"But here, even when it is plain the people have a hard life (like the "riverboat" guy), they still seem like they are more - I don't know - real/alive/(happy?). The quality of this work, even if it has been touched up, is more in the composition and subject selection - but the color brings it all together."
I think it seems that way because of how the color affects your perspective. For every schoolkid in the last few decades or so, black and white photos were of people who lived in another era, while color photos were stuff that was from "now," during the time when you were alive. When you look at an old B&W photo, you automatically look at it as a piece of ancient history, long gone and past. But the people in these color photos look like they could be your next-door neighbor, or at least be "modern" people living in another country. The color in the photos give them a sense of newness, and that makes the people in them seem far more real, when you forget for a moment that everyone in these photos has probably been dead for many, many years.
Oddly enough, we're probably one of the last generations who will be able to fully appreciate the strangeness of these photos. For the children growing up now, and those being born today, many of the photos of people, places, and events that they would think of as "ancient history" (i.e. anytime before they were born;) ) are in full color. In fifty years or so, it will seem odder to see photos of the past that are in black and white, as so much history will have been recorded in full color, and perhaps in other formats that we can only imagine now. Those color photos, which seem so amazing and modern to us today, will seem like old news to people who grew up in the middle of the 21st century...
RoadRunner isn't exactly AOL. It's technically a joint venture between several cable, computer, and telecom companies, including Time Warner (now AOL-Time Warner) and, believe it or not, Microsoft. It will take a while for any AOLisms to filter down to the RoadRunner service, but I imagine it will happen sooner than we RR users would like. Of course, AOL-TWC might just give up their stake in RR and start their own broadband service, if they can figure out how to get away with it without drawing the ire of the feds. Either way, we TWC/RoadRunner customers end up on the losing end...
The day my ISP requires proprietary software to connect is the day I look elsewhere for my Internet service, even if it does mean giving up broadband...
It really is true...you don't realize how much your "mental image" of past times and places is influenced by the medium in which you see them. It's astonishing to look at those photographs and think that they were taken more than sixty years before I was born, when I've never seen anything but "black and white" or sepia photos from that time before. It's so strange to think that almost all of the people in those photos have been dead for so many years, but those pictures look like they were taken just yesterday. It makes you realize that the people back then were just as "real" as we are today. Very cool stuff!;)
"At the DVD 2000 conference this past summer in Universal City, Calif., the MPAA's head of anti-piracy said the latest batch of bootlegs in China were indistinguishable from the real product."
Now, what is this supposed to mean? Based on the previous two paragraphs of the article, it would seem that what they call a "bootleg" is a movie which hasn't been released on DVD that's been copied from another source (VHS, laserdisc, etc.) and burned to a DVD disc in DVD format. So...how can these be "indistinguishable from the originals"? There *are* no originals to compare them to if these movies aren't out on DVD! And if there were, then the MPAA spokesgerbil is saying that DVD movies are no better than VHS or laserdisc movies! I thought DVDs were supposed to be way more cool and beautiful and awesome than VHS, or so all those ads on my VHS rentals keep telling me over and over and over... Or does copying a movie onto DVD automagically replace all the low-quality VHS video and audio with brilliant digital picture and 3-D ultrarealistic sound? Does it add all those cool DVD extras like trailers, directors' comments, outtakes, and all? If so, I gotta get me a DVD burner and start bootlegging. Do you think the magic of DVD will get rid of those annoying "If you like this free preview then call 1-800-2BUYME to order HBO now!!!!!" overlays on the movies in my collection, too?;)
Or does the spokesgerbil mean that the DVD copies were indistinguishable from the original low-quality copies of those movies? If so, I'll have to mod him up a couple of points for creative doublespeak that fooled at least one media drone, but he gets a point off for stating the obvious...;)
www.lyrics.ch (once the best lyrics search site out there, now a pile of dog doo...) uses a Java applet to "protect" the few lyrics they still have on their site. The applet displays the song lyrics one page at a time. It also disables the Print Screen key, and stops displaying lyrics if you switch to another task. Obviously, you can't select any of the words that the applet displays, either...
