The real point of patents is to encourage inventors to make their inventions public, with the understanding that they will be allowed to profit off them for a reasonable time, and then the public will own that invention, and it won't be lost as some random trade secret.
The alternative to patents is not complete freedom of information, it's utter and complete secrecy. Companies would spend a fortune obfuscating their own code, and doing everything they could to prevent reverse engineering. You'd have to sign a hundred NDA's in order to get a contract to refill a soda machine at a big company.
The thing is, it's actually pretty close to the way they enforce things for "public performance"
"Section 101 of the copyright law says that a performance is public if it is in a public place or if it is in any place if "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its acquaintances" is gathered there.
Thus, the factors to consider in determining whether a performance is public include whether the place is public and the size and composition of the audience. For example, if the place where the performance takes place is a public place (open to the public), how many and what kind of people attend is not important."
I used to go hang out on the boardwalk in my home town, and there was this one guy who had a second floor condo, and a big screen tv, and he didn't seem to mind if people hung out nearby and watched whatever he was watching (there was a raised area next to the walkway across from his place, so you actually got a pretty good view...Lot of my less socially inclined friends would hang out there and watch tv instead of trying to chat up scantily clad females like a sane person). Every time that guy put on a movie, he was breaking the law, because he didn't close the balcony door, or pull the drapes.
The only thing that's keeping this from being a real issue for them, is that people don't talk to their neighbors anymore...I mean, if you invited over a few sets of neighbors to watch the new release on your bigass system, they'd want you to be using a "licensed for public display" copy of the movie.
Re:More widely used than you'd know
on
Fedora Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
8 & 9 definitely sucked. Those were both crappy, mediocre distros, especially considering how excellent the Valhalla (7.3?) distro was...It's still a hugely popular distro for web hosting companies.
I was pretty pleased with Fedora Core 2-4, felt like they were modern, without being bloated and slow like 8 & 9. FC5 was a real dog, though, so I don't know what to say about that. In all, I tend to use Fedora more than any other distro. It's got its issues, but when you use it enough, you just sort of tune them out by default.
Redhat and Fedora have their moments of brilliance, but you really have to watch 'em, they can bite you. Definitely not an automatic upgrade, whenever the new one comes out.
There was a brief period where Planetside was an excellent all-combat MMO, with massive player vs player battles. I remember some early fights that were truly epic, far and away the best combat experiences I've ever had in a game. Didn't last though...Everything devolved into zergdom, and it ceased to be interesting to me.
It's typical MS fud. They LOVE to harp on how many bugs their competition has, but there is a hell of a lot more to it than quantity. Slammer anyone?
Oracle is a huge robust database with lots of extremely security conscious clients. A high number of reported bugs and fixes shows that they're executing due diligence, and working to keep their system as secure as possible. MSSQL's low number of bugs suggests that Microsoft isn't digging hard into their code, but only waiting for big public flaws.
They used the same argument in claiming that IE was less buggy than Firefox (see this crappy article) and it's just as untrue in this case.
I'm trying to figure out what "reality" people over 45 have ever dealt with. Sure sure, we still have a few depression era types around, they dealt with reality. But their kids? I don't THINK so.
Look at our current political mess, and think about what age group all those people belong to, and tell me that there is reality in there ANYWHERE!
The problem with this is that tech changes waaaay too quickly to try and be specific in every law. I mean, you're the same guy who, in 5 years will be saying, "Hey the law only covers IM, Email, Blog posts and VOIP...It doesn't say anything about holo-chat rooms!" Forcing the law down to a super nit-picky technical medium is ripe for setting up a huge number of bad precidents.
Either you're going to have to allow a level of leeway to deal with the fact that communications are evolving pretty rapidly right now, or you're going to basically force legislators to make these colossal generalizations, to cover every possible case. And you really don't want a case with this much 1st amendment baggage and a legitimate "Think of the children" complaint to go to the current supreme court, do you?
This isn't a slipperly slope. It's a case where the people who wrote the law had an intention: to make it illegal to sexually solicit a minor across the internet.
