said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Is nothing enough for Paul Newman? It's not enough that he stars in movies with Robert Redford, or that I'm forced to by his Salad Dressings and Microwave Pop-Corn... now I must apparently take his word on the o-zone layer. I suppose in 20 years he'll show up in a computer animated film as some sort of washed-up radio telescope convinced to go for one more shot at the big time.
I was watching a C-Span panel with US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff earlier today (rebroadcast from Tuesday 9/12) and he was talking about a lot of things. However, I was very positively struck when he talked about interoperability of first responder radio networks and how it's important that we don't lock ourselves into a proprietary network should the feds mandate a specific system.
He specifically refered to making it an 'open source' setup if we were to mandate specific equipment to avoid vendor lockin.
While I don't follow the open source movement too closely, it's a major reference, from where I see it.
Where is SuSE's wireless support? I like SuSE, but am on an encrypted 802.11g network with a wireless card with a broadcom chipset... I know it's broadcom's problem the chipset isn't open, but I can't use SuSE without wireless support.
Not to mention the use of audio from the broadcast without (I'm assuming) the express written consent of Major League Baseball (I always like that line best when it was spoken by Al Michaels)
There's a ton of copyright violations going on here, but anyone who sues over it will look like a major douchebag.
This is one of those situations where having copyright law be like trademark law, where you actually have to enforce your rights in order to keep them... would be really interesting, and would lead eventually to major overhauls in law....
Granted, those changes would probably be so you can use selective enforcement... doh.
To all those saying Netflix has been around longer, my local library has had this since I was still on dialup, which dates it to 1997-1998, and that's only when I discovered their public telnet server. You could also renew books online, along with everything else.
This is what plagues the RIAA and MPAA. This is what plagues movie screens and radio. Piracy is a problem, yes, but it's not the reason these big corporate types are losing money is because of the big corporate types. Putting out new colors of the same thing will drag sales out only so much.
Are we talking about the same George Lucas here? The same man who held the original Star Wars trilogy off DVD for years because he was that paranoid about piracy? The same man who tried to force every theater in the country to upgrade to digital projection for the same reason?
First, this lawsuit only has application in the state of New York. Naxos can continue to sell these discs in every other state. Second, Naxos's claim was that because the discs were PD in England, so to were they in the US, which isn't quite correct.
I understand they found their own, truly PD masters in England, but the performance in the recording is still copyrighted in the US.
The reason this is even an issue is because congress got a little lazy with copyright rewrites back in the early 1900's. Basically, they decided that they were going to continue to handle everything written, but that they'd let the states handle music recordings. As such, we ended up with a wide array of state copyrights, but only on music (well, and player piano rolls, which was the original reason for the rewrite anyway.)
This is from the court's statement:
Capitol commenced an action against Naxos in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2002. The complaint set forth claims of common-law copyright infringement, unfair competition, misappropriation and unjust enrichment, all of which were premised on the law of the State of New York, the situs of the alleged infringement. Naxos moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim, arguing that the recordings had entered the public domain in the United Kingdom and, hence, the United States as well. Capitol moved for, among other relief, partial summary judgment on liability.
I'm on the fence about the quality of the music stations though. For music, I mainly bounce around between to Boom Box, Octane, Hard Attack, Hair Nation, and Back Spin. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes not. It does not sound like Sirius is selectively changing bandwidth though as when a song does not sound so good, it does sound like it is overly compressed, it sounds more like less quality source material IMO. Maybe they have the ability to dynamically change bandwidth like that but I've never heard it happen mid song.
Sirius uses a sliding compression scale, where all of their channels compete for bandwidth based on their momentary needs. Basically, it functions like VBR mp3's do. XM uses a fixed bandwidth for all of their stations. As a result, sometimes one service will sound better than the other.
>They survive with low prices, and must be paying their employees fairly good because they do not
>have very high turnover rates.
Check again in a year. For 3 years now I have been interviewing small business owners all over the Midwest (urban, suburban and rural). In over 2000 face-to-face interview in 3 years, over 70% said they were taking out loans to support their businesses in hopes that things turn around.
