Instead of supporting this form of broadcast, why not send some money to your local public radio organizations instead?... They insulate you from the blatant and sickening commericialism.
This is not, in fact, the case.
Listener donations are an important part of community radio, but corporate sponsorships also play a big (often a majority) role. The only difference between a sponsorship spot and an out-and-out ad is:
A sponsorship spot is read by the DJ on the mic, instead of being a flashy canned ad.
A sponsorship cannot contain a call to action. You can't say "Call MyCo at 1-800-CHEAPER!" -- but you can say "The number for MyCo is..." or "MyCo can be reached at..."
Apart from those, there is very little difference between the ads you hear on commercial radio and the spots you hear on public radio.
I worked for a community radio station in Charlottesville, VA called WNRN (91.9 -- still have my t-shirt). They started off with 4 breaks per hour --:03,:20,:35 and:47 plus the top-of-the-hour station ID live/liner break (or something close to that -- it's been some years). During donation drives the number of breaks doubled.
By the time I moved out of Charlottesville this past year they had added I think 2 promo spots to the hour. You can't get enough on your calendar otherwise to support the station.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not knocking community radio. I loved WNRN and the people who work there. But let's not talk about how public radio is "non-commercial" when that's simply not true.
I'm stunned that the price difference in the CPU alone wouldn't be enough to keep Gateway using AMD, but there you have it.
I think it's less "cheaper" (though they'll tell investors that... and in some intangible way, they might be right) than it is "safer".
One: Intel is a brand name everybody knows from the catchy TV ads. We know the Bunnymen, we know Blue Man Group. They make us laugh and give us warm fuzzies about Intel.
(Side rant: this points up that companies that do not advertise, cannot displace a well-known, dominant player. The mass market will not buy your product if they've never heard of you. It's practically a law of nature. I've never seen an AMD ad on network TV... could that just possibly start to explain why consumers don't care about them?)
Two: AMD is literally a bigger risk physically. I think by now we've all seen the videos of AMD chips turning themselves into slag when they lose cooling. Nobody wants to be the PC maker getting sued because their PC caused a fire that did $300,000 worth of damage to some CTO's house in Ritztown. Even less do they want to the PC maker whose halted-and-caught-fire box burns down some working-poor family's two-room cottage, breaking them financially. Until AMD does something about their (lack of) resistance to cooling failure, I sure wouldn't put it in a computer I built for my family and I probably wouldn't run it myself either. Given the videos I'm surprised UL approved their chips (or did they?)
I can't agree with you here. Søren's code was not free for the taking. If it was in the public domain, it would be free for the taking. But this code was not in the public domain, it was distributed under the BSD license. It's only free to use if you abide by the terms of the license!
OK, I was a little unclear. By "free for the taking", I meant "explicitly allowed to be used, modified and redistributed with only minimal requirements." I still consider something "free" even if I'm required to credit the author, because that's such a vanishingly small requirement that I'll hardly notice the impact in terms of time and effort.
Even in the absence of the BSD license, this would still be plagiarism -- if something is not explicitly declared public domain, you can't just use it as your own whether you know who owns the rights to it or not. In an academic setting, even claiming public-domain stuff without distinguishing it from your own work will get you in trouble if you're caught.
Okay, so Søren reverse engineers the proprietary data structures developed at great cost by corporations, and then bitches when his work is ripped off by one of his fellow Open Source travelers. Give me a break!
First, what Soren did was not plagiarism (claiming another's work as his own) nor theft (stealing another's property). He just made a part that works as a replacement for a factory part, much like the thriving parts industry in the auto world.
What Red Hat's developers did wasn't "theft", since they were not required to have permission to use or modify and re-release the code. It was plagiarism -- essentially they took some of Soren's parts (which were free for the taking), filed off the serial numbers, then stamped their own on.
It's not illegal to sell someone else's parts if you acquired them legally, but it is illegal to claim them as your own make without permission, regardless of how they were acquired.
The only place Soren might have problems is if the driver algorithms were patented, and even there drivers exist in a world of murky law apart from applications. I seem to remember some abortive efforts by sound and video card manufacturers to squash third-party open-source drivers that got such negative press reaction that they were abandoned.
The simple fact of life is, things tend to heterogenize. We'll always have people who live in the rarefied strata of the super-rich and never handle their own money (cash or otherwise). We'll always have the working poor who deal (and often get paid) entirely in cash day-to-day.
We're at about the midpoint of the transition, I'd say. There are about as many places that won't take your Visa card as won't take the $20 in your wallet (or at least will give you grief over it, like a friend got the other day at Best Buy). But there's still the impetus of "legal tender" to keep cash around.
I lived in a pure-cash economy for about 3 years. I was moving and changing jobs, and closed my bank account. Then as I was about to open a new one, the bank I was moving to got swallowed up by Wachovia, so I held off. By the time I got around to it again, I didn't feel like going through the bother. (I finally had to when the company I was working for got bought by EA and my paychecks started being drawn on Wells Fargo.)
My co-workers who have always had credit cards, checks and ATMs don't understand how one can live in the "cash economy" without sacrificing quality of life, but it can (mostly) be done.
The biggest hurdle is things that require a reservation. If you travel you're going to have to resign yourself to paying up-front for your airline ticket and playing Hotel-Motel Lotto when you arrive (unless you're staying with friends or family). Renting a car will also be off-limits to you unless you have a couple of thousand dollars to spare for the duration as a deposit.
Apart from that, you really don't notice much. Sending money through the mail (to pay bills, for example) will involve getting a money order from the post office, which is in the neighborhood of a dollar per MO -- and USPS money orders have the advantage that a receipt is presentable in court as prima facie proof of payment. Getting a loan can be a little trickier if you have no previous loan history, but you can use landlords as references. Also, your utility history will most likely show up on your credit history, especially if you have a cell phone. And speaking of utilities, you may have to give them deposits before they will start service, but these are usually payable in installments.
You won't be able to buy things instantly online, but most places will be happy to bill you or ship after receiving payment.
If you can forego instant gratification and avoid things like needing to rent a car, there's nothing preventing most Americans from living a pure cash lifestyle.
"Under Section #1, Grant of License, the second paragraph headed 'Restrictions' states in part: 'You may not use the Software...'"
In the license I saw, an earlier paragraph said:
"For purposes of this section, the Software means the FrontPage Web components, including the MSNBC news headline component, the MSN MoneyCentral Stock Quote component, and the MSN Search component."
The story submitter doesn't say whether this clause is in his EULA or not. If it is, then as previously reported, the site content restrictions only apply to sites that use services provided through MSN, not all sites that are created with FrontPage.
Speaking as someone who's rented two P.O. and one Mailboxes Etc. box, you'll still get junk mail.
