The Oddessey is just Fantasy, not Sci-Fi. Yes, there's a decided difference between "Space Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" (and, of course, Ellisons claim that Science Fiction doesn't exist), but under the more common definitions of Sci-Fi, Somnium counts, and Homer doesn't.
Frankenstein is 19th century. Kepler is 17th. And it IS based on scientific principles. In it, he describes man's view of the Earth from the Moon in surprisingly accurate detail, with the idea that the Earth would "rise" and "set", and have phases the way the moon does from Earth's view. This was all based on the mathematics he used to determine planetary orbits, and determining the mathematics behind the moon's phases based on the Sun's position.
Prior art reviews in the patent office are obviously not working.
As I've pointed out before, the dude in charge at the patent office has plainly and bluntly stated up front that the only "Prior Art" they search for are in existing patents, and current patent applications submitted before the one in question.
No talking with an "expert in the field", no looking at public domain, nothing. If a patent exists, there's prior art. If a patent doesn't exist, it MUST be patentable, so they grant the patent.
What happens is that users of ASP and (to give another example) Cold Fusion tend to use templates to generate the html, and those templates tend to have netscape-breaking bugs in them...The biggest example is that most of the common ASP templates people were using for a while all left off a closing </table> tag, which IE just "fakes" adding one at the end of the page, and netscape decides not to render at all.
Result -- netscape viewing ASP would come up blank, making it look like netscape and not the ASP page was at fault. It never gets noticed in testing because the ASP users normally only test with their one and only browser (that they may not have had a choice in getting). If you're using ASP, you're likely using IE exclusively. Its actually very rare now that someone actually tests their code on multiple browsers.
Even I still haven't fixed all my problems getting www.celticdistrict.com to act right under mozilla...
Just as Microsoft is declaring the Server is key and the Desktop is Dead. M$ knows that PC sales are now slumping, and that's a hit into their bread and butter (Windows upgrades, plus the bundled Office kits from OEMs). As Cringley wrote, nobody NEEDS 1ghtz when your 28.8 connection (the best most people get out of a 56K modem) is your number one bottleneck.
Keep in mind the #1 problem with Linux is what many consider the #1 advantage of Linux : anything you can build and run on Linux can be moved somewhere else and run just as well. Heck, I just installed on a win98 laptop the NuSphere kit of MySQL, Apache, PHP4, Perl5. I've already had emacs, cygwin, mp3 encoders and players, and the jdk, and so the only missing piece now is mozilla and my win98 laptop has all the same software i regularly use on my Dell RedHat box. Linux may have built and/or popularized all that software, but Linux is not necessary to run it.
THAT's what M$ is going to point out. That's the FUD they're gonna use, and its gonna hurt, 'cause its true. Open Standards made Linux, but Open Standards also make Linux irrelevant.
Keep in mind a LOT of the money wouldn't have just gone to Wiley. Taxes for one take out a LOT of that -- first the "sales tax" (if/when that gets applied...albiet not right now), then there's the tax taken out for each bit of it that would go to a person (Wiley is one, but so are the coloring artists, etc...; remember that given Wiley's income (_much_ higher than $30K i'd guess, given the success of non-sequitur), a higher portion of his income would go to taxes).
Then there's the software and bandwidth costs. If reading online through a single site is the only way to get a comic, that site must be able to handle the demand (who remembers when user friendly first got slashdotted and the user friendly virus went on its first contagious rampage).
Plus, if managing subscriptions and restricting access, you get into some degrees of intellectual property protection -- you have to 1) configure the server to recognize the subscribers (cookies? basic authentication?) and 2) higher lawyers to handle unauthorized duplication. That don't come cheap, either in the lawyers or the geeks.
The Case Against Micropayments at O'ReillyNet is a good counter to Jakob Nielson's Case For Micropayments and also this slashdot-entry. This paragraph provides the best summary:
In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions. Micropayments thus create in the mind of the user both anxiety and confusion, characteristics that users have not heretofore been known to actively seek out.
