This past year, I dumped BellSouth for Vonage after having had my phones accidentally cut off and difficulty getting the service restored. I also dumped Cingular as my cellular provider and then dealt with them attempting to extract an early cancellation fee that was not part of my contract (when all was said and done, they owed *me* about $3.00). A couple of years ago, after having gone through phone support hell in trying to get my Xbox fixed, I wrote a very polite but pointed snail-mail letter to Microsoft and magically the problem got the problem taken care of at no cost to me a few days later. Hell, once I even wrote to a snack vendor because of a stale bag of pork rinds I got out of a vending machine, and was shipped a free 12-count case of full-size bags in three different flavors for my trouble.
There may not be tons of people that will actually take action, but I'm one of them. I've found that a lot of companies do in fact value their customers and will actively try to provide service recovery when they drop the ball. I've also found that said companies generally are those that provide a physical product, and those that provide only services often seem as if they couldn't care less about any given customer's level of satisfaction. I really fail to understand that, as I'd expect it costs a service provider more money to gain new customers than those companies that provide tangible goods.
Why should Apple buy Disney? Can they use them to sell Macs or even iPods
Like you wouldn't believe. If Apple buys Disney, one could expect that within 5 years or so almost every one of the 70,000 HP/Compaq desktops used by Disney would be replaced with an Apple product, along with many of the 10,000 or so servers Disney maintains. This would be a great opportunity for Apple to be taken more seriously in the business market, and to get someone other than geeks to look at the Xserve as a viable choice for back-end stuff. Assuming Apple begins offering some kind of virtualization support for the Intel Macs in the near future, the compatibility issues involved in such a wholesale change wouldn't be nearly the problem that they would have been just a year ago. Also, HP pays Disney many, many millions of dollars each year to sponsor the Mission:Space attraction at Epcot. If Apple bought Disney, not only would they have a massive captive (and international) audience at the Disney parks to sell to, there's a good chance they'd also be chewing substantially into HP sales. HP really can't afford to take much of a hit in their sales right now, which of course will work to Apple's advantage.
On top of all that, Disney still makes a pretty good chunk of money every year all by itself. I don't really think Apple will throw down that kind of money to buy Disney, but there are most definitely advantages to be had by doing so.
Yes, it certainly can, and under previous US copyright law, it was quite common that a work's copyright would expire during the author's lifetime. This is how it should be, IMHO. Copyright law should certainly allow a reasonable period of time for an author to benefit financially from his creation, but I don't see any reason why it should necessarily extend to his entire lifetime, and I see absolutely no reason at all why the author's family should be given any special dispensation simply by virtue of their relation to the author.
They're being made out to be the bad guy because there's no objective proof it is in fact a huge and real problem, and they've been given a ridculous amount of gravy by Congress in the form of extended copyright terms, Draconian copyright infringement penalties, the DMCA, mandatory 3% tax on blank music CD media, etc. The $8.95 billion they contribute to the economy doesn't come close to the costs they incur for *everyone* because of these concessions, in many peoples' opinion.
They claim $5.4 billion in losses, but by its very nature it's a number that's more or less pulled out of the air with no means to know how that figure was determined, and thus how accurate it might be. Given that many of the individual RIAA/MPAA members have shown a propensity to mislead and cheat the public and have been held accountable by the court system for doing so, I fail to see why I should accept that their reported losses are even within an order of magnitude of any true losses they may have experienced.
Translation: I cannot conceive of the existence of someone whose natural abilities and strengths differ from mine, and therefore they must be lazy bastards who just don't care enough to bother learning what I consider easy.
That's not what I said, and it's not an accurate interpretation of what I did say. I fully understand that everyone has natural strengths and weaknesses. I am somewhat gifted musically, but that doesn't mean I think any less of someone that can't hear pitch to save their life. Perhaps spelling is in fact something that people have a different degree of aptitude for, but I think it rather odd that the vast majority of people I know have good spelling skills, and those that don't tend to have problems with organization and attention to detail. It was the correlation between the poor spelling skills and the observed lack of attention to detail to which I was speaking, and which I believe is relevant to predicting how well someone may perform at a job that requires attention to detail.
