Give them kudos for turning it into a popular search engine and succesfull business as well. Think of it: many of us are able to come up with some brilliant bits of coding or clever ideas for on-line services. It's just a few people that have the guts and the business sense to turn their inventions into a thriving company.
However, I agree with you that people give far too much weight to his opinion on world problems. Well, that happens to many celebrities, including those who you would not expect to be particularly clever, but just wrote a few songs people seem to like, or are able to punt a ball into a net strung between two posts.
Zo ook digitale portable audiospelers en dvd-recorders met harde schijf die op dit moment onderwerp van onderhandeling zijn. De hoogte van de vergoeding wordt bepaald in een aparte onderhandelingsstichting (SONT) waar de betalingsplichtigen en de rechthebbenden gelijk zijn vertegenwoordigd. [...] Het bestuur van de SONT heeft nog geen besluit genomen over de hoogte van het tarief; de onderhandelingen zijn gaande. Berichten die suggereren dat er al enige duidelijkheid is over de hoogte van een tarief zijn onjuist.
Translation:...Also digital portable audioplayers and DVD recorders with an internal hard disk which are at this time subject of negotiations. The amount of the levy is being negotiated in a separate foundation (SONT), where copyright owners and subjects of the levy are equally represented. [...] At this time, the SONT committee has not reached a decision on the amount of the levy; negotiations are still in progress. Any article suggesting that there already is some indication on the proposed levy, is incorrect.
Re:Recording industry damages
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
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· Score: 2, Interesting
How then could the industry argue that people who share music are depriving them of revenue - they've already had it!
That's exactly how it works. We already pay levies on blank CDs and DVDs, but we are allowed to make copies of protected works for our personal use, from any source, preferably but not necessarily legal. The proposed law aims to extend the levy to a storage medium that has become increasingly popular for portable music players: the hard disk. It's all logical if you think about it.
Then again it's a bollocksy proposal. Never mind that blank media and hard disks are not always used to store copies of protected works; the real problem is that very little of the collected money finds its way into the pockets of the mucisians whose work is being copied. This is like collecting toll on a bridge you don't own, from people who are not crossing it.
Larceny on a scale of $10,000-$50,000 can get an offender 36 months (in some cases, less!) than someone breaking copyright on a *single file
Don't the RIAA/MPAA count damages of $10.000 to 50.000 for every shared file, in claims against file sharers?
In any case, this law is about people distributing a movie before its official release. In this day of high-quality copies of prerelease movies and ubiquitous surround-sound/projector video home cinema setups, I can well imagine that there will be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people who will not decide to go see a movie in the cinema if they've already seen it at their friend's place? The damage caused by the 'seeder' of the illegal copy could well run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn't anyone else distributing the copy responsible for at least part of the damage? In any case, you are responsible for the damaged caused 'downstream' of you... this damage may still be substantial.
If you break American law (e.g. this one) and live in any country (like the UK) which has an extradition treaty with the USA you can be brought to America and charged with the crime.
Not so, most extradition treaties stipulate that the crime you are extradited for, is actually a crime on your home country. In fact, some requests made by the USA for extraditions from the Netherlands, for something that is a crime in both countries, have been denied by Dutch courts, on the grounds that the punishment in the US for such crimes is much harsher than the one in the Netherlands. This mostly concerns minor drug-related crimes.
You're absolutely right. If only the music and movie industry would turn into something like Allofmp3, I'd be a loyal and happy customer. With such easy downloading, a choice of encoding formats, and the option to encode on the fly to a bitrate of my choice, I wouldn't mind paying a buck a song, which seems to be the price for "official" online music.
however this doesn't take into account the fact that if the service closes earlier, you could end up with no ability to play your music
Sounds like a very good argument against this type of DRM! This is the sort of fun fact we should tell the public about DRM... yes, not all flavours of DRM have this problem, but all's fair in love and war, so let's spread a little FUD of our own.
This is also why people want to own content rather than rent it... it kind of sucks if you suddenly find yourself locked out of your music or movie collection (or your pr0n pile, oh noes!).
but innovation and creativity?? Since when does ownership of ideas make people more innovative?
