It's good to see someone in the industry figuring out the most frustrating part of video games. After all, those of us with poor hand-eye coordination have been blaming the controller for decades.
You have to be fairly fortunate (or do research ahead of time) to own a DVD player that someone has hacked the firmware for, or that even has flashable firmware. For example, I like my DVD player - a JVC - but sadly, very few of their players have been hacked.
While the parent poster is in good shape, the rest of you can do a search for "dvd player firmware" to get started.
Actually, I wish they'd expand their used purchase program, both in terms of selections and by allowing you to purchase a disc while you have it rented out. There are quite a few discs that I'd have paid Netflix $5 to $10 to permanently keep a disc that I've rented.
Your linked article is great at casting aspersions, but doesn't actually prove that his views are anti-environment in any way. Even if he is firmly in the pocket of these companies, there's nothing saying that a timber company, a GM crops company, or a nuclear power plant company can't have positive environmental practices or make use of the environment without abusing it.
Furthermore, the US must reduce its carbon emissions if global disaster is to be averted; if it doesn't, it is irrelevant what any other nation does--China and India might as well pollute as much as they like, since it will probably only make a few decades of difference in the long term.
The same applies to China and, to a lesser extent right now, India. China emitted 3541 metric tons of CO2 in 2003, India emitted 1025 MT CO2 in 2003. Compare this to the US's 5802 MT CO2 in 2005. If the US's nonparticipation makes the treaty pointless, then doesn't China not being regulated by the treaty do the same thing? Yet China is given a pat on the back for agreeing to a treaty that helps them rather than harms them, while the US is lambasted for demanding that China, as one of the world's largest polluters, be governed by the same rules that the US is.
Why do you measure pollution in terms of "per dollar GDP" ? Isn't pollution "per person" a fairer measure ?
No. If the US had a billion more people in it, but the GDP stayed the same, its pollution per capita would look a hell of a lot better, but it wouldn't be producing any more than it does without the extra billion people.
In 2005, the US emitted 491.7 metric tons of CO2 per million dollars GDP. In 2003 (the latest year of data available for China at this site), China emitted 2511 MT CO2 per million dollars GDP.
Another possible measure would be the pollution emitted per unit energy consumption. In 2005, the US emitted 57.87 metric tons of CO2 per billion BTU of energy used. In 2003, China emitted 77.82 MT CO2 per billion BTU.
(a) Does the DRM system prevent users from making fair use of protected content? (Shifting content in time, space, format) (b) Does the DRM system enforce additional non-piracy-related restrictions on the end user at the behest of the content industry? (Region codes, preventing use of things like track skip/fast forward/other remote control buttons) (c) Does the DRM system continually depend on an external authority which, if it were ever to become defunct, would effectively revoke the rights of the user to access the content? (And, can that external authority track the usage habits of the end user?)
While (c) here is an implementation detail that has implications concerning things the content industry would like to be able to do, (a) and (b) are make-or-break issues which apply to all DRM. That is, if (a) and (b) are true, then the DRM system is just as oppressive (perhaps even more so) than the DRM we're already afflicted with, regardless of the platforms that the DRM is available on or the open-source-ness of the scheme. But if (a) and (b) are false, then the content industry won't use them.
From the article you linked:
We believe in content owners' rights to control their creations as they see fit. And consumers have the right that if those systems are onerous, they just don't have to buy them. So the fair usage issue gets sorted out by the market. - Glenn Edens, Director, Sun Labs
This is a foolhardy assumption. The entire reason that the content industry plays the way they do is to ensure that there is no consumer choice when it comes to DRM. They use the legislature to enforce particular DRM schemes on the public. They collude in I-can't-see-how-this-is-legal associations to ensure that whatever DRM scheme is used is burdened with licensing terms to prevent electronics manufacturers from making playback devices that permit the full scope of fair use or that don't impose non-piracy restrictions on the end user, and those licensing restrictions are given teeth by the even-more-broken patent system. Even the biggest duel of the new millennium - Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD - laid to rest the question of DRM fairly early when both format consortia announced they were using AACS. And none of this is motivated solely (or even primarily) by piracy - the real goals here are to be able to track the end user, to manipulate the international content market, and to force the end user to watch advertising.