I might also point out that the ad hominem was totally unwarranted, although it is nice to know that someone at least thought about what I wrote enough for it to piss them off.:-)
I definitely consider that a problem too, but I was only attempting to speak as to the viability of non-GOP/Democrat candidates among the population.
Frankly, I've not thought about the problem in enough detail to really have an informed opinion about how the elections themselves *should* be run. Offhand, I think I'd tend to favor some variation of instant runoff voting, but I just haven't yet taken the time to really sit down and ponder the pros and cons of the different methods.
Ugh, one of my English teachers in high school would regularly use Strunk & White as a club on us when critiquing our written work. Thanks for the unwanted flashbacks!:-)
Spelling is a pet peeve of mine, something I would definitely look at, and something that makes an impression on me when I read someone's written work. I've heard, "I've never been able to spell well" as an excuse for poor spelling for years, but what that really says is, "I don't consider the details of proper spelling important, since people will understand what I mean anyway." If someone can't be bothered to attend to the relatively easy-to-manage detail of correct spelling, why should I think they'll pay enough attention to other details that aren't as easy to manage? Of course, there are those that have a legitimate difficulty with spelling (dyslexics, English not their primary language, etc.), but by and large I think it's laziness that contributes to the vast majority of spelling problems.
Another peeve - poor penmanship. Is penmanship even taught in school anymore? About the only people I know of that consistently have good, clear handwriting are mechanical engineers and draftsman that have had experience with drawing by hand. Interestingly, most women seem to develop pretty clear writing without really working at it - is there something in the Y chromosome that inhibits good penmanship?
Besides people will never vote that way en masse, because for years and years and years, their perception has been focused on this aspect of third party candidates (on the national level;) they're all nuts, ultra-liberal hippies, or plain unelectable
One in every five voters cast their vote for Ross Perot in the 1992 election, and in some states Perot garnered more votes than at least one of the mainstream candidates. I think the biggest problem isn't getting people to vote for a non GOP/Democrat candidate, it's fighting through the sense of entitlement that both major parties seem to hold - they appear to believe that that the U.S. must have either Republican or Democratic leaders, and both parties actively work to limit what anyone else can do, particularly by denying their participation in public debates.
I don't believe there's an inherent problem with presenting candidates from a number of political parties to the people, rather, it's limited to the Big Two because that's how they want it.
So, it is a requirement that there be Democrats on the commission
No, that's not what your quote said. There are more parties out there than just the Republicans and Democrats, you know. There are also *plenty* of people out there that aren't a member of any political party.
If the heir also works in the same field (such as Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son) then they can continue the story (or even finish it, such as in Brian Herbert's case) without having a whole bunch of other people meddling in the work (if 50 endings from 50 authors existed, there wouldn't be much incentive for Brian Herbert)
Without intending to, I think you proved my point - if 50 derivative stories from 50 other authors were written as a result, then society is arguably richer for having had the additional content, rather than just the one from Brian Herbert. He's certainly free to continue writing, and even his own writings will still enjoy exclusive copyright - even any derivative works based on those of his father. He'll already enjoy a competitive advantage simply because he's Frank Herbert's son. I still fail to see a reason why he should be simply given that which rightly belongs to the people.
It seems only right to me that an author can bequeath the copyrights to a work as he wishes, until they expire.
Why is that? How does it serve the purpose behind copyright, when the *sole* purpose of the monopoly is to encourage said author to create? Why should the author's heirs get a free ride at society's expense? They're more than welcome to create their own works, and will probably be able to trade on their dead relative's name anyway.
I prefer the "fence test" (discussed a few days ago on/. in regards to patents) for determining if something is property or not. If you can put a fence around it, it's property. If not, it's an exercise in legal masturbation.
One could also look at IP taxes as a form of rent paid to the actual owners of the work, namely society at large. In this manner, the copyright holder could continue to benefit from his monopoly, but society doesn't completely end up with the short end of the stick should the holder choose to keep the copyright for a long period of time.
