They expect to sell players?! at 2 grand a piece? No recording capabililty and are even further crippled by copy prevention (like just exactly what is going to be used to copy it anyways?). Somehow I don't see HD DVD (when it arrives) starting at 2 grand and I don't expect to see camcorders using this format either.
It is definitely a niche market thing, but are there really ten thousand suckers ready to pony up the big bucks to see Ahnold say "Hasta La Vista Baby" in HD? I somehow doubt that these tapes will show up at Wal-Mart for $6.44 each. And what "videophile" is going to forgo all the lovely extras that come on a DVD over a video tape. (Play with or without subtitles, commentaries, etc)
Last point is that this format really eats storage requirements (I seem to recall 75 gigs per hour from somewhere) so it just won't be very efficient to transfer the content (assuming that it can be legally accomplished) to that newfangled networked media server that we were going to use in place of separate CD and DVD players with each TV.
I think not, but the studios would like you to believe that.
pan and scan : yep, those of us that purchase DVDs really really find it worth the extra money to have the studio thoughtfully excise about 25% of each and every frame.
filmographies: yep, advertising fo other movies you might want to buy - we always love to pay extra for advertising
making of: I'll grant you a half point here, but who really makes the "making of" shorts - they are not made for the express purpose of inclusion in the DVD, so it isn't really an extra cost.
production photos: oh PUH LEASE!
But the commentaries are a legitimate value add. If I had a choice of two identical DVDs except that one had the commentary adn one did not... Well I'd pay an extra dollar for the commentary.
In short, I would expect that the actual production differential between DVD s VHS is pretty close to nil, so I certainly can't see any justificaion for a significantly higher retail prce for DVDs. (Of course the studios need no more justification than the record labels - they will just need 20 years in the US before the FTC determines that they are engaged in price fixing)
3 versions, 4 versions.. next year it'll probably be 12 versions according to some people:)
Win 3.1 was the version that marked it as "arrived" - We don't hear about the earlier versions very much - they were there but nobody would buy them. There was Interface Manager (original Windows), then there was Windows 286.
In IE, can you give me the release dates for versions 1.0 and 2.0? I don't remember them at all. It was when Win '95 came out that version numbering became a marketing function. And since by then it was common knowledge that MSFT never "gets it right" until version 3, guess where the marketroids started the version numbers? Of course, then they pretty much gave up on version numbers...(Pop quiz: how many versions of Win '95 were there? Win '98? Win ME? With NT/2K, you just needed service packs to be up to date. (Oh yeah, why Win 2K and not NT 5? marketing not engineering - and pretty darn stupid marketing - it caused a bunch of the same versionhecking problems that the change from Win 4 to Win 95 did)
If you consider the ability to play games as the criteria for workability, then Linux still ain't there for me. I have to exit it completely to play the games I like.
I've played with several browsers myself, and I like Opera 6 best. Competition is GOOD. But both MSFT and AOL want to make it illegal - it is easier to make your marketing forecasts when there is no mechanism for change that can upset your applecart. AOL really bought Netscape as a weapon to use in a legal battle - the same way Caldera used DR DOS. They will not bundle it into their AOL environment for technical merit.
But like all MSFT software, it won't be till they reach version 3 that it will actually be workable. Will it be acceptable to their corporate customers? Yes - Bill G is many things, but "stupid" ain't one of them. ("Criminally arrogant" might be:))
Just look at their history of innovative products:
Windows: Sure they were caught a bit off guard by that fruity company down south of Redmond, but Bill G. made a GUI the main priority and they invented FUD (or did they license it from IBM?) to confuse and delay the corporate world for the years it took to get up to Windows 3.1
Similarly, when the Internet torpedoed Bill's fledgling MSN, he made the internet the company priority. It took a few years, but just look at the market share of MS IE nowadays. Even AOL uses IE as their main browser (and they own Netscape - why don't they "eat their own dog food"?)