The little-known difference between junk mail and first-class personal is that bulk mail rates actually subsidize the first-class rate. Translation: if the post office abolished junk mail, everybody else would end up paying more postage.
The rules for bulk mail dictate things like how it's sorted and bundled. Ever notice the "CAR-RT SORT" notation on a bulk-mail label? That refers to the "carrier route". Basically when the post office gets a mailing from a bulk-mail operation, it's pre-sorted, pre-packaged, pre-everything and the carrier just picks up the bundle for his route. All this means the post office has no processing cost (which is where most of the postage you pay actually goes). Spam, on the other hand, is analogous to ad circulars coming "postage due".
I look at it like property rights. Generally if the neighbor's kid cuts through my yard on the way to school, I'm going to hassle him just enough to make my point -- maybe grab him by the ear and escort him off the property in front of his buddies. I have the right to bodily throw him over the fence if I want (and if he pisses me off enough, I just might). But generally I'll use a minimum of force, even though I have the right to use much more. Likewise I think we have to accept the fact that an innocent unsolicited e-mail (commercial or not) from someone you happen not to like can be turned into a major pissing contest if unsolicited bulk e-mail is outlawed, but just trust that the vast majority of people aren't going to unnecessarily be an asshole about it and deal sensibly with the ones that are.
Telcos: chronically behind on their own data
on
Stopping The 56K Hate
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· Score: 3, Informative
Chanc_Gorkon wrote:
I bet Database's not being updated is the primary reason that DSL is not available in more places.
I don't know about the primary reason, but certainly a big one. My rule has always been (and it's worked for 4 attempted DSL installs, 2 successful):
Get an as-the-crow-flies distance estimate. Don't just trust what getspeed.com or dslreports tells you -- check the address of the CO they give you on a map, then check with the telco to make sure it's the right CO. Draw a line from where you are to where it is and figure the distance. Then drive there and check your odometer (cabling tends to follow streets so the cable distance is probably at least as long as the shortest driving distance). If you come up with more than about 20,000 feet, you're hosed (except see below). Otherwise, keep going.
Call the DSL provider in question. If they say they don't provide to your area, make them tell you why not. A lot of places will not provide to apartment complexes because they don't realize that the lines generally all go to a phone closet with everything nicely labeled (for varying values of "nicely"). If they say your line didn't test clean, make them tell you when it was tested. If it was more than a few months ago, make them test it again.
If they start the order process, keep after them. If they say they'll be there at 4:00, call them at 4:15 if nobody shows up. Don't waste your time thinking the guy might have gotten stuck in traffic -- they will have phone contact with their installers, make them use it.
If they stop the order process halfway through, make them tell you why. Is there something wrong with your lines specifically? Is it an equipment issue? Don't let them call your operating system "unsupported" -- make it clear that you expect a physical install and a usable signal even if they refuse to support your specific connection to it.
If all else fails you can usually get IDSL. The bastard child of the DSL family, it's slow and it requires a phone line all to itself, but if your switch supports it you can get it no matter how far from the switch you are (just like an ISDN line). It's not out-of-band signaling like the others are so it's not subject to filtering out. The only thing is multiplexing might degrade it (just like it does a voice signal).
If you've made reasonable efforts, waited for installers who never come, paid in advance for service you still haven't gotten, and the response you get is basically "screw you, Bell was our daddy", take it to your Public Utility Commission. Most (all?) states have one and their raison d'etre is to redress poor customer service and abuses by regulated monopoly utilities. Here in Virginia that job is handled by the State Corporation Commission (other places it's usually its own agency) and they have the power, they know it and they do not hesitate to use it. I've had a vice-president of a regional telco call me personally to apologize and had Verizon ask me what day and time is most convenient for their installer to serve me. It's a last resort, but here at least, one that gets fast results.
Most of all, be informed. Know how the technology works and why it should work for you.
Sometimes you just can't get DSL (or cable as the case may be, and most of the above suggestions apply there too), but more often the telco or cableco is just going with the easy install over anything that even whiffs of being complicated. Be persistent. Be a pain in the ass if they feed you lines. Don't be afraid to use the consumer agencies whose whole purpose is to make the telco give you the service you're paying for. Recognize when they really can't do it, but make them prove it.
Assuming he wasn't misquoted, according to the article new MySQL CEO Mickos had this to say:
MySQL says NuSphere releasing Storage Engine source just the other day doesnt change history, and its new CEO doubts the source code NuSphere has released is the stuff Progress really used in its proprietary version of Storage Engine. Mickos claims he heard someone tried to compile the code and failed.
Oh, he "heard" that "someone" couldn't get it to compile? Well I guess the Linux kernel is in the same boat, because I hear of people who can't get it to compile every day.
In Mickos' situation, I would have downloaded and tried to compile the code myself, but nobody asked me...
On the other hand, the article is so poorly written (and, by extension, edited), that it could be a misquote, a misunderstanding, or just made up out of whole cloth.
A home movie would be private property, and you would discretion over who did or did not see it. If you held the copyright, you could be forced to liscense it out, whether you had any interest in doing so or not.
Compulsory licensing only (AFAIK) applies to already-published musical works. No one can force you to allow them to publish an unpublished musical work, or any non-musical work. So your home movie example is not a good one. Just spreading knowledge of the existence of a work doesn't count as "publishing" either -- the work itself must be presented to the public, usually defined as offered in some way to people you have no direct relationship with.
Also, I don't know if this has changed, but it used to be an inviolable principle that an artist, regardless of what rights he may have signed away, had the right to determine the first publication version of his work. Bob Dylan actually denied a physical license to his own recording company for (if I recall correctly) Mr. Tambourine Man until they got a recording he liked. Meantime the Brothers Four and the Byrds were waiting in the wings with versions of their own; even though the Brothers Four version was finished first, it was the Byrds who got copies to market fastest, making them famous.
I personally dislike both compulsory licensing and eminent domain; one way of looking at your property rights is examining the extent to which others are allowed to use your property without your consent, or to forbid you to use it in certain ways.
To do this, we simply type ssh drobbins@remotebox at localbox's console, as we always have. However, this time, ssh lets remotebox's sshd know that it would like to use the RSA authentication protocol. What happens next is rather interesting. Remotebox's sshd generates a random number, and encrypts it using our public key that we copied over earlier. Then, it sends this encrypted random number back to the ssh running on localbox. In turn, our ssh uses our private key to decrypt this random number, and then sends it back to remotebox, saying in effect "See, I really do hold the matching private key; I was able to successfully decrypt your message!" Finally, sshd concludes that we should be allowed to log in, since we hold a matching private key. Thus, the fact that we hold a matching private key grants us access to remotebox.
This seems to me to say that when our client decrypts the servers random-number challenge, it sends back the decrypted random number in the clear. This is fine as long as the algorithm used is never compromised, but if it is, wouldn't the cleartext random number help an eavesdropper decrypt the session? Wouldn't it be better to re-encrypt the random number using the server's public key and send that?
