A few disputes with your assertions here. Not that I know a lot about this specific law, but here goes...
You say that CD burners don't count as they are not "'marketed for the primary purpose' of making digital audio copies." Well I know the Yamaha CRW-F1 in my machine had a big bold statement on the front of the box that said "44x Maximum Audio Ripping!" and "Advanced Audio Master." It further had various small print on the back and sides refering to the ability to "Clean, Edit, and Transfer music from your old LPs and cassettes to CD" and "...burn Mp3 files to CD." About 65% of the USES(not features) mentioned on the box refer to music.
While YOU may not consider it's primary purpose as copying CDs, the current marketing on some CD burners IS quite obviously for the "primary purpose" of making audio copies.
As far as the whole "Serial copy management system" goes, I know that most DAT doesn't obey that either, so that argument goes out the window too. The whole "flawless digital copy" argument goes out the window as well when you consider that DAT is better than CD.
Interesting bit of postal law is that: If a company ships you something that you did not request, they cannot bill you for it. It is considered a gift at that point. This law was put into place to prevent companies from scamming folks by sending you a $1 product and claiming you owe them $20.
Now, UPS is NOT the US Postal Service so I'm wondering if this law applies to them. If so, then nobody HAS to send in the old phone. They can keep it and do whatever they want. If the law does not apply then I don't know... perhaps acceptance of the package would constitute acceptance of the terms listed in the letter you got.
You can get a CD by just working an hour more a week? Dude, must be nice to be making $20/hour. I'd be willing to bet most of us don't get more than $10/hour and a good portion of us are at minimum wage($5.15/hour).
Assuming you still have a full time job(must be nice too) if you're making $10/hour you lose 5% of your pay that week to pick up one CD with maybe two songs you actually want.
Online music services are picking up sales big time since you can pick just one song and it's only about a dollar. Of course we know the RIAA thinks we're all patch eyed pirates no matter what. Maybe they'll get a clue and offer out-of-print stuff that I want and can't find even through P2P services.
I'm pretty sure Cerlyn's take on this is right. While the phones can download, they're not well designed for sending data. This does vary phone by phone though as we do have a couple of PDA phones and a device called a "Sidekick."
What CAN be done with most phones is to get a USB adapter. Some can use Infra-Red adapters(already in most laptops, available for PCs). IR is available on at least 30% of the phones. Some even come with Bluetooth and sync readily with programs such as MS Outlook or Apple iSync(iCalendar?).
I'm afraid Cerlyn is right that updating the web by grabbing data at will from the phone through the web is not likely to be added for various reasons.
I know most carriers charge you a PER MONTH fee, so it could cost you a fair amount over the long term to keep your number. T-Mobile does not charge any fees for keeping your number when you port to them.
One carrier, Qwest will kill your home phone as well if you port your Qwest cellphone to another carrier. Seems kinda rude to me.
All in all I havn't gotten nearly as many people that want to port their number in the last few days. I'd say only 15% of those with existing service I sign up want to port their number. A lot of people like the idea of a new number simply to stop unneccessary calls from people. When you have a cellphone I find people will call that number exclusively even if you're at home, so you burn minutes when you don't need to.
As far as big sales to keep existing customers, you bet! Normally (I feel)T-Mobile beats everyone's plan price hands down, but since November the competition's gotten a lot stiffer. Not that everyone gets those promotional plans, but those promotions are top notch from every carrier. It's a prime time to sign up with anyone right now really. In six months prices will probably go back to what they were since the hype will have died down.
Ok, so they're expecting the bartender or some dedicated person to watch for you. How about two days from now? A month?
Photo recognition software can't even get 90% right in the tests I've seen reported.
Well, the license swipe might help, but what happens when it fails to read? Type it in right? No big deal. What happens when 50% of your customers purposefully scratch barcode on the license or de-magnetize it? Give yourself about sixty seconds to process that customer. Big club with say, 60 people an hour ane gonna have their hands VERY full in a hurry.
