The article says, in effect, that in exchange for reduced audio quality, providing your own CD's, a lack of liner notes, you too can make record company executives happy.
If you really like music, you would never accept a lack of subsonic. You buy full albums of artists you like, and you Kazaa / live 365 to find new artists. If you don't really like music, you probably have never even heard of Kazaa. Maybe you will like this service, then.
In a world where costs have been cut dramatically, you can't go on charging the same. Tapes were a step above records acoustically, and CD's were a premium above tapes (despite being cheaper to manufacture). What do MP3's offer? They're cheap. Charge a premium for a lower quality? Nuts.
All you can eat 128k MP3's for 19.95 per month, with 180k MP3's available for 29.95, and lossless CD for 59.95. Why is supply, demand, and competition such a hard concept for record executives?
Agreed. Your friends can record and redistribute your music, yet most would consider that rude. When you write a letter full of very, very juicy information in the format of an article and don't tell anyone not to forward it, you're asking for trouble. This is something she should be discussing with her friends, as anyone who values their privacy needs to talk about blogs and forwarding with their loved ones.
Perhaps the lesson isn't one of privacy, but the assumption of privacy. Laurie assumed that friends were on the "message from Laurie, don't f#$@ up my career" wavelength, when they were on the "that's incredible, I want other people to know this" wavelength (which is exactly what Laurie was feeling too, or else she wouldn't have sent the message).
If you need something to not be forwarded, make sure the people know that, and make sure they are trustworthy. Or don't send it.
Hmm... Good questions. Any lawyer know how much the Open Office team can sue the BSA for claiming, under penalty of perjury, they represent them?
Or, does the Open Office team have to sue the script that sent out this letter?
(I'm not opposed to people sending out thoughtful, intelligent cease-and-desist letters on a case by case basis. I'm opposed to blanketing legal threats like spam across the world, and taking up other company's time and money instead of doing your job as a lawyer properly. This letter obviously was never seen by a human being until such a time that it was recieved by the school, who like so many other institutions had to take a large chunk of time to investigate the claim. Only piles of money allows the BSA to do such a thing: no smaller company would ever be allowed to get away with flagrantly false legal threats.)
From: dmca@idsa.com.no.junk.mail To:abuse@xxxxxxxxx Subject: Berne Convention - Demand for Immediate Take Down - Notice of Infringing Activity - Reference#: 922932 Date: 14 February, 2003 5:23 PM Interactive Digital Software Association 1211 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 USA Attention: Piracy Enforcement - DMCA Officer Telephone: 202-223-2400 Fax: 202-223-2401 E-mail: dmca@idsa.com Friday, February 14, 2003
Dear abuse@xxxxxxxxxx,
I am an authorized representative of the Interactive Digital Software Association ("IDSA"), which represents the intellectual property interests of almost thirty companies that publish interactive games for video game consoles, personal computers, handheld devices and the Internet.
IDSA is providing this letter of notification to make xxxxxxxxxx aware of material available via its network or system that infringes the exclusive copyright and trademark rights of one or more IDSA members. This notice is addressed to you as an agent of xxxxxxxxxx for purposes of receiving notifications of claimed infringement. We hereby affirm that the IDSA is authorized to act on behalf of the IDSA members whose exclusive copyright rights we believe to be infringed as described herein.
Based on the information obtained by IDSA that is provided in this e-mail's attachments, IDSA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ infringes the rights of one or more IDSA members by offering for download one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game products protected by copyright, including, but not limited to: 007 Barbarian Donkey Kong Frogger Mario Pac Man Soldier Of Fortune
Through the Berne Convention and other international treaties covering intellectual property rights, we believe that our members' rights in such games are entitled to the full protection of the intellectual property laws of your country. The unauthorized copies of such game product[s] appearing on, or made available through, such site are listed and/or identified on such Internet site by their titles, variations thereof or depictions of associated artwork (any such game titles, copies, listings and/or other depictions of, or references to, any contents of such game product, are hereinafter referred to as "Infringing Material"). Based on the information at its disposal on 2/7/2003 6:49:39 PM GMT, IDSA believes that the statements herein accurately describe the infringing nature and status of the Infringing Material.
Accordingly, IDSA hereby requests xxxxxxxxxx to immediately remove or disable access to the Infringing Material at the URL address identified above.
Should you have questions, please contact the IDSA at the above listed mailing address or by replying to this email. Please also include the above noted Reference Number in the subject line of all email correspondence. We thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is appreciated. Regards, Robert L. Hunter, IV
Interactive Digital Software Association Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers.
From: Martijn van der Heide To: dmca@idsa.com.no.junk.mail Subject: Your reference #922932 Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 12:54:02 +0100 (CET) Your reference: #922932
Dear Mr Hunter,
Thank you for your email dated 14th February 2003, 5:23PM CET. The World of Spectrum archive site at is a software preservation site, archiving software for the classic microcomputer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
We strive to gain permission for redistribution for all software in the archive from the original publisher, and if the publisher no longer exists, from the original author. We publish all such permits on our site, and where such permission has been rescinded by either the publisher and/or author, we comply and remove the affected titles from the archive. Our copyrights policy is available in a dedicated section of the site, the Copyrights section, at.
To this end, we take all allegations that we are carrying software to which we do not have permission very seriously, however, the list of titles provided to us by yourselves is unfortunately somewhat vague, and we believe there may in fact be 'false positives', with titles in our archive of old software originally made during a period between 1982 to 1992 matching currently available software. An example is the title 'Soldiers of Fortune', for which we have explicit formal permission from the publisher Firebird Software Ltd (a label from British Telecom). If there is indeed clear and present proof that the titles you specifically list are present in our archive, we will be happy to remove those titles to endeavour to retain the goodwill we have in the industry and our position as being responsive to creators requests. To this end, could you please provide further information on the titles you have listed, such as publisher (or relevant IDSA member), release date, platform and so on, so that we can properly investigate and expedite this request.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Yours sincerely, Martijn van der Heide -- Martijn van der Heide Owner of the official world archive for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum The World of Spectrum, http://www.worldofspectrum.org/
Publishers should sell archival CD's to collecters and (gasp) libraries. $500 for an archive of all 20 (or whatever) games your company made between 1980 and 1986, sold in a run of 100. Game company makes 50k (less 5k packaging and 10k distribution), ensures that the games are not lost for all time, makes a few collecters happy, and doesn't risk losing the revenue on a sequal to cheezy Amiga Pacman clone #3.
