I would venture that there are a great many people similar to your father-in-law. However, there are a great many ordinary computer users who hate Windows as well. I think it boils down to the user experience. Windows is buggy and unstable enough that a significant number of people experience serious problems with stability. I have many friends who have problems with their windows machines
I would be very interested in exactly what the numbers are -- how many "joes" think microsoft is a provider of quality, and how many don't.
A second issue is whether people blame their problems on Microsoft. Some people don't realize it's the operating system and instead associate it with a coincidental event that is not the cause ("it started freezing after I changed the printer cartridge"). On the other hand, some people blame faulty (non-MS) software or damage done by viruses on Microsoft (ok, maybe they are to blame for the last one).
In the end, most computer users have no idea why their computer acts the way it does. Some will learn, some won't. But my guess would be that Microsoft is not gaining ground in consumer confidence. I don't know of many people, other than those on MS's payroll, who praise Microsoft products to others. Most of us who use it suffer and grumble about it when it doesn't work. And when it does work, well, it was supposed to in the first place, so I'm not throwing a party over that.
I remember, the first 10 minutes were the worst. The next 10 minutes, they were the worst. The next 10 minutes after that were even more horrible. After that, it went into a bit of a decline...
Very true. If the court were to uphold the injunction because of the nature of the parody, then that opens the door on being able to quash any because you don't like it -- and very often, the targets of parody don't like how the parody is done.
Uphold this, and parody will soon be dead as a right, since everyone who has parody directed against their "intellectual property" will be able to convince a judge that there is something "dangerous" about the content.
The only standard is whether it actually could cause confusion over their trademark. And it's refreshing that the judge stuck to that.
The article suggests that AOL would want to build it's own OS to compete with Windows. So maybe we'll see a linux distro on all those AOL coasters. The great thing about this is that AOL is probably the best vehicle to get Linux into the hands of millions of Americans. It will be quite a stark contrast to Microsoft's rather onerous XP activation.
The following is a repost of a post to the Unbreakable Oracle article posted by negativekarmanow which you should see for yourself. The real spectacle is that every post in that thread has been reduced to -1. Anyway, it's worth a few points of Karma to have it replayed.
The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:
More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post. There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4.
Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions)
Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore. This means a logged in user can keep on trolling as much as he (or she) likes, without risking a ban to post on slashdot. When trolling as an anonymous user, every post starts at score 0, and you will be modded down to -1 ON EVERY POST. When you are modded down a certain number of times in 24 hour, you cannot post anymore from your current IP for a day or so. So, for successful trolling, ALWAYS log in.
A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic. Now, on a news site like slashdot, where the number of different topics of discussion can be counted on 1 hand, I must say I quite like the distraction these posts offer. But no, when the topic is yet another minor version change of the Linux kernel, they only expect ooohs and aaahs about this great feat of engineering. Look at the moderation done in this thread to see what I mean.
Digging deep into the history of slashdot, I found this poll , which clearly indicates the vast majority does NOT want the moderation we have here today. 'nuff said.
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
*sigh* since I can't post normally anymore : my journal
How long before someone figures out a way to get around the server by wrapping a.mp3 file in.nap format so the server thinks it's a "secure" file, but the mp3 can be extracted from it? Then maybe they would get some subscribers...
"We are partially responsible for every Brian West [slashdot.org], Eric Corley [2600.com], Dmitri Skylarov, Ted Felten, Randal Schwartz, [slashdot.org], and DrinkOrDie member."
I shall take that as a compliment. Thank you for your kind words.
"When you purchase a DVD, you are paying for the ability to play it on players approved by the people who made the disc. As much as everyone hates to admit it, there is nothing illegal about this. You can buy a DVD without owning a player, and if you do you can't sue about not being able to watch it."
All true
"Likewise, you can't write a program that lets you watch it on something the makers don't want you to watch it on."
Here's the problem. In fact, you can write a program for that purpose. Reverse-engineering is allowed for the purposes of interoperability (at least at the moment in the USA). And I have the right to do whatever I want with that disc as long as I do not violate the copyright -- which means I cannot distribute, publicly broadcast/show the content, etc. Watching it on a linux player in my home, ripping it and converting it to Divx or a VCD, taping it onto VHS, none of these activities are illegal, because they do not violate the copyright.
