From what I understand, nothing that's been proposed would make AOL's dialup service free.
Thus, those people who are currently using AOL as their ISP -- because they can't get broadband and for whatever reason, don't want to switch to a regular dialup ISP -- will still have to pay.
What's being proposed in TFA is a shift in focus of AOL's marketing efforts, away from promoting their pay-to-use dialup service, in favor of promoting their "free" ad-supported web-based services, which anyone with an existing internet connection can use.
So the people that you're talking about, who are using AOL as their only means of connecting to the 'net, would not probably see much change, except that they would slowly become further and further into the minority (since the service wouldn't be promoted anymore), and probably the quality of service is going to decline (since AOL's focus will be on other revenue sources). However, I don't think that dialup access will ever be free from AOL: they just have too much invested in it, and see it as too lucrative a source of revenue. As you pointed out, the people who are left as dialup subscribers to AOL aren't likely to change and are pretty entrenched, so they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to decrease the price. If anything, they'll probably increase the price or discontinue the service as they transition to a new business model.
Because unlike just writing some farmer a check, this actually encourages/ensures that they're doing something environmentally important with the money. (Or something that you, the theoretical buyer of said power, thinks is environmentally important.)
If I want to encourage certain behavior -- in this case, the use of Green power -- it makes more sense for me to pay you to do that behavior, than it does for me to just give you some cash for being yourself.
So yes, it's basically a donation to a bunch of farmers, but it's a donation to a bunch of farmers in return for doing something that assumedly you think is important (if you're participating).
I don't really think this is going to change anything. The injections that this is replacing are mostly intra-muscular, so (assuming they're in your protocols) you could do them right now.
The reason Paramedics drop lines is less to introduce drugs but to add fluid volume, saline or blood. You can't do that intramuscularly, or without a needle. Once you have the line inserted as a way of adding volume, it's an easy way to give drugs (and there are admittedly drugs that are intended for intravascular use instead of IM), but a needle-less IM system wouldn't replace most IV insertions.
Unless you could find some way to continuously pump fluids into a vein without a catheter in place to keep it open, but I don't think anyone has proposed a needleless sytem that does that.
This makes me wonder: although I don't know of any drugs that can change the size of your nads, there are a whole lot of drugs that would affect the other 51% of the population's hydrodynamics. Oral contraceptives, mainly, but I'm sure there are other things that could make a woman's breasts larger and consequently make her slower in the water...seems like you could probably do the opposite (make them smaller) with the right hormones, if you wanted to, and it would be very hard to detect on a drug check. How are you to know from a urine screen if one competitor's hormone levels are naturally that low, or are being artificially shifted to the limits of the 'normal range'?
I wonder how much of stuff like that already goes on? I bet at the upper echelons of sports where it's important, quite a bit.
Not actually true. I'm sure that if you made the swimmers compete nude, instead of competing to see who could have the most high-tech swimsuit, the focus would switch to who could create the most high-tech water-repellent skin creme. Some sort of wax or silicone, perhaps, that lowered the water resistance below what was normal for human skin. Or maybe some sort of treatment that made the body produce more oil (or less oil -- I don't know if oily skin has less or more resistance through water).
Anything that tries to stop technology and innovation from affecting a sport is inherently doomed to failure. A better approach would be to embrace innovation, in all sports, since this would have the effect of making the sports more interesting, and more relevant to society in general (by encouraging technological development, things would be produced that benefit everyone -- putting the focus on athleticism, while amusing to watch, doesn't produce any tangible benefit for the rest of us).
However, I agree, nude sports would get much better television ratings. Find some way to justify nude beach volleyball, and you have yourself a winner.
There's a quite fundamental difference between saying "hey, if you mess around with this and screw something up, we're not going to pay to fix it" and saying "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO OPEN THIS UNDER PENALTY OF LAW."
If I buy a brand new Taurus (or whatever they've replaced the Taurus with these days) and immediately open the hood up and put a supercharger on the engine, I may well have voided my warranty. (If I'm not a service technician.) Basically Ford is washing their hands of me. It's my car, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, but they're not going to clean up my mess if I break it. That's perfectly fair.