(thereby also reducing the need for military expenses), and it would create lots of new economic activity and jobs
Okay, let me get this straight - public and private expenditure to meet environmental regulations is good for the economy, but public expenditure to maintain the military is bad for the economy? Military spending has historically been a big positive for the economy, as long as debt is properly managed. (Admittedly, the debt is certainly not being properly managed at the moment, but the drop in taxable income and the increase in public expenditure to meet new environmental regs wouldn't help that situation out any.)
those other nations are rightfully arguing that it is not fair that the US has achieved its current economic strength by emitting carbon without restrictions and now they are supposed to limit their economies by not being allowed to emit equal amounts of carbon.
If the intent of Kyoto is to help the environment, then fairness shouldn't enter into it. The reason why China and India support Kyoto now is that it gives them a huge comparative advantage over the US, by letting them continue to emit high levels of CO2 at the expense of the environment. The US gets demonized for opposing such an arrangement, while China and India (which are already heavy polluters, and which release far more CO2 per dollar GDP than the US or EU) are defended for supporting an agreement that not only benefits them economically, but also allows them to continue harming the environment.
Sadly enough, this is true, more often than not. Here's a related anecdote:
Many years ago - around 1990, as I recall - my original home state of West Virginia was running a significant budget deficit. In response, the governor (Gaston Caperton, or Gas Cap, as we used to call him) and the state legislature decided to pass a few tax edicts. One of these was an ill-fated tree tax where you were taxed based on the number of trees you had on your property. The tax was intended to target the lumber industry, but since much of West Virginia consists of forest, the gnashing of teeth among private citizens forced the repeal of this tax within the year.
But another of these new taxes was a sales tax hike of one percentage point (from 5% to 6%). The tax was touted as being necessary to resolve the budget shortfall, and the public was reassured that it would be a temporary measure.
16 years later, West Virginians are still paying a 6% sales tax.
That said, if the federal income tax were actually replaced by a federal sales tax, as in the income tax repeal and the sales tax levy occurred in the same piece of legislation, I would wholeheartedly support it (as long exemptions for necessities of life were made in some way).
Did you know that the Bush administration has barred climate researchers working for the government from speaking directly to the press?
If you work directly for the gubment, and their policies concerning speaking on behalf of the administration bother you, then quit your job and say whatever you want. There's no scandal of censorship here.
Mailing hard drives, tapes, Blu-ray discs, or other removable media is just a high-latency, high-packet-size data link, with routing handled by a parcel courier. Define "offline" in such a way as to exclude sneakernet.
The common usage of "online" doesn't include sneakernet - it's already been defined that way by society. A reasonable person familiar with the Internet knows the difference between online and offline, and knows that a copy on a CD or whatever isn't online, and that's the way the court will look at it.
Besides, the post office has been around for hundreds of years, while the word "online", which is specifically used in the statute, has only been around for just over 50 years. Whatever screwy explanation you might come up with to hammer a round peg into a square hole won't fly in court.
Also interesting is that 1 Penn Plaza only has 57 floors. Maybe the suite numbers go that high - no way to know for sure without someone scouting it out and letting us know - but there's a good chance the address is fake. I checked most of the names listed in the entries with the NY Secretary of State, and none of them came up as legitimate businesses (no surprise there). The only obvious lead left to check, then, are the phone and fax numbers.
For posterity's sake, the address and phone listed in each of those records is shown below.
Address: One Penn Plaza, #6177 10119 New York NY United States Phone: +1.3472876993 Fax: +1.3472876986
On a purely coincidental side note, WhenU has an office in that building; and a similar phone number - (347) 287-6901 - showed up as being used in a Nigerian scam e-mail. Almost certainly no connection, but sometimes it's fun to dust off the ol' tin foil hat.
