Probably the same people that sat around thinking up "Uniting & Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."
Re:WiFi access at airports
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One airport per city doesn't necessarily mean no choice in airports. Pittsburgh is an example of this. Since US airways runs something like 80% of the flights out of PIT, they can set the fares high... which means a lot of people drive the 2 hours to Cleveland to save money. Free wifi (or moving walkways, parking shuttles, or anything else that makes the experience more pleasant) will give people one more reason to fly out of PIT and not Cleveland.
by ShadowBlasko (597519) on Friday January 30, @01:23PM (#8138733)
Well, unless you work second shift or live in Europe or something, it looks like you're posting comments to Slashdot in the middle of the work day. Perhaps a better approach would be to simply set the example you want others to follow.
How many people have write access to the knowledge base? Is it possible that the "type in URLs rather than clicking" advice is nothing more than a troll?
I guess I'm the opposite of that. If I try to go to the video store without a specific movie in mind that I want to rent, I usually end up wandering around for half an hour, looking at all the new releases, and not finding anything I want to watch that I haven't already seen. With Netflix, I always have 3 movies to choose from (that I picked out earlier), so if I decide I want to watch a movie, I pick one and watch it. No advance planning needed, as long as you send the movies back once you're done with them.
"The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam."
They say this as if "complicated" is a good thing that promotes safety. Most of the reason so many people are calling for the shuttle to be replaced is because it's so complicated, and therefore expensive, hard to maintain, and has a lot of ways that something can go wrong. The proposed shuttle replacement (space plane?) would be less complex, better suited to its purpose (no need to send cargo and astronauts on the same vehicle when you can use separate vehicles optimized for each purpose), and a lot safer and cheaper. Unnecessary complexity isn't a good thing.
Or to put it another way: The most complicated operating system ever designed has been compromised (many times) by 13 year old scr1pt k1dd13z.
It's worse than you think. A typical 30 minute TV show is actually 21 minutes of program and 9 minutes of commercials. That's 18 minutes per hour, or 72 minutes over 4 hours (in 1 week, that's 504 minutes = 8h24m of ads).
Re:why play if you can't win? hope it's fun...
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 1
If you have cable, you're sharing bandwidth with other users. If you use a lot, everyone else's connection gets slower, which might cause some people to get rid of their cable modems. This reduces the cable company's revenues, so they have an incentive to try and stop it, even if it means losing the customer using "too much" bandwidth. With DSL, you don't have this problem, so the ISP shouldn't care as long as the cost of the bandwidth you use doesn't exceed what you're paying for the DSL connection (and since bandwidth is dirt cheap, this is very unlikely).
Traditionally IPO shares are initially sold at a fixed price, which tends to be below the price it will sell for in the first few days on the open market. The insiders then have a tendency to allocate IPO shares to their buddies, or family, or the bank handling the IPO, or whoever. Therefore people with "connections" can (essentially) get free money by buying IPO shares and then selling them quickly. If you are lucky enough to have access to this free money, it's in your best interest to take it.
Since the Google IPO is being done differently, there's no opportunity for insiders or anyone else to buy shares below fair market value -- buying IPO shares during the auction gives you about the same price you'd get on the open market 5 minutes after the auction ends. Therefore, nobody gets "free money" as is usually the case in IPOs. This allows Google to raise money more efficiently which, incidentally, is the point of holding an auction in the first place.
That's exactly why the DMCA is so insidious. They've effectively given media companies the ability to make fair use illegal, without anyone having to be accountable for a law that says "fair use is illegal."
And the ol' fashioned paper method may work for Canada, but there's only, what, 5 people that actually live there, eh?
Why do people keep bringing this up as a reason paper ballots won't work? The USA has 10 times the population of Canada; that means we have 10 times as many people to help count ballots, and 10 times the tax base to pay them.
Here's another way of looking at it: Let's say each precinct has 1000 voters, and requires 10 people to count ballots. It doesn't matter how many precincts there are. Whatever the size of the country, you just need 1% of the people in each precinct to be willing to count ballots.
That's because Visa and Mastercard are controlled by essentially the same banks. A few years ago, they were sued for antitrust because their member banks agreed not to issue cards other than Visa/MC. Visa pooh-poohing Mastercard would be kind of like Disneyland pooh-poohing Disney World.
Actually, I brought this up because I'm wondering how Apple is getting away with what looks like clearly illegal activity. The [labels represented by the] RIAA aren't the only people that have gotten in trouble for this or similar practices in the past. In the 80s, Nintendo had to send coupons to all the Nintendo Power subscribers for price fixing on NES consoles. I'm assuming that what Apple is doing is legal or else some lawyer would have filed a class action lawsuit by now. Any lawyers want to comment on why they haven't sued Apple yet?
Building codes aren't closed-source, but they can be copyrighted. Slashdot ran a story about this in 2001. Some company writes a section of the law, and if you want to read it, you have to pay. Many cities/states can't post their own building codes on the internet because they're copyrighted.
This isn't quite the same thing as a closed source law, but don't just assume all the laws are freely available for anyone to read.
