the #1 world PC maker would be the Taiwanese company Dell buys computers from!!!! Probably a company like Asus or Quanta that sells to rebranders in the US but "out the door" to retailers in Asia.
he was agreeing with you. If a kevlar vest sinks it's one more thing you have to swim against (the Navy works in the high seas after all) But the shrapnel is probably a bigger concern as most ship to ship warfare is missiles now anyway. As a sailor they're not even gunning for YOU anymore, but when your dealing with guns that split steel beams people are pretty fragile creatures. The flying scraps would take out most people easily.
I'd think the difference is that the poly absorbs more energy thru phase change than the kevlar does. Kevlar acts as a net to stop the bullet getting thru by tightening up. The fibers themselves don't absorb damage, just spread it out. Poly being slightly weaker would absorb the energy of the bullet thru generating heat that breaks up the molecules... sounds counter intuitive, but that heat has to come from kinetic energy... or something like that. The same reason bicycle helmets are mostly styrofoam and not steel... it's the body underneath that's fragile, safety gear can be replaced for minimal cost over the cheapest GSW surgery.
he's already been run out of one court for his antics... so yes, the courts are tired of this.
on a side note, I don't think he'd have a chance in hell against Microsoft's lawyers. Halo is the wrong game to attack anyway. Sure it's violent, but it's fantasy violence a la Aliens or Starship Troopers against not to scary monsters. It's not even the horror genre like Doom with people turned to zombies and demonic undertones... it's strictly man versus alien. And occasionally alien versus people. It's not violence depicted against PEOPLE for sport like GTA. otherwise he ought to be out there protesting Forest Gump or Pearl Harbor for depictions of people really getting shot at and loosing limbs. Personally what I've seen of Halo 2 makes it barely PG-13.. mostly for the language and occasional gratituious monster kills or foul language to bump up the ESRP so tweens will want it for being "grown up".
notebooks!!!! many people travel and take all their entertainment with them. Or in the case of students don't bother with a separate TV at all anymore.
Routine backups with current LTO3 tapes can put up to 800MB on a tape in about 2 hours. Most mid size companies need one tape for a full system and the tapes are about $120 each. a full month of backup rotation (daily/weekly/monthly) is about $3500. To data optical disks just don't compete with tape. A DVD is what 9 gig.. that's pocket change in the data backup world. There are places like Walmart or Visa that would fill a backup tape in an HOUR of critical transaction data!!! These are guys buying 100 tape (that's ~600 GB each) libraries and wanting more. As far as cost this is comparable to a server version of a LTO3 library from the big guys, it's right in line and finally almost capable of making optical media usable for enterprise.
Look at Google, they make their money from having eyeballs looking at their searches... they found somebody willing to pay to put ads in front of those people. That's the business, finding people willing to pay for ads. But Shuttleworth is looking at the support/service side of the business. There's plenty of money to make there. I was in an IBM training class and even at that scale customers willing to PAY for one-of-a-kind features still make a difference in company direction. The distro is just the marketing tag to get paying customers in.. it was rumored at one point they were doing a bunch of work for NASA desktops. That's where money is.. in private "distros" that address the needs of one customer at a time. That's something Microsoft has NEVER done well. Microsoft's model is to pass you off to somebody else.. go to Dell if your OS doesn't work, go to your VAR consultant for Servers & programming, go to tech support in India.... If Ubuntu gets big, it's no threat to them to have other people work on it. They can only get so much consulting business, and as more people do it, they'll want the interesting, advanced work and they'll get the privilege of leaving their card first to every new customer that tries the Distro. In a truly CAPITALIST world you don't have to control all the uses of your product. Microsoft has a monopoly complex because they don't actually take responsibility for ANYTHING that they sell... they expect somebody else to do that. Microsoft has a monopoly on one small piece of the pie and if they loose that, they lose the farm. In capitalistic companies the amount of money you make is directly proportional to how far out your neck is. The more you or your company put its reputation on providing quality service determines how much money you make. Linux Distros by definition provide measurable differences in quality, the maintainers can be rewarded based on their successes or failures... in OSS the focus is on PEOPLE not PRODUCTS.
