Well, I think a sub cent fee per page viewed would be a good idea, so long as it was quick and easy.
I'd like to suggest a method whereby your ISP pays your surfing bill and then bills you back. It could work something like this.
1) Browse to foo.com 2) Site "foo.com" sends back a warning that pages are priced at.5c each. 3) You agree by digitally signing 4) Your signing tells your ISP to record pages you visit at foo.com and pay foo.com.5c for each page. 5) your ISP tells foo.com that it will pay.5c per page 6) foo.com trusts your ISP and serves web pages to you. 7) you receive a bill from your ISP.
This method has the advantage of allowing anonymous access to pay sites as the ISP is acting as your agent, OK your ISP knows what sites you've visited, but they know that anyway.
The settling (stealing) of the US led to the deaths of 20+ million Native Americans (Not to mention the slave trade, but that is full of it's own myths too.) through disease, starvation, murder, and warfare. I might add that's more than Hitler managed to kill.
I'm sure it is more than Hilter managed to kill, he wasn't particularly interested in killing Native Americans. He did however manage to kill 6-14 million Jews, and about 20 million Russians. I'm not belittleing the evils perpetrated against native americans, I'm just saying Hilter really was a particularly evil guy.
Should it go into the public domain because the author is dead?
Yes.
Why should his mum get the cash? OK its very sad for her, but she didn't write the book and neither did the publisher. Why should get an exclusive right to print the work? OK I understand that publishers will tend not to publish unless they have exclusive rights, but I suspect that is only because having exclusive rights is the norm. Without exclusive rights publishers would be forced to work hard for their money, and have much less power over authors. Currently publishers have the power to decide what the public can buy, and use that power to force authors to surrender their works for a pittance.
Actually I believe it is legal to marry your cousin here in the UK. Not that I know anyone who has done that, but I have heard it is common among certain immigrant communities.
The problem comes when you have a small enough pool of content providers (ie publishers) that they can act as a cartel, charging what they want for what they provide. The other problem is that unless the copyright term is reduced the big publishers will have a guaranteed, continuous revenue stream, allowing them to buy up the copyright titles to more and more of the available pool of content. I would like to suggest a couple of possible solutions.
a) non-transferable copyright. Copyright belongs to the author(s) or their estates, unless the author is a true employee of a company (and an advance doesn't count)
b) regulation of publishing. In the UK we have a number of industries that have been privatised over the past decade or so. They are largely involved in power, water, telecoms, transport etc. In order to control the former monopoly holders an industry regulator is apointed to ensure fair competition, who has the power to impose price caps (and limits) and ultimately to revoke licences to operate. For example, for years the former monopoly British Gas was forced to sell at a higher price than their competitors to try and attract customers towards the smaller companies. This shows that a powerful independant regulator with legal powers can benefit the public good. I know this may go against many/.rs libertarian/capitalist ideals, but I find that holding too strictly to principles and ideals in the face of contrary evidence just tends to add to the length of rope with which you will subsequently hang yourself.
This seems fine for when a biker hits another vehicle more or less head on but there are plenty of accidents where this wouldn't help at all. During the summer I came across two motorcycle accidents, one of which was sadly fatal (lots of blood. Not very nice). In one of them the victim just lost control of his bike on a bend and hit his head on the curb hard, and in the other one the bike was clipped from behind by a car and the rider fell off her bike and thankfully ended up in a bush with little more than bruises. The point is that in neither of these cases did the rider (or bike) experience forces in excess of 10 g's until the moment they hit the road, and possibly not even then.
I'm saying that this is a bad device, just that its applicability is limited.
It seems to me that the whole problem is the the Norwegian legal system is operating on the basis that all copyrighted material is owned by the copyright holder, and that they have the right to specify how you access it. This is not the case. Copyright does not allow to the copyright holder to retain ownership of the copyrighted material after first sale, it merely allows the copyright holder the exclusive right to make and sell copies of the material, by making it illegal for the owner of the copy to distribute copies of his copy.
