pretty accurately in their attempts to kill it. This latest faux paux of Sony/BMG is just the icing on the cake.
I mean, has no one made note that the decline in sales is partially the result of the dissappearance of the CD logo from the label, a logo that Phillips owns? You see, savvy buyers often look at the packaging, and if that logo isn't on it, its got some sort of copy protection on it that may not be good and healthy for your hardware with the Mac cd drive being one of the more famous oopses.
And have you noticed that despite the claims to the contrary, as in "we're replacing all those disks", the exact same infected disks are still for sale at WallyWorld this instant, and the sales clerks aka shoplifter observers on the floor in the music dept have no knowledge of the controversy surrounding Sony/BMG stuff. None, nada, zip, and haven't got 50 cents to call somebody who might care. Its all a big shrug to them.
So the standard mantra is still being chanted for all the legal people that pass our laws to absorb as gospel "Sales are in the toilet so it must be piracy, please pass even more restrictive laws to protect our jurassic business model."
I looked at quite a few Christmas music cd's at Krogers today, and not one of them had the CD logo. They all went back neatly into the cardboard display as I wasn't about to take a chance that one of them might re-program the flash in my player and make a 90 dollar dvd burner into a brick to be thrown out.
It all boils down to the sales loss being a direct result of enough folks looking for that logo, guaranteeing its a fully standard stereo audio cd with no fancy hidden programs on it, to make a visible difference in the sales volume. IMO, piracy has so little to do with it that its not a measurable statistic, its been going on for 65 years that I know of, back when someone would buy the record, and carefully transcribe the words and music and make copies on the school mimeo for all their friends. Once my older cousin even called the radio station and asked them to play it about hourly so she could write down what she heard. She didn't tell them that though of course. That is how piracy was done then, todays duping of the cd for your friends may be easier, but I have serious doubts the actual count of copies passed around in terms of the % of sales lost is a hell of a lot different now than it was then.
To Sony/BMG et all: Give us back the CD logo, and watch sales climb back out of the sewer. Provided the music itself can get out of the sewer that is, we aren't buying excrementy music, and there is plenty of that on the shelves today.
Chuckle, the next msg says he's running for re-election next year. What the heck do you suppose he'll do if he don't? John Sununu is an old dog with many years in the political games and has managed to keep his shorts clean better than most.
Tell ya what, based on the mans intelligence which is considerable, if he were to run for pres, he'd have my normally libertarian vote. Really, I haven't figured out why he hasn't tossed his hat in that direction other than he can't do that and be like Feingold as it would take a considerable war chest to do that.
Based on what I've read about Feingold not accepting campaign contribs from anybody, I'd say he'd be a bit short on funds to mount a campaign for president. Either way, those 2 are far better men than the 43rd will ever be. And McCain, while his hearts in the right place, just doesn't have the mental stuff for that job.
Democracy is no longer a Democracy when it takes upwards of 20 million just to get to the first primary, and then you really have to go hat in hand to those that expect payment in kind. After a while, the money has bypassed so many campaign finance laws that these sharks own you.
As a broadcast engineer, the income we get from the campaigns is considerable, but we would survive, albeit a little lower on the hog, if political time was not billable, but was also limited to a reasonable fraction of the air time available.
Think about it, and vote with your concience, not for the flashier 30 second spot.
Tee hee. As if anybody can imagine that sony is gonna sue M$ for a dmca violation? I sure as heck can't even imagine it. But then my imagination seems to have taken a vacation after 71 years, in favor of my version of common sense.
This whole fiasco SHOULD have sony backed into the far corner of their cage, with their tail tucked so firmly in its a very effective chastity belt.
Funny part is, all those cd's marked copy protected? Wally World hasn't pulled a single title off their music racks, nosiree bub. Not a one.
I asked at the counter if sales of sony/bmg music was down & the twerp said not that he could notice. He seemed to be totally unaware of any controversy regarding this, and didn't seem to have a quarter to call somebody who might care.
So this whole sordid thing has NOT made near enough noise for Joe Sixpack to understand the issues here, and thats the real problem. We're preaching to the choir, and we the choir know the words by heart. But to Joe Sixpack, were just a bunch of noise makers to be turned off.
Maybe next time we should vote for the greater evil, look at what voting for the lesser eveil got us...
Because if its unlicensed, by the RIAA or MPAA, then excuse me but where the hell do they get any legal standing?
If they didn't have an assigned copyright to the work the poor schmuk is accuused of downloading, giving them licenseing rights over THAT WORK, then they have absolutely NO STANDING in court, and are wasting their attorneys^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hshysters time to even screw with the suit.
To top that, the shysters involved, and thats the right term, would if they were not shysters, be bound to educate the RIAA/MPAA as to their lack of legal standing to bring an action. Thats one of the differences between a lawyer/attorney, and a shyster/ambulance chaser. The judge is equally bound to educate them and I've seen it happen in an action brought against me.
Shysters that would get involved with such as that give decent attorneys a bad name. To bad the bar associations are often run by such, so there is no self policing of the rank & file.
