How much HD space does a recorded show take? I very much doubt that it's going to be possible to store an entire season of any one show "recorded in perfect digital form and organized" on the moderate sized HD's of these devices. And that's assuming you only watch _one_ series. It would cost about $150 to buy one year of a TV series on VHS tapes (2 hours per tape, 10-15 tapes), and I think a PVR costs more than this. So this cause of action is based on alleged harm that is obviously just imaginary (so far).
OTOH, I'm sure there are people who have the entire X-Files or Buffy series recorded on a shelf full of VHS tapes. (I don't want to meet the X-people, but if you've got the Buffy episodes I missed...) That's more work than just asking your ReplayTV to record "Buffy", but it's possible and apparently legal.
However, they might have a point for the future. Add a DVD recorder or a RAID array to ReplayTV, and you've got a machine that might well cut into the studios ability to stick a paltry two hours of Buffy onto a tape and sell it. But it doesn't cut into the value of the broadcast show -- so I don't know if it's valid under the law or not. Maybe they will be able to legally limit the storage capacity of PVR's, so only hackers who can expand it themselves can get a whole year of TV onto one machine...;-)
Actually, the PVR's do have the capability of killing advertising revenues. If the advertisers figure out that _everyone_ is fast-forwarding through the commercials, then why will they pay the million$$$ that support TV networks.
OTOH, it may turn out that people are fast-forwarding through the lousy shows to watch the commercials. At least, Tivo's feedback from their machines on the Superbowl showed that the Pepsi commercial with Britney Spears got more playbacks than the football.
What would really suck is if they canceled Buffy because it's more interesting than the commercials....
Because Unix wasn't designed as an OS that came with all the functions you would ever need (until next year, when you had to replace it), but rather a framework for adding in whatever turned out to be needed.
does anyone really believe that there will be an average of 10,000 (assuming american billion) files per machine?
There are 80,000 files on my machine. 42,000 are in or under the Windows folder. That is 38,000 non-OS files. (Actually many more than that, because lots of non-OS stuff gets into the Windows folder -- e.g., every internet bookmark is a separate file in Windows\Favorites.) And that's on a 10G hard drive, with less than 7G used!
I find that part about a "self-healing" OS in a fantastically complicated distributed system rather unbelievable. Microsoft has actually been attempting to edge Windows towards self-healing. But that depends on the OS actually being able to identify problems and find the fixes. So far, "self-damaging" seems to be a more accurate assessment of the results -- and this is for an OS residing on a single box. In a distributed system...
Interesting theory. A settlement will not establish the court precedent BT needs, but it might be used to convince investors that BT owns a valuable patent. It would seem, though, that this would work much better if the $ amount was public and large, and it would also seem that any significant amount would eventually show up in the public profit-and-loss statements of each company. But perhaps BT's hope is to bring in the suckers before the actual details are revealed. It would have worked a year ago, but after the dot.com meltdown and then Enron, how many suckers still have that much money?
Another way to inflate the value of a patent: find someone else with a patent that won't hold up in court either, agree to cross-license them, and announce the deal with the highest possible evaluation placed on the patents involved. (That is, assume the patents hold up in court, that you are actually able to collect large royalties on everything the patents claim to cover, and that the businesses you are taking these royalties out of don't shrink as a result...)
US patents used to run for 17 years from the time a patent was granted, vs. 20 years from the time of application in the rest of the world. So if it expires in 2006, then it must have been granted in 1989 -- that's a rather long delay if the UK application was in 1980. Or, the article seems to say that the suit now is over patent infringement in the 80's -- which makes this a remarkably long time to wait, and isn't there an applicable statute of limitations?
Also, US courts are just now beginning to consider that failure to enforce a patent for an unreasonably long time (like while the patented technique becomes industry standard practice, with no royalties), may constitute "prosecution laches" and make the patent unenforceable. See this.
Yes, they have been doing that for quite a while. I looked at the board design for a meter like that maybe 8 years ago, although finally the job of producing them went to the Tampa plant, since the customer was a Florida utility...
