Since the CD doesn't play in her car, but does play in most consumer-grade CD players, perhaps she should be suing the Auto manufacturer, or the OEM who produced the player in her car. It clearly is not conformant with the media that major music publishers are producing.
Well, see, unlike the music companies, the auto manufacturers and oems are crazy and like to enhance their products by using new technology to improve sound quality and ease of use and to lower consumer costs. Music companies, on the other hand, like to stagnate on quality, ignore consumer desires, and use technology to make their products more difficult to use...ON PURPOSE.
Consider a mailing worm which has a 99% chance of re-using its "parent's" subject line, and a 1% chance of using a new subject line, randomly chosen from the host's mail spool.
Unfortunately for the virus, there is a 99% chance that a randomly chosen subject from the mail spool will read something like "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!"
Hmmm, I don't think the Palistinian idea of war is what the MPAA had in mind when it began prosecuting a war on copyright infringement. If I were a US company I would worry anytime a middle eastern group used my name and the word "war" in the same sentence. Sometimes they (Palestians, well most groups in the middle east, including Israel) are not the most rational people.
MPAA/RIAA lawyers with subpoenas vs. Palestinians with RPGs (not the game format mind you).
While it is true that some computers and users don't need internet access, i.e. critical process machines, cutting it off all together is bad for employee morale, especially when some have it and some don't. Additionally, with the workday as it is now, the employees' breaktime or lunch or sometimes even during regular hours may be the only opportunity they have to take care of personal business. And even beyond those aspects, it is actually good for employee productivity to have some diversion while at work.
If you are concerned about overuse, filter sites employees use or bytes transferred or access hours. There all sorts of ways to manage internet access without cutting it out all together.
The internet, like anything else, can be abused and overused while at work. Milly the office clerk can blow the whole day talking on the phone, regardless of whether or not you turn her internet on or off. The bottom line is that goofing off at work was occuring long before the internet was even a twinkle in some engineers eye (while daydreaming at his regular job no doubt). It's a fact of business life, and its well known.
Your post suggests that you are of the "employee is the enemy" managerial mindset. Its bad for the morale of your employees and also their productivity. If they are able to complete their assigned work in the time allotted, what is the problem?
"Please don't apply for a job where I work."
I don't think I will have a problem with that directive.
My God Man! It's the birth of the borg!
on
Learning Robots
·
· Score: 1
"After a number of generations the amount of improvement finally tends to taper off, says Mahdavi, indicating that the GA has reached a performance plateau" and "Once the robot was mobile, the team disabled some of its segments to see if it could adapt to injury. Initially it was immobilised, says Bentley, but as the GA continued to try to improve the locomotion, it gradually worked out how to move again..."
My god! It is the beginning of the Borg! "You will adapt to service us." or something. How long before the snake's genetic algorithm determines that the fastest way to get from point A to point B is by making a human in a porche drive it there.
When you think about it, fuel crops are actually just storage devices for the energy of the sun. When you burn them, most of the energy released was collected from sunlight. I wonder what the efficiency numbers for this would be in that respect. Hmmm....
But on another note, there is a huge amount of agricultural waste here. I have personally seen huge quantaties of wheat buried in holes in the ground to dispose of it for the sake of subsidies. If we could use that material, it would be fantastic.
Besides excess finished crops, there are all sorts of byproducts that go to waste. For example, when cotton is ginned, literally tons of nasty waste containing mostly cotton seed hulls and leaves is produced. They just pile the stuff into mountains around here, some of it is used as fertilizer (it is an extremely rich fertilizer) and then most of it is just carted off to some land fill (i think, it just sort of disappears). When it is in large piles and damp, the decomposition of it produces enough heat to set itself on fire, lol. It's great to have random and spontaneous combustion.
But that is just one example. Every agricultural process (horticulture and livestock) we currently use produces huge amounts of waste in addition to the finished product. If we could recycle just a little bit of that waste into useable energy, we would be doing ourselves a huge favor. Solar power doesn't have to be high tech, nature has been doing it for a long time.
