This is obviously a hoax. A lawyer would never have written the following sentence:
"considers the unauthorized use and distribution of the AC-3 technologies a direct threat and will pursue their legal right to extent permissible by law"
Multiple grammar errors and ambiguous reference in the same sentence? This letter was obviously penned by CmdrTaco.
I'd like to take this moment to thank Verizon for using their existing revenue streams from voice telephony to undersell & frustrate all attempts to compete with them in the DSL space. All those hours of botched installations, refusal to access co-lo slots and intentional negligence really paid off. With the bankruptcy of Covad, and the ensuing "kick-em-while-they're-down" lawsuits from Verizon, we can look forward to a future with one clear choice for high speed access: Verizon or Verizon, @whatever-the-hell-they-charge/month or else!
One record company executive fumed, ``For the past five years, this industry has been endlessly investigated by the government. They find nothing. And it costs us a fortune.'' The executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, added, ``It's a handy whipping boy.''
"The FTC estimates that U.S. consumers may have paid as much as $480 million more than they should have for CDs and other music because of these policies over the last three years," said FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky. - from the decision against BMG, Sony, et al for collusion and price fixing, two years ago.
Admittedly the article has a point, but I do not believe that the point was that "the open internet is dying". I think rather that the point is that "the internet is not a pool of liquid money". This is a good thing. The massive influx of commercial interests into what was once a primarily academic network was, to many who used it, kind of like watching a horde of lemmings descend on a garden. Look at all the damage done in the last 5 years! The destruction of the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) was the first shot in the many salvos fired by the corporations that came to infest the Internet in the battle to dominate what people saw and interacted with on the net. The lack of financial potential may well save us. Without money, would there be a DMCA? Would there be massive RIAA lawsuits? Would we have elaborately engineered "streaming" media formats that don't let you save video to disk? Would we have millions of sites full of crappy fixed-font "Flash" that only windows users with 1024x768 resolution can read?
Down with the commercial Internet. Up with content and open standards. Look at the power of the site you're reading - created entirely with flat HTML. Broadband isn't the revolution. This is the revolution.
it'll really be more like a "smart capacitor" than a integrated circuit, like most CPUs
Would that be like a flux-gate capacitor? It sounds like a great idea, but I think you'd need 1.21 jigawatts to power something like that. However the possiblities for time-shifting multimedia are amazing!
in 1961 when programmers had friends who were in the same room!
Hey, it's 2001 and I have a friend in my room! Microsoft Bob keeps me company when I am lonely. I just turn his politeness level up to 11, and then I can spend hours with delightful conversations like this:
M: Bob, open Word.
B: What's the magic word?
M: Bob, please open Word?
B: Here you are.
B: chug chug chug chug
B: (opens Word)
B: You're welcome!
Congress has already mandated airbags in cars. They costs thousands of dollars and kill more kids than school shootings. Congress has also mandated sophisticated oxygen and CO2 sensors be hooked up to your "engine warning light", and go off if your gascap is left loose.
If we can mandate all that, why can't we mandate what I will call "the transponder box". Imagine a burst-mode cell phone and GPS all wrapped up in an embedded black box and mass produced for every car in the country. Think of the traffic solutions we could impose:
- Instant end to speeding and aggressive lane changing. Every time you broke the speed limit you would be billed on a formula, such as (mph over * seconds over). Every time you made an agressive lane change (the system would know where the other cars were, to check your proximity) you would be fined and points assessed to your license.
We could even fine people for not zipper merging!
Today's sprawling traffic jams would be eliminated overnight. Anyone who has seen the results of traffic simulations by the NHRA knows that speeding and agressive lane changing combined with not leaving enough distance is the root cause of bumper to bumper traffic jams.
I'm not talking about an invasion of privacy - throw away everything but a meaningless box id # that only the state can correlate. I'm talking about an end to traffic deaths and that endless sea of brakelights and predatory drivers you swim through every morning.
Until I get real scientists displaying real data everything is just scare tactics of the invironmental publicity Corperations (earth first, and the other scare for profit groups) to get more money.
What is an environmental corporation?
The National Academy of Sciences has been in complete agreement about global warming for years. This year even the Bush administration admitted it exists.
