Does that sound like a just and right situation to you?
Sure does. Because anyone stupid enough to enter into such a contract for something as important as water is pretty much Darwin bait as far as I'm concerned. And while we're stretching analogies to the breaking point I'd like to make it clear that if you want to sequence your genes, make a few modifications and grow a pair of wings that's fine by me too.
Before you go off on the fact that legally, broadband providers aren't utilities, consider this: They're generally monopolies;
I disagree - let's say that you like good beer, and you have a choice of Anchor Steam, Bud, Miller, Bush, Coors and a generic selection of 40oz malt liquors. Does Anchor have a "monopoly" on good beer? Yeah, I guess. But do they have a monopoly on beer? No. Your provider may have a "monopoly" on broadband, but that's just another way of saying there's only one place you can get the "good stuff". You can drink Bud if you have to, you just won't be as happy about it.
they provide a service many people need in order to earn money to live on
I disagree again - cheap broadband is pretty novel - what were these people doing before they had it, hunting and gathering? It makes more sense to say that there are people who have decided to make a living working from the internet and need broadband to do it. There are also people who decided to make a living buying and selling Beanie Babies, should we nationalize Ty so they can keep working in their desired profession?
Shouldn't they have to get a court order to cut off your access?
Uh, no. Here's another news item: your local grocery store is under no obligation to give you 90 days notice that they're not going to carry your favorite carbonated beverage any more.
Time Warner is a private enterprise, not the goverment. The only thing they (and you) are bound by is the agreement you enter into when you sign up for their service. And guess what? That agreement says they can cut you off any time they like, for no reason whatsoever.
This is why it's important to read and understand what you sign.
The point is that if you are paying money for a service you expect that service. They expect the money and you expect the bandwidth. If an organization which apparently can't even accurately determine the source IP of the traffic they are monitoring just needs to point a finger to get your access shutdown then that seems to be a violation of the contract you have with the ISP.
Only on Slashdot would people take broadband access as an inalienable right. This has nothing to do with innocence, guilt or the jury system, and everything to do with the terms of service (ie, contract) that you enter into with the ISP.
Let's take a look at that contract, shall we?
If the author's service was with Time Warner, then she was probably a Roadrunner user. I'm on RR too, and here's an exerpt from the agreement I've got with the NEO (Northeast Ohio) branch - I would imagine hers is similar if not identical:
Time Warner Cable NEO Division and ServiceCo each shall have the right at any time to change or discontinue any aspect or feature of the Road Runner Service, including but not limited to content, hours of availability, Equipment and System Requirements. Either Time Warner Cable NEO Division or Subscriber may terminate the Road Runner Service to Subscriber at any time.
Oops. Looks like the ISP can pull the plug any time they want to, for any reason they want to, and there's exactly jack squat I can do about it.
Eeek! My precious high-speed pr0n, er, business net access is at peril! Whatever shall I do?
Make sure that I'm not dependent on RR for my business needs, that's what. A 56 modem and a serial cable is pretty much all I need to do that. And luckily I can remember how I used to do things before the cable modem was around.
Time Wanker and the MPAA did this pair a favor - now that they understand that their broadband access can evaporate they'll (hopefully) get some backups in place. Perhaps there's a lesson for all of us...?
I haven't heard of a DVD player which will read both sides of a double sided DVD...
Here is one. Clever design, it's a 300 disc carousel with the drive inside the hub. Normally it sucks the disc in from the front, but if you hit the "flip" button on the remote it'll spit the disc back into the carousel, spin the tray 180 degrees, then suck the same disc in from the back.
I also have a Panasonic combo LD/DVD player that can move the read head from one side of the platter to the other.
...nor have I heard of double sided DVD's being used for a single version of a movie... I've only seen double sided used for widescreen/regular view versions of a movie so you don't have to flip it.
Yeah, same here. Too bad, given my gear I'd much rather have one double-sided disc taking up one slot than two single-siders.
Simply put. Microchannel was great. The biggest problem was the stupid reference diskettes, and that was simply because flash memory wasn't there, yet.
No, the biggest problem was the lack of backward compatability with ISA cards. MCA forced a chicken-and-egg scenario: people wouldn't buy the machine because there weren't as many expansion cards for it, and third party providers weren't going to tool up to produce cards for a machine that wasn't selling well. Lose lose.
Microchannel machines simply worked longer and more reliably than ISA or even PCI machines.
The ones that weren't DOA, maybe. My experience is that one out of every five P(o)S2 machines that I pulled out of a box was fscked in some way. High on the hit parade were dead serial and parallel ports. Well, on the bright side, they did introduce VGA and 3 1/2" disk drives.
