You can only if you want them too. There are various bit of equipment (Armor/Kits) which will show on you avatar. But you can hide then if you desire. The uniform pieces are limited, but they are quite versatile with different patterns and colors (4 colors on most pirces). Just about any combination you can get will look like Star Trek. And the Custom Alien race gives you the most options and the most versatility. And you can change you looks at any time, assuming you have enough game currency (Energy Credits).
There is some of that. There are 6 tier's (Mk) of equipment which are limited by level. (Mk I/II useable level 1-10, Mk III/IV usable at level 11+, etc). But drops and rewards are generally usably by your character. Sometimes you'll get a Mk drop then you can as you approaching a new rank.
It's probably like the N900. There are 2 modes when it's connect to the PC via USB. You select which mode when you connect it. The first us Mass Storage mode. The N900 exposes its eMCC FAT parition and microSD card as USB storage devices. The other is PC Suite mode. In this mode the N900 looks like a phone to the PC. You can sync data, load software or use the phone as a modem via tethering.
The fact that that T-Mobile is the first carrier in the US is just coincidence. The N1 was engineered to work with the most common 3G frequency bands used in the world. Nokia's N900 is the same in that regard. The first (or only) iteration of the phones aimed worldwide at the largest 3G market.
One factor that most are missing is that most ISPs over subscriber their consumer class bandwidth. If every customer used all of the full bandwidth of their connection, the ISP's network would slow to a craw or worse. ISPs advertise all of these huge download speeds and how great they are. But they punish you behind the scenes if anyone dares to actually use it.
Mobile Broadband Providers have a trickier problem in that individual cell sites/towers are the bandwidth choke points. The amount of bandwith they can process is fixed by the limits of the technology (and also the size of the landline pipes from the cell tower back to the MTSO). Mobile provider can't bump up the amount of bandwith with a huge infrastructure investment. And the bandwidth usage is dynamic because people are moving in and out of cell tower coverage areas.
It's different because you don't have to jailbreak the N900, because there is no jail to break. You can install whatever software you want on the phone. There is no tech in the phone that Nokia or a provider can remotely disable or remove installed software on the phone. As I previously posted, Nokia closes that off from the casual user to prevent them from inadvertently screwing their phone. But gaining root is simple as installed a software package from a Maemo repo.
In my previous post I was pointing out that YOU control what goes on the phone and what you want to do with it. I was just point out the futility of even trying to lock down an N900.
If you design something that interferes with the wrong person's profits, or might mess with the stability of the device, then that app will be disallowed just as surely on the N900 as it would be on any other cellphone, including the iPhone.
Uh, no they can't. The base software on the N900 does come an xterminal program. The N900 is "locked down" (I use that term very loosely) to prevent a casual user from inadvertently screwing up their phone. But for the knowledgeable user, you can gain a root shell on the N900 quite easily. If you have root, well, you own the device.
Maemo is built on top of Debian. You can do 'agt-get install x' from a root shell to install software from any repository yourself. If you screw up your phone well it's you own fault. But one that can easily be corrected. Just reflash it with a base image. Restore all your contacts and restore from a previous Backup, reinstall your apps (the restore will do that for you if you want) and you're good to go. Want OGG support? Install it. Want tethering? (yes it's not setup by default) Just tweak some configuration files. Want OpenSSH? Install it. (That's Openssh Client AND Server mind you).
I'm agreeing with most of the intent, and certainly all of the purpose. Supporting copyright is far more importantto me than supporting fair-use, and I'd certainly sacrifice the latter entirely in order to improve the former.
Do you even kno what the basis of Fair Use is? It's not something that you can sacrifice. Fair Use derives from diametrically opposed provisions of the US Constitution.
The First Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech..."
And the Copyright Clause:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The first gives me unlimited freedom to use speech even it's someone else's speech. And the second gives a limited time monopoly to a creator's speech. You cannot downplay nor get rid of one or the other. They have equal weight in determining the law.
Though the years,court cases and precedents, the US Courts crafted the Fair Use doctrine as a balance between the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause. And ultimately the Fair Use doctrine was written into law by the US Congress.
Are people (the decision makers) taking this seriously? It reads like something from The Onion...
Even if agreed upon as a treaty, will it hold up in any courts?
Ratified treaties are the highest form of governance second only to the Constitution itself. In other words, if a treaty provisions don't violate the Constitution, we are stuck with them. The treaties can't be undone. The Congress and President are force to pass legislation to enable the terms of the treaty.
It seems the goal of the new law was to discourage using the name or persona of another person to create a Web page.
Aren't there already laws in place that discourage one from claiming to be someone they are not? Why not use the existing law instead of wasting time and effort creating a new law because a web page is involved?