The end result of their lovely system? I go elsewhere for lyric searches, to sites where I don't have to put up with an annoying and invasive Java applet just to look at a few song lyrics...
Might not be illegal...if the server is publicly accessible and you aren't sending enough data to crash it or otherwise interrupt the service, I don't know if there is any law that prevents you from sending fake info. After all, if you don't own a CueCat, you didn't accept any agreements *not* to send false info to their servers...;)
This isn't really a new concept, and I think that as long as any advertising is used tastefully and, most essentially, FITS IN with the gaming environment, there is no problem. Any game set in a realistic modern environment, for instance, could benefit from having realistic advertising in that environment (billboards, etc.). However, if these companies start including ads that disrupt the game environment, that's a different story entirely - but with the importance of having a game sell well and the abundance of Internet review sites to forewarn potential customers of irritating advertising in a game, I doubt we'll see many companies trying that...especially not after the first attempt or two fails spectacularly...;)
Actually, it's probably just the fact that only a relatively small percentage of the copyrighted songs are being blocked. The RIAA had to submit a list of songs and possible filenames that they wanted blocked to Napster...they couldn't just say "Block all copyrighted music!" I believe there were about 155,000 or so songs on the list the RIAA finally put together, though I think they can add to that list any time they want. Naturally, they wanted to block the most popular songs first, so they went after the "pop" artists and their most popular works. However, there are many Napster users who listen to other, less popular music, and that music is still being shared on Napster. For example, of the 720 or so songs in my file list, only about 150 or so are being blocked. Most of these are the few pop songs I actually like, and some of the songs by the more popular artists in the genres I listen to. The other 570 songs or so are not being filtered. Several of the artists I listen to are not being filtered at all, like Angels of Venice and Dead Can Dance, because they just aren't very popular. Thus, if you prefer less popular artists or music, you can still find a lot of it on Napster. If you're into boy bands and bubblegum pop, though, you're probably out of luck (not to mention out of your mind...;-D ).
...but one part of the article makes me doubt it's effectiveness:
" It would make it a criminal offense to fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam, or to continue sending spam after being notified by a recipient not to do it anymore."
In other words, they are trying to make spam lists *opt-out* instead of *opt-in*...so anyone can send you spam if they want to, but they can't send you any more if you tell them to stop. Problem is, spammers rarely send spam from the same address more than once or twice, and almost never honor unsubscribe requests.
Also, if the article is being true to the wording of the proposed law, and the law really does make it illegal to "fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam," then it would still be perfectly permissable to send spam from a *fake* email address, as long as that address doesn't belong to an actual individual. I could send as much spam as I want by making up a completely different fake email each time, and advertising different crap. Who's going to really take the time and effort to find out if bob@fakeaddress1.com telling you to make millions by calling 1-800-CHEAT-ME and joe@fakeaddress2.com telling you to send this letter and a buck to ten other people are really the same person? Is the FBI going to investigate every single piece of spam that gets sent every day to determine it's origin, so that if someone asks to be unsubscribed and then gets a different piece of spam from another address which ends up being the same guy, they can fine him $10? Yeah, right...
I agree! The problem I have with these companies moaning about how much piracy costs them is that any number they come up with is nothing more than a wild guess. There is no way to calculate how much a company loses through piracy, period. None. It isn't possible. All of these companies would have you believe they they lose 100% profit on every single pirated copy of every product that is created, but that is far from the truth...because no one knows how many of the people who have those pirated copies would (or even could) actually purchase the game if the pirated copy wasn't available. Chances are, it's a minority...but there is simply no way to tell. That's why piracy is such a great scapegoat when a company wants to find something to blame it's falling profits on, or wants an excuse to come up with a new system to take away our privacy and fair use rights. They love it, because they can say they lose "an estimated" $X billion per year to those evil pirates, and no one will be able to prove otherwise...because it is theoretically possible that the actual loss really would be 100%, even though that is highly unlikely.
Only problem with your theory is that you are assuming that most consumers are smart enough to make an educated decision. Trouble is, they aren't. Most consumers will happily go wherever Uncle MegaCorp, Inc. wants to lead them. Why do you think AOL is the country's most popular ISP?