Hold up now, the United States just went through a recession. Big and small businesses, and the US government, have been borrowing money. The idea that loans are somehow unique to small businesses is incorrect.
I also find your '2000' business owner interviews number suspicious. You would have to be interviewing 1-2 business owners every day of the week, every day of the year, with no exceptions. Even if you are a reporter, I'm not sure I buy your information.
Taping shows on your vcr is still free, however now everyone and their dog runs Tivo, sending a monthly check to them for the priviledge. Personally when you're raising a family and making a budget I don't see how all of these subscriptions are neccessary. Of course we have to have our monthy cell phone bills...
I don't claim to know how many people own Tivos, but as other pvr systems become less expensive I expect Tivo's service will be less relevant. As well, you can finally buy affordable recordable DVD VCR units. Wal-Mart has one for $98. That's where my money is. I don't need Tivo recording every Patrick Swayze movie because I watched 20 minutes of Dirty Dancing.
On the EFF page, it says that the chair of the committee, Joe Barton is not interested in the mpaa's advances unless there is a deal. That's almost as scary as these 20 congressmen sending him a letter in the first place. What sort of a deal is he interested in?
According to the recording industry Association of America taping broadcasts off the radio is not a fair use right. So the difference is, basically they think both are illegal.
The music industry, or at least some people in it still do not get that supply and demand does not apply in an online economy. The idea of supply and demand means a product is more expensive because it's less available due to the fact that a lot of people are buying the product being sold.
However in an online environment the product is virtual and therefore cannot be less available, because there is no physical product to be out of stock. The only price is bandwidth. The idea that they should be in charge more for songs based on an old business model that doesn't apply in the Internet does not make sense.
while the music industry is now going into a 'singles' only economy. That's the way was back in the 50s and 60s, and they managed to survive then. And they can do it now, or they can find better artists that people want to buy full albums of.
It's rather interesting that the music industry is going after itunes for their $.99 pricing but isn't going after Wal-Mart, which only charges $.88 a song. It seems that they don't want to upset Wal-Mart, which bring in more retail sales than any other business. At the same time, however, it's odd, considering that the music industry is taking an even smaller profit with the walmart store.
This is internet business we're talking about, folks. Retailers can track sales minute-by-minute, adjust prices moment to moment, and tailor prices to individual customers.
Replace the 'hot new hits' smokescreen with 'anything that's actually popular' and you have what the music industry actually wants. Does 'Highway to Hell' get more action than the latest push-the-star album? No problem.. that song gets a price hike.
Apple recognizes that supply and demand, as it currently stands, does not work in an internet economy. In supply and demand, as demand goes up, supply goes down, so the price goes up.
However, with a virtual commodity, like downloaded songs, the demand can increase to near infinity, and you don't run out of supply. You might need a better server, but this isn't a continuing expense, like hiring more employees to build more product are.
It doesn't take a genius to figure this out. Consumers will realize that pricing would just be a joke, and wait a few weeks for the price of the latest single to drop.
The United States is not Britain. We are not raised to respect and embrace our government, we are raised to be skeptical of it. If you recall, we broke away from England because we didn't agree with how they did business.
Between the recent payola scandal and the incursion of Big Radio into podcasting the major labels are pushing hard to monopolize what they can.
The problems with FM radio go far beyond payola. Music Director's no longer pick songs to play because they thing that the song will be something their listeners will think is cool. Music Director's now rely almost exclusively on what the trade magazines (R&R and Billboard) say is popular. The trade magazines get their information from the bigger stations, which pay consultants to pick out songs
The consultants are not picking songs because listeners will think it is something new and interesting and might bring in new ears, but rather, they pick songs based on the idea of 'please, please, we can't lose/offend any of our existing listeners.'
This is a poor business model, as it doesn't bring in new people, and this a big reason radio is losing listeners to the internet.
Stations that only play 250 songs (1 days worth) on a rotating basis is another.
I completely agree with you. Worst. Article. Ever.
