Put it on your website WITHOUT a referring link from the html of your site. Then advise/. of the url, anonomously, along the lines of 'gosh, look wot I found!'. You'll then be wearing underwear (ie your ass will be covered).
Actually, there's no such thing as citizen of Illinois. Illinois state court has jurisdiction over residents of Illinois, who may or may not be US citizens. Pedantic I may be, but a lawyer should get it right!
This is very, very nice... but hopefully he automates the data stream (to avoid it becoming a pain for him) AND ensures nothing irrevant gets sent, because instigator can surely then sue him for costs.
Original at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,19093,00.asp July 30, 2001 Truce or Dare By Michael R. Zimmerman
If you're a small or medium-size company, there's a good chance you've heard from the Business Software Alliance about getting your software compliant with its licenses. If not, you probably will. The group is well into a nationwide letter and radio campaign to do just that.
But what you probably don't know is that, like so many of the companies that stuff your mailboxes with junk mail, the BSA, which represents such software giants as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Apple Computer Inc., has no intention of following up on its letters--regardless of how threatening and personal they may seem. It won't phone. And it won't pop in for a surprise audit.
Instead, an eWeek investigation reveals, the BSA's campaign is primarily a marketing effort essentially designed to scare people into buying more software. But for many enterprise customers who are quickly becoming fed up with the group's hardball tactics, the campaign is having the reverse effect: compliance, then departure to alternative products, like open source.
The reason the BSA Truce Campaign is more bark than bite is simple: As part of each Truce Campaign, the group sends out hundreds of thousands of letters at a time to businesses in a handful of cities. For the month of July, for example, it mailed 700,000 letters to businesses in five cities between New York and Portland, Ore. As such, it would be virtually impossible to contact even a sample of those companies to check up on their progress or lack of progress.
Indeed, one of the only ways the BSA is gauging the success of the Truce Campaign is by the size of the spike in software sales for various cities as the BSA passes through, which so far total 19.
"Everywhere we've run the Truce Campaign, we're seeing dramatic increases in sales," said Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement for the BSA, in Washington. "So it's being successful."
But a deeper look into the Truce Campaign, as well as an ongoing and almost identical anti-piracy campaign by Microsoft, a founding member of the BSA, reveals something more complex: the possible beginning of an entirely new business model built around anti-piracy and fear. The bottom line: There's money in anti-piracy, and plenty to go around.
To be sure, piracy results in major losses of revenue for the software industry. According to the BSA, $2.94 billion was lost to piracy in North America alone last year, while $11.75 billion was lost to it globally for the same period. But so far this year, those figures have declined.
Since the launch of its enforcement campaign in North America in 1993, however, the BSA has brought in about $70 million in settlements, a mere drop in the bucket compared with the overall total. Now it seems the industry, with the help of the BSA, is taking a new tack, with its focus on generating revenue the old-fashioned way.
Consider the following: Microsoft has been busy constructing a network of support services through distributor and licensing partners to assist customers in assessing and auditing their software to comply with their licenses.
One Microsoft partner, License Online Inc., of Bellevue, Wash., tracks where the BSA is headed and rounds up as many of its 36,000 registered channel partners as it can for those cities to swoop in and sell licenses.
"When we know what area the BSA is going into, we're going in scrambling to piggyback on their marketing efforts," said Sharon Erdman, vice president of marketing for License Online.
License Online offers its partners across the United States a 12 percent commission on any licenses they sell through License Online. To get the contractors rolling, the company supplies them with a list of companies Microsoft has sent its anti-piracy letters to. In addition to commissions, the contractors are told the companies contacted have the potential to become "long-term" customers.
"Microsoft has absolutely partnered with businesses who can address the concerns," according to Devin Driggs, a Microsoft spokeswoman in Lake Oswego, Ore. "It feels a responsibility to its customers to address any issues with compliance they may be experiencing."