I think this will probably work, but I would expect the cost to be quite significant to implement.
As far as I can gather from the article, RSS uses XML and can be read by web-browser or specialized client. Special RSS providers are the only way to access these "feeds."
How many people want to buy or download yet ANOTHER program for their communication needs? We already have AIM, MSN, ICQ, YIM,IRC, five different proprietary video clients, and newsreaders. If using a web browser, who wants to visit twenty different websites to read their mailing lists(Yahoo Groups is bad enough isn't it?) On top of that, email still must be dealt with.
I can understand the benefits of it I think: Locked down feeds presenting a huge hurdle for spammers, XML for flexible programming, and a download as you go structure(like newsgroups).
I like email lists the way they are personally. I find spam to be easily identifiable so I don't lose tons of messages like the article mentions. I don't know if I'd go for it if it's like blogs. Email lists can get off topic, but blogs seem like they're always rambling. I've looked at the blogs of the people that belong to mailing lists I'm on, and there's no way they'd ever replace the email list.
Anybody care to give a good explanation about RSS?
CDs aren't the only thing on cereal boxes now. I've seen full version movies such as The Muppets Take Manhattan and others. Heck, even Pizza Hut gave away free DVD movies for a promotion with a certain type of pizza.
Maybe the DVD-R is slightly more compatible and more cheap, but are we going to make the VHS mistake all over again? With the next protocol already?
I can't help but feel that your comparison of the DVD format situation is a bit backward.
DVD-R is the VHS in the situation yes? DVD+R is the Beta right? Well which won that one? VHS won, not because it was better, it clearly wasn't, but because it was cheaper and more compatible. Beta was better, but more expensive and quite proprietary.
I keep hearing from people saying that the + format is winning, but I havn't seen any proof of that. People keep saying "The minus format is going at bargain bin prices because it's being phased out," but that falls flat on it's face quite quickly. The DVD-R format was created by the official DVD forum, they're not going to back off easily. On top of that, things get cheaper when they're sold in great quantity...so it seems to me that the "bargain bin" prices are due to the format being the acutal popular choice.
One cannot assume that just because 80% of the DVD writers going out the door at one particular store (or even chain) that THAT is the winning format. If you go to Best Buy, that's almost all they carry so that's what sells. If you go to the local computer enthusiast shops -R outsells +R quite handily. Well guess who's buying and using the DVD writers, Joe Sixpack or Joe Techie. Seems to me that the format war is far from over no matter what anyone says.
Another good use for parents can be the removal of Macrovision protection. It allows you to put the DVD on VHS so you can give the kids the movie in a format that's a little less likely to be destroyed in ten seconds.
If you have a DVD burner, you could also give the kids the back-up version instead of the original to avoid the same problem(loss of the original).
Solution one is probably beyond most parent's computer ability, and solution two is pricey(DVD burner ~=$300). However, in comparison to having the kid ruin the originals it can be cheaper since X x $20 = Big bucks if your kid scratches a movie every other week.
The movie studios want to have it so that you only own the disk, but restrict you like you only license the content. If you are paying "only" for the disk, you should be allowed to back it up. If you only payed for the content then the studios should replace the disk no matter what happens to it since what you payed for was "the right to watch the movie when you want to."
If these people wonâ(TM)t provide us service that serves us then they need laws to force it out of them. The number portability rule is not only a good one, but long overdue. The fact that theyâ(TM)re lobbying to screw us out of this feature for the sole purpose of lining their pockets at our inconvenience should be swatted down faster than fast.
I do agree with what you're feeling there, but rather than making a law, vote with your money. We don't need more laws. If a company won't provide what you need, buy from company #2 and let company #1 know why. The posting did mention that Cingular was on the good side of this one right?