Webaroo and their proposed product do not meet many of the qualifications required to fit under 17 USC 512(b). In particular, the storage of the cache is not "temporary" or "intermediate", since the entire cache is made available wholesale to the end user in permanent form. Webaroo does not qualify as a "service provider" when talking about this cache, because the cache is made available offline.
And aside from those problems, Webaroo would find itself in hot water if anyone decided to enforce 512(b)(2)(E) against them, since it would be impossible to guarantee that all copies of the cache had been updated.
I agree wholeheartedly. Other things that shouldn't be possible: specifying a window as never having scrollbars, specifying a window as non-resizeable, or changing the behavior of a right-click to anything other than causing the context menu to appear.
If there are two influences at work - one, a tendency to go where there is some chemical, and two, a tendency to avoid going where that chemical is too strong - then it is possible for the roaches to end up not filling every shelter available, depending on what happens very early on in the experiment. That is, if a roach goes into each shelter right away, then there'll be a good chance that all three shelters will end up with some roaches in them. If a roach only goes into two of the three shelters, then it's likely that the remaining roaches will follow the chemical gradient and only end up in those two shelters. (In such a situation, if the shelters are too small, eventually the roaches would stop going into the occupied shelters and start going into the empty one.)
Obviously, a blurb on the Discovery Channel website isn't the same as going to PNAS and reading the article for oneself, but from what little info was provided there, it doesn't seem to me that actual communication is necessarily what's going on.
In the case of parceling out a population of roaches into equal-size subpopulations, well, cockroaches stink. Er, that is, they emit chemicals into the air, and an individual cockroach may be able to detect the concentration of such a chemical as it approaches multiple sheltered areas to determine which area is occupied a little bit but not too much. The experimenter should attempt to determine what chemical accounts for such behavior and determine what concentrations are attractive or repulsive to roaches. This doesn't necessarily convey communication, because if the same chemical governs the entire behavior, then each individual cockroach isn't really conveying any information about the state of the colony in a shelter. The information results as the emergent property of having a lot of cockroaches in the same space.
In the case of roaches determining whether a cockroach is kin or not, this may be governed by similar chemicals which vary slightly among the world population of cockroaches. The same determination is made by single-celled organisms, which respond differently to the presence of certain proteins in the cell membrane. This doesn't indicate that actual communication is taking place, but rather that one cockroach is able to detect chemicals that the other cockroach would be emitting regardless of whether the two were interacting or not.
One has to be careful when deciding whether a phenomenon is explained by communication or not, because there may be many definitions of communication. Is it communication when one organism does something while oblivious to the reasons why it's doing it, and the results of that action later affect another organism? Does communication require the direct interaction of two organisms? Must the behaviors of both organisms - both emitting and receiving the signal - be neurally based, or can one or both actions be the result of a purely mechanical property of the organisms? Do the organisms have to be aware of the information they are sending or receiving (and there you bring in another ball of wax, because what constitutes awareness)?
Ethanol may not eliminate CO2 emissions, but it will reduce them, and requires very little change in infrastructure compared to electric or hydrogen vehicles. It would (should) be meant as a stopgap until technology and infrastructure can catch up with environmental needs.
Zoidberg: They're tastier than an unguarded penguin nest. What do you call them? Leela: We haven't thought of a name yet. Bender: They're tasty, right? Let's call 'em "Tasticles". Hermes: *gasp* Amy: Ew! Farnsworth: No! Leela: We can't call them that. Bender: Why not? Leela: It sounds too much like those frozen Rocky Mountain oysters on a stick. You know, "Testsicles"?
If Google decides to go along with music industry pricing, how does that benefit the music industry any more than Napster or other online stores that have bent to their will? As long as iTMS is still around and still pricing their music the same way, the public will still decide which pricing model they prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good to see someone in the industry figuring out the most frustrating part of video games. After all, those of us with poor hand-eye coordination have been blaming the controller for decades.
You have to be fairly fortunate (or do research ahead of time) to own a DVD player that someone has hacked the firmware for, or that even has flashable firmware. For example, I like my DVD player - a JVC - but sadly, very few of their players have been hacked.