Chicago is a big place. There are large areas of the city full of projects and poverty. The people in these areas don't have bank accounts, computers, or DVD players. According to the article, the city is looking for private corporations to build this network. It's unlikely that anyone putting broadband in would bother with areas that wouldn't be profitable.
This is the nature of public utilities -- they are forced to install infrastructure everywhere, even in the unprofitable areas, in order to secure a monopoly franchise. But broadband is not going to be a regulated monopoly utility.
So what will this become, if anything? A city-promoted push to install broadband in profitable areas. The problem is, that broadband is already in most of those areas. So unless the city is going to cough up some money to fund building infrastructure that won't pay for itself, this probably won't go anywhere.
Incidentally, this only highlights how the process of widenening the gap between the haves and the have-nots occurs. The poor areas don't even have access to good technology, so it's harder to acquire skills in that technology, making it harder to break out of poverty, which means they stay poor, and continue to not have access to new technology, and so on.
Here's a test case:
Jack buys Jill a $500 bracelet for Christmas. Jill buys Jack a $500 arc-welder. Jack decides he doesn't like his arc-welder, and goes online and switches his gift for a PS2 and 4 games. Jill decides she doesn't like her bracelet and switches it for a gucci handbag.
What's the point of giving a gift at this point. They might have well exchanged $500 gift certificates. But even that would be pointless, because it's just an even swap. They might as well keep their money and just spend it on themselves, and save each other a whole bunch of time.
That's the problem with gifts in a society such as ours. I prefer to have gifts be things that no one else can provide. I created a video for my family this Christmas. I have made cookies, and burned CD's of the texts of ancient books for people. Something unique, something I had to put my own effort into creating.
And with Jack and Jill, what's the need to know anything about what the person *really* wants? After all, they can just exchange it for whatever they do want. So I don't have to muck about getting to know them so I might be in touch with what they like.
These days, gift-giving is a form of commerce. It is a business transaction, carried out not in a boardroom, but a living room. But it requires "fair exchange". It requires that we get what we want, otherwise the gift is useless. "It's the thought that counts." But that is a cliche. It's the love behind the thought that counts. Because where there is that love, the gift can be given and received with joy and freedom. Then, I don't need to receive anything back, I don't need to exchange it, I don't need to feel cheated.
The Gift Of The Magi, by o'henry
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."
The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
One idea might be to pair up a design-minded developer with a science-minded programmer. Kind of the right-brain/left-brain thing. Not that there isn't overlap, but usually someone is better at one than the other. And even if someone has both good design and scientific skills, it is hard to practice them at the same time. I know I have to take time to "switch" modes when going from creative stuff to more technical stuff.
So pair up a couple of guys. One to worry about the artistic design, and another to worry about realistic physics.
"Covad said it has learned from the past and will not expand until it can afford it."
And it took how long and how much wasted money to realize a principle that a 8 year-old with a lemonade stand has figured out?
On the plus side for Covad, they managed to outlast their competition both on the DSL side (Northpoint, Rythms) and cable (Excite), so they've got the opportunity for a bigger share of the pie, and a better chance of staying afloat.
After a couple of years of reading slashdot, I think I have built up a resistance to bad grammar. I don't even notice these anymore. Sometimes I even forget that you don't spell hacker with a 4 and an x.
I like Salon. I used to read Salon all the time. But they started putting 2/3 of their good articles on Salon Premium. I almost subscribed, but after a couple of weeks without it, I found I could live in a Salon-free world. Now I hardly ever visit it.
I used to use Encyclopedia Britannica once in a while. But now, I can't use it at all because it's a pay site. I can't justify paying a subscription when I might use it once or twice a month.
I currently pay to subscribe to one on-line content provider : Cooks Illustrated. Its worth it to me. Salon might be worth it to me, too, but I don't buy it. As more and more sites go pay-for-play, I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of sites. 1) I am only a casual reader, and 2) even if I thought it was worth it, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with all the sites I visit.