first to file means nothing if the invention is already PUBLISHED... then NOBODY can patent it. I've often thought that Sourceforge would be a good place to convert to a software "patent-free" house. Sourceforge is a public forum, that counts as published.. if we took all the crazy ideas posted in slashdot, fleshed them out to be usable, and posted them on sourceforge that would quickly make vast swaths of programing permanently unpatentable.
It would be smart of the FSF to file a suit right now for slander of title against Microsoft. They need to put up or shut up... doing otherwise is "tortuous interference" with Linux and other OSS vendors' businesses by making legal accusations that aren't true to stymie their business. It may be good to deal with 200 patents at once rather than one at a time. Microsoft has money to play that game, the FSF does not. Also, patents en mass in court can show a clear misappropriation of the patent system in the field of software and business model patents that one-at-a-time can't prove effectively in separate non-connected cases.
there's MANY technology managers that don't surf past Cnet or PC World for their industry data. Sure, they keep up on individual products, but remember, Cnet is owned by people that can actually PRINT and SELL tech news.. (not that it's always a month behind, but the management that reads these rags doesn't know that!) and there's a lot of managers getting free subscriptions to this. This drivel has CLOUT.. it gets spread all over.
it incentivizes "inventing around" existing patents because if your idea is new YOU can patent it! Often the ideas "invented around" are good for the company and take it in new directions, with new experience. In the business environement the goal is to then turn marketing around to suit your invention.
I the last company I worked at make parts for people. We had one large customer stupid enough to fire all their chief engineers and just milk the product. Those engineers cashed in there options and opened their own company making the same product, funnier yet was the that the work they did to get around THEIR OWN PATENTS!!!! AFTER they were forced out was BETTER than what the old company was selling. It's a great example of how the system works for bad and good. The design arguments were hillarious... after all, when the patent lawyers came calling they were refuting their own patents!!! It was brilliant to see the products be re-engineered from scratch all over again, while the new company mopped the floor with the old one.
is there more to that comment, because all the views I've seen compare no differently than the "Di Vinci Code" does to the Catholic Church... that movie makes accusations similar in scope to that usenet post.. or what about that Rushdie (name wrong) book about islam from 10 years ago that all those Islamic people wanted punished? Those things were far more publicized than some usenet post.
just like anti-abortion protesters or union strikes, as long as the protest is on public right-of-way(ie road or sidewalks) and doesn't block access (prevent people from enter/exit without confrontation) then it's not criminal. Unless this law adds something else because it's "religion".
except under those conditions the Moonite incident clearly fails to be covered. While the Boston govt did overreact (1), the cartoon network people contacted them as soon as they heard about it (#2 fails) and made themselves available to answer questions (#3 fails)... which the Boston PD REFUSED to acknowledge and continued to propagate the false info. The Cartoon Network people also did this in several other cities with no police problems. This was clearly deliberate, planned mismanagement by the Boston PD.. any law needs to take that into account with even harsher punishment for being wrong.
I think the reporters would be stupid to sue... that would violate their sources and open them up to all sorts of HP fun!! HP got their numbers from either the wayward board director's phone, or from HP's own company phone records. That much is legally fact. By them admitting there is more, opens them up to admitting they made the other calls... they can't hide behind "sources" and press a CIVIL suit... It's a CIVIL suit.. there's no Constitutional "freedom of press" there. They were knowingly calling a board member off the books.. in it self is an illegal action under SEC rules and while reporters aren't held to that law, the person calling them IS. But in a civil case all that goes on the table and HP gets what they really want! The board members on a stick!
but what they're doing is legal.. under copyright law, under DMCA, and under their CSS contract. That's the technicality that lets them SELL a product in the USA!!! Versus MythTV and everybody else that has marginally legal parts.
