Come on, that's an off-the-wall conspiracy theory....
The real problem is the old saying of of "Information wants to be free." Major movie releases are mega-hyped events where the content is something that is kept out of public view until the designated day, hour, minute of a moment, but within the process has to pass through the hands of thousands of people. It takes only one person to make an unauthorized copy at that level to get it onto the P2P networks.
AT&T Broadband was not the smartest player in the cable industry. They sold $500 items for $300 among other dumb offers... and ended up in financial crisis. It took being bought by the stingy Comcast to save the company from an impending bankruptcy.
This is the cable company's problem, they cannot possibly price-match DBS equipment cost when they're being raped by the holders of the closed digital cable formats at the moment.
It's actually the box makers who don't want consumers buying or anybody else making their own digital cable boxes.
The cable companies want there to be an open standard because buying a 7-year lifespan unit for $500 and renting it for $5 a month is not a profitable business to be in. But, if they wanna run digital cable, they've gotta pick somebody's closed format or it's just not possible today. OpenCable is the solution to that problem. Again, OpenCable doesn't handle DRM control itself, it just leaves a slot for the DRM-soltion-of-choice to be inserted.
Cable will always have a much easier time protecting themselves against piracy because they have the ability to use a different encryption key in each system they operate, where each DBS company only can have one key for the entire nation. Since all forms of encryption are beatable by brute force, it's only a matter of time before the secret keys are discovered. However, the same effort to get one national DBS code will translate to only one cable system's code. Once the crack is realized by the provider, the cable company only has to swap out cards in that one small geographic area rather than the whole nation to make the crackers have to start all over again.
So, basically, Ashcroft and friends want to build a government where those with power can look ingo anything they want, imprision anybody they want...
Wait a second, that's exactly what the Taliban had in Afganistan and Saddam had in Iraq. It's starting to blur the line between who's friend and foe here...
Luckily, the legislative and executive branches can't take away all our liberties alone. The judicial branch still has the chance to strike down any law that goes too far accross the lines of the Constitutional protections. I mean, a court can still order that "the Feds" an give accused terrorist access to question another accused terrorist for evidence to be used in his defense... rule of law hasn't broken down totally around here.
Still, do any of those 10-10-whatever numbers let you buy simply 1 minute of long distance from them per month for less than 50 cents?
They either hit your with a heavy fee for making your first call of the month with them, or they have minimum per-call charge, such as the "first 15 minutes for 99 cents" pricing model that still charges you the full 99 cents for a one minute answering machine message.
Besides... you're not exactly gonna write a check for 99 cents anyway, their charges get tacked onto your standard landline phone bill, which is always greater than $20 anyway...
That's exactly why it would fail. Every "electronic payment" transaction eventually comes back to your credit card or bank account, and that has to be properly documented on your statement. Until our financial service providers completely do away with paper statements, there's no way they're going to get the cost of processing a single transaction low enough... which is why micropayments will always have to be grouped into multi-dollar units.
But/. won't let you buy one page for a half-penny. You have to buy in minimum units of 1000 pages... that means instead of 1000 micropayment transactions you're actually making one normal transaction.
Yes, but they can't collect units smaller than the price of a postage stamp. They can charge-per-view in the form of a subscription environment in the form of buying 100 "points" for $10, but they can't charge 10 cent per view with the option of walking away after the first view because that's a unit that the financial system is just not willing to support.
Let's face it... airline security would be a whole lot easier if they could get rid of most of the damn passengers and have a select group of 20 backround-check cleared people be the only ones flying.
When securing something equals destroying it, you've got a big problem...
The central problem here is that what makes the Internet so great, that there is no central controling authority, is also its downfall. Allowing total annonymity would mean that hit-and-run hackers would be impossible to trace, and the network will fall apart.
The Internet is not really supposed to be one network. It's supposed to be the network-between-networks where each network is supposed to have its own admin responsibile for controling what goes in and out. If somebody on the network is sending out a virus, it's supposed to be the responsibility of the network admin to displine the misbehaving user so the problem gets contained.
But now, the ISPs of the world don't seem to care much about keeping their own networks virus-free, and there's nobody above the ISPs to force them to do their job.
I really think the Internet as we know it will be replaced by another network within the next 20 years. The replacement network will be Internet-like in that it connects multiple providers, but would have authenticated sender-identifying information intrisic in its protocols, so spoofing in all its forms would be killed at the first router it sees outside of the spoofer's control. The orignal protocols like SMTP and FTP were all based on being on a network where everybody played fairly... and clearly that's not the case anymore.