And here's where it starts to break down: the (commercial) web can end up just like print media. Sure, any print publication could be subscribed to by everyone, but everyone is not going to subscribe to everything, or even one thing. So you have your subscribers, and you don't reach anyone else.
I know that Salon Premium pretty much drove me away from Salon. I accept that in the future, I will be much more limited web site availability. I'm willing to pay that price because all that casual content isn't worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to maintain subscriptions.
Unfortunately, this, like many patent issues, can't be decided except by a court. Just because someone says "we don't infringe on Apple's patent", that doesn't stop Apple from suing or a judge from ruling that it does infringe.
That's why the call for prior art goes on. Deny that Apple has a case, but build a strong defense against their case. It's the cover-your-bases approach, and, sadly, the only wise one available in the current intellectual property age.
1. A robot must not infringe on intellectual property, or through inaction, allow a intellectual property to be infringed.
2. A robot may not injure a human being unless that human being is infringing intellectual property. If that's the case, go nuts.
3. A robot must protect its own intellectual property and prevent anyone from hacking, disassembling, or reverse-engineering the robot.
OK, "a penny a page" sounds all well and good, but it reminds me of a story about the early U.S. mint, which spent over 1 penny to mint a penny. Pretty cost-ineffective.
So what does it cost per page view to track and bill? If it costs more than $0.01, then this system would be a further drain on resources, rather than paying for anything.
One of the big problems with the micropayment model is that it creates a lot of overhead. Keeping track of all those views, payments, etc., as it stands now, would require a lot more resources -- resources that could go for other things.
Re:It is NOT legal to rip CDs, but not illegal...
on
More Copy Protected CDs?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What you are saying is contrary to the nature of a free society and to the constitutional intent of copyright law (but is consistent with the current view of copyright as a form of property). The way freedom works is this: you have the right to do anything not expressly prohibited by law. This goes especially with copyright law, where transfer of information can be considered protected speech. The police cannot say to you, "the law doesn't say you can do that, so it is illegal." That is why America has so many laws -- everything illegal must be explicity stated as illegal. Everything else is implicitly legal.
Your argument runs along the opposite line, that if copyright law doesn't say you can, then you cannot. Again, if you believe the rhetoric of the "intellectual property" cartels, sure. But if you believe the people who founded this nation and the ideals embodied in the U.S. Constitution, then that view is clearly incompatible with freedom.
This is the insidious nature of the re-education effort being undertaken by media publishers, the BSA, etc.. The criminalization of copyright infringement (before it was a civil matter), the outlandish extension of copyrights, the aggressive litigation, the shift from sale of a product to a license, and the broad use of terms such as "stealing", "piracy", "protection" are all part of this effort. And people have integrated these ideas into their worldview. People are shifting to a "it's only legal if the shrink-wrap license says it's legal" mindset.
This seems like a foolish move to do. It seems safe to say that it has been established that it is legal to rip CDs. Also, MP3s are more widespread than, say, DVDs ripped to DivX. Therefore it will be much harder to demonize people who break the copy prevention measures (or make tools to do so) on these CDs. With DVDs, it requires that I assert a new right never granted me by the MPAA (not that I really need them to grant me that right). However, with CDs, the RIAA is taking away a right I have been enjoying. A much harder thing to do.
I have a feeling this will backfire in one of two ways: 1) they will drop the copy prevention after a public outcry, or 2) there will be new drivers or tools published that make it possible to rip/play these CDs, and they become common enough to make the copy prevention irrelevant. This will mean that the only people truly affected will be innocent people with limited technical expertise (mom goes and buys a PC, puts her new CD in the tray, and it doesn't play; mom gets mad and calls you). This will only further giving a black eye to the RIAA.
A third possibility is the nightmare of DeCSS -- that someone publishes a method to defeat this copy prevention, gets sued, goes to court, etc. But as we've seen with DeCSS, it's pretty hard to stop it once it's out.
