I don't like DRM in the consumer world, DRM'd media files, games, etc. I agree with all the arguments against using DRM there. Criminalizing decryption is a travesty of justice.
However, there are entirely different contexts where DRM can be a useful tool. For example, in a past job, my company was receiving a sensitive data feed from another company where we had to promise to revoke our internal access to certain parts of the data feed upon demand. We were not worried about internal hackery, but we were worried about inadvertent copies being made within our enterprise for reasonable reasons. (Backups, caches for speed, etc.) We self-imposed DRM, and it was a great solution.
Having such an easily game-able criteria (boisterous people get more investigation) yields more success rate for those who don't want to get investigate. The al-Qaeda training manual suggesting blending in is an obvious reaction - while the security spends more time on some class, they have less time to spend on the class the terrorist can put themselves into. (Quiet and blending in.) Thus, this actively (slightly) increases the chance the terrorist can achieve their goals.
In case anyone else was interested but ignorant of the meaning of: Most EU countries use civil law, not common law. Translation of legal terms may be misleading., I read a few articles online. I think that this one was the most helpful:
What I took away (apart from the very interesting history) was that common law expects/requires judges to consider past judges decisions, so the law is a combination of legislated statute and precedent. Civil law on the other hand focuses mostly/exclusively on legislated statue. (I'm sure I'm over-simplifying, so read the article yourself!)
I definitely agree, iSight w/iChat is the best. A few months ago for Mother's Day, I set up videoconferencing for my daughter's two grandmothers, we're spread out across the USA. I tried MSN Messenger, Skype Video and iChat. iSight+iChat was *so* superior to the others in terms of picture quality and video quality (slightly different considerations) that I ended up upgrading my Powerbook to a MacBook Pro, giving the hand-me-down to my parents, and setting up my in-laws with an iSight for their Mac Mini computer they were planning on getting rid of. The quality is simply in another class from the other solutions, in my experience.
are about industrial conveyor belts? (I got "Belt Conveyors From the Industry Leader, QC Solutions") I can certainly understand it, given that the article has the text "'conveyor belt' consisting of lasers", but it's still wrong and funny!
I'm hardly an official Yahoo! source, but I can tell you that we use TWiki internally to manage documentation and project planning for our products. Our development team includes hundreds of people in various locations all over the world, so web collaboration is VERY important to us. TWiki has changed the way we run meetings, plan releases, document our product and generally communicate with each other. We're great fans of your work! Thanks! Eric Baldeschwieler - Director of Software Development
...
Yahoo's TWiki is currently over 60+gigs and growing. It works great. Thanks for the great product!
I think the beauty of Wikis is the zero cost publishing and viewing. SVN over WebDav that someone else here came up with sounds like a great idea too, I'd never thought of that. The very light-weight-ness of TWiki (doesn't need to be that particular Wiki implementation) is what makes it successful. You really don't have to think about going from viewing to editing or anything, it's got a trivial UI on seeing revisions that untrained newbies pick up, etc. It's seriously changed our ability to do collaboration.
Still, I wonder if it is legal to fire someone just for having looked for alternate employment options. Maybe it is legal, but that would be one scary hostile workplace.
I'm an engineering manager in California, which is an at-will employment state. In general, this means that you can get your employment terminated at any time for any reason, save a few protected things. (I.e. in general you can't get fired/not hired for race, religion, etc) However, you still have to be consistent in your approach. You can still get in legal trouble if you only fire some of the people who you find are looking for alternative employment but not others. I bet if you started consistently firing everyone who was looking for another job, you wouldn't have much a company before long!
Not exactly. Google may not make money on the sale of Firefox (since Firefox isn't "sold") but they do offer $1 per new user referred (with the firefox toolbar)
Certainly they wouldn't be able to afford this without the Firefox default page (in the US) and searches going to Google where they make money on the AdSense. Google certainly paid Firefox for that privilege.
Cringely's essay from years ago
on
Store Your Own Juice
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely wrote about such devices years ago and presented a reasonable argument that they are a solution to the California energy crisis, but that it won't happen. Basically, he said that the cost to California to equip 10x more houses than the rolling blackouts consume would be less than the cost of building new powerplants. I haven't checked his math, but it seems reasonable that last-mile caching (this is effectively similiar to other caching-type solutions) would really help solve this problem.
I wonder if there are appropriate points in the traditional power grid system where power-storage systems could be used to buffer enough stuff over 24 hours to solve this problem. Gigantic flywheels near your block, poised to clobber through the neighborhood, anyone? I suppose this problem has already been studied.
TiVo's patent in question is on being able to record one show while using the same device to watch another. Dish's prior recorder that allowed pausing of live TV isn't really prior art of that.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like DRM in the consumer world, DRM'd media files, games, etc. I agree with all the arguments against using DRM there. Criminalizing decryption is a travesty of justice.