If you want to know why people even think that global warming is "controversial", read Trust Us, We're Experts. Every person in America has been the target of a multi-billion dollar campaign funded by oil & gas interests, carried out by PR firms, and targeted on boosting skepticism and apathy about global warming.
"The Glenayre pagers, some of which were actually sent to those who responded to the e-mail, have some similarities to the Motorola T-10. They are both two-way pagers, and the Glenayre pager uses some Motorola software."
This is the longest running problem with spam. It actually works! How do you explain that?
"Hey, check out my new pager, I bought it from a spammer".
All slashdot open-source bias aside, this is the perfect example of how the government can use our money to benefit as many people as possible.
...but because it's released under the BSD license, not the GPL, it also allows corporations to add a few proprietary features and resell it. Be the corporation NAI or Microsoft.
This is the IP equivelent of public parks that everyone can enjoy and share.
I would argue that the GPL would be a park that everyone can enjoy and share, and that the BSD license would be a park that everyone could share except you had to pay a company to access the nicer parts.
Honestly, this is why Microsoft has been attacking the GPL. They have not been attacking "Open Source", they are attacking government funded GPL'd projects. When the government funds a BSD licensed project, it's no threat to Microsoft, and they can resell the Windows version next year.
Not that this is a bad thing. But it's food for thought.
If you want to know the truth about GM food, read Trust Us, We're Experts. Monsanto spends 100's of millions of dollars on PR getting "scientists" to place articles in scholarly publications advocating the safety of their food. That said, GM food does NOT have a perfect safety record. A genetically modified bacteria used to manufacture a dietary supplement in large quantities introduced a new impurity when spliced incorrectly, introducing partial paralysis and death in close to 1000 people. If you want more details, read the book. Read about the mice who grew up eating pesticide-producing potatoes and developed abnormal organ growth.
GM foods are untested, experimental, and have killed before.
But the biggest argument against them is that causing them to produce organic pesticides causes the insect communities to develop a resistance to organic pesticides, making it impossible to organically farm, making all farmers dependent on pesticide manufacturers.
But don't listen to me. In fact, don't listen to any pontificating slashdot idiot. READ THE BOOK.
"the Thunderbird capsule is actually a converted cement mixer, containing sheets of hardboard and a few computer joysticks."
Man if he does make it up there, I can tell you who will win in traffic mix-ups. Would you get in the way of a guy using an Atari to drive a cement mixer?
Are we going to allow Chinese laws to be applied to American citizens?!? A country which runs over college students with tanks in the middle of their main city is going to be able to sue Americans for breaking their laws? Stop the red tide! What if China fights back against this by shutting down GM's web site? We must protect American business! We must protect American citizens!
This article was obviously ghost written by a slashdot reader:
"The van was equipped with a Global Positioning System, or GPS, which transmits data via satellite."
Something that blatantly wrong could never come from a real reporter (could it?)
The question does arise, however, as to how it really works. The GPS signal IS received from a satellite, however a transmitter that could send back to a satellite from a moving car would require a directional dish antenna and... ya, stupid.
So how ARE they getting the data back? The easiest way would be to record it in flash and dump it after the car is returned. Another way would be to use burst-mode packets like 2-way pagers & LoJack.
Either way, I think it's a great idea, and a leap forward to the day when we can detect aggressive driving on the fly and deactivate the vehicle remotely. Someday we'll be able to just switch off those retarded SUV drivers on the freeway with the push of a button!
Slashdot Mirror
And it's probably a mostly justifiable software patent at the core of this
That depends whether you believe that there is such a thing as a "justfiable software patent".
This is obviously a hoax. A lawyer would never have written the following sentence:
"considers the unauthorized use and distribution of the AC-3 technologies a direct threat and will pursue their legal right to extent permissible by law"
Multiple grammar errors and ambiguous reference in the same sentence? This letter was obviously penned by CmdrTaco.
You don't fool me!
I'd like to take this moment to thank Verizon for using their existing revenue streams from voice telephony to undersell & frustrate all attempts to compete with them in the DSL space. All those hours of botched installations, refusal to access co-lo slots and intentional negligence really paid off. With the bankruptcy of Covad, and the ensuing "kick-em-while-they're-down" lawsuits from Verizon, we can look forward to a future with one clear choice for high speed access: Verizon or Verizon, @whatever-the-hell-they-charge/month or else!