What DRM does, in concert with the DMCA, is make it illegal to modify things in equipment that you own. It would be like Ford telling me that I can only put Mobil gas into my new car, and if I modify the gas port so that I can use an Exxon nozzle, not only are they going to refuse to help me fix it, but I'm a criminal as well. They are saying not what they will or will not do, but what I can or cannot do.
In the case of a voided warranty, there's no inherent judgment on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the action/modification made: your property is your castle, to do with what you think fit. You only have to follow the rules if you want outside help later on. With the DMCA, it becomes actually illegal to tinker with something that you yourself own, regardless of whether you're ever planning on taking it outside your home again, or if you were planning on asking someone later to fix it.
That's a pretty big and important distinction: your right to use something that you own is not like a car warranty, and shouldn't be able to be voided just because you break somebody's holy foil seal. If you own the box, it should be yours to do with however you like.
The USSC ruled that the duration of copyright, since it is not precisely specified in the Constitution, is the domain of Congress to interpret.
The Court specifically did not say that copyright can go on forever, only that the duration can be changed more-or-less arbitrarily by Congress, meaning that if they continue to extend it to the point where it becomes 'forever,' then the Court has the power to step in, since that would be unconstitutional. Since they've only extended it once (so far), it's not yet "effectively forever," and the Court decided not to do anything.
I think both you and Mr. Lloyd (the Ars contributor who wrote much of what is quoted in the linked AC post) are off base. To be honest, Mr. Lloyd comes across as a bit of a Luddite. He sees 'art' only in terms of something that can be mass produced and sold many times over. This is understandable, since in our society this is fairly common, but it doesn't have to be that way. I could easily see many situations -- an entire future of situations -- where artwork is reproduced without compensation to the original creator, but there are still artists in business: because people pay for novelty. People will pay for originality. In a world where you could get anything that had already been created virtually for free, there would be an instant premium placed on anything that was newly-minted. Anything bespoke. Anything custom.
Obviously the payment framework would have to change -- artists couldn't guarantee a living by making things basically on speculation, hoping that they'd be able to recoup the labor involved in its creation over the years of royalties to follow, and instead would need to demand payment up front, like any other skilled laborer (which is what they are, after all).
Overall I think Mr. Lloyd's claims that the rise of cheap mechanical reproduction would lead to a catastrophic decline in artistic quality are foolish. Also, I think it's incredibly naive -- bordering on arrogant -- to assume that somehow our situation is historically unique. The argument that we are having today regarding the possible decline of the Arts in the face of a new technological age (and with it, new rules), has happened over and over. I'd argue that the situation with 'intellectual property' and DRM today is not dissimilar to the fundamental arguments over what constitutes art that happened more than a century ago with the rise of the photographic process.
There will always be a market for the labor of individuals who are skilled at their crafts, be it creating beautiful images, writing stories, making music, or building houses. The fact that some of them may be unable to sell the same labor thousands of times over may make make their trade comparatively less lucrative compared to others, but it does not fundamentally eliminate it.
I don't think the rebate per se is a scam: what's dishonest is the way prices are advertised.
In many cases, the HUMONGOUS BIG FONT price on the item is the price after the rebate -- not what you actually have to pay to the cashier. This is illegal in some states (as it should be), but when it's not, the retailers love to do it.
Depending on how it's done, rebates can border on a bait-and-switch: you decide to buy the widget because of the 'price after rebate,' but you don't know until you get up to the register and get the rebate form -- in many cases after you pay the inflated price -- exactly what you have to do in order to GET that price.
Also, in many cases there are artificial restrictions on the rebates which keep you from getting the item at that price. (Limit one per family, etc.) So that price that you think you're going to be able to pay is really only good on the first item -- after that, you have to pay the inflated price. Woe onto you if you buy more than one. I understand it's a caveat emptor world, but sometimes the stores have gone too far.
I'm glad to see OfficeMax doing what it's doing, and I hope that other stores will follow suit.
I was thinking the same thing. ABC is missing out on a chance to really increase their advertisement revenue. Here's how: instead of selling regular 30-second commercials, they tell everyone that with the advent of DVRs, that what they really need to do is buy five minute ads, and then play their normal advertisement at 1/10th normal speed for everyone who's watching it in fast-forward.