I think a recent inch filler in the currant readers digest said it best when it defined a vegetarian as one who "doesn't hunt well". I tend to agree. But that doesn't mean he has to be pale either.
As far as the article being right or wrong, although they do have some wins, the losses have been highly precedent setting losses, losses we really shouldn't have lost, and cannot well afford in the longer view.
Well, some experiments take place whether you want to do them or not.
Back in '78, the local conoco delivery driver in Farmington NM made a mistake and filled the no-lead tanks at the gas station we fueled up at, with super-diesel.. I arrived and filled both tanks of a 77 bronco (early 302 v8) to the brim with that stuff, starting from nearly dry.
By the time I was 5 miles out on the hiway, I knew something wasn't exactly kosher as it was pinging like crazy anytime I gave it enough throttle to accelerate. I was dragging a trailer with a Big Max ATV on it, so that little bronco was being rode hard & put away wet anyway. So I stopped at the next gas pump, borrowed a funnel, and put as much hi-test leaded ethyl in it as it would hold, using that tank on the hills & the other one on the flats as I headed for a mountain in Colorado where a microwave relay was on the fritz that I needed to fix asap. I did this about every 40 miles or so, and finally got enough ethyl into both tanks to shut it up.
But that did blow the carbon out of things, and it ran with an obvious increase in horsepower for a couple of months after that! And other than a possible poisoning of the cat convertor at the time, there was no other effect, good or bad, detectable by that little "experiment".
Yeah, I think its over half a day now that this story has been the top of the page. Hey/., wtf?
Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Unforch, when an open source idea seems bent on a major debut in the market, thre is always some yahoo that scribbles it down on the back of the knapkin as he sits in the next booth with his hearing aid turned all the way up, just so he can run to the Patent office and get a monopoly he can then charge royalties for.
This is exactly what happened when the fcc setforth new rules and protocols for the digital alert now used in the EAS system.
3 or 4 years later (the patent office is always that far behind) we all get letters from some legal beagle whose mother should have been spayed, demanding $1500/year royalties for use of "their" patented methods.
I don't believe that any of us broadcasters even took the time to compose a go get screwed message. We ignored it, and rightfully so, based on the fact that this was a government edict, and we damned sure weren't about to pay some slimeball to use what the government said we _had_ to use. We in turn threw it back into the equipment makers lap along with the commission, saying we wanted indemnification against this patent.
The equipment makers gathered up all their notes and presented enough prior art to predate this slimeball by over 2 decades, and that patent quietly went away. But to actualy have a publicly available "we made a mistake" notice to all who got that letter issued by the USTPO? You must be new here, never happened unless we wasted our dime and called somebody who might have had an interest in seeing it revoked.
I was all for sueing the idiots for damages if it was upheld on a rehearing, and there were some pretty big names in the business thinking along the same lines from the conversations I had with a couple of them.
There needs to be a balanceing of interests in both patent, and copyright arenas vis-a-vis the public interest. Today there is none, as in absolutely zip protections for societies ills directly caused by our draconion laws directly purchased by M$, Disney & Company, et all.
When its pretty much an established fact that the piracy effects only the middleman, and not the talent, the talent often being the beneficiary of the distribution of their work via pirate channels making it more popular at the concert box office, its no wonder that so few feel any remorse for the copyright violations they may commit, they aren't harming the artist in the least. Its time the talent got paid a reasonable fee per sale that IS NOT IN ANY WAY DISCOUNTED other than by pro-rated agreement, by the total production and advertising costs associated with the production of an 5 cent cd. In other words, everybody needs to accept an equal sized piece of the gamble including the guys in the middle as to whether or not this particular cd will or will not be a hit. That appears not to be the situation now as the talent is expected to shoulder it all, and a million seller can still leave people like the Dixie Chicks in the red according to the creative accounting so prevalently used.
Thats BS, pure and simple, usually found in pastures shared by cattle. Be carefull you don't step in it as it reduces your choices of where to go have dinner unless you are in the Omaha stockyards near Johnny's.
Well, they did say getting/.'ed would be the icing on the cake. Just hope it doesn't run all over the floor before they can cut and serve the cake we can't hear...
That was a credit to the Hudson Bay Fan Company for keeping all that smoking data cool.
But don't tell the RIAA or the MPAA, they'll have a press release out yet tonight about how much they lost to piracy. But I'll bet its never crossed their minds that if they'd quit treating the customer like a thief, and give him an honest hours entertainment for an honest hours wages, plus letting us see how much the talent got out of that, we'ed be a hell of a lot happier when we do fork over.
We don't like the talent to starve when they've a million seller, and nearly $20 for a friggin cd is outragious.
I have to concur heartily. Not to mention that while boinc has a message board one can take problems to, the answers, when occasionally given are meant to make the user feel about 1/8" tall. So when it gets shut down, I guess I'll just reclaim the drive space. Which frankly, tends to pi$$ me off as I'm currently ranked at 99.363% in the world rankings.