Part of the "Semantic Web" was to prevent consolidation of power all across the actors... These guys were really clever and quite anti-establishment... or even crating a new one. Semantic web has more to do with Archives of documents and not really Web Applications... that's the real flaw in the system. For archival formats, what the W3C's laid out would work quite nicely over 100+ years. I routinely work with 15+ year old data and comparing what they've done is ahead of the curve... consider it scary when most of the specs people ignore as too "edgy" are from year 2000!!! But the W3C has basically refused to address Web applications... or even worse they let companies like Adobe and IBM completely monopolize the discussion... of course it was designed never to conflict with THEIR proprietary web app products!!! I agree with the other guy below that they put a little too much faith in people wanting to do good over easy though.
IBM's customers are large companies... places that buy a dozen mainframes or thousands of cash registers. That's where IBM is loosing money. They won't "cut them loose" but rather rebid the contract with a nice margin of profit (to make up what they lost)... which the customer will readily refuse and go elsewhere. Motto: if you're in an industry against IBM... figure out how to make money from these guys IBM turns lose!!!! Many of these contracts are in the million dollar + range.. that can keep a small shop or consultant fed for years. HP, SUN, linux start recruiting the ex-IBMers for your service/sales departments. Much of what Global Services does is customer facing or back end support. The stuff that SHOULDN'T be outsourced... talking to customers and solving problems!!
This makes more sense now! Actually that's a legal trap somebody set for the previous owner. It doesn't qualify as "cybersquatting" until the "squatter" requests payment. Otherwise it's under "first come, first serve" rules. Some PHB manager is playing dirty against a fan site. As busy as candidates are, I'd doubt Obama actually knew about it. But it still makes him look bad.
no it's worse than that!! What they've done is throw the kid in a "GED mill" until they get sick of the druggies and teen moms and drop out. Pretty much any chance of getting into a good college just went away too.. unless the kid works his way up thru community college to get back in. There's no "re-education" just the education that if you mess with the "system" you will get abused and ruined for years to come and they just don't care.
I view.Net as Microsoft's version of RPG. IBM still doesn't sanction moving RPG anywhere except AS400/iSeries/i5 and I wouldn't expect them to ever. I see.Net as Microsoft putting themselves in a smaller box so they can move from low cost commodities to high(er) profit support contracts and perhaps non-configurable hardware. They seem to want to be like "so-and-so" but not actually do business like that.
I think the biggest problem is that too many people outside want to make the Microsoft stuff work for them and it's just not practical.. look at Mono. First, it's a waste of resources that could be used on ruby, python or smalltalk based solutions. Second, it's just stepping into Microsoft's arena of IP and marketing "bait-n-switch". Novell will never win trying to "bargain" with the devil.
I think Dell may be taking AMD up instead. Dell needs to be unique... not just shipping department for "WinTel". With their new try at Ubuntu, AMD would be a good choice for OSS solutions.. AMD don't seem to have a problem with OSS, they relied on it to sell opterons. Perhaps a big vendor like Dell would finally get some decent ATI drivers out there because it would make really cheap powerful notebooks. I'd think AMD would intend to fix that, but they need cash for work like anybody else.
we need some web technology that lets a web designer mark up what the page is about in some kind of structured pattern. That way shopping sites for diamonds would be easily identified as opposed to diamond mining or Neil Diamond. If a lot of pages did this we wouldn't need google as much... even individual users machines could bot the net and identify what they needed.
