NEWS: Slashdot editors fail to find duplicate post
on
Fun with Hookes' Law
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· Score: 1
After what could only be described as seconds of checking, the SlashDot editors failed to detect a duplicate topic posting that was right in form of their faces.
When asked to comment, they said "we were to distacted counting our stock options to notice that an astronomy related post might be about the same discovery as a Science related post. Besides, we were just going to stick in the SCIENCE section where no-one ever bother to read the posts anyway."
About a decade ago, (at the height of the Japanese economic boom) the Japanese franchisee for 7-11 bought a majority stake in the US chain from it's parent company (which I think is/was called Southland Corporation) then licensed the 7-Eleven US franchise back to them.
Convenience stores, especially 7-Eleven, are a major business in Japan.
LinuxWorld has article with pics
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Protesting DMCA
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· Score: 1
Mostly based on interview with David Niemi (the protest's organizer) but also gets a comment from an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association (plaintiff California case).
If you could just let us know what the name of the site is, I'm sure the added traffic from slashdotters will drasticlly pump-up your March banner impression totals. This should give you a better bargaining position.
I just read an article that indicated that spending on web-based advertising will exceed TV advertising by 2005. We used to consider ourselves as living in a TV based economy, however I think that is evolving into web based economy.
Both are extremely consumerism oriented, however, I think there are some appreciable differences:
People will expect to be rewarded more for viewing advertising, whether it it through AllAdvantage type programs, or by receiving bonus content/features for viewing additional ads like DialPad.
Once content has been released in digital form, unlimited copying and distribution will have to be taken into account in the business model, such as the new advertising supported version of Eudora, or Corel's subtle self-promotion in the downloadable version of CLOS.
There will be a lot less tolerance for mediocre content, or reruns. As we move from 50-60 cable channels to 50B-60B websites, if its not newer/better/different, it won't hold our attention.
Macrovision (the company) which has been very profitable recently is on the acquisition trail again picking up business software licensing specialists Globetrotter. story
Bill Krepick, the company's president and chief executive, said in an interview at the SG Cowen Global Technology Conference here that the acquisition positions Macrovision for the growing transition to electronic software distribution.
He cited projections from market research firm International Data Corp that fully one-half of the world's business software will be licensed electronically within five years, replacing traditional packaged software distribution.
Shouldn't they rename best supporting actor/actress "lifetime achievement"?
No they shouldn't. Often both the supporting and leading actor/actress awards are used this way as could be argued for Michael Caine, or for Jack Palance.
But when a newcomer does manage to get one, it can lift a superior actor from supporting roles to lead roles, which it certainly did for Kevin Spacey. Spacey has had some great supporting roles in the past, such as his Oscar winning role in the Usual Suspects, or for his creepy character in JFK. But he is not your stereotypical leading man type, so were it not for his supporting actor Oscar, he might never have been given leading roles in major films.
Let's hope that the industry starts offering Angelina Jolie challenging leading roles, now that she has proven herself in a supporting role.
If Microsoft keeps getting legal heat, their stock price will remain stagnant.
MS stock was on a run Friday, based on a USA Today article that indicated a settlement could emerge over the weekend based on a new proposal MS was submitting Friday.
The Justice has soundly rejected that offer as not going any way near far enough. As a result expect MS to drop as much as 10% (which will also pull the DOW down quite a bit).
Judge Jackson is now expected to issue his rulling as early as Tuesday, and everyone is expecting a finding that MS violated the anti-trust act.
Economic bug #1: They're not going to get a tax write-off for this. They're losing money, so they don't pay any taxes anyway.
WRONG! Iridium the company can't get a tax write-off, but everyone that invested in them or lent them money could. In fact, it's possible for the total amount written off to exceed the actual cost of the company, since a lot people bought the stock at prices much higher than the IPO price. Anyone that is still holding stock or debt of the company (or that sold at a loss as the stock plummetted) will get to write the off investment against gains/income from their other investing or lending activity.
Motorola is like to save a bundle in taxes by writing off this sucker. It shouldn't matter much to them whether they burn the birds or donate them, either way they should be able to get a write-off.
You could use these to establish a massive network of weather monitoring stations. Put one station in the center of each 10,000 square mile grid and get constant updates for an array of environmental data: temperature, windspeed, CO2 concentration, Ozone level, humidity, precipitation, pH of precipitation, barometric pressure, seismic activity, InfraRed radiation, etc.