From the article:
About the author
Clarence Ladson is currently a college student (emphasis mine) in Tocoma(sic), Washinton and works in robotical and anatomical engineering. His hobbies include contributing programming skills to various console homebrew developements and orchestrating local LAN gaming events.
So now apparently what are essentiall slashdot comments (by the slashdot primary base of college students) are worthy of becoming entire news stories for technology websites. I'm going to be rich! We all are!
This won't work for one big reason: Institutional buyers. As it is, colleges and universities have huge numbers of older computers they still use. Where I am, these machines range from 400 - 1 GHz in speed, and they all run XP Pro. For the record, I use 400 mHz XP Pro machine on a regular basis, and while it's a little bit slow, it runs just fine.
While Universities have many new machines, in a few years (when Longhorn finally comes out), they will be old, and replacing the current old crop of computers.
What I'm getting at, is these computers already have existing monitors, and schools are not going to replace the (often onboard) video cards and monitors so that they can access the latest DRM encrypted educational content.
So, MS has one of two options 1. Not implement this at all. or 2. Take it out of 'fleet' copies of Longhorn.
Being that current institutional copies do not have the registration requirements mandated by the home buyers copies, I suspect that MS will pick option 1. However, up until now, only the tech guys really are aware of what is and isn't in the institutional copies... now it will affect regular users.
At this point, someone will have to explain why students, faculty, and employees at businesses with large amounts of older machines can access restricted content at work on older computers with 14 inch CRTs, but not at home on 18 inch LCDs.
The New York Times Op-Ed page has a piece entitled Worse Than Death that calls for harsher 'hacker' penalties as a deterrent, quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty
Well, the Supreme Court just declared the death penalty for minors unconstitutional, so I don't think this will have much of an impact.
Slashdot Mirror
said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
/end sarcasm sequencer
Is nothing enough for Paul Newman? It's not enough that he stars in movies with Robert Redford, or that I'm forced to by his Salad Dressings and Microwave Pop-Corn... now I must apparently take his word on the o-zone layer. I suppose in 20 years he'll show up in a computer animated film as some sort of washed-up radio telescope convinced to go for one more shot at the big time.
I was watching a C-Span panel with US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff earlier today (rebroadcast from Tuesday 9/12) and he was talking about a lot of things. However, I was very positively struck when he talked about interoperability of first responder radio networks and how it's important that we don't lock ourselves into a proprietary network should the feds mandate a specific system.
He specifically refered to making it an 'open source' setup if we were to mandate specific equipment to avoid vendor lockin.
While I don't follow the open source movement too closely, it's a major reference, from where I see it.
And the police officers will all be holding walkie talkies.
I've never been able to make ndiswrapper work with encryption. Does it? With g?
Where is SuSE's wireless support? I like SuSE, but am on an encrypted 802.11g network with a wireless card with a broadcom chipset... I know it's broadcom's problem the chipset isn't open, but I can't use SuSE without wireless support.
O'Connor was part of the dissent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._New_London
Not to mention the use of audio from the broadcast without (I'm assuming) the express written consent of Major League Baseball (I always like that line best when it was spoken by Al Michaels) There's a ton of copyright violations going on here, but anyone who sues over it will look like a major douchebag.
This is one of those situations where having copyright law be like trademark law, where you actually have to enforce your rights in order to keep them... would be really interesting, and would lead eventually to major overhauls in law....
Granted, those changes would probably be so you can use selective enforcement... doh.
To all those saying Netflix has been around longer, my local library has had this since I was still on dialup, which dates it to 1997-1998, and that's only when I discovered their public telnet server. You could also renew books online, along with everything else.
This is what plagues the RIAA and MPAA. This is what plagues movie screens and radio. Piracy is a problem, yes, but it's not the reason these big corporate types are losing money is because of the big corporate types. Putting out new colors of the same thing will drag sales out only so much.
Are we talking about the same George Lucas here? The same man who held the original Star Wars trilogy off DVD for years because he was that paranoid about piracy? The same man who tried to force every theater in the country to upgrade to digital projection for the same reason?
