James Cameron may have spawned the Terminator franchise, but he had no connection T3 (the film was directed by Jonathan Mostow.) Rumor has it that Cameron was planning to buy back the rights to the Terminator franchise, and then produce/direct his own script, but was outbid. When the guys who bought the Terminator rights tried to hire him for T3, Cameron turned them down.
It would be interesting for receiving SMTP servers to portscan the IP source for sender servers that it has never seen before to see if it is a server that has been compromised and is a zombie. If it is, then it rejects the mail, and puts in a time-limited RBL to prevent bandwidth-consuming resends. Sure, it wouldn't be long before the next trojan seals the ports behind it, and uses an active query to some central source (which could be tracked and disabled), but it would render all the existing zombies useless.
now, here's another fun question. why, if this problem has been boiling up for five years now (and it has, hasn't it?) has some group not already tried to quash it?
Plenty of people have, but many people seem to have the mindset that "you can just delete it" and "it's just a fact of e-mail on the internet these days." Congress with their "you CAN SPAM everybody too" act hasn't helped a bit, and unfortunately, as anti-spammers have slammed the door on spammers (by changing the default for mailservers so that they no longer relay - a legacy of a more genteel network, reporting spammers to ISPs, setting up blocklists and blacklists to whip rogue ISPs into line), spammers have gotten much more sophisticated.
These days, spammers utilize exploits and e-mail trojans to take over machines and use them as zombies to mask their trail. They'll try and hack webforms to inject messages, forge e-mails to come from domains that have opposed them in the past (joe-jobbing), and re-route visitors through a labyrinth of foreign and domestic servers in order to distance themselves from their pusuers. In other words, spamming has become a criminal enterprise, with well established tools and tactics, and multiple layers of obfuscation to keep the law off their tails.
Short of throwing away the SMTP protocol, not much can stop spammers now - other than maybe a targeted takedown by the FBI (drug cartel style). Unless steps are taken, everybody will eventually go to a whitelist-style defense, which will do nothing to prevent the hijacking and waste of bandwidth that the spammers will attempt, but will at least keep the end users somewhat sane. The e-mail system administrators on the other hand...
For my accounts, I'm getting a combined total of 300+ pieces of spam per day, out of an average of maybe 325 total e-mails. That works out to 2100 pieces of spam per week, or 8400 pieces of spam per month. It's eating up a LOT of my time, even after SpamAssassin w/ bayes and some custom procmail rules have looked at them. It wouldn't be too bad except for the spammers who deliberately craft their spam to try and evade SpamAssassin with bayes - for them I have to manually tune and tweak my filters.
This doesn't take into account the time I have to spend dealing with spammers forging e-mails from my domain, or doing dictionary attacks on non-existent users in my domain. It's gotten to the point where it's now an economical use of my time to integrate and debug a challenge and response whitelisting system, as opposed to manually reviewing trapped spam messages for false positives.
Mind you, I'm having to deal with all the above, in addition to trying to get work done. Why do I have to deal with all that? Because e-mail is my primary method of communication. As an analogy, if my e-mail box was my telephone, I'd be hanging up on telemarketers at a rate of 1 call every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Would the burden of proof not be on the owner of the database who says their material was stolen?
It would be. However, the entrenched competitor would have the deep pockets to put up a lot of legal trouble for the upstart... who would likely not have that kind of money. It's copyright law based on the golden rule - he who has the gold, rules. For example, Wikipedia would get 100 years of protection for any facts that it had - but on the other hand, would suddenly become a target for anyone with money in their pockets, and a vested interest in keeping Wikipedia out of their market.
Also, remember. Copyright extends protection for 100 years. The most trivial of facts, once compiled, would be out of the reach of everyone (think Almanacs - copy anything out of one, and you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.)
We should argue that it should be illegal to fix your car in your driveway, since it robs tax-paying mechanics of their livelihood.
Or that car hoods should be welded shut to prevent illegal tampering that might run afoul of national anti-pollution standards? Don't laugh, but the stupider the idea is, the more likely that some damnfool in congress is going to actually use it. If you look at California, there are MANY laws that require certification and testing of EVERYTHING. It's just a few more steps to outright bans (ie, the "if it ain't illegal, it ought to be" school of thought.)
Don't give em any more crazy ideas than they've already got!
I don't think there's a double standard at all. Someone breaks into a credit card site, is busted immediately, no real effect on the Slashdot population other than as a topic for discussion. Someone spams 90% of the slashdot readership, and in some cases, 90% of the users that slashdotters have to do tech support or network administration for, on a DAILY BASIS, and becomes the focus of a lot of angry geeks. I think the magnitude of the reaction is dependent on how much it affects the person doing the reacting... in this case, I'm not suprised that people want to string these bastards up.
I've already manually kicked the SpamAssassin score for Habeas to -.5. If things don't get better, I may help out the bayes filter by turning Habeas scoring off (set to 0). Habeas should be spitting brass tacks PRwise - every day that goes by without a peep from them just enboldens other spammers thinking about trying the same stunt.
