Re:Do you hear the Trademark lawyers running?
on
The ROBOlympic Games
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· Score: 1
The USOC even has something than the usual trademark, they've got The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act that gives them specific rights to use of the words "Olympic", "Olympiad", "Citius Altius Fortius", "Paralympic", "Paralympiad", "Pan-American", and "America Espirito Sport Fraternite".
TechTV aired the UK series for a while, and they also aquired the rights to produce a US-based version of the series. I know TechTV had tickets to give away to this event but I'm not sure if TechTV is going to be televising this event in the form of a future weekly series...
WRAL-TV in Raleigh is broadcasting every game of the this year's NCAA Tournament over the air in HD. But you still need the receiver to get it...
CBS isn't even producing every game in HD, just the games in the later rounds when there's only one game going on at a time.
What WRAL is doing is they're using digital subcariers to broadcast the 2 or 3 games that are goign on that aren't on their main station because another game is. There can be up to 37 of the 63 games that fall into that category, all of which are during the first three rounds. These are the same games that DirecTV's Mega March Madness package would get you access to for $49.
I wonder whether corporations as big as Novell can survive in a "world without information boundaries". I'd expect that in such a world, networks of smaller (much more nible) companies will rule.
I'm not sure what that phrase means other than being marketing fluff. No information boundries would me no infomation security, right?
"One person, one vote" isn't even the U.S. Presidential election system... People don't directly vote for candidates for president, they vote for a panel of electors sworn to vote for a candidate to represent their state. There have been several cases in U.S. history where the candidate with the most popular votes isn't the one who wins because their support was not evenly enough distributed accross the map and another candidate caputres more electoral votes.
It seems like these Diebold systems have all sorts of features like smart cards and locks that make them look secure, but when you actually kick the tires you realize things are not as secure as they should be.
We'd be much better off with a system that produces prints a human readable and machine readable piece of paper, and then put those pieces of paper into a ballot box. At least, when the security of a box in plain sight gets compromised we know that something happened... the worst case here is swearing in a losing candidate.
That depends on what you consider to be in the "public interest."
Sure, my scheme would have to have a written out definition of what counts as a public interest program so that the losing station can be determined by a mathematical calculation. The way I'd do it is to have a list of ways a program can be certified as public interest programming such as a news program produced within the station's area, a political debate between viable candidates in an upcoming election, an educational program certified by specific educational authorites, or public service announcements generated by the Ad Council.
I'd also favor the stations that don't bury such programs in the middle of the night. The basic formula would be time spent broadcasting public interest content times the rating in that timeslot. You can't serve the public interest if the public isn't interested in what you're broadcasting.
the FCC auctions off bands of frequencies to companies all the time.
Right. But most TV stations have never had to buy the rights to their licenses at an auction. In the early days of broadcasting, radio and TV licenses were handed out to anybody who thought they could make a viable business out of it, and so long as they keep a signal on the air and don't seriously violate FCC rules, stations are allowed to renew their license infinitely. In fact, station owners are allowed to sell their licenses with nothing but a small transfer fee payable to the FCC and a rather trivial approval processes to make sure that the new owner can hold the license.
So, while TV stations are allowed to operate a for-profit business, they don't have to pay for their licenses... licenses don't come up for auction like cell phone frequences have been auctioned.
Personally, I'd love to see it an FCC rule that whenever a market worth of TV stations come up for a renewal, the station that has done the least to serve the public interest during the previous license period doesn't get renewed and their license goes up for bids in an auction. The booted company can try to buy their license back, but the idea is that this would make a shop-at-home TV station a lot more expensive to operate.
If they're using KULC's bandwidth, then the three cable networks that are going over that station are going to need some help...
An educational station can lease out its bandwidth to commercial ventures, but it cannot broadcast commercial announcements. For FCC purposes, the defintion of a commercial announcement on an educational station is anything that mentions either the prices of products for sale, a competitor, or make a comparitive statement like saying they are the "best" at something. It's a subtile qualification, it means that most ads on commerical TV would fly on an educational station... however every ad that steps over the line would set the station up for a fine.