He draws parallels between one-time-cost services vs. accumulate-as-you-use services like the utilities. The 20-minutes (or less) for $1.00 long distance thing sells because its predictable. One can budget x- number of phone calls and know that they won't exceed them. With long-distance rates varying based on distance, as in the old model (or AT&T's default to this day), a bill for 10 phone calls can be 50 cents of 50 dollars and you wouldn't know until you got it. No-extra-costs for long distance calling is a BIG selling point for celular phone contracts these days.
Wiley of "Non-Sequitur" fame had already tried a $2/month subscription-based idea for distributing his spin-off, "Homer", online. And found that the vast majority wouldn't pay for it. Even at that low a price. Advertising (or run-at-a-loss) has given everyone the impression that "everything on the web is free", and the vast majority of comments on the subscription idea were reflecting that. For getting a presumed readership of several million, they only got 1200 to actually subscribe (I did). They canceled the whole thing and switched to the sell books (though the first book has never made it to print so far, and its been over 2 years).
Details @ http://www.non-sequitur.com/homer/badnews.php3, but the best quote is "Others wrote to say they would not pay for anything on the net, no matter how much they like it, as a matter of principle."
calling lots of little subroutines is a coding style encouraged by OO devotees
If i remember my first-year CS classes, calling lots of little subroutines is encouraged by structured programming as well -- "always break up a function that's more than 10 lines long" or stuff along those lines...
Experience doesn't always make up for a lack of discipline. The degree shows an aptitude for endurance and discipline and sticking through things even when they downright fucking suck (as most college days tend to be, academically speaking).
A non-degreed candidate would need to have years of experience within a single company, to show the endurance. A lot of experience doing lots of little 2-5 month things then moving on to some other company rather than sticking around and at least supporting those who have to maintain what the programmer worked on does not impress me at all...
I really don't know what the deal is with certain minorities in the tech world...in my company, we don't even get that many black or hispanic (to pick an example...) programmer resumes (not that we know, since that's usually not advertised on the resume proper)...if we did, we didn't know, and race didn't factor into it when we pick who we'd like to interview. the resume itself didn't have the experience or skills we were looking for.
Of course, even thinking back to college there weren't that many of either demographic (and i _hate_ that word, mind you) in my CS classes...tho one of the best programmers i knew during college was black. if i could get a hold of him now, i'd yell at him to get a resume over to my company...
Now here at M$ we have a case where blacks were hired, and felt that they were being mistreated after getting the job...while i think its entirely possible that they weren't being treated any less favorably than others of their position -- I'd not be surprised to find that M$ treats ALL of its employees in that manner.
I find that quite a few of their complaints aren't discrimination based on color...they're things that Microsoft does to ALL of their low-level employees. We don't call them Microserfs for nothing, you know...
If you hadn't read some of the other patent threads before, the truth came straight from the horse's mouth (ass? anyways, the dude in charge of the patent office -- "we're there to help our 'customers' [his word] get patents"):
The only "research" into prior art the patent office does is to look at existing patents already granted and the applications that exist that pre-date the application being considered.
No web searches, no common sense, no "gee, didn't I see something else that did that?", and certainly no asking someone with real, relevant experience in the field covered by the application ("hey, do you think this is too obvious a concept?" is a question that pretty much hasn't entered their minds in years). nada, zip, zilch.
If a patent doesn't already exist, there's no "prior art". The current view of the patent office is exactly that. Their attitude is "You want to prove prior art or obviousness, do it in court, and not on MY time..."
the fact that we are all part of a tribe called "the human race."
We will never recognize our unity as "humans" until we have a non-human enemy to face, and we can all agree that it is an enemy.
Whether that enemy comes from earth or outside is meaningless. Our differences will continue to divide until we _NEED_ our similarities and unity to help us...
And in the sci-fi & cynic world, even then some "humans" will take advantage of that unity behind the scenes to advance themselves...