I can understand blocking outgoing port 25 on your network except for your mail server and thus assuring that all mail is routed through the ISP's mail server - Mindspring/Earthlink has been doing this for quite a while! But not relaying mail for your local users (regardless of from address) breaks one of the core reasons for having LOCAL mail servers. What the hell else are people going to do? Most third partys' mail servers are locked down to allow local relay only (as well they should be!). Yeah there are a few open relays out there, but everyone won't be able to find one. I for one won't be opening up my server!
The problem with allowing random-relay from local IPs is that your customers can still spam through your mailservers while disguising their address. You can blast a lot of spam even through a 28.8 connection before you get caught.
I remember when MindSpring turned off port 25 access to the outside world -- a lot of their customers made the same complaints I'm seeing here. Turning off outbound 25 is actually a much more draconian measure than this -- it still allows legitimate access to third-party SMTP servers that allow it.
The bottom line is, this is understandable and I see it all the time.
Really, how can you argue with behavior-based experimental data that "this isn't how people behave"? Oh right - with unfounded 3l337 opinion.
I completely agree with this (see also my post in the "Why Linux will never be mainstream" comments). However, some of the recommended fixes made me sit up for a second.
As an example, the researchers recommended replacing "Halt" with "Suspend (Halt - stops the processor)"
IMHO, this is a bad idea. "Suspend" a) already has established meaning in the context of computers (go into power-save or sleep mode), and b) implies stopping something in the middle to return to it later (as in the phrase "suspended animation")
My personal recommendation would be something like "Shut down" or "Power off" (and if you can detect soft vs. hard power-switch, use an appropriate term in each case, e.g. "Turn off computer" vs. "Shut down the system").
The experimental data are pretty solid, but there's nothing gospel about the recommendations, except "Consult an experienced technical writer" -- preferably one who wrote docs for absolute novices and got direct feedback on it from them.
In doing what I've done, I've run into two general classes of new users:
1) The newbie who understands that he has to learn something (although he may not know how much) about what he is trying to use. He's willing to put forth some reasonable amount of effort, and if he throws his hands up in disgust, it's usually a sign that the thing in question is poorly designed.
2) The luser who insists on use without learning or thinking, who wants the computer (or whatever) to be a magic psychic box that just makes things happen.
I will help a person in the first group as far as they're willing to go (within the limits of what I know... I know at least one guy that started from zero, I helped him get started and now he's hacking away on X doing things I just manage to comprehend). The second group I have no time for. You can talk and explain till you're blue in the face and it will do you (and them) zero good.
The trouble comes with people who treat both groups as equivalent. They remind me of college professors who say "There's the reading for the course, test is on May 2, see you in four months." Excuse me? What the hell are you doing in charge of a class if you're not going to teach? If all you want is to do research, fine, but don't then try to claim you're a "teacher" too.
The funny thing about issues like this is, it's all been done before. In the early 80's, Apple did something radical by bringing out the Mac.
Was it perfect? No.
Was it the best tool for certain jobs? Absolutely. In fact it turned out to be "pretty good, and easier too" for just about everything computer novices needed, and there was something there for a lot of power users too (particularly multimedia). Look at HyperCard. Look at ClarisWorks. Hell, look at MacWrite and MacPaint in the context of their times.
Apple put a lot of thought and research into designing MacOS (which was still just The System back then). Much of it has been imitated or outright ripped off. After using Macs for over 10 years, Windows and *nix for 7, I'd say the following:
Every place MacOS fails is because Apple either decided "you must do it this way, no matter what you think you want, because it's better" (example: lack of keyboard shortcuts in menus) or because they were imitating, not innovating (replacing SCSI components with IDE, IMHO, ultimately hurt the Mac).
What we need is for somebody to write a whole new OS around the Linux kernel. The first goal of this OS should be "the command line is always useful, but never necessary." The second goal should be "this OS does not try to outthink the user, but think with the user."
Essentially the usual Linux tools would still be there, with a whole new user-interface layer on top of it. Sound familiar? It should.
It's always a fatal mistake to think your company can't learn anything from the competition. The fact that Linux is not a "company" makes it no less true.
Apparently, this has been going on for about 10 years.
From the actual story:
By [the Russians'] calculations, an enormous amount of Russia's nuclear material... would disappear from their accounting records if Russia were to use the flawed U.S. software program for 10 years.
Please, please, please read what you're writing about before you write about it!
The problem with your Ferrari example, and others like it, is that there is a cost to produce every single automobile that rolls out of the factory. With electronic content, there is no per-unit cost, and so there is no starting-point upon which margins can be based. If we are indeed a capitalist society, our people probably know this innately, and so they begin to smell a rat when content providers, who traditionally have means of support (from advertising or fixed-rate subscription) start charging per unit of content.
First off, there is always a per-unit cost. It may be, as it is with online content, that the cost of distribution is much greater than the cost of production. But even then, just because you don't see something you can point to and say "there's an expense", that doesn't mean it's cheap or easy to make that content available to the public.
You're also missing my point, and in the process making it for me -- the price of certain goods is dependent more on what people will pay, than what it actually costs to provide it. Consumer Internet access is a perfect example -- price pressure has pushed the typical price below the cost of production (though it seems to be rebounding a bit in various ways), making it a loss-leader in any place that a national ISP is providing service. People just aren't willing to pay what it actually costs.
Put another way, somebody will pay $250,000 for a Ferrari, but there's no way it costs that much to build one.
I could get into elastic vs. inelastic demand too -- demand for luxuries tends to be elastic (meaning, among other things, that the demand goes down as the price goes up) while necessities like milk and bread tend to have inelastic demand -- you need those things no matter what the price is (note that for all the talk about the "digital divide", the market still treats Internet access as a luxury, not a necessity). Cornering the market on an item with inelastic demand is a quick ticket to riches (till you get hit with antitrust action, at least).
Monopolies do have to watch out that they don't jack up prices to such a point that they force the market to elasticize -- such as the increased use of fuel-efficient cars in the wake of the OPEC-induced gas shortages in the 70s. (Insert comment about software monopolies here.)
Books and newspapers cost money because they are tangible things.... The content itslef has no innate value.
Want to say that at a writer's convention? I'd pay money to see what happens next.
...why can't you take the $20, pay the product and then put the change to your pocket?
Well, in reality I can. The point I was sort of fuzzily trying to make was that the units of currency themselves are not necessarily a barrier to making transactions smaller than those units.
I usually try to avoid criticizing a/. editor directly, but the comment Cliff made about the "worth of information being subjective" bears further scrutiny.