After all, Habeas was whitelisted because they promised legal action against spammers infringing on their copyrights... well, the spammers are infringing. Where are those spam-eating lawyers we were promised?
Going through the book and actually reading it out loud probably did more for your long term memory than playing it while you were off in fairyland...
Reading the manual probably provided enough information to remember and dissect the info in your dreams, but the tape probably prompted your brain to chew on it (as well as providing cues for sections you might not have remembered.)
I think you should take it for granted that your brain is going to do something productive while your sleeping - doing a bit of suggestion, and slipping in some audio cues to act as a cheat sheet can help as well. A full night's worth of sleep is a crucial ingredient, of course - no way you can speed cram material, take in an hour or two of sleep, and be able to remember much of anything past what's in your short-term buffer the next day.
The last time I looked at AR, there were the following issues:
1. Tracking. This is a biggie, since you want to make sure that what you want to add is seamlessly integrated to what you're actually seeing. Things like GPS, intertial tracking, etc. are needed, but suffer from lag and displacement error (very disorienting when you turn, and an object suddenly ghosts from one point to another). Magnetic and edge-based tracking also have issues outside of a carefully controlled environment.
2. Display (which leads to weight and power issues.) Do you use a half silvered system which superimposes items on your field of view (ghosts), or do you use dual cameras with a full opaqued HMD to simulate vision? The first method is less realistic, the second method is cumbersome even with modern ccd cameras and displays.
3. Cost. It takes money to equip enough soldiers with this kind of equipment, and build an environment that can use all of the bells and whistles to maximum effect. For less money and prep time, you can do a blank-fire exercise in a purpose-built structure, and you can run many more soldiers through. Yes, with well designed AR (which doesn't always have to rely on soldiers equipped with HMDs, BTW - stereophonic headsets can be used to "augment" reality very well) can enhance a training experience. Problem is, we aren't even spending the money to do blank-fire exercises (regular army is much better trained than reserve/nat guard, but reserve and nat guard are on long deployments also). Unless AR equipment becomes the next gamer sensation, resulting in readily available, super-cheap, high-end, and reliable equipment, don't expect any major deployments of AR based training tools.
As to why VR is more widespread than AR, VR is an easier problem, since your entire environment is in the computer. Integrating a changing environment (the user is moving, thereby changing what needs to be shown) with a changing virtual environment, outside of a tethered research lab or CAVE is not an easy task.
America's Army was built on top of the Unreal engine, so there's at least one pre-existing model for development out there. Not only that, but America's Army is multi-platform (Mac and Linux, as well as the all-pervasive Windows PC) with minimal (probably about a month or two) lag between Windows and non-Windows releases. For a free game, this is pretty good - plenty of for-profit companies can't even get a multiplatform release out at all, much less one that keeps the feature lag to a minimum.
Personally, I'd love for them to incorporate more training classes (land nav, care and feeding of your M16A2, chemical warfare, etc.) as well as extending the existing training on first aid. Heh, they've even got the damn Powerpoint-powered classrooms down. Just wait till the Navy releases their simulator - take marine nav and train onboard a ship, taking bearing, plotting course, and trying to figure out if the light in front of you is another ship or a lighthouse...
Oh, it just might get better than that. IBM's been poking around the connection between SCO and the Canopy Group. With luck, not only will SCO be a smoking crater, but the principals of the Canopy Group will be spending lots of time in Federal prison.
Especially when we have LEO capability. The shuttles are flying pieces of crap, but they DO fly, and are capable of lifting a respectable payload into orbit. Combine that with a schedule of unmanned launches, and we can get a pretty nice cache of materials into orbit. Plus, there's the idea of burning a little bit more fuel and decoupling the external fuel tank later, so you get to re-use the shell by putting it into orbit.
In the 60's, we did things the hard way - straight from Earth to the Moon in one shot, just to prove we could do it. Today, we should be building tools in space (tugs, transports, crew modules) and just tow them into a lunar orbit, or to one of the Lagrange points. We've got a space station - either use it, or start stripping it for parts. Also, back then, we were racing against the Russians - now we can hire them for pennies on the dollar for what it would cost to do it ourselves to put stuff (ie fuel, raw materials, food, people) into orbit for us.
Unfortunately, what I'm suspecting is happening is that Bush is using the lure of more aerospace pork barrel spending to boost his chances of getting bills passed, and thus getting reelected. If he was serious about getting the US to the moon, he'd be turning the task over to private enterprise, instead of giving NASA a piddling 1 billion to do what really amounts to a big feasibility study...
Even in the IP world, there are rules. For example patent portfolios and patent cross licensing exist to prevent this kind of all out attack - you don't sue a competitor over basic tech that you've patented because you probably are infringing on basic tech that they've patented. This works for companies that actually invent and build things. The problem comes when you have shell companies that operate on the "buy patent portfolio, build nothing, and sue everybody" model.