A perfect, digital copy that you can retain and play as many times as you want, at your leisure.
Depends on the technology...mp3 broadcasts can be saved, but most technology out there saves incoming mp3 streams as.wavs, needing to be re-encoded (xmms, winamp). They don't save the raw mp3 form, only the decoded form. Regenerating an mp3 from the.wav that came from the decoding is likely to be lossy, just as an analog copy degrades the from original. And the user will also need to have a.wav editor to "clip" the song they want out of the stream...a bit too much work, IMHO, for the average listener.
RealPlayer and Windows Media don't even let you save the audio data directly at all, or if they do, it isn't in a non-proprietary format...and only on versions of the players you pay for (for which they now do or may later pay the RIAA for, depending on how the RIAA chooses to proceed next). When dealing with files that needed to be decrypted (esp in Windows Media's case), the decryption key needs to be used later to view the data again, and that may have expiration dates programmed into it or be locked to a particular machine so the file is non-transferable.
So no, its not really possible to get from current players an exact copy to keep just from "listening" to an on air broadcast...
Not to say that won't be possible in the future, but its not really there with current popular streaming clients like winamp/xmms or "free" realplay and windows media players.
Now one day when the technology changes, and mp3 players are able to recognize the end of a particular song in a stream and delimit it and store the mp3 as it received it and all that...
That's not the problem. The problem is that on-air radio stations are exempt from paying the record companies for anything more than buying the album (and sometimes the albums or singles are given to them as radio promos and don't cost the station a dime). Radio stations only have to pay the publishers (ASCAP, BMI, etc). Record companies get the boost in promotionals with the idea that radio airplay eventually boosts record sales.
The DMCA unfortunately changed the rules. Because 'net broadcasting using a Digital version of the source (even if weakened by mp3 encoding down to a 22/11 mono file), the DMCA allows the owner of the copyright on the work itself (e.g., the record label in 99.99% of all contracts, exceptions being labels like DGM) is due a royalty. This is a royalty they would NOT pay if they were broadcasting over the air only.
THAT's what radio stations are protesting (and lost) in this case -- having to pay a royalty in one medium (internet) they don't have to pay in another (FM/AM frequencies).
There may be hope for the client side yet, but last I looked Swing was still too slow for comfortable use on the Linux port of Sun's JDK.
Switch to Blackdown's ports, especially for JDK 1.2.2. They use native threads (Sun's own "official port doesn't", and I found native threads when making Swing GUIs or Server socket listeners/threads to provide much more improvement than just the low-level loop optimizations by using a JIT compiler. This on a 2.2.x kernel.
And for my stuff, speed is inconsequential when compared to the power of Swing over GTK/QT/Motif. The plug-in renderers/editors in the JTable/JList/JTree just blow away going back to "strings only" that I get with the GTK equivs. I really like the idea that my "data" can stay in its object/class even as its sitting in the complex component, and provide another "object" in the form of a renderer that encapsulates the translation of that data to a viewable object.
People forget that Java had a different set of priorities over C++/C. C was meant to be fast as lightning and still portable. C++ was meant to provide OOP with the efficiency (read: speed) of C. Speed was not / never a high priority with Java. Speed of application development, not application execution, was always the key. It really reflects the market needs out there: its more important to get a program working, relatively bug-free, and in front of the customer than to get it FAST and full of bugs/leaks that you wouldn't want to give to anybody.
I think the biggest problem they've ever had was living by CISC so strongly (and then making it worse when RISC chips were coming out).
And then putting so much into their marketting to try to tout that CISC was better than RISC (at the time). It still isn't better, but there's now no point in trying to convince an IT manager with an MBA of that. He's been sold on it (and Microsoft dropping support for all non-Intel-compatable chips hasn't helped).