While distributed power would still require a fuel distribution grid, I think it would still be more reliable. If you use natural gas in your home, consider, when was the last time it failed in its delivery. In the ten years I have lived there, I can't recall the natural gas ever being off at my home.
The bad thing about natural gas is that its price varies so wildly. The petroleum cartels can pretty much price it at whatever level they desire. Before we can rely on natural gas as a steady and predictable power source, I think we would need to break the hold OPEC has on petroleum. It would seem that Bush is on that track, for better or worse; but I highly doubt that our individual well being is his greatest concern in that endeavor.
This kind of device is not made for foreign wars if you ask me. It seems tailor made for countering the kinds of things we (individuals, not the government) would use for countering communication of resistence right here if we needed to. That might sound paranoid and crazy, but looking at all the things the military is doing, it would appear they are getting things ready to fight here more than anywhere else.
When you conquer and put to rest all the external enemies, the greatest threat to your empire is its own people.
I'm not so sure that Microsoft can "pull an IBM" on these guys. The company that won the lawsuit one of the more evil patent-related institutions: a patent holding company. They only license patents, they don't actually implement them in any of their own products. Without any real products, Microsoft can't turn around and sue them for infringing upon its own patents.
While Microsoft may not be able to sue them for reverse patent infringement, they can most certainly buy 10 Stealth Bombers and reduce Eolas headquarters to flaming pile of rubble! Eolas will be sorry. Oh yes, they WILL be SORRRRRRRY! Muahahahaha! Muahahahaha! MuaHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh sorry, I was having a Bill Gates moment. Move along, nothing to see here...
When the people whose data was stolen have their identities assumed by some third party, I imagine the last thing on their mind will be the horrors of someone stealing their hotmail account.
Of course this is newsworthy. Everytime one of these companies has a security breach because of stupidity and unpreparedness, the news should be spread as far and wide and as loudly as possible. It would seem that corporate embarrassment and public outcry is the only way to get through to these companies.
With the growing level of criticality these databases are being endowed with, it is essential that they be secure and accurate. If the companies can't handle that responsibility, they should have it at all. If you ask me, the level of importance things like credit reports have reached is a disaster waiting to happen. The databases they are created from are full inaccuracies and have huge access holes. It's part of the reason why identity theft is exploding in the US.
Pfft...everybody knows the bible came down from heaven in Renaissance era English way back in the day. Imagine the trouble Moses had trying to explain the Ten Commandments without knowing what language they were in! Fortunately, God guided our language in such a way that we are today able to read it.
The idea that the words of the bible changed to English from some heathen language is an evil LIE and work of the Devil! Everybody knows that Jesus was and his disciples were English speaking white men! Haven't you seen the movie! and TBN! They couldn't possibly be wrong!
Why even use electronics in a glove? We already have sophisticated motion capture systems that use cameras and contrast dots. I propose that if you have to wear a glove at all, you just have the person wear a black glove with contrasting dots of white, or perhaps a different color for each finger.
Then you could use two or three offset cameras to locate the position and configuration of the hand in a three dimensional space, and use software to figure out the meaning of a given configuration. With such a system, I don't see why you would be restricted to using letter signing only. You could just have a database, generic or created from training, of hand configurations and their meanings. You could match a given hand configuration to the database, and voila, sign language recognition.
It seems like it would be even easier to do than voice recognition. And as a benefit, when not signing, you could use your hand as a pointing device, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
That's probably more of a safety feature than the government saying no to speeding. My car is electronically speed limited to 137mph, which is 3mph below the maximum speed rating for the tires on the car.
The idea that this model would function on the basis of the doctrine of fair use is just plain wrong. If something like what Cringely proposes were to actually work, it would actually be working on the principles of corporate ownership. If you owned shares in such a corporation, publicly traded or not, you would own a share of all of the assets of that company. So, in theory, if the corporation purchases 10,000 albums, you own a share of those assets.
