As a certified techno-geek whom you would think would be considered part of the current target market, I can tell you exactly why I haven't bought one of these things:
Because 99% of what's on TV these days is vapid, mindless crap designed to appeal to sub-literate mouth-breathers with the attention span of a ferret on a sugar buzz, the memory capacity of a lobotomized Alzheimer's patient, and the sense of humor more normally exhibited by scatologically-minded six-year-olds. What few half-competent, marginally entertaining jewels do exist buried within the steaming pile of horseshit that TV has become are so few and far between, that I can record an entire week's worth of what pathetically few "good" shows do exist on a single T160 cassette (in SP mode) and go through it on a Sunday morning before lunchtime.
In other words - Television, as a whole, sucks. Unless TiVo contains some magic software that converts the incoming signals into something worth watching, a $600 (plus subscription fees) black box sitting on top of the TV set isn't going to make it suck any less... so why would I want it?
No, he means DCC - Digital Compact Cassette. It was a short-lived format introduced by Philips back in the early 90's, which was intended to offer digital recording to the consumer in a backwards-compatible format (sound familiar). The tape shells looked just like a standard cassette, except that (IIRC) there was a metal shutter over the tape openings or something like that... (it's been years since I've seen one, so I'm going from memory here.) While it doesn't seem like that impressive of a format today, you must bear in mind that back in 1992 CD-R drives and blanks were tremendously expensive (as bad as DVD-R was a couple of years ago) and required a $2,000 computer (no standalone Philips units here!), DAT was mired in disputes over copy-prevention schemes and was only available to the consumer via the "grey market", MiniDisc was both expensive and hard to find, and there wasn't any such thing as MP3's.
It might have had a chance as a "transitional" format, if Philips had played their cards right... What really killed it in the U.S. market, though, was that Philips foolishly gave Radio Shack exclusive marketing rights for the U.S. market - which meant that, thanks to Radio Shack's bizarre pricing schemes, the already-expensive format got priced right out of the market, even more horrendously than MiniDisc or DAT were. Not to mention that, having already gone through the Beta/VHS and Laserdisc/CED format wars, the public wasn't too eager to buy in to Yet Another Format War - especially with one that it seemed only one retailer (Radio Shack) supported. (Most people weren't aware of the Philips-branded decks, since those were only being sold through the "pro" and "grey" markets.)
Microsoft? Challenge the network/broadcast interests? The same Microsoft that just can't wait to implement Digital Rights Management from one end of the "computing experience" to the other? The Microsoft whose legal teams are undoubtedly, even now, filing friends-of-the-court briefs on behalf of UCITA, the DMCA, and so on? The Microsoft running an active FUD campaign to convince your local lawmakers, pointy-haired bosses, and corporate powers-that-be that open-source is tatamount to piracy and intellectual-property theft, and that the only reason any of us would oppose DRM, UCITA, DMCA, etc. is because we're all a bunch of thieving pirates? That Microsoft?
At the very least, copyright should expire if the work is not being produced after a set time period (10-20 years seems reasonable).
In other words, give the concept of "abandonware" a legal, clearly-defined standing? Now that's an idea worth pursuing, especially if the terms were codified in such a way as to take into account the different rates at which different works become "obsolete." (For example, I think a 20-year "out of print" period is about right for books, movies, music, etc., while I think a 5-year period would be more appropriate for computer software.)
I wouldn't say that an "abandoned" work should become entirely public-domain right away, though. This could raise the spectre of a publishing house (movie studio, record label, etc.) only putting out a single printing of a work, waiting long enough for the abandonware term to expire, then "re-issuing" it without having to pay the author any further royalties. (This would, for example, allow MGM to drag their heels on a reissue of Nelvana's "Rock and Rule" for a couple more years, then issue it as soon as it becomes "abandoned" without paying Nelvana a dime.)
I would suggest, rather, than when a work becomes "abandonware", the copyright holder only loses the right to control non-profit copying and distribution of the work. Thus, if MGM (to refer to the example above) is still dragging their heels on a Rock & Rule DVD release after 2003, under my proposed "abandonware" scheme I could legally make DVD-R copies from my laserdisc and give them away; such copying would only be illegal if I tried to make a profit off of it. It would also, in the case of Project Gutenberg, allow for the not-for-profit digitizing and distribution of those out-of-print books, but would allow the original author to keep his right to sue anyone who tried to plagiarize his work and claim it as their own.
Seems like a fair balance to me... what do you think?
Where do I live? Why, the great state of Texas, that hopelessly-backward land of ignorant rednecks all you fancy-pants California and New York boys love to sneer at, of course.:P
I get my renewal notice in the mail from TXDOT about a month ahead of the due date. I can either mail it in, take it down to the county office... or just walk into my local HEB grocery store, go up to the customer-service counter, write a check, show my proof of insurance, and walk out with a new window sticker. And yes, it takes all of five minutes. Heck, I can even get new license plates there (which you have to do every few years, since the reflective coatings wear out pretty regularly under the Texas sun!), which takes another minute or so.
Gee, maybe we ain't all such ig'nernt, uncivilized hicks down here after all, huh?
As for your other comments:
A time when 100% pure democracy will be in effect. (as opposed to a democratic republic). Our senators will no longer be the ones voting on and creating/modifying laws, the public will.
Ahhh, idealism from wet-behind-the-ears young 'uns armed with Civics 101 is just so cute to watch... Son, "100% pure democracy" is also called "mob rule", and the "tyranny of the majority." It's three wolves and two sheep voting on what's for dinner tonight; it's five men and two women on a desert island voting on whether the men get to rape the women. Before you champion the virtues of "100% pure democracy" and laws created/modified by the public, you might want to consider that:
Under "100% democracy", the southern states woould have remained free to oppress blacks and other minorities under Jim Crow laws.