So I think that MSFT will be able to bring about this shift to secure their OS and applications. 40 billion dollars in actual cash on hand is only chump change for a first world government. It can finance one heck of a lot of spin doctoring (Just the interest off that would come to more than all the US Congress - House and Senate races plus what Bush and Gore spent combined in the 2000 election campaigns). And of course, however much various folks like to grumble, MSFT actually does spend some money on programming as well as marketing. Heck, they might just make their own version hyper secure version of BSD (given how much BSD code they have alrady borrowed) and call it MS Fortress 2005.
"And analysts say consumers are likely to accept the new copy restrictions as just one more element of a new generation of technology that provides features well beyond what they've been used to with analogue TV."
Hmm... and just what "features" are these "analysts" referring to? Every feature of digital TV beyond what was available with analog seems to be precisely what the "content" producers insist on prohibiting. By the time they have finished "protecting" their "rights" there will be even less reason to bother with TV than there is now. Somebody seriously needs to consult a proctologist on just how to go about removing their heads from that dark stinking hell they have been lead into by their IP lawyers.
The proper answer is that the software they produced with taxpayer money should be in the public domain. That way anyone can profit from it. This type of software should be considered part of "the commons". The GPL is only good for using copyright to maintain control. The original creators of taxpayer funded material SHOULD NOT have control over what anyone else might do with that code.
If Ashton Tate had not been able to pick up on PD code originally produced by NASA, we would have never seen products like dBase, Clipper, or FoxPro. NASA certainly would have had no interest in the continuing development of what was for a time quite a lucrative market.
Public domain also means that if the code needs proprietary components, that those components won't have their copyrights "infected" by the GPL. So if Coder DooD writes a gene sequencing program in VB (as part of a taxpayer funded research project), his source code will be PD, but not MSFT's runtimes and not the thrid party grid control he used.
And if you don't mean projectors, the nice folks that make LCD monitors think they will be able to raise prices this year - as demand is finally catching up with supply. There is a story about it over on zdnet Of course, they are talking about shortages "especially in the 15 inch segment". I'm looking for something bigger to replace a 21" CRT - so I hope the larger ones keep getting cheaper.
And it is pretty damn inexpensive. Or aren't you aware of what happens when you slide your credit card / ATM card into a gas pump? The only new infrastructure pieces would be the currency database that the government would need to set up and the currency scanner.
Care to guess how long it would take the credit card companies and banking industry to bid against each other for the privilege of administering such a system for the government? They could point out the "economies of scale" from simply ramping up their existing infrastructure. And of course a simple quarter percent "verification charge" similar to the charge on debit cards would easily fund the system. Further, use of RFID chips on that scale would make it a no-brainer for the CC companies to start using them in their credit cards - eliminating the need for a mag stripe reader.
But, yeah the article did say the chips were a bit pricey as yet. But when you have a guaranteed demand for billions of units per year, the price will come down. And then once it is proven to work, it will be approved for use in the North American Police States...
Seriously, consider the potential for something like this with a storage capacity similar to that of a CD (or even bigger) with a cost comparable to a CD-R, but a footprint the size of a postage stamp. So, if you have a choice of spending $142 for 320 MB of reuseable CF, or getting 450+ GB of Write-Once CF-R for the same price, which one are you really likely to choose? (assume they can sell them for $1.99 each - be optimistic) And if you need more than a single piece of CF - because you have several devices that use it?
This could replace a lot of currently used media (CDs, DVDs, VHS tape, floppies, film, etc) and they could all use the same reader hardware.
Europeans leave their country and "visit" places in other countries that have racist content. If the European government has a problem with this, they can take the same approach that the Peoples Republic of China has taken with regards to the Internet (and with regards to actual travel for that manner). Or the approach taken by the former unofficial govenrment of Afghanistan.
By your logic, Canada (with some absurdly strict laws regarding the French language) should be able to fine every single website operator whose every web page does not meet their requirements for the French language. EVERYTHING must be provided in French as well as any other language, and all French text must be AT LEAST the same font size as the non-French text. Remember those folks even have a separate police force whose sole duty is to enforce those language laws.
Why is cnn.com still operating? why haven't the Canadians shut down Slashdot? Could it be that just maybe Canadians are just a wee might more intelligent than the Australians and the Europeans?
That is an easy one.