And this is redundant, but dozens of idiots still haven't got the message: It's NOT an internet connection. It's not even a 300bps teletype connection! Power lines are not built to carry signals -- but you can sort of make it work if you send just a few bits per second, with lots of error detection and correction coding, and ask for a repeat whenever a switch flips somewhere and drowns out a packet.
That's about 50 cents per meter read, or are you running an estimate for two months and only reading four times a year? Seems way too low.
We've found that the real cost of minimum wage factory labor is about $20/hr, including wages, taxes, benefits, insurance, and the in-door workspace. I'd think that outdoors work would be even costlier (probably includes costs of a vehicle, insurance costs are higher since car crashes, dog-bite, pneumonia, and muggings are now work-related). Anyway, labor costs are thus $0.33/minute, so your meter readers must be reading one every minute and a half. I believe that only if it's in an urban area, and all meters are positioned to be visible from the sidewalk.
Right now I own two houses. One is in a small town (actually on Main Street!), but to reach the meter you have to walk 50 feet across the back yard. In summertime, it's going to take longer than 1-1/2 minutes, and right now the snow is 18 inches deep. Or maybe they've got binoculars that can make out the numbers from the street? I don't know, but last time I looked the faceplate was fogged up so it was hard to read at 8 inches... The other one is on 30 acres, and 200 feet from the road, with direct sight blocked. If they were to do actual readings, it would be park the car and walk around the house. However, the co-op trusts us to read the meter ourselves, and we positioned it so we can see it out the window. Good thing right now with 30 mph winds, 0 fahrenheit (-20C) actual temperature, and gigantic snowdrifts.
So the cost of meter readings and the ROI on remote-reading meters may vary. It does seem like $300 would be hard to justify -- but does it really cost that much? My employer's plant in Tampa makes (or made) meters for a Florida utility that report back their readings over the power line, and I think the electronics is around $50.
companies aren't in the business of installing operating systems. They exist to get work done with their machines,
We used to have one "help desk" man that spent more than 20 hours/week just re-installing Windows, Office, etc., on user's desktops as the 100 users here kept developing problems for which MS tech support's recommendation was a disk wipe and re-install. I'm not talking about upgrades here, but re-installs. Win 98SE is rather more stable, 2000 is said to be better, but still, Windows is not a great solution for those that don't want to be in the OS business either.
Granted, Windows gives a complete ignoramus about a 90% chance of getting through an install on recent hardware without ever reading the instructions, while with Linux you've got to know what the hell you are doing for the initial install. But AFAIK once Linux is running right on a desktop, the only reason to ever re-install is to upgrade with new features. If you've got a few hundred desktops, maybe you could replace several guys who don't know much beyond "stick in the CD and run d:setup.exe", with one guy that actually knows how to solve the problems with Linux setup. (Servers also need constant security upgrades, just like Windows -- but does Windows still have to be re-booted for every patch? And you'd damn well better have someone knowledgeable maintain your servers, no matter what OS is used.)
Now, the more interesting provisions in government purchasing usually read like this (1) you have to certify that you never have and never will sell it to anyone else for less than you charge the government, (2) it has to be accessible to users with various handicaps (eg visually impaired, carpal tunnel victims, etc).
How well does open source meet the needs of the handicapped? I know that it is be easier to make a text-based command-line system work for the blind (just link to a reader program), but a blind office-worker has to run the same word processor his colleagues are running -- and that's GUI whether it's Windoze & Office, or Gnome or KDE with Star Office... And how about accommodations for other handicaps?
When I see a story titled "The World of the Laid Off Techie" I expect to hear about people laid off from actual technical jobs. Instead there's the Aggie "throwing mail with an MBA" (it doesn't say what his former job was, but I doubt it used his mechanical engineering degree), a former marketing manager who might know a little programming, etc. I'm sure there are many actual techies laid off, and their stories might be worse than these ex-suits described in the story, but one thing is very clear: the reporter doesn't even know what a techie is.
Re:Once again, Slashdotters want to have it both w
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 2
The EULA does not say that Microsoft can automatically upgrade if you want them to -- it says that simply by running XP you give Microsoft permission to enter your computer and upgrade your software. This could even be construed as you agreeing not to turn off the auto-upgrade...
