There are an awful lot of industry standards (DIN, ISO et al) that aren't free. "freeing" some more common mpeg standards would also be desirable.
Funding open journals like plos biology and help support the peer review process would be a great way to improve on academic research.
Hell if you want to go wild one could fund a foundation that tries to take back authors and musicians rights that have been abused by rights-"holders". one immediately comes to mind, but I've heard of many more.
Under French law, fashion designs are considered to be protected intellectual property, but not under American law.
I belive that's a bit of oversimplification: There are significant movements to equalize and "homogenize" laws on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean - of course aiming at maximum possible monopolization of creative works. In the US the latest attempt is the grant of a special 3 year patent on fashion design with bill HR 5055.
Claiming copyright in works that appear in RL-in-context pictures is of course utter BS. And there I think it is a matter of liberty and freedom of expression: I may not be able to claim the chicago bean as my own work, but I sure as hell should be able to take pictures of it.
I just imagined an NTP lawyer strangling Mr. Goodfellow. But no, he just received less than 20K for not talking to anyone else than NTP during trial.
To me the most interesting part of the article was
To this day, Port 99 remains set aside for Mr. Goodfellow's original brainstorm: pushing an electronic mail message to a wireless pager.
Yet another brilliant illustration why patents don't help independent inventors. Is there a site collecting all these stories?
OK, I took a very brief look at this guys paper he mentions in the article. In the abstract he says that he analyzed satellite data and found that higher ground temperatures coincide with a smaller area of sky covered by cirrus clouds. He does not seem to discuss wether or not these smaller areas vary in density and if that affects the ability of the cirrus clouds to deflect infrared light. Then again, I just glanced at it.
We are seeing some parts of the world heating up quite a bit and we are seeing much more extreme weather. We are also seeing a rise in frequency of these extreme weather events (floodings, storms, droughts...).
What I think is vital is to understand how the mechanisms leading to these x-weather events work. What I also think is important is that this collection of knowledge happens fast.
Oh yeah and that mr. Lindzen creates the impression that there is some big conspiracy of the UN and peer review publications to secure public funds for alarmist researchers does not make him look very sane. That and the "[how can] a 1-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes"-BS.
And to all the "Less public funding"-ravers in this thread a quote from the article: M. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science... - This means he is payed by private funds, right?
To me, this should be a case for *more* publicly funded research;-)
Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth?
The Internet is a system you pay to have access to - Normally you go by the resources you use (i.e. Bandwidth). So yes it is set up, so both the sender and the receiver have to pay for bandwidth.
However, this is not the issue at hand - with the new bill it is not forbidden to hold certain kinds of traffic hostage, so essentially anyone who happens to come across your traffic can demand you pay him for this traffic again - or else...
Digital Highwayman has thus become a legal profession.
"Hey this is just the first step in what will be eventually become the move to a MS Windows kernel. It's all starting to make sense now!"
I should stop channeling Dvorak, it creeps me out ^_^
How great! Now I can so look forward to running this on my linux box...
Wha? what do you mean "only runs on intel processors"? You mean this is x86-binary only? Yeah that mindset served us really well in the past...
Maybe that's just me, but until they GPL their code this is a non-story. Wine getting more bugfixes on the other hand is good news. It's always nice to see an open source project progress - especially with help from commercial vendors.
Intellectual work is only property as long as it is exclusively imprinted into your brain cells. Incidentally then it's also totally worthless, so one might even dispute that.;-)
Wait a sec - is Mr. Zeller actually saying, in his own words, that excercising your freedom to market your own artistic works is equal to murder, rape and robbery on the seven seas? And he really publishes in the NY friggin Times?
*blinks*
I wonder if this guy wrote the article with a straight face. And I smell cat pee.
[text text text] we are committed to working together to provide consumers a convenient, legal way to find accurate song lyrics.
The goal of Warner/Chappell's prior letter to pearworks was to gain assurance that pearLyrics operated according to those principles[text text text]
to me that reads:
[fluff fluff fluff]Your program is illegal, next time we will criminalize you before we slap you with lawyer letters, so we are in a better position marketing the incident in our favour [fluff fluff fluff]
I agree that every telemarketer illegitimately using your DNS contact info deserves to be stoned to death.
But I think the key to suppressing this BS is to pass some better privacy-laws. You shouldn't be forced to implement a technical solution for a social problem.
The DNS was designed as a public directory and should be used as such. If I want to speak my mind anonymously, there are enough places I can turn to that are reasonably anonymous. for that I do not need www.thatanonymouswebguy.com.
Anonymizing and allowing forgery of DNS records only helps spammers and phishers, noone else.