Ownership of ideas encourages people to invest into research or creating an original work. Research can be a costly undertaking, and even an activity like writing a book requires the writer to invest a great deal of his time. Would a writer make that investment if he knew that anyone at all would be free to copy his work without compensation? Would companies do any research or keep the results of their research a secret, instead of publishing and licensing it?
Patents protect inventions (and other assorted brain farts that made it past the patent office screening procedure), copyright protects creative works.
Anyway, do you think companies like IBM would be so enthusiastic in their research into new technologies, if any competitor were allowed to just sit back and copy IBMs methods as soon as they hit the market? In such a patent-free market, those doing the research would actually be at a disadvantage. They'd be first to market, sure, but their competition would not have to recoup any investment in research, which can be substantial.
Similarly, do you think it's right that a publisher in Russia can just bang out copies of O'Reilly books, without a penny of the profits going to the authors or original publisher? Copyrights and patents exist for a good reason, even though we have let certain people get away with patenting things that should never have been granted one. On the other hand, I think copyright law works quite well and fairly.
Per advice, I have begun to keep a plaintext file on my desktop computer with all my passwords in it and when they expire. My corporate IT guidelines are too secure for me, a legit user.
A common problem. One pet peeve of mine is expiring passwords. There are some good arguments for having them: a compromised password will only work for a certain amount of time (unless the hacker changes it), and if passwords do not change very often, a brute force attack will have more time to find a valid password. However, I think these advantages fall way short of the disadvantages of pissing off users and forcing them to remember their passwords in insecure ways, like you're company even advises you to.
I used to work in a military environment wher people were serious about computer security. The administrators there were forbidden to enable password expiry, because it was deemed to promote unsafe practices instead of secure ones.
Oh well, in some places there's now way getting around having to manage multiple passwords. I keep a password file for my private accounts, but I keep it in a 'password safe' on my PDA. It's not completely safe, but hard enough to thwart all but the most determined hackers, and certainly better than a plaintext file on the computer or a sticky note in a desk drawer.
"Eyewitnesses have reported a Microsoft corporate jet in the area where von Tetzcher was last seen. According to one witness, the jet descended to just above sea level, and dropped a largem ferocious-looking fish with some sort of optical device attached to its head, into the water".
Hazardous driving like following too close, passing too tightly, which is on the books of as illegal, has no revenue stream. Yet these actions themselves are highly dangerous and CAUSE accidents. Why are cops not checking for these infractions? Simple, it means WORK, and the revenue earned is less than the effort required. Meaning its not a cash cow.
You touch on an important point there. Here in NL, speeding tickets have become little more than a cash cow. Each district gets a quota for the nr. of tickets issued in a year, and since a few years, the revenue of these tickets is part of the country's budget (it wasn't always so). Meaning that if we all start driving according to the book, the finance minister would have a gap in his budget to fill. End of last year, people said to each other jokingly: "if you have to drive through Zeeland, stay within the speed limit, buckle up, make sure your car is in order and don't do anything else that might attract a cop's attention. That region is way behind on their ticket quota this year". And yes, that does mean they will do you for anything
Privacy concerns aside, there's a nice advantage to a car-mounted system that monitors speed violations, namely that traffic cops can be released from radar gun duty to do real work. Before anyone chimes in to say that checking for speed violations is part of their job... no it is not! Keeping the roads safe is their job. Speed limits and other rules are merely a means to that end. Does that mean that we should be allowed to break the speed limit whenever we want? Of course not. My point is that the usual speed traps do not contribute one iota to road safety, because you'll invariably find them on roads where it is safe to drive, say, 70km/h, but the limit has been set at 50 for some arbitrary reason. Easy pickings, and after all, they have a quota to fill.
Yup, and it's no biggie since these days you can get players for 50 euros that have pretty good audio and video quality. Still, I feel bad about throwing away an old piece of equipment, even a broken one.
For what it's worth, my plastic 45 euro Chinese DVD player has far outlasted my 350 euro JVC player, and has seen a lot more use too.