The basic idea of patent/copyright/trademark law is that you own some abstract thing, and if anyone uses it without getting a license from you (at whatever price you like), you can take them to court and attempt to bankrupt them with legal costs.
No. The basic idea of patent/copyright law is to make it more beneficial to release material into the public instead of hoarding it as a trade secret, in order to advance general knowledge and enrich society by granting a limited monopoly. Besides, anybody can go to court under any number of contract and business laws, and attempt to muscle someone into settling - that's the American legal system in action. Even if you haven't done anything, you still have to pay a lawyer to respond, go to court, etc., just to keep some crank from trying to rip you off. Of course, the trial lawyers all say it's to protect the little guy - if we forced the plaintiff to bear the costs of trial and discovery if they get ruled against, the lawyers would complain that the system is biased against the little guy, they'd never have money to mount a successful attack.
Expensive court time is not something inherent in copyright/patent law, but is a problem endemic in the US legal system in general. Same for trademarks - except trademarks are covered more under trade dress/unfair competition/consumer protection laws.
Um, isn't Microsoft going to release a competing music service later this year (pissing off everybody else who had gotten assurances that Microsoft was just going to provide WMA tech, and not compete directly)? Unless they're also going to release AAC-only files, shutting out the rest of the WMA players, then they've got BOATLOADS of competition for iTunes.
Basically HP saw that anybody who tried to use WMAs in a competing music service was eventually going to get swallowed up/squished by Microsoft, and condemmed to selling commodity players. Instead of going that route, they signed up to sell high-margin music players, probably with a cut for every customer they sign for iTunes. Now THAT's real competition right there, and Microsoft doesn't like that - no siree...
Besides - if other services wanted to get their stuff on iPods, all they have to do is sell em as straight MP3s. iPod will play that with no problems.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can only listen to iTunes content on an iPod.
You can play DRM-encoded AAC iTunes content on iPods, other iTunes equipped Macs and PCs, burn the content to CD, and stream your AAC library to other Macs/PCs on the local network.
However, it doesn't matter. You could turn your argument on it's head and state that you can only listen to DRM-WMA content on DRM-WMA devices (and exactly how many WMA devices currently support DRM-locked WMA files?), whereas you can listen to DRM-encoded AAC files on any iPod/HP Music Player/Mini iPod or iTunes equipped Mac or PC.
Both would still pale in comparison to the number of devices that can support MP3s. Microsoft is pissed because the choices that HP is offering doesn't include their brand of proprietary lock, weakening the chances that WMA will become the new.DOC of the media world.
Flooz and Beanz died because they required merchants to purchase Flooz and Beanz reward points at a pretty bad markup. The startup I was working for at the time did extensive research into these types of "loyalty/incentive" reward currencies - as I recall, Flooz make something like 15% off of each sale, and you could only purchase/redeem in lots of like $50-100. As a consequence, instead of being a cash replacement, they became merchant-issued gift certificates, ultimately redeemable only by Flooz. Of course, if Flooz ever went belly up, your points became worthless (which they did.)
The rise of services like PayPal and Billpoint, which gave average merchants the ability to process credit cards, killed more cumbersome loyalty/reward-oriented services like Flooz. No point in having to spend your own money on points that might not be redeemed in your own business, if you could just charge customers directly on their credit/debit card. Netcentives is another company that operated in that same space (they issued reward points that could be exchanged for airline miles, etc.) - they died because all the "old model" companies that they worked with eventually got up to speed with internet-enabled commerce, making their role as a middleman unnecessary.
There's a big problem with micropayments vs. cash or credit. The problem is that most people don't already have micropayment accounts set up with cash available. This tends to inhibit the kind of on-the-spot impulse buy that micropayments are supposed to be good for.
For example, for $.25, users can download a custom ring-tone for their cell phone. If you rig it up so that a user has to go to a website, try out the ring, set up an account either with a credit card or paypal, and THEN debit a resulting micropayment account for the $.25, you're going to get a lot fewer customers than say, charging their cellphone account for the ring.
What about items that are soley online? Let's assume some author or artist (or director) puts out a series online. Every weekly installment costs the user $.25. If you're a die-hard fan, it'd be easier to prepay $5 for 20 episodes, than go to to the trouble of setting up a dedicated micropayment account JUST for the show. Conversely, if you just want to try it out, it'd be smarter to let you download a free episode in order to hook you onto the show, than to try and convince you to jump through the hoops of getting an account just to try the show.
Now, in both scenarios, it wouldn't be a problem if users ALREADY HAD ACCOUNTS with balances. The question is, how do you promote widespread adoption of these accounts, and convince people to keep money in them? Paypal pays interest on their accounts, but I'll be most users initate a transfer to their bank account the moment their Paypal account starts carrying a balance.
