program seriously when it has the word "Cyber" in it. Sure, I realize that the original Terminator was a Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Model 101, and that sounded really cool at the time. It doesn't anymore. They need to find another prefix for their project names.
Well, he was really commenting more on the overall irrationality with which both genetically modified and 9/11 have been treated by the public, and don't even get me started on Creationism. And there I agree with him: corporations are paying dearly in terms of public acceptance of their products for decades of duplicity, and we are all seeing, firsthand, the results of having a poorly-educated public that can't tell DNA from a concrete block.
I read recently that Boeing imports its advanced avionics from Japan, because they can't get that kind of equipment here anymore. Granted Japan is an ally, but nevertheless it's another sign of deteriorating independence. America, Land of the Brave, Home of the Free... just don't ask us to build a flat panel or a microwave oven. People wonder about the shrinking middle class. It seems to me that it is shrinking in direct proportion to the number of factories that are moving to China.
We really are shooting ourselves in the foot by allowing our Captains of Industry (are you listening, Carly?), our elected leaders and unelected, largely unaccountable government officials to sell us out this way. We are going to pay for it, and pay hard.
Sounds very similar to the CVSD (Continuously-Variable-Slope-Delta modulation) technique that was used to provided compressed speech for a lot of early electronic pinball games (Black Night, Firepower and others.) I remember fiddling with a CVSD codec back in 1980 or thereabouts. It was pretty nifty for the time.
Usually that sensation is followed by the sound of a metal plate ripping through the back of your skull and adhering firmly to the inside of the scanner.
1. Are the continuing lawsuits still indicative of the RIAA's stated desire to curb illegal copyright violations via file-sharing, or have they crossed over into being a profit center in and of themselves?
2. If this activity is actually profitable for them, what motivation would they have for ever calling a halt?
I ask because there seems to be no interest whatsoever on the part of the RIAA's legal machine to properly vet these cases before filing suit. Guilty or not, they want their pound of flesh from their terrified victims, and my understanding is that the money received from these out-of-court settlements pays for filing additional suits and extracting even more settlements. This kind of rolling thunder can be hard to stop if it is making money. Lawyers don't like being out of work any more than anyone else.
So you can burn and rip all you want, RIAA will not care.
The hell they don't. They simply have no easy way to prosecute or intimidate anyone for personal burning and ripping, but they would if they could, fair use not withstanding. The RIAA doesn't believe in or accept the legitimacy of fair use anyway, considering how they reneged on their side of the Audio Home Recording Act. The studios themselves have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to use DRM, as well as other even less savory technological measures, to control the usage (let alone distribution) of their content.
Three out of every four MP3 players sold are iPods, but the device could be challenged later this year by Zune, the contender from Microsoft, whose billionaire founder Bill Gates is not used to losing.
Who is this guy kidding? Other than his core profit centers of operating systems and office suites, Bill Gates should be rather accustomed to failure by now.
Because you know that standards compliance saves you money in the long run, and that the most common blind person to visit your site is a web crawler, meaning that accessbility and search engine ranking can be directly correlated.
A mod point. A mod point. My kingdom for a mod point.
That's why I said a "two second" ad at the beginning: no way I'm going to sit through a forty-second ad for a two minute payoff. This doesn't scale down linearly, you're right about that. For that matter, I can't even stand watching regular TV anymore, too damn many commercials. There aren't that many shows I watch (the Stargates and a couple of others) so while I do pay for cable (my girlfriend likes channel surfing, unfortunately) I torrent the shows I do watch because they're generally commercial-free.
As a previous poster pointed out, they can claim that they tried to go online with a legit service and it didn't work.
"So now, Mr. Congressman, you have no reason not to pass our new "Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act". Yes, I know that it requires the death penalty without due process for suspected infringers, and yes yes, the new Corporate Copyright Storm Trooper section of the bill may raise a few eyebrows but we need this to protect the artists so just sign it if you want your check."