They will want to talk our ears off, or eat our livers.
Alternatively, they may desire to stop us from eating their liver-equivalents.
I'm oversimplifying of course, but if there is no interaction between ourselves and "other" intelligence, then there may as well be no "other". Ditto for the hypothetical silicon based lifeforms of Aldebaran IV (or Anderson DD) regardless of their intellectual accomplishments.
Well, I would remind you that H20 was a movie, and there is a great deal of life outside of the movies in general and 20 year retreads of slasher flicks in particular. Of course jack Valenti may have a differing opinion on this...
Of course if you meant non H2O life, that is an entirely different story. My own expert opinion is that we would not recognize any such life form unless it was intelligent. And even then we would be likely to think of it as some form of machine rather than something actually living.(Paranoid crackpots like Stephen Hawking do speak of machine life - but only as an extension of our own creations)
Let them do it. It is their "product" after all. As long as they do it right (and they claim they are) - clearly labeling the "product" as being copy protected so that you know that it will not play in your new integerated DVD/CD player, won't let you make a compilation disc (Phillips runs lots of ads telling people how great it is to make such discs Perhaps they might have a case against the RIAA?). If you want to buy such a "product", do so. If you don't want to buy such a product, don't. If you want to tell Universal that you refuse to buy such "product" do so.
But before you decide to engage in using their return policy to send a "message" take a moment to reflect on what is involved in getting a refund....
I'll wait Still rarin to teach them a lesson?
OK visit every retail establishment in your city to purchase/return a few thousand dollars worth of "product" (at 20 bucks per, you can do it with 10 CDs at dozen stores). Boy you sure taught them a lesson. Especially when Universal pulls all the refund data from the different stores together and your name pops out at the top of the list as buying tweleve copies each of the same ten "products" and then getting refunds on them. Of course corporations are really stupid and they would never dream of doing that type of data mining... So it also stands to reason that they might not consider how they could teach you a "lesson" either. Certainly they are at least as stupid as Adobe. And we all know that Adobe is too stupid to go after anyone who messes with Adobe eBooks.
Lets see, you are on their list now as a "copyright infringement activist", so what can they do to you?
Using creative accounting practices (and no one has ever accused the recording industry of having any other kind) they can probably parlay your little spree into something that cost in excess of 5000.00 dollars. And of course, it invloved their computer systems (someone had to do data entry on those transactions), so you can now be labeled as a terrorist courtesy of AG Ashcroft's early Christmas present
If that is a bit over the top for your tastes, I'm sure that you will welcome the visit from the friendly FBI agent who will have good reason to suspect you of criminal violations of the DMCA. Of course, theFBI won't stop with your home, they will also have warrants for your place of employment and/or institution of education.
And that is just what they can do by using Uncle Sam to do their dirty work for them. What sort of petty troble could they make for you if they really wanted to slap you down? If you run a website, they could complain to your ISP about infringing material there.
They could sell your mailing address to the child pornography industry. Heck they could email you computer generated "virtual kiddie porn" - just before that friendly FBI agent shows up to serve that warrant and take away your computer.
Like I said, they own the "product". They can sell it in whatever manner they see fit. We can buy or not buy the "product". Personally I think a much shorter copyright term (20 years?) and mandatory revocation of copyright for copyrighted material if the holder does not provide an unecumberd copy of the material to the Library of Congress - or maybe the USPTO? Then the gubmin releases it when the copyright expires.
I use PayPal occasionally - mostly to accept payments from people who want to use credit cards rather than checks. I've had no problems.
Now the website mentioned (paypalwarning), was spammed into Usenet in a most obnoxious manner - implying that PayPal was invloved in a bigger scandal than Enron insider trading - (with coverage on all the major news programs etc). Since it also helpfully suggested an alternative to PayPal, I considered it to be a pretty darn worthless bit of FUD.
Yeah, but they were also pricing a coal fired plant at $600M, so that would cost (using your numbers) $6,850 per hour in interest costs alone (3.4 cents per kwh). So, in order for the development cost to make this unfeasable, a coal fired plant would have to generate a KWH of electricty on less than 0.4 cents worth of coal. Further, you are not factoring in any dollar value for the tradeable carbon credits a wind powered plant would produce compared to a coal fired plant.
