Yeah, right. First, just because "my" copy of a movie ends up all over the internet, doesn't mean that I did anything wrong; maybe it was stolen from me. Second, if an evil-doer buys (or steals) a few copies with different watermarks, it's a good bet that he can merge them in a way that obliterates any evidence of where they originals came from. Do your homework, guys.
I used my credit card to pay for a relative's AOL account as a gift a long while ago. The relative lost interest, but my card kept getting charged. I called AOL to cancel, but they wouldn't let me without my knowing the login password to the account. "But it's not my account!" "You can't cancel it, then." "Fine, don't cancel it, but I do not authorize you to charge MY credit card any longer." "No, you can't change the credit card info on an account you don't know the password to." "But it's MY credit card and as the only person authorized to use it, I'm telling you I don't approve of the charge! Let me speak to a supervisor!" Amazingly, still no luck. I had to get the credit card company to cut them off.
This was before they capitulated on a few class-action lawsuits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#Account_cancellat ion and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/aol_billin g_litigation/, so I don't know if it's better now.
I call BS! On Bill Joy!?!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sorry, Bill, but your memory has dropped a few bits. Even back in the 1970's, EMACS was very careful about doing only the absolute necessary screen updating, and worked quite well at 1200 baud. The code made all sorts of effort to take advantage of whatever capabilities your particular terminal had for moving text around on the screen by itself (such as inserting a character within a line without re-sending the whole line; ditto for inserting a new line without having to re-send the lines below it). See "The Display Processor" section of Stallman's "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor" 1981 paper for the ACM Conference on Text Processing http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html / for more info on the optimizations involved.
I remember once getting really fooled by this. I'd accidently created a file with two sequential copies of the text I thought I had. I searched for "foobar", which worked as expected; then I searched again. The screen didn't change, and the cursor didn't move. So, first I checked if the mainframe had crashed, but that wasn't it. It took many minutes of fooling around to realize what had happened: EMACS had figured out that the screen already looked right, so no need to do anything (except perhaps update a
character or two on the status line). I wonder how many other people had similar experiences back in the day.
So, sure EMACS may have been too big to run fast on Bill's machine, but bandwidth to the terminal had nothing to do with it.
Before Pluto was discovered, there was "Mother Visits Every Monday and Just Stays Until Noon". (Note that the "and" covers the asteroid belt!) Adding Pluto changed this to "...Until Noon, Period". I propose we just go back to the original.
RTFA. Most of the "extra" money goes to the performers, promoter, venue, etc. TicketMaster gets a percentage or a flat fee. As someone who has purchased tickets from scalpers, I'd be happier paying the (inflated) price on a ticket that was guaranteed to be legitimate, rather than have to carry lots of cash to pay for a questionable one.
On the other hand, TFA doesn't explain how the auction process will work. Will they auction a few seats each hour, or a few dozen once a day, or some other scheme? Or do you just bid on some number of seats within a specific area, and they dole them out to the high bidders? If I am willing to spend, say, $200 on the "best available at the price" seat, will I be guaranteed to get some seat somewhere (assuming that not all the seats in the house went for more)? What if I'm flexible on the exact date? What about groups of 5 that want to sit together? And how long do I have to wait to find out if I got a seat or not? It seems like it would be tricky to come up with a scheme that even just keeps all the rich people happy.
There's also an existing "TicketExchange" feature, where customers can re-sell their tickets for more or less than they paid for them. TicketMaster is getting close to establishing a REAL market here, where you could even sell a ticket short! Now that's exciting -- "I think this upcoming mega-show with the big stars is going to be a flop, so I'll sell a ticket I don't own yet, wait for the bad reviews to come out, and then cover my short sale by buying a ticket that's now really cheap". How about a Broadway Futures market? Or Mutual Funds (an unmanaged portfolio of dramas; or a basket of musicals with no more than 20% revivals; etc.)?
OK, here's the pronoun chart of subject nouns (I am here), object nouns (Give it to ME), adjectives (That is MY ball), and possessives (The ball is MINE) as best as I can render them without a table:
subj obj adj poss I me my mine you you your yours he him his his she her her hers it it its its we us our ours you you your yours they them their theirs
Not an apostrophe in sight! As you move from the third to the fourth column, you generally append an "s" without an apostrophe. So, none of the possessives that end in an "s" (yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs) take an apostrophe.