The problem with privatizing what was once a public service or a public utility is that you lose control of that entity. You will find it even more difficult to enforce any kind of useful standards (e.g. students must actually meet minimum requirements and prove it before they graduate.) Privatization works very well in some areas, but is disastrous in others because there is a balance that must be achieved between fiscal efficiency and quality-of-service, and once acquiring money becomes the prime function of an organization quality will eventually suffer. Worse, what will happen is the same useless empire-building bureacratic dicks that run our current school system will end up in charge of the new privatized one, only with even fewer checks on their aberrant behavior.
Regarding Scientology, a dangerous cult generally doesn't make a good example of a successful approach to public education... unless brainwashing counts as education nowadays. Actually, I think it probably does. But you're right that they're out to make a profit.
In the pilot for the old Max Headroom series, Network 23 pioneered a new type of advertising called "blipverts", fast, tightly-compressed burst of audio-visual information designed to prevent viewers from switching channels. Unfortunately, they had the side effect of making their "perpetual, more slothful viewers literally explode" but a similar idea could work here. YouTube doesn't have the advantage of conventional television, where people are watching a minimum 30 minute show, and will sit through a 30 second commercial spot in order to get back to what they really want. YouTube is offering what are essentially extremely short TV shows as their primary product with no real possibility of a commercial interlude. On the other hand, a two second advertisement presented at the beginning, if entertaining (or startling) enough, might be very effective yet not turn viewers off to the service itself.
Heck, if they want this to really work they should offer a plan that would reward submitters for presenting typical YouTube videos formatted as advertising for specific products. Those videos could then be shown to advertisers, who could pay to have the ones they like presented to regular YouTube viewers as advertising.
You mean free as in "Here. Take it. Go on, take a puff. Won't cost you a cent." Remember, the first hit is always free.
And once you're hooked, that $29 per month fee will seem... reasonable, somehow. You know it doesn't feel right, but you can't quite put your finger on why. Then your 802.11g-equipped laptop finishes booting up and connects to the network and you stop wondering.
There are gaping holes in all of this, and please don't take my original post as necessarily defending our government's actions (I don't really know enough about the case to bother forming an opinion, although lately I've begun to assume the Feds are guilty until proven innocent.) But presumably there is more evidence than the credit-card usage itself. For all we know (and no I haven't RTFA) Mr. Dick's gambling service might have been running from servers located in the U.S., in which case the geographic location of the customer base could be inferred from recorded IP addresses. If there are hundreds or thousands of addresses owned by US service providers in those logs, that would be pretty damning.
Insightful? I think not. Here, let me fix it for you: "If you live out side of the {insert any country here} and have done something that the {insert any country here} has made illegal then don't go there.
Our government isn't in the habit of arresting foreign nationals for activities that are perfectly legal in their country of origin. But if he was providing illegal services to U.S. citizens then he put himself at risk. Why that is such a shock to you people I don't know, unless you just need another excuse to America-bash. People complain bitterly when a Google or a Yahoo complies with the laws of another country when they disagree with those laws, fully expecting that those companies should simply break that country's laws with impunity. And maybe they should: but the principle works both ways... if you break our laws, even over the Internet, we have the right to subject you to those laws when you're on our territory. That's how it is anywhere in the world.
Now, having said that... I'd rather our government kept its grubby little paternalistic fingers out of our lives and let us give all our hard-earned cash to crooked foreigners if we so choose. One of the most cherished rights that Americans have always enjoyed is the right to go to Hell in our own way. But unfortunately we have a lot of people in power over here that think they know better than we do what is best for us, want to force their pattern for living on everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
program seriously when it has the word "Cyber" in it. Sure, I realize that the original Terminator was a Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Model 101, and that sounded really cool at the time. It doesn't anymore. They need to find another prefix for their project names.
Well, he was really commenting more on the overall irrationality with which both genetically modified and 9/11 have been treated by the public, and don't even get me started on Creationism. And there I agree with him: corporations are paying dearly in terms of public acceptance of their products for decades of duplicity, and we are all seeing, firsthand, the results of having a poorly-educated public that can't tell DNA from a concrete block.