The person quoted in the article as syaing that it wouldn't work was the guy who wanted to build lots more 1 MWH "conventional" windmills.
For those who didn't take finance, you need to calculate the "opportunity cost" of spending moneyt on a project as if you were financing it.
The conclusions of the Australian court won't matter a whole lot in the US, so this whole issue should have a big YMMV disclaimer. The studios are not going to destroy their current distribution system after all. Except when they can use a new distribution system to kill it of course. DIVX (the pay-per-view, not the encoding scheme) was going to utterly destroy the video rental business - anyone remember?
The major trade association for video stores in the US is the VSDA. For the acronym impaired, that stands for Video Software Dealers Association. The members of this organization (which admittedly has been hijacked by Blockbuster, and Hollywood Video) are currently quite happy with the way that the studios have been releasing DVDs at what are called "sell through" pricing rather than "rental pricing". At the same time, the studios have still been releasing VHS tapes at "rental" prices for the first six weeks and then dropping the price once the video stores have paid the much higher premium - and had a chance to recover that higher cost. As a hypothetical example, the DVD version of Phantom Menace (sell through) might wholesale for 16.98, while the (rental priced) VHS version would wholesale for 80-100 bucks. (Six weeks later, the VHS version is released for sell-through and is on sale at Wal-Mart for 19.95.)
Various leasing programs (revenue sharing) complicate that picture quite a bit, but they also play hell with the video stores cash flow (so aren't as widespread as the studios might like). This difference in pricing is the reason that Blockbuster just took a massive inventory writedown to recognize that their old VHS tapes aren't worth a cup of warm spit - and to really move into DVD in a big way. The revenue sharing route means that the initial cost of a "rental priced" VHS tape will be around ten bucks, but the stores lose around half the revenue (the exact amounts vary, but are always covered by really nasty NDAs - I would have rented Battlefield Earth if I knew that my local store owned their copy as opposed to having a revenue share where some funds could find their way back to the CoS).When they can buy the DVD outright for about twice as much, and keep all the revenue there is no incentive to go to the revenue sharing.
Since Q3 has become pretty much a defacto benchmark for measuring graphics card performance, tweaking the card to get better results with Q3 is a pretty dishonest act.
Hercules did something similar to "improve" their display card "performance" about ten years ago. One part of a popular benchmark (PC Magazine?, Byte?) involved displaying strings. Hercules hardcoded the benchmark strings into their display cards ROM - they really smoked everyone on the string display portion of the benchmarkgood results. When someone examined their ROM, the benchmark strings were changed and Hercules got both a much reduced benchmark, and a lot of really bad press.
Once upon a time (8088's were the big thing then), a clone chip (NEC v10?) got really good benchmark ratings, because a manufacturer screwed with the software clock to make things seem faster. Slower clock means that the self measured time was shorter. Of course, since the machines couldn't keep actual time time worth a damn, the scam didn't last very long.
Yah, but you'd better care about Bill's opinion. Or did you forget that little bit in XP about Product Activation?
And I agree - there's only one of me, I have lotsa boxes at home and one legit copy of Office '97. It is installed on several boxes, but I don't use them all at the same time. Obviously I am not interested in upgrading any of my MS software to the XP versions
Naah, mindwipes will be handled by the MPAA. They already put it out as a trial balloon and everyone thought it was a cute joke.
Or have you forgotten the TV ad during the theatrical run of Men In Black? Where Will Smith asks the audience if they have seen the movie, then puts on his Ray Bans and holds up the little mindwipe device...
IBM mainframes that used water cooling. prior to that they were all air cooled. And that was part of the reason why 360's were kept in "climate controlled" rooms separate from the rest of a business. Room temperatures in the 80 degree Fahrenheit range would cause thermal failure of the systems.
System 360's used printed circuit boards with lots of discrete transistors. They were just starting to phase in newfangled things called "integrated circuits" that could replace literally dozens of transistors.
