The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Quit arguing about how to use the government against the "other side", whichever side you are on. If you don't want the government making you pay for Iraq, shrink the government. If you don't want the government telling Catholics they have to fund birth control and abortifacients, shrink the government.
Quit using the government as a stick with which to beat your enemies, then complaining when they turn around and use it to beat on you.
We don't give rich parking violators bigger tickets than poorer ones.
But punitive fines/damages levied by a judge will take into account the financial resources of the entity being fined to make sure the fine actually represents a punishment. Similarly, bail is also influenced by a person's financial resources.
The problem with "loser pays" systems is that not all lawsuits are clear-cut cases of someone trying to screw over someone else.
This isn't a problem at all with loser pays... It is just a risk of taking your dispute to the legal system.
Given the incredibly over-litigious atmosphere in the US today, a reasonable disincentive to bringing suit is a "Good Thing." Even if a few reasonable lawsuits are discouraged, the effect on the avalanche of frivolous lawsuits that clog our courts and poison our discourse would be an enormous net positive to society.
Welcome to the United States, home of the "free" (how come we aren't free from this kind of nonsense?)
Because we don't have a "loser pays" system. If they had to automatically pay the fees for any lawsuit they lost, it would greatly discourage this kind of garbage and make it much easier to defend yourself in court. It would probably even make it possible to get defense lawyers on contingency.
Your statement is akin to a defendant reminding the jury of his presumed innocence after evidence of his guilt was introduced.
Bleh. Your statement is akin to repealing the 5th amendment and forcing all defendents to defend themselves personally rather than leaving the defense to others.
Presumption of innocence has only gone out the window for those that have prejudged (hmm, is that the root word of "prejudice"?) without waiting for all the facts.
Wow, so anything not denied is automatically true... What a creative way of blending logic and innuendo! A fresh new take on guilty until proven innocent.
Kudos on your succint statement of a principle worthy of any of the more heinous repressive regimes of our age.
A different minimally invasive test that is likely to have a larger impact on colon cancer screening in developed countries is described in the latest New England Journal of Medicine
The technique is known as CT colonography and consists of aquiring several hundred CT slices of the abdomen/pelvis then using software to reconstruct the lumen of the colon and fly through it virtual-reality style looking for cancer. The linked study reports that CT colonography in experienced hands is as good as the "gold standard" of colonoscopy, a finding that (if validated in other studies) could mean that hundreds of thousands of people might be able to avoid the scope and get a less invasive CT scan to screen for cancer.
Thank you for the first comment in this thread that strikes to the heart of the matter.
All the people discussing "intellectual property" on this thread need to review the history of intellectual property, the original reason for its creation, and the social contract that it encompasses when analyzing the current situation in the the field of computer science (and frankly within the entertainment industry as well.)
Intellectual property does not exist to guarrantee the rights of a particular person or group to make a living in a certain way. Rather it is a grant of limited monopoly as an inducement for innovation. In fields were the monetary barrier to entry is small (computer science, music) or where the majority of innovation is government sponsered (biotech, genetics), intellectual property in its current form has ceased to serve its purpose and has instead become an anti-competive bludgeon that quashes innovation. The current system of intellectual property in the US is thus in severe need of reform but such reform is hampered by the business models that it currently protects (as reflected by several postings in this thread.)
Well, I would use it to play the videos of my kids that I have been archiving to mpeg4. I've also been re-encoding favorite shows from my ReplayTV to mpeg4 for long-term storage on CD's. It would be nice to be able to easily play these archived shows and home movies on my television instead of only on my computer.
Wow, where do you even start with a post like this? Hmm, let's see...
It's about being a member of the world community.
One of only (with a few notable exceptions) members of the world community with the courage to actually do something about a brutal dictator who has repeatedly ignored the dictates of the UN, brutally repressed his own people, paid palestinian terrorists for blowing up coffee shops and malls in Israel, invaded and brutally occupied a neighboring country, and put the rest of the world at risk by pursuing a policy of WMD proliferation.
Iraq is a soverign nation. now that the bush administration has bumbled its way across the ideal of sovereignty, no nation can feel safe.
What a load of garbage. See above. Act in that manner, and you should NOT feel safe. There is something wrong with a world order that considers a country held hostage by a brutal dictator to be a "sovereign" nation that is afforded the same level of protection in international law as a free, liberal democracy.
Now that's irony.
No, the irony is that dictators like Saddam turn our liberal ideals back against us and play the concepts of sovereignty and international law to their own advantage while flagrantly flouting them themselves.
