Yes, but what about Microsoft who would absoutely hate to see a public domain fueled resurgance of MS-DOS back into the mainstream? They'd perpetually renew the copright not because they have an interest in the work, but an interest in seeing that the work never resurfaces.
So when a TV program is created by 5 writers, using the characters created by 3 men at a bar which are played out by 16 actors being recorded by 4 cameramen with lighting designed by 2 people on a set built by 4 carpenters....
Which is the whole point... if Clarinex is vaulable only to solve problems Claritin can't already solve.
As Paxil starts to expire, we see Paxil CR which lowers the dosage frequency which is a very useful advancement in cases where the patient is responsible for remembering to take it, but useless when there is somebody else there to see that it is taken on time.
Allowing these new modifications to enjoy patent protection for their 17-20 year lifespan is a good thing, it rewards the work needed to create them. However, since these modifications have to compete against the classic version, their value is little compared to the value of a medcine that cures a previously uncurable disease. Still, at least the value is greater than zero.
In the end, what this proves is that selling your works at a price much lower than the competition makes your IP more valuable. Now if only somebody would volunteer to allow their works to be treated this way...
I think this a big problem. We're preaching to the quire, submitting opinions to sites that are filled with people who agree with us.
I think Slashdot should create a political action committee, with the goal of furthering the politcal viewpoints reflected by the 5-Insightful posts around here. It can collect donations simply by holding out its hand around here, and maybe with tie-in items at ThinkGeek. If we want to beat the corperations, we have to play their game first.
When this group needs guidance, it can simply pose questions in an Ask Slashdot format. Remember, any troll can post here, but you have to read Slashdot posts for quite a while to become a moderator, and disagreed with moderators get ejected via M2. Quite simply, it takes far too many people to corrupt Slashdot's moderation system.
It is possible that two or more completely opposing positions can get modded up to +5 in the same thread, but I would suggest that reflects that the Slashdot community is devided on the issue, so the Slashdot PAC should take no position on that issue (although, it could direct Congresspeople to the +5 comments so they can make up their own informed opinions for once...) and move onto the issues where there appear to be a near-unanimous verdict on Slashdot.
We don't need to convince ourselves anymore, we need to start reaching the people who haven't even heard of Slashdot.
Copyright owners hate compulsory license fees because they set rates via a legal process, and it's very hard to raise rates when you have to go through a system rather than just announcing the new rates and saying goodbye to the few customers who won't take it.
Ransom is closer to a marketing gimick than a copyright policy. If ransom became law, an infinite copyright would be granted to all flop ideas, as they would never reach their ransom target.
Copyright protects innovation within art, patents protects innovation within science.
Computer software lands in that fuzzy land on the border between art and science, but the business interests of software were smart enough in the early days of software to see to it that their works fall under copyright law where they enjoy 95 years of ownership instead of patent law where they would get a mere 17-20 years of ownership. Nothing creates an incentive for you to build a better mousetrap than to have your old mousetrap flooding the market against you.
I don't think the ~$20 million went to anywhere productive. The Russians simply don't have enough rubles to fund their space program (or much of anything else) and USD$20 million wasn't enough to save it. They're so out of it to the point that NASA's planning an exit strategy for the ISS project.
It doesn't. In fact, if another season does get made it'll likely be distributed either by DVD or Pay Per View to make sure that everybody who watches is paying at least part of their share to the project.
Viewer-supported TV exists. It's called Public Television.
Nova or Frontline would not survive on a typical broadcast network, it simply wouldn't get the ratings in demographics that sponsors would pay for. Those shows exist because donors from individuals to corperations fund the show. (Your PBS station knows what show your pledge can be attributed to... they know what time you called, and specifically if they're sending you the Nova totebag or videotape of John Tesh in Concert and fund programs accordingly.)
I think the clear rule that TVC needs to set from the outset is that when they put money into a show, they want that money to either be lost in a losing-money effort, or if the show rights itself and becomes profitable, they want their share of the profits so they can go save another show. The money they spend goes pay the actors and crew of the show, not into the production company or network's hands.