As far as the anti-piracy fight becoming a business unto itself, Driggs said Microsoft views the subject as an industry issue.
Kruger acknowledged that the BSA's letter campaign is a direct marketing campaign designed to encourage users to get in compliance and not directed at any company in particular. The group uses common mailing list companies such as Dun & Bradstreet Inc. to generate the lists.
Microsoft's campaign is more deliberate, company officials said.
"I don't think we're doing anything that's random," said Nancy Anderson, associate general counsel for the company, in Redmond, Wash. As part of Microsoft's licensing agreements for its products, Anderson said, "the customer agrees to assure us they are current. The obligation is on them to assure them and to undertake an audit if requested by Microsoft."
Not surprisingly, however, the hardball tactics are having a negative effect on customers.
"We were nailed for tens of thousands of dollars," said Cary White, an IT manager at a financial services company in San Diego who acted on a letter from Microsoft. "We received a letter addressed to our CEO that they received a tip we were not compliant with Windows, Word and Excel.... That was a fishing expedition."
"My company is to completely go away from Microsoft," White said. "We're not going to buy any more Microsoft products. It's my decision. They're alienating their customers. I don't trust them."
The fear factor
For the BSA and Microsoft campaigns to work, the fear factor is essential, according to letter recipients contacted by eWeek.
"[Fear] is the first emotion when you get the letter. It's like, 'Oh my God, the Gestapo's coming,'" said Robert Fuller, president and chief operating officer of R.E. Fuller Engineering Consulting, a one-man company in Camas, Wash.
The BSA has struck fear in customers' minds through carefully worded, but threatening letters and an accompanying radio ad blitz warning businesses to beware of disgruntled employees dropping dimes on them.
According to the BSA's Kruger, the Truce Campaign is merely a 30-day grace period companies can use to get their software in compliance. If a company does use the time to get in compliance, it will avoid any potential future BSA investigation that may spring up as a result of its radio ad blitz.
But that doesn't explain the BSA's use of what many are calling threatening language. What's troubling to businesses, besides not being informed on how they were selected for the mailing list, is the letter's accusatory tone. For example, one line reads: "If you're caught [with unlicensed software], your organization could face penalties totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars."
And while Kruger insists the Truce Campaign is not a vehicle for generating leads or tips, that contradicts the thrust of the BSA's radio spots.
For example, at one point, the announcer in a radio spot for the Truce Campaign currently running in New York asks Kruger how the BSA receives most of its leads. Kruger responds: "Most of the calls come from current or former employees. I would say to businesses that, unless you have no current or former unhappy employees, you are only one phone call away from becoming the target of a BSA investigation."
"My management's concern was that there was almost a bit of paranoia about [the Truce Campaign]," said Peter Rassmussen, a technology manager at a Midwest retailer. "There were radio ads going on at the same time that sounded like Joe Stalin encouraging you to turn in your parents."
As for Microsoft, Anderson said, it's not in the company's interest to frighten customers. "We don't want to create anxiety," she said. "It's not our interest."
Misleading the pack
Exacerbating the anxieties for companies contacted by eWeek that have received Truce Campaign letters was the seemingly intentional vagueness of the letters, vagueness that is compounded by misleading information.
For example, though the Truce letter establishes a 30-day deadline for software reviews and includes a line that states, "If the BSA contacts you, just show your Truce Participation Number and software purchase receipts to take advantage of the Truce," the BSA has no intention of contacting any letter recipient.
But at least one radio spot, the one currently playing in New York, implores letter recipients to "review your software installations and acquire the licenses you need before the Business Software Alliance returns to New York City!"
Still, Kruger insists: "We don't visit any of these companies. The ones getting the letters are not under investigation."
When asked if these discrepancies were misleading or at least confusing, Kruger said any letter recipient who is confused can go to the BSA Web site or call the Truce hot line for information.
