My 4-year-old enjoys watching Monster Garage, and I must say that it's encouraged her to look at things in different ways. She gets to see other people tearing cars apart and building new "things" out of the pieces - so daddy's not so strange after all (daddy races with SCCA.)
While it's pandering to the "great unwashed masses," it's still better than Disney's "All Product Marketing, All The Time" Channel.
The SDA is a cartel, plain and simple. The Host/Anciliary License Agreement (pdf) is truely draconian. In addition to paying the annual extortion fee, you have to agree to license any new developments back into the cartel. You're also prohibited from disclosing any details about SD cards. So once you're a member of the cartel, you pretty much can't work on any open-source SD-related projects. There are even "antitrust guidelines" published by SDA because they're dangerously close to crossing the line.
Taken by itself, the request for additional copyright protection may seem like a reasonable request. However, when you consider that the copyright period has been extended to life+infinity, this is clearly an attempt to enhance the strangle hold that's already being imposed. This has nothing to do with "enforcing copyright." It's about "enforcing consumer behavior." When they start forcing content down your throat, you won't like the term "consumer."
The BSA is one of the worst offenders where "presumption of guilt" exists. If you start a new business, as soon as you get your state license you can expect a postcard from the BSA offering to "help" you make sure there's no improperly licensed software on your corporate lan. They'll even install software to periodically check. The BSA may lick my left nut. The sheriff doesn't come in without a warrant. Why would I let these self-appointed asshats in?
So, think Arnold Schwarzenegger when you pronounce the acronym. Maybe something else would be more appropriate.
Re:Nyko's iPod movie player
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
I have motion sickness issues, so reading in the car was not a viable option when I was a kid. Usually, I just suffered through the time trying not to puke.
I built a stand that fits between the front seats in our van. It provides a stable platform for either a laptop or a flat screen (15" is nice) monitor fed by a Viewsonic video-to-VGA converter (broadcast reception comes for free.) We can pipe video tapes in through a portable VCR. The 4-year-old is fully entertained, and typically doesn't complain about "are we there yet." Her preference is to play MAME games on the laptop. Logitech USB game controllers fit her hands well. Gauntlet is her favorite. I'm soooo proud...
No, the destination isn't biased by the airport selection any more than it would be by rental car availability. Consider that you've got two flights that will get you to {$destination} for the same number of sheckels. Consider also that this is a business trip. One flight routes you through Albany's old armpit terminal, and the other routes you though Baltimore's BWI terminal. Both flights have a three-hour layover on the connection. BWI has Boingo service for wifi. Albany has iPass and Airpass. If you have a Boingo account, you're more likely to route through BWI. Hey! The wifi aspect just helped with your purchasing decision.
Your comment makes me thing you've done embedded software development. I'm currently turning up some new hardware, and I'm disgusted by the software IDE. The "hello world" demo program compiled, with full optimization, to just over 65k of code. Yelchkk. I ended up writing a complete console monitor program, complete with initialization, in assembly in just under 4k bytes.
The current mentality of "abstraction from the hardware layer" allows software folks to write code without knowledge of the underlying hardware, but the penalties are code bloat and an ever increasing appetite for cpu cycles. So while the cpu speeds keep increasing, the code performance stays about the same as more layers of abstraction are spackled on top. I have complete faith that someone will build an abstraction layer that allows a GHz SMP machine to run legacy single-thread code with the perfomance of a Pentium 2 366. And then the complaining about "we need better hardware" will continue...
My father did some business with several large metro airports that were upgrading their facilities. High on the list was upgrading the concessions. All of the airports were installing micro-cells within the buildings to capture cell phone revenue. They were also putting in wireless hotspots, and selling pre-paid wi-fi cards (i.e. time on the net) at all the concourse shops. Some airports are installing laptop workstations that strongly resemble the sit-down payphone kiosks. The wired/wireless lan connections and the power outlet are enabled by swiping your pre-paid card that you just purchased. Other airports offer convenient power outlets, with the expectation that you'll enjoy your trip through the facility, and will travel there again in the future.
I wasn't going to get into the whole "is 25 years appropriate" arguement, but since you asked...
I don't think FPMITA prison is appropriate for this doofus. Take away his lasers. He's a fiber optic tech (or something related?) Take away his access to lasers. Force a career change on him. Tatoo "asshat" on his forehead. House arrest with a tracking collar would probably do fine. A year of intense scrutiny will alter his outlook, and that's the point, right? This guy's probably more ignorant than fundamentally evil. A prison sentence makes you and me pay (financially) for his transgression. I'm not interested in that. Prison should be reserved for truely violent and dangerous folks.