Had the MP3.com members been buying shares in the company, they might have had a right to the music MP3.com owned. To be sure, it's questionable legal ground.
Barring some sort of fundamental change in coroporate ownership law, I can't see that there would be any way around what Cringely proposed. License agreemnents on the music might help, but that would be shaky ground for the RIAA. I really hope someone tries to implement this idea, just to see what happens.
Also, I'm glad that this concept has had a public airing so it doesn't get patented by Evil Corporation X. Not that prior art has ever stopped the Patent Office from doling out stupid patents.
Maybe you could make it 1.07 or so and 'donate' 2 (or more) cents to the song's artist for every play, cutting the record labels out all together. Since that would kill the labels eventually, the company could save its pennies and eventually bankroll artist development and promotion.
I'm not sure where your family farms, but in the Miss. Delta where we do our farming (cotton, soybeans, rice) it's getting very difficult to find reliable farm hands. I for one would welcome the opportunity to dismiss half of the crystal meth monkeys we employ.
I got one of those damn letters, AT WORK, and I only bought a ISO smart card programmer from a site that was selling them cheap. The programmers (2) that I bought worked well for my application because they didn't use surface mount components, so they were easier to screw around with. Sometimes its easier to buy something prebuilt and modify it.
The ISO smart card reader I bought is not illegal, and it should never be made illegal. If they are, I guess I will have to throw out the Toshiba laptop I have with a reader BUILT IN. And all of the other devices that read smart cards. I guess the door to my lab will be illegal too.
MY GOD, DIRECTV WANTS TO TAKE OVER MY LAB!
Re:Long distance repairs
on
SOHO Is Back
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I wholeheartedly agree. However, Viking's still there, with it's batteries long dead...
Wouldn't it be a hoot if, say, 50 years from now, a couple of astronauts found it, dusted it off, replaced the batteries, hit the master reset button (or whatever) and it sprang back to life!
Wouldn't it be even more of a hoot if it spontaneously and mysteriously started transmitting on its own? If they even told us about it, NASA would have a lot of questions.
Conyers and Berman have really gone overboard with this bill for their rabid protection of the copyright industry (for $$$?). It makes them look bad, and it makes the Democratic party look bad. When you start writing your letters to your Congressional Rep. (you are going to, right?), also consider visiting the Democratic National Committee and voice your displeasure with these two representatives and their anticonsumer activity. Then when you're finished with that, you can write yet another letter to the House Minority Leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and tell her the same thing. Be sure to emphasize that these two Representatives make all of the Democrats look bad.
Maybe with enough complaints the Democratic leadership will lean on these fools and make them shut up.
None of the systems in the hardware section of that page are remotely like the Telly device. See the post I made earlier for details for a device of similar capabilities to the Telly. If you don't like the ATI tuner, add a hundred dollars for the Wintv PVR-250. Still a heck of a lot lower than $800. And keep in mind that the prices I found were retailer prices. A company building machines would be getting OEM pricing, so it looks even more like a rip off to me.
Yes yes it's off topic, but after having seen T3 it has been bugging the hell out of me that at the end of the movie John said that there was no central computer for Skynet, but instead it had spread into thousands of machines on the internet. Isn't that fantastic!
And then I thought, well, if Skynet is actually a distributed computing app running on computers on the internet, then, when Skynet decided to blow up all of the cities, wouldn't it also be destroying the majority of its compute nodes and thus massively diminish its capacity. It would, after all, be living in the same cities as you and I. Not to mention that computers rely on the same infrastructure (power grids, telecom) as we do.
Ok, so I am anal, but a plot hole large enough to launch the shuttle through does catch my attention and drive me crazy for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Vibration Test...Completed
Structural Load Test...Completed
Good to see they got those out of the way!