$1.7 mil USD is likely the production budget per episode, but $800,000 USD per episode is the ammount of money Sci-Fi network gave the production company at the start, with the theory being that the remaining half of the money would come in from other sources such as the infinite future of rerun rights (which Sci-Fi is apparently still buying) and other intellectual property licensing rights. Remember, all this money would buy them just one episode to wrap things up, they'd need to multiply it all by 10-20 if they want a full season.
As for this TVC entity, it should be very interesting to see what this builds into. If it were to be able to build up enough of warchest, it could finance the production of borderline shows that it knows there are enough fans to make viable, then collect a share of the revenues and use that income to finance future show-saving efforts. Of course, the whole point of this organization would be to finance shows that are good TV but are being canceled because they lose money, so TVC should seek non-profit status and always be soliciting donations.
As for distributing the show to maximize profits, I would suggest that TVC first sell the new episodes via DVD and pay-per-view at about $10-20 per episode in order to capture the outright hardcore fans who are willing to pay big to see the show continued. Then, about six months later enter into a prime-time time exchange with a TV network where TVC provides the show for free to a cable network in exchange for TVC being allowed to sell all but 2 minutes or so of the ad time. (Of course, if there is a network willing to pay for the show, that is the safer bet...) The idea of putting the show on free TV would be to attract new fans, and hopefully enough new fans would be brought in to make the show once again viable, at which point TVC could begin to pull its financial involvement out and find another show to rescue.
Government tracking == bad, private group tracking data for limited purposes == good.
Tracking me to give me a speeding ticket every time my car's speed > 66 mph == bad... tracking me so that the world can know trafic's moving at 75 mph on route 3 good.
One use I can think of this would be a data source for traffic reports. If the sensor is moving quickly, it's safe to assume that whereever that sensor is, there's a highway operating perfectly fine. If a sensor comes to a stop or goes slower than normal speed on a highway (excluding tollbooths and rest stations, zones that I'm sure will be quickly identified) that indicates that something has gone wrong such as an accident or blockage. Whatever it is doesn't matter, so much as the fact cars aren't going at the proper speed. What would result from this data is a hot-cold map of the highways that indicates pixel by pixel where the road is at full speed, and where it's not.
The only thing is, I'd much rather that sensor in my car be reporting to a private traffic-reporting company than the government....
AOL's ending its Magic Carpet service, which allowed non-AOL sites to accept AOL ScreenNames as a logon, in much the way that Microsoft is offering up its.Net Passport to not-Microsoft sites. Magic Carpet's biggest site, CDNow, is about to stop operations and essentially direct it's traffic to Amazon.com, so the service was declared a failure because nobody wanted to buy it.
However, this doesn't mean ScreenName Service is going away completely. That is, your AIM screenname will still let you log into every site AOL/TW controls, and that's quite a few of them. That's still a lot of personal info for AOL/TW to possess.
Has anybody noticed that there are two other Passport-like systems floating out there as well?
The first is AOL's. AOL Time Warner has gone around and tied the login systems of almost all of their properties from CNN to Netscape to use the same logon system as AOL/AIM ScreenNames. AOL has direct competitors to almost everything MSN has and then some, and can collect just as much personal info to send to a media empire.
The second is Yahoo's. Now, I know the Yahoo logon is only valid at the Yahoo.com domain, but Yahoo has within its domain content that MSN spreads out into dozens of domains. Everything including a Hotmail-like e-mail site, an Expedia-like travel site, a CNBC-like financial site, and an MSNBC-like news site all accept the same Yahoo logon. Yahoo wants your credit card numbers in your Yahoo Wallet let's not forget...
Yeah, Microsoft is the most annoying in getting you to sign up for a.Net Passport so that you can use MSN Messenger, but there are millions of people who dashed to aim.aol.com to get AIM and therefore ScreenName Service account, and Yahoo's got an IM client too if you want it.
There are really three web empires... yet only one is getting all the heat. What's up with that?
What bothers me here is that the programs that are being used to bring spyware to the common user are programs that do things for which either there already exists an spyware-free solution, or is a program us/.ers could write in minutes.
