A remote won't be able to paper over a devices bad interface. If the device only supports a 1 db up and 1 db down infrared command, no universal remote will be able to change the volume very fast.
What would be better, frankly, is to respond to volume commands on a logarithmic scale over time, so that it would go faster the longer you pressed the button.
You'd think that it would have occurred to them that they were putting a Flash ad on a page discussing a major flaw in Flash.
Why? I'm sure the editorial group uses a CMS to publish these pages, and the standard template has DoubleClick ads in them. DoubleClick may or may serve out Flash ads, based on what is bought and should be served at any particular moment. This allows the advertiser to have a lot of flexibility, as they can buy only 1,000 impressions or 1,000,000 impressions, and have those ads served out over a wide range of pages. It also makes it easy for editorial people to get paid for their work, instead of having to worry about ads on every single page they publish
There are some cases where ads will be pulled or targeted for a specific reason, such as no ads at all on plane crash stories, or no MSN ads on AOL pages. But it would be far too costly to make an exception like that for a flash ad on a page about flash insecurities.
...Simple combinations of existing technologies are exactly what 90% of patents are. Even some legitimate.
Due to the recent Supreme Court ruling, simple combinations of existing technologies are no longer patentable. The obviousness test has been strengthened, and no longer requires a "a "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" tying the earlier inventions together." According to Justice Kennedy, ""The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws."
IANAL, but given this ruling, it appears that patents like the Amazon S3 one would fail under this new ruling.
You're far too quick to predict the demise of one of the biggest, richest and toughest corporate organisations in America. It's very naive.
Biggest and richest corporate organizations in America? Uh, really?
EMI Group bills itself as the worlds largest independent music company. They had revenue last year of 2 billion pounds (approximately 4 billion dollars) with profits of approximately 250 million pounds ($500 million dollars).
So, Exxon Mobile was 79 times more profitable than one of the larger music companies. Despite getting lots of press and being in a glamorous industry, entertainment companies are a lot smaller and less profitable than many other businesses. Take a look at the Fortune 500. The highest entertainment company is Time Warner at 48th, followed by Disney at 64th.
Bargain basement CPUs do better at $ / work than faster, more expensive ones, because they are so cheap. AMD does well at the low end.
But this doesn't consider the total price of a computer which would help mid priced chips. A $113 CPU is 54% more expensive than a $73 one, so it would have to perform 54% better. But when you throw them into identical $200 systems (case, hard drive, fan, power supply, memory, etc), the $113 CPU (with a total system cost of $313) is only 14% more expensive than the $73 CPU (with a total system cost of $273).
So, while the extremely low end chips do well with this analysis, they make much less sense when you consider total system costs.
What about audio CDs of previously performed concerts?
This is very different. This is a case there the photographer already got paid for distribution rights by National Geographic, and his work was being distributed in magazine format. He sued because they started distributing the magazines in digital format. This ruling says that the photographer isn't entitled to additional royalties. So this appears to say format shifting for publishers is OK.
In the case of CDs of previously performed concerts, the musician was never paid for distribution of the material. You can argue that he was paid for the live performance, but live performace of a work and distributing that work in recorded format seem totally different. This is much closer to a record company distributing a bands work on a CD, and later on a memory stick. This would argue that the same contract applies, because it is the same work.
Get a good music lawyer before signing anything. If the record company refuses to deal with you once you've "lawyered up" then walk away.
Did you actually read the article? If you did, you would have seen this:
Well, they get the final contract, and it's not quite what they expected. They figure it's better to be safe than sorry and they turn it over to a lawyer--one who says he's experienced in entertainment law and he hammers out a few bugs. They're still not sure about it, but the lawyer says he's seen a lot of contracts, and theirs is pretty good. They'll be great royalty: 13% [less a 10% packaging deduction]. Wasn't it Buffalo Tom that were only getting 12% less 10? Whatever.
There is no way to lawyer up with the music industry. They have been doing this for many years, know how to creatively account and under report profits, and have these contracts down pat. At this point, the music industry won't offer a fair contract to a new acts. If new acts don't like it, they can go it alone, self publish, and get no radio play.
So the band really has two choices: go it alone or sign a bad deal.
The problem isn't just the FAT32 device size limit, it is also that FAT32 has a maximum file size of four gigs. Given this format will be used for videos, that is a cripling limitation.
According to Wikipedia, Microsoft's solution is exFAT.
According to this, Haskell generates HC files (which are stylized C files) when it compiles GHC (the Haskell compiler). You then get the HC running with GCC, and you have a working Haskell compiler.
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Disney can probably argue that all forms of media released for some of these films contained technological measures to control access to the work. So VHS versions probably contained Macrovision copy protection, and DVDs contained CSS. And therefore the author of this film circumvented the technology measure to create this work. Although another part of the authors intent here might have been to show that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision unduly burdens fair use.