Oh yes, and if the "upgrade" fscks your system, it's your problem, not Microsoft's.
If the intention is really just to give MS legal cover for auto-upgrade when the user selects that, the proper place for the legalese is not in the EULA, but in the dialog window that enables auto-upgrade.
More exactly -- Hollerith's company merged with other companies to form IBM, directed by Watson, Sr.. Their biggest product was employee time clocks for quite a while.
The Jacquard and Babbage cards were quite a lot different from the Hollerith version. Jacquard cards were _huge and were stitched together along the sides to form an endless loop; each hole controlled the lifter for one warp thread, and the loop gave the loom a repeating pattern. I haven't seen pictures of the Babbage cards.
Except that it may take that long to subtitle, edit, and generally prepare the movie for foreign markets.
1) You are assuming that videos without subtitles will out-compete theater presentations with them. If true, makes you wonder why the subtitles are needed...
2) Subtitles are hardly needed in Australia/NZ or Britain, but movie releases are delayed there, too. I doubt that subtitles do much good in India either (possibly the world's largest country), because there are a lot more Indians that understand English than understand any one of the many local dialects. I rather doubt that most films ever get subtitled in Malaysian, but then all educated Malaysians do more or less speak English, and the rest probably can't afford a movie ticket anyhow. And so on.
3) It should only take a few weeks to subtitle a movie anyhow. Or are you arguing that residents of other parts of the world should pay for the movie studios inefficiencies with delayed releases and higher prices?
IANAL, but judging from the Skylarov, Yahoo, and other recent cases, the rules seem to be: American laws overrule other nations in all cases, except where our government is trying to do something that the US Constitution won't allow, then they look for some other country to do the dirty work...
I'm beginning to think Thomas Jefferson was right about watering the tree of liberty...
The ruling says that the image has to be reduced enough as to be nearly useless for the original purpose. This is quite vague-seeming, so in the future courts might have to argue over just how many pixels have to be lost... But when it comes to Arriba's or anyone else's on-line thumbnail index to pictures, it's not going to be a problem. If it's useful as an index, the picture size must be dramatically reduced so many will fit on a page, and the pixel count must be low enough that it doesn't take an inordinate time to load the page. So you are talking about tiny, low-res pictures; for almost all purposes except indexing, the original will be preferable.
Agreed. And for once we got a quite sensible judicial decision.
Building an index to other sites is fair use. (Duh!) Presenting an abstract or small selection from each page so users can more easily determine which pages contain what they are looking for is fair use, as long as the abstract isn't so complete as to make it unnecessary to go visit the indexed page. In an index of images, thumbnail images are an appropriate way to make the abstract.
Finally, providing links from the thumbnails or other index items to the web pages is quite appropriate. In spite of the alarmist language in the post and some news articles, the decision itself made this clear. On Arriba now, clicking the link opens a second window, sending the user to the artist's web page. The court specifically said this is legal. It's also how I prefer an index to work!
However, Arriba's links used to take the original image and frame it in their own web page. This is not a technical description of the actual process (actually, it created a page with a link directly to the image, so the image was married to the Arriba page only in the user's browser), but that is how it looks to a user, and that is how the court treated it. That's wrong. It is appropriating someone else's work and presenting it as part of yours. And the court sent the case back to the lower courts to determine damages and penalties for the period in which Arriba did this.
I agree wholeheartedly, and hope the one indexing service I use which does this inline linking gets the message. It sucks finding the company that I am looking for, but instead of their web-site I get the damned indexes interpretation of it, without a URL that's useful for bookmarking!
So in-line linking is not OK. Linking is OK. Deep-linking is OK. Some web sites are structured so that by jumping directly into the page of interest, you bypass the page(s) of advertising and hit-counter that pays the bills. Boohoo. You can program so as to block anyone who isn't coming from your home page, and if you haven't bothered to do that, don't try to make up for your deficiencies with a lawsuit, because this court said linking directly to the indexed page is OK. However, I think such blocking is usually a bad idea. If Google has coughed up 50 possible matches, and your site blocks me from jumping straight to the #1 match, do you really think I am going to try to figure out the structure of your site so I can navigate through it and find that page? No time, I've got 49 more to check out...
