carry between 27 and 32Mbit, depending on the frequency and the encoding. Of course, since cable modems are a shared technology, that bandwidth is divided amongst however many people are on the local loop (optimistically, 300-400, for some companies more like 2000-3000.) So yeah, the cable companies are telling the truth, just not the whole truth. Now, it's possible to use multiple channels for cable modem service, but you won't see a whole lot of it. Each cable modem channel used takes away a slot that could have been used for an analog cable channel, or up to 10 digital cable channels. Right now, that's not part of companies' business model.
You can also reduce the size of the local loop. This means running multiple copies of the local channels (one for each loop) through the analog fiber from the head-end. One of the biggest problems today for many large cable infrastructures is lack of fiber bandwidth, even more than lack of space on the local loop. So any plans to bring sustained 20Mbit connections to homes is a long way off. It may not arrive til fiber-to-the-home, which is where DSL and Cable are both going to converge.
What do you mean? You've never seen AT&T's Public Phone 2000 in an airport or train station? Talk about a high-tech marvel. They were so far ahead technologically, they didn't even have to wait till 2000 to build the thing! Now if only someone knew how it worked. And why it has that screen...
If they want to ban you for no reason except that they don't like your screen name they can.
Ack. Sure, Napster can ban you for any reason they want to. But do other organizations have the right to force Napster to do so, based on flimsy evidence? That would be the presumption of the DMCA.
The Napster people can refuse you service at their discretion. It's their software.
The DMCA and the DMCA-based Napster injunction (probably at least, pending rewrite) give copyright-holders the specific right to request certain accounts be closed. So yes, Napster is closing the accounts. But they're doing it under force of Federal law, so it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
What's happening here is more like arresting someone for wearing a ski mask while loitering outside a recently-robbed bank. 99% of the time, they're guilty, and, for that other 1%, they'll be found innocent in a trial (or charges may be dropped if they have a good excuse).
Hmm. But if you are arrested, interrogated, and found to be a confused skiier who wandered off the trail (or at least, no evidence turns up to prove you actually did anything wrong)-- generally you get your full freedom back within a few hours. And if you are charged, the government will kindly provide you with legal representation should this be beyond your means.
If you're suspected of copyright violation, however, you are required to prove that you didn't break any laws. Until then, you can have your account taken away, etc. Finally, if you're innocent and crazy enough to take it to court-- you're out many thousands of dollars. If you can't afford to fight the civil suit, your out of luck.
Hit the limit and you'll get a message saying you're cut off. I already have.
Or, like many cable-modem customers are finding out, your packet loss will suddenly go through the roof. This is at least a little bit fairer than shutting people down.
This means that there is a good chance a local peer will have a copy of data you want.
That's true. But at the moment, very few of the major p2p services look too closely at network topology. When this becomes more common, you probably will see ISPs reacting more favorably.
I dont see how me having some sort of P2P running off my DSL line is any different than me being on IRC with files offered
That's exactly what P2P is. And ISPs don't like it. They want you to take your files off of the pretty web pages, many of which (in their master-plan) will have local caching servers ala Akamai. If you look at the TOS for most cable-modem and residential DSL providers, they specifically say "don't operate a server or file sharing program." The unpredictable downstream and upstream bandwidth that P2P generates might eventually require them to spend more money.
This is really too bad for them. As long as people have these relatively powerful machines hooked up to the net, it's inevitable that they're going to use them for more than one-way downloads and web surfing. ISPs will adjust.
But what about (*shivvers*) Britney Spears? Little 12-year old girls are probably going out and buying that one song they really like (and is played over the radio constantly), instead of full albums of songs...
The record industry's business model relies heavily on those little 12-year old girls buying the whole album. There is little benefit to the industry in selling a (less than $10) single vs. a $17.99 album. If they can sell both, they're happy; but this is rare, and apparently singles are going the way of the dodo as far as the industry's marketing people are concerned:
From the AP: "Singles, a mainstay of the industry in the 1950s and 60s, have fallen out of favor as a tool to inflate sales figures and influence radio programming, said Roy Lott, president of EMI Group's Capitol label."
their revenue would be up $739,000,000 over last year. And up $1,600,000,000 from 1998.