It is a public beta, for evaluation. You're supposed to use this alongside your existing backup mechanism, in a 'sandbox' environment, or in a carefully monitored environment, where you should expect and prepare for issues with this product
Any sysadmin using expiring public beta software for production backups, shouldn't be a sysadmin in the first place. Don't blame Microsoft for this.
The fact that they happen to hold a lot of patents themselves and still want reform just adds more weight to the argument that the current system is fscked.
The current CEO of Cisco seems to think so too. He recently complained about the huge amounts of money wasted in the 'patent arms race'. It is probably in the best interests of many large companies as well as small-time inventors and the community at large, to reform patent law so that only real inventions can be patented (no more one-click nonsense or patents on swinging sideways), and that we'll see and end of the court cases where bullshit patents are used to eliminate potential competitors, or to make a quick buck by leeching off of someone else's success.
The only companies with a real interest in the current patent mess, are the so-called 'IP companies', and companies that want or need to protect their market share by legislation and lawsuits, rather than on the merit of their products. And we all know who I mean by that...
I was hoping to see autonomous robots ride these camels. However:
"The mechanical jockey is light in weight and receives orders from the instructor via a remote control system fixed on the back of the camel," the daily Gulf News said, quoting an official statement.
I remember reading about something similar yeeaaars ago; the Japanese developed a remotely controlled robot that was light enough to ride a pony, allowing them to hold indoor pony races.
Over here, one of the major parties lost an election on the basis of a plan to build a canal more than 3,000km long, at a cost of at least $A5 billion, to bring water from the Kimberlies to Perth. It didn't matter to them that it would take less energy to pump sea water against a membrane to get fresh water, and that the membrane would be cheaper to maintain than 3,000km of canal. They had a vision of this connection directly to the water, and that blurred their view of reality.
I think they had a vision of a gargantuan, $ 5 billion undertaking with their name written all over it. A small water purifying plant wouldn't have the same bragging rights. This has nothing to do with the need of a physical connection; it's called megalomania, and many politicians suffer from it. My own country has several good examples of such sums of money being wasted on bollocksy projects. (To be sure, many other people also suffer from this condition, but unlike politicians, they are not in a position to spend vast sums of other people's money).
The key reasons why it will (deservedly) fail;
Deservedly? I for one would love to see it succeed, and I think it might. Besides which, all your arguments could equally be applied to the Space Shuttle.
It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.
If your employees are proud to be part of the firm, and if you treat them with respect and pay a decent wage, they are less likely to turn to fraud. However, if you treat them like shit and pay peanuts, they are more likely to become disgruntled and commit fraud or (digital) vandalism. Yes, just like in 'Office space'.
The current relentless drive to reduce employee costs to a minimum does not help in that respect, in any country. From what I understand, Indians are currently happy with their current wages (and often very odd working hours). But what will happen when the squeeze from even cheaper Chinese workers is on?
...joke won't work unless you're gullible enough to do it.
It certainly won't work if the gullible read your post, you spoilsport!
A similar joke in NL apparently did work... there was a news item that researchers had received weak signals from the Huygens probe. They asked everyone to stand outside today at 12:30pm, turn on their cellphones, and point the antenna east. The cellphones would act like a giant electromagnetic mirror, amplifying the weak signals from Huygens so that they could be received and interpreted.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I agree with you that people give far too much weight to his opinion on world problems. Well, that happens to many celebrities, including those who you would not expect to be particularly clever, but just wrote a few songs people seem to like, or are able to punt a ball into a net strung between two posts.
Then again it's a bollocksy proposal. Never mind that blank media and hard disks are not always used to store copies of protected works; the real problem is that very little of the collected money finds its way into the pockets of the mucisians whose work is being copied. This is like collecting toll on a bridge you don't own, from people who are not crossing it.
In any case, this law is about people distributing a movie before its official release. In this day of high-quality copies of prerelease movies and ubiquitous surround-sound/projector video home cinema setups, I can well imagine that there will be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people who will not decide to go see a movie in the cinema if they've already seen it at their friend's place? The damage caused by the 'seeder' of the illegal copy could well run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn't anyone else distributing the copy responsible for at least part of the damage? In any case, you are responsible for the damaged caused 'downstream' of you... this damage may still be substantial.