While bush destroys decades of partnerships with other nations like France and Germany
So Gerhard SchrÃder states up front that he would not support war under any circumstances in a move that was motivated largely by re-election politics, and the effects of that on our relationship with Germany is now the fault of George Bush. So France, who is a) afraid of their huge Arab population, b) economically profitting from the current oil-for-food arrangements, and c) hungry for increased power in the EU, selfishly opposes all US attempts at (God forbid!) enforcing resolution 1441 and the effects of this betrayal their "ally" the US is now the fault of George Bush. To say that Germany is at least 50% to blame for "destruction of our decades of partnership" is probably accurate. To say that France is 90% to blame is to be extremely generous.
while bush scuttles the last remaining vestige of authority that the United Nations had
The UN scuttled their own authority by not backing up their own resolutions. Of course, when you look at the composition and track record of the UN, it is highly questionable that we should mourn its passing.
No one was trying to save Saddam or the government of Iraq. They were asking for diplomacy to be given a chance.
Anyone who believes this is is as clueless as you seem to be. The only reason that "diplomacy" has shown any success whatsoever in the last 6 months is because George Bush had essentially put a loaded gun to Saddam's head and has been slowly pulling back the hammer. Look back over the last 12 years while that gun wasn't there and see what "diplomacy" has wrought. It has bought us 5000 Iraqi children dying per month (by the Iraqis own figures) due to sanctions. It has bought us an unrepentant dictator who continued to pursue weapons of mass destruction. It has bought us a regime that, even in the words of the previous administration (whom I am guessing by the tone of your post you are more likely to believe), is one of the greatest threats to our security and to the proliferation of WMD in the world today.
Of course, we don't have to worry about those things any more because the US, Britain, and Spain had the courage to actually weather the storm created by those who, out of their own financial, political, or ideological self interest, would support the continued existence of this brutal dictator in Iraq. Thank God there are a few leaders left with the courage and the foresight to take a potentially unpopular position because it is the right thing to do.
Although this is a discussion for another day, you have hit on exactly the reason that software "licensing" (click through, shrink wrap, etc) is also such a bad idea.
Those sorts of licenses were held to be illegal for video tapes. If they hadn't been, there would be no such thing as video stores because the studios originally were not the least bit interested in allowing third parties to profit by renting their movies. For some strange reason, however, we seem to think they are OK for software.
Software "licensing" and it's enforcement through DRM are two sides of the same nefarious coin.
The technical reasons (such as making physical writes to the hard drive, etc) for not using this product are compelling, but I believe the legal and social reasons for avoiding it are even more compelling.
"Digital rights management" in this form essentially strips me of the right of first sale (the doctrine that makes it legal for video stores to rent out videos that they have purchased or for you to resell a book once you are done reading it). Once I purchase this software I should be free to do whatever I darn well please with it, *and* once I'm done with it, I should be free to sell it, give it away, or whatever I wish as long as I don't keep a copy for myself. By preventing any of these actions, "DRM" tramples on consumers' rights and should be resisted any without technical flaws that could render your computer unbootable.
I sure am glad I have procrastinated in doing my taxes... Looks like I'll be checking out Intuit's competition this year.
I have an Xbox that I bought around Christmas last year. I had the same sort of troubles with the DVD drive that are described in this story. Luckily, the problems for me started only a month after I got the system so the system was under warranty and was replaced by Microsoft for free, shipping and all.
I have been thinking the same thing. One of the biggest problems I see with the do-it-yourself open source PVR projects is the hardware problem. That is, I (read "my wife") don't really want a computer or some home made contraption with wires sticking out everywhere in or around our entertainment center.
If one of these projects targetted the ReplayTV hardware, it would solve that problem perfectly. In fact, if the system were simply hacked to point to some sort of freely available TV listings it seems that even that would prevent you from needing to sign the agreement or use "the service."
Regardless of how it's done though, I think our only chance of owning a VCR replacement (PVR) that is not capable of spying on our viewing habits or blocking basic activites like "fast-forward" is through open source software. My dream is to see a linux-based open source system that combiines a DVD player/writer with a PVR in a simple, self-contained, unobtrusive case. This I would pay significant $$ for.
It seems like it would be a nice move for AMD to support GCC optimizations for Athlon processors. The idea would be similar to IBM supporting Linux as a way of chipping away at market dominance by Microsoft.
