This is a major narrowing of the online music market.
Excuse me? I don't see any "Yahoo! Music Download" service folding up. "Launch Music on Yahoo" is a music news site, now likely to see its brand image tied closer to the MusicMatch music delivery service.
Yahoo!'s favorite music delivery service at this point according to the launch.yahoo.com page appears to be going out and buying the CD the old fashioned way at Target.
There are really two kinds of person-to-person communication medium...
- An open network, where anybody can send to anybody... and that means you can get messages from people you never heard of, for better or worse. Lowlife types are allowed to thrive and spam away. - A closed network where in order to stay in the club, you've gotta play by the rules. Lowlifes are bounced out on their first offenses. This keeps the trouble away, but it also limits the number of people who can reach you over that channel.
Whenever our normally capitalist system grants somebody a monopoly, it's usally because two of that kind of business would lead to mutual destruction, and we need that business to exist because it makes other businesses possible.
Netflix would not be able to operate if not for the United States Postal Service, for example. The same goes for most magazine subscriptions. Sure, FedEx, UPS and Airborne Express all compete with the USPS express and priority line of services, but everybody else is prohibited by law from making a daily stop at every address without a pre-existing relationship.
Cities control the local water and sewage systems as well for obvious reasons. We can't afford these services becoming unavailable for any length of time for any reason.
POTS used to be an essential utility as it was the only commonly deployed realtime communnication tech. Now, it's not so much the only game in town, but it still is the only communication lifeline for some elderly people who don't want a cell phone. Because of this, the local Ma Bell company is not allowed to close up shop, and that's why they're basically granted a monopoly to soak the customers the can soak so that the company can afford to give below-cost service to those who can't.
In general, they don't. They're still functional at catching what they used to, In-The-Clear C-Band feeds... but in general very few such feeds exist anymore. The major networks encrypt nearly all of their feeds to affiliates, and sports networks that used to broadcast games in the clear have now locked those feeds down with encryption too.
There are entities like 4DTV that sell packages of encrypted channels... but, well, that's an ugly and more expensive way to get exactly what you would get out of DirecTV or Dish. Not worth bothering in my opinion.
Swapping cards BEFORE they're widely hacked is the only way to prevent hacking from ever recurring as badly as DirecTV used to have to deal with.
Sure, spend all the processing resources you can muster, if the solution to the codec isn't descovered until the card generation is already retired, then it'll be a successful hack but too late to cause any money problems.
NDS, 78 percent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has developed the anti-piracy software component for SVP. Beginning next year, Thomson will embed SVP-enabled chips developed by STMicro into its video playback devices and set-top boxes.
American satellite TV operator DIRECTV, a News Corp affiliate, is the first to use the new technology, the companies said.
Now, let's think about this for a second. Even though DirecTV has about millions units in circulation now, the actual decryption part of the operation is done in the form of a single smart card that is very easy to swap out. Therefore, DirecTV doesn't have to make everybody get new boxes to apply this tech, they just have to send out new cards.
They fix the downed nodes eventually... but one down node alone is not worth sending anybody after. They wait until there's a collection of downed nodes to send the tech after them...
If Congress was actually in session, it might cause congresscritters to talk about the fact that their office phone people are getting overloaded.
Of course, annoying a congresscritter's staff is a good way to NOT get whatever you want. Staff members sometimes have the critical influence over the congresscritter they work for on technical issues they don't understand.
We have to admire Betamax. It died way too young... but without what it did at the Supreme Court, VHS and DVRs might not be considered "fair use" and therefore might not have even been born.
We've heard from these Downhill Battle people before. They proposed the a scheme to try to collect Apple/Pepsi winning-cap codes for iTunes downloads that neglected the fact that there were limits to how many songs a given person could download, neglected the fact that the rules said non-transferable, and that the group didn't disclose just how they selected the artists they wanted to favor.
In short, these guys come up with nice ideas that don't work due to real world constraints.
