And by doing so, the "rich world" will eventually give away so much work that they will be poor.
As a professional software engineer in the US, I sympathize. I certainly want the US to keep all of its software development in the US. But it's worth keeping in mind that the cheaper software engineers in other countries want those jobs just as badly as we do. While I'm certainly against exporting jobs to countries were the employees will be threatened, abused, and subjected to inhuman working conditions, my understanding is that software engineers in say, India, enjoy very good working conditions by their standards. Also, these low wage industries have been the foundation for growth for a number of countries in Asia, creating many jobs and generally increasing the technological level of the countries, changing them from "a cheap place to get labor" to "high tech competitors." So my selfish side says, "We should keep all programming jobs in the US", but I have to balance it against "Why should my job opportunities be given more weight than the job opportunities of people in other countries."
You can have the all open source entertainment center if you're willing to always be at least 2 or 3 years behind what is current. Users who want to view the latest video disk format will have to go to best buy to get the needed player to do so. It takes the hacker community a little while to duplicate a comercial product.
Only true if the entertainment industry can convince people to keep shifting formats. The problem is that once quality has gotten "good enough" people will stop shifting. The music industry would love to convince people to shift from CDs to DVD-Audio or MiniDisc or something else, but people just won't stand for it. They've already purchased the music, it sounds fine and the disc will easily least their lifetime (barring mis-treatment). Why upgrade. DVDs may be the last video format they can get people to upgrade to for a long time. People feel "done". No, it's not the perfect format, but it's good enough.
On the subject of consoles, you are more correct. Consoles are nowhere near stabilizing, the gains from generation to generation remain obvious to any user. But I don't think it matters to people considering this sort of project. I think most people are interested in unifying audio and video (DVD, CD, VCD, television DVR, MP3s, Oggs, etc). Anything else, like MAME, is just icing on the cake.
You do realize that the first 3 links arent 'open'.
Just because you can emulate arcade roms, snes roms and psx discs, doesn't mean it's legal to do so, or that they're somehow 'open'.
The software linked to is open. You can get the source and basically use it as you will. Of course, they're not terribly useful without some content that is typically not open, but so what? The same goes for software allowing you to play CDs, DVDs, or even record television. If you add in software and hardware with the ability to play CDs and DVDs, it doesn't require that the CDs and DVDs be open. The question is "is the convergence system open?" not "is the content used with the system open?"
At this point, I suspect we're just talking to each other... ah well.
I believe that people are biologically inclined to certain jobs/industries.
I believe that this is the core of our disagreement.
Clearly men and women have physical differences that make give us differing advantages in certain physical jobs, most obviously in sports. On average, a male wrestler will have a size and weight advantage over a female wrestler. This is something you can easily measure and test.
But "inclined" really points to mental state. To a certain extend, yes, your mental state is genetic. But mental state is also clearly significantly influenced by parenting, schooling, and interaction with society.
The question becomes, what aspects of someone inclination toward or against certain careers is biological and what portion is learned.
That is a much harder question. You can't simply look at the existing strong correlation between gender and profession and declare that gender has a strong causality to profession. You need to look for other correlations to profession. The one that immediately leaps out as a possibility is "what did the persons upbringing suggest were 'appropriate' professions" to actual profession chosen. You'll see a similarly strong correlation.
Perhaps biological gender plays a strong role in ones preferences and mental strengths. Perhaps it doesn't. We don't have enough data to be sure yet!
I am not saying that we need to provide programs to help women enter traditionally male dominated professions. No, I'm interested in a more fundamental change: a society that doesn't gender-brand professions. Given a society were a girl isn't told, "programming is a boys job" and a boy isn't told, "nursing is a girls job," things will sort themselves out. Then if it happens that women and men still continue to self-select into certain professions, so be it.
Our society is much better about this than it used to be. And sure enough, the lines between what jobs are typically male and female are blurring slightly. But there still is a bias and there will be for generations to come.
Your discussion of inequalities in law between men and women is really off-topic for the discussion. I'm certainly against legal and social inequalities between the genders. Perhaps we should be investigating why men don't enter the nursing profession! I'm not arguing for or against particular programs or laws designed to improve a given gender's lot in life or opportunities. I'm just arguing that 1) we need to admit that we don't know how important biological gender is on choice of profession, and 2) we need to eliminate any societal pressures for or against particular professions for specific genders.
The world is not Linux. The world is not free. Why is it
automatically assumed by members of this site that everything should be
free?
Erm, who exactly are you addressing? I'm a member of this site, and I
certainly don't think everything should be free. By and large the people
arguing against this copyright extension reaching backward through time are
for copyright. I certainly am.
Disney Corp wants to keep control of it's very identifiable mascot, Mickey
Mouse. And why shouldn't they? What would Walt Disney think if some 40 years
after his death, somebody with a computer and an internet connection was making
porn cartoons with the characters he created? And nobody could do anything
about it.
How would Disney feel? Perhaps sad, but he would need to accept it. When
he originally created Mickey Mouse in 1928 he knew that his work would only be
protected by copyright law for 56 years. That's it. Yet he created Mickey
Mouse and shared him with the world anyway. He knew the deal when he created
Mickey, so why should we just hand him a freebie?
Why shouldn't Disney keep control? Because Disney knew the rules when they
acquired the Mickey Mouse copyright. Heck, both Disney the company and Disney
the man relied on a public domain. Disney's first cartoons were
based on Alice in Wonderland, which had entered the public domain some
years earlier. Disney's The Jungle Book was released just eleven
years after Kiplings copyrights expired. Heck, a healthy chunk of Disney's
feature length films (and almost all of the famous "classic" films) are based
on works in the public domain. Why should Disney get to enjoy the benefits of the public domain, but not have to play fair itself.
How would you feel if, after some established time period (let's say 50 years),
ownership of your property passed into the public domain? Programs you wrote,
houses and land you own, cars you drive.
That's just silly. First, the programs that I write will enter the
public domain eventually, that's part of the deal. I don't mind so much
because I know that copyright vastly outlives the value of the software.
Seventy years after my death, (heck, in just twenty years from today), the
software I write today will be worthless to anyone but historians.
Furthermore you're confusing two very different types of ownership. My car
can't be taken away from me because I own that specific car. (I'll ignore the
many ways that society can take my car away.) If I want, I can protect my
creative works in just the same way: don't give copies to anyone else. I'll
have absolute control over it and it can pass through the generations without
entering the public domain. (Well, technically it will enter the public
domain, but because my and my descendants aren't letting anyone else see it,
it's not relevant. No one will force my descendents to make the work
available, they can hoard it all they want.)
