I guarantee you there is no way in hell he'd ever spend that much on Viagra or any other drug that someone could possibly use if he lived
Your Dad perhaps not.
The kid diagnosed with cancer at age ten who survives into his mid-eighties? That's a much tougher question to answer.
What would you be willing to pay over twenty-five years, fifty years, for a greatly extended, vigorous and productive, old age free of cancer, heart disease and stroke, arthritis, diabeties, Alzheimer's, COPD...? $20K, $50K, $100K? More?
If breast cancer is detected early, the survival rate is above 90%.
Because of screening, about 25% of breast cancer is caught early at the stage of non-invasive cancer, which is very treatable. Studies show that mammography reduces the risk of death from breast cancer by 15%.
Doctors recommend annual mammograms for women over the age of 40, or starting earlier if you are at elevated risk. "It's still alarming how many women don't get mammograms or skip for years at a time," says Dr. Elisa Port. [The chief of breast surgery at Mount Sinai] " "Mammograms are essential."
Your customers die at age ninety and not forty-five. Your investment in a cure just might lead you towards a much deeper ubderstanding of aging and disease.
The technique is based on triangulation. Alice uses several transmitters to send messages to Bob who returns them immediately at the speed of light. If the return arrives within a certain time period, Alice can be certain that Bob is where he says he is
Alice can be certain that the repeaters are where they say they are.
But Bob could be elsewhere - and his personal responses to these messages won't be - can't be - instantaneous.
Buy a PS3 for clustering? Have your PAID FOR CLUSTER disabled, unrepairable, and suddenly worth its weight in crap as soon as the machines start to die off.
The Windows OS and software used aboard the supper carrier USS George H.W. Bush was sold and customized through Microsoft Federal Systems in an IT partnership with Lockheed Martin.
It is not the mass market consumer product.
The Fat was sold without a guarantee that replacement product and parts would remain in stock forever. The Fat video game console in your mission critical HPC cluster was sold without a warranty of fitness for that particular purpose.
Chances are good that you made hardware or software changes that voided the consumer warranty. That you were stressing the system in ways home use never would.
You are not asking to present yourself openly and publicly as an amicus - a friend of the court.
There are many reasons why neither the plaintiff or the defendant are likely to welcome your intrusion - many reasons why the judge can't - and shouldn't - be considering arguments made outside the courtroom.
Your entire argument is retarded. First, you're using language (accessory) to a criminal offense, not a civil one -- which AFAIK, copyright infringement is.
Copyright infringement is a federal crime.
The for-profit motive was removed as an element of the offense in the "No Electronic Theft Act" of 1997.
Humphrey operated the subscription-based website USAWAREZ.COM from which he distributed copies of hundreds of copyrighted movies, computer games and software products without authorization from the copyright owners. Humphrey offered paid subscription services for access to the pirated materials on his website and also solicited donations for his operation of the siteOHIO MAN SENTENCED TO 29 MONTHS IN PRISON FOR SELLING PIRATED COPIES OF MOVIES [April 20]
Second, going by your argument, if you were responsible for downloads, every time you open a webpage, you would open yourself up to liability. Who owns that font? Who owns that clipart? Or those jpegs? Haven't you ever heard of websites using other website author's templates, either knowingly or unknowingly. Should you the browser be liable then?
Since I really don't want to bother reading 59 pages just to get the answer to this question, does it address how Limewire "encouraged" people to download copyrighted material
From the LA Times:
Relying on the Supreme Court's ruling in MGM v Grokster, Wood held that the defendants deliberately induced LimeWire users to violate copyrights, and that it profited from the infringements. Here's a snippet from the ruling (Wood refers to the company LimeWire by the initials LW):
[T]he following factors, taken together, establish that LW intended to encourage infringement by distributing LimeWire: (1) LW's awareness of substantial infringement by users; (2) LW's efforts to attract infringing users; (3) LW's efforts to enable and assist users to commit infringement; (4) LW's dependence on infringing use for the success of its business; and (5) LW's failure to mitigate infringing activities.
Most of those factors are non-controversial applications of the Grokster principle that folks who encourage piracy in order to profit from it are liable for infringement. Wood cited internal documents to show that LimeWire executives knew most of its users were downloading songs illegally, and that they sought out such users through, among other things, "press campaigns on college campuses relating to 'file-sharing and getting free MP3's.' " The company aids would-be infringers, Wood wrote, by enabling them to search by categories (such as Classic Rock and Top 40) that "inevitably guide users to copyrighted recordings." She also noted that the more users it attracts, the more revenue it collects from advertisers and consumers who buy the ad-free version of the software.