Now, when they wrote this law, the people who put it on paper put down "email" to define the method of communication, when they shouldn't have specified.
Along comes this case, about a guy who unquestionably solicited sex with a minor, but ooops, technicality, he can't be prosecuted because he didn't use "email".
The judge, doing what judges are supposed to do, ruled that just because the legislators were dumbasses and said "email" doesn't mean that they hadn't intended to cover cases exactly like this.
I think it's a good call based on the law. Now if you're saying, "Any law that ads a penalty for sexually soliciting a 13 year old online is stupid, and should be repealed" that's a separate issue. But don't blast the judge for making the correct call based on his level (Florida law, Florida crime, Florida court, Florida judge).
Never ending loops never work in a complex system (unless you have some sort of superuser access).
The secret is to remember that you don't have to go anywhere near infinite to take down a finite system, so just create some de-centralized replication code that starts finitely eating up resources in a finite number of different places, and voila, chaos.
This sort of thing will always happen where user code is allowed; the only way to stop it would be to limit what the user can do with their code, which defeats the purpose of this sort of system.
They haven't won any actual cases against people, though they have won a number of suits against the companies running the file sharing software.
This is an interesting defense, though I don't think it'll fly. I think the record companies will argue that the settlement against Kazaa was for creating the file sharing software, and not for actually infringing on any copyrights.
I do think that the arbitrary value per song is long over due for a re-evaluation. 750 is nothing more than extortion unless they can prove actual value lost (which they can't) or until they actually force someone to settle for that amount, which they haven't yet.
Meh. The print media business is pretty conservative by nature, even if their views run the spectrum. The "internets" are a little more than a decade in the public consciousness, and print media rightly fears what they represent in terms of their long term business strategy.
My personal viewpoint (speaking as a guy who does tech for a print newspaper) is that the death of actual "paper" is the best thing that could ever happen to print media, because almost all the heartache and stress of the industry revolves around the creation of the paper product, and the distribution of said product to the world, and an all digital product would allow them a HUGE amount of freedom.
However they haven't come up with a "good" way of working out compensation yet, and that prompts them to stupid measures like this.
Really hard to press libel against a person who's making statements about a public figure. I mean, if I say, "I've heard that Dick Cheney falsified reports about WMDs" what could you sue me for? I just said I heard it, I didn't attribute it, I didn't claim it was true, or from a reputable source. Hell, most of the 24 hour news channels say crap like this in the form of speculation all day long.
I could claim, "Joe Lieberman today failed to deny reports that he was an affectionado of child pornography" without even asking him the question, and I could say he did deny it, as of course he would if someone asked him, then I could crop out anything except the sound bite of him saying, "I do not watch child porn!" and play it over and over and over again until "Lieberman" and "Child Porn" are forever linked in your brain.
It's a dirty dirty world, and there is a lot of stuff you can do that's not quite libelous or slanderous that is nonetheless dirty as hell. Any half competent blogger should be able to skirt that line with no trouble at all...But don't try it with non-public figures! The standard there is a hell of a lot lower.
Well, in my opinion, most media these days plays too fast and loose with the truth *cough* television *cough cough* and Blogs are really just more of the same. No one really holds them accountable, so while Blog A) may be honest and fair Blog B) could just be a complete partisan shill, lying his ass off, knowing no one can prove he's definitely wrong.
I think pretty much any story that doesn't include solid research into publicly available documents or primary sources who are willing to go on the record, is worthless, and this includes most Blogs, most television news, and not a few print news sources as well.
You're laughably naive if you thought it would be any other way. The media (including blogs) is only answerable to other media. They keep each other honest. This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face. People give you a little credit, even though you screwed 'em, when you own up to it and try to make amends.
But mostly, and by mostly I mean 99% of the reason, is because you do not ever ever want to give that kind of ammo to your competition. You will be found out and when you are, they will make you pay...Remember the Bush papers?
This is a prime example. The Times breaks it, but everyone and their dog will jump on the bandwagon about how the oh-so-transparent Blogs are perfectly willing to bury information when it comes to themselves. Can you really trust them? Is it just a passing fad? News at 11:00.