While the parent poster is in good shape, the rest of you can do a search for "dvd player firmware" to get started.
Actually, I wish they'd expand their used purchase program, both in terms of selections and by allowing you to purchase a disc while you have it rented out. There are quite a few discs that I'd have paid Netflix $5 to $10 to permanently keep a disc that I've rented.
Your linked article is great at casting aspersions, but doesn't actually prove that his views are anti-environment in any way. Even if he is firmly in the pocket of these companies, there's nothing saying that a timber company, a GM crops company, or a nuclear power plant company can't have positive environmental practices or make use of the environment without abusing it.
Furthermore, the US must reduce its carbon emissions if global disaster is to be averted; if it doesn't, it is irrelevant what any other nation does--China and India might as well pollute as much as they like, since it will probably only make a few decades of difference in the long term.
The same applies to China and, to a lesser extent right now, India. China emitted 3541 metric tons of CO2 in 2003, India emitted 1025 MT CO2 in 2003. Compare this to the US's 5802 MT CO2 in 2005. If the US's nonparticipation makes the treaty pointless, then doesn't China not being regulated by the treaty do the same thing? Yet China is given a pat on the back for agreeing to a treaty that helps them rather than harms them, while the US is lambasted for demanding that China, as one of the world's largest polluters, be governed by the same rules that the US is.
Why do you measure pollution in terms of "per dollar GDP" ? Isn't pollution "per person" a fairer measure ?
No. If the US had a billion more people in it, but the GDP stayed the same, its pollution per capita would look a hell of a lot better, but it wouldn't be producing any more than it does without the extra billion people.
In 2005, the US emitted 491.7 metric tons of CO2 per million dollars GDP. In 2003 (the latest year of data available for China at this site), China emitted 2511 MT CO2 per million dollars GDP.
Another possible measure would be the pollution emitted per unit energy consumption. In 2005, the US emitted 57.87 metric tons of CO2 per billion BTU of energy used. In 2003, China emitted 77.82 MT CO2 per billion BTU.
The important questions are these:
(a) Does the DRM system prevent users from making fair use of protected content? (Shifting content in time, space, format)
(b) Does the DRM system enforce additional non-piracy-related restrictions on the end user at the behest of the content industry? (Region codes, preventing use of things like track skip/fast forward/other remote control buttons)
(c) Does the DRM system continually depend on an external authority which, if it were ever to become defunct, would effectively revoke the rights of the user to access the content? (And, can that external authority track the usage habits of the end user?)
While (c) here is an implementation detail that has implications concerning things the content industry would like to be able to do, (a) and (b) are make-or-break issues which apply to all DRM. That is, if (a) and (b) are true, then the DRM system is just as oppressive (perhaps even more so) than the DRM we're already afflicted with, regardless of the platforms that the DRM is available on or the open-source-ness of the scheme. But if (a) and (b) are false, then the content industry won't use them.
From the article you linked:
We believe in content owners' rights to control their creations as they see fit. And consumers have the right that if those systems are onerous, they just don't have to buy them. So the fair usage issue gets sorted out by the market. - Glenn Edens, Director, Sun Labs
This is a foolhardy assumption. The entire reason that the content industry plays the way they do is to ensure that there is no consumer choice when it comes to DRM. They use the legislature to enforce particular DRM schemes on the public. They collude in I-can't-see-how-this-is-legal associations to ensure that whatever DRM scheme is used is burdened with licensing terms to prevent electronics manufacturers from making playback devices that permit the full scope of fair use or that don't impose non-piracy restrictions on the end user, and those licensing restrictions are given teeth by the even-more-broken patent system. Even the biggest duel of the new millennium - Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD - laid to rest the question of DRM fairly early when both format consortia announced they were using AACS. And none of this is motivated solely (or even primarily) by piracy - the real goals here are to be able to track the end user, to manipulate the international content market, and to force the end user to watch advertising.