Well, not exactly. The Napster settlement was actually 1 billion over several years, totalling $150 million/year divided out amongst the big 5 and indie labels. It would have made a dent in those numbers, but not as big as you say.
I'm not defending the RIAA, just trying to explain why they rejected the offer. $30 million per label per year isn't a lot of money, compared to what they're afraid they'll lose to Napster. Of course they're going to lose a lot more due to bad decision making, but they are a fairly short-sighted profit-driven industry.
It won't be the same for current Napster addicts who have plenty of MP3 they can still share?
From what I understand, you'll be able to share either MP3s or Napster-specific files on your drive and Napster won't touch them. When somebody else downloads the file to their machine, however, it always becomes an encrypted file. So there's no way to filter out the encrypted files, as everything will come to your machine as an encrypted file.
I agree with many of the posters that it's likely this copy protection will be easy to hack. I doubt that it will be on purpose, but napster just doesn't have the kind of resources or time it takes to play this kind of game.
Napster doesn't have the resources to do it right, but InterTrust does. If they're the ones hired to do this, it'll be their biggest project ever. Make-or-break. Of course it'll probably still get hacked, but if a Digital Right Management solution can work, they're the ones who'll do it.
I'd hate to imagine what happens to their stock if they fail.
Napster servers will require you to use the new client, and the record companies are going to quickly target the existing OpenNap servers. That won't destroy OpenNap, but it's going to get a lot less convenient for most users. The only real question is whether they go ahead and kill Napster or let it live, probably the smartest thing they can do at this time.
You can't prove everything, and to prove anything, you've got to start by assuming something. Don't tell me science can prove evolution - science can only disprove scientific theories. Creationism is not a scientific theory because it cannot be disproved.
Sure, of course you're right. And you're preaching to the choir. My point was that many people are presenting the tenets of Creationism as a scientific theory. They're not saying "hey, the bible says it's so, therefore it's science." They're writing books and proposing theories attempting to show that the world might be only a few thousand years old, and we might have sprung into being at the whim of forces we don't understand. It's not a very likely theory, but couched correctly, it can be viewed as science. Unfortunately, disproving a scientific theory is not as easy as all that no matter how ridiculous the claims may be. When that's done, the courts end up having to make a judgement not based on church vs. state, but on whether one scientific theory is "good" enough to be considered, and that's tough. There have been plenty of scientific theories throughout history that were banned, or shunned because they weren't considered good enough, or pointed to forces that we didn't understand-- some of them are widely accepted today. And it's for just this reason that the courts are not eager to throw a Scientific Creationism argument out of court.
Additionally, it becomes questionable if the GET string qualifies as a unique URL.
For example, if I send the same URL (script access) with a different set of variables, I should potentially be able to escape the claims.
I think everything after the GET is considered to be the URL. I'd be surprised if this patent (or the courts) takes such a narrow view of the term URL to see it as only the core component (ie, the name of a script) rather than the full string. If different strings give you different pages (locations), they'll be considered URLs. Not that this is a strong patent, but I'd bet the above argument wouldn't hold up in a courtroom.
The word scientific is used in this case to confuse and cajole the unwashed masses who can't tell the difference
Unfortunately, in this case it's the unwashed judges who are supposed to be confused. The 'scientific' bit came about mainly because creationists found that they couldn't force the government to teach Creationism in its raw biblical form (that pesky church and state thing.) So the argument was codified into a 'scientific' argument. The science is dubious, and ignores mountains of evidence to the contrary; but unlike, say Euclidian Geometry, there's no way to prove that evolution theory is correct. The creation-science chimera stands a much better chance of going under the church/state radar, and at least claiming equal time in American schools.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. My bank now sports ads that require the latest version of Flash. As I don't have it installed on my machine, I get to see a nice annoying "this page requires you download a plugin" dialog every time I go there. And this is a company I'm actually doing real business with!
You're probably right. On the other hand, AIM is wildly successful and right now AOL has a virtual monopoly on Instant Messenging (and they paid an obscene amount for it). If they go messing the client and protocol up too much (and they would have to do a lot to get Aimster off their back), they might just push people off to some other IM service. For whatever that's worth.