Feed the data collected over the remaining life of the satellites into NOAA's new supercomputer and maybe we could develop a weather model that predicts hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, (maybe even earth quakes and volcanoes) etc. weeks, or even months in advance. This would help prevent the loss of tons of crops and thousands of lives a year. And perhaps indentify potentially harmful longterm trends (like global warming or ozone depletion) in time for corrective action to be taken. The large re-insurance companies like Lloyds of London would likely provide a substantial amount of funding for such a venture.
All this could be done with very little bandwidth. Just because you can't stream video, or play Quake over an data connection doesn't mean its worthless. NASA is still getting data back from satellites it launched in the 70's that only transmit at around 2400 bps, it doesn't mean they no longer bother to listen.
----
Another idea would be to give free phones to UN and NGO workers (For example, Doctors without Borders (MSF), or Oxfam) in isolated locations. They could then request supplies specific to a given crises based on what they find in the field like the need for seeds of a specific crop, or vaccines for a specific disease.
Remember the great deals one could get in California, with the MSDN bundling with a computer? Microsoft didn't bother trying to make the internet service legally bound to the computer, because they knew it was so blatantly against California law,
IANAL however, the problem that MS had in California and Oregon is that they were tying it to a loan. It was a very strange way to configure the deal that other ISP/PC bundles didn't use.
Maybe there is a seperate law against tying a hardware purchase to a subcription, but it must have loopholes, how else would DirectTV, WebTV, and even Record/Book-of-the-month clubs do business in states with such laws.
How much did they lose from their involvement in DIVX anyway, It was at least $207M as of their last company Annual Report.
I'm starting to think that it's time to start a complete Open Source community boycott of Circuit City.
Do they even sell boxed versions of Linux in the computer sections of their stores? I'm sure that they don't sell any systems that don't already have Windows pre-installed.
I expect that next they will start selling radios & TV's that can only play CC approved stations, and washing machines that require CC approved detergent.
What action can be taken? Are folks like the ACLU willing to help out?
This from the TBTF 'Blog is reporting the American Civil Liberties Union will back Waldo Jaquith, Lindsay Haisley, and Bennett Haselton in their case against Cyber Patrol.
Wouldn't it be great if this really was a whole new story about a whole new Netfinity cluster at UNM? Then they could Beowulf the two clusters together into one of the top ten supercomputers.
Oh well, just thought I'd mention thought before this thread gets wiped.
I think the font resize thing is just a bug and not intentional, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to resize the font on the WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING page.
Of course, when you use font resize on that page (at least with Netscape) it blows away the background and changes the font style.
This is one of the ugliest pages I ahve ever seen. There are quotes from Bugle and Electronic Arts that are presented as images only with no ALT text, and the text that is on the page is in microprint (when I try to use CTRL-] in Netscape, the page layout falls apart and font doesn't increase.)
Also, there is an email sign-up box with no privacy statement.
You would hope that all X-box webpages would be readable on a WebTV unit as this is one of their natural target markets, but I doubt that you could read the Image only quotes on WebTV.
11. Here is a situation to avoid, according to Microsoft. When upgrading from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000, you may not want to create logical drives within extended partitions on basic disks. A drive geometry translation error in the Logical Disk Manager may trigger this error message: 'Parameter is incorrect.' There is no workaround.
28. Microsoft says that some PC card network adapters may not be able to handle heavy network traffic on a Windows 2000 network, and may either lose their connection or hang. These cards include: 3Com Megahertz 10/100 (3C575); Xircom Credit Card Ethernet IIps (PS-CE2-10); Earlier versions of the Xircom CE2, although later versions are OK. {I find this one the most interesting as it might mean mean that there is a problem with the way Win2k formats ethernet packets.}
30. According to Microsoft, Windows 2000 Professional may hang after you install Microsoft IntelliPoint 2.2. Microsoft says that pressing CTRL-ALT-DELETE will not help. To resolve this problem, Microsoft says you have to reinstall Windows 2000 Professional.
So are you suggesting they just mirror DeCSS on a webserver in China? That would be ideal I guess. Anyone have any friends in China with a high bandwidth website?
In the US, it used to be the case that that trademarks applied to a specific type of product so that you could have an ACME brand of soap that didn't infringe on the trademark of ACME brand cars. With the web, this seems to have changed so that if you can pay your lawyers enough, you can own ACME.com and prevent all the other ACME's from even using the word ACME in the name of their websites.