The best idea I can think of so far is to treat micropayment balances as play money - similar to gift card balances (I know they're real money, but you can't get that money back out again unless you buy something) or casino chips (where you can get real money back out again, but they're designed to look like play money to get you to spend freely.) With this idea in mind, you need to seed the market somehow. eBay/Paypal is already doing this with their points system, where you can purchase items on eBay and pay with a combination of cash/credit and eBay/Paypal points. Convincing an ISP to issue automatic BitPass accuonts to their customers upon signup, for example, would be another way of seeding the market.
With all this said though, BitPass only recently (just toward the end of December) came off of their beta program. Since the number of merchants using it is still pretty low, it may be much too soon to judge how well BitPass is doing. Personally, I think someone should pick up the eCash idea that PayPal originally was built around - anyone remember that? Beaming crypto-derived credits from one Palm device to another - there are a hell of a lot more handheld devices (phones, PDAs, etc.) now than there were in 1999. They'd be a heck of a lot cheaper to get into circulation than smart cards, especially since DirectTV tends to sue anyone trying to do research into using smart cards in the United States...
Basically, there's an SEC rule that says companies with over a certain number of shareholders have to act like public companies, and file disclosures (10Ks, 10Qs, etc.) Essentially, they're going to be forced to act like a public company (which is expensive - think of all that paper that has to go out), without having the benefit of raising new money. Google has three choices in this event:
1. Reduce the number of shareholders so they're not subject to the rule. 2. Live with it (ie, pay more, and be subject to more regulation, without the benefits of an IPO.) 3. Go ahead and go public, and get new money for their trouble, plus allowing investors to cash out at some future date.
Given the current market and Google's dominance in the search engine field, #3 doesn't sound like a half-bad choice.
When the scam is over, Darl McBride and Co. better be rotting in Federal prision for a long, long time, otherwise it will be a very bad preceedent. If they get away with what they're trying to do (jamming legal monkey wrenches in other companies in hopes of extorting money from them, while simultaneously boosting their stock price so insiders can sell) then it becomes a model way for OTHER unsavory characters to go around doing the same thing.
In other words, if EVERYONE at SCO isn't taken out to the back of the woodshed and dealt a fatal blow when it's all over, then every frigging sleazeball lawyer in the United States will start whispering into their CEO's ear... "Well, there is another option. Do you know much about Darl McBride and SCO?"
Google could fight back by reserving shares for "geek" investors. I'm sure loyalists bent to sending a message to SCO would gladly pay the current offering price... especially since IPO's are pretty much impossible to get on the ground floor by regular joes without some sort of securities contact.
Actually, the RIAA is right - raids by company agents (either on behalf of the RIAA or the MPAA) are nothing new, and have been conducted against street vendors, mom & pop shops, and mass pirating operations in the past. HOWEVER, these types of raids have ALWAYS involved the cooperation of local and state law enforcement - the company agents ID the culprits, gather evidence (usually in the form of photographs, purchased merchandise, etc.), and once an air-tight case is built, the raid is conducted, by regular law enforcement with company assistance.
From the article, it sounds like they've decided to forgo local law enforcement cooperation, and go the way of the BSA (no not the boy scouts) and tackle suspects as a law unto themselves. The "voluntary" forfeiture aspect is particularly troubling, since what it amounts to is "We know you're committing a crime - hand over the evidence and we won't send you to jail." Since these private contractors have no power of arrest, and the only legal recourse is to haul these vendors into court and present actual evidence, what it amounts to is circumventing the normal process of law (ie, vigilantism.) By using the threat of force (the suggestion that you WILL get hauled off to jail is a pretty good threat) to take property - when you don't have those powers, some might call it a pretty good bluff. I'd call it a con game and call the cops on these guys instead.
Sounds like Apple is going for mass-mass production of the iPod/iPod mini players to get per-unit costs down. Having a guaranteed buyer for a significant portion of them allows Apple to produce that many units without having to worry about excess inventory on their end.
Look for Apple to either make more per iPod on the ones that they sell, plus the revenue on units that they wholesale to HP. Also, I'd expect the recent shortages of iPods to be a thing of the past once manufacturing is ramped up. This is great news for 3rd party equipment manufacturers (like Belkin, and th replacement battery sellers) as they get to sell more product, at possibly lower prices.
Plus, Apple gets more clout with record distributors when negotiating future rates (or trying to get hard-to-license songs) since the available pool of iTunes/iPod users will grow.
This is win-win-win, for Apple, Apple partners, and iPod/iTunes buyers/users. The only people this would be bad news for are Microsoft and the other WMA player folks.
If I recall, Mao declared a certain sparrow a pest (the propaganda was that the bird was stealing valuable grain) so they embarked on a nationwide campaign to exterminate the bird. Little kids beat pans to drive birds away from their nesting sites, hunters used nets, rocks, etc. Of course, it turned out the sparrow was a needed predator, to control the insects that eventually ravaged their grain crops...
The question is, what does this have to do with El Nino?