The article is sorely lacking in good pictures. Surfing around, the Philadelphia Inquirer has a much more thorough article here.
r er/KRT_packages/archive/graphics/hybrid_car/index. html
They've also got a flash presentation with exploded diagrams of the structure of the car. http://www.realcities.com/multimedia/philly/inqui
You're off, by a little bit, anyway.
First, this lawsuit only has application in the state of New York. Naxos can continue to sell these discs in every other state. Second, Naxos's claim was that because the discs were PD in England, so to were they in the US, which isn't quite correct.
I understand they found their own, truly PD masters in England, but the performance in the recording is still copyrighted in the US.
The reason this is even an issue is because congress got a little lazy with copyright rewrites back in the early 1900's. Basically, they decided that they were going to continue to handle everything written, but that they'd let the states handle music recordings. As such, we ended up with a wide array of state copyrights, but only on music (well, and player piano rolls, which was the original reason for the rewrite anyway.)
This is from the court's statement:
Capitol commenced an action against Naxos in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2002. The complaint set forth claims of common-law copyright infringement, unfair competition, misappropriation and unjust enrichment, all of which were premised on the law of the State of New York, the situs of the alleged infringement. Naxos moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim, arguing that the recordings had entered the public domain in the United Kingdom and, hence, the United States as well. Capitol moved for, among other relief, partial summary judgment on liability.
I'm on the fence about the quality of the music stations though. For music, I mainly bounce around between to Boom Box, Octane, Hard Attack, Hair Nation, and Back Spin. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes not. It does not sound like Sirius is selectively changing bandwidth though as when a song does not sound so good, it does sound like it is overly compressed, it sounds more like less quality source material IMO. Maybe they have the ability to dynamically change bandwidth like that but I've never heard it happen mid song.
Sirius uses a sliding compression scale, where all of their channels compete for bandwidth based on their momentary needs. Basically, it functions like VBR mp3's do. XM uses a fixed bandwidth for all of their stations. As a result, sometimes one service will sound better than the other.
However, they both need more bandwidth.
>They survive with low prices, and must be paying their employees fairly good because they do not
>have very high turnover rates.
Check again in a year. For 3 years now I have been interviewing small business owners all over the Midwest (urban, suburban and rural). In over 2000 face-to-face interview in 3 years, over 70% said they were taking out loans to support their businesses in hopes that things turn around.
Hold up now, the United States just went through a recession. Big and small businesses, and the US government, have been borrowing money. The idea that loans are somehow unique to small businesses is incorrect.
I also find your '2000' business owner interviews number suspicious. You would have to be interviewing 1-2 business owners every day of the week, every day of the year, with no exceptions. Even if you are a reporter, I'm not sure I buy your information.
Taping shows on your vcr is still free, however now everyone and their dog runs Tivo, sending a monthly check to them for the priviledge. Personally when you're raising a family and making a budget I don't see how all of these subscriptions are neccessary. Of course we have to have our monthy cell phone bills...
I don't claim to know how many people own Tivos, but as other pvr systems become less expensive I expect Tivo's service will be less relevant. As well, you can finally buy affordable recordable DVD VCR units. Wal-Mart has one for $98. That's where my money is. I don't need Tivo recording every Patrick Swayze movie because I watched 20 minutes of Dirty Dancing.
On the EFF page, it says that the chair of the committee, Joe Barton is not interested in the mpaa's advances unless there is a deal. That's almost as scary as these 20 congressmen sending him a letter in the first place. What sort of a deal is he interested in?
According to the recording industry Association of America taping broadcasts off the radio is not a fair use right. So the difference is, basically they think both are illegal.
The music industry, or at least some people in it still do not get that supply and demand does not apply in an online economy. The idea of supply and demand means a product is more expensive because it's less available due to the fact that a lot of people are buying the product being sold.
However in an online environment the product is virtual and therefore cannot be less available, because there is no physical product to be out of stock. The only price is bandwidth. The idea that they should be in charge more for songs based on an old business model that doesn't apply in the Internet does not make sense.
while the music industry is now going into a 'singles' only economy. That's the way was back in the 50s and 60s, and they managed to survive then. And they can do it now, or they can find better artists that people want to buy full albums of.