Speeding up an Internet connection is more-or-less a myth in the first place, you can't make software to cause a modem to go any faster than it goes physically. The only thing that really can be done is to make sure there's nothing stupid in the Windows registry slowing down the connection... and guess what, in older versions of Windows there is! Microsoft initially set the Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) to something that made sense on a LAN connection, but caused an annoying number of retransmitted frames on a modem connection. Lower that number to something sane, and web pages will appear to the user to be faster. However, that didn't really speed up the modem, it's now just not wasting as many cycles on bad data. Changing the MTU number is a registry hack, the program needs to only be run once... no need for it to be there on every boot.
Another such program syncs your computer's clock with to official U.S. Government time. That's a cool and useful function, but it's really just using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) standard to contact government servers. Anybody who bothers to read the docs can write their own program to do that. Microsoft has even built NTP into Windows XP, although once-a-week updates isn't exactly enough for most users who care about their clock accuracy.
Another program hitches its ride offering the local thermometer reading from your local TV station's WeatherNet system in an icon in your system tray. Cool feature... but wait a second here. What if you don't live near a WeatherNet site? Oh, that's simple, it taps into the National Weather Service data to get you a report. But NWS's data is public, paid for by your tax dollars. The info is available on both FTP and HTTP servers that are absolutely free to access.
Open source projects could knock these "Download me!" programs out of existance. Why don't we?
This is very interesting data if it is properly collected. However, there is a certain ethics that require that the subjects of such a survey know exactly what information they're sending in. Burying it in an EULA isn't exactly informed consent.
Clear, specific, and against someone within a jurisdiction that will hear you.
Sorry, no license restriction is gonna prevent Saddam Hussein from using your software. He'll do whatever he wants to do, because he controls an army and you don't. It'll take serious work by the American armed forces to punish him for any of the many crime he's comitted... violating license terms seem minor in comparaison.
I think the only factor that prevents a Palladium-based security model from being applied here is the fact that if they did that, they would have to make Palladium the only platform on which the game is available. Microsoft has quite a lot of skeptical people to sell on that concept before that becomes a viable business decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but what about Microsoft who would absoutely hate to see a public domain fueled resurgance of MS-DOS back into the mainstream? They'd perpetually renew the copright not because they have an interest in the work, but an interest in seeing that the work never resurfaces.
So when a TV program is created by 5 writers, using the characters created by 3 men at a bar which are played out by 16 actors being recorded by 4 cameramen with lighting designed by 2 people on a set built by 4 carpenters....
Whose death triggers the experation?
I think death of the artist is a bad idea for a copyright time limit. You don't want to create a new motive to murder authors.
Which is the whole point... if Clarinex is vaulable only to solve problems Claritin can't already solve.
As Paxil starts to expire, we see Paxil CR which lowers the dosage frequency which is a very useful advancement in cases where the patient is responsible for remembering to take it, but useless when there is somebody else there to see that it is taken on time.
Allowing these new modifications to enjoy patent protection for their 17-20 year lifespan is a good thing, it rewards the work needed to create them. However, since these modifications have to compete against the classic version, their value is little compared to the value of a medcine that cures a previously uncurable disease. Still, at least the value is greater than zero.
In the end, what this proves is that selling your works at a price much lower than the competition makes your IP more valuable. Now if only somebody would volunteer to allow their works to be treated this way...
Option Explicit
Type Credit
End Type
Function Respect(Money as Currency) as Credit
End Sub
And then in the immediate pane...
? Respect($20)
Resulting in a popup window...
Error: Type Mismatch
I think this a big problem. We're preaching to the quire, submitting opinions to sites that are filled with people who agree with us.
I think Slashdot should create a political action committee, with the goal of furthering the politcal viewpoints reflected by the 5-Insightful posts around here. It can collect donations simply by holding out its hand around here, and maybe with tie-in items at ThinkGeek. If we want to beat the corperations, we have to play their game first.
When this group needs guidance, it can simply pose questions in an Ask Slashdot format. Remember, any troll can post here, but you have to read Slashdot posts for quite a while to become a moderator, and disagreed with moderators get ejected via M2. Quite simply, it takes far too many people to corrupt Slashdot's moderation system.
It is possible that two or more completely opposing positions can get modded up to +5 in the same thread, but I would suggest that reflects that the Slashdot community is devided on the issue, so the Slashdot PAC should take no position on that issue (although, it could direct Congresspeople to the +5 comments so they can make up their own informed opinions for once...) and move onto the issues where there appear to be a near-unanimous verdict on Slashdot.