Slashdot Mirror
James Cameron may have spawned the Terminator franchise, but he had no connection T3 (the film was directed by Jonathan Mostow.) Rumor has it that Cameron was planning to buy back the rights to the Terminator franchise, and then produce/direct his own script, but was outbid. When the guys who bought the Terminator rights tried to hire him for T3, Cameron turned them down.
It would be interesting for receiving SMTP servers to portscan the IP source for sender servers that it has never seen before to see if it is a server that has been compromised and is a zombie. If it is, then it rejects the mail, and puts in a time-limited RBL to prevent bandwidth-consuming resends. Sure, it wouldn't be long before the next trojan seals the ports behind it, and uses an active query to some central source (which could be tracked and disabled), but it would render all the existing zombies useless.
now, here's another fun question. why, if this problem has been boiling up for five years now (and it has, hasn't it?) has some group not already tried to quash it?
Plenty of people have, but many people seem to have the mindset that "you can just delete it" and "it's just a fact of e-mail on the internet these days." Congress with their "you CAN SPAM everybody too" act hasn't helped a bit, and unfortunately, as anti-spammers have slammed the door on spammers (by changing the default for mailservers so that they no longer relay - a legacy of a more genteel network, reporting spammers to ISPs, setting up blocklists and blacklists to whip rogue ISPs into line), spammers have gotten much more sophisticated.
These days, spammers utilize exploits and e-mail trojans to take over machines and use them as zombies to mask their trail. They'll try and hack webforms to inject messages, forge e-mails to come from domains that have opposed them in the past (joe-jobbing), and re-route visitors through a labyrinth of foreign and domestic servers in order to distance themselves from their pusuers. In other words, spamming has become a criminal enterprise, with well established tools and tactics, and multiple layers of obfuscation to keep the law off their tails.
Short of throwing away the SMTP protocol, not much can stop spammers now - other than maybe a targeted takedown by the FBI (drug cartel style). Unless steps are taken, everybody will eventually go to a whitelist-style defense, which will do nothing to prevent the hijacking and waste of bandwidth that the spammers will attempt, but will at least keep the end users somewhat sane. The e-mail system administrators on the other hand...
For my accounts, I'm getting a combined total of 300+ pieces of spam per day, out of an average of maybe 325 total e-mails. That works out to 2100 pieces of spam per week, or 8400 pieces of spam per month. It's eating up a LOT of my time, even after SpamAssassin w/ bayes and some custom procmail rules have looked at them. It wouldn't be too bad except for the spammers who deliberately craft their spam to try and evade SpamAssassin with bayes - for them I have to manually tune and tweak my filters.
This doesn't take into account the time I have to spend dealing with spammers forging e-mails from my domain, or doing dictionary attacks on non-existent users in my domain. It's gotten to the point where it's now an economical use of my time to integrate and debug a challenge and response whitelisting system, as opposed to manually reviewing trapped spam messages for false positives.
Mind you, I'm having to deal with all the above, in addition to trying to get work done. Why do I have to deal with all that? Because e-mail is my primary method of communication. As an analogy, if my e-mail box was my telephone, I'd be hanging up on telemarketers at a rate of 1 call every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Would the burden of proof not be on the owner of the database who says their material was stolen?
It would be. However, the entrenched competitor would have the deep pockets to put up a lot of legal trouble for the upstart... who would likely not have that kind of money. It's copyright law based on the golden rule - he who has the gold, rules. For example, Wikipedia would get 100 years of protection for any facts that it had - but on the other hand, would suddenly become a target for anyone with money in their pockets, and a vested interest in keeping Wikipedia out of their market.
Also, remember. Copyright extends protection for 100 years. The most trivial of facts, once compiled, would be out of the reach of everyone (think Almanacs - copy anything out of one, and you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.)
We should argue that it should be illegal to fix your car in your driveway, since it robs tax-paying mechanics of their livelihood.
Or that car hoods should be welded shut to prevent illegal tampering that might run afoul of national anti-pollution standards? Don't laugh, but the stupider the idea is, the more likely that some damnfool in congress is going to actually use it. If you look at California, there are MANY laws that require certification and testing of EVERYTHING. It's just a few more steps to outright bans (ie, the "if it ain't illegal, it ought to be" school of thought.)
Don't give em any more crazy ideas than they've already got!
Hehehe, mod this guy up - total genius.
I don't think there's a double standard at all. Someone breaks into a credit card site, is busted immediately, no real effect on the Slashdot population other than as a topic for discussion. Someone spams 90% of the slashdot readership, and in some cases, 90% of the users that slashdotters have to do tech support or network administration for, on a DAILY BASIS, and becomes the focus of a lot of angry geeks. I think the magnitude of the reaction is dependent on how much it affects the person doing the reacting... in this case, I'm not suprised that people want to string these bastards up.
