Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding
on
Internet Movies Before DVD
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's all about the perception of scarcity. If you dangle the threat that someday, access to commodity X will be restricted (ie, made more expensive) or taken away, it creates an incentive to hoard. Whether it be guns, alcohol, rare paintings, media, etc., if you have the reasonable belief that what you can get today for $5, you cannot get tommorrow for $5, you will get as much as you can, while you can.
For example, there are people who archive useful websites, because sometimes, these websites change (become less useful) or disappear completely. You and I would probably not devote much time to this, because we know that we can usually rely on the Internet Archive or Google's cache to make snapshots (not always, but that's the risk we're taking). However, if it was information that had a reasonable chance of not being preserved due to external influence (ie, internal Diebold memo on how to fix elections for the highest bidder), then people would hoard it just for the sake for hoarding it, due to its potential value in scarcity. Ironically, because of that potential value, it would probably be less scarce than if it was a run of the mill technical document.
Given the movie/music industry's more or less stated goal of converting all of their "property" into licensable forms, preferably forms that expire on you (remember Divx - not DivX;), but the DVD you could rent to view for 24, then throw away?), hoarding what you can get, while you can still get it, isn't as crazy an idea as you might think. Of course, there's always the other explanation of hoarding specific items - some people are just natural-born packrats.
Just goes to show you that when our "elected representatives" look at us, the electorate, all they see are pockets to be picked. Whose idea was it to concentrate all that power in the hands of the very few, anyways?
I already pay 7.65% for FICA (ie, Social Security), but were I to run my own business and turn a profit, I would have to pay double that, since I would be both employee and employer. Of the money I get after FICA, state and federal income taxes, and state mandated unemployment insurance, I then get charged 8.25% in sales taxes, surcharges and strange fees for my electric, water, gas, and telephone bills (including that 3% tax left over from the Spanish American war, which was well over a century ago), and twice a year, I have to fork over money to the local county for the privilege of owning tangible property.
And for this I get: roads that still need fixing, bribery and corruption scandals that cost taxpayers money, ever-increasingly complex laws that require you to have a law degree just for self-defense, school districts that wail and complain that they need bond money, but then turn around and spend the money building shopping plazas on top of abandoned oil fields, leading to the project being declared unusable, and of course, the innumerable tax breaks and pork-barrel projects doled out by our collective congresscritters to keep their districts happy at the expense of the rest of the United States.
It's a pity that elections couldn't take place in late April, say a week after tax day. Oh well, I might as well start working on my taxes for NEXT year...
There will be plenty of these boxes (so a local cable co-op can grab off-the-air signal to transmit to subscribers), but I'm not sure they will within the price range of most consumers. To give an example, a selective channel amp (to grab only channel 13, and insert it into a CATV multiplexer) costs about $120-$200 on eBay.
I'm in the same boat as you, so maybe some kind soul will mass produce these things. Otherwise, you're face with buying several converter boxes, setting each one on a particular channel, and creating your own in-house CATV system. I guess a couple of houses on the block (or an apartment complex) could gang up their money, buy enough of the converters to cover local channels, have a multiplexer, and create their own CATV system...
Which credit card company didn't take a fraud complaint seriously?
All of them don't. If you get your number stolen, they just issue you a new one. Unless there's a mass compromise, they ignore the thieves, as (to them) it's not worth the time and effort to go after them, even if you give them lots of leads. After all, they aren't out the money, and neither are the banks involved (there's an issuing bank - your bank, and the merchant bank - the bank that processes the payment) - the people who get screwed are the merchants.
Sounds like you've been listening to the car salesperson. Yes, you can recover some kinetic energy through regenerative braking, but I doubt you'd be able to recover enough to supply your hybrid with enough power to top off the battery pack unless you do nothing but high-acceleration stop & go driving. Why? Because at low speeds, you're pulling power from the electric motors, which means that you're getting less and less juice from the pack, back into the pack (no free energy for you.) At some point, the gas engine will have to kick in to supply power to the pack.