At the risk of getting too long-winded: Yes, it may be inconvenient to vote with your money. Yes, it may mean not having a cellphone at all. Yes, it may not be possible for you at all for certain things, but the method DOES work. Quick example; AOL reduced the number of pop-ups because people cut their service with them.
Tired of the RIAA? Don't buy music. Tired of the MPAA? Don't go to the movies. Tired of high gas prices? Drive less/smarter. Inconvenienced by all this? Perhaps, but you win when you save your money for what really matters.
I use Mozilla 1.1a(out of date, I know). I was able to view the page, but none of the advertisements loaded, they were like requested popups in a one-quarter screen size, and I was not transitioned to another page. Does this stuff actually work on Mozilla at all? Opera?
Other than Internet Exploder users, who's this going to affect?
Actually the first "BioTech" would probably be something along the lines of the smallpox vaccines that were manufactured by injecting horses and then taking the serum from the blood for the antibodies.
In the harddrive case, it's a mechanical good. In the smallpox case, it's a medicine. Both are certainly ways to use biological means for manufacturing.
If someone can think of an earlier biotech, please feel free to let us know!
Having an AIM name is not the same as having software from AOL on your machine. Trillian(for windows), Firefly(Mac I think), Gaim(Linux), and others allow you to run multiple instant messaging systems at once.
Not only does it put everything in one less memory eating program, it gets rid of the spyware/adware stuff from the various original service programs.:)
Question, how much does the average family in China make per month? I'd be willing to bet it's nowhere near what we make here in the US.
Therefore... an X-Box for US$300($100 more than what it is here) would be something like six months pay perhaps? I don't know, I'm guessing, so try not to take this as condescending.
QUOTE: For a project code-named Dmitri, Evans is now focused on improving the ability of AI to interact socially. Agents' behavior will be controlled by their membership in overlapping social groups. ----
So how long until the AI gets good enough that we don't need it to be truly multiplayer and can all play on our local machines with AI characters that can chat with us about our real lives instead of just the game?
After letting the "denial message" show up, I found you can modify the words at the top to show anything you want. Try it out! Edit the URL line in your browser...
As an example I changed the first two words from "We have" to "Yoda has."
http://www.anti-leech.com/at_block.php?message=Y od a+has+determined+that+you+use+ad+blocking+software.+This+site+is+provided+for+free+and+depend+on+an+ income+from+these+ads.+By+blocking+them%2C+you+mak e+it+impossible+for+us+to+continue+keeping+this+we bsite+online+for+free.+Therefore%2C+you+will+not+b e+able+to+access+this+website+again+until+you+unin stall+or+de-activate+your+ad+blocking+software.%3C br%3E%3Cbr%3EClose+your+browser+window%2C+uninstal l+your+ad-blocker+and+come+back+here+to+visit+us.
> I mean, if you really need to buy many games a year, should you consider buying only good games instead of disposable crap?:)
I think you have a very good point there. As you said, some of the best games don't neccessarily need to have the fastest computer and best video card. Look at the popularity of "The Sims." That said, how am I going to know if the game is any good if I can't even play the demo at more than 2 frames per second(Unreal Tournament 2003: approximate actual framerate). --
Slashdot Mirror
A few disputes with your assertions here. Not that I know a lot about this specific law, but here goes...
You say that CD burners don't count as they are not "'marketed for the primary purpose' of making digital audio copies." Well I know the Yamaha CRW-F1 in my machine had a big bold statement on the front of the box that said "44x Maximum Audio Ripping!" and "Advanced Audio Master." It further had various small print on the back and sides refering to the ability to "Clean, Edit, and Transfer music from your old LPs and cassettes to CD" and "...burn Mp3 files to CD." About 65% of the USES(not features) mentioned on the box refer to music.
While YOU may not consider it's primary purpose as copying CDs, the current marketing on some CD burners IS quite obviously for the "primary purpose" of making audio copies.
As far as the whole "Serial copy management system" goes, I know that most DAT doesn't obey that either, so that argument goes out the window too. The whole "flawless digital copy" argument goes out the window as well when you consider that DAT is better than CD.