This seems to be the problem with premise behind the DMCA as well. It assumed that copyright holder s retain some kind of ownership of copyrighted material after first sale, and that ownership confered right to control useage. This all seems a bit backwards to me, especially as there are no licence agreements even attempted with the sale of DVDs, which possibly would extend some kind of rights to the publisher (dodgy groud itself IMHO. Once you pay your money and buy the CD you are free to ignore or read anything therein, including the licence agreement)
I agree. Under this interpretation of Norwegian law, if I sell you a product in a locked box and say that only certain people are allowed to sell you a key, you're not allowed to a) break open the box (which you own) b) use a key you bought to open a different box to open the new box. c) Buy a key, make copy of the key and use that to open the box.
You are also not allowed to break into anything you own that has a "protection device". ie, YOUR house, YOUR car, YOUR safe, YOUR luggage etc.
"The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age"
Does this mean then that no-one over the age of 45 is allowed to own a gun?
Actually if you lived in europe you'd have heard plenty of screaming about GM food. Any food products containing GM material MUST (by law) say so, and many stores have stopped selling GM products at all because of consumer unease.
You say "no sane food/drug company would risk the impact of such a level of carelessness/unconcern", but many would say you were insane for making such a dangerous and naive assumption.
The big biotech companies have spent vast amounts of money on developing these new products. Do you really believe that they would be beyond "selecting" scientific data that supports claims that they are safe? All/.rs know about RIAA and their pet senators, but how many pet senators does Monsanto have and why do they need them if the food is so safe?
Well one reason they need the senators is obvious actually. They need them to force the US government to persuade the WTO, UN etc that GM food is safe, so that any country which blocks the sale of US food goods is in breach of WTO rules, and so is any country that refuses GM food aid.
Just another example of US corporate imperialism by proxy.
I've just returned from a business trip to moscow with my laptop. Somehow I feel that if I had been carrying a nuclear powered laptop I might not have been allowed into the country or perhaps even worse, I might not have been allowed to leave. Also, what effect would a radioactive power source have on an X-Ray machine. Perhaps there would be way to check whether a laptop contained a bomb without tearing it apart. I think this idea needs a little thinking about, and besides, wouldn't a fuel cell be safer and cheaper.
A gigabyte IS a billion bytes. Read the SI definition of Gigabyte
While we're on the subject Ars talks about 8 bytes as being called a "word". As a programmer I was under the impression that a "word" is 2 bytes, a Double Word (DWORD) was 4 bytes and a Quadword was 8 bytes or 64 bits. What's he on about?
Apple may be a hardware company but they shouldn't be. In essence all they do is assemble expensive PC's which will run their software. In that sense they're like an expensive Dell who also produce software. The key factor is that it is not the hardware which sells Macs except to the ultra fashion victim who wants a snazzy looking computer, but the software. You may say that apple makes more than computers and software, iPod for example, but so does M$ (joysticks, mice, XBox, etc) and they are still a software company.
Your point about being able to import much of my PC hardware into a Mac box is missing the point. I want to able able to run windows and MacOS side by side on the same hardware like I do with Windows and Linux. My point is that there is a market for MacOS on x86 and Apple is being foolish by not meeting that demand. The thrust of my argument about Apple ducking their responsibilities was not that they can be blamed for M$'s excesses, but that had MacOS been a true option for a desktop OS without requiring a whole new set of hardware, and the possibility of trying it out before you make the big change, then Microsoft may never have been able to establish the monopoly that they now have. If OEMs and end users could have switched from M$ by simply installing a new OS then Microsoft's bully boy illegal practices would have had a serious negative effect on their user base and thus profit margin. We are now seeing this kind of effect where large bodies like European and other governments are considering Linux and the BSDs for desktops in light of the new licensing regime that Microsoft is trying to impose.
The reason I mentioned Linux as getting some penetration is that despite obviously not being a great desktop OS for your Average Joe user it is STILL making progress. This shows that IF MacOS was available for x86, THEN lots of people would at least try it out, and perhaps stick with it. What I am trying to say is that MacOS for x86 could be a serious threat to Microsofts monopoly
I dunno about being beyond getting back. If Apple release MacOS for x86 I think I might give it a go. perhaps triple boot MacOS, WinXP, and Linux. Then if I liked it, and found there were apps that I liked I might even buy it. Hey, perhaps there should be a time limited trial version so you can see if you like it.