Wood's fifth factor, however, suggests that liability might ensue merely from the way a technology is designed and used. According to Wood, LimeWire built a filter into the software that could block copyrighted works from being downloaded, but left it inoperative unless users turned it on. A separate filter, however, barred users from sharing the songs they bought from the LimeWire store.
This selective filtering further demonstrates LW's knowledge of infringement-mitigating technologies and the company's intentional decision not to employ any such technologies in a way that meaningfully deters LimeWire users' infringing activities....
Failure to utilize existing technology to create meaningful barriers against infringement is a strong indicator of intent to foster infringement.
As for former CEO Gorton, Wood cited precedents that held company executives liable for infringements when they had the ability to supervise them and they benefited from them. She went on to note:
Gorton directed and approved many aspects of LimeWire's design and development. Gorton admits that he conceived of LimeWire and decided that the program should be decentralized and should use P2P technology.... Gorton oversaw the development of LimeWire's filtering system, and decided that the filter should be turned "off" by default.... This evidence, taken together, also establishes that Gorton knew about the infringement being committed through LimeWire.
I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice.
The fundamental problem here is the geek's obsession with the browser.
H.264 has rock-solid anchorage in professional production. In broadcasting. Cable and satellite distribution. Blu-Ray. CCTV [Industrial and Security Video, for example]
A casual search of Google Shopping returns 1600 hits for "H.264 WiFi Camera."
Home video.
The $125 HD "Flip" pocket camcorder. The $5,000 Sony Handycam.
Google Shopping returns 3600 hits for "H.264 Camcorder." In stores now.
The major stakeholders in H.264 are global industrial giants. Names like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens and Toshiba. AVC/H.264 Licensors
The 817 H.264 licensees include dozens - hundreds of names - which would be considered first-tier in their respective markets.
Many, many, of these enormously rich and influential companies are based in China, Japan and Korea. They have no reason to follow Mozilla's lead - or Google's.
For (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to end users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of an operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = "unit"), royalties...per legal entity are:
0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one legal entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit.
The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year 2009-10.
_____
MPEG LA seems interested only in very large scale commercial deployment of H.264.
Local TV broadcasters serving more than 100,000 households. Subscription services like HBO with more than 100,000 subscribers.
Brand-name consumer products: the HDTV from LG or Samsung. The video game console from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.
It's not at all clear to me why - apart from ideological reasons - Mozilla couldn't negotiate a free-as-in-beer license for the codec for bare-bones non-commercial deployments of the Firefox browser.
No OEM or marketing tie-ins. No customization of the browser.
It wouldn't be the first time I have asked myself if Mozilla wouldn't benefit from a more arm's length relationship with Google.
Yes, revenue isn't profit, as many have pointed out. But I'll bet you anything, these people are doing fine, which isn't exactly something we can all say, now is it?
If you are making decent money, why not just say so?
Talk about hourly wages, salaries and benefits. Dividends. Profits. Return on investment. Access to credit.
These are people just like us, and they're pioneering the new way to design, manufacture, and sell electronics.
Is this the "new" way or simply the old way - "Popular Science" circa 1910, 1020, 1930. QST. The Post-War Heathkit of the 50s and 60s. Where assembly was still mostly handcraft work. Where wiring a coil or machining a part coukld save you real money.
So, if your project makes $100,001 a year, you have to pay MPEG-LA 25% of its income for their one single technical contribution
That is 100,000 subscribers to your paid subscription service. The Strip Club Channel at $20/mo. AVC license $25,000/yr. Your monthly gross $2 million.
I don't want to read this kind of stuff on Slashdot. I come here for tech news that has some bearing on the world. This story is specifically about American politics and should have no place on this site.
Elena Kagan at fifty would be the youngest judge on the Court.
Justice Stevens is ninety.
Appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court cast a very long shadow.