I guess the uncharted territory here is the question over whether an ad on an encrypted subchannel would be able to cause problem. The FCC's never had to rule on such a situation... but I have a feeling they're not going to like it.
I live near SLC and was looking for a cheaper way to get HDTV..
I just hope these guys pickup cartoon network soon.
Prepare to be disapointed. This thing doesn't offer any HDTV that isn't already available over the air. Their 10 pay channels are all non-HDTV channels.
And as to picking up more channels... that's doubtful. It's hard to squeeze much more than 3 or 4 extra channels onto a digital TV signal, so they need 3 or 4 local broadcasters to help them out. They won't be adding any more channels because they won't have anywhere to put them.
But so much for passing the savings onto the customer. This service only offers 10 encrypted channels for $19.99. People might think that there's 30 stations coming out of their box, but about 20 of them are free over-the-air digital channels including the digital subchannels that you don't see with an analog tuner, but are decodable by any digital tuner.
USDTV only really adds 10 channels that you can't get with a normal digital TV decoder. Namely, Disney Channel, Toon Disney, Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network, HGTV, Food Network, ESPN, ESPN2, Discovery Channel and TLC.
Everything else they list on this page are channels that can be plucked out of the air with a standard digital TV tuner in the Salt Lake City area. So, in effect, viewers are paying $19.95 to get 10 channels... roughly $2 per channel.
It looks like they're going to use a smart-card based decoder just like DirecTV and Dish Network are using. You can pluck their signal out of the air with no problem, but figuring out what to do with it to squeeze the content out won't be so simple.
It's more or less "idle bandwidth" that they're talking about. Every TV station should have a digital transmitter up by now, but not every TV station has HDTV content to put on it. Affiliates of Univision, Telemundo, Pax, Shop-At-Home and ShopNBC simply have no HDTV programs to put on their signals, so why not sell their wasted bandwidth cycles to this thing...
Your line of argument raises the whole nannyism question. Is the lack of a picture phone really going to impede someone bent on doing the unethical?
In the case of a physically secure environment, one where your bags have to be checked on the way in and out, any data storage device of any kind is going to have to be explained at the checkpoints. They're not going to let you have a CD-R burner at your desk, etc.
The ultimate fear in such an enviroment is data leaving by airwave. Bluetooth is a mighty scary thing for administrators in such an environment, in that a bluetooth wireless mouse's access point could talk to a bluetooth cell phone, and then that cell phone can make a connection to the untrusted world. That'd could even worse than somebody taking a picture of their display with classifed info up.
When secure environments are being discussed, nobody's ever considered fully trusted.
One thing to point out would be where you lose your ability to be notified. For example, a "The server is getting slow!" e-mail can cover you at your desk, but who's going to pull you out of the meeting room if something breaks when you're in a meeting? The whole point is to know of a problem before users experience an outage, because outages can waste the employee time of a whole company.
To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
So long as somebody's answering the main switchboard at the company front desk, you're not out of contact. Just leave your personal phone in your car, and make sure your family knows your office's number to try during business hours.
One of my former employers had to implement a ban on personal devices unless otherwise approved because the salespeople were all bringing in personal laptops and wanting to use them despite the fact that they had perfectly good computers on their desks. This was getting to the point that they were starting to trip the circuit breaker and taking the entire room's power down.
The reason they wanted to use their own laptops became a bit of a turf war. See, these were mostly new sales reps who had worked for other companies before joining ours. They wanted to keep their sales contact list on their own laptop so they could bring it from employer to employer. The company wanted them to store their sales leads only on the company server because even though sales reps could only see their own accounts, when a rep leaves it becomes very easy to split their leads list among other reps and also limits the outgoing rep's ability to contact their existing accounts under a new employer.