For that matter, what's stopping me from going to Borders, getting the book, sitting down with a cup of coffee, and reading the whole thing without paying?
It doesn't need to be impossible to read the book without paying for it. It just needs to be enough of a hassle that most people won't bother. If you have so much free time and so little money that you would actually consider reading a book by searching for the individual pages on Amazon, you're probably getting books by going to the library or borrowing from friends anyway.
If only more people understood this, we might have more reasonable copyright laws. Copyright laws exist because without them, few people would bother to make (in this case) movies. As a society, we have more movies to choose from because of copyright law. The longer the copyright term, the more incentive there is. However, a longer copyright term also makes it harder to access older movies, discourages derivative works, and does little to encourage production. So there's a tradeoff. One week is too short (would you pay $9 to see a movie that would be free next weekend? Didn't think so) while life+70 years is too long (how much money my movie makes between the years 2107 and 2127 isn't very important to me). Somewhere in the middle is an optimal term that benefits all of us the most.
Unfortunately, we've lost track of why copyright law exists. It's not there to protect Hollywood studios; it's not there to protect millionaire actors; it's not even there to protect the "average" people shown in the MPAA propaganda. It's there to benefit society as a whole by giving people an incentive to make movies (and other works). We give the producers this incentive in the form of specific limited, temporary rights, which are very different from physical property ownership. If we wanted to, we could shorten the copyright term to 1 year. The benefit would be cheap access to all but the newest movies. The drawback would be less new movies would be made. Would we as a society be better off in the long run? It's hard to say. Maybe someone should Ask Slashdot. But we should be thinking about this debate in terms of a tradeoff between availability of movies already made vs. incentive to create new movies, and not "how much money does the MPAA deserve" or whatever. These arguments just play into the MPAA's hands by hiding the fact that copyright term extensions affect anything other than film studio revenues.
This service lets you send an email, and have it converted to a snail mail letter and sent to someone. So if you combined the two services, you could send an email which would be converted to snail mail, then the recipient could convert the snail mail to an email that they could read from any computer in the world.
I was listening to a football game on the radio the other day, and the announcer said "the following legal disclaimer is brought to you by [some law firm]. This broadcast is intended for the private noncommercial use of our listening audience and may not be reproduced or rebroadcast without the express written consent of the National Football League..."
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the same people that sat around thinking up "Uniting & Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."
One airport per city doesn't necessarily mean no choice in airports. Pittsburgh is an example of this. Since US airways runs something like 80% of the flights out of PIT, they can set the fares high... which means a lot of people drive the 2 hours to Cleveland to save money. Free wifi (or moving walkways, parking shuttles, or anything else that makes the experience more pleasant) will give people one more reason to fly out of PIT and not Cleveland.
by ShadowBlasko (597519) on Friday January 30, @01:23PM (#8138733)
Well, unless you work second shift or live in Europe or something, it looks like you're posting comments to Slashdot in the middle of the work day. Perhaps a better approach would be to simply set the example you want others to follow.
How many people have write access to the knowledge base? Is it possible that the "type in URLs rather than clicking" advice is nothing more than a troll?
I guess I'm the opposite of that. If I try to go to the video store without a specific movie in mind that I want to rent, I usually end up wandering around for half an hour, looking at all the new releases, and not finding anything I want to watch that I haven't already seen. With Netflix, I always have 3 movies to choose from (that I picked out earlier), so if I decide I want to watch a movie, I pick one and watch it. No advance planning needed, as long as you send the movies back once you're done with them.
"The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam."
They say this as if "complicated" is a good thing that promotes safety. Most of the reason so many people are calling for the shuttle to be replaced is because it's so complicated, and therefore expensive, hard to maintain, and has a lot of ways that something can go wrong. The proposed shuttle replacement (space plane?) would be less complex, better suited to its purpose (no need to send cargo and astronauts on the same vehicle when you can use separate vehicles optimized for each purpose), and a lot safer and cheaper. Unnecessary complexity isn't a good thing.
Or to put it another way: The most complicated operating system ever designed has been compromised (many times) by 13 year old scr1pt k1dd13z.
It's worse than you think. A typical 30 minute TV show is actually 21 minutes of program and 9 minutes of commercials. That's 18 minutes per hour, or 72 minutes over 4 hours (in 1 week, that's 504 minutes = 8h24m of ads).
The government already runs gambling games.
If you have cable, you're sharing bandwidth with other users. If you use a lot, everyone else's connection gets slower, which might cause some people to get rid of their cable modems. This reduces the cable company's revenues, so they have an incentive to try and stop it, even if it means losing the customer using "too much" bandwidth. With DSL, you don't have this problem, so the ISP shouldn't care as long as the cost of the bandwidth you use doesn't exceed what you're paying for the DSL connection (and since bandwidth is dirt cheap, this is very unlikely).
Traditionally IPO shares are initially sold at a fixed price, which tends to be below the price it will sell for in the first few days on the open market. The insiders then have a tendency to allocate IPO shares to their buddies, or family, or the bank handling the IPO, or whoever. Therefore people with "connections" can (essentially) get free money by buying IPO shares and then selling them quickly. If you are lucky enough to have access to this free money, it's in your best interest to take it.