Also at issue is ironing out exactly what authority the BSA has to present deadlines, request software reviews or even conduct audits. According to Kruger, the only authority the BSA has, as power of attorney for its members, is to seek court orders on behalf of its members to conduct software audits on businesses suspected of using pirated or unlicensed software. But even then, the BSA does not seek such court orders frivolously.
"We only proceed on the basis of reliable information," Kruger said. "We take pretty good pains here to make sure our cases are based on solid information before going forward."
Indeed. Despite the tone in the Truce Campaign letters and radio ads to the contrary, the task of proving guilt lies with the BSA.
"The burden's on the BSA to prove itself to the court," said Peter Baruk, director of anti-piracy at Network Associates Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif., and former vice president of piracy for The Software & Information Industry Association, another software advocacy group in Washington that conducts piracy investigations. "If you're contacted by the BSA and doing the right thing, you have nothing to worry about. So, why respond? You can and be a good corporate citizen. [But] there's no reason why you'd have to react to a letter like this."
Perhaps you didn't have the difficulty I had getting good copies of Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd at that time... but if DVDs (and LPs) have a defect level of 1% of units shipped, that's appallingly bad quality control for an industry.
Each disc is verified on manufacture? I think not.
At most a disc is checked at beginning of a run, and another at the end.
LPs were far less reliably manufactured - d'ya think someone checked each one? And the plastics used for LPs had notorious quality problems, particularly in the 70s.
AOL's simple to use software certainly put a lot of people on the internet. But, then, you didn't have to be a bright spark to use CompuServe 3.x on any Windows platform, before DUN made it trivial.
The main problem with AOL is that they try to commercially rape every customer, and the customer is typically naive enough not to really. Sure, many may not care that their on-line behaviour is tracked for marketing, that pop-up ads aren't unavoidable, but that's not the point.
My (admittedly more pompous) other complain with AOL is that they are helping the train the new users that the Internet is purely a platform for sales and commercial entertainment, and these people may not notice or care if/when walled gardens become the norm with new-user ISPs.
I use to deal with a company in UK who handled remore control and transmission of real time video from security cameras and similar.
They told me that digital material is only treated as 'evidential' by UK courts if it has not been processed digitally any way. Raw data from digital cameras is ok, but lossless compression (zip, rar etc) cannot be used before storage or transmission of data. Thus encryption is not allowed, and lossy processing like MPEG? Forget it.
This is one reason why security recording are still largely analog - VCRs. Another reason is that VCR tapes are cheap, hold a hell of a lot of information, don't take up much room, and can be re-used.
It is probably fairly easy to present reasonable doubt of digitized evidence unless the resolution is so that tampering would be detectable.
What do customs do if they search luggage and find CDs and/or DVDs that look (to them) counterfeit, such as the passenger bought in China? I'm talking no more than one of each title, ie clearly for personal consumption. If the passenger bought them in good faith (difficult to prove otherwise), unless they are very obviously fake, is the passenger allowed to keep them?
Through Hotmail and Passport, MS can largely guarantee that your identity is correct - certainly on XP systems. With IE6 forcing P3P on commercial sites, the MS databases will be in the best position to accurately profile web users.
I think cookie-tracker schemes and companies like Doubleclick will be wiped by this, and MS will dominate the served advertisement market before too long.
Microsoft can simply implement the patent secretly, ie phone-home software licensing data, without announcing it. Deny they do this if necessary - after all, the data is not for public consumption, just for 'partners'.
Doesn't matter if the patent is granted - the patentee will get nowhere suing MS, and this way round the burden of proof is on the patentee proving MS used the patented technique.
Might even find DCMA covers the encrypted data been phoned-home, so it could be illegal to attempt to prove such patent (if granted) was violated. Wow!
The killers are lifetime and power dissipation, neither of which match LCD. This is ok for small displays (games, PDAs), bad for big displays (laptops). The power dissipation rises drastically will high multiplex rations (read: bigger displays) because each OLED/PLED pixel is very capacitive compared with LCD.