It'd be interesting to see how the encryption protections provided by copyright law (doesn't Europe have something equivalent to the DMCA?) stand up to anti-encryption laws like the ones they're passing in the UK. Apparently the government is allowed to monitor your encrypted communication, and if you fail to disclose encryption keys you get to spend time in jail.
Interesting article in Salon (a couple years old) about how Federal Judges are cozied up to by foundations with business interests. This particular article is about antitrust legislation, but it does make you think that perhaps judges who accept $5000 vacations and attend "educational" seminars on law and economics... might not be completely impartial.
I don't think so... A "browserless operating system" is very different from a "browserless computer" or "browserless installation", wouldn't you agree? "Browserless operating system" implies that the browser is not a part of the Operating System. "Browserless computer" implies that there is no browser present on the machine, either as an embedded part of the OS or as a separate app. Would seem to be a fairly straightforward bit of language.
Sure there are. That is, there are other OSes out there that don't consider the browser to be built-in to the operating system, and rather bundle it as a separate application. New MacOS machines include IE as an app, and various Linux distributions include Netscape and other browsers. Just because people connect their machines to the internet doesn't mean they need an OS with an embedded browser.
Sure, but at the moment they're not being used very efficiently. A lot of the services that use those radio bands would benefit from a global/national high-speed wireless access network. And think of all those channels being wasted for UHF and VHF. I live in a very large city and most of them are unused. Imagine how many go to waste in Cleveland, OH. So there are a lot of uses for the bandwidth, but many of the existing services could be rolled into high-efficiency digital systems.
Each (6Mhz) cable channel dedicated to Cable Modem service can carry between 27 and 32Mbit, depending on the frequency and the encoding. Of course, since cable modems are a shared technology, that bandwidth is divided amongst however many people are on the local loop (optimistically, 300-400, for some companies more like 2000-3000.) So yeah, the cable companies are telling the truth, just not the whole truth. Now, it's possible to use multiple channels for cable modem service, but you won't see a whole lot of it. Each cable modem channel used takes away a slot that could have been used for an analog cable channel, or up to 10 digital cable channels. Right now, that's not part of companies' business model.
You can also reduce the size of the local loop. This means running multiple copies of the local channels (one for each loop) through the analog fiber from the head-end. One of the biggest problems today for many large cable infrastructures is lack of fiber bandwidth, even more than lack of space on the local loop. So any plans to bring sustained 20Mbit connections to homes is a long way off. It may not arrive til fiber-to-the-home, which is where DSL and Cable are both going to converge.
What do you mean? You've never seen AT&T's Public Phone 2000 in an airport or train station? Talk about a high-tech marvel. They were so far ahead technologically, they didn't even have to wait till 2000 to build the thing! Now if only someone knew how it worked. And why it has that screen...
Ack. Sure, Napster can ban you for any reason they want to. But do other organizations have the right to force Napster to do so, based on flimsy evidence? That would be the presumption of the DMCA.
The DMCA and the DMCA-based Napster injunction (probably at least, pending rewrite) give copyright-holders the specific right to request certain accounts be closed. So yes, Napster is closing the accounts. But they're doing it under force of Federal law, so it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
Hmm. But if you are arrested, interrogated, and found to be a confused skiier who wandered off the trail (or at least, no evidence turns up to prove you actually did anything wrong)-- generally you get your full freedom back within a few hours. And if you are charged, the government will kindly provide you with legal representation should this be beyond your means.
If you're suspected of copyright violation, however, you are required to prove that you didn't break any laws. Until then, you can have your account taken away, etc. Finally, if you're innocent and crazy enough to take it to court-- you're out many thousands of dollars. If you can't afford to fight the civil suit, your out of luck.
No, the painting in question is "White House At Night", a recently discovered painting. It says so in the article and in the story.
Or, like many cable-modem customers are finding out, your packet loss will suddenly go through the roof. This is at least a little bit fairer than shutting people down.
That's true. But at the moment, very few of the major p2p services look too closely at network topology. When this becomes more common, you probably will see ISPs reacting more favorably.