I'm pretty sure there are more people who are nostalgic for the S-100 bus than for MCA.
What every vendor should do is compile a list of everything they have to sell and stick it in a database.
This works if all the junk is easlily counted and of decent value. Otherwise the database maintenance is going to be more of a PITA than the money the seller will make dumping it. And realize that the motivation for selling a lot of this stuff is the wife saying "Get it OUT!"
Which brings up a good bargaining tip: If someone has something that you'd like, but you can't haggle them down to your price, wait until the end of the event when the vendors start to pack up and leave. Then stroll by and suggest that your bank notes will be much more easy to carry home than that widget the vendor has. The bigger/heavier the widget the better this tactic works.
What's up with this old junk fettish people have? Those things take a lot of space and serve no useful purpose.
Would these items serve a more useful purpose if they were in a landfill?
One word: Education.
You can learn quite a bit about how things work by (a) taking apart old stuff and then later (b) using the peices to build new things. You might even be able to parlay that learning into a vocation. Wouldn't be the first time.
Ever try to talk to someone at Radio Shack about a computer?
Ever try to talk to someone at Radio Shack about anything remotely electronic? I've been shopping RS since before they sold their Trash-80s, and while most of them knew the diffence between a double A and 9-volt battery you were pushing the envelope on any question more technical than that.
There are clued ratshack employees, but in my experience they're as rare as hen's teeth. I've always assumed if they actually knew something about what they were selling they could get a better paying job than salesdrone.
Why the hell would i want a lousy compression format?
I appreciate your effort, I really do, but any attempt at humor on Slashdot based on misspelling is doomed from the start, as the replies readily indicate.
The audience just isn't ready for this sort of thing. Sorta like Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football.
I could (or I expect to be able to in a couple years) program my PVR to always find sci-fi for me to watch, so that my TV is essentially one big sci-fi jukebox with no commercials.
FWIW, Replay already has something along these lines called "zones". Go to the SciFi zone and it lists all that type of content coming up in the next week.
I hate to think of banner ads on the CBS evening news (oh wait, those don't work)...
First off, I wouldn't equate banner ads with TV commercials. The former measure their "success" by the number of click-throughs they get, the latter by raised public consciousness of the product (or increased floor traffic or increased sales).
I can imagine some scenario where a part of the screen is used for advertising ala a banner ad. Think of how a ballgame image shrinks to show a scroller on the bottom with the latest scores around the league - why not do the same thing with the commercials?
Possibility #2: Special PVRs that are very cheap (perhaps given away?) that download "commercials" overnight with the TV listings, and force you to sit through minutes of ads before you can watch "Battlebots" or what have you... although I don't see how likely this would be.
Possibility #3: Shows go back to the old days of "Sponsored by...", where the sponsor's billboard is part of the background (heck, this is currently the case in sporting events). Furthermore the sponsor's mention will be part of the show, ie Chairman Kaga states "If I remember correctly, this episode of Iron Chef is brought to you by Chopsalot cutlery, the knives great chefs use."
Along the same lines, am I the only person who has a problem with Cringley? After watching his PBS show about building an airplane in thirty days, I was convinced the guy has more money than brains, and that his infamy is due more to who he knows than what he knows.
To get a good idea of just what he does know you might want to read his book "Accidental Empires", which IMHO is a pretty good look at the history of the microcomputer revolution.
You should be able to get a copy cheap from half.com.
This campaign is targeted to small and mid-sized businesses. That is where the most institutionalized piracy occurs.
I think there's a much more important reason that the BSA wouldn't dare go after a Fortune 500 company - those are the folks that are lining Bill's pockets the most. Piss off the CIO with one of these "audit" threats, and he's likely to get B. Gates on the phone and threaten to cancel that 50,000 seat license to SQL Server.
They also tend to have big legal departments that would just love to smack the BSA around like a red-haired stepchild.
Point taken though, the arbitration will be a nightmare. Consider how you'd calculate the value of any given song traded on Son of Napster. Number of trades (easy to rig)? Chart position? (easy to buy, and screws independent artists and actual real music) User feedback? (easy to rig and buy with enough MTV time).
You're making this way too complicated. Here's an example, data from Amazon:
CD: Madonna, "Music". List price: $18.97
Number of tracks: 10
Price per song: $1.90.
Alternative: divide price of CD by # of minutes of audio, that's the per-minute price for any given song on the disc.
So instead of Napster users paying the RIAA an RIAA set per-song price, they'll be paying the RIAA a court arbitrated per-song price.
No... the end user will be paying the record label (I don't know why the RIAA would be involved at all).