AMD should supply GPL'd contributions to GCC that optimize code for its Athlon processors. This would give them a relatively cheap way of putting out a competing compiler to Intel's proprietary version since it would leverage all the work that has already been done by the GCC group. It could also make them the preferred chip for open source OS's by ensuring that Athlons run GCC code faster than any other processor. This would be strategically very valuable at a time that they are about to push their new 64 bit instructions while Linux is simultaneously becoming viable/validated as an enterprise platform. Since GCC is not limited to Linux, these performance enhancements would also translate into gains for non-open source development projects as well.
All in all, it seems that this could be a be a great way for AMD to give developers a way to produce AMD optimized code while at the same time encouraging the use of their new 64 bit instructions in the booming open source OS server/workstation market.
I don't understand your logic. This won't stop people using Morpheus on Windows since it only takes one person to rip the files and put them up on the network then the genie is out of the bottle. After that all those Wintel users just download the MP3.
/em goes back to expanding his extensive collection of penguin pictures.
The problem with ubiquitous surveillance that worries me is the potential for government harrassment of ordinary citizens. By being able to easily catalog and search for a person's movements and activities, the government gains vast new powers to control the lives of its citizens. The potential for blackmail, harrassment, or selective enforcement of little enforced laws is quite disturbing.
Many people are making the argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I agree that you have no real expectation of privacy in public places. The difference here is the change in the balance of power. Previously, no one person could be everywhere at once. Although you didn't have absolute privacy in any public place you went, the inability to string together your movements actually provided you with a great deal of effective privacy. Now, the government actually can be everywhere at once, and that privacy is completely gone.
Do not assume that your government will always be benevolent, as that is the surest path to tyranny. Do not give powers to your government that can be misused, or they likely will be.
just like its okay for the US to develop defensive systems that give it the power to launch nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation.
Last I heard, the system was only theoretically good for one or two incoming "rogue" ICBM's. It would be worthless against a massive retaliatory nuclear attack. I agree with your point about Microsoft, but baseless offhand anti-US assertions don't strengthen your argument.
Slashdot Mirror
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Quit arguing about how to use the government against the "other side", whichever side you are on. If you don't want the government making you pay for Iraq, shrink the government. If you don't want the government telling Catholics they have to fund birth control and abortifacients, shrink the government.
Quit using the government as a stick with which to beat your enemies, then complaining when they turn around and use it to beat on you.
We don't give rich parking violators bigger tickets than poorer ones.
But punitive fines/damages levied by a judge will take into account the financial resources of the entity being fined to make sure the fine actually represents a punishment. Similarly, bail is also influenced by a person's financial resources.
The problem with "loser pays" systems is that not all lawsuits are clear-cut cases of someone trying to screw over someone else.
This isn't a problem at all with loser pays... It is just a risk of taking your dispute to the legal system.
Given the incredibly over-litigious atmosphere in the US today, a reasonable disincentive to bringing suit is a "Good Thing." Even if a few reasonable lawsuits are discouraged, the effect on the avalanche of frivolous lawsuits that clog our courts and poison our discourse would be an enormous net positive to society.
Welcome to the United States, home of the "free" (how come we aren't free from this kind of nonsense?)
Because we don't have a "loser pays" system. If they had to automatically pay the fees for any lawsuit they lost, it would greatly discourage this kind of garbage and make it much easier to defend yourself in court. It would probably even make it possible to get defense lawyers on contingency.
Your statement is akin to a defendant reminding the jury of his presumed innocence after evidence of his guilt was introduced.
Bleh. Your statement is akin to repealing the 5th amendment and forcing all defendents to defend themselves personally rather than leaving the defense to others.
Presumption of innocence has only gone out the window for those that have prejudged (hmm, is that the root word of "prejudice"?) without waiting for all the facts.
Wow, so anything not denied is automatically true... What a creative way of blending logic and innuendo! A fresh new take on guilty until proven innocent.
Kudos on your succint statement of a principle worthy of any of the more heinous repressive regimes of our age.
A different minimally invasive test that is likely to have a larger impact on colon cancer screening in developed countries is described in the latest New England Journal of Medicine
The technique is known as CT colonography and consists of aquiring several hundred CT slices of the abdomen/pelvis then using software to reconstruct the lumen of the colon and fly through it virtual-reality style looking for cancer. The linked study reports that CT colonography in experienced hands is as good as the "gold standard" of colonoscopy, a finding that (if validated in other studies) could mean that hundreds of thousands of people might be able to avoid the scope and get a less invasive CT scan to screen for cancer.
