1. User rips TV episode from TiVo 2. User distributes TV episode using BitTorrent 3. TiVo Inc. downloads TV episode 4. TiVo Inc. decodes watermark, identifies subscriber who ripped it
And then what? In my opinion they ought to do nothing (and Profit!) but I suspect their user agreement stipulates that the user's TiVo should be deactivated. With TiVo already in hot water among users for various non-consumer-friendly things (DRM on TiVoToGo, ads, more ads, content protection, billboard ads) I think TiVo would be wise to just let it slide.
I have to wonder whether they're actually going to rewrite the questions in Quiz & Dragons. I downloaded a ROM of the game which was made in the early '90s. Most of the questions are of the '80s at the very latest and are incredibly inconsistent. Some of them are for little kids but then you get a question like "Which 1930s actor played the lead role in (some obscure '30s movie)?" It really looked like the Capcom localization crew bought some trivia books from the remainders bin at an outlet book store and just threw the questions into the game.
If Vonage is like a telephone line, think of Skype like a phone card. You can buy a few dollars' worth of time and spend it calling people over a period of up to 6 months. (Every time you buy time, all your existing time gains another 6 months of useful life.) I like Skype better than Vonage because I make very few long-distance calls; on those rare occasions when I'm about to run out of cell phone minutes, I can use Skype instead.
AIM mail gives you 2 GB of free space and IMAP access so you can use it from a real mail client. All you need is an AIM screen name.
For my personal mail I use Fastmail, IMAP mail with excellent server-side filtering. They had a brief outage last weekend, but aside from that they've been rock-solid for the last 2 years. They don't offer you enough storage space to make a warez repository out of your inbox, but it would take me a decade to fill up my 600 MB account.
Sure, that's why people use Microsoft Access. Where's the open source equivalent to Access, a database with a friendly, customizable front-end and no constricting row limits on tables?
I didn't like that system the first time, when it was called Kuro5hin. Just because a story is popular doesn't mean it is of interest to absolutely everyone.
I actually like Slashdot's subsections; I can specify that I want to see all Games stories but no YRO stories, and the home page changes accordingly. I have seen no news site that handles such filters as smoothly -- certainly not Google News or Yahoo News, where everything's split up into blocks that change at different rates.
Right, but the 65K row limit has been around for nearly a decade in any commercial spreadsheet package. Since then computer processor and memory capacity has doubled several times over. OpenOffice Calc seems content to match, not surpass, Microsoft's worksheet size limits; meanwhile its performance still sucks when compared with Microsoft Excel.
Excel 2006 has finally broken through the limit of 2^16 rows / 2^8 cols per spreadsheet. Now there's 2^20 rows and 2^14 columns. Why can't OpenOffice have as many as I want? It wasn't until OO2 that they even caught up to Excel 97's 2^16 limit.
Before I hear the Open Source "who needs that many rows," I'll answer, "why cripple a product based on what you think users will want?" I deal with situations where a 100K+row spreadsheet is demanded daily.
No thanks. I don't like using Jabber servers which shut themselves off from other Jabber servers and are still in "beta." (How hard is it to set up a Jabber server that you declare it as "beta" for months?)
OK. From now on I am only buying feature-limited games in the hopes that their publishers will put out incremental upgrades that address the shortcomings in the original. EA is such a bunch of jerks for finishing a game and then asking people to pay for a revised version if they want it.
Likewise, a nice-looking car is a work of art. An iPod is a work of art. A thoughtfully-designed building is a work of art. The math test in which I expertly demonstrated that 0 = 1 is a work of art. The arrangement of boxes in my basement is a work of art. My mash-ups of Google Maps with Britney Spears songs are all works of art.
Lastly, this entire post is a work of art. Treasure it as if it were your own, but it's not; comments are owned by the poster, and you may not reproduce mine unless it is within the rights accorded you under the Creative Commons CC-NA-lk-OI-MM-5L-Z| license.
Terribly sorry. When my game company wants to release a sequel to one of our extremely popular games, I will have to contact MilenCent first by e-mail to see if the game "deserves a sequel.' If MilenCent does not approve, we will have to shelve the project.
Sincerely, Lawrence F. Probst III Chief Executive Officer, Electronic Arts
I know it's hard to believe, but people asked for more sports games too. While EA could have sold roster updates for a fraction of the cost of Madden n+1, making nearly 100% profit on readily-available data, people will happily pay $50 for each incarnation.
Is Pac-Man less fun because there are 200 clones of it floating around? Is Breakout less fun because it's been ported everywhere? I thought competition (in the absence of exclusive licenses) was supposed to encourage creativity and innovation, not stifle it.
Like the PlayStation or GameCube are any better: Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2, Dynasty Warriors 5, Romance of the Three Kingdoms X, Final Fantasy XII, Mario Party 7, Dragon Quest VIII, Soul Calibur III, and even We Love Katamari (remember the original, the game that was supposed to rid us of derivative games? It has a sequel).
Oh, come now. We all know that Windows Vista is going to be used everywhere, just like the similarly-doomed-and-delayed Windows 2000 and Windows XP before it. That's why all types of applications, from office suites to viruses, are being ported now. By contrast, nobody will write viruses for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" because only Mac users (a much smaller portion of the computer userbase) will ever buy that.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly will happen?
1. User rips TV episode from TiVo
2. User distributes TV episode using BitTorrent
3. TiVo Inc. downloads TV episode
4. TiVo Inc. decodes watermark, identifies subscriber who ripped it
And then what? In my opinion they ought to do nothing (and Profit!) but I suspect their user agreement stipulates that the user's TiVo should be deactivated. With TiVo already in hot water among users for various non-consumer-friendly things (DRM on TiVoToGo, ads, more ads, content protection, billboard ads) I think TiVo would be wise to just let it slide.
