I want that font they use in their logo. Talk about elegant industrial design! That is one of the most striking I've seen since Frank Lloyd Wright used to design fonts.
will make first contact with aliens within 20 years.
Now that sounds like a safe prediciton. Rather like the we'll have flat-screen televisions that we just unroll and hang on the wall in 5 years that I've been hearing for the past twenty.
Seriously though, the idea that life must exist elsewhere, and will communicate in a method we can detect across interstellar distances, is still just that -- a theory.
The bill would exempt from copyright law technologies enabling users to zap objectionable parts of shows and movies so the programming can be viewed by children.
Let's start with all the commercials, trailers, and FBI warnings at the start of every DVD nowdays.
Most everyone seems to think that Isaac Asimov's laws were an attempt to design a better robot. WRONG! They were to design better stories!
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (latter amended to include a necessary Zeroth Law) existed to create the classic locked room murder mystery (i.e. the dead body is alone in a locked room that could have only been locked from the inside -- so how was he murdered?).
After creating his supposedly nothing-can-go-wrong infallible set of rules, he proceeded to show their flaws in virtually every story he wrote about robots afterwards. As long as people believed that his Three Laws guaranteed safe robots, his writing career was assured.
(Well almost assured. Even he couldn't save himself from what I Robot has become, given that it's based on his book - which goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense!)
So we ended up with a fascinatingly entertaining set of stories many of us have enjoyed, a couple attempts at movies of them (don't forget The Bicentennial Man), and Dr. Asimov's legacy as a Science Fiction Grand Master is secure for at least our lifetimes.
Whereas one guy putting MP3s on BitTorrent can flood the entire world in hours.
A beautiful myth -- and utter garbage. A few million file sharers -- a few billion inhabitants of this Earth. Yeah, that's going to happen. Would that there really was a song so popular that everybody actually wanted it.
1: To enrich big companies that hold their contracts?
2: To enrich themselves?
3: To enrich their descendents for n generations through perpetual copyrights?
3: Because it's more fun than anything else they can think of to do?
4: Because the music is in them and this is what they do, and they'd perform for free on the street corners if there was no other way to express themselves?
5: Some combination of the above?
Your answer to this will determine if the failure of the big record companies will destroy the creative future of music for us all.
Observation: There are a lot of fiction authors who publish their work for free on the Internet because they can't sell it otherwise. The lack of a big publishing contract has not stopped these people from creating and sharing their works with the rest of us!
1: They might once have been necessary, as when the cost of production, distribution, and promotion was a high barrier of entry to independents.
2: That case no longer exists in anything like its original form.
3: They continue to live well off the efforts of others, not due to any contribution of their own that actually adds to the work being done, but rather through their ability to continue to convince the workers that they remain somehow essential to that worker's survivial.
Am I the only one who find this disturbing that a private company is allowed inside a number of major ISP's and allowed to monitor traffic to the level of determining which programs the users are running? Doesn't this mean that they've looked inside the packets, since most programs now allow the user's choice of ports to use, and P2P means you can't analyze traffic based on its destination IP address?
If CacheLogic, then why not the RIAA?
If monitoring, then why not outright blocking?
Is that a slope, or a Slip-and-Slide[tm], ahead of me?
Given that we cannot establish identity completely anywhere else in society short of invasive DNA testing (identical twins beat this one) or fingerprints (already shown to be easily spoofed), why should cyberspace be any different? We're awash in counterfeit identity documents good enough to pass, and sold on street corners for a few bucks and a few minute's waiting. Most IP addresses dynamically change faster than presidential candidates positions on the issues. You might be able to generate a unique PC ID value (e.g. Windows Product Activation), but who doesn't have more than one PC? And there was an outcry against the CPU ID feature Intel introduced a few years back. Besides, often times many people may use the same PC. So with nothing more than a keyboard and mouse at the far end of the wire, you want to know how to uniquely identify a person -- and all without asking for personal information most of us are (wisely) loath to provide.
My solution: Everyone gets an implanted RFID grain with a unique 128-bit identifier + a public encryption key with cheap readers everywhere they will ever need to establish identity. And anyone caught faking an identity goes to jail for life to deter such attempts.
