I just recieved mail from netforward, letting me know that if I didn't pay for another year of forwarding, they would end my account. I find this funny because A: netforward promised to cut me off two years ago when they started charging for the service and B: they send the mail through a very old iname account which had long ago promised to do exactly the same thing.
I've once heard an ISP executive say that it doesn't make sense to cut off your customers for not paying their bills. Does anyone know if Yahoo plans on enforcing this particular
As an avid pobox user, I can say their service has been great. They are a pure forwarding service, with no adds / hassles, and a filter like most people would setup on their own domain. They also have interesting but useless stats / graphs on volume of mail and volume of spam over time.
Having used many forwarding services over the past four years (friendly mail, mail.com, earthling.net, deathsdoor.com, yahoo, london.com, etc), I can confidently say that pobox's ping times, response times, and overall professionalism have been the best.
Many of the posters here seem to want a device that can do more than just sing and dance. cnet has a piece on the debate, balancing the SDR-4X vs the Asimo. The Asimo, btw, is 150,000 per unit per year (per the article). That's a lot more than leasing three cars. I presume we need robotic housekeepers because, while they are far more expensive than a living, breathing housekeeper, they don't think and we don't have to feel ackward around them. Neither reason explains why we need a robot that sings and dances.
I wonder if this is what being a god is like. Does she laugh at the pointlessness of it all too? Will Sony make an SDR-5X that makes little robots out of Mindstorms?
60k words aren't that many for a robot living in Japan. 60k words are about as much vocabulary as you would need to say "I want to get some ice cream" in japanese, though saying "very much hello person who is above me in the social stature and introduced by a lower co-worker" takes about two.
When these things can read Kanji, then I'll be impressed.
Can we please get over the prejudice that games and gaming hardware are not an actual product? If that's so, then what are we to attribute the rise of the PC to? Microsoft word? Is your laptop therefore not an actual product?
(BTW, if you read a previous post WRT Western Digital, both WD and Nvida had PLAYABLE X-boxes at their booths. This wasn't because the rule is inflexible, it is because someone complained.)
Please don't allow me to assist in the well-documented transition of Slashdot from a technical site to a political forum, but I can't resist in this situation.
Sony broke the rules. Sony let gamers play the games on the systems they sell during a trade show. Sony gets kicked out of the game. Microsoft broke the rules. Microsoft was found guilty of illegal bundling, hiding api's, and setting monopolistic terms to computer vendors in 94, 99, and 2001. Microsoft gets kicked out of the game.
Sounds fair.
Yes, Sony is a huge corporation that has attempted to leverage its presence (though not dominance) in consumer electronics to sell standards like the memory stick and DVD's. Yes, Sony is known to try and muscle competitors. However, something is inherintly wrong when a competitor can have you kicked out of a trade show because you let people have fun with your toys. I would think the director of the convention would have the power to make an exception on the grounds that the rule is unnecessary in this situation, and give Sony the year to plan a show without user interaction. Furthermore, it is in the show organizer's best financial interest if the customers participating in the show have a good time, and the only thing at a convention more enjoyable than free gaming is free gaming schwag.
The only group who benefits from this action is Microsoft (who, of course, lied about it afterwards to introduce doubt). The only reason Microsoft would act in this way is if they didn't want to compete. Is this sounding familiar?
Up until this point the X-box was starting to sound tempting so long as they could correct durability issues. With this action, Microsoft has reaffirmed once again why it is our moral imperitive to not give money to assholes... they just become more powerful assholes across more markets.
instead of enriching those who use the world for support.
I am no longer running Mandrake on any of my computers, but it was the best distro I've come across (only missing apt-get). The installer eased me into the world of linux, diskdrake is lightyears ahead of fdisk, and the command center is sorely missed in other distros. I never would have been able to learn linux without their help. An encrypted filesystem might be enough to convince me to upgrade to a supported video card and give Mandrake a fourth (lifetime... the other three have been given away) computer.
Mandrake, and community software, are like public television... They do philanthropic deeds for many people, but philanthropy is never profitable. They need money? I own a box set, and I haven't had an income in 5 months, but Mandrake is worth it to me. Count my Donation.
Blank videocasette tapes in the US are sold with a portion of sales going to the MPAA for lost revenue due to piracy. This does not mean that pirating videos is legal. This means that stopping the casual piracy of videos is unenforceable, and as such consumers are free to illegaly copy videos, and the companies involved have been justly compensated.
The sad thing about all of this is that most of the independent labels with bands worth pirating wouldn't see a dime from this outrageously high tax, and I severely doubt that, say, Qbert, DJ Seishi, or Courtney Love will get their fair share. Do artists ever get a cut from the RIAA?
All that this means is that audio piracy is now a unstoppable institution, and "creators" are being paid by it. It may not be legal, but now it is moral.
That having been said, your non-compete clause may not be binding everywhere. In California, for example, non-compete clauses are considered an impediment to fair trade in the technology industry and are therefore not binding. This may be true in your industry. It wouldn't take much to convince a judge that news photography doesn't involve the risk of dissemenation of industry secrets and that there isn't something else you can reasonably do.