It's true that the only third-column word that already ends with an "s" is "its", so maybe that's where the confusions comes from as you move to the fourth column. (Well, actually, there's also "his" which doesn't turn into "his's" or "hi's" or "he's", either.)
The "hers" example was supposed to help make this point; your subject vs. object objection makes your proposed rule even more special-casey than the (incorrect) one you were arguing against to begin with.
If English were more regular, perhaps we'd be discussing the incorrect apostrophe in the possessives you's / he's / she's / we's / they's.
"His" and "hers", two third-person singular possessive personal pronouns, don't have apostrophes, so why should "its", the third third-person singular possessive personal pronoun? For that matter, the third-person plural possessive personal pronouns ("ours", "yours", and "theirs") don't, either.
So, it's more like the rule-plus-exception you inferred simply isn't the real rule at all.
In 1975 I was a summer computer intern at the National ICEE offices and factory in Philadelphia (where they also made Evans Sundae Toppings; the whole surrounding community could smell which flavor they were brewing up on any given day). Needless to say, we all knew that ICEEs beat Slurpees by a mile.
They had an NCR Century 200 mainframe with at most 64Kbytes of short-rod (not "core"!) memory. The great thing about the Century CPU was that addresses had an "indirect" bit in them, so if you dereferenced an address, it might cause a further dereference, etc., down to an arbitrary depth of 5, at which point the cpu would throw an interrupt to avoid a hardware loop (this sort of thing would be handy for relocatable object memory ala Java, but they were a few decades early). Also, all instructions had a whole byte for the operand length, so you could, say, add two 255-byte integers in a single instruction (though, sadly, not in a single cycle); this came in handy, oh, maybe once in the history of the architecture.
Applications were in Cobol or NEAT/3 (assembly language with a few high-level file i/o operations glommed on). All the career programmers chain-smoked as they pored over the multi-hundred-page green-and-white-striped hard copies of their code. There was, of course, no interactive debugging; instead, you'd add some "print" statements (punch cards, that is to say) to your deck, submit them to the reader, and wait maybe a few dozen minutes for your output if things weren't busy. This gave you plenty of time to hang out in the machine room, which was just as well as it was the only air-conditioned spot in the building.
I once accidently over-wrote the 9-track tape with the current week's accounting info, and while trying to recreate it from the delta tape managed to over-write the previous week's, too. Each tape took hours and hours to create, and Mr. Fred Rump, the director of the operation, was extrememly nice about it. Thanks, Mr. Rump.
How could it be 158 million legal American downloads over six months, when Apple claims about 250 million iTunes sales over the same period (albeit world-wide)?
Also, at about $1 per song, the total sales are still a very small percentage of total music CD sales, so we've still got quite a way to go before CDs are history.
Netscape made the first widely-used browser. Netscape's browser accepted non-conforming HTML all over the place (perhaps because many HTML files were hand-crafted).
IE came later. IE was forced to maintain compatability with all the non-conforming stuff that Netscape introduced; otherwise, the user-experience was "NS works; IE doesn't". And, having worked at the time on yet a different browser, let me tell you that it was a huge pain to try to even figure out the exact language that Netscape accepted, and what the exact semantics of all the non-conforming HTML that it accepted were. I don't know how IE managed to get so much of it to match. (It's hard enough to write to a spec; but when you've also got a, well, white box that you're trying to match the behavior of, good luck).
So, all this business about how it's all a MS plot may be fun to claim, but it doesn't match up with the reality of history. (OK, ok, this is not to say that once IE gained the lion's share of the market that they didn't pull the sort of trick being suggested; but they sure weren't first.) The world would be a much better place today if Netscape had been rigid in the language it accepted; by the time IE came on the scene, it just didn't have the option to enforce strictly-conforming HTML.
"New tool"? Credit where credit is due: Sun created the NeWS windowing system (Gosling's project prior to doing Java); and NeXT (Jobs' project before Pixar and rescuing Apple) used Adobe's Display PostScript. Note that none of these exist anymore, but maybe the time has come for this idea to really work. MacOS 10 has Quartz, and that seems to be working out, unlike those earlier attempts.