Its chump change for Austin Powers. Now go away till you can recognize a stupid movie reference before one rips your humourless throat out.
Of course, rather than have that second rate international man of mystery pony up the money, one could just ask Derek Flint to whip up a cure in between pissing contests with Maxwell Smart and Joh Steed.
Who told the pharmaceutical companies that they were going to make the drugs themselves. I think the licensing terms got a whole lot less oneraous all of a sudden. (This was before the same problem hit the courts in South Africa) There were some important points they made in Argentina:
Their entire economy system had no chance of dealing with the sheer drain all of the untreated AIDS patients would have put on them. The costs involved in treating AIDS is much less than the simple loss of productivity from having a large population of people with untreated AIDS - plus the infected people remain productive.
The drugs require training to be used properly, but they discovered that people are motivated when they understand the alternative is death.
The cost - when manufacturing the drugs themselves worked out to about 700 USD per year versus the 10,000 USD per year in the USA. And they were still paying some royalties to the pharmaceutical companies.
Of course, as has been pointed out, pharmaceutical research is exppensive. I propose that the UN set up a cash reward for a cure. Surely (placing pinky at corner of mouth) ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS would be a great motivator for the pharmaceutical companies - especially if it were combined with an exemption from liability for any side effects of the cure.
Those puppies have really crappy resolution. Even the expensive "borg-look" units have only 800x600 monochrome at best. Fine for portable applications, lousy for doing work that needs lots of screen real estate (like programming)
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It is definitely a niche market thing, but are there really ten thousand suckers ready to pony up the big bucks to see Ahnold say "Hasta La Vista Baby" in HD? I somehow doubt that these tapes will show up at Wal-Mart for $6.44 each. And what "videophile" is going to forgo all the lovely extras that come on a DVD over a video tape. (Play with or without subtitles, commentaries, etc)
Last point is that this format really eats storage requirements (I seem to recall 75 gigs per hour from somewhere) so it just won't be very efficient to transfer the content (assuming that it can be legally accomplished) to that newfangled networked media server that we were going to use in place of separate CD and DVD players with each TV.
- pan and scan : yep, those of us that purchase DVDs really really find it worth the extra money to have the studio thoughtfully excise about 25% of each and every frame.
- filmographies: yep, advertising fo other movies you might want to buy - we always love to pay extra for advertising
- making of: I'll grant you a half point here, but who really makes the "making of" shorts - they are not made for the express purpose of inclusion in the DVD, so it isn't really an extra cost.
- production photos: oh PUH LEASE!
But the commentaries are a legitimate value add. If I had a choice of two identical DVDs except that one had the commentary adn one did not... Well I'd pay an extra dollar for the commentary.In short, I would expect that the actual production differential between DVD s VHS is pretty close to nil, so I certainly can't see any justificaion for a significantly higher retail prce for DVDs. (Of course the studios need no more justification than the record labels - they will just need 20 years in the US before the FTC determines that they are engaged in price fixing)
3 versions, 4 versions.. next year it'll probably be 12 versions according to some people :)
Win 3.1 was the version that marked it as "arrived" - We don't hear about the earlier versions very much - they were there but nobody would buy them. There was Interface Manager (original Windows), then there was Windows 286.
In IE, can you give me the release dates for versions 1.0 and 2.0? I don't remember them at all. It was when Win '95 came out that version numbering became a marketing function. And since by then it was common knowledge that MSFT never "gets it right" until version 3, guess where the marketroids started the version numbers? Of course, then they pretty much gave up on version numbers...(Pop quiz: how many versions of Win '95 were there? Win '98? Win ME? With NT/2K, you just needed service packs to be up to date. (Oh yeah, why Win 2K and not NT 5? marketing not engineering - and pretty darn stupid marketing - it caused a bunch of the same versionhecking problems that the change from Win 4 to Win 95 did)
If you consider the ability to play games as the criteria for workability, then Linux still ain't there for me. I have to exit it completely to play the games I like.