(thereby also reducing the need for military expenses), and it would create lots of new economic activity and jobs
Okay, let me get this straight - public and private expenditure to meet environmental regulations is good for the economy, but public expenditure to maintain the military is bad for the economy? Military spending has historically been a big positive for the economy, as long as debt is properly managed. (Admittedly, the debt is certainly not being properly managed at the moment, but the drop in taxable income and the increase in public expenditure to meet new environmental regs wouldn't help that situation out any.)
those other nations are rightfully arguing that it is not fair that the US has achieved its current economic strength by emitting carbon without restrictions and now they are supposed to limit their economies by not being allowed to emit equal amounts of carbon.
If the intent of Kyoto is to help the environment, then fairness shouldn't enter into it. The reason why China and India support Kyoto now is that it gives them a huge comparative advantage over the US, by letting them continue to emit high levels of CO2 at the expense of the environment. The US gets demonized for opposing such an arrangement, while China and India (which are already heavy polluters, and which release far more CO2 per dollar GDP than the US or EU) are defended for supporting an agreement that not only benefits them economically, but also allows them to continue harming the environment.
That's not fair. That's screwed up.
Sadly enough, this is true, more often than not. Here's a related anecdote:
Many years ago - around 1990, as I recall - my original home state of West Virginia was running a significant budget deficit. In response, the governor (Gaston Caperton, or Gas Cap, as we used to call him) and the state legislature decided to pass a few tax edicts. One of these was an ill-fated tree tax where you were taxed based on the number of trees you had on your property. The tax was intended to target the lumber industry, but since much of West Virginia consists of forest, the gnashing of teeth among private citizens forced the repeal of this tax within the year.
But another of these new taxes was a sales tax hike of one percentage point (from 5% to 6%). The tax was touted as being necessary to resolve the budget shortfall, and the public was reassured that it would be a temporary measure.
16 years later, West Virginians are still paying a 6% sales tax.
That said, if the federal income tax were actually replaced by a federal sales tax, as in the income tax repeal and the sales tax levy occurred in the same piece of legislation, I would wholeheartedly support it (as long exemptions for necessities of life were made in some way).
Did you know that the Bush administration has barred climate researchers working for the government from speaking directly to the press?
If you work directly for the gubment, and their policies concerning speaking on behalf of the administration bother you, then quit your job and say whatever you want. There's no scandal of censorship here.
Here's a catchphrase I thought up that just oozes cool. The marketing wonks over at Dell might want to look into using it in a fresh new ad campaign:
"Duuuuude, yer gettin' an Alienware!"
Cheap, small, and good. Pick any two.
Mailing hard drives, tapes, Blu-ray discs, or other removable media is just a high-latency, high-packet-size data link, with routing handled by a parcel courier. Define "offline" in such a way as to exclude sneakernet.
The common usage of "online" doesn't include sneakernet - it's already been defined that way by society. A reasonable person familiar with the Internet knows the difference between online and offline, and knows that a copy on a CD or whatever isn't online, and that's the way the court will look at it.
Besides, the post office has been around for hundreds of years, while the word "online", which is specifically used in the statute, has only been around for just over 50 years. Whatever screwy explanation you might come up with to hammer a round peg into a square hole won't fly in court.
Also interesting is that 1 Penn Plaza only has 57 floors. Maybe the suite numbers go that high - no way to know for sure without someone scouting it out and letting us know - but there's a good chance the address is fake. I checked most of the names listed in the entries with the NY Secretary of State, and none of them came up as legitimate businesses (no surprise there). The only obvious lead left to check, then, are the phone and fax numbers.
For posterity's sake, the address and phone listed in each of those records is shown below.
Address:
One Penn Plaza, #6177
10119 New York
NY
United States
Phone: +1.3472876993
Fax: +1.3472876986
On a purely coincidental side note, WhenU has an office in that building; and a similar phone number - (347) 287-6901 - showed up as being used in a Nigerian scam e-mail. Almost certainly no connection, but sometimes it's fun to dust off the ol' tin foil hat.