First, everything's "worth" or "value" is subjective. I don't have much use for a hot-rod Ferrari, because I can't drive a stick and I'm not into the prestige factor of owning one. It will, however, get me to the grocery store, so I'd still pay some amount of money for one -- say $10,000.
Some guy with a lot more money than me may like really fast cars, or want to impress his rich buddies, so he's willing to shell out a quarter-mill for the same car.
In the Jack-Jill-Joe example, the smart thing for that content provider to do is price the content at $10. Joe pays his $10. If you price it lower, Joe will still buy it, but Jack won't buy it till it hits $2, at which point you've made another sale, but you lose a net $6. Jill's never going to buy it, so we don't worry about her.
This is basic econ, folks. It's not about cost, except insofar as cost of production provides a lower bound on price. It's all about how much money you make at a given price, taking into account that you may make more or less per unit, which may or may not balance out the difference in sales.
I agree with some here that we need a good micropayment system. What nobody seems to understand is that single-use pay-as-you-go and micropayment are incompatible with each other, but that is not a real barrier to micropayments. Most ATMs where I am (DC area) won't dispense less than $20, but if I need to buy something smaller than $20, I'm not screwed -- I write a check drawn on my account.
Eventually we'll reach the point where a few players have well-known, trusted micropayment account systems. Don't look for that latter bit for a while though -- it took a long time for people to regain their trust in the banking system after the Great Depression. I know people who still haven't.
The silly part is, assuming they can say they didn't see the license, what gave them the right to use the software then? They should know it's copyrighted...
Copyright is not (for the most part) about use. It's about reproduction and distribution.
This is why there was (and is) so much uncertainty about "automatic" licenses that limit terms of use -- such terms are outside the scope of copyright law. The only way you could claim legal justification to enforce those terms is to claim that the license is a contract that the user has agreed to. This argument was never, that I know of, tested in court, so a coalition of big players lobbied for UCITA (twice, if you count Article 2B as a UCITA precursor) -- UCITA explicity recognizes shrink-wrap licenses as binding legal contracts.
Copyright law for decades has more or less explicitly (through judicial review) recognized the right of a legitimate owner of an artifact to use that artifact in any way that does not otherwise violate the law. In fact, at its base, copyright law allows anyone to reproduce, or to distribute, but not both. I am free (in theory) to make a thousand copies of a book, and keep them for myself. I am free to buy a thousand books and give them away or resell them. What I am not free to do is buy a book, make copies, and distribute the copies.
Of course as we all know, various industry groups have lobbied for and gotten various medium-specific additional restrictions -- witness the aforementioned UCITA, the DMCA, the Audio Home Recording Act, etc.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about just how much protection a trademark does or doesn't give you. IANAL, but let me inject some boring ol' facts into the discussion.
First, foremost, and most gallingly to the Slashdot-kiddie population, is that US trademark (and patent) law is based on a "use it or lose it" principle -- if, today, you fail to defend your property, you may lose the right to do so tomorrow.
This means that Adobe may not particularly care, per se, what the KDE vector-graphics product is called, but they fear the loss of their trademark more than they fear pissing off the Linux community. This does not, IMHO, make them bad or evil, just businessmen trying to hold on to the good name they've built.
Second, trademarks are not "global" in the sense that just because Ray Kroc trademarked "McDonald's" as a name for his burger chain, that doesn't prevent me from opening up a "McDonald's Auto Repair". Trademarks apply to a name or logo applied to a specific product or field of business. You better believe if I open up a roadside hamburger stand called McDonald's that the big chain is gonna land on me with both feet.
Third, what does Adobe's "Illustrator" refer to? A vector-based drawing program. What does KDE's "Illustrator" refer to? You guessed it. Similar products doing similar things means that KDE knows damn well (or should know damn well) that they're on Adobe's trademark turf.
Fourth, yes, a simple phone call might have sufficed, but a) the people who are protesting this would probably still protest even that, urging resistance and thus forcing a lawsuit anyway, and b) with reference to point 1, this may be the first real challenge Adobe's ever had on the Illustrator name, so they feel they need to act decisively to maintain their right to that name.
A final point: precedence rules over registration. This means if some guy in 1981 wrote a program called "Illustrator", not only would he have the right to continue to use the name, he might even have the right to sue Adobe to have their trademark vacated and/or assigned to him. When businesses in unrelated fields use the same name, an understanding is often reached (cf. Apple Computer/Apple Records), amicably or by litigation, that those companies will not enter each others' arenas with the same trademark (Apple Records would not, for example, be allowed to sell "Apple" computers without clearing it with Apple Computer and probably paying a license fee first).
Executive summary: Quit whining. A couple of thousand Euros is pretty damn cheap considering the goodwill that goes with the "Illustrator" name.
Today, everybody I know has a fast connection to the internet and can download the relevant packages as often as is necessary. And everybody has a fast computer on which to recompile the software they use nightly, if necessary.
The trouble with comments like these are that they're simply untrue at best and cravenly elitist at worst. They smack of "I got mine, the rest of you are just SOL I guess."
When I worked ISP tech support, I reserved my foulest curses for Rockwell and USR, who used a totally invalid test (making an interstate call to a toll-free number) to try to tell people whether or not their phone lines were capable of 56K. I had to field literally hundreds of calls from people that went just like this:
"But the modem test said I was OK!" "The test is wrong." "But how can it be wrong? They make the modem. I think you don't know what you're talking about. I just spent $200 on this modem and I want 56K!!!"
Even people getting better than 33.6 wanted that last few K and demanded that we satisfy them. Particularly galling were the people who canceled their service in disgust, then went to a competitor, where because of different PSTN vagaries they were able to successfully get a 56K connection, and then called us to gloat about how they were smarter than us geeks who didn't really understand how things worked.
The point of that rambling little tale is, at the time 56K was hitting the scene, fewer than 5% of American residential phone lines were even capable of 33.6 -- 56K was a pipe dream for everybody else. If the figures I see in the PAC ads on TV are to be believed, fewer than 8% of American homes now have "broadband" Internet service. I submit that at least as restrictive as the political maneuverings is the technical limitation of an aging, patched-up telecomm infrastructure. Just taking DSL as an example, it traditionally does well in places with brand-new infrastructure, or places with older infrastructure that hasn't been stressed by population growth. In Charlottesville, VA, there's almost noplace in the city that you can't get DSL from one of a handful of competitors, but a hundred miles north in Northern VA, it's touch and go. If you can't get traditional xDSL you can usually get IDSL, but up here even that's iffy if you live in an apartment complex (and they are legion) that was put up cheaply when the population exploded. They don't have niceties like conduits from the phone closet to the apartment; the lines are just run wherever and if you don't have a free pair already you can forget about getting a new one.
Not everyone enjoys access to broadband; in fact, because of a variety of reasons, the majority can't get it yet. Don't assume that what's true for you and your friends is true for everyone in the country or on the planet.