This is another thing that irks me. Creating new laws for specific cases which are already covered by other laws. For instance, the banning of text while driving. The name varies from place to place, but in my town it's called Inattentive Driving. You can get a ticket for eating, putting on make up, reading a map, texting while driving a car.
The given intent of a law is irrelevant, for the most part, to police and prosecutors. They will prosecute you based on the wording of the law. And they'll bend the law to the breaking point and beyond if they want to nail you (Lori Drew case from California).
Actually, doesn't AT&T have download caps on its cell network? I imagine someone using Skype regularly would hit that wall pretty fast, and end up paying AT&T for the overage anyway.
Doubtful. VoIP datastream doesn't use up that much bandwidth. Ultimately It all depends on which codecs the call winds up using. But a good quality codec will using 8 kps. That's roughly 675MB per day. With AT&T's 5GB cap, that's a little over 7.5 days of VoIP talk time. By any standard, that a lot of gabbing.
The current FCC is looking into the celluar provider exclusive deals for phone. (i.e. AT&T being the carrier that can have the iPhone.) And the FCC is forumulating rules on Network Neutrality. That means treating all network traffic on their networks equally: no port blocking, no throttling. Internet connectity should be a pipline to the customer. The customer determine how they want use their bandwidth.
AT&T and other ISPs and cellular providers will fight it tooth and nail. But they realize it's a loosing battle. So they are gonna pick their fights. They will give ground in hoping that the things will stop short of Network Neutrality as the rule of law. Hence them giving in to allowing VoIP traffic on their cellular network.
When Stallman started the GNU project, the software he was cloning had been created by a big, litigious, evil monopoly called "AT&T". There was a good chance that they were going to shut him down for copyright and patent infringement. He took that risk, and the rest is history.
The situation surrounding Mono is actually far less serious. Yes, Microsoft is a big, litigious, evil monopoly, but they actually have made a pretty watertight commitment to keeping those portions of.NET that Mono relies on open and free.
There were no software patents back then. Only copyright and very proprietary (read: expensive) software licenses. RMS started creating work alike and very often superior software. The software was written independent of any of the Unix source code to avoid any chance of it being tainted by that same source code. There was no chance of AT&T shutting down GNU software; because, they didn't have any legal leg to stand on.
Many Palm employees have said that they enjoy the homebrew scene and will not stop distribution via this avenue. They only restrict selling outside of the Catalog.
And hence Palm is going to be gatekeeper, nay, middleman to take their cut of the proceeds. If one can't sell apps in any venue, the device isn't really open. Palm is just being magnanimous in allowing homebrewers (so long as you don't cross the hidden lines i.e. tethering apps).
Don't kid youself, Palm is going to be controlling just like Apple is. They kowtow to their Lord and Masters (US cell providers) as their survive depends on it. Palm can't afford to be tight as Apple's control because it's one of their few marketing advantages against Apple and the IPhone.
This situation won't change until there is a major shake up of the industry. Either the public wakes up and stops being sheep (not likely) or the FCC or FTC stops in to stop their exclusive deals and phone locking.
...until now (well it's is coming "Soon (tm)"). The new Nokia N900. A truely open mobile computer (with a phone). It's Debian under the fancy Maemo hood. Albeit not x86.
Getting a root shell using the building Xterm is very easy for those that want to do it, and are a bit technically inclined. Add a certain repo, add the rootsh.deb, open xterm, sudo gain root, and viola! Or you can enable R&D mode using the flasher (firmware updater) utility.
The browser used in Maemo is based on the MicroB brower of the Mozilla Foundation. The version on the current versions of Maemo were based on 3.0 versions so where very sluggy. But the one on Freemantle (on the N900) is based on much later versions of MicroB. It has all of the speed improvements of the later 3.0 versions.
And there are a few other options for Browsers based on Webkit (Tear and Digia). They work quite nicely on the N770 and N8x0.
"Ideally" might be try to be stretched but the courts would have to err to the side of the defendant. IF the Feds do go overboard and grab more data than what their search warrant states, all a defense lawyer is to pose a very plausible method the government could have followed to get the data. Any excess data gathered would become tainted, and therefore inadmissible.
But I agree with the quoted laywer in teh Wired article. I doubt the ruling would survive scrutiny of the SCOTUS with it's current makeup.
No they don't. Otherwise they would not allow their users to erase and/or change content on their pages. Most well written ToS includes a limited grant of copyright permission from the users for their submitted content. Places like MySpace, Facebook or Yahoo have to publish and make multiple copies of the content, e.g. to push it out to their large user bases using a web farm and for plain old backups. Otherwise those companies would be guilt of copyright infringement on a massive scale.