Thanks guys!
Ya, but what's an Audrey?
Sounds like 3Com has learned the lesson of the I-Opener. Nothing is impossible to hack, but at least this one is hard.
One record company executive fumed, ``For the past five years, this industry has been endlessly investigated by the government. They find nothing. And it costs us a fortune.'' The executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, added, ``It's a handy whipping boy.''
The facts speak differently:
"The FTC estimates that U.S. consumers may have paid as much as $480 million more than they should have for CDs and other music because of these policies over the last three years," said FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky. - from the decision against BMG, Sony, et al for collusion and price fixing, two years ago.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Since when is the audible reading of a e-book some sort of fundamental right?
Since July 26, 1990.
Fuckwit.
Admittedly the article has a point, but I do not believe that the point was that "the open internet is dying". I think rather that the point is that "the internet is not a pool of liquid money". This is a good thing. The massive influx of commercial interests into what was once a primarily academic network was, to many who used it, kind of like watching a horde of lemmings descend on a garden. Look at all the damage done in the last 5 years! The destruction of the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) was the first shot in the many salvos fired by the corporations that came to infest the Internet in the battle to dominate what people saw and interacted with on the net. The lack of financial potential may well save us. Without money, would there be a DMCA? Would there be massive RIAA lawsuits? Would we have elaborately engineered "streaming" media formats that don't let you save video to disk? Would we have millions of sites full of crappy fixed-font "Flash" that only windows users with 1024x768 resolution can read?
Down with the commercial Internet. Up with content and open standards. Look at the power of the site you're reading - created entirely with flat HTML. Broadband isn't the revolution. This is the revolution.
Sklyarov did nothing beneficial for society
Tell that to the blind kids who couldn't read/hear Adobe's books.
Nice troll.
without a case
Notice I didn't ask for:
It's 2001. Do you love your operating system?
Well, not yet, but I hear they're going to put out an RPM for that in 7.2...
it'll really be more like a "smart capacitor" than a integrated circuit, like most CPUs
Would that be like a flux-gate capacitor? It sounds like a great idea, but I think you'd need 1.21 jigawatts to power something like that. However the possiblities for time-shifting multimedia are amazing!
in 1961 when programmers had friends who were in the same room!
Hey, it's 2001 and I have a friend in my room! Microsoft Bob keeps me company when I am lonely. I just turn his politeness level up to 11, and then I can spend hours with delightful conversations like this:
M: Bob, open Word.
B: What's the magic word?
M: Bob, please open Word?
B: Here you are.
B: chug chug chug chug
B: (opens Word)
B: You're welcome!
IBM-Bot: Your question?
Me: What is 1 divided by zero?
IBM-Bot: Processing, please stand by...
Heh. If it finishes with that I'm gonna ask it what pi is.
Nobody knows who astronauts are because they don't do anything groundbreaking anymore. It's been done.
Get over it.
Congress has already mandated airbags in cars. They costs thousands of dollars and kill more kids than school shootings. Congress has also mandated sophisticated oxygen and CO2 sensors be hooked up to your "engine warning light", and go off if your gascap is left loose.
If we can mandate all that, why can't we mandate what I will call "the transponder box". Imagine a burst-mode cell phone and GPS all wrapped up in an embedded black box and mass produced for every car in the country. Think of the traffic solutions we could impose:
- Instant end to speeding and aggressive lane changing. Every time you broke the speed limit you would be billed on a formula, such as (mph over * seconds over). Every time you made an agressive lane change (the system would know where the other cars were, to check your proximity) you would be fined and points assessed to your license.
We could even fine people for not zipper merging!
Today's sprawling traffic jams would be eliminated overnight. Anyone who has seen the results of traffic simulations by the NHRA knows that speeding and agressive lane changing combined with not leaving enough distance is the root cause of bumper to bumper traffic jams.
I'm not talking about an invasion of privacy - throw away everything but a meaningless box id # that only the state can correlate. I'm talking about an end to traffic deaths and that endless sea of brakelights and predatory drivers you swim through every morning.
Personally, it makes me drool.