Copyright influences what can happen to something that you've sold to
another person. If I sell my car to someone else (even if I built the car
myself), I have no control over what the other person does with it. They can
lease it out, rent it out, modify it, resell it, give it away, destroy it,
reverse engineer it, and build and sell new copies of it. Copyright is a
special case that takes some of those rights away from a legal owner of a copy
of my creative work.
Somebody could take your house, move themselves in, and there was
nothing you could do about it. In fact, the police would come to insure that
you could not prevent them from moving in.
This is a totally insane comparison. If you never let anyone else own your
work, it won't ever effectively enter the public domain. (You can even use
trade secret laws to let other people see it under restrictive NDAs.) The only
time someone can excersize the public domain is if they legally acquired a copy
in the first place. So for someone to take my house, they would have to have
legally gotten access in first place (perhaps by renting it or purchasing it
from me.) To make the comparison more accurate, they don't even need to move
into my house, they simply get the right to make exact copies of my house. I
still get to live, alone, in my house. No properly loss occurs.
If you want to create something, create something original. Don't depend on the
work somebody else did decades ago to be your only creative outlet.
That seems reasonable. Of course, the very Disney you're defending grew into the power it is today by creating clearly derivative works.
This isn't about getting stuff for free (although it is a nice side effect).
Without the public domain, Disney never would have been as successful. We're
just arguing that the next Disney like person have the same advantages as the
original Walt Disney.
Believe it or not, it's possible for a single human being to do both good things and bad things. It's generally considered acceptable to complain about the bad things someone does while still appreciating the good things.
Second, the "we" you're talking about refers to a thousands of people, each with slightly differing ideas and opinions. If you collect all of those opinions and try to stick it into a single opinion labelled "Slashdot's opinion", you're going to get some confused, conflicting ideas.
Microsoft, while under the control of Bill Gates, repeatedly and intentionally used their market dominance to limit potential competitors access to the market. Netscape just happened to be the straw that broke the camels back. The complaint isn't "He tried to squash Netscape." Every competitor tries to outdo their opponents. The complaint is "Microsoft used its position of market dominance to threaten a wide variety of companies into behaving as Microsoft wanted."
Bill Gates is using his fortune for a great deal of good work. But Bill Gates also lead his company as it tried to stop the free market forces that created it. There is no irony here, just the complexity of humanity.
Now why do they use this? And why is it government funded?
The "this" in question, the Voters News Service, is funded by news networks and newspapers, not the government. They use it so that they can provide as up to the minute information on voting results as possible, and so that they can provide in depth analysis of voter behavior.
Voting in this country is a fraud. Voting machines of any kind can be rigged. They don't count the ballots at the polling place. How do I know that my ballot box is the same one that arrives at city hall.
I suggest volunteering to work at the polls, or to be a monitor of the polls. You're free to watch the entire process yourself. In hotly contested races, the various parties will send people down to monitor things themselves.
It is a fraud. I don't vote because of it. Our rights were stolen from years ago.
If you are absolutely convinced that the system is fraudulent, what are you doing about it? Might I suggest:
Vote anyway. It doesn't take long and gives you a certain credibility. Many people will hear, "I don't vote" and hear "I'm lazy and have no right to complain." It sounds more impressive if you say "I vote and I feel my vote was illegally discarded."
Monitor the election. Get a few friends and watch the ballot boxes from start to finish to ensure no tampering occurs.
Run for office yourself. Then vote for yourself. They can't steal that vote from you (after all, you can find out exactly how many votes you got, and if you don't get at least one, it will look suspicious).
Run your own polls. The various parties certainly do. If your polling results significantly diverge from the actual results, use it as evidence to...
Demand recounts. Collect as much evidence as you can and present it to as many people as you can. Hand recounts happen every election cycle in some places.
Demand accountable voting systems. The new touch screen systems are a sham that provides an opportunity for fraud. Voting should be done on paper in an easily human readable fashion. Locally (Madison, Wisconsin), we use a paper ballot with broken arrows next to each candidate. You just draw a line to complete the arrow of the candidate you want. It's easy for an automated tabulator to read, but if you need to recount, humans can trivially read your vote.
Your claim that our election system is rigged is extremely serious. If you seriously believe it, don't you owe it to yourself and your country to fight back?
At least in Wisconsin I'm required to declare how much I ordered from other places. If the retailer didn't take sales tax out, I'm required to declare the value and pay taxes on it. Sure, most people don't bother (it's difficult for the state to determine that someone lied), but in theory you already pay it.
If the "Internet Tax" simply strives to enforce existing sales taxes, that seems fair to me. If it represents a new tax above normal sales tax, that's not reasonable.
Hey, my Newton 110 had handwriting recognition! And it was 7 years ago when I had it!
I'm not arguing real handwriting recognition wasn't possible. I'm arguing that it's not possible given the desired form factor and battery life. My first Palm (a Palm III) was 4.7 x 3.2 x 0.7 (inches), and I viewed it as irritatingly bulky, but at least it fit in my pocket. Your Newton was a monstrous 8.0 x 4.0 x 1.25. It's not going into my pocket. I carry my Palm everywhere, so size is critical. Furthermore, my original Palm III lasted about a month doing moderate to heavy PDA usage on two AA batteries. How long did your Newton last?
The Newton was, by all accounts, a sweat piece of hardware. But that power and handwriting recognition demanded a beefier processor, a larger case, and used more power. Palm guessed, correctly, that people would sacrifice power and handwriting recognition for size and battery life.
I completely understand where you are coming from. I certainly agree that there are biological differences between men and women that will affect their lives and careers. Men absolutely tend to be larger and stronger, that's simple biology. However, when we start discussing behavior and mental characteristics things get more complex. Yes, there are measurable biological differences in how male and female brains function. However, the brain remains largely a mystery to science and we cannot conclusively say that women fundamentally tend toward social fields because of biology. You certainly cannot observe current practice and hold it as evidence that biology controlled where men and women ended up. There are certainly still strong societal pressures for boys to behave in certain ways and girls to behave in certain different ways. In the replies to this very article you'll find many female geeks who comment that their parents discouraged them from math or computers. It's just anecdotal evidence, but it suggests that it may be worth more research. It's certainly every bit as plausible that the observable behavior differences between men and women are dominated by upbringing and the society the child observes, not simple biology. The system is complex, we're influenced by our immediate family, our schools, our media, our biology, and a million other sources. To point to biology and declare it as the dominant factor and wave away other influences as unimportant is crazy. Maybe biology is the dominant force, I'm just arguing that maybe it isn't. It seems worth study to me.