To do this by computer means that you have to keep the on-line ballots linked to the person's name until the polls close. That gives significantly greater chances for some kinds of tampering...
I don't really expect coercion, but based on history, I wouldn't be surprised by lots of vote buying. Maybe the pols haven't figured it out yet. Or maybe they don't have enough cash per voter to make it work...
OTOH, you could argue that if our congressmen get to sell their votes, why don't we?;-)
Re:Power requirements?
on
Modular Robots
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That is a pretty good question. In the likely uses for these things only a few motors will run at any one time, with the rest of the modules just maintaining a locked position. So they'd better design them so they can lock in position without a continuous power draw.
Power-PC CPU's draw a lot less power than Pentiums (I think), but it's not going to be practical to have portable-powered units (solar, battery, fuel cell, or combination) with large numbers of them. They also built a chain robot with PIC CPU's -- that's an 8 bitter that draws a little more current than a digital watch. It could follow a pre-programmed plan but couldn't re-configure itself, and probably isn't brainy enough to handle unpredictability. So I expect a real world modular bot will be a lot of PIC "muscle" units, plus a few high-powered "brains". The PIC's will have just enough intelligence to follow the plan sent out by the brains, and not burn up much power when idling.
The lab model (powered by a wall plug) might put a "brain" in every unit, to make it easier to work out the basic motions. Then you compile that to PIC object code add it to the list of options the brain can activate.
The Republicans were much too liberal for old Jasper... (This was about 1965-1980; many of the local Republicans, including the Governor of Michigan (Milliken), probably would have been Democrats except for family traditions dating back to the Civil War. This sort of balanced out the southern rednecks in Detroit who voted Democrat by reflex no matter how far that party strayed from their beliefs. Ain't politics fun!)
Slashdot Mirror
How much HD space does a recorded show take? I very much doubt that it's going to be possible to store an entire season of any one show "recorded in perfect digital form and organized" on the moderate sized HD's of these devices. And that's assuming you only watch _one_ series. It would cost about $150 to buy one year of a TV series on VHS tapes (2 hours per tape, 10-15 tapes), and I think a PVR costs more than this. So this cause of action is based on alleged harm that is obviously just imaginary (so far).
;-)
OTOH, I'm sure there are people who have the entire X-Files or Buffy series recorded on a shelf full of VHS tapes. (I don't want to meet the X-people, but if you've got the Buffy episodes I missed...) That's more work than just asking your ReplayTV to record "Buffy", but it's possible and apparently legal.
However, they might have a point for the future. Add a DVD recorder or a RAID array to ReplayTV, and you've got a machine that might well cut into the studios ability to stick a paltry two hours of Buffy onto a tape and sell it. But it doesn't cut into the value of the broadcast show -- so I don't know if it's valid under the law or not. Maybe they will be able to legally limit the storage capacity of PVR's, so only hackers who can expand it themselves can get a whole year of TV onto one machine...
Actually, the PVR's do have the capability of killing advertising revenues. If the advertisers figure out that _everyone_ is fast-forwarding through the commercials, then why will they pay the million$$$ that support TV networks.
OTOH, it may turn out that people are fast-forwarding through the lousy shows to watch the commercials. At least, Tivo's feedback from their machines on the Superbowl showed that the Pepsi commercial with Britney Spears got more playbacks than the football.
What would really suck is if they canceled Buffy because it's more interesting than the commercials....
Because Unix wasn't designed as an OS that came with all the functions you would ever need (until next year, when you had to replace it), but rather a framework for adding in whatever turned out to be needed.
does anyone really believe that there will be an average of 10,000 (assuming american billion) files per machine?
There are 80,000 files on my machine. 42,000 are in or under the Windows folder. That is 38,000 non-OS files. (Actually many more than that, because lots of non-OS stuff gets into the Windows folder -- e.g., every internet bookmark is a separate file in Windows\Favorites.) And that's on a 10G hard drive, with less than 7G used!
