Let me tell you a story. It is long, but it does get around to AMD, and how they are already on the path to big and evil.
Not all land is created equally. Some land, like that in Manhattan, is more valuable than others economically. Other land is more important environmentally. Let's say, for example, that an endangered species lives on that land. When Wal-Mart runs commercials that say "we are committed to the environment; for each store we build we preserve the same amount of land somewhere else", remember that they could be building on top of environmentally important land, and saving non-so-important land somewhere else.
In Texas, there is a large underground lake (called an aquifer) that supplies water to almost two million people, through natural springs and wells. While the aquifer itself is huge, only water that falls on a certain bit of it actually reaches the rock strata where the aquifer resides. Edwards Aquifer (http://www.edwardsaquifer.net/) is a precious natural resource that must be protected to ensure a safe drinking water supply for Texas.
To protect the small recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer, building restrictions are in place. I know, I know - some people will say that owners of land should be free to do what they want with that land. But I feel that protecting the environment is more important than the free market in this case. If you pollute your land with oil and gas runoff, it just doesn't affect your land - it pollutes the entire aquifer and all the water it provides. Even in a libertarian world someone who did so would (ideally) have their pants sued off, but then it would be too late and the aquifer would be contaminated. No, I prefer preventative law than post-contamination lawsuit.
With that said, developers are constantly trying to build on the Edwards Aquifer sensitive recharge zone. The northern most tip of this zone is in southern Austin, in a rather expensive region of Austin, and developers keep wanting to put large retail establishments there. (Houses can be built in the recharge area, so there are lots of customers. But developers with massive buildings and parking lots need to stay away.) The Save Our Springs Alliance (http://www.sosalliance.org/) has fought off Wal-Mart and Home Depot who tried to build in this area, using consumer education campaigns, lobbying, and lawsuits.
AMD is based in Austin. They have several campuses spread around town. And, as might make sense for business, they are trying to consolidate onto one campus. The problem, of course, is that they want to build their huge sprawling campus on top of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. See the Save Our Springs Alliace page (http://www.sosalliance.org/) and the Move AMD page (http://www.moveamd.com/) for details of the issues and struggle.
I am a big AMD fan. I like their processors and use them whenever I can.
That said, AMD is not so different from Home Depot and Wal-Mart and other big evil corporations in this regard. I will start bashing AMD's name and products if the proceed to build on the aquifer, because, as I said, I think some things are more important than free-market capitalism, and protecting Texas' greatest water resource is one of them.
For me, I expect it would be the Mentor Graphics EDA tools that would die a sudden death if I switched to a non-Windows system, as I would have little choice but to use them with WINE.
The tools are buggy enough in Windows. I can't imagine running them in WINE.
As it happens, the job that Dell offered me was in their laptop division. At that time (if not now) they designed their own laptop motherboards, and that (or a subset of that) would have been my job.
That is real engineering design. Of the items you mention, I think they are all valid, but I think they could be done with one pseudo-mechanical/electrical engineer overseeing one or two technicians.
Those aren't the kinds of things that would keep me employed.
Pretty soon, cutting costs comes at the expense of things like customer service, R&D, and other things that are required to maintain a viable, growing business.
Pretty soon? R&D is the first thing they cut when things go bad. Heck, I even watched a television show about Dell that explained precisely this as their corporate strategy.
I was offered an R&D job at Dell when I graduated from college years back. I am so glad I didn't take it; I would have been layed off in less than a year when the 2001 recession took effect. Instead I work for a company that invested in R&D through the recession and is now reaping those benefits.
Because normal humans grow sentimentally attached to things......even if those things are a distant, faceless corporation whose products were used years ago, or even just read about.
I worked for university network management in college, and for a year or two I had an SGI workstation before upgrading to a newer Sun station. It was something different, which made it memorable.
I dunno what you mean. I pay 28% taxes in the middle class. If I had more money, I could earn money on the stock market or other investments at 15% interest.
What happened to the days of the richest of the rich paying 60, 70, 80, 90% taxes?
I am a hardware designer at a medium-sized company.