Was Sewer Urchin the casualty of the intellectual-property fight, or was he removed because of political correctness? There are equivalent characters to American Maid and Die Fledermaus, but no bizarro Sewer Urchin. Was it just too much to have a autistic live-action hero on primetime?
Yes, this is too bad. Probably the best $50 I ever spent in college (mechanical engineering) was on my HP15C when my Casio Scientific Calculator was dying.
It definitely helped my grades. Before the HP, I remember on every test, running all the calculations through over and over until I got the same result twice. Due to all the complex equations and parenthesis used, it was very very easy to get the order of operations wrong or just hit the wrong key. I learned not to trust myself to evaluate an equation properly. I used to have to calculate something four or five times on a test just to get a repeatable result.
Once I got the HP, I was amazed how often the first time I evaluated, it was correct. It saved me a ton of time on tests, not to mention aggravation.
I surely hope that someone picks up HP's designs -- the "landscape" calculator is much better, the keys are solid -- it's very hard to accidentally press those keys, and the RPN is an engineer's dream.
I remember all these Poly Sci majors (why try? Poly Sci!) who had some tricked-out TI calculator. For what? Well, because they took one math class that had statistics, so they needed standard deviation and a couple of other stat functions.
TI has done a wonderful job of marketing these humongous graphing calculators to a generation of high school and college students who couldn't factor a quadratic equation to save their life. Ignorant people buy calculators based on marketing (parents and students). And HP's been making pretty much the same calculators for years. TI puts out new models like GM cars. Never mind 99% of the people who bought the previous models never used 1% of the features.
TI tries to make everyone believe that they need a mammoth calculator. HP, on the other hand, sold calculators to those that needed them, and doesn't try to sell unnecessary calculators. It's an honest, ethical way to do business. They probably couldn't sell that many more unless they tapped into the frivolous student market like TI.
I bought a MD recorder for live recording. I would much rather have something that I could pop into my CD-ROM drive rather than having to record it from my MD to my PC in real time. At the time, I looked all over the net for a portable standalone CD-R with mic input. A bit too late for me, I suppose...
Slashdot Mirror
I would be very interested in exactly what the numbers are -- how many "joes" think microsoft is a provider of quality, and how many don't.
A second issue is whether people blame their problems on Microsoft. Some people don't realize it's the operating system and instead associate it with a coincidental event that is not the cause ("it started freezing after I changed the printer cartridge"). On the other hand, some people blame faulty (non-MS) software or damage done by viruses on Microsoft (ok, maybe they are to blame for the last one).
In the end, most computer users have no idea why their computer acts the way it does. Some will learn, some won't. But my guess would be that Microsoft is not gaining ground in consumer confidence. I don't know of many people, other than those on MS's payroll, who praise Microsoft products to others. Most of us who use it suffer and grumble about it when it doesn't work. And when it does work, well, it was supposed to in the first place, so I'm not throwing a party over that.
I remember, the first 10 minutes were the worst. The next 10 minutes, they were the worst. The next 10 minutes after that were even more horrible. After that, it went into a bit of a decline...
Uphold this, and parody will soon be dead as a right, since everyone who has parody directed against their "intellectual property" will be able to convince a judge that there is something "dangerous" about the content.
The only standard is whether it actually could cause confusion over their trademark. And it's refreshing that the judge stuck to that.
The article suggests that AOL would want to build it's own OS to compete with Windows. So maybe we'll see a linux distro on all those AOL coasters. The great thing about this is that AOL is probably the best vehicle to get Linux into the hands of millions of Americans. It will be quite a stark contrast to Microsoft's rather onerous XP activation.
The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
*sigh* since I can't post normally anymore : my journal
end of repost
How long before someone figures out a way to get around the server by wrapping a .mp3 file in .nap format so the server thinks it's a "secure" file, but the mp3 can be extracted from it? Then maybe they would get some subscribers...
I shall take that as a compliment. Thank you for your kind words.
All true
"Likewise, you can't write a program that lets you watch it on something the makers don't want you to watch it on."