This is a good lesson for them. It's not easy to gain credibility, but it's easy as pie to lose it, and when people catch you in a single omission, they'll wonder how many omissions they failed to catch, and no amount of assurance will convince them that the answer is zero.
A "minimum wage" code monkey? What dream world are you living in, where a skilled programmer doesn't command more than minimum wage? I agree with you that you'll never be a design lead or a manager without communications skills but you can be a prolific, successful coder without being in management, and highly skilled programmer = highly paid programmer. I still make 5 figures a year doing consulting work above and beyond my day job, and I don't claim to be an amazing programmer. I know guys who never even leave their houses and make 90,000 a year, just subcontracting to people like me.
Not everyone is cut out to be management, and if you're not, why try to fake it? You can make a hell of a living as a brainy worker bee, and the stress is so much less.
No offense, but as an English/CS/Philos major, I understand that there are roles for people who have the ability to both do the nerd thing, and do the communication thing, but there are also roles for people who simply do the communication thing, and people who simply do the nerd thing.
To make the facile assumption that everyone needs to be able to do both is to miss the point of hiring specialists in the first place.
Frankly, in my experience, technical people and communication people both believe that their specialty is more important than it actually is. This is why you see CS people berating tech writers for not having a Masters in CS before they dare to form an opinion regarding tech, and English people telling a bunch of introverted CS guys that they need to take 20 credits worth of communications classes to be good at their technical specialties. The truth is, it is more important to be good at what you're supposed to be good at than it is to be well-rounded.
I'm an unfocused kind of guy, and I like being what I am, but if you hire someone like me you have to accept that I'm not going to be as good a programmer as a specialist programmer, and you have to accept that I'm not going to be as good a communicator as a specialist communicator.
Where I work, this is not only fine, it's necessary, because my job is to translate the needs of the users directly to code, so I have to be able to deal with users and write the code. But it is much more common to have two sets of specialists who deal with each other through a set of equally specialized intermediaries who are adept at translating.
You're the whackjob that put a political slant on it. I frankly don't give a damn which party it favors, and neither should you.
And, for the record, yea, mysql would be better (because it has better security controls), but what would be RIGHT is Oracle, running on Unix big iron, with transaction logs and mandated paper trail data validation. Or we could go all paper, which has the advantage that it's worked for a zillion years, and is hugely difficult to fraud on a large scale. And I'm not talking stupid ass punch ballots, I'm talking piece of paper and a goddamn pencil ballots. Someone screws that up, they're too stupid to vote anyway.
Why is it little ass-pirates like you think this is a party issue? This is a huge flaw at the very root of the whole election system, and you want to say, "Oh well, since it's the dems who are complaining, the system must be perfect!" Holy shit! Are you out of your mind? Are you so party brainwashed that this doesn't even seem like a problem to you?
What can't happen is that that ballot that you filled out will register your votes differently when someone else reads it. Ballots are (often) sequentially numbered so you know if a pile of them went missing.
Contrast this with Diebold and their crap voting system based on fucking MICROSOFT ACCESS. Jesus Christ! That screams Mickey Mouse half-assed bullshit solution to me. ACCESS? That's like having fricking Mattel or Hasbro stamped on the side in kid-friendly primary colors. You know just by hearing that little factoid that fraud is completely possible. Securing an access database is a fantasy.
Voter fraud is always going to be possible, but I'd rather a system that requires people to print fake ballots and lug the real ballots to a river or something, rather than a system that can untracably introduce a 2 or 3% error to favor one side over another.
That's like saying its cheap to produce a TV show, if you already have everything you'll need to do it, or cars are cheap if you already own one.
Since the article is about regulation and barriers to businesses setting up, and signal interference, I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that it is not by any stretch cheap to set up a radio station, and that a good part of that cost comes from jumping through the hoops of regulation.
Not a surprise to me, but the individual above who seems to think that starting up a radio station is "cheap" would probably be pretty surprised at how not cheap it actually is.
It's when it gets rebroadcast off someones handheld unit onto the extreme upper or lower end of the common FM band, thus allowing some stupid fundie in the car next to yours to catch a few seconds of something guaranteed to offend.