Stop thinking about Napster, start thinking about CD-Now (or Amazon, or B&N or whatever) where you can pay and download any given track from their libary, instead of buying a whole CD and waiting for it to land in your mailbox. This decision would (if I understand it correctly) allow CD-Now/et al to do this as long as they give a cut to the label that owns the copyright. That cut has to be negotiated, of course.
" how does this apply to any of the music that was ever traded on napster?
It doesn't, but then that's not the point of the article. The idea here is that this ruling could force the IP holders (in this case the music labels) into allowing their material to be distributed over the net as long as the distributor pays a fair price (agreed to either by negotiation or binding arbitration).
So this does not mean FREE MUSIC NAPSTER!!!! is coming back - but it might mean you can pay a buck or two and download the music you want. Napster for pay.
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/03/1520239.sh tm l
Slashdot article talked about a controler that would give the user electric shocks as feedback. I cannot find anything on the Mad Catz site to support this, nor anywhere else.
dosent sound so bad to me. Kill off the lazy and the stupid that way, thus insuring the success of generations to come, by reducing headcount and "chlorinating the gene pool" as it were.
Think again - this isn't some clapped-out 1978 Buick beater we're talking about here. The lazy and stupid will not be driving something that cost half a million bucks.
After all, it would probably be necessary to delineate "sky lanes" for traffick, since you can't just have everybody up there drivin' around free.
Personally I subscribe to the "Big Sky" theory of air traffic control. I mean look at it - there's so much sky up there, what're the odds that two planes would be in the same place at the same time?
The centrifugal force from 55-pounds of depleted uranium in each blade tip keeps the rotor rigid and stable at the reduced rotor rpm and high forward speeds.
Uranium? That's what they use in Nookyooler reactors, and those are EVIL and will DESTROY THE WORLD! The CarterCopter must be STOPPED!
Slashdot Mirror
...perpetrated by the CD-R manufacturers, hoping for a run on current blanks as Slashdotters world-wide "stock up" on the as-yet untaxed media.
Admit it, you were thinking of buying an extra spindle or three, weren't you?
Does that sound like a just and right situation to you?
Sure does. Because anyone stupid enough to enter into such a contract for something as important as water is pretty much Darwin bait as far as I'm concerned. And while we're stretching analogies to the breaking point I'd like to make it clear that if you want to sequence your genes, make a few modifications and grow a pair of wings that's fine by me too.
Before you go off on the fact that legally, broadband providers aren't utilities, consider this: They're generally monopolies;
I disagree - let's say that you like good beer, and you have a choice of Anchor Steam, Bud, Miller, Bush, Coors and a generic selection of 40oz malt liquors. Does Anchor have a "monopoly" on good beer? Yeah, I guess. But do they have a monopoly on beer? No. Your provider may have a "monopoly" on broadband, but that's just another way of saying there's only one place you can get the "good stuff". You can drink Bud if you have to, you just won't be as happy about it.
they provide a service many people need in order to earn money to live on
I disagree again - cheap broadband is pretty novel - what were these people doing before they had it, hunting and gathering? It makes more sense to say that there are people who have decided to make a living working from the internet and need broadband to do it. There are also people who decided to make a living buying and selling Beanie Babies, should we nationalize Ty so they can keep working in their desired profession?
You pays your money, you takes your risk.
Shouldn't they have to get a court order to cut off your access?
Uh, no. Here's another news item: your local grocery store is under no obligation to give you 90 days notice that they're not going to carry your favorite carbonated beverage any more.
Time Warner is a private enterprise, not the goverment. The only thing they (and you) are bound by is the agreement you enter into when you sign up for their service. And guess what? That agreement says they can cut you off any time they like, for no reason whatsoever.
This is why it's important to read and understand what you sign.
For many, their internet connection is the primary way they communicate with others.
Perhaps, but primary isn't the same thing as "most important": if you smell smoke you're not going to e-mail the fire department.
The point is that if you are paying money for a service you expect that service. They expect the money and you expect the bandwidth. If an organization which apparently can't even accurately determine the source IP of the traffic they are monitoring just needs to point a finger to get your access shutdown then that seems to be a violation of the contract you have with the ISP.
Only on Slashdot would people take broadband access as an inalienable right. This has nothing to do with innocence, guilt or the jury system, and everything to do with the terms of service (ie, contract) that you enter into with the ISP.
Let's take a look at that contract, shall we?