The problem is, when companies combine, merge, or form partnerships, they gain a lot of protection against consumer dissatisfaction. A company with ten customers has to work it's butt off to please all ten of those customers, or it stands to lose a fairly large percentage of it's income. A company with ten million customers can sit back and laugh at the 100,000 or so informed consumers who decide to "boycott" them.
What will happen is that these companies will create copy-protected media and flood the market with it. Most consumers will buy it because they don't know any better. This copy-protected media will refuse to talk to any media that's not copy protected. Now, your boss can't open your Word document you sent him on his new Gateway, because you created the file on an unprotected computer. Guess who has to upgrade their drive? Open PCs will always be around, I'm sure...but they will no longer be useful. I still use my Commodore 64, but how many people can read files I create with it? How many ISPs would let me connect to the Internet with it? It's obsolete...just like the "open" PC will be someday...
1. Use Netscape 4.7x
2. Use The Proxomitron to filter ads (if it doesn't do it out of the box, write your own filter for it!)
3. "Uninstall" Netscape's Flash plugin. There is no automatic uninstaller, but all you have to do to disable the plugin is rename the npswf32.dll file in your Plugins directory to npswf32.old or something else. If you really really really have to see a Flash animation, use IE or something...;) The Web looks a *lot* nicer without Flash, BTW...
Hate to break it to Napster, but it's very easy to bypass the encryption scheme by simply re-recording the MP3 audio into another file. My Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value can easily do this with the built-in software mixer. It can record from the Windows WAV device, or "What-U-Hear" (records whatever is playing through your speakers, i.e. you can mix sound fron different sound devices, like WAV and CD, or WAV and MIDI). So, I play the song with Napster's special player, and record it at the same time...no quality loss, and I now have a nice, unencrypted WAV file that I can do whatever I want with.
Don't forget Global Datalink (gdi.net)...I used to work for them, so I used their service for free. Even after I left to work on my own, I still kept my account...and it was easy to get any problems I had fixed, since I personally knew the head engineer and co-owner of the business, and the guys who worked the graveyard shift. When Duro gobbled them up, everyone I knew over there vanished overnight...and though I kept the account with MPInet until I got cable service, the support just wasn't as good.
Generally, I've found the bigger the company, the less each individual customer matters...so when a company becomes large enough, they can just blow off the people who are too much "trouble" (read: the ones who want support when it doesn't work rght...) and still be making a profit.
IANAL, but as far as I know, if you didn't sign anything forbidding you to discuss the company in public, and your statements were entirely truthful, I'm not sure what grounds they have to threaten you with any legal action. If the stuff you said was factual and accurate (i.e. you didn't lie and say your former manager had intercourse with farm animals or something...;) ), they can't get you for defamation, and if you didn't reveal any "inside" information or anything that might be considered a company trade secret, they can't get you for...well...whatever you call revealing inside information and trade secrets...;)
However...you might want to get a lawyer anyway, and make sure you have a record of exactly what you said. Also, be careful...I believe that, in some cases, things like accounting systems or other business methods may sometimes be considered "trade secrets"...so if you talked about some management system or something that was unique to your company, they *may* have some sort of legal ground to come after you. I don't know how well such a thing would hold up in court, but it may be enough to force you to defend a lawsuit.
In any case, good luck, and don't let them intimidate you!;)
Depends on what your idea of "obsolete" is... Sure, the stuff will work four years from now, and probably even longer...but what will you be able to play on it? All of your old albums...but new ones? I doubt it. How much *new* music have you bought for that turntable in the last four years? How much new material is being released on LP records today? If I have a Beta video player, is it not obsolete because I can still watch Beta tapes on it...despite the fact that nothing has been released on Beta tapes for years? Cassettes are still around in the commercial music area only because they work better in portable players (no skipping like CDs), and maybe because the players are more common in lower-end car stereos.