I don't think we need a license for users as much as we need requirements that ISPs crack down on virus-spreaders on their network as much as they crack down on Spammers...
Thing is, the Civic Hybrid also only needs oil changes at every 10,000 too... TDI is a step forward, but it's still a 1.0 technology when Hybrids are at 2.0...
For our American viewers, the tax advantage is a $4000 tax deduction this year that's scheduled step down to $3000 next year an deduction and $2000 the year after that.
Remember though, a deduction doesn't go straight to your wallet (that'd be a credit) so you have to multiply it by your tax rate to see how much real cash you end up with. (You also have to have actually earned $4000 this year to have $4000 to deduct, which may be a problem for some/. readers...)
This is an "above the line" deduction, which means you still get to count it even if you don't "itemize" your deductions and claim the automatic one instead.
I've had the 2003 Civic Hybrid since Feb. and I've been happy with it as well.
The AutoStop feature is exactly as advertised. When the conditions are right and you're coasting towards a red light with your breaks on, the engine cuts. When you lift your foot off the brake, it restarts in the time it takes to get your foot to the gas pedal. Everyone else is burning 0 MPG gas, you're running the radio and fan off of the battery. (BTW... The standard-issue radio sounds great when you totally lose the engine background, not that the engine ever gets loud in the first place.)
This isn't an high-speed acceleration car, but it will get you up to highway speed fast enough to keep up with the crowds.
The gas savings in cash isn't quite enough to make up for the addition to your car payment over the standard Civic, but you can get the warm fuzzy feeling that your overpayment is going to Japan rather than the oil barrons...
Numbers without a counting methodogy are usually worthless. We've got a small article that doesn't even name what "british security company" released the data, and a summary that somehow gets the BBC involved even though they're nowhere to be found in the story.
are they doing tose little google text ads or what?
Bingo... that's got to be the plan. Google already has a powerful advertising system, and it'd be rather trivial to associate ads entry-by-entry with the blogs using the AdSense technology they're already trying out elsewhere.
I'm sure this is a drive to get the Blogger userbase as big as possible, then they'll roll out the ads.
Nope. Copyright violation is both a civil and criminal matter. Most criminal crimes also have a civil component.
(Anybody who committs a murder is also responsible for wrongful death, but what good is being owed money by somebody who's already in jail for life and spent everything they had on a failed defense?)
Or read a newspaper. Companies are prohibited from owning TV or radio stations in the same cities as they own major papers. (WGN and WGN-TV in Chicago being owned by the Tribune Group is an example of a grandfathered situtation... Tribune's USA Today is spread out enough to not count towards any city.) This has prevented the "big 5" media companies from absorbing companies such as Post-Newsweek and The New York Times Company who still remain independent.
You're getting your legal terms confused. It's easy to make an out-of-court settlement for a pending civil claim, even if the claim hasn't even made it to the point of a lawsuit. There are certain things you can't waive before they happen (such as a claim for wrongful death for a deliberate killing) but that's an exception to the general rule
What's impossible is for the RIAA to grant immunity from a criminal prosecution, only the government can do that. Just like a rape victim that tries to pull out of testifying at the trial, the government can still go forward with a prosecution even if the victim of the crime doesn't want to press the charges.
This is even worse than that. You are giving a consideration, because the definition of p2p sharing is so broad that it accidently covers the situation in which you're legally sharing a music file by p2p because the artist has given you permission to. (Somehow, this situation is unthinkable to the RIAA...)
Worse yet, they're the one giving no consideration. It's a settlement with somebody to whom you owe nothing to. It's impossible to share a music file that the RIAA owns the copyright to, the orginazation doesn't own copyrights, it's individual members do.
It's like going to the AAA to settle claim of bodily injury with all of the drivers injured in an incredible 20,000 car pileup that you started. Yeah, it's likely most of the drivers were members, but that still doesn't give the organization the ability to settle on their behalf...
The RIAA is not offering immunity from prosecution, but rather a settlement of the possible civil claim. In the US, there are selected parts of the government who can offer various forms of immunity from criminal charges in exchange for testimony. In fact, it's sometimes even forced upon them. A witness who refuses to testify claiming 5th Amendment protection because their answers would incriminate them could be granted immunity, which would then make their 5th Amendment claim moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, that's an off-the-wall conspiracy theory....
The real problem is the old saying of of "Information wants to be free." Major movie releases are mega-hyped events where the content is something that is kept out of public view until the designated day, hour, minute of a moment, but within the process has to pass through the hands of thousands of people. It takes only one person to make an unauthorized copy at that level to get it onto the P2P networks.