I could call up a distributor and get 5-10 of any integrated circuit on the market that runs for less than $15 at absolutely no cost to me. More expensive ones would be fewer samples, but it could be done.
Sampling is the only way a distributor can sell a new part.
Even if that was not available, I have a whole cabinet full of parts where I requisitioned 15 from stock, used 13, and it costs less to throw away the other two than try to put them back on tape and reel for production use.
And boards will never be potted. Epoxy coating would make it impossible to rework the products, which is pretty much mandatory for anything except mass-market, consumer-grade junk. And how can you make mass-market, consumer-grade junk without better instruments available to test it all?
And my company makes instruments that can perform data acquisition - in other words, the exact same kind that could be used to digitize analog signals.
Daniel Lyons deserves to be banned from publishing in Forbes for his sidebar on Pamela Jones. Completely paints one side of the story without any attempt at balance, and uses quotes out of context to twist the meaning of the words.
>> When O'Gara's story about her quest appeared in Linux Business News, an online magazine, indignant bloggers went on the attack. They said the story was unethical and demanded that the site take it down. (So much for free speech.)
>> Jones responded by penning a pious thank-you to her defenders. "My faith in the human race is restored," she wrote. "It means so much to me to know that there is still a line, an ethical line, and some things we agree we ought never to do to a fellow human."
If I recall correctly, O'Gara's story attempted to question Jones' sexual orientation or something else of that nature, and Pamela Jones' reply about "an ethical line" refers to this.
Daniel Lyons completely left that bit out, instead talking only about O'Gara as simply trying to meet Pamela or verify that was her real name, and that bloggers ravenously swarmed to keep that information secret.
Several people have mentioned microwaving the passport to remove the chip, but your comment about sitting on your passport makes me think an arbor press is a better bet.
I was thinking just yesterday that most GPL'd programs that I have used present the GPL at the beginning, during installation or first launch, just like a EULA.
That's fine if the author prefers, but I think it leads to some confusion among the non-lawyer crowd about whether the GPL is a EULA or not.
Perhaps the text that one must agree to could start like this:
"The program does not have an end-user license agreement. You are free to use this program in any way you choose. If you choose to redistribute this program, you must do so under the terms of the copyright holder. Those terms follow."
...or something similar. You could even throw in "If you choose to redistribute this program, you must do so under the terms of the copyright holder or you are in violation of US and international copyright law." and toss in some legal USC references.
...or, if you have a radical flair, you could say "This program does not have an end-user license agreement, because EULAs are not legally enforceable. However, US and international law protects the copyright holder if you wish to redistribute this program; to do so you MUST follow the terms of the copyright holder. Those terms follow."
Heck, if most regular people who downloaded GPL actually read that first line "EULAs are not legally enforceable" maybe people would stop agreeing to them blindly.
CDPattern, nothing you said is correct. Google will happily remove from their index any book whose author wishes it to be removed. That's very clear in the F article.
Instead of asking their books to be removed, these authors decided to sue, claiming that Google doesn't have the right to index any book in this way.
Which isn't correct. Google can. Because they aren't giving the content of the book to people over the web, they are only giving away small portions around the part that contained the search term. (Very similar to how they index web pages, but then only give you a little bit of the page when you search for it, huh? Notwithstanding the "cache" feature, which I think is only legal because specific court rulings made web caches legal. They do NOT give away their "cache" of the book for any reason, which again is in the F article.)
For those too lazy to follow the link: Peak Power: 250 HP (combined) Acceleration: 0-60 MPH 7 Seconds Fuel Economy: 80 MPG est Maximum Range: 650 Miles est. (8 gal) All-electric Range: 20 Miles
It uses a 200 HP electric motor (!) to provide the major "thrust", with a 60 HP, 80 MPG diesel engine (running at peak efficiency RPMs) to recharge the battery or provide extra oomph to accelerate or to cruise at highway speed.
Exactly. I have an AT&T TDMA phone bought just before the merger, and I bought a $100 card with a 1-year expiration just before they stopped selling them this April.