On one hand, the patent covers the fundamental aspects of the algorithim as of three years ago.
On the other hand, this algorithim does not include updates since then, nor does it include the actual values of the variables, simply their names. Likewise, google is probably using an updated version of this algorithim in their page rank system, one which may resemble this one but which doesn't necessarily emulate it. Furthermore, this doesn't tell us anything that we didn't already know, at least at a fundamental level.
The exploits, such as putting up 1000 pages with lots of text and tags that point back to your page, are already known. They didn't exactly post any source code, so specific bugs are out of the question. The patent will not reveal buffer overflows.
"Open to public scrutiny" is a relative term... This patent opens google to as much public scrutiny as photos of the wing of the B2 bomber give away the secrets of the mechanisms inside.
So yes, it is open. And no, it doesn't actually tell you anything.
Sorry to be one more person to not answer your question directly (does anyone ever on ask slashdot?), but with the volitility of RAM and the cost of commodity hardware spread across 12 machines, it does seem a little bit unlikely to be the most cost-efficient solution.
If I am to understand you correctly, he needs about 24GB to store his files... but perhaps he doesn't need to access all 24GB at once?
If you want to see if it will make an improvement, why not setup a GB ethernet samba connection to one of those P2's setup for a ramdisk? Then you can decide if it is worth it to him, pricewise, to do such a major upgrade before going all out and spending several thousand dollars on equipment. (unfortunately, final latency will probably be about twice what you experience on the single setup, as you are adding a host controller) Perhaps you could eek out some performance gains by copying the files to a local ramdisk, then editing (silly, though, as it should be copied to ram anyway for editing), or using the remote RAM as a scratch disk, so as to maximize the available ram on the host board.
And, of course, there is the list of upgrades that might be more inexpensive, such as - Dual CPU's? More optimized VidCard? Turning off fontsmoothing?
Hardware may just not be fast enough yet. There must be other people here that remembers when running a Photoshop filter meant a coffee break.
Were you born stupid? The list of patches that Microsoft must have is HUGE. They have patches for Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. Thousands of pieces of hardware... tons of bug fixes, security patches, and hotfixes.
Hi troll.
My last windows update was 30 MB.
My windows registry lists 178 programs.
Assuming they never cached the database on the the client, and that it takes 50 bytes to describe each of the 2,000 patches for XP, it would take longer to load up the Windows update page in Internet Explorer than it would to download the list of patches.
This strikes me as true: for years and years and years, researchers have been promising AI was just around the corner... And what do we have right now? Nothing!
Well, nothing is a very relative term. We now have AI capable of counting the number of cars on a given street given a photograph of a region, and can automatically follow people / vehicles / animals as they travel around and through objects. OCR is accurate enough to be implemented professionally, and voice recognition is up to 95%. None of these were possible 25 years ago, and not just because of a lack of hardware.
While full AI is still a while away, the first major stumbling block, pattern recognition, is well on its way to being solved.
The AI in Quake 3 is much better than the AI in Pong.
Viruses did happen over floppies. It doesn't happen anymore, people don't pass viruses like that. Infected.exe files? Only if it uses that privledge to attack the network, at which point it is a worm. When was the last time Symantic issued an alert about a floppy-borne virus? When was the last time a virus that didn't transfer itself over the network made it into the top ten?
I did forget to mention word macro viruses, which oddly do get passed around manually. Which means, of course, my list is hackneyed and out of date. But that doesn't mean the point is invalid: nearly every time Cnet refers to a "computer virus" outbreak, it's talking about an outlook virus. Nearly every major virus people get are outlook viruses.
I should also point out that I didn't mean to imply that Outlook is as bad as it used to be. It was designed badly, and has been mostly patched in post-production. However, that design should never have gotten to the production stage with such a flagrant security flaw.
I do not object to address books being accessible outside of protected programs, and in fact wish they were more transparent. I object to running scripts from e-mail, as they have no business being there. I strongly object to scripts running automatically from e-mail, and feel that is one of the least security-conscious decisions I have seen short of ftp passwords being passed in plaintext. Worse, actually, as Outlook was designed for the internet and ftp for direct computer to computer communication over a trusted channel.
But to point to these band-aids and workarounds and say "see, there is no problem anymore" is just sad. A new exploit comes out every week to get around those band-aids. Messenger is nearly as popular as outlook, yet has relatively few exploits because it was designed reasonably well.
int i = 0 do
outlook.send(outlook.addressbook[i++], "Here's that file, Bob", "I send you this file in order to have your advice", outlook.vbs)
while(outlook.addressbook[i]!= NULL )
[/pseudo code]
Any program that allows you to do this is BADLY designed. You may claim that your copy of outlook has never been compromised, but all of the viruses you have recieved have come from outlook. There is no such thing as computer viruses. There are computer worms, and outlook viruses.
"Oh look, those new explorer things have been flipping over during turns." "Well, when we get our explorer we'll just have to turn slowly."
The US patent system as it stands today is a system by which innovations are registered by the government with little or no background check. These innovation registrations are then challenged in court by those with competing interests. The problem with this system is that during the registration process it is assumed that the courts will check the validity of the patent, and during the court process it is assumed the patent office checked its validity. It takes a large deal of financial backing to challenge a patent in court, and a relatively small amount of money to obtain a patent. Thus, it is financially advantageous to file BS patents, and equally advantageous to settle with those companies who wield them.
I'm glad to see another site reporting on the issue, but I fail to see how this has changed since 1989.