Under "100% democracy", the majority-heterosexual voting populace could pass laws excluding the minority-homosexual population from just about everything.
Under "100% democracy", in the wake of 9-11 every person of even vaguely arabic descent or appearance would be getting incarcerated or deported.
Under "100% democracy", the (nominally) Christian majority could ban books and movies, or the teaching of evolution, with impunity.
Shall I go on? "Pure" democracy sounds like a wonderful ideal, but in practice it is just as flawed as "pure" Socialism, for essentially the same reasons - both can only work when practiced by rational, logical beings who make their decisions solely on the basis of available facts and not through emotions or irrational desires. Now, unless I woke up on the planet Vulcan this morning...
There was no "panic" over the Susan B. Anthony dollar. The SBA dollar was rejected for several reasons, but chief among them were:
(1) It was almost exactly the same size and shape as a quarter, and it was too easy to mistake one for the other when you were distracted or in a hurry. (Which, among other things, resulted in a lot of older vending machines - particularly newspaper stands - suddenly making windfall profits!)
(2) No compartment for them in the majority of cash registers. (This was also the downfall of the $2 bill, and will be one of the main reasons the Sacajawea dollar will also fail.) This has a huge impact on circulation - since there's no place for them in the drawer, they get tossed underneath along with the checks, food stamps, credit-card receipts, and odd-denomination bills ($2, $50, $100, etc.) and promptly forgotten about until the cashier closes their register and removes them. They almost never get given out as change - thus, the only place most people can get them is from the bank (or as change from some USPS vending machines). They get spent once, then wind up being thrown into the deposit satchel and sent right back to the bank. Thus, for the most part, they don't get carried around and spent, so people tend to regard them as curiosities and don't get in the habit of thinking of them as "real" money.
As for conversion to the metric system - one reason that never flew is because it was, for the most part, gone about in an extremely stupid fashion. The government and educational system was trying to push metrics onto everyone overnight... but there was no coordinated effort to simply stop selling things in pounds, quarts, and gallons and start packaging them in kilograms and liters instead, and nobody wanted to remember arcane conversion formulas and carry around pocket calculators to try and figure out how much of what they were buying, or how far they were driving and what kind of "kilometerage" they were getting per liter of gasoline. (Grocery shopping and gas tanks had the biggest impacts here... there was widespread suspicion that various companies were taking advantage of the confusion over the "old" price-per-gallon vs. the "new" price-per-liter to jack up the prices.)
While I'm not so sure it was corporate lobbyists who "pushed" the IRS to go on-line, much of the rest of your comment is right on target.
Slashdotters, please try to step outside your computer rooms for a moment and look at the real, everyday world outside the insular environs of silicon valley and the like? The simple fact is that most of the people in the U.S. are not on-line, a large percentage of households in the U.S. do not even own a computer yet... and many of those non-connected people don't want a computer, don't want to be online, and couldn't give a tinker's damn less whether or not the U.S. government (or the state, county, or city governments) offer "e-government" portals. Heck, even I don't particularly care about it, and as someone who was designing and building hardware when a lot of youl were still learning to tie your shoes, I think my "geek credentials" are pretty unassailable... Tell me, what's so bloody convenient about booting the PC, logging into the internet, getting to the state DMV site, filling out a webpage form, paying by credit card, then waiting 3 weeks for my vehicle-registration sticker to be mailed to me, when I can just stop by the customer-service desk at my local grocery store the next time I go shopping and renew my vehicle reg in 5 minutes?
Not to mention that, as a rabid libertarian, I want as little to do with the government as possible, and vice versa.:) Frankly, I don't want the government to be online, or to be efficient; the less information they have, the more difficult it is for them to pool and cross-index it, and the less efficiently they're able to make use of it, the better off we all are.
It isn't a matter of being kind or unkind; it's a matter of being realistic.
Nor is it a matter of discriminating against those to whom English is not their primary language - I have known plenty of U.S. and British-born citizens who couldn't write above a first-grade level to save their lives, too.
But the simple fact is this: if you cannot spell correctly, and construct proper sentences, in the language in which you are trying to communicate - be it English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or Tagalog - then you will not be taken seriously by those to whom you are trying to communicate. And that's just the way it is.
Sorry, but that's the most hilariously naive statement I've read in a long time, mj6798. I challenge you to produce any kind of hard, real evidence that the viewing public, or even a significant majority of it, has ever "asked for useful, interesting, educational content."
What, do you think we live in some kind of "Videodrome" universe, where the TV set turns itself on, reaches out and grabs people, chains them to their sofas, and forces them to watch until "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Oprah", and "Survivor" are burned into their neurons - assimilating them, Borg-like, into some kind of warped collective pop-culture consciousness by beaming M-rays at them?
I hate to burst your bubble, but - God help us all - far too many people in this country (and probably the world over, judging by some of what I've seen on non-American TV!) do, indeed, think that pseudomystical claptrap like "Crossing Over With John Edward" and artificial "reality" programs like "The Real World" and "Temptation Island" are "useful, interesting, and educational"... and if you put them down in front of a truly useful and educational program like NOVA, or even an intelligently-written fantasy like "Farscape" (which, whether you like the show or not, you must admit does at least require you to pay attention for more than 30 seconds at a time), in five minutes they'd be reaching for the remote.
People like you and me, who resent having our intelligence insulted, are in a very small minority - not just in TV-land, but in the world at large. The vast majority of human beings are ignorant, lazy cretins, and the "lowest common denominator" is very low, and far too common. Get used to it.
Re:Small? F***ing huge more like...
