You can't even download the DirectX redistributable package anymore without validation, despite it being on almost every PC game CD I've bought in the past decade.
You have to understand that copyright is not a partisan issue. This is why no openly partisan organization should get involved in the debate over these matters (such as MoveOn.org did with network neutrality, killing any chance of Republicans supporting that issue).
That's the difference. The RIAA didn't realize they wanted tiered pricing until they saw how much money Jobs was pulling in, but selling music through iTMS at zero cost is like crack to them, and now they just can't stop. The only reason the MPAA wants tiered pricing is because the RIAA keeps saying they do, but the MPAA doesn't yet know what they're really missing. Once the MPAA gets a taste of that sweet, sweet candy, they'll be singing the same tune.
Anyways, on many of the more established realms, the creation of new characters (for accounts with no characters already on that realm) is closed.
Interesting. I see a new market in the near future - retired WoW players selling their accounts to gold farmers, with worth of the account based on how many alts on different servers they have available. And as long as character creation stays closed, the prices for these accounts can only go up. Wheee!
Sure, it sounds hypocritical, but underneath there are some very big differences between the US and Iran.
For one, the US has had "the bomb" for over 60 years, and developed/improved it in response to actual threats (ostensibly from Japan, but primarily from the Soviets). There is no comparable threat to Iran (yeah, you might say the US, but the only thing Iran has to worry about from the US is caused directly by their nuclear weapon ambitions in the first place).
For another, the US maintains its stockpiles of nuclear weapons solely to serve as a deterrent against other nations, while Iran's leadership has publicly and repeatedly declared that Israel should not exist as a state and has funded terrorist acts in order to remove it - it may very well use nuclear weapons in a first-strike effort against Israel, and even the threat of this occurring destabilizes the Middle East further than it already is.
And for a third, Iran's government maintains a stranglehold over its people - the people are fairly Westernized as the region goes, and they are interested in legitimate democracy. If Iran's government gains control of WMDs with significant range, they will ensure that other nations can never again interfere with their oppression of their own people.
Finally, the stability of the US government is much greater than that of Iran. The chances of Iran's government collapsing at some point in the future, relegating their nuclear weapons to whoever can get their hands on them first, are significant. It is thus in the interest of everyone (especially in that region, but potentially around the world) for Iran not to acquire nuclear weapons.
Besides all this, if developing a new nuclear weapon design allows the US to decrease its active stockpile of warheads, thereby reducing the cost of maintaining those weapons, decreasing the hazard their existence presents (aside from their use, of course), and generally reducing the overwhelming overkill the stockpile represents, isn't that a good thing?
Still, it's a lot harder to get out of a treaty than a regular law, and so the copyright cabal is especially interested in seeing something like this pass - not just for the imposition of US copyright law on other countries, but to further ensconce these laws in US statute.
But with VoIP service, internet access is a given. The VoIP companies can then implement these features and make them customer-configurable with a handy web interface. But you do have a point - when Sprint hires a guy in India to read questions to me off a screen and choose the multiple-choice answer that sounds closest to my response, rather than putting it on the web and letting me navigate through it myself, how can we expect a phone company to let the end user handle anything?
Stephen Hawking:Great. The entire universe was destroyed. Fry: Destroyed? Then where are we now? Al Gore: I don't know. But I can darn well tell you where we're not: The universe. Nichelle Nichols: (groans) Eternity with nerds. It's the Pasadena Star Trek convention all over again.
Saturate good times, come on! (Let's saturate) Saturate good times, come on! (Let's saturate)
A download party's goin' on right here In saturation that lasts throughout the years So bring your eMule, and your Torrent too We gonna saturate this market with you
Fortunately, VoIP is also more like e-mail than like the traditional phone system in that filtering should be a lot easier. Ever tried to get a traditional phone company to block a phone number from calling you? Some companies will charge you extra for the privilege, while others (especially cell phone companies) will refuse to do so at all. On the other hand, VoIP companies have no excuse - the request is rather obviously implementable in software, perhaps even programmable into the user's phone, and can include whitelisting as an easily-configurable method for call filtering.