I find that part about a "self-healing" OS in a fantastically complicated distributed system rather unbelievable. Microsoft has actually been attempting to edge Windows towards self-healing. But that depends on the OS actually being able to identify problems and find the fixes. So far, "self-damaging" seems to be a more accurate assessment of the results -- and this is for an OS residing on a single box. In a distributed system...
Interesting theory. A settlement will not establish the court precedent BT needs, but it might be used to convince investors that BT owns a valuable patent. It would seem, though, that this would work much better if the $ amount was public and large, and it would also seem that any significant amount would eventually show up in the public profit-and-loss statements of each company. But perhaps BT's hope is to bring in the suckers before the actual details are revealed. It would have worked a year ago, but after the dot.com meltdown and then Enron, how many suckers still have that much money?
Another way to inflate the value of a patent: find someone else with a patent that won't hold up in court either, agree to cross-license them, and announce the deal with the highest possible evaluation placed on the patents involved. (That is, assume the patents hold up in court, that you are actually able to collect large royalties on everything the patents claim to cover, and that the businesses you are taking these royalties out of don't shrink as a result...)
US patents used to run for 17 years from the time a patent was granted, vs. 20 years from the time of application in the rest of the world. So if it expires in 2006, then it must have been granted in 1989 -- that's a rather long delay if the UK application was in 1980. Or, the article seems to say that the suit now is over patent infringement in the 80's -- which makes this a remarkably long time to wait, and isn't there an applicable statute of limitations?
Also, US courts are just now beginning to consider that failure to enforce a patent for an unreasonably long time (like while the patented technique becomes industry standard practice, with no royalties), may constitute "prosecution laches" and make the patent unenforceable. See this.
Yes, they have been doing that for quite a while. I looked at the board design for a meter like that maybe 8 years ago, although finally the job of producing them went to the Tampa plant, since the customer was a Florida utility...
And this is redundant, but dozens of idiots still haven't got the message: It's NOT an internet connection. It's not even a 300bps teletype connection! Power lines are not built to carry signals -- but you can sort of make it work if you send just a few bits per second, with lots of error detection and correction coding, and ask for a repeat whenever a switch flips somewhere and drowns out a packet.
That's about 50 cents per meter read, or are you running an estimate for two months and only reading four times a year? Seems way too low.
We've found that the real cost of minimum wage factory labor is about $20/hr, including wages, taxes, benefits, insurance, and the in-door workspace. I'd think that outdoors work would be even costlier (probably includes costs of a vehicle, insurance costs are higher since car crashes, dog-bite, pneumonia, and muggings are now work-related). Anyway, labor costs are thus $0.33/minute, so your meter readers must be reading one every minute and a half. I believe that only if it's in an urban area, and all meters are positioned to be visible from the sidewalk.
Right now I own two houses. One is in a small town (actually on Main Street!), but to reach the meter you have to walk 50 feet across the back yard. In summertime, it's going to take longer than 1-1/2 minutes, and right now the snow is 18 inches deep. Or maybe they've got binoculars that can make out the numbers from the street? I don't know, but last time I looked the faceplate was fogged up so it was hard to read at 8 inches... The other one is on 30 acres, and 200 feet from the road, with direct sight blocked. If they were to do actual readings, it would be park the car and walk around the house. However, the co-op trusts us to read the meter ourselves, and we positioned it so we can see it out the window. Good thing right now with 30 mph winds, 0 fahrenheit (-20C) actual temperature, and gigantic snowdrifts.
So the cost of meter readings and the ROI on remote-reading meters may vary. It does seem like $300 would be hard to justify -- but does it really cost that much? My employer's plant in Tampa makes (or made) meters for a Florida utility that report back their readings over the power line, and I think the electronics is around $50.
I do know the Navy has put Windows into some ships. And they had the main propulsion BSOD'd at least once...
companies aren't in the business of installing operating systems. They exist to get work done with their machines,
We used to have one "help desk" man that spent more than 20 hours/week just re-installing Windows, Office, etc., on user's desktops as the 100 users here kept developing problems for which MS tech support's recommendation was a disk wipe and re-install. I'm not talking about upgrades here, but re-installs. Win 98SE is rather more stable, 2000 is said to be better, but still, Windows is not a great solution for those that don't want to be in the OS business either.