Somebody should have thought of this sooner. If there was some standard for semantics on web pages then there wouldn't be the need to game the system as much. I wonder if the W3C has any working groups to fix this? That Tim guy knows a lot about the web, maybe he can help.
without knowing particulars because the links are light, I think there's one change to your example... Microsoft may have licensed the code prior to putting it into there software in the US and agreed to pay fees... then exported that software where it wasn't patented. Should Microsoft pay for all the copies they sold under the agreement as the agreement was for their company to use ATT IP? It would seem Microsoft is pulling a "we don't have to pay" move here... after negotiating a contract for say 1 million copies with ATT then telling the court half were sold where there is no patent so we shouldn't have to pay ATT.
on a side note, this is why Microsoft doesn't understand the GPL.... they simply don't believe in honesty. period. They don't appear to every negotiate a contract in good faith... look at all the articles on slashdot about that. It's the absolute worst kind of business dishonesty because they ruin it for everybody. I've always likened their business practice to that kid on the playground that trades everybody for stuff they're not allowed to have then runs to teacher when they get one bad deal and wants take-backs because they weren't supposed to be doing it in the first place..."that's the rules!" then sneers behind the teacher's dress and starts all over again.
For starts this is a big "told you so" to Kevin from CmdrTaco... Kevin originally approached Taco about adding what would become Digg to Slashdot and Taco said it would never work... Both were wrong! Digg does work but would be much better if it took from Slashdot's experiences. This whole post is about the Digg/Slashdot p*** match. oh well, it gets page hits!
back OT, Digg's focus is to "Digg" around on the internet and find interesting stuff. Where Slashdot is about Quality, Digg is all about Quantity and cleverness. I find myself on Digg more (to follow the links than to discuss) because Slashdot has slowed down.. every time somebody post Lego robots, or weird news, etc (the "news for nerds" part of the slogan!) it gets flamed as "stupid" or not a "relevant" issue to the Slashdot (stuff that matters) "agenda". I've noticed from Firehose that clever quirky stuff just isn't making front page anymore even if it gets hits.
I'd say each site has it's place. In a lot of ways Digg "gaming" doesn't hurt if it doesn't happen too much as it's usually interesting stuff if somebody wants it there enough to go to all that work. On the other hand, Slashdot has better discussion. Slashdot has that cool factor of actual industry insiders that will show up and post... that's way cool and they only do it because Slashdot has that history. If Slashdot wants to remain "relevant" there's the ticket... get more actual people from the industry to post, answer questions, etc... that's where the NEWS really is.
but these guys weren't breaking the CSS encryption on their product. They kept the data encrypted on their server... the user can't access it to make a copy elsewhere, it's just stored. By being official licensees there are no copyright issues because the USER isn't making any copies. In short they've implemented the kind of system the MPAA people keep saying would be "legal" with all the appropriate protections. I'd like to see Apple jump on board with one of these as and iTV attachment with one of those new 1TB drives for storing movies!! I don't think Apple would do it because they don't want to upset people trying to sell movies over iTunes, but on the other hand allowing people to rip CDs to iTunes hasn't slowed down iTunes music sales... I could see this doing good for the movie biz. The MPAA need to get over themselves. Users than know anything can download all day.. but HONEST people can't put their movies on ipods or itvs to make things easier. Apple already has approved methods in place... why stop it now.
Slashdot Mirror
the #1 world PC maker would be the Taiwanese company Dell buys computers from!!!! Probably a company like Asus or Quanta that sells to rebranders in the US but "out the door" to retailers in Asia.
I'd think the difference is that the poly absorbs more energy thru phase change than the kevlar does. Kevlar acts as a net to stop the bullet getting thru by tightening up. The fibers themselves don't absorb damage, just spread it out. Poly being slightly weaker would absorb the energy of the bullet thru generating heat that breaks up the molecules... sounds counter intuitive, but that heat has to come from kinetic energy... or something like that. The same reason bicycle helmets are mostly styrofoam and not steel... it's the body underneath that's fragile, safety gear can be replaced for minimal cost over the cheapest GSW surgery.