Re:People don't want Graffiti, Jot and so on
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Palm Kills Off Graffiti
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Competing PDAs (usually running Windows CE) have offered handwriting recognition and keyboards for a long time. Dispite this, Palm's with Graffiti dominated the PDA market for a long time. Those people who were willing to pay for PDA chose the optino that provided a smaller form facter, longer battery life, and in many cases a lower price. While they may not want Graffiti, they're clearly willing to live with it.
Of course, as technology advances, handwriting recognition or usable keyboards may become an option. But such devices are still larger and have a shorted battery life at the moment. Palm's market share has certainly started to slide, but it's not a dead yet.
Re:Computers Teaching UI to Humans = Reality
on
Palm Kills Off Graffiti
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· Score: 3, Insightful
When *consumers* have to learn a new language just to be able to use a consumer device, that's just downright brain-damaged.
You're forgetting history. Until recently, computers didn't have the processing power to understand arbitrary input (and a computers attempts to still aren't perfect.) Dispite this, people who wanted the computer now instead of later adapted.
Sure, true handwriting recognition was adequete and available when the Palm first came out. But it was also processor intensive. Certainly more demanding than the puny 16 Mhz processor in the Palm. To support handwriting recognition would have required a faster processor and thus, a shorter battery life. In fact, about the time of my first Palm, Microsoft's PocketPCs had handwriting recognition. Of course, they were surprisingly warm to the touch when running and measured their battery lifespan in hours. The Palms of the era generated no noticable heat and measured their lifespan in weeks! As someone who easily forgets to buy new batteries (or recharge my newer PalmOS device), I appreciate this.
Yes, ideally my computer would perfectly understand my handwriting without any training period. However there will need to be a balance between price, battery life, heat, and ease of input for the forseeable future. For many people (including the millions of Palm users), Palm achieved the best balance available at the time.
For all we know...the DMCA is quite harmless. As the DMCA has never been tested in court, it can't be said it's a bad law because we, including the EFF, truly don't know the extent of its abilities to stifle free speech and innovation. Now, one might be able to say that the threat of using the DMCA has stifled innovation and censored feee speech , but this is far different from actually being the root of the problem.
The heck are you talking about? The general goal of making something illegal is for the threat of enforcement of the law to stop people from doing something. The threat of the DMCA is the whole purpose of the DMCA. The DMCA has stifled innovation and censored free speech. That it hasn't been well tested in court is irrelevant. Your average person doesn't have the ability to fight such a court case, so the law effectively stifles most people. The DMCA is certainly the root to some problems.
One of these days the geeks are going to realize that laws apply to the internet as much as they do in reality and that information doesn't want to be free, it simply wants to be information, nothing more, nothing less.
Take life a little less literally. No, for a literal standpoint, information does not want to be free. But would you complain if someone said that water wants to run downhill? It's just an literally incorrect. Saying that information wants to be free is short, memorable summary of a more fundamental issue: "Information tends, over time, to become more free. This happens because human beings like spreading information and spend great deals of effort to develop technologies to spread information. Over time, the cost to spread information has dropped lower and lower. One you had to spread information be word of mouth, then writing evolved to make it easier, then the printing press, then movable type, then telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, photocopiers, facsimile machines, and finally the internet. Spreading information is far easier than stopping the flow of information, all it takes is one little leak and you'll be hard pressed to stop that bit of information from spreading like wildfire. Ultimately you can't stop of the flow of information with technology. The best that you can do is slow the flow of information down, and you can only do so with a repressive government that heavily censors its own people. Information will be free because people want information to be free. Efforts to stop it are doomed, instead spend you time figuring out how to adjust to the new world order."
Of course laws apply everywhere, including on the internet. That's not terribly relevant. The point is that the laws are wrong and should be repealed. Often the laws are wrong because they create an entirely different set of rules when you're working digitally on the internet than you follow working in analog off the internet. That's hardly fair.
The last Little Red Corvette section reminded me that there are people in this country who don't deserve to live here. eople who just want the free ride. People who have never considered giving of themselves.
Heavens, yes! These people spend thier time running independent media, trying to scrap together enough to afford their web site bills or to publish their next issue, effectively working for free to produce articles and films in an effort to make the world better. These people dont' deserve to be Americans. The next thing you'll know they'll be bitching about social justice, spending their money and time to travel to various meetings to protest, organizing unions in places where it may cost them their jobs, or working in the Peace Corps to provide clean water to impovershed villages.
God, these people are so selfish! They think life is just easy street.
The scumbags who made that waste of film will have hopefully forgotten to have gotten the rights to one of those clips and will be sued blind.
God, I hate those scumbags who take short clips of other works for purposes of commentary and political speech! If you can't afford clearances, clearly you have no right to show examples of how the media and politicians are acting! Leave the free speech for true patriots like Fox News.
Humans will always like wars -- deal with it.
Yeah, you filthy hippy liberals. Don't bother trying to change the world for the "better". Humans fundamentally like wars. Heck, we should try and start some more! Canada looks prime for the taking to me!
The fact is, the nature of the subject, and anything else requiring in-depth knowledge, will not appeal to most girls...
I believe this to be true. (Well, I disagree with the specific phrasing, perhaps, "Men are far more likely than women to be willing to engage in the hyperfocused, solitary, almost obsessive study of a single subject.") But I think that to come to this conclusion, announce, "well, men and women are different," and declare your work done is a cop-out. You're just observing what you see right now and declaring it a fundamental truth.
We need to follow through to the next, and perhaps question: Why do are men more likely to engage in this behavior than women? What lead to this behavior?
Perhaps it comes from physical gender differences, but I'm not convinced. I think that differences between how girls and boys are raised and how society portrays "ideal" men and women have a great deal to do with the situation. The social circle one grew up in probably has a great deal of influence as well. (I find it interesting that by and large the skilled computer scientists and programmers I know were unpopular "nerds" in school. We need to consider all reasonable possibilities.
I realize the business of business is to make profit, but that statement make it sound as if the law is a secondary concern, an inconvinience that need be followed only if you're in a good mood.
And of course the law is a rough edged tool when viewed upon from a purely business stand point. That's because most laws aren't designed with only business in mind. There are these things called "people" too...
Actively trolling, or are you just stupid?
Laws don't exist for their own sake. Laws (in general) exist to protect people from things our society deems wrong. Our society has deemed copying something that someone else created without their permission as wrong. So copyright law was created. Copyright law solely exists to try and protect creators.
