Yesterday in Massachusetts, a snow plow operator, too dumb to know his truck had GPS, exposed himself to a woman at a coffee shop, hopped back in his truck and was apprehended in minutes because the state troopers, knowing only the location of the coffee shop and that it was a snow plow operator, could find his exact whereabouts."
So, the police knew the phone number to call for the snow plow dispatch center and the dispatch center pulled up the plow nearest that address at that time all in a matter of minutes?! Wow. That's efficiency.
No "disgruntled iTunes customer" hires three law firms to file his suit (Braun Law Group P.C. of LA; Katriel Law Firm of DC; and Murray, Frank & Sailer LLP of NY).
Somebody open a pool on what company is bank-rolling this!
Scientist gets lab funded. Scientist gets paid salary, then pension at x% of salary. -- This is good.
Consumers get recorded music in convenient format. -- This is good.
Research labs make $1 million. -- This is OK.
The patents have expired. -- This is good.
Phillips, Sony, RIAA, et al. make $100s of billions selling discs and music. -- This, presumably, is bad.
What bad thing did the patents do in this story?
While we're tripping over our prejudices trying to answer that, ponder this: how would the story have gone if no patents had existed? The answer is that only one thing changes -- the lab doesn't get paid the $1 million.
What a bizarre way of looking at it. IMO a better way to look at it is "newspapers no longer extorting $65 million per year from local residents". Or "$65 million once wasted on newspaper classifieds now available for health, education, other productive uses".
Would some one just name the elephant in the room already? A 'bizarre outlook' just like this is exactly why p2p'ers don't think there is any continuing need for "the music industry" to be involved in the distribution of recorded music.
May all those who perform a service that is no longer needed wither and die!
From one of the articles: Explaining the rationale for such a law, a senior government official said, "In the MMS case the objectionable clip was put on the website by someone who had access to it and not necessarily the person behind it. It was an infringement of the copyright. Moreover, despite the incident becoming a public knowledge the clip was not removed."
What a pathetic attempt to use a media event / scandal to promote something unrelated to it! No one in India or elsewhere is worried about copyright here. The boy certainly hasn't made a claim for lost revenues! Whoever the shill is who is claiming that the MMS incident justifies an Indian DMCA ought to be embarrassed to be selling this bunk. There really is only one thing to say to an argument like this:
"Ladies and gentlemen this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee--an eight foot tall Wookiee--want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense!
"But more important, you have to ask yourself, what does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!
"Look at me, I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense!
And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room . . . does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."
Unless the beans were ground this morning, it's not high-end coffee. Starbucks (stores) has nothing to worry about here. This product is aimed at a different market: the home market or the remote-use market.
Modern Homo Sapiens have existed for ~130000 years. If the article's 1/455 chance of destruction per 100 years is correct, the the odds of modern homo sapiens surviving the past 130000 years are (1-1/455)^(130000/100) or 5.7%.
The first members of genus homo existed 2000000 years ago. By the same calculation, the odds of genus homo existing today are (1-1/455)^(2000000/100)= 7.7E-18 %
Someone should explain to them that people who watch/read a lot of Science Fiction are more interested in a decent scientific plot instead of their writer's latest flavor-of-the-week politically-correct-philosophy with "futuristic" stuff tacked on.
And yet, these people are the guaranteed audience for anything SciFi. Perhaps the producers take them for granted and are seeking a dumber, broader audienc with their gimmicks, changes, etc.
I'm not sure I follow. If by You can absorb whatever you think are the right percentages by adjusting the percentages of people you mean that the Nth and subsequent stations to enter a market gain initially less than a 1/N portion of the market, I agree.
Now, it is time for data. Is the effect of established competitors small enough to ignore (as in the original model) or must we assess the strength of brand loyalty (etc.) in the market type at issue to get a useable answer?
Next, we'll need to determine whether barriers to entry are equal in all markets. (For radio stations, they are equal unless royalties for music differ from fees for news reports.) Further, loyalty may be unequal in the various markets; perhaps rock customers switch brands easily where news customers are slow to change.