I've already manually kicked the SpamAssassin score for Habeas to -.5. If things don't get better, I may help out the bayes filter by turning Habeas scoring off (set to 0). Habeas should be spitting brass tacks PRwise - every day that goes by without a peep from them just enboldens other spammers thinking about trying the same stunt.
After all, Habeas was whitelisted because they promised legal action against spammers infringing on their copyrights... well, the spammers are infringing. Where are those spam-eating lawyers we were promised?
Going through the book and actually reading it out loud probably did more for your long term memory than playing it while you were off in fairyland...
Reading the manual probably provided enough information to remember and dissect the info in your dreams, but the tape probably prompted your brain to chew on it (as well as providing cues for sections you might not have remembered.)
I think you should take it for granted that your brain is going to do something productive while your sleeping - doing a bit of suggestion, and slipping in some audio cues to act as a cheat sheet can help as well. A full night's worth of sleep is a crucial ingredient, of course - no way you can speed cram material, take in an hour or two of sleep, and be able to remember much of anything past what's in your short-term buffer the next day.
The last time I looked at AR, there were the following issues:
1. Tracking. This is a biggie, since you want to make sure that what you want to add is seamlessly integrated to what you're actually seeing. Things like GPS, intertial tracking, etc. are needed, but suffer from lag and displacement error (very disorienting when you turn, and an object suddenly ghosts from one point to another). Magnetic and edge-based tracking also have issues outside of a carefully controlled environment.
2. Display (which leads to weight and power issues.) Do you use a half silvered system which superimposes items on your field of view (ghosts), or do you use dual cameras with a full opaqued HMD to simulate vision? The first method is less realistic, the second method is cumbersome even with modern ccd cameras and displays.
3. Cost. It takes money to equip enough soldiers with this kind of equipment, and build an environment that can use all of the bells and whistles to maximum effect. For less money and prep time, you can do a blank-fire exercise in a purpose-built structure, and you can run many more soldiers through. Yes, with well designed AR (which doesn't always have to rely on soldiers equipped with HMDs, BTW - stereophonic headsets can be used to "augment" reality very well) can enhance a training experience. Problem is, we aren't even spending the money to do blank-fire exercises (regular army is much better trained than reserve/nat guard, but reserve and nat guard are on long deployments also). Unless AR equipment becomes the next gamer sensation, resulting in readily available, super-cheap, high-end, and reliable equipment, don't expect any major deployments of AR based training tools.
As to why VR is more widespread than AR, VR is an easier problem, since your entire environment is in the computer. Integrating a changing environment (the user is moving, thereby changing what needs to be shown) with a changing virtual environment, outside of a tethered research lab or CAVE is not an easy task.
America's Army was built on top of the Unreal engine, so there's at least one pre-existing model for development out there. Not only that, but America's Army is multi-platform (Mac and Linux, as well as the all-pervasive Windows PC) with minimal (probably about a month or two) lag between Windows and non-Windows releases. For a free game, this is pretty good - plenty of for-profit companies can't even get a multiplatform release out at all, much less one that keeps the feature lag to a minimum.
Personally, I'd love for them to incorporate more training classes (land nav, care and feeding of your M16A2, chemical warfare, etc.) as well as extending the existing training on first aid. Heh, they've even got the damn Powerpoint-powered classrooms down. Just wait till the Navy releases their simulator - take marine nav and train onboard a ship, taking bearing, plotting course, and trying to figure out if the light in front of you is another ship or a lighthouse...
Oh, it just might get better than that. IBM's been poking around the connection between SCO and the Canopy Group. With luck, not only will SCO be a smoking crater, but the principals of the Canopy Group will be spending lots of time in Federal prison.
Especially when we have LEO capability. The shuttles are flying pieces of crap, but they DO fly, and are capable of lifting a respectable payload into orbit. Combine that with a schedule of unmanned launches, and we can get a pretty nice cache of materials into orbit. Plus, there's the idea of burning a little bit more fuel and decoupling the external fuel tank later, so you get to re-use the shell by putting it into orbit.
In the 60's, we did things the hard way - straight from Earth to the Moon in one shot, just to prove we could do it. Today, we should be building tools in space (tugs, transports, crew modules) and just tow them into a lunar orbit, or to one of the Lagrange points. We've got a space station - either use it, or start stripping it for parts. Also, back then, we were racing against the Russians - now we can hire them for pennies on the dollar for what it would cost to do it ourselves to put stuff (ie fuel, raw materials, food, people) into orbit for us.
Unfortunately, what I'm suspecting is happening is that Bush is using the lure of more aerospace pork barrel spending to boost his chances of getting bills passed, and thus getting reelected. If he was serious about getting the US to the moon, he'd be turning the task over to private enterprise, instead of giving NASA a piddling 1 billion to do what really amounts to a big feasibility study...
Even in the IP world, there are rules. For example patent portfolios and patent cross licensing exist to prevent this kind of all out attack - you don't sue a competitor over basic tech that you've patented because you probably are infringing on basic tech that they've patented. This works for companies that actually invent and build things. The problem comes when you have shell companies that operate on the "buy patent portfolio, build nothing, and sue everybody" model.