(Yes, the same should be true of traditional phone service, but the old Bells have surrounded their inner workings with such a sense of mystery for decades on end that the average Joe is unlikely to realize how easily the service can be implemented.)
It's basically two guys taking nasty swipes at each other.
Not only that, but it shows the ignorance of the participants relative to the topic at hand. The "electronic Hezbollah" that you and most other Slashdotters have noted is one good example, but another comes from Glickman:
John Perry Barlow is the one who's doing a disservice to the consumers, because you see if you don't adequately compensate the artist, the director, the creator, the actor, they won't do it in the first place so people won't get movies.
Compensating these folks has never been a problem. Out of the 347 movies that have grossed over $100M at the box office, 145 of them were released in or after the year 2000. In fact, if there is anyone in the movie industry who is being inadequately compensated, it's the small-time indie filmmakers who aren't being protected by the MPAA at all because they represent competition to the big movie studios.
The EFF doesn't support mass piracy of copyrighted works, anyway. It supports the institution of fair use and the rights of the consumer, in the face of an industry that demands increasing levels of control in an effort to squeeze all the cash it can from its consumers, either directly or through advertising. The MPAA sees the Internet as a real threat, not simply to its bottom line from mysteriously-accounted lost sales, but to its enforcement of control over the industry.
I'm not sure about that. VoIP has an unrelated and legitimate commercial interest behind it to support it not being blocked solely based on the virtue of it being VoIP, and thus anybody wanting to jam/block particular VoIP calls would have to know ahead of time at what phone number the message was going to appear. And there are a lot of phone numbers;)
On the other hand, the various intelligence services have some pretty powerful jamming equipment that can render shortwave transmissions at least partially unintelligible. Numbers stations often work based on a schedule (in terms of both time and radio frequency), and once an intelligence service determines this schedule, they can wash out the frequency with crap at the appropriate time. Since the whole reason for numbers stations are that spies in the field are relatively incommunicado with their handlers, figuring out the schedule can have a fairly long-term impact on the spy being able to receive information and orders. In fact, the biggest question is likely where the jammer antenna should be positioned to ensure that the transmission will be jammed.
The History Channel series "Modern Marvels" has covered several of these engineering disasters in the past, as well as some of the extras that other posters have brought up. These particular episodes are entitled "Engineering Disasters", and I think they have around 20 or so of them. In each show, they discuss three or four pretty horrendous disasters, most of which led either to great loss of life or the destruction of a large and expensive structure. Learning about beer or breakfast cereal is interesting, but the Engineering Disasters episodes are by far their best ones.
mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw It's the most remarkable word I've ever seen! mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw I wish I knew exactly what I mean! It starts out like an M word as anyone can see, But somewhere in the middle it gets awful 4J to me! mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw If I ever find out just what this word can mean, I'll be the smartest bird the world has ever seen!
This is nonsense. Micron could achieve the same objective by simply lowering their prices. Infineon, Samsung, etc., would end up lowering their prices as well in order to stay competitive, and the overpriced, underperforming Rambus would suffer all the same. Micron informing its competitors of the reason for the price cut is merely a courtesy.
There are quite a few people out there - not just representatives of the telecommunications industry - under the impression that "Government Intervention Is Bad", hence we should all oppose network neutrality legislation. But this bill underscores the fact that government intervention by itself isn't necessarily bad - it's how government intervenes that determines whether the right or wrong thing is being done.
So let's all drop this nonsense about claiming that the government shouldn't be intervening in how the Internet works, and get back to the core of the matter - which is whether the telecommunications industry should be allowed to leverage its oligopoly position in the broadband ISP market to extract profit from content providers that don't even connect to them directly, and whether the industry should be allowed to discriminate based on traffic type and content, rather than pricing by bandwidth consumption alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoth the Incompetent Robot Elders:
Silence!!!
Hmm.... well, I was shooting for Teh Funny, but I'll take what I can get.
They originally wanted to name it Unix, but SCO threatened to sue.
You can't even download the DirectX redistributable package anymore without validation, despite it being on almost every PC game CD I've bought in the past decade.
If TiVo really wants to fill the gap caused by ad-skipping, they should create interactive ads that viewers can poke and prod.