I so totally agree with you that privacy is a luxury - as do almost all countries of the modern world. The quote you were searching for:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Well they only announced that they were recalling the cd's that week, it seems they were still dragging their feet at the end of november. I would doubt that sparse availability of mr. diamonds cd's has to do with declining sales the immediate following week.
In the longer term (aka throughout December) however, your prediction might be true, since sony is apparently unable to produce a batch of new standard-compliant cd's on such short notice.
What's wrong with believing that the "Intelligent Being" *designed* evolution? That the Being designed this whole system we live in and all the laws that govern it.
No need to mod this a troll - this is a perfectly valid question. There is nothing wrong with believing that, you can believe all you want. However the validity of this belief is not the question, nor the point of the creationism debate.
The thing is, this belief, as another poster pointed out, cannot be falsified. Unfortunately for the Creationists, everything in science today rests on the premise of scientific theories which can be falsified by opposing evidence. At least that is the scientific method almost all scientists today subscribe to. If you want to know the basis of this methodology read Popper.
Also note that a theory (aka "I made something up") is very different from a scientific theory, which is based on a hypothesis (normally multiple iterations thereof) and needs a certain amount of evidence and no counter-evidence to be more widely recognized.
So creationists want to introduce unfalsifiable "We made shit up you cannot disprove" into a class that is all about falsifyability. This is of course not such a bright idea - and that is the point, not the judgement of your personaly beliefs (although some people with moderator points obviously think otherwise, but that's a whole different post altogether).
Weapons coined non-lethal are weapons that kill only 25% of the targeted victims.
There are countless videos on the net depicting non-lethal going wrong, but the whole point is that these weapons are only not lethal. (my favourite beeing the professional instructor from the taser manufacturer beeing hit by the taser, missing the matress and crushing his skull - talk about karma. You see one still can cripple someone for life with such a weapon.)
In your scenario only 3 out of 4 suv-drivers have to survive, injuries are not counted. Given the sheer mass of the vehicle my guess is this would be considered non-lethal, since surviving the crash is quite possible for the driver. (s/he may be blind and forced into a wheelchair but not dead)
For a more thorough read I highly recommend this article on non-lethal weapons.
PS: If you blind someone with a laser you always deal permanent damage, the question is only how much. and no, most sunglasses won't protect you.
What is a "realistic" solution? I wasn't able to glance any parameters from your text (encoding quality requirements, computer speed and graphics constraints etc.)
I have no clue wether or not this is standard behaviour, but my windows friends can play my quicktime encoded home videos (in mpeg 4 format, encapsulated with.mp4, not.mov) just fine - So at least their windows is 100% mpeg-4 compatible. mp4 files can be played on all the players, after all it is an industry standard and that is the whole point of having one.
On the other hand have I yet to find a wmv that plays well on my mac. And you can tell your bosses that the guy from the intarnets said although the Windows media player exists on other platforms, at least on the mac it is an annoying piece of crap.
As for a solution: I would take a good long look at the vlc streaming server, which not only offers raw data streaming but also extremely good transcoding options. take a look here what it has to offer. Even the single client can stream or transcode to any location, including files.
One question remains: did you even bother to encode an mp4 file with quicktime and try to play it in every player before posting to slashdot? You know "that guys from teh intarwebs forum told me (X) therefore you must believe me (Y) is true" is not a very convincing strategy if you want to make a pitch. Show them you did actually work on it;-)
good point. But Disney only geared into action when one of their cash-cows was under imminent threat. In my lifetime copyright has gone from a voluntary opt-in system to a 70+ years opt-out system with some scaringly powerful people claiming "infinity minus one" as the appropriate compensation time.
The first valuable genomic patents will run out in about 45 years from now. I guess we will have to wait and see how this plays out, maybe politicians will be less dependent on corporate money by then...
I just realized: Cher Patent Term Extension Act? You are an evil genius;-)
Realistically, we do not have the capability as a civilization to cope with this sort of thing as we stand
Do not worry. The patent secured monopoly granted to the two or three companies who are actualy allowed to sell this product will ensure that this anti-ageing treatment will be far out of reach for all the commoners with less than a few billion dollars to spare.
On the upside, our grand-grand-grandchildren will still know what we were talking about when they unearth our slashdot postings wherein we talk about Bill Gates beeing "teh d3vil";-)
I cannot remember any slashdot article reading "HTTP user guilty of piracy" - What is it with BitTorrent that people are so hung up on the name of the transfer protocol?
Just because it's fast doesn't make it illegal! Every time a dumb headline like this is posted the tech crowd shoots itself in the foot - It's like saying "Porsche driver guilty of manslaughter", these two things may have something to do with each other, but expressing it this way makes it appear as if they are causally related - which they are not.
It's not that this specific transfer protocol enables copyright infringement right out of the box or anything....