Copyright does not apply to ideas but to expression. No amount of copyright would have stopped West Side Story from replaying Romeo and Juliette; or, for that matter any of the other few hundred novels, movies and TV series based on the idea (which itself was a replay of the millenial Tristan and Isult folk tale). Copyrights don't provide monopolies over ideas--that's what patents do. It's best not to get them confused.
This is not the case. Both plot and characters are usually copyrighted. See wikipedia for the definition of a derivative work.
When J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she not only gained copyright over her particular expression of her ideas, in book form. She also gained copyright over movie versions (even if they were not an exact implementation of her original book). She also gained copyright over her characters. I can't write a book about Hagrid without getting sued. Finally, she copyrighted her plot. In fact, thought it wasn't a US court case, J.K. Rowling sued and blocked publication of a Russian book called "Tanya Grotter and The Magic Double Bass." Although the author argued that his work was parody, the court found:
"The court orders Byblos to cease and desist from any infringement of Rowling's copyright", including publication of The Magic Double Bass, the judgment said.
The books bore similarities in that both central characters, Potter and Grotter, were orphans with magical powers.
Both must battle evil and Tanya Grotter, like Harry Potter, has a strange mark on her face.
Clearly copyright protects much more than just a particular expression of ideas (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). It applies to the ideas themselves (Orphan has magical powers, has strange mark on face, and battles evil). As to how powerful the copyright protection is, and how close something has to be to be a derivative, that is up to courts and lawyers. But given that the media giants and publisher have a lot of resources, fair use usually suffers.
Mr. Helprin makes many pithy comparisons with intellectual and real property. Both are taxed. Both are inherited. If one can be owned forever, why shouldn't the other?
The reality is that they are very different types of "property". If I think about an idea, my thoughts are no less impoverished if 100 or 1,000,000,000 people think the same idea. If I own a chair, only one person can sit in it at a time. Ideas are fundamentally different from physical things.
If Mr. Helprin does write the Great American novel (which, I would say, is exceedingly doubtful, if his sample of jumbled prose is any indication), he will be protected in two ways. First, the valuable first edition of his novel will be protected by laws. That physical book (and his notes, signiture, etc) can be handed down through generation after generation, and will never be "stolen" by the government. But he also wants far more protection. He wants to be protected from people who literally copy his work, word for word. He also wants the thematic elements of his work protected, and his characters. Finally, he wants these controls to be a complete monopoly. No one can copy his work without his permission, and probably hefty licensing fee.
It's these other protections he wants are onerous to society. Creating any sort of monopoly creates a huge power shift in the monopolists favor. Anyone now writing any book has to be careful to avoid his plot and his characters. Anyone who wants to extend, enhance, or debase his work, for good or bad purposes, is effectively stopped. Especially if the person wants to do something the author would consider debasing, whether it is or not.
So I ask you, Mr. Helprin, would you like to live in a world where intellectual property lasts forever? Where authors and descendants are granted a complete monopoly over their ideas forever? Where everything you write may infringe on others monopolies? And the monopolies can be enforced capriciously and unfairly? Is the small stream of revenue which starts 70 years after your death worth it to tie up all the works of Shakespeare (on which many plays and movies have been based), all the songs of Mozart (which much music was and is based on), and all the novels of Dickens (which continue to be source material for novels and movies). Do you want to live in a society where rights are more important than new creative works? If so, sir, you should have become a lawyer and not a writer.
Intellectual and physical property are different. And I for one am glad I live in a society that acknowledges that, even though the boundaries are pushed longer and longer each year.
Well, if you had actually read yesterday's article, you would have seen that the mileage estimate on your regular civic has also dropped. The Prius combined estimate dropped 16%, while the non hybrid Civic dropped 12%. Even after the milage drop, the Prius still gets 58% better combined fuel economy than your Civic (46 mpg vs. 29 mpg combined).
Of course, these are just estimates, and your mileage may vary.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It says petition the Government for a redress of grievances. How can giving the government my phone records be considered a petition to redress grievances? This is ridiculous.
There are several significant factors undercutting this supposed billion dollar price tag. The first is that AIDS research has received significant public funding, and second is that antiretroviral drugs have the shortest time to approval of any class of drugs, approximately half the time of normal clinical trials (the mean time for antiretrovirals is 44.6 months, compared to an industry average of 87.4 months).
See this report from Doctors Without Boarders for more information.
We would NOT be better off if it became unprofitable to develop new drugs in the first place.
Much AIDS research is publicly funded. In fact, a key AIDS drug, Norvir, was publically funded. Tell me why it is that I should pay for drug development with my taxes, then pay incredibly high prices ($8.57 per day) just because someone holds a patent?