See Philips Semiconductors' presentation at http://www.usdc.org/technical/downloads/Web_Report _0101/sld027.htm
The other cost killer right is the fact that the displays still need more than 5V to drive them, which is not useful in today's low voltage equipment. You can get a 200 pad chip-on-mylar LCD driver (look inside your old cell-phone!) suitable for a small (128 x 64 pixel) monocolour LCD from the likes of Seiko-Epson for little more than $1 at million type volume. Current OLED drivers come nowhere near that.
I reckon the technology is still 5 years away from becoming anything like mainstream. The hype may be to do with the fact the developers need to keep stimulating cash flow while the technology is still being developed. Also, although the displays do look gorgeous (bright, with unsurpassed viewing angle) the advantage of LCD for small low cost low power displays (PDAs, cell phones) is that they only draw serious power when the backlight is on. Not true for OLED/PLED, since they generate the light. Do you really want to press a button on your cell phone to see the time?
1. Copying DVDs is not theft, if fair use. 2. Copying DVDs requires breaking the encryption, which is an unlawful act in USA because of DCMA. 3. Copying an unprotected DVD, if fair use, is lawful everywhere.
Yes, it's difficult. However the existing DVD was meant to a lot more difficult to decrypt than it is now. Would many people actually bother if it took a month per movie?
...but movies get their profit from theatre release. DVD is icing. CD music release generates the profit. Radio etc is the icing. That's way DVDs are relatively cheap.
"We can't afford to mentor very many juniors," Of course you can't, that would be looking toward the future.
There's a practical limit to the ratio of trainees to trainer, and still get some 'main job' from the trainer. Training someone damages the 'now' performance of a firm as an investment for the firm's future. This is not good is the trainee then goes to work for the competition.
This was all well understood in the the good ol' days of apprenticeships, where the trainee was bound to the firm for a number of years.
I agree that there are tons of eager people out there wanting to work. If they were capable, there wouldn't be a problem.
As a British engineer currently working in the Bay Area for a semiconductor company, and who used to work in UK for a well known blue chip UK general engineering company - some points:
1. We're currently desperate (as are our competition) to hire high end people with a relatively narrow range of skills - for example IC regulator design, or system experts for technical product definition. Can't find 'em. Most resumes from designers show inexperience, or the wrong experience. People applying for the second example show 'marketing' knowldge but shallow technical expertise and practically zero real system experience. We can't afford to mentor very many juniors, and the few US universities that churn, say, IC designeers, don't churn out enough. The designer graduates from India and China I've seen at work have been very competent and professional.
2. In UK, when the big companies were laying off 15 years ago, the engineers from (say) British Aerospace or Smiths couldn't get hired anywhere. Their experience was a narrow spike out of tune with the other electronic industry requirements.
3. Ageism rules. Most recruiters think that old staff (= over 35) are slow, and don't have the 'latest skills', whatever they are. The real reason is probably that younger=cheaper and easier to bully.
4. Yeah, I'm paid 15% less than I could get if I farmed my resume around. But that holds for as long as it takes to get residency (if desperate to move - I'm not), and it averages out in the end.
5. US should consider itself lucky that the top engineers want to come to the US, to the detriment of competing high tech zones like Taiwan and Bangalore. Would this attitude also apply to other industries - d'ya not want the best surgeons to work here too?
Slashdot Mirror
Put it on your website WITHOUT a referring link from the html of your site. Then advise /. of the url, anonomously, along the lines of 'gosh, look wot I found!'. You'll then be wearing underwear (ie your ass will be covered).
..or were you just letting off steam? Not that I'm complaining, it's an interesting tale.
Actually, there's no such thing as citizen of Illinois. Illinois state court has jurisdiction over residents of Illinois, who may or may not be US citizens. Pedantic I may be, but a lawyer should get it right!
Could I insist, for example, that my employer DNR my records without a court order? Is this federally protected?