"If confirmed, Kagan will be the fourth woman justice in the history of the Supreme court, the eighth Jewish justice to sit on the court, and the first nominee since 1972 with no prior experience as a judge." Court Nominee Elena Kagan
The U.S. Supreme Court is the court of the Constitution:
It has become fashionable for Supreme Court nominees and sometimes the Justices themselves to deflect controversy and play down their own importance by suggesting judicial decision-making involves nothing more than the simple application of clear, undisputed rules. Perhaps with Obama's selection of a woman, we won't be subjected to the baseball metaphor that Chief Justice John Roberts has used, but however the idea is couched, it's pure bunk. There is no rulebook for constitutional interpretation. In trying to give meaning to inherently elastic constitutional concepts like "equal protection of the laws" and due process, and in interpreting federal statutes that are often less than precise, Supreme Court Justices inevitably make subjective value judgments that are colored by their individual views about right and wrong, fair and unfair, wise and unwise.
In voting against confirming John Roberts, then Senator Obama explained that he was opposing the conservative Roberts because of how he would decide the slim "5%" of cases in which the law really is ambiguous and a Justice's values will inevitably shape his or her views. Our law-professor President got the concept right but the percentage wrong. Cases rarely reach the Supreme Court level when the right answer is clear. Most of the time, the Supreme Court hears cases only after lower federal courts have reached conflicting answers on vexing legal questions.
In short, there is a reason that Justice Harry Blackmun, a man whose grandfathers had fought for the Union in the Civil War and who idolized Abraham Lincoln, opposed the states' rights movement and was a passionate liberal voice on issues of race. There is a reason that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer of the fight for women's legal equality, takes an expansive view of the equal-protection clause. There is a reason that Roberts, who came of age as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, has a voting record that matches the old Reagan agenda. And there is a reason that Clarence Thomas, who grew up resenting the racial preferences that took him up the educational ladder to Yale Law School, reads the Constitution as imposing absolute colorblindness on government actors.
Conscientious judges understand that the law is much more than a reflection of their own personal preferences. But in the hard cases, the political cases, the cases tinged with moral judgment, where constitutional language and history provide no single irrefutable answer, a judge's formative experience matters -- family, geography, mentors and heroes -- they cleave liberal from conservative and ineluctably insinuate themselves into the law.
There is the 2010 Beta. The 60 day trial on your new PC. The Docs for Facebook Beta...
Sales are quite good as well. MS Office Home & Student 2007 No. 1 in software sales. 1,231 Days in the top 100. Free upgrade to F&S 2010 if purchased before September 30.
The spring loaded snap mousetrap. The hand-pushed reel lawn mower.
All have been patented again and again because inventors made significant improvements on the original idea.
What you want in a mower is a less physically demanding machine, safety for the operator and bystanders, an even cut, and a product that is economical to build, ship and service.
There is no one path to a solution.
The power mower - the riding mower - introduces its own complications and hazards. From where I sit, automation make sense. Faster response time in an emergency. Greater fuel efficiency, and so on.
That these improvements are implemented in software rather than hardware doesn't strike me as a meaningful distinction.
Exactly. It's like creating furniture with a SawStop table saw and the patent holders expecting to get a cut of everything you make with it. You should buy the right to use the patented technology, and that should be the end of it.
MPEG LA is only interested in the big green.
2 cents a disk is chicken feed unless you are talking $1 million in sales.
Your state of the art H.264 encoder is - for all practical purposes - free as in beer until you reach that level of success. Can you say the same for the SawStop?
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription),there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010), and after the first term the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.
The broadcast license for a single station in markets over 1,000,000 households is $10,000/yr.
In markets of less than 100,000 households, a station can license AVC encoders for a one-time payment of $2,500 each - and that will be the end of it.
The enterprise license - for broadcast and cable media giants like Disney - maxes out at $5,000,000/yr.
Licenses are for five years, with a 10% cap on any increases on renewal.
There are the problems for your "free" codec of choice:
1 Google is a giant in Search.
Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Toshiba and the rest are giants in manufacturing.
Consumer goods. Industrial technologies.
H.264 hardware acceleration is available now or "coming soon" for everything from your cell phone to the 4Kx2K theatrical quality projector.
OEM hardware support is everything.
The geek builds his Field of Dreams player into a browser and prays for rain.
2 The free alternative needs miraculous "ten-thousand-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin" compression before anyone will see a dime in savings on media, storage and transmission.
3 The free alternative needs editing and production tools as good as those available now from Adobe, Apple and Sony.
And stating that it's relevant to video sharing sites- they're an enabler, but YOU are the one on the hook, not they (because there's yet another license THEY have to have to do what they're doing...) and you're still needing that license in addition to the one they're paying.
Shorts under 12 minutes long are royalty free.
Period.
Amateur or professional production.