What's my point? Simple models are nice, but if a factor has been left out that is big enough to regularly change the results, then the model needs refining. (Of course, I do not know whether the factor I'm discussing _is_ that big; not without data.)
3 stations: 2 rock + 1 news the third station does better splitting the rock vote then going after country or classical (i.e you end up with 2 rock + 1 news)
Wow! That's a vastly simplified model. To start with, it assumes that the third station has an equal chance of capturing an even portion of any market it competes in regardless of the existence of established competitors. In reality, capturing all of an unserved market can be easier than capturing a portion of a market where you have competitors.
I know all models have to generalize a little, but...
"Efforts at physical security will not be enough, because the thinking enemy that we confront is going to school on our network vulnerabilities as well, and I think the two are inextricably linked," he said. "The number of known potential adversaries conducting research on information attacks is increasing rapidly and includes intelligence services, military organizations and nonstate entities."
According to Tenet "a loose collection of regional [terrorist] networks" now "thrive independently" worldwide by using telecommunications and the Internet to communicate with and learn from each other at almost no cost.
Telecommunications technology for government and business should have built-in protections, Tenet said, such as intrusion detection and protection systems, antivirus software, authentication and identify management services, and encryption.
"I know that these actions would be controversial in this age where we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he added. "But, ultimately, the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
Former senior federal cyber security official F. Lynn McNulty told UPI there would have to be "some retreat from the Wild West" concept of the Internet as an ungoverned space.
"It has become such an integral part of people's lives," he argued, "that they will demand from policymakers and legislators the laws and regulations needed to protect it."
Tenet suggested that this might not be enough. "New attacks have raised questions about the trustworthiness of the Internet and Internet protocol technologies," he said.
Tenet suggests a move to Internet 2, a project of universities and private industry geared at advancing the speed and security of the Internet as we know it. The project claims speeds at 300,000 times that of the current home Internet connection, allowing high-quality real-time video and audio over long distances.
"Efforts at physical security will not be enough, because the thinking enemy that we confront is going to school on our network vulnerabilities as well, and I think the two are inextricably linked," he said. "The number of known potential adversaries conducting research on information attacks is increasing rapidly and includes intelligence services, military organizations and nonstate entities."
According to Tenet "a loose collection of regional [terrorist] networks" now "thrive independently" worldwide by using telecommunications and the Internet to communicate with and learn from each other at almost no cost.
Telecommunications technology for government and business should have built-in protections, Tenet said, such as intrusion detection and protection systems, antivirus software, authentication and identify management services, and encryption.
"I know that these actions would be controversial in this age where we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he added. "But, ultimately, the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
unworkably expensive as yet
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From the article: The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood.
Think about what that means. No mass production. A blood sample from each patient must be taken, processed, and the finished vaccine returned to that patient, without error. There is no generic serum.
Forget the patent flame-war for a minute. The production costs of this thing are prohibitive. The costs of this thing will look more like the costs of in virto fertilization procedures than they will look like a vaccine.
I'm sorry to say that this announcement is, as yet, a nice bit of research and nothing more.
an education and information campaign to teach parents about the perils of the Internet
What's this "information campaign" going to look like, eh? FCP, that's what. Fear, Certainty, and Panic. And after $30MM has been spent scaring the populace, what do you suppose the legislature will vote for the next time 'round?
This book does not make me want to celebrate Dungeons & Dragons. It makes me frustrated and sort of angry that this sloppy product was foisted off on us. So much more could have been done, and so much better.... We deserve better.
We could say the same thing about our beloved game, more's the pity. We've had 30 years of just-barely-good-enough and sub-par and unprofessional and get-it-out-the-door. It's almost as if the book is merely a cleverly accurate reflection of the quality of its subject matter. Almost.
So much more could have been done in our game, and so much better.
A poster wrote: Actually they have a complicated set of rules that varies from area to area.... In our area they have lots of wood shops that used gas powered air compressors. Then they use air tools for their work.
Another poster wrote: The Amish doing their laundry by hand were getting exercise and camaraderie, and as a bonus they got their laundry done all at the same time.