If a particular creator decides that the a particular copyright violation is in his best interests, who are you to insist that the law be enforced? Lessig isn't arguing that copyright violations are acceptable, he's suggesting that businesses who have the option of pressing charges against a copyright violator consider the business ramifications of doing so. It might be that in some cases it will be more profitable to let the violation slide. It's the businesses choice to make, blindly enforcing the might actually cause harm to the business, the very entity the law tries to protect!
When a business or an individual decides to let a violation slide, that decision doesn't affect the rights of other individuals or businesses to press charges against other copyright violators. Everyone wins!
they don't ask for your social security #, they ask for the last 4 digits. They also don't ask for mother's maiden name
Unfortunately many financial institutions use the last four digits of your social security number as a password of sorts. It's sometimes used directly as a PIN, and sometimes as the initial password when you set up online banking for the first time. Armed with a name, address, date of birth, and last four digits of your social security number, you could get access to many bank accounts.
Now, a financial institution shouldn't use your SSN as a password of any sort, but there is still no reason for these people to requirement.
As long as the government doesn't mandate or forbid things, we are rid of the monopolies. The definition of monopoly was originally based on whether or not the government allowed competition.
Well, yes, I guess, as long as you're willing to use that definition. You wouldn't have monopolies, you'd just have strangeholds on markets created by manipulation of supply, tie ins, and other techniques designed to limit competition.
Meanwhile, the working definition of monopoly has drifted in the last hundred years. For example, Merriam-Webster defines monopoly as "1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action". Heck, government or legal restrictions don't appear in any of M-W's definitions.
Entrepreneurs like to make money. And as long as they aren't forbidden to entera sector of the market, and it's profitable, they will. And it's the customers that vote with their pocketbooks that allow it to happen. It's a beautiful thing.
It's a beautiful thing in theory. The problem is that you can be forbidden to enter a sector of the market by forces other than the government. Your competitors have a great deal of incentive to try and create such limits as quickly as possible. Running an nationwide railroad? Instead of investing in rails, buy up all of the coal sources, preventing your competitors from running at all. Got a dominant position in the market? Tie your customers to you through subtle techniques that will make it unrealistically expense to shift products. Afraid of an upstart competitor making a superior car? Use bogus lawsuits to force him to burn through all of his funding defending himself and drive him out of business.
Perfect capitalism is a beautiful thing, but it has unattainable requirements: perfect competition, low costs to enter a market, well informed consumers in all areas. In the absense of perfect capitalism you're left with a system that functions acceptably, but creates the incentive and potential for monopolies to form. The result is that we as a society need to keep an eye on the system and occasionally tweak things when the system fails.
(Out of context and bit off topic, but I can't resist:)
The problems in the marketplace aren't "market failures" that the government needs to fix for you (at no small cost), but areas where the government has forced things to work a particular way.
A compelling argument. Let's start by getting rid of any laws that grant someone an "exclusive Right" to something, which is clearly a monopoly by your own definition. I suggest starting with copyright, patent, and trademark laws...
Unfortunately I'm unable to dig up the agreement I originally signed on for to comparision, but the following are changes from the previous agreement:
2. The TiVo Service. The basic TiVo service consists of program guide information and the following features:... Season Pass... WishList... Smart Recording... TiVo Suggestions... Parental Controls.
This is fairly subtle, but the previous agreement basically just said that service consisted of program guide information. Nothing else. The other features were implicitly part of the unit you purchased. Sure, the features weren't terribly useful without guide information, but if you could find another way to provide guide data those feature would work. Now they're claiming that if you fail to pay you have no rights at all these features which are entirely managed within the unit.
3. Changes to Your TiVo Service. TiVo
may, at its discretion and from time to
time change, add or remove features and
functionality of the TiVo Service or the
TiVo DVR (when the TiVo DVR access
TiVo's servers) without notice. If you are dissatisfied with any such changes to the TiVo Service, you may immediately cancel your subscription as provided in section 13 ("Termination of Service").
Given the helpful definitions of features in the previous section, TiVo is clearly reserving the right to remove Season Passes, WishList, Smart Recording, TiVo Suggestions, Parental Controls and other functionality. Sure, it seems unlikely that they'll take such features away, but why are they asking for the right to? Those are specifically the features they advertised the Tivo as having, and the reason I bought mine.
But I can terminate the service if I don't like it? Given the new changes, my Tivo effectively becomes a giant paperweight. And (checking Section 13), my lifetime subscription that I paid for before this change will not be refunded in any way, so I'm especially S.O.L..
10. Using the TiVo Service.... you agree not to tamper with or otherwise modify the TiVo DVR.
The rest of the section is pretty reasonable, but this little clause is unreasonable. I purchased my Tivo specifically because they were very open and had a "You void your warrantee, and we won't support you, but feel free to hack on your Tivo" policy. I wanted to support that behavior. This effectively reverses the decision. No more hard drive expansion hacks. To heck with that.
11. Advertising and Promotions.... In
order to send such content, you agree
that Tivo may tune your Tivo DVR to a
particular channel at a particular
time.
In practice it looks like they only use this to record the silly promos I see on my main menu. That I don't mind. What I do mind is that this implies that they can preempt my normal recording to record their ads. That I object to. I doubt they ever will preempt my programming, but why not state as much in the policy?
12. Definition of Product Lifetime Subscription.... Of course, hardware
products don't last forever and their
lifespan will vary.
When I purchased a lifetime subscription, I understood that the lifetime in question was for the unit, not me. I figured it just meant that if the system failed I'd need to pay to get it repaired. This working left me fearing that they may claim that once a Tivo experiences any failure that they can claim that its lifetime is over and cancel the service. Since my Tivo actually experienced a modem failure nine months into its life, this seems like a real risk to me. (On a related note, it looks like Tivo modems are fragile, thus products like this one. Get your Tivo on a phone line surge supressor!)
I brought up all of these complaints to Tivo support when I became aware of them. I got a form letter back that failed to address the issues I brought up. Feh.
no season passes (doh!), no suggestions (doh!), needs a athlon 1800 all to itself (DOH!). Thanks, I think I'll stick with Tivo.
Actually, MythTV does support season passes. In fact, it gives you more options than a Tivo. check it out. "Record this program whenever it's shown on this channel" is the equivalent of Tivo's Season Pass.
It does lack suggestions. That's a shame, but it's still a work in progress. I can live without them.