If it becomes a problem, speak to a lawyer familiar with laws in different states. You may have to move to get out of your non-compete, but it is better than not working just to please the F***ing man.
(This is from a technology law course taken last year at the University of California, Irvine. It is not intended to plot a course of action but to give you a direction for your discussions with a certified lawyer.)
This comes up every now and then, and it is amazing that more people really don't know what happened.
This feud started with The Secret of Mana . Square, Nintendo, and Sony were teaming up to release the Secret of Mana as the killer app for the SNES CD. Sony then decided that they wanted to also release their own "playstation," which would play SNES CD's, and their own proprietary format. History can be found here. The contract did not forbid this, but forbid Nintendo from breaking out of the agreement. So, Nintendo started working with Phillips on another CD rom (compatible with the also doomed CDI), and announced that it would be the dominant CD format for the SNES. (See SCEE's Official Version. Also visible on www.scee.com, if you have IE and a patience with slow scrolling scripting. More history here.)
The history of that feud is probably only truly understood by lawyers, but it is clear that Square took a major hit in terms of profit when Nintendo abandoned the platform that Square had just geared up to and had developed their largest game to date for. I don't know who bore the brunt of costs for translating SOM to the SNES, but I'm sure it wasn't a happy meeting.
Let's also not forget that Nintendo decided not to release FF2 in the US thinking that it would be unprofitable, and made this decision after A: it had been translated and B: they had run an 8-page spread in Nintendo Power (check your backissues folks! There was a contest and everything.).
From there, Square naturally decided to follow the evolution of the SNES CD the Playstation, and break ties with the company that they had established an intimate relationship with. Ugliness followed.
That ugliness can be found elsewhere, I'm not here to tell you how it ends. I'm only here to show you the beginning.
Not every platform Square has developed for has become the dominant. Square did develop for the Wonderswan and Wonderswan Color in Japan. While it did reach a 30% marketshare, it still didn't compare to the GB's (who had basically the rest). This of course, happened after Square severed the relationship with Nintendo.
Let's not all claim ignorance and say that we don't realize that millions of songs are available at any given second thanks to technology, and let's not pretend that this isn't the sort of nirvana that music lovers and humanists have always wanted. Greene made a mistake on the number of days, and made a common mistake of equating the Internet (the network backbone) with the Web (a comparitively well-policed HTML protocol). Those aren't all that important.
More revealing than anything is that in hiring children to break this law he showed just how little he thinks of pirating himself. Therein lies the dillema. Do you think these kids deleted the songs from their hard drives? Is it that horrible? It isn't bad for me to do it, it isn't bad for you to do it. But if everyone does it, then nobody gets any more music (arguable). In the USA, that argument has hardly convinced half of the population to get up and vote, and voting is free.
While it would be an interesting twist, I don't wish jail upon Greene. I reserve that for Rosen. Sadly, though, they are both too rich to go to jail for something as trivial as this. Then again, if they really had the guts to set an example...
Actually, Cartridges have no problem with magnets. They are read-only and cannot be written to. They can also be frozen, thrown off of the roof, and dipped into a rather dirty pool. They like cats. The only thing they don't like is having their contacts worn down, which is apparently what caused all of the old NES problems.
I can understand your worries about CD's... I lost a copy of Silpheed to a mechanical pencil and a glob of mayo. However, the Playstation shipped with what Sony branded as 10 X oversampling... which is a fancy way of saying that the pits were really deep. While, say, a burned copy of Silent Hill has to be constantly coddled to work with the slightest surface blemish, we've taken pocketknives to copies of Parappa and they still ran just fine (ymmv). While an MO disk with a protective caddy is hardly any safer than a DVD in a caddy, it would be a heck of a lot more expensive, and bulkier.
If you are worried about your games, keep a modded playstation around and upload your collection to one of the 100 gig drives out there, or back them up to tape. That way, you can re-burn them any time you want to play again. And by the way, Nintendo had a fleeting affair with a MO drive in Japan (the DD or "Bulky Drive"). Yamauchi said they learned a lot from that encounter, and that they would never do that again.
If the courts find that the U.S. can hold foreign companies to US copyright law because they transact over the net, the ramifications go much father than just businesses. This means that China (under US interpretation of law) can hold the Founder of FaLun Gong guilty of breaking their intellectual property laws. The average person won't be able to buy controversial items (such as satanic verses, hitler's smoking jacket, DVD's of any kind) because of the expense involved in maintaining dozens of country / locality / product type blacklists as well as location verification. In short (and probably in redundant) this will dumb down the net to the LCD. Basic Yahoo vs. France stuff.
Of course, it would be a shame if this were the case to set a prescedent, as many articles have pointed out that Elcomsoft ran a server out of Chicago, communicated with US customers in english, and was quite aware of the law. Yes, this is why their approach is so novel: they are arguing that the infrastructure of the net on the US soil is not under US law. Novelty is no substitute for intellectual prowess. They really haven't a snowball's chance with that line of legal reasoning any more than an indian tribe who asserts sovereginity and tries to grow hemp. It's that specific that makes it so sad that this case will be applied overly broadly to anything American corporations don't like. We own our net, so QED we own yours.