Webaroo and their proposed product do not meet many of the qualifications required to fit under 17 USC 512(b). In particular, the storage of the cache is not "temporary" or "intermediate", since the entire cache is made available wholesale to the end user in permanent form. Webaroo does not qualify as a "service provider" when talking about this cache, because the cache is made available offline.
And aside from those problems, Webaroo would find itself in hot water if anyone decided to enforce 512(b)(2)(E) against them, since it would be impossible to guarantee that all copies of the cache had been updated.
That's no moon.... that's a space station!
I dunno, it seems like there'd be a lot of false positives from vomit shorting out people's keyboards.
I agree wholeheartedly. Other things that shouldn't be possible: specifying a window as never having scrollbars, specifying a window as non-resizeable, or changing the behavior of a right-click to anything other than causing the context menu to appear.
Since only SCO knows what its claims are, requiring such an exercise of IBM would be as senseless and unfair as it would be Herculean.
Wait a second.... who ever said that SCO knows what its claims are?
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
If there are two influences at work - one, a tendency to go where there is some chemical, and two, a tendency to avoid going where that chemical is too strong - then it is possible for the roaches to end up not filling every shelter available, depending on what happens very early on in the experiment. That is, if a roach goes into each shelter right away, then there'll be a good chance that all three shelters will end up with some roaches in them. If a roach only goes into two of the three shelters, then it's likely that the remaining roaches will follow the chemical gradient and only end up in those two shelters. (In such a situation, if the shelters are too small, eventually the roaches would stop going into the occupied shelters and start going into the empty one.)
Obviously, a blurb on the Discovery Channel website isn't the same as going to PNAS and reading the article for oneself, but from what little info was provided there, it doesn't seem to me that actual communication is necessarily what's going on.
In the case of parceling out a population of roaches into equal-size subpopulations, well, cockroaches stink. Er, that is, they emit chemicals into the air, and an individual cockroach may be able to detect the concentration of such a chemical as it approaches multiple sheltered areas to determine which area is occupied a little bit but not too much. The experimenter should attempt to determine what chemical accounts for such behavior and determine what concentrations are attractive or repulsive to roaches. This doesn't necessarily convey communication, because if the same chemical governs the entire behavior, then each individual cockroach isn't really conveying any information about the state of the colony in a shelter. The information results as the emergent property of having a lot of cockroaches in the same space.
In the case of roaches determining whether a cockroach is kin or not, this may be governed by similar chemicals which vary slightly among the world population of cockroaches. The same determination is made by single-celled organisms, which respond differently to the presence of certain proteins in the cell membrane. This doesn't indicate that actual communication is taking place, but rather that one cockroach is able to detect chemicals that the other cockroach would be emitting regardless of whether the two were interacting or not.
One has to be careful when deciding whether a phenomenon is explained by communication or not, because there may be many definitions of communication. Is it communication when one organism does something while oblivious to the reasons why it's doing it, and the results of that action later affect another organism? Does communication require the direct interaction of two organisms? Must the behaviors of both organisms - both emitting and receiving the signal - be neurally based, or can one or both actions be the result of a purely mechanical property of the organisms? Do the organisms have to be aware of the information they are sending or receiving (and there you bring in another ball of wax, because what constitutes awareness)?
Ethanol may not eliminate CO2 emissions, but it will reduce them, and requires very little change in infrastructure compared to electric or hydrogen vehicles. It would (should) be meant as a stopgap until technology and infrastructure can catch up with environmental needs.
Zoidberg: They're tastier than an unguarded penguin nest. What do you call them?
Leela: We haven't thought of a name yet.
Bender: They're tasty, right? Let's call 'em "Tasticles".
Hermes: *gasp*
Amy: Ew!
Farnsworth: No!
Leela: We can't call them that.
Bender: Why not?
Leela: It sounds too much like those frozen Rocky Mountain oysters on a stick. You know, "Testsicles"?
If Google decides to go along with music industry pricing, how does that benefit the music industry any more than Napster or other online stores that have bent to their will? As long as iTMS is still around and still pricing their music the same way, the public will still decide which pricing model they prefer.