When I first started this, about a month after the project went public, I thought maybe it might be worthwhile. But now that I see the data is from a rather narrow band around the ecliptic and not from the whole sky, I'm not so sure we'll find anything in the more sterile environs of the milky way. To much sterilizing radiation down in the inner core for anything to have time to grow into something we might want to meet in between supernovas. Something we might not want to meet, maybe...
Maybe it felt that target gismo land and it tickled it, so it moved out of the way of the main probe?
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.36% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I'm a bit puzzled as to why this bit of old history is considered a story.
There are lots of these stories about, some of which might even be upheld in court if M$, disney et all contribute enough to the judges retirement fund.
We do occasionally read a EULA, but only for its amusement value. If the product itself sucks, then there is usually no way to get your money back, and only occasionally you might get a fresh copy of the stuff with a builtin vacuum, but only in the industrial/broadcast market does it do you any good to squawk at the vendor. He's usually so big he can tell you to go screw yourself and get away with it cause he's got more lawyers than your car has valves in its engine. To me, thats a pretty powerfull reason to use open source, such as linux.
Only where the market is a niche market, and the software folks are eating well only if it works, are you able to actually relay your dis-satisfaction back to the coders. That assumption goes with the price of the software/hardware. For a $500 computer you don't get that priviledge, for a $18,000 video server hardware software package, he knows he'll never see the last $12,000 if it doesn't work 24/7/365, so thats a pretty strong incentive to not screw the one of maybe 700 customers who might be interested in the package.
This is not a worthy story for slashdot IMO, its just a fact of life.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
42 years, from Douglas Adams HHGTTG? Yes, I expect it will be enough since storage and computer power growth will foreshorten his estimated 300 years. But one possible constraint might exist, that of finding the energy to power all that, and to cool it. But who knows what we'll be using to add 2&2 15 years from now, I don't & won't because I'll probably be returning to dust by then, although some of the whatif press sure seems positive.
On a side note, since they are restricted to doing verbatum the works that are out of copyright, how about we start lobbying our reps to pass a law that says if the material is rights protected by some encodeing where the DMCA prohibits the defeat, and there is not an AUTOMATIC expiration of the restrictions based on the time when the material would pass into public domain, then such material, since it can never pass into the public domain without violating the DMCA, is to have no copyright protections under the copyright laws whatsoever. After all, if it cannot pass into the public domain without breaking the DMCA restrictions, it will never pass into the public domain.
Such material should be granted a copyright ONLY if it can legally pass into the public domain at the end of the copyright period. Put the RIAA and MPAA on notice that they can have their cake ONLY if they don't eat it. One or the other but not both.
FWIW, I do not consider the maintainance of a securely vaulted, unprotected copy of the work to be a valid defense unless this copy is transfered absolutely verbatum, to whatever lossless media is the currently used favorite about every 5 years so that it would become available and usable on the equipment of the time when the copyright does run out, along with suitable high penalities for not meeting their obligations under the copyright statute.
Make it a part of this proposed copyright addendum that the continuence of the copyright is contingent on the court, at someones request, requireing they trot out the equipment in common use at the time, and perform or otherwise show the court that they have an unrestricted copy instantly available in case its copyright should end that day. If they cannot do this, then the DMCA is null and void for that work and the copyright is terminated instantly.
And, the copyright holder going bankrupt immediately causes the material to become public domain since there will then be no one to assure the copyright statute is observed and obeyed. Bankruptcy is too often used as a means to transfer such "property" in such a manner as to cause the ownership trail to be so obfuscated that there is no one in authority to see to it the copyright statute obligations vis-a-vis the transfer to public domain will ever be done. Remove that glaring loophole and quite a few bankruptcies will be stopped.
What say the rest of the/.ers here? Can we do it? Write your reps, on paper, expressing your views on the subject & lets see what happens...
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Nice, needs shockwave. Sure, hit the macromedia site, follow the shockwave links, and get told that a 20 day old mozilla-1.7.12 install is some oddball thing they don't support. "If running netscape, please upgrade to at least 6.1." Lemme see, that would be what, 5 years old now?
What time warp are these folks at macromedia living in?
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Makng the comparison of that attitude to my friendly neighborood smack dealer wasn't a Good Thing(TM). I've been around long enough (71 years now) to see what that stuff can do to otherwise good people, its far more addictive than alcohol.
There's things that are right & things that aren't. Thats an "aren't". Think shotgun and shovel if I ever find he's given/sold any to my kids.
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Trying valiantly to explain that big, bleeding hole in his foot I presume?
How much longer is it gonna take & how many whacks with a clue-bat to make him understand that sleeping in the same bed with M$ isn't always the smartest business decision? But I suppose just one phone call from Bill, to remind him of the juicey discount he gets on winderz goes away if he so much as sells a single pc without it.
There should never have been such a discount in the first place. If winderz is worth x dollars at staples, then it should be worth that same price minus maybe 10 bucks because the dell folks should be experts at installing it by now. From the rumors I here, dell et all buy it for under 10 bucks a copy.