Of course, the obnoxiousness of watching a five-minute commercial would immediately cause the folks still watching normal-speed TV to go out and get DVRs in order to FF through them; the end result would be that everyone would buy a DVR, and everyone would watch the same 30-second clips!
In time, there would be an 'arms race' between the networks and DVR companies, to see who could have faster fast-forwards, and who could have the slowest commercials. Just think: a two-hour Rogaine ad, transmitted at 0.5 fps.
Why the hell would anyone pay eighty-five pounds for an unlicensed copy of anything?
Do people really think that the box and the manuals and the stamped CDs really cost that much? If you're going to get "unlicensed" software, why not just pay someone a couple of bucks to dupe the CDs? That's effectively what you're getting; a set of installation media without any right to use the software that's on it.
I bet if you called up Microsoft as a licensed user and said that your dog had eaten your media, that they probably wouldn't charge you that much for a new set of media for use with your existing license. The "license" is the only thing that has any value -- the installation media and manual are just extras, worth maybe a few bucks, but certainly not a significant percentage of the 'retail price' of the software (with license).
Understood. I guess my question boils down to 'a tree falling in a forest.'
If we create a legal construct, but there's no objective evidence of it being created or agreed to, then can the construct really be said to exist?
If it's uncontested, it may not be an issue; but as soon as one party tries to contest some part of the construct, then whether or not there's evidence of the agreement/construct becomes a serious problem. That's why we have contracts and signatures -- not because they are legal constructs themselves, but because they're physical embodiments of them, setting out what has been agreed to, and the consent of the various parties concerned, in a way which is obvious to a third party.
Particularly in regions where clickthru EULAs are not enforceable, it seems as though there's a shortage of the physical embodiments of the license 'agreement.'
I don't think it's illegal for a minor to enter into a contract, it's just that their signature doesn't have any weight. It can't be 'illegal' for them to enter into a contract, because as far as the law is concerned, they can't do it. They don't have the necessary legal status (unless they've been legally emancipated).
It's not a prohibition, like selling drugs (where you can do it, but it's illegal), it's just a nullification of their ability to agree to the terms. Thus, anything they'd sign would be unenforceable. That's why credit card companies don't give cards to minors -- you couldn't force them to pay up.
IANAL, naturally...but I don't think that you could endanger the morals of a minor by making them click on a clickthru license (snarky anti-Windows comments go here); however you couldn't hold them to the terms of whatever they "agreed" to, because they can't legally enter into a contract.
What does the judge think the license is? Is it the receipt? The media? The license key? Or some/all of these combined? IMHO the COA is the piece of paper saying "you are license for this product". It doesn't matter what media or license key you use providing the COA is valid.
I wondered the same thing. Okay, so when you buy software, you're not really buying the software, you're buying a license (or so they tell us). Fine; but where the hell is the license? What confers it? The purchase receipt? Possession of the original authentic media? The front page of the manual? The click-through license?
If the silly certificate isn't the license, then what is?
It's all well and good to say that I'm buying a license, but if that's the case, then I want to know exactly how it was conferred to me, and how I can transfer or sell it to somebody else.
I'm surprised that they haven't disabled the print-screen functionality in some way so that it's not possible to do this.
For example, in OS X, taking screenshots is disabled whenever DVD Player is running. It's not particularly hard to get around (actually, it's almost trivially easy; yet another situation where I feel like Apple did just the bare minimum required to look like they care) using the Terminal or a third-party applet that calls the screen grab, but the normal hotkey is disabled.
I assume that if this method becomes a popular way of ripping movies, that the ability to take screenshots on Windows will simply be similarly crippled (probably more thoroughly), or removed altogether under certain situations. ('Printscreen doesn't function unless conditions x, y, and z exist...')
That's not to say that I ever think it will be impossible for a sufficiently motivated person to rip a movie (or indeed, circumvent any level of DRM), but that a simple-but-useful historical feature like Print Screen could easily become a casualty of the DRM war.
Much has been done in the name of the global war on terror that makes patent infringement look like jay-walking.
Only against foreigners, hippies, Arabs, political undesirables, and the U.S. citizenry in general. Obviously, a higher burden of proof is in order when it comes to infringing on the rights of defense-industry corporations.