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**SIGH**
Y'know... I, too, was there during the days of the 8-bit systems, and remember the kinds of programs that could be written under the constraints of those systems... but would you please stop to consider that writing code for the x86-PC archetecture is not the same thing as writing code for a C=64? On a PC, your programs have to cooperate with other programs (especially under Windows), have to present an event-driven graphical interface, your instruction lengths are longer, and the.EXE file has to contain overhead data to tell the loader how to link the program segments. Oh, and of course, if you want maximum speed out of your code on a modern 32-bit Intel CPU you have to DWORD-align all of your data and use non-intuitive, space-wasting "tricks" to get around the P6-core's well-documented register-stall problem. All of this increases the size of your programs, no matter how efficiently you write your algorithms.
On a C=64, you don't have to cooperate with anything, you don't have to work with (or work around) a "helpful" O/S, you have a small instruction set consisting almost entirely of 1 and 2-byte instructions, there's no byte/word/dword alignment or register-stall workarounds to contend with, and your resulting executable.PRG file is little more than a pure memory image with 4 bytes of overhead to indicate load and start addresses.
don't go out and buy a $200 programmer, it's much cheaper to build one yourself.
However, if you want to work with anything other than the general-purpose, Flash-based parts (a number of Microchip's PICs, including their newest 18Cxxx-series chips, are EPROM-based), buying their PICSTART Plus kit might save you some aggravation in the long run. Many of those "do-it-yourself" kits either can't do EPROM parts, or can only do a limited range of them... and the way Microchip has been churning out new variations lately (they even have a PIC with an onboard USB port now!), you never know when you might want to play with a variant that your DIY programmer can't cope with.
Given this, storage of music by consumers won't be needed
You don't get away from your computer or leave the house very often, do you.
How do you propose to make this system work for me when I'm out driving my car, or jogging to the store and back, or sitting in an airplane, or lounging on the beach, or...
Wireless broadband? Oh, yeah, like I'm gonna pay 20 cents a minute to listen to music on a 3-hour trip to Dallas... and they won't let me use it on the airplane anyway, any more than I could use my cell phone. Not to mention that trying to cope with the system you describe while driving at highway speeds would be suicidal.
Storage of music by consumers will always be needed, as long as consumers are likely to go places where their computers aren't, or where the internet connection doesn't reach.
Why not use a Z80 derivative? Good question - primarily, it's because there are tradeoffs to consider. An embedded 8-bit MCU (such as a PIC or a Z80 system) is great for low-level, real-time hardware control, especially when your user I/O doesn't need to be more complicated than a ten-key pad and a 2-line LCD display. However, in applications (such as scientific equipment, for instance) where your user needs to be able to navigate a full 640x480 graphics display, enter complex alphanumeric data, then export megabytes of raw data to a desktop PC for in-depth analysis, a 386/486-based PC running DOS or Linux offers you a much easier development environment.
Re:Apply the same arguments to other areas of safe
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Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that the industry is incapable of policing itself... rather, I think the problem is that the industry has little incentive to do so, given that they've been able to sell their software - even "professional" packages like Acrobat, Premiere, Windows 2000 Server, etc. - under layers of liability disclaimers that most other industries could never get away with. Micro$oft, Adobe, et al. don't have to care whether or not their software has huge, gaping security flaws that can let any 12-year-old "3733T D00D" wreak havoc anytime he feels like it, because they're insulated from any liability even if they knew about the flaws months in advance and failed to correct them.
With that in mind, I think you could go a long way towards fixing these problems simply by abolishing, as a matter of law, the software industry's ability to sell shrink-wrapped consumer products as though they were used cars.:)
Which is why I am keeping my big, clunky 12" laserdisc player and my black-box "Star Wars Trilogy" CAV laserdisc set.:)
Actually, I didn't mind the Jabba scene so much, but the re-jiggered scene between Greedo and Han completely screws up Han Solo's character arc. Sure, the "heroic" Han Solo we see at the end of ROTJ wouldn't have shot first - but that's the whole damn point! One of the major themes of the original Star Wars trilogy, IMO, is redemption. The most obvious example, of course, is Darth Vader's eventual salvation from the Dark Side, but this theme is echoed in any number of other characters throughout the trilogy who, by becoming part of something greater than themselves, become better people - sometimes in spite of themselves. The fact that Han Solo started out as a disreputable, self-centered never-do-well, and became something better, is what made him interesting.
MST3K still enjoyed considerable popularity on the Sci-Fi channel, though... I think they might've gone another season or two, except for two problems:
#1 - Creative burnout. It was simply becoming too hard to sustain the level of energy needed for the series.
#2 - Dwindling supply of movies to mock. Not that there aren't lots of movies deserving of the MST3K treatment, but the people who held the broadcast rights to those movies were starting to get more demanding about royalties and such, or were simply denying permission outright.
I've found LEXX to be something of a mixed bag, personally... brilliant in some episodes, excreable in others. I have to admit that, at first, I disliked the show intensely - but that, as it turned out, was primarily due to the stupid way in which the Sci-Fi Channel chose to premiere the series, by dropping us right into the middle of season 2 and running, then re-running, four or five of the most sexually-charged episodes out of sequence. (Which, of course, meant that nothing going on made the slightest bit of sense.) Once they actually ran the four TV-movies which comprised "season 1", then started running season 2 in the correct order, I started getting into it.