Since the CD doesn't play in her car, but does play in most consumer-grade CD players, perhaps she should be suing the Auto manufacturer, or the OEM who produced the player in her car. It clearly is not conformant with the media that major music publishers are producing.
Well, see, unlike the music companies, the auto manufacturers and oems are crazy and like to enhance their products by using new technology to improve sound quality and ease of use and to lower consumer costs. Music companies, on the other hand, like to stagnate on quality, ignore consumer desires, and use technology to make their products more difficult to use...ON PURPOSE.
But I know you were just kidding, right?
Consider a mailing worm which has a 99% chance of re-using its "parent's" subject line, and a 1% chance of using a new subject line, randomly chosen from the host's mail spool.
Unfortunately for the virus, there is a 99% chance that a randomly chosen subject from the mail spool will read something like "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!"
Hmmm, I don't think the Palistinian idea of war is what the MPAA had in mind when it began prosecuting a war on copyright infringement. If I were a US company I would worry anytime a middle eastern group used my name and the word "war" in the same sentence. Sometimes they (Palestians, well most groups in the middle east, including Israel) are not the most rational people.
MPAA/RIAA lawyers with subpoenas vs. Palestinians with RPGs (not the game format mind you).
This could get interesting.
While it is true that some computers and users don't need internet access, i.e. critical process machines, cutting it off all together is bad for employee morale, especially when some have it and some don't. Additionally, with the workday as it is now, the employees' breaktime or lunch or sometimes even during regular hours may be the only opportunity they have to take care of personal business. And even beyond those aspects, it is actually good for employee productivity to have some diversion while at work.
If you are concerned about overuse, filter sites employees use or bytes transferred or access hours. There all sorts of ways to manage internet access without cutting it out all together.
The internet, like anything else, can be abused and overused while at work. Milly the office clerk can blow the whole day talking on the phone, regardless of whether or not you turn her internet on or off. The bottom line is that goofing off at work was occuring long before the internet was even a twinkle in some engineers eye (while daydreaming at his regular job no doubt). It's a fact of business life, and its well known.
Your post suggests that you are of the "employee is the enemy" managerial mindset. Its bad for the morale of your employees and also their productivity. If they are able to complete their assigned work in the time allotted, what is the problem?
"Please don't apply for a job where I work."
I don't think I will have a problem with that directive.
"After a number of generations the amount of improvement finally tends to taper off, says Mahdavi, indicating that the GA has reached a performance plateau" and "Once the robot was mobile, the team disabled some of its segments to see if it could adapt to injury. Initially it was immobilised, says Bentley, but as the GA continued to try to improve the locomotion, it gradually worked out how to move again..."
My god! It is the beginning of the Borg! "You will adapt to service us." or something. How long before the snake's genetic algorithm determines that the fastest way to get from point A to point B is by making a human in a porche drive it there.
When you think about it, fuel crops are actually just storage devices for the energy of the sun. When you burn them, most of the energy released was collected from sunlight. I wonder what the efficiency numbers for this would be in that respect. Hmmm....
But on another note, there is a huge amount of agricultural waste here. I have personally seen huge quantaties of wheat buried in holes in the ground to dispose of it for the sake of subsidies. If we could use that material, it would be fantastic.
Besides excess finished crops, there are all sorts of byproducts that go to waste. For example, when cotton is ginned, literally tons of nasty waste containing mostly cotton seed hulls and leaves is produced. They just pile the stuff into mountains around here, some of it is used as fertilizer (it is an extremely rich fertilizer) and then most of it is just carted off to some land fill (i think, it just sort of disappears). When it is in large piles and damp, the decomposition of it produces enough heat to set itself on fire, lol. It's great to have random and spontaneous combustion.
But that is just one example. Every agricultural process (horticulture and livestock) we currently use produces huge amounts of waste in addition to the finished product. If we could recycle just a little bit of that waste into useable energy, we would be doing ourselves a huge favor. Solar power doesn't have to be high tech, nature has been doing it for a long time.