The instruction set for the PIII is rediculous, and it keeps getting worse...i'd rather they just settle on an instruction set that works, and concentrate on getting speed solely by working on that instruction set...this "lets keep adding optimizations that use special instructions that only 5% of our customers will really ever need to use and is completely pointless to add if Microsoft doesn't actually use the damned instruction in any of its compilers/assemblers" stuff has got to go.
As mentioned in the first reply to the One Handed Food suggestion, there's prior art on that one. It was the theme of a week's worth of the Sally Forth newspaper comic in early October. In fact, that's the batch that's in "2-week delay mode" as I write this...
So I think the better question would be "What will these books evolve into?
Easy -- Clipboard and Form into the same device...for government bureaucracies to give to people (like @ the DMV).
Keep in mind, once something is "digital" there really is no limit to what can be done with it...interactive editing, toggle-able highlights (and sets of highlights, catalogued by date, person, topic...), interactive searching and indexing (and saving the search and/or results)...
And of course, software enforced copyright protection via passwords, encryption, etc...
With technology that exists today (or is _easily_ implemented -- OBVIOUSLY (so fuck you patent whores)) you can read a book, highlight sections of it for your report, have the software cut-n-paste the highlights into your report, and then have a grammer+thesaurus program reword the text to make it "original"! Who says you need to "buy" term papers in college anymore? All you need to is buy the software to make term papers out of any source material, as long as that material is digital...
Keep in mind ^ 2 -- screen technology will improve...to think that the resolution of the palm is the be-all-end-all of monitors is stupid.
I just came up with something (well, its been in my head for months, but an email that didn't get a reply to a legal department pretty much confirmed it in my mind...).
The artists aren't going to see a dime from ANY of these lawsuits and legal agreements between RIAA members and web music distributors. Not one. "Artists rights" be damned.
I took a look at the "legal" page of live365.com, a shoutcast/icecast compatable multi-caster. They claim that they are paying the publishing companies (well, specifically ASCAP) royalties.
Yet they don't ask or require you to log what songs you play (RIAA & ASCAP/BMI do require it of am/fm broadcast, plus tv/movies). And they don't say anything about the RIAA and their $5000 they want (plus the royalties for the recording itself).
So my attitude is -- how does the ASCAP know how to distribute the money they receive, if they aren't being given a log of what music is actually being played over live365's systems?
My Theory: They Don't.
ASCAP itself keeps the money. You can't distribute money equitably if you don't know who all is properly entitled to it. Or at least, that's my theory. Additionally, that covers ASCAP, but not BMI (and a lot of stuff on the 'net is British).
I raised that question to the legal department address @ live365, and received no reply. Because of this, I'm inclined to think i'm right on this. Evading a logical question on a legal issue by non-answer seems to be a common technique of most of the soul-suckers of the entertainment + legal industry.
Robotech's been part of Toonami before (I've got 'em all taped from there), but they have their own opening (as all Toonami shows do) and they didn't show the 3rd set with the Invid, Genesis Climber Mospeada. Interestingly, they DID run the full-monty w/ regards to violence that was in the original Harmony Gold issues, but cut out in the Sci-Fi channels run (especially in Force of Arms).
However, it should be noted that Harmony Gold had already trimmed some violence off when they translated and edited.
Star Blazers as a return would be nice. I bought all of season 2, and some favorites of season 1, but i've not seen any season 3 except that quick-time download a few months back, and i'm not interested in buying any more season 1's.
I don't like any of the English versions of Gatchaman. They've all cut the original show to shreads too much...now if then really were up for it, they _could_ run Gatchaman translated during their after-hours run...
Slashdot Mirror
The Oddessey is just Fantasy, not Sci-Fi. Yes, there's a decided difference between "Space Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" (and, of course, Ellisons claim that Science Fiction doesn't exist), but under the more common definitions of Sci-Fi, Somnium counts, and Homer doesn't.