Sadly, Paul Verhoeven holds the patent on that one.
It's obvious that the Republican government insists on the maximum corporate legislation possible, and the minimum personal freedom.
This must be why Republican Senator John Sununu is our avatar on the committee for removing the broadcast/audio flags from this legislation.
You have to understand that copyright is not a partisan issue. This is why no openly partisan organization should get involved in the debate over these matters (such as MoveOn.org did with network neutrality, killing any chance of Republicans supporting that issue).
The 3145 mpg figure was probably Canadian, too.
That would be... let's see, carry the one... roughly 28 mpg American (22 city).
That's the difference. The RIAA didn't realize they wanted tiered pricing until they saw how much money Jobs was pulling in, but selling music through iTMS at zero cost is like crack to them, and now they just can't stop. The only reason the MPAA wants tiered pricing is because the RIAA keeps saying they do, but the MPAA doesn't yet know what they're really missing. Once the MPAA gets a taste of that sweet, sweet candy, they'll be singing the same tune.
Anyways, on many of the more established realms, the creation of new characters (for accounts with no characters already on that realm) is closed.
Interesting. I see a new market in the near future - retired WoW players selling their accounts to gold farmers, with worth of the account based on how many alts on different servers they have available. And as long as character creation stays closed, the prices for these accounts can only go up. Wheee!
On the Intarweb, such grandiose claims of superiority over one's foes are usually spelled "EVAR".
Sure, it sounds hypocritical, but underneath there are some very big differences between the US and Iran.
For one, the US has had "the bomb" for over 60 years, and developed/improved it in response to actual threats (ostensibly from Japan, but primarily from the Soviets). There is no comparable threat to Iran (yeah, you might say the US, but the only thing Iran has to worry about from the US is caused directly by their nuclear weapon ambitions in the first place).
For another, the US maintains its stockpiles of nuclear weapons solely to serve as a deterrent against other nations, while Iran's leadership has publicly and repeatedly declared that Israel should not exist as a state and has funded terrorist acts in order to remove it - it may very well use nuclear weapons in a first-strike effort against Israel, and even the threat of this occurring destabilizes the Middle East further than it already is.
And for a third, Iran's government maintains a stranglehold over its people - the people are fairly Westernized as the region goes, and they are interested in legitimate democracy. If Iran's government gains control of WMDs with significant range, they will ensure that other nations can never again interfere with their oppression of their own people.
Finally, the stability of the US government is much greater than that of Iran. The chances of Iran's government collapsing at some point in the future, relegating their nuclear weapons to whoever can get their hands on them first, are significant. It is thus in the interest of everyone (especially in that region, but potentially around the world) for Iran not to acquire nuclear weapons.
Besides all this, if developing a new nuclear weapon design allows the US to decrease its active stockpile of warheads, thereby reducing the cost of maintaining those weapons, decreasing the hazard their existence presents (aside from their use, of course), and generally reducing the overwhelming overkill the stockpile represents, isn't that a good thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_clause
Still, it's a lot harder to get out of a treaty than a regular law, and so the copyright cabal is especially interested in seeing something like this pass - not just for the imposition of US copyright law on other countries, but to further ensconce these laws in US statute.
But with VoIP service, internet access is a given. The VoIP companies can then implement these features and make them customer-configurable with a handy web interface. But you do have a point - when Sprint hires a guy in India to read questions to me off a screen and choose the multiple-choice answer that sounds closest to my response, rather than putting it on the web and letting me navigate through it myself, how can we expect a phone company to let the end user handle anything?
Stephen Hawking: Great. The entire universe was destroyed.
Fry: Destroyed? Then where are we now?
Al Gore: I don't know. But I can darn well tell you where we're not: The universe.
Nichelle Nichols: (groans) Eternity with nerds. It's the Pasadena Star Trek convention all over again.
Saturate good times, come on! (Let's saturate)
Saturate good times, come on! (Let's saturate)
A download party's goin' on right here
In saturation that lasts throughout the years
So bring your eMule, and your Torrent too
We gonna saturate this market with you
Fortunately, VoIP is also more like e-mail than like the traditional phone system in that filtering should be a lot easier. Ever tried to get a traditional phone company to block a phone number from calling you? Some companies will charge you extra for the privilege, while others (especially cell phone companies) will refuse to do so at all. On the other hand, VoIP companies have no excuse - the request is rather obviously implementable in software, perhaps even programmable into the user's phone, and can include whitelisting as an easily-configurable method for call filtering.