It's not as if you can't do this right now, already. Okay, this would give you the images of the barcodes so you could print them out onto label stock yourself, at home, but I think most theives are probably more comfortable with the low-tech method: you rip the tag off of some item, and then either just peel its sticker off (or photocopy it) and put it on the item in the store you want to get at a "discount."
This is an inherent vunerability of barcodes, and although having a database of UPCs makes the scam easier, it's not hard to do right now and hasn't been for a while.
Actually most of the time, the government does not seize patents. Not that they don't have the ability to, or that perhaps they don't just go ahead and infringe on them sometimes, but the military spends a lot of money buying stuff from contractors/vendors every year, because the vendor has a patent on stuff. If we were in the middle of World War III, the situation might be slightly different.
So if someone in the Navy really did have a novel idea, it's not hard to imagine that they might want to get it patented, just as a defensive measure.
My big question is: if the government patents something, wouldn't the invention automatically be in the public domain, provided that it wasn't classified? Normally all products produced by government employees in the course of their jobs are in the public domain, so I would think that a patent held by the Navy would be impossible to use aggressively.
In that situation -- assuming that's true, and the Navy can't collect royalties -- then having the Navy (or other government agencies) patent stuff might be a very good idea. For the small taxpayer expense that it takes to file and maintain the patent, the country might be saved millions of dollars a year of royalties and litigation costs.
Interesting. Two questions: can you get Adblock and a spell checker for Seamonkey? If you can, I'm definitely interested; those two features are necessities though, as far as I'm concerned.
Adblock has been the best thing that's happened to my internet experience since dropping dialup in favor of broadband, moral arguments about blocking ads be damned; and spell checking is just a no-brainer with the amount of time I spend on various forums.
I'm a fan of the iPods generally, but just to answer your question regarding rugged electronic gadgets, take a look at GPS receivers.
I don't know what the very recent ones are like -- maybe they're built like crap -- because I'm still using my Magellan GPS 300, purchased back in 2000. It's waterproof (hell, it floats), dustproof, shockproof, and short of smashing it with a hammer, basically close to indestructible under normal use. The only comment I have to say about it is that the screen can get scratched if you're not careful; I solve this by keeping it inside an old sock.
Granted, it's a whole lot bigger than an iPod, and pretty spartan in terms of features. It basically does one thing in life (tell you where you are in your choice of coordinate systems) and that's it. I'm not sure what sort of tradeoffs they made in order to create something so rugged: I imagine one that wasn't would be a lot smaller and probably would have been cheaper. It's all about what you want.
There are doubtless some of us (geeks, especially) who would find the idea of an MP3 player the size of a brick and about as hard to destroy attractive. But the resulting product would not be an iPod, and would not sell like one.
Am I the only person that can't get SeenOnSlash to render properly?
All the actual content is outside the white area, all the way over on the right hand side. (This is with Firefox 1.0.7.
It's odd -- I've used Firefox for a while now, and never had a problem with very many pages rendering (outside of the odd bank page or something that just refused to work). But in the past week I've run into two pages that just looked awful in Firefox, obviously poorly created, but looked okay in other browsers. Are site authors just getting lazier, or what?
I think it's you that's really misinformed. I know a lot of non-nerd, non-geeks, and very few of them have bought music from the iTMS. (I know a few older non-gen-x folks with iPods who aren't into the whole "virtual purchasing" thing to begin with: they don't assign any value to a digital file, only to physical items. Thus if they're going to pay money for something, they'd better get some thing.)
Most people who are out of their teens already have substantial amounts of money invested in CDs (if you have 10 CDs, that's at least $150 right there), and it makes sense that the first thing they're going to do is put all that music on their iPods.
Ripping CDs isn't hard. Really. You install iTunes. You plug in the iPod. You put the CD into the computer's drive and press the button. That's it. (This was the original function of iTunes, pre-iTMS and pre-iPod.) Lots of "non geeks" that I know have thousands of songs ripped from CDs on their computers and on their iPods.
If anything, I'd say that it takes more effort to download a track from the iTMS than it does to rip tracks from CD.