on a side note, I don't think he'd have a chance in hell against Microsoft's lawyers. Halo is the wrong game to attack anyway. Sure it's violent, but it's fantasy violence a la Aliens or Starship Troopers against not to scary monsters. It's not even the horror genre like Doom with people turned to zombies and demonic undertones... it's strictly man versus alien. And occasionally alien versus people. It's not violence depicted against PEOPLE for sport like GTA. otherwise he ought to be out there protesting Forest Gump or Pearl Harbor for depictions of people really getting shot at and loosing limbs. Personally what I've seen of Halo 2 makes it barely PG-13.. mostly for the language and occasional gratituious monster kills or foul language to bump up the ESRP so tweens will want it for being "grown up".
notebooks!!!! many people travel and take all their entertainment with them. Or in the case of students don't bother with a separate TV at all anymore.
Routine backups with current LTO3 tapes can put up to 800MB on a tape in about 2 hours. Most mid size companies need one tape for a full system and the tapes are about $120 each. a full month of backup rotation (daily/weekly/monthly) is about $3500. To data optical disks just don't compete with tape. A DVD is what 9 gig.. that's pocket change in the data backup world. There are places like Walmart or Visa that would fill a backup tape in an HOUR of critical transaction data!!! These are guys buying 100 tape (that's ~600 GB each) libraries and wanting more. As far as cost this is comparable to a server version of a LTO3 library from the big guys, it's right in line and finally almost capable of making optical media usable for enterprise.
Look at Google, they make their money from having eyeballs looking at their searches... they found somebody willing to pay to put ads in front of those people. That's the business, finding people willing to pay for ads. But Shuttleworth is looking at the support/service side of the business. There's plenty of money to make there. I was in an IBM training class and even at that scale customers willing to PAY for one-of-a-kind features still make a difference in company direction. The distro is just the marketing tag to get paying customers in.. it was rumored at one point they were doing a bunch of work for NASA desktops. That's where money is.. in private "distros" that address the needs of one customer at a time. That's something Microsoft has NEVER done well. Microsoft's model is to pass you off to somebody else.. go to Dell if your OS doesn't work, go to your VAR consultant for Servers & programming, go to tech support in India.... If Ubuntu gets big, it's no threat to them to have other people work on it. They can only get so much consulting business, and as more people do it, they'll want the interesting, advanced work and they'll get the privilege of leaving their card first to every new customer that tries the Distro. In a truly CAPITALIST world you don't have to control all the uses of your product. Microsoft has a monopoly complex because they don't actually take responsibility for ANYTHING that they sell... they expect somebody else to do that. Microsoft has a monopoly on one small piece of the pie and if they loose that, they lose the farm. In capitalistic companies the amount of money you make is directly proportional to how far out your neck is. The more you or your company put its reputation on providing quality service determines how much money you make. Linux Distros by definition provide measurable differences in quality, the maintainers can be rewarded based on their successes or failures... in OSS the focus is on PEOPLE not PRODUCTS.
first to file means nothing if the invention is already PUBLISHED... then NOBODY can patent it. I've often thought that Sourceforge would be a good place to convert to a software "patent-free" house. Sourceforge is a public forum, that counts as published.. if we took all the crazy ideas posted in slashdot, fleshed them out to be usable, and posted them on sourceforge that would quickly make vast swaths of programing permanently unpatentable.
It would be smart of the FSF to file a suit right now for slander of title against Microsoft. They need to put up or shut up... doing otherwise is "tortuous interference" with Linux and other OSS vendors' businesses by making legal accusations that aren't true to stymie their business. It may be good to deal with 200 patents at once rather than one at a time. Microsoft has money to play that game, the FSF does not. Also, patents en mass in court can show a clear misappropriation of the patent system in the field of software and business model patents that one-at-a-time can't prove effectively in separate non-connected cases.
there's MANY technology managers that don't surf past Cnet or PC World for their industry data. Sure, they keep up on individual products, but remember, Cnet is owned by people that can actually PRINT and SELL tech news.. (not that it's always a month behind, but the management that reads these rags doesn't know that!) and there's a lot of managers getting free subscriptions to this. This drivel has CLOUT.. it gets spread all over.