If he does it *again* after all that, then it's definitely malicious. Toss him in the clink if he even *looks* at an Edmund Scientific catalog...
The kicker in this case is two-fold: a) he did it more than once; b) he knew the laser he was using could cause eye damage. So this isn't a case of Joe Sixpack getting a laser-pointer from his girlfriend, ripping the package open and heading outside while hollerin' "Hey y'all, watch this!" Nope, Doofus here pointed his fiber-optic test equipment (which he warned the attorneys about being dangerous) at more than one aircraft on more than one occasion. He can try to plead with the judge that he didn't know there would be any people on the aircraft, or that he didn't think that there would be danger beyond X distance from the source, but I don't think anyone is going to fall for it. There's no doubt that the lawyers are going to publicly crucify him, but this guy's actions were clearly negligent.
I RTFA'd, and I thought it was odd that the article leads off with "a study says internet use impacts TV viewing." Well, duh. So I looked at the report's company website - Knowledge Networks. They're a bunch of Stanford professors who build a product marketing research company. Ah, there's the connection. They wrote a report that says "folks are using the internet - your TV advertising is less effective." Makes more sense now. You might consider this report to be an advert for their Syndicated Products. After all, if you're in Product Marketing, you need professional study info and long-term trend analysis info to back up your current crop of wild-assed guesses, right?
Both the US and the former-Soviets have programs to dispose of ICBMs through commercial-use conversions. The US turns Peacekeeper ICBMs into Taurus launch vehicles. Stanford University launched a bunch of picosats on the first Minotaur - a hybrid of the Minuteman ICBM and Pegasus upper stages. The DNEPR has launched a couple of small satellites already, and has a number of Cubesats on-deck. You can coordinate getting a Cubesat on a DNEPR launch through OSSS or TransOrbital.
If they need more machine-readable information than a conventional barcode, use the 2-D barcodes like UPS does (they use Maxicode, good for about 100 ASCII chars.) And check this out - once the passport is closed, nobody can read it. Oh, and it's not detectable with metal detectors, and it's compatible with the existing publication techniques.
My gut is tellimg me that the RFID manufacturers are lobbying the politicians. The malicious behavior is on the part of the RFID manufacturers who are desperate to expand their market.
And if Oldsmobile's contributions were so stellar, exactly why did GM decide to terminate the product line? Answer: they were bland, and were stealing market share from Buick, Pontiac, and Chevy.
Which brings us back on-topic - Nintendo wants product separation, and doesn't want the DS to cannibalize the Gaeboy or console market segments from itself. In order to avoid the divisional infighting, Nintendo is desperately trying to steer the public acceptance to one where three product strata co-exist. If Joe Sixpack views the DS to be another Gameboy, he'll choose one or the other, but not both. Stealing market from yourself is a bad thing. Always.
This is the same situation as Oldsmobile's slogan "It's Not Your Father's Oldsmobile." In general, the slogan should be interpreted as "Oh yes it *is* your Dad's Oldsmobile, but we're so desperate to sell it to you that we're trying to convince you that it's not."
When there's a common perception in the market, the advertising folks will typically issue a "no it isn't" campaign in an effort to alter market acceptance.
TFA talks about the product entering mainstream production in a couple of years. You can purchase the Iowa Thin Film solar cells now. They're about 7% efficient, as they claim. They're not expensive, and you can get them at a number of distributors. I've personally used Jameco and Sundance Solar.
Poking around the XCP Aurora website, there are buried references to "playing through the XCP player," or "using the provided player." Makes me think they require playback through custom software that they include on the disc. There are also references to RealPlayer, MS Media Player, Winamp, etc. It's possible that they're providing a plug-in to those programs that allows decoding of the audio portion while still appearing to be the playback tool of choice. If they're breaking the CD-ROM access by putting bogus CD structure info up front, someone will break out a Sharpie and "fix" it.
My guess is that some MBA looked at the market, and included OS's and playback programs until he got 98% market coverage, and said "that's good enough. The 3% [sic] represented by the remaining folks won't matter - we'll more than make up for that with the increased sales that result from the reduction in bootleg copies." The unfortunate truth is that it won't make a damned difference. They fail to realize that the Internet is what the military folks call a "force multiplier." You only need one determined individual to crack the coding, or to make a decent D-A-D copy (thus stripping off the DRM), and post it on the 'net. Once that happens, you've got a gazillion traders who are more than willing to propagate the copies.