Frisbees. Rambo III. Soul Train. The Twist. Landscape Seating. Horse Shoes. Phrenology. Axe Throwing. Radio Ventriloquism. Cowboys 'n Indians. Baseball. Hula Hoops.
BTW, was the original poster trying to be funny when he claimed that NASCAR racing, professional wrestling, country music, and reality shows were the three greatest contributors to the plummeting American IQ? He should add the level of mathematics in public schools to that list, and bring it up to a round seven.
People can write games for Linux on their own. Many do. People can self-publish in the shareware realm. Many do. LPG is risking money, but without actual guarenteed publishing and committed amounts, that money is somewhat insignificant compared to the value of the time lost by the developers. If the game is a financial flop, the developers can't even take solstice in those that would download and play the game for free.
The developers are risking a huge time investment. The publishers, a small to moderate financial investment. If your time isn't worth any money, then yes, the publishers are taking the bigger risk. But if the programmers want to become professional developers and sell their time, they need to value it.
And apparently the 8 programmers do not get 70% of the income. The development team gets 70% of the income. Chances are, the development team will have to lure at least 8 good artists and musicians onto the team with a sizable portion of that 70%. Unlike in programming, there is no open-source art, so likely those artists will command up to 45% of that money... leaving the programmers to split 25%. Assuming the programmers put in 20 hours per week for a year and get to an actual professional level of polish, that they would command an entry-level salry in the programming industry, and a 15 dollar wholesale price, they would have to move nearly ninety-thousand units to break even.
The free speech, free software community isn't that hard to understand. When a company changes your work into their profits, it exists the realm of philanthropic software and into the workday realm. Many of the people here have hired lawyers to pour over our workday contracts looking for the exact sorts of holes and outs that LGP has put in place for themselves. We're used to routinely being abused by these systems. People may be willing to work for free to contribute to the development of a free piece of software, but a large part of that payout is that a large number of people will be using it. Would you work for free so that someone else could make money restricting access to your work?
Work with publishers for a few years, then come back and tell me what you think is wrong with this deal.
We understand that you may have good intentions, and if you actually did guarentee publishing this would be a great deal.
But you don't.
At the bottom of your announcement, LGP commits to publishing the game but reserves the right to not do so if we feel that publishing will harm our company.. In essence, you do not guarantee publishing. You are guarenteeing that you have the option to publish, but that you have a convienient out if you choose not to do so. This is the most commonly abused clause in book publishing today, with many authors works tied up in legal tape surrounding the issues of optional publishing.
*Actually* guarantee publishing, and make some guarenteed publishing commitments (x amount or more marketing, x amount of stores, x amount for box art...), and you have a good deal. But remember, you're a publisher now. Nobody will give you the benefit of the doubt on anything because your fellow publishers employ more lawyers than developers. It's a risk, but a significantly smaller one than you are asking the developers to take.
And for god's sake, get a team of free artists and free level designers in on the thing before it is too late to have a complete game.
That reminds me of the lego ramming wars we had as a child. Alternative materials, hidden mass increasers, design documents, energy dispersion patterns...
It really is a shame that war makes the best engineers. Eventually our study was cut short by an overzealous parent, but in those short few weeks we learned lessons about physics that we would keep for the rest of our lives.
I have been defrauded before. It was on Yahoo, and while they did handle it slowly, they returned my money. And that was before resorting to contesting the charges through my credit card company. Ebay should handle things similarly, as they now control both the initiation of the exchange and the medium of exchange (paypal, billpay). And if worst comes to worst, you can contest the paypal charge to your credit card company, who have been on the consumer's side on this issue.
On the one hand, I do see that the fraudulent person should be revealed under the right circumstances. On the other hand, the process of obtaining a warrant or other confirmation data is the process of determining if you are in the right circumstances or not. For example, another poster pointed out how easy it would be to defraud this system into revealing personal information to non-police personnel. A used record company might be able to decipher a competitor's next business moves by illegally obtaining their e-bay browsing habits. Or a political incumbent might get "dirt" on an opponent by requesting their viewing habits. Warrants are there to prevent such abuses... if police and those claiming to be police never abused the system, there would be no need for warrants at all.
To obtain a warrant, you go before a judge and ask her if the search is reasonable. That's not a tremendous hoop to jump through to resolve a complaint.
This reminds me of a longstanding FDA position that the labeling of GMO Free food is misleading if it implies that said food is superior to other foods that are genetically modified. This is not just an idle position, the FDA has actedseveraltimes to stop the voluntary labeling of non GMO foods.
I can see the RIAA and the MPAA taking a similar position. I know the FCC's mandate is less restrictive than the FDA's, but the argument could seem compelling in the face of millions of dollars of campaign contributions. Law-abiding citizens should have no reason to violate their shrinkwrap agreements, and the copy control mechanisms are only there to enforce those licences. It would mislead the law-abiding public, the argument would go, to mandate the labeling of protected content because good, modern copy controls are invisible to the end user and in no way degrade the experience. Besides, they would continue, nearly all content is GMO^H^H^H copy controlled one way or another, therefore fears of copy control schemes are unfounded.
Not that I agree with the above arguments, but I can definitely see a certain Harvard professor having those debates with a group of bloodsucking lawyers from LA.
Sir Bedevere: Tell me. What do you do with spammers? Peasant 1: quarter them! Sir Bedevere: And what do you quarter, apart from spammers? Peasant 1: More spammers! Peasant 2: Videogames! Sir Bedevere: Correct. Now, why do spammers quarter? Peasant 3:...because they're... Videogames? Sir Bedevere: Good. So how do you tell whether he is a Videogame? Peasant 1: Dominate Japan with him! Sir Bedevere: But don't we also dominate Japan with excessively cute rodentia iconography? Peasant 1: Oh yeah. Sir Bedevere: Now, do videogames withstand a slashdotting? Peasant 1: No, no... Throw him to the Trolls! Sir Bedevere: No, no. What else does not withstand a slashdotting? Peasant 1: Apples! Peasant 2: IIS! Peasant 3: Very small rocks! Peasant 2: Debian! KDE Mirrors for minor upgrades! Peasant 1: Mindstorms Segway Scooters! Peasant 2: Beers cooled by Jet Engine exhaust! Peasant 3: Matrix Movies! Peasant 2: The RIAA! Peasant 3: Churches! Churches!