It's an incentive to create *a* winner and discourages others from building upon (and quite possibly improving) the original work, which works to a net loss for society.
I'm for a reasonable copyright length, and I think the length was about right at the original 14 + 14 term. It provides enough time to let the creator benefit financially, but doesn't strangle those who might also be able to make something worthwhile from the original work. As it is now, one could live their entire life without being able to create a derivative work on something that existed when they were born. This BS about life + X years is unjustifiable IMHO - it completely defeats the purpose of copyright, and I feel it's basically stealing from society.
Oh, and Thomas also has a comcast.net address listed on the contact . C'mon, virtual hosting is dirt cheap - couldn't these guys at least spend the $30/month to get colossalstorage.net e-mail addresses for everyone?
Best of all, he has a pacbell.com account listed as his contact address and his web site is hosted on Yahoo. Something about that just instills all kinds of confidence in me.
I didn't mean to imply that Apple wouldn't have left the PPC architecture for something else at some point, but I do think the availability of Vanderpool had a very large impact on when the Intel Macs were introduced. Jobs had to make the announcement last year because Apple was just getting eaten up with criticism regarding the PPC, and that was affecting their stock price. It's typically not Apple's style to announce a product before they actually have said product to ship, and given their resources I'd bet they already had Intel-based hardware ready to roll at the time of the announcment. Waiting to introduce the Intel Macs allowed them to offer VT functionality on every system shipped instead of having a small number of early orphan systems that won't be able to take advantage of it and the attendant pissed-off customers.
This may all be off-base, but the telling thing for me is the delay between the announcement and the shipping of the first products. I don't remember Apple ever doing that under the Jobs regime.
I think the virtualization angle probably had a lot to do with the switch. It's something of a rather large coincidence that Apple made the switch just in time to be able to include Vanderpool in its first Intel-based products, don't you think?
Having worked with much bigger lasers than the pointer in question for a number of years, I still think the whole thing is ridiculous. An average green pointer with a divergence of 1.5 millirads will produce a spot about 9 feet across at a distance of 3000 feet (the distance at which the guy convicted was said to have been), and assuming an output power of 5 milliwatts and absolutely no scattering, that works out to around 550 nanowatts per square inch. It's nighttime, so let's assume the pilot's eyes are fully dilated to 6mm, which means that if the laser hits him directly, each pupil will receive around 30 nanowatts of power.
It might be a noticeable blip in your field of vision at night (certainly less than the airport beacon lamps), but no one can convince me that it's enough to even dazzle someone. It's definitely an immature thing to do, and I might even go along with it being a misdemeanor offense at the state level, but it's certainly not worthy of a 20 year sentence. I especially liked how the guy was charged with "lying to federal officers", while our government apparently feels no shame in doing the same to the citizenry.
I'm pretty sure I was correct. The parent poster had implied that there wasn't a delay sufficient enough to interfere with gaming on a Myth system. In the several months that I've been using my Myth system, I most definitely have experienced a perceivable delay. I certainly could reduce it by cutting the buffering (at present, it's running at about 14 megabytes, or around two seconds), but I'd be doing so at the risk of running into problems if the system gets tied up doing something else long enough for the buffer to be exhausted (swapping, deleting files, etc.).
Simply playing through a capture card isn't the problem - playing through a system configured as a usable PVR is, and that's what the discussion was about.
No, actually he's not. I see the same behavior on my v18.1 system with a PVR-250 and PVR-350. The delay exists because the "live TV" signal that's displayed on the screen is actually played from the buffered data, and it takes a short period of time for the system to buffer enough data before it displays it. The same delay is seen during channel changes. In my particular case, it's about two seconds.
The image in the link is from Dachau. The proportions of the gate are identical, but it's the guard tower directly ahead and the maintenance building (a museum now) on the right in the background that really give it away. I compared it with the photos I took during my visit to Dachau last year, and it's definitely the same place.