Free or paid distribution. It doesn't matter.
Royalties on SALES of disks or downloads are 2% of the retail price or 2 cents a title, whichever is LOWER.
MPEG LA doesn't give a damn about your wedding videos.
Subscription services with less than 100,000 paid subscribers are also royalty free. Your "viewer supported" Free Culture magazine on DVD+R is a go.
Own a cable service or TV station in a market of less than 100,000 households?
The one time fee for an AVC transmission encoder is $2,500.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather leave my port accessible- someday I may want to write some software.
Then it becomes a problem for everyone else on the road.
But do you really want to void the warranty on your $26,000 Prius? Or see your hack introduced as Exhibit A in a vehicular manslaughter case?
I guarantee you there is no way in hell he'd ever spend that much on Viagra or any other drug that someone could possibly use if he lived
Your Dad perhaps not.
The kid diagnosed with cancer at age ten who survives into his mid-eighties? That's a much tougher question to answer.
What would you be willing to pay over twenty-five years, fifty years, for a greatly extended, vigorous and productive, old age free of cancer, heart disease and stroke, arthritis, diabeties, Alzheimer's, COPD...? $20K, $50K, $100K? More?
Everyone is already as aware as they need to be! Stop spending money on awareness and start spending it on research!
Most breast cancer cases are curable, but mammograms are still a must
If breast cancer is detected early, the survival rate is above 90%.
Because of screening, about 25% of breast cancer is caught early at the stage of non-invasive cancer, which is very treatable. Studies show that mammography reduces the risk of death from breast cancer by 15%.
Doctors recommend annual mammograms for women over the age of 40, or starting earlier if you are at elevated risk. "It's still alarming how many women don't get mammograms or skip for years at a time," says Dr. Elisa Port. [The chief of breast surgery at Mount Sinai] " "Mammograms are essential."
There is no money in a cure....
Of course there is.
Your customers die at age ninety and not forty-five. Your investment in a cure just might lead you towards a much deeper ubderstanding of aging and disease.
Way back when I had XP SP2, installing SP3 borked my machine. Had to do a System Restore.
The plural of anecdote is not data. How many upgrades to SP3 were successful on the first attempt?
OS Market Share
Windows XP 63%
Vista 16%
Win 7 12%
OSX 10.6 2%
OSX 10.5 2%
Linux 1%
Windows ME 0.03%
iPad 0.03%
OS Share Trends
Jun 2009 Win 7 1%. Linux 1%.
Apr 2009 Win 7 12% Linux 1%
The technique is based on triangulation. Alice uses several transmitters to send messages to Bob who returns them immediately at the speed of light. If the return arrives within a certain time period, Alice can be certain that Bob is where he says he is
Alice can be certain that the repeaters are where they say they are.
But Bob could be elsewhere - and his personal responses to these messages won't be - can't be - instantaneous.
Buy a PS3 for clustering? Have your PAID FOR CLUSTER disabled, unrepairable, and suddenly worth its weight in crap as soon as the machines start to die off.
The Windows OS and software used aboard the supper carrier USS George H.W. Bush was sold and customized through Microsoft Federal Systems in an IT partnership with Lockheed Martin.
It is not the mass market consumer product.
The Fat was sold without a guarantee that replacement product and parts would remain in stock forever. The Fat video game console in your mission critical HPC cluster was sold without a warranty of fitness for that particular purpose.
Chances are good that you made hardware or software changes that voided the consumer warranty. That you were stressing the system in ways home use never would.
Sony owes you nothing.
I want to send an E-mail explaining many things.
You are not a party to the case.
You are not asking to present yourself openly and publicly as an amicus - a friend of the court.
There are many reasons why neither the plaintiff or the defendant are likely to welcome your intrusion - many reasons why the judge can't - and shouldn't - be considering arguments made outside the courtroom.
Your entire argument is retarded. First, you're using language (accessory) to a criminal offense, not a civil one -- which AFAIK, copyright infringement is.
Copyright infringement is a federal crime.
The for-profit motive was removed as an element of the offense in the "No Electronic Theft Act" of 1997.