I've played with several browsers myself, and I like Opera 6 best. Competition is GOOD. But both MSFT and AOL want to make it illegal - it is easier to make your marketing forecasts when there is no mechanism for change that can upset your applecart. AOL really bought Netscape as a weapon to use in a legal battle - the same way Caldera used DR DOS. They will not bundle it into their AOL environment for technical merit.
But like all MSFT software, it won't be till they reach version 3 that it will actually be workable. Will it be acceptable to their corporate customers? Yes - Bill G is many things, but "stupid" ain't one of them. ("Criminally arrogant" might be :))
Just look at their history of innovative products:
Windows: Sure they were caught a bit off guard by that fruity company down south of Redmond, but Bill G. made a GUI the main priority and they invented FUD (or did they license it from IBM?) to confuse and delay the corporate world for the years it took to get up to Windows 3.1
Similarly, when the Internet torpedoed Bill's fledgling MSN, he made the internet the company priority. It took a few years, but just look at the market share of MS IE nowadays. Even AOL uses IE as their main browser (and they own Netscape - why don't they "eat their own dog food"?)
So I think that MSFT will be able to bring about this shift to secure their OS and applications. 40 billion dollars in actual cash on hand is only chump change for a first world government. It can finance one heck of a lot of spin doctoring (Just the interest off that would come to more than all the US Congress - House and Senate races plus what Bush and Gore spent combined in the 2000 election campaigns). And of course, however much various folks like to grumble, MSFT actually does spend some money on programming as well as marketing. Heck, they might just make their own version hyper secure version of BSD (given how much BSD code they have alrady borrowed) and call it MS Fortress 2005.
"And analysts say consumers are likely to accept the new copy restrictions as just one more element of a new generation of technology that provides features well beyond what they've been used to with analogue TV."
Hmm... and just what "features" are these "analysts" referring to? Every feature of digital TV beyond what was available with analog seems to be precisely what the "content" producers insist on prohibiting. By the time they have finished "protecting" their "rights" there will be even less reason to bother with TV than there is now. Somebody seriously needs to consult a proctologist on just how to go about removing their heads from that dark stinking hell they have been lead into by their IP lawyers.
The proper answer is that the software they produced with taxpayer money should be in the public domain. That way anyone can profit from it. This type of software should be considered part of "the commons". The GPL is only good for using copyright to maintain control. The original creators of taxpayer funded material SHOULD NOT have control over what anyone else might do with that code.
If Ashton Tate had not been able to pick up on PD code originally produced by NASA, we would have never seen products like dBase, Clipper, or FoxPro. NASA certainly would have had no interest in the continuing development of what was for a time quite a lucrative market.
Public domain also means that if the code needs proprietary components, that those components won't have their copyrights "infected" by the GPL. So if Coder DooD writes a gene sequencing program in VB (as part of a taxpayer funded research project), his source code will be PD, but not MSFT's runtimes and not the thrid party grid control he used.
And if you don't mean projectors, the nice folks that make LCD monitors think they will be able to raise prices this year - as demand is finally catching up with supply. There is a story about it over on zdnet
Of course, they are talking about shortages "especially in the 15 inch segment". I'm looking for something bigger to replace a 21" CRT - so I hope the larger ones keep getting cheaper.
And it is pretty damn inexpensive. Or aren't you aware of what happens when you slide your credit card / ATM card into a gas pump? The only new infrastructure pieces would be the currency database that the government would need to set up and the currency scanner.
Care to guess how long it would take the credit card companies and banking industry to bid against each other for the privilege of administering such a system for the government? They could point out the "economies of scale" from simply ramping up their existing infrastructure. And of course a simple quarter percent "verification charge" similar to the charge on debit cards would easily fund the system. Further, use of RFID chips on that scale would make it a no-brainer for the CC companies to start using them in their credit cards - eliminating the need for a mag stripe reader.
But, yeah the article did say the chips were a bit pricey as yet. But when you have a guaranteed demand for billions of units per year, the price will come down. And then once it is proven to work, it will be approved for use in the North American Police States...
OK. Are you happy now?