Frankly, that gives me a very good idea of what winderz is really worth. But then the only windows allowed on this property are made out of glass (or x-windows based). Do I miss it? Dontbesilly...
-- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) 99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I doubt that yahoo would be interested without more time to investigate. Who knows, maybe he was part of the problem.
I've seen this happen before and the one who commented that it was probably slave driving management that caused the exodus is usually spot on. I mean come on now, Nuance just got bought, and these guys don't have a clue if they have a job next week. Refining your running skills just plain makes sense. As to taking their knowledge with them, as long as its not in the hardware form, and only wetware, I can't see as Nuance has a good leg to stand on.
While I have a strong tendency to agree that properly done, linux should be the more stable of the two, let me toss out that well written windows apps don't have to be unstable. As a furinstance, back when W95 was all the rage, it had one and only one reason to reboot it, and that was the tick counter overflow around the 46th day of uptime. So we stuck postit notes on the box that it needed rebooting on such and such a date, and just updated the date each time. The application in question? APNewsDesk, an old version, and it ran an 8 desk news dept at the tv station where I worked as Chief, producing approximately 4.5 hours of fresh news a day...
Tell that to the ghost of Jackie Gleason, who did all his own trick shots in the movie about Minnesota Fats where he played Minnesota Fats. There wasn't any standin there my friend, and I've seen him do it on live tv several times too. Yes, he can miss, but the one ball in each pocket trick while bouncing the cue ball off a closed pack of book matches was his at least 75% of the time, first shot. I was decent in past years, on my own table, but to even think of playing in the same building with folks of his talent when I was at my peak 30 years ago was a waste of my time, because I wasn't watching the likes of him instead, trying to learn.
I for one, tend to think that if Mass sticks to its guns, a lot of things will sort themselves out by the end of the 2nd fiscal year.
By then, those that want to do business with the state will have made the required investment in updated, possibly free, opensource programs to facilitate their doing business. And by then, hopefully some of the 'growing pains' will have subsided.
The potential fallout into the private sector will domino throughout the area as folks discover that they now have a newfound ability to do business from business to business without the chain of phone calls from the other guy saying he can't open the bid quote.
Now, really NOW, is the time for the opensource folks to get their acts together and make sure that abiword can read an OOo file and render it exactly both on-screen and on paper, and vice versa, as well as a file from any other source that claims compliance with this standard. And yes, I do expect there will be a bit of shakeout and possibly some name calling here and there in the open source camp while things are being sorted.
And yes, if m$ wants to play, all they have to do is write their code for 100% compliance, doing it absolutely without any so-called enhancements we all know are intended to lock the user into the m$ camp. If Office-12 doesn't do that, then its up to m$ to issue a free service pack to fix it. If they don't want to play by those rules, well, I for one can't say its been nice to know them, because it personally hasn't. But lets be plain, if they want to play by those rules, doing it nicely (something m$ isn't exactly famous for) then they are as welcome to play as the rest who do abide by the standard.
My $.02 worth. Adjust for inflation since 1934 please.
Not at the moment, but its pretty simple really, and I'm not sure there are any batteries of consequence involved.
One of the radioactive elements with a half life of a couple of decades is heating the inside of a stack of thermoelectric cells. This is a semi-conductor junction that is commonly used in tv cameras to cool the camera chips thereby reducing the heat related noises, but its also a generator. If you heat the inside of a pipe that has these things wrapped around it, and the outside is exposed to the cold of space, the temperature differential creates a usable amount of electrical power. Eventually of course, the radioactive stuff, usually some isotop of plutonium I believe, will cool, both from poisoning its own purity, and because there is less and less of it because of the half-life as it converts itself to a lower level metal.
Its the plutonium in them that causes all the public uproar based on a launch accident releasing it into the environment. But I don't recall that we've ever had such a scenario due to the extra precautions taken for such a launch.
FWIW, small (1 to 10 watt), cover a single valley tv translators are also powered in remote locations by these same generators, except that for those, the heat is supplied by a propane flame not much bigger than the pilot lights in old time gas furnaces. It takes 500 to 1000 gallons of propane to run one of them for about a year.
If any extraterrestrials make unauthorized digital copies of the phonograph record, the RIAA needs some way to send its lawyers!
Now there's a thought. Unforch its considerably more expensive than driving school busses full of them into the ocean. Sure as hell, one of them wouldn't be full and somebody would claim the empty seats as waste...
n other news, the asteroid deflected in 2008 by the European Space Agency has been confirmed as hitting Earth in December this year, with an expected impact point near Switzerland.
Lets try that again please. Somehow, you've contrived to have it hit us at least 3 years before it was deflected. This is, in case you've not seen a calendar lately, 2005 (yet).
Slashdot Mirror
pretty accurately in their attempts to kill it. This latest faux paux of Sony/BMG is just the icing on the cake.