Ditto with freeway driving - you will use the pack to help with acceleration, but with little, or no braking opportunities (unless you happen to hit convenient patches of traffic every couple of miles) you WILL be tapping some of that gas engine capacity to top off your battery pack.
Mind you, tapping the gas to charge the hybrid is what is SUPPOSED to happen. Regen braking is just a bonus that helps the efficiency levels, just as substituting the electric motor on low speed driving, and as a high speed acceleration assist to the gas engine helps to curb fuel use and engine pollution. That's the main reason you get good fuel milage. Remember, if you need to sudden stops, regen gets little to none of that because your regular brakes vent off most of that energy as heat (as all normal cars do) in the time that you do the stop.
Emulating 68k stuff is easy, thanks to the cumulative efforts of some very talented individuals working on multiple platforms. But what about decent PPC emulation? Are they going to force recompiles of new software, and completely abandon support for old PPC binaries, or are they going to have really slow support of PPC software?
The industry already has sunk costs in existing distribution channels. Keeping those channels costs them little, moving to new channels costs them quite a bit. Also, there are many jobs involved in the old channel, existing bribe/kickback schemes, etc. It's easier to hire a bunch of lawyers/publicists, and keep raking in the money coming in through existing channels, than it is to actively build new ways of selling/distributing product. The last person in the industry to push for a new distribution channel (DVD's) got his ass canned, not a great way to encourage people to take risks.
If you consider that less than 50 years ago, many of the markets they sell to today didn't exist, resisting change is an incredibly stupid thing to do. But given the current copyright laws, there's no reason why they CAN'T resist change, and get away with it, at least for a while. What we need is more competition - you should expect stagnation when you have government enforced monopolies (which are what copyrights are.)
Does anyone even watch (live) TV anymore? I know that I don't aside from catching the 3 minutes of weather on the tube in the mornings on occasion, or watching PBS on weekends. Everything else is either Netflix or ReplayTV. Heck, I even timeshift my radio programs. The only thing I spend time on on a regular basis is the newspaper (Wall Street Journal), which, unlike what people might think, is actually a very broad spectrum, 1st class paper. It's getting maybe a little TOO broad for my tastes (they're adding a weekend section come September), but the reporting is definitely worth reading on a daily basis.
What's really hilarious is that there IS an episode where The Doctor's backup copy is lost during a mission, only to be rediscovered hundreds of years later by the inhabitants of the world that Voyager visited (not to be confused with the episode where The Doctor's program is abducted by what can only be called a "fence" for stolen tech.) Given that they had the ability to duplicate him once, (not to mention, had enough leftover spare parts to give to the Hirojen) one can only guess why they didn't make better use of him.
Hormel is not trying to prevent the use of spam to describe UCE. They are trying to prevent the confustion of spam, which they are perfectly cool with, with SPAM(tm), which is a registered trademark of the Hormel company. Someone trademarking something called DSPAM(tm) is certainly treading on SPAM(tm), and that's what the commotion is about.
All you have to do is point me towards where the anti-spam vendors are using the word in conjunction with the food industry and I'm right with you.
They're not protecting the mark against use in the computer industry. They're protecting the mark against becoming genericized. Preserving the difference between SPAM as a product, and spam as a class of unwanted advertising is critical to that. Not to mention, that on the web, you definitely have issues with mark dilution when people keep drawing connections between the two (witness the old Slashdot icon for UCE, which was a can of SPAM, for example.)
if holograms are so "easy" to make into self-aware AI's, then why did Tom & Harry have such trouble making a stable holomatrix
You answered your own question. Tom & Harry were trying to create a holomatrix from scratch, with none of the basic heuristic routines, human interaction routines, etc., that would have been present and taken for granted in an existing hologram. They would have been better off using an existing hologram as a template, and overloading them (like overloading a function) with the extra capabilities that they wanted in a doctor. It's the difference between taking an existing expert system and adding active problem solving to it, and writing an expert system from the ground up.