The IT department's offer was to convert any contact database into our system. We never did get any reps who took us up on that, but some left in protest of being unable to keep their laptops up-to-date.
I think they're just ranking by distance and returning whatever the best 10 are. If the nearest result is 30 miles away, they return that one first instead of saying "Sorry, nothing within 10 miles, try a bigger range." If a 30-miles-away answer isn't acceptable to you, then you can determine for yourself that there are no useful results.
What it appears Google is doing is taking whenever it gets a zipcode or phone number or city/state mention in its master web search database, they're mapping it to its GPS coordinates. For this search, they're tossing asside any results that don't have a GPS location determined, and then instead of ranking by PageRank order they're ranking by distance from the user-supplied location and the page's location.
It's not a bad idea. Seems to have a few bugs in it, but that's why this is a Google Labs page rather than one that's on the main site.
RSS is "Really Simple Syndication" and it's best thought of as a spinoff to XML. It's a language under which blog-type news-channels can publish their content using, and then the user can use an RSS client that can group stories together into whatever sequence the user wants to see.
It's also seen as a effective way to replace e-mail mailing lists. Instead of getting your newsletters in your e-mail client, open them up in your RSS client which works on a pull basis rather than a push basis, but can still present the content to the user just like an e-mail program might.
It's very different than Active Desktop... that was just the idea of letting IE browser windows be part of the Windows Desktop level so that users could have a frequently-refreshed mini-page of content on their desktop.
If you devide the costs of a dorm room connection over the length of time of a whole school year, you'll often find that you're paying less than they typical cable/DSL costs for far more bandwidth than you ever get from a consumer service.
Face it, desipre the fact that you're paying through the noze, your whole college life is still subsidized by government grants, donations to your school, and corperations paying to make impressions on students to affect buying decisions throughout life. Without those sources of income, tuition would cost even more than it does already.
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The USOC even has something than the usual trademark, they've got The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act that gives them specific rights to use of the words "Olympic", "Olympiad", "Citius Altius Fortius", "Paralympic", "Paralympiad", "Pan-American", and "America Espirito Sport Fraternite".
TechTV aired the UK series for a while, and they also aquired the rights to produce a US-based version of the series. I know TechTV had tickets to give away to this event but I'm not sure if TechTV is going to be televising this event in the form of a future weekly series...
WRAL-TV in Raleigh is broadcasting every game of the this year's NCAA Tournament over the air in HD. But you still need the receiver to get it...
CBS isn't even producing every game in HD, just the games in the later rounds when there's only one game going on at a time.
What WRAL is doing is they're using digital subcariers to broadcast the 2 or 3 games that are goign on that aren't on their main station because another game is. There can be up to 37 of the 63 games that fall into that category, all of which are during the first three rounds. These are the same games that DirecTV's Mega March Madness package would get you access to for $49.
I wonder whether corporations as big as Novell can survive in a "world without information boundaries". I'd expect that in such a world, networks of smaller (much more nible) companies will rule.
I'm not sure what that phrase means other than being marketing fluff. No information boundries would me no infomation security, right?
"One person, one vote" isn't even the U.S. Presidential election system... People don't directly vote for candidates for president, they vote for a panel of electors sworn to vote for a candidate to represent their state. There have been several cases in U.S. history where the candidate with the most popular votes isn't the one who wins because their support was not evenly enough distributed accross the map and another candidate caputres more electoral votes.
There's no recount possible. If you doubt the number's they're outputting, there's no way to challenge the number for validity.
No hanging chad problems... but no pieces of paper at all to count wasn't the solution we were looking for.
It seems like these Diebold systems have all sorts of features like smart cards and locks that make them look secure, but when you actually kick the tires you realize things are not as secure as they should be.
We'd be much better off with a system that produces prints a human readable and machine readable piece of paper, and then put those pieces of paper into a ballot box. At least, when the security of a box in plain sight gets compromised we know that something happened... the worst case here is swearing in a losing candidate.