Bowie,
Thanks for the reply. Perhaps "Project Founder and Caretaker" is now more appropriate!
Tim
Bowie,
Er, what's a Project Founder?
Not being rude, but I'm curious and it's not self-explanatory (or I'm particularly stupid).
Tim
This is very, very nice... but hopefully he automates the data stream (to avoid it becoming a pain for him) AND ensures nothing irrevant gets sent, because instigator can surely then sue him for costs.
Original at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,19093,00.asp
... That was a fishing expedition."
July 30, 2001
Truce or Dare
By Michael R. Zimmerman
If you're a small or medium-size company, there's a good chance you've heard from the Business Software Alliance about getting your software compliant with its licenses. If not, you probably will. The group is well into a nationwide letter and radio campaign to do just that.
But what you probably don't know is that, like so many of the companies that stuff your mailboxes with junk mail, the BSA, which represents such software giants as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Apple Computer Inc., has no intention of following up on its letters--regardless of how threatening and personal they may seem. It won't phone. And it won't pop in for a surprise audit.
Instead, an eWeek investigation reveals, the BSA's campaign is primarily a marketing effort essentially designed to scare people into buying more software. But for many enterprise customers who are quickly becoming fed up with the group's hardball tactics, the campaign is having the reverse effect: compliance, then departure to alternative products, like open source.
The reason the BSA Truce Campaign is more bark than bite is simple: As part of each Truce Campaign, the group sends out hundreds of thousands of letters at a time to businesses in a handful of cities. For the month of July, for example, it mailed 700,000 letters to businesses in five cities between New York and Portland, Ore. As such, it would be virtually impossible to contact even a sample of those companies to check up on their progress or lack of progress.
Indeed, one of the only ways the BSA is gauging the success of the Truce Campaign is by the size of the spike in software sales for various cities as the BSA passes through, which so far total 19.
"Everywhere we've run the Truce Campaign, we're seeing dramatic increases in sales," said Bob Kruger, vice president of enforcement for the BSA, in Washington. "So it's being successful."
But a deeper look into the Truce Campaign, as well as an ongoing and almost identical anti-piracy campaign by Microsoft, a founding member of the BSA, reveals something more complex: the possible beginning of an entirely new business model built around anti-piracy and fear. The bottom line: There's money in anti-piracy, and plenty to go around.
To be sure, piracy results in major losses of revenue for the software industry. According to the BSA, $2.94 billion was lost to piracy in North America alone last year, while $11.75 billion was lost to it globally for the same period. But so far this year, those figures have declined.
Since the launch of its enforcement campaign in North America in 1993, however, the BSA has brought in about $70 million in settlements, a mere drop in the bucket compared with the overall total. Now it seems the industry, with the help of the BSA, is taking a new tack, with its focus on generating revenue the old-fashioned way.
Consider the following: Microsoft has been busy constructing a network of support services through distributor and licensing partners to assist customers in assessing and auditing their software to comply with their licenses.
One Microsoft partner, License Online Inc., of Bellevue, Wash., tracks where the BSA is headed and rounds up as many of its 36,000 registered channel partners as it can for those cities to swoop in and sell licenses.
"When we know what area the BSA is going into, we're going in scrambling to piggyback on their marketing efforts," said Sharon Erdman, vice president of marketing for License Online.
License Online offers its partners across the United States a 12 percent commission on any licenses they sell through License Online. To get the contractors rolling, the company supplies them with a list of companies Microsoft has sent its anti-piracy letters to. In addition to commissions, the contractors are told the companies contacted have the potential to become "long-term" customers.
"Microsoft has absolutely partnered with businesses who can address the concerns," according to Devin Driggs, a Microsoft spokeswoman in Lake Oswego, Ore. "It feels a responsibility to its customers to address any issues with compliance they may be experiencing."
As far as the anti-piracy fight becoming a business unto itself, Driggs said Microsoft views the subject as an industry issue.