Season 1 was pretty good, although "Brunnis" was a bit scattershot in focus and "Eating Pattern" dragged in a few places. (Giggerota's performance in "Brunnis" was so gleefully over-the-top, though, that you have to love it even if the plot was utter nonsense.:) ) Season 2 started out promisingly enough, then kind of went off the rails a bit with stories like "Love Grows" and "White Trash"... but once they got back on track with the whole Mantrid theme (sorry, Scorchmon, I liked Mantrid!) Season 2 wound up with a bang - literally.:) Season 3, I wasn't sure about until about halfway through it; my initial reaction was that they'd gone off the rails again, and were just being weird for the sake of weirdness... fortunately, after about five episodes or so, the pieces started clicking into place. Season 4, well... I don't know; I'm having difficulty buying into the premise that they seem to be trying to hang the season's story arc off of; like Season 3, this one may be a "late bloomer" which will start to click about halfway through. We'll see.
I suspect the primary objection to this will be "But.. but... you mean I have to do it in real time? I don't want to have to wait for this; I want it right now!!"
Actually, they probably couldn't... Government services have typically had a hard time attracting top-flight IT talent in the last decade or so; the dot-com generation doesn't consider Government jobs to be "cool," for a variety of reasons:
+ The base pay is, as a general rule, significantly less than in the private sector. (And of course, you don't get stock options.)
+ Your job position is part of a rigid hierarchy, in which Rank Hath Its Privileges - you are not rewarded for "thinking outside the box", the organization does not move in "internet time", and you will not be promoted if you do not play the appropriate office-politics games. Most dot-commers abhor this kind of thing.
+ In most Government offices, you must wear a suit and tie to the office, which is anethema to a dot-commer.:)
+ You typically won't be working with cutting-edge technology in a government office; half of Washington still runs on IBM mainframes and terminals dating back to the sixties and seventies.
Also, U.S. Government webpages are under some strict regulations regarding accessibility, thanks to the ADA, so a webpage designer cannot get too fancy with the page even if he wants to.
Er... you do realize, do you not, that the U.S.A. is also a republic? A republic in which our representatives are democratically elected, but a republic nonetheless.
...No, come to think of it, you probably didn't realize that, considering the appalling lack of decent civics education in the schools these days.
"Pure Democracy" is four wolves and one sheep voting on what's for dinner.
"Pure Democracy" is two men and one woman voting on whether it's OK for the men to tie the woman down and have their way with her.
"Pure Democracy" is a population consisting of 80% whites and 20% blacks voting on whether it's OK to keep blacks as slaves.
In other words, "Pure Democracy" is mob rule, the law of the jungle, and I'd just as soon live in our representative republic, thankyouverymuch.
True, and I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that "LinuxBASIC" (or whatever you want to name it) would be a useful tool for development work on the kernel, or for writing drivers, or whatever. Clearly, that sort of task is best left to languages which don't rely on runtime modules, and which don't try to second-guess you or prevent you from doing things they don't think you should be doing.
However, BASIC does have its uses - especially in its modern incarnations, where you have access to a lot of language features that used to be found only in "serious" languages like Pascal or, yes, even 'C'. (If you think BASIC is still mired in what it was back in the days of your old Commodore=64, or of GWBASIC, you really should check out what's being done with languages like PowerBASIC. While you're there, drop 'em a note encouraging them to finish up the PB For Linux version.:) )
Many of the programs I write in PowerBASIC (which, unlike VB, does not require a runtime DLL!) are one-off, single-function utilities to perform a specific task - usually, something simple and stupid, like running a custom test rig by trading sixteen-byte data packets with a board full of 8-bit microcontrollers, or searching a directory full of graphics files to make sure their extensions match their file types, or to act as a simple quick-n-dirty shell for a command-line utility.
For these kinds of applications, a language which hides all of the gory details from you and takes care of them on its own can be quite desirable; it makes it possible for me to say "sure, no problem, give me fifteen minutes" to a co-worker who's trying to get into a file that was created ten years ago on some weird program that terminated all of the lines with instead of .:)
A language like BASIC, with its English-like syntax, also opens up the world of programming to a larger group of hobbyist types who either can't, or don't necessarily want to, get their heads around the highly compressed (and somewhat arcane) syntax of 'C' and 'C++'. Many of them don't have any ambition to become professional programmers, and don't care that BASIC may be teaching them bad habits (or what 'C' programmers think are bad habits, anyway); all they want to do is throw together a small program to let them automate some tedious task, or implement a simple game, or control their latest electronics project through the parallel port. A good, Visual LinuxBASIC would go a long way towards attracting these kinds of people to the Linux world; right now, most of them stick with DOS or Windows because of the perception that they'll have to learn 'C++' before they can use it.
Word is probably not the best example, although it does have its problems... Excel, however, has some real problems with backwards compatibility. Worse, the problem isn't necessarily that old versions of the software can't deal with newer documents - rather, sometimes it's that new Office suites will inexplicably refuse to open legacy documents which were created with older versions of the software, or will open them but scramble the contents. This can be a real problem for companies with a lot of legacy documents lying around on floppies and backup tapes...
(Believe it or not, not all corporations operate in "internet time" with the collective memory of gnats; some of us are in businesses where having to retrieve documents that haven't been touched in years to provide service on a 20-year-old piece of equipment isn't that unusual.)
Did you just bitch about too many time travel episodes on Voyager and lack of a Dr. Who revival in the same message, and get modded up as insightful?
A small bit of irony there, to be sure... However, Doctor Who generally didn't use time-travel as a way to screw with the audience's heads for an hour and then smack the big red Universal Reset Button at the end of the episode, which is something that Voyager does constantly.
Unfortunately, too many people seem to assume that your posession of a cell phone entitles them to get hold of you any time they please, and will actually get angry at you if you turn the phone off.
Some of us just don't want to deal with having to constantly explain to friends, family, employers, etc. that "I own a cell phone is for my convenience, not yours."
