I realize the article is primarily about the EU. But it's also about software patents, and being a citizen of the US, I'm interested in what I as a mere citizen can do to fight for patent reform (the kind against software patents, of course) in my country. And considering that there's a strong tendency to legislate through treaty these days, especially between the US and UK, and especially in the realms of IP law, a success against software patents in the US is a success for the world in general.
Anyway....
Are there any US Representatives or Senators who have USPTO reform and the elimination of software patents on their agendas? Are there any who support the OSS and/or Free Software movements? Is there a process by which individual US citizens can file prior art claims against patents (either in the application stage or after granting them) without spending a god-awful amount of money on legal representation, and if so, how does that process work? Are there any industry players (other than Linus and others in the Free Software arena) who have come out as supporting the elimination of software patents?
I guess, in total, I'm asking this: is my time/effort/money better spent as an individual citizen on this issue, or should I just give my dollars to the EFF and let them fight on my behalf?
Decentralization is generally useful for any application where failure of some critical node results in failure of the entire transaction. Distribution of any data via bittorrent will benefit - regardless of content - if there is a possibility that a tracker host could fail.
You could hotkey inventory items, but that would take up hotkey slots - and unless you're pretty good at switching from one hotkey group to another, hotkey slots are at a premium. Also, you *can't* swap weapons via one button-push, though you could waste hotkey slots and main inventory slots to accomplish this by putting your equipment slot and a main inventory slot on a hotkey and then clicking the swapped items between them.
Also, you really missed out on LDoN. 'Twas the best thing to happen to EQ since Velious. Of course, then they went and screwed things up with GoD and OoW, just in time for EQ2 and WoW to come out.
Except that in "cookbooks and reference titles" the relevant material is chunked up into small sections which can stand alone, much like individual tracks from a CD. Bezos's comment was that people weren't just ripping off the individual available quanta of information, they were using it to determine whether the rest of the book was worth purchasing.
The problem is that the "mainstream" distribution channels for previewed music are severely biased. Music industry execs don't hype the suck-ass tracks on their new albums - they pick and choose the tracks that they assume will generate the most sales. One reason they don't want people to be able to hear the other tracks is that they're worried that because their artists lack enough talent to put out an album with 9 out of 11 good tracks, people won't buy the album at all if they had better information.
The only real indication that the RIAA is starting to realize that control != better sales is services like iTunes, which (a) let you preview tracks before buying, and (b) let you pick and choose the tracks you want to pay for. iTunes has been a phenomenal success, at the same time as CD sales have increased *and* p2p downloads have increased, which leads me to believe that a better informed customer base is more likely to spend money than a less informed one.
We wondered about things like cookbooks and reference titles - would people just take the snippet they need and not buy the book? In fact, by letting people search inside, sales of these types of books have gone up more than average.
It's not quite as bad as Fox News yet though, so I can't complain too much. When I start seeing Bush/Cheney ads instead of Thinkgeek ads at the top of my page, I'm outta here.
And oddly enough, without including this in your description of Slashdot's bias at all, you exemplified it as a very strong part of Slashdot's bias.
I mean, he can drive a car. He's got a job. But you have to accompany him to buy Grand Theft Auto? Lame.
Parents *should* have to accompany their minor children to buy a game like GTA. The question is whether the policy should be voluntarily implemented by retailers or enforced by law.
Remember that for pretty much all of those games with huge populations, there are many servers running the game. You can't interact from one server to another, so it doesn't really matter if a game has 2 billion people playing it when only 10,000 of them inhabit any one server.
Besides, the defining quality of "Massively" multiplayer games isn't that zillions of people can play, but rather that it's significantly bigger than something like Diablo 2 where lots of people play on battle.net, but only 8 people can join one game at a time.
Bad form to reply to my own post, but according to the EFF, the FCC isn't regulating broadcast flag for cable/satellite applications, but evidently the MPAA has convinced the cable industry to roll over on its own. I suppose that wouldn't necessarily stop a "rogue" manufacturer from releasing a nonconforming product which accepts cable cards and does the QAM decryption but which doesn't force restrictions based on a broadcast flag.
What I'm hoping for is a TV capture card (i.e., the kind that sits in your PC or Mac) that is digital cable ready (which would mean that it accepts a Cable Card).
Of course, I'm really hoping one of these gets released before the middle of this year, when the FCC pretends it's Congress and mandates broadcast flag recognition.
You say you prepare food upon occasion, yes? And you're enough of a geek to read/. and tech journals? Then I suggest Alton Brown's "Good Eats" show on Food Network. Alton explains the ever-so-elusive *why* of cooking, not just the how, in a way that I and several of my engineering friends enjoy.