Duh...AOL has always been the king of free shit. I don't think I bought a blank 3.5" floppy disk from the mid-1990s onwards because of them. Just plain white Avery labels to cover them up with.
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From what I understand, nothing that's been proposed would make AOL's dialup service free.
Thus, those people who are currently using AOL as their ISP -- because they can't get broadband and for whatever reason, don't want to switch to a regular dialup ISP -- will still have to pay.
What's being proposed in TFA is a shift in focus of AOL's marketing efforts, away from promoting their pay-to-use dialup service, in favor of promoting their "free" ad-supported web-based services, which anyone with an existing internet connection can use.
So the people that you're talking about, who are using AOL as their only means of connecting to the 'net, would not probably see much change, except that they would slowly become further and further into the minority (since the service wouldn't be promoted anymore), and probably the quality of service is going to decline (since AOL's focus will be on other revenue sources). However, I don't think that dialup access will ever be free from AOL: they just have too much invested in it, and see it as too lucrative a source of revenue. As you pointed out, the people who are left as dialup subscribers to AOL aren't likely to change and are pretty entrenched, so they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to decrease the price. If anything, they'll probably increase the price or discontinue the service as they transition to a new business model.
Because unlike just writing some farmer a check, this actually encourages/ensures that they're doing something environmentally important with the money. (Or something that you, the theoretical buyer of said power, thinks is environmentally important.)
If I want to encourage certain behavior -- in this case, the use of Green power -- it makes more sense for me to pay you to do that behavior, than it does for me to just give you some cash for being yourself.
So yes, it's basically a donation to a bunch of farmers, but it's a donation to a bunch of farmers in return for doing something that assumedly you think is important (if you're participating).
I don't really think this is going to change anything. The injections that this is replacing are mostly intra-muscular, so (assuming they're in your protocols) you could do them right now.
The reason Paramedics drop lines is less to introduce drugs but to add fluid volume, saline or blood. You can't do that intramuscularly, or without a needle. Once you have the line inserted as a way of adding volume, it's an easy way to give drugs (and there are admittedly drugs that are intended for intravascular use instead of IM), but a needle-less IM system wouldn't replace most IV insertions.
Unless you could find some way to continuously pump fluids into a vein without a catheter in place to keep it open, but I don't think anyone has proposed a needleless sytem that does that.
This makes me wonder: although I don't know of any drugs that can change the size of your nads, there are a whole lot of drugs that would affect the other 51% of the population's hydrodynamics. Oral contraceptives, mainly, but I'm sure there are other things that could make a woman's breasts larger and consequently make her slower in the water...seems like you could probably do the opposite (make them smaller) with the right hormones, if you wanted to, and it would be very hard to detect on a drug check. How are you to know from a urine screen if one competitor's hormone levels are naturally that low, or are being artificially shifted to the limits of the 'normal range'?
I wonder how much of stuff like that already goes on? I bet at the upper echelons of sports where it's important, quite a bit.
Not actually true. I'm sure that if you made the swimmers compete nude, instead of competing to see who could have the most high-tech swimsuit, the focus would switch to who could create the most high-tech water-repellent skin creme. Some sort of wax or silicone, perhaps, that lowered the water resistance below what was normal for human skin. Or maybe some sort of treatment that made the body produce more oil (or less oil -- I don't know if oily skin has less or more resistance through water).
Anything that tries to stop technology and innovation from affecting a sport is inherently doomed to failure. A better approach would be to embrace innovation, in all sports, since this would have the effect of making the sports more interesting, and more relevant to society in general (by encouraging technological development, things would be produced that benefit everyone -- putting the focus on athleticism, while amusing to watch, doesn't produce any tangible benefit for the rest of us).
However, I agree, nude sports would get much better television ratings. Find some way to justify nude beach volleyball, and you have yourself a winner.
There's a quite fundamental difference between saying "hey, if you mess around with this and screw something up, we're not going to pay to fix it" and saying "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO OPEN THIS UNDER PENALTY OF LAW."
If I buy a brand new Taurus (or whatever they've replaced the Taurus with these days) and immediately open the hood up and put a supercharger on the engine, I may well have voided my warranty. (If I'm not a service technician.) Basically Ford is washing their hands of me. It's my car, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, but they're not going to clean up my mess if I break it. That's perfectly fair.