As to the issue of compiling everything because the computers are fast, a) Not everyone has a fast computer (my fastest one is a Celeron 433), b) Not everybody wants to be constantly compiling from source. It's frankly a pain in the ass and I speculate it's one reason the BSDs haven't caught on in the desktop market even to the extent Linux has. Linux's great strength and one of the main reasons it became the force it did was that it made older "obsolete" machines usable for real work again. Let's not unnecessarily dump that over the side for some vaguely-perceived efficiency that will likely as not evaporate like a puff of smoke on close inspection.
By far the most often-used argument against GraceNote is "we entered all of that data ourself! We wrote it up and submitted it!" Of course, what never gets pointed out is that the CD title and the track names are themselves copyrighted material, owned by the copyright holder (in this case the record company.) In point of fact, the legality of entering this information and uploading it anonymously is quite shaky (IMHO.)
In point of fact, you're wrong. Titles of copyrighted works are not themselves copyrighted, but may be trademarked if they are sufficiently Unique. I could go out today and write a book (or produce a movie, or paint a picture) called _Gone With the Wind_ and Margaret Mitchell's estate has no control over it.
Now, if I were to rip off large sections of Mitchell's GWtW I would be liable for copyright infringement. But I can put track listings and song listings all over the Internet if I want and no one has any right to say "boo".
One of the clips showed a weird multi-segmented bug with stilt-like legs, very similar to one of the weird fossils in the burgess shale.
I think I know the one you're referring to -- it has stiff spines on one side and little knobblies on the other. The story I heard about it is that scientists decided the spines were the legs and came up with all kinds of wacky theories about what kind of environment such legs would be advantageous in.
Until one day some guy came along and said "Fellas, that's the top half." And all kinds of theories went bye-bye as biologists scratched their collective beards and went "y'know..."
I have no idea if it's true or not, but That's What I Was Told (m*tt*!)
Whether you have a Mac or a PC, you can't violate the laws of physics. The simple truth is that noise radiated from an engine varies as the fourth power of the power output; you can design well or poorly but it's still going to be "much louder" when you run it hard.
The real solution is cooler computing in the first place.
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Instead of supporting this form of broadcast, why not send some money to your local public radio organizations instead?... They insulate you from the blatant and sickening commericialism.
This is not, in fact, the case.
Listener donations are an important part of community radio, but corporate sponsorships also play a big (often a majority) role. The only difference between a sponsorship spot and an out-and-out ad is:
Apart from those, there is very little difference between the ads you hear on commercial radio and the spots you hear on public radio.
I worked for a community radio station in Charlottesville, VA called WNRN (91.9 -- still have my t-shirt). They started off with 4 breaks per hour -- :03, :20, :35 and :47 plus the top-of-the-hour station ID live/liner break (or something close to that -- it's been some years). During donation drives the number of breaks doubled.
By the time I moved out of Charlottesville this past year they had added I think 2 promo spots to the hour. You can't get enough on your calendar otherwise to support the station.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not knocking community radio. I loved WNRN and the people who work there. But let's not talk about how public radio is "non-commercial" when that's simply not true.
I'm stunned that the price difference in the CPU alone wouldn't be enough to keep Gateway using AMD, but there you have it.
I think it's less "cheaper" (though they'll tell investors that... and in some intangible way, they might be right) than it is "safer".
One: Intel is a brand name everybody knows from the catchy TV ads. We know the Bunnymen, we know Blue Man Group. They make us laugh and give us warm fuzzies about Intel.
(Side rant: this points up that companies that do not advertise, cannot displace a well-known, dominant player. The mass market will not buy your product if they've never heard of you. It's practically a law of nature. I've never seen an AMD ad on network TV... could that just possibly start to explain why consumers don't care about them?)
Two: AMD is literally a bigger risk physically. I think by now we've all seen the videos of AMD chips turning themselves into slag when they lose cooling. Nobody wants to be the PC maker getting sued because their PC caused a fire that did $300,000 worth of damage to some CTO's house in Ritztown. Even less do they want to the PC maker whose halted-and-caught-fire box burns down some working-poor family's two-room cottage, breaking them financially. Until AMD does something about their (lack of) resistance to cooling failure, I sure wouldn't put it in a computer I built for my family and I probably wouldn't run it myself either. Given the videos I'm surprised UL approved their chips (or did they?)
I can't agree with you here. Søren's code was not free for the taking. If it was in the public domain, it would be free for the taking. But this code was not in the public domain, it was distributed under the BSD license. It's only free to use if you abide by the terms of the license!
OK, I was a little unclear. By "free for the taking", I meant "explicitly allowed to be used, modified and redistributed with only minimal requirements." I still consider something "free" even if I'm required to credit the author, because that's such a vanishingly small requirement that I'll hardly notice the impact in terms of time and effort.
Even in the absence of the BSD license, this would still be plagiarism -- if something is not explicitly declared public domain, you can't just use it as your own whether you know who owns the rights to it or not. In an academic setting, even claiming public-domain stuff without distinguishing it from your own work will get you in trouble if you're caught.
Okay, so Søren reverse engineers the proprietary data structures developed at great cost by corporations, and then bitches when his work is ripped off by one of his fellow Open Source travelers. Give me a break!
First, what Soren did was not plagiarism (claiming another's work as his own) nor theft (stealing another's property). He just made a part that works as a replacement for a factory part, much like the thriving parts industry in the auto world.
What Red Hat's developers did wasn't "theft", since they were not required to have permission to use or modify and re-release the code. It was plagiarism -- essentially they took some of Soren's parts (which were free for the taking), filed off the serial numbers, then stamped their own on.
It's not illegal to sell someone else's parts if you acquired them legally, but it is illegal to claim them as your own make without permission, regardless of how they were acquired.
The only place Soren might have problems is if the driver algorithms were patented, and even there drivers exist in a world of murky law apart from applications. I seem to remember some abortive efforts by sound and video card manufacturers to squash third-party open-source drivers that got such negative press reaction that they were abandoned.
We're at about the midpoint of the transition, I'd say. There are about as many places that won't take your Visa card as won't take the $20 in your wallet (or at least will give you grief over it, like a friend got the other day at Best Buy). But there's still the impetus of "legal tender" to keep cash around.
I lived in a pure-cash economy for about 3 years. I was moving and changing jobs, and closed my bank account. Then as I was about to open a new one, the bank I was moving to got swallowed up by Wachovia, so I held off. By the time I got around to it again, I didn't feel like going through the bother. (I finally had to when the company I was working for got bought by EA and my paychecks started being drawn on Wells Fargo.)
My co-workers who have always had credit cards, checks and ATMs don't understand how one can live in the "cash economy" without sacrificing quality of life, but it can (mostly) be done.