I used to get about 20 spams a day at my old address. I would also travel for weeks at a time. 20 deletes per day may not seem like much, but coming home after two weeks to 280 pieces of spam and one important message *somewhere* inside of it all is a real pain. If your ISP is incapable of the simple acts of configuring their servers to only transport mail for authorized people, and TOSing those people who do spam, then you need to find a better ISP. This is not just about the right to choose, but balancing that with the responsibility to choose wisely.
The purpose of non-lethal weapons is to stop someone from doing something when what they are doing is not threatening someone's life, only their property or rules. Police can, will, and are encouraged (by me) to kill anyone attempting to kill anyone else. They are not going to use slippery slime in a hostage situation.
Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. This is about the power to suppress. It would be very important for the police to have the power to suppress crowds during a soccer riot. It is less useful when they wield it to protect the WTO's oppression. It is downright wrong to use it to prevent participation in national election conventions. The tool is agnostic, the people are not.
Unfortunately, history has shown that people hardly ever protest unnecessarily, and those that should get gassed usually aren't the ones that do. (when was the last time you heard of a KKK demonstration getting the mustard?). The police are looking for tools that they can use besides the threat of death. While rubber bullets may occasionally kill people, their general "safety" record is an encouragement to turn them on crowds. This looks to be another tool that may occasionally lead to fractured skulls and death, but the not-directly-lethal nature (and the inevitable corporate hype) will seduce many in law enforcement to turn to this when property / rules are challenged.
They have been turning the firehoses on protesters since the civil rights movement. Somehow this seems nicer.
If you really want to know how much "choice" you have in the marketplace, look for foods / supplies in the supermarket that involve patents. You can usually trace which brands are identical products by the same company if you follow which patents are on the products you buy. Detergent, for example, is a marketplace rife with colors and boxes, but trace the patents and everything is being made by Dow and one other company.
It's a lot of legwork, I know, but it is something that you can do in your own life.
"Hmm. It looks like a beautiful morning. I'd like to share it. Let's just walk to my friend's house and and..."
"BEAUTIFUL WOMEN WANT TO MEET YOU!!!"
   "ARE YOU POOR, BROKE, DEEPLY IN DEBT!?!"
 "INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES AWAIT YOU!"
"...or maybe I'll just stay inside again today, so that I can listen to some Garcia and call them instead..."
     "WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A PREVIEW OF OUR LONG-DISTANCE SERVICES?!"
    "PLEASE DON'T HANG UP, THIS IS NOT A TELEMARKETING MESSAGE!!"
  "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE COST OF HEALTH CARE FOR THE UNINSURED?!"
"...or not. And I think my member is a perfectly adequate size, thank you very much. Oh well, at least I can just IM them."
    "DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS!?!"
"I BECAME A MILLIONAIRE AND SO CAN YOU!"
 "YOU CAN BE PART OF THE ACTION AND WIN AT LORDOFTHERINGS.COM TODAY!!"
   "I SEND YOU THIS IM IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR ADVICE."
"ARE YOU HAPPY WITH YOUR RELATIONSHIP?!"
        "SPEND EVERY YEAR IN THE BAHAMAS WITH THIS AMAZING NEW PROGRAM!"
   "HOT YOUNG TEENS WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU!"
"HERE IS THE INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED!!"
 
"...maybe I'll just..."
  "rssn wmn hre cll nw"
"damn, forgot to turn off sms. Maybe I'll just complain on slashdot."
 "YOU HAVE JUST 2 MORE CHANCES TO WIN $10,000 BY MODERATING THIS COMMENT UP TO 5 - INSIGHTFUL."
In other ways, however, the server is still up and running. It's just running it's little tail off and dropping papers here and there. It is struggling, but it has so far survived where many processes before it have been kill -7ed.
I'm amazed at how much venom has spewed forth from this crowd over this little company. For those of you who seem to not get this idea
***THE POINT***
"My office runs outlook and IE, and I need to keep my palm in synch. But I've heard good things about that Linux operating system."
"Children need to explore the world of computing. While they've convinced me to switch from AOL to Earthlink, I don't think I could live without my copy of outlook."
"We've spent hundreds of dollars on software already, so while I hate Microsoft I guess I'm stuck using them."
They're NOT trying to get you to switch to Windows (though I wouldn't mind getting Dreamweaver to work. [ducks]). They're not here to fake screenshots. They're not trying to destroy all that makes Open Source good by commingling it with Windows. They're opening a migration path. If you have one app that you desperately need that only runs under windows, but you prefer or want to experiment with another operating system, you can. Connectix has been doing it for years with the Virtual PC for the Macintosh, and this is basically just a more integrated version of that (and one where Microsoft doesn't recieve unnecessary royalties). This is not going to take over the world, destroy linux or windows, but fill a necessary niche.
It should be a validation of the power of linux that the letter (so far) survived/.ing. Even the images are still up. Why do people still think they need IIS?
(of course, they *should* be running IIS under Lindows...)
In some ways, it is interesting how the courts have realized that video games are a form of expression and as such require protection. This is easily paralled with the perception in the 30's that movies were just a way that children wasted time. This perception was had, of course, by the generation of people who grew up without movies. Now we have a generation of people who have never really experienced gaming, a generation of people of whom some have and some haven't, and a generation of people whose paradigms of life will revolve around it.