I think teachers lashing out at students who are more intelligent than them is common. A relation of mine was in a grade school science class and the teacher said that liquids are always less dense than solids. My relative said that the teacher was wrong, and that ice is less dense than water. Instead of the teacher admitting she was wrong, she sent my relative to the principal's office.
Apple's Pippin certainly seems right for a technical flop list. A game machine based on the Macintosh; a platform well known for games. Much hype, under powered when delivered, quickly killed.
Also, although technically under the category net PC's, what about the AMD PIC (see here or here)? I briefly was involved in a project to develop media for the PIC. Remarkably, this low cost computer made its debut two years after the i-Opener failed. You would think they would learn.
What he actually invented was a linked list with two or three pointers, an therefore sort orders, in the same list. Doubly linked lists demonstrate his concept, though are more complicated (since they allow backwards traversals of the same list) and useful.
Fix the patent system, and save your ire towards MS for things like illegally leveraging their monopoly power.
But illegally leveraging their monopoly power is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do with their FAT patents. The FAT file system isn't useful to anyone besides someone trying to interoperate with Microsoft Windows. Microsoft's targets in their licencing efforts have been to go after removable media vendors and consumer electronics companies. The only value the FAT patents have for these companies is to interoperate with Microsoft Windows, otherwise they would use some other royalty free alternative.
But this is utterly unsurprising. If you run a big memory app like photshop you already know better than to be running other apps that consume memory.
Really? You know, this isn't 1997 when OS's did cooperative multitasking and machines had 32 megs of RAM. In 2007, many people have dual core machines and 1 gig or more RAM, and like to run more than one program at the same time. In this day and age, people want and expect to be able to run multiple apps (including web browsers, instant messaging programs, office apps, and, gasp!, photo editing apps) at the same time.
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A remote won't be able to paper over a devices bad interface. If the device only supports a 1 db up and 1 db down infrared command, no universal remote will be able to change the volume very fast.
What would be better, frankly, is to respond to volume commands on a logarithmic scale over time, so that it would go faster the longer you pressed the button.
Welcome to a world where the Fantastic Four get science right. Nooooooooooooo!
There are some cases where ads will be pulled or targeted for a specific reason, such as no ads at all on plane crash stories, or no MSN ads on AOL pages. But it would be far too costly to make an exception like that for a flash ad on a page about flash insecurities.
IANAL, but given this ruling, it appears that patents like the Amazon S3 one would fail under this new ruling.
Sure, if your definition of "dirt cheap" is ~$1000.
EMI Group bills itself as the worlds largest independent music company. They had revenue last year of 2 billion pounds (approximately 4 billion dollars) with profits of approximately 250 million pounds ($500 million dollars).
Compare that to say, Exxon Mobile. In 2006, it had a profit of 39.5 billion dollars.
So, Exxon Mobile was 79 times more profitable than one of the larger music companies. Despite getting lots of press and being in a glamorous industry, entertainment companies are a lot smaller and less profitable than many other businesses. Take a look at the Fortune 500. The highest entertainment company is Time Warner at 48th, followed by Disney at 64th.
Bargain basement CPUs do better at $ / work than faster, more expensive ones, because they are so cheap. AMD does well at the low end.
But this doesn't consider the total price of a computer which would help mid priced chips. A $113 CPU is 54% more expensive than a $73 one, so it would have to perform 54% better. But when you throw them into identical $200 systems (case, hard drive, fan, power supply, memory, etc), the $113 CPU (with a total system cost of $313) is only 14% more expensive than the $73 CPU (with a total system cost of $273).
So, while the extremely low end chips do well with this analysis, they make much less sense when you consider total system costs.
In the case of CDs of previously performed concerts, the musician was never paid for distribution of the material. You can argue that he was paid for the live performance, but live performace of a work and distributing that work in recorded format seem totally different. This is much closer to a record company distributing a bands work on a CD, and later on a memory stick. This would argue that the same contract applies, because it is the same work.
So the band really has two choices: go it alone or sign a bad deal.
The problem isn't just the FAT32 device size limit, it is also that FAT32 has a maximum file size of four gigs. Given this format will be used for videos, that is a cripling limitation.
According to Wikipedia, Microsoft's solution is exFAT.
According to this, Haskell generates HC files (which are stylized C files) when it compiles GHC (the Haskell compiler). You then get the HC running with GCC, and you have a working Haskell compiler.
According to Sec. 1201 (a)(1)(A) of the DMCA: Disney can probably argue that all forms of media released for some of these films contained technological measures to control access to the work. So VHS versions probably contained Macrovision copy protection, and DVDs contained CSS. And therefore the author of this film circumvented the technology measure to create this work. Although another part of the authors intent here might have been to show that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision unduly burdens fair use.