What DRM does, in concert with the DMCA, is make it illegal to modify things in equipment that you own. It would be like Ford telling me that I can only put Mobil gas into my new car, and if I modify the gas port so that I can use an Exxon nozzle, not only are they going to refuse to help me fix it, but I'm a criminal as well. They are saying not what they will or will not do, but what I can or cannot do.
In the case of a voided warranty, there's no inherent judgment on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the action/modification made: your property is your castle, to do with what you think fit. You only have to follow the rules if you want outside help later on. With the DMCA, it becomes actually illegal to tinker with something that you yourself own, regardless of whether you're ever planning on taking it outside your home again, or if you were planning on asking someone later to fix it.
That's a pretty big and important distinction: your right to use something that you own is not like a car warranty, and shouldn't be able to be voided just because you break somebody's holy foil seal. If you own the box, it should be yours to do with however you like.
The USSC ruled that the duration of copyright, since it is not precisely specified in the Constitution, is the domain of Congress to interpret.
The Court specifically did not say that copyright can go on forever, only that the duration can be changed more-or-less arbitrarily by Congress, meaning that if they continue to extend it to the point where it becomes 'forever,' then the Court has the power to step in, since that would be unconstitutional. Since they've only extended it once (so far), it's not yet "effectively forever," and the Court decided not to do anything.
I think both you and Mr. Lloyd (the Ars contributor who wrote much of what is quoted in the linked AC post) are off base. To be honest, Mr. Lloyd comes across as a bit of a Luddite. He sees 'art' only in terms of something that can be mass produced and sold many times over. This is understandable, since in our society this is fairly common, but it doesn't have to be that way. I could easily see many situations -- an entire future of situations -- where artwork is reproduced without compensation to the original creator, but there are still artists in business: because people pay for novelty. People will pay for originality. In a world where you could get anything that had already been created virtually for free, there would be an instant premium placed on anything that was newly-minted. Anything bespoke. Anything custom.
Obviously the payment framework would have to change -- artists couldn't guarantee a living by making things basically on speculation, hoping that they'd be able to recoup the labor involved in its creation over the years of royalties to follow, and instead would need to demand payment up front, like any other skilled laborer (which is what they are, after all).
Overall I think Mr. Lloyd's claims that the rise of cheap mechanical reproduction would lead to a catastrophic decline in artistic quality are foolish. Also, I think it's incredibly naive -- bordering on arrogant -- to assume that somehow our situation is historically unique. The argument that we are having today regarding the possible decline of the Arts in the face of a new technological age (and with it, new rules), has happened over and over. I'd argue that the situation with 'intellectual property' and DRM today is not dissimilar to the fundamental arguments over what constitutes art that happened more than a century ago with the rise of the photographic process.
There will always be a market for the labor of individuals who are skilled at their crafts, be it creating beautiful images, writing stories, making music, or building houses. The fact that some of them may be unable to sell the same labor thousands of times over may make make their trade comparatively less lucrative compared to others, but it does not fundamentally eliminate it.
I don't like having huge, bulging, jagged thighs all the time.
Maybe you should ease up on the steroids a little?
I don't think the rebate per se is a scam: what's dishonest is the way prices are advertised.
In many cases, the HUMONGOUS BIG FONT price on the item is the price after the rebate -- not what you actually have to pay to the cashier. This is illegal in some states (as it should be), but when it's not, the retailers love to do it.
Depending on how it's done, rebates can border on a bait-and-switch: you decide to buy the widget because of the 'price after rebate,' but you don't know until you get up to the register and get the rebate form -- in many cases after you pay the inflated price -- exactly what you have to do in order to GET that price.
Also, in many cases there are artificial restrictions on the rebates which keep you from getting the item at that price. (Limit one per family, etc.) So that price that you think you're going to be able to pay is really only good on the first item -- after that, you have to pay the inflated price. Woe onto you if you buy more than one. I understand it's a caveat emptor world, but sometimes the stores have gone too far.
I'm glad to see OfficeMax doing what it's doing, and I hope that other stores will follow suit.