As with all things accounting, the company will probably be given a bunch of choices as to how they do their accounting. All choices are "acceptable," as long as they're consistent. That'll guarantee another set of confusing and essentially meaningless statistics for the bean-counters to mull over.
When an option is granted, the strike price is supposed to be the FMV of the share, possibly minus some discount absorbed by the company. If the company isn't trading yet, they pretty much have the ability to define the price by consulting the ouiji board. Now, the option may have an exercise restriction on it - you, Joe Peon, can't exercise the option until X years have passed. That means the option has zero-value to you, but doesn't necessarily mean that it has zero-value to either the company or to the IRS. I envision two choices - Choice A: the company can expense the option at the time of grant; Choice B: the company can expense the option at the time of exercise. The former has the penalty that the company may expense options that ultimately aren't exercised (i.e. the employee quites before the restriciton period expires.) They'd probably have the opportunity to de-expense unexercised options at that point. The latter choice only taxes exercised options, but tends to defer the accounting event to a point later than what I think was intended.
I'm sure there will be much heated discussion amongst the bean-counters to choose the method that will benefit their industry the best.
IMHO, GEICO is the worst. I had insurance with them when I first got my license, and the rates were absolutely brutal. They wouldn't insure me as an independent driver, and insisted on conjoining my insurance with both parents' accounts. I moved to a different state for college (a legal change of residence) and they wouldn't un-tether me from the folk's policy because I was a student. It was fscked. I got away from them as fast as possible. In retrospect, it's clear that they did this in order to jack all family members' rates when one had an accident. I got away from them prior to my sister having a fander-bender - which promptly caused the family premiums to skyrocket.
While I recognize that GEICO needs to defend it's trademark or risk losing it, I have to believe that the company officers are resorting to litigation in defense of a poorly-crafted business model. Sueing the search engine because someone else mis-used the trademark? That'd be like sueing a golf club manufacturer because someone whacked a ball through my window.
The biggest headache I have with all this legal crap is that software companies want both patents and copyrights to apply to the software product. Copyright applies to non-tangible items like the words inside a book, a musical score, and... software. Patents apply to tangible items like engines, razor blades, sewing machine needles... note the lack of "intellectual property."
I don't see how software can receive protection under both programs. I believe that's part of the problem. There's a fundamental arguement that hasn't been settled - the lawmakers need to declare that software is either IP or tangible-goods. Once that's done, you use either copyright or patent, respectively. You don't get both.
If software is IP, which is the classification I believe it should have, then you don't get patent protection. None. Can you place your "patented algorithm" in my hand? No no no, that's a piece of paper with some scribbling on it. I want just the algorithm. You can't do that? Copyright...
I was on assignment in Arizona with a Toyota Corrola as my rental car. I must say, the Corrola handles desert off-roading quite capably. I'm glad it has a minimal skid plate up front - it got used several times. Don't ever, ever, ever, buy a used rental car... they really mean "used."
(with a US bias...) The file sharing backlash is, IMHO, an example of civil disobedience in response to the **AA organizations cheating the system. Copyright and Patent structures are a *temporary* monopoly granted to the author (and enforced thorough the legal system) in exchange for incentive to expend resources and take risks for the creative process. When the Copyright/Patent period expires, the work is supposed to fall into the public domain for the benefit of society. So, exactly when do the authors make good on their end of the deal? The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension-to-Infinity Act distills down to "effectively, never."
There are two paths to changing the law - pursue it through petition to representatives, or pursue it through civil disobedience. Since the congresscritters appear to be bought and paid for, disobedience seems to be the only reasonable choice that remains. The file sharing folks aren't making a buck doing so. In fact, it costs them time and resources (electricity, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) to participate in the activity. The pirates who sell the materials are a different matter...
Nah, it's just someone trying to make a sensational comparison. If the article said "He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of slightly less than two CD-Rs" you're likely to be unimpressed. Oh, and I'd like to know how he translated some of the electronic sounds into a paper counterpart... there are still huge arguements about how sheet music should be updated to account for modern sounds. The gigabyte-paper comparison is worthless, other than to make Joe Sixpack go "ooohhh."