Kruger acknowledged that the BSA's letter campaign is a direct marketing campaign designed to encourage users to get in compliance and not directed at any company in particular. The group uses common mailing list companies such as Dun & Bradstreet Inc. to generate the lists.
Microsoft's campaign is more deliberate, company officials said.
"I don't think we're doing anything that's random," said Nancy Anderson, associate general counsel for the company, in Redmond, Wash. As part of Microsoft's licensing agreements for its products, Anderson said, "the customer agrees to assure us they are current. The obligation is on them to assure them and to undertake an audit if requested by Microsoft."
Not surprisingly, however, the hardball tactics are having a negative effect on customers.
"We were nailed for tens of thousands of dollars," said Cary White, an IT manager at a financial services company in San Diego who acted on a letter from Microsoft. "We received a letter addressed to our CEO that they received a tip we were not compliant with Windows, Word and Excel.
"My company is to completely go away from Microsoft," White said. "We're not going to buy any more Microsoft products. It's my decision. They're alienating their customers. I don't trust them."
The fear factor
For the BSA and Microsoft campaigns to work, the fear factor is essential, according to letter recipients contacted by eWeek.
"[Fear] is the first emotion when you get the letter. It's like, 'Oh my God, the Gestapo's coming,'" said Robert Fuller, president and chief operating officer of R.E. Fuller Engineering Consulting, a one-man company in Camas, Wash.
The BSA has struck fear in customers' minds through carefully worded, but threatening letters and an accompanying radio ad blitz warning businesses to beware of disgruntled employees dropping dimes on them.
According to the BSA's Kruger, the Truce Campaign is merely a 30-day grace period companies can use to get their software in compliance. If a company does use the time to get in compliance, it will avoid any potential future BSA investigation that may spring up as a result of its radio ad blitz.
But that doesn't explain the BSA's use of what many are calling threatening language. What's troubling to businesses, besides not being informed on how they were selected for the mailing list, is the letter's accusatory tone. For example, one line reads: "If you're caught [with unlicensed software], your organization could face penalties totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars."
And while Kruger insists the Truce Campaign is not a vehicle for generating leads or tips, that contradicts the thrust of the BSA's radio spots.
For example, at one point, the announcer in a radio spot for the Truce Campaign currently running in New York asks Kruger how the BSA receives most of its leads. Kruger responds: "Most of the calls come from current or former employees. I would say to businesses that, unless you have no current or former unhappy employees, you are only one phone call away from becoming the target of a BSA investigation."
"My management's concern was that there was almost a bit of paranoia about [the Truce Campaign]," said Peter Rassmussen, a technology manager at a Midwest retailer. "There were radio ads going on at the same time that sounded like Joe Stalin encouraging you to turn in your parents."
As for Microsoft, Anderson said, it's not in the company's interest to frighten customers. "We don't want to create anxiety," she said. "It's not our interest."
Misleading the pack
Exacerbating the anxieties for companies contacted by eWeek that have received Truce Campaign letters was the seemingly intentional vagueness of the letters, vagueness that is compounded by misleading information.
For example, though the Truce letter establishes a 30-day deadline for software reviews and includes a line that states, "If the BSA contacts you, just show your Truce Participation Number and software purchase receipts to take advantage of the Truce," the BSA has no intention of contacting any letter recipient.
But at least one radio spot, the one currently playing in New York, implores letter recipients to "review your software installations and acquire the licenses you need before the Business Software Alliance returns to New York City!"
Still, Kruger insists: "We don't visit any of these companies. The ones getting the letters are not under investigation."
When asked if these discrepancies were misleading or at least confusing, Kruger said any letter recipient who is confused can go to the BSA Web site or call the Truce hot line for information.
Also at issue is ironing out exactly what authority the BSA has to present deadlines, request software reviews or even conduct audits. According to Kruger, the only authority the BSA has, as power of attorney for its members, is to seek court orders on behalf of its members to conduct software audits on businesses suspected of using pirated or unlicensed software. But even then, the BSA does not seek such court orders frivolously.