I won't move to Mac. Make Mac move to me
on
Moving to Mac Made Easy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If i've spent £1000+ on a uberPC with everything, I dont want to have to switch hardware to run MacOS. Apple will never seduce Windows users while their investment in hardware cannot be transported over.
We all know that M$ is an evil monopoly but I think the reason why they're a monopoly is because Apple refused to compete with microsoft on the commodity PC platform. For years microsoft had no decent rival on platform that brought computing to the masses. OS2? I was a joke at best. Apple had (and has) decent software, but until they grow some balls and decide to play with the big boys.
We see the effect and penetration that Linux is developing on the desktop in the Red Hat and SuSe form, and that is fighting against the established monopoly. This proves that there is, and probably always has been, a market for a real alternative to Windows for existing windows users, but which has been left sadly vacant for years. Had Apple decided to stop making hardware and just sold software, perhaps we would not be in the trouble we are now in regarding MS vs DOJ etc.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Microsoft may be evil, but Apple could be accused of having done nothing to stop it, when perhaps they were the only ones who could have.
So laser may not be banned, but they're really unethical for use against ground targets. People have talked about using lasers to avoid collateral damage in built up areas or for use against terrorists. They seem to forget that anyone within several hundred meters of the target or possibly more could be blinded and/or seriously burnt by light reflected from anything in the target area. The target needn't be a reflective surface either. A laser of with more than around five hundred milliwatts of power can blind even if you only see the beam incident on a rough surface like a wall or a piece of paper. There's no way you could use this weapon anywhere near any of your own personnel unless they had all been issued with special protective gear.
Targeting a laser would be a simple job. What you need to know is the position of the target and its velocity. The difficulty is getting the position sufficiently accurate, but this should be a trivial job using millimeter wavelength radar (as found on the Longbow apache)or possibly even lidar (laser radar). The only other problem is that your laser pulse would heat the air through which it traveled which would then distort the beam and seriously reduce the effective laser power on the target.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think a sub cent fee per page viewed would be a good idea, so long as it was quick and easy.
.5c each. .5c for each page. .5c per page
I'd like to suggest a method whereby your ISP pays your surfing bill and then bills you back. It could work something like this.
1) Browse to foo.com
2) Site "foo.com" sends back a warning that pages are priced at
3) You agree by digitally signing
4) Your signing tells your ISP to record pages you visit at foo.com and pay foo.com
5) your ISP tells foo.com that it will pay
6) foo.com trusts your ISP and serves web pages to you.
7) you receive a bill from your ISP.
This method has the advantage of allowing anonymous access to pay sites as the ISP is acting as your agent, OK your ISP knows what sites you've visited, but they know that anyway.
I'm sure it is more than Hilter managed to kill, he wasn't particularly interested in killing Native Americans. He did however manage to kill 6-14 million Jews, and about 20 million Russians. I'm not belittleing the evils perpetrated against native americans, I'm just saying Hilter really was a particularly evil guy.
you missed DDG and CCGN for guided missile destroyers, and nuclear guided missile cruisers.
I dont know any BBN's but there are CBGN's (Nuclear Guided Missile Battle Cruiser) in the Kirov class even if they are all rusting hulks these days.
Should it go into the public domain because the author is dead?
Yes.
Why should his mum get the cash? OK its very sad for her, but she didn't write the book and neither did the publisher. Why should get an exclusive right to print the work? OK I understand that publishers will tend not to publish unless they have exclusive rights, but I suspect that is only because having exclusive rights is the norm. Without exclusive rights publishers would be forced to work hard for their money, and have much less power over authors. Currently publishers have the power to decide what the public can buy, and use that power to force authors to surrender their works for a pittance.
Actually I believe it is legal to marry your cousin here in the UK. Not that I know anyone who has done that, but I have heard it is common among certain immigrant communities.
One word. Exchange
I Wish...
s/appealing/repealing/;?
The problem comes when you have a small enough pool of content providers (ie publishers) that they can act as a cartel, charging what they want for what they provide. The other problem is that unless the copyright term is reduced the big publishers will have a guaranteed, continuous revenue stream, allowing them to buy up the copyright titles to more and more of the available pool of content. I would like to suggest a couple of possible solutions.
