I don't get it... now they'll have to pay the MPEG fee AND the AVS fee, what's the point of that? Nobody will pay for a player that can't play a normal DVD!
That would never work, they'd just have your license thrown out on some obscure grounds you've never heard of, or bust you for something else.
Look, the US Justice Department got their butt kicked by Microsoft in the courtroom, even after Microsoft's actions were found to be illegal. There is hardly any point in trying to sue a company that big, unless the amount you want in settlement is less than their potential lawyer's fees.
Ok, my question is: why not use a standard software based encryption, like an automatic Triple DES, or better yet AES, that is based on a keyphrase that you enter every time you start up the computer?
Possibly because software encryption kills performance?
I think a pay service is worth it, and I'd be interested to hear which people like the best. The Macintosh one is an obvious candidate, though paying per track (or album) could get expensive if I go overboard. I had an emusic.com account and thought it was worth paying for the convenience and quality. I only quit after exhausting their selection. So who else has a good selection of music at a fair price without ridiculous restrictions?
Apparently morse code at 20 wpm is not out of reach. At that rate, I don't know of a better input system for tiny computers like the fossil wristwatch pda. And you could enter the text without staring down at the watch.
In a sense, I think insider trading is just what this system is designed to promote, because the real insiders are the ones so hard to get information from in any other way. Terrorist organizations might be tempted to fund their activities with this, in doing so they would have to betray information about their plans.
However, this scheme is politically impossible. If our govt. were half as smart as we thought, they'd have simply suggested this idea to some unscrupulous businessman, and run interference with the DOJ to prevent them shutting him down. Then the "greedy capitalist" rather than the govt. would take the fall, but all the same information would still come out.
Here's a different kind of cost though. I have always been careful with my email addresses and managed to avoid most spam. But now it has affected me. Because of spam, my block of IPs (Comcast) has been blacklisted by quite a few mail servers. I can still send email if I go through Comcast servers, but I'd rather send it directly, and to me it's sad to see locks and fences thrown up (the "taming of the wild west" if you will), in opposition to the peer-to-peer model that makes the Internet great, necessitated by spam.
...well, not when you've got guaranteed income from locking millions of customers into your cash cows. Gotta spend money on something or investors will get all uppity and start demanding dividends and whatnot.
But seriously, everybody knows experimentation and failure cannot be avoided. Most businesses just don't have the luxury of failing with no penalty.
If you need evidence of breaking up a monopoly failures , look at the baby bells.
Here's a very interesting little article on the AT&T breakup. Some tidbits:
Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger argued strenuously in 1981 that the Justice Dept. should drop its suit against AT&T because the military needed a single, integrated communications network.
Oh, man, that is choice. "Establishment politician goes to bat for Big Business, citing national security concerns." Pull the other one.
Arno A. Penzias, a Nobel laureate at Bell Laboratories, testified that the world-class labs would become a ''sinking ship'' if AT&T were broken up.
Score one for the Nobel laureate, except that he recanted:
Penzias [now] says the breakup got Bell Labs focused on customers: ''They still create jewels, but more of them are made into jewelry,''
Hmm, sounds like he still works at Lucent. Except the article is from 1999, so now he's probably unemployed.
But curiously that article makes no mention of telephone costs. Here's a graph showing that telephone costs have fallen (well, risen quite a bit slower than general inflation). I imagine most of that benefit is in long distance.
You may want a world with no or different IP laws but pretending you live in that world now is naive. If OSS software contains illegal code then it is monumental irresponsibility for a company to use that software.
None of your argument is any more relevant to OSS than to software from any company. Since all the new IP laws and interpretations are ill-defined (i.e. "shades of gray") everybody is infringing on everybody else. So don't just avoid OSS, avoid everybody.
Except Microsoft, that is, who recently announced idemnity from such lawsuits for their customers.
$2 billion in late 80s (1986 specifically) dollars = $3.2 billion in 2002 (most recent available Consumer Price Index data).
That was the cost to design and build one from scratch! Surely manufacturing a copy would be far less expensive.
I'm sure technology will have improved and parts will be cheaper, but then again we wouldn't be putting another telescope into orbit using 1980s technology... it would have to be FAR superior to the HST, or why bother?
It's not just a slippery slope problem; helmet laws are annoying in themselves. First, because it falls outside what I want my govt to legislate. I certainly don't mind "allowing" others to ride helmetless (or seatbeltless), in fact I feel silly just saying that. Second, occasionally for short trips on slow roads I do like to ride helmetless, so such a law would be a direct annoyance to me.
Bullfeathers. If everyone has a college degree, the competitive advantage of having one is, by definition, nil.
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Increased productivity can make everybody richer at the same time.
Even in a hypothetical society like the one you propose, this is a dungbeetle-bait proposition. Requiring one of everyone is the same as outlawing going to college for everyone.
Of course it's a stupid idea. Just like forcing people to wear helmets.
The first and most obvious reply to your argument is that telling people what to wear is none of the govt's (or your) business.
Second, helmets are not as effective as you might think. They reduce the risk of death by about 30% by the govt's own most generous estimates. That means when somebody dies helmetless, they probably would have died with a helmet anyways. Of course 30% is still worth having, and I hope you always wear one when driving your car for maximum safety.
Finally, the argument about making people wear people wear helmets to save society money is a nonstarter. If you really want to save society money, you should look at outlawing alcohol (decreased productivity, higher crime, accidents) and premarital sex (statistically higher crime rate and lower earnings from 1-parent kids) and obesity (obvious). Each of these has a far, far greater impact than motorcycle helmets. Also everybody should be forced to attend college, since they're otherwise robbing society of about $2 Mil in potential productive capacity over a lifetime. Of course since we have privately funded health care in the US the whole argument is irrelevant to those of us who live here anyways.