We don't need to convince ourselves anymore, we need to start reaching the people who haven't even heard of Slashdot.
Copyright owners hate compulsory license fees because they set rates via a legal process, and it's very hard to raise rates when you have to go through a system rather than just announcing the new rates and saying goodbye to the few customers who won't take it.
Ransom is closer to a marketing gimick than a copyright policy. If ransom became law, an infinite copyright would be granted to all flop ideas, as they would never reach their ransom target.
Copyright protects innovation within art, patents protects innovation within science.
Computer software lands in that fuzzy land on the border between art and science, but the business interests of software were smart enough in the early days of software to see to it that their works fall under copyright law where they enjoy 95 years of ownership instead of patent law where they would get a mere 17-20 years of ownership. Nothing creates an incentive for you to build a better mousetrap than to have your old mousetrap flooding the market against you.
I don't think the ~$20 million went to anywhere productive. The Russians simply don't have enough rubles to fund their space program (or much of anything else) and USD$20 million wasn't enough to save it. They're so out of it to the point that NASA's planning an exit strategy for the ISS project.
It always seemed like PayPal was founded by some kind of space cadet. We shoulda seen this coming.
It doesn't. In fact, if another season does get made it'll likely be distributed either by DVD or Pay Per View to make sure that everybody who watches is paying at least part of their share to the project.
Viewer-supported TV exists. It's called Public Television.
Nova or Frontline would not survive on a typical broadcast network, it simply wouldn't get the ratings in demographics that sponsors would pay for. Those shows exist because donors from individuals to corperations fund the show. (Your PBS station knows what show your pledge can be attributed to... they know what time you called, and specifically if they're sending you the Nova totebag or videotape of John Tesh in Concert and fund programs accordingly.)
I think the clear rule that TVC needs to set from the outset is that when they put money into a show, they want that money to either be lost in a losing-money effort, or if the show rights itself and becomes profitable, they want their share of the profits so they can go save another show. The money they spend goes pay the actors and crew of the show, not into the production company or network's hands.
$1.7 mil USD is likely the production budget per episode, but $800,000 USD per episode is the ammount of money Sci-Fi network gave the production company at the start, with the theory being that the remaining half of the money would come in from other sources such as the infinite future of rerun rights (which Sci-Fi is apparently still buying) and other intellectual property licensing rights. Remember, all this money would buy them just one episode to wrap things up, they'd need to multiply it all by 10-20 if they want a full season.
As for this TVC entity, it should be very interesting to see what this builds into. If it were to be able to build up enough of warchest, it could finance the production of borderline shows that it knows there are enough fans to make viable, then collect a share of the revenues and use that income to finance future show-saving efforts. Of course, the whole point of this organization would be to finance shows that are good TV but are being canceled because they lose money, so TVC should seek non-profit status and always be soliciting donations.
As for distributing the show to maximize profits, I would suggest that TVC first sell the new episodes via DVD and pay-per-view at about $10-20 per episode in order to capture the outright hardcore fans who are willing to pay big to see the show continued. Then, about six months later enter into a prime-time time exchange with a TV network where TVC provides the show for free to a cable network in exchange for TVC being allowed to sell all but 2 minutes or so of the ad time. (Of course, if there is a network willing to pay for the show, that is the safer bet...) The idea of putting the show on free TV would be to attract new fans, and hopefully enough new fans would be brought in to make the show once again viable, at which point TVC could begin to pull its financial involvement out and find another show to rescue.
Government tracking == bad, private group tracking data for limited purposes == good.
Tracking me to give me a speeding ticket every time my car's speed > 66 mph == bad... tracking me so that the world can know trafic's moving at 75 mph on route 3 good.
One use I can think of this would be a data source for traffic reports. If the sensor is moving quickly, it's safe to assume that whereever that sensor is, there's a highway operating perfectly fine. If a sensor comes to a stop or goes slower than normal speed on a highway (excluding tollbooths and rest stations, zones that I'm sure will be quickly identified) that indicates that something has gone wrong such as an accident or blockage. Whatever it is doesn't matter, so much as the fact cars aren't going at the proper speed. What would result from this data is a hot-cold map of the highways that indicates pixel by pixel where the road is at full speed, and where it's not. The only thing is, I'd much rather that sensor in my car be reporting to a private traffic-reporting company than the government....