The fact is, all it would take is for some of the big record companies to announce that within the next two years, all of their material would be released only on special copy-protected, encrypted CDs that only played with a special copy-protected CD player...and within five years, current CD players would be obsolete, because no one was making any new material that would work in them. Or, the recording industry may make a deal with some of the big audio companies to include a special decryption chip in all of their CD players. The chip does nothing now...but, in a couple of years, when the players with that chip have saturated the market, the recording companies begin slowly switching to an encrypted format...that needs a player with that chip to decrypt. Perhaps the record companies add some little extra to these new CD formats, so they can call them "Enhanced CDs" or some such nonsense. Now, their new "Enhanced CDs" will play in "most modern CD players," so there won't be an enormous public outcry (just some scattered grumbling from those who are too "technologically challenged" to upgrade their "pitifully outdated" equipment like they should...;-D )...and as they move toward releasing nothing but the new "enhanced" format CDs, the fringe manufacturers who didn't get in on the deal in the first place will be forced to switch, because the old CD format will be obsolete.
Kind of scary, really, when you think about how easy it would be for the companies who control the media industry to force whatever standards they want to down our throats, eventually...
Actually, that wouldn't work very well for Napster...under that system, the overall upload to download ratio would always be 1:1. The only way that it might work would be to pay a percentage of the "download" cost for each upload...this would ensure that Napster makes a profit.
DennyK
Actually, I don't think AltaVista or CMGI even owns that technology...they license it from SysTran, which doesn't seem to be owned by CMGI...;)
Maybe this is just a marketing ploy to gain media attention? I used to use AltaVista a lot, and it's still good for doing complex searches for obscure data, but it returns so many dead links and nonsensical results anymore that now I only use it if the other engines fail to find what I need...
DennyK
but of course this would extend to actual child
pornography, and so back to the conondrum.
Well, not exactly. Actual child pornography is wrong and should be illegal because creating it involves exploitation of a child. Creating "virtual" child porn exploits no one, and, although I personally find it disgusting and depraved, I don't think there is any good reason for making it illegal, since it doesn't hurt anyone.
DennyK
Slashdot Mirror
"But here, even when it is plain the people have a hard life (like the "riverboat" guy), they still seem like they are more - I don't know - real/alive/(happy?). The quality of this work, even if it has been touched up, is more in the composition and subject selection - but the color brings it all together."
;) ) are in full color. In fifty years or so, it will seem odder to see photos of the past that are in black and white, as so much history will have been recorded in full color, and perhaps in other formats that we can only imagine now. Those color photos, which seem so amazing and modern to us today, will seem like old news to people who grew up in the middle of the 21st century...
I think it seems that way because of how the color affects your perspective. For every schoolkid in the last few decades or so, black and white photos were of people who lived in another era, while color photos were stuff that was from "now," during the time when you were alive. When you look at an old B&W photo, you automatically look at it as a piece of ancient history, long gone and past. But the people in these color photos look like they could be your next-door neighbor, or at least be "modern" people living in another country. The color in the photos give them a sense of newness, and that makes the people in them seem far more real, when you forget for a moment that everyone in these photos has probably been dead for many, many years.
Oddly enough, we're probably one of the last generations who will be able to fully appreciate the strangeness of these photos. For the children growing up now, and those being born today, many of the photos of people, places, and events that they would think of as "ancient history" (i.e. anytime before they were born
DennyK
RoadRunner isn't exactly AOL. It's technically a joint venture between several cable, computer, and telecom companies, including Time Warner (now AOL-Time Warner) and, believe it or not, Microsoft. It will take a while for any AOLisms to filter down to the RoadRunner service, but I imagine it will happen sooner than we RR users would like. Of course, AOL-TWC might just give up their stake in RR and start their own broadband service, if they can figure out how to get away with it without drawing the ire of the feds. Either way, we TWC/RoadRunner customers end up on the losing end...
The day my ISP requires proprietary software to connect is the day I look elsewhere for my Internet service, even if it does mean giving up broadband...
DennyK
It really is true...you don't realize how much your "mental image" of past times and places is influenced by the medium in which you see them. It's astonishing to look at those photographs and think that they were taken more than sixty years before I was born, when I've never seen anything but "black and white" or sepia photos from that time before. It's so strange to think that almost all of the people in those photos have been dead for so many years, but those pictures look like they were taken just yesterday. It makes you realize that the people back then were just as "real" as we are today. Very cool stuff! ;)
DennyK
I got a little suspicious at this point:
;)
;)
"At the DVD 2000 conference this past summer in Universal City, Calif., the MPAA's head of anti-piracy said the latest batch of bootlegs in China were indistinguishable from the real product."
