IANAL, but it seems like the arguement is pretty simple to me. This device lets you pull games off of carts and put games onto carts, right? This case should be pretty easy.
Just bring up video editing stations. They're perfectly legal, right? What do they allow you to do? You can pull video off a tape, DAT or DVD, and put video onto a tape, DAT or DVD. You need to do this in order to do your job as a video content producer. You can't do your job without this equipment. If the government were to make it illegal, you'd be screwed. Since video editing equipment is still legal, thus the standard is set.
Back to the Flash thingy. GBA programmers cannot do their job without a device to put code onto the carts and get it back off them, nor can they sell their product without a means to get the programs to people.
All you have to do to win is argue that this standard has already been set in the courts with the video equipment, a precedent therefore exists, and to top it off a bunch of small businesses (which America is supposed to adore) would be obliterated without this equipment they need to perform their legitimate occupations. Seems pretty easy to me.
What would be the point of sending poeple on a journey to the stars that would take centuries to complete? As our technology advances, our speed of interstellar transport would (I assume) only increase. What happens to people sent on a 300 year journey when fifty years later, on Earth, a new tech is invented that cuts the journey time in half and we send a new improved ship to the same place? I'd be pretty pissed if I were on the historic First Journey To A New World and when I finally reach my destination and deboard the ship I run smack into a Burger King because people have already been there for a few decades.
Personally, I think we should sit down and figure out how quickly our interstellar travel rate has been increasing over the past few millenia, do some min-maxing calculus, and figure out the optimal time to send the first ship. Heck, if the technological advances come at a rate constant enough to be predicted, we could rig it so they all get there at the same time.:)
TV started out being ephemeral. You couldn't even tape shows to edit them before broadcasting them. Everything thing was live, sometimes with disastrous results. Soon, however, there will be millions of PVR's out there, and the possibility of them networking together in P2P fashion. Imagine storage getting cheaper and cheaper, bandwidth getting better and better (as they do year by year) and eventually, you'll have access to everything that's ever been released over the airwaves whenever you want it in digital, HDTV quality. Plus, you'll be able to edit commercials out. Bye-bye goes the need for recordings of movies or shows (Sopranos, Friends) that have appeared on TV, bye-bye goes ad revenue, bankrupt goes the industry.
The solution is for content producers to show some friggin' brains, accept that this is inevitable, and act accordingly. First off, accept the fact that anything you put on the air is gone, forever to be viewed and skipped through by people whenever they want. We no longer have a real schedule of programming, more like a pool of available shows that gets added to each day regularly by producers of content. Get rid of DVDs, Tapes, etc. We no longer need them. Get rid of commercials, which are useless now that people can skim through programs. Start using things like ESPN's bottom line to add banners of advertisment to shows while they're running (much like what they do to soccer games in Europe right-freakin-now. Change the way you do it every so often so that you can't easily code a way to strip them out, and make them unobtrusive enough that people will notice them but not hate them.
There. You now have a world where people can get much more out of TV than they do now, no one wants to ban Tivo's, and everyone still gets paid.
Only to you. These days so many people just skim headlines without paying attention to the details that they'll buy it without question, just because they saw "Working Kidneys from Stem Cells" scroll across the bottom of the screen on CNN.
For me, as a software-producing entity, the big question is how delivery of the product would be handled. For a PC it's no big deal, there are dozens of was to distribute - Shrink-Wrap, Shareware, Downloadable Payware, Bundles, Freeware, etc. I'm confident enough in my ability to reach the consumer when I'm producing desktop software that I'm willing to invest development time toward producing an profitable product.
In this market, though, I wouldn't be willing to get out of bed and take a step towards my dev machine without some serious answers about how this stuff gets distributed. Can you download it directly from a WAP site into the phone? Am I going to have to write a website and fifty different installation apps to go with the myriad ways a phone might hook up to a PC? Can I get the phone manufacturer to bundle my game with the phone?