If the author's service was with Time Warner, then she was probably a Roadrunner user. I'm on RR too, and here's an exerpt from the agreement I've got with the NEO (Northeast Ohio) branch - I would imagine hers is similar if not identical:
Time Warner Cable NEO Division and ServiceCo each shall have the right at any time to change or discontinue any aspect or feature of the Road Runner Service, including but not limited to content, hours of availability, Equipment and System Requirements. Either Time Warner Cable NEO Division or Subscriber may terminate the Road Runner Service to Subscriber at any time.
You can find the whole load here
Oops. Looks like the ISP can pull the plug any time they want to, for any reason they want to, and there's exactly jack squat I can do about it.
Eeek! My precious high-speed pr0n, er, business net access is at peril! Whatever shall I do?
Make sure that I'm not dependent on RR for my business needs, that's what. A 56 modem and a serial cable is pretty much all I need to do that. And luckily I can remember how I used to do things before the cable modem was around.
Time Wanker and the MPAA did this pair a favor - now that they understand that their broadband access can evaporate they'll (hopefully) get some backups in place. Perhaps there's a lesson for all of us...?
What if they were your only option for broadband?
You learn to live life without it, like the vast majority of people on this planet?
Naw, no principle is worth that much.
One of Bluetooth's purposes is wireless mice/keyboards that work with each other, unlike the proprietary standards of today.
Creeping Crud! So I've got to put batteries in bleeding everything?
Everyready and/or Duracell is behind this, aren't they?
I haven't heard of a DVD player which will read both sides of a double sided DVD...
...nor have I heard of double sided DVD's being used for a single version of a movie... I've only seen double sided used for widescreen/regular view versions of a movie so you don't have to flip it.
Here is one. Clever design, it's a 300 disc carousel with the drive inside the hub. Normally it sucks the disc in from the front, but if you hit the "flip" button on the remote it'll spit the disc back into the carousel, spin the tray 180 degrees, then suck the same disc in from the back.
I also have a Panasonic combo LD/DVD player that can move the read head from one side of the platter to the other.
Yeah, same here. Too bad, given my gear I'd much rather have one double-sided disc taking up one slot than two single-siders.
Simply put. Microchannel was great. The biggest problem was the stupid reference diskettes, and that was simply because flash memory wasn't there, yet.
No, the biggest problem was the lack of backward compatability with ISA cards. MCA forced a chicken-and-egg scenario: people wouldn't buy the machine because there weren't as many expansion cards for it, and third party providers weren't going to tool up to produce cards for a machine that wasn't selling well. Lose lose.
Microchannel machines simply worked longer and more reliably than ISA or even PCI machines.
The ones that weren't DOA, maybe. My experience is that one out of every five P(o)S2 machines that I pulled out of a box was fscked in some way. High on the hit parade were dead serial and parallel ports. Well, on the bright side, they did introduce VGA and 3 1/2" disk drives.
I'm pretty sure there are more people who are nostalgic for the S-100 bus than for MCA.
What every vendor should do is compile a list of everything they have to sell and stick it in a database.
This works if all the junk is easlily counted and of decent value. Otherwise the database maintenance is going to be more of a PITA than the money the seller will make dumping it. And realize that the motivation for selling a lot of this stuff is the wife saying "Get it OUT!"
Which brings up a good bargaining tip: If someone has something that you'd like, but you can't haggle them down to your price, wait until the end of the event when the vendors start to pack up and leave. Then stroll by and suggest that your bank notes will be much more easy to carry home than that widget the vendor has. The bigger/heavier the widget the better this tactic works.
What's up with this old junk fettish people have? Those things take a lot of space and serve no useful purpose.
Would these items serve a more useful purpose if they were in a landfill?
One word: Education.
You can learn quite a bit about how things work by (a) taking apart old stuff and then later (b) using the peices to build new things. You might even be able to parlay that learning into a vocation. Wouldn't be the first time.
Ever try to talk to someone at Radio Shack about a computer?
Ever try to talk to someone at Radio Shack about anything remotely electronic? I've been shopping RS since before they sold their Trash-80s, and while most of them knew the diffence between a double A and 9-volt battery you were pushing the envelope on any question more technical than that.
There are clued ratshack employees, but in my experience they're as rare as hen's teeth. I've always assumed if they actually knew something about what they were selling they could get a better paying job than salesdrone.
Why the hell would i want a lousy compression format?
I appreciate your effort, I really do, but any attempt at humor on Slashdot based on misspelling is doomed from the start, as the replies readily indicate.
The audience just isn't ready for this sort of thing. Sorta like Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football.
I could (or I expect to be able to in a couple years) program my PVR to always find sci-fi for me to watch, so that my TV is essentially one big sci-fi jukebox with no commercials.
FWIW, Replay already has something along these lines called "zones". Go to the SciFi zone and it lists all that type of content coming up in the next week.