Seriously, consider the potential for something like this with a storage capacity similar to that of a CD (or even bigger) with a cost comparable to a CD-R, but a footprint the size of a postage stamp. So, if you have a choice of spending $142 for 320 MB of reuseable CF, or getting 450+ GB of Write-Once CF-R for the same price, which one are you really likely to choose? (assume they can sell them for $1.99 each - be optimistic) And if you need more than a single piece of CF - because you have several devices that use it?
This could replace a lot of currently used media (CDs, DVDs, VHS tape, floppies, film, etc) and they could all use the same reader hardware.
And you have it backwards.
Europeans leave their country and "visit" places in other countries that have racist content. If the European government has a problem with this, they can take the same approach that the Peoples Republic of China has taken with regards to the Internet (and with regards to actual travel for that manner). Or the approach taken by the former unofficial govenrment of Afghanistan.
By your logic, Canada (with some absurdly strict laws regarding the French language) should be able to fine every single website operator whose every web page does not meet their requirements for the French language. EVERYTHING must be provided in French as well as any other language, and all French text must be AT LEAST the same font size as the non-French text. Remember those folks even have a separate police force whose sole duty is to enforce those language laws.
Why is cnn.com still operating? why haven't the Canadians shut down Slashdot? Could it be that just maybe Canadians are just a wee might more intelligent than the Australians and the Europeans?
That is an easy one.
They will want to talk our ears off, or eat our livers.
Alternatively, they may desire to stop us from eating their liver-equivalents.
I'm oversimplifying of course, but if there is no interaction between ourselves and "other" intelligence, then there may as well be no "other". Ditto for the hypothetical silicon based lifeforms of Aldebaran IV (or Anderson DD) regardless of their intellectual accomplishments.
Of course if you meant non H2O life, that is an entirely different story. My own expert opinion is that we would not recognize any such life form unless it was intelligent. And even then we would be likely to think of it as some form of machine rather than something actually living.(Paranoid crackpots like Stephen Hawking do speak of machine life - but only as an extension of our own creations)
But before you decide to engage in using their return policy to send a "message" take a moment to reflect on what is involved in getting a refund....
I'll wait
Still rarin to teach them a lesson?
OK visit every retail establishment in your city to purchase/return a few thousand dollars worth of "product" (at 20 bucks per, you can do it with 10 CDs at dozen stores). Boy you sure taught them a lesson. Especially when Universal pulls all the refund data from the different stores together and your name pops out at the top of the list as buying tweleve copies each of the same ten "products" and then getting refunds on them. Of course corporations are really stupid and they would never dream of doing that type of data mining... So it also stands to reason that they might not consider how they could teach you a "lesson" either. Certainly they are at least as stupid as Adobe. And we all know that Adobe is too stupid to go after anyone who messes with Adobe eBooks.
Lets see, you are on their list now as a "copyright infringement activist", so what can they do to you?
- Using creative accounting practices (and no one has ever accused the recording industry of having any other kind) they can probably parlay your little spree into something that cost in excess of 5000.00 dollars. And of course, it invloved their computer systems (someone had to do data entry on those transactions), so you can now be labeled as a terrorist courtesy of AG Ashcroft's early Christmas present
- If that is a bit over the top for your tastes, I'm sure that you will welcome the visit from the friendly FBI agent who will have good reason to suspect you of criminal violations of the DMCA. Of course, theFBI won't stop with your home, they will also have warrants for your place of employment and/or institution of education.
- And that is just what they can do by using Uncle Sam to do their dirty work for them. What sort of petty troble could they make for you if they really wanted to slap you down? If you run a website, they could complain to your ISP about infringing material there.
- They could sell your mailing address to the child pornography industry. Heck they could email you computer generated "virtual kiddie porn" - just before that friendly FBI agent shows up to serve that warrant and take away your computer.
Like I said, they own the "product". They can sell it in whatever manner they see fit. We can buy or not buy the "product". Personally I think a much shorter copyright term (20 years?) and mandatory revocation of copyright for copyrighted material if the holder does not provide an unecumberd copy of the material to the Library of Congress - or maybe the USPTO? Then the gubmin releases it when the copyright expires.Now the website mentioned (paypalwarning), was spammed into Usenet in a most obnoxious manner - implying that PayPal was invloved in a bigger scandal than Enron insider trading - (with coverage on all the major news programs etc). Since it also helpfully suggested an alternative to PayPal, I considered it to be a pretty darn worthless bit of FUD.