It does want an athlon 1800, but you can easily get such a processor for $100. If you're willing to put some work into it you can put together a suitable system for about the same price as a Tivo with lifetime subscription. The resulting system will be more generally capable than a Tivo (web browser, game player, MP3/OGG player, record to CD or DVD, simple video editor (suitable for editing out commercials for personal archival use).
Yes MythTV lags behind Tivo. It looks like the listing information is being screen scraped off a web site. If it gets popular that's going to get shut off. (Fortunately there are pay services they'll be able to switch to.) MythTV is relatively new and under heavy development, so you'll either live with reduced functionality or spend time upgrading. As it matures that will change. To put together a machine to run it on cheaply you'll need to invest alot of your own time. Right now, if you're looking for something that just works out of the box, Tivo is probably the right answer. But MythTV is showing alot of promise for the future. Personally I love my Tivo. However, Tivo is showing signs of becoming consumer hostile. They recently decided to change the terms of the lifetime subscription I already paid for from "paying for guide service" to "paying to use the Tivo at all" and declaring that I'm prohibited from modifying my Tivo (with say the popular extra hard drive). I'm not filled with trust for Tivo's future at this point. I'm glad to know that if Tivo's terms become too onerous, I'll have a Free option to try. If I decide I'd just be interested in hacking on a PVR for the fun of it, a project exists I can start with.
(On an unrelated note, it was a moderately big deal when Tivo made the change to the service agreement, but I haven't been able to turn up any good web summaries of the changes. I was certainly ticked off because I specifically researched the service agreement before deciding to purchase a Tivo and a lifetime subscription. Silly me, I foolishly assumed that the "We can revise this agreement at will" clause would never be used to screw me so hard. I made the mistake that the previous pro-customer attitude and unofficial support for modifications would last. I was clearly wrong. On the up side, it reinforced my belief: any company which has a "we can screw you at will" clause, but promises to never use it will eventually break that promise. The only way to protect yourself is to assume that any contract will be abused to harm you, the consumer, as much as possible. I'm so freaking happy that we get to live in a world were we have to assume everyone is out to get us. Hopefully as more citizens get screwed they'll start demanding fair license agreements. Anyway.... back to the original digression...
Can someone offer a good reference beyond the actual agreement? Ideally a site comparing the original and revised agreements with a little analysis of why the changes are bad for customers.)
It's a neat technique to increase resolution, but the implication that the article gives that you need this technique to improve resolution is silly. Effectively each grouping of red, green, and blue sensing points in a CCD camera returns a single pixel. If you replace each red sensor with three smaller sensors (one red, one green, and one blue), you'll get the same increase in resolution. In theory you could lose data because a little bit of blue light hit the red sensor, but not the blue one, but in practice it isn't an issue. Assuming you can keep making the sensors small, you can keep scaling the resolution of CCD technology.
This is neat technology and may well improve the quality of cameras to come. But it's not essential to improving the quality of cameras.
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As a professional software engineer in the US, I sympathize. I certainly want the US to keep all of its software development in the US. But it's worth keeping in mind that the cheaper software engineers in other countries want those jobs just as badly as we do. While I'm certainly against exporting jobs to countries were the employees will be threatened, abused, and subjected to inhuman working conditions, my understanding is that software engineers in say, India, enjoy very good working conditions by their standards. Also, these low wage industries have been the foundation for growth for a number of countries in Asia, creating many jobs and generally increasing the technological level of the countries, changing them from "a cheap place to get labor" to "high tech competitors." So my selfish side says, "We should keep all programming jobs in the US", but I have to balance it against "Why should my job opportunities be given more weight than the job opportunities of people in other countries."
Only true if the entertainment industry can convince people to keep shifting formats. The problem is that once quality has gotten "good enough" people will stop shifting. The music industry would love to convince people to shift from CDs to DVD-Audio or MiniDisc or something else, but people just won't stand for it. They've already purchased the music, it sounds fine and the disc will easily least their lifetime (barring mis-treatment). Why upgrade. DVDs may be the last video format they can get people to upgrade to for a long time. People feel "done". No, it's not the perfect format, but it's good enough.
On the subject of consoles, you are more correct. Consoles are nowhere near stabilizing, the gains from generation to generation remain obvious to any user. But I don't think it matters to people considering this sort of project. I think most people are interested in unifying audio and video (DVD, CD, VCD, television DVR, MP3s, Oggs, etc). Anything else, like MAME, is just icing on the cake.
The software linked to is open. You can get the source and basically use it as you will. Of course, they're not terribly useful without some content that is typically not open, but so what? The same goes for software allowing you to play CDs, DVDs, or even record television. If you add in software and hardware with the ability to play CDs and DVDs, it doesn't require that the CDs and DVDs be open. The question is "is the convergence system open?" not "is the content used with the system open?"
At this point, I suspect we're just talking to each other... ah well.
I believe that this is the core of our disagreement.
Clearly men and women have physical differences that make give us differing advantages in certain physical jobs, most obviously in sports. On average, a male wrestler will have a size and weight advantage over a female wrestler. This is something you can easily measure and test.
But "inclined" really points to mental state. To a certain extend, yes, your mental state is genetic. But mental state is also clearly significantly influenced by parenting, schooling, and interaction with society.
The question becomes, what aspects of someone inclination toward or against certain careers is biological and what portion is learned.
That is a much harder question. You can't simply look at the existing strong correlation between gender and profession and declare that gender has a strong causality to profession. You need to look for other correlations to profession. The one that immediately leaps out as a possibility is "what did the persons upbringing suggest were 'appropriate' professions" to actual profession chosen. You'll see a similarly strong correlation.
Perhaps biological gender plays a strong role in ones preferences and mental strengths. Perhaps it doesn't. We don't have enough data to be sure yet!
I am not saying that we need to provide programs to help women enter traditionally male dominated professions. No, I'm interested in a more fundamental change: a society that doesn't gender-brand professions. Given a society were a girl isn't told, "programming is a boys job" and a boy isn't told, "nursing is a girls job," things will sort themselves out. Then if it happens that women and men still continue to self-select into certain professions, so be it.
Our society is much better about this than it used to be. And sure enough, the lines between what jobs are typically male and female are blurring slightly. But there still is a bias and there will be for generations to come.
Your discussion of inequalities in law between men and women is really off-topic for the discussion. I'm certainly against legal and social inequalities between the genders. Perhaps we should be investigating why men don't enter the nursing profession! I'm not arguing for or against particular programs or laws designed to improve a given gender's lot in life or opportunities. I'm just arguing that 1) we need to admit that we don't know how important biological gender is on choice of profession, and 2) we need to eliminate any societal pressures for or against particular professions for specific genders.