Google is such a distributed computing network that when a single computer in a cluster fails, they've discovered that it'd cost them more to go to the broken node and repair it than the vaule of the computing resources they've lost. Google just lets such failed computers sit useless, and waits until there are enough downed computers to justify sending in the repair people.
Besides, P2P services to respond to your Google query would mean that your query would end up in the hands of a dreaded "untrusted third party", and I don't think anybody here wants all of their searches available to their next door neighbor.
Re:Last time I checked,
on
P2P Web searches
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Not to mention, Google is often better at searching a given website than the search untility a site tries to provide on its own. TechTV host Leo Laporte used to frequently searching Google with the "Site:techtv.com" marker included to find deeply-hidden articles on the site, because it'd be easier to search that way than using TechTV's own search boxes.
Google's even encuraging this behavior by linking their free websearch feature with their AdSense service, and giving publishers a share of the AdWords revenue when a search that came from their site results in an ad click.
Why do a modem connect... all the resoultion they really need could be contained in just 10-12 touch tone signals, giving the GPS co-ords in that form.
Of course, Time Warner Cable in Austin knows that you're, uhm, in Austin and knows which 911 call center to give your call to and can hard-wire a connect to that center from their operations center. Vonage, on the other hand, hasn't a clue which 911 center you belong to and furthermore sometimes can't reach that center because it doesn't have any "real number" besides the 911...
If you don't think PayPal has the authority to fine misbehaving users, maybe you should think of it as an "annoyance fee".
So long as the schedule of penalties are agreed to as part of the Terms of Service, the misbehaving user has already agreed that their activity would generate a fee that they'd be responsible for paying...
It's also the way most private universities generate the ability to fine people who break parking rules. "Unauthorized users of this space agree to pay $n" on a sign posted next to the space is good enough to generate a fee...
Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation had very tight continuity between the two series despite the fact that they were produced decades apart. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started off well, but seriously derailed when Gene Roddenbury died and therefore the franchise got run by people hired by Paramount who clearly didn't share the same vision.
I can't stand the present Star Trek: Enterprise because it's so wrong... It constantly uses technology that was not present in the Star Trek series, despite being placed in timeline order as a prequel to the original series.
I hope the series finalie of Star Trek: Enterprise comes soon and declares that the entire series was a dream sequence so that it is ejected from the "cannonical" Star Trek Universe and gets parked right next to the licenced-but-not-official Star Trek books.
Only two candidates are viable this time. Just because it's reported by Fox News Channel doesn't make it false.
All of the third party candidates do not really have a party behind them. It's possible for a third party to take a governatoral seat or some house seats... but it's impossible to win the presidency without having some support in the House behind you, and currently no third party candidate has that.
You must be new here. All subsite stories always show up on the main page by default. If you wish hide such stories, you can configure the site to do that for you in the preferences section.
The election of 1860 was an election had four candidates get electoral votes, but Lincoln was able to capture a majority by winning every one of the non-slave states.
Between the election and his swearing in seven of the states that didn't vote for him decided they wanted to rebel... and that's the path that led to something known as the Civil War.
This brings up a very interesting point in the current American system... not all "democrats" agree with what the "Democratic Party" is doing, and likewise there are "republicans" who don't agree with the "Republican Party".
In fact, so called "529 groups" cannot speak to the main parties at all. They get their numerical name from the section that creates the loophole in the McCain-Finegold Campaign Finance Reform law that allows them to exist. The reform law was meant to end soft money, but really, it just sends the soft money to groups like "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" that exist to create attack ads that the main candidate and main party have no control over and therefore can deny association with.
Yes, democrats are trying to knock Nader off the ballot out of fear that his being there will distract votes from Kerry. However, it's also true that republicans are supporting Nader because they're hoping that Nader will distract votes from Kerry in close states letting Bush win those states.