Swiss law might be more forgiving. The ETOY controversy I think was decided in part that ETOY was a Swiss company and the US company ETOYS wasn't able to enforce their US brand their. (Peter E. Wild in Zurich was their legal counsel)
Also, I think Switzerland is one the few countries that upholds Pivo Budvar's right to the Budweiser brand for beer.
Given that your site isn't selling another brand of cola, I think you have a good shot.
PS I can't access your site due to a DNS error. Is it already up and running?
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention BSOD!
After what could only be described as seconds of checking, the SlashDot editors failed to detect a duplicate topic posting that was right in form of their faces.
When asked to comment, they said "we were to distacted counting our stock options to notice that an astronomy related post might be about the same discovery as a Science related post. Besides, we were just going to stick in the SCIENCE section where no-one ever bother to read the posts anyway."
About a decade ago, (at the height of the Japanese economic boom) the Japanese franchisee for 7-11 bought a majority stake in the US chain from it's parent company (which I think is/was called Southland Corporation) then licensed the 7-Eleven US franchise back to them.
Convenience stores, especially 7-Eleven, are a major business in Japan.
read it here.
Mostly based on interview with David Niemi (the protest's organizer) but also gets a comment from an attorney for the DVD Copy Control Association (plaintiff California case).
If you could just let us know what the name of the site is, I'm sure the added traffic from slashdotters will drasticlly pump-up your March banner impression totals. This should give you a better bargaining position.
Both are extremely consumerism oriented, however, I think there are some appreciable differences:
Shouldn't they rename best supporting actor/actress "lifetime achievement"?
No they shouldn't. Often both the supporting and leading actor/actress awards are used this way as could be argued for Michael Caine, or for Jack Palance.
But when a newcomer does manage to get one, it can lift a superior actor from supporting roles to lead roles, which it certainly did for Kevin Spacey. Spacey has had some great supporting roles in the past, such as his Oscar winning role in the Usual Suspects, or for his creepy character in JFK. But he is not your stereotypical leading man type, so were it not for his supporting actor Oscar, he might never have been given leading roles in major films.
Let's hope that the industry starts offering Angelina Jolie challenging leading roles, now that she has proven herself in a supporting role.
If Microsoft keeps getting legal heat, their stock price will remain stagnant.
MS stock was on a run Friday, based on a USA Today article that indicated a settlement could emerge over the weekend based on a new proposal MS was submitting Friday.
The Justice has soundly rejected that offer as not going any way near far enough. As a result expect MS to drop as much as 10% (which will also pull the DOW down quite a bit).
Judge Jackson is now expected to issue his rulling as early as Tuesday, and everyone is expecting a finding that MS violated the anti-trust act.
Economic bug #1: They're not going to get a tax write-off for this. They're losing money, so they don't pay any taxes anyway.
WRONG! Iridium the company can't get a tax write-off, but everyone that invested in them or lent them money could. In fact, it's possible for the total amount written off to exceed the actual cost of the company, since a lot people bought the stock at prices much higher than the IPO price. Anyone that is still holding stock or debt of the company (or that sold at a loss as the stock plummetted) will get to write the off investment against gains/income from their other investing or lending activity.
Motorola is like to save a bundle in taxes by writing off this sucker. It shouldn't matter much to them whether they burn the birds or donate them, either way they should be able to get a write-off.
You could use these to establish a massive network of weather monitoring stations. Put one station in the center of each 10,000 square mile grid and get constant updates for an array of environmental data:
temperature, windspeed, CO2 concentration, Ozone level, humidity, precipitation, pH of precipitation, barometric pressure, seismic activity, InfraRed radiation, etc.
Feed the data collected over the remaining life of the satellites into NOAA's new supercomputer and maybe we could develop a weather model that predicts hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, (maybe even earth quakes and volcanoes) etc. weeks, or even months in advance. This would help prevent the loss of tons of crops and thousands of lives a year. And perhaps indentify potentially harmful longterm trends (like global warming or ozone depletion) in time for corrective action to be taken. The large re-insurance companies like Lloyds of London would likely provide a substantial amount of funding for such a venture.