/.rs libertarian/capitalist ideals, but I find that holding too strictly to principles and ideals in the face of contrary evidence just tends to add to the length of rope with which you will subsequently hang yourself.
a) non-transferable copyright. Copyright belongs to the author(s) or their estates, unless the author is a true employee of a company (and an advance doesn't count)
b) regulation of publishing. In the UK we have a number of industries that have been privatised over the past decade or so. They are largely involved in power, water, telecoms, transport etc. In order to control the former monopoly holders an industry regulator is apointed to ensure fair competition, who has the power to impose price caps (and limits) and ultimately to revoke licences to operate. For example, for years the former monopoly British Gas was forced to sell at a higher price than their competitors to try and attract customers towards the smaller companies. This shows that a powerful independant regulator with legal powers can benefit the public good. I know this may go against many
This seems fine for when a biker hits another vehicle more or less head on but there are plenty of accidents where this wouldn't help at all. During the summer I came across two motorcycle accidents, one of which was sadly fatal (lots of blood. Not very nice). In one of them the victim just lost control of his bike on a bend and hit his head on the curb hard, and in the other one the bike was clipped from behind by a car and the rider fell off her bike and thankfully ended up in a bush with little more than bruises. The point is that in neither of these cases did the rider (or bike) experience forces in excess of 10 g's until the moment they hit the road, and possibly not even then.
I'm saying that this is a bad device, just that its applicability is limited.
feel free
(consider this a copyleft licence agreement style thingy)
It seems to me that the whole problem is the the Norwegian legal system is operating on the basis that all copyrighted material is owned by the copyright holder, and that they have the right to specify how you access it. This is not the case. Copyright does not allow to the copyright holder to retain ownership of the copyrighted material after first sale, it merely allows the copyright holder the exclusive right to make and sell copies of the material, by making it illegal for the owner of the copy to distribute copies of his copy.
This seems to be the problem with premise behind the DMCA as well. It assumed that copyright holder s retain some kind of ownership of copyrighted material after first sale, and that ownership confered right to control useage. This all seems a bit backwards to me, especially as there are no licence agreements even attempted with the sale of DVDs, which possibly would extend some kind of rights to the publisher (dodgy groud itself IMHO. Once you pay your money and buy the CD you are free to ignore or read anything therein, including the licence agreement)
I agree. Under this interpretation of Norwegian law, if I sell you a product in a locked box and say that only certain people are allowed to sell you a key, you're not allowed to
a) break open the box (which you own)
b) use a key you bought to open a different box to open the new box.
c) Buy a key, make copy of the key and use that to open the box.
You are also not allowed to break into anything you own that has a "protection device". ie, YOUR house, YOUR car, YOUR safe, YOUR luggage etc.
Who wants to bet that someone will sue Linus under the DMCA for writing the copyright circumvention device, and hacker tool known as Linux?
"The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age"
Does this mean then that no-one over the age of 45 is allowed to own a gun?
Of course, this is business corruption as opposed to political corruption.
Actually if you lived in europe you'd have heard plenty of screaming about GM food. Any food products containing GM material MUST (by law) say so, and many stores have stopped selling GM products at all because of consumer unease.
/.rs know about RIAA and their pet senators, but how many pet senators does Monsanto have and why do they need them if the food is so safe?
You say "no sane food/drug company would risk the impact of such a level of carelessness/unconcern", but many would say you were insane for making such a dangerous and naive assumption.
The big biotech companies have spent vast amounts of money on developing these new products. Do you really believe that they would be beyond "selecting" scientific data that supports claims that they are safe? All
Well one reason they need the senators is obvious actually. They need them to force the US government to persuade the WTO, UN etc that GM food is safe, so that any country which blocks the sale of US food goods is in breach of WTO rules, and so is any country that refuses GM food aid.
Just another example of US corporate imperialism by proxy.
I've just returned from a business trip to moscow with my laptop. Somehow I feel that if I had been carrying a nuclear powered laptop I might not have been allowed into the country or perhaps even worse, I might not have been allowed to leave. Also, what effect would a radioactive power source have on an X-Ray machine. Perhaps there would be way to check whether a laptop contained a bomb without tearing it apart. I think this idea needs a little thinking about, and besides, wouldn't a fuel cell be safer and cheaper.