The so called "media recount" of the 2000 Florida election actually discovered that there was a counting method that would have declared Gore the winner, however it wasn't the one that Gore had called for, and Gore still would have lost had Kathrine Harris not opened her office for a few minutes on a Saturday to certify the result forcing the incomplete counters to stop short. Yep, little things like the "butterfly ballot" actually mattered that time... it was so close the margin of error in our system showed up to cast uncertainty over the outcome..
There is absolutely no way somebody other than Bush or Kerry is going to win in November... the American presidential election system just doesn't play that way.
Every state, plus Washington D.C., holds its own election that determines which set of electors will be sent to the electoral college. Almost all are in a winner-take-all format where the candidate with the most actual votes takes all of the state's electoral votes.
If a third party candidate is able to somehow upset both Bush and Kerry and take a state or two, they'd possibly pull things so that nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes. Realistically, a third candidate of the strength of the other two would result in an even 3-way split, which would most certainly promise that nobody can capture a majority. If that happens... the whole system turns on it head.
The electoral votes are tossed aside, and the newly elected House of Representatives gets to vote in a one-vote-per-state fashion to pick the new president.
In short, a third party candidate has no way to win the direct election, and can only hope to kick the election into the House's hands. However, if that third party doesn't have any representation in the House, they're going to crash there. In short, you can't start a new party at the presidency... you have to start building it with smaller offices before you can approach the Oval Office.
These things are being done in the unpopulated desert areas of the USA for a very specific reason... if these things misfire they want as few people and things in the area. Afterall, we just saw NASA drop a space probe they were hoping to catch, and nobody was in any danger because they intentionally did the operation over an unpopulated desert because landing into a creator in the sand was a very tolerable worst-case situation.
Crowd control shouldn't be an issue. There should be no crowds to begin with... let's watch these things from a safe distance here on/. instead.
What you saw there would clearly be a violation of several laws because employee wages owed are always the first thing handed out when a company goes bankrupt. Any company that stoops to that level is already morally bankrupt and the financial bankruptcy can't be far behind.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a major narrowing of the online music market.
Excuse me? I don't see any "Yahoo! Music Download" service folding up. "Launch Music on Yahoo" is a music news site, now likely to see its brand image tied closer to the MusicMatch music delivery service.
Yahoo!'s favorite music delivery service at this point according to the launch.yahoo.com page appears to be going out and buying the CD the old fashioned way at Target.
There are really two kinds of person-to-person communication medium...
- An open network, where anybody can send to anybody... and that means you can get messages from people you never heard of, for better or worse. Lowlife types are allowed to thrive and spam away.
- A closed network where in order to stay in the club, you've gotta play by the rules. Lowlifes are bounced out on their first offenses. This keeps the trouble away, but it also limits the number of people who can reach you over that channel.
Whenever our normally capitalist system grants somebody a monopoly, it's usally because two of that kind of business would lead to mutual destruction, and we need that business to exist because it makes other businesses possible.
Netflix would not be able to operate if not for the United States Postal Service, for example. The same goes for most magazine subscriptions. Sure, FedEx, UPS and Airborne Express all compete with the USPS express and priority line of services, but everybody else is prohibited by law from making a daily stop at every address without a pre-existing relationship.
Cities control the local water and sewage systems as well for obvious reasons. We can't afford these services becoming unavailable for any length of time for any reason.
POTS used to be an essential utility as it was the only commonly deployed realtime communnication tech. Now, it's not so much the only game in town, but it still is the only communication lifeline for some elderly people who don't want a cell phone. Because of this, the local Ma Bell company is not allowed to close up shop, and that's why they're basically granted a monopoly to soak the customers the can soak so that the company can afford to give below-cost service to those who can't.
In general, they don't. They're still functional at catching what they used to, In-The-Clear C-Band feeds... but in general very few such feeds exist anymore. The major networks encrypt nearly all of their feeds to affiliates, and sports networks that used to broadcast games in the clear have now locked those feeds down with encryption too.
There are entities like 4DTV that sell packages of encrypted channels... but, well, that's an ugly and more expensive way to get exactly what you would get out of DirecTV or Dish. Not worth bothering in my opinion.