These are the questions I'd be rushing to answer if I was someone putting out phones or development tools for them. They're going to make a huge impact in whether developers give the hardware manufacturers the support they need
I have one right now in My Toshiba e570. It has eighty mp3s, a dozen programs, and an episode or two of my favorite sitcom with tons of room to spare. It sucks power, but if you're using it for Email and document storage you're not going to be hitting it for an hour straight like I do, so it probably won't be an issue. You ought to take a look at the new PPC 2002 devices with CF slots built into them. If storage is your issue, they might change your mind.
I'd be interested to know why you think anyone who "knows what they're doing" would prefer a Palm? I've been earning my living developing for handhelds, and I much prefer my Toshiba PocketPC to any PalmOS product, despite the $400 price difference.
Donna has referred to organizers as a "dead end" several times before now. I can't blame her, since she's right. With the hardware getting better and better all the time, and Microsoft's PocketPC basically owning the high-end of the market, she can see where the road will lead. When the hardware finally does catch up and the price falls, no one will pay $100 for a Palm when they can get a PocketPC for the same price that runs their cozy Windows OS and does almost as much as their laptop.
So what does Handspring do? They go sideways. Start merging their devices into cell phones and other WiFi solutions, and hopefully expand the market in a way Microsoft's lumbering embrace-and-extend strategy won't be able to engulf for another year or two, buying them some more time to figure out where to go next.
In a bizarre way it reminds me of The Nothing relentlessly following Atreyu across the countryside in The Never-Ending Story.:)
On how many days it takes for nap2mp3.exe to appear on usenet? Hell, I had a activation-free copy of XP Pro about six weeks before it was actually released, I would think the hacker community could knock out a.nap to.mp3 converter over a six-pack.
What, and miss Counselor Troi in the short skirt and knee-high boots they stuck her in through the first season? I guess they thought they needed some thigh to keep the borderline geeks coming back, so they added a splash of "Sex Kittens go to Mars" to the series.:)
"CNET is reporting that COMDEX organizers have a new security policy--no bags except vendor supplied plastic bags will allowed on the show floor. "While on-site, you should CARRY A PHOTO ID (DRIVER'S LICENSE OR PASSPORT) ON YOU AT ALL TIMES." They want you to leave your laptop in your hotel room, too! Oh, and no cameras at the keynotes, either. But they haven't announced that they're planning to strip search people... yet."
Go ahead and bitch about the extra security measures, 'cause God knows you'll probably be the first person to start screaming about how irresponsible they were if something happens. You want to know you're safe at a large gathering of Americans? Then you should be prepared to deal with simple, common-sense security provisions, even if it makes it a wee bit harder to carry all your lame IBM-hearts-Linux tchochkes home with you.
Not all security is an instant breach of your rights, people. If you can't handle COMDEX adding some extra measures to keep their visitors secure, don't go. It's a free country.
Your logic isn't quite sound. If $500 for every ten copies of Office is enough to earn Microsoft's obscene profits, then that's what they'll take. If they can only get one license out of you, it'll be for $500. If they can make you pay for all ten installations, they'll cut the price to $50. Piracy doesn't *really* change ow much money a software company will make in the long term, only who pays it.
All the more reason to buy a DVD player that lets you change its region code an infinite number of times, rather than a region-free player. That's a subtle distinction most people don't notice when they're out hunting for a machine to play their anime or DVD's of Friends on.
I own an Apex AD600A, which can be set to be region-less, or to the region of your choice. I highly recommend it. It even plays mp3 CD's.
Personally, I find the very idea of getting excited about new, efficient, computer technologies being used in warfare, the most useless and inefficent aspect of mankind, pathetically ironic.
Pardon my lack of enthusiasm. I'll go find a little flag to wave or something and forget that there shouldn't be any borders to defend in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but it seems like the arguement is pretty simple to me. This device lets you pull games off of carts and put games onto carts, right? This case should be pretty easy.
Just bring up video editing stations. They're perfectly legal, right? What do they allow you to do? You can pull video off a tape, DAT or DVD, and put video onto a tape, DAT or DVD. You need to do this in order to do your job as a video content producer. You can't do your job without this equipment. If the government were to make it illegal, you'd be screwed. Since video editing equipment is still legal, thus the standard is set.
Back to the Flash thingy. GBA programmers cannot do their job without a device to put code onto the carts and get it back off them, nor can they sell their product without a means to get the programs to people.