When J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she not only gained copyright over her particular expression of her ideas, in book form. She also gained copyright over movie versions (even if they were not an exact implementation of her original book). She also gained copyright over her characters. I can't write a book about Hagrid without getting sued. Finally, she copyrighted her plot. In fact, thought it wasn't a US court case, J.K. Rowling sued and blocked publication of a Russian book called "Tanya Grotter and The Magic Double Bass." Although the author argued that his work was parody, the court found: Clearly copyright protects much more than just a particular expression of ideas (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). It applies to the ideas themselves (Orphan has magical powers, has strange mark on face, and battles evil). As to how powerful the copyright protection is, and how close something has to be to be a derivative, that is up to courts and lawyers. But given that the media giants and publisher have a lot of resources, fair use usually suffers.
Mr. Helprin makes many pithy comparisons with intellectual and real property. Both are taxed. Both are inherited. If one can be owned forever, why shouldn't the other?
The reality is that they are very different types of "property". If I think about an idea, my thoughts are no less impoverished if 100 or 1,000,000,000 people think the same idea. If I own a chair, only one person can sit in it at a time. Ideas are fundamentally different from physical things.
If Mr. Helprin does write the Great American novel (which, I would say, is exceedingly doubtful, if his sample of jumbled prose is any indication), he will be protected in two ways. First, the valuable first edition of his novel will be protected by laws. That physical book (and his notes, signiture, etc) can be handed down through generation after generation, and will never be "stolen" by the government. But he also wants far more protection. He wants to be protected from people who literally copy his work, word for word. He also wants the thematic elements of his work protected, and his characters. Finally, he wants these controls to be a complete monopoly. No one can copy his work without his permission, and probably hefty licensing fee.
It's these other protections he wants are onerous to society. Creating any sort of monopoly creates a huge power shift in the monopolists favor. Anyone now writing any book has to be careful to avoid his plot and his characters. Anyone who wants to extend, enhance, or debase his work, for good or bad purposes, is effectively stopped. Especially if the person wants to do something the author would consider debasing, whether it is or not.
So I ask you, Mr. Helprin, would you like to live in a world where intellectual property lasts forever? Where authors and descendants are granted a complete monopoly over their ideas forever? Where everything you write may infringe on others monopolies? And the monopolies can be enforced capriciously and unfairly? Is the small stream of revenue which starts 70 years after your death worth it to tie up all the works of Shakespeare (on which many plays and movies have been based), all the songs of Mozart (which much music was and is based on), and all the novels of Dickens (which continue to be source material for novels and movies). Do you want to live in a society where rights are more important than new creative works? If so, sir, you should have become a lawyer and not a writer.
Intellectual and physical property are different. And I for one am glad I live in a society that acknowledges that, even though the boundaries are pushed longer and longer each year.
Well, if you had actually read yesterday's article, you would have seen that the mileage estimate on your regular civic has also dropped. The Prius combined estimate dropped 16%, while the non hybrid Civic dropped 12%. Even after the milage drop, the Prius still gets 58% better combined fuel economy than your Civic (46 mpg vs. 29 mpg combined).
Of course, these are just estimates, and your mileage may vary.
Stop believing big pharma's FUD.
There are several significant factors undercutting this supposed billion dollar price tag. The first is that AIDS research has received significant public funding, and second is that antiretroviral drugs have the shortest time to approval of any class of drugs, approximately half the time of normal clinical trials (the mean time for antiretrovirals is 44.6 months, compared to an industry average of 87.4 months).
See this report from Doctors Without Boarders for more information.
I especially love the fact that the guitar players (as well as the bassist) play bass on Big Bottom. Three basses. Now that's a lot of bottom!
I think teachers lashing out at students who are more intelligent than them is common. A relation of mine was in a grade school science class and the teacher said that liquids are always less dense than solids. My relative said that the teacher was wrong, and that ice is less dense than water. Instead of the teacher admitting she was wrong, she sent my relative to the principal's office.
Apple's Pippin certainly seems right for a technical flop list. A game machine based on the Macintosh; a platform well known for games. Much hype, under powered when delivered, quickly killed.
Also, although technically under the category net PC's, what about the AMD PIC (see here or here)? I briefly was involved in a project to develop media for the PIC. Remarkably, this low cost computer made its debut two years after the i-Opener failed. You would think they would learn.
Hey. From the article, consultants from Microsoft and Dell were called in. As they said in Raiders of the Lost Ark, top...men.
What he actually invented was a linked list with two or three pointers, an therefore sort orders, in the same list. Doubly linked lists demonstrate his concept, though are more complicated (since they allow backwards traversals of the same list) and useful.