Swapping cards BEFORE they're widely hacked is the only way to prevent hacking from ever recurring as badly as DirecTV used to have to deal with.
Sure, spend all the processing resources you can muster, if the solution to the codec isn't descovered until the card generation is already retired, then it'll be a successful hack but too late to cause any money problems.
someone's probably already hatching a plan..
The password is: "Analog Hole".
From the article...
NDS, 78 percent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has developed the anti-piracy software component for SVP. Beginning next year, Thomson will embed SVP-enabled chips developed by STMicro into its video playback devices and set-top boxes.
American satellite TV operator DIRECTV, a News Corp affiliate, is the first to use the new technology, the companies said.
Now, let's think about this for a second. Even though DirecTV has about millions units in circulation now, the actual decryption part of the operation is done in the form of a single smart card that is very easy to swap out. Therefore, DirecTV doesn't have to make everybody get new boxes to apply this tech, they just have to send out new cards.
It wouldn't even be "Copyright Control", it's closer to "Copy prevention"...
They fix the downed nodes eventually... but one down node alone is not worth sending anybody after. They wait until there's a collection of downed nodes to send the tech after them...
If Congress was actually in session, it might cause congresscritters to talk about the fact that their office phone people are getting overloaded.
Of course, annoying a congresscritter's staff is a good way to NOT get whatever you want. Staff members sometimes have the critical influence over the congresscritter they work for on technical issues they don't understand.
We have to admire Betamax. It died way too young... but without what it did at the Supreme Court, VHS and DVRs might not be considered "fair use" and therefore might not have even been born.
We've heard from these Downhill Battle people before. They proposed the a scheme to try to collect Apple/Pepsi winning-cap codes for iTunes downloads that neglected the fact that there were limits to how many songs a given person could download, neglected the fact that the rules said non-transferable, and that the group didn't disclose just how they selected the artists they wanted to favor.
In short, these guys come up with nice ideas that don't work due to real world constraints.
Save the server load on the main google server!
Error 404: No such main server found.
Google is such a distributed computing network that when a single computer in a cluster fails, they've discovered that it'd cost them more to go to the broken node and repair it than the vaule of the computing resources they've lost. Google just lets such failed computers sit useless, and waits until there are enough downed computers to justify sending in the repair people.
Besides, P2P services to respond to your Google query would mean that your query would end up in the hands of a dreaded "untrusted third party", and I don't think anybody here wants all of their searches available to their next door neighbor.
Not to mention, Google is often better at searching a given website than the search untility a site tries to provide on its own. TechTV host Leo Laporte used to frequently searching Google with the "Site:techtv.com" marker included to find deeply-hidden articles on the site, because it'd be easier to search that way than using TechTV's own search boxes.
Google's even encuraging this behavior by linking their free websearch feature with their AdSense service, and giving publishers a share of the AdWords revenue when a search that came from their site results in an ad click.
Why do a modem connect... all the resoultion they really need could be contained in just 10-12 touch tone signals, giving the GPS co-ords in that form.
Of course, Time Warner Cable in Austin knows that you're, uhm, in Austin and knows which 911 call center to give your call to and can hard-wire a connect to that center from their operations center. Vonage, on the other hand, hasn't a clue which 911 center you belong to and furthermore sometimes can't reach that center because it doesn't have any "real number" besides the 911...
If you don't think PayPal has the authority to fine misbehaving users, maybe you should think of it as an "annoyance fee".
So long as the schedule of penalties are agreed to as part of the Terms of Service, the misbehaving user has already agreed that their activity would generate a fee that they'd be responsible for paying...
It's also the way most private universities generate the ability to fine people who break parking rules. "Unauthorized users of this space agree to pay $n" on a sign posted next to the space is good enough to generate a fee...
Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation had very tight continuity between the two series despite the fact that they were produced decades apart. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started off well, but seriously derailed when Gene Roddenbury died and therefore the franchise got run by people hired by Paramount who clearly didn't share the same vision.