I was thinking the same thing. ABC is missing out on a chance to really increase their advertisement revenue. Here's how: instead of selling regular 30-second commercials, they tell everyone that with the advent of DVRs, that what they really need to do is buy five minute ads, and then play their normal advertisement at 1/10th normal speed for everyone who's watching it in fast-forward.
Of course, the obnoxiousness of watching a five-minute commercial would immediately cause the folks still watching normal-speed TV to go out and get DVRs in order to FF through them; the end result would be that everyone would buy a DVR, and everyone would watch the same 30-second clips!
In time, there would be an 'arms race' between the networks and DVR companies, to see who could have faster fast-forwards, and who could have the slowest commercials. Just think: a two-hour Rogaine ad, transmitted at 0.5 fps.
Isn't technology beautiful?
Why the hell would anyone pay eighty-five pounds for an unlicensed copy of anything?
Do people really think that the box and the manuals and the stamped CDs really cost that much? If you're going to get "unlicensed" software, why not just pay someone a couple of bucks to dupe the CDs? That's effectively what you're getting; a set of installation media without any right to use the software that's on it.
I bet if you called up Microsoft as a licensed user and said that your dog had eaten your media, that they probably wouldn't charge you that much for a new set of media for use with your existing license. The "license" is the only thing that has any value -- the installation media and manual are just extras, worth maybe a few bucks, but certainly not a significant percentage of the 'retail price' of the software (with license).
Understood. I guess my question boils down to 'a tree falling in a forest.'
If we create a legal construct, but there's no objective evidence of it being created or agreed to, then can the construct really be said to exist?
If it's uncontested, it may not be an issue; but as soon as one party tries to contest some part of the construct, then whether or not there's evidence of the agreement/construct becomes a serious problem. That's why we have contracts and signatures -- not because they are legal constructs themselves, but because they're physical embodiments of them, setting out what has been agreed to, and the consent of the various parties concerned, in a way which is obvious to a third party.
Particularly in regions where clickthru EULAs are not enforceable, it seems as though there's a shortage of the physical embodiments of the license 'agreement.'
I don't think it's illegal for a minor to enter into a contract, it's just that their signature doesn't have any weight. It can't be 'illegal' for them to enter into a contract, because as far as the law is concerned, they can't do it. They don't have the necessary legal status (unless they've been legally emancipated).
It's not a prohibition, like selling drugs (where you can do it, but it's illegal), it's just a nullification of their ability to agree to the terms. Thus, anything they'd sign would be unenforceable. That's why credit card companies don't give cards to minors -- you couldn't force them to pay up.
IANAL, naturally...but I don't think that you could endanger the morals of a minor by making them click on a clickthru license (snarky anti-Windows comments go here); however you couldn't hold them to the terms of whatever they "agreed" to, because they can't legally enter into a contract.
If the silly certificate isn't the license, then what is?
It's all well and good to say that I'm buying a license, but if that's the case, then I want to know exactly how it was conferred to me, and how I can transfer or sell it to somebody else.
I'm surprised that they haven't disabled the print-screen functionality in some way so that it's not possible to do this.
For example, in OS X, taking screenshots is disabled whenever DVD Player is running. It's not particularly hard to get around (actually, it's almost trivially easy; yet another situation where I feel like Apple did just the bare minimum required to look like they care) using the Terminal or a third-party applet that calls the screen grab, but the normal hotkey is disabled.
I assume that if this method becomes a popular way of ripping movies, that the ability to take screenshots on Windows will simply be similarly crippled (probably more thoroughly), or removed altogether under certain situations. ('Printscreen doesn't function unless conditions x, y, and z exist...')
That's not to say that I ever think it will be impossible for a sufficiently motivated person to rip a movie (or indeed, circumvent any level of DRM), but that a simple-but-useful historical feature like Print Screen could easily become a casualty of the DRM war.
It's not as if you can't do this right now, already. Okay, this would give you the images of the barcodes so you could print them out onto label stock yourself, at home, but I think most theives are probably more comfortable with the low-tech method: you rip the tag off of some item, and then either just peel its sticker off (or photocopy it) and put it on the item in the store you want to get at a "discount."
This is an inherent vunerability of barcodes, and although having a database of UPCs makes the scam easier, it's not hard to do right now and hasn't been for a while.