Slashdot Mirror
This past year, I dumped BellSouth for Vonage after having had my phones accidentally cut off and difficulty getting the service restored. I also dumped Cingular as my cellular provider and then dealt with them attempting to extract an early cancellation fee that was not part of my contract (when all was said and done, they owed *me* about $3.00). A couple of years ago, after having gone through phone support hell in trying to get my Xbox fixed, I wrote a very polite but pointed snail-mail letter to Microsoft and magically the problem got the problem taken care of at no cost to me a few days later. Hell, once I even wrote to a snack vendor because of a stale bag of pork rinds I got out of a vending machine, and was shipped a free 12-count case of full-size bags in three different flavors for my trouble.
There may not be tons of people that will actually take action, but I'm one of them. I've found that a lot of companies do in fact value their customers and will actively try to provide service recovery when they drop the ball. I've also found that said companies generally are those that provide a physical product, and those that provide only services often seem as if they couldn't care less about any given customer's level of satisfaction. I really fail to understand that, as I'd expect it costs a service provider more money to gain new customers than those companies that provide tangible goods.
Why should Apple buy Disney? Can they use them to sell Macs or even iPods
Like you wouldn't believe. If Apple buys Disney, one could expect that within 5 years or so almost every one of the 70,000 HP/Compaq desktops used by Disney would be replaced with an Apple product, along with many of the 10,000 or so servers Disney maintains. This would be a great opportunity for Apple to be taken more seriously in the business market, and to get someone other than geeks to look at the Xserve as a viable choice for back-end stuff. Assuming Apple begins offering some kind of virtualization support for the Intel Macs in the near future, the compatibility issues involved in such a wholesale change wouldn't be nearly the problem that they would have been just a year ago. Also, HP pays Disney many, many millions of dollars each year to sponsor the Mission:Space attraction at Epcot. If Apple bought Disney, not only would they have a massive captive (and international) audience at the Disney parks to sell to, there's a good chance they'd also be chewing substantially into HP sales. HP really can't afford to take much of a hit in their sales right now, which of course will work to Apple's advantage.
On top of all that, Disney still makes a pretty good chunk of money every year all by itself. I don't really think Apple will throw down that kind of money to buy Disney, but there are most definitely advantages to be had by doing so.
Yes, it certainly can, and under previous US copyright law, it was quite common that a work's copyright would expire during the author's lifetime. This is how it should be, IMHO. Copyright law should certainly allow a reasonable period of time for an author to benefit financially from his creation, but I don't see any reason why it should necessarily extend to his entire lifetime, and I see absolutely no reason at all why the author's family should be given any special dispensation simply by virtue of their relation to the author.
They're being made out to be the bad guy because there's no objective proof it is in fact a huge and real problem, and they've been given a ridculous amount of gravy by Congress in the form of extended copyright terms, Draconian copyright infringement penalties, the DMCA, mandatory 3% tax on blank music CD media, etc. The $8.95 billion they contribute to the economy doesn't come close to the costs they incur for *everyone* because of these concessions, in many peoples' opinion.
They claim $5.4 billion in losses, but by its very nature it's a number that's more or less pulled out of the air with no means to know how that figure was determined, and thus how accurate it might be. Given that many of the individual RIAA/MPAA members have shown a propensity to mislead and cheat the public and have been held accountable by the court system for doing so, I fail to see why I should accept that their reported losses are even within an order of magnitude of any true losses they may have experienced.
Translation: I cannot conceive of the existence of someone whose natural abilities and strengths differ from mine, and therefore they must be lazy bastards who just don't care enough to bother learning what I consider easy.
:-)
That's not what I said, and it's not an accurate interpretation of what I did say. I fully understand that everyone has natural strengths and weaknesses. I am somewhat gifted musically, but that doesn't mean I think any less of someone that can't hear pitch to save their life. Perhaps spelling is in fact something that people have a different degree of aptitude for, but I think it rather odd that the vast majority of people I know have good spelling skills, and those that don't tend to have problems with organization and attention to detail. It was the correlation between the poor spelling skills and the observed lack of attention to detail to which I was speaking, and which I believe is relevant to predicting how well someone may perform at a job that requires attention to detail.