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My 4-year-old enjoys watching Monster Garage, and I must say that it's encouraged her to look at things in different ways. She gets to see other people tearing cars apart and building new "things" out of the pieces - so daddy's not so strange after all (daddy races with SCCA.)
While it's pandering to the "great unwashed masses," it's still better than Disney's "All Product Marketing, All The Time" Channel.
The SDA is a cartel, plain and simple. The Host/Anciliary License Agreement (pdf) is truely draconian. In addition to paying the annual extortion fee, you have to agree to license any new developments back into the cartel. You're also prohibited from disclosing any details about SD cards. So once you're a member of the cartel, you pretty much can't work on any open-source SD-related projects. There are even "antitrust guidelines" published by SDA because they're dangerously close to crossing the line.
Taken by itself, the request for additional copyright protection may seem like a reasonable request. However, when you consider that the copyright period has been extended to life+infinity, this is clearly an attempt to enhance the strangle hold that's already being imposed. This has nothing to do with "enforcing copyright." It's about "enforcing consumer behavior." When they start forcing content down your throat, you won't like the term "consumer."
The BSA is one of the worst offenders where "presumption of guilt" exists. If you start a new business, as soon as you get your state license you can expect a postcard from the BSA offering to "help" you make sure there's no improperly licensed software on your corporate lan. They'll even install software to periodically check. The BSA may lick my left nut. The sheriff doesn't come in without a warrant. Why would I let these self-appointed asshats in?
So, think Arnold Schwarzenegger when you pronounce the acronym. Maybe something else would be more appropriate.
I have motion sickness issues, so reading in the car was not a viable option when I was a kid. Usually, I just suffered through the time trying not to puke.
...
I built a stand that fits between the front seats in our van. It provides a stable platform for either a laptop or a flat screen (15" is nice) monitor fed by a Viewsonic video-to-VGA converter (broadcast reception comes for free.) We can pipe video tapes in through a portable VCR. The 4-year-old is fully entertained, and typically doesn't complain about "are we there yet." Her preference is to play MAME games on the laptop. Logitech USB game controllers fit her hands well. Gauntlet is her favorite. I'm soooo proud
No, the destination isn't biased by the airport selection any more than it would be by rental car availability. Consider that you've got two flights that will get you to {$destination} for the same number of sheckels. Consider also that this is a business trip. One flight routes you through Albany's old armpit terminal, and the other routes you though Baltimore's BWI terminal. Both flights have a three-hour layover on the connection. BWI has Boingo service for wifi. Albany has iPass and Airpass. If you have a Boingo account, you're more likely to route through BWI. Hey! The wifi aspect just helped with your purchasing decision.
Your comment makes me thing you've done embedded software development. I'm currently turning up some new hardware, and I'm disgusted by the software IDE. The "hello world" demo program compiled, with full optimization, to just over 65k of code. Yelchkk. I ended up writing a complete console monitor program, complete with initialization, in assembly in just under 4k bytes.
...
The current mentality of "abstraction from the hardware layer" allows software folks to write code without knowledge of the underlying hardware, but the penalties are code bloat and an ever increasing appetite for cpu cycles. So while the cpu speeds keep increasing, the code performance stays about the same as more layers of abstraction are spackled on top. I have complete faith that someone will build an abstraction layer that allows a GHz SMP machine to run legacy single-thread code with the perfomance of a Pentium 2 366. And then the complaining about "we need better hardware" will continue
You post information on a public forum? without IP protection? without compensation?
...
Damned commies
My father did some business with several large metro airports that were upgrading their facilities. High on the list was upgrading the concessions. All of the airports were installing micro-cells within the buildings to capture cell phone revenue. They were also putting in wireless hotspots, and selling pre-paid wi-fi cards (i.e. time on the net) at all the concourse shops. Some airports are installing laptop workstations that strongly resemble the sit-down payphone kiosks. The wired/wireless lan connections and the power outlet are enabled by swiping your pre-paid card that you just purchased. Other airports offer convenient power outlets, with the expectation that you'll enjoy your trip through the facility, and will travel there again in the future.
I wasn't going to get into the whole "is 25 years appropriate" arguement, but since you asked ...
...
I don't think FPMITA prison is appropriate for this doofus. Take away his lasers. He's a fiber optic tech (or something related?) Take away his access to lasers. Force a career change on him. Tatoo "asshat" on his forehead. House arrest with a tracking collar would probably do fine. A year of intense scrutiny will alter his outlook, and that's the point, right? This guy's probably more ignorant than fundamentally evil. A prison sentence makes you and me pay (financially) for his transgression. I'm not interested in that. Prison should be reserved for truely violent and dangerous folks.