All this could be done with very little bandwidth. Just because you can't stream video, or play Quake over an data connection doesn't mean its worthless. NASA is still getting data back from satellites it launched in the 70's that only transmit at around 2400 bps, it doesn't mean they no longer bother to listen.
----
Another idea would be to give free phones to UN and NGO workers (For example, Doctors without Borders (MSF), or Oxfam) in isolated locations. They could then request supplies specific to a given crises based on what they find in the field like the need for seeds of a specific crop, or vaccines for a specific disease.
Remember the great deals one could get in California, with the MSDN bundling with a computer? Microsoft didn't bother trying to make the internet service legally bound to the computer, because they knew it was so blatantly against California law,
IANAL
however, the problem that MS had in California and Oregon is that they were tying it to a loan. It was a very strange way to configure the deal that other ISP/PC bundles didn't use.
Maybe there is a seperate law against tying a hardware purchase to a subcription, but it must have loopholes, how else would DirectTV, WebTV, and even Record/Book-of-the-month clubs do business in states with such laws.
How much did they lose from their involvement in DIVX anyway, It was at least $207M as of their last company Annual Report.
I'm starting to think that it's time to start a complete Open Source community boycott of Circuit City.
Do they even sell boxed versions of Linux in the computer sections of their stores? I'm sure that they don't sell any systems that don't already have Windows pre-installed.
I expect that next they will start selling radios & TV's that can only play CC approved stations, and washing machines that require CC approved detergent.
What action can be taken? Are folks like the ACLU willing to help out?
This from the TBTF 'Blog is reporting the American Civil Liberties Union will back Waldo Jaquith, Lindsay Haisley, and Bennett Haselton in their case against Cyber Patrol.
Wouldn't it be great if this really was a whole new story about a whole new Netfinity cluster at UNM? Then they could Beowulf the two clusters together into one of the top ten supercomputers.
Oh well, just thought I'd mention thought before this thread gets wiped.
I have a patent on the idea of ideas, which in effect gives me patent rights to all subsquent patents.
Please see my patent on IBM's patent database listed as US Patent #1.
(talk about your first posts)
I think the font resize thing is just a bug and not intentional, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to resize the font on the WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING page.
Of course, when you use font resize on that page (at least with Netscape) it blows away the background and changes the font style.
This is one of the ugliest pages I ahve ever seen. There are quotes from Bugle and Electronic Arts that are presented as images only with no ALT text, and the text that is on the page is in microprint (when I try to use CTRL-] in Netscape, the page layout falls apart and font doesn't increase.)
Also, there is an email sign-up box with no privacy statement.
You would hope that all X-box webpages would be readable on a WebTV unit as this is one of their natural target markets, but I doubt that you could read the Image only quotes on WebTV.
I think there is a significant clue that it is a Beowulf or Beowulf derivitive in that the name of the machine is Los Lobos, 'The Wolves'.
Of course it could just be a refence to the UMN Basketball Team The Lobos
"Bucky Shuttle" Memory Device: Synthetic Approach and Molecular Dynamics Simulations,
there are also MPEG simulations available here: Simulation of a nanotube-based memory element.
My favorites:
MS just released SR-1 for MS Office 2000. Here's a list of the 329 bug fixes included in the service pack.
Oh, don't forget that you get a FREE copy of IE 5.01 thrown in.
The patch file, depending on your system and prior patches applied, is between 24 and 40 Mb.
So are you suggesting they just mirror DeCSS on a webserver in China? That would be ideal I guess. Anyone have any friends in China with a high bandwidth website?
Probably the SONY Discam. Here some links to more info it:
SONY's spec sheet, a page from MiniDisc.org, and a ZDNet Review.
In the US, it used to be the case that that trademarks applied to a specific type of product so that you could have an ACME brand of soap that didn't infringe on the trademark of ACME brand cars. With the web, this seems to have changed so that if you can pay your lawyers enough, you can own ACME.com and prevent all the other ACME's from even using the word ACME in the name of their websites.
Swiss law might be more forgiving. The ETOY controversy I think was decided in part that ETOY was a Swiss company and the US company ETOYS wasn't able to enforce their US brand their. (Peter E. Wild in Zurich was their legal counsel)
Also, I think Switzerland is one the few countries that upholds Pivo Budvar's right to the Budweiser brand for beer.
Given that your site isn't selling another brand of cola, I think you have a good shot.
PS I can't access your site due to a DNS error. Is it already up and running?