Erm, who exactly are you addressing? I'm a member of this site, and I certainly don't think everything should be free. By and large the people arguing against this copyright extension reaching backward through time are for copyright. I certainly am.
How would Disney feel? Perhaps sad, but he would need to accept it. When he originally created Mickey Mouse in 1928 he knew that his work would only be protected by copyright law for 56 years. That's it. Yet he created Mickey Mouse and shared him with the world anyway. He knew the deal when he created Mickey, so why should we just hand him a freebie?
Why shouldn't Disney keep control? Because Disney knew the rules when they acquired the Mickey Mouse copyright. Heck, both Disney the company and Disney the man relied on a public domain. Disney's first cartoons were based on Alice in Wonderland, which had entered the public domain some years earlier. Disney's The Jungle Book was released just eleven years after Kiplings copyrights expired. Heck, a healthy chunk of Disney's feature length films (and almost all of the famous "classic" films) are based on works in the public domain. Why should Disney get to enjoy the benefits of the public domain, but not have to play fair itself.
That's just silly. First, the programs that I write will enter the public domain eventually, that's part of the deal. I don't mind so much because I know that copyright vastly outlives the value of the software. Seventy years after my death, (heck, in just twenty years from today), the software I write today will be worthless to anyone but historians.
Furthermore you're confusing two very different types of ownership. My car can't be taken away from me because I own that specific car. (I'll ignore the many ways that society can take my car away.) If I want, I can protect my creative works in just the same way: don't give copies to anyone else. I'll have absolute control over it and it can pass through the generations without entering the public domain. (Well, technically it will enter the public domain, but because my and my descendants aren't letting anyone else see it, it's not relevant. No one will force my descendents to make the work available, they can hoard it all they want.)
Copyright influences what can happen to something that you've sold to another person. If I sell my car to someone else (even if I built the car myself), I have no control over what the other person does with it. They can lease it out, rent it out, modify it, resell it, give it away, destroy it, reverse engineer it, and build and sell new copies of it. Copyright is a special case that takes some of those rights away from a legal owner of a copy of my creative work.
This is a totally insane comparison. If you never let anyone else own your work, it won't ever effectively enter the public domain. (You can even use trade secret laws to let other people see it under restrictive NDAs.) The only time someone can excersize the public domain is if they legally acquired a copy in the first place. So for someone to take my house, they would have to have legally gotten access in first place (perhaps by renting it or purchasing it from me.) To make the comparison more accurate, they don't even need to move into my house, they simply get the right to make exact copies of my house. I still get to live, alone, in my house. No properly loss occurs.
That seems reasonable. Of course, the very Disney you're defending grew into the power it is today by creating clearly derivative works.
This isn't about getting stuff for free (although it is a nice side effect). Without the public domain, Disney never would have been as successful. We're just arguing that the next Disney like person have the same advantages as the original Walt Disney.
Of which irony do you speak? I fail to see any.
Believe it or not, it's possible for a single human being to do both good things and bad things. It's generally considered acceptable to complain about the bad things someone does while still appreciating the good things.
Second, the "we" you're talking about refers to a thousands of people, each with slightly differing ideas and opinions. If you collect all of those opinions and try to stick it into a single opinion labelled "Slashdot's opinion", you're going to get some confused, conflicting ideas.
Microsoft, while under the control of Bill Gates, repeatedly and intentionally used their market dominance to limit potential competitors access to the market. Netscape just happened to be the straw that broke the camels back. The complaint isn't "He tried to squash Netscape." Every competitor tries to outdo their opponents. The complaint is "Microsoft used its position of market dominance to threaten a wide variety of companies into behaving as Microsoft wanted."
Bill Gates is using his fortune for a great deal of good work. But Bill Gates also lead his company as it tried to stop the free market forces that created it. There is no irony here, just the complexity of humanity.
The point was not to dis KHTML, but to rebut the implication that Gecko is too complicated for real world use.
Safari is closer to 90% done.
Of course, that just leaves the other 90% to do...
The "this" in question, the Voters News Service, is funded by news networks and newspapers, not the government. They use it so that they can provide as up to the minute information on voting results as possible, and so that they can provide in depth analysis of voter behavior.
I suggest volunteering to work at the polls, or to be a monitor of the polls. You're free to watch the entire process yourself. In hotly contested races, the various parties will send people down to monitor things themselves.
If you are absolutely convinced that the system is fraudulent, what are you doing about it? Might I suggest:
Your claim that our election system is rigged is extremely serious. If you seriously believe it, don't you owe it to yourself and your country to fight back?
At least in Wisconsin I'm required to declare how much I ordered from other places. If the retailer didn't take sales tax out, I'm required to declare the value and pay taxes on it. Sure, most people don't bother (it's difficult for the state to determine that someone lied), but in theory you already pay it.
If the "Internet Tax" simply strives to enforce existing sales taxes, that seems fair to me. If it represents a new tax above normal sales tax, that's not reasonable.
I'm not arguing real handwriting recognition wasn't possible. I'm arguing that it's not possible given the desired form factor and battery life. My first Palm (a Palm III) was 4.7 x 3.2 x 0.7 (inches), and I viewed it as irritatingly bulky, but at least it fit in my pocket. Your Newton was a monstrous 8.0 x 4.0 x 1.25. It's not going into my pocket. I carry my Palm everywhere, so size is critical. Furthermore, my original Palm III lasted about a month doing moderate to heavy PDA usage on two AA batteries. How long did your Newton last?
The Newton was, by all accounts, a sweat piece of hardware. But that power and handwriting recognition demanded a beefier processor, a larger case, and used more power. Palm guessed, correctly, that people would sacrifice power and handwriting recognition for size and battery life.
I completely understand where you are coming from. I certainly agree that there are biological differences between men and women that will affect their lives and careers. Men absolutely tend to be larger and stronger, that's simple biology. However, when we start discussing behavior and mental characteristics things get more complex. Yes, there are measurable biological differences in how male and female brains function. However, the brain remains largely a mystery to science and we cannot conclusively say that women fundamentally tend toward social fields because of biology. You certainly cannot observe current practice and hold it as evidence that biology controlled where men and women ended up. There are certainly still strong societal pressures for boys to behave in certain ways and girls to behave in certain different ways. In the replies to this very article you'll find many female geeks who comment that their parents discouraged them from math or computers. It's just anecdotal evidence, but it suggests that it may be worth more research. It's certainly every bit as plausible that the observable behavior differences between men and women are dominated by upbringing and the society the child observes, not simple biology. The system is complex, we're influenced by our immediate family, our schools, our media, our biology, and a million other sources. To point to biology and declare it as the dominant factor and wave away other influences as unimportant is crazy. Maybe biology is the dominant force, I'm just arguing that maybe it isn't. It seems worth study to me.