If he does it *again* after all that, then it's definitely malicious. Toss him in the clink if he even *looks* at an Edmund Scientific catalog
The kicker in this case is two-fold: a) he did it more than once; b) he knew the laser he was using could cause eye damage. So this isn't a case of Joe Sixpack getting a laser-pointer from his girlfriend, ripping the package open and heading outside while hollerin' "Hey y'all, watch this!" Nope, Doofus here pointed his fiber-optic test equipment (which he warned the attorneys about being dangerous) at more than one aircraft on more than one occasion. He can try to plead with the judge that he didn't know there would be any people on the aircraft, or that he didn't think that there would be danger beyond X distance from the source, but I don't think anyone is going to fall for it. There's no doubt that the lawyers are going to publicly crucify him, but this guy's actions were clearly negligent.
I RTFA'd, and I thought it was odd that the article leads off with "a study says internet use impacts TV viewing." Well, duh. So I looked at the report's company website - Knowledge Networks. They're a bunch of Stanford professors who build a product marketing research company. Ah, there's the connection. They wrote a report that says "folks are using the internet - your TV advertising is less effective." Makes more sense now. You might consider this report to be an advert for their Syndicated Products. After all, if you're in Product Marketing, you need professional study info and long-term trend analysis info to back up your current crop of wild-assed guesses, right?
Both the US and the former-Soviets have programs to dispose of ICBMs through commercial-use conversions. The US turns Peacekeeper ICBMs into Taurus launch vehicles. Stanford University launched a bunch of picosats on the first Minotaur - a hybrid of the Minuteman ICBM and Pegasus upper stages. The DNEPR has launched a couple of small satellites already, and has a number of Cubesats on-deck. You can coordinate getting a Cubesat on a DNEPR launch through OSSS or TransOrbital.
If they need more machine-readable information than a conventional barcode, use the 2-D barcodes like UPS does (they use Maxicode, good for about 100 ASCII chars.) And check this out - once the passport is closed, nobody can read it. Oh, and it's not detectable with metal detectors, and it's compatible with the existing publication techniques.
My gut is tellimg me that the RFID manufacturers are lobbying the politicians. The malicious behavior is on the part of the RFID manufacturers who are desperate to expand their market.
And if Oldsmobile's contributions were so stellar, exactly why did GM decide to terminate the product line? Answer: they were bland, and were stealing market share from Buick, Pontiac, and Chevy.
Which brings us back on-topic - Nintendo wants product separation, and doesn't want the DS to cannibalize the Gaeboy or console market segments from itself. In order to avoid the divisional infighting, Nintendo is desperately trying to steer the public acceptance to one where three product strata co-exist. If Joe Sixpack views the DS to be another Gameboy, he'll choose one or the other, but not both. Stealing market from yourself is a bad thing. Always.
This is the same situation as Oldsmobile's slogan "It's Not Your Father's Oldsmobile." In general, the slogan should be interpreted as "Oh yes it *is* your Dad's Oldsmobile, but we're so desperate to sell it to you that we're trying to convince you that it's not."
When there's a common perception in the market, the advertising folks will typically issue a "no it isn't" campaign in an effort to alter market acceptance.
TFA talks about the product entering mainstream production in a couple of years. You can purchase the Iowa Thin Film solar cells now. They're about 7% efficient, as they claim. They're not expensive, and you can get them at a number of distributors. I've personally used Jameco and Sundance Solar.
Poking around the XCP Aurora website, there are buried references to "playing through the XCP player," or "using the provided player." Makes me think they require playback through custom software that they include on the disc. There are also references to RealPlayer, MS Media Player, Winamp, etc. It's possible that they're providing a plug-in to those programs that allows decoding of the audio portion while still appearing to be the playback tool of choice. If they're breaking the CD-ROM access by putting bogus CD structure info up front, someone will break out a Sharpie and "fix" it.
My guess is that some MBA looked at the market, and included OS's and playback programs until he got 98% market coverage, and said "that's good enough. The 3% [sic] represented by the remaining folks won't matter - we'll more than make up for that with the increased sales that result from the reduction in bootleg copies." The unfortunate truth is that it won't make a damned difference. They fail to realize that the Internet is what the military folks call a "force multiplier." You only need one determined individual to crack the coding, or to make a decent D-A-D copy (thus stripping off the DRM), and post it on the 'net. Once that happens, you've got a gazillion traders who are more than willing to propagate the copies.