Granted, Windows gives a complete ignoramus about a 90% chance of getting through an install on recent hardware without ever reading the instructions, while with Linux you've got to know what the hell you are doing for the initial install. But AFAIK once Linux is running right on a desktop, the only reason to ever re-install is to upgrade with new features. If you've got a few hundred desktops, maybe you could replace several guys who don't know much beyond "stick in the CD and run d:setup.exe", with one guy that actually knows how to solve the problems with Linux setup. (Servers also need constant security upgrades, just like Windows -- but does Windows still have to be re-booted for every patch? And you'd damn well better have someone knowledgeable maintain your servers, no matter what OS is used.)
Now, the more interesting provisions in government purchasing usually read like this (1) you have to certify that you never have and never will sell it to anyone else for less than you charge the government, (2) it has to be accessible to users with various handicaps (eg visually impaired, carpal tunnel victims, etc).
How well does open source meet the needs of the handicapped? I know that it is be easier to make a text-based command-line system work for the blind (just link to a reader program), but a blind office-worker has to run the same word processor his colleagues are running -- and that's GUI whether it's Windoze & Office, or Gnome or KDE with Star Office... And how about accommodations for other handicaps?
When I see a story titled "The World of the Laid Off Techie" I expect to hear about people laid off from actual technical jobs. Instead there's the Aggie "throwing mail with an MBA" (it doesn't say what his former job was, but I doubt it used his mechanical engineering degree), a former marketing manager who might know a little programming, etc. I'm sure there are many actual techies laid off, and their stories might be worse than these ex-suits described in the story, but one thing is very clear: the reporter doesn't even know what a techie is.
The EULA does not say that Microsoft can automatically upgrade if you want them to -- it says that simply by running XP you give Microsoft permission to enter your computer and upgrade your software. This could even be construed as you agreeing not to turn off the auto-upgrade...
Oh yes, and if the "upgrade" fscks your system, it's your problem, not Microsoft's.
If the intention is really just to give MS legal cover for auto-upgrade when the user selects that, the proper place for the legalese is not in the EULA, but in the dialog window that enables auto-upgrade.
More exactly -- Hollerith's company merged with other companies to form IBM, directed by Watson, Sr.. Their biggest product was employee time clocks for quite a while.
The Jacquard and Babbage cards were quite a lot different from the Hollerith version. Jacquard cards were _huge and were stitched together along the sides to form an endless loop; each hole controlled the lifter for one warp thread, and the loop gave the loom a repeating pattern. I haven't seen pictures of the Babbage cards.
And I think it was the 1880 census.
Except that it may take that long to subtitle, edit, and generally prepare the movie for foreign markets.
1) You are assuming that videos without subtitles will out-compete theater presentations with them. If true, makes you wonder why the subtitles are needed...
2) Subtitles are hardly needed in Australia/NZ or Britain, but movie releases are delayed there, too. I doubt that subtitles do much good in India either (possibly the world's largest country), because there are a lot more Indians that understand English than understand any one of the many local dialects. I rather doubt that most films ever get subtitled in Malaysian, but then all educated Malaysians do more or less speak English, and the rest probably can't afford a movie ticket anyhow. And so on.
3) It should only take a few weeks to subtitle a movie anyhow. Or are you arguing that residents of other parts of the world should pay for the movie studios inefficiencies with delayed releases and higher prices?
The cost of getting a DVD to market in Japan is much higher than it is in Florida.
So, region coding protects inefficient retail stores and distributors from competition. Doesn't sound like a good thing to me.
IANAL, but judging from the Skylarov, Yahoo, and other recent cases, the rules seem to be: American laws overrule other nations in all cases, except where our government is trying to do something that the US Constitution won't allow, then they look for some other country to do the dirty work...
I'm beginning to think Thomas Jefferson was right about watering the tree of liberty...