Wilson faces a maximum sentence of six years in prison, a $500,000 fine, two years of supervised release following the prison term and an order of restitution. A sentencing date has not yet been set by the court. New Jersey Man Pleads Guilty to Unauthorized Recording of Newly Released Motion Pictures in Movie Theater [Feb 23]
Humphrey operated the subscription-based website USAWAREZ.COM from which he distributed copies of
hundreds of copyrighted movies, computer games and software products without authorization from
the copyright owners. Humphrey offered paid subscription services for access to the pirated
materials on his website and also solicited donations for his operation of the site OHIO MAN SENTENCED TO 29 MONTHS IN PRISON FOR SELLING PIRATED COPIES OF MOVIES [April 20]
Second, going by your argument, if you were responsible for downloads, every time you open a webpage, you would open yourself up to liability. Who owns that font? Who owns that clipart? Or those jpegs? Haven't you ever heard of websites using other website author's templates, either knowingly or unknowingly. Should you the browser be liable then?
This is why we can't have nice things.
Font Foundries Opening Up To the Web
When you re-use the unlicensed font, photograph or other element of a webpage for your own purposes you risk being sued.
Ignorance is no excuse.
That is why the pro does his shopping at Corbis or Getty Images when he needs a stock photo.
copyright would protect everything down to the lowly font, jpeg, and animated gif.
It does.
["Digital fonts" may be protected by copyrighted computer programs or design patents.]
Actually - it IS NOT illegal to download anything.
Can you produce a signed NDA with the studios for the pre-release screeners in your possesion?
I didn't think so.
Focusing on the uploader is efficient and economical. But P2P downloads can be hazardous for the greedy and the careless.
Since I really don't want to bother reading 59 pages just to get the answer to this question, does it address how Limewire "encouraged" people to download copyrighted material
From the LA Times:
Relying on the Supreme Court's ruling in MGM v Grokster, Wood held that the defendants deliberately induced LimeWire users to violate copyrights, and that it profited from the infringements. Here's a snippet from the ruling (Wood refers to the company LimeWire by the initials LW):
[T]he following factors, taken together, establish that LW intended to encourage infringement by distributing LimeWire: (1) LW's awareness of substantial infringement by users; (2) LW's efforts to attract infringing users; (3) LW's efforts to enable and assist users to commit infringement; (4) LW's dependence on infringing use for the success of its business; and (5) LW's failure to mitigate infringing activities.
Most of those factors are non-controversial applications of the Grokster principle that folks who encourage piracy in order to profit from it are liable for infringement. Wood cited internal documents to show that LimeWire executives knew most of its users were downloading songs illegally, and that they sought out such users through, among other things, "press campaigns on college campuses relating to 'file-sharing and getting free MP3's.' " The company aids would-be infringers, Wood wrote, by enabling them to search by categories (such as Classic Rock and Top 40) that "inevitably guide users to copyrighted recordings." She also noted that the more users it attracts, the more revenue it collects from advertisers and consumers who buy the ad-free version of the software.
Wood's fifth factor, however, suggests that liability might ensue merely from the way a technology is designed and used. According to Wood, LimeWire built a filter into the software that could block copyrighted works from being downloaded, but left it inoperative unless users turned it on. A separate filter, however, barred users from sharing the songs they bought from the LimeWire store.
This selective filtering further demonstrates LW's knowledge of infringement-mitigating technologies and the company's intentional decision not to employ any such technologies in a way that meaningfully deters LimeWire users' infringing activities....
Failure to utilize existing technology to create meaningful barriers against infringement is a strong indicator of intent to foster infringement.
As for former CEO Gorton, Wood cited precedents that held company executives liable for infringements when they had the ability to supervise them and they benefited from them. She went on to note:
Gorton directed and approved many aspects of LimeWire's design and development. Gorton admits that he conceived of LimeWire and decided that the program should be decentralized and should use P2P technology.... Gorton oversaw the development of LimeWire's filtering system, and decided that the filter should be turned "off" by default.... This evidence, taken together, also establishes that Gorton knew about the infringement being committed through LimeWire.
Another win for the RIAA
It must be bad, but really I don't know what it means. Can you tell me, a non-lawyer, what it means other than "You're screwed" or some such thing?
"You're screwed" sums it up pretty well.
Your case is falling apart. The law is against you. The facts are against you.
Even when the judge gives you the benefit of every doubt, there is nothing left in dispute worth taking to trial.
I'm not saying that h.264 is the wrong choice, it certainly seems better than the competition right now, but just because the licensing group are playing nice at the moment, don't assume they will always play nice.
The fundamental problem here is the geek's obsession with the browser.
