Does anyone know of companies planning on building processors without DRM? In a competitive marketplace there would not be DRM because consumers don't demand it and surely would prefer computers that aren't controlled by the market after the sale. But with only two major PC processor manufacturers having a duopoly over the market it isn't very competitive.
Well some things aren't overpriced (I saw a DVD of scifi classic Logan's Run advertised for $4.95) but many are. I like The X-Files but each season costs $100-$135. That comes to about $5 per episode. They made 200 episodes. So that's $1000 to watch the whole series. Also, music is generally overpriced, thanks to their illegal market practices (fixing prices, acting as an oligopoly, etc).
Re:Oh the humanity.......
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Wow, someone on Slashdot knows what he's talking about, and it's grammar no less. If that's not ironic I don't know what is.
And does anyone remember the Futurama episode where the 80s guy helped Fry make their stock go public? Zoidberg sold his shares of stock for a sandwich, then the stock went up then down in value.
"Aha! Once again the conservative sandwich-heavy portfolio pays of for the hungry investor!"
It's like that with any intellectual property. Prices fall to the real economic cost when there are perfect substitutes and enough different suppliers of them to produce any amount (and perfect competition, of course)...for example, certain farm products if you don't care where you buy your potatoes. That simply doesn't work with things like CDs--no matter how much that new Britney Spears CD costs you'll still buy it if it has enough utility to you, even if the Barbara Streisand CD costs loads less. Of course, the oligopoly situation in the music industry doesn't help, and government should be used to block these threats to the free market.
The settlement comes after a two-year probe, begun in 2002 I didn't know we already were in 2004.
Didn't you hear? AOL is teaming up with the RIAA to fight piracy. Those several months of heavy litigation were equivalent to two years of lighter litigation.
They already have acquired the 'privilege' to license IE for 'free' from Microsoft. Seriously, I wonder how long it will be until AOL kills off the division completely. I doubt they will actively invest in it anymore anyway, lest they harm their warm relationship with Microsoft. It will die the slow death of MacIE.
Yeah, so who would he listen to? Firefly was on Fox so perhaps he'd listen to those network execs? The ones who cancelled Futurama, Family Guy, Firefly, and every other great show that started with an F? No, you see, his efforts are great because they are his. Neal Stephenson works like that too. You didn't see Shakespeare or Van Gogh making their art in ways that marketers wanted to.
Didn't you learn anything from Dilbert? The lesson is that marketing departments suck.
I particularly liked the section where they said to
Crack the settings in your Instant Messenger program and disable the "idle" feature, which tells coworkers if you're online. (In AOL Instant Messager programs, go to "preferences," then "privacy.")
Yeah article writer, you're one leet dude, "cracking" a program by modifying the options that it gives you on the file menu.
I also enjoyed the hint that said "(One key: Reply messages sent from a BlackBerry often have "Re:" with a lower-case "e" in the subject line, while e-mails sent from an office PC sometimes show "RE" in the subject line.)"
Seriously, why is Slashdot linking to articles like this that are so technologically uninformed? Alas, at least it didn't post the article twice.
I heard Stephenson give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on Thursday of last week, where he discussed this novel. It sounded very interesting, albeit a departure from his normal science fiction type novels. He discussed what he considered to be the "soap opera" of the Newton-Leibniz controversy regarding the invention of calculus, which spread to other areas. Eventually this led up to a description of Leibniz's ideas metaphysics, which he regards as highly relevant in regards to computer science, cellular automata, and quantum physics. His descriptions of these events were slightly convoluted but that was part of their charm, and while I expected some type of discussion of technology or Snow Crash / Cryptonomicon type topics, I was pleasantly surprised to hear his 18th century tangent. He's a very talented and fascinating man.
On a side note, he mentioned that he only speaks about once every five years and that he's very anti-social. He said his books are not a social process and come entirely from him, as opposed to including feedback from others. Still, I'm glad to have this man off in his little corner of the world thinking and researching about fascinating topics, broadcasting his findings to the rest of us.
I think it's hilarious when people read the article in a post then respond to the post as though it was its own information. As if people on Slashdot will read random posts but not the article itself.
Huh? What judge was bought? In general it's politicians in the executive and legislative branch that are bought (i.e. the President and Congresscritters). But judges generally aren't corrupt in this method. The only problems are when they're clueless or when they're activist (i.e. choosing the President). But they aren't corrupt. I would like to see some evidence for federal judges being corrupt, because I'm sure not much such evidence exists (and if it does, I doubt it's for more than a small handful of judges).
Mathematical rigor demands we see the proof first. One decade ago Wiles thought he solved Fermat's Last Theorem but a mistake was found and worked again for several months before ultimately solving it. Faulty proofs are made all the time. Until it undergoes peer review I will be very skeptical.