Wouldn't the loser be more likely to complain?
That depends on what you consider to be in the "public interest."
Sure, my scheme would have to have a written out definition of what counts as a public interest program so that the losing station can be determined by a mathematical calculation. The way I'd do it is to have a list of ways a program can be certified as public interest programming such as a news program produced within the station's area, a political debate between viable candidates in an upcoming election, an educational program certified by specific educational authorites, or public service announcements generated by the Ad Council.
I'd also favor the stations that don't bury such programs in the middle of the night. The basic formula would be time spent broadcasting public interest content times the rating in that timeslot. You can't serve the public interest if the public isn't interested in what you're broadcasting.
the FCC auctions off bands of frequencies to companies all the time.
Right. But most TV stations have never had to buy the rights to their licenses at an auction. In the early days of broadcasting, radio and TV licenses were handed out to anybody who thought they could make a viable business out of it, and so long as they keep a signal on the air and don't seriously violate FCC rules, stations are allowed to renew their license infinitely. In fact, station owners are allowed to sell their licenses with nothing but a small transfer fee payable to the FCC and a rather trivial approval processes to make sure that the new owner can hold the license.
So, while TV stations are allowed to operate a for-profit business, they don't have to pay for their licenses... licenses don't come up for auction like cell phone frequences have been auctioned.
Personally, I'd love to see it an FCC rule that whenever a market worth of TV stations come up for a renewal, the station that has done the least to serve the public interest during the previous license period doesn't get renewed and their license goes up for bids in an auction. The booted company can try to buy their license back, but the idea is that this would make a shop-at-home TV station a lot more expensive to operate.
If they're using KULC's bandwidth, then the three cable networks that are going over that station are going to need some help...
An educational station can lease out its bandwidth to commercial ventures, but it cannot broadcast commercial announcements. For FCC purposes, the defintion of a commercial announcement on an educational station is anything that mentions either the prices of products for sale, a competitor, or make a comparitive statement like saying they are the "best" at something. It's a subtile qualification, it means that most ads on commerical TV would fly on an educational station... however every ad that steps over the line would set the station up for a fine.
I guess the uncharted territory here is the question over whether an ad on an encrypted subchannel would be able to cause problem. The FCC's never had to rule on such a situation... but I have a feeling they're not going to like it.
I live near SLC and was looking for a cheaper way to get HDTV..
I just hope these guys pickup cartoon network soon.
Prepare to be disapointed. This thing doesn't offer any HDTV that isn't already available over the air. Their 10 pay channels are all non-HDTV channels.
And as to picking up more channels... that's doubtful. It's hard to squeeze much more than 3 or 4 extra channels onto a digital TV signal, so they need 3 or 4 local broadcasters to help them out. They won't be adding any more channels because they won't have anywhere to put them.
But so much for passing the savings onto the customer. This service only offers 10 encrypted channels for $19.99. People might think that there's 30 stations coming out of their box, but about 20 of them are free over-the-air digital channels including the digital subchannels that you don't see with an analog tuner, but are decodable by any digital tuner.
USDTV only really adds 10 channels that you can't get with a normal digital TV decoder. Namely, Disney Channel, Toon Disney, Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network, HGTV, Food Network, ESPN, ESPN2, Discovery Channel and TLC.
Everything else they list on this page are channels that can be plucked out of the air with a standard digital TV tuner in the Salt Lake City area. So, in effect, viewers are paying $19.95 to get 10 channels... roughly $2 per channel.
It looks like they're going to use a smart-card based decoder just like DirecTV and Dish Network are using. You can pluck their signal out of the air with no problem, but figuring out what to do with it to squeeze the content out won't be so simple.
It's more or less "idle bandwidth" that they're talking about. Every TV station should have a digital transmitter up by now, but not every TV station has HDTV content to put on it. Affiliates of Univision, Telemundo, Pax, Shop-At-Home and ShopNBC simply have no HDTV programs to put on their signals, so why not sell their wasted bandwidth cycles to this thing...