Frankenstein is 19th century. Kepler is 17th. And it IS based on scientific principles. In it, he describes man's view of the Earth from the Moon in surprisingly accurate detail, with the idea that the Earth would "rise" and "set", and have phases the way the moon does from Earth's view. This was all based on the mathematics he used to determine planetary orbits, and determining the mathematics behind the moon's phases based on the Sun's position.
Kepler wrote a book, Somnium (trans: "The Dream"), about man flying to the moon and seeing the earth from the moon, in the early 1600s.
As I've pointed out before, the dude in charge at the patent office has plainly and bluntly stated up front that the only "Prior Art" they search for are in existing patents, and current patent applications submitted before the one in question.
No talking with an "expert in the field", no looking at public domain, nothing. If a patent exists, there's prior art. If a patent doesn't exist, it MUST be patentable, so they grant the patent.
Hey, try actually having a boss who won the IOCCC...three times, even...
What happens is that users of ASP and (to give another example) Cold Fusion tend to use templates to generate the html, and those templates tend to have netscape-breaking bugs in them...The biggest example is that most of the common ASP templates people were using for a while all left off a closing </table> tag, which IE just "fakes" adding one at the end of the page, and netscape decides not to render at all.
Result -- netscape viewing ASP would come up blank, making it look like netscape and not the ASP page was at fault. It never gets noticed in testing because the ASP users normally only test with their one and only browser (that they may not have had a choice in getting). If you're using ASP, you're likely using IE exclusively. Its actually very rare now that someone actually tests their code on multiple browsers.
Even I still haven't fixed all my problems getting www.celticdistrict.com to act right under mozilla...
Just as Microsoft is declaring the Server is key and the Desktop is Dead. M$ knows that PC sales are now slumping, and that's a hit into their bread and butter (Windows upgrades, plus the bundled Office kits from OEMs). As Cringley wrote, nobody NEEDS 1ghtz when your 28.8 connection (the best most people get out of a 56K modem) is your number one bottleneck.
Keep in mind the #1 problem with Linux is what many consider the #1 advantage of Linux : anything you can build and run on Linux can be moved somewhere else and run just as well. Heck, I just installed on a win98 laptop the NuSphere kit of MySQL, Apache, PHP4, Perl5. I've already had emacs, cygwin, mp3 encoders and players, and the jdk, and so the only missing piece now is mozilla and my win98 laptop has all the same software i regularly use on my Dell RedHat box. Linux may have built and/or popularized all that software, but Linux is not necessary to run it.
THAT's what M$ is going to point out. That's the FUD they're gonna use, and its gonna hurt, 'cause its true. Open Standards made Linux, but Open Standards also make Linux irrelevant.
Then there's the software and bandwidth costs. If reading online through a single site is the only way to get a comic, that site must be able to handle the demand (who remembers when user friendly first got slashdotted and the user friendly virus went on its first contagious rampage).
Plus, if managing subscriptions and restricting access, you get into some degrees of intellectual property protection -- you have to 1) configure the server to recognize the subscribers (cookies? basic authentication?) and 2) higher lawyers to handle unauthorized duplication. That don't come cheap, either in the lawyers or the geeks.
Mod that one up -- that's a brilliant line. :)
He draws parallels between one-time-cost services vs. accumulate-as-you-use services like the utilities. The 20-minutes (or less) for $1.00 long distance thing sells because its predictable. One can budget x- number of phone calls and know that they won't exceed them. With long-distance rates varying based on distance, as in the old model (or AT&T's default to this day), a bill for 10 phone calls can be 50 cents of 50 dollars and you wouldn't know until you got it. No-extra-costs for long distance calling is a BIG selling point for celular phone contracts these days.
Details @ http://www.non-sequitur.com/homer/badnews.php3, but the best quote is "Others wrote to say they would not pay for anything on the net, no matter how much they like it, as a matter of principle."
If i remember my first-year CS classes, calling lots of little subroutines is encouraged by structured programming as well -- "always break up a function that's more than 10 lines long" or stuff along those lines...