(Yes, the same should be true of traditional phone service, but the old Bells have surrounded their inner workings with such a sense of mystery for decades on end that the average Joe is unlikely to realize how easily the service can be implemented.)
Not only that, but it shows the ignorance of the participants relative to the topic at hand. The "electronic Hezbollah" that you and most other Slashdotters have noted is one good example, but another comes from Glickman:
Compensating these folks has never been a problem. Out of the 347 movies that have grossed over $100M at the box office, 145 of them were released in or after the year 2000. In fact, if there is anyone in the movie industry who is being inadequately compensated, it's the small-time indie filmmakers who aren't being protected by the MPAA at all because they represent competition to the big movie studios.
The EFF doesn't support mass piracy of copyrighted works, anyway. It supports the institution of fair use and the rights of the consumer, in the face of an industry that demands increasing levels of control in an effort to squeeze all the cash it can from its consumers, either directly or through advertising. The MPAA sees the Internet as a real threat, not simply to its bottom line from mysteriously-accounted lost sales, but to its enforcement of control over the industry.
I say your 3-cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!
I'm not sure about that. VoIP has an unrelated and legitimate commercial interest behind it to support it not being blocked solely based on the virtue of it being VoIP, and thus anybody wanting to jam/block particular VoIP calls would have to know ahead of time at what phone number the message was going to appear. And there are a lot of phone numbers ;)
On the other hand, the various intelligence services have some pretty powerful jamming equipment that can render shortwave transmissions at least partially unintelligible. Numbers stations often work based on a schedule (in terms of both time and radio frequency), and once an intelligence service determines this schedule, they can wash out the frequency with crap at the appropriate time. Since the whole reason for numbers stations are that spies in the field are relatively incommunicado with their handlers, figuring out the schedule can have a fairly long-term impact on the spy being able to receive information and orders. In fact, the biggest question is likely where the jammer antenna should be positioned to ensure that the transmission will be jammed.
The History Channel series "Modern Marvels" has covered several of these engineering disasters in the past, as well as some of the extras that other posters have brought up. These particular episodes are entitled "Engineering Disasters", and I think they have around 20 or so of them. In each show, they discuss three or four pretty horrendous disasters, most of which led either to great loss of life or the destruction of a large and expensive structure. Learning about beer or breakfast cereal is interesting, but the Engineering Disasters episodes are by far their best ones.
mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw
It's the most remarkable word I've ever seen!
mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw
I wish I knew exactly what I mean!
It starts out like an M word as anyone can see,
But somewhere in the middle it gets awful 4J to me!
mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw
If I ever find out just what this word can mean,
I'll be the smartest bird the world has ever seen!
This is nonsense. Micron could achieve the same objective by simply lowering their prices. Infineon, Samsung, etc., would end up lowering their prices as well in order to stay competitive, and the overpriced, underperforming Rambus would suffer all the same. Micron informing its competitors of the reason for the price cut is merely a courtesy.
There are quite a few people out there - not just representatives of the telecommunications industry - under the impression that "Government Intervention Is Bad", hence we should all oppose network neutrality legislation. But this bill underscores the fact that government intervention by itself isn't necessarily bad - it's how government intervenes that determines whether the right or wrong thing is being done.
So let's all drop this nonsense about claiming that the government shouldn't be intervening in how the Internet works, and get back to the core of the matter - which is whether the telecommunications industry should be allowed to leverage its oligopoly position in the broadband ISP market to extract profit from content providers that don't even connect to them directly, and whether the industry should be allowed to discriminate based on traffic type and content, rather than pricing by bandwidth consumption alone.
Actually, we can do experiments, but we're restricted to a sample size of 1.
So is this what you're saying?
Well, here's some reading material for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
By the way, my use of the word "diatribe" wasn't meant to refute his argument. That's what the rest of my post was for.