Now, what is this supposed to mean? Based on the previous two paragraphs of the article, it would seem that what they call a "bootleg" is a movie which hasn't been released on DVD that's been copied from another source (VHS, laserdisc, etc.) and burned to a DVD disc in DVD format. So...how can these be "indistinguishable from the originals"? There *are* no originals to compare them to if these movies aren't out on DVD! And if there were, then the MPAA spokesgerbil is saying that DVD movies are no better than VHS or laserdisc movies! I thought DVDs were supposed to be way more cool and beautiful and awesome than VHS, or so all those ads on my VHS rentals keep telling me over and over and over... Or does copying a movie onto DVD automagically replace all the low-quality VHS video and audio with brilliant digital picture and 3-D ultrarealistic sound? Does it add all those cool DVD extras like trailers, directors' comments, outtakes, and all? If so, I gotta get me a DVD burner and start bootlegging. Do you think the magic of DVD will get rid of those annoying "If you like this free preview then call 1-800-2BUYME to order HBO now!!!!!" overlays on the movies in my collection, too?
Or does the spokesgerbil mean that the DVD copies were indistinguishable from the original low-quality copies of those movies? If so, I'll have to mod him up a couple of points for creative doublespeak that fooled at least one media drone, but he gets a point off for stating the obvious...
DennyK
www.lyrics.ch (once the best lyrics search site out there, now a pile of dog doo...) uses a Java applet to "protect" the few lyrics they still have on their site. The applet displays the song lyrics one page at a time. It also disables the Print Screen key, and stops displaying lyrics if you switch to another task. Obviously, you can't select any of the words that the applet displays, either...
The end result of their lovely system? I go elsewhere for lyric searches, to sites where I don't have to put up with an annoying and invasive Java applet just to look at a few song lyrics...
DennyK
Might not be illegal...if the server is publicly accessible and you aren't sending enough data to crash it or otherwise interrupt the service, I don't know if there is any law that prevents you from sending fake info. After all, if you don't own a CueCat, you didn't accept any agreements *not* to send false info to their servers... ;)
DennyK
This isn't really a new concept, and I think that as long as any advertising is used tastefully and, most essentially, FITS IN with the gaming environment, there is no problem. Any game set in a realistic modern environment, for instance, could benefit from having realistic advertising in that environment (billboards, etc.). However, if these companies start including ads that disrupt the game environment, that's a different story entirely - but with the importance of having a game sell well and the abundance of Internet review sites to forewarn potential customers of irritating advertising in a game, I doubt we'll see many companies trying that...especially not after the first attempt or two fails spectacularly... ;)
DennyK
Actually, it's probably just the fact that only a relatively small percentage of the copyrighted songs are being blocked. The RIAA had to submit a list of songs and possible filenames that they wanted blocked to Napster...they couldn't just say "Block all copyrighted music!" I believe there were about 155,000 or so songs on the list the RIAA finally put together, though I think they can add to that list any time they want. Naturally, they wanted to block the most popular songs first, so they went after the "pop" artists and their most popular works. However, there are many Napster users who listen to other, less popular music, and that music is still being shared on Napster. For example, of the 720 or so songs in my file list, only about 150 or so are being blocked. Most of these are the few pop songs I actually like, and some of the songs by the more popular artists in the genres I listen to. The other 570 songs or so are not being filtered. Several of the artists I listen to are not being filtered at all, like Angels of Venice and Dead Can Dance, because they just aren't very popular. Thus, if you prefer less popular artists or music, you can still find a lot of it on Napster. If you're into boy bands and bubblegum pop, though, you're probably out of luck (not to mention out of your mind... ;-D ).
DennyK
...but one part of the article makes me doubt it's effectiveness:
" It would make it a criminal offense to fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam, or to continue sending spam after being notified by a recipient not to do it anymore."