You may find the rules less complex if you ask yourself whose work the modern device would make easier. Modern devices have entered the out-of-home work of Amish men somewhat faster than they have been allowed to relieve the in-home drudgery of Amish women.
Shimizu suggests a comparison with laptop computers, digital cameras and iPods. "With each generation, they get smaller, yet they have more memory and longer battery life. In a few years, car batteries will be lighter, smaller, have more power and have a longer life too. It's just a matter of time."
In small electronic gadgets, some of the big power improvements between generations are due to lowering the amount of Work that must be done by the batteries. Not so with cars. The Work a car battery must do is moving a mass (people and parcels) over a distance, with accelerations, decelerations, etc. We will not see the work loads of these batteries cut by orders of magnitude with each new generation of these cars.
I hope he succeeds with his project, but the comparison of cars to logic circuits is disingenuous.
bypassing the networks sponsors is not QUITE a victimless crime, as the networks are losing money by it...
It's not any kind of crime. Because it has never been criminal.
C'mon folks. When a business does something that fails to make them money, that does not imply that we "took" money from them. It certainly does not follow that a law must be enacted guaranteeing them money for something no one liked well enough to pay them for absent the law.
Um. No. Sorry. From the wiki link itself we see that the churches did not like the printing press at first -- mostly because it destroyed their near-monopoly on the written word.
The supplantation of hand copied manuscripts with printed works was not received with unanimous encomium. Not only did the papal court contemplate making printing presses an industry requiring a licence from the Catholic Church (an idea rejected in the end), but as early as in the 15th century some nobles refused to have printed books in their libraries to sully their valuable handcopied manuscripts. Similar resistance was later encountered in much of the Islamic world, where calligraphic traditions were extremely important, and also in the Far East.
Slashdot Mirror
Yesterday in Massachusetts, a snow plow operator, too dumb to know his truck had GPS, exposed himself to a woman at a coffee shop, hopped back in his truck and was apprehended in minutes because the state troopers, knowing only the location of the coffee shop and that it was a snow plow operator, could find his exact whereabouts."
So, the police knew the phone number to call for the snow plow dispatch center and the dispatch center pulled up the plow nearest that address at that time all in a matter of minutes?! Wow. That's efficiency.
No "disgruntled iTunes customer" hires three law firms to file his suit (Braun Law Group P.C. of LA; Katriel Law Firm of DC; and Murray, Frank & Sailer LLP of NY).
Somebody open a pool on what company is bank-rolling this!
Scientist gets lab funded. Scientist gets paid salary, then pension at x% of salary. -- This is good.
Consumers get recorded music in convenient format. -- This is good.
Research labs make $1 million. -- This is OK.
The patents have expired. -- This is good.
Phillips, Sony, RIAA, et al. make $100s of billions selling discs and music. -- This, presumably, is bad.
What bad thing did the patents do in this story?
While we're tripping over our prejudices trying to answer that, ponder this: how would the story have gone if no patents had existed? The answer is that only one thing changes -- the lab doesn't get paid the $1 million.
What a bizarre way of looking at it. IMO a better way to look at it is "newspapers no longer extorting $65 million per year from local residents". Or "$65 million once wasted on newspaper classifieds now available for health, education, other productive uses".
Would some one just name the elephant in the room already? A 'bizarre outlook' just like this is exactly why p2p'ers don't think there is any continuing need for "the music industry" to be involved in the distribution of recorded music.
May all those who perform a service that is no longer needed wither and die!
The article "MPAA Goes After More Bittorrent Site Operators" follows immediately after the article "China Closes 1,129 Web Sites".
Coincidence? Or not.
What a pathetic attempt to use a media event / scandal to promote something unrelated to it! No one in India or elsewhere is worried about copyright here. The boy certainly hasn't made a claim for lost revenues! Whoever the shill is who is claiming that the MMS incident justifies an Indian DMCA ought to be embarrassed to be selling this bunk. There really is only one thing to say to an argument like this:
Unless the beans were ground this morning, it's not high-end coffee. Starbucks (stores) has nothing to worry about here. This product is aimed at a different market: the home market or the remote-use market.