As with all things accounting, the company will probably be given a bunch of choices as to how they do their accounting. All choices are "acceptable," as long as they're consistent. That'll guarantee another set of confusing and essentially meaningless statistics for the bean-counters to mull over.
When an option is granted, the strike price is supposed to be the FMV of the share, possibly minus some discount absorbed by the company. If the company isn't trading yet, they pretty much have the ability to define the price by consulting the ouiji board. Now, the option may have an exercise restriction on it - you, Joe Peon, can't exercise the option until X years have passed. That means the option has zero-value to you, but doesn't necessarily mean that it has zero-value to either the company or to the IRS. I envision two choices - Choice A: the company can expense the option at the time of grant; Choice B: the company can expense the option at the time of exercise. The former has the penalty that the company may expense options that ultimately aren't exercised (i.e. the employee quites before the restriciton period expires.) They'd probably have the opportunity to de-expense unexercised options at that point. The latter choice only taxes exercised options, but tends to defer the accounting event to a point later than what I think was intended.
I'm sure there will be much heated discussion amongst the bean-counters to choose the method that will benefit their industry the best.
"Cowboy Neil"
The Young Ones version? I'll use Rick's cricket bat to solve this problem. *whack*
IMHO, GEICO is the worst. I had insurance with them when I first got my license, and the rates were absolutely brutal. They wouldn't insure me as an independent driver, and insisted on conjoining my insurance with both parents' accounts. I moved to a different state for college (a legal change of residence) and they wouldn't un-tether me from the folk's policy because I was a student. It was fscked. I got away from them as fast as possible. In retrospect, it's clear that they did this in order to jack all family members' rates when one had an accident. I got away from them prior to my sister having a fander-bender - which promptly caused the family premiums to skyrocket.
While I recognize that GEICO needs to defend it's trademark or risk losing it, I have to believe that the company officers are resorting to litigation in defense of a poorly-crafted business model. Sueing the search engine because someone else mis-used the trademark? That'd be like sueing a golf club manufacturer because someone whacked a ball through my window.
The biggest headache I have with all this legal crap is that software companies want both patents and copyrights to apply to the software product. Copyright applies to non-tangible items like the words inside a book, a musical score, and ... software. Patents apply to tangible items like engines, razor blades, sewing machine needles ... note the lack of "intellectual property."
...
I don't see how software can receive protection under both programs. I believe that's part of the problem. There's a fundamental arguement that hasn't been settled - the lawmakers need to declare that software is either IP or tangible-goods. Once that's done, you use either copyright or patent, respectively. You don't get both.
If software is IP, which is the classification I believe it should have, then you don't get patent protection. None. Can you place your "patented algorithm" in my hand? No no no, that's a piece of paper with some scribbling on it. I want just the algorithm. You can't do that? Copyright
I was on assignment in Arizona with a Toyota Corrola as my rental car. I must say, the Corrola handles desert off-roading quite capably. I'm glad it has a minimal skid plate up front - it got used several times. Don't ever, ever, ever, buy a used rental car ... they really mean "used."
(with a US bias ...) The file sharing backlash is, IMHO, an example of civil disobedience in response to the **AA organizations cheating the system. Copyright and Patent structures are a *temporary* monopoly granted to the author (and enforced thorough the legal system) in exchange for incentive to expend resources and take risks for the creative process. When the Copyright/Patent period expires, the work is supposed to fall into the public domain for the benefit of society. So, exactly when do the authors make good on their end of the deal? The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension-to-Infinity Act distills down to "effectively, never."
...
There are two paths to changing the law - pursue it through petition to representatives, or pursue it through civil disobedience. Since the congresscritters appear to be bought and paid for, disobedience seems to be the only reasonable choice that remains. The file sharing folks aren't making a buck doing so. In fact, it costs them time and resources (electricity, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) to participate in the activity. The pirates who sell the materials are a different matter
Nah, it's just someone trying to make a sensational comparison. If the article said "He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of slightly less than two CD-Rs" you're likely to be unimpressed. Oh, and I'd like to know how he translated some of the electronic sounds into a paper counterpart ... there are still huge arguements about how sheet music should be updated to account for modern sounds. The gigabyte-paper comparison is worthless, other than to make Joe Sixpack go "ooohhh."