And I hope the DMCA wins every battle. Only when people realize how absurd the law is will the force to repeal it be strong enough. It's like civil liberties. If Ashcroft tried to take them all away at once the opposition would be too strong, but if he does it slower then people won't notice it as strongly. If the DMCA slowly defeats logic it could win, but if it is absurdly clear how illogical it is then perhaps it can be repealed.
Of course, this is the philosophy Ralph Nader used in the 2000 election, so I could be wrong...
Whatever happened to the morals of Google "don't be evil"?
I hope they aren't planning on trying to enforce this patent.
As for the trademark, they actually expect to be able to restrict how people speak? They should be flattered that people use their name so often, it gives them publiclity. And generally people mean "to search with Google" when using the word. I know, I know, screwed up trademark law makes someone aggressively pursue a trademark or give it up, but still...
Fine, make IRC illegal too...
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 3, Funny
...cause we all know about all the piracy that goes on there. You know what I'm taking about...all those ads for channels with "0 DAY WAITZ FULL RIPPED LINUX ISOS 24/7 DISTRO"
Because the politicians in DC would never pass a bill that would so blatently please American consumers. The average American doesn't have much money for campaign donations.
And hm, I wish we saw Lawrence Lessig post on Slashdot more, like the way Bruce Perens does. That would be cool.
Have you seen many, um, photos of the leonids? How, er, about time lapse videos of them? There are some really cool vvideos here (realplayer, hopefully cool st-stuff from helix will , uh, emerge soon) and here.
CmdrTaco, Jr., is now 40 years old and running Slashdot. He posts repeat stories using his Linux Tablet PC, which is of course illegal since Linux's source code compromises Intellectual Property. All of the major companies have merged into a single company which most people believe runs the country. George Bush, IV, along with "Lil" Fritz Hollings pass a law mandating quotas of consumer involvement. The war on terror has not ended but that's ok since the country has rallied behind mini-Bush.
I mean, it has XP in the name, and the reason is that it's an XP-like desktop environment. And it looks just like WinXP. Seriously, how long before it gets sued?
On the other hand, it does look pretty nice, and if it could survive legal wranglings it might make linux at least look like Windows. They're doing better than the Lindows people at that.
I think program emulation (think WINE) might be more important, of course. People aren't gonna change because it "looks like windows." If they want Windows, they'll probably just buy Windows. If they want Linux, they'll download Linux. Linux has to make special reasons for downloading it. On my Windows partition, I use Mozilla because of its features (tabbed browsing, block popup ads, and type ahead find is a bonus that came after I switched). If Mozilla was just an IE clone that worked almost as well at rendering pages (which is tough since IE renders fake MS-HTML and broken Frontpage code and fake Javascript, etc) then I'd use IE.
Slashdot Mirror
I misspoke--I meant that they surely would prefer computers that aren't controlled by the manufacturers after the sale.
Does anyone know of companies planning on building processors without DRM? In a competitive marketplace there would not be DRM because consumers don't demand it and surely would prefer computers that aren't controlled by the market after the sale. But with only two major PC processor manufacturers having a duopoly over the market it isn't very competitive.
Well some things aren't overpriced (I saw a DVD of scifi classic Logan's Run advertised for $4.95) but many are. I like The X-Files but each season costs $100-$135. That comes to about $5 per episode. They made 200 episodes. So that's $1000 to watch the whole series. Also, music is generally overpriced, thanks to their illegal market practices (fixing prices, acting as an oligopoly, etc).
And does anyone remember the Futurama episode where the 80s guy helped Fry make their stock go public? Zoidberg sold his shares of stock for a sandwich, then the stock went up then down in value.
It's like that with any intellectual property. Prices fall to the real economic cost when there are perfect substitutes and enough different suppliers of them to produce any amount (and perfect competition, of course)...for example, certain farm products if you don't care where you buy your potatoes. That simply doesn't work with things like CDs--no matter how much that new Britney Spears CD costs you'll still buy it if it has enough utility to you, even if the Barbara Streisand CD costs loads less. Of course, the oligopoly situation in the music industry doesn't help, and government should be used to block these threats to the free market.
Zoidberg - "Once again the sandwich heavy investor comes out ahead *munch* ... I'm ruined!"
They already have acquired the 'privilege' to license IE for 'free' from Microsoft. Seriously, I wonder how long it will be until AOL kills off the division completely. I doubt they will actively invest in it anymore anyway, lest they harm their warm relationship with Microsoft. It will die the slow death of MacIE.
Yeah, so who would he listen to? Firefly was on Fox so perhaps he'd listen to those network execs? The ones who cancelled Futurama, Family Guy, Firefly, and every other great show that started with an F? No, you see, his efforts are great because they are his. Neal Stephenson works like that too. You didn't see Shakespeare or Van Gogh making their art in ways that marketers wanted to.
Didn't you learn anything from Dilbert? The lesson is that marketing departments suck.