I can't stand the present Star Trek: Enterprise because it's so wrong... It constantly uses technology that was not present in the Star Trek series, despite being placed in timeline order as a prequel to the original series.
I hope the series finalie of Star Trek: Enterprise comes soon and declares that the entire series was a dream sequence so that it is ejected from the "cannonical" Star Trek Universe and gets parked right next to the licenced-but-not-official Star Trek books.
Only two candidates are viable this time. Just because it's reported by Fox News Channel doesn't make it false.
All of the third party candidates do not really have a party behind them. It's possible for a third party to take a governatoral seat or some house seats... but it's impossible to win the presidency without having some support in the House behind you, and currently no third party candidate has that.
You must be new here. All subsite stories always show up on the main page by default. If you wish hide such stories, you can configure the site to do that for you in the preferences section.
The election of 1860 was an election had four candidates get electoral votes, but Lincoln was able to capture a majority by winning every one of the non-slave states.
Between the election and his swearing in seven of the states that didn't vote for him decided they wanted to rebel... and that's the path that led to something known as the Civil War.
This brings up a very interesting point in the current American system... not all "democrats" agree with what the "Democratic Party" is doing, and likewise there are "republicans" who don't agree with the "Republican Party".
In fact, so called "529 groups" cannot speak to the main parties at all. They get their numerical name from the section that creates the loophole in the McCain-Finegold Campaign Finance Reform law that allows them to exist. The reform law was meant to end soft money, but really, it just sends the soft money to groups like "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" that exist to create attack ads that the main candidate and main party have no control over and therefore can deny association with.
Yes, democrats are trying to knock Nader off the ballot out of fear that his being there will distract votes from Kerry. However, it's also true that republicans are supporting Nader because they're hoping that Nader will distract votes from Kerry in close states letting Bush win those states.
The so called "media recount" of the 2000 Florida election actually discovered that there was a counting method that would have declared Gore the winner, however it wasn't the one that Gore had called for, and Gore still would have lost had Kathrine Harris not opened her office for a few minutes on a Saturday to certify the result forcing the incomplete counters to stop short. Yep, little things like the "butterfly ballot" actually mattered that time... it was so close the margin of error in our system showed up to cast uncertainty over the outcome..
There is absolutely no way somebody other than Bush or Kerry is going to win in November... the American presidential election system just doesn't play that way.
Every state, plus Washington D.C., holds its own election that determines which set of electors will be sent to the electoral college. Almost all are in a winner-take-all format where the candidate with the most actual votes takes all of the state's electoral votes.
If a third party candidate is able to somehow upset both Bush and Kerry and take a state or two, they'd possibly pull things so that nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes. Realistically, a third candidate of the strength of the other two would result in an even 3-way split, which would most certainly promise that nobody can capture a majority. If that happens... the whole system turns on it head.
The electoral votes are tossed aside, and the newly elected House of Representatives gets to vote in a one-vote-per-state fashion to pick the new president.
In short, a third party candidate has no way to win the direct election, and can only hope to kick the election into the House's hands. However, if that third party doesn't have any representation in the House, they're going to crash there. In short, you can't start a new party at the presidency... you have to start building it with smaller offices before you can approach the Oval Office.
These things are being done in the unpopulated desert areas of the USA for a very specific reason... if these things misfire they want as few people and things in the area. Afterall, we just saw NASA drop a space probe they were hoping to catch, and nobody was in any danger because they intentionally did the operation over an unpopulated desert because landing into a creator in the sand was a very tolerable worst-case situation.
/. instead.
Crowd control shouldn't be an issue. There should be no crowds to begin with... let's watch these things from a safe distance here on
What you saw there would clearly be a violation of several laws because employee wages owed are always the first thing handed out when a company goes bankrupt. Any company that stoops to that level is already morally bankrupt and the financial bankruptcy can't be far behind.