All you have to do to win is argue that this standard has already been set in the courts with the video equipment, a precedent therefore exists, and to top it off a bunch of small businesses (which America is supposed to adore) would be obliterated without this equipment they need to perform their legitimate occupations. Seems pretty easy to me.
Call me if you want me to argue the case.
Done. Kinesis offers several of their optimized keyboards with foot pedals, or you can purchase the pedals separately. They're fantastic.
Where's Mitch Taylor and Chris Knight when you need them?
What would be the point of sending poeple on a journey to the stars that would take centuries to complete? As our technology advances, our speed of interstellar transport would (I assume) only increase. What happens to people sent on a 300 year journey when fifty years later, on Earth, a new tech is invented that cuts the journey time in half and we send a new improved ship to the same place? I'd be pretty pissed if I were on the historic First Journey To A New World and when I finally reach my destination and deboard the ship I run smack into a Burger King because people have already been there for a few decades.
:)
Personally, I think we should sit down and figure out how quickly our interstellar travel rate has been increasing over the past few millenia, do some min-maxing calculus, and figure out the optimal time to send the first ship. Heck, if the technological advances come at a rate constant enough to be predicted, we could rig it so they all get there at the same time.
There's just no end to the lengths geeks will go to get a little pussy... :)
TV started out being ephemeral. You couldn't even tape shows to edit them before broadcasting them. Everything thing was live, sometimes with disastrous results. Soon, however, there will be millions of PVR's out there, and the possibility of them networking together in P2P fashion. Imagine storage getting cheaper and cheaper, bandwidth getting better and better (as they do year by year) and eventually, you'll have access to everything that's ever been released over the airwaves whenever you want it in digital, HDTV quality. Plus, you'll be able to edit commercials out. Bye-bye goes the need for recordings of movies or shows (Sopranos, Friends) that have appeared on TV, bye-bye goes ad revenue, bankrupt goes the industry.
The solution is for content producers to show some friggin' brains, accept that this is inevitable, and act accordingly. First off, accept the fact that anything you put on the air is gone, forever to be viewed and skipped through by people whenever they want. We no longer have a real schedule of programming, more like a pool of available shows that gets added to each day regularly by producers of content. Get rid of DVDs, Tapes, etc. We no longer need them. Get rid of commercials, which are useless now that people can skim through programs. Start using things like ESPN's bottom line to add banners of advertisment to shows while they're running (much like what they do to soccer games in Europe right-freakin-now. Change the way you do it every so often so that you can't easily code a way to strip them out, and make them unobtrusive enough that people will notice them but not hate them.
There. You now have a world where people can get much more out of TV than they do now, no one wants to ban Tivo's, and everyone still gets paid.
I think those of us who were around in the BBS days know all about the real cookbook for geeks...
Only to you. These days so many people just skim headlines without paying attention to the details that they'll buy it without question, just because they saw "Working Kidneys from Stem Cells" scroll across the bottom of the screen on CNN.
Think of what's on the list. :)
If I went to the US government and said give a list of the latest warez and porn sites, they'd toss me out on my ear!
If I put my Athlon in the microwave, I can get numbers out of it that don't exist in nature.
For me, as a software-producing entity, the big question is how delivery of the product would be handled. For a PC it's no big deal, there are dozens of was to distribute - Shrink-Wrap, Shareware, Downloadable Payware, Bundles, Freeware, etc. I'm confident enough in my ability to reach the consumer when I'm producing desktop software that I'm willing to invest development time toward producing an profitable product.
In this market, though, I wouldn't be willing to get out of bed and take a step towards my dev machine without some serious answers about how this stuff gets distributed. Can you download it directly from a WAP site into the phone? Am I going to have to write a website and fifty different installation apps to go with the myriad ways a phone might hook up to a PC? Can I get the phone manufacturer to bundle my game with the phone?
These are the questions I'd be rushing to answer if I was someone putting out phones or development tools for them. They're going to make a huge impact in whether developers give the hardware manufacturers the support they need
Two words - Gigabyte Microdrive.