Actually most of the time, the government does not seize patents. Not that they don't have the ability to, or that perhaps they don't just go ahead and infringe on them sometimes, but the military spends a lot of money buying stuff from contractors/vendors every year, because the vendor has a patent on stuff. If we were in the middle of World War III, the situation might be slightly different.
So if someone in the Navy really did have a novel idea, it's not hard to imagine that they might want to get it patented, just as a defensive measure.
My big question is: if the government patents something, wouldn't the invention automatically be in the public domain, provided that it wasn't classified? Normally all products produced by government employees in the course of their jobs are in the public domain, so I would think that a patent held by the Navy would be impossible to use aggressively.
In that situation -- assuming that's true, and the Navy can't collect royalties -- then having the Navy (or other government agencies) patent stuff might be a very good idea. For the small taxpayer expense that it takes to file and maintain the patent, the country might be saved millions of dollars a year of royalties and litigation costs.
Interesting. Two questions: can you get Adblock and a spell checker for Seamonkey? If you can, I'm definitely interested; those two features are necessities though, as far as I'm concerned.
Adblock has been the best thing that's happened to my internet experience since dropping dialup in favor of broadband, moral arguments about blocking ads be damned; and spell checking is just a no-brainer with the amount of time I spend on various forums.
I'm a fan of the iPods generally, but just to answer your question regarding rugged electronic gadgets, take a look at GPS receivers.
I don't know what the very recent ones are like -- maybe they're built like crap -- because I'm still using my Magellan GPS 300, purchased back in 2000. It's waterproof (hell, it floats), dustproof, shockproof, and short of smashing it with a hammer, basically close to indestructible under normal use. The only comment I have to say about it is that the screen can get scratched if you're not careful; I solve this by keeping it inside an old sock.
Granted, it's a whole lot bigger than an iPod, and pretty spartan in terms of features. It basically does one thing in life (tell you where you are in your choice of coordinate systems) and that's it. I'm not sure what sort of tradeoffs they made in order to create something so rugged: I imagine one that wasn't would be a lot smaller and probably would have been cheaper. It's all about what you want.
There are doubtless some of us (geeks, especially) who would find the idea of an MP3 player the size of a brick and about as hard to destroy attractive. But the resulting product would not be an iPod, and would not sell like one.
Am I the only person that can't get SeenOnSlash to render properly?
All the actual content is outside the white area, all the way over on the right hand side. (This is with Firefox 1.0.7.
It's odd -- I've used Firefox for a while now, and never had a problem with very many pages rendering (outside of the odd bank page or something that just refused to work). But in the past week I've run into two pages that just looked awful in Firefox, obviously poorly created, but looked okay in other browsers. Are site authors just getting lazier, or what?
Actually, there exists a wide range of audio-less iPods.
The iPod (my G3, anyway) will play AAC, MP3, AIFF, Apple Lossless, uncompressed WAV, Audible Audiobook (.aa), and Protected AAC (.m4p) files.
Full story is here:
http://www.apple.com/support/ipod101/anatomy/5/#6
I think it's you that's really misinformed. I know a lot of non-nerd, non-geeks, and very few of them have bought music from the iTMS. (I know a few older non-gen-x folks with iPods who aren't into the whole "virtual purchasing" thing to begin with: they don't assign any value to a digital file, only to physical items. Thus if they're going to pay money for something, they'd better get some thing.)
Most people who are out of their teens already have substantial amounts of money invested in CDs (if you have 10 CDs, that's at least $150 right there), and it makes sense that the first thing they're going to do is put all that music on their iPods.
Ripping CDs isn't hard. Really. You install iTunes. You plug in the iPod. You put the CD into the computer's drive and press the button. That's it. (This was the original function of iTunes, pre-iTMS and pre-iPod.) Lots of "non geeks" that I know have thousands of songs ripped from CDs on their computers and on their iPods.
If anything, I'd say that it takes more effort to download a track from the iTMS than it does to rip tracks from CD.
Duh...AOL has always been the king of free shit. I don't think I bought a blank 3.5" floppy disk from the mid-1990s onwards because of them. Just plain white Avery labels to cover them up with.