Of course, that little segment was written for comic relief, but it remains thus, the original question was, if the existing hologram templates CAN be converted into self-aware, or reasonable facimilies of self-aware beings, then it begs the question, are holograms AIs with limiters on them that restrict full self awareness, or are holograms programs complex enough to become self-aware?
Because some of us would rather not reward greedy municipalities with oodles of tax money from taxing celphones. Plus, once you get it working with Vonage, you should be able to set up your own wi-fi based VOIP services, and get service for free in places where you control the infrastructure.
The 2001/2002 Ford Escapes have to have the EEPROM flashed as part of a transmission recall. The days of software fixes for cars have been with us for a while.
Also completely missing from his article - the contributions (largely lost) of General Magic, which was the counterpoint to the Newton team (having been founded by ex-Apple engineers, like Andy Herzfield). They came out with the MagicCap OS, which was lightyears ahead of it's time (with a long-lasting lithium-ion batter, back in 1995!), and still (in my opinion) unmatched in it's ease of use. Surviving units from Sony and Motorola give a glimpse of what might have been. Unlike the Newton, programming for MagicCap devices really didn't take off.
Being able to program the USR Pilot (later the USR, then 3Com PalmPilot, before becoming the 3Com/Palm Palm), was the biggest reason for it's success. Thanks to the efforts of a handful of enthusiasts (like Darrin Massena), who got GCC working to cross-compile Palm-compatible 68k binaries, and to USR, for not getting bent out of shape by someone else using their header files, Pilot programming took off, a huge library of 3rd party freeware/shareware became available, and the dominance (for a time) of the Palm platform was assured.
Having remembered the original BG (I saw the original run), I wouldn't have watched the new one unless a whole bunch of my peers told me to watch it by any means necessary - it was that good. So at least in my case, yes, word of mouth was what got me to watch the new series, not the old name (which brings to mind 70's/80's era plotlines and set design, not to mention the endlessly recycled shot of vipers launching from Galactica.)
If the law were really there to 'serve and protect' there would only be one 'law of the road'. It would be, 'you drive safely'. With video in police cars, cases would be easy to make. The asshole passing on the right in rush hour, even though he is not exceeding the speed limit would be penalized while the guy running 110 in broad daylight, on an open road with no traffic, would be perfectly within his rights to do so
Man, where are my mod points when good posts like this come out? Someone mod this guy up!
I've had my ReplayTV crash on occassion (usually due to weirdness with one of the switches on my home network), so even off the shelf consumer PVRs aren't immune to downtime. Even without crashing, my ReplayTVs have to reboot every couple of days for software upgrades, etc., so I wouldn't be too concerned about maintaining perfect uptime. Just make sure your box doesn't go down while you're recording something or watching TV, and that should be about as much reliability as you really need.
Hell, if all Congress is good for is to write laws to restrict your competition and use the might of the US Government as your own private police force, we might as well act preemtively and ban the MPAA. Turnabout is fair play, in my opinion.
whoops, you're right, my brain short-circuited the problem. If you live in a state that allows 7-character plates, you can get *almost* all of the way there...
The thing is, when I go shopping at the grocery store, I know where things are, or I have a store circular that I can circle and cross off. When catalog shop, same deal - I can dog-ear the pages and be reasonably sure that I can continue compiling my list of things to buy days later.
When I'm shopping online, it's usually a pain in the ass to find things, and unless I remember to take a screenshot of my shopping cart, I'll lose all the work I've put into building my list.
Who really expects most shopping carts to still be there after 'a day or so' ???
While there are valid reasons for clearing out purchase info after a given amount of time, 20 min, or even 20 hrs is way too soon. A wishlist, or being able to save your cart is a great idea - I wish the places I shopped would let you do that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about the perception of scarcity. If you dangle the threat that someday, access to commodity X will be restricted (ie, made more expensive) or taken away, it creates an incentive to hoard. Whether it be guns, alcohol, rare paintings, media, etc., if you have the reasonable belief that what you can get today for $5, you cannot get tommorrow for $5, you will get as much as you can, while you can.