"We only proceed on the basis of reliable information," Kruger said. "We take pretty good pains here to make sure our cases are based on solid information before going forward."
Indeed. Despite the tone in the Truce Campaign letters and radio ads to the contrary, the task of proving guilt lies with the BSA.
"The burden's on the BSA to prove itself to the court," said Peter Baruk, director of anti-piracy at Network Associates Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif., and former vice president of piracy for The Software & Information Industry Association, another software advocacy group in Washington that conducts piracy investigations. "If you're contacted by the BSA and doing the right thing, you have nothing to worry about. So, why respond? You can and be a good corporate citizen. [But] there's no reason why you'd have to react to a letter like this."
Perhaps you didn't have the difficulty I had getting good copies of Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd at that time... but if DVDs (and LPs) have a defect level of 1% of units shipped, that's appallingly bad quality control for an industry.
Each disc is verified on manufacture? I think not.
At most a disc is checked at beginning of a run, and another at the end.
LPs were far less reliably manufactured - d'ya think someone checked each one? And the plastics used for LPs had notorious quality problems, particularly in the 70s.
AOL's simple to use software certainly put a lot of people on the internet. But, then, you didn't have to be a bright spark to use CompuServe 3.x on any Windows platform, before DUN made it trivial.
The main problem with AOL is that they try to commercially rape every customer, and the customer is typically naive enough not to really. Sure, many may not care that their on-line behaviour is tracked for marketing, that pop-up ads aren't unavoidable, but that's not the point.
My (admittedly more pompous) other complain with AOL is that they are helping the train the new users that the Internet is purely a platform for sales and commercial entertainment, and these people may not notice or care if/when walled gardens become the norm with new-user ISPs.
I use to deal with a company in UK who handled remore control and transmission of real time video from security cameras and similar.
They told me that digital material is only treated as 'evidential' by UK courts if it has not been processed digitally any way. Raw data from digital cameras is ok, but lossless compression (zip, rar etc) cannot be used before storage or transmission of data. Thus encryption is not allowed, and lossy processing like MPEG? Forget it.
This is one reason why security recording are still largely analog - VCRs. Another reason is that VCR tapes are cheap, hold a hell of a lot of information, don't take up much room, and can be re-used.
It is probably fairly easy to present reasonable doubt of digitized evidence unless the resolution is so that tampering would be detectable.
What do customs do if they search luggage and find CDs and/or DVDs that look (to them) counterfeit, such as the passenger bought in China? I'm talking no more than one of each title, ie clearly for personal consumption. If the passenger bought them in good faith (difficult to prove otherwise), unless they are very obviously fake, is the passenger allowed to keep them?
Through Hotmail and Passport, MS can largely guarantee that your identity is correct - certainly on XP systems. With IE6 forcing P3P on commercial sites, the MS databases will be in the best position to accurately profile web users.
I think cookie-tracker schemes and companies like Doubleclick will be wiped by this, and MS will dominate the served advertisement market before too long.
Microsoft can simply implement the patent secretly, ie phone-home software licensing data, without announcing it. Deny they do this if necessary - after all, the data is not for public consumption, just for 'partners'.
Doesn't matter if the patent is granted - the patentee will get nowhere suing MS, and this way round the burden of proof is on the patentee proving MS used the patented technique.
Might even find DCMA covers the encrypted data been phoned-home, so it could be illegal to attempt to prove such patent (if granted) was violated. Wow!