The following statement cuts quite deep, and should be written into the big book of good things that came out of the 7th circuit.
"attempting to shield children from exposure to violent images would be 'not only quixotic, but deforming.'"
It is estimated that US bombing in Afghanastan has killed 68 people per day (directly, not counting starvation / injury / illness / etc). The 7th Circuit has said that, basically, exposure to the uglyness of violence is a necessary part of becoming a complete human being. And as that exposure can come through the form of a harmless game, then gaming is therefore an expressive medium. Quite frankly, after having just completed MGS2, I can't think of a better medium to express the horrors of war (though Francis Ford Coppola comes very close). We're talking context here, of course. GTA hasn't done a good job showing the high points of what is possible in the medium any more than Lady Chatterly did for literature.
Of course I would support opposition to the sex portion too: I agree that it should be considered worse by this society to show someone's guts nonconsentually being sprayed out across a table (arguably the worst thing to happen in their life) than to take off their pants and pleasure them (arguably one of the better things). But I can understand why they wouldn't bother to oppose the sexuality portion when nobody has yet found a good way to use the new medium to express intimacy. I can't think of a single game this provision would apply to. AMOA is doing very badly these days (financially), and I can understand why they would choose their battles carefully. I'm just sad that I didn't see the ACLU on their side.
"These artists chose to enter into an agreement that stated they gave up the right to market their work. That's the way business works - sometimes you make a good deal, sometimes you don't."
Interesting how labels almost always wind up with the good deal, and some of the crem de la crem of successful artists (TLC, BBKing, Toni Braxton...) file for bankrupcy. Business works because sometimes you get good deals, sometimes you don't. When an entire class of people never get a good deal from people who are making truly disgusting amounts of money, things move from the realm of business to the realm of exploitation. They did sign a contract (whose only other option was to go back to Mc Donalds and never be heard), but contract law in this country (usa) has always been based around the balance of the technicalities of the agreement and its spirit. Calling it "very simple" is a gross misuse of that term.
I know that is a separate issue from piracy. That's like saying in 1930 that I won't buy German cars because of their politics. That's not exactly a fair analogy: Other countries made cars back then. But when the money trail goes 95% assholes, 5% artists, it becomes quite tempting to enact the only power we have (veto) and shout "Fuck it! Nobody gets paid!" This is of course a strategy successfully utilized by strikers and boycotters around the world, with the major difference that most strikers / boycotters are a little clearer about their reasonings than most of the morpheous crowd.
Napster took distributers, labels, paid radio play (and all of it is paid these days), coca-cola tie-ins, and all of the rest of the uglyness out of something that is a low-level expression of humanity and culture. Unfortunately, it also didn't pay the artists.
Yes, Napster2 should use MP3's. These wrapper formats are basically a form of house arrest for music, whereas one of the largest benifits of digital music is the awesome portables. Yes, distributers and those who accept financial risk (which is the primary function of labels) should recieve their fare share. And yes, the idea of paying 20$ a month for the general shoddyness we've come to expect from Napster connections seems rather foolish. A portion of that 20 should definitely go to some servers and some bandwidth. None of this is really up for debate.
Speaking of money, How much have mainstream CD's crept up to? Let me go see... The latest N'Sync lists for 19 bucks. We bought a licenced, artist-paid 2 CD set of Bossa Nova & Samba in Argentina for 5 dollars. It lists here for 22.99. Compared to tapes and records, the distribution and manufacturing costs of CD's are nothing. Compared to CD's the distribution costs of MP3's are nothing. Shouldn't such reductions have some effect on the overall price of music? Shouldn't these effect the price paid to distributers?
The artificial control - based politics of the RIAA, which is what keeps music prices high, is going to be a factor in whether or not people accept these new services. Ask Dimitry. Ask Johansen. Ask Courtney Love. Ask the young artists struggling to get some radio play. Ask the consumers who are spending 4 hours worth of paycheck (after taxes) to buy (technically, "licence") 1 hour worth of music. The RIAA hasn't exactly killed 20 million Jews, but if it was in their business interests I wouldn't put it past them. Knowing that a large portion of the money I spend on CD's will go to a group dedicated to the strengthining of the DMCA and the destruction of basic freedoms in this country makes me feel like it's a moral imperitave to NOT pay for music. We're not living in Saudi Arabia yet (unless of course, you are), but we could very soon find ourselves living in Australia. Theft of rights is a form of theft too, and the kind that we have to be most vigilant about.
Music is one of the strongest forms of culture we have, and those who make money creating a scarcity (and qed a depravity) of culture should not be supported. Go to shows, go to concerts, buy a pack of beer for your favorite artist, dance, and be free. Spend money on music in ways that help artists and seem fair all around, and which don't destroy the cultural landscape. Support positive labels. The ugly, exploitive side can go screw: Napster taught us that we can always just help ourselves.
20$ a month = 140$ a year = 10$ to the RIAA = 10 minutes of some prick convincing Ashcroft that talking badly about encryption legislation is a form of terrorism. Now multiply this number by a million subscribers.