... The NY Times gives his birthdate as April 30, 1916. That'd only make him 84. Not that this is really all that important.
That's exactly what P2P is. And ISPs don't like it. They want you to take your files off of the pretty web pages, many of which (in their master-plan) will have local caching servers ala Akamai. If you look at the TOS for most cable-modem and residential DSL providers, they specifically say "don't operate a server or file sharing program." The unpredictable downstream and upstream bandwidth that P2P generates might eventually require them to spend more money.
This is really too bad for them. As long as people have these relatively powerful machines hooked up to the net, it's inevitable that they're going to use them for more than one-way downloads and web surfing. ISPs will adjust.
The record industry's business model relies heavily on those little 12-year old girls buying the whole album. There is little benefit to the industry in selling a (less than $10) single vs. a $17.99 album. If they can sell both, they're happy; but this is rare, and apparently singles are going the way of the dodo as far as the industry's marketing people are concerned:
From the AP: "Singles, a mainstay of the industry in the 1950s and 60s, have fallen out of favor as a tool to inflate sales figures and influence radio programming, said Roy Lott, president of EMI Group's Capitol label."
Well, not exactly. The Napster settlement was actually 1 billion over several years, totalling $150 million/year divided out amongst the big 5 and indie labels. It would have made a dent in those numbers, but not as big as you say.
I'm not defending the RIAA, just trying to explain why they rejected the offer. $30 million per label per year isn't a lot of money, compared to what they're afraid they'll lose to Napster. Of course they're going to lose a lot more due to bad decision making, but they are a fairly short-sighted profit-driven industry.
From what I understand, you'll be able to share either MP3s or Napster-specific files on your drive and Napster won't touch them. When somebody else downloads the file to their machine, however, it always becomes an encrypted file. So there's no way to filter out the encrypted files, as everything will come to your machine as an encrypted file.
Napster doesn't have the resources to do it right, but InterTrust does. If they're the ones hired to do this, it'll be their biggest project ever. Make-or-break. Of course it'll probably still get hacked, but if a Digital Right Management solution can work, they're the ones who'll do it.
I'd hate to imagine what happens to their stock if they fail.
Napster servers will require you to use the new client, and the record companies are going to quickly target the existing OpenNap servers. That won't destroy OpenNap, but it's going to get a lot less convenient for most users. The only real question is whether they go ahead and kill Napster or let it live, probably the smartest thing they can do at this time.
Sure, of course you're right. And you're preaching to the choir. My point was that many people are presenting the tenets of Creationism as a scientific theory. They're not saying "hey, the bible says it's so, therefore it's science." They're writing books and proposing theories attempting to show that the world might be only a few thousand years old, and we might have sprung into being at the whim of forces we don't understand. It's not a very likely theory, but couched correctly, it can be viewed as science. Unfortunately, disproving a scientific theory is not as easy as all that no matter how ridiculous the claims may be. When that's done, the courts end up having to make a judgement not based on church vs. state, but on whether one scientific theory is "good" enough to be considered, and that's tough. There have been plenty of scientific theories throughout history that were banned, or shunned because they weren't considered good enough, or pointed to forces that we didn't understand-- some of them are widely accepted today. And it's for just this reason that the courts are not eager to throw a Scientific Creationism argument out of court.
I think everything after the GET is considered to be the URL. I'd be surprised if this patent (or the courts) takes such a narrow view of the term URL to see it as only the core component (ie, the name of a script) rather than the full string. If different strings give you different pages (locations), they'll be considered URLs. Not that this is a strong patent, but I'd bet the above argument wouldn't hold up in a courtroom.
Unfortunately, in this case it's the unwashed judges who are supposed to be confused. The 'scientific' bit came about mainly because creationists found that they couldn't force the government to teach Creationism in its raw biblical form (that pesky church and state thing.) So the argument was codified into a 'scientific' argument. The science is dubious, and ignores mountains of evidence to the contrary; but unlike, say Euclidian Geometry, there's no way to prove that evolution theory is correct. The creation-science chimera stands a much better chance of going under the church/state radar, and at least claiming equal time in American schools.