I'm sure they hate me for it, but I just don't need to "Get More Minutes" or whatever the latest marketing campaign is. I use my phone for 20-30 minutes a month, and that's it. $8.50 a month prepaid is the only plan that works for me. And Cingular's deal for the GSM phones is much worst. Plus Cingular GSM coverage is horrible in Austin, or at least the system is down all the time. My wife (who had an AT&T GSM phone inherited by Cingular) has regular problems getting a circuit, when I have no problems right next to her.
Oh well, if nothing else, I don't expect that I was going to use all $100 worth of minutes before they expired next April. Now, maybe they'll give me some cash back, and I'll use the money to buy a Virgin Mobile phone or something.
>> hmmm... last I checked, software updates occur automatically over the air.
From what I read about PocketDISH yesterday, when you first plug in a PocketDISH device to your DVR, the PocketDISH adapter would upgrade the firmware on your box.
Also, I do not believe that DishDVRs can receive firmware upgrades via satellite. I suspect that they are only possible via the attached phone line. This, of course, is one big reason why mine has never had a phone line attached... something that I'm glad Dish Network allows.
US law is based on common law and precedences derived from it, not just on the Constitution. For example, common law (actually, I'd call it common sense) says that two year olds do not have the right to look at pornography; indeed, parents of two year olds have the legal responsibility to keep their children from it.
The same laws allow smoking, drinking, and voting to be limited to those over a certain age.
This isn't just an embodiment of the tenth amendment, since some things guaranteed by the Constitution (such as the right to peaceable assemble) can be taken away from children, in that the government can pass laws (such as truancy laws) that control where a child can go and what they can and cannot do.
Large limitations on drivers under age 18 are also from a similar vein of law, though as driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right, for everyone, it is a little different.
Seriously, I suppose a drastic event now would make winter even harder for some part of the world, possibly killing many people and probably driving heating costs even higher than they are expected to be. Are there any good volcanoes in the southern hemisphere than could help us out and only cool down the southern summer?
Children under 18 don't have the same rights as adults. That's how it should be. Thanks Eliot Spitzer, a democrat, for working to make things as they should be.
Provided that you have a model with no DRM, video can already be removed (legally) using existing instructions available on the web. It does require you to remove the hard drive and void the warranty, but if you have a DVR-5xx series product it has probably already passed the warranty period.
The Dish Network 522 DVR can already be accessed to remove video content, but it must be done by removing the hard disk and placing it into a computer. The folks on the dishrip forum on yahoo have software and instructions.
*** Note that the Dish522, like the Dish501, 508, 510, and the older 7000 series, have no DRM or other encryption of the video ***
The dishrip folks are very serious about not tolerating any discussion that could invoke the DMCA and shut down their forums. The newer models, like the Dish942, have DRM and cannot be legally hacked.
However note that the PocketDISH quick facts page (http://www.satelliteone.com/dish/support/PocketDI SH-Quick_Facts.pdf) says that the Dish522 will only support PocketDISH after a firmware upgrade. I assume this is at least necessary to upgrade the USB from 1.0 to 2.0 if the hardware supports that, but I also suspect that you would have DRM added to the device at the same time.
In other words, if you want to legally remove encoded video from your DVR, you can do so now, but do NOT upgrade for the PocketDISH. If you do so, you'll find your avenues of support limited and the major resources that (legally) hack Dish Network DVRs will be cut off.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.moveamd.com/
I post a longer reply to the parent post below, but this is a good start.
It's one thing to seek profit. It is another to be a poor neighbor and a bad citizen.
Let me tell you a story. It is long, but it does get around to AMD, and how they are already on the path to big and evil.
Not all land is created equally. Some land, like that in Manhattan, is more valuable than others economically. Other land is more important environmentally. Let's say, for example, that an endangered species lives on that land. When Wal-Mart runs commercials that say "we are committed to the environment; for each store we build we preserve the same amount of land somewhere else", remember that they could be building on top of environmentally important land, and saving non-so-important land somewhere else.