The basic idea of patent/copyright/trademark law is that you own some abstract thing, and if anyone uses it without getting a license from you (at whatever price you like), you can take them to court and attempt to bankrupt them with legal costs.
No. The basic idea of patent/copyright law is to make it more beneficial to release material into the public instead of hoarding it as a trade secret, in order to advance general knowledge and enrich society by granting a limited monopoly. Besides, anybody can go to court under any number of contract and business laws, and attempt to muscle someone into settling - that's the American legal system in action. Even if you haven't done anything, you still have to pay a lawyer to respond, go to court, etc., just to keep some crank from trying to rip you off. Of course, the trial lawyers all say it's to protect the little guy - if we forced the plaintiff to bear the costs of trial and discovery if they get ruled against, the lawyers would complain that the system is biased against the little guy, they'd never have money to mount a successful attack.
Expensive court time is not something inherent in copyright/patent law, but is a problem endemic in the US legal system in general. Same for trademarks - except trademarks are covered more under trade dress/unfair competition/consumer protection laws.
Um, isn't Microsoft going to release a competing music service later this year (pissing off everybody else who had gotten assurances that Microsoft was just going to provide WMA tech, and not compete directly)? Unless they're also going to release AAC-only files, shutting out the rest of the WMA players, then they've got BOATLOADS of competition for iTunes.
Basically HP saw that anybody who tried to use WMAs in a competing music service was eventually going to get swallowed up/squished by Microsoft, and condemmed to selling commodity players. Instead of going that route, they signed up to sell high-margin music players, probably with a cut for every customer they sign for iTunes. Now THAT's real competition right there, and Microsoft doesn't like that - no siree...
Besides - if other services wanted to get their stuff on iPods, all they have to do is sell em as straight MP3s. iPod will play that with no problems.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can only listen to iTunes content on an iPod.
.DOC of the media world.
You can play DRM-encoded AAC iTunes content on iPods, other iTunes equipped Macs and PCs, burn the content to CD, and stream your AAC library to other Macs/PCs on the local network.
However, it doesn't matter. You could turn your argument on it's head and state that you can only listen to DRM-WMA content on DRM-WMA devices (and exactly how many WMA devices currently support DRM-locked WMA files?), whereas you can listen to DRM-encoded AAC files on any iPod/HP Music Player/Mini iPod or iTunes equipped Mac or PC.
Both would still pale in comparison to the number of devices that can support MP3s. Microsoft is pissed because the choices that HP is offering doesn't include their brand of proprietary lock, weakening the chances that WMA will become the new
Flooz and Beanz died because they required merchants to purchase Flooz and Beanz reward points at a pretty bad markup. The startup I was working for at the time did extensive research into these types of "loyalty/incentive" reward currencies - as I recall, Flooz make something like 15% off of each sale, and you could only purchase/redeem in lots of like $50-100. As a consequence, instead of being a cash replacement, they became merchant-issued gift certificates, ultimately redeemable only by Flooz. Of course, if Flooz ever went belly up, your points became worthless (which they did.)
The rise of services like PayPal and Billpoint, which gave average merchants the ability to process credit cards, killed more cumbersome loyalty/reward-oriented services like Flooz. No point in having to spend your own money on points that might not be redeemed in your own business, if you could just charge customers directly on their credit/debit card. Netcentives is another company that operated in that same space (they issued reward points that could be exchanged for airline miles, etc.) - they died because all the "old model" companies that they worked with eventually got up to speed with internet-enabled commerce, making their role as a middleman unnecessary.
There's a big problem with micropayments vs. cash or credit. The problem is that most people don't already have micropayment accounts set up with cash available. This tends to inhibit the kind of on-the-spot impulse buy that micropayments are supposed to be good for.
For example, for $.25, users can download a custom ring-tone for their cell phone. If you rig it up so that a user has to go to a website, try out the ring, set up an account either with a credit card or paypal, and THEN debit a resulting micropayment account for the $.25, you're going to get a lot fewer customers than say, charging their cellphone account for the ring.
What about items that are soley online? Let's assume some author or artist (or director) puts out a series online. Every weekly installment costs the user $.25. If you're a die-hard fan, it'd be easier to prepay $5 for 20 episodes, than go to to the trouble of setting up a dedicated micropayment account JUST for the show. Conversely, if you just want to try it out, it'd be smarter to let you download a free episode in order to hook you onto the show, than to try and convince you to jump through the hoops of getting an account just to try the show.
Now, in both scenarios, it wouldn't be a problem if users ALREADY HAD ACCOUNTS with balances. The question is, how do you promote widespread adoption of these accounts, and convince people to keep money in them? Paypal pays interest on their accounts, but I'll be most users initate a transfer to their bank account the moment their Paypal account starts carrying a balance.