A non-degreed candidate would need to have years of experience within a single company, to show the endurance. A lot of experience doing lots of little 2-5 month things then moving on to some other company rather than sticking around and at least supporting those who have to maintain what the programmer worked on does not impress me at all...
Of course, even thinking back to college there weren't that many of either demographic (and i _hate_ that word, mind you) in my CS classes...tho one of the best programmers i knew during college was black. if i could get a hold of him now, i'd yell at him to get a resume over to my company...
Now here at M$ we have a case where blacks were hired, and felt that they were being mistreated after getting the job...while i think its entirely possible that they weren't being treated any less favorably than others of their position -- I'd not be surprised to find that M$ treats ALL of its employees in that manner.
I find that quite a few of their complaints aren't discrimination based on color...they're things that Microsoft does to ALL of their low-level employees. We don't call them Microserfs for nothing, you know...
The only "research" into prior art the patent office does is to look at existing patents already granted and the applications that exist that pre-date the application being considered.
No web searches, no common sense, no "gee, didn't I see something else that did that?", and certainly no asking someone with real, relevant experience in the field covered by the application ("hey, do you think this is too obvious a concept?" is a question that pretty much hasn't entered their minds in years). nada, zip, zilch.
If a patent doesn't already exist, there's no "prior art". The current view of the patent office is exactly that. Their attitude is "You want to prove prior art or obviousness, do it in court, and not on MY time..."
We will never recognize our unity as "humans" until we have a non-human enemy to face, and we can all agree that it is an enemy.
Whether that enemy comes from earth or outside is meaningless. Our differences will continue to divide until we _NEED_ our similarities and unity to help us...
And in the sci-fi & cynic world, even then some "humans" will take advantage of that unity behind the scenes to advance themselves...
Depends on the technology...mp3 broadcasts can be saved, but most technology out there saves incoming mp3 streams as .wavs, needing to be re-encoded (xmms, winamp). They don't save the raw mp3 form, only the decoded form. Regenerating an mp3 from the .wav that came from the decoding is likely to be lossy, just as an analog copy degrades the from original. And the user will also need to have a .wav editor to "clip" the song they want out of the stream...a bit too much work, IMHO, for the average listener.
RealPlayer and Windows Media don't even let you save the audio data directly at all, or if they do, it isn't in a non-proprietary format...and only on versions of the players you pay for (for which they now do or may later pay the RIAA for, depending on how the RIAA chooses to proceed next). When dealing with files that needed to be decrypted (esp in Windows Media's case), the decryption key needs to be used later to view the data again, and that may have expiration dates programmed into it or be locked to a particular machine so the file is non-transferable.
So no, its not really possible to get from current players an exact copy to keep just from "listening" to an on air broadcast...
Not to say that won't be possible in the future, but its not really there with current popular streaming clients like winamp/xmms or "free" realplay and windows media players.
Now one day when the technology changes, and mp3 players are able to recognize the end of a particular song in a stream and delimit it and store the mp3 as it received it and all that...
The DMCA unfortunately changed the rules. Because 'net broadcasting using a Digital version of the source (even if weakened by mp3 encoding down to a 22/11 mono file), the DMCA allows the owner of the copyright on the work itself (e.g., the record label in 99.99% of all contracts, exceptions being labels like DGM) is due a royalty. This is a royalty they would NOT pay if they were broadcasting over the air only.
THAT's what radio stations are protesting (and lost) in this case -- having to pay a royalty in one medium (internet) they don't have to pay in another (FM/AM frequencies).
Switch to Blackdown's ports, especially for JDK 1.2.2. They use native threads (Sun's own "official port doesn't", and I found native threads when making Swing GUIs or Server socket listeners/threads to provide much more improvement than just the low-level loop optimizations by using a JIT compiler. This on a 2.2.x kernel.