Slashdot Mirror
I just recieved mail from netforward, letting me know that if I didn't pay for another year of forwarding, they would end my account. I find this funny because A: netforward promised to cut me off two years ago when they started charging for the service and B: they send the mail through a very old iname account which had long ago promised to do exactly the same thing.
I've once heard an ISP executive say that it doesn't make sense to cut off your customers for not paying their bills. Does anyone know if Yahoo plans on enforcing this particular
As an avid pobox user, I can say their service has been great. They are a pure forwarding service, with no adds / hassles, and a filter like most people would setup on their own domain. They also have interesting but useless stats / graphs on volume of mail and volume of spam over time.
Having used many forwarding services over the past four years (friendly mail, mail.com, earthling.net, deathsdoor.com, yahoo, london.com, etc), I can confidently say that pobox's ping times, response times, and overall professionalism have been the best.
Good work, and support the indies.
I wonder if this is what being a god is like. Does she laugh at the pointlessness of it all too? Will Sony make an SDR-5X that makes little robots out of Mindstorms?
60k words aren't that many for a robot living in Japan. 60k words are about as much vocabulary as you would need to say "I want to get some ice cream" in japanese, though saying "very much hello person who is above me in the social stature and introduced by a lower co-worker" takes about two.
When these things can read Kanji, then I'll be impressed.
Gaming = 20 billion dollar industry.
Can we please get over the prejudice that games and gaming hardware are not an actual product? If that's so, then what are we to attribute the rise of the PC to? Microsoft word? Is your laptop therefore not an actual product?
(BTW, if you read a previous post WRT Western Digital, both WD and Nvida had PLAYABLE X-boxes at their booths. This wasn't because the rule is inflexible, it is because someone complained.)
Please don't allow me to assist in the well-documented transition of Slashdot from a technical site to a political forum, but I can't resist in this situation.
Sony broke the rules. Sony let gamers play the games on the systems they sell during a trade show. Sony gets kicked out of the game. Microsoft broke the rules. Microsoft was found guilty of illegal bundling, hiding api's, and setting monopolistic terms to computer vendors in 94, 99, and 2001. Microsoft gets kicked out of the game.
Sounds fair.
Yes, Sony is a huge corporation that has attempted to leverage its presence (though not dominance) in consumer electronics to sell standards like the memory stick and DVD's. Yes, Sony is known to try and muscle competitors. However, something is inherintly wrong when a competitor can have you kicked out of a trade show because you let people have fun with your toys. I would think the director of the convention would have the power to make an exception on the grounds that the rule is unnecessary in this situation, and give Sony the year to plan a show without user interaction. Furthermore, it is in the show organizer's best financial interest if the customers participating in the show have a good time, and the only thing at a convention more enjoyable than free gaming is free gaming schwag.
The only group who benefits from this action is Microsoft (who, of course, lied about it afterwards to introduce doubt). The only reason Microsoft would act in this way is if they didn't want to compete. Is this sounding familiar?
Up until this point the X-box was starting to sound tempting so long as they could correct durability issues. With this action, Microsoft has reaffirmed once again why it is our moral imperitive to not give money to assholes... they just become more powerful assholes across more markets.
instead of enriching those who use the world for support.
I am no longer running Mandrake on any of my computers, but it was the best distro I've come across (only missing apt-get). The installer eased me into the world of linux, diskdrake is lightyears ahead of fdisk, and the command center is sorely missed in other distros. I never would have been able to learn linux without their help. An encrypted filesystem might be enough to convince me to upgrade to a supported video card and give Mandrake a fourth (lifetime... the other three have been given away) computer.
Mandrake, and community software, are like public television... They do philanthropic deeds for many people, but philanthropy is never profitable. They need money? I own a box set, and I haven't had an income in 5 months, but Mandrake is worth it to me. Count my Donation.
Blank videocasette tapes in the US are sold with a portion of sales going to the MPAA for lost revenue due to piracy. This does not mean that pirating videos is legal. This means that stopping the casual piracy of videos is unenforceable, and as such consumers are free to illegaly copy videos, and the companies involved have been justly compensated.
The sad thing about all of this is that most of the independent labels with bands worth pirating wouldn't see a dime from this outrageously high tax, and I severely doubt that, say, Qbert, DJ Seishi, or Courtney Love will get their fair share. Do artists ever get a cut from the RIAA?
All that this means is that audio piracy is now a unstoppable institution, and "creators" are being paid by it. It may not be legal, but now it is moral.
(IANAL)
IANAL
IARNAL
IARRNAL
That having been said, your non-compete clause may not be binding everywhere. In California, for example, non-compete clauses are considered an impediment to fair trade in the technology industry and are therefore not binding. This may be true in your industry. It wouldn't take much to convince a judge that news photography doesn't involve the risk of dissemenation of industry secrets and that there isn't something else you can reasonably do.
If it becomes a problem, speak to a lawyer familiar with laws in different states. You may have to move to get out of your non-compete, but it is better than not working just to please the F***ing man.
(This is from a technology law course taken last year at the University of California, Irvine. It is not intended to plot a course of action but to give you a direction for your discussions with a certified lawyer.)
why not pick up a Mako for 150, or a Clie with a keyboard and cord to connect to your cell?