The ruling says that the image has to be reduced enough as to be nearly useless for the original purpose. This is quite vague-seeming, so in the future courts might have to argue over just how many pixels have to be lost... But when it comes to Arriba's or anyone else's on-line thumbnail index to pictures, it's not going to be a problem. If it's useful as an index, the picture size must be dramatically reduced so many will fit on a page, and the pixel count must be low enough that it doesn't take an inordinate time to load the page. So you are talking about tiny, low-res pictures; for almost all purposes except indexing, the original will be preferable.
Agreed. And for once we got a quite sensible judicial decision.
Building an index to other sites is fair use. (Duh!) Presenting an abstract or small selection from each page so users can more easily determine which pages contain what they are looking for is fair use, as long as the abstract isn't so complete as to make it unnecessary to go visit the indexed page. In an index of images, thumbnail images are an appropriate way to make the abstract.
Finally, providing links from the thumbnails or other index items to the web pages is quite appropriate. In spite of the alarmist language in the post and some news articles, the decision itself made this clear. On Arriba now, clicking the link opens a second window, sending the user to the artist's web page. The court specifically said this is legal. It's also how I prefer an index to work!
However, Arriba's links used to take the original image and frame it in their own web page. This is not a technical description of the actual process (actually, it created a page with a link directly to the image, so the image was married to the Arriba page only in the user's browser), but that is how it looks to a user, and that is how the court treated it. That's wrong. It is appropriating someone else's work and presenting it as part of yours. And the court sent the case back to the lower courts to determine damages and penalties for the period in which Arriba did this.
I agree wholeheartedly, and hope the one indexing service I use which does this inline linking gets the message. It sucks finding the company that I am looking for, but instead of their web-site I get the damned indexes interpretation of it, without a URL that's useful for bookmarking!
So in-line linking is not OK. Linking is OK. Deep-linking is OK. Some web sites are structured so that by jumping directly into the page of interest, you bypass the page(s) of advertising and hit-counter that pays the bills. Boohoo. You can program so as to block anyone who isn't coming from your home page, and if you haven't bothered to do that, don't try to make up for your deficiencies with a lawsuit, because this court said linking directly to the indexed page is OK. However, I think such blocking is usually a bad idea. If Google has coughed up 50 possible matches, and your site blocks me from jumping straight to the #1 match, do you really think I am going to try to figure out the structure of your site so I can navigate through it and find that page? No time, I've got 49 more to check out...
To do this by computer means that you have to keep the on-line ballots linked to the person's name until the polls close. That gives significantly greater chances for some kinds of tampering...
I don't really expect coercion, but based on history, I wouldn't be surprised by lots of vote buying. Maybe the pols haven't figured it out yet. Or maybe they don't have enough cash per voter to make it work...
;-)
OTOH, you could argue that if our congressmen get to sell their votes, why don't we?
That is a pretty good question. In the likely uses for these things only a few motors will run at any one time, with the rest of the modules just maintaining a locked position. So they'd better design them so they can lock in position without a continuous power draw.
Power-PC CPU's draw a lot less power than Pentiums (I think), but it's not going to be practical to have portable-powered units (solar, battery, fuel cell, or combination) with large numbers of them. They also built a chain robot with PIC CPU's -- that's an 8 bitter that draws a little more current than a digital watch. It could follow a pre-programmed plan but couldn't re-configure itself, and probably isn't brainy enough to handle unpredictability. So I expect a real world modular bot will be a lot of PIC "muscle" units, plus a few high-powered "brains". The PIC's will have just enough intelligence to follow the plan sent out by the brains, and not burn up much power when idling.
The lab model (powered by a wall plug) might put a "brain" in every unit, to make it easier to work out the basic motions. Then you compile that to PIC object code add it to the list of options the brain can activate.
The Republicans were much too liberal for old Jasper... (This was about 1965-1980; many of the local Republicans, including the Governor of Michigan (Milliken), probably would have been Democrats except for family traditions dating back to the Civil War. This sort of balanced out the southern rednecks in Detroit who voted Democrat by reflex no matter how far that party strayed from their beliefs. Ain't politics fun!)