The person quoted in the article as syaing that it wouldn't work was the guy who wanted to build lots more 1 MWH "conventional" windmills.
For those who didn't take finance, you need to calculate the "opportunity cost" of spending moneyt on a project as if you were financing it.
Yeah, well, he didn't have to imagine a Beowulf cluster. On the other hand, he didn't have the a Eunichs secured environment...
The major trade association for video stores in the US is the VSDA. For the acronym impaired, that stands for Video Software Dealers Association. The members of this organization (which admittedly has been hijacked by Blockbuster, and Hollywood Video) are currently quite happy with the way that the studios have been releasing DVDs at what are called "sell through" pricing rather than "rental pricing". At the same time, the studios have still been releasing VHS tapes at "rental" prices for the first six weeks and then dropping the price once the video stores have paid the much higher premium - and had a chance to recover that higher cost. As a hypothetical example, the DVD version of Phantom Menace (sell through) might wholesale for 16.98, while the (rental priced) VHS version would wholesale for 80-100 bucks. (Six weeks later, the VHS version is released for sell-through and is on sale at Wal-Mart for 19.95.)
Various leasing programs (revenue sharing) complicate that picture quite a bit, but they also play hell with the video stores cash flow (so aren't as widespread as the studios might like). This difference in pricing is the reason that Blockbuster just took a massive inventory writedown to recognize that their old VHS tapes aren't worth a cup of warm spit - and to really move into DVD in a big way. The revenue sharing route means that the initial cost of a "rental priced" VHS tape will be around ten bucks, but the stores lose around half the revenue (the exact amounts vary, but are always covered by really nasty NDAs - I would have rented Battlefield Earth if I knew that my local store owned their copy as opposed to having a revenue share where some funds could find their way back to the CoS) .When they can buy the DVD outright for about twice as much, and keep all the revenue there is no incentive to go to the revenue sharing.
Hercules did something similar to "improve" their display card "performance" about ten years ago. One part of a popular benchmark (PC Magazine?, Byte?) involved displaying strings. Hercules hardcoded the benchmark strings into their display cards ROM - they really smoked everyone on the string display portion of the benchmarkgood results. When someone examined their ROM, the benchmark strings were changed and Hercules got both a much reduced benchmark, and a lot of really bad press.
Once upon a time (8088's were the big thing then), a clone chip (NEC v10?) got really good benchmark ratings, because a manufacturer screwed with the software clock to make things seem faster. Slower clock means that the self measured time was shorter. Of course, since the machines couldn't keep actual time time worth a damn, the scam didn't last very long.
Or did you forget that little bit in XP about Product Activation?
And I agree - there's only one of me, I have lotsa boxes at home and one legit copy of Office '97. It is installed on several boxes, but I don't use them all at the same time. Obviously I am not interested in upgrading any of my MS software to the XP versions
Or have you forgotten the TV ad during the theatrical run of Men In Black? Where Will Smith asks the audience if they have seen the movie, then puts on his Ray Bans and holds up the little mindwipe device...
System 360's used printed circuit boards with lots of discrete transistors. They were just starting to phase in newfangled things called "integrated circuits" that could replace literally dozens of transistors.
It also sounds like you need to check out advances in other areas besides chips - such as serial ATA (600MB per second is promised)
Of course, rather than have that second rate international man of mystery pony up the money, one could just ask Derek Flint to whip up a cure in between pissing contests with Maxwell Smart and Joh Steed.
Of course, as has been pointed out, pharmaceutical research is exppensive. I propose that the UN set up a cash reward for a cure. Surely (placing pinky at corner of mouth) ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS would be a great motivator for the pharmaceutical companies - especially if it were combined with an exemption from liability for any side effects of the cure.
Those puppies have really crappy resolution. Even the expensive "borg-look" units have only 800x600 monochrome at best. Fine for portable applications, lousy for doing work that needs lots of screen real estate (like programming)