What do you really need to do on your machine that you can't do remotely on another one?
This feud started with The Secret of Mana . Square, Nintendo, and Sony were teaming up to release the Secret of Mana as the killer app for the SNES CD. Sony then decided that they wanted to also release their own "playstation," which would play SNES CD's, and their own proprietary format. History can be found here. The contract did not forbid this, but forbid Nintendo from breaking out of the agreement. So, Nintendo started working with Phillips on another CD rom (compatible with the also doomed CDI), and announced that it would be the dominant CD format for the SNES. (See SCEE's Official Version. Also visible on www.scee.com, if you have IE and a patience with slow scrolling scripting. More history here.)
The history of that feud is probably only truly understood by lawyers, but it is clear that Square took a major hit in terms of profit when Nintendo abandoned the platform that Square had just geared up to and had developed their largest game to date for. I don't know who bore the brunt of costs for translating SOM to the SNES, but I'm sure it wasn't a happy meeting.
Let's also not forget that Nintendo decided not to release FF2 in the US thinking that it would be unprofitable, and made this decision after A: it had been translated and B: they had run an 8-page spread in Nintendo Power (check your backissues folks! There was a contest and everything.).
From there, Square naturally decided to follow the evolution of the SNES CD the Playstation, and break ties with the company that they had established an intimate relationship with. Ugliness followed.
That ugliness can be found elsewhere, I'm not here to tell you how it ends. I'm only here to show you the beginning.
Not every platform Square has developed for has become the dominant. Square did develop for the Wonderswan and Wonderswan Color in Japan. While it did reach a 30% marketshare, it still didn't compare to the GB's (who had basically the rest). This of course, happened after Square severed the relationship with Nintendo.
Let's not all claim ignorance and say that we don't realize that millions of songs are available at any given second thanks to technology, and let's not pretend that this isn't the sort of nirvana that music lovers and humanists have always wanted. Greene made a mistake on the number of days, and made a common mistake of equating the Internet (the network backbone) with the Web (a comparitively well-policed HTML protocol). Those aren't all that important.
More revealing than anything is that in hiring children to break this law he showed just how little he thinks of pirating himself. Therein lies the dillema. Do you think these kids deleted the songs from their hard drives? Is it that horrible? It isn't bad for me to do it, it isn't bad for you to do it. But if everyone does it, then nobody gets any more music (arguable). In the USA, that argument has hardly convinced half of the population to get up and vote, and voting is free.
While it would be an interesting twist, I don't wish jail upon Greene. I reserve that for Rosen. Sadly, though, they are both too rich to go to jail for something as trivial as this. Then again, if they really had the guts to set an example...
Actually, Cartridges have no problem with magnets. They are read-only and cannot be written to. They can also be frozen, thrown off of the roof, and dipped into a rather dirty pool. They like cats. The only thing they don't like is having their contacts worn down, which is apparently what caused all of the old NES problems.
I can understand your worries about CD's... I lost a copy of Silpheed to a mechanical pencil and a glob of mayo. However, the Playstation shipped with what Sony branded as 10 X oversampling... which is a fancy way of saying that the pits were really deep. While, say, a burned copy of Silent Hill has to be constantly coddled to work with the slightest surface blemish, we've taken pocketknives to copies of Parappa and they still ran just fine (ymmv). While an MO disk with a protective caddy is hardly any safer than a DVD in a caddy, it would be a heck of a lot more expensive, and bulkier.
If you are worried about your games, keep a modded playstation around and upload your collection to one of the 100 gig drives out there, or back them up to tape. That way, you can re-burn them any time you want to play again. And by the way, Nintendo had a fleeting affair with a MO drive in Japan (the DD or "Bulky Drive"). Yamauchi said they learned a lot from that encounter, and that they would never do that again.
If the courts find that the U.S. can hold foreign companies to US copyright law because they transact over the net, the ramifications go much father than just businesses. This means that China (under US interpretation of law) can hold the Founder of FaLun Gong guilty of breaking their intellectual property laws. The average person won't be able to buy controversial items (such as satanic verses, hitler's smoking jacket, DVD's of any kind) because of the expense involved in maintaining dozens of country / locality / product type blacklists as well as location verification. In short (and probably in redundant) this will dumb down the net to the LCD. Basic Yahoo vs. France stuff.
Of course, it would be a shame if this were the case to set a prescedent, as many articles have pointed out that Elcomsoft ran a server out of Chicago, communicated with US customers in english, and was quite aware of the law. Yes, this is why their approach is so novel: they are arguing that the infrastructure of the net on the US soil is not under US law. Novelty is no substitute for intellectual prowess. They really haven't a snowball's chance with that line of legal reasoning any more than an indian tribe who asserts sovereginity and tries to grow hemp. It's that specific that makes it so sad that this case will be applied overly broadly to anything American corporations don't like. We own our net, so QED we own yours.
I used to get about 20 spams a day at my old address. I would also travel for weeks at a time. 20 deletes per day may not seem like much, but coming home after two weeks to 280 pieces of spam and one important message *somewhere* inside of it all is a real pain. If your ISP is incapable of the simple acts of configuring their servers to only transport mail for authorized people, and TOSing those people who do spam, then you need to find a better ISP. This is not just about the right to choose, but balancing that with the responsibility to choose wisely.