All Peasants: Ooooooooo.... Sir Bedevere: Exactly! So logically... Peasant 1: If... he... computes as fast as... an Atari 800... he's a videogame. Sir Bedevere: And therefore? Peasant 1:... A spammer! Peasant 2: A Spammer! crowd: A Spammer! A Spammer!
Bedevere: Who are you who are so wise in the ways of mob logic? King Taco: I am CmdrTaco, King of the Geekins. Bedevere: My liege!
They're an online learning company... Very possibly "thinkcage," which appears to be getting revved up to launch in early 2002 "or sooner." Sarcasm aside, they do not appear to be in the process of buying hardware solutions, or choosing the platforms that their clients will be utilizing.
Is there a way to enable a speaking engine across browsers, so that anyone can listen as well as read? Sure, use Flash. But it will drive your costs through the roof.
Offer a flash-based reading course available and get them some reading proficiency first. Nobody should graduate without the ability to read enough to learn at a high-school level. High-school textbooks aren't exactly Heidegger, and your through-the-cracks targets will probably require simplified language usage anyway. In simple terms, you can't use big words anyway. You would be reading to them because they can't read at all, not because they can't understand the language. If they can't read at all, learning that Ronald Regan was the 50th president of the United States won't do them any good, as they won't have the capability to actualize on that knowledge.
Don't do it. Focus on the kids you *can* help. Improve your curriculum, and do extensive studies with students to find out their patterns / needs / successes / weaknesses. And yes, offer a reading course. But quite frankly if your students are graduating your course (and highschool) while remaining entirely or functionally illiterate, you might as well just sell diplomas.
I tend to think that the person who Asked Slashdot doesn't want to be in the business of selling diplomas. And judging by hir comments about hirs cirriculum director, I would think ze too would rather students become literate rather than graduate without useful knowledge. I hope hirs cirriculum director is reading these comments with a critical eye: while Ask Slashdots do tend to draw fewer solutions to goals than people critical of your goals, in this case such criticism is warranted. Nobody should get a High-School diploma without being able to read. Period. Focus your limited funding on those people you can help, and leave those you can't to the system that bred them. Or, as I mentioned, make an online literacy course available to those people willing to put in the effort.
The modern automobile is an unmitigated disaster, one that has buried the earth in asphalt and caused more wars and strife than assassinations ever did. However, corporate America's expectations are also an unmitigated disaster. We have become subjected to a daily hypemachine stuck on some sort of feedback loop that drowns out real conversation. Kamen contributed to that hype immensely with the Segway, which when viewed by a real human is just a scooter. It's a scooter with a few neat tricks, but it's a scooter. "IT" flooded the news when it was leaked, "IT" flooded the news when it was released, and now "IT" is in the news because of the failure of "IT". The extensive newscoverage of the Segway is even reported as news.
Compared to other alternative forms of transportation, the Segway ranks pretty low. It involves no real user-power, so it isn't particularly healthy. It weighs 80 pounds, so it isn't particularly portable. It involves pretty extensive electronics, so it is impossible to work on. It requires user intervention, so you can't read a book. Compare that to Electric bikes, which have longer ranges, lower weight, can utilize user power, cost nearly one-tenth as much money, and can carry a sizable number of groceries. Or to the subway, which requires a high initial investment and understandable traffic loads, but which can carry hundreds of thousands of people to their destinations faster than automobiles, and free the user to do with their time what they wish. Or motorized scooters, which can travel faster than the segway for much longer distances at about the same cost. Really, the only thing the Segway has over current alternative transportation options is the ability to go backwards. The balancing mechanism at the core keeps the price too high to be a real alternative to anything, but remove that and the entire design is gone.
The Segway's obvious limitations as transportation are not why people are venomous about it, but people are venomous about hype that doesn't pan out. Look at the backlash against the commercial that hyped the second-to-last Joe Millionaire as if it were the last. Many people spent the last 5 years being taken in by hucksters who believed their own exaggerations, then exaggerated thoes until they believed their exaggerations^2, then exaggerated those... We've had people claim that a way to complain publically about websites would revolutionize human communication, a way of selling dogfood online would make all public shopping spaces obsolete, a system of releasing odors into the air on cue would necessitate the re-purchasing of all human interface displays, and a way of trading low-quality recordings online would revolutionize world law. Dean Kamen's IT falls squarely with the former three examples, as a hype machine that grew monstrously out of control. A market valuation of 650 million dollars? Two-hundred sixty times gross revenue? The yearly salry of 16,320 people? For an expensive electric bike company?
I don't think most people here are closing the case on this new technology. I think most people here are closing the case on another company that grossly overpromised, tremendously underdelivered, and stood there blankly wondering where their fortune was. If they can redesign the entire internal mechanism to run on inexpensive mechanical principles and low-cost electronics, can get the range AND SPEED up to 30 miles at roadway speeds, and can sell the thing at real stores rather than online, they still would need to readjust their expectations from inherited world domination to working eagerly to satisfy the customer's needs.
Kamen us all to flock to his new invention like so many lemmings just makes us feel cheap. He should be working his tail off if he wants our money. He contributed greatly to the health of many Americans, but if he wants to break into this new market he needs to drop the entitlement.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says, in effect, that in exchange for reduced audio quality, providing your own CD's, a lack of liner notes, you too can make record company executives happy.
If you really like music, you would never accept a lack of subsonic. You buy full albums of artists you like, and you Kazaa / live 365 to find new artists. If you don't really like music, you probably have never even heard of Kazaa. Maybe you will like this service, then.