In Texas, there is a large underground lake (called an aquifer) that supplies water to almost two million people, through natural springs and wells. While the aquifer itself is huge, only water that falls on a certain bit of it actually reaches the rock strata where the aquifer resides. Edwards Aquifer (http://www.edwardsaquifer.net/) is a precious natural resource that must be protected to ensure a safe drinking water supply for Texas.
To protect the small recharge zone of the Edwards Aquifer, building restrictions are in place. I know, I know - some people will say that owners of land should be free to do what they want with that land. But I feel that protecting the environment is more important than the free market in this case. If you pollute your land with oil and gas runoff, it just doesn't affect your land - it pollutes the entire aquifer and all the water it provides. Even in a libertarian world someone who did so would (ideally) have their pants sued off, but then it would be too late and the aquifer would be contaminated. No, I prefer preventative law than post-contamination lawsuit.
With that said, developers are constantly trying to build on the Edwards Aquifer sensitive recharge zone. The northern most tip of this zone is in southern Austin, in a rather expensive region of Austin, and developers keep wanting to put large retail establishments there. (Houses can be built in the recharge area, so there are lots of customers. But developers with massive buildings and parking lots need to stay away.) The Save Our Springs Alliance (http://www.sosalliance.org/) has fought off Wal-Mart and Home Depot who tried to build in this area, using consumer education campaigns, lobbying, and lawsuits.
AMD is based in Austin. They have several campuses spread around town. And, as might make sense for business, they are trying to consolidate onto one campus. The problem, of course, is that they want to build their huge sprawling campus on top of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone. See the Save Our Springs Alliace page (http://www.sosalliance.org/) and the Move AMD page (http://www.moveamd.com/) for details of the issues and struggle.
I am a big AMD fan. I like their processors and use them whenever I can.
That said, AMD is not so different from Home Depot and Wal-Mart and other big evil corporations in this regard. I will start bashing AMD's name and products if the proceed to build on the aquifer, because, as I said, I think some things are more important than free-market capitalism, and protecting Texas' greatest water resource is one of them.
For me, I expect it would be the Mentor Graphics EDA tools that would die a sudden death if I switched to a non-Windows system, as I would have little choice but to use them with WINE.
The tools are buggy enough in Windows. I can't imagine running them in WINE.
Massachussets has issued hundreds of press releases about their change.
Unfortunately, they were all in OpenDocument format and no one using Office can read them.
As it happens, the job that Dell offered me was in their laptop division. At that time (if not now) they designed their own laptop motherboards, and that (or a subset of that) would have been my job.
That is real engineering design. Of the items you mention, I think they are all valid, but I think they could be done with one pseudo-mechanical/electrical engineer overseeing one or two technicians.
Those aren't the kinds of things that would keep me employed.
Pretty soon, cutting costs comes at the expense of things like customer service, R&D, and other things that are required to maintain a viable, growing business.
Pretty soon? R&D is the first thing they cut when things go bad. Heck, I even watched a television show about Dell that explained precisely this as their corporate strategy.
I was offered an R&D job at Dell when I graduated from college years back. I am so glad I didn't take it; I would have been layed off in less than a year when the 2001 recession took effect. Instead I work for a company that invested in R&D through the recession and is now reaping those benefits.
And in MS Privacy.net 1.0, an intentionally malformed http request will let you retrieve the personal information of everyone in the country.
Oops, meant 15% tax, compared to the 28% I have to pay for wages I earn at a job.
Because normal humans grow sentimentally attached to things... ...even if those things are a distant, faceless corporation whose products were used years ago, or even just read about.
I worked for university network management in college, and for a year or two I had an SGI workstation before upgrading to a newer Sun station. It was something different, which made it memorable.
I dunno what you mean. I pay 28% taxes in the middle class. If I had more money, I could earn money on the stock market or other investments at 15% interest.
What happened to the days of the richest of the rich paying 60, 70, 80, 90% taxes?
I am a hardware designer at a medium-sized company.
I could call up a distributor and get 5-10 of any integrated circuit on the market that runs for less than $15 at absolutely no cost to me. More expensive ones would be fewer samples, but it could be done.