Thank you for the first comment in this thread that strikes to the heart of the matter.
All the people discussing "intellectual property" on this thread need to review the history of intellectual property, the original reason for its creation, and the social contract that it encompasses when analyzing the current situation in the the field of computer science (and frankly within the entertainment industry as well.)
Intellectual property does not exist to guarrantee the rights of a particular person or group to make a living in a certain way. Rather it is a grant of limited monopoly as an inducement for innovation. In fields were the monetary barrier to entry is small (computer science, music) or where the majority of innovation is government sponsered (biotech, genetics), intellectual property in its current form has ceased to serve its purpose and has instead become an anti-competive bludgeon that quashes innovation. The current system of intellectual property in the US is thus in severe need of reform but such reform is hampered by the business models that it currently protects (as reflected by several postings in this thread.)
Normal lifespan for the mice used in research is between one and two years.
Well, I would use it to play the videos of my kids that I have been archiving to mpeg4. I've also been re-encoding favorite shows from my ReplayTV to mpeg4 for long-term storage on CD's. It would be nice to be able to easily play these archived shows and home movies on my television instead of only on my computer.
Wow, where do you even start with a post like this? Hmm, let's see...
It's about being a member of the world community.
One of only (with a few notable exceptions) members of the world community with the courage to actually do something about a brutal dictator who has repeatedly ignored the dictates of the UN, brutally repressed his own people, paid palestinian terrorists for blowing up coffee shops and malls in Israel, invaded and brutally occupied a neighboring country, and put the rest of the world at risk by pursuing a policy of WMD proliferation.
Iraq is a soverign nation. now that the bush administration has bumbled its way across the ideal of sovereignty, no nation can feel safe.
What a load of garbage. See above. Act in that manner, and you should NOT feel safe. There is something wrong with a world order that considers a country held hostage by a brutal dictator to be a "sovereign" nation that is afforded the same level of protection in international law as a free, liberal democracy.
Now that's irony.
No, the irony is that dictators like Saddam turn our liberal ideals back against us and play the concepts of sovereignty and international law to their own advantage while flagrantly flouting them themselves.
While bush destroys decades of partnerships with other nations like France and Germany
So Gerhard SchrÃder states up front that he would not support war under any circumstances in a move that was motivated largely by re-election politics, and the effects of that on our relationship with Germany is now the fault of George Bush. So France, who is a) afraid of their huge Arab population, b) economically profitting from the current oil-for-food arrangements, and c) hungry for increased power in the EU, selfishly opposes all US attempts at (God forbid!) enforcing resolution 1441 and the effects of this betrayal their "ally" the US is now the fault of George Bush. To say that Germany is at least 50% to blame for "destruction of our decades of partnership" is probably accurate. To say that France is 90% to blame is to be extremely generous.
while bush scuttles the last remaining vestige of authority that the United Nations had
The UN scuttled their own authority by not backing up their own resolutions. Of course, when you look at the composition and track record of the UN, it is highly questionable that we should mourn its passing.
No one was trying to save Saddam or the government of Iraq. They were asking for diplomacy to be given a chance.
Anyone who believes this is is as clueless as you seem to be. The only reason that "diplomacy" has shown any success whatsoever in the last 6 months is because George Bush had essentially put a loaded gun to Saddam's head and has been slowly pulling back the hammer. Look back over the last 12 years while that gun wasn't there and see what "diplomacy" has wrought. It has bought us 5000 Iraqi children dying per month (by the Iraqis own figures) due to sanctions. It has bought us an unrepentant dictator who continued to pursue weapons of mass destruction. It has bought us a regime that, even in the words of the previous administration (whom I am guessing by the tone of your post you are more likely to believe), is one of the greatest threats to our security and to the proliferation of WMD in the world today.
Of course, we don't have to worry about those things any more because the US, Britain, and Spain had the courage to actually weather the storm created by those who, out of their own financial, political, or ideological self interest, would support the continued existence of this brutal dictator in Iraq. Thank God there are a few leaders left with the courage and the foresight to take a potentially unpopular position because it is the right thing to do.
Although this is a discussion for another day, you have hit on exactly the reason that software "licensing" (click through, shrink wrap, etc) is also such a bad idea.
Those sorts of licenses were held to be illegal for video tapes. If they hadn't been, there would be no such thing as video stores because the studios originally were not the least bit interested in allowing third parties to profit by renting their movies. For some strange reason, however, we seem to think they are OK for software.