In other words, they are trying to make spam lists *opt-out* instead of *opt-in*...so anyone can send you spam if they want to, but they can't send you any more if you tell them to stop. Problem is, spammers rarely send spam from the same address more than once or twice, and almost never honor unsubscribe requests.
Also, if the article is being true to the wording of the proposed law, and the law really does make it illegal to "fraudulently use another individual's e-mail address to send spam," then it would still be perfectly permissable to send spam from a *fake* email address, as long as that address doesn't belong to an actual individual. I could send as much spam as I want by making up a completely different fake email each time, and advertising different crap. Who's going to really take the time and effort to find out if bob@fakeaddress1.com telling you to make millions by calling 1-800-CHEAT-ME and joe@fakeaddress2.com telling you to send this letter and a buck to ten other people are really the same person? Is the FBI going to investigate every single piece of spam that gets sent every day to determine it's origin, so that if someone asks to be unsubscribed and then gets a different piece of spam from another address which ends up being the same guy, they can fine him $10? Yeah, right...
DennyK
I agree! The problem I have with these companies moaning about how much piracy costs them is that any number they come up with is nothing more than a wild guess. There is no way to calculate how much a company loses through piracy, period. None. It isn't possible. All of these companies would have you believe they they lose 100% profit on every single pirated copy of every product that is created, but that is far from the truth...because no one knows how many of the people who have those pirated copies would (or even could) actually purchase the game if the pirated copy wasn't available. Chances are, it's a minority...but there is simply no way to tell. That's why piracy is such a great scapegoat when a company wants to find something to blame it's falling profits on, or wants an excuse to come up with a new system to take away our privacy and fair use rights. They love it, because they can say they lose "an estimated" $X billion per year to those evil pirates, and no one will be able to prove otherwise...because it is theoretically possible that the actual loss really would be 100%, even though that is highly unlikely.
DennyK
Only problem with your theory is that you are assuming that most consumers are smart enough to make an educated decision. Trouble is, they aren't. Most consumers will happily go wherever Uncle MegaCorp, Inc. wants to lead them. Why do you think AOL is the country's most popular ISP?
The problem is, when companies combine, merge, or form partnerships, they gain a lot of protection against consumer dissatisfaction. A company with ten customers has to work it's butt off to please all ten of those customers, or it stands to lose a fairly large percentage of it's income. A company with ten million customers can sit back and laugh at the 100,000 or so informed consumers who decide to "boycott" them.
What will happen is that these companies will create copy-protected media and flood the market with it. Most consumers will buy it because they don't know any better. This copy-protected media will refuse to talk to any media that's not copy protected. Now, your boss can't open your Word document you sent him on his new Gateway, because you created the file on an unprotected computer. Guess who has to upgrade their drive? Open PCs will always be around, I'm sure...but they will no longer be useful. I still use my Commodore 64, but how many people can read files I create with it? How many ISPs would let me connect to the Internet with it? It's obsolete...just like the "open" PC will be someday...
DennyK
1. Use Netscape 4.7x ;) The Web looks a *lot* nicer without Flash, BTW...
2. Use The Proxomitron to filter ads (if it doesn't do it out of the box, write your own filter for it!)
3. "Uninstall" Netscape's Flash plugin. There is no automatic uninstaller, but all you have to do to disable the plugin is rename the npswf32.dll file in your Plugins directory to npswf32.old or something else. If you really really really have to see a Flash animation, use IE or something...
DennyK
Hate to break it to Napster, but it's very easy to bypass the encryption scheme by simply re-recording the MP3 audio into another file. My Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value can easily do this with the built-in software mixer. It can record from the Windows WAV device, or "What-U-Hear" (records whatever is playing through your speakers, i.e. you can mix sound fron different sound devices, like WAV and CD, or WAV and MIDI). So, I play the song with Napster's special player, and record it at the same time...no quality loss, and I now have a nice, unencrypted WAV file that I can do whatever I want with.
DennyK
Don't forget Global Datalink (gdi.net)...I used to work for them, so I used their service for free. Even after I left to work on my own, I still kept my account...and it was easy to get any problems I had fixed, since I personally knew the head engineer and co-owner of the business, and the guys who worked the graveyard shift. When Duro gobbled them up, everyone I knew over there vanished overnight...and though I kept the account with MPInet until I got cable service, the support just wasn't as good.