Offtopic I know but for the ultimate in bad latancy try this link. An implementation of RFC-1149
While we're on the subject Ars talks about 8 bytes as being called a "word". As a programmer I was under the impression that a "word" is 2 bytes, a Double Word (DWORD) was 4 bytes and a Quadword was 8 bytes or 64 bits. What's he on about?
So you're a freak of nature. That doesn't prove anything. :p
Apple may be a hardware company but they shouldn't be. In essence all they do is assemble expensive PC's which will run their software. In that sense they're like an expensive Dell who also produce software. The key factor is that it is not the hardware which sells Macs except to the ultra fashion victim who wants a snazzy looking computer, but the software. You may say that apple makes more than computers and software, iPod for example, but so does M$ (joysticks, mice, XBox, etc) and they are still a software company.
Your point about being able to import much of my PC hardware into a Mac box is missing the point. I want to able able to run windows and MacOS side by side on the same hardware like I do with Windows and Linux. My point is that there is a market for MacOS on x86 and Apple is being foolish by not meeting that demand. The thrust of my argument about Apple ducking their responsibilities was not that they can be blamed for M$'s excesses, but that had MacOS been a true option for a desktop OS without requiring a whole new set of hardware, and the possibility of trying it out before you make the big change, then Microsoft may never have been able to establish the monopoly that they now have. If OEMs and end users could have switched from M$ by simply installing a new OS then Microsoft's bully boy illegal practices would have had a serious negative effect on their user base and thus profit margin. We are now seeing this kind of effect where large bodies like European and other governments are considering Linux and the BSDs for desktops in light of the new licensing regime that Microsoft is trying to impose.
The reason I mentioned Linux as getting some penetration is that despite obviously not being a great desktop OS for your Average Joe user it is STILL making progress. This shows that IF MacOS was available for x86, THEN lots of people would at least try it out, and perhaps stick with it. What I am trying to say is that MacOS for x86 could be a serious threat to Microsofts monopoly
I dunno about being beyond getting back. If Apple release MacOS for x86 I think I might give it a go. perhaps triple boot MacOS, WinXP, and Linux. Then if I liked it, and found there were apps that I liked I might even buy it. Hey, perhaps there should be a time limited trial version so you can see if you like it.
If i've spent £1000+ on a uberPC with everything, I dont want to have to switch hardware to run MacOS. Apple will never seduce Windows users while their investment in hardware cannot be transported over.
We all know that M$ is an evil monopoly but I think the reason why they're a monopoly is because Apple refused to compete with microsoft on the commodity PC platform. For years microsoft had no decent rival on platform that brought computing to the masses. OS2? I was a joke at best. Apple had (and has) decent software, but until they grow some balls and decide to play with the big boys.
We see the effect and penetration that Linux is developing on the desktop in the Red Hat and SuSe form, and that is fighting against the established monopoly. This proves that there is, and probably always has been, a market for a real alternative to Windows for existing windows users, but which has been left sadly vacant for years. Had Apple decided to stop making hardware and just sold software, perhaps we would not be in the trouble we are now in regarding MS vs DOJ etc.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Microsoft may be evil, but Apple could be accused of having done nothing to stop it, when perhaps they were the only ones who could have.
So laser may not be banned, but they're really unethical for use against ground targets. People have talked about using lasers to avoid collateral damage in built up areas or for use against terrorists. They seem to forget that anyone within several hundred meters of the target or possibly more could be blinded and/or seriously burnt by light reflected from anything in the target area. The target needn't be a reflective surface either. A laser of with more than around five hundred milliwatts of power can blind even if you only see the beam incident on a rough surface like a wall or a piece of paper. There's no way you could use this weapon anywhere near any of your own personnel unless they had all been issued with special protective gear.
Targeting a laser would be a simple job. What you need to know is the position of the target and its velocity. The difficulty is getting the position sufficiently accurate, but this should be a trivial job using millimeter wavelength radar (as found on the Longbow apache)or possibly even lidar (laser radar). The only other problem is that your laser pulse would heat the air through which it traveled which would then distort the beam and seriously reduce the effective laser power on the target.