Interesting bit of postal law is that: If a company ships you something that you did not request, they cannot bill you for it. It is considered a gift at that point. This law was put into place to prevent companies from scamming folks by sending you a $1 product and claiming you owe them $20.
Now, UPS is NOT the US Postal Service so I'm wondering if this law applies to them. If so, then nobody HAS to send in the old phone. They can keep it and do whatever they want. If the law does not apply then I don't know... perhaps acceptance of the package would constitute acceptance of the terms listed in the letter you got.
Anyone else wanna play IANAL for me here?
You can get a CD by just working an hour more a week? Dude, must be nice to be making $20/hour. I'd be willing to bet most of us don't get more than $10/hour and a good portion of us are at minimum wage($5.15/hour).
Assuming you still have a full time job(must be nice too) if you're making $10/hour you lose 5% of your pay that week to pick up one CD with maybe two songs you actually want.
Online music services are picking up sales big time since you can pick just one song and it's only about a dollar. Of course we know the RIAA thinks we're all patch eyed pirates no matter what. Maybe they'll get a clue and offer out-of-print stuff that I want and can't find even through P2P services.
I'm pretty sure Cerlyn's take on this is right. While the phones can download, they're not well designed for sending data. This does vary phone by phone though as we do have a couple of PDA phones and a device called a "Sidekick."
What CAN be done with most phones is to get a USB adapter. Some can use Infra-Red adapters(already in most laptops, available for PCs). IR is available on at least 30% of the phones. Some even come with Bluetooth and sync readily with programs such as MS Outlook or Apple iSync(iCalendar?).
I'm afraid Cerlyn is right that updating the web by grabbing data at will from the phone through the web is not likely to be added for various reasons.
Disclaimer: I work for T-Mobile
I know most carriers charge you a PER MONTH fee, so it could cost you a fair amount over the long term to keep your number. T-Mobile does not charge any fees for keeping your number when you port to them.
One carrier, Qwest will kill your home phone as well if you port your Qwest cellphone to another carrier. Seems kinda rude to me.
All in all I havn't gotten nearly as many people that want to port their number in the last few days. I'd say only 15% of those with existing service I sign up want to port their number. A lot of people like the idea of a new number simply to stop unneccessary calls from people. When you have a cellphone I find people will call that number exclusively even if you're at home, so you burn minutes when you don't need to.
As far as big sales to keep existing customers, you bet! Normally (I feel)T-Mobile beats everyone's plan price hands down, but since November the competition's gotten a lot stiffer. Not that everyone gets those promotional plans, but those promotions are top notch from every carrier. It's a prime time to sign up with anyone right now really. In six months prices will probably go back to what they were since the hype will have died down.
Alternate Translation: "I don't want to fight keyboard manufacturers for creating copyright circumvention devices second only to console mod chips."
Ah yes, if you didn't read the article though you might not realize that.
Though most people would probably guess Vancouver = Canada, it's not the ONLY Vancouver.
There's a Vancouver in Washington state, USA.
There's a Paris in Texas as well as France.
There's an Alexandria in Louisiana as well as Egypt.
There's a lot more that I could spout off, but I think you can see the point.
And parents could demand that their kids only go to bars with this sort of system, with all sorts of notification and child safety precautions.
:)
I suspect bars without these sorts of systems will eventually be considered the "seedy" places, where parents don't want their kids to go.
Uhhh, I'm sure the parents are trying to keep their kids out of ALL the bars.
Ok, so they're expecting the bartender or some dedicated person to watch for you. How about two days from now? A month?
Photo recognition software can't even get 90% right in the tests I've seen reported.
Well, the license swipe might help, but what happens when it fails to read? Type it in right? No big deal. What happens when 50% of your customers purposefully scratch barcode on the license or de-magnetize it? Give yourself about sixty seconds to process that customer. Big club with say, 60 people an hour ane gonna have their hands VERY full in a hurry.