The killers are lifetime and power dissipation, neither of which match LCD. This is ok for small displays (games, PDAs), bad for big displays (laptops). The power dissipation rises drastically will high multiplex rations (read: bigger displays) because each OLED/PLED pixel is very capacitive compared with LCD.
t _0101/sld027.htm
See Philips Semiconductors' presentation at http://www.usdc.org/technical/downloads/Web_Repor
The other cost killer right is the fact that the displays still need more than 5V to drive them, which is not useful in today's low voltage equipment. You can get a 200 pad chip-on-mylar LCD driver (look inside your old cell-phone!) suitable for a small (128 x 64 pixel) monocolour LCD from the likes of Seiko-Epson for little more than $1 at million type volume. Current OLED drivers come nowhere near that.
I reckon the technology is still 5 years away from becoming anything like mainstream. The hype may be to do with the fact the developers need to keep stimulating cash flow while the technology is still being developed. Also, although the displays do look gorgeous (bright, with unsurpassed viewing angle) the advantage of LCD for small low cost low power displays (PDAs, cell phones) is that they only draw serious power when the backlight is on. Not true for OLED/PLED, since they generate the light. Do you really want to press a button on your cell phone to see the time?
Ok, listen up.
1. Copying DVDs is not theft, if fair use.
2. Copying DVDs requires breaking the encryption, which is an unlawful act in USA because of DCMA.
3. Copying an unprotected DVD, if fair use, is lawful everywhere.
Don't mix the issues up.
Yes, it's difficult. However the existing DVD was meant to a lot more difficult to decrypt than it is now. Would many people actually bother if it took a month per movie?
...but movies get their profit from theatre release. DVD is icing. CD music release generates the profit. Radio etc is the icing. That's way DVDs are relatively cheap.
DVD encryption is flawed; don't presume 'clever hackers' can fix the next gen.
After all, the only realistic way to decode a PGP message is to guess the password, clever hacker or not.
Well put!
errr.... that's it! Just some praise.
foreign workers are white too - stop being so quick to label everyone a racist
Racism is not always the same as as color prejudice.
Racism is sometimes very close to extreme right-wing nationalism.
"We can't afford to mentor very many juniors,"
Of course you can't, that would be looking toward the future.
There's a practical limit to the ratio of trainees to trainer, and still get some 'main job' from the trainer. Training someone damages the 'now' performance of a firm as an investment for the firm's future. This is not good is the trainee then goes to work for the competition.
This was all well understood in the the good ol' days of apprenticeships, where the trainee was bound to the firm for a number of years.
I agree that there are tons of eager people out there wanting to work. If they were capable, there wouldn't be a problem.
H1B holders pay taxes for social security, but cannot receive it. So you are already getting the benefits - be grateful!
...and I'm afraid that you don't own the country. A lot of other people do, a lot or corporations do, and a lot of those are foreigners.
As a British engineer currently working in the Bay Area for a semiconductor company, and who used to work in UK for a well known blue chip UK general engineering company - some points:
1. We're currently desperate (as are our competition) to hire high end people with a relatively narrow range of skills - for example IC regulator design, or system experts for technical product definition. Can't find 'em. Most resumes from designers show inexperience, or the wrong experience. People applying for the second example show 'marketing' knowldge but shallow technical expertise and practically zero real system experience. We can't afford to mentor very many juniors, and the few US universities that churn, say, IC designeers, don't churn out enough. The designer graduates from India and China I've seen at work have been very competent and professional.
2. In UK, when the big companies were laying off 15 years ago, the engineers from (say) British Aerospace or Smiths couldn't get hired anywhere. Their experience was a narrow spike out of tune with the other electronic industry requirements.
3. Ageism rules. Most recruiters think that old staff (= over 35) are slow, and don't have the 'latest skills', whatever they are. The real reason is probably that younger=cheaper and easier to bully.
4. Yeah, I'm paid 15% less than I could get if I farmed my resume around. But that holds for as long as it takes to get residency (if desperate to move - I'm not), and it averages out in the end.
5. US should consider itself lucky that the top engineers want to come to the US, to the detriment of competing high tech zones like Taiwan and Bangalore. Would this attitude also apply to other industries - d'ya not want the best surgeons to work here too?