Shouldn't the DVD-CCA, rather than the MPAA be the be the organization responsible for enforcing the rules behind the CSS system?
Granted, the two organizations are very similar, but the MPAA should be calling its friends rather than be the entity in the headline.
The point is that the cloud image isn't assembled by a person acting senselessly in Photoshop, but by an automated program that is most definitely acting senselessly each hour.
Cool, and it takes a bit of graphics processing to make it happen... but still kinda pointless.
There were no last minute additions to the Olympic sponsor list. Athletes who didn't want to comply with those sponsor restrictions could have pulled out of the games...
It's exactly what the Olympic sponsors don't want to see happen... a close up on a competitor drinking water that has a logo other than that of an official sponsor. That'd be a free ad that'd water down the value of the ones that the sponsors are paying for.
NBC would very quickly be driven out of the Olympic business if people started telling sponsors that their sponsorship would make them less likely to buy their products. No sponsor of any kind ever likes to attract a protest group, and right now NBC is selling their Olympic coverage sponsorships on the premise that it's one of the most family-friendly broadcasts you can find.
Right now, there's just not enough complaints about Olympic corruption for sponsors to be scared away. However, if there ever was, the whole IOC might colapse out of a funding crisis.
Most athletes are used to it. They've always had to obey rules given down to them by their leagues about what they're allowed to wear during competition, and they're also used to having clauses in personal endorcement deals that say they can't be seen in public consuming/using a competitor's product.
If an athlete doesn't like those rules, they can just sit out. We're already seeing several noteworthy NBA players refuse to take part in the Olympic basketball competition, and NBA team owner Mark Cuban is suggesting that players on his team stay out because of the risk that an injury that happens in those games that they'd have to play for free might impact their ability to play in the games they're being paid for.
The web casino gets all sorts of free worldwide media coverage and they only had to pay the one guy a few hundred dollars... pretty good bang for the advertising buck for a company that has trouble buying ads in mainstream venues.
This is what the Olympic officials most want to avoid. They've got sponsors paying for the right to be associated with the games, and they don't want anybody taking a free ride on their publicity.
This is just like an amusement park that can control what they're going to let through their gates, even while charging $25 a person going through. The IOC is renting every olympic venue, so they get to set the rules as to what goes on there. If you don't like the rules, don't buy a ticket and don't go in the venues...
What it boils down to is the fact that the Olympics have lost their glow as a world gathering and now are just plain one big international TV game show production...
Home automation is actually pretty simple and the idea's been around for years. Instead of a thermostat being set at a particular level all of the time, it can be dynamically reset by software logic based on whatever rules you can think of. In the mainstream now, there are simple hardware based models that can change their settings based on time of day paterns, but just think of the potential power if a thermostat could base its rules on more relavant details like the outdoor conditions and whether there are people home or not.
What I've found in my family's ruleset for when we do and don't use our A/C system is that when we decide to disable the A/C, we immediately must open our windows to let in outdoor air... is there any system that could motorize the windows so that they'd open based on the same software that might decide that the outdoor air was too cool for A/C but too warm to let the house be allowed to retain heat by having the windows closed?
Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.
The natural course of any process is towards entropy. All schedules of organization, including a business, will naturally fall apart if its owners don't work hard to keep it together.
Any business is on a natural course towards bankruptcy, it isn't limited to just spammers. People get born, and eventually they die. Businesses come into life when they get incorperated, and eventually die when they declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and can have near-death experiences as they file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.]
We all wish spammers will just go bankrupt, but the truth is that all businesses will eventually. It's only a matter of time.
There are some things the US Government is just plain contradictory on because, well, We the People are contradictory on the topic.
We shout out that we have the First Amendment rights anytime somebody tries to tell us not to speak, but then we strugle to find a way to make other people we don't want to hear shut up. The fact is, anywhere you create an unregulated communication medium, the smut, scum, and scam people will definitely show up to play. It's just the way things work.