No, that was because a GM truck just ran over you.
It would be of great comfort to me if the Teeming Millions could learn to think rationally about such things.
I read recently that Boeing imports its advanced avionics from Japan, because they can't get that kind of equipment here anymore. Granted Japan is an ally, but nevertheless it's another sign of deteriorating independence. America, Land of the Brave, Home of the Free ... just don't ask us to build a flat panel or a microwave oven. People wonder about the shrinking middle class. It seems to me that it is shrinking in direct proportion to the number of factories that are moving to China.
We really are shooting ourselves in the foot by allowing our Captains of Industry (are you listening, Carly?), our elected leaders and unelected, largely unaccountable government officials to sell us out this way. We are going to pay for it, and pay hard.
To paraphrase Lewis Black: "It would've been better if the CEO of Chase just came to your house ... and pissed on your foot."
Sounds very similar to the CVSD (Continuously-Variable-Slope-Delta modulation) technique that was used to provided compressed speech for a lot of early electronic pinball games (Black Night, Firepower and others.) I remember fiddling with a CVSD codec back in 1980 or thereabouts. It was pretty nifty for the time.
A supreme Court Justice from even 30 years ago would hardly recognize the U.S. today.
... but for many of those Justices, decisions they made then helped put us where we are now.
Perhaps not
Usually that sensation is followed by the sound of a metal plate ripping through the back of your skull and adhering firmly to the inside of the scanner.
1. Are the continuing lawsuits still indicative of the RIAA's stated desire to curb illegal copyright violations via file-sharing, or have they crossed over into being a profit center in and of themselves?
2. If this activity is actually profitable for them, what motivation would they have for ever calling a halt?
I ask because there seems to be no interest whatsoever on the part of the RIAA's legal machine to properly vet these cases before filing suit. Guilty or not, they want their pound of flesh from their terrified victims, and my understanding is that the money received from these out-of-court settlements pays for filing additional suits and extracting even more settlements. This kind of rolling thunder can be hard to stop if it is making money. Lawyers don't like being out of work any more than anyone else.
So you can burn and rip all you want, RIAA will not care.
The hell they don't. They simply have no easy way to prosecute or intimidate anyone for personal burning and ripping, but they would if they could, fair use not withstanding. The RIAA doesn't believe in or accept the legitimacy of fair use anyway, considering how they reneged on their side of the Audio Home Recording Act. The studios themselves have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to use DRM, as well as other even less savory technological measures, to control the usage (let alone distribution) of their content.
Three out of every four MP3 players sold are iPods, but the device could be challenged later this year by Zune, the contender from Microsoft, whose billionaire founder Bill Gates is not used to losing.
Who is this guy kidding? Other than his core profit centers of operating systems and office suites, Bill Gates should be rather accustomed to failure by now.
Because you know that standards compliance saves you money in the long run, and that the most common blind person to visit your site is a web crawler, meaning that accessbility and search engine ranking can be directly correlated.
A mod point. A mod point. My kingdom for a mod point.
Q: Why do technology companies always overreach and seek to use the Internet to exploit customers using questionable if not outright illegal tactics?
A: For the same reason that dogs lick their balls. Because they can.
Good question. More holes, I guess.
That's why I said a "two second" ad at the beginning: no way I'm going to sit through a forty-second ad for a two minute payoff. This doesn't scale down linearly, you're right about that. For that matter, I can't even stand watching regular TV anymore, too damn many commercials. There aren't that many shows I watch (the Stargates and a couple of others) so while I do pay for cable (my girlfriend likes channel surfing, unfortunately) I torrent the shows I do watch because they're generally commercial-free.
As a previous poster pointed out, they can claim that they tried to go online with a legit service and it didn't work.
"So now, Mr. Congressman, you have no reason not to pass our new "Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act". Yes, I know that it requires the death penalty without due process for suspected infringers, and yes yes, the new Corporate Copyright Storm Trooper section of the bill may raise a few eyebrows but we need this to protect the artists so just sign it if you want your check."