The purpose of non-lethal weapons is to stop someone from doing something when what they are doing is not threatening someone's life, only their property or rules. Police can, will, and are encouraged (by me) to kill anyone attempting to kill anyone else. They are not going to use slippery slime in a hostage situation.
Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. This is about the power to suppress. It would be very important for the police to have the power to suppress crowds during a soccer riot. It is less useful when they wield it to protect the WTO's oppression. It is downright wrong to use it to prevent participation in national election conventions. The tool is agnostic, the people are not.
Unfortunately, history has shown that people hardly ever protest unnecessarily, and those that should get gassed usually aren't the ones that do. (when was the last time you heard of a KKK demonstration getting the mustard?). The police are looking for tools that they can use besides the threat of death. While rubber bullets may occasionally kill people, their general "safety" record is an encouragement to turn them on crowds. This looks to be another tool that may occasionally lead to fractured skulls and death, but the not-directly-lethal nature (and the inevitable corporate hype) will seduce many in law enforcement to turn to this when property / rules are challenged.
They have been turning the firehoses on protesters since the civil rights movement. Somehow this seems nicer.
If you really want to know how much "choice" you have in the marketplace, look for foods / supplies in the supermarket that involve patents. You can usually trace which brands are identical products by the same company if you follow which patents are on the products you buy. Detergent, for example, is a marketplace rife with colors and boxes, but trace the patents and everything is being made by Dow and one other company.
It's a lot of legwork, I know, but it is something that you can do in your own life.
Hmm... Now that basically all of our code is developed and systems are embedded in concrete... let's try to secure this, shall we?
Maybe they should have thought of this BEFORE they rewrote the OS?
"Hmm. It looks like a beautiful morning. I'd like to share it. Let's just walk to my friend's house and and..."
"BEAUTIFUL WOMEN WANT TO MEET YOU!!!"
   "ARE YOU POOR, BROKE, DEEPLY IN DEBT!?!"
 "INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES AWAIT YOU!"
"...or maybe I'll just stay inside again today, so that I can listen to some Garcia and call them instead..."
     "WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A PREVIEW OF OUR LONG-DISTANCE SERVICES?!"
    "PLEASE DON'T HANG UP, THIS IS NOT A TELEMARKETING MESSAGE!!"
  "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE COST OF HEALTH CARE FOR THE UNINSURED?!"
"...or not. And I think my member is a perfectly adequate size, thank you very much. Oh well, at least I can just IM them."
    "DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS!?!"
"I BECAME A MILLIONAIRE AND SO CAN YOU!"
 "YOU CAN BE PART OF THE ACTION AND WIN AT LORDOFTHERINGS.COM TODAY!!"
   "I SEND YOU THIS IM IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR ADVICE."
"ARE YOU HAPPY WITH YOUR RELATIONSHIP?!"
        "SPEND EVERY YEAR IN THE BAHAMAS WITH THIS AMAZING NEW PROGRAM!"
   "HOT YOUNG TEENS WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU!"
"HERE IS THE INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED!!"
 
"...maybe I'll just..."
  "rssn wmn hre cll nw"
"damn, forgot to turn off sms. Maybe I'll just complain on slashdot."
 "YOU HAVE JUST 2 MORE CHANCES TO WIN $10,000 BY MODERATING THIS COMMENT UP TO 5 - INSIGHTFUL."
 
*whimper*
 
In some ways, I spoke too soon and appologize.
In other ways, however, the server is still up and running. It's just running it's little tail off and dropping papers here and there. It is struggling, but it has so far survived where many processes before it have been kill -7ed.
That poor, poor lisa.
I'm amazed at how much venom has spewed forth from this crowd over this little company. For those of you who seem to not get this idea
***THE POINT***
"My office runs outlook and IE, and I need to keep my palm in synch. But I've heard good things about that Linux operating system."
"Children need to explore the world of computing. While they've convinced me to switch from AOL to Earthlink, I don't think I could live without my copy of outlook."
"We've spent hundreds of dollars on software already, so while I hate Microsoft I guess I'm stuck using them."
They're NOT trying to get you to switch to Windows (though I wouldn't mind getting Dreamweaver to work. [ducks]). They're not here to fake screenshots. They're not trying to destroy all that makes Open Source good by commingling it with Windows. They're opening a migration path. If you have one app that you desperately need that only runs under windows, but you prefer or want to experiment with another operating system, you can. Connectix has been doing it for years with the Virtual PC for the Macintosh, and this is basically just a more integrated version of that (and one where Microsoft doesn't recieve unnecessary royalties). This is not going to take over the world, destroy linux or windows, but fill a necessary niche.
Good luck Lindows team, you have my support.
-Chris
It should be a validation of the power of linux that the letter (so far) survived /.ing. Even the images are still up. Why do people still think they need IIS?
(of course, they *should* be running IIS under Lindows...)
In some ways, it is interesting how the courts have realized that video games are a form of expression and as such require protection. This is easily paralled with the perception in the 30's that movies were just a way that children wasted time. This perception was had, of course, by the generation of people who grew up without movies. Now we have a generation of people who have never really experienced gaming, a generation of people of whom some have and some haven't, and a generation of people whose paradigms of life will revolve around it.