(For the record, no, I don't work for Food Network;) )
That's okay. It isn't actually law in the US, either. Rather, this is an example of an executive-branch agency (the FCC) attempting to emulate legislation - and then, over a domain where their jurisdiction is anywhere from tenuous to nonexistent.
Obviously, Gates intends to make the allusion that these people are big-C Communists (whose motivation is to keep themselves in power through suppression of the masses), rather than little-c communists (whose motivation is to serve the people through suppression of those currently in power). He's playing off the ignorant knee-jerk reaction of most Americans to equate the word "Communism" with "Evil" (Stalin did, after all, kill millions of his own people).
My question is, how does this solve the "problem" of piracy at all? Suppose I'm one of those 0-day (or -2 month) pirates who rips pre-release DVDs and posts them to the Intarweb. I hack a key out of X DVD player, and use it to do the rips. But I'm smart - I *never tell anybody* what key I ripped. The movie industry doesn't know their key is compromised.
Now, what this *does* do is further stifle the Open Source movement, by making the publishing of a key in a legitimate piece of OSS (such as a Linux-based DVD player) a "bad thing". Ultimately, this isn't about piracy prevention - yet again, it's about content control. The industry doesn't want the consumer to have any control over the content they view, and they'll do whatever they can to prevent an Open Source solution from emerging, because it takes the control out of their hands.
If the concept is so simple to explain (and it is, because you just did it), why was that explanation not included in the article? Instead, they introduce this "folksonomies" term, give an eight-word definition that includes two terms (bottom-up and taxonomies) which need further explanation to put them in the proper context, and expect everybody to understand what's being talked about.
That's a reasonable price for trashing your old computer and buying a new one, which is what far too many people do when their computer slows to a crawl from having all that spy/adware crud on there.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, that's nothing compared to getting to heaven and having God say, "Do you realize how many kittens I had to kill because of you?!"
Gamers are human? I knew that.
Now, Slashdotters, on the other hand....
I realize the article is primarily about the EU. But it's also about software patents, and being a citizen of the US, I'm interested in what I as a mere citizen can do to fight for patent reform (the kind against software patents, of course) in my country. And considering that there's a strong tendency to legislate through treaty these days, especially between the US and UK, and especially in the realms of IP law, a success against software patents in the US is a success for the world in general.
Anyway....
Are there any US Representatives or Senators who have USPTO reform and the elimination of software patents on their agendas? Are there any who support the OSS and/or Free Software movements? Is there a process by which individual US citizens can file prior art claims against patents (either in the application stage or after granting them) without spending a god-awful amount of money on legal representation, and if so, how does that process work? Are there any industry players (other than Linus and others in the Free Software arena) who have come out as supporting the elimination of software patents?
I guess, in total, I'm asking this: is my time/effort/money better spent as an individual citizen on this issue, or should I just give my dollars to the EFF and let them fight on my behalf?
Decentralization is generally useful for any application where failure of some critical node results in failure of the entire transaction. Distribution of any data via bittorrent will benefit - regardless of content - if there is a possibility that a tracker host could fail.
You could hotkey inventory items, but that would take up hotkey slots - and unless you're pretty good at switching from one hotkey group to another, hotkey slots are at a premium. Also, you *can't* swap weapons via one button-push, though you could waste hotkey slots and main inventory slots to accomplish this by putting your equipment slot and a main inventory slot on a hotkey and then clicking the swapped items between them.
Also, you really missed out on LDoN. 'Twas the best thing to happen to EQ since Velious. Of course, then they went and screwed things up with GoD and OoW, just in time for EQ2 and WoW to come out.
You have to admit, though, that Bush was the biggest reason for the high turnout in 2004.
You know, you'd think that Slashdotters would be more interested in seeing one gigantic thing ramming into another gigantic thing.
Oh, wait, there won't be any fire and explosions. Never mind.
Except that in "cookbooks and reference titles" the relevant material is chunked up into small sections which can stand alone, much like individual tracks from a CD. Bezos's comment was that people weren't just ripping off the individual available quanta of information, they were using it to determine whether the rest of the book was worth purchasing.
The problem is that the "mainstream" distribution channels for previewed music are severely biased. Music industry execs don't hype the suck-ass tracks on their new albums - they pick and choose the tracks that they assume will generate the most sales. One reason they don't want people to be able to hear the other tracks is that they're worried that because their artists lack enough talent to put out an album with 9 out of 11 good tracks, people won't buy the album at all if they had better information.