AT&T Broadband was not the smartest player in the cable industry. They sold $500 items for $300 among other dumb offers... and ended up in financial crisis. It took being bought by the stingy Comcast to save the company from an impending bankruptcy.
This is the cable company's problem, they cannot possibly price-match DBS equipment cost when they're being raped by the holders of the closed digital cable formats at the moment.
It's actually the box makers who don't want consumers buying or anybody else making their own digital cable boxes.
The cable companies want there to be an open standard because buying a 7-year lifespan unit for $500 and renting it for $5 a month is not a profitable business to be in. But, if they wanna run digital cable, they've gotta pick somebody's closed format or it's just not possible today. OpenCable is the solution to that problem. Again, OpenCable doesn't handle DRM control itself, it just leaves a slot for the DRM-soltion-of-choice to be inserted.
Cable will always have a much easier time protecting themselves against piracy because they have the ability to use a different encryption key in each system they operate, where each DBS company only can have one key for the entire nation. Since all forms of encryption are beatable by brute force, it's only a matter of time before the secret keys are discovered. However, the same effort to get one national DBS code will translate to only one cable system's code. Once the crack is realized by the provider, the cable company only has to swap out cards in that one small geographic area rather than the whole nation to make the crackers have to start all over again.
So, basically, Ashcroft and friends want to build a government where those with power can look ingo anything they want, imprision anybody they want...
Wait a second, that's exactly what the Taliban had in Afganistan and Saddam had in Iraq. It's starting to blur the line between who's friend and foe here...
Luckily, the legislative and executive branches can't take away all our liberties alone. The judicial branch still has the chance to strike down any law that goes too far accross the lines of the Constitutional protections. I mean, a court can still order that "the Feds" an give accused terrorist access to question another accused terrorist for evidence to be used in his defense... rule of law hasn't broken down totally around here.
Or has it?
Doesn't the average PC with a "voice modem" have the capability to become an autodialer these days?
Been done before, but they all went bankrupt.
Still, do any of those 10-10-whatever numbers let you buy simply 1 minute of long distance from them per month for less than 50 cents?
They either hit your with a heavy fee for making your first call of the month with them, or they have minimum per-call charge, such as the "first 15 minutes for 99 cents" pricing model that still charges you the full 99 cents for a one minute answering machine message.
Besides... you're not exactly gonna write a check for 99 cents anyway, their charges get tacked onto your standard landline phone bill, which is always greater than $20 anyway...
That's exactly why it would fail. Every "electronic payment" transaction eventually comes back to your credit card or bank account, and that has to be properly documented on your statement. Until our financial service providers completely do away with paper statements, there's no way they're going to get the cost of processing a single transaction low enough... which is why micropayments will always have to be grouped into multi-dollar units.
But /. won't let you buy one page for a half-penny. You have to buy in minimum units of 1000 pages... that means instead of 1000 micropayment transactions you're actually making one normal transaction.
Yes, but they can't collect units smaller than the price of a postage stamp. They can charge-per-view in the form of a subscription environment in the form of buying 100 "points" for $10, but they can't charge 10 cent per view with the option of walking away after the first view because that's a unit that the financial system is just not willing to support.
Whose wi-fi bandwidth are you mooching to read /.?
Let's face it... airline security would be a whole lot easier if they could get rid of most of the damn passengers and have a select group of 20 backround-check cleared people be the only ones flying.
When securing something equals destroying it, you've got a big problem...
The central problem here is that what makes the Internet so great, that there is no central controling authority, is also its downfall. Allowing total annonymity would mean that hit-and-run hackers would be impossible to trace, and the network will fall apart.
The Internet is not really supposed to be one network. It's supposed to be the network-between-networks where each network is supposed to have its own admin responsibile for controling what goes in and out. If somebody on the network is sending out a virus, it's supposed to be the responsibility of the network admin to displine the misbehaving user so the problem gets contained.
But now, the ISPs of the world don't seem to care much about keeping their own networks virus-free, and there's nobody above the ISPs to force them to do their job.
I really think the Internet as we know it will be replaced by another network within the next 20 years. The replacement network will be Internet-like in that it connects multiple providers, but would have authenticated sender-identifying information intrisic in its protocols, so spoofing in all its forms would be killed at the first router it sees outside of the spoofer's control. The orignal protocols like SMTP and FTP were all based on being on a network where everybody played fairly... and clearly that's not the case anymore.