Walt Disney never drew a single cartoon character! He couldn't even draw Mickey Mouse when kids asked for his signature. It's a well-known fact. So what fantasy-land did you get your story from?
p.s. Also, all non-Walmart stores that sell DVD players (Circuit City, Best Buy, CostCo etc.) are motivated to push NetFlix on their customers, rather than Walmart, with whom they compete. Everything from the salesperson suggesting NetFlix (and perhaps getting a kick-back if you sign up), to NetFlix coupons in/on the box, to PR at the Point-Of-Sale.
This isn't necessarily bad for NetFlix. First, it "validates" the market, and gives NetFlix a bunch of free PR (all the articles about the Walmart entering the fray will compare/contrast with NetFlix), including making tens of millions of consumers more aware of this new sort of rental scheme that they just don't grok yet. Second, it makes NetFlix a take-over target for any other company wanting to join in the competition (perhaps even BlockBuster, if their home-grown offering falters). Then again, maybe NetFlix will get blown out of the water.
Good grief! The main motivation for teaching cursive writing is that it allows you to write faster, especially in real-time situations, like taking notes in class, or (when you get to be an adult) at a meeting or while receiving verbal instructions from your boss. It's closer to "regular" writing than short-hand, which is for the real pros. Sure, technology may be well on the way to replacing the need for cursive writing, but there's more to that than how many WPM kids can type; it's also a matter of whether they have a keyboard device with them in class that they can use (quietly) to take notes. For me, small PDA thumb-keyboards aren't fast enough, while full-size keyboard devices are too bulky and noisy and generally obtrusive.
In England (and the rest of the UK) you have to pay a tax of about $15 a month for each colo(u)r TV (and about $4 for black&white). Hard to believe, but true. I'm not sure, but I think this covers the costs of the BBC.
What if we had a similar tax on TVs and PCs, but now you'd be allowed to legally download and/or record anything you wanted? Let's see: 98% of US households have at least one TV, so let's conservatively estimate that there are 200 million of them, and let's not even count how many PCs there are. So that would be about $3 billion per month or $36 billion a year. In 2002, the music industry sold about $13 billion of CDs while the movie industry sold about $20 billion of DVDs (and only sold $9 billion worth of theater tickets, by the way). Well, $36 is greater than $13+$20, so I'd say we have a deal!
Hold your glee. In short order, a telemarketing company will launch a court case, and the rule will be put aside for a decade or so while it works its way up to the Supreme Court. Oh, well, maybe our kids will benefit.
So what? The 700,000 or so Tivo customers are a drop in the bucket compared to the many tens of millions of cable users that Mystro is being marketed at. If they can get faster up-take of Mystro among the population that doesn't yet have Tivo, they win.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, right. First, just because "my" copy of a movie ends up all over the internet, doesn't mean that I did anything wrong; maybe it was stolen from me. Second, if an evil-doer buys (or steals) a few copies with different watermarks, it's a good bet that he can merge them in a way that obliterates any evidence of where they originals came from. Do your homework, guys.
I used my credit card to pay for a relative's AOL account as a gift a long while ago. The relative lost interest, but my card kept getting charged. I called AOL to cancel, but they wouldn't let me without my knowing the login password to the account. "But it's not my account!" "You can't cancel it, then." "Fine, don't cancel it, but I do not authorize you to charge MY credit card any longer." "No, you can't change the credit card info on an account you don't know the password to." "But it's MY credit card and as the only person authorized to use it, I'm telling you I don't approve of the charge! Let me speak to a supervisor!" Amazingly, still no luck. I had to get the credit card company to cut them off. This was before they capitulated on a few class-action lawsuits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL#Account_cancellat ion and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/aol_billin g_litigation/, so I don't know if it's better now.
I remember once getting really fooled by this. I'd accidently created a file with two sequential copies of the text I thought I had. I searched for "foobar", which worked as expected; then I searched again. The screen didn't change, and the cursor didn't move. So, first I checked if the mainframe had crashed, but that wasn't it. It took many minutes of fooling around to realize what had happened: EMACS had figured out that the screen already looked right, so no need to do anything (except perhaps update a character or two on the status line). I wonder how many other people had similar experiences back in the day.
So, sure EMACS may have been too big to run fast on Bill's machine, but bandwidth to the terminal had nothing to do with it.
It was "put through the ringer"? I suppose that sounded a lot nicer than when they put it through the wringer.
Before Pluto was discovered, there was "Mother Visits Every Monday and Just Stays Until Noon". (Note that the "and" covers the asteroid belt!) Adding Pluto changed this to "...Until Noon, Period". I propose we just go back to the original.