I mean, has no one made note that the decline in sales is partially the result of the dissappearance of the CD logo from the label, a logo that Phillips owns? You see, savvy buyers often look at the packaging, and if that logo isn't on it, its got some sort of copy protection on it that may not be good and healthy for your hardware with the Mac cd drive being one of the more famous oopses.
And have you noticed that despite the claims to the contrary, as in "we're replacing all those disks", the exact same infected disks are still for sale at WallyWorld this instant, and the sales clerks aka shoplifter observers on the floor in the music dept have no knowledge of the controversy surrounding Sony/BMG stuff. None, nada, zip, and haven't got 50 cents to call somebody who might care. Its all a big shrug to them.
So the standard mantra is still being chanted for all the legal people that pass our laws to absorb as gospel "Sales are in the toilet so it must be piracy, please pass even more restrictive laws to protect our jurassic business model."
I looked at quite a few Christmas music cd's at Krogers today, and not one of them had the CD logo. They all went back neatly into the cardboard display as I wasn't about to take a chance that one of them might re-program the flash in my player and make a 90 dollar dvd burner into a brick to be thrown out.
It all boils down to the sales loss being a direct result of enough folks looking for that logo, guaranteeing its a fully standard stereo audio cd with no fancy hidden programs on it, to make a visible difference in the sales volume. IMO, piracy has so little to do with it that its not a measurable statistic, its been going on for 65 years that I know of, back when someone would buy the record, and carefully transcribe the words and music and make copies on the school mimeo for all their friends. Once my older cousin even called the radio station and asked them to play it about hourly so she could write down what she heard. She didn't tell them that though of course. That is how piracy was done then, todays duping of the cd for your friends may be easier, but I have serious doubts the actual count of copies passed around in terms of the % of sales lost is a hell of a lot different now than it was then.
To Sony/BMG et all: Give us back the CD logo, and watch sales climb back out of the sewer. Provided the music itself can get out of the sewer that is, we aren't buying excrementy music, and there is plenty of that on the shelves today.
--
Cheers, Gene
Chuckle, the next msg says he's running for re-election next year. What the heck do you suppose he'll do if he don't? John Sununu is an old dog with many years in the political games and has managed to keep his shorts clean better than most.
Tell ya what, based on the mans intelligence which is considerable, if he were to run for pres, he'd have my normally libertarian vote. Really, I haven't figured out why he hasn't tossed his hat in that direction other than he can't do that and be like Feingold as it would take a considerable war chest to do that.
Based on what I've read about Feingold not accepting campaign contribs from anybody, I'd say he'd be a bit short on funds to mount a campaign for president. Either way, those 2 are far better men than the 43rd will ever be. And McCain, while his hearts in the right place, just doesn't have the mental stuff for that job.
Democracy is no longer a Democracy when it takes upwards of 20 million just to get to the first primary, and then you really have to go hat in hand to those that expect payment in kind. After a while, the money has bypassed so many campaign finance laws that these sharks own you.
As a broadcast engineer, the income we get from the campaigns is considerable, but we would survive, albeit a little lower on the hog, if political time was not billable, but was also limited to a reasonable fraction of the air time available.
Think about it, and vote with your concience, not for the flashier 30 second spot.
--
Cheers, Gene
Tee hee. As if anybody can imagine that sony is gonna sue M$ for a dmca violation? I sure as heck can't even imagine it. But then my imagination seems to have taken a vacation after 71 years, in favor of my version of common sense.
This whole fiasco SHOULD have sony backed into the far corner of their cage, with their tail tucked so firmly in its a very effective chastity belt.
Funny part is, all those cd's marked copy protected? Wally World hasn't pulled a single title off their music racks, nosiree bub. Not a one.
I asked at the counter if sales of sony/bmg music was down & the twerp said not that he could notice. He seemed to be totally unaware of any controversy regarding this, and didn't seem to have a quarter to call somebody who might care.
So this whole sordid thing has NOT made near enough noise for Joe Sixpack to understand the issues here, and thats the real problem. We're preaching to the choir, and we the choir know the words by heart. But to Joe Sixpack, were just a bunch of noise makers to be turned off.
Maybe next time we should vote for the greater evil, look at what voting for the lesser eveil got us...
--
Cheers, Gene
with that statement.
Because if its unlicensed, by the RIAA or MPAA, then excuse me but where the hell do they get any legal standing?
If they didn't have an assigned copyright to the work the poor schmuk is accuused of downloading, giving them licenseing rights over THAT WORK, then they have absolutely NO STANDING in court, and are wasting their attorneys^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hshysters time to even screw with the suit.
To top that, the shysters involved, and thats the right term, would if they were not shysters, be bound to educate the RIAA/MPAA as to their lack of legal standing to bring an action. Thats one of the differences between a lawyer/attorney, and a shyster/ambulance chaser. The judge is equally bound to educate them and I've seen it happen in an action brought against me.
Shysters that would get involved with such as that give decent attorneys a bad name. To bad the bar associations are often run by such, so there is no self policing of the rank & file.
--
Cheers, gene
A pale vegetarian eh?