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As a certified techno-geek whom you would think would be considered part of the current target market, I can tell you exactly why I haven't bought one of these things:
Because 99% of what's on TV these days is vapid, mindless crap designed to appeal to sub-literate mouth-breathers with the attention span of a ferret on a sugar buzz, the memory capacity of a lobotomized Alzheimer's patient, and the sense of humor more normally exhibited by scatologically-minded six-year-olds. What few half-competent, marginally entertaining jewels do exist buried within the steaming pile of horseshit that TV has become are so few and far between, that I can record an entire week's worth of what pathetically few "good" shows do exist on a single T160 cassette (in SP mode) and go through it on a Sunday morning before lunchtime.
In other words - Television, as a whole, sucks. Unless TiVo contains some magic software that converts the incoming signals into something worth watching, a $600 (plus subscription fees) black box sitting on top of the TV set isn't going to make it suck any less... so why would I want it?
No, he means DCC - Digital Compact Cassette. It was a short-lived format introduced by Philips back in the early 90's, which was intended to offer digital recording to the consumer in a backwards-compatible format (sound familiar). The tape shells looked just like a standard cassette, except that (IIRC) there was a metal shutter over the tape openings or something like that... (it's been years since I've seen one, so I'm going from memory here.) While it doesn't seem like that impressive of a format today, you must bear in mind that back in 1992 CD-R drives and blanks were tremendously expensive (as bad as DVD-R was a couple of years ago) and required a $2,000 computer (no standalone Philips units here!), DAT was mired in disputes over copy-prevention schemes and was only available to the consumer via the "grey market", MiniDisc was both expensive and hard to find, and there wasn't any such thing as MP3's.
It might have had a chance as a "transitional" format, if Philips had played their cards right... What really killed it in the U.S. market, though, was that Philips foolishly gave Radio Shack exclusive marketing rights for the U.S. market - which meant that, thanks to Radio Shack's bizarre pricing schemes, the already-expensive format got priced right out of the market, even more horrendously than MiniDisc or DAT were. Not to mention that, having already gone through the Beta/VHS and Laserdisc/CED format wars, the public wasn't too eager to buy in to Yet Another Format War - especially with one that it seemed only one retailer (Radio Shack) supported. (Most people weren't aware of the Philips-branded decks, since those were only being sold through the "pro" and "grey" markets.)
Microsoft? Challenge the network/broadcast interests? The same Microsoft that just can't wait to implement Digital Rights Management from one end of the "computing experience" to the other? The Microsoft whose legal teams are undoubtedly, even now, filing friends-of-the-court briefs on behalf of UCITA, the DMCA, and so on? The Microsoft running an active FUD campaign to convince your local lawmakers, pointy-haired bosses, and corporate powers-that-be that open-source is tatamount to piracy and intellectual-property theft, and that the only reason any of us would oppose DRM, UCITA, DMCA, etc. is because we're all a bunch of thieving pirates? That Microsoft?
At the very least, copyright should expire if the work is not being produced after a set time period (10-20 years seems reasonable).
In other words, give the concept of "abandonware" a legal, clearly-defined standing? Now that's an idea worth pursuing, especially if the terms were codified in such a way as to take into account the different rates at which different works become "obsolete." (For example, I think a 20-year "out of print" period is about right for books, movies, music, etc., while I think a 5-year period would be more appropriate for computer software.)
I wouldn't say that an "abandoned" work should become entirely public-domain right away, though. This could raise the spectre of a publishing house (movie studio, record label, etc.) only putting out a single printing of a work, waiting long enough for the abandonware term to expire, then "re-issuing" it without having to pay the author any further royalties. (This would, for example, allow MGM to drag their heels on a reissue of Nelvana's "Rock and Rule" for a couple more years, then issue it as soon as it becomes "abandoned" without paying Nelvana a dime.)
I would suggest, rather, than when a work becomes "abandonware", the copyright holder only loses the right to control non-profit copying and distribution of the work. Thus, if MGM (to refer to the example above) is still dragging their heels on a Rock & Rule DVD release after 2003, under my proposed "abandonware" scheme I could legally make DVD-R copies from my laserdisc and give them away; such copying would only be illegal if I tried to make a profit off of it. It would also, in the case of Project Gutenberg, allow for the not-for-profit digitizing and distribution of those out-of-print books, but would allow the original author to keep his right to sue anyone who tried to plagiarize his work and claim it as their own.
Seems like a fair balance to me... what do you think?
Where do I live? Why, the great state of Texas, that hopelessly-backward land of ignorant rednecks all you fancy-pants California and New York boys love to sneer at, of course. :P
I get my renewal notice in the mail from TXDOT about a month ahead of the due date. I can either mail it in, take it down to the county office... or just walk into my local HEB grocery store, go up to the customer-service counter, write a check, show my proof of insurance, and walk out with a new window sticker. And yes, it takes all of five minutes. Heck, I can even get new license plates there (which you have to do every few years, since the reflective coatings wear out pretty regularly under the Texas sun!), which takes another minute or so.
Gee, maybe we ain't all such ig'nernt, uncivilized hicks down here after all, huh?
As for your other comments:
A time when 100% pure democracy will be in effect. (as opposed to a democratic republic). Our senators will no longer be the ones voting on and creating/modifying laws, the public will.
Ahhh, idealism from wet-behind-the-ears young 'uns armed with Civics 101 is just so cute to watch... Son, "100% pure democracy" is also called "mob rule", and the "tyranny of the majority." It's three wolves and two sheep voting on what's for dinner tonight; it's five men and two women on a desert island voting on whether the men get to rape the women. Before you champion the virtues of "100% pure democracy" and laws created/modified by the public, you might want to consider that:
Under "100% democracy", the southern states woould have remained free to oppress blacks and other minorities under Jim Crow laws.
Under "100% democracy", the majority-heterosexual voting populace could pass laws excluding the minority-homosexual population from just about everything.
Under "100% democracy", in the wake of 9-11 every person of even vaguely arabic descent or appearance would be getting incarcerated or deported.
Under "100% democracy", the (nominally) Christian majority could ban books and movies, or the teaching of evolution, with impunity.
Shall I go on? "Pure" democracy sounds like a wonderful ideal, but in practice it is just as flawed as "pure" Socialism, for essentially the same reasons - both can only work when practiced by rational, logical beings who make their decisions solely on the basis of available facts and not through emotions or irrational desires. Now, unless I woke up on the planet Vulcan this morning...
There was no "panic" over the Susan B. Anthony dollar. The SBA dollar was rejected for several reasons, but chief among them were:
(1) It was almost exactly the same size and shape as a quarter, and it was too easy to mistake one for the other when you were distracted or in a hurry. (Which, among other things, resulted in a lot of older vending machines - particularly newspaper stands - suddenly making windfall profits!)
(2) No compartment for them in the majority of cash registers. (This was also the downfall of the $2 bill, and will be one of the main reasons the Sacajawea dollar will also fail.) This has a huge impact on circulation - since there's no place for them in the drawer, they get tossed underneath along with the checks, food stamps, credit-card receipts, and odd-denomination bills ($2, $50, $100, etc.) and promptly forgotten about until the cashier closes their register and removes them. They almost never get given out as change - thus, the only place most people can get them is from the bank (or as change from some USPS vending machines). They get spent once, then wind up being thrown into the deposit satchel and sent right back to the bank. Thus, for the most part, they don't get carried around and spent, so people tend to regard them as curiosities and don't get in the habit of thinking of them as "real" money.
As for conversion to the metric system - one reason that never flew is because it was, for the most part, gone about in an extremely stupid fashion. The government and educational system was trying to push metrics onto everyone overnight... but there was no coordinated effort to simply stop selling things in pounds, quarts, and gallons and start packaging them in kilograms and liters instead, and nobody wanted to remember arcane conversion formulas and carry around pocket calculators to try and figure out how much of what they were buying, or how far they were driving and what kind of "kilometerage" they were getting per liter of gasoline. (Grocery shopping and gas tanks had the biggest impacts here... there was widespread suspicion that various companies were taking advantage of the confusion over the "old" price-per-gallon vs. the "new" price-per-liter to jack up the prices.)
While I'm not so sure it was corporate lobbyists who "pushed" the IRS to go on-line, much of the rest of your comment is right on target.
:) Frankly, I don't want the government to be online, or to be efficient; the less information they have, the more difficult it is for them to pool and cross-index it, and the less efficiently they're able to make use of it, the better off we all are.
Slashdotters, please try to step outside your computer rooms for a moment and look at the real, everyday world outside the insular environs of silicon valley and the like? The simple fact is that most of the people in the U.S. are not on-line, a large percentage of households in the U.S. do not even own a computer yet... and many of those non-connected people don't want a computer, don't want to be online, and couldn't give a tinker's damn less whether or not the U.S. government (or the state, county, or city governments) offer "e-government" portals. Heck, even I don't particularly care about it, and as someone who was designing and building hardware when a lot of youl were still learning to tie your shoes, I think my "geek credentials" are pretty unassailable... Tell me, what's so bloody convenient about booting the PC, logging into the internet, getting to the state DMV site, filling out a webpage form, paying by credit card, then waiting 3 weeks for my vehicle-registration sticker to be mailed to me, when I can just stop by the customer-service desk at my local grocery store the next time I go shopping and renew my vehicle reg in 5 minutes?
Not to mention that, as a rabid libertarian, I want as little to do with the government as possible, and vice versa.
It isn't a matter of being kind or unkind; it's a matter of being realistic.
Nor is it a matter of discriminating against those to whom English is not their primary language - I have known plenty of U.S. and British-born citizens who couldn't write above a first-grade level to save their lives, too.
But the simple fact is this: if you cannot spell correctly, and construct proper sentences, in the language in which you are trying to communicate - be it English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or Tagalog - then you will not be taken seriously by those to whom you are trying to communicate. And that's just the way it is.
Bwa-hah-hah-hah-ha-haa......
Sorry, but that's the most hilariously naive statement I've read in a long time, mj6798. I challenge you to produce any kind of hard, real evidence that the viewing public, or even a significant majority of it, has ever "asked for useful, interesting, educational content."
What, do you think we live in some kind of "Videodrome" universe, where the TV set turns itself on, reaches out and grabs people, chains them to their sofas, and forces them to watch until "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Oprah", and "Survivor" are burned into their neurons - assimilating them, Borg-like, into some kind of warped collective pop-culture consciousness by beaming M-rays at them?
I hate to burst your bubble, but - God help us all - far too many people in this country (and probably the world over, judging by some of what I've seen on non-American TV!) do, indeed, think that pseudomystical claptrap like "Crossing Over With John Edward" and artificial "reality" programs like "The Real World" and "Temptation Island" are "useful, interesting, and educational"... and if you put them down in front of a truly useful and educational program like NOVA, or even an intelligently-written fantasy like "Farscape" (which, whether you like the show or not, you must admit does at least require you to pay attention for more than 30 seconds at a time), in five minutes they'd be reaching for the remote.
People like you and me, who resent having our intelligence insulted, are in a very small minority - not just in TV-land, but in the world at large. The vast majority of human beings are ignorant, lazy cretins, and the "lowest common denominator" is very low, and far too common. Get used to it.
**SIGH**
.EXE file has to contain overhead data to tell the loader how to link the program segments. Oh, and of course, if you want maximum speed out of your code on a modern 32-bit Intel CPU you have to DWORD-align all of your data and use non-intuitive, space-wasting "tricks" to get around the P6-core's well-documented register-stall problem. All of this increases the size of your programs, no matter how efficiently you write your algorithms.
.PRG file is little more than a pure memory image with 4 bytes of overhead to indicate load and start addresses.
Y'know... I, too, was there during the days of the 8-bit systems, and remember the kinds of programs that could be written under the constraints of those systems... but would you please stop to consider that writing code for the x86-PC archetecture is not the same thing as writing code for a C=64? On a PC, your programs have to cooperate with other programs (especially under Windows), have to present an event-driven graphical interface, your instruction lengths are longer, and the
On a C=64, you don't have to cooperate with anything, you don't have to work with (or work around) a "helpful" O/S, you have a small instruction set consisting almost entirely of 1 and 2-byte instructions, there's no byte/word/dword alignment or register-stall workarounds to contend with, and your resulting executable
don't go out and buy a $200 programmer, it's much cheaper to build one yourself.
However, if you want to work with anything other than the general-purpose, Flash-based parts (a number of Microchip's PICs, including their newest 18Cxxx-series chips, are EPROM-based), buying their PICSTART Plus kit might save you some aggravation in the long run. Many of those "do-it-yourself" kits either can't do EPROM parts, or can only do a limited range of them... and the way Microchip has been churning out new variations lately (they even have a PIC with an onboard USB port now!), you never know when you might want to play with a variant that your DIY programmer can't cope with.
Given this, storage of music by consumers won't be needed
You don't get away from your computer or leave the house very often, do you.
How do you propose to make this system work for me when I'm out driving my car, or jogging to the store and back, or sitting in an airplane, or lounging on the beach, or...
Wireless broadband? Oh, yeah, like I'm gonna pay 20 cents a minute to listen to music on a 3-hour trip to Dallas... and they won't let me use it on the airplane anyway, any more than I could use my cell phone. Not to mention that trying to cope with the system you describe while driving at highway speeds would be suicidal.
Storage of music by consumers will always be needed, as long as consumers are likely to go places where their computers aren't, or where the internet connection doesn't reach.
Why not use a Z80 derivative? Good question - primarily, it's because there are tradeoffs to consider. An embedded 8-bit MCU (such as a PIC or a Z80 system) is great for low-level, real-time hardware control, especially when your user I/O doesn't need to be more complicated than a ten-key pad and a 2-line LCD display. However, in applications (such as scientific equipment, for instance) where your user needs to be able to navigate a full 640x480 graphics display, enter complex alphanumeric data, then export megabytes of raw data to a desktop PC for in-depth analysis, a 386/486-based PC running DOS or Linux offers you a much easier development environment.
Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that the industry is incapable of policing itself... rather, I think the problem is that the industry has little incentive to do so, given that they've been able to sell their software - even "professional" packages like Acrobat, Premiere, Windows 2000 Server, etc. - under layers of liability disclaimers that most other industries could never get away with. Micro$oft, Adobe, et al. don't have to care whether or not their software has huge, gaping security flaws that can let any 12-year-old "3733T D00D" wreak havoc anytime he feels like it, because they're insulated from any liability even if they knew about the flaws months in advance and failed to correct them. With that in mind, I think you could go a long way towards fixing these problems simply by abolishing, as a matter of law, the software industry's ability to sell shrink-wrapped consumer products as though they were used cars. :)
Which is why I am keeping my big, clunky 12" laserdisc player and my black-box "Star Wars Trilogy" CAV laserdisc set. :)
Actually, I didn't mind the Jabba scene so much, but the re-jiggered scene between Greedo and Han completely screws up Han Solo's character arc. Sure, the "heroic" Han Solo we see at the end of ROTJ wouldn't have shot first - but that's the whole damn point! One of the major themes of the original Star Wars trilogy, IMO, is redemption. The most obvious example, of course, is Darth Vader's eventual salvation from the Dark Side, but this theme is echoed in any number of other characters throughout the trilogy who, by becoming part of something greater than themselves, become better people - sometimes in spite of themselves. The fact that Han Solo started out as a disreputable, self-centered never-do-well, and became something better, is what made him interesting.
MST3K still enjoyed considerable popularity on the Sci-Fi channel, though... I think they might've gone another season or two, except for two problems:
#1 - Creative burnout. It was simply becoming too hard to sustain the level of energy needed for the series.
#2 - Dwindling supply of movies to mock. Not that there aren't lots of movies deserving of the MST3K treatment, but the people who held the broadcast rights to those movies were starting to get more demanding about royalties and such, or were simply denying permission outright.
I've found LEXX to be something of a mixed bag, personally... brilliant in some episodes, excreable in others. I have to admit that, at first, I disliked the show intensely - but that, as it turned out, was primarily due to the stupid way in which the Sci-Fi Channel chose to premiere the series, by dropping us right into the middle of season 2 and running, then re-running, four or five of the most sexually-charged episodes out of sequence. (Which, of course, meant that nothing going on made the slightest bit of sense.) Once they actually ran the four TV-movies which comprised "season 1", then started running season 2 in the correct order, I started getting into it.
:) ) :)
Season 1 was pretty good, although "Brunnis" was a bit scattershot in focus and "Eating Pattern" dragged in a few places. (Giggerota's performance in "Brunnis" was so gleefully over-the-top, though, that you have to love it even if the plot was utter nonsense.
Season 2 started out promisingly enough, then kind of went off the rails a bit with stories like "Love Grows" and "White Trash"... but once they got back on track with the whole Mantrid theme (sorry, Scorchmon, I liked Mantrid!) Season 2 wound up with a bang - literally.
Season 3, I wasn't sure about until about halfway through it; my initial reaction was that they'd gone off the rails again, and were just being weird for the sake of weirdness... fortunately, after about five episodes or so, the pieces started clicking into place.
Season 4, well... I don't know; I'm having difficulty buying into the premise that they seem to be trying to hang the season's story arc off of; like Season 3, this one may be a "late bloomer" which will start to click about halfway through. We'll see.
I suspect the primary objection to this will be "But.. but... you mean I have to do it in real time? I don't want to have to wait for this; I want it right now!! "
Actually, they probably couldn't... Government services have typically had a hard time attracting top-flight IT talent in the last decade or so; the dot-com generation doesn't consider Government jobs to be "cool," for a variety of reasons:
:)
+ The base pay is, as a general rule, significantly less than in the private sector. (And of course, you don't get stock options.)
+ Your job position is part of a rigid hierarchy, in which Rank Hath Its Privileges - you are not rewarded for "thinking outside the box", the organization does not move in "internet time", and you will not be promoted if you do not play the appropriate office-politics games. Most dot-commers abhor this kind of thing.
+ In most Government offices, you must wear a suit and tie to the office, which is anethema to a dot-commer.
+ You typically won't be working with cutting-edge technology in a government office; half of Washington still runs on IBM mainframes and terminals dating back to the sixties and seventies.
Also, U.S. Government webpages are under some strict regulations regarding accessibility, thanks to the ADA, so a webpage designer cannot get too fancy with the page even if he wants to.
Er... you do realize, do you not, that the U.S.A. is also a republic? A republic in which our representatives are democratically elected, but a republic nonetheless.
...No, come to think of it, you probably didn't realize that, considering the appalling lack of decent civics education in the schools these days.
"Pure Democracy" is four wolves and one sheep voting on what's for dinner.
"Pure Democracy" is two men and one woman voting on whether it's OK for the men to tie the woman down and have their way with her.
"Pure Democracy" is a population consisting of 80% whites and 20% blacks voting on whether it's OK to keep blacks as slaves.
In other words, "Pure Democracy" is mob rule, the law of the jungle, and I'd just as soon live in our representative republic, thankyouverymuch.
Groove Mechanic might be able to do it... it's pretty good at removing clicks and pops from vinyl recordings.
True, and I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that "LinuxBASIC" (or whatever you want to name it) would be a useful tool for development work on the kernel, or for writing drivers, or whatever. Clearly, that sort of task is best left to languages which don't rely on runtime modules, and which don't try to second-guess you or prevent you from doing things they don't think you should be doing. However, BASIC does have its uses - especially in its modern incarnations, where you have access to a lot of language features that used to be found only in "serious" languages like Pascal or, yes, even 'C'. (If you think BASIC is still mired in what it was back in the days of your old Commodore=64, or of GWBASIC, you really should check out what's being done with languages like PowerBASIC. While you're there, drop 'em a note encouraging them to finish up the PB For Linux version. :) )
Many of the programs I write in PowerBASIC (which, unlike VB, does not require a runtime DLL!) are one-off, single-function utilities to perform a specific task - usually, something simple and stupid, like running a custom test rig by trading sixteen-byte data packets with a board full of 8-bit microcontrollers, or searching a directory full of graphics files to make sure their extensions match their file types, or to act as a simple quick-n-dirty shell for a command-line utility.
For these kinds of applications, a language which hides all of the gory details from you and takes care of them on its own can be quite desirable; it makes it possible for me to say "sure, no problem, give me fifteen minutes" to a co-worker who's trying to get into a file that was created ten years ago on some weird program that terminated all of the lines with instead of . :)
A language like BASIC, with its English-like syntax, also opens up the world of programming to a larger group of hobbyist types who either can't, or don't necessarily want to, get their heads around the highly compressed (and somewhat arcane) syntax of 'C' and 'C++'. Many of them don't have any ambition to become professional programmers, and don't care that BASIC may be teaching them bad habits (or what 'C' programmers think are bad habits, anyway); all they want to do is throw together a small program to let them automate some tedious task, or implement a simple game, or control their latest electronics project through the parallel port. A good, Visual LinuxBASIC would go a long way towards attracting these kinds of people to the Linux world; right now, most of them stick with DOS or Windows because of the perception that they'll have to learn 'C++' before they can use it.
Word is probably not the best example, although it does have its problems... Excel, however, has some real problems with backwards compatibility. Worse, the problem isn't necessarily that old versions of the software can't deal with newer documents - rather, sometimes it's that new Office suites will inexplicably refuse to open legacy documents which were created with older versions of the software, or will open them but scramble the contents. This can be a real problem for companies with a lot of legacy documents lying around on floppies and backup tapes...
(Believe it or not, not all corporations operate in "internet time" with the collective memory of gnats; some of us are in businesses where having to retrieve documents that haven't been touched in years to provide service on a 20-year-old piece of equipment isn't that unusual.)
Did you just bitch about too many time travel episodes on Voyager and lack of a Dr. Who revival in the same message, and get modded up as insightful? A small bit of irony there, to be sure... However, Doctor Who generally didn't use time-travel as a way to screw with the audience's heads for an hour and then smack the big red Universal Reset Button at the end of the episode, which is something that Voyager does constantly.
Unfortunately, too many people seem to assume that your posession of a cell phone entitles them to get hold of you any time they please, and will actually get angry at you if you turn the phone off.
Some of us just don't want to deal with having to constantly explain to friends, family, employers, etc. that "I own a cell phone is for my convenience, not yours."