It won't happen. The privacy advocates would be up in arms against this before the ink was dry on the proposal. And someone would still manage to beat it -- though probably very few. Someone will manage to make his ID grain rewritiable, or some such nonsense.
Conclusion: I don't feel this problem is solvable through any measures current society will accept, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I look forward to seeing what solutions are proposed.
1: Collect empty Pringles cans (cost: free).
2: Cut up one side and roll flat.
3: Xerox one page of instructions (cost: 5 cents).
4: Insert in envelope (cost: 20 cents).
5: Postage (cost: 57 cents for over 1 ounce).
6: Walk to mailbox (good exercise).
7: Collect $25 checks for above.
8: Walk to bank (better exercise).
9: Profit!
To cut a long story short...Company X had a license to USE some code from Company Z.
Ahem, reading the article says:
Softimage's code illegally included proprietary software from another company.
Doesn't sound to me like an licensing issue. More like MS bought a company already illegally using someone else's "patented" or otherwise protected code, and now get the blame for the whole thing. That's not quite fair to MS.
what were altavista running at the time (OS + webserver)?
Funny thought, however Alta Vista started out as a technical demonstration project by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) for their then new Alpha processor boxes. They went out looking for a really big problem to solve, and found it in the attempt to index the web in something close to real-time with excellent transaction response time back to user queries. In that regard it was exceptionally successful, and became the leading search engine until eventually (in many people's minds) being eclisped by Google, which runs on huge farms of "white box" PC's running Linux.
They think it was solar storms. I think it was patents. The Martians kept granting more and more ridiculous software patents until someone was allowed to patent water. And that person then collected it all up and that was the end of Mars as they knew it.
1: Getting the right discs to the right players is certainly going to be fun.
2: One person giving access to the player and discs for a de-macrovisioned rip.
3: Outright theft of the player and discs from any of the well known Academy members.
4: These people are involved in acting. And you expect them to all set up their own new DVD players???
5: Theft where these custom discs are being manufactured in the first place. Maybe it already is.
6: Why not just invite them all into the a big vault -- the real kind, not the film kind -- and have them watch it there?
At some point this is easily more trouble than it's worth.
And wouldn't be funny if they find out that interest in movies actually goes down when all the holes in the early release dike are plugged? Wouldn't that be a shocker!!
Slashdot Mirror
I want that font they use in their logo. Talk about elegant industrial design! That is one of the most striking I've seen since Frank Lloyd Wright used to design fonts.
The lawyers who crafted this settlement, and the judge who approved it, are all forced to have their salaries paid in kind.
Remember that the next time you're in a class action suit. Demand that your lawyers are paid in the same manner that your settlement arrives.
Now that sounds like a safe prediciton. Rather like the we'll have flat-screen televisions that we just unroll and hang on the wall in 5 years that I've been hearing for the past twenty.
Seriously though, the idea that life must exist elsewhere, and will communicate in a method we can detect across interstellar distances, is still just that -- a theory.
Those are probably precisely the countries we want to jam.
Let's start with all the commercials, trailers, and FBI warnings at the start of every DVD nowdays.
There better be a whole chapter dedicated to SCO.
Now I'll be able to run Doom 3 and Longhorn on the same system!
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (latter amended to include a necessary Zeroth Law) existed to create the classic locked room murder mystery (i.e. the dead body is alone in a locked room that could have only been locked from the inside -- so how was he murdered?).
After creating his supposedly nothing-can-go-wrong infallible set of rules, he proceeded to show their flaws in virtually every story he wrote about robots afterwards. As long as people believed that his Three Laws guaranteed safe robots, his writing career was assured.
(Well almost assured. Even he couldn't save himself from what I Robot has become, given that it's based on his book - which goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense!)
So we ended up with a fascinatingly entertaining set of stories many of us have enjoyed, a couple attempts at movies of them (don't forget The Bicentennial Man), and Dr. Asimov's legacy as a Science Fiction Grand Master is secure for at least our lifetimes.
A beautiful myth -- and utter garbage. A few million file sharers -- a few billion inhabitants of this Earth. Yeah, that's going to happen. Would that there really was a song so popular that everybody actually wanted it.