RTFA. Most of the "extra" money goes to the performers, promoter, venue, etc. TicketMaster gets a percentage or a flat fee. As someone who has purchased tickets from scalpers, I'd be happier paying the (inflated) price on a ticket that was guaranteed to be legitimate, rather than have to carry lots of cash to pay for a questionable one. On the other hand, TFA doesn't explain how the auction process will work. Will they auction a few seats each hour, or a few dozen once a day, or some other scheme? Or do you just bid on some number of seats within a specific area, and they dole them out to the high bidders? If I am willing to spend, say, $200 on the "best available at the price" seat, will I be guaranteed to get some seat somewhere (assuming that not all the seats in the house went for more)? What if I'm flexible on the exact date? What about groups of 5 that want to sit together? And how long do I have to wait to find out if I got a seat or not? It seems like it would be tricky to come up with a scheme that even just keeps all the rich people happy. There's also an existing "TicketExchange" feature, where customers can re-sell their tickets for more or less than they paid for them. TicketMaster is getting close to establishing a REAL market here, where you could even sell a ticket short! Now that's exciting -- "I think this upcoming mega-show with the big stars is going to be a flop, so I'll sell a ticket I don't own yet, wait for the bad reviews to come out, and then cover my short sale by buying a ticket that's now really cheap". How about a Broadway Futures market? Or Mutual Funds (an unmanaged portfolio of dramas; or a basket of musicals with no more than 20% revivals; etc.)?
Look, all he's saying is "Don't have a cow, man." Nobody complains when Bart says it.
Their copyright laws aren't lax, but their enforcement is.
OK, here's the pronoun chart of subject nouns (I am here), object nouns (Give it to ME), adjectives (That is MY ball), and possessives (The ball is MINE) as best as I can render them without a table:
subj obj adj poss
I me my mine
you you your yours
he him his his
she her her hers
it it its its
we us our ours
you you your yours
they them their theirs
Not an apostrophe in sight! As you move from the third to the fourth column, you generally append an "s" without an apostrophe. So, none of the possessives that end in an "s" (yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs) take an apostrophe.
It's true that the only third-column word that already ends with an "s" is "its", so maybe that's where the confusions comes from as you move to the fourth column. (Well, actually, there's also "his" which doesn't turn into "his's" or "hi's" or "he's", either.)
The "hers" example was supposed to help make this point; your subject vs. object objection makes your proposed rule even more special-casey than the (incorrect) one you were arguing against to begin with.
If English were more regular, perhaps we'd be discussing the incorrect apostrophe in the possessives you's / he's / she's / we's / they's.
But "her" IS just as much of a noun as "it" is: "I saw her" and "I saw it". I hope that you'd write "The ball is hers" and not "The ball is her's".
So, it's more like the rule-plus-exception you inferred simply isn't the real rule at all.
Bill Gates knows when to use "it's" and when to use "its" (unlike the Slashdot editors).
They had an NCR Century 200 mainframe with at most 64Kbytes of short-rod (not "core"!) memory. The great thing about the Century CPU was that addresses had an "indirect" bit in them, so if you dereferenced an address, it might cause a further dereference, etc., down to an arbitrary depth of 5, at which point the cpu would throw an interrupt to avoid a hardware loop (this sort of thing would be handy for relocatable object memory ala Java, but they were a few decades early). Also, all instructions had a whole byte for the operand length, so you could, say, add two 255-byte integers in a single instruction (though, sadly, not in a single cycle); this came in handy, oh, maybe once in the history of the architecture.
Applications were in Cobol or NEAT/3 (assembly language with a few high-level file i/o operations glommed on). All the career programmers chain-smoked as they pored over the multi-hundred-page green-and-white-striped hard copies of their code. There was, of course, no interactive debugging; instead, you'd add some "print" statements (punch cards, that is to say) to your deck, submit them to the reader, and wait maybe a few dozen minutes for your output if things weren't busy. This gave you plenty of time to hang out in the machine room, which was just as well as it was the only air-conditioned spot in the building.
I once accidently over-wrote the 9-track tape with the current week's accounting info, and while trying to recreate it from the delta tape managed to over-write the previous week's, too. Each tape took hours and hours to create, and Mr. Fred Rump, the director of the operation, was extrememly nice about it. Thanks, Mr. Rump.