I have to wonder whether they're actually going to rewrite the questions in Quiz & Dragons. I downloaded a ROM of the game which was made in the early '90s. Most of the questions are of the '80s at the very latest and are incredibly inconsistent. Some of them are for little kids but then you get a question like "Which 1930s actor played the lead role in (some obscure '30s movie)?" It really looked like the Capcom localization crew bought some trivia books from the remainders bin at an outlet book store and just threw the questions into the game.
If Vonage is like a telephone line, think of Skype like a phone card. You can buy a few dollars' worth of time and spend it calling people over a period of up to 6 months. (Every time you buy time, all your existing time gains another 6 months of useful life.) I like Skype better than Vonage because I make very few long-distance calls; on those rare occasions when I'm about to run out of cell phone minutes, I can use Skype instead.
Gmail, being beta software, is not yet approved for widespread use.
When Hotmail was hacked 6 years ago, Microsoft sealed off the problem within a day. Google is incredibly slow.
AIM mail gives you 2 GB of free space and IMAP access so you can use it from a real mail client. All you need is an AIM screen name.
For my personal mail I use Fastmail, IMAP mail with excellent server-side filtering. They had a brief outage last weekend, but aside from that they've been rock-solid for the last 2 years. They don't offer you enough storage space to make a warez repository out of your inbox, but it would take me a decade to fill up my 600 MB account.
Yet another reason to eschew use of beta software like Gmail for something as vital as e-mail.
Sure, that's why people use Microsoft Access. Where's the open source equivalent to Access, a database with a friendly, customizable front-end and no constricting row limits on tables?
According to Slashdot, popular music sucks. As a result, non-sucky music will cost less than it does today. This is good.
I didn't like that system the first time, when it was called Kuro5hin. Just because a story is popular doesn't mean it is of interest to absolutely everyone.
I actually like Slashdot's subsections; I can specify that I want to see all Games stories but no YRO stories, and the home page changes accordingly. I have seen no news site that handles such filters as smoothly -- certainly not Google News or Yahoo News, where everything's split up into blocks that change at different rates.
Right, but the 65K row limit has been around for nearly a decade in any commercial spreadsheet package. Since then computer processor and memory capacity has doubled several times over. OpenOffice Calc seems content to match, not surpass, Microsoft's worksheet size limits; meanwhile its performance still sucks when compared with Microsoft Excel.
Excel 2006 has finally broken through the limit of 2^16 rows / 2^8 cols per spreadsheet. Now there's 2^20 rows and 2^14 columns. Why can't OpenOffice have as many as I want? It wasn't until OO2 that they even caught up to Excel 97's 2^16 limit.
Before I hear the Open Source "who needs that many rows," I'll answer, "why cripple a product based on what you think users will want?" I deal with situations where a 100K+row spreadsheet is demanded daily.
Pure Pwnage captured this all in the very first episode. Here's a torrent.
No thanks. I don't like using Jabber servers which shut themselves off from other Jabber servers and are still in "beta." (How hard is it to set up a Jabber server that you declare it as "beta" for months?)
OK. From now on I am only buying feature-limited games in the hopes that their publishers will put out incremental upgrades that address the shortcomings in the original. EA is such a bunch of jerks for finishing a game and then asking people to pay for a revised version if they want it.
Yes, good games are art.
Likewise, a nice-looking car is a work of art. An iPod is a work of art. A thoughtfully-designed building is a work of art. The math test in which I expertly demonstrated that 0 = 1 is a work of art. The arrangement of boxes in my basement is a work of art. My mash-ups of Google Maps with Britney Spears songs are all works of art.
Lastly, this entire post is a work of art. Treasure it as if it were your own, but it's not; comments are owned by the poster, and you may not reproduce mine unless it is within the rights accorded you under the Creative Commons CC-NA-lk-OI-MM-5L-Z| license.
Terribly sorry. When my game company wants to release a sequel to one of our extremely popular games, I will have to contact MilenCent first by e-mail to see if the game "deserves a sequel.' If MilenCent does not approve, we will have to shelve the project.
Sincerely,
Lawrence F. Probst III
Chief Executive Officer, Electronic Arts
I know it's hard to believe, but people asked for more sports games too. While EA could have sold roster updates for a fraction of the cost of Madden n+1, making nearly 100% profit on readily-available data, people will happily pay $50 for each incarnation.
Is Pac-Man less fun because there are 200 clones of it floating around? Is Breakout less fun because it's been ported everywhere? I thought competition (in the absence of exclusive licenses) was supposed to encourage creativity and innovation, not stifle it.
Like the PlayStation or GameCube are any better: Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2, Dynasty Warriors 5, Romance of the Three Kingdoms X, Final Fantasy XII, Mario Party 7, Dragon Quest VIII, Soul Calibur III, and even We Love Katamari (remember the original, the game that was supposed to rid us of derivative games? It has a sequel).
I prefer Sitefinder thankyouverymuch
Dear elitist sir,
Dumb people use Google too.
Sincerely,
Internet
Apple is a company which makes stylish, popular MP3 players. I hear they're going to start making personal computers soon.
I buy Compact Discs which conform to the Red Book standard, not DRM-encrusted audio discs.
Always look for the CD logo before you buy a useless plastic coaster.
Is this the end of the Hollywood-based, profit-driven, money-grubbing, piracy-preventing, your-rights-violating, politician-donating-to movie empire?
I, for one, welcome our stiltedly-animated overlords.
Oh, come now. We all know that Windows Vista is going to be used everywhere, just like the similarly-doomed-and-delayed Windows 2000 and Windows XP before it. That's why all types of applications, from office suites to viruses, are being ported now. By contrast, nobody will write viruses for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" because only Mac users (a much smaller portion of the computer userbase) will ever buy that.