I also enjoyed the hint that said "(One key: Reply messages sent from a BlackBerry often have "Re:" with a lower-case "e" in the subject line, while e-mails sent from an office PC sometimes show "RE" in the subject line.)"
Seriously, why is Slashdot linking to articles like this that are so technologically uninformed? Alas, at least it didn't post the article twice.
I was joking, but actually, what you described was nearly correct (he finished his sentences though). It was very interesting nevertheless.
Were you at the lecture too?
I heard Stephenson give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on Thursday of last week, where he discussed this novel. It sounded very interesting, albeit a departure from his normal science fiction type novels. He discussed what he considered to be the "soap opera" of the Newton-Leibniz controversy regarding the invention of calculus, which spread to other areas. Eventually this led up to a description of Leibniz's ideas metaphysics, which he regards as highly relevant in regards to computer science, cellular automata, and quantum physics. His descriptions of these events were slightly convoluted but that was part of their charm, and while I expected some type of discussion of technology or Snow Crash / Cryptonomicon type topics, I was pleasantly surprised to hear his 18th century tangent. He's a very talented and fascinating man.
On a side note, he mentioned that he only speaks about once every five years and that he's very anti-social. He said his books are not a social process and come entirely from him, as opposed to including feedback from others. Still, I'm glad to have this man off in his little corner of the world thinking and researching about fascinating topics, broadcasting his findings to the rest of us.
I think it's hilarious when people read the article in a post then respond to the post as though it was its own information. As if people on Slashdot will read random posts but not the article itself.
Huh? What judge was bought? In general it's politicians in the executive and legislative branch that are bought (i.e. the President and Congresscritters). But judges generally aren't corrupt in this method. The only problems are when they're clueless or when they're activist (i.e. choosing the President). But they aren't corrupt. I would like to see some evidence for federal judges being corrupt, because I'm sure not much such evidence exists (and if it does, I doubt it's for more than a small handful of judges).
Mathematical rigor demands we see the proof first. One decade ago Wiles thought he solved Fermat's Last Theorem but a mistake was found and worked again for several months before ultimately solving it. Faulty proofs are made all the time. Until it undergoes peer review I will be very skeptical.
After all, it runs Windows! What do you expect?
And I hope the DMCA wins every battle. Only when people realize how absurd the law is will the force to repeal it be strong enough. It's like civil liberties. If Ashcroft tried to take them all away at once the opposition would be too strong, but if he does it slower then people won't notice it as strongly. If the DMCA slowly defeats logic it could win, but if it is absurdly clear how illogical it is then perhaps it can be repealed.
Of course, this is the philosophy Ralph Nader used in the 2000 election, so I could be wrong...
Here comes corporate Google!
Whatever happened to the morals of Google "don't be evil"?
I hope they aren't planning on trying to enforce this patent.
As for the trademark, they actually expect to be able to restrict how people speak? They should be flattered that people use their name so often, it gives them publiclity. And generally people mean "to search with Google" when using the word. I know, I know, screwed up trademark law makes someone aggressively pursue a trademark or give it up, but still...
...cause we all know about all the piracy that goes on there. You know what I'm taking about...all those ads for channels with "0 DAY WAITZ FULL RIPPED LINUX ISOS 24/7 DISTRO"
Because the politicians in DC would never pass a bill that would so blatently please American consumers. The average American doesn't have much money for campaign donations.
And hm, I wish we saw Lawrence Lessig post on Slashdot more, like the way Bruce Perens does. That would be cool.
Have you seen many, um, photos of the leonids? How, er, about time lapse videos of them? There are some really cool vvideos here (realplayer, hopefully cool st-stuff from helix will , uh, emerge soon) and here.
CmdrTaco, Jr., is now 40 years old and running Slashdot. He posts repeat stories using his Linux Tablet PC, which is of course illegal since Linux's source code compromises Intellectual Property. All of the major companies have merged into a single company which most people believe runs the country. George Bush, IV, along with "Lil" Fritz Hollings pass a law mandating quotas of consumer involvement. The war on terror has not ended but that's ok since the country has rallied behind mini-Bush.
Ahh, what days lie ahead. I can't wait!
I mean, it has XP in the name, and the reason is that it's an XP-like desktop environment. And it looks just like WinXP. Seriously, how long before it gets sued?
On the other hand, it does look pretty nice, and if it could survive legal wranglings it might make linux at least look like Windows. They're doing better than the Lindows people at that.
I think program emulation (think WINE) might be more important, of course. People aren't gonna change because it "looks like windows." If they want Windows, they'll probably just buy Windows. If they want Linux, they'll download Linux. Linux has to make special reasons for downloading it. On my Windows partition, I use Mozilla because of its features (tabbed browsing, block popup ads, and type ahead find is a bonus that came after I switched). If Mozilla was just an IE clone that worked almost as well at rendering pages (which is tough since IE renders fake MS-HTML and broken Frontpage code and fake Javascript, etc) then I'd use IE.