The whole region code thingy is braindead anyway. Why shouldn't I be able to buy a movie in the US and watch it here in the Netherlands? I mean, I could buy books, tapes, CD-ROMS, basically anything else in the US and use it here, so why not DVDs?
The whole napster thingy is basically the same issue: it's all about companies who want to squeeze as much money out of the public at large as possible with no regard whatsoever for the artists, nor for the public. They're just a middle man, and they know that, so they're fighting as best they can to ensure they can remain the middle man for all eternity. The fact that they're starting to fight so extremely dirty means they're quite desperate, which you could ofcourse also see as a good sign:)
Remember that this is only the first incarnation of the Internet on a large scale, and any first incarnation is bound to have childhood diseases. The current Internet's is domain name structuring and registration. They should switch to a strict structuring. No more.com,.org,.gov,.be,.to,.cx,.co.uk but strictly.com.us,.org.nl,.gov.bf,.net.de,.mil.ly. Restructuring from scratch now will simply be impossible. Lets wait for IPv6 and Internet2, and make the best of what we have now.
American companies, due to COPPA, are not allowed to gather information from children under 13. Not just Americans under thirteen... anyone under 13.
I ask myself why the US government feels itself inclined to protect the privacy of children all over the world. All I've seen from COPPA so far though are infringements on my privacy, as various sites across the web have demanded me to disclose my age and country of residence. The means erected to protect the privacy of American children under 13 is actually infringing on same privacy of American people over 13 and of all non-Americans. The cure seems to be much worse than the disease here, as I see more and more often with new laws in the US... IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, [insert standard disclaimer]:)
What kind of a check is that? Here in Europe everybody has debit cards. The only reason I got myself a credit card two years ago (at the age of 20) is to be able to buy stuff online. I often do online purchases for friends and family who don't have credit cards.
There may be a minimum age to having a credit card, just like there's a minimum age to having a driving licence (which varies from country to country, but that's another thing), but that doesn't by any means say that everybody above that age has one of those things. Here you can have a driving licence at 18, I got it at 19. I got a credit card at 20. My girlfriend is 30, and she has neither credit card nor driving licence.
I'm surprised they can get away with an "age check" like that...
Exactly. From my point of view it's simply discrimination. Is there any good ground that somebody who is 12 can't use ICQ while somebody who is 14 can?
This COPPA thing is getting out of hand... Don't people realise that the measures taken to protect the privacy of Americans under 13 are infringing the privacy of Americans over 13 and of non-Americans because sites all over the place are suddenly demanding you to disclose your age and location?
OTOH, clearing American 13-year-olds off ICQ, IRC and other internet communication services would definitely result in a dramatic decrease the amount of a/s/l checks:)
Okay, so maybe it's the law, but it's a US law! How would a US law apply to a kid under 13 in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France and so on?
Another interesting thing: Because of this Children Online Privacy Protection Act I have already been forced to give my age and country of residence on various US-based sites and forums. What the hell of my own privacy???
Why do you have to be above 13 to use ICQ? COPA was struck down, and even if that was the reason, what of children outside the US? They wouldn't have been influenced by COPA one bit...
Land of the free? Yeah, sure... I see more and more such discrimination and segregation going on over there, and it worries me that such trends might cross the Atlantic...
They simply don't speak German in die Schweiz. "null aynz, nünenünzk zwaa drie-e-driezk aachtzk, klappe null zwaa", that's how your average Züricher gives you his phone number. If that's German, then Redneckspeak is Victorian English:)
That post was moderated informative??? Funny, maybe, or even interesting if you're so inclined, but informative??? Could the moderators please put down the crack pipe?:)
One thing that also clearly shows that it's not those midiwhatever thingies that "cause" the Force is Darth Vader. He's about as strong with the Force as you can get, but all that is left of his body is his head, really - the rest is all artificial, created by the Emperor. I guess those midithingies would have a really hard time living in an almost fully mechanical body...