Until I get real scientists displaying real data everything is just scare tactics of the invironmental publicity Corperations (earth first, and the other scare for profit groups) to get more money.
What is an environmental corporation?
The National Academy of Sciences has been in complete agreement about global warming for years. This year even the Bush administration admitted it exists.
If you want to know why people even think that global warming is "controversial", read Trust Us, We're Experts. Every person in America has been the target of a multi-billion dollar campaign funded by oil & gas interests, carried out by PR firms, and targeted on boosting skepticism and apathy about global warming.
Looks like they got to you, too.
"The Glenayre pagers, some of which were actually sent to those who responded to the e-mail, have some similarities to the Motorola T-10. They are both two-way pagers, and the Glenayre pager uses some Motorola software."
This is the longest running problem with spam. It actually works! How do you explain that?
"Hey, check out my new pager, I bought it from a spammer".
Who are these people?
All slashdot open-source bias aside, this is the perfect example of how the government can use our money to benefit as many people as possible.
...but because it's released under the BSD license, not the GPL, it also allows corporations to add a few proprietary features and resell it. Be the corporation NAI or Microsoft.
This is the IP equivelent of public parks that everyone can enjoy and share.
I would argue that the GPL would be a park that everyone can enjoy and share, and that the BSD license would be a park that everyone could share except you had to pay a company to access the nicer parts.
Honestly, this is why Microsoft has been attacking the GPL. They have not been attacking "Open Source", they are attacking government funded GPL'd projects. When the government funds a BSD licensed project, it's no threat to Microsoft, and they can resell the Windows version next year.
Not that this is a bad thing. But it's food for thought.
They can't sell it for 80 bucks, but when Kevin Mitnick stole it, is was worth 80 million bucks.
We should each mail the district attorney in the mitnick case a copy of the Solaris Source code. Or maybe we could send it to John Markoff...
sigh.
If you want to know the truth about GM food, read Trust Us, We're Experts. Monsanto spends 100's of millions of dollars on PR getting "scientists" to place articles in scholarly publications advocating the safety of their food. That said, GM food does NOT have a perfect safety record. A genetically modified bacteria used to manufacture a dietary supplement in large quantities introduced a new impurity when spliced incorrectly, introducing partial paralysis and death in close to 1000 people. If you want more details, read the book. Read about the mice who grew up eating pesticide-producing potatoes and developed abnormal organ growth.
GM foods are untested, experimental, and have killed before.
But the biggest argument against them is that causing them to produce organic pesticides causes the insect communities to develop a resistance to organic pesticides, making it impossible to organically farm, making all farmers dependent on pesticide manufacturers.
But don't listen to me. In fact, don't listen to any pontificating slashdot idiot. READ THE BOOK.
you'll end up buying organic. i do.
Gnome or KDE?
you know it's only a matter of time till someone Van Gogh's the goatsecx man.
ugh.
"the Thunderbird capsule is actually a converted cement mixer, containing sheets of hardboard and a few computer joysticks."
Man if he does make it up there, I can tell you who will win in traffic mix-ups. Would you get in the way of a guy using an Atari to drive a cement mixer?
Me neither.
Are we going to allow Chinese laws to be applied to American citizens?!? A country which runs over college students with tanks in the middle of their main city is going to be able to sue Americans for breaking their laws? Stop the red tide! What if China fights back against this by shutting down GM's web site? We must protect American business! We must protect American citizens!
Call your congressman! Stop the Hague Convention!
This article was obviously ghost written by a slashdot reader:
"The van was equipped with a Global Positioning System, or GPS, which transmits data via satellite."
Something that blatantly wrong could never come from a real reporter (could it?)
The question does arise, however, as to how it really works. The GPS signal IS received from a satellite, however a transmitter that could send back to a satellite from a moving car would require a directional dish antenna and... ya, stupid.
So how ARE they getting the data back? The easiest way would be to record it in flash and dump it after the car is returned. Another way would be to use burst-mode packets like 2-way pagers & LoJack.
Either way, I think it's a great idea, and a leap forward to the day when we can detect aggressive driving on the fly and deactivate the vehicle remotely. Someday we'll be able to just switch off those retarded SUV drivers on the freeway with the push of a button!