Like I care? AM radio is very lossy, and that's where I've often fallen in love with the songs I've chosen to own afterwards.
Do they do it to:
1: To enrich big companies that hold their contracts?
2: To enrich themselves?
3: To enrich their descendents for n generations through perpetual copyrights?
3: Because it's more fun than anything else they can think of to do?
4: Because the music is in them and this is what they do, and they'd perform for free on the street corners if there was no other way to express themselves?
5: Some combination of the above?
Your answer to this will determine if the failure of the big record companies will destroy the creative future of music for us all.
Observation: There are a lot of fiction authors who publish their work for free on the Internet because they can't sell it otherwise. The lack of a big publishing contract has not stopped these people from creating and sharing their works with the rest of us!
1: They might once have been necessary, as when the cost of production, distribution, and promotion was a high barrier of entry to independents.
2: That case no longer exists in anything like its original form.
3: They continue to live well off the efforts of others, not due to any contribution of their own that actually adds to the work being done, but rather through their ability to continue to convince the workers that they remain somehow essential to that worker's survivial.
Impressive for a first post. I can't type nearly that fast.
This induces people to commit crimes by copying and sharing these recordings that would never exist if the RIAA didn't sell them in the first place.
ARREST THE RIAA!
Can I download some firmware to upgrade my Celeron to a full Pentium 4?
If CacheLogic, then why not the RIAA?
If monitoring, then why not outright blocking?
Is that a slope, or a Slip-and-Slide[tm], ahead of me?
My solution: Everyone gets an implanted RFID grain with a unique 128-bit identifier + a public encryption key with cheap readers everywhere they will ever need to establish identity. And anyone caught faking an identity goes to jail for life to deter such attempts.
It won't happen. The privacy advocates would be up in arms against this before the ink was dry on the proposal. And someone would still manage to beat it -- though probably very few. Someone will manage to make his ID grain rewritiable, or some such nonsense.
Conclusion: I don't feel this problem is solvable through any measures current society will accept, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I look forward to seeing what solutions are proposed.
1: Collect empty Pringles cans (cost: free).
2: Cut up one side and roll flat.
3: Xerox one page of instructions (cost: 5 cents).
4: Insert in envelope (cost: 20 cents).
5: Postage (cost: 57 cents for over 1 ounce).
6: Walk to mailbox (good exercise).
7: Collect $25 checks for above.
8: Walk to bank (better exercise).
9: Profit!
Ahem, reading the article says:
Softimage's code illegally included proprietary software from another company.
Doesn't sound to me like an licensing issue. More like MS bought a company already illegally using someone else's "patented" or otherwise protected code, and now get the blame for the whole thing. That's not quite fair to MS.
Funny thought, however Alta Vista started out as a technical demonstration project by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) for their then new Alpha processor boxes. They went out looking for a really big problem to solve, and found it in the attempt to index the web in something close to real-time with excellent transaction response time back to user queries. In that regard it was exceptionally successful, and became the leading search engine until eventually (in many people's minds) being eclisped by Google, which runs on huge farms of "white box" PC's running Linux.
They also offered to accept my $3000 RIAA apology-for-using-KaZaA payment.
And next week they've promised me a toaster for opening my new account.
Uh, don't you mean billion?
They think it was solar storms. I think it was patents. The Martians kept granting more and more ridiculous software patents until someone was allowed to patent water. And that person then collected it all up and that was the end of Mars as they knew it.
2: One person giving access to the player and discs for a de-macrovisioned rip.
3: Outright theft of the player and discs from any of the well known Academy members.
4: These people are involved in acting. And you expect them to all set up their own new DVD players???
5: Theft where these custom discs are being manufactured in the first place. Maybe it already is.
6: Why not just invite them all into the a big vault -- the real kind, not the film kind -- and have them watch it there?
At some point this is easily more trouble than it's worth.
And wouldn't be funny if they find out that interest in movies actually goes down when all the holes in the early release dike are plugged? Wouldn't that be a shocker!!
Probably the same guy who designed Louis Wu's ship the Lying Bastard. That ship, as I recall, crashed into the Ringworld.