Let's not read too much into this.
.Net Passport to not-Microsoft sites. Magic Carpet's biggest site, CDNow, is about to stop operations and essentially direct it's traffic to Amazon.com, so the service was declared a failure because nobody wanted to buy it.
AOL's ending its Magic Carpet service, which allowed non-AOL sites to accept AOL ScreenNames as a logon, in much the way that Microsoft is offering up its
However, this doesn't mean ScreenName Service is going away completely. That is, your AIM screenname will still let you log into every site AOL/TW controls, and that's quite a few of them. That's still a lot of personal info for AOL/TW to possess.
Has anybody noticed that there are two other Passport-like systems floating out there as well?
.Net Passport so that you can use MSN Messenger, but there are millions of people who dashed to aim.aol.com to get AIM and therefore ScreenName Service account, and Yahoo's got an IM client too if you want it.
The first is AOL's. AOL Time Warner has gone around and tied the login systems of almost all of their properties from CNN to Netscape to use the same logon system as AOL/AIM ScreenNames. AOL has direct competitors to almost everything MSN has and then some, and can collect just as much personal info to send to a media empire.
The second is Yahoo's. Now, I know the Yahoo logon is only valid at the Yahoo.com domain, but Yahoo has within its domain content that MSN spreads out into dozens of domains. Everything including a Hotmail-like e-mail site, an Expedia-like travel site, a CNBC-like financial site, and an MSNBC-like news site all accept the same Yahoo logon. Yahoo wants your credit card numbers in your Yahoo Wallet let's not forget...
Yeah, Microsoft is the most annoying in getting you to sign up for a
There are really three web empires... yet only one is getting all the heat. What's up with that?
What bothers me here is that the programs that are being used to bring spyware to the common user are programs that do things for which either there already exists an spyware-free solution, or is a program us /.ers could write in minutes.
Speeding up an Internet connection is more-or-less a myth in the first place, you can't make software to cause a modem to go any faster than it goes physically. The only thing that really can be done is to make sure there's nothing stupid in the Windows registry slowing down the connection... and guess what, in older versions of Windows there is! Microsoft initially set the Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) to something that made sense on a LAN connection, but caused an annoying number of retransmitted frames on a modem connection. Lower that number to something sane, and web pages will appear to the user to be faster. However, that didn't really speed up the modem, it's now just not wasting as many cycles on bad data. Changing the MTU number is a registry hack, the program needs to only be run once... no need for it to be there on every boot.
Another such program syncs your computer's clock with to official U.S. Government time. That's a cool and useful function, but it's really just using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) standard to contact government servers. Anybody who bothers to read the docs can write their own program to do that. Microsoft has even built NTP into Windows XP, although once-a-week updates isn't exactly enough for most users who care about their clock accuracy.
Another program hitches its ride offering the local thermometer reading from your local TV station's WeatherNet system in an icon in your system tray. Cool feature... but wait a second here. What if you don't live near a WeatherNet site? Oh, that's simple, it taps into the National Weather Service data to get you a report. But NWS's data is public, paid for by your tax dollars. The info is available on both FTP and HTTP servers that are absolutely free to access.
Open source projects could knock these "Download me!" programs out of existance. Why don't we?
This is very interesting data if it is properly collected. However, there is a certain ethics that require that the subjects of such a survey know exactly what information they're sending in. Burying it in an EULA isn't exactly informed consent.
How can state governments test for Chronic Wasting Disease... I thought most state governments suffered from it!
Clear, specific, and against someone within a jurisdiction that will hear you. Sorry, no license restriction is gonna prevent Saddam Hussein from using your software. He'll do whatever he wants to do, because he controls an army and you don't. It'll take serious work by the American armed forces to punish him for any of the many crime he's comitted... violating license terms seem minor in comparaison.
Free as in speech within Iraq.
Sorry. Nope. Doesn't work.
I think the only factor that prevents a Palladium-based security model from being applied here is the fact that if they did that, they would have to make Palladium the only platform on which the game is available. Microsoft has quite a lot of skeptical people to sell on that concept before that becomes a viable business decision.