In a world where costs have been cut dramatically, you can't go on charging the same. Tapes were a step above records acoustically, and CD's were a premium above tapes (despite being cheaper to manufacture). What do MP3's offer? They're cheap. Charge a premium for a lower quality? Nuts.
All you can eat 128k MP3's for 19.95 per month, with 180k MP3's available for 29.95, and lossless CD for 59.95. Why is supply, demand, and competition such a hard concept for record executives?
Did you mean: What percentage of responses to an Ask Slashdot question that can be solved by a proper Google qwerty mention something along the lines of "Use Google?"
Agreed. Your friends can record and redistribute your music, yet most would consider that rude. When you write a letter full of very, very juicy information in the format of an article and don't tell anyone not to forward it, you're asking for trouble. This is something she should be discussing with her friends, as anyone who values their privacy needs to talk about blogs and forwarding with their loved ones.
Perhaps the lesson isn't one of privacy, but the assumption of privacy. Laurie assumed that friends were on the "message from Laurie, don't f#$@ up my career" wavelength, when they were on the "that's incredible, I want other people to know this" wavelength (which is exactly what Laurie was feeling too, or else she wouldn't have sent the message).
If you need something to not be forwarded, make sure the people know that, and make sure they are trustworthy. Or don't send it.
Hmm... Good questions. Any lawyer know how much the Open Office team can sue the BSA for claiming, under penalty of perjury, they represent them?
Or, does the Open Office team have to sue the script that sent out this letter?
(I'm not opposed to people sending out thoughtful, intelligent cease-and-desist letters on a case by case basis. I'm opposed to blanketing legal threats like spam across the world, and taking up other company's time and money instead of doing your job as a lawyer properly. This letter obviously was never seen by a human being until such a time that it was recieved by the school, who like so many other institutions had to take a large chunk of time to investigate the claim. Only piles of money allows the BSA to do such a thing: no smaller company would ever be allowed to get away with flagrantly false legal threats.)
from here
.
From: dmca@idsa.com.no.junk.mail To:abuse@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Berne Convention - Demand for Immediate Take Down - Notice of
Infringing Activity - Reference#: 922932 Date: 14 February, 2003 5:23 PM
Interactive Digital Software Association 1211 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 USA Attention: Piracy Enforcement - DMCA Officer
Telephone: 202-223-2400 Fax: 202-223-2401 E-mail: dmca@idsa.com Friday, February 14, 2003
Dear abuse@xxxxxxxxxx,
I am an authorized representative of the Interactive Digital Software Association ("IDSA"), which represents the intellectual property interests of almost thirty companies that publish interactive games for video game consoles, personal computers, handheld devices and the Internet.
IDSA is providing this letter of notification to make xxxxxxxxxx aware of material available via its network or system that infringes the exclusive copyright and trademark rights of one or more IDSA members. This notice is addressed to you as an agent of xxxxxxxxxx for purposes of receiving notifications of claimed infringement. We hereby affirm that the IDSA is authorized to act on behalf of the IDSA members whose exclusive copyright rights we believe to be infringed as described herein.
Based on the information obtained by IDSA that is provided in this e-mail's attachments, IDSA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ infringes the rights of one or more IDSA members by offering for download one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game products protected by copyright, including, but not limited to: 007 Barbarian Donkey Kong Frogger Mario Pac Man Soldier Of Fortune
Through the Berne Convention and other international treaties covering intellectual property rights, we believe that our members' rights in such games are entitled to the full protection of the intellectual property laws of your country. The unauthorized copies of such game product[s] appearing on, or made available through, such site are listed and/or identified on such Internet site by their titles, variations thereof or depictions of associated artwork (any such game titles, copies, listings and/or other depictions of, or references to, any contents of such game product, are hereinafter referred to as "Infringing Material"). Based on the information at its disposal on 2/7/2003 6:49:39 PM GMT, IDSA believes that the statements herein accurately describe the infringing nature and status of the Infringing Material.
Accordingly, IDSA hereby requests xxxxxxxxxx to immediately remove or disable access to the Infringing Material at the URL address identified above.
Should you have questions, please contact the IDSA at the above listed mailing address or by replying to this email. Please also include the above noted Reference Number in the subject line of all email correspondence. We thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is appreciated.
Regards,
Robert L. Hunter, IV
Interactive Digital Software Association
Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers.
From: Martijn van der Heide
To: dmca@idsa.com.no.junk.mail
Subject: Your reference #922932
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 12:54:02 +0100 (CET)
Your reference: #922932
Dear Mr Hunter,
Thank you for your email dated 14th February 2003, 5:23PM CET. The World of Spectrum archive site at is a software preservation site, archiving software for the classic microcomputer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
We strive to gain permission for redistribution for all software in the archive from the original publisher, and if the publisher no longer exists, from the original author. We publish all such permits on our site, and where such permission has been rescinded by either the publisher and/or author, we comply and remove the affected titles from the archive. Our copyrights policy is available in a dedicated section of the site, the Copyrights section, at
To this end, we take all allegations that we are carrying software to which we do not have permission very seriously, however, the list of titles provided to us by yourselves is unfortunately somewhat vague, and we believe there may in fact be 'false positives', with titles in our archive of old software originally made during a period between 1982 to 1992 matching currently available software. An example is the title 'Soldiers of Fortune', for which we have explicit formal permission from the publisher Firebird Software Ltd (a label from British Telecom). If there is indeed clear and present proof that the titles you specifically list are present in our archive, we will be happy to remove those titles to endeavour to retain the goodwill we have in the industry and our position as being responsive to creators requests. To this end, could you please provide further information on the titles you have listed, such as publisher (or relevant IDSA member), release date, platform and so on, so that we can properly investigate and expedite this request.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Yours sincerely,
Martijn van der Heide
--
Martijn van der Heide
Owner of the official world archive for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum
The World of Spectrum, http://www.worldofspectrum.org/
-------------
Agreed
Publishers should sell archival CD's to collecters and (gasp) libraries. $500 for an archive of all 20 (or whatever) games your company made between 1980 and 1986, sold in a run of 100. Game company makes 50k (less 5k packaging and 10k distribution), ensures that the games are not lost for all time, makes a few collecters happy, and doesn't risk losing the revenue on a sequal to cheezy Amiga Pacman clone #3.