Generally, I've found the bigger the company, the less each individual customer matters...so when a company becomes large enough, they can just blow off the people who are too much "trouble" (read: the ones who want support when it doesn't work rght...) and still be making a profit.
DennyK
IANAL, but as far as I know, if you didn't sign anything forbidding you to discuss the company in public, and your statements were entirely truthful, I'm not sure what grounds they have to threaten you with any legal action. If the stuff you said was factual and accurate (i.e. you didn't lie and say your former manager had intercourse with farm animals or something... ;) ), they can't get you for defamation, and if you didn't reveal any "inside" information or anything that might be considered a company trade secret, they can't get you for...well...whatever you call revealing inside information and trade secrets... ;)
;)
However...you might want to get a lawyer anyway, and make sure you have a record of exactly what you said. Also, be careful...I believe that, in some cases, things like accounting systems or other business methods may sometimes be considered "trade secrets"...so if you talked about some management system or something that was unique to your company, they *may* have some sort of legal ground to come after you. I don't know how well such a thing would hold up in court, but it may be enough to force you to defend a lawsuit.
In any case, good luck, and don't let them intimidate you!
DennyK
Actually, they don't own those trademarks yet...as of now, they are still being considered by the USPTO, according to their TARR system...see:
l &a mp;e ntry=76041367&action=Request+Status
l &a mp;e ntry=76041368&action=Request+Status
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=seria
and:
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=seria
DennyK
Depends on what your idea of "obsolete" is... Sure, the stuff will work four years from now, and probably even longer...but what will you be able to play on it? All of your old albums...but new ones? I doubt it. How much *new* music have you bought for that turntable in the last four years? How much new material is being released on LP records today? If I have a Beta video player, is it not obsolete because I can still watch Beta tapes on it...despite the fact that nothing has been released on Beta tapes for years? Cassettes are still around in the commercial music area only because they work better in portable players (no skipping like CDs), and maybe because the players are more common in lower-end car stereos.
;-D )...and as they move toward releasing nothing but the new "enhanced" format CDs, the fringe manufacturers who didn't get in on the deal in the first place will be forced to switch, because the old CD format will be obsolete.
The fact is, all it would take is for some of the big record companies to announce that within the next two years, all of their material would be released only on special copy-protected, encrypted CDs that only played with a special copy-protected CD player...and within five years, current CD players would be obsolete, because no one was making any new material that would work in them. Or, the recording industry may make a deal with some of the big audio companies to include a special decryption chip in all of their CD players. The chip does nothing now...but, in a couple of years, when the players with that chip have saturated the market, the recording companies begin slowly switching to an encrypted format...that needs a player with that chip to decrypt. Perhaps the record companies add some little extra to these new CD formats, so they can call them "Enhanced CDs" or some such nonsense. Now, their new "Enhanced CDs" will play in "most modern CD players," so there won't be an enormous public outcry (just some scattered grumbling from those who are too "technologically challenged" to upgrade their "pitifully outdated" equipment like they should...
Kind of scary, really, when you think about how easy it would be for the companies who control the media industry to force whatever standards they want to down our throats, eventually...
DennyK
Actually, that wouldn't work very well for Napster...under that system, the overall upload to download ratio would always be 1:1. The only way that it might work would be to pay a percentage of the "download" cost for each upload...this would ensure that Napster makes a profit.
DennyK
Actually, I don't think AltaVista or CMGI even owns that technology...they license it from SysTran, which doesn't seem to be owned by CMGI... ;)
Maybe this is just a marketing ploy to gain media attention? I used to use AltaVista a lot, and it's still good for doing complex searches for obscure data, but it returns so many dead links and nonsensical results anymore that now I only use it if the other engines fail to find what I need...
DennyK
but of course this would extend to actual child pornography, and so back to the conondrum. Well, not exactly. Actual child pornography is wrong and should be illegal because creating it involves exploitation of a child. Creating "virtual" child porn exploits no one, and, although I personally find it disgusting and depraved, I don't think there is any good reason for making it illegal, since it doesn't hurt anyone. DennyK