I keep mine tuned to an annoying religious station (which also happens to be only barely receivable where I live). I'm sure I've occasionally drowned out some joker, but I'm equally sure I don't give a damn.
It's not cheap to broadcast, unless you don't care about being heard off your own property. Between FCC fees and the other hassles of actually getting license to broadcast (they, no lie, make you survey your proposed broadcast area and give them elevation maps, etc), and the cost of amplifiers, space on a tower (or, god forbid, buying a tower), then a broadcast setup, and an actual music library (and the fricking RIAA makes you pay fees to broadcast their stuff), you're talking an expensive hobby.
Of course it looks pretty goddamn tempting when Clearchannel comes along and does a format shift on your only decent local radio station from Modern Alternative to wall-to-wall x-mas carols, which actually happened to me yesterday, bastards.
CD's are in a weird limbo, because their adoption of a fricking solid digital format is still hanging fire. The only formats record companies agree on are awful...No good to consumers at all. Consumer unfriendly formatting pretty much keeps me buying CDs.
Besides, I'm not sure what CD profits being 6 times online profits actually means...I buy one CD, that's going to cost the same as what? 10 songs on iTunes? At least? So, maybe it's just that online sales, being mainly single songs, are exposing the obvious fact that most albums only have one or two good songs.
It's similar, but a thesaurus tells you what words mean the same or opposite to a word you already know...This is more like a reverse dictionary, where things are listed by their definition.
There is a writing tool called the "Flip Dictionary"...It's a dictionary, but backwards, where you're trying to come up with the word that describes some thing you don't know the word for, so you look up "thing thats sorta like x" and it gives you the word.
I think of Google kind of like that. I was trying to come up with a search for a specific type of security device a while ago, and I was putting in "auditory alarms" and "sonic detectors" and other stupid crap, but the thing I was looking for (glassbreak sensor) still showed up on the first page.
Slashdot Mirror
The real point of patents is to encourage inventors to make their inventions public, with the understanding that they will be allowed to profit off them for a reasonable time, and then the public will own that invention, and it won't be lost as some random trade secret.
The alternative to patents is not complete freedom of information, it's utter and complete secrecy. Companies would spend a fortune obfuscating their own code, and doing everything they could to prevent reverse engineering. You'd have to sign a hundred NDA's in order to get a contract to refill a soda machine at a big company.
Not exactly a desirable course of events.
The thing is, it's actually pretty close to the way they enforce things for "public performance"
"Section 101 of the copyright law says that a performance is public if it is in a public place or if it is in any place if "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its acquaintances" is gathered there.
Thus, the factors to consider in determining whether a performance is public include whether the place is public and the size and composition of the audience. For example, if the place where the performance takes place is a public place (open to the public), how many and what kind of people attend is not important."
I used to go hang out on the boardwalk in my home town, and there was this one guy who had a second floor condo, and a big screen tv, and he didn't seem to mind if people hung out nearby and watched whatever he was watching (there was a raised area next to the walkway across from his place, so you actually got a pretty good view...Lot of my less socially inclined friends would hang out there and watch tv instead of trying to chat up scantily clad females like a sane person). Every time that guy put on a movie, he was breaking the law, because he didn't close the balcony door, or pull the drapes.
The only thing that's keeping this from being a real issue for them, is that people don't talk to their neighbors anymore...I mean, if you invited over a few sets of neighbors to watch the new release on your bigass system, they'd want you to be using a "licensed for public display" copy of the movie.
8 & 9 definitely sucked. Those were both crappy, mediocre distros, especially considering how excellent the Valhalla (7.3?) distro was...It's still a hugely popular distro for web hosting companies.
I was pretty pleased with Fedora Core 2-4, felt like they were modern, without being bloated and slow like 8 & 9. FC5 was a real dog, though, so I don't know what to say about that. In all, I tend to use Fedora more than any other distro. It's got its issues, but when you use it enough, you just sort of tune them out by default.
Redhat and Fedora have their moments of brilliance, but you really have to watch 'em, they can bite you. Definitely not an automatic upgrade, whenever the new one comes out.
There was a brief period where Planetside was an excellent all-combat MMO, with massive player vs player battles. I remember some early fights that were truly epic, far and away the best combat experiences I've ever had in a game. Didn't last though...Everything devolved into zergdom, and it ceased to be interesting to me.
It's typical MS fud. They LOVE to harp on how many bugs their competition has, but there is a hell of a lot more to it than quantity. Slammer anyone?
Oracle is a huge robust database with lots of extremely security conscious clients. A high number of reported bugs and fixes shows that they're executing due diligence, and working to keep their system as secure as possible. MSSQL's low number of bugs suggests that Microsoft isn't digging hard into their code, but only waiting for big public flaws.
They used the same argument in claiming that IE was less buggy than Firefox (see this crappy article) and it's just as untrue in this case.
I'm trying to figure out what "reality" people over 45 have ever dealt with. Sure sure, we still have a few depression era types around, they dealt with reality. But their kids? I don't THINK so.
Look at our current political mess, and think about what age group all those people belong to, and tell me that there is reality in there ANYWHERE!
The problem with this is that tech changes waaaay too quickly to try and be specific in every law. I mean, you're the same guy who, in 5 years will be saying, "Hey the law only covers IM, Email, Blog posts and VOIP...It doesn't say anything about holo-chat rooms!" Forcing the law down to a super nit-picky technical medium is ripe for setting up a huge number of bad precidents.
Either you're going to have to allow a level of leeway to deal with the fact that communications are evolving pretty rapidly right now, or you're going to basically force legislators to make these colossal generalizations, to cover every possible case. And you really don't want a case with this much 1st amendment baggage and a legitimate "Think of the children" complaint to go to the current supreme court, do you?
This isn't a slipperly slope. It's a case where the people who wrote the law had an intention: to make it illegal to sexually solicit a minor across the internet.
Now, when they wrote this law, the people who put it on paper put down "email" to define the method of communication, when they shouldn't have specified.
Along comes this case, about a guy who unquestionably solicited sex with a minor, but ooops, technicality, he can't be prosecuted because he didn't use "email".
The judge, doing what judges are supposed to do, ruled that just because the legislators were dumbasses and said "email" doesn't mean that they hadn't intended to cover cases exactly like this.
I think it's a good call based on the law. Now if you're saying, "Any law that ads a penalty for sexually soliciting a 13 year old online is stupid, and should be repealed" that's a separate issue. But don't blast the judge for making the correct call based on his level (Florida law, Florida crime, Florida court, Florida judge).
Never ending loops never work in a complex system (unless you have some sort of superuser access).
The secret is to remember that you don't have to go anywhere near infinite to take down a finite system, so just create some de-centralized replication code that starts finitely eating up resources in a finite number of different places, and voila, chaos.
This sort of thing will always happen where user code is allowed; the only way to stop it would be to limit what the user can do with their code, which defeats the purpose of this sort of system.
They haven't won any actual cases against people, though they have won a number of suits against the companies running the file sharing software.
This is an interesting defense, though I don't think it'll fly. I think the record companies will argue that the settlement against Kazaa was for creating the file sharing software, and not for actually infringing on any copyrights.
I do think that the arbitrary value per song is long over due for a re-evaluation. 750 is nothing more than extortion unless they can prove actual value lost (which they can't) or until they actually force someone to settle for that amount, which they haven't yet.
Meh. The print media business is pretty conservative by nature, even if their views run the spectrum. The "internets" are a little more than a decade in the public consciousness, and print media rightly fears what they represent in terms of their long term business strategy.
My personal viewpoint (speaking as a guy who does tech for a print newspaper) is that the death of actual "paper" is the best thing that could ever happen to print media, because almost all the heartache and stress of the industry revolves around the creation of the paper product, and the distribution of said product to the world, and an all digital product would allow them a HUGE amount of freedom.
However they haven't come up with a "good" way of working out compensation yet, and that prompts them to stupid measures like this.