Competing PDAs (usually running Windows CE) have offered handwriting recognition and keyboards for a long time. Dispite this, Palm's with Graffiti dominated the PDA market for a long time. Those people who were willing to pay for PDA chose the optino that provided a smaller form facter, longer battery life, and in many cases a lower price. While they may not want Graffiti, they're clearly willing to live with it.
Of course, as technology advances, handwriting recognition or usable keyboards may become an option. But such devices are still larger and have a shorted battery life at the moment. Palm's market share has certainly started to slide, but it's not a dead yet.
You're forgetting history. Until recently, computers didn't have the processing power to understand arbitrary input (and a computers attempts to still aren't perfect.) Dispite this, people who wanted the computer now instead of later adapted.
Sure, true handwriting recognition was adequete and available when the Palm first came out. But it was also processor intensive. Certainly more demanding than the puny 16 Mhz processor in the Palm. To support handwriting recognition would have required a faster processor and thus, a shorter battery life. In fact, about the time of my first Palm, Microsoft's PocketPCs had handwriting recognition. Of course, they were surprisingly warm to the touch when running and measured their battery lifespan in hours. The Palms of the era generated no noticable heat and measured their lifespan in weeks! As someone who easily forgets to buy new batteries (or recharge my newer PalmOS device), I appreciate this.
Yes, ideally my computer would perfectly understand my handwriting without any training period. However there will need to be a balance between price, battery life, heat, and ease of input for the forseeable future. For many people (including the millions of Palm users), Palm achieved the best balance available at the time.
The heck are you talking about? The general goal of making something illegal is for the threat of enforcement of the law to stop people from doing something. The threat of the DMCA is the whole purpose of the DMCA. The DMCA has stifled innovation and censored free speech. That it hasn't been well tested in court is irrelevant. Your average person doesn't have the ability to fight such a court case, so the law effectively stifles most people. The DMCA is certainly the root to some problems.
Take life a little less literally. No, for a literal standpoint, information does not want to be free. But would you complain if someone said that water wants to run downhill? It's just an literally incorrect. Saying that information wants to be free is short, memorable summary of a more fundamental issue: "Information tends, over time, to become more free. This happens because human beings like spreading information and spend great deals of effort to develop technologies to spread information. Over time, the cost to spread information has dropped lower and lower. One you had to spread information be word of mouth, then writing evolved to make it easier, then the printing press, then movable type, then telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, photocopiers, facsimile machines, and finally the internet. Spreading information is far easier than stopping the flow of information, all it takes is one little leak and you'll be hard pressed to stop that bit of information from spreading like wildfire. Ultimately you can't stop of the flow of information with technology. The best that you can do is slow the flow of information down, and you can only do so with a repressive government that heavily censors its own people. Information will be free because people want information to be free. Efforts to stop it are doomed, instead spend you time figuring out how to adjust to the new world order."
Of course laws apply everywhere, including on the internet. That's not terribly relevant. The point is that the laws are wrong and should be repealed. Often the laws are wrong because they create an entirely different set of rules when you're working digitally on the internet than you follow working in analog off the internet. That's hardly fair.
God, I hate those scumbags who take short clips of other works for purposes of commentary and political speech! If you can't afford clearances, clearly you have no right to show examples of how the media and politicians are acting! Leave the free speech for true patriots like Fox News.
Yeah, you filthy hippy liberals. Don't bother trying to change the world for the "better". Humans fundamentally like wars. Heck, we should try and start some more! Canada looks prime for the taking to me!
I believe this to be true. (Well, I disagree with the specific phrasing, perhaps, "Men are far more likely than women to be willing to engage in the hyperfocused, solitary, almost obsessive study of a single subject.") But I think that to come to this conclusion, announce, "well, men and women are different," and declare your work done is a cop-out. You're just observing what you see right now and declaring it a fundamental truth.
We need to follow through to the next, and perhaps question: Why do are men more likely to engage in this behavior than women? What lead to this behavior? Perhaps it comes from physical gender differences, but I'm not convinced. I think that differences between how girls and boys are raised and how society portrays "ideal" men and women have a great deal to do with the situation. The social circle one grew up in probably has a great deal of influence as well. (I find it interesting that by and large the skilled computer scientists and programmers I know were unpopular "nerds" in school. We need to consider all reasonable possibilities.
Actively trolling, or are you just stupid?
Laws don't exist for their own sake. Laws (in general) exist to protect people from things our society deems wrong. Our society has deemed copying something that someone else created without their permission as wrong. So copyright law was created. Copyright law solely exists to try and protect creators.
If a particular creator decides that the a particular copyright violation is in his best interests, who are you to insist that the law be enforced? Lessig isn't arguing that copyright violations are acceptable, he's suggesting that businesses who have the option of pressing charges against a copyright violator consider the business ramifications of doing so. It might be that in some cases it will be more profitable to let the violation slide. It's the businesses choice to make, blindly enforcing the might actually cause harm to the business, the very entity the law tries to protect!
When a business or an individual decides to let a violation slide, that decision doesn't affect the rights of other individuals or businesses to press charges against other copyright violators. Everyone wins!
Unfortunately many financial institutions use the last four digits of your social security number as a password of sorts. It's sometimes used directly as a PIN, and sometimes as the initial password when you set up online banking for the first time. Armed with a name, address, date of birth, and last four digits of your social security number, you could get access to many bank accounts.
Now, a financial institution shouldn't use your SSN as a password of any sort, but there is still no reason for these people to requirement.
If it's their box, what exactly did I pay $200 for? The nifty packing material?
Well, yes, I guess, as long as you're willing to use that definition. You wouldn't have monopolies, you'd just have strangeholds on markets created by manipulation of supply, tie ins, and other techniques designed to limit competition.
Meanwhile, the working definition of monopoly has drifted in the last hundred years. For example, Merriam-Webster defines monopoly as "1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action". Heck, government or legal restrictions don't appear in any of M-W's definitions.
It's a beautiful thing in theory. The problem is that you can be forbidden to enter a sector of the market by forces other than the government. Your competitors have a great deal of incentive to try and create such limits as quickly as possible. Running an nationwide railroad? Instead of investing in rails, buy up all of the coal sources, preventing your competitors from running at all. Got a dominant position in the market? Tie your customers to you through subtle techniques that will make it unrealistically expense to shift products. Afraid of an upstart competitor making a superior car? Use bogus lawsuits to force him to burn through all of his funding defending himself and drive him out of business.