While distributed power would still require a fuel distribution grid, I think it would still be more reliable. If you use natural gas in your home, consider, when was the last time it failed in its delivery. In the ten years I have lived there, I can't recall the natural gas ever being off at my home.
The bad thing about natural gas is that its price varies so wildly. The petroleum cartels can pretty much price it at whatever level they desire. Before we can rely on natural gas as a steady and predictable power source, I think we would need to break the hold OPEC has on petroleum. It would seem that Bush is on that track, for better or worse; but I highly doubt that our individual well being is his greatest concern in that endeavor.
This kind of device is not made for foreign wars if you ask me. It seems tailor made for countering the kinds of things we (individuals, not the government) would use for countering communication of resistence right here if we needed to. That might sound paranoid and crazy, but looking at all the things the military is doing, it would appear they are getting things ready to fight here more than anywhere else.
When you conquer and put to rest all the external enemies, the greatest threat to your empire is its own people.
I'm not so sure that Microsoft can "pull an IBM" on these guys. The company that won the lawsuit one of the more evil patent-related institutions: a patent holding company. They only license patents, they don't actually implement them in any of their own products. Without any real products, Microsoft can't turn around and sue them for infringing upon its own patents.
While Microsoft may not be able to sue them for reverse patent infringement, they can most certainly buy 10 Stealth Bombers and reduce Eolas headquarters to flaming pile of rubble! Eolas will be sorry. Oh yes, they WILL be SORRRRRRRY! Muahahahaha! Muahahahaha! MuaHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh sorry, I was having a Bill Gates moment. Move along, nothing to see here...
When the people whose data was stolen have their identities assumed by some third party, I imagine the last thing on their mind will be the horrors of someone stealing their hotmail account.
Of course this is newsworthy. Everytime one of these companies has a security breach because of stupidity and unpreparedness, the news should be spread as far and wide and as loudly as possible. It would seem that corporate embarrassment and public outcry is the only way to get through to these companies.
With the growing level of criticality these databases are being endowed with, it is essential that they be secure and accurate. If the companies can't handle that responsibility, they should have it at all. If you ask me, the level of importance things like credit reports have reached is a disaster waiting to happen. The databases they are created from are full inaccuracies and have huge access holes. It's part of the reason why identity theft is exploding in the US.
Pfft...everybody knows the bible came down from heaven in Renaissance era English way back in the day. Imagine the trouble Moses had trying to explain the Ten Commandments without knowing what language they were in! Fortunately, God guided our language in such a way that we are today able to read it.
The idea that the words of the bible changed to English from some heathen language is an evil LIE and work of the Devil! Everybody knows that Jesus was and his disciples were English speaking white men! Haven't you seen the movie! and TBN! They couldn't possibly be wrong!
Why even use electronics in a glove? We already have sophisticated motion capture systems that use cameras and contrast dots. I propose that if you have to wear a glove at all, you just have the person wear a black glove with contrasting dots of white, or perhaps a different color for each finger.
Then you could use two or three offset cameras to locate the position and configuration of the hand in a three dimensional space, and use software to figure out the meaning of a given configuration. With such a system, I don't see why you would be restricted to using letter signing only. You could just have a database, generic or created from training, of hand configurations and their meanings. You could match a given hand configuration to the database, and voila, sign language recognition.
It seems like it would be even easier to do than voice recognition. And as a benefit, when not signing, you could use your hand as a pointing device, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
That's probably more of a safety feature than the government saying no to speeding. My car is electronically speed limited to 137mph, which is 3mph below the maximum speed rating for the tires on the car.
The idea that this model would function on the basis of the doctrine of fair use is just plain wrong. If something like what Cringely proposes were to actually work, it would actually be working on the principles of corporate ownership. If you owned shares in such a corporation, publicly traded or not, you would own a share of all of the assets of that company. So, in theory, if the corporation purchases 10,000 albums, you own a share of those assets.