And for my stuff, speed is inconsequential when compared to the power of Swing over GTK/QT/Motif. The plug-in renderers/editors in the JTable/JList/JTree just blow away going back to "strings only" that I get with the GTK equivs. I really like the idea that my "data" can stay in its object/class even as its sitting in the complex component, and provide another "object" in the form of a renderer that encapsulates the translation of that data to a viewable object.
People forget that Java had a different set of priorities over C++/C. C was meant to be fast as lightning and still portable. C++ was meant to provide OOP with the efficiency (read: speed) of C. Speed was not / never a high priority with Java. Speed of application development, not application execution, was always the key. It really reflects the market needs out there: its more important to get a program working, relatively bug-free, and in front of the customer than to get it FAST and full of bugs/leaks that you wouldn't want to give to anybody.
And then putting so much into their marketting to try to tout that CISC was better than RISC (at the time). It still isn't better, but there's now no point in trying to convince an IT manager with an MBA of that. He's been sold on it (and Microsoft dropping support for all non-Intel-compatable chips hasn't helped).
The instruction set for the PIII is rediculous, and it keeps getting worse...i'd rather they just settle on an instruction set that works, and concentrate on getting speed solely by working on that instruction set...this "lets keep adding optimizations that use special instructions that only 5% of our customers will really ever need to use and is completely pointless to add if Microsoft doesn't actually use the damned instruction in any of its compilers/assemblers" stuff has got to go.
As mentioned in the first reply to the One Handed Food suggestion, there's prior art on that one. It was the theme of a week's worth of the Sally Forth newspaper comic in early October. In fact, that's the batch that's in "2-week delay mode" as I write this...
Easy -- Clipboard and Form into the same device...for government bureaucracies to give to people (like @ the DMV).
Keep in mind, once something is "digital" there really is no limit to what can be done with it...interactive editing, toggle-able highlights (and sets of highlights, catalogued by date, person, topic...), interactive searching and indexing (and saving the search and/or results)...
And of course, software enforced copyright protection via passwords, encryption, etc...
With technology that exists today (or is _easily_ implemented -- OBVIOUSLY (so fuck you patent whores)) you can read a book, highlight sections of it for your report, have the software cut-n-paste the highlights into your report, and then have a grammer+thesaurus program reword the text to make it "original"! Who says you need to "buy" term papers in college anymore? All you need to is buy the software to make term papers out of any source material, as long as that material is digital...
Keep in mind ^ 2 -- screen technology will improve...to think that the resolution of the palm is the be-all-end-all of monitors is stupid.
The artists aren't going to see a dime from ANY of these lawsuits and legal agreements between RIAA members and web music distributors. Not one. "Artists rights" be damned.
I took a look at the "legal" page of live365.com, a shoutcast/icecast compatable multi-caster. They claim that they are paying the publishing companies (well, specifically ASCAP) royalties.
Yet they don't ask or require you to log what songs you play (RIAA & ASCAP/BMI do require it of am/fm broadcast, plus tv/movies). And they don't say anything about the RIAA and their $5000 they want (plus the royalties for the recording itself).
So my attitude is -- how does the ASCAP know how to distribute the money they receive, if they aren't being given a log of what music is actually being played over live365's systems?
My Theory: They Don't.
ASCAP itself keeps the money. You can't distribute money equitably if you don't know who all is properly entitled to it. Or at least, that's my theory. Additionally, that covers ASCAP, but not BMI (and a lot of stuff on the 'net is British).
I raised that question to the legal department address @ live365, and received no reply. Because of this, I'm inclined to think i'm right on this. Evading a logical question on a legal issue by non-answer seems to be a common technique of most of the soul-suckers of the entertainment + legal industry.
Star Blazers as a return would be nice. I bought all of season 2, and some favorites of season 1, but i've not seen any season 3 except that quick-time download a few months back, and i'm not interested in buying any more season 1's.
I don't like any of the English versions of Gatchaman. They've all cut the original show to shreads too much...now if then really were up for it, they _could_ run Gatchaman translated during their after-hours run...