Perfect capitalism is a beautiful thing, but it has unattainable requirements: perfect competition, low costs to enter a market, well informed consumers in all areas. In the absense of perfect capitalism you're left with a system that functions acceptably, but creates the incentive and potential for monopolies to form. The result is that we as a society need to keep an eye on the system and occasionally tweak things when the system fails.
(Out of context and bit off topic, but I can't resist:)
A compelling argument. Let's start by getting rid of any laws that grant someone an "exclusive Right" to something, which is clearly a monopoly by your own definition. I suggest starting with copyright, patent, and trademark laws...
This is Tivo's new service agreement in PDF, and here is Google's copy of Tivo's service agreement converted to HTML.
Unfortunately I'm unable to dig up the agreement I originally signed on for to comparision, but the following are changes from the previous agreement:
This is fairly subtle, but the previous agreement basically just said that service consisted of program guide information. Nothing else. The other features were implicitly part of the unit you purchased. Sure, the features weren't terribly useful without guide information, but if you could find another way to provide guide data those feature would work. Now they're claiming that if you fail to pay you have no rights at all these features which are entirely managed within the unit.
Given the helpful definitions of features in the previous section, TiVo is clearly reserving the right to remove Season Passes, WishList, Smart Recording, TiVo Suggestions, Parental Controls and other functionality. Sure, it seems unlikely that they'll take such features away, but why are they asking for the right to? Those are specifically the features they advertised the Tivo as having, and the reason I bought mine.
But I can terminate the service if I don't like it? Given the new changes, my Tivo effectively becomes a giant paperweight. And (checking Section 13), my lifetime subscription that I paid for before this change will not be refunded in any way, so I'm especially S.O.L..
The rest of the section is pretty reasonable, but this little clause is unreasonable. I purchased my Tivo specifically because they were very open and had a "You void your warrantee, and we won't support you, but feel free to hack on your Tivo" policy. I wanted to support that behavior. This effectively reverses the decision. No more hard drive expansion hacks. To heck with that.
In practice it looks like they only use this to record the silly promos I see on my main menu. That I don't mind. What I do mind is that this implies that they can preempt my normal recording to record their ads. That I object to. I doubt they ever will preempt my programming, but why not state as much in the policy?
When I purchased a lifetime subscription, I understood that the lifetime in question was for the unit, not me. I figured it just meant that if the system failed I'd need to pay to get it repaired. This working left me fearing that they may claim that once a Tivo experiences any failure that they can claim that its lifetime is over and cancel the service. Since my Tivo actually experienced a modem failure nine months into its life, this seems like a real risk to me. (On a related note, it looks like Tivo modems are fragile, thus products like this one. Get your Tivo on a phone line surge supressor!)
I brought up all of these complaints to Tivo support when I became aware of them. I got a form letter back that failed to address the issues I brought up. Feh.
Actually, MythTV does support season passes. In fact, it gives you more options than a Tivo. check it out. "Record this program whenever it's shown on this channel" is the equivalent of Tivo's Season Pass.
It does lack suggestions. That's a shame, but it's still a work in progress. I can live without them.
It does want an athlon 1800, but you can easily get such a processor for $100. If you're willing to put some work into it you can put together a suitable system for about the same price as a Tivo with lifetime subscription. The resulting system will be more generally capable than a Tivo (web browser, game player, MP3/OGG player, record to CD or DVD, simple video editor (suitable for editing out commercials for personal archival use).
Yes MythTV lags behind Tivo. It looks like the listing information is being screen scraped off a web site. If it gets popular that's going to get shut off. (Fortunately there are pay services they'll be able to switch to.) MythTV is relatively new and under heavy development, so you'll either live with reduced functionality or spend time upgrading. As it matures that will change. To put together a machine to run it on cheaply you'll need to invest alot of your own time. Right now, if you're looking for something that just works out of the box, Tivo is probably the right answer. But MythTV is showing alot of promise for the future. Personally I love my Tivo. However, Tivo is showing signs of becoming consumer hostile. They recently decided to change the terms of the lifetime subscription I already paid for from "paying for guide service" to "paying to use the Tivo at all" and declaring that I'm prohibited from modifying my Tivo (with say the popular extra hard drive). I'm not filled with trust for Tivo's future at this point. I'm glad to know that if Tivo's terms become too onerous, I'll have a Free option to try. If I decide I'd just be interested in hacking on a PVR for the fun of it, a project exists I can start with.
(On an unrelated note, it was a moderately big deal when Tivo made the change to the service agreement, but I haven't been able to turn up any good web summaries of the changes. I was certainly ticked off because I specifically researched the service agreement before deciding to purchase a Tivo and a lifetime subscription. Silly me, I foolishly assumed that the "We can revise this agreement at will" clause would never be used to screw me so hard. I made the mistake that the previous pro-customer attitude and unofficial support for modifications would last. I was clearly wrong. On the up side, it reinforced my belief: any company which has a "we can screw you at will" clause, but promises to never use it will eventually break that promise. The only way to protect yourself is to assume that any contract will be abused to harm you, the consumer, as much as possible. I'm so freaking happy that we get to live in a world were we have to assume everyone is out to get us. Hopefully as more citizens get screwed they'll start demanding fair license agreements. Anyway.... back to the original digression...
Can someone offer a good reference beyond the actual agreement? Ideally a site comparing the original and revised agreements with a little analysis of why the changes are bad for customers.)
It's a neat technique to increase resolution, but the implication that the article gives that you need this technique to improve resolution is silly. Effectively each grouping of red, green, and blue sensing points in a CCD camera returns a single pixel. If you replace each red sensor with three smaller sensors (one red, one green, and one blue), you'll get the same increase in resolution. In theory you could lose data because a little bit of blue light hit the red sensor, but not the blue one, but in practice it isn't an issue. Assuming you can keep making the sensors small, you can keep scaling the resolution of CCD technology.
This is neat technology and may well improve the quality of cameras to come. But it's not essential to improving the quality of cameras.
It appears that last month, with more than a month to go before the law took effect, more than one million Wisconsinites joined the No Call List. For a state with an adult population in the area of four million, that's pretty impressive. Apparently a great deal of the state hates the calls as much as I do. If you're in Wisconsin, join the crowd and get on the No Call List, it's the cool thing to do!