I hate to think of banner ads on the CBS evening news (oh wait, those don't work)...
First off, I wouldn't equate banner ads with TV commercials. The former measure their "success" by the number of click-throughs they get, the latter by raised public consciousness of the product (or increased floor traffic or increased sales).
I can imagine some scenario where a part of the screen is used for advertising ala a banner ad. Think of how a ballgame image shrinks to show a scroller on the bottom with the latest scores around the league - why not do the same thing with the commercials?
Possibility #2: Special PVRs that are very cheap (perhaps given away?) that download "commercials" overnight with the TV listings, and force you to sit through minutes of ads before you can watch "Battlebots" or what have you... although I don't see how likely this would be.
Possibility #3: Shows go back to the old days of "Sponsored by...", where the sponsor's billboard is part of the background (heck, this is currently the case in sporting events). Furthermore the sponsor's mention will be part of the show, ie Chairman Kaga states "If I remember correctly, this episode of Iron Chef is brought to you by Chopsalot cutlery, the knives great chefs use."
Believe me, they'll figure out something!
Along the same lines, am I the only person who has a problem with Cringley? After watching his PBS show about building an airplane in thirty days, I was convinced the guy has more money than brains, and that his infamy is due more to who he knows than what he knows.
To get a good idea of just what he does know you might want to read his book "Accidental Empires", which IMHO is a pretty good look at the history of the microcomputer revolution.
You should be able to get a copy cheap from half.com.
This campaign is targeted to small and mid-sized businesses. That is where the most institutionalized piracy occurs.
I think there's a much more important reason that the BSA wouldn't dare go after a Fortune 500 company - those are the folks that are lining Bill's pockets the most. Piss off the CIO with one of these "audit" threats, and he's likely to get B. Gates on the phone and threaten to cancel that 50,000 seat license to SQL Server.
They also tend to have big legal departments that would just love to smack the BSA around like a red-haired stepchild.
Naw, bullies always pick easy targets.
Point taken though, the arbitration will be a nightmare. Consider how you'd calculate the value of any given song traded on Son of Napster. Number of trades (easy to rig)? Chart position? (easy to buy, and screws independent artists and actual real music) User feedback? (easy to rig and buy with enough MTV time).
You're making this way too complicated. Here's an example, data from Amazon:
CD: Madonna, "Music". List price: $18.97
Number of tracks: 10
Price per song: $1.90.
Alternative: divide price of CD by # of minutes of audio, that's the per-minute price for any given song on the disc.
So instead of Napster users paying the RIAA an RIAA set per-song price, they'll be paying the RIAA a court arbitrated per-song price.
No... the end user will be paying the record label (I don't know why the RIAA would be involved at all).
Stop thinking about Napster, start thinking about CD-Now (or Amazon, or B&N or whatever) where you can pay and download any given track from their libary, instead of buying a whole CD and waiting for it to land in your mailbox. This decision would (if I understand it correctly) allow CD-Now/et al to do this as long as they give a cut to the label that owns the copyright. That cut has to be negotiated, of course.
" how does this apply to any of the music that was ever traded on napster?
It doesn't, but then that's not the point of the article. The idea here is that this ruling could force the IP holders (in this case the music labels) into allowing their material to be distributed over the net as long as the distributor pays a fair price (agreed to either by negotiation or binding arbitration).
So this does not mean FREE MUSIC NAPSTER!!!! is coming back - but it might mean you can pay a buck or two and download the music you want. Napster for pay.
But I though Matrix was the sequel to Tron...?
This:
h tm l
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/03/1520239.s
Slashdot article talked about a controler that would give the user electric shocks as feedback. I cannot find anything on the Mad Catz site to support this, nor anywhere else.
So why should I believe this article?
dosent sound so bad to me. Kill off the lazy and the stupid that way, thus insuring the success of generations to come, by reducing headcount and "chlorinating the gene pool" as it were.
Think again - this isn't some clapped-out 1978 Buick beater we're talking about here. The lazy and stupid will not be driving something that cost half a million bucks.
After all, it would probably be necessary to delineate "sky lanes" for traffick, since you can't just have everybody up there drivin' around free.
Personally I subscribe to the "Big Sky" theory of air traffic control. I mean look at it - there's so much sky up there, what're the odds that two planes would be in the same place at the same time?
The centrifugal force from 55-pounds of depleted uranium in each blade tip keeps the rotor rigid and stable at the reduced rotor rpm and high forward speeds.
Uranium? That's what they use in Nookyooler reactors, and those are EVIL and will DESTROY THE WORLD! The CarterCopter must be STOPPED!