Here's the problem. In fact, you can write a program for that purpose. Reverse-engineering is allowed for the purposes of interoperability (at least at the moment in the USA). And I have the right to do whatever I want with that disc as long as I do not violate the copyright -- which means I cannot distribute, publicly broadcast/show the content, etc. Watching it on a linux player in my home, ripping it and converting it to Divx or a VCD, taping it onto VHS, none of these activities are illegal, because they do not violate the copyright.
Read the post. I said that it was already in most profitable areas, not most areas.
Marxist tripe, huh? If caring about the poor is Marxist tripe, then I'll take a big bowl of it. The fate of your soul is your business.
This is the nature of public utilities -- they are forced to install infrastructure everywhere, even in the unprofitable areas, in order to secure a monopoly franchise. But broadband is not going to be a regulated monopoly utility.
So what will this become, if anything? A city-promoted push to install broadband in profitable areas. The problem is, that broadband is already in most of those areas. So unless the city is going to cough up some money to fund building infrastructure that won't pay for itself, this probably won't go anywhere.
Incidentally, this only highlights how the process of widenening the gap between the haves and the have-nots occurs. The poor areas don't even have access to good technology, so it's harder to acquire skills in that technology, making it harder to break out of poverty, which means they stay poor, and continue to not have access to new technology, and so on.
No, it's not a hoax, Hugh Barrass is just a lucky, lucky man.
Jack buys Jill a $500 bracelet for Christmas. Jill buys Jack a $500 arc-welder. Jack decides he doesn't like his arc-welder, and goes online and switches his gift for a PS2 and 4 games. Jill decides she doesn't like her bracelet and switches it for a gucci handbag.
What's the point of giving a gift at this point. They might have well exchanged $500 gift certificates. But even that would be pointless, because it's just an even swap. They might as well keep their money and just spend it on themselves, and save each other a whole bunch of time.
That's the problem with gifts in a society such as ours. I prefer to have gifts be things that no one else can provide. I created a video for my family this Christmas. I have made cookies, and burned CD's of the texts of ancient books for people. Something unique, something I had to put my own effort into creating.
And with Jack and Jill, what's the need to know anything about what the person *really* wants? After all, they can just exchange it for whatever they do want. So I don't have to muck about getting to know them so I might be in touch with what they like.
These days, gift-giving is a form of commerce. It is a business transaction, carried out not in a boardroom, but a living room. But it requires "fair exchange". It requires that we get what we want, otherwise the gift is useless. "It's the thought that counts." But that is a cliche. It's the love behind the thought that counts. Because where there is that love, the gift can be given and received with joy and freedom. Then, I don't need to receive anything back, I don't need to exchange it, I don't need to feel cheated.
The Gift Of The Magi, by o'henry
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."
The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
So pair up a couple of guys. One to worry about the artistic design, and another to worry about realistic physics.
And it took how long and how much wasted money to realize a principle that a 8 year-old with a lemonade stand has figured out?
On the plus side for Covad, they managed to outlast their competition both on the DSL side (Northpoint, Rythms) and cable (Excite), so they've got the opportunity for a bigger share of the pie, and a better chance of staying afloat.
I believe the site you want is here
After a couple of years of reading slashdot, I think I have built up a resistance to bad grammar. I don't even notice these anymore. Sometimes I even forget that you don't spell hacker with a 4 and an x.
I used to use Encyclopedia Britannica once in a while. But now, I can't use it at all because it's a pay site. I can't justify paying a subscription when I might use it once or twice a month.
I currently pay to subscribe to one on-line content provider : Cooks Illustrated. Its worth it to me. Salon might be worth it to me, too, but I don't buy it. As more and more sites go pay-for-play, I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of sites. 1) I am only a casual reader, and 2) even if I thought it was worth it, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with all the sites I visit.
And here's where it starts to break down: the (commercial) web can end up just like print media. Sure, any print publication could be subscribed to by everyone, but everyone is not going to subscribe to everything, or even one thing. So you have your subscribers, and you don't reach anyone else.
I know that Salon Premium pretty much drove me away from Salon. I accept that in the future, I will be much more limited web site availability. I'm willing to pay that price because all that casual content isn't worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to maintain subscriptions.
Micropayments, anyone?