The biggest hurdle is things that require a reservation. If you travel you're going to have to resign yourself to paying up-front for your airline ticket and playing Hotel-Motel Lotto when you arrive (unless you're staying with friends or family). Renting a car will also be off-limits to you unless you have a couple of thousand dollars to spare for the duration as a deposit.
Apart from that, you really don't notice much. Sending money through the mail (to pay bills, for example) will involve getting a money order from the post office, which is in the neighborhood of a dollar per MO -- and USPS money orders have the advantage that a receipt is presentable in court as prima facie proof of payment. Getting a loan can be a little trickier if you have no previous loan history, but you can use landlords as references. Also, your utility history will most likely show up on your credit history, especially if you have a cell phone. And speaking of utilities, you may have to give them deposits before they will start service, but these are usually payable in installments.
You won't be able to buy things instantly online, but most places will be happy to bill you or ship after receiving payment.
If you can forego instant gratification and avoid things like needing to rent a car, there's nothing preventing most Americans from living a pure cash lifestyle.
"Under Section #1, Grant of License, the second paragraph headed 'Restrictions' states in part: 'You may not use the Software...'"
In the license I saw, an earlier paragraph said:
"For purposes of this section, the Software means the FrontPage Web components, including the MSNBC news headline component, the MSN MoneyCentral Stock Quote component, and the MSN Search component."
The story submitter doesn't say whether this clause is in his EULA or not. If it is, then as previously reported, the site content restrictions only apply to sites that use services provided through MSN, not all sites that are created with FrontPage.
The little-known difference between junk mail and first-class personal is that bulk mail rates actually subsidize the first-class rate. Translation: if the post office abolished junk mail, everybody else would end up paying more postage.
The rules for bulk mail dictate things like how it's sorted and bundled. Ever notice the "CAR-RT SORT" notation on a bulk-mail label? That refers to the "carrier route". Basically when the post office gets a mailing from a bulk-mail operation, it's pre-sorted, pre-packaged, pre-everything and the carrier just picks up the bundle for his route. All this means the post office has no processing cost (which is where most of the postage you pay actually goes). Spam, on the other hand, is analogous to ad circulars coming "postage due".
I look at it like property rights. Generally if the neighbor's kid cuts through my yard on the way to school, I'm going to hassle him just enough to make my point -- maybe grab him by the ear and escort him off the property in front of his buddies. I have the right to bodily throw him over the fence if I want (and if he pisses me off enough, I just might). But generally I'll use a minimum of force, even though I have the right to use much more. Likewise I think we have to accept the fact that an innocent unsolicited e-mail (commercial or not) from someone you happen not to like can be turned into a major pissing contest if unsolicited bulk e-mail is outlawed, but just trust that the vast majority of people aren't going to unnecessarily be an asshole about it and deal sensibly with the ones that are.
I bet Database's not being updated is the primary reason that DSL is not available in more places.
I don't know about the primary reason, but certainly a big one. My rule has always been (and it's worked for 4 attempted DSL installs, 2 successful):
Sometimes you just can't get DSL (or cable as the case may be, and most of the above suggestions apply there too), but more often the telco or cableco is just going with the easy install over anything that even whiffs of being complicated. Be persistent. Be a pain in the ass if they feed you lines. Don't be afraid to use the consumer agencies whose whole purpose is to make the telco give you the service you're paying for. Recognize when they really can't do it, but make them prove it.
MySQL says NuSphere releasing Storage Engine source just the other day doesnt change history, and its new CEO doubts the source code NuSphere has released is the stuff Progress really used in its proprietary version of Storage Engine. Mickos claims he heard someone tried to compile the code and failed.
Oh, he "heard" that "someone" couldn't get it to compile? Well I guess the Linux kernel is in the same boat, because I hear of people who can't get it to compile every day.
In Mickos' situation, I would have downloaded and tried to compile the code myself, but nobody asked me...
On the other hand, the article is so poorly written (and, by extension, edited), that it could be a misquote, a misunderstanding, or just made up out of whole cloth.
A home movie would be private property, and you would discretion over who did or did not see it. If you held the copyright, you could be forced to liscense it out, whether you had any interest in doing so or not.
Compulsory licensing only (AFAIK) applies to already-published musical works. No one can force you to allow them to publish an unpublished musical work, or any non-musical work. So your home movie example is not a good one. Just spreading knowledge of the existence of a work doesn't count as "publishing" either -- the work itself must be presented to the public, usually defined as offered in some way to people you have no direct relationship with.
Also, I don't know if this has changed, but it used to be an inviolable principle that an artist, regardless of what rights he may have signed away, had the right to determine the first publication version of his work. Bob Dylan actually denied a physical license to his own recording company for (if I recall correctly) Mr. Tambourine Man until they got a recording he liked. Meantime the Brothers Four and the Byrds were waiting in the wings with versions of their own; even though the Brothers Four version was finished first, it was the Byrds who got copies to market fastest, making them famous.
(Or so the story goes. See The Straight Dope for the details.)
I personally dislike both compulsory licensing and eminent domain; one way of looking at your property rights is examining the extent to which others are allowed to use your property without your consent, or to forbid you to use it in certain ways.
This seems to me to say that when our client decrypts the servers random-number challenge, it sends back the decrypted random number in the clear. This is fine as long as the algorithm used is never compromised, but if it is, wouldn't the cleartext random number help an eavesdropper decrypt the session? Wouldn't it be better to re-encrypt the random number using the server's public key and send that?
I can understand blocking outgoing port 25 on your network except for your mail server and thus assuring that all mail is routed through the ISP's mail server - Mindspring/Earthlink has been doing this for quite a while! But not relaying mail for your local users (regardless of from address) breaks one of the core reasons for having LOCAL mail servers. What the hell else are people going to do? Most third partys' mail servers are locked down to allow local relay only (as well they should be!). Yeah there are a few open relays out there, but everyone won't be able to find one. I for one won't be opening up my server!
The problem with allowing random-relay from local IPs is that your customers can still spam through your mailservers while disguising their address. You can blast a lot of spam even through a 28.8 connection before you get caught.
I remember when MindSpring turned off port 25 access to the outside world -- a lot of their customers made the same complaints I'm seeing here. Turning off outbound 25 is actually a much more draconian measure than this -- it still allows legitimate access to third-party SMTP servers that allow it.
The bottom line is, this is understandable and I see it all the time.
Really, how can you argue with behavior-based experimental data that "this isn't how people behave"? Oh right - with unfounded 3l337 opinion.
I completely agree with this (see also my post in the "Why Linux will never be mainstream" comments). However, some of the recommended fixes made me sit up for a second.