Sometimes the grant of permissions go a bit further then they what they need to operate as a business (i.e. publicity or advertising). The privacy and consumer protection groups get up in arms if the ToS go too far, such as claiming to own the copyright of everything uploaded their servers.
You don't need to look at anything but the wording applicable section of the statute.
(d) When any common carrier, subject to the jurisdiction of the
Federal Communications Commission, is notified in writing by a
Federal, State, or local law enforcement agency, acting within its
jurisdiction, that any facility furnished by it is being used or
will be used for the purpose of transmitting or receiving gambling
information in interstate or foreign commerce in violation of
Federal, State or local law, it shall discontinue or refuse, the
leasing, furnishing, or maintaining of such facility, after
reasonable notice to the subscriber, but no damages, penalty or
forfeiture, civil or criminal, shall be found against any common
carrier for any act done in compliance with any notice received
from a law enforcement agency. Nothing in this section shall be
deemed to prejudice the right of any person affected thereby to
secure an appropriate determination, as otherwise provided by law,
in a Federal court or in a State or local tribunal or agency, that
such facility should not be discontinued or removed, or should be
restored.
The common carrier "shall discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" when notified in writting that "any facility furnished by it is being used or will be used for the purpose of transmitting or receiving gambling
information". It means they have to cut off subscribers or any permanent circuits and the like, if they know that *those* specific facilities are being or will be used for gambling.
Nice try (actually quite lame), but the plain language of the law says no. They don't have any authority to block specific sites that are not being serviced by the common carrier. They may think that's the intent of the law, but courts nowadays have a big thing for the "plain language" of the law as it's written.
I did a Google search for Cyberterm I found Michael's paper about Cyberterm. After reading the paper throughly, it seems to be prior art to most, if not all, claims of that patent. There is publish date of the paper, but the web page headers indicate a date of July, 1992. And the paper talks of release of source code in late '92, and the work that went into the project from the last year. I now have absolutely no worries at all that patent. To borrow a phrase, that patent is BUSTED!
And I wish I had know about the software back then. I was heavy in Amigas at that time. I would have loved to take that software for spin and help out.
Crypitc bought out the Champions IP from Hero Games. Champions Online is not a MMORPG set to Hero Systems rules. It's has it's own set game fules. The only things that will be partially recognizable will be the NPCs and organizations. And I say partially because they are mangling the Champions source material. The more I found out about it, the more I'm turned off. AT the moment, I'm not going to to touch it until free trials become available.
Slashdot Mirror
You can only if you want them too. There are various bit of equipment (Armor/Kits) which will show on you avatar. But you can hide then if you desire. The uniform pieces are limited, but they are quite versatile with different patterns and colors (4 colors on most pirces). Just about any combination you can get will look like Star Trek. And the Custom Alien race gives you the most options and the most versatility. And you can change you looks at any time, assuming you have enough game currency (Energy Credits).
There is some of that. There are 6 tier's (Mk) of equipment which are limited by level. (Mk I/II useable level 1-10, Mk III/IV usable at level 11+, etc). But drops and rewards are generally usably by your character. Sometimes you'll get a Mk drop then you can as you approaching a new rank.
Reportedly, Massively.com is giving out open beta keys.
It's probably like the N900. There are 2 modes when it's connect to the PC via USB. You select which mode when you connect it. The first us Mass Storage mode. The N900 exposes its eMCC FAT parition and microSD card as USB storage devices. The other is PC Suite mode. In this mode the N900 looks like a phone to the PC. You can sync data, load software or use the phone as a modem via tethering.
The fact that that T-Mobile is the first carrier in the US is just coincidence. The N1 was engineered to work with the most common 3G frequency bands used in the world. Nokia's N900 is the same in that regard. The first (or only) iteration of the phones aimed worldwide at the largest 3G market.
One factor that most are missing is that most ISPs over subscriber their consumer class bandwidth.
If every customer used all of the full bandwidth of their connection, the ISP's network would slow to a craw or worse. ISPs advertise all of these huge download speeds and how great they are. But they punish you behind the scenes if anyone dares to actually use it.
Mobile Broadband Providers have a trickier problem in that individual cell sites/towers are the bandwidth choke points. The amount of bandwith they can process is fixed by the limits of the technology (and also the size of the landline pipes from the cell tower back to the MTSO). Mobile provider can't bump up the amount of bandwith with a huge infrastructure investment. And the bandwidth usage is dynamic because people are moving in and out of cell tower coverage areas.