The fact is, if they were invented today, motorcycles would never be legal. Ditto for guns, alcohol, and who knows what else. Cars probably.
In case you're wondering, yes, I am a motorcyclist, and yes, I (almost) always wear a helmet because, as I said, a 30% reduced risk of death is worth having. But it's a personal choice in the state where I live, as it should be.
No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.
Guess what, you could say exactly the same thing about your beloved CRTs, because they have dot pitch. The only difference has been that traditionally the dot pitch was smaller than the pixels on LCDs. But as your parent mentioned, 200 dpi LCDs will scale well. Those will be ready in plenty of time before CRTs become specialty items.
My point is that calling people stupid or asking "what do they expect" is not any kind of solution at all. Public terminals can be made reasonably secure.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to look up some info in immigrating TO China on the web but couldn't find any... seems you're a real pioneer in this area!
I don't get it... now they'll have to pay the MPEG fee AND the AVS fee, what's the point of that? Nobody will pay for a player that can't play a normal DVD!
And here I thought it was only 1,284,303,704!
This isn't far off. Not quite, but it might work for some of your applications. (As for understanding maps, aren't most of the words proper nouns?)
Look, the US Justice Department got their butt kicked by Microsoft in the courtroom, even after Microsoft's actions were found to be illegal. There is hardly any point in trying to sue a company that big, unless the amount you want in settlement is less than their potential lawyer's fees.
I think it's a poke at how vain, greedy, and foolish Americans are compared to our wise and prudent forebearers the Brits (if you buy that).
I think a pay service is worth it, and I'd be interested to hear which people like the best. The Macintosh one is an obvious candidate, though paying per track (or album) could get expensive if I go overboard. I had an emusic.com account and thought it was worth paying for the convenience and quality. I only quit after exhausting their selection. So who else has a good selection of music at a fair price without ridiculous restrictions?
Does that Panasonic W2 really get anywhere near 7.5 hours batter life? I would be awfully impressed with 4 hours of DVD playback.
Apparently morse code at 20 wpm is not out of reach. At that rate, I don't know of a better input system for tiny computers like the fossil wristwatch pda. And you could enter the text without staring down at the watch.
However, this scheme is politically impossible. If our govt. were half as smart as we thought, they'd have simply suggested this idea to some unscrupulous businessman, and run interference with the DOJ to prevent them shutting him down. Then the "greedy capitalist" rather than the govt. would take the fall, but all the same information would still come out.
Here's a different kind of cost though. I have always been careful with my email addresses and managed to avoid most spam. But now it has affected me. Because of spam, my block of IPs (Comcast) has been blacklisted by quite a few mail servers. I can still send email if I go through Comcast servers, but I'd rather send it directly, and to me it's sad to see locks and fences thrown up (the "taming of the wild west" if you will), in opposition to the peer-to-peer model that makes the Internet great, necessitated by spam.
But seriously, everybody knows experimentation and failure cannot be avoided. Most businesses just don't have the luxury of failing with no penalty.
But curiously that article makes no mention of telephone costs. Here's a graph showing that telephone costs have fallen (well, risen quite a bit slower than general inflation). I imagine most of that benefit is in long distance.
Except Microsoft, that is, who recently announced idemnity from such lawsuits for their customers.
"Microsoft: The Only Legal Choice (TM)"
It's not just a slippery slope problem; helmet laws are annoying in themselves. First, because it falls outside what I want my govt to legislate. I certainly don't mind "allowing" others to ride helmetless (or seatbeltless), in fact I feel silly just saying that. Second, occasionally for short trips on slow roads I do like to ride helmetless, so such a law would be a direct annoyance to me.
Are you saying people never get head injuries in cars with airbags? Or that helmets would not help in such cases?
Second, helmets are not as effective as you might think. They reduce the risk of death by about 30% by the govt's own most generous estimates. That means when somebody dies helmetless, they probably would have died with a helmet anyways. Of course 30% is still worth having, and I hope you always wear one when driving your car for maximum safety.
Finally, the argument about making people wear people wear helmets to save society money is a nonstarter. If you really want to save society money, you should look at outlawing alcohol (decreased productivity, higher crime, accidents) and premarital sex (statistically higher crime rate and lower earnings from 1-parent kids) and obesity (obvious). Each of these has a far, far greater impact than motorcycle helmets. Also everybody should be forced to attend college, since they're otherwise robbing society of about $2 Mil in potential productive capacity over a lifetime. Of course since we have privately funded health care in the US the whole argument is irrelevant to those of us who live here anyways.
The fact is, if they were invented today, motorcycles would never be legal. Ditto for guns, alcohol, and who knows what else. Cars probably.
In case you're wondering, yes, I am a motorcyclist, and yes, I (almost) always wear a helmet because, as I said, a 30% reduced risk of death is worth having. But it's a personal choice in the state where I live, as it should be.
Please use emticons in your future postings so we know whether to laugh with you or at you.
Thanks,
The Slashdot-reading public.
Guess what, you could say exactly the same thing about your beloved CRTs, because they have dot pitch. The only difference has been that traditionally the dot pitch was smaller than the pixels on LCDs. But as your parent mentioned, 200 dpi LCDs will scale well. Those will be ready in plenty of time before CRTs become specialty items.
Businesses get talent exactly the same way they get computer hardware. They buy it.
My point is that calling people stupid or asking "what do they expect" is not any kind of solution at all. Public terminals can be made reasonably secure.