H.264 has rock-solid anchorage in professional production. In broadcasting. Cable and satellite distribution. Blu-Ray. CCTV [Industrial and Security Video, for example]
A casual search of Google Shopping returns 1600 hits for "H.264 WiFi Camera."
Home video.
The $125 HD "Flip" pocket camcorder. The $5,000 Sony Handycam.
Google Shopping returns 3600 hits for "H.264 Camcorder." In stores now.
The major stakeholders in H.264 are global industrial giants. Names like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens and Toshiba. AVC/H.264 Licensors
The 817 H.264 licensees include dozens - hundreds of names - which would be considered first-tier in their respective markets.
Many, many, of these enormously rich and influential companies are based in China, Japan and Korea. They have no reason to follow Mozilla's lead - or Google's.
From the numbers a lot of people have posted, it would only cost about 3 cents per copy of Firefox.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
For (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to end users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of an operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = "unit"), royalties...per legal entity are:
0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one legal entity in an affiliated group);
US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year;
above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit.
The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year 2009-10.
_____
MPEG LA seems interested only in very large scale commercial deployment of H.264.
Local TV broadcasters serving more than 100,000 households. Subscription services like HBO with more than 100,000 subscribers.
Brand-name consumer products: the HDTV from LG or Samsung. The video game console from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.
It's not at all clear to me why - apart from ideological reasons - Mozilla couldn't negotiate a free-as-in-beer license for the codec for bare-bones non-commercial deployments of the Firefox browser.
No OEM or marketing tie-ins. No customization of the browser.
It wouldn't be the first time I have asked myself if Mozilla wouldn't benefit from a more arm's length relationship with Google.
Yes, revenue isn't profit, as many have pointed out. But I'll bet you anything, these people are doing fine, which isn't exactly something we can all say, now is it?
If you are making decent money, why not just say so?
Talk about hourly wages, salaries and benefits. Dividends. Profits. Return on investment. Access to credit.
These are people just like us, and they're pioneering the new way to design, manufacture, and sell electronics.
Is this the "new" way or simply the old way - "Popular Science" circa 1910, 1020, 1930. QST. The Post-War Heathkit of the 50s and 60s. Where assembly was still mostly handcraft work. Where wiring a coil or machining a part coukld save you real money.
For the job of "top 9 judges in the United States", yes, that's not enough experience.
The Supreme Court is the Court of the Constitution.
You can spend a lifetime in the lower courts and come no closer to understanding what the Supreme Court is all about than the Gray Line bus tour.
So, if your project makes $100,001 a year, you have to pay MPEG-LA 25% of its income for their one single technical contribution
That is 100,000 subscribers to your paid subscription service. The Strip Club Channel at $20/mo. AVC license $25,000/yr. Your monthly gross $2 million.
Pirated videos? Invariably re-encoded into something smaller. Bam! Checksum completely obliterated!
How much smaller - and at what quality? Netflix streams directly to my HD set. No more nursing P2P downloads. No more amateur DiVX rips.
But is it a simple checksum - and has it been obliterated? Can
I don't want to read this kind of stuff on Slashdot. I come here for tech news that has some bearing on the world. This story is specifically about American politics and should have no place on this site.
Elena Kagan at fifty would be the youngest judge on the Court.
Justice Stevens is ninety.
Appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court cast a very long shadow.
"If confirmed, Kagan will be the fourth woman justice in the history of the Supreme court, the eighth Jewish justice to sit on the court, and the first nominee since 1972 with no prior experience as a judge." Court Nominee Elena Kagan
The U.S. Supreme Court is the court of the Constitution:
It has become fashionable for Supreme Court nominees and sometimes the Justices themselves to deflect controversy and play down their own importance by suggesting judicial decision-making involves nothing more than the simple application of clear, undisputed rules. Perhaps with Obama's selection of a woman, we won't be subjected to the baseball metaphor that Chief Justice John Roberts has used, but however the idea is couched, it's pure bunk. There is no rulebook for constitutional interpretation. In trying to give meaning to inherently elastic constitutional concepts like "equal protection of the laws" and due process, and in interpreting federal statutes that are often less than precise, Supreme Court Justices inevitably make subjective value judgments that are colored by their individual views about right and wrong, fair and unfair, wise and unwise.
In voting against confirming John Roberts, then Senator Obama explained that he was opposing the conservative Roberts because of how he would decide the slim "5%" of cases in which the law really is ambiguous and a Justice's values will inevitably shape his or her views. Our law-professor President got the concept right but the percentage wrong. Cases rarely reach the Supreme Court level when the right answer is clear. Most of the time, the Supreme Court hears cases only after lower federal courts have reached conflicting answers on vexing legal questions.