Really hard to press libel against a person who's making statements about a public figure. I mean, if I say, "I've heard that Dick Cheney falsified reports about WMDs" what could you sue me for? I just said I heard it, I didn't attribute it, I didn't claim it was true, or from a reputable source. Hell, most of the 24 hour news channels say crap like this in the form of speculation all day long.
I could claim, "Joe Lieberman today failed to deny reports that he was an affectionado of child pornography" without even asking him the question, and I could say he did deny it, as of course he would if someone asked him, then I could crop out anything except the sound bite of him saying, "I do not watch child porn!" and play it over and over and over again until "Lieberman" and "Child Porn" are forever linked in your brain.
It's a dirty dirty world, and there is a lot of stuff you can do that's not quite libelous or slanderous that is nonetheless dirty as hell. Any half competent blogger should be able to skirt that line with no trouble at all...But don't try it with non-public figures! The standard there is a hell of a lot lower.
Well, in my opinion, most media these days plays too fast and loose with the truth *cough* television *cough cough* and Blogs are really just more of the same. No one really holds them accountable, so while Blog A) may be honest and fair Blog B) could just be a complete partisan shill, lying his ass off, knowing no one can prove he's definitely wrong.
I think pretty much any story that doesn't include solid research into publicly available documents or primary sources who are willing to go on the record, is worthless, and this includes most Blogs, most television news, and not a few print news sources as well.
You're laughably naive if you thought it would be any other way. The media (including blogs) is only answerable to other media. They keep each other honest. This is why you see papers like the Times printing lots of stories about themselves when they catch a reporter plagarizing; because when you out yourself, you get to keep a little face. People give you a little credit, even though you screwed 'em, when you own up to it and try to make amends.
But mostly, and by mostly I mean 99% of the reason, is because you do not ever ever want to give that kind of ammo to your competition. You will be found out and when you are, they will make you pay...Remember the Bush papers?
This is a prime example. The Times breaks it, but everyone and their dog will jump on the bandwagon about how the oh-so-transparent Blogs are perfectly willing to bury information when it comes to themselves. Can you really trust them? Is it just a passing fad? News at 11:00.
This is a good lesson for them. It's not easy to gain credibility, but it's easy as pie to lose it, and when people catch you in a single omission, they'll wonder how many omissions they failed to catch, and no amount of assurance will convince them that the answer is zero.
A "minimum wage" code monkey? What dream world are you living in, where a skilled programmer doesn't command more than minimum wage? I agree with you that you'll never be a design lead or a manager without communications skills but you can be a prolific, successful coder without being in management, and highly skilled programmer = highly paid programmer. I still make 5 figures a year doing consulting work above and beyond my day job, and I don't claim to be an amazing programmer. I know guys who never even leave their houses and make 90,000 a year, just subcontracting to people like me.
Not everyone is cut out to be management, and if you're not, why try to fake it? You can make a hell of a living as a brainy worker bee, and the stress is so much less.
No offense, but as an English/CS/Philos major, I understand that there are roles for people who have the ability to both do the nerd thing, and do the communication thing, but there are also roles for people who simply do the communication thing, and people who simply do the nerd thing.
To make the facile assumption that everyone needs to be able to do both is to miss the point of hiring specialists in the first place.
Frankly, in my experience, technical people and communication people both believe that their specialty is more important than it actually is. This is why you see CS people berating tech writers for not having a Masters in CS before they dare to form an opinion regarding tech, and English people telling a bunch of introverted CS guys that they need to take 20 credits worth of communications classes to be good at their technical specialties. The truth is, it is more important to be good at what you're supposed to be good at than it is to be well-rounded.
I'm an unfocused kind of guy, and I like being what I am, but if you hire someone like me you have to accept that I'm not going to be as good a programmer as a specialist programmer, and you have to accept that I'm not going to be as good a communicator as a specialist communicator.
Where I work, this is not only fine, it's necessary, because my job is to translate the needs of the users directly to code, so I have to be able to deal with users and write the code. But it is much more common to have two sets of specialists who deal with each other through a set of equally specialized intermediaries who are adept at translating.