That's why the call for prior art goes on. Deny that Apple has a case, but build a strong defense against their case. It's the cover-your-bases approach, and, sadly, the only wise one available in the current intellectual property age.
1. A robot must not infringe on intellectual property, or through inaction, allow a intellectual property to be infringed.
2. A robot may not injure a human being unless that human being is infringing intellectual property. If that's the case, go nuts.
3. A robot must protect its own intellectual property and prevent anyone from hacking, disassembling, or reverse-engineering the robot.
So what does it cost per page view to track and bill? If it costs more than $0.01, then this system would be a further drain on resources, rather than paying for anything.
One of the big problems with the micropayment model is that it creates a lot of overhead. Keeping track of all those views, payments, etc., as it stands now, would require a lot more resources -- resources that could go for other things.
Your argument runs along the opposite line, that if copyright law doesn't say you can, then you cannot. Again, if you believe the rhetoric of the "intellectual property" cartels, sure. But if you believe the people who founded this nation and the ideals embodied in the U.S. Constitution, then that view is clearly incompatible with freedom.
This is the insidious nature of the re-education effort being undertaken by media publishers, the BSA, etc.. The criminalization of copyright infringement (before it was a civil matter), the outlandish extension of copyrights, the aggressive litigation, the shift from sale of a product to a license, and the broad use of terms such as "stealing", "piracy", "protection" are all part of this effort. And people have integrated these ideas into their worldview. People are shifting to a "it's only legal if the shrink-wrap license says it's legal" mindset.
I have a feeling this will backfire in one of two ways: 1) they will drop the copy prevention after a public outcry, or 2) there will be new drivers or tools published that make it possible to rip/play these CDs, and they become common enough to make the copy prevention irrelevant. This will mean that the only people truly affected will be innocent people with limited technical expertise (mom goes and buys a PC, puts her new CD in the tray, and it doesn't play; mom gets mad and calls you). This will only further giving a black eye to the RIAA.
A third possibility is the nightmare of DeCSS -- that someone publishes a method to defeat this copy prevention, gets sued, goes to court, etc. But as we've seen with DeCSS, it's pretty hard to stop it once it's out.
Was Sewer Urchin the casualty of the intellectual-property fight, or was he removed because of political correctness? There are equivalent characters to American Maid and Die Fledermaus, but no bizarro Sewer Urchin. Was it just too much to have a autistic live-action hero on primetime?
It definitely helped my grades. Before the HP, I remember on every test, running all the calculations through over and over until I got the same result twice. Due to all the complex equations and parenthesis used, it was very very easy to get the order of operations wrong or just hit the wrong key. I learned not to trust myself to evaluate an equation properly. I used to have to calculate something four or five times on a test just to get a repeatable result.
Once I got the HP, I was amazed how often the first time I evaluated, it was correct. It saved me a ton of time on tests, not to mention aggravation.
I surely hope that someone picks up HP's designs -- the "landscape" calculator is much better, the keys are solid -- it's very hard to accidentally press those keys, and the RPN is an engineer's dream.
I remember all these Poly Sci majors (why try? Poly Sci!) who had some tricked-out TI calculator. For what? Well, because they took one math class that had statistics, so they needed standard deviation and a couple of other stat functions.
TI has done a wonderful job of marketing these humongous graphing calculators to a generation of high school and college students who couldn't factor a quadratic equation to save their life. Ignorant people buy calculators based on marketing (parents and students). And HP's been making pretty much the same calculators for years. TI puts out new models like GM cars. Never mind 99% of the people who bought the previous models never used 1% of the features.
TI tries to make everyone believe that they need a mammoth calculator. HP, on the other hand, sold calculators to those that needed them, and doesn't try to sell unnecessary calculators. It's an honest, ethical way to do business. They probably couldn't sell that many more unless they tapped into the frivolous student market like TI.
I bought a MD recorder for live recording. I would much rather have something that I could pop into my CD-ROM drive rather than having to record it from my MD to my PC in real time. At the time, I looked all over the net for a portable standalone CD-R with mic input. A bit too late for me, I suppose...