I the last company I worked at make parts for people. We had one large customer stupid enough to fire all their chief engineers and just milk the product. Those engineers cashed in there options and opened their own company making the same product, funnier yet was the that the work they did to get around THEIR OWN PATENTS!!!! AFTER they were forced out was BETTER than what the old company was selling. It's a great example of how the system works for bad and good. The design arguments were hillarious... after all, when the patent lawyers came calling they were refuting their own patents!!! It was brilliant to see the products be re-engineered from scratch all over again, while the new company mopped the floor with the old one.
is there more to that comment, because all the views I've seen compare no differently than the "Di Vinci Code" does to the Catholic Church... that movie makes accusations similar in scope to that usenet post.. or what about that Rushdie (name wrong) book about islam from 10 years ago that all those Islamic people wanted punished? Those things were far more publicized than some usenet post.
just like anti-abortion protesters or union strikes, as long as the protest is on public right-of-way(ie road or sidewalks) and doesn't block access (prevent people from enter/exit without confrontation) then it's not criminal. Unless this law adds something else because it's "religion".
except under those conditions the Moonite incident clearly fails to be covered. While the Boston govt did overreact (1), the cartoon network people contacted them as soon as they heard about it (#2 fails) and made themselves available to answer questions (#3 fails)... which the Boston PD REFUSED to acknowledge and continued to propagate the false info. The Cartoon Network people also did this in several other cities with no police problems. This was clearly deliberate, planned mismanagement by the Boston PD.. any law needs to take that into account with even harsher punishment for being wrong.
I think the reporters would be stupid to sue... that would violate their sources and open them up to all sorts of HP fun!! HP got their numbers from either the wayward board director's phone, or from HP's own company phone records. That much is legally fact. By them admitting there is more, opens them up to admitting they made the other calls... they can't hide behind "sources" and press a CIVIL suit... It's a CIVIL suit.. there's no Constitutional "freedom of press" there. They were knowingly calling a board member off the books.. in it self is an illegal action under SEC rules and while reporters aren't held to that law, the person calling them IS. But in a civil case all that goes on the table and HP gets what they really want! The board members on a stick!
but what they're doing is legal .. under copyright law, under DMCA, and under their CSS contract. That's the technicality that lets them SELL a product in the USA!!! Versus MythTV and everybody else that has marginally legal parts.
Part of the "Semantic Web" was to prevent consolidation of power all across the actors... These guys were really clever and quite anti-establishment... or even crating a new one. Semantic web has more to do with Archives of documents and not really Web Applications... that's the real flaw in the system. For archival formats, what the W3C's laid out would work quite nicely over 100+ years. I routinely work with 15+ year old data and comparing what they've done is ahead of the curve... consider it scary when most of the specs people ignore as too "edgy" are from year 2000!!! But the W3C has basically refused to address Web applications... or even worse they let companies like Adobe and IBM completely monopolize the discussion... of course it was designed never to conflict with THEIR proprietary web app products!!! I agree with the other guy below that they put a little too much faith in people wanting to do good over easy though.
IBM's customers are large companies... places that buy a dozen mainframes or thousands of cash registers. That's where IBM is loosing money. They won't "cut them loose" but rather rebid the contract with a nice margin of profit (to make up what they lost)... which the customer will readily refuse and go elsewhere. Motto: if you're in an industry against IBM... figure out how to make money from these guys IBM turns lose!!!! Many of these contracts are in the million dollar + range.. that can keep a small shop or consultant fed for years. HP, SUN, linux start recruiting the ex-IBMers for your service/sales departments. Much of what Global Services does is customer facing or back end support. The stuff that SHOULDN'T be outsourced... talking to customers and solving problems!!