Well, yes and no.
On one hand, the patent covers the fundamental aspects of the algorithim as of three years ago.
On the other hand, this algorithim does not include updates since then, nor does it include the actual values of the variables, simply their names. Likewise, google is probably using an updated version of this algorithim in their page rank system, one which may resemble this one but which doesn't necessarily emulate it. Furthermore, this doesn't tell us anything that we didn't already know, at least at a fundamental level.
The exploits, such as putting up 1000 pages with lots of text and tags that point back to your page, are already known. They didn't exactly post any source code, so specific bugs are out of the question. The patent will not reveal buffer overflows.
"Open to public scrutiny" is a relative term... This patent opens google to as much public scrutiny as photos of the wing of the B2 bomber give away the secrets of the mechanisms inside.
So yes, it is open. And no, it doesn't actually tell you anything.
Sorry to be one more person to not answer your question directly (does anyone ever on ask slashdot?), but with the volitility of RAM and the cost of commodity hardware spread across 12 machines, it does seem a little bit unlikely to be the most cost-efficient solution.
If I am to understand you correctly, he needs about 24GB to store his files... but perhaps he doesn't need to access all 24GB at once?
If you want to see if it will make an improvement, why not setup a GB ethernet samba connection to one of those P2's setup for a ramdisk? Then you can decide if it is worth it to him, pricewise, to do such a major upgrade before going all out and spending several thousand dollars on equipment. (unfortunately, final latency will probably be about twice what you experience on the single setup, as you are adding a host controller) Perhaps you could eek out some performance gains by copying the files to a local ramdisk, then editing (silly, though, as it should be copied to ram anyway for editing), or using the remote RAM as a scratch disk, so as to maximize the available ram on the host board.
And, of course, there is the list of upgrades that might be more inexpensive, such as - Dual CPU's? More optimized VidCard? Turning off fontsmoothing?
Hardware may just not be fast enough yet. There must be other people here that remembers when running a Photoshop filter meant a coffee break.
Were you born stupid? The list of patches that Microsoft must have is HUGE. They have patches for Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. Thousands of pieces of hardware... tons of bug fixes, security patches, and hotfixes.
Hi troll.
My last windows update was 30 MB.
My windows registry lists 178 programs.
Assuming they never cached the database on the the client, and that it takes 50 bytes to describe each of the 2,000 patches for XP, it would take longer to load up the Windows update page in Internet Explorer than it would to download the list of patches.
On DSL it's trivial.
This strikes me as true: for years and years and years, researchers have been promising AI was just around the corner... And what do we have right now? Nothing!
Well, nothing is a very relative term. We now have AI capable of counting the number of cars on a given street given a photograph of a region, and can automatically follow people / vehicles / animals as they travel around and through objects. OCR is accurate enough to be implemented professionally, and voice recognition is up to 95%. None of these were possible 25 years ago, and not just because of a lack of hardware.
While full AI is still a while away, the first major stumbling block, pattern recognition, is well on its way to being solved.
The AI in Quake 3 is much better than the AI in Pong.
-C
What's to stop a shell script from reading your Pine addressbook and using 'mailx' to send e-mails out all over the place?
Because shell scripts don't execute automatically from pine?
Odd, I wasn't trying to troll.
.exe files? Only if it uses that privledge to attack the network, at which point it is a worm. When was the last time Symantic issued an alert about a floppy-borne virus? When was the last time a virus that didn't transfer itself over the network made it into the top ten?
Viruses did happen over floppies. It doesn't happen anymore, people don't pass viruses like that. Infected
I did forget to mention word macro viruses, which oddly do get passed around manually. Which means, of course, my list is hackneyed and out of date. But that doesn't mean the point is invalid: nearly every time Cnet refers to a "computer virus" outbreak, it's talking about an outlook virus. Nearly every major virus people get are outlook viruses.
I should also point out that I didn't mean to imply that Outlook is as bad as it used to be. It was designed badly, and has been mostly patched in post-production. However, that design should never have gotten to the production stage with such a flagrant security flaw.
I do not object to address books being accessible outside of protected programs, and in fact wish they were more transparent. I object to running scripts from e-mail, as they have no business being there. I strongly object to scripts running automatically from e-mail, and feel that is one of the least security-conscious decisions I have seen short of ftp passwords being passed in plaintext. Worse, actually, as Outlook was designed for the internet and ftp for direct computer to computer communication over a trusted channel.
But to point to these band-aids and workarounds and say "see, there is no problem anymore" is just sad. A new exploit comes out every week to get around those band-aids. Messenger is nearly as popular as outlook, yet has relatively few exploits because it was designed reasonably well.
use...something...better
[begin pseudo code]
vim outlook.vbs
main
int i = 0
do
outlook.send(outlook.addressbook[i++], "Here's that file, Bob", "I send you this file in order to have your advice", outlook.vbs)
while(outlook.addressbook[i]!= NULL )
[/pseudo code]
Any program that allows you to do this is BADLY designed. You may claim that your copy of outlook has never been compromised, but all of the viruses you have recieved have come from outlook. There is no such thing as computer viruses. There are computer worms, and outlook viruses.
"Oh look, those new explorer things have been flipping over during turns."
"Well, when we get our explorer we'll just have to turn slowly."
The "trick" is simple.
use...something...better
-C
The US patent system as it stands today is a system by which innovations are registered by the government with little or no background check. These innovation registrations are then challenged in court by those with competing interests. The problem with this system is that during the registration process it is assumed that the courts will check the validity of the patent, and during the court process it is assumed the patent office checked its validity. It takes a large deal of financial backing to challenge a patent in court, and a relatively small amount of money to obtain a patent. Thus, it is financially advantageous to file BS patents, and equally advantageous to settle with those companies who wield them.