I might also point out that the ad hominem was totally unwarranted, although it is nice to know that someone at least thought about what I wrote enough for it to piss them off.
I definitely consider that a problem too, but I was only attempting to speak as to the viability of non-GOP/Democrat candidates among the population.
Frankly, I've not thought about the problem in enough detail to really have an informed opinion about how the elections themselves *should* be run. Offhand, I think I'd tend to favor some variation of instant runoff voting, but I just haven't yet taken the time to really sit down and ponder the pros and cons of the different methods.
Eh, I'll do it.
:-)
"In Soviet Russia, a comma means the difference between life and death"
I had comma to burn anyway, so mod me down at your pleasure.
Ugh, one of my English teachers in high school would regularly use Strunk & White as a club on us when critiquing our written work. Thanks for the unwanted flashbacks! :-)
Spelling is a pet peeve of mine, something I would definitely look at, and something that makes an impression on me when I read someone's written work. I've heard, "I've never been able to spell well" as an excuse for poor spelling for years, but what that really says is, "I don't consider the details of proper spelling important, since people will understand what I mean anyway." If someone can't be bothered to attend to the relatively easy-to-manage detail of correct spelling, why should I think they'll pay enough attention to other details that aren't as easy to manage? Of course, there are those that have a legitimate difficulty with spelling (dyslexics, English not their primary language, etc.), but by and large I think it's laziness that contributes to the vast majority of spelling problems.
Another peeve - poor penmanship. Is penmanship even taught in school anymore? About the only people I know of that consistently have good, clear handwriting are mechanical engineers and draftsman that have had experience with drawing by hand. Interestingly, most women seem to develop pretty clear writing without really working at it - is there something in the Y chromosome that inhibits good penmanship?
Besides people will never vote that way en masse, because for years and years and years, their perception has been focused on this aspect of third party candidates (on the national level;) they're all nuts, ultra-liberal hippies, or plain unelectable
One in every five voters cast their vote for Ross Perot in the 1992 election, and in some states Perot garnered more votes than at least one of the mainstream candidates. I think the biggest problem isn't getting people to vote for a non GOP/Democrat candidate, it's fighting through the sense of entitlement that both major parties seem to hold - they appear to believe that that the U.S. must have either Republican or Democratic leaders, and both parties actively work to limit what anyone else can do, particularly by denying their participation in public debates.
I don't believe there's an inherent problem with presenting candidates from a number of political parties to the people, rather, it's limited to the Big Two because that's how they want it.
So, it is a requirement that there be Democrats on the commission
No, that's not what your quote said. There are more parties out there than just the Republicans and Democrats, you know. There are also *plenty* of people out there that aren't a member of any political party.
If the heir also works in the same field (such as Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son) then they can continue the story (or even finish it, such as in Brian Herbert's case) without having a whole bunch of other people meddling in the work (if 50 endings from 50 authors existed, there wouldn't be much incentive for Brian Herbert)
Without intending to, I think you proved my point - if 50 derivative stories from 50 other authors were written as a result, then society is arguably richer for having had the additional content, rather than just the one from Brian Herbert. He's certainly free to continue writing, and even his own writings will still enjoy exclusive copyright - even any derivative works based on those of his father. He'll already enjoy a competitive advantage simply because he's Frank Herbert's son. I still fail to see a reason why he should be simply given that which rightly belongs to the people.
It seems only right to me that an author can bequeath the copyrights to a work as he wishes, until they expire.
Why is that? How does it serve the purpose behind copyright, when the *sole* purpose of the monopoly is to encourage said author to create? Why should the author's heirs get a free ride at society's expense? They're more than welcome to create their own works, and will probably be able to trade on their dead relative's name anyway.
I prefer the "fence test" (discussed a few days ago on /. in regards to patents) for determining if something is property or not. If you can put a fence around it, it's property. If not, it's an exercise in legal masturbation.
One could also look at IP taxes as a form of rent paid to the actual owners of the work, namely society at large. In this manner, the copyright holder could continue to benefit from his monopoly, but society doesn't completely end up with the short end of the stick should the holder choose to keep the copyright for a long period of time.