This makes more sense now! Actually that's a legal trap somebody set for the previous owner. It doesn't qualify as "cybersquatting" until the "squatter" requests payment. Otherwise it's under "first come, first serve" rules. Some PHB manager is playing dirty against a fan site. As busy as candidates are, I'd doubt Obama actually knew about it. But it still makes him look bad.
no it's worse than that!! What they've done is throw the kid in a "GED mill" until they get sick of the druggies and teen moms and drop out. Pretty much any chance of getting into a good college just went away too.. unless the kid works his way up thru community college to get back in. There's no "re-education" just the education that if you mess with the "system" you will get abused and ruined for years to come and they just don't care.
I think the biggest problem is that too many people outside want to make the Microsoft stuff work for them and it's just not practical.. look at Mono. First, it's a waste of resources that could be used on ruby, python or smalltalk based solutions. Second, it's just stepping into Microsoft's arena of IP and marketing "bait-n-switch". Novell will never win trying to "bargain" with the devil.
I think Dell may be taking AMD up instead. Dell needs to be unique... not just shipping department for "WinTel". With their new try at Ubuntu, AMD would be a good choice for OSS solutions.. AMD don't seem to have a problem with OSS, they relied on it to sell opterons. Perhaps a big vendor like Dell would finally get some decent ATI drivers out there because it would make really cheap powerful notebooks. I'd think AMD would intend to fix that, but they need cash for work like anybody else.
Somebody should have thought of this sooner. If there was some standard for semantics on web pages then there wouldn't be the need to game the system as much. I wonder if the W3C has any working groups to fix this? That Tim guy knows a lot about the web, maybe he can help.
on a side note, this is why Microsoft doesn't understand the GPL.... they simply don't believe in honesty. period. They don't appear to every negotiate a contract in good faith... look at all the articles on slashdot about that. It's the absolute worst kind of business dishonesty because they ruin it for everybody. I've always likened their business practice to that kid on the playground that trades everybody for stuff they're not allowed to have then runs to teacher when they get one bad deal and wants take-backs because they weren't supposed to be doing it in the first place..."that's the rules!" then sneers behind the teacher's dress and starts all over again.
back OT, Digg's focus is to "Digg" around on the internet and find interesting stuff. Where Slashdot is about Quality, Digg is all about Quantity and cleverness. I find myself on Digg more (to follow the links than to discuss) because Slashdot has slowed down.. every time somebody post Lego robots, or weird news, etc (the "news for nerds" part of the slogan!) it gets flamed as "stupid" or not a "relevant" issue to the Slashdot (stuff that matters) "agenda". I've noticed from Firehose that clever quirky stuff just isn't making front page anymore even if it gets hits.
I'd say each site has it's place. In a lot of ways Digg "gaming" doesn't hurt if it doesn't happen too much as it's usually interesting stuff if somebody wants it there enough to go to all that work. On the other hand, Slashdot has better discussion. Slashdot has that cool factor of actual industry insiders that will show up and post... that's way cool and they only do it because Slashdot has that history. If Slashdot wants to remain "relevant" there's the ticket... get more actual people from the industry to post, answer questions, etc... that's where the NEWS really is.
but these guys weren't breaking the CSS encryption on their product. They kept the data encrypted on their server... the user can't access it to make a copy elsewhere, it's just stored. By being official licensees there are no copyright issues because the USER isn't making any copies. In short they've implemented the kind of system the MPAA people keep saying would be "legal" with all the appropriate protections. I'd like to see Apple jump on board with one of these as and iTV attachment with one of those new 1TB drives for storing movies!! I don't think Apple would do it because they don't want to upset people trying to sell movies over iTunes, but on the other hand allowing people to rip CDs to iTunes hasn't slowed down iTunes music sales... I could see this doing good for the movie biz. The MPAA need to get over themselves. Users than know anything can download all day.. but HONEST people can't put their movies on ipods or itvs to make things easier. Apple already has approved methods in place... why stop it now.