In short, there is a reason that Justice Harry Blackmun, a man whose grandfathers had fought for the Union in the Civil War and who idolized Abraham Lincoln, opposed the states' rights movement and was a passionate liberal voice on issues of race. There is a reason that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer of the fight for women's legal equality, takes an expansive view of the equal-protection clause. There is a reason that Roberts, who came of age as a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, has a voting record that matches the old Reagan agenda. And there is a reason that Clarence Thomas, who grew up resenting the racial preferences that took him up the educational ladder to Yale Law School, reads the Constitution as imposing absolute colorblindness on government actors.
Conscientious judges understand that the law is much more than a reflection of their own personal preferences. But in the hard cases, the political cases, the cases tinged with moral judgment, where constitutional language and history provide no single irrefutable answer, a judge's formative experience matters -- family, geography, mentors and heroes -- they cleave liberal from conservative and ineluctably insinuate themselves into the law.
Four Enduring Myths About Supreme Court Nominees: 3. Supreme Court Justices Are Umpires
That first sample of crack is free too!
No, it ain't.
You want a sampling of MS Office?
There is the 2010 Beta. The 60 day trial on your new PC. The Docs for Facebook Beta...
Sales are quite good as well. MS Office Home & Student 2007 No. 1 in software sales. 1,231 Days in the top 100. Free upgrade to F&S 2010 if purchased before September 30.
Could you patent lawnmowers?
The clothespin. The lead pencil.
The spring loaded snap mousetrap. The hand-pushed reel lawn mower.
All have been patented again and again because inventors made significant improvements on the original idea.
What you want in a mower is a less physically demanding machine, safety for the operator and bystanders, an even cut, and a product that is economical to build, ship and service.
There is no one path to a solution.
The power mower - the riding mower - introduces its own complications and hazards. From where I sit, automation make sense. Faster response time in an emergency. Greater fuel efficiency, and so on.
That these improvements are implemented in software rather than hardware doesn't strike me as a meaningful distinction.
Exactly. It's like creating furniture with a SawStop table saw and the patent holders expecting to get a cut of everything you make with it.
You should buy the right to use the patented technology, and that should be the end of it.
MPEG LA is only interested in the big green.
2 cents a disk is chicken feed unless you are talking $1 million in sales.
Your state of the art H.264 encoder is - for all practical purposes - free as in beer until you reach that level of success. Can you say the same for the SawStop?
To make this a little more clear:
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription),there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010),
and after the first term the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of
royalties payable during the same time for free television.
The broadcast license for a single station in markets over 1,000,000 households is $10,000/yr.
In markets of less than 100,000 households, a station can license AVC encoders for a one-time payment of $2,500 each - and that will be the end of it.
The enterprise license - for broadcast and cable media giants like Disney - maxes out at $5,000,000/yr.
Licenses are for five years, with a 10% cap on any increases on renewal.
There are the problems for your "free" codec of choice:
1 Google is a giant in Search.
Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Toshiba and the rest are giants in manufacturing.
Consumer goods. Industrial technologies.
H.264 hardware acceleration is available now or "coming soon" for everything from your cell phone to the 4Kx2K theatrical quality projector.
OEM hardware support is everything.
The geek builds his Field of Dreams player into a browser and prays for rain.
2 The free alternative needs miraculous "ten-thousand-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin" compression before anyone will see a dime in savings on media, storage and transmission.
3 The free alternative needs editing and production tools as good as those available now from Adobe, Apple and Sony.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
And stating that it's relevant to video sharing sites- they're an enabler, but YOU are the one on the hook, not they (because there's yet another license THEY have to have to do what they're doing...) and you're still needing that license in addition to the one they're paying.
Shorts under 12 minutes long are royalty free.
Period.
Amateur or professional production.
Free or paid distribution. It doesn't matter.
Royalties on SALES of disks or downloads are 2% of the retail price or 2 cents a title, whichever is LOWER.
MPEG LA doesn't give a damn about your wedding videos.
Subscription services with less than 100,000 paid subscribers are also royalty free. Your "viewer supported" Free Culture magazine on DVD+R is a go.
Own a cable service or TV station in a market of less than 100,000 households?
The one time fee for an AVC transmission encoder is $2,500.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS