Any other outcome would mean we could say goodbye to the software industry, the online content industry, and probably a whole slew of other industries we're not thinking of as well, upon which copyright law touches in one way or another. Not to mention saying goodbye to 220+ years of precident.
Any other outcome would likely also mean that we have some very well paid (as in purchased) public officials.
Maybe not, but that hasn't stopped GM from trying to sueAvanti Motor Corp. over their upcoming Studebaker XUV. GM apparantly thinks that their deal with Hummer gives them ownership of the fundamental concept of big, boxy, utility vehicles. Or maybe they're just counting on the smaller company not being strong enough to defend against them whether legitimate or not. There seems to be an awful lot of that going around these days.
If I'm going to be treated like a criminal (and I already am, seeing as how I buy CD-Rs for data backup and mixing my own albums from music I legally own), I'm going to at least act like a criminal. Hoist the Jolly Rogers, it's time to sail the IRCs! Yaaaarrrrrrr!
Perhaps a more appropriate act of civil disobedience would be to dump a shipment of blank media into Boston Harbor.
Re:I was hoping they'd bring back the hardware.
on
Tulip to Relaunch C64
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· Score: 2, Informative
Then there's the big cartridge port that I've never programmed, but I think it's something like the user port, perhaps a bit more advanced.
The cartridge port gives you access to the processor bus, minus a few address lines. It can only address 8K directly, but has a couple of i/o lines that were sometimes used to swap different pages of ROM or RAM into the 8K space. It was typically used for ROM cartridges and RAM expansion cartridges, but it could also be used to map in additional i/o ports (potentially lots of 'em, if that's what you needed), or other neat tricks. Technically quite a different animal from the user port, but certainly very versatile and accessible in the same geek-friendly spirit as the user port and joystick ports. There was a company called Jason Ranheim (I think) that sold an EPROM programmer and blank cartridges with eprom sockets, along with some nice little software tools for rolling your own cartridges with up to 128K of EPROM. That was a fun tool. I learned a lot while playing with my C64.
While working for a large nameless Telecoms Company,
I and my fellow Contractors had an unwritten rule to "hold off" on all "good" ideas generated in meetings etc on Monday & Friday. Almost inevitably they would
all be canceled within a couple of days. Not subjecting ourselves to post/pre weekend madness saved ourselves a ton of work and helped us bring the project in on time!!
Wouldn't that just relocate the "weekend madness" to Tuesday and Thursday?
Not necessarily bad for word processing. It depends on how it's implemented. If it only completes upon pressing a particular key (like maybe the "end" key), then it wouldn't get in your way at all. Let's say I type "top" and it offers "topology". If all I wanted was "top", no biggie. I just type a space, enter, or punctuation mark, or whatever was supposed to come next, and all is well. Being that this is the same thing I would have done without the feature, nothing is lost. But if I did want topology, then I have the option of saving a few keystrokes by pressing "end". Perhaps I could then even backspace the "y", and be offered "topological" as an alternative.
All gain, no pain.
But laptops will not be replaced by tablets until handwriting recognition becomes just as fast (if not faster) than typing, with reduced errors.
That will never happen. Unless one has unusually poor typing skill, handwriting is inherently much slower than typing. Even perfect recognition won't change that.
I read an article many years ago about making live binaural recordings by placing microphones in the ear canals of a fairly anatomically accurate soft plastic head. According to the article, the effect when listening with headphones was dramatic. But having never heard such a recording, I can't say first hand.
Simple: you don't! If your clients want MS crap, then you have two choices: 1) give it to them, and put up with all that entails. 2) tell your clients to go to hell, and get some new clients.
I suspect the primary reason that one's clients are demanding MS crap is that they think they need it to provide what their clients want. They're correct, of course. It's a self-fulfilling thing, and thus very hard to overcome. As long as a majority believe it, it is true. And since it's true, they're inclined to keep believing it.
You can't break out of that just by offering non-MS alternatives to your clients (though that is important). More effective is to demand non-MS alternatives from your suppliers. And if you choose vendor B's product over vendor A's because B doesn't lock you into MS crap, be sure to let B know why you chose them, and let A know why they lost a sale. (Politely. Being an ass about it won't help.).
The old "lead a horse to water" adage seems apt here. The point is that unless you're a monopoly, you have very minimal influence over what your clients demand from you. But you have complete control over what you demand from your suppliers. Forget about leading horses to water. Be the horse.
The 3d engine wasn't even impressive when it was released, let alone now.
Sure it was impressive. And still is. A decent 1st person shooter with extensive maps and a good variety of challenges that ran smoothly on a 60MHZ Pentium with 16M of RAM, and only taking a minor chunk of my 420M hard drive. That's impressive.
I don't think I'd trust a high school drop out to build me a bridge.
I would, IF there were another way to validate his/her credentials.
The purpose of school is two fold:
1. to teach
2. to evaluate
I think the biggest failing in education as it is currently practiced is that these two things are tied too closely together. There are many highly capable people who are actively prevented from contributing to society because of this, resulting in an enormous waste of human potential. Different people learn in different ways, and even for those who do learn best in a formal way, some subjects don't lend themselves well to that.
I'd really like to see the existence and accreditation of an institution that does not teach, but only evaluates. This way, it matters not whether you studied in a classroom, or hired private tutoring, or took self-moderated self-study courses, or just read a lot out of personal curiosity, or just got your hands on and figured it out for yourself.
And I'm talking about more than just simple testing, though there would likely be some of that. For such a thing to be credible, it would have to be very rigorous and closely monitored. Personally, I think it should be so rigorous as to be of greater credibility than that of traditional degrees.
In the interest of full disclosure, I too am a high school drop out with a fairly high-tech career.
The RIAA hasn't figured out yet that the price tag isn't the major issue here (Lots of people are buying $50 games when the tools the pirate them are there and waiting to be used), it's a matter of the service. The RIAA still has a wonderful opportunity here that they're arrogantly overlooking. They should set up their own music download service. All the songs they can muster, they guarantee the quality, and they provide a server that can handle quick downloads. That's it. Don't make it more complicated than that.
That's it exactly. Opportunity has knocked. But instead of letting it in, the music industry is standing at the door with a shotgun.
Downloading music is easier, cheaper, and thanks to the new copy protected CD's, of greater utility than buying it at the store. Heck, it's easier and cheaper and of greater utility than driving to a store even if they were handing out the stupid copy protected CD's for free.
The right way to take advantage of this situation seems obvious to me. Imagine:
A subscription service priced a little above what the average music buyer spent on recordings a few years ago.
Artist royalties paid in proportion to each artist's downloads and total subscription revenue.
More music to choose from than with traditional distribution (after all, old and/or very obscure titles consuming a little disk space is much less of a problem than unsold physical inventory)
Reliable servers with enough bandwidth and physical locations to make it easy to get what you want whenever you want it.
Consistently good quality files available in several formats. No hassles with downloading a song only to find that it's incomplete, recompressed, or otherwise poor quality. No downloading an ogg file only to find that some idiot converted it from an MP3.
An easy user interface. Finding and retrieving the songs you want should be a no-brainer. Convenience sells.
Very high download limits, if any. Subscribers should be able to hear what they want, when they want, without having to maintain a huge local collection. The only incentives to keep local copies should be to avoid download time & network outages, or to transfer to other media for portable use. Essentially, being a subscriber should be a lot like having the world's largest music collection, only more convenient.
Losslessly compressed files available, though possibly with a somewhat more expensive account to offset the higher bandwidth consumption. If this service is to replace CD's for all purposes, it will have to provide equal or better sound quality.
NO copy protection of any kind. The songs are not the product. The service is. People will be more willing to pay for that service if it is more useful to them. DRM can only reduce the value of that service, and thus reduce customer's willingness to pay for it.
While this would almost certainly result in people paying less per song, I believe that most people would be willing to spend more on music per month than average CD purchases. The recording industry would get the increased income it wants. Consumers would get the music and fair-use rights that they want. And independent artists would get an opportunity to gain more exposure and get paid at least something for their music, instead of having to give it away on MP3.com and only hope that someone might occasionally buy a CD.
Music retailers would, however be screwed. But so be it. Holding back digital music distribution for the sake of the record stores would make about as much sense as holding back automobiles for the sake of livery stables.
Enough of these cases and the patent office may begin to reforem itself in when and where it grants a patent.
Or it could just make the USPTO folks even more overworked and underfunded, resulting in even less ability to properly review patent applications.Perhaps a better solution would be to let the USPTO use the fees it collects to fund its own operation, instead of siphoning much of it away as a general tax revenue source.