The problem with privatizing what was once a public service or a public utility is that you lose control of that entity. You will find it even more difficult to enforce any kind of useful standards (e.g. students must actually meet minimum requirements and prove it before they graduate.) Privatization works very well in some areas, but is disastrous in others because there is a balance that must be achieved between fiscal efficiency and quality-of-service, and once acquiring money becomes the prime function of an organization quality will eventually suffer. Worse, what will happen is the same useless empire-building bureacratic dicks that run our current school system will end up in charge of the new privatized one, only with even fewer checks on their aberrant behavior.
... unless brainwashing counts as education nowadays. Actually, I think it probably does. But you're right that they're out to make a profit.
Regarding Scientology, a dangerous cult generally doesn't make a good example of a successful approach to public education
... or "Star Wars" and "Battlestar Galactica".
And Wagon Train.
In the pilot for the old Max Headroom series, Network 23 pioneered a new type of advertising called "blipverts", fast, tightly-compressed burst of audio-visual information designed to prevent viewers from switching channels. Unfortunately, they had the side effect of making their "perpetual, more slothful viewers literally explode" but a similar idea could work here. YouTube doesn't have the advantage of conventional television, where people are watching a minimum 30 minute show, and will sit through a 30 second commercial spot in order to get back to what they really want. YouTube is offering what are essentially extremely short TV shows as their primary product with no real possibility of a commercial interlude. On the other hand, a two second advertisement presented at the beginning, if entertaining (or startling) enough, might be very effective yet not turn viewers off to the service itself.
Heck, if they want this to really work they should offer a plan that would reward submitters for presenting typical YouTube videos formatted as advertising for specific products. Those videos could then be shown to advertisers, who could pay to have the ones they like presented to regular YouTube viewers as advertising.
You mean free as in "Here. Take it. Go on, take a puff. Won't cost you a cent." Remember, the first hit is always free.
... reasonable, somehow. You know it doesn't feel right, but you can't quite put your finger on why. Then your 802.11g-equipped laptop finishes booting up and connects to the network and you stop wondering.
And once you're hooked, that $29 per month fee will seem
There are gaping holes in all of this, and please don't take my original post as necessarily defending our government's actions (I don't really know enough about the case to bother forming an opinion, although lately I've begun to assume the Feds are guilty until proven innocent.) But presumably there is more evidence than the credit-card usage itself. For all we know (and no I haven't RTFA) Mr. Dick's gambling service might have been running from servers located in the U.S., in which case the geographic location of the customer base could be inferred from recorded IP addresses. If there are hundreds or thousands of addresses owned by US service providers in those logs, that would be pretty damning.
Insightful? I think not. Here, let me fix it for you: "If you live out side of the {insert any country here} and have done something that the {insert any country here} has made illegal then don't go there.
... if you break our laws, even over the Internet, we have the right to subject you to those laws when you're on our territory. That's how it is anywhere in the world.
... I'd rather our government kept its grubby little paternalistic fingers out of our lives and let us give all our hard-earned cash to crooked foreigners if we so choose. One of the most cherished rights that Americans have always enjoyed is the right to go to Hell in our own way. But unfortunately we have a lot of people in power over here that think they know better than we do what is best for us, want to force their pattern for living on everyone else.
Our government isn't in the habit of arresting foreign nationals for activities that are perfectly legal in their country of origin. But if he was providing illegal services to U.S. citizens then he put himself at risk. Why that is such a shock to you people I don't know, unless you just need another excuse to America-bash. People complain bitterly when a Google or a Yahoo complies with the laws of another country when they disagree with those laws, fully expecting that those companies should simply break that country's laws with impunity. And maybe they should: but the principle works both ways
Now, having said that
If MS has a hand in the DNS servers, it will greatly improve interoperability ...
... with Windows, which is precisely why nobody wants Microsoft's hand in anything to do with Internet/Web standards.
No, but it can crack fifteen billion iTunes files per second.