Seems like there needs to be a phone extention placed in the datacenter and meeting room so that at least an all-building page reaches those spots.
Your line of argument raises the whole nannyism question. Is the lack of a picture phone really going to impede someone bent on doing the unethical?
In the case of a physically secure environment, one where your bags have to be checked on the way in and out, any data storage device of any kind is going to have to be explained at the checkpoints. They're not going to let you have a CD-R burner at your desk, etc.
The ultimate fear in such an enviroment is data leaving by airwave. Bluetooth is a mighty scary thing for administrators in such an environment, in that a bluetooth wireless mouse's access point could talk to a bluetooth cell phone, and then that cell phone can make a connection to the untrusted world. That'd could even worse than somebody taking a picture of their display with classifed info up.
When secure environments are being discussed, nobody's ever considered fully trusted.
One thing to point out would be where you lose your ability to be notified. For example, a "The server is getting slow!" e-mail can cover you at your desk, but who's going to pull you out of the meeting room if something breaks when you're in a meeting? The whole point is to know of a problem before users experience an outage, because outages can waste the employee time of a whole company.
To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
So long as somebody's answering the main switchboard at the company front desk, you're not out of contact. Just leave your personal phone in your car, and make sure your family knows your office's number to try during business hours.
One of my former employers had to implement a ban on personal devices unless otherwise approved because the salespeople were all bringing in personal laptops and wanting to use them despite the fact that they had perfectly good computers on their desks. This was getting to the point that they were starting to trip the circuit breaker and taking the entire room's power down.
The reason they wanted to use their own laptops became a bit of a turf war. See, these were mostly new sales reps who had worked for other companies before joining ours. They wanted to keep their sales contact list on their own laptop so they could bring it from employer to employer. The company wanted them to store their sales leads only on the company server because even though sales reps could only see their own accounts, when a rep leaves it becomes very easy to split their leads list among other reps and also limits the outgoing rep's ability to contact their existing accounts under a new employer.
The IT department's offer was to convert any contact database into our system. We never did get any reps who took us up on that, but some left in protest of being unable to keep their laptops up-to-date.
I think they're just ranking by distance and returning whatever the best 10 are. If the nearest result is 30 miles away, they return that one first instead of saying "Sorry, nothing within 10 miles, try a bigger range." If a 30-miles-away answer isn't acceptable to you, then you can determine for yourself that there are no useful results.
What it appears Google is doing is taking whenever it gets a zipcode or phone number or city/state mention in its master web search database, they're mapping it to its GPS coordinates. For this search, they're tossing asside any results that don't have a GPS location determined, and then instead of ranking by PageRank order they're ranking by distance from the user-supplied location and the page's location.
It's not a bad idea. Seems to have a few bugs in it, but that's why this is a Google Labs page rather than one that's on the main site.
RSS is "Really Simple Syndication" and it's best thought of as a spinoff to XML. It's a language under which blog-type news-channels can publish their content using, and then the user can use an RSS client that can group stories together into whatever sequence the user wants to see.
It's also seen as a effective way to replace e-mail mailing lists. Instead of getting your newsletters in your e-mail client, open them up in your RSS client which works on a pull basis rather than a push basis, but can still present the content to the user just like an e-mail program might.
It's very different than Active Desktop... that was just the idea of letting IE browser windows be part of the Windows Desktop level so that users could have a frequently-refreshed mini-page of content on their desktop.
If you devide the costs of a dorm room connection over the length of time of a whole school year, you'll often find that you're paying less than they typical cable/DSL costs for far more bandwidth than you ever get from a consumer service.
Face it, desipre the fact that you're paying through the noze, your whole college life is still subsidized by government grants, donations to your school, and corperations paying to make impressions on students to affect buying decisions throughout life. Without those sources of income, tuition would cost even more than it does already.