I fully agree. Ewoks taste much better too. There was this French cook who prepared one for me once, a l'orange. Délicieux! 'e wokked 'em very well indeed...
Jar-Jar however tastes like, hmm, dunno. I tried his tongue, because it reminded me of those delicious Greek kalamari, but all it did was make mesa talka bombfat weirdly stuff, yousa know...
No, I didn't read the article, actually, because I'm at work now, which has a backwards proxy that does allow access to www.slashdot.org (yay!) but not very much else - including images.slashdot.org (boo!).
The chance of that rocket hitting a plane is at best equal to the chance of you hitting a skeeter in flight with a dart. The chance of it crashing in a populated area, however, is very real, considering that it's also being launched from a populated area - his own back yard.
The FAA will never give the go-ahaid for this thing, so he'll either have to can the idea, or launch without permission.
I think it's terribly presumptuous for us to say humans are destroying the environment. Look at the age of the earth, and how long humans have been around. Just a blink of an eye. And only in the last couple of centuries have we started to develop technology. A fraction of a blink of an eye. How could we, in such a small period of time, possibly have any meaningful impact at all?
Deforestation? That would fix itself in just a few hundred years, the same fraction of a blink of an eye. Desertification? We've merely sped that up a little bit. Nothing shocking there. Greenhouse effect? At worst, we're speeding up a natural process, if we've had any meaningful influence at all.
Am I against environmental control? Not in the least! I love nature, and I want to live in an environment that is as clean and natural as possible. I see pollution and environmental destruction everywhere. But to think we have any true influence on nature at all is an unprecedented feat of megalomania.
The net was never intended for eCommerce, nor for lame home pages, nor for day trading, nor for Slashdot... in fact it was never intended for us at all.
Telephone was never intended for what it's being used for now either. When it was invented, it was thought to be only of business use, for easy and fast communication between companies, and their executives. But pretty soon the wives of the executives found another use for this newfangled thingy: fast exchange of gossip. In the beginning, only a few companies had phones, and maybe there was one phone in the telegraph office in town. Almost everybody has a cell phone now. The same thing is happening to the Internet. You can't stop it, so might as well face it and make the best of it.:)
There was mention in previous posts that the Academy Awards are only for movies that are distributed on film to theatres first. Possibly the writers of the original article that/. refers to only saw the implications of that with regards to movies released on the Internet, maybe because there had been specific mention of that, but the implications might reach much farther...
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but I do seem to recall that neurons are basically onion-shaped, so to say, with a thick roundish end where the cell core and other such useful things are, and a long "tentacle" that stretches out. I also seem to recall that that "tentacle" splits into various others, to (almost) touch various other neurons at the receptors on the thick end. Then again, the last time I had biology is four years ago, and then most of that was all about (populational) genetics, (natural) selection and the calculations behind those...:)
Ever seen a nice image of a neuron? It has an input end, and an output end. A neuron may also have multiple output ends, and multiple output ends may come together to one neuron's input end.
Neurons don't only "decide" to fire or not to fire... They can fire at a multitude of magnitudes. All neurons have a trigger level. An incoming pulse needs to be of that magnitude or higher for the neuron to react. The neuron can then "decides" to fire, but neurons can also increase or decrease the magnitude of the pulse they send off. That's the way a neural net works. Various pulses of various magnitudes travel through a neural net, and according to the magnitude of a pulse, the receiving neuron "decides" what to do with it.
You could indeed consider the "decision" to fire or not to fire a binary decision. Compare it to a joystick. It's not a binary joystick that either goes full or not at all, but it's one of those analog joysticks that can go everywhere inbetween aswell. The neuron can have dead zones on both ends, can alter sensitivity, can switch axis and could even reverse axis. On the whole, neurons adapt and learn. All these "neuron settings" cause various pulses to travel different paths through the same network, to split, to die off, and do all sorts of other interesting stuff.
...so neither do many data havens. There is for example the Principality of Sealand, which is a small artificial island in British territorial waters that is, due to a glitch in British law, a sovereign principality (aka princedom). Sure, the US could send a few carriers to surround the isle, but then they'd have to send those into British territorial waters, which would be rather awkward, wouldn't it?:)
... if they're so worried about that, they should just not put English as a language choice on foreign distributions.
How would you envision that? Here in the Netherlands everything in theatres and on TV is subbed, not dubbed, so this would basically be impossible here, except by forcing the Dutch to watch English spoken movies in unskilled Dutch dubbing. You know, German dubbing is quite bearable, because they've become extremely skilled at it, but Dutch dubbing would positively suck. Correction, Dutch dubbing does positively suck. Children's movies are shown in both dubbed and subbed versions at different times of the day. Never ever go to the dubbed version unless you have children who can't read, or who don't understand English...
... ensure that the Academy Awards for film continue to be awards for film. Other mediums can (and do) have their own awards. But what about movies that are digitally released to theatres? Film has very distinct disadvantages. Reels are huge, heavy, become dusty, can break, and generally degrade over time. If you distribute movies to theatres digitally via satellite or laserdisc, you solve all those problems at once. But would it be eligable for an Oscar???
Then why do hardware manufacturers only make drivers for (some versions of) Microsoft Windows, and sometimes for MacOS, and conveniently forget BeOS, OS/2, Linux, UNIX, Solaris, BSD and so on?
I do partly agree with you, but there are two sides of the issue... On one side, it's the OS manufacturer's responsibility to make their OS interface with all hardware, and on the other side, it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make their hardware interface with all operating systems. The problem is that currently they are measuring by two standards. Hardware manufacturers happily provide drivers for Microsoft Windows, because if they didn't, their hardware wouldn't sell, but then they conveniently forget the alternative operating systems, causing the alternatives to drop out of the competition with Microsoft because they simply don't support the latest and greatest hardware, and that IS what most computer geeky people want: the latest and greatest hardware to run the latest and greatest games. The PC has turned into a game console.
Now, I'm not saying Linux should be turned into a game console, quite the contrary, but that's definitely a market Linux will never be able to compete for. Linux should go after servers and office workstations. Leave the gaming to Microsoft. They're damn good at that, and you'd never be able to compete there anyway, at least not within the foreseeable future.
Okay, I kinda drifted away there, but I hope you get my point. Don't get me wrong, I do see your point, I just choose to disagree with it:)
My GeForce, Modem, NIC, burner, CDROM and Monitor all came with their own drivers FROM THE MANUFACTURER. Are you saying M$ should have supplied those too?
But did they come with drivers for MacOS, BeOS, Linux, Solaris, UNIX, AtheOS, OS/2, The HURD, BSD and what have you more? Why are you exempting only Microsoft from their obligation to write device drivers, and not all other operating system creators?
Applications run on the operating system, thus they should adapt to the operating system. Similarly, the operating system runs on the hardware, and should thus adapt itself to the hardware <i>by providing drivers</i> for that hardware. Many manufacturers make and deliver their own drivers for Microsoft Windows, because that is the most often used operating system, and because other hardware manufacturers do it to, so if they don't, they'll lose their market ground. But in essence, the burdain of writing device drivers is <i>not</i> with the hardware manufacturers.
A string of letters can, by definition, be copyrighted or trademarked, because a string of letters is essentially a text. But numbers cannot be copyrighted, by those same copyright definitions. You can copyright "Coca-cola", but you cannot copyright "1274-8986". Digitised media are in essence just a huge number. What, technically, is the difference between "1" and "123 093 709 145 680 134 673 136 130 086 690 634 635 523 582 853 816 966 418 116 669 924 147"? Nothing. Sure, the latter, when put through some kind of decoder (ASCII, Wave, MP3, MPEG, JPEG, foo, bar, baz) you might get something else, like a bit of text, a bit of music, or a picture.
As a little mind test: If you encode the DeCSS source code... How can anybody see that that string of ones and zeroes is just that? It might just as well be a bunch of garbage...
Slashdot Mirror
The whole region code thingy is braindead anyway. Why shouldn't I be able to buy a movie in the US and watch it here in the Netherlands? I mean, I could buy books, tapes, CD-ROMS, basically anything else in the US and use it here, so why not DVDs?
:)
The whole napster thingy is basically the same issue: it's all about companies who want to squeeze as much money out of the public at large as possible with no regard whatsoever for the artists, nor for the public. They're just a middle man, and they know that, so they're fighting as best they can to ensure they can remain the middle man for all eternity. The fact that they're starting to fight so extremely dirty means they're quite desperate, which you could ofcourse also see as a good sign
Things always get worse before they get better...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Remember that this is only the first incarnation of the Internet on a large scale, and any first incarnation is bound to have childhood diseases. The current Internet's is domain name structuring and registration. They should switch to a strict structuring. No more .com, .org, .gov, .be, .to, .cx, .co.uk but strictly .com.us, .org.nl, .gov.bf, .net.de, .mil.ly. Restructuring from scratch now will simply be impossible. Lets wait for IPv6 and Internet2, and make the best of what we have now.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
American companies, due to COPPA, are not allowed to gather information from children under 13. Not just Americans under thirteen... anyone under 13.
:)
I ask myself why the US government feels itself inclined to protect the privacy of children all over the world. All I've seen from COPPA so far though are infringements on my privacy, as various sites across the web have demanded me to disclose my age and country of residence. The means erected to protect the privacy of American children under 13 is actually infringing on same privacy of American people over 13 and of all non-Americans. The cure seems to be much worse than the disease here, as I see more and more often with new laws in the US... IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, [insert standard disclaimer]
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
What kind of a check is that? Here in Europe everybody has debit cards. The only reason I got myself a credit card two years ago (at the age of 20) is to be able to buy stuff online. I often do online purchases for friends and family who don't have credit cards.
There may be a minimum age to having a credit card, just like there's a minimum age to having a driving licence (which varies from country to country, but that's another thing), but that doesn't by any means say that everybody above that age has one of those things. Here you can have a driving licence at 18, I got it at 19. I got a credit card at 20. My girlfriend is 30, and she has neither credit card nor driving licence.
I'm surprised they can get away with an "age check" like that...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Exactly. From my point of view it's simply discrimination. Is there any good ground that somebody who is 12 can't use ICQ while somebody who is 14 can?
:)
This COPPA thing is getting out of hand... Don't people realise that the measures taken to protect the privacy of Americans under 13 are infringing the privacy of Americans over 13 and of non-Americans because sites all over the place are suddenly demanding you to disclose your age and location?
OTOH, clearing American 13-year-olds off ICQ, IRC and other internet communication services would definitely result in a dramatic decrease the amount of a/s/l checks
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Okay, so maybe it's the law, but it's a US law! How would a US law apply to a kid under 13 in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France and so on?
Another interesting thing: Because of this Children Online Privacy Protection Act I have already been forced to give my age and country of residence on various US-based sites and forums. What the hell of my own privacy???
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Why do you have to be above 13 to use ICQ? COPA was struck down, and even if that was the reason, what of children outside the US? They wouldn't have been influenced by COPA one bit...
Land of the free? Yeah, sure... I see more and more such discrimination and segregation going on over there, and it worries me that such trends might cross the Atlantic...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
They simply don't speak German in die Schweiz. "null aynz, nünenünzk zwaa drie-e-driezk aachtzk, klappe null zwaa", that's how your average Züricher gives you his phone number. If that's German, then Redneckspeak is Victorian English :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
That post was moderated informative??? Funny, maybe, or even interesting if you're so inclined, but informative??? Could the moderators please put down the crack pipe? :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
One thing that also clearly shows that it's not those midiwhatever thingies that "cause" the Force is Darth Vader. He's about as strong with the Force as you can get, but all that is left of his body is his head, really - the rest is all artificial, created by the Emperor. I guess those midithingies would have a really hard time living in an almost fully mechanical body...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Give me Ewoks any day.
I fully agree. Ewoks taste much better too. There was this French cook who prepared one for me once, a l'orange. Délicieux! 'e wokked 'em very well indeed...
Jar-Jar however tastes like, hmm, dunno. I tried his tongue, because it reminded me of those delicious Greek kalamari, but all it did was make mesa talka bombfat weirdly stuff, yousa know...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
No, I didn't read the article, actually, because I'm at work now, which has a backwards proxy that does allow access to www.slashdot.org (yay!) but not very much else - including images.slashdot.org (boo!).
:)
I'll read the article when I get home
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
I'd want at least a half dozen successfull unmanned flights under my belt brfore I strapped my skin into something like that
Exactly... If he doesn't, the statistical estimate death toll he'll be submitting to the DOT is "one".
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
The chance of that rocket hitting a plane is at best equal to the chance of you hitting a skeeter in flight with a dart. The chance of it crashing in a populated area, however, is very real, considering that it's also being launched from a populated area - his own back yard.
The FAA will never give the go-ahaid for this thing, so he'll either have to can the idea, or launch without permission.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
I think it's terribly presumptuous for us to say humans are destroying the environment. Look at the age of the earth, and how long humans have been around. Just a blink of an eye. And only in the last couple of centuries have we started to develop technology. A fraction of a blink of an eye. How could we, in such a small period of time, possibly have any meaningful impact at all?
Deforestation? That would fix itself in just a few hundred years, the same fraction of a blink of an eye. Desertification? We've merely sped that up a little bit. Nothing shocking there. Greenhouse effect? At worst, we're speeding up a natural process, if we've had any meaningful influence at all.
Am I against environmental control? Not in the least! I love nature, and I want to live in an environment that is as clean and natural as possible. I see pollution and environmental destruction everywhere. But to think we have any true influence on nature at all is an unprecedented feat of megalomania.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
There was mention in previous posts that the Academy Awards are only for movies that are distributed on film to theatres first. Possibly the writers of the original article that /. refers to only saw the implications of that with regards to movies released on the Internet, maybe because there had been specific mention of that, but the implications might reach much farther...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but I do seem to recall that neurons are basically onion-shaped, so to say, with a thick roundish end where the cell core and other such useful things are, and a long "tentacle" that stretches out. I also seem to recall that that "tentacle" splits into various others, to (almost) touch various other neurons at the receptors on the thick end. Then again, the last time I had biology is four years ago, and then most of that was all about (populational) genetics, (natural) selection and the calculations behind those... :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Ever seen a nice image of a neuron? It has an input end, and an output end. A neuron may also have multiple output ends, and multiple output ends may come together to one neuron's input end.
Neurons don't only "decide" to fire or not to fire... They can fire at a multitude of magnitudes. All neurons have a trigger level. An incoming pulse needs to be of that magnitude or higher for the neuron to react. The neuron can then "decides" to fire, but neurons can also increase or decrease the magnitude of the pulse they send off. That's the way a neural net works. Various pulses of various magnitudes travel through a neural net, and according to the magnitude of a pulse, the receiving neuron "decides" what to do with it.
You could indeed consider the "decision" to fire or not to fire a binary decision. Compare it to a joystick. It's not a binary joystick that either goes full or not at all, but it's one of those analog joysticks that can go everywhere inbetween aswell. The neuron can have dead zones on both ends, can alter sensitivity, can switch axis and could even reverse axis. On the whole, neurons adapt and learn. All these "neuron settings" cause various pulses to travel different paths through the same network, to split, to die off, and do all sorts of other interesting stuff.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
...so neither do many data havens. There is for example the Principality of Sealand, which is a small artificial island in British territorial waters that is, due to a glitch in British law, a sovereign principality (aka princedom). Sure, the US could send a few carriers to surround the isle, but then they'd have to send those into British territorial waters, which would be rather awkward, wouldn't it? :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
... if they're so worried about that, they should just not put English as a language choice on foreign distributions.
How would you envision that? Here in the Netherlands everything in theatres and on TV is subbed, not dubbed, so this would basically be impossible here, except by forcing the Dutch to watch English spoken movies in unskilled Dutch dubbing. You know, German dubbing is quite bearable, because they've become extremely skilled at it, but Dutch dubbing would positively suck. Correction, Dutch dubbing does positively suck. Children's movies are shown in both dubbed and subbed versions at different times of the day. Never ever go to the dubbed version unless you have children who can't read, or who don't understand English...
Just pushing a point...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
... ensure that the Academy Awards for film continue to be awards for film. Other mediums can (and do) have their own awards. But what about movies that are digitally released to theatres? Film has very distinct disadvantages. Reels are huge, heavy, become dusty, can break, and generally degrade over time. If you distribute movies to theatres digitally via satellite or laserdisc, you solve all those problems at once. But would it be eligable for an Oscar???
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Then why do hardware manufacturers only make drivers for (some versions of) Microsoft Windows, and sometimes for MacOS, and conveniently forget BeOS, OS/2, Linux, UNIX, Solaris, BSD and so on?
:)
I do partly agree with you, but there are two sides of the issue... On one side, it's the OS manufacturer's responsibility to make their OS interface with all hardware, and on the other side, it's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make their hardware interface with all operating systems. The problem is that currently they are measuring by two standards. Hardware manufacturers happily provide drivers for Microsoft Windows, because if they didn't, their hardware wouldn't sell, but then they conveniently forget the alternative operating systems, causing the alternatives to drop out of the competition with Microsoft because they simply don't support the latest and greatest hardware, and that IS what most computer geeky people want: the latest and greatest hardware to run the latest and greatest games. The PC has turned into a game console.
Now, I'm not saying Linux should be turned into a game console, quite the contrary, but that's definitely a market Linux will never be able to compete for. Linux should go after servers and office workstations. Leave the gaming to Microsoft. They're damn good at that, and you'd never be able to compete there anyway, at least not within the foreseeable future.
Okay, I kinda drifted away there, but I hope you get my point. Don't get me wrong, I do see your point, I just choose to disagree with it
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
But did they come with drivers for MacOS, BeOS, Linux, Solaris, UNIX, AtheOS, OS/2, The HURD, BSD and what have you more? Why are you exempting only Microsoft from their obligation to write device drivers, and not all other operating system creators?
Applications run on the operating system, thus they should adapt to the operating system. Similarly, the operating system runs on the hardware, and should thus adapt itself to the hardware <i>by providing drivers</i> for that hardware. Many manufacturers make and deliver their own drivers for Microsoft Windows, because that is the most often used operating system, and because other hardware manufacturers do it to, so if they don't, they'll lose their market ground. But in essence, the burdain of writing device drivers is <i>not</i> with the hardware manufacturers.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
A string of letters can, by definition, be copyrighted or trademarked, because a string of letters is essentially a text. But numbers cannot be copyrighted, by those same copyright definitions. You can copyright "Coca-cola", but you cannot copyright "1274-8986". Digitised media are in essence just a huge number. What, technically, is the difference between "1" and "123 093 709 145 680 134 673 136 130 086 690 634 635 523 582 853 816 966 418 116 669 924 147"? Nothing. Sure, the latter, when put through some kind of decoder (ASCII, Wave, MP3, MPEG, JPEG, foo, bar, baz) you might get something else, like a bit of text, a bit of music, or a picture.
As a little mind test: If you encode the DeCSS source code... How can anybody see that that string of ones and zeroes is just that? It might just as well be a bunch of garbage...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,