How could it be 158 million legal American downloads over six months, when Apple claims about 250 million iTunes sales over the same period (albeit world-wide)? Also, at about $1 per song, the total sales are still a very small percentage of total music CD sales, so we've still got quite a way to go before CDs are history.
Netscape made the first widely-used browser. Netscape's browser accepted non-conforming HTML all over the place (perhaps because many HTML files were hand-crafted).
IE came later. IE was forced to maintain compatability with all the non-conforming stuff that Netscape introduced; otherwise, the user-experience was "NS works; IE doesn't". And, having worked at the time on yet a different browser, let me tell you that it was a huge pain to try to even figure out the exact language that Netscape accepted, and what the exact semantics of all the non-conforming HTML that it accepted were. I don't know how IE managed to get so much of it to match. (It's hard enough to write to a spec; but when you've also got a, well, white box that you're trying to match the behavior of, good luck).
So, all this business about how it's all a MS plot may be fun to claim, but it doesn't match up with the reality of history. (OK, ok, this is not to say that once IE gained the lion's share of the market that they didn't pull the sort of trick being suggested; but they sure weren't first.) The world would be a much better place today if Netscape had been rigid in the language it accepted; by the time IE came on the scene, it just didn't have the option to enforce strictly-conforming HTML.
"New tool"? Credit where credit is due: Sun created the NeWS windowing system (Gosling's project prior to doing Java); and NeXT (Jobs' project before Pixar and rescuing Apple) used Adobe's Display PostScript. Note that none of these exist anymore, but maybe the time has come for this idea to really work. MacOS 10 has Quartz, and that seems to be working out, unlike those earlier attempts.
Walt Disney never drew a single cartoon character! He couldn't even draw Mickey Mouse when kids asked for his signature. It's a well-known fact. So what fantasy-land did you get your story from?
Take a look at canopy.com and see if there are any other Canopy Group companies that are boycotable.
p.s. Also, all non-Walmart stores that sell DVD players (Circuit City, Best Buy, CostCo etc.) are motivated to push NetFlix on their customers, rather than Walmart, with whom they compete. Everything from the salesperson suggesting NetFlix (and perhaps getting a kick-back if you sign up), to NetFlix coupons in/on the box, to PR at the Point-Of-Sale.
This isn't necessarily bad for NetFlix. First, it "validates" the market, and gives NetFlix a bunch of free PR (all the articles about the Walmart entering the fray will compare/contrast with NetFlix), including making tens of millions of consumers more aware of this new sort of rental scheme that they just don't grok yet. Second, it makes NetFlix a take-over target for any other company wanting to join in the competition (perhaps even BlockBuster, if their home-grown offering falters). Then again, maybe NetFlix will get blown out of the water.
Good grief! The main motivation for teaching cursive writing is that it allows you to write faster, especially in real-time situations, like taking notes in class, or (when you get to be an adult) at a meeting or while receiving verbal instructions from your boss. It's closer to "regular" writing than short-hand, which is for the real pros. Sure, technology may be well on the way to replacing the need for cursive writing, but there's more to that than how many WPM kids can type; it's also a matter of whether they have a keyboard device with them in class that they can use (quietly) to take notes. For me, small PDA thumb-keyboards aren't fast enough, while full-size keyboard devices are too bulky and noisy and generally obtrusive.
Their chops are busted?
What if we had a similar tax on TVs and PCs, but now you'd be allowed to legally download and/or record anything you wanted? Let's see: 98% of US households have at least one TV, so let's conservatively estimate that there are 200 million of them, and let's not even count how many PCs there are. So that would be about $3 billion per month or $36 billion a year. In 2002, the music industry sold about $13 billion of CDs while the movie industry sold about $20 billion of DVDs (and only sold $9 billion worth of theater tickets, by the way). Well, $36 is greater than $13+$20, so I'd say we have a deal!
Hold your glee. In short order, a telemarketing company will launch a court case, and the rule will be put aside for a decade or so while it works its way up to the Supreme Court. Oh, well, maybe our kids will benefit.
So what? The 700,000 or so Tivo customers are a drop in the bucket compared to the many tens of millions of cable users that Mystro is being marketed at. If they can get faster up-take of Mystro among the population that doesn't yet have Tivo, they win.