It's different because you don't have to jailbreak the N900, because there is no jail to break. You can install whatever software you want on the phone. There is no tech in the phone that Nokia or a provider can remotely disable or remove installed software on the phone. As I previously posted, Nokia closes that off from the casual user to prevent them from inadvertently screwing their phone. But gaining root is simple as installed a software package from a Maemo repo.
In my previous post I was pointing out that YOU control what goes on the phone and what you want to do with it. I was just point out the futility of even trying to lock down an N900.
No one will tell you what you cannot do?
Um, this is obvious bullshit.
If you design something that interferes with the wrong person's profits, or might mess with the stability of the device, then that app will be disallowed just as surely on the N900 as it would be on any other cellphone, including the iPhone.
Uh, no they can't. The base software on the N900 does come an xterminal program. The N900 is "locked down" (I use that term very loosely) to prevent a casual user from inadvertently screwing up their phone. But for the knowledgeable user, you can gain a root shell on the N900 quite easily. If you have root, well, you own the device.
Maemo is built on top of Debian. You can do 'agt-get install x' from a root shell to install software from any repository yourself. If you screw up your phone well it's you own fault. But one that can easily be corrected. Just reflash it with a base image. Restore all your contacts and restore from a previous Backup, reinstall your apps (the restore will do that for you if you want) and you're good to go. Want OGG support? Install it. Want tethering? (yes it's not setup by default) Just tweak some configuration files. Want OpenSSH? Install it. (That's Openssh Client AND Server mind you).
I'm agreeing with most of the intent, and certainly all of the purpose. Supporting copyright is far more importantto me than supporting fair-use, and I'd certainly sacrifice the latter entirely in order to improve the former.
Do you even kno what the basis of Fair Use is? It's not something that you can sacrifice. Fair Use derives from diametrically opposed provisions of the US Constitution.
The First Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech..."
And the Copyright Clause:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The first gives me unlimited freedom to use speech even it's someone else's speech. And the second gives a limited time monopoly to a creator's speech. You cannot downplay nor get rid of one or the other. They have equal weight in determining the law.
Though the years,court cases and precedents, the US Courts crafted the Fair Use doctrine as a balance between the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause. And ultimately the Fair Use doctrine was written into law by the US Congress.
Are people (the decision makers) taking this seriously? It reads like something from The Onion...
Even if agreed upon as a treaty, will it hold up in any courts?
Ratified treaties are the highest form of governance second only to the Constitution itself. In other words, if a treaty provisions don't violate the Constitution, we are stuck with them. The treaties can't be undone. The Congress and President are force to pass legislation to enable the terms of the treaty.
It seems the goal of the new law was to discourage using the name or persona of another person to create a Web page.
Aren't there already laws in place that discourage one from claiming to be someone they are not? Why not use the existing law instead of wasting time and effort creating a new law because a web page is involved?
This is another thing that irks me. Creating new laws for specific cases which are already covered by other laws. For instance, the banning of text while driving. The name varies from place to place, but in my town it's called Inattentive Driving. You can get a ticket for eating, putting on make up, reading a map, texting while driving a car.
The given intent of a law is irrelevant, for the most part, to police and prosecutors. They will prosecute you based on the wording of the law. And they'll bend the law to the breaking point and beyond if they want to nail you (Lori Drew case from California).
ARGH. Maths is so hard. Move the decimal over on those numbers. I should never ever do math before morning caffeine IV feed.
Actually, doesn't AT&T have download caps on its cell network? I imagine someone using Skype regularly would hit that wall pretty fast, and end up paying AT&T for the overage anyway.
Doubtful. VoIP datastream doesn't use up that much bandwidth. Ultimately It all depends on which codecs the call winds up using. But a good quality codec will using 8 kps. That's roughly 675MB per day. With AT&T's 5GB cap, that's a little over 7.5 days of VoIP talk time. By any standard, that a lot of gabbing.
The current FCC is looking into the celluar provider exclusive deals for phone. (i.e. AT&T being the carrier that can have the iPhone.) And the FCC is forumulating rules on Network Neutrality. That means treating all network traffic on their networks equally: no port blocking, no throttling. Internet connectity should be a pipline to the customer. The customer determine how they want use their bandwidth.
AT&T and other ISPs and cellular providers will fight it tooth and nail. But they realize it's a loosing battle. So they are gonna pick their fights. They will give ground in hoping that the things will stop short of Network Neutrality as the rule of law. Hence them giving in to allowing VoIP traffic on their cellular network.
When Stallman started the GNU project, the software he was cloning had been created by a big, litigious, evil monopoly called "AT&T". There was a good chance that they were going to shut him down for copyright and patent infringement. He took that risk, and the rest is history.