I don't think we need a license for users as much as we need requirements that ISPs crack down on virus-spreaders on their network as much as they crack down on Spammers...
Thing is, the Civic Hybrid also only needs oil changes at every 10,000 too... TDI is a step forward, but it's still a 1.0 technology when Hybrids are at 2.0...
For our American viewers, the tax advantage is a $4000 tax deduction this year that's scheduled step down to $3000 next year an deduction and $2000 the year after that.
/. readers...)
Remember though, a deduction doesn't go straight to your wallet (that'd be a credit) so you have to multiply it by your tax rate to see how much real cash you end up with. (You also have to have actually earned $4000 this year to have $4000 to deduct, which may be a problem for some
This is an "above the line" deduction, which means you still get to count it even if you don't "itemize" your deductions and claim the automatic one instead.
I've had the 2003 Civic Hybrid since Feb. and I've been happy with it as well.
The AutoStop feature is exactly as advertised. When the conditions are right and you're coasting towards a red light with your breaks on, the engine cuts. When you lift your foot off the brake, it restarts in the time it takes to get your foot to the gas pedal. Everyone else is burning 0 MPG gas, you're running the radio and fan off of the battery. (BTW... The standard-issue radio sounds great when you totally lose the engine background, not that the engine ever gets loud in the first place.)
This isn't an high-speed acceleration car, but it will get you up to highway speed fast enough to keep up with the crowds.
The gas savings in cash isn't quite enough to make up for the addition to your car payment over the standard Civic, but you can get the warm fuzzy feeling that your overpayment is going to Japan rather than the oil barrons...
Numbers without a counting methodogy are usually worthless. We've got a small article that doesn't even name what "british security company" released the data, and a summary that somehow gets the BBC involved even though they're nowhere to be found in the story.
/. day?
Uhm... slow
Okay... do the editors read the links anymore?
This clearly came from Canada's Globe and Mail newsmapaper, which is clearly has nothing in common with the British Broadcasting Company
are they doing tose little google text ads or what?
Bingo... that's got to be the plan. Google already has a powerful advertising system, and it'd be rather trivial to associate ads entry-by-entry with the blogs using the AdSense technology they're already trying out elsewhere.
I'm sure this is a drive to get the Blogger userbase as big as possible, then they'll roll out the ads.
Nope. Copyright violation is both a civil and criminal matter. Most criminal crimes also have a civil component.
(Anybody who committs a murder is also responsible for wrongful death, but what good is being owed money by somebody who's already in jail for life and spent everything they had on a failed defense?)
Or read a newspaper. Companies are prohibited from owning TV or radio stations in the same cities as they own major papers. (WGN and WGN-TV in Chicago being owned by the Tribune Group is an example of a grandfathered situtation... Tribune's USA Today is spread out enough to not count towards any city.) This has prevented the "big 5" media companies from absorbing companies such as Post-Newsweek and The New York Times Company who still remain independent.
And since nobody seems to have caught the joke that my above post was the setup lines for, here it is:
What, the RIAA thinks it's part of the government now?
You're getting your legal terms confused. It's easy to make an out-of-court settlement for a pending civil claim, even if the claim hasn't even made it to the point of a lawsuit. There are certain things you can't waive before they happen (such as a claim for wrongful death for a deliberate killing) but that's an exception to the general rule
What's impossible is for the RIAA to grant immunity from a criminal prosecution, only the government can do that. Just like a rape victim that tries to pull out of testifying at the trial, the government can still go forward with a prosecution even if the victim of the crime doesn't want to press the charges.
This is even worse than that. You are giving a consideration, because the definition of p2p sharing is so broad that it accidently covers the situation in which you're legally sharing a music file by p2p because the artist has given you permission to. (Somehow, this situation is unthinkable to the RIAA...)
Worse yet, they're the one giving no consideration. It's a settlement with somebody to whom you owe nothing to. It's impossible to share a music file that the RIAA owns the copyright to, the orginazation doesn't own copyrights, it's individual members do.
It's like going to the AAA to settle claim of bodily injury with all of the drivers injured in an incredible 20,000 car pileup that you started. Yeah, it's likely most of the drivers were members, but that still doesn't give the organization the ability to settle on their behalf...
The RIAA is not offering immunity from prosecution, but rather a settlement of the possible civil claim. In the US, there are selected parts of the government who can offer various forms of immunity from criminal charges in exchange for testimony. In fact, it's sometimes even forced upon them. A witness who refuses to testify claiming 5th Amendment protection because their answers would incriminate them could be granted immunity, which would then make their 5th Amendment claim moot.