You're absolutely right. If only the music and movie industry would turn into something like Allofmp3, I'd be a loyal and happy customer. With such easy downloading, a choice of encoding formats, and the option to encode on the fly to a bitrate of my choice, I wouldn't mind paying a buck a song, which seems to be the price for "official" online music.
This is also why people want to own content rather than rent it... it kind of sucks if you suddenly find yourself locked out of your music or movie collection (or your pr0n pile, oh noes!).
Yes, you are quite right. I too am not a big fan of these eternal or hereditary copyrights.
Patents protect inventions (and other assorted brain farts that made it past the patent office screening procedure), copyright protects creative works.
Anyway, do you think companies like IBM would be so enthusiastic in their research into new technologies, if any competitor were allowed to just sit back and copy IBMs methods as soon as they hit the market? In such a patent-free market, those doing the research would actually be at a disadvantage. They'd be first to market, sure, but their competition would not have to recoup any investment in research, which can be substantial.
Similarly, do you think it's right that a publisher in Russia can just bang out copies of O'Reilly books, without a penny of the profits going to the authors or original publisher? Copyrights and patents exist for a good reason, even though we have let certain people get away with patenting things that should never have been granted one. On the other hand, I think copyright law works quite well and fairly.
I used to work in a military environment wher people were serious about computer security. The administrators there were forbidden to enable password expiry, because it was deemed to promote unsafe practices instead of secure ones.
Oh well, in some places there's now way getting around having to manage multiple passwords. I keep a password file for my private accounts, but I keep it in a 'password safe' on my PDA. It's not completely safe, but hard enough to thwart all but the most determined hackers, and certainly better than a plaintext file on the computer or a sticky note in a desk drawer.
"Eyewitnesses have reported a Microsoft corporate jet in the area where von Tetzcher was last seen. According to one witness, the jet descended to just above sea level, and dropped a largem ferocious-looking fish with some sort of optical device attached to its head, into the water".
...please break glass by slamming with forehead. Repeat as necessary (or desirable).
Seriously, all manner of emergency buttons, virtual or otherwise, already exist. What is the patent-worthy innovation here?
Privacy concerns aside, there's a nice advantage to a car-mounted system that monitors speed violations, namely that traffic cops can be released from radar gun duty to do real work. Before anyone chimes in to say that checking for speed violations is part of their job... no it is not! Keeping the roads safe is their job. Speed limits and other rules are merely a means to that end. Does that mean that we should be allowed to break the speed limit whenever we want? Of course not. My point is that the usual speed traps do not contribute one iota to road safety, because you'll invariably find them on roads where it is safe to drive, say, 70km/h, but the limit has been set at 50 for some arbitrary reason. Easy pickings, and after all, they have a quota to fill.
For what it's worth, my plastic 45 euro Chinese DVD player has far outlasted my 350 euro JVC player, and has seen a lot more use too.
Any sysadmin using expiring public beta software for production backups, shouldn't be a sysadmin in the first place. Don't blame Microsoft for this.
The only companies with a real interest in the current patent mess, are the so-called 'IP companies', and companies that want or need to protect their market share by legislation and lawsuits, rather than on the merit of their products. And we all know who I mean by that...
Deservedly? I for one would love to see it succeed, and I think it might. Besides which, all your arguments could equally be applied to the Space Shuttle.
The current relentless drive to reduce employee costs to a minimum does not help in that respect, in any country. From what I understand, Indians are currently happy with their current wages (and often very odd working hours). But what will happen when the squeeze from even cheaper Chinese workers is on?
You forgot about 50 posts of the form: "I predict x posts of type A, y posts of type B and z posts of type C." ;-)
A similar joke in NL apparently did work... there was a news item that researchers had received weak signals from the Huygens probe. They asked everyone to stand outside today at 12:30pm, turn on their cellphones, and point the antenna east. The cellphones would act like a giant electromagnetic mirror, amplifying the weak signals from Huygens so that they could be received and interpreted.