I think a recent inch filler in the currant readers digest said it best when it defined a vegetarian as one who "doesn't hunt well". I tend to agree. But that doesn't mean he has to be pale either.
As far as the article being right or wrong, although they do have some wins, the losses have been highly precedent setting losses, losses we really shouldn't have lost, and cannot well afford in the longer view.
--
Cheers, Gene
Well, some experiments take place whether you want to do them or not.
Back in '78, the local conoco delivery driver in Farmington NM made a mistake and filled the no-lead tanks at the gas station we fueled up at, with super-diesel.. I arrived and filled both tanks of a 77 bronco (early 302 v8) to the brim with that stuff, starting from nearly dry.
By the time I was 5 miles out on the hiway, I knew something wasn't exactly kosher as it was pinging like crazy anytime I gave it enough throttle to accelerate. I was dragging a trailer with a Big Max ATV on it, so that little bronco was being rode hard & put away wet anyway. So I stopped at the next gas pump, borrowed a funnel, and put as much hi-test leaded ethyl in it as it would hold, using that tank on the hills & the other one on the flats as I headed for a mountain in Colorado where a microwave relay was on the fritz that I needed to fix asap. I did this about every 40 miles or so, and finally got enough ethyl into both tanks to shut it up.
But that did blow the carbon out of things, and it ran with an obvious increase in horsepower for a couple of months after that! And other than a possible poisoning of the cat convertor at the time, there was no other effect, good or bad, detectable by that little "experiment".
--
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, I think its over half a day now that this story has been the top of the page. Hey /., wtf?
Unforch, when an open source idea seems bent on a major debut in the market, thre is always some yahoo that scribbles it down on the back of the knapkin as he sits in the next booth with his hearing aid turned all the way up, just so he can run to the Patent office and get a monopoly he can then charge royalties for.
This is exactly what happened when the fcc setforth new rules and protocols for the digital alert now used in the EAS system.
3 or 4 years later (the patent office is always that far behind) we all get letters from some legal beagle whose mother should have been spayed, demanding $1500/year royalties for use of "their" patented methods.
I don't believe that any of us broadcasters even took the time to compose a go get screwed message. We ignored it, and rightfully so, based on the fact that this was a government edict, and we damned sure weren't about to pay some slimeball to use what the government said we _had_ to use. We in turn threw it back into the equipment makers lap along with the commission, saying we wanted indemnification against this patent.
The equipment makers gathered up all their notes and presented enough prior art to predate this slimeball by over 2 decades, and that patent quietly went away. But to actualy have a publicly available "we made a mistake" notice to all who got that letter issued by the USTPO? You must be new here, never happened unless we wasted our dime and called somebody who might have had an interest in seeing it revoked.
I was all for sueing the idiots for damages if it was upheld on a rehearing, and there were some pretty big names in the business thinking along the same lines from the conversations I had with a couple of them.
There needs to be a balanceing of interests in both patent, and copyright arenas vis-a-vis the public interest. Today there is none, as in absolutely zip protections for societies ills directly caused by our draconion laws directly purchased by M$, Disney & Company, et all.
When its pretty much an established fact that the piracy effects only the middleman, and not the talent, the talent often being the beneficiary of the distribution of their work via pirate channels making it more popular at the concert box office, its no wonder that so few feel any remorse for the copyright violations they may commit, they aren't harming the artist in the least. Its time the talent got paid a reasonable fee per sale that IS NOT IN ANY WAY DISCOUNTED other than by pro-rated agreement, by the total production and advertising costs associated with the production of an 5 cent cd. In other words, everybody needs to accept an equal sized piece of the gamble including the guys in the middle as to whether or not this particular cd will or will not be a hit. That appears not to be the situation now as the talent is expected to shoulder it all, and a million seller can still leave people like the Dixie Chicks in the red according to the creative accounting so prevalently used.
Thats BS, pure and simple, usually found in pastures shared by cattle. Be carefull you don't step in it as it reduces your choices of where to go have dinner unless you are in the Omaha stockyards near Johnny's.
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Cheers, Gene
Well, they did say getting /.'ed would be the icing on the cake. Just hope it doesn't run all over the floor before they can cut and serve the cake we can't hear...
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Cheers, Gene
That was a credit to the Hudson Bay Fan Company for keeping all that smoking data cool.
But don't tell the RIAA or the MPAA, they'll have a press release out yet tonight about how much they lost to piracy. But I'll bet its never crossed their minds that if they'd quit treating the customer like a thief, and give him an honest hours entertainment for an honest hours wages, plus letting us see how much the talent got out of that, we'ed be a hell of a lot happier when we do fork over.
We don't like the talent to starve when they've a million seller, and nearly $20 for a friggin cd is outragious.
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Cheers, gene
I have to concur heartily. Not to mention that while boinc has a message board one can take problems to, the answers, when occasionally given are meant to make the user feel about 1/8" tall. So when it gets shut down, I guess I'll just reclaim the drive space. Which frankly, tends to pi$$ me off as I'm currently ranked at 99.363% in the world rankings.