Of course a single planet is a single point of failure. This is not news. Of course the world is going to end. Yawn.
Now, who wants to join me on the quad for a game of football?
Modern Homo Sapiens have existed for ~130000 years. If the article's 1/455 chance of destruction per 100 years is correct, the the odds of modern homo sapiens surviving the past 130000 years are (1-1/455)^(130000/100) or 5.7%.
The first members of genus homo existed 2000000 years ago. By the same calculation, the odds of genus homo existing today are (1-1/455)^(2000000/100)= 7.7E-18 %
Someone should explain to them that people who watch/read a lot of Science Fiction are more interested in a decent scientific plot instead of their writer's latest flavor-of-the-week politically-correct-philosophy with "futuristic" stuff tacked on.
And yet, these people are the guaranteed audience for anything SciFi. Perhaps the producers take them for granted and are seeking a dumber, broader audienc with their gimmicks, changes, etc.
I'm not sure I follow. If by You can absorb whatever you think are the right percentages by adjusting the percentages of people you mean that the Nth and subsequent stations to enter a market gain initially less than a 1/N portion of the market, I agree.
Now, it is time for data. Is the effect of established competitors small enough to ignore (as in the original model) or must we assess the strength of brand loyalty (etc.) in the market type at issue to get a useable answer?
Next, we'll need to determine whether barriers to entry are equal in all markets. (For radio stations, they are equal unless royalties for music differ from fees for news reports.) Further, loyalty may be unequal in the various markets; perhaps rock customers switch brands easily where news customers are slow to change.
What's my point? Simple models are nice, but if a factor has been left out that is big enough to regularly change the results, then the model needs refining. (Of course, I do not know whether the factor I'm discussing _is_ that big; not without data.)
3 stations: 2 rock + 1 news the third station does better splitting the rock vote then going after country or classical (i.e you end up with 2 rock + 1 news)
Wow! That's a vastly simplified model. To start with, it assumes that the third station has an equal chance of capturing an even portion of any market it competes in regardless of the existence of established competitors. In reality, capturing all of an unserved market can be easier than capturing a portion of a market where you have competitors.
I know all models have to generalize a little, but...
Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code
What software? When? The average for OS Kernels? Not hardly.
So, what was Tenet talking about, really? See http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1204/120104c1.htm.
"Efforts at physical security will not be enough, because the thinking enemy that we confront is going to school on our network vulnerabilities as well, and I think the two are inextricably linked," he said. "The number of known potential adversaries conducting research on information attacks is increasing rapidly and includes intelligence services, military organizations and nonstate entities."
According to Tenet "a loose collection of regional [terrorist] networks" now "thrive independently" worldwide by using telecommunications and the Internet to communicate with and learn from each other at almost no cost.
Telecommunications technology for government and business should have built-in protections, Tenet said, such as intrusion detection and protection systems, antivirus software, authentication and identify management services, and encryption.
"I know that these actions would be controversial in this age where we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he added. "But, ultimately, the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
And here:
Former senior federal cyber security official F. Lynn McNulty told UPI there would have to be "some retreat from the Wild West" concept of the Internet as an ungoverned space.
"It has become such an integral part of people's lives," he argued, "that they will demand from policymakers and legislators the laws and regulations needed to protect it."
Tenet suggested that this
might not be enough. "New attacks have raised questions about the trustworthiness of the Internet and Internet protocol technologies," he said.
Tenet suggests a move to Internet 2, a project of universities and private industry geared at advancing the speed and security of the Internet as we know it. The project claims speeds at 300,000 times that of the current home Internet connection, allowing high-quality real-time video and audio over long distances.
Oops. Mea cupla. This is attached to the wrong article.
So, what was Tenet talking about, really? See http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1204/120104c1.htm.
"Efforts at physical security will not be enough, because the thinking enemy that we confront is going to school on our network vulnerabilities as well, and I think the two are inextricably linked," he said. "The number of known potential adversaries conducting research on information attacks is increasing rapidly and includes intelligence services, military organizations and nonstate entities."