Had the MP3.com members been buying shares in the company, they might have had a right to the music MP3.com owned. To be sure, it's questionable legal ground.
Barring some sort of fundamental change in coroporate ownership law, I can't see that there would be any way around what Cringely proposed. License agreemnents on the music might help, but that would be shaky ground for the RIAA. I really hope someone tries to implement this idea, just to see what happens.
Also, I'm glad that this concept has had a public airing so it doesn't get patented by Evil Corporation X. Not that prior art has ever stopped the Patent Office from doling out stupid patents.
Maybe you could make it 1.07 or so and 'donate' 2 (or more) cents to the song's artist for every play, cutting the record labels out all together. Since that would kill the labels eventually, the company could save its pennies and eventually bankroll artist development and promotion.
Well, when I was a young developer, we walked to and from work every day, uphill! Both ways!
But seriously, if it's 15km uphill on your way home, I bet it is one hell of a rollerblade express commute on the way down to work in the mornings!
I'm not sure where your family farms, but in the Miss. Delta where we do our farming (cotton, soybeans, rice) it's getting very difficult to find reliable farm hands. I for one would welcome the opportunity to dismiss half of the crystal meth monkeys we employ.
No, they sent letters to people that bought regular ISO programmers too. I got one! Lucky me. The damn fools.
I got one of those damn letters, AT WORK, and I only bought a ISO smart card programmer from a site that was selling them cheap. The programmers (2) that I bought worked well for my application because they didn't use surface mount components, so they were easier to screw around with. Sometimes its easier to buy something prebuilt and modify it.
The ISO smart card reader I bought is not illegal, and it should never be made illegal. If they are, I guess I will have to throw out the Toshiba laptop I have with a reader BUILT IN. And all of the other devices that read smart cards. I guess the door to my lab will be illegal too.
MY GOD, DIRECTV WANTS TO TAKE OVER MY LAB!
I wholeheartedly agree. However, Viking's still there, with it's batteries long dead...
Wouldn't it be a hoot if, say, 50 years from now, a couple of astronauts found it, dusted it off, replaced the batteries, hit the master reset button (or whatever) and it sprang back to life!
Wouldn't it be even more of a hoot if it spontaneously and mysteriously started transmitting on its own? If they even told us about it, NASA would have a lot of questions.
I'm afraid so. Just like the Republicans.
Conyers and Berman have really gone overboard with this bill for their rabid protection of the copyright industry (for $$$?). It makes them look bad, and it makes the Democratic party look bad. When you start writing your letters to your Congressional Rep. (you are going to, right?), also consider visiting the Democratic National Committee and voice your displeasure with these two representatives and their anticonsumer activity. Then when you're finished with that, you can write yet another letter to the House Minority Leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and tell her the same thing. Be sure to emphasize that these two Representatives make all of the Democrats look bad.
Maybe with enough complaints the Democratic leadership will lean on these fools and make them shut up.
None of the systems in the hardware section of that page are remotely like the Telly device. See the post I made earlier for details for a device of similar capabilities to the Telly. If you don't like the ATI tuner, add a hundred dollars for the Wintv PVR-250. Still a heck of a lot lower than $800. And keep in mind that the prices I found were retailer prices. A company building machines would be getting OEM pricing, so it looks even more like a rip off to me.
Yes yes it's off topic, but after having seen T3 it has been bugging the hell out of me that at the end of the movie John said that there was no central computer for Skynet, but instead it had spread into thousands of machines on the internet. Isn't that fantastic!
And then I thought, well, if Skynet is actually a distributed computing app running on computers on the internet, then, when Skynet decided to blow up all of the cities, wouldn't it also be destroying the majority of its compute nodes and thus massively diminish its capacity. It would, after all, be living in the same cities as you and I. Not to mention that computers rely on the same infrastructure (power grids, telecom) as we do.
Ok, so I am anal, but a plot hole large enough to launch the shuttle through does catch my attention and drive me crazy for a while.