When I first started this, about a month after the project went public, I thought maybe it might be worthwhile. But now that I see the data is from a rather narrow band around the ecliptic and not from the whole sky, I'm not so sure we'll find anything in the more sterile environs of the milky way. To much sterilizing radiation down in the inner core for anything to have time to grow into something we might want to meet in between supernovas. Something we might not want to meet, maybe...
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Cheers, Gene
Maybe it felt that target gismo land and it tickled it, so it moved out of the way of the main probe?
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.36% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I'm a bit puzzled as to why this bit of old history is considered a story.
There are lots of these stories about, some of which might even be upheld in court if M$, disney et all contribute enough to the judges retirement fund.
We do occasionally read a EULA, but only for its amusement value. If the product itself sucks, then there is usually no way to get your money back, and only occasionally you might get a fresh copy of the stuff with a builtin vacuum, but only in the industrial/broadcast market does it do you any good to squawk at the vendor. He's usually so big he can tell you to go screw yourself and get away with it cause he's got more lawyers than your car has valves in its engine. To me, thats a pretty powerfull reason to use open source, such as linux.
Only where the market is a niche market, and the software folks are eating well only if it works, are you able to actually relay your dis-satisfaction back to the coders. That assumption goes with the price of the software/hardware. For a $500 computer you don't get that priviledge, for a $18,000 video server hardware software package, he knows he'll never see the last $12,000 if it doesn't work 24/7/365, so thats a pretty strong incentive to not screw the one of maybe 700 customers who might be interested in the package.
This is not a worthy story for slashdot IMO, its just a fact of life.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
42 years, from Douglas Adams HHGTTG? Yes, I expect it will be enough since storage and computer power growth will foreshorten his estimated 300 years. But one possible constraint might exist, that of finding the energy to power all that, and to cool it. But who knows what we'll be using to add 2&2 15 years from now, I don't & won't because I'll probably be returning to dust by then, although some of the whatif press sure seems positive.
/.ers here? Can we do it? Write your reps, on paper, expressing your views on the subject & lets see what happens...
On a side note, since they are restricted to doing verbatum the works that are out of copyright, how about we start lobbying our reps to pass a law that says if the material is rights protected by some encodeing where the DMCA prohibits the defeat, and there is not an AUTOMATIC expiration of the restrictions based on the time when the material would pass into public domain, then such material, since it can never pass into the public domain without violating the DMCA, is to have no copyright protections under the copyright laws whatsoever. After all, if it cannot pass into the public domain without breaking the DMCA restrictions, it will never pass into the public domain.
Such material should be granted a copyright ONLY if it can legally pass into the public domain at the end of the copyright period. Put the RIAA and MPAA on notice that they can have their cake ONLY if they don't eat it. One or the other but not both.
FWIW, I do not consider the maintainance of a securely vaulted, unprotected copy of the work to be a valid defense unless this copy is transfered absolutely verbatum, to whatever lossless media is the currently used favorite about every 5 years so that it would become available and usable on the equipment of the time when the copyright does run out, along with suitable high penalities for not meeting their obligations under the copyright statute.
Make it a part of this proposed copyright addendum that the continuence of the copyright is contingent on the court, at someones request, requireing they trot out the equipment in common use at the time, and perform or otherwise show the court that they have an unrestricted copy instantly available in case its copyright should end that day. If they cannot do this, then the DMCA is null and void for that work and the copyright is terminated instantly.
And, the copyright holder going bankrupt immediately causes the material to become public domain since there will then be no one to assure the copyright statute is observed and obeyed. Bankruptcy is too often used as a means to transfer such "property" in such a manner as to cause the ownership trail to be so obfuscated that there is no one in authority to see to it the copyright statute obligations vis-a-vis the transfer to public domain will ever be done. Remove that glaring loophole and quite a few bankruptcies will be stopped.
What say the rest of the
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Nice, needs shockwave. Sure, hit the macromedia site, follow the shockwave links, and get told that a 20 day old mozilla-1.7.12 install is some oddball thing they don't support. "If running netscape, please upgrade to at least 6.1." Lemme see, that would be what, 5 years old now?
What time warp are these folks at macromedia living in?
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
And just who is BRITIAN?
Makng the comparison of that attitude to my friendly neighborood smack dealer wasn't a Good Thing(TM). I've been around long enough (71 years now) to see what that stuff can do to otherwise good people, its far more addictive than alcohol.
There's things that are right & things that aren't. Thats an "aren't". Think shotgun and shovel if I ever find he's given/sold any to my kids.
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Trying valiantly to explain that big, bleeding hole in his foot I presume?
How much longer is it gonna take & how many whacks with a clue-bat to make him understand that sleeping in the same bed with M$ isn't always the smartest business decision? But I suppose just one phone call from Bill, to remind him of the juicey discount he gets on winderz goes away if he so much as sells a single pc without it.