The situation surrounding Mono is actually far less serious. Yes, Microsoft is a big, litigious, evil monopoly, but they actually have made a pretty watertight commitment to keeping those portions of .NET that Mono relies on open and free.
There were no software patents back then. Only copyright and very proprietary (read: expensive) software licenses. RMS started creating work alike and very often superior software. The software was written independent of any of the Unix source code to avoid any chance of it being tainted by that same source code. There was no chance of AT&T shutting down GNU software; because, they didn't have any legal leg to stand on.
Many Palm employees have said that they enjoy the homebrew scene and will not stop distribution via this avenue. They only restrict selling outside of the Catalog.
And hence Palm is going to be gatekeeper, nay, middleman to take their cut of the proceeds. If one can't sell apps in any venue, the device isn't really open. Palm is just being magnanimous in allowing homebrewers (so long as you don't cross the hidden lines i.e. tethering apps).
Don't kid youself, Palm is going to be controlling just like Apple is. They kowtow to their Lord and Masters (US cell providers) as their survive depends on it. Palm can't afford to be tight as Apple's control because it's one of their few marketing advantages against Apple and the IPhone.
This situation won't change until there is a major shake up of the industry. Either the public wakes up and stops being sheep (not likely) or the FCC or FTC stops in to stop their exclusive deals and phone locking.
...until now (well it's is coming "Soon (tm)"). The new Nokia N900. A truely open mobile computer (with a phone). It's Debian under the fancy Maemo hood. Albeit not x86.
.deb, open xterm, sudo gain root, and viola! Or you can enable R&D mode using the flasher (firmware updater) utility.
Getting a root shell using the building Xterm is very easy for those that want to do it, and are a bit technically inclined. Add a certain repo, add the rootsh
The browser used in Maemo is based on the MicroB brower of the Mozilla Foundation. The version on the current versions of Maemo were based on 3.0 versions so where very sluggy. But the one on Freemantle (on the N900) is based on much later versions of MicroB. It has all of the speed improvements of the later 3.0 versions.
And there are a few other options for Browsers based on Webkit (Tear and Digia). They work quite nicely on the N770 and N8x0.
"Ideally" might be try to be stretched but the courts would have to err to the side of the defendant. IF the Feds do go overboard and grab more data than what their search warrant states, all a defense lawyer is to pose a very plausible method the government could have followed to get the data. Any excess data gathered would become tainted, and therefore inadmissible.
But I agree with the quoted laywer in teh Wired article. I doubt the ruling would survive scrutiny of the SCOTUS with it's current makeup.
No they don't. Otherwise they would not allow their users to erase and/or change content on their pages. Most well written ToS includes a limited grant of copyright permission from the users for their submitted content. Places like MySpace, Facebook or Yahoo have to publish and make multiple copies of the content, e.g. to push it out to their large user bases using a web farm and for plain old backups. Otherwise those companies would be guilt of copyright infringement on a massive scale.
Sometimes the grant of permissions go a bit further then they what they need to operate as a business (i.e. publicity or advertising). The privacy and consumer protection groups get up in arms if the ToS go too far, such as claiming to own the copyright of everything uploaded their servers.
That wasn't the worst of it. They were the slowpokes. There were some doing level 1-50 in 1 (one) hour.
The common carrier "shall discontinue or refuse, the leasing, furnishing, or maintaining" when notified in writting that "any facility furnished by it is being used or will be used for the purpose of transmitting or receiving gambling information". It means they have to cut off subscribers or any permanent circuits and the like, if they know that *those* specific facilities are being or will be used for gambling.
Nice try (actually quite lame), but the plain language of the law says no. They don't have any authority to block specific sites that are not being serviced by the common carrier. They may think that's the intent of the law, but courts nowadays have a big thing for the "plain language" of the law as it's written.
I did a Google search for Cyberterm I found Michael's paper about Cyberterm. After reading the paper throughly, it seems to be prior art to most, if not all, claims of that patent. There is publish date of the paper, but the web page headers indicate a date of July, 1992. And the paper talks of release of source code in late '92, and the work that went into the project from the last year. I now have absolutely no worries at all that patent. To borrow a phrase, that patent is BUSTED!
And I wish I had know about the software back then. I was heavy in Amigas at that time. I would have loved to take that software for spin and help out.
Crypitc bought out the Champions IP from Hero Games. Champions Online is not a MMORPG set to Hero Systems rules. It's has it's own set game fules. The only things that will be partially recognizable will be the NPCs and organizations. And I say partially because they are mangling the Champions source material. The more I found out about it, the more I'm turned off. AT the moment, I'm not going to to touch it until free trials become available.