I'm glad to see another site reporting on the issue, but I fail to see how this has changed since 1989.
take the space out of the link and it works fine.
Frisbees. Rambo III. Soul Train. The Twist. Landscape Seating. Horse Shoes. Phrenology. Axe Throwing. Radio Ventriloquism. Cowboys 'n Indians. Baseball. Hula Hoops.
BTW, was the original poster trying to be funny when he claimed that NASCAR racing, professional wrestling, country music, and reality shows were the three greatest contributors to the plummeting American IQ? He should add the level of mathematics in public schools to that list, and bring it up to a round seven.
then their DRM doesn't seem to be doing very well right now.
People can write games for Linux on their own. Many do. People can self-publish in the shareware realm. Many do. LPG is risking money, but without actual guarenteed publishing and committed amounts, that money is somewhat insignificant compared to the value of the time lost by the developers. If the game is a financial flop, the developers can't even take solstice in those that would download and play the game for free.
The developers are risking a huge time investment. The publishers, a small to moderate financial investment. If your time isn't worth any money, then yes, the publishers are taking the bigger risk. But if the programmers want to become professional developers and sell their time, they need to value it.
And apparently the 8 programmers do not get 70% of the income. The development team gets 70% of the income. Chances are, the development team will have to lure at least 8 good artists and musicians onto the team with a sizable portion of that 70%. Unlike in programming, there is no open-source art, so likely those artists will command up to 45% of that money... leaving the programmers to split 25%. Assuming the programmers put in 20 hours per week for a year and get to an actual professional level of polish, that they would command an entry-level salry in the programming industry, and a 15 dollar wholesale price, they would have to move nearly ninety-thousand units to break even.
The free speech, free software community isn't that hard to understand. When a company changes your work into their profits, it exists the realm of philanthropic software and into the workday realm. Many of the people here have hired lawyers to pour over our workday contracts looking for the exact sorts of holes and outs that LGP has put in place for themselves. We're used to routinely being abused by these systems. People may be willing to work for free to contribute to the development of a free piece of software, but a large part of that payout is that a large number of people will be using it. Would you work for free so that someone else could make money restricting access to your work?
Work with publishers for a few years, then come back and tell me what you think is wrong with this deal.
We understand that you may have good intentions, and if you actually did guarentee publishing this would be a great deal.
But you don't.
At the bottom of your announcement, LGP commits to publishing the game but reserves the right to not do so if we feel that publishing will harm our company.. In essence, you do not guarantee publishing. You are guarenteeing that you have the option to publish, but that you have a convienient out if you choose not to do so. This is the most commonly abused clause in book publishing today, with many authors works tied up in legal tape surrounding the issues of optional publishing.
*Actually* guarantee publishing, and make some guarenteed publishing commitments (x amount or more marketing, x amount of stores, x amount for box art...), and you have a good deal. But remember, you're a publisher now. Nobody will give you the benefit of the doubt on anything because your fellow publishers employ more lawyers than developers. It's a risk, but a significantly smaller one than you are asking the developers to take.
And for god's sake, get a team of free artists and free level designers in on the thing before it is too late to have a complete game.
That reminds me of the lego ramming wars we had as a child. Alternative materials, hidden mass increasers, design documents, energy dispersion patterns...
It really is a shame that war makes the best engineers. Eventually our study was cut short by an overzealous parent, but in those short few weeks we learned lessons about physics that we would keep for the rest of our lives.
Thanks for bringing up a few good memories...
I have been defrauded before. It was on Yahoo, and while they did handle it slowly, they returned my money. And that was before resorting to contesting the charges through my credit card company. Ebay should handle things similarly, as they now control both the initiation of the exchange and the medium of exchange (paypal, billpay). And if worst comes to worst, you can contest the paypal charge to your credit card company, who have been on the consumer's side on this issue.
On the one hand, I do see that the fraudulent person should be revealed under the right circumstances. On the other hand, the process of obtaining a warrant or other confirmation data is the process of determining if you are in the right circumstances or not. For example, another poster pointed out how easy it would be to defraud this system into revealing personal information to non-police personnel. A used record company might be able to decipher a competitor's next business moves by illegally obtaining their e-bay browsing habits. Or a political incumbent might get "dirt" on an opponent by requesting their viewing habits. Warrants are there to prevent such abuses... if police and those claiming to be police never abused the system, there would be no need for warrants at all.
To obtain a warrant, you go before a judge and ask her if the search is reasonable. That's not a tremendous hoop to jump through to resolve a complaint.
This reminds me of a longstanding FDA position that the labeling of GMO Free food is misleading if it implies that said food is superior to other foods that are genetically modified. This is not just an idle position, the FDA has acted several times to stop the voluntary labeling of non GMO foods.
I can see the RIAA and the MPAA taking a similar position. I know the FCC's mandate is less restrictive than the FDA's, but the argument could seem compelling in the face of millions of dollars of campaign contributions. Law-abiding citizens should have no reason to violate their shrinkwrap agreements, and the copy control mechanisms are only there to enforce those licences. It would mislead the law-abiding public, the argument would go, to mandate the labeling of protected content because good, modern copy controls are invisible to the end user and in no way degrade the experience. Besides, they would continue, nearly all content is GMO^H^H^H copy controlled one way or another, therefore fears of copy control schemes are unfounded.
Not that I agree with the above arguments, but I can definitely see a certain Harvard professor having those debates with a group of bloodsucking lawyers from LA.
Sir Bedevere: Tell me. What do you do with spammers? ...because they're... Videogames?
... A spammer!
Peasant 1: quarter them!
Sir Bedevere: And what do you quarter, apart from spammers?
Peasant 1: More spammers!
Peasant 2: Videogames!
Sir Bedevere: Correct. Now, why do spammers quarter?
Peasant 3:
Sir Bedevere: Good. So how do you tell whether he is a Videogame?
Peasant 1: Dominate Japan with him!