For example, there are people who archive useful websites, because sometimes, these websites change (become less useful) or disappear completely. You and I would probably not devote much time to this, because we know that we can usually rely on the Internet Archive or Google's cache to make snapshots (not always, but that's the risk we're taking). However, if it was information that had a reasonable chance of not being preserved due to external influence (ie, internal Diebold memo on how to fix elections for the highest bidder), then people would hoard it just for the sake for hoarding it, due to its potential value in scarcity. Ironically, because of that potential value, it would probably be less scarce than if it was a run of the mill technical document.
Given the movie/music industry's more or less stated goal of converting all of their "property" into licensable forms, preferably forms that expire on you (remember Divx - not DivX;), but the DVD you could rent to view for 24, then throw away?), hoarding what you can get, while you can still get it, isn't as crazy an idea as you might think. Of course, there's always the other explanation of hoarding specific items - some people are just natural-born packrats.
Oh yes, this marvel of engineering can be yours, for the low, low, price of $849.99.
I like the packaging, and the use of open source. But for that price, I think I'll pass.
Just goes to show you that when our "elected representatives" look at us, the electorate, all they see are pockets to be picked. Whose idea was it to concentrate all that power in the hands of the very few, anyways?
I already pay 7.65% for FICA (ie, Social Security), but were I to run my own business and turn a profit, I would have to pay double that, since I would be both employee and employer. Of the money I get after FICA, state and federal income taxes, and state mandated unemployment insurance, I then get charged 8.25% in sales taxes, surcharges and strange fees for my electric, water, gas, and telephone bills (including that 3% tax left over from the Spanish American war, which was well over a century ago), and twice a year, I have to fork over money to the local county for the privilege of owning tangible property.
And for this I get: roads that still need fixing, bribery and corruption scandals that cost taxpayers money, ever-increasingly complex laws that require you to have a law degree just for self-defense, school districts that wail and complain that they need bond money, but then turn around and spend the money building shopping plazas on top of abandoned oil fields, leading to the project being declared unusable, and of course, the innumerable tax breaks and pork-barrel projects doled out by our collective congresscritters to keep their districts happy at the expense of the rest of the United States.
It's a pity that elections couldn't take place in late April, say a week after tax day. Oh well, I might as well start working on my taxes for NEXT year...
There will be plenty of these boxes (so a local cable co-op can grab off-the-air signal to transmit to subscribers), but I'm not sure they will within the price range of most consumers. To give an example, a selective channel amp (to grab only channel 13, and insert it into a CATV multiplexer) costs about $120-$200 on eBay.
I'm in the same boat as you, so maybe some kind soul will mass produce these things. Otherwise, you're face with buying several converter boxes, setting each one on a particular channel, and creating your own in-house CATV system. I guess a couple of houses on the block (or an apartment complex) could gang up their money, buy enough of the converters to cover local channels, have a multiplexer, and create their own CATV system...
Which credit card company didn't take a fraud
complaint seriously?
All of them don't. If you get your number stolen, they just issue you a new one. Unless there's a mass compromise, they ignore the thieves, as (to them) it's not worth the time and effort to go after them, even if you give them lots of leads. After all, they aren't out the money, and neither are the banks involved (there's an issuing bank - your bank, and the merchant bank - the bank that processes the payment) - the people who get screwed are the merchants.
Sounds like you've been listening to the car salesperson. Yes, you can recover some kinetic energy through regenerative braking, but I doubt you'd be able to recover enough to supply your hybrid with enough power to top off the battery pack unless you do nothing but high-acceleration stop & go driving. Why? Because at low speeds, you're pulling power from the electric motors, which means that you're getting less and less juice from the pack, back into the pack (no free energy for you.) At some point, the gas engine will have to kick in to supply power to the pack.
Ditto with freeway driving - you will use the pack to help with acceleration, but with little, or no braking opportunities (unless you happen to hit convenient patches of traffic every couple of miles) you WILL be tapping some of that gas engine capacity to top off your battery pack.