However, there are entirely different contexts where DRM can be a useful tool. For example, in a past job, my company was receiving a sensitive data feed from another company where we had to promise to revoke our internal access to certain parts of the data feed upon demand. We were not worried about internal hackery, but we were worried about inadvertent copies being made within our enterprise for reasonable reasons. (Backups, caches for speed, etc.) We self-imposed DRM, and it was a great solution.
Having such an easily game-able criteria (boisterous people get more investigation) yields more success rate for those who don't want to get investigate. The al-Qaeda training manual suggesting blending in is an obvious reaction - while the security spends more time on some class, they have less time to spend on the class the terrorist can put themselves into. (Quiet and blending in.) Thus, this actively (slightly) increases the chance the terrorist can achieve their goals.
So will our kids be perplexed by all jokes of the form 'How many X does it take to screw in a light bulb?'
In case anyone else was interested but ignorant of the meaning of: Most EU countries use civil law, not common law. Translation of legal terms may be misleading., I read a few articles online. I think that this one was the most helpful:
http://fountainoflaw.com/Vocab/commonlaw.html
What I took away (apart from the very interesting history) was that common law expects/requires judges to consider past judges decisions, so the law is a combination of legislated statute and precedent. Civil law on the other hand focuses mostly/exclusively on legislated statue. (I'm sure I'm over-simplifying, so read the article yourself!)
I definitely agree, iSight w/iChat is the best. A few months ago for Mother's Day, I set up videoconferencing for my daughter's two grandmothers, we're spread out across the USA. I tried MSN Messenger, Skype Video and iChat. iSight+iChat was *so* superior to the others in terms of picture quality and video quality (slightly different considerations) that I ended up upgrading my Powerbook to a MacBook Pro, giving the hand-me-down to my parents, and setting up my in-laws with an iSight for their Mac Mini computer they were planning on getting rid of. The quality is simply in another class from the other solutions, in my experience.
Has anyone else noticed that the ads on the informative article page:
a chine-29616.shtml
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Atom-Sorting-M
are about industrial conveyor belts? (I got "Belt Conveyors From the Industry Leader, QC Solutions") I can certainly understand it, given that the article has the text "'conveyor belt' consisting of lasers", but it's still wrong and funny!
I'm hardly an official Yahoo! source, but I can tell you that we use TWiki internally to manage documentation and project planning for our products. Our development team includes hundreds of people in various locations all over the world, so web collaboration is VERY important to us. TWiki has changed the way we run meetings, plan releases, document our product and generally communicate with each other. We're great fans of your work! Thanks! Eric Baldeschwieler - Director of Software Development
...
Yahoo's TWiki is currently over 60+gigs and growing. It works great. Thanks for the great product!
I think the beauty of Wikis is the zero cost publishing and viewing. SVN over WebDav that someone else here came up with sounds like a great idea too, I'd never thought of that. The very light-weight-ness of TWiki (doesn't need to be that particular Wiki implementation) is what makes it successful. You really don't have to think about going from viewing to editing or anything, it's got a trivial UI on seeing revisions that untrained newbies pick up, etc. It's seriously changed our ability to do collaboration.
Still, I wonder if it is legal to fire someone just for having looked for alternate employment options. Maybe it is legal, but that would be one scary hostile workplace.
I'm an engineering manager in California, which is an at-will employment state. In general, this means that you can get your employment terminated at any time for any reason, save a few protected things. (I.e. in general you can't get fired/not hired for race, religion, etc) However, you still have to be consistent in your approach. You can still get in legal trouble if you only fire some of the people who you find are looking for alternative employment but not others. I bet if you started consistently firing everyone who was looking for another job, you wouldn't have much a company before long!
Not exactly. Google may not make money on the sale of Firefox (since Firefox isn't "sold") but they do offer $1 per new user referred (with the firefox toolbar)
Certainly they wouldn't be able to afford this without the Firefox default page (in the US) and searches going to Google where they make money on the AdSense. Google certainly paid Firefox for that privilege.
PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely wrote about such devices years ago and presented a reasonable argument that they are a solution to the California energy crisis, but that it won't happen. Basically, he said that the cost to California to equip 10x more houses than the rolling blackouts consume would be less than the cost of building new powerplants. I haven't checked his math, but it seems reasonable that last-mile caching (this is effectively similiar to other caching-type solutions) would really help solve this problem.
I wonder if there are appropriate points in the traditional power grid system where power-storage systems could be used to buffer enough stuff over 24 hours to solve this problem. Gigantic flywheels near your block, poised to clobber through the neighborhood, anyone? I suppose this problem has already been studied.
TiVo's patent in question is on being able to record one show while using the same device to watch another. Dish's prior recorder that allowed pausing of live TV isn't really prior art of that.