Sampling is the only way a distributor can sell a new part.
Even if that was not available, I have a whole cabinet full of parts where I requisitioned 15 from stock, used 13, and it costs less to throw away the other two than try to put them back on tape and reel for production use.
And boards will never be potted. Epoxy coating would make it impossible to rework the products, which is pretty much mandatory for anything except mass-market, consumer-grade junk. And how can you make mass-market, consumer-grade junk without better instruments available to test it all?
And my company makes instruments that can perform data acquisition - in other words, the exact same kind that could be used to digitize analog signals.
Off topic? This is a sidebar of the article linked to by slashdot.
In other words, a direct comment on part of the article. How is that off topic? Perhaps the moderator didn't RTFA and only went from the summary?
Now THIS post is off topic.
Daniel Lyons deserves to be banned from publishing in Forbes for his sidebar on Pamela Jones. Completely paints one side of the story without any attempt at balance, and uses quotes out of context to twist the meaning of the words.
>> When O'Gara's story about her quest appeared in Linux Business News, an online magazine, indignant bloggers went on the attack. They said the story was unethical and demanded that the site take it down. (So much for free speech.)
>> Jones responded by penning a pious thank-you to her defenders. "My faith in the human race is restored," she wrote. "It means so much to me to know that there is still a line, an ethical line, and some things we agree we ought never to do to a fellow human."
If I recall correctly, O'Gara's story attempted to question Jones' sexual orientation or something else of that nature, and Pamela Jones' reply about "an ethical line" refers to this.
Daniel Lyons completely left that bit out, instead talking only about O'Gara as simply trying to meet Pamela or verify that was her real name, and that bloggers ravenously swarmed to keep that information secret.
Several people have mentioned microwaving the passport to remove the chip, but your comment about sitting on your passport makes me think an arbor press is a better bet.
I was thinking just yesterday that most GPL'd programs that I have used present the GPL at the beginning, during installation or first launch, just like a EULA.
...or something similar. You could even throw in "If you choose to redistribute this program, you must do so under the terms of the copyright holder or you are in violation of US and international copyright law." and toss in some legal USC references.
...or, if you have a radical flair, you could say "This program does not have an end-user license agreement, because EULAs are not legally enforceable. However, US and international law protects the copyright holder if you wish to redistribute this program; to do so you MUST follow the terms of the copyright holder. Those terms follow."
That's fine if the author prefers, but I think it leads to some confusion among the non-lawyer crowd about whether the GPL is a EULA or not.
Perhaps the text that one must agree to could start like this:
"The program does not have an end-user license agreement. You are free to use this program in any way you choose. If you choose to redistribute this program, you must do so under the terms of the copyright holder. Those terms follow."
Heck, if most regular people who downloaded GPL actually read that first line "EULAs are not legally enforceable" maybe people would stop agreeing to them blindly.
CDPattern, nothing you said is correct. Google will happily remove from their index any book whose author wishes it to be removed. That's very clear in the F article.
Instead of asking their books to be removed, these authors decided to sue, claiming that Google doesn't have the right to index any book in this way.
Which isn't correct. Google can. Because they aren't giving the content of the book to people over the web, they are only giving away small portions around the part that contained the search term. (Very similar to how they index web pages, but then only give you a little bit of the page when you search for it, huh? Notwithstanding the "cache" feature, which I think is only legal because specific court rulings made web caches legal. They do NOT give away their "cache" of the book for any reason, which again is in the F article.)
And you could have one for about $75,000, according to the developer when I talked to him at a trade show a few months ago.
o ns.htm
http://l3research.com/vehicles/enigma/specificati
For those too lazy to follow the link:
Peak Power: 250 HP (combined)
Acceleration: 0-60 MPH 7 Seconds
Fuel Economy: 80 MPG est
Maximum Range: 650 Miles est. (8 gal)
All-electric Range: 20 Miles
It uses a 200 HP electric motor (!) to provide the major "thrust", with a 60 HP, 80 MPG diesel engine (running at peak efficiency RPMs) to recharge the battery or provide extra oomph to accelerate or to cruise at highway speed.