While this small victory is somewhat nice, it is quite too early to celebrate. It's a simple algorithm: take the number of emails produced by a spam-king, multiply by the number of possible suckers (gross profit), subtract the $500 per infraction of those willing to take the time and effort (net profit), and the result is well a very, very large pot minus a few pennies.
The potential (if this holds up in more cases) may be better than you think.
The percentage of people who respond to spam by purchasing is very small. Therefore, the percentage who respond by suing can also be quite small, yet still effective.
Here's a hypothetical scenario:
Spammer is selling penis enlargers for $99 + S&H
Spammer's profit is $50 per sale after all overhead cost is accounted for
Assume S&H charge is close to real cost, so negligible
Spammer gets 1 sale per every 100,000 emails sent
Since each lawsuit would consume the profit from 10 sales, only 1 out of every 1,000,000 spam recipients need sue to make his business completely without profit. Any more than that and he loses money.
(And who buys those stupid things anyway? Unsatisfied women, perhaps?)
It's actually a merry dance between potential (voltage), resistance (which dictates current), and the frequency (read about skin effect).
Yeah, it really is very complex. No one unit of measure tells the whole story. One poster suggested energy. That's probably better than just voltage or current in isolation, but still not complete. A large amount of energy could be completely harmless if spread out over a long period of time, because the power is never significant at any given moment. Power accounts for both voltage and current, but still is incomplete because a potentially dangerous amont of power could be harmless if applied for a very short time. Such as the half-cycle shock you might get if you trip a GFCI. In this case, the power is adequate to cause harm, but because of the short time, the total energy is too little.
Lots of situational variables too. Is your skin wet or scraped? Do you have an existing heart problem? What are you standing on? Are your shoes a good insulator? Through what parts of your body did the current flow? Etc.
And like you say, many shocks are not life threatening, and some are harmless. I once got a shock from a 2uF capacitor that was charged to over 1KV. The current flowed between two points on the same hand, so my heart wasn't affected. It just hurt like hell and left a pair of small burns, one on my palm, the other near the tip of a finger. My hand ached a little for a couple of days (I'm guessing some minor muscle injury), but I've experienced no long term ill effects from it (that was 8 years ago). No serious harm. but with slightly different circumstances, it could have been.
There is no answer that is both simple and correct. And even if you had a perfect formula, most of the time you wouldn't know all the variables to plug into it. The best policy is to err on the side of caution. Especially when voltage is high, but not be totally careless even when it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, then just make the caption say "One Million dollars!".
Clever, but sounds like a potential spammer loophole to me. They could just make their spam look more like mailing list messages.
Not necessarily bad for word processing. It depends on how it's implemented. If it only completes upon pressing a particular key (like maybe the "end" key), then it wouldn't get in your way at all. Let's say I type "top" and it offers "topology". If all I wanted was "top", no biggie. I just type a space, enter, or punctuation mark, or whatever was supposed to come next, and all is well. Being that this is the same thing I would have done without the feature, nothing is lost. But if I did want topology, then I have the option of saving a few keystrokes by pressing "end". Perhaps I could then even backspace the "y", and be offered "topological" as an alternative. All gain, no pain.
Ok, 10%.
This conversation never happenned.
I read an article many years ago about making live binaural recordings by placing microphones in the ear canals of a fairly anatomically accurate soft plastic head. According to the article, the effect when listening with headphones was dramatic. But having never heard such a recording, I can't say first hand.
You can't break out of that just by offering non-MS alternatives to your clients (though that is important). More effective is to demand non-MS alternatives from your suppliers. And if you choose vendor B's product over vendor A's because B doesn't lock you into MS crap, be sure to let B know why you chose them, and let A know why they lost a sale. (Politely. Being an ass about it won't help.).
The old "lead a horse to water" adage seems apt here. The point is that unless you're a monopoly, you have very minimal influence over what your clients demand from you. But you have complete control over what you demand from your suppliers. Forget about leading horses to water. Be the horse.
Now I have something to store in my write-only memory!
The purpose of school is two fold:
1. to teach
2. to evaluate
I think the biggest failing in education as it is currently practiced is that these two things are tied too closely together. There are many highly capable people who are actively prevented from contributing to society because of this, resulting in an enormous waste of human potential. Different people learn in different ways, and even for those who do learn best in a formal way, some subjects don't lend themselves well to that.