I have one right now in My Toshiba e570. It has eighty mp3s, a dozen programs, and an episode or two of my favorite sitcom with tons of room to spare. It sucks power, but if you're using it for Email and document storage you're not going to be hitting it for an hour straight like I do, so it probably won't be an issue. You ought to take a look at the new PPC 2002 devices with CF slots built into them. If storage is your issue, they might change your mind.
I'd be interested to know why you think anyone who "knows what they're doing" would prefer a Palm? I've been earning my living developing for handhelds, and I much prefer my Toshiba PocketPC to any PalmOS product, despite the $400 price difference.
Donna has referred to organizers as a "dead end" several times before now. I can't blame her, since she's right. With the hardware getting better and better all the time, and Microsoft's PocketPC basically owning the high-end of the market, she can see where the road will lead. When the hardware finally does catch up and the price falls, no one will pay $100 for a Palm when they can get a PocketPC for the same price that runs their cozy Windows OS and does almost as much as their laptop.
:)
So what does Handspring do? They go sideways. Start merging their devices into cell phones and other WiFi solutions, and hopefully expand the market in a way Microsoft's lumbering embrace-and-extend strategy won't be able to engulf for another year or two, buying them some more time to figure out where to go next.
In a bizarre way it reminds me of The Nothing relentlessly following Atreyu across the countryside in The Never-Ending Story.
On how many days it takes for nap2mp3.exe to appear on usenet? Hell, I had a activation-free copy of XP Pro about six weeks before it was actually released, I would think the hacker community could knock out a .nap to .mp3 converter over a six-pack.
What, and miss Counselor Troi in the short skirt and knee-high boots they stuck her in through the first season? I guess they thought they needed some thigh to keep the borderline geeks coming back, so they added a splash of "Sex Kittens go to Mars" to the series. :)
"Just remembered that Perl was created on this day (12/18) in 1987 by Larry Wall..."
He did the whole thing in a day? Damn!
Jerkin!
"CNET is reporting that COMDEX organizers have a new security policy--no bags except vendor supplied plastic bags will allowed on the show floor. "While on-site, you should CARRY A PHOTO ID (DRIVER'S LICENSE OR PASSPORT) ON YOU AT ALL TIMES." They want you to leave your laptop in your hotel room, too! Oh, and no cameras at the keynotes, either. But they haven't announced that they're planning to strip search people ... yet."
Go ahead and bitch about the extra security measures, 'cause God knows you'll probably be the first person to start screaming about how irresponsible they were if something happens. You want to know you're safe at a large gathering of Americans? Then you should be prepared to deal with simple, common-sense security provisions, even if it makes it a wee bit harder to carry all your lame IBM-hearts-Linux tchochkes home with you.
Not all security is an instant breach of your rights, people. If you can't handle COMDEX adding some extra measures to keep their visitors secure, don't go. It's a free country.
God knows it equates to some offensive words for me.
Indiana Jones and the Broken Hip of Doom.
Christ the guy's already 58 years old. By the time they start filming he'd be over 60!
--Brogdon
Your logic isn't quite sound. If $500 for every ten copies of Office is enough to earn Microsoft's obscene profits, then that's what they'll take. If they can only get one license out of you, it'll be for $500. If they can make you pay for all ten installations, they'll cut the price to $50. Piracy doesn't *really* change ow much money a software company will make in the long term, only who pays it.
--Brogdon
All the more reason to buy a DVD player that lets you change its region code an infinite number of times, rather than a region-free player. That's a subtle distinction most people don't notice when they're out hunting for a machine to play their anime or DVD's of Friends on.
I own an Apex AD600A, which can be set to be region-less, or to the region of your choice. I highly recommend it. It even plays mp3 CD's.
--Brogdon
"Hopefully, it will fly at speeds up to almost mach 7 for 10-15 seconds before shutting off and plunging into the Pacific"
Fortunately the seat cushions can be used as a floatation device.
--Brogdon
Personally, I find the very idea of getting excited about new, efficient, computer technologies being used in warfare, the most useless and inefficent aspect of mankind, pathetically ironic.
Pardon my lack of enthusiasm. I'll go find a little flag to wave or something and forget that there shouldn't be any borders to defend in the first place.
--Brogdon