As an example, the researchers recommended replacing "Halt" with "Suspend (Halt - stops the processor)"
IMHO, this is a bad idea. "Suspend" a) already has established meaning in the context of computers (go into power-save or sleep mode), and b) implies stopping something in the middle to return to it later (as in the phrase "suspended animation")
My personal recommendation would be something like "Shut down" or "Power off" (and if you can detect soft vs. hard power-switch, use an appropriate term in each case, e.g. "Turn off computer" vs. "Shut down the system").
The experimental data are pretty solid, but there's nothing gospel about the recommendations, except "Consult an experienced technical writer" -- preferably one who wrote docs for absolute novices and got direct feedback on it from them.
1) The newbie who understands that he has to learn something (although he may not know how much) about what he is trying to use. He's willing to put forth some reasonable amount of effort, and if he throws his hands up in disgust, it's usually a sign that the thing in question is poorly designed.
2) The luser who insists on use without learning or thinking, who wants the computer (or whatever) to be a magic psychic box that just makes things happen.
I will help a person in the first group as far as they're willing to go (within the limits of what I know... I know at least one guy that started from zero, I helped him get started and now he's hacking away on X doing things I just manage to comprehend). The second group I have no time for. You can talk and explain till you're blue in the face and it will do you (and them) zero good.
The trouble comes with people who treat both groups as equivalent. They remind me of college professors who say "There's the reading for the course, test is on May 2, see you in four months." Excuse me? What the hell are you doing in charge of a class if you're not going to teach? If all you want is to do research, fine, but don't then try to claim you're a "teacher" too.
Was it perfect? No.
Was it the best tool for certain jobs? Absolutely. In fact it turned out to be "pretty good, and easier too" for just about everything computer novices needed, and there was something there for a lot of power users too (particularly multimedia). Look at HyperCard. Look at ClarisWorks. Hell, look at MacWrite and MacPaint in the context of their times.
Apple put a lot of thought and research into designing MacOS (which was still just The System back then). Much of it has been imitated or outright ripped off. After using Macs for over 10 years, Windows and *nix for 7, I'd say the following:
Every place MacOS fails is because Apple either decided "you must do it this way, no matter what you think you want, because it's better" (example: lack of keyboard shortcuts in menus) or because they were imitating, not innovating (replacing SCSI components with IDE, IMHO, ultimately hurt the Mac).
What we need is for somebody to write a whole new OS around the Linux kernel. The first goal of this OS should be "the command line is always useful, but never necessary." The second goal should be "this OS does not try to outthink the user, but think with the user."
Essentially the usual Linux tools would still be there, with a whole new user-interface layer on top of it. Sound familiar? It should.
It's always a fatal mistake to think your company can't learn anything from the competition. The fact that Linux is not a "company" makes it no less true.
Apparently, this has been going on for about 10 years.
From the actual story:
By [the Russians'] calculations, an enormous amount of Russia's nuclear material... would disappear from their accounting records if Russia were to use the flawed U.S. software program for 10 years.
Please, please, please read what you're writing about before you write about it!
The problem with your Ferrari example, and others like it, is that there is a cost to produce every single automobile that rolls out of the factory. With electronic content, there is no per-unit cost, and so there is no starting-point upon which margins can be based. If we are indeed a capitalist society, our people probably know this innately, and so they begin to smell a rat when content providers, who traditionally have means of support (from advertising or fixed-rate subscription) start charging per unit of content.
First off, there is always a per-unit cost. It may be, as it is with online content, that the cost of distribution is much greater than the cost of production. But even then, just because you don't see something you can point to and say "there's an expense", that doesn't mean it's cheap or easy to make that content available to the public.
You're also missing my point, and in the process making it for me -- the price of certain goods is dependent more on what people will pay, than what it actually costs to provide it. Consumer Internet access is a perfect example -- price pressure has pushed the typical price below the cost of production (though it seems to be rebounding a bit in various ways), making it a loss-leader in any place that a national ISP is providing service. People just aren't willing to pay what it actually costs.
Put another way, somebody will pay $250,000 for a Ferrari, but there's no way it costs that much to build one.
I could get into elastic vs. inelastic demand too -- demand for luxuries tends to be elastic (meaning, among other things, that the demand goes down as the price goes up) while necessities like milk and bread tend to have inelastic demand -- you need those things no matter what the price is (note that for all the talk about the "digital divide", the market still treats Internet access as a luxury, not a necessity). Cornering the market on an item with inelastic demand is a quick ticket to riches (till you get hit with antitrust action, at least).
Monopolies do have to watch out that they don't jack up prices to such a point that they force the market to elasticize -- such as the increased use of fuel-efficient cars in the wake of the OPEC-induced gas shortages in the 70s. (Insert comment about software monopolies here.)
Books and newspapers cost money because they are tangible things.... The content itslef has no innate value.
Want to say that at a writer's convention? I'd pay money to see what happens next.
Well, in reality I can. The point I was sort of fuzzily trying to make was that the units of currency themselves are not necessarily a barrier to making transactions smaller than those units.
First, everything's "worth" or "value" is subjective. I don't have much use for a hot-rod Ferrari, because I can't drive a stick and I'm not into the prestige factor of owning one. It will, however, get me to the grocery store, so I'd still pay some amount of money for one -- say $10,000.
Some guy with a lot more money than me may like really fast cars, or want to impress his rich buddies, so he's willing to shell out a quarter-mill for the same car.
In the Jack-Jill-Joe example, the smart thing for that content provider to do is price the content at $10. Joe pays his $10. If you price it lower, Joe will still buy it, but Jack won't buy it till it hits $2, at which point you've made another sale, but you lose a net $6. Jill's never going to buy it, so we don't worry about her.
This is basic econ, folks. It's not about cost, except insofar as cost of production provides a lower bound on price. It's all about how much money you make at a given price, taking into account that you may make more or less per unit, which may or may not balance out the difference in sales.
I agree with some here that we need a good micropayment system. What nobody seems to understand is that single-use pay-as-you-go and micropayment are incompatible with each other, but that is not a real barrier to micropayments. Most ATMs where I am (DC area) won't dispense less than $20, but if I need to buy something smaller than $20, I'm not screwed -- I write a check drawn on my account.
Eventually we'll reach the point where a few players have well-known, trusted micropayment account systems. Don't look for that latter bit for a while though -- it took a long time for people to regain their trust in the banking system after the Great Depression. I know people who still haven't.
The silly part is, assuming they can say they didn't see the license, what gave them the right to use the software then? They should know it's copyrighted...
Copyright is not (for the most part) about use. It's about reproduction and distribution.
This is why there was (and is) so much uncertainty about "automatic" licenses that limit terms of use -- such terms are outside the scope of copyright law. The only way you could claim legal justification to enforce those terms is to claim that the license is a contract that the user has agreed to. This argument was never, that I know of, tested in court, so a coalition of big players lobbied for UCITA (twice, if you count Article 2B as a UCITA precursor) -- UCITA explicity recognizes shrink-wrap licenses as binding legal contracts.