Automatic creation of blogger accounts. Now that's even one step more than the already rediculus blog and ping automator from the guy believed to be the one spamming boingboing's comment form.
I seriously wonder if the DMCA's or other *AA laws couldn't be used to subpoena the ISP of these guys to get their real addresses. For some reason I doubt they are that many people in the spam and "search engine optimization" business.
Well Apple (and their CEO) certainly know how to play the market, they understand that in order to break new ground in a new market you do not only need the device, but also the consumable content. the mac delivered that in 1984 and the following years with all its DTP toys. The newton failed to deliver it, since you had to put the content on the device yourself instead of just beeing a passive consumer. The itunes music store delivered content for a quite good but not overwhelmingly great product (the ipod) - it deliveres that desirable content again with the video ipod.
Packaging and Content is an almost orgiastic celebrated experienced Apple orchestrates (I mean look at this engadget piece of gargantuan designer-porn for heavens sake). It's showbiz. The media just looooves showbiz. I you've ever watched Fox News you immediatly recognize that they just serve a giant horror flick that tries to scare you - but it's a movie "based on real events" as they say in showbiz.
Asking if the showbiz is biased towards showbiz is like asking, if the fat kid is biased towards candy.
I think John C. Dvorak has an inherent anti-showbiz attitude that I give him great credit for. If you visit This Week in Tech, Episode 22 you will hear from 7:30 on that he holds an ipod in his hands for the first time in his life and he says it's pretty cool. This is the effect this product has on many people and mostly people connect to this positive experience.
On another point - media is expected to cover events of interest to the general populace. As Apple tends to implement certain changes earlier in their finished, shipping consumer product (USB, WIFi, iTMS, ZeroConf, mac-mini-formfactor, Quad processors come to mind) they do provide a nice outlet of new and upcoming tech trends in consumer tech land.
So while there may be a correlation between showbiz-loving cutting-edge consumers and their reports on a showbiz-cutting-edge consumertech corporation I do not think it is necessarily a causality.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell if you want to go wild one could fund a foundation that tries to take back authors and musicians rights that have been abused by rights-"holders". one immediately comes to mind, but I've heard of many more.
Claiming copyright in works that appear in RL-in-context pictures is of course utter BS. And there I think it is a matter of liberty and freedom of expression: I may not be able to claim the chicago bean as my own work, but I sure as hell should be able to take pictures of it.
To me the most interesting part of the article was Yet another brilliant illustration why patents don't help independent inventors. Is there a site collecting all these stories?
Then again, I just glanced at it.
We are seeing some parts of the world heating up quite a bit and we are seeing much more extreme weather. We are also seeing a rise in frequency of these extreme weather events (floodings, storms, droughts...).
What I think is vital is to understand how the mechanisms leading to these x-weather events work. What I also think is important is that this collection of knowledge happens fast.
Oh yeah and that mr. Lindzen creates the impression that there is some big conspiracy of the UN and peer review publications to secure public funds for alarmist researchers does not make him look very sane. That and the "[how can] a 1-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes"-BS.
And to all the "Less public funding"-ravers in this thread a quote from the article: M. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science... - This means he is payed by private funds, right? ;-)
To me, this should be a case for *more* publicly funded research
The Internet is a system you pay to have access to - Normally you go by the resources you use (i.e. Bandwidth). So yes it is set up, so both the sender and the receiver have to pay for bandwidth.
However, this is not the issue at hand - with the new bill it is not forbidden to hold certain kinds of traffic hostage, so essentially anyone who happens to come across your traffic can demand you pay him for this traffic again - or else...
Digital Highwayman has thus become a legal profession.
I should stop channeling Dvorak, it creeps me out ^_^
Wha? what do you mean "only runs on intel processors"? You mean this is x86-binary only? Yeah that mindset served us really well in the past...
Maybe that's just me, but until they GPL their code this is a non-story. Wine getting more bugfixes on the other hand is good news. It's always nice to see an open source project progress - especially with help from commercial vendors.
after reading your post and picking myself up from the floor let me just say: ROFL
*blinks*
I wonder if this guy wrote the article with a straight face. And I smell cat pee.
[fluff fluff fluff]Your program is illegal, next time we will criminalize you before we slap you with lawyer letters, so we are in a better position marketing the incident in our favour [fluff fluff fluff]
Please tell me I'm wrong.
But I think the key to suppressing this BS is to pass some better privacy-laws. You shouldn't be forced to implement a technical solution for a social problem.
The DNS was designed as a public directory and should be used as such. If I want to speak my mind anonymously, there are enough places I can turn to that are reasonably anonymous. for that I do not need www.thatanonymouswebguy.com. Anonymizing and allowing forgery of DNS records only helps spammers and phishers, noone else.