Mind you, tapping the gas to charge the hybrid is what is SUPPOSED to happen. Regen braking is just a bonus that helps the efficiency levels, just as substituting the electric motor on low speed driving, and as a high speed acceleration assist to the gas engine helps to curb fuel use and engine pollution. That's the main reason you get good fuel milage. Remember, if you need to sudden stops, regen gets little to none of that because your regular brakes vent off most of that energy as heat (as all normal cars do) in the time that you do the stop.
Emulating 68k stuff is easy, thanks to the cumulative efforts of some very talented individuals working on multiple platforms. But what about decent PPC emulation? Are they going to force recompiles of new software, and completely abandon support for old PPC binaries, or are they going to have really slow support of PPC software?
The industry already has sunk costs in existing distribution channels. Keeping those channels costs them little, moving to new channels costs them quite a bit. Also, there are many jobs involved in the old channel, existing bribe/kickback schemes, etc. It's easier to hire a bunch of lawyers/publicists, and keep raking in the money coming in through existing channels, than it is to actively build new ways of selling/distributing product. The last person in the industry to push for a new distribution channel (DVD's) got his ass canned, not a great way to encourage people to take risks.
If you consider that less than 50 years ago, many of the markets they sell to today didn't exist, resisting change is an incredibly stupid thing to do. But given the current copyright laws, there's no reason why they CAN'T resist change, and get away with it, at least for a while. What we need is more competition - you should expect stagnation when you have government enforced monopolies (which are what copyrights are.)
Does anyone even watch (live) TV anymore? I know that I don't aside from catching the 3 minutes of weather on the tube in the mornings on occasion, or watching PBS on weekends. Everything else is either Netflix or ReplayTV. Heck, I even timeshift my radio programs. The only thing I spend time on on a regular basis is the newspaper (Wall Street Journal), which, unlike what people might think, is actually a very broad spectrum, 1st class paper. It's getting maybe a little TOO broad for my tastes (they're adding a weekend section come September), but the reporting is definitely worth reading on a daily basis.
What's really hilarious is that there IS an episode where The Doctor's backup copy is lost during a mission, only to be rediscovered hundreds of years later by the inhabitants of the world that Voyager visited (not to be confused with the episode where The Doctor's program is abducted by what can only be called a "fence" for stolen tech.) Given that they had the ability to duplicate him once, (not to mention, had enough leftover spare parts to give to the Hirojen) one can only guess why they didn't make better use of him.
Hormel is not trying to prevent the use of spam to describe UCE. They are trying to prevent the confustion of spam, which they are perfectly cool with, with SPAM(tm), which is a registered trademark of the Hormel company. Someone trademarking something called DSPAM(tm) is certainly treading on SPAM(tm), and that's what the commotion is about.
All you have to do is point me towards where the anti-spam vendors are using the word in conjunction with the food industry and I'm right with you.
They're not protecting the mark against use in the computer industry. They're protecting the mark against becoming genericized. Preserving the difference between SPAM as a product, and spam as a class of unwanted advertising is critical to that. Not to mention, that on the web, you definitely have issues with mark dilution when people keep drawing connections between the two (witness the old Slashdot icon for UCE, which was a can of SPAM, for example.)
if holograms are so "easy" to make into self-aware AI's, then why did Tom & Harry have such trouble making a stable holomatrix
You answered your own question. Tom & Harry were trying to create a holomatrix from scratch, with none of the basic heuristic routines, human interaction routines, etc., that would have been present and taken for granted in an existing hologram. They would have been better off using an existing hologram as a template, and overloading them (like overloading a function) with the extra capabilities that they wanted in a doctor. It's the difference between taking an existing expert system and adding active problem solving to it, and writing an expert system from the ground up.
Of course, that little segment was written for comic relief, but it remains thus, the original question was, if the existing hologram templates CAN be converted into self-aware, or reasonable facimilies of self-aware beings, then it begs the question, are holograms AIs with limiters on them that restrict full self awareness, or are holograms programs complex enough to become self-aware?