I thought everyone on Slashdot hated the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft. Why do you keep hyping CDs, movies, and Windows games? Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
In short, there are some advertiser communications that we don't welcome into our lives and call "spam", while there are other advertiser communications that we invite into our lives when we go through the Sunday Newspaper looking for the ad circular from our favorite store so we can see what's on sale without having to go there.
Wording a rule set so that spam gets shut down but ads we want to see still get through is quite a tough task to do on a one-viewer basis. It becomes even more difficult to do that on a comminity basis. Some of us want to know what's on sale this week at Best Buy, others couldn't care less.
I just don't see a solution that pleases everybody being possible in this area. It'll always be a game of new regulations constantly going up, but only being effective until somebody finds a way to work around them. We can hate spammers as scum, but that seems like the worst we can do to them at times.
Far too many people strive to maximize profits in the present, while neglecting the risk that their actions might cause a disruption in the slow-but-steady cash flow they already have.
Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to "the community" for no direct financial reward in order for them to have the credit in the community to get the development they need in the future.
It's truely a balancing act. Give away too much and you give away the store, but give away too little and people who you aren't paying will stop doing your work for you...
It's right now a legal bit of muddy water because two sets of rights come into conflict. The copyright owner has a right to try to protect their copyright, but the computer system owner also has the right under anti-hacking laws to post a "No accessing if you work for _______" sign and have that stick.
So, basically, the RIAA has to comitt a civil tort against person X in order to get evidence to prove that person X comitted a civil tort against them. Two torts however do not offset... it'd be interesting if a group of RIAA lawsuit victims countersued the RIAA claiming illegal system access.
In 1779, the rule was that all criminal defendants were entitled to a trial by jury if they wanted one, and either side of a civil trial was entitled to get a trial by jury if they wanted one and more than $20 worth of property was in dispute.
Now, in 2004,the rule is that all criminal defendants are entitled to a trial by jury if they want one, and either side of a civil trial is entitled to get a trial by jury if they want one and more than $20 worth of property is in dispute.
Uhm... wait a second, I think a little inflation set in over the 200+ year span, yet the $20 value has been hard-coded into the Constitution and never revised. The point is that a jury trial is much more expensive for all involved partisipate in than a judge trial. "The People's Court" was a groundbreaking TV show because it showed a concept in courts that most people didn't know about, the Small Claims Court where both parties waive their right to a trial by jury and the entire case can fit into a short presentation to a single judge, with no lawyers allowed. The thing is, however, most businesses that can afford high-priced lawyers will always demand a trial by jury whenever being sued in order to stay out of such an environment... because that environment levels the playing field and makes unequal ability to afford a lawyer worthless.
It'd be interesting to see what would happen if that right to demand a civil trial by jury was moved from $20 to $20,000... if the RIAA didn't have their advantage-by-lawyer and had to prove each case one-by-one at appointed hours, would they still be able to do what they're doing?
Judges have little to no control over what kind of trials they're assigned to preside over. That decision is usually made by a clerk who strives to maintain a random process of assigning incoming cases to available judges on a random basis.
If you want to make a statement on her credibility or lack there of, how about saying something about her behavior when presented with such cases in her court...
Just like how most lawyers who are deciding whether to take a civil case or not look for "deep pockets" in the potential defendants to see if there's any money to be had, the RIAA seems like they're doing enough background research to assure that they only sue "empty pockets", people for whom a $5000 loss would drive them into bankruptcy, and most certainly couldn't fund a $20,000 defense.
If anybody surprises them and mounts a defense that can withstand a RIAA paperwork dump, the RIAA quickly retreats out of fear losing a case in the courtroom would become a model for which other defendants could mount a less expensive defense.
In short, the RIAA is playing the game to win thousands of small fights, while backing down from any high-stakes challenge.
That seems setup makes sense under Windows, but seems utterly useless under any Unix variant. It's almost as if Microsoft is defensively patenting just to make sure nobody else weasels in and trys to cut them off from a concept they want to use.
That phrase, "in a data store" seems to be the innovation that qualified for the patent. The sudo command lets a process run as root, but requires the root logon to do so.
The Microsoft Way seems to mark the "run as root" privledge on the shortcut to the program without having the lower user have any access to see what the higher-level password actually is.
If you own any mutual funds, you might want to look into what their behavior around the Google IPO was this week.
The IPO shares had a pop of about $13 on day one, which clearly indicates that there were a lot of people who wanted in on GOOG stock but didn't get it out of the Dutch Auction process so they were willing to offer a premium to the first Dutch Auction winners who were willing to sell and bank an instant profit.
I suspect that there were many "institutional investors" who boycotted the Dutch Auction simply because they didn't like it, as it takes the ability to bank instant profits away from them and instead gives it to the average investor. However, mutual fund managers represent a whole bunch of average investors at once... when they lose money, they're losing their customer's money.
If any of your mutual funds turned out to have paid more than the IPO price for GOOG stock yesterday, sell the fund today. Your manager spent some of your money trying to make the Dutch Aution process look bad. If he was willing to pay $95 per share for GOOG in the afternoon, he should have been willing to bid $95 per share in the Dutch Auction, which would have resulted in the same shares for less money.
The Dutch Auction is just a different way of doing an IPO, one that upsets the big boys because everybody gets to come out of the gate at the same time with no advantage for them anymore. This instant-pop seems to indicate that some people were waiting for GOOG to hit the NASDAQ system and not playing in the Dutch Auction, and if somebody was doing that in your name I don't think you want them controling your money any more.
Which essentially makes it an apples to oranges comparision. It's like saying I have 60 GB of possible e-mail storage because I store everything to a local HD.:)
There seems to be a segment of the marketplace that loves the word "digital" thinking it must mean "better technology" which is true most of the time, but there are some things that are just meant to be done in analog sound amplification and image magnification being two of the biggest examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't the DVD-CCA, rather than the MPAA be the be the organization responsible for enforcing the rules behind the CSS system? Granted, the two organizations are very similar, but the MPAA should be calling its friends rather than be the entity in the headline.
The point is that the cloud image isn't assembled by a person acting senselessly in Photoshop, but by an automated program that is most definitely acting senselessly each hour.
Cool, and it takes a bit of graphics processing to make it happen... but still kinda pointless.
Nothing like taking a small image-based site and exposing it to a slashdotting, huh?
Mind linking to that other post?... Oh, yeah, right, that other post doesn't exist. Sorry.
There were no last minute additions to the Olympic sponsor list. Athletes who didn't want to comply with those sponsor restrictions could have pulled out of the games...
It's exactly what the Olympic sponsors don't want to see happen... a close up on a competitor drinking water that has a logo other than that of an official sponsor. That'd be a free ad that'd water down the value of the ones that the sponsors are paying for.
NBC would very quickly be driven out of the Olympic business if people started telling sponsors that their sponsorship would make them less likely to buy their products. No sponsor of any kind ever likes to attract a protest group, and right now NBC is selling their Olympic coverage sponsorships on the premise that it's one of the most family-friendly broadcasts you can find.
Right now, there's just not enough complaints about Olympic corruption for sponsors to be scared away. However, if there ever was, the whole IOC might colapse out of a funding crisis.
Most athletes are used to it. They've always had to obey rules given down to them by their leagues about what they're allowed to wear during competition, and they're also used to having clauses in personal endorcement deals that say they can't be seen in public consuming/using a competitor's product. If an athlete doesn't like those rules, they can just sit out. We're already seeing several noteworthy NBA players refuse to take part in the Olympic basketball competition, and NBA team owner Mark Cuban is suggesting that players on his team stay out because of the risk that an injury that happens in those games that they'd have to play for free might impact their ability to play in the games they're being paid for.
You can say they may have too much security put up for brand protection at the Athens games, but they've already had a high profile failure... A man wearing a tutu and with the logo of a web-based casino paited on his chest jumped off a diving board into the pool at the diving venue.
The web casino gets all sorts of free worldwide media coverage and they only had to pay the one guy a few hundred dollars... pretty good bang for the advertising buck for a company that has trouble buying ads in mainstream venues.
This is what the Olympic officials most want to avoid. They've got sponsors paying for the right to be associated with the games, and they don't want anybody taking a free ride on their publicity.
This is just like an amusement park that can control what they're going to let through their gates, even while charging $25 a person going through. The IOC is renting every olympic venue, so they get to set the rules as to what goes on there. If you don't like the rules, don't buy a ticket and don't go in the venues...
What it boils down to is the fact that the Olympics have lost their glow as a world gathering and now are just plain one big international TV game show production...
Home automation is actually pretty simple and the idea's been around for years. Instead of a thermostat being set at a particular level all of the time, it can be dynamically reset by software logic based on whatever rules you can think of. In the mainstream now, there are simple hardware based models that can change their settings based on time of day paterns, but just think of the potential power if a thermostat could base its rules on more relavant details like the outdoor conditions and whether there are people home or not.
What I've found in my family's ruleset for when we do and don't use our A/C system is that when we decide to disable the A/C, we immediately must open our windows to let in outdoor air... is there any system that could motorize the windows so that they'd open based on the same software that might decide that the outdoor air was too cool for A/C but too warm to let the house be allowed to retain heat by having the windows closed?
Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.
The natural course of any process is towards entropy. All schedules of organization, including a business, will naturally fall apart if its owners don't work hard to keep it together.
Any business is on a natural course towards bankruptcy, it isn't limited to just spammers. People get born, and eventually they die. Businesses come into life when they get incorperated, and eventually die when they declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and can have near-death experiences as they file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.]
We all wish spammers will just go bankrupt, but the truth is that all businesses will eventually. It's only a matter of time.
There are some things the US Government is just plain contradictory on because, well, We the People are contradictory on the topic.
We shout out that we have the First Amendment rights anytime somebody tries to tell us not to speak, but then we strugle to find a way to make other people we don't want to hear shut up. The fact is, anywhere you create an unregulated communication medium, the smut, scum, and scam people will definitely show up to play. It's just the way things work.
I thought everyone on Slashdot hated the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft. Why do you keep hyping CDs, movies, and Windows games?
Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
In short, there are some advertiser communications that we don't welcome into our lives and call "spam", while there are other advertiser communications that we invite into our lives when we go through the Sunday Newspaper looking for the ad circular from our favorite store so we can see what's on sale without having to go there.
Wording a rule set so that spam gets shut down but ads we want to see still get through is quite a tough task to do on a one-viewer basis. It becomes even more difficult to do that on a comminity basis. Some of us want to know what's on sale this week at Best Buy, others couldn't care less.
I just don't see a solution that pleases everybody being possible in this area. It'll always be a game of new regulations constantly going up, but only being effective until somebody finds a way to work around them. We can hate spammers as scum, but that seems like the worst we can do to them at times.
Far too many people strive to maximize profits in the present, while neglecting the risk that their actions might cause a disruption in the slow-but-steady cash flow they already have.
Profiting off of Open Source requires that a business must sometimes give valuable IP back to "the community" for no direct financial reward in order for them to have the credit in the community to get the development they need in the future.
It's truely a balancing act. Give away too much and you give away the store, but give away too little and people who you aren't paying will stop doing your work for you...
It's right now a legal bit of muddy water because two sets of rights come into conflict. The copyright owner has a right to try to protect their copyright, but the computer system owner also has the right under anti-hacking laws to post a "No accessing if you work for _______" sign and have that stick. So, basically, the RIAA has to comitt a civil tort against person X in order to get evidence to prove that person X comitted a civil tort against them. Two torts however do not offset... it'd be interesting if a group of RIAA lawsuit victims countersued the RIAA claiming illegal system access.
In 1779, the rule was that all criminal defendants were entitled to a trial by jury if they wanted one, and either side of a civil trial was entitled to get a trial by jury if they wanted one and more than $20 worth of property was in dispute.
Now, in 2004,the rule is that all criminal defendants are entitled to a trial by jury if they want one, and either side of a civil trial is entitled to get a trial by jury if they want one and more than $20 worth of property is in dispute.
Uhm... wait a second, I think a little inflation set in over the 200+ year span, yet the $20 value has been hard-coded into the Constitution and never revised. The point is that a jury trial is much more expensive for all involved partisipate in than a judge trial. "The People's Court" was a groundbreaking TV show because it showed a concept in courts that most people didn't know about, the Small Claims Court where both parties waive their right to a trial by jury and the entire case can fit into a short presentation to a single judge, with no lawyers allowed. The thing is, however, most businesses that can afford high-priced lawyers will always demand a trial by jury whenever being sued in order to stay out of such an environment... because that environment levels the playing field and makes unequal ability to afford a lawyer worthless.
It'd be interesting to see what would happen if that right to demand a civil trial by jury was moved from $20 to $20,000... if the RIAA didn't have their advantage-by-lawyer and had to prove each case one-by-one at appointed hours, would they still be able to do what they're doing?
Judges have little to no control over what kind of trials they're assigned to preside over. That decision is usually made by a clerk who strives to maintain a random process of assigning incoming cases to available judges on a random basis.
If you want to make a statement on her credibility or lack there of, how about saying something about her behavior when presented with such cases in her court...
Just like how most lawyers who are deciding whether to take a civil case or not look for "deep pockets" in the potential defendants to see if there's any money to be had, the RIAA seems like they're doing enough background research to assure that they only sue "empty pockets", people for whom a $5000 loss would drive them into bankruptcy, and most certainly couldn't fund a $20,000 defense.
If anybody surprises them and mounts a defense that can withstand a RIAA paperwork dump, the RIAA quickly retreats out of fear losing a case in the courtroom would become a model for which other defendants could mount a less expensive defense.
In short, the RIAA is playing the game to win thousands of small fights, while backing down from any high-stakes challenge.
That seems setup makes sense under Windows, but seems utterly useless under any Unix variant. It's almost as if Microsoft is defensively patenting just to make sure nobody else weasels in and trys to cut them off from a concept they want to use.
That phrase, "in a data store" seems to be the innovation that qualified for the patent. The sudo command lets a process run as root, but requires the root logon to do so.
The Microsoft Way seems to mark the "run as root" privledge on the shortcut to the program without having the lower user have any access to see what the higher-level password actually is.
If you own any mutual funds, you might want to look into what their behavior around the Google IPO was this week.
The IPO shares had a pop of about $13 on day one, which clearly indicates that there were a lot of people who wanted in on GOOG stock but didn't get it out of the Dutch Auction process so they were willing to offer a premium to the first Dutch Auction winners who were willing to sell and bank an instant profit.
I suspect that there were many "institutional investors" who boycotted the Dutch Auction simply because they didn't like it, as it takes the ability to bank instant profits away from them and instead gives it to the average investor. However, mutual fund managers represent a whole bunch of average investors at once... when they lose money, they're losing their customer's money.
If any of your mutual funds turned out to have paid more than the IPO price for GOOG stock yesterday, sell the fund today. Your manager spent some of your money trying to make the Dutch Aution process look bad. If he was willing to pay $95 per share for GOOG in the afternoon, he should have been willing to bid $95 per share in the Dutch Auction, which would have resulted in the same shares for less money.
The Dutch Auction is just a different way of doing an IPO, one that upsets the big boys because everybody gets to come out of the gate at the same time with no advantage for them anymore. This instant-pop seems to indicate that some people were waiting for GOOG to hit the NASDAQ system and not playing in the Dutch Auction, and if somebody was doing that in your name I don't think you want them controling your money any more.
Which essentially makes it an apples to oranges comparision. It's like saying I have 60 GB of possible e-mail storage because I store everything to a local HD. :)
There seems to be a segment of the marketplace that loves the word "digital" thinking it must mean "better technology" which is true most of the time, but there are some things that are just meant to be done in analog sound amplification and image magnification being two of the biggest examples.