The following statement cuts quite deep, and should be written into the big book of good things that came out of the 7th circuit.
"attempting to shield children from exposure to violent images would be 'not only quixotic, but deforming.'"
It is estimated that US bombing in Afghanastan has killed 68 people per day (directly, not counting starvation / injury / illness / etc). The 7th Circuit has said that, basically, exposure to the uglyness of violence is a necessary part of becoming a complete human being. And as that exposure can come through the form of a harmless game, then gaming is therefore an expressive medium. Quite frankly, after having just completed MGS2, I can't think of a better medium to express the horrors of war (though Francis Ford Coppola comes very close). We're talking context here, of course. GTA hasn't done a good job showing the high points of what is possible in the medium any more than Lady Chatterly did for literature.
Of course I would support opposition to the sex portion too: I agree that it should be considered worse by this society to show someone's guts nonconsentually being sprayed out across a table (arguably the worst thing to happen in their life) than to take off their pants and pleasure them (arguably one of the better things). But I can understand why they wouldn't bother to oppose the sexuality portion when nobody has yet found a good way to use the new medium to express intimacy. I can't think of a single game this provision would apply to. AMOA is doing very badly these days (financially), and I can understand why they would choose their battles carefully. I'm just sad that I didn't see the ACLU on their side.
"These artists chose to enter into an agreement that stated they gave up the right to market their work. That's the way business works - sometimes you make a good deal, sometimes you don't."
Interesting how labels almost always wind up with the good deal, and some of the crem de la crem of successful artists (TLC, BBKing, Toni Braxton...) file for bankrupcy. Business works because sometimes you get good deals, sometimes you don't. When an entire class of people never get a good deal from people who are making truly disgusting amounts of money, things move from the realm of business to the realm of exploitation. They did sign a contract (whose only other option was to go back to Mc Donalds and never be heard), but contract law in this country (usa) has always been based around the balance of the technicalities of the agreement and its spirit. Calling it "very simple" is a gross misuse of that term.
I know that is a separate issue from piracy. That's like saying in 1930 that I won't buy German cars because of their politics. That's not exactly a fair analogy: Other countries made cars back then. But when the money trail goes 95% assholes, 5% artists, it becomes quite tempting to enact the only power we have (veto) and shout "Fuck it! Nobody gets paid!" This is of course a strategy successfully utilized by strikers and boycotters around the world, with the major difference that most strikers / boycotters are a little clearer about their reasonings than most of the morpheous crowd.
Napster took distributers, labels, paid radio play (and all of it is paid these days), coca-cola tie-ins, and all of the rest of the uglyness out of something that is a low-level expression of humanity and culture. Unfortunately, it also didn't pay the artists.
Yes, Napster2 should use MP3's. These wrapper formats are basically a form of house arrest for music, whereas one of the largest benifits of digital music is the awesome portables. Yes, distributers and those who accept financial risk (which is the primary function of labels) should recieve their fare share. And yes, the idea of paying 20$ a month for the general shoddyness we've come to expect from Napster connections seems rather foolish. A portion of that 20 should definitely go to some servers and some bandwidth. None of this is really up for debate.
Speaking of money, How much have mainstream CD's crept up to? Let me go see... The latest N'Sync lists for 19 bucks. We bought a licenced, artist-paid 2 CD set of Bossa Nova & Samba in Argentina for 5 dollars. It lists here for 22.99. Compared to tapes and records, the distribution and manufacturing costs of CD's are nothing. Compared to CD's the distribution costs of MP3's are nothing. Shouldn't such reductions have some effect on the overall price of music? Shouldn't these effect the price paid to distributers?
The artificial control - based politics of the RIAA, which is what keeps music prices high, is going to be a factor in whether or not people accept these new services. Ask Dimitry. Ask Johansen. Ask Courtney Love. Ask the young artists struggling to get some radio play. Ask the consumers who are spending 4 hours worth of paycheck (after taxes) to buy (technically, "licence") 1 hour worth of music. The RIAA hasn't exactly killed 20 million Jews, but if it was in their business interests I wouldn't put it past them. Knowing that a large portion of the money I spend on CD's will go to a group dedicated to the strengthining of the DMCA and the destruction of basic freedoms in this country makes me feel like it's a moral imperitave to NOT pay for music. We're not living in Saudi Arabia yet (unless of course, you are), but we could very soon find ourselves living in Australia. Theft of rights is a form of theft too, and the kind that we have to be most vigilant about.
Music is one of the strongest forms of culture we have, and those who make money creating a scarcity (and qed a depravity) of culture should not be supported. Go to shows, go to concerts, buy a pack of beer for your favorite artist, dance, and be free. Spend money on music in ways that help artists and seem fair all around, and which don't destroy the cultural landscape. Support positive labels. The ugly, exploitive side can go screw: Napster taught us that we can always just help ourselves.
20$ a month = 140$ a year = 10$ to the RIAA = 10 minutes of some prick convincing Ashcroft that talking badly about encryption legislation is a form of terrorism. Now multiply this number by a million subscribers.