Because some of us would rather not reward greedy municipalities with oodles of tax money from taxing celphones. Plus, once you get it working with Vonage, you should be able to set up your own wi-fi based VOIP services, and get service for free in places where you control the infrastructure.
The 2001/2002 Ford Escapes have to have the EEPROM flashed as part of a transmission recall. The days of software fixes for cars have been with us for a while.
Also completely missing from his article - the contributions (largely lost) of General Magic, which was the counterpoint to the Newton team (having been founded by ex-Apple engineers, like Andy Herzfield). They came out with the MagicCap OS, which was lightyears ahead of it's time (with a long-lasting lithium-ion batter, back in 1995!), and still (in my opinion) unmatched in it's ease of use. Surviving units from Sony and Motorola give a glimpse of what might have been. Unlike the Newton, programming for MagicCap devices really didn't take off.
Being able to program the USR Pilot (later the USR, then 3Com PalmPilot, before becoming the 3Com/Palm Palm), was the biggest reason for it's success. Thanks to the efforts of a handful of enthusiasts (like Darrin Massena), who got GCC working to cross-compile Palm-compatible 68k binaries, and to USR, for not getting bent out of shape by someone else using their header files, Pilot programming took off, a huge library of 3rd party freeware/shareware became available, and the dominance (for a time) of the Palm platform was assured.
Having remembered the original BG (I saw the original run), I wouldn't have watched the new one unless a whole bunch of my peers told me to watch it by any means necessary - it was that good. So at least in my case, yes, word of mouth was what got me to watch the new series, not the old name (which brings to mind 70's/80's era plotlines and set design, not to mention the endlessly recycled shot of vipers launching from Galactica.)
If the law were really there to 'serve and protect' there would only be one 'law of the road'. It would be, 'you drive safely'. With video in police cars, cases would be easy to make. The asshole passing on the right in rush hour, even though he is not exceeding the speed limit would be penalized while the guy running 110 in broad daylight, on an open road with no traffic, would be perfectly within his rights to do so
Man, where are my mod points when good posts like this come out? Someone mod this guy up!
The MPAA is a group of businesses that works together to protect their right to the business. Know who else does that? The mafia. RICO, anyone?
Good call. I propose that from now on, we should refer to the MPAA/RIAA as the "Media Mafia". Who's with me?
# Be rock-solid stable 24/
I've had my ReplayTV crash on occassion (usually due to weirdness with one of the switches on my home network), so even off the shelf consumer PVRs aren't immune to downtime. Even without crashing, my ReplayTVs have to reboot every couple of days for software upgrades, etc., so I wouldn't be too concerned about maintaining perfect uptime. Just make sure your box doesn't go down while you're recording something or watching TV, and that should be about as much reliability as you really need.
Hell, if all Congress is good for is to write laws to restrict your competition and use the might of the US Government as your own private police force, we might as well act preemtively and ban the MPAA. Turnabout is fair play, in my opinion.
whoops, you're right, my brain short-circuited the problem. If you live in a state that allows 7-character plates, you can get *almost* all of the way there...
Actually, if you use hex, you should be able to get a 6-digit license plate that corresponds to a full IP-4 address...
Hmmm...
My question is, is the letter printed the original letter in its entirety, or has it been edited for length?
The thing is, when I go shopping at the grocery store, I know where things are, or I have a store circular that I can circle and cross off. When catalog shop, same deal - I can dog-ear the pages and be reasonably sure that I can continue compiling my list of things to buy days later.
When I'm shopping online, it's usually a pain in the ass to find things, and unless I remember to take a screenshot of my shopping cart, I'll lose all the work I've put into building my list.
Who really expects most shopping carts to still be there after 'a day or so' ???
While there are valid reasons for clearing out purchase info after a given amount of time, 20 min, or even 20 hrs is way too soon. A wishlist, or being able to save your cart is a great idea - I wish the places I shopped would let you do that.