It's an incentive to create *a* winner and discourages others from building upon (and quite possibly improving) the original work, which works to a net loss for society.
I'm for a reasonable copyright length, and I think the length was about right at the original 14 + 14 term. It provides enough time to let the creator benefit financially, but doesn't strangle those who might also be able to make something worthwhile from the original work. As it is now, one could live their entire life without being able to create a derivative work on something that existed when they were born. This BS about life + X years is unjustifiable IMHO - it completely defeats the purpose of copyright, and I feel it's basically stealing from society.
Oh, and Thomas also has a comcast.net address listed on the contact . C'mon, virtual hosting is dirt cheap - couldn't these guys at least spend the $30/month to get colossalstorage.net e-mail addresses for everyone?
Best of all, he has a pacbell.com account listed as his contact address and his web site is hosted on Yahoo. Something about that just instills all kinds of confidence in me.
I didn't mean to imply that Apple wouldn't have left the PPC architecture for something else at some point, but I do think the availability of Vanderpool had a very large impact on when the Intel Macs were introduced. Jobs had to make the announcement last year because Apple was just getting eaten up with criticism regarding the PPC, and that was affecting their stock price. It's typically not Apple's style to announce a product before they actually have said product to ship, and given their resources I'd bet they already had Intel-based hardware ready to roll at the time of the announcment. Waiting to introduce the Intel Macs allowed them to offer VT functionality on every system shipped instead of having a small number of early orphan systems that won't be able to take advantage of it and the attendant pissed-off customers.
This may all be off-base, but the telling thing for me is the delay between the announcement and the shipping of the first products. I don't remember Apple ever doing that under the Jobs regime.
I think the virtualization angle probably had a lot to do with the switch. It's something of a rather large coincidence that Apple made the switch just in time to be able to include Vanderpool in its first Intel-based products, don't you think?
Having worked with much bigger lasers than the pointer in question for a number of years, I still think the whole thing is ridiculous. An average green pointer with a divergence of 1.5 millirads will produce a spot about 9 feet across at a distance of 3000 feet (the distance at which the guy convicted was said to have been), and assuming an output power of 5 milliwatts and absolutely no scattering, that works out to around 550 nanowatts per square inch. It's nighttime, so let's assume the pilot's eyes are fully dilated to 6mm, which means that if the laser hits him directly, each pupil will receive around 30 nanowatts of power.
It might be a noticeable blip in your field of vision at night (certainly less than the airport beacon lamps), but no one can convince me that it's enough to even dazzle someone. It's definitely an immature thing to do, and I might even go along with it being a misdemeanor offense at the state level, but it's certainly not worthy of a 20 year sentence. I especially liked how the guy was charged with "lying to federal officers", while our government apparently feels no shame in doing the same to the citizenry.
I'm pretty sure I was correct. The parent poster had implied that there wasn't a delay sufficient enough to interfere with gaming on a Myth system. In the several months that I've been using my Myth system, I most definitely have experienced a perceivable delay. I certainly could reduce it by cutting the buffering (at present, it's running at about 14 megabytes, or around two seconds), but I'd be doing so at the risk of running into problems if the system gets tied up doing something else long enough for the buffer to be exhausted (swapping, deleting files, etc.).
Simply playing through a capture card isn't the problem - playing through a system configured as a usable PVR is, and that's what the discussion was about.
No, actually he's not. I see the same behavior on my v18.1 system with a PVR-250 and PVR-350. The delay exists because the "live TV" signal that's displayed on the screen is actually played from the buffered data, and it takes a short period of time for the system to buffer enough data before it displays it. The same delay is seen during channel changes. In my particular case, it's about two seconds.
The image in the link is from Dachau. The proportions of the gate are identical, but it's the guard tower directly ahead and the maintenance building (a museum now) on the right in the background that really give it away. I compared it with the photos I took during my visit to Dachau last year, and it's definitely the same place.
There's something similar that exists when you exceed the speed of light in a given medium.