The only real indication that the RIAA is starting to realize that control != better sales is services like iTunes, which (a) let you preview tracks before buying, and (b) let you pick and choose the tracks you want to pay for. iTunes has been a phenomenal success, at the same time as CD sales have increased *and* p2p downloads have increased, which leads me to believe that a better informed customer base is more likely to spend money than a less informed one.
I am but a poor unfrozen caveman Slashdot poster. Your modern logic confuses and frightens me.
We wondered about things like cookbooks and reference titles - would people just take the snippet they need and not buy the book? In fact, by letting people search inside, sales of these types of books have gone up more than average.
It's not quite as bad as Fox News yet though, so I can't complain too much. When I start seeing Bush/Cheney ads instead of Thinkgeek ads at the top of my page, I'm outta here.
And oddly enough, without including this in your description of Slashdot's bias at all, you exemplified it as a very strong part of Slashdot's bias.
I mean, he can drive a car. He's got a job. But you have to accompany him to buy Grand Theft Auto? Lame.
Parents *should* have to accompany their minor children to buy a game like GTA. The question is whether the policy should be voluntarily implemented by retailers or enforced by law.
If we had a flat tax or got rid of deductions, then the need to file would be almost nonexistent.
The same would be true if we replaced our horrible income tax scheme with a federal sales tax.
Colombia is 95% Catholic, yet they have a massive, massive drug problem. And they have terrorism too. Should I blame Christianity?
Last time I checked, Colombia wasn't a theocracy.
As with all good vaporware code, they haven't finished writing it.
Remember that for pretty much all of those games with huge populations, there are many servers running the game. You can't interact from one server to another, so it doesn't really matter if a game has 2 billion people playing it when only 10,000 of them inhabit any one server.
Besides, the defining quality of "Massively" multiplayer games isn't that zillions of people can play, but rather that it's significantly bigger than something like Diablo 2 where lots of people play on battle.net, but only 8 people can join one game at a time.
Have you ever tried to be a "Verbose PK" in UO?
You mean "HAHA PWNED NOOB!!!!!11" doesn't count?
Bad form to reply to my own post, but according to the EFF, the FCC isn't regulating broadcast flag for cable/satellite applications, but evidently the MPAA has convinced the cable industry to roll over on its own. I suppose that wouldn't necessarily stop a "rogue" manufacturer from releasing a nonconforming product which accepts cable cards and does the QAM decryption but which doesn't force restrictions based on a broadcast flag.
What I'm hoping for is a TV capture card (i.e., the kind that sits in your PC or Mac) that is digital cable ready (which would mean that it accepts a Cable Card).
Of course, I'm really hoping one of these gets released before the middle of this year, when the FCC pretends it's Congress and mandates broadcast flag recognition.
You say you prepare food upon occasion, yes? And you're enough of a geek to read /. and tech journals? Then I suggest Alton Brown's "Good Eats" show on Food Network. Alton explains the ever-so-elusive *why* of cooking, not just the how, in a way that I and several of my engineering friends enjoy.
;) )
(For the record, no, I don't work for Food Network
That's okay. It isn't actually law in the US, either. Rather, this is an example of an executive-branch agency (the FCC) attempting to emulate legislation - and then, over a domain where their jurisdiction is anywhere from tenuous to nonexistent.
Obviously, Gates intends to make the allusion that these people are big-C Communists (whose motivation is to keep themselves in power through suppression of the masses), rather than little-c communists (whose motivation is to serve the people through suppression of those currently in power). He's playing off the ignorant knee-jerk reaction of most Americans to equate the word
"Communism" with "Evil" (Stalin did, after all, kill millions of his own people).
My question is, how does this solve the "problem" of piracy at all? Suppose I'm one of those 0-day (or -2 month) pirates who rips pre-release DVDs and posts them to the Intarweb. I hack a key out of X DVD player, and use it to do the rips. But I'm smart - I *never tell anybody* what key I ripped. The movie industry doesn't know their key is compromised.
Now, what this *does* do is further stifle the Open Source movement, by making the publishing of a key in a legitimate piece of OSS (such as a Linux-based DVD player) a "bad thing". Ultimately, this isn't about piracy prevention - yet again, it's about content control. The industry doesn't want the consumer to have any control over the content they view, and they'll do whatever they can to prevent an Open Source solution from emerging, because it takes the control out of their hands.
If the concept is so simple to explain (and it is, because you just did it), why was that explanation not included in the article? Instead, they introduce this "folksonomies" term, give an eight-word definition that includes two terms (bottom-up and taxonomies) which need further explanation to put them in the proper context, and expect everybody to understand what's being talked about.
That's a reasonable price for trashing your old computer and buying a new one, which is what far too many people do when their computer slows to a crawl from having all that spy/adware crud on there.