I think this will probably work, but I would expect the cost to be quite significant to implement.
As far as I can gather from the article, RSS uses XML and can be read by web-browser or specialized client. Special RSS providers are the only way to access these "feeds."
How many people want to buy or download yet ANOTHER program for their communication needs? We already have AIM, MSN, ICQ, YIM,IRC, five different proprietary video clients, and newsreaders. If using a web browser, who wants to visit twenty different websites to read their mailing lists(Yahoo Groups is bad enough isn't it?) On top of that, email still must be dealt with.
I can understand the benefits of it I think: Locked down feeds presenting a huge hurdle for spammers, XML for flexible programming, and a download as you go structure(like newsgroups).
I like email lists the way they are personally. I find spam to be easily identifiable so I don't lose tons of messages like the article mentions. I don't know if I'd go for it if it's like blogs. Email lists can get off topic, but blogs seem like they're always rambling. I've looked at the blogs of the people that belong to mailing lists I'm on, and there's no way they'd ever replace the email list.
Anybody care to give a good explanation about RSS?
CDs aren't the only thing on cereal boxes now. I've seen full version movies such as The Muppets Take Manhattan and others. Heck, even Pizza Hut gave away free DVD movies for a promotion with a certain type of pizza.
Maybe the DVD-R is slightly more compatible and more cheap, but are we going to make the VHS mistake all over again? With the next protocol already?
I can't help but feel that your comparison of the DVD format situation is a bit backward.
DVD-R is the VHS in the situation yes? DVD+R is the Beta right? Well which won that one? VHS won, not because it was better, it clearly wasn't, but because it was cheaper and more compatible. Beta was better, but more expensive and quite proprietary.
I keep hearing from people saying that the + format is winning, but I havn't seen any proof of that. People keep saying "The minus format is going at bargain bin prices because it's being phased out," but that falls flat on it's face quite quickly. The DVD-R format was created by the official DVD forum, they're not going to back off easily. On top of that, things get cheaper when they're sold in great quantity...so it seems to me that the "bargain bin" prices are due to the format being the acutal popular choice.
One cannot assume that just because 80% of the DVD writers going out the door at one particular store (or even chain) that THAT is the winning format. If you go to Best Buy, that's almost all they carry so that's what sells. If you go to the local computer enthusiast shops -R outsells +R quite handily. Well guess who's buying and using the DVD writers, Joe Sixpack or Joe Techie. Seems to me that the format war is far from over no matter what anyone says.
Another good use for parents can be the removal of Macrovision protection. It allows you to put the DVD on VHS so you can give the kids the movie in a format that's a little less likely to be destroyed in ten seconds.
If you have a DVD burner, you could also give the kids the back-up version instead of the original to avoid the same problem(loss of the original).
Solution one is probably beyond most parent's computer ability, and solution two is pricey(DVD burner ~=$300). However, in comparison to having the kid ruin the originals it can be cheaper since X x $20 = Big bucks if your kid scratches a movie every other week.
The movie studios want to have it so that you only own the disk, but restrict you like you only license the content. If you are paying "only" for the disk, you should be allowed to back it up. If you only payed for the content then the studios should replace the disk no matter what happens to it since what you payed for was "the right to watch the movie when you want to."
If these people wonâ(TM)t provide us service that serves us then they need laws to force it out of them. The number portability rule is not only a good one, but long overdue. The fact that theyâ(TM)re lobbying to screw us out of this feature for the sole purpose of lining their pockets at our inconvenience should be swatted down faster than fast.
I do agree with what you're feeling there, but rather than making a law, vote with your money. We don't need more laws. If a company won't provide what you need, buy from company #2 and let company #1 know why. The posting did mention that Cingular was on the good side of this one right?