You're the whackjob that put a political slant on it. I frankly don't give a damn which party it favors, and neither should you.
And, for the record, yea, mysql would be better (because it has better security controls), but what would be RIGHT is Oracle, running on Unix big iron, with transaction logs and mandated paper trail data validation. Or we could go all paper, which has the advantage that it's worked for a zillion years, and is hugely difficult to fraud on a large scale. And I'm not talking stupid ass punch ballots, I'm talking piece of paper and a goddamn pencil ballots. Someone screws that up, they're too stupid to vote anyway.
Why is it little ass-pirates like you think this is a party issue? This is a huge flaw at the very root of the whole election system, and you want to say, "Oh well, since it's the dems who are complaining, the system must be perfect!" Holy shit! Are you out of your mind? Are you so party brainwashed that this doesn't even seem like a problem to you?
What can't happen is that that ballot that you filled out will register your votes differently when someone else reads it. Ballots are (often) sequentially numbered so you know if a pile of them went missing.
Contrast this with Diebold and their crap voting system based on fucking MICROSOFT ACCESS. Jesus Christ! That screams Mickey Mouse half-assed bullshit solution to me. ACCESS? That's like having fricking Mattel or Hasbro stamped on the side in kid-friendly primary colors. You know just by hearing that little factoid that fraud is completely possible. Securing an access database is a fantasy.
Voter fraud is always going to be possible, but I'd rather a system that requires people to print fake ballots and lug the real ballots to a river or something, rather than a system that can untracably introduce a 2 or 3% error to favor one side over another.
That's like saying its cheap to produce a TV show, if you already have everything you'll need to do it, or cars are cheap if you already own one.
Since the article is about regulation and barriers to businesses setting up, and signal interference, I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that it is not by any stretch cheap to set up a radio station, and that a good part of that cost comes from jumping through the hoops of regulation.
Not a surprise to me, but the individual above who seems to think that starting up a radio station is "cheap" would probably be pretty surprised at how not cheap it actually is.
It's when it gets rebroadcast off someones handheld unit onto the extreme upper or lower end of the common FM band, thus allowing some stupid fundie in the car next to yours to catch a few seconds of something guaranteed to offend.
I keep mine tuned to an annoying religious station (which also happens to be only barely receivable where I live). I'm sure I've occasionally drowned out some joker, but I'm equally sure I don't give a damn.
It's not cheap to broadcast, unless you don't care about being heard off your own property. Between FCC fees and the other hassles of actually getting license to broadcast (they, no lie, make you survey your proposed broadcast area and give them elevation maps, etc), and the cost of amplifiers, space on a tower (or, god forbid, buying a tower), then a broadcast setup, and an actual music library (and the fricking RIAA makes you pay fees to broadcast their stuff), you're talking an expensive hobby.
Of course it looks pretty goddamn tempting when Clearchannel comes along and does a format shift on your only decent local radio station from Modern Alternative to wall-to-wall x-mas carols, which actually happened to me yesterday, bastards.
CD's are in a weird limbo, because their adoption of a fricking solid digital format is still hanging fire. The only formats record companies agree on are awful...No good to consumers at all. Consumer unfriendly formatting pretty much keeps me buying CDs.
Besides, I'm not sure what CD profits being 6 times online profits actually means...I buy one CD, that's going to cost the same as what? 10 songs on iTunes? At least? So, maybe it's just that online sales, being mainly single songs, are exposing the obvious fact that most albums only have one or two good songs.
It's similar, but a thesaurus tells you what words mean the same or opposite to a word you already know...This is more like a reverse dictionary, where things are listed by their definition.
I actually like that somewhat.
There is a writing tool called the "Flip Dictionary"...It's a dictionary, but backwards, where you're trying to come up with the word that describes some thing you don't know the word for, so you look up "thing thats sorta like x" and it gives you the word.
I think of Google kind of like that. I was trying to come up with a search for a specific type of security device a while ago, and I was putting in "auditory alarms" and "sonic detectors" and other stupid crap, but the thing I was looking for (glassbreak sensor) still showed up on the first page.