The best idea I can think of so far is to treat micropayment balances as play money - similar to gift card balances (I know they're real money, but you can't get that money back out again unless you buy something) or casino chips (where you can get real money back out again, but they're designed to look like play money to get you to spend freely.) With this idea in mind, you need to seed the market somehow. eBay/Paypal is already doing this with their points system, where you can purchase items on eBay and pay with a combination of cash/credit and eBay/Paypal points. Convincing an ISP to issue automatic BitPass accuonts to their customers upon signup, for example, would be another way of seeding the market.
With all this said though, BitPass only recently (just toward the end of December) came off of their beta program. Since the number of merchants using it is still pretty low, it may be much too soon to judge how well BitPass is doing. Personally, I think someone should pick up the eCash idea that PayPal originally was built around - anyone remember that? Beaming crypto-derived credits from one Palm device to another - there are a hell of a lot more handheld devices (phones, PDAs, etc.) now than there were in 1999. They'd be a heck of a lot cheaper to get into circulation than smart cards, especially since DirectTV tends to sue anyone trying to do research into using smart cards in the United States...
Basically, there's an SEC rule that says companies with over a certain number of shareholders have to act like public companies, and file disclosures (10Ks, 10Qs, etc.) Essentially, they're going to be forced to act like a public company (which is expensive - think of all that paper that has to go out), without having the benefit of raising new money. Google has three choices in this event:
1. Reduce the number of shareholders so they're not subject to the rule.
2. Live with it (ie, pay more, and be subject to more regulation, without the benefits of an IPO.)
3. Go ahead and go public, and get new money for their trouble, plus allowing investors to cash out at some future date.
Given the current market and Google's dominance in the search engine field, #3 doesn't sound like a half-bad choice.
When the scam is over, Darl McBride and Co. better be rotting in Federal prision for a long, long time, otherwise it will be a very bad preceedent. If they get away with what they're trying to do (jamming legal monkey wrenches in other companies in hopes of extorting money from them, while simultaneously boosting their stock price so insiders can sell) then it becomes a model way for OTHER unsavory characters to go around doing the same thing.
In other words, if EVERYONE at SCO isn't taken out to the back of the woodshed and dealt a fatal blow when it's all over, then every frigging sleazeball lawyer in the United States will start whispering into their CEO's ear... "Well, there is another option. Do you know much about Darl McBride and SCO?"
Google could fight back by reserving shares for "geek" investors. I'm sure loyalists bent to sending a message to SCO would gladly pay the current offering price... especially since IPO's are pretty much impossible to get on the ground floor by regular joes without some sort of securities contact.
Actually, the RIAA is right - raids by company agents (either on behalf of the RIAA or the MPAA) are nothing new, and have been conducted against street vendors, mom & pop shops, and mass pirating operations in the past. HOWEVER, these types of raids have ALWAYS involved the cooperation of local and state law enforcement - the company agents ID the culprits, gather evidence (usually in the form of photographs, purchased merchandise, etc.), and once an air-tight case is built, the raid is conducted, by regular law enforcement with company assistance.
From the article, it sounds like they've decided to forgo local law enforcement cooperation, and go the way of the BSA (no not the boy scouts) and tackle suspects as a law unto themselves. The "voluntary" forfeiture aspect is particularly troubling, since what it amounts to is "We know you're committing a crime - hand over the evidence and we won't send you to jail." Since these private contractors have no power of arrest, and the only legal recourse is to haul these vendors into court and present actual evidence, what it amounts to is circumventing the normal process of law (ie, vigilantism.) By using the threat of force (the suggestion that you WILL get hauled off to jail is a pretty good threat) to take property - when you don't have those powers, some might call it a pretty good bluff. I'd call it a con game and call the cops on these guys instead.
Sounds like Apple is going for mass-mass production of the iPod/iPod mini players to get per-unit costs down. Having a guaranteed buyer for a significant portion of them allows Apple to produce that many units without having to worry about excess inventory on their end.
Look for Apple to either make more per iPod on the ones that they sell, plus the revenue on units that they wholesale to HP. Also, I'd expect the recent shortages of iPods to be a thing of the past once manufacturing is ramped up. This is great news for 3rd party equipment manufacturers (like Belkin, and th replacement battery sellers) as they get to sell more product, at possibly lower prices.
Plus, Apple gets more clout with record distributors when negotiating future rates (or trying to get hard-to-license songs) since the available pool of iTunes/iPod users will grow.
This is win-win-win, for Apple, Apple partners, and iPod/iTunes buyers/users. The only people this would be bad news for are Microsoft and the other WMA player folks.
If I recall, Mao declared a certain sparrow a pest (the propaganda was that the bird was stealing valuable grain) so they embarked on a nationwide campaign to exterminate the bird. Little kids beat pans to drive birds away from their nesting sites, hunters used nets, rocks, etc. Of course, it turned out the sparrow was a needed predator, to control the insects that eventually ravaged their grain crops...
The question is, what does this have to do with El Nino?