At the risk of getting too long-winded: Yes, it may be inconvenient to vote with your money. Yes, it may mean not having a cellphone at all. Yes, it may not be possible for you at all for certain things, but the method DOES work. Quick example; AOL reduced the number of pop-ups because people cut their service with them.
Tired of the RIAA? Don't buy music. Tired of the MPAA? Don't go to the movies. Tired of high gas prices? Drive less/smarter. Inconvenienced by all this? Perhaps, but you win when you save your money for what really matters.
I use Mozilla 1.1a(out of date, I know). I was able to view the page, but none of the advertisements loaded, they were like requested popups in a one-quarter screen size, and I was not transitioned to another page. Does this stuff actually work on Mozilla at all? Opera?
Other than Internet Exploder users, who's this going to affect?
Actually the first "BioTech" would probably be something along the lines of the smallpox vaccines that were manufactured by injecting horses and then taking the serum from the blood for the antibodies.
In the harddrive case, it's a mechanical good. In the smallpox case, it's a medicine. Both are certainly ways to use biological means for manufacturing.
If someone can think of an earlier biotech, please feel free to let us know!
If you could get James Bond, or anyone in one of these machines I'd be amazed. Looks to me they'd have to be six inches tall first...
Now, where was that matter reducer invention I saw advertized....
Having an AIM name is not the same as having software from AOL on your machine. Trillian(for windows), Firefly(Mac I think), Gaim(Linux), and others allow you to run multiple instant messaging systems at once.
:)
Not only does it put everything in one less memory eating program, it gets rid of the spyware/adware stuff from the various original service programs.
>but a hell of a lot of crates....
>good thing he brought a handy crowbar.....
Yeah, and in those crates is nothing but hats, CDs, batteries, and the occasional trip-mine. Nothing classified right?
Seriously, isn't this why the W3C tries to make people follow standards? So it doesn't matter what browser you use, it should all work?
Anyone, including Microsoft, who writes a site that serves seperate pages to different browsers is doing a disservice to the public.
Question, how much does the average family in China make per month? I'd be willing to bet it's nowhere near what we make here in the US.
Therefore... an X-Box for US$300($100 more than what it is here) would be something like six months pay perhaps? I don't know, I'm guessing, so try not to take this as condescending.
QUOTE: For a project code-named Dmitri, Evans is now focused on improving the ability of AI to interact socially. Agents' behavior will be controlled by their membership in overlapping social groups.
----
So how long until the AI gets good enough that we don't need it to be truly multiplayer and can all play on our local machines with AI characters that can chat with us about our real lives instead of just the game?
-
After letting the "denial message" show up, I found you can modify the words at the top to show anything you want. Try it out! Edit the URL line in your browser...
Y od a+has+determined+that+you+use+ad+blocking+software .+This+site+is+provided+for+free+and+depend+on+an+ income+from+these+ads.+By+blocking+them%2C+you+mak e+it+impossible+for+us+to+continue+keeping+this+we bsite+online+for+free.+Therefore%2C+you+will+not+b e+able+to+access+this+website+again+until+you+unin stall+or+de-activate+your+ad+blocking+software.%3C br%3E%3Cbr%3EClose+your+browser+window%2C+uninstal l+your+ad-blocker+and+come+back+here+to+visit+us.
As an example I changed the first two words from "We have" to "Yoda has."
http://www.anti-leech.com/at_block.php?message=
> I mean, if you really need to buy many games a year, should you consider buying only good games instead of disposable crap? :)
I think you have a very good point there. As you said, some of the best games don't neccessarily need to have the fastest computer and best video card. Look at the popularity of "The Sims."
That said, how am I going to know if the game is any good if I can't even play the demo at more than 2 frames per second(Unreal Tournament 2003: approximate actual framerate).
--
With a Celeron 400mhz and a Riva TNT 2 video card I can't play many of the games released in the last year. :(
Being a gamer I'm REQUIRED to upgrade or get left out of all the fun. At least Half Life still works...