And it is a convertible.
>>> But... that's just my two cents
That's two AND A HALF cents, buddy, PER MINUTE.
Exactly. I have an AT&T TDMA phone bought just before the merger, and I bought a $100 card with a 1-year expiration just before they stopped selling them this April.
I'm sure they hate me for it, but I just don't need to "Get More Minutes" or whatever the latest marketing campaign is. I use my phone for 20-30 minutes a month, and that's it. $8.50 a month prepaid is the only plan that works for me. And Cingular's deal for the GSM phones is much worst. Plus Cingular GSM coverage is horrible in Austin, or at least the system is down all the time. My wife (who had an AT&T GSM phone inherited by Cingular) has regular problems getting a circuit, when I have no problems right next to her.
Oh well, if nothing else, I don't expect that I was going to use all $100 worth of minutes before they expired next April. Now, maybe they'll give me some cash back, and I'll use the money to buy a Virgin Mobile phone or something.
>> hmmm... last I checked, software updates occur automatically over the air.
From what I read about PocketDISH yesterday, when you first plug in a PocketDISH device to your DVR, the PocketDISH adapter would upgrade the firmware on your box.
Also, I do not believe that DishDVRs can receive firmware upgrades via satellite. I suspect that they are only possible via the attached phone line. This, of course, is one big reason why mine has never had a phone line attached... something that I'm glad Dish Network allows.
US law is based on common law and precedences derived from it, not just on the Constitution. For example, common law (actually, I'd call it common sense) says that two year olds do not have the right to look at pornography; indeed, parents of two year olds have the legal responsibility to keep their children from it.
The same laws allow smoking, drinking, and voting to be limited to those over a certain age.
This isn't just an embodiment of the tenth amendment, since some things guaranteed by the Constitution (such as the right to peaceable assemble) can be taken away from children, in that the government can pass laws (such as truancy laws) that control where a child can go and what they can and cannot do.
Large limitations on drivers under age 18 are also from a similar vein of law, though as driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right, for everyone, it is a little different.
Only something dramatic, such as a major volcanic eruption, could cause enough cooling to miss setting a new record.
Come on Mount St. Helens, you can pull us out of this mess!
/ starts staring at the web cam, waiting....
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/
Seriously, I suppose a drastic event now would make winter even harder for some part of the world, possibly killing many people and probably driving heating costs even higher than they are expected to be. Are there any good volcanoes in the southern hemisphere than could help us out and only cool down the southern summer?
I'm over 18. He isn't abridging my rights.
Children under 18 don't have the same rights as adults. That's how it should be. Thanks Eliot Spitzer, a democrat, for working to make things as they should be.
Provided that you have a model with no DRM, video can already be removed (legally) using existing instructions available on the web. It does require you to remove the hard drive and void the warranty, but if you have a DVR-5xx series product it has probably already passed the warranty period.
The Dish Network 522 DVR can already be accessed to remove video content, but it must be done by removing the hard disk and placing it into a computer. The folks on the dishrip forum on yahoo have software and instructions.
I SH-Quick_Facts.pdf) says that the Dish522 will only support PocketDISH after a firmware upgrade. I assume this is at least necessary to upgrade the USB from 1.0 to 2.0 if the hardware supports that, but I also suspect that you would have DRM added to the device at the same time.
*** Note that the Dish522, like the Dish501, 508, 510, and the older 7000 series, have no DRM or other encryption of the video ***
The dishrip folks are very serious about not tolerating any discussion that could invoke the DMCA and shut down their forums. The newer models, like the Dish942, have DRM and cannot be legally hacked.
However note that the PocketDISH quick facts page (http://www.satelliteone.com/dish/support/PocketD
In other words, if you want to legally remove encoded video from your DVR, you can do so now, but do NOT upgrade for the PocketDISH. If you do so, you'll find your avenues of support limited and the major resources that (legally) hack Dish Network DVRs will be cut off.