Since the Google IPO is being done differently, there's no opportunity for insiders or anyone else to buy shares below fair market value -- buying IPO shares during the auction gives you about the same price you'd get on the open market 5 minutes after the auction ends. Therefore, nobody gets "free money" as is usually the case in IPOs. This allows Google to raise money more efficiently which, incidentally, is the point of holding an auction in the first place.
That's exactly why the DMCA is so insidious. They've effectively given media companies the ability to make fair use illegal, without anyone having to be accountable for a law that says "fair use is illegal."
And the ol' fashioned paper method may work for Canada, but there's only, what, 5 people that actually live there, eh?
Why do people keep bringing this up as a reason paper ballots won't work? The USA has 10 times the population of Canada; that means we have 10 times as many people to help count ballots, and 10 times the tax base to pay them.
Here's another way of looking at it: Let's say each precinct has 1000 voters, and requires 10 people to count ballots. It doesn't matter how many precincts there are. Whatever the size of the country, you just need 1% of the people in each precinct to be willing to count ballots.
That's because Visa and Mastercard are controlled by essentially the same banks. A few years ago, they were sued for antitrust because their member banks agreed not to issue cards other than Visa/MC. Visa pooh-poohing Mastercard would be kind of like Disneyland pooh-poohing Disney World.
Actually, I brought this up because I'm wondering how Apple is getting away with what looks like clearly illegal activity. The [labels represented by the] RIAA aren't the only people that have gotten in trouble for this or similar practices in the past. In the 80s, Nintendo had to send coupons to all the Nintendo Power subscribers for price fixing on NES consoles. I'm assuming that what Apple is doing is legal or else some lawyer would have filed a class action lawsuit by now. Any lawyers want to comment on why they haven't sued Apple yet?
Didn't the RIAA get sued for doing exactly this not that long ago?
Building codes aren't closed-source, but they can be copyrighted. Slashdot ran a story about this in 2001. Some company writes a section of the law, and if you want to read it, you have to pay. Many cities/states can't post their own building codes on the internet because they're copyrighted.
This isn't quite the same thing as a closed source law, but don't just assume all the laws are freely available for anyone to read.
HDTV will only happen when the Internet is locked down.
So I can choose either (a) having an Internet that isn't locked down or (b) getting a few more lines of resolution on the latest "reality" show.
I choose (a).
Maybe Ana could loan him an a.
Ebay auctions here
Be prepared to pay... people are bidding these up to around $50 a ticket.
One guy bid $1299 for 2 tickets to the Hollywood screening.
My PREVIOUS car got 35MPG on the highway and had plenty of power. They don't make cars like that anymore..
Actually now they make cars that do better than that.
For that matter, what's stopping me from going to Borders, getting the book, sitting down with a cup of coffee, and reading the whole thing without paying?
It doesn't need to be impossible to read the book without paying for it. It just needs to be enough of a hassle that most people won't bother. If you have so much free time and so little money that you would actually consider reading a book by searching for the individual pages on Amazon, you're probably getting books by going to the library or borrowing from friends anyway.
If only more people understood this, we might have more reasonable copyright laws. Copyright laws exist because without them, few people would bother to make (in this case) movies. As a society, we have more movies to choose from because of copyright law. The longer the copyright term, the more incentive there is. However, a longer copyright term also makes it harder to access older movies, discourages derivative works, and does little to encourage production. So there's a tradeoff. One week is too short (would you pay $9 to see a movie that would be free next weekend? Didn't think so) while life+70 years is too long (how much money my movie makes between the years 2107 and 2127 isn't very important to me). Somewhere in the middle is an optimal term that benefits all of us the most.
Unfortunately, we've lost track of why copyright law exists. It's not there to protect Hollywood studios; it's not there to protect millionaire actors; it's not even there to protect the "average" people shown in the MPAA propaganda. It's there to benefit society as a whole by giving people an incentive to make movies (and other works). We give the producers this incentive in the form of specific limited, temporary rights, which are very different from physical property ownership. If we wanted to, we could shorten the copyright term to 1 year. The benefit would be cheap access to all but the newest movies. The drawback would be less new movies would be made. Would we as a society be better off in the long run? It's hard to say. Maybe someone should Ask Slashdot. But we should be thinking about this debate in terms of a tradeoff between availability of movies already made vs. incentive to create new movies, and not "how much money does the MPAA deserve" or whatever. These arguments just play into the MPAA's hands by hiding the fact that copyright term extensions affect anything other than film studio revenues.
This service lets you send an email, and have it converted to a snail mail letter and sent to someone. So if you combined the two services, you could send an email which would be converted to snail mail, then the recipient could convert the snail mail to an email that they could read from any computer in the world.
Oh wait...
I am not making this up.
I was listening to a football game on the radio the other day, and the announcer said "the following legal disclaimer is brought to you by [some law firm]. This broadcast is intended for the private noncommercial use of our listening audience and may not be reproduced or rebroadcast without the express written consent of the National Football League..."
when Sesame Street is brought to you by the letters S, C, and O, and the number 699.