Software "licensing" and it's enforcement through DRM are two sides of the same nefarious coin.
The technical reasons (such as making physical writes to the hard drive, etc) for not using this product are compelling, but I believe the legal and social reasons for avoiding it are even more compelling.
"Digital rights management" in this form essentially strips me of the right of first sale (the doctrine that makes it legal for video stores to rent out videos that they have purchased or for you to resell a book once you are done reading it). Once I purchase this software I should be free to do whatever I darn well please with it, *and* once I'm done with it, I should be free to sell it, give it away, or whatever I wish as long as I don't keep a copy for myself. By preventing any of these actions, "DRM" tramples on consumers' rights and should be resisted any without technical flaws that could render your computer unbootable.
I sure am glad I have procrastinated in doing my taxes... Looks like I'll be checking out Intuit's competition this year.
For a well written opposing view on the issue, check out this editorial over at the Economist.
Wow, the first reasonable comment I've seen in this entire discussion!
Easy or not, they are the ones who (apparently) did it *first*, and that's newsworthy.
I have an Xbox that I bought around Christmas last year. I had the same sort of troubles with the DVD drive that are described in this story. Luckily, the problems for me started only a month after I got the system so the system was under warranty and was replaced by Microsoft for free, shipping and all.
The second one has been fine thus far.
GnuPG
I have been thinking the same thing. One of the biggest problems I see with the do-it-yourself open source PVR projects is the hardware problem. That is, I (read "my wife") don't really want a computer or some home made contraption with wires sticking out everywhere in or around our entertainment center.
If one of these projects targetted the ReplayTV hardware, it would solve that problem perfectly. In fact, if the system were simply hacked to point to some sort of freely available TV listings it seems that even that would prevent you from needing to sign the agreement or use "the service."
Regardless of how it's done though, I think our only chance of owning a VCR replacement (PVR) that is not capable of spying on our viewing habits or blocking basic activites like "fast-forward" is through open source software. My dream is to see a linux-based open source system that combiines a DVD player/writer with a PVR in a simple, self-contained, unobtrusive case. This I would pay significant $$ for.
The flip side of this is that patents aren't like copyrights. They expire after 20 years or so, and become public domain.
Copyrights used to have this same problem I believe... Thank goodness for Disney!
It seems like it would be a nice move for AMD to support GCC optimizations for Athlon processors. The idea would be similar to IBM supporting Linux as a way of chipping away at market dominance by Microsoft.
AMD should supply GPL'd contributions to GCC that optimize code for its Athlon processors. This would give them a relatively cheap way of putting out a competing compiler to Intel's proprietary version since it would leverage all the work that has already been done by the GCC group. It could also make them the preferred chip for open source OS's by ensuring that Athlons run GCC code faster than any other processor. This would be strategically very valuable at a time that they are about to push their new 64 bit instructions while Linux is simultaneously becoming viable/validated as an enterprise platform. Since GCC is not limited to Linux, these performance enhancements would also translate into gains for non-open source development projects as well.
All in all, it seems that this could be a be a great way for AMD to give developers a way to produce AMD optimized code while at the same time encouraging the use of their new 64 bit instructions in the booming open source OS server/workstation market.
I don't understand your logic. This won't stop people using Morpheus on Windows since it only takes one person to rip the files and put them up on the network then the genie is out of the bottle. After that all those Wintel users just download the MP3.
/em goes back to expanding his extensive collection of penguin pictures.
The problem with ubiquitous surveillance that worries me is the potential for government harrassment of ordinary citizens. By being able to easily catalog and search for a person's movements and activities, the government gains vast new powers to control the lives of its citizens. The potential for blackmail, harrassment, or selective enforcement of little enforced laws is quite disturbing.
Many people are making the argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I agree that you have no real expectation of privacy in public places. The difference here is the change in the balance of power. Previously, no one person could be everywhere at once. Although you didn't have absolute privacy in any public place you went, the inability to string together your movements actually provided you with a great deal of effective privacy. Now, the government actually can be everywhere at once, and that privacy is completely gone.
Do not assume that your government will always be benevolent, as that is the surest path to tyranny. Do not give powers to your government that can be misused, or they likely will be.
Last I heard, the system was only theoretically good for one or two incoming "rogue" ICBM's. It would be worthless against a massive retaliatory nuclear attack. I agree with your point about Microsoft, but baseless offhand anti-US assertions don't strengthen your argument.
Until the SSSCA passes, making all these formats obsolete by their lack of access controls... Have you written your representatives lately?