It's rather interesting that the music industry is going after itunes for their $.99 pricing but isn't going after Wal-Mart, which only charges $.88 a song. It seems that they don't want to upset Wal-Mart, which bring in more retail sales than any other business. At the same time, however, it's odd, considering that the music industry is taking an even smaller profit with the walmart store.
This is internet business we're talking about, folks. Retailers can track sales minute-by-minute, adjust prices moment to moment, and tailor prices to individual customers.
Replace the 'hot new hits' smokescreen with 'anything that's actually popular' and you have what the music industry actually wants. Does 'Highway to Hell' get more action than the latest push-the-star album? No problem.. that song gets a price hike.
Apple recognizes that supply and demand, as it currently stands, does not work in an internet economy. In supply and demand, as demand goes up, supply goes down, so the price goes up.
However, with a virtual commodity, like downloaded songs, the demand can increase to near infinity, and you don't run out of supply. You might need a better server, but this isn't a continuing expense, like hiring more employees to build more product are.
It doesn't take a genius to figure this out. Consumers will realize that pricing would just be a joke, and wait a few weeks for the price of the latest single to drop.
Ask any Londoner how oppressed they feel.
The United States is not Britain. We are not raised to respect and embrace our government, we are raised to be skeptical of it. If you recall, we broke away from England because we didn't agree with how they did business.
Between the recent payola scandal and the incursion of Big Radio into podcasting the major labels are pushing hard to monopolize what they can.
The problems with FM radio go far beyond payola. Music Director's no longer pick songs to play because they thing that the song will be something their listeners will think is cool. Music Director's now rely almost exclusively on what the trade magazines (R&R and Billboard) say is popular. The trade magazines get their information from the bigger stations, which pay consultants to pick out songs
The consultants are not picking songs because listeners will think it is something new and interesting and might bring in new ears, but rather, they pick songs based on the idea of 'please, please, we can't lose/offend any of our existing listeners.'
This is a poor business model, as it doesn't bring in new people, and this a big reason radio is losing listeners to the internet.
Stations that only play 250 songs (1 days worth) on a rotating basis is another.
I completely agree with you. Worst. Article. Ever.
From the article:
About the author
Clarence Ladson is currently a college student (emphasis mine) in Tocoma(sic), Washinton and works in robotical and anatomical engineering. His hobbies include contributing programming skills to various console homebrew developements and orchestrating local LAN gaming events.
So now apparently what are essentiall slashdot comments (by the slashdot primary base of college students) are worthy of becoming entire news stories for technology websites. I'm going to be rich! We all are!
So... that Mr. Fusion I ordered off of eBay will actually work?
Well, it can certainly make some good coffee.
This won't work for one big reason: Institutional buyers. As it is, colleges and universities have huge numbers of older computers they still use. Where I am, these machines range from 400 - 1 GHz in speed, and they all run XP Pro. For the record, I use 400 mHz XP Pro machine on a regular basis, and while it's a little bit slow, it runs just fine.
While Universities have many new machines, in a few years (when Longhorn finally comes out), they will be old, and replacing the current old crop of computers.
What I'm getting at, is these computers already have existing monitors, and schools are not going to replace the (often onboard) video cards and monitors so that they can access the latest DRM encrypted educational content.
So, MS has one of two options 1. Not implement this at all. or 2. Take it out of 'fleet' copies of Longhorn.
Being that current institutional copies do not have the registration requirements mandated by the home buyers copies, I suspect that MS will pick option 1. However, up until now, only the tech guys really are aware of what is and isn't in the institutional copies... now it will affect regular users.
At this point, someone will have to explain why students, faculty, and employees at businesses with large amounts of older machines can access restricted content at work on older computers with 14 inch CRTs, but not at home on 18 inch LCDs.
The New York Times Op-Ed page has a piece entitled Worse Than Death that calls for harsher 'hacker' penalties as a deterrent, quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty
Well, the Supreme Court just declared the death penalty for minors unconstitutional, so I don't think this will have much of an impact.