There should never have been such a discount in the first place. If winderz is worth x dollars at staples, then it should be worth that same price minus maybe 10 bucks because the dell folks should be experts at installing it by now. From the rumors I here, dell et all buy it for under 10 bucks a copy.
Frankly, that gives me a very good idea of what winderz is really worth. But then the only windows allowed on this property are made out of glass (or x-windows based). Do I miss it? Dontbesilly...
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Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
I doubt that yahoo would be interested without more time to investigate. Who knows, maybe he was part of the problem.
I've seen this happen before and the one who commented that it was probably slave driving management that caused the exodus is usually spot on. I mean come on now, Nuance just got bought, and these guys don't have a clue if they have a job next week. Refining your running skills just plain makes sense. As to taking their knowledge with them, as long as its not in the hardware form, and only wetware, I can't see as Nuance has a good leg to stand on.
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Cheers, Gene
While I have a strong tendency to agree that properly done, linux should be the more stable of the two, let me toss out that well written windows apps don't have to be unstable. As a furinstance, back when W95 was all the rage, it had one and only one reason to reboot it, and that was the tick counter overflow around the 46th day of uptime. So we stuck postit notes on the box that it needed rebooting on such and such a date, and just updated the date each time. The application in question? APNewsDesk, an old version, and it ran an 8 desk news dept at the tv station where I worked as Chief, producing approximately 4.5 hours of fresh news a day...
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Cheers, Gene
Tell that to the ghost of Jackie Gleason, who did all his own trick shots in the movie about Minnesota Fats where he played Minnesota Fats. There wasn't any standin there my friend, and I've seen him do it on live tv several times too. Yes, he can miss, but the one ball in each pocket trick while bouncing the cue ball off a closed pack of book matches was his at least 75% of the time, first shot. I was decent in past years, on my own table, but to even think of playing in the same building with folks of his talent when I was at my peak 30 years ago was a waste of my time, because I wasn't watching the likes of him instead, trying to learn.
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Cheers, Gene
I for one, tend to think that if Mass sticks to its guns, a lot of things will sort themselves out by the end of the 2nd fiscal year.
By then, those that want to do business with the state will have made the required investment in updated, possibly free, opensource programs to facilitate their doing business. And by then, hopefully some of the 'growing pains' will have subsided.
The potential fallout into the private sector will domino throughout the area as folks discover that they now have a newfound ability to do business from business to business without the chain of phone calls from the other guy saying he can't open the bid quote.
Now, really NOW, is the time for the opensource folks to get their acts together and make sure that abiword can read an OOo file and render it exactly both on-screen and on paper, and vice versa, as well as a file from any other source that claims compliance with this standard. And yes, I do expect there will be a bit of shakeout and possibly some name calling here and there in the open source camp while things are being sorted.
And yes, if m$ wants to play, all they have to do is write their code for 100% compliance, doing it absolutely without any so-called enhancements we all know are intended to lock the user into the m$ camp. If Office-12 doesn't do that, then its up to m$ to issue a free service pack to fix it. If they don't want to play by those rules, well, I for one can't say its been nice to know them, because it personally hasn't. But lets be plain, if they want to play by those rules, doing it nicely (something m$ isn't exactly famous for) then they are as welcome to play as the rest who do abide by the standard.
My $.02 worth. Adjust for inflation since 1934 please.
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Cheers, Gene
Not at the moment, but its pretty simple really, and I'm not sure there are any batteries of consequence involved.
One of the radioactive elements with a half life of a couple of decades is heating the inside of a stack of thermoelectric cells. This is a semi-conductor junction that is commonly used in tv cameras to cool the camera chips thereby reducing the heat related noises, but its also a generator. If you heat the inside of a pipe that has these things wrapped around it, and the outside is exposed to the cold of space, the temperature differential creates a usable amount of electrical power. Eventually of course, the radioactive stuff, usually some isotop of plutonium I believe, will cool, both from poisoning its own purity, and because there is less and less of it because of the half-life as it converts itself to a lower level metal.
Its the plutonium in them that causes all the public uproar based on a launch accident releasing it into the environment. But I don't recall that we've ever had such a scenario due to the extra precautions taken for such a launch.
FWIW, small (1 to 10 watt), cover a single valley tv translators are also powered in remote locations by these same generators, except that for those, the heat is supplied by a propane flame not much bigger than the pilot lights in old time gas furnaces. It takes 500 to 1000 gallons of propane to run one of them for about a year.
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Cheers, Gene
If any extraterrestrials make unauthorized digital copies of the phonograph record, the RIAA needs some way to send its lawyers!
Now there's a thought. Unforch its considerably more expensive than driving school busses full of them into the ocean. Sure as hell, one of them wouldn't be full and somebody would claim the empty seats as waste...
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Cheers, Gene
n other news, the asteroid deflected in 2008 by the European Space Agency has been confirmed as hitting Earth in December this year, with an expected impact point near Switzerland.
Lets try that again please. Somehow, you've contrived to have it hit us at least 3 years before it was deflected. This is, in case you've not seen a calendar lately, 2005 (yet).
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Cheers, Gene