I'd really like to see the existence and accreditation of an institution that does not teach, but only evaluates. This way, it matters not whether you studied in a classroom, or hired private tutoring, or took self-moderated self-study courses, or just read a lot out of personal curiosity, or just got your hands on and figured it out for yourself.
And I'm talking about more than just simple testing, though there would likely be some of that. For such a thing to be credible, it would have to be very rigorous and closely monitored. Personally, I think it should be so rigorous as to be of greater credibility than that of traditional degrees.
In the interest of full disclosure, I too am a high school drop out with a fairly high-tech career.
Why without potato? Just grow long thin skinless potatoes to eliminate the peeling and slicing steps.
Downloading music is easier, cheaper, and thanks to the new copy protected CD's, of greater utility than buying it at the store. Heck, it's easier and cheaper and of greater utility than driving to a store even if they were handing out the stupid copy protected CD's for free.
The right way to take advantage of this situation seems obvious to me. Imagine:
- A subscription service priced a little above what the average music buyer spent on recordings a few years ago.
- Artist royalties paid in proportion to each artist's downloads and total subscription revenue.
- More music to choose from than with traditional distribution (after all, old and/or very obscure titles consuming a little disk space is much less of a problem than unsold physical inventory)
- Reliable servers with enough bandwidth and physical locations to make it easy to get what you want whenever you want it.
- Consistently good quality files available in several formats. No hassles with downloading a song only to find that it's incomplete, recompressed, or otherwise poor quality. No downloading an ogg file only to find that some idiot converted it from an MP3.
- An easy user interface. Finding and retrieving the songs you want should be a no-brainer. Convenience sells.
- Very high download limits, if any. Subscribers should be able to hear what they want, when they want, without having to maintain a huge local collection. The only incentives to keep local copies should be to avoid download time & network outages, or to transfer to other media for portable use. Essentially, being a subscriber should be a lot like having the world's largest music collection, only more convenient.
- Losslessly compressed files available, though possibly with a somewhat more expensive account to offset the higher bandwidth consumption. If this service is to replace CD's for all purposes, it will have to provide equal or better sound quality.
- NO copy protection of any kind. The songs are not the product. The service is. People will be more willing to pay for that service if it is more useful to them. DRM can only reduce the value of that service, and thus reduce customer's willingness to pay for it.
While this would almost certainly result in people paying less per song, I believe that most people would be willing to spend more on music per month than average CD purchases. The recording industry would get the increased income it wants. Consumers would get the music and fair-use rights that they want. And independent artists would get an opportunity to gain more exposure and get paid at least something for their music, instead of having to give it away on MP3.com and only hope that someone might occasionally buy a CD.Music retailers would, however be screwed. But so be it. Holding back digital music distribution for the sake of the record stores would make about as much sense as holding back automobiles for the sake of livery stables.
The percentage of people who respond to spam by purchasing is very small. Therefore, the percentage who respond by suing can also be quite small, yet still effective.
Here's a hypothetical scenario:
- Spammer is selling penis enlargers for $99 + S&H
- Spammer's profit is $50 per sale after all overhead cost is accounted for
- Assume S&H charge is close to real cost, so negligible
- Spammer gets 1 sale per every 100,000 emails sent
Since each lawsuit would consume the profit from 10 sales, only 1 out of every 1,000,000 spam recipients need sue to make his business completely without profit. Any more than that and he loses money.(And who buys those stupid things anyway? Unsatisfied women, perhaps?)
Except that prospective coast line land also happens to be prospective fault line land.
Lots of situational variables too. Is your skin wet or scraped? Do you have an existing heart problem? What are you standing on? Are your shoes a good insulator? Through what parts of your body did the current flow? Etc.
And like you say, many shocks are not life threatening, and some are harmless. I once got a shock from a 2uF capacitor that was charged to over 1KV. The current flowed between two points on the same hand, so my heart wasn't affected. It just hurt like hell and left a pair of small burns, one on my palm, the other near the tip of a finger. My hand ached a little for a couple of days (I'm guessing some minor muscle injury), but I've experienced no long term ill effects from it (that was 8 years ago). No serious harm. but with slightly different circumstances, it could have been.
There is no answer that is both simple and correct. And even if you had a perfect formula, most of the time you wouldn't know all the variables to plug into it. The best policy is to err on the side of caution. Especially when voltage is high, but not be totally careless even when it isn't.
It has great potential as a tattoo.