Sir Bedevere: But don't we also dominate Japan with excessively cute rodentia iconography?
Peasant 1: Oh yeah.
Sir Bedevere: Now, do videogames withstand a slashdotting?
Peasant 1: No, no... Throw him to the Trolls!
Sir Bedevere: No, no. What else does not withstand a slashdotting?
Peasant 1: Apples!
Peasant 2: IIS!
Peasant 3: Very small rocks!
Peasant 2: Debian! KDE Mirrors for minor upgrades!
Peasant 1: Mindstorms Segway Scooters!
Peasant 2: Beers cooled by Jet Engine exhaust!
Peasant 3: Matrix Movies!
Peasant 2: The RIAA!
Peasant 3: Churches! Churches!
King Taco: Atari 800s!
All Peasants: Ooooooooo....
Sir Bedevere: Exactly! So logically...
Peasant 1: If... he... computes as fast as... an Atari 800... he's a videogame.
Sir Bedevere: And therefore?
Peasant 1:
Peasant 2: A Spammer!
crowd: A Spammer! A Spammer!
Bedevere: Who are you who are so wise in the ways of mob logic?
King Taco: I am CmdrTaco, King of the Geekins.
Bedevere: My liege!
They're an online learning company... Very possibly "thinkcage," which appears to be getting revved up to launch in early 2002 "or sooner." Sarcasm aside, they do not appear to be in the process of buying hardware solutions, or choosing the platforms that their clients will be utilizing.
Is there a way to enable a speaking engine across browsers, so that anyone can listen as well as read? Sure, use Flash. But it will drive your costs through the roof.
Offer a flash-based reading course available and get them some reading proficiency first. Nobody should graduate without the ability to read enough to learn at a high-school level. High-school textbooks aren't exactly Heidegger, and your through-the-cracks targets will probably require simplified language usage anyway. In simple terms, you can't use big words anyway. You would be reading to them because they can't read at all, not because they can't understand the language. If they can't read at all, learning that Ronald Regan was the 50th president of the United States won't do them any good, as they won't have the capability to actualize on that knowledge.
Don't do it. Focus on the kids you *can* help. Improve your curriculum, and do extensive studies with students to find out their patterns / needs / successes / weaknesses. And yes, offer a reading course. But quite frankly if your students are graduating your course (and highschool) while remaining entirely or functionally illiterate, you might as well just sell diplomas.
I tend to think that the person who Asked Slashdot doesn't want to be in the business of selling diplomas. And judging by hir comments about hirs cirriculum director, I would think ze too would rather students become literate rather than graduate without useful knowledge. I hope hirs cirriculum director is reading these comments with a critical eye: while Ask Slashdots do tend to draw fewer solutions to goals than people critical of your goals, in this case such criticism is warranted. Nobody should get a High-School diploma without being able to read. Period. Focus your limited funding on those people you can help, and leave those you can't to the system that bred them. Or, as I mentioned, make an online literacy course available to those people willing to put in the effort.
The modern automobile is an unmitigated disaster, one that has buried the earth in asphalt and caused more wars and strife than assassinations ever did. However, corporate America's expectations are also an unmitigated disaster. We have become subjected to a daily hypemachine stuck on some sort of feedback loop that drowns out real conversation. Kamen contributed to that hype immensely with the Segway, which when viewed by a real human is just a scooter. It's a scooter with a few neat tricks, but it's a scooter. "IT" flooded the news when it was leaked, "IT" flooded the news when it was released, and now "IT" is in the news because of the failure of "IT". The extensive newscoverage of the Segway is even reported as news.
Compared to other alternative forms of transportation, the Segway ranks pretty low. It involves no real user-power, so it isn't particularly healthy. It weighs 80 pounds, so it isn't particularly portable. It involves pretty extensive electronics, so it is impossible to work on. It requires user intervention, so you can't read a book. Compare that to Electric bikes, which have longer ranges, lower weight, can utilize user power, cost nearly one-tenth as much money, and can carry a sizable number of groceries. Or to the subway, which requires a high initial investment and understandable traffic loads, but which can carry hundreds of thousands of people to their destinations faster than automobiles, and free the user to do with their time what they wish. Or motorized scooters, which can travel faster than the segway for much longer distances at about the same cost. Really, the only thing the Segway has over current alternative transportation options is the ability to go backwards. The balancing mechanism at the core keeps the price too high to be a real alternative to anything, but remove that and the entire design is gone.
The Segway's obvious limitations as transportation are not why people are venomous about it, but people are venomous about hype that doesn't pan out. Look at the backlash against the commercial that hyped the second-to-last Joe Millionaire as if it were the last. Many people spent the last 5 years being taken in by hucksters who believed their own exaggerations, then exaggerated thoes until they believed their exaggerations^2, then exaggerated those... We've had people claim that a way to complain publically about websites would revolutionize human communication, a way of selling dogfood online would make all public shopping spaces obsolete, a system of releasing odors into the air on cue would necessitate the re-purchasing of all human interface displays, and a way of trading low-quality recordings online would revolutionize world law. Dean Kamen's IT falls squarely with the former three examples, as a hype machine that grew monstrously out of control. A market valuation of 650 million dollars? Two-hundred sixty times gross revenue? The yearly salry of 16,320 people? For an expensive electric bike company?
I don't think most people here are closing the case on this new technology. I think most people here are closing the case on another company that grossly overpromised, tremendously underdelivered, and stood there blankly wondering where their fortune was. If they can redesign the entire internal mechanism to run on inexpensive mechanical principles and low-cost electronics, can get the range AND SPEED up to 30 miles at roadway speeds, and can sell the thing at real stores rather than online, they still would need to readjust their expectations from inherited world domination to working eagerly to satisfy the customer's needs.
Kamen us all to flock to his new invention like so many lemmings just makes us feel cheap. He should be working his tail off if he wants our money. He contributed greatly to the health of many Americans, but if he wants to break into this new market he needs to drop the entitlement.