According to Tenet "a loose collection of regional [terrorist] networks" now "thrive independently" worldwide by using telecommunications and the Internet to communicate with and learn from each other at almost no cost.
Telecommunications technology for government and business should have built-in protections, Tenet said, such as intrusion detection and protection systems, antivirus software, authentication and identify management services, and encryption.
"I know that these actions would be controversial in this age where we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he added. "But, ultimately, the Wild West must give way to governance and control."
From the article: The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood.
Think about what that means. No mass production. A blood sample from each patient must be taken, processed, and the finished vaccine returned to that patient, without error. There is no generic serum.
Forget the patent flame-war for a minute. The production costs of this thing are prohibitive. The costs of this thing will look more like the costs of in virto fertilization procedures than they will look like a vaccine.
I'm sorry to say that this announcement is, as yet, a nice bit of research and nothing more.
an education and information campaign to teach parents about the perils of the Internet
What's this "information campaign" going to look like, eh? FCP, that's what. Fear, Certainty, and Panic. And after $30MM has been spent scaring the populace, what do you suppose the legislature will vote for the next time 'round?
This book does not make me want to celebrate Dungeons & Dragons. It makes me frustrated and sort of angry that this sloppy product was foisted off on us. So much more could have been done, and so much better. ... We deserve better.
We could say the same thing about our beloved game, more's the pity. We've had 30 years of just-barely-good-enough and sub-par and unprofessional and get-it-out-the-door. It's almost as if the book is merely a cleverly accurate reflection of the quality of its subject matter. Almost.
So much more could have been done in our game, and so much better.
I didn't say anything about the Christian religion :P
Fair enough. On rereading your post, I see that it does not imply any religion in particular.
(Of course, the grandparent post referred exclusively to christianity, a religion that has many famous examples of rejecting new technologies.)
A poster wrote: Actually they have a complicated set of rules that varies from area to area. ... In our area they have lots of wood shops that used gas powered air compressors. Then they use air tools for their work.
Another poster wrote: The Amish doing their laundry by hand were getting exercise and camaraderie, and as a bonus they got their laundry done all at the same time.
You may find the rules less complex if you ask yourself whose work the modern device would make easier. Modern devices have entered the out-of-home work of Amish men somewhat faster than they have been allowed to relieve the in-home drudgery of Amish women.
Shimizu suggests a comparison with laptop computers, digital cameras and iPods. "With each generation, they get smaller, yet they have more memory and longer battery life. In a few years, car batteries will be lighter, smaller, have more power and have a longer life too. It's just a matter of time."
In small electronic gadgets, some of the big power improvements between generations are due to lowering the amount of Work that must be done by the batteries. Not so with cars. The Work a car battery must do is moving a mass (people and parcels) over a distance, with accelerations, decelerations, etc. We will not see the work loads of these batteries cut by orders of magnitude with each new generation of these cars.
I hope he succeeds with his project, but the comparison of cars to logic circuits is disingenuous.
Congress shall make no law exceeding in length the United States Constitution (exclusive of amendments).
Try getting the pork into a bill that short. Try defending a voting record when there can be no omnibus bills.
bypassing the networks sponsors is not QUITE a victimless crime, as the networks are losing money by it...
It's not any kind of crime. Because it has never been criminal.
C'mon folks. When a business does something that fails to make them money, that does not imply that we "took" money from them. It certainly does not follow that a law must be enacted guaranteeing them money for something no one liked well enough to pay them for absent the law.
Um. No. Sorry. From the wiki link itself we see that the churches did not like the printing press at first -- mostly because it destroyed their near-monopoly on the written word.
The supplantation of hand copied manuscripts with printed works was not received with unanimous encomium. Not only did the papal court contemplate making printing presses an industry requiring a licence from the Catholic Church (an idea rejected in the end), but as early as in the 15th century some nobles refused to have printed books in their libraries to sully their valuable handcopied manuscripts. Similar resistance was later encountered in much of the Islamic world, where calligraphic traditions were extremely important, and also in the Far East.