Copyright law for decades has more or less explicitly (through judicial review) recognized the right of a legitimate owner of an artifact to use that artifact in any way that does not otherwise violate the law. In fact, at its base, copyright law allows anyone to reproduce, or to distribute, but not both. I am free (in theory) to make a thousand copies of a book, and keep them for myself. I am free to buy a thousand books and give them away or resell them. What I am not free to do is buy a book, make copies, and distribute the copies.
Of course as we all know, various industry groups have lobbied for and gotten various medium-specific additional restrictions -- witness the aforementioned UCITA, the DMCA, the Audio Home Recording Act, etc.
First, foremost, and most gallingly to the Slashdot-kiddie population, is that US trademark (and patent) law is based on a "use it or lose it" principle -- if, today, you fail to defend your property, you may lose the right to do so tomorrow.
This means that Adobe may not particularly care, per se, what the KDE vector-graphics product is called, but they fear the loss of their trademark more than they fear pissing off the Linux community. This does not, IMHO, make them bad or evil, just businessmen trying to hold on to the good name they've built.
Second, trademarks are not "global" in the sense that just because Ray Kroc trademarked "McDonald's" as a name for his burger chain, that doesn't prevent me from opening up a "McDonald's Auto Repair". Trademarks apply to a name or logo applied to a specific product or field of business. You better believe if I open up a roadside hamburger stand called McDonald's that the big chain is gonna land on me with both feet.
Third, what does Adobe's "Illustrator" refer to? A vector-based drawing program. What does KDE's "Illustrator" refer to? You guessed it. Similar products doing similar things means that KDE knows damn well (or should know damn well) that they're on Adobe's trademark turf.
Fourth, yes, a simple phone call might have sufficed, but a) the people who are protesting this would probably still protest even that, urging resistance and thus forcing a lawsuit anyway, and b) with reference to point 1, this may be the first real challenge Adobe's ever had on the Illustrator name, so they feel they need to act decisively to maintain their right to that name.
A final point: precedence rules over registration. This means if some guy in 1981 wrote a program called "Illustrator", not only would he have the right to continue to use the name, he might even have the right to sue Adobe to have their trademark vacated and/or assigned to him. When businesses in unrelated fields use the same name, an understanding is often reached (cf. Apple Computer/Apple Records), amicably or by litigation, that those companies will not enter each others' arenas with the same trademark (Apple Records would not, for example, be allowed to sell "Apple" computers without clearing it with Apple Computer and probably paying a license fee first).
Executive summary: Quit whining. A couple of thousand Euros is pretty damn cheap considering the goodwill that goes with the "Illustrator" name.
Today, everybody I know has a fast connection to the internet and can download the relevant packages as often as is necessary. And everybody has a fast computer on which to recompile the software they use nightly, if necessary.
The trouble with comments like these are that they're simply untrue at best and cravenly elitist at worst. They smack of "I got mine, the rest of you are just SOL I guess."
When I worked ISP tech support, I reserved my foulest curses for Rockwell and USR, who used a totally invalid test (making an interstate call to a toll-free number) to try to tell people whether or not their phone lines were capable of 56K. I had to field literally hundreds of calls from people that went just like this:
"But the modem test said I was OK!"
"The test is wrong."
"But how can it be wrong? They make the modem. I think you don't know what you're talking about. I just spent $200 on this modem and I want 56K!!!"
Even people getting better than 33.6 wanted that last few K and demanded that we satisfy them. Particularly galling were the people who canceled their service in disgust, then went to a competitor, where because of different PSTN vagaries they were able to successfully get a 56K connection, and then called us to gloat about how they were smarter than us geeks who didn't really understand how things worked.
The point of that rambling little tale is, at the time 56K was hitting the scene, fewer than 5% of American residential phone lines were even capable of 33.6 -- 56K was a pipe dream for everybody else. If the figures I see in the PAC ads on TV are to be believed, fewer than 8% of American homes now have "broadband" Internet service. I submit that at least as restrictive as the political maneuverings is the technical limitation of an aging, patched-up telecomm infrastructure. Just taking DSL as an example, it traditionally does well in places with brand-new infrastructure, or places with older infrastructure that hasn't been stressed by population growth. In Charlottesville, VA, there's almost noplace in the city that you can't get DSL from one of a handful of competitors, but a hundred miles north in Northern VA, it's touch and go. If you can't get traditional xDSL you can usually get IDSL, but up here even that's iffy if you live in an apartment complex (and they are legion) that was put up cheaply when the population exploded. They don't have niceties like conduits from the phone closet to the apartment; the lines are just run wherever and if you don't have a free pair already you can forget about getting a new one.
Not everyone enjoys access to broadband; in fact, because of a variety of reasons, the majority can't get it yet. Don't assume that what's true for you and your friends is true for everyone in the country or on the planet.
As to the issue of compiling everything because the computers are fast, a) Not everyone has a fast computer (my fastest one is a Celeron 433), b) Not everybody wants to be constantly compiling from source. It's frankly a pain in the ass and I speculate it's one reason the BSDs haven't caught on in the desktop market even to the extent Linux has. Linux's great strength and one of the main reasons it became the force it did was that it made older "obsolete" machines usable for real work again. Let's not unnecessarily dump that over the side for some vaguely-perceived efficiency that will likely as not evaporate like a puff of smoke on close inspection.
By far the most often-used argument against GraceNote is "we entered all of that data ourself! We wrote it up and submitted it!" Of course, what never gets pointed out is that the CD title and the track names are themselves copyrighted material, owned by the copyright holder (in this case the record company.) In point of fact, the legality of entering this information and uploading it anonymously is quite shaky (IMHO.)
In point of fact, you're wrong. Titles of copyrighted works are not themselves copyrighted, but may be trademarked if they are sufficiently Unique. I could go out today and write a book (or produce a movie, or paint a picture) called _Gone With the Wind_ and Margaret Mitchell's estate has no control over it.
Now, if I were to rip off large sections of Mitchell's GWtW I would be liable for copyright infringement. But I can put track listings and song listings all over the Internet if I want and no one has any right to say "boo".
One of the clips showed a weird multi-segmented bug with stilt-like legs, very similar to one of the weird fossils in the burgess shale.
I think I know the one you're referring to -- it has stiff spines on one side and little knobblies on the other. The story I heard about it is that scientists decided the spines were the legs and came up with all kinds of wacky theories about what kind of environment such legs would be advantageous in.
Until one day some guy came along and said "Fellas, that's the top half." And all kinds of theories went bye-bye as biologists scratched their collective beards and went "y'know..."
I have no idea if it's true or not, but That's What I Was Told (m*tt*!)
The real solution is cooler computing in the first place.