In the longer term (aka throughout December) however, your prediction might be true, since sony is apparently unable to produce a batch of new standard-compliant cd's on such short notice.
The thing is, this belief, as another poster pointed out, cannot be falsified. Unfortunately for the Creationists, everything in science today rests on the premise of scientific theories which can be falsified by opposing evidence. At least that is the scientific method almost all scientists today subscribe to. If you want to know the basis of this methodology read Popper.
Also note that a theory (aka "I made something up") is very different from a scientific theory, which is based on a hypothesis (normally multiple iterations thereof) and needs a certain amount of evidence and no counter-evidence to be more widely recognized. So creationists want to introduce unfalsifiable "We made shit up you cannot disprove" into a class that is all about falsifyability. This is of course not such a bright idea - and that is the point, not the judgement of your personaly beliefs (although some people with moderator points obviously think otherwise, but that's a whole different post altogether).
There are countless videos on the net depicting non-lethal going wrong, but the whole point is that these weapons are only not lethal. (my favourite beeing the professional instructor from the taser manufacturer beeing hit by the taser, missing the matress and crushing his skull - talk about karma. You see one still can cripple someone for life with such a weapon.)
In your scenario only 3 out of 4 suv-drivers have to survive, injuries are not counted. Given the sheer mass of the vehicle my guess is this would be considered non-lethal, since surviving the crash is quite possible for the driver. (s/he may be blind and forced into a wheelchair but not dead)
For a more thorough read I highly recommend this article on non-lethal weapons.
PS: If you blind someone with a laser you always deal permanent damage, the question is only how much. and no, most sunglasses won't protect you.
I have no clue wether or not this is standard behaviour, but my windows friends can play my quicktime encoded home videos (in mpeg 4 format, encapsulated with
On the other hand have I yet to find a wmv that plays well on my mac. And you can tell your bosses that the guy from the intarnets said although the Windows media player exists on other platforms, at least on the mac it is an annoying piece of crap.
As for a solution: I would take a good long look at the vlc streaming server, which not only offers raw data streaming but also extremely good transcoding options. take a look here what it has to offer. Even the single client can stream or transcode to any location, including files.
One question remains: did you even bother to encode an mp4 file with quicktime and try to play it in every player before posting to slashdot? You know "that guys from teh intarwebs forum told me (X) therefore you must believe me (Y) is true" is not a very convincing strategy if you want to make a pitch. Show them you did actually work on it
The first valuable genomic patents will run out in about 45 years from now. I guess we will have to wait and see how this plays out, maybe politicians will be less dependent on corporate money by then
I just realized: Cher Patent Term Extension Act? You are an evil genius ;-)
Do not worry. The patent secured monopoly granted to the two or three companies who are actualy allowed to sell this product will ensure that this anti-ageing treatment will be far out of reach for all the commoners with less than a few billion dollars to spare. ;-)
On the upside, our grand-grand-grandchildren will still know what we were talking about when they unearth our slashdot postings wherein we talk about Bill Gates beeing "teh d3vil"
Just because it's fast doesn't make it illegal! Every time a dumb headline like this is posted the tech crowd shoots itself in the foot - It's like saying "Porsche driver guilty of manslaughter", these two things may have something to do with each other, but expressing it this way makes it appear as if they are causally related - which they are not.
It's not that this specific transfer protocol enables copyright infringement right out of the box or anything....
I seriously wonder if the DMCA's or other *AA laws couldn't be used to subpoena the ISP of these guys to get their real addresses. For some reason I doubt they are that many people in the spam and "search engine optimization" business.
Dang
Packaging and Content is an almost orgiastic celebrated experienced Apple orchestrates (I mean look at this engadget piece of gargantuan designer-porn for heavens sake). It's showbiz. The media just looooves showbiz. I you've ever watched Fox News you immediatly recognize that they just serve a giant horror flick that tries to scare you - but it's a movie "based on real events" as they say in showbiz.
Asking if the showbiz is biased towards showbiz is like asking, if the fat kid is biased towards candy.
I think John C. Dvorak has an inherent anti-showbiz attitude that I give him great credit for. If you visit This Week in Tech, Episode 22 you will hear from 7:30 on that he holds an ipod in his hands for the first time in his life and he says it's pretty cool. This is the effect this product has on many people and mostly people connect to this positive experience.
On another point - media is expected to cover events of interest to the general populace. As Apple tends to implement certain changes earlier in their finished, shipping consumer product (USB, WIFi, iTMS, ZeroConf, mac-mini-formfactor, Quad processors come to mind) they do provide a nice outlet of new and upcoming tech trends in consumer tech land. So while there may be a correlation between showbiz-loving cutting-edge consumers and their reports on a showbiz-cutting-edge consumertech corporation I do not think it is necessarily a causality.