Sadly, it's not that simple. From the FAQ on the settlement:
Q. What kind of documentation is necessary to establish whether my hard disk drive is covered by the Settlement?
A. The documentation must demonstrate your purchase of the 75GXP hard disk drive from an authorized seller. Invoices, receipts or purchase agreements, in combination with the credit / debit card statements, are the best form of documentation. The validity of information and/or documentation demonstrating your purchase of a 75GXP will be determined by the Settlement Administrator.
In determining the sufficiency of information and documentation provided as proof of purchase, the Settlement Administrator may request that additional information be provided. Failure to provide the Settlement Administrator with the requested additional information may result in the rejection of your claim.
So if you have your five year old original receipt, you're ok.
Having read slashdot for some time, it seems that, in almost all circumstances where group of elected, or non-elected officials in power do something that the/. community decides is, well, stupid, said officials get thousands of emails from slashdotters.
Within a few days, administrators have a change of heart simply to stop the flow of email.
Maybe Scifi has their collective heads on straight now, but they've really had some bizarro priorities when it comes to programming in the past, particularly shows they pick up from elseware.
Case(s) in point:
Sliders : Cancelled at it's peak of popularity, and as I remember, it was the No. 1 rated show on the channel.
MST3K : Cancelled because the show couldn't bring in more ratings, or because it was too expensive, depending on what time of day it is when you ask. Of course, the fact that Scifi never ran promos for the show helped.
Farscape : Cancelled when it was the No. 1 rated show on the channel, because it was too expensive. How is it possible for your most popular show to be too expensive?
Failing that, how about starting the patent challenge clock when the patent holder issues a claim instead of starting the clock when the patent is issued. It'd deal with submarine patents as well as eliminate the need to look over the patent office's shoulder on each and every patent they issue.
What the patent system needs is to take a page from the trademark system, which is the only part of intellectual property law in the US that works well.
Under trademark law, if you find something you think it infringing, you HAVE to defend your trademark... or your lose it. If you aren't using your trademark, you lose it (after 5 years.) This would largely eliminate intellectual property companies (that have no real products), and would also end the process of submarine patents.
Google and A9 are a lot like little kids on the playground:
"I've got the best search technology in the world."
"Oh yea, well mines better now."
"What?!? Well, now I've got maps of the world... from space."
"Huh? No, I've got maps from space and ground level pictures of buildings in American cities."
"Regular maps? I've got maps in 3D now."
Of course, the difference is, Google and A9 are actually telling the truth, although I'd be wary if A9 starts talking about 'their Dad's flying car.'
But Stallman is right about the other Nokia stance on European patents. They're bad, for Nokia like everyone else in the long run. They prevent Nokia from improving on innovation elsewhere. With a big company that can't take risks like small developers, Nokia benefits from unimpeded traffic in software. And as a hardware vendor, more software sells their products, with a protected base that can be protected by valid, traditional hardware patents.
Actually, they aren't bad for Nokia, or any large software company. Software patents will not stop large software companies in the list bit. When they are sued by another large software company (think Sun and IBM), they will simply sign a cross-licensing agreement.
Software patents allow Nokia, and others, to go after smaller software companies, and force them into massive lawsuits, or sell themselves to Nokia.
Effectively, software patents preserve bad business models.
"Why don't we simply pre-emptively incarcerate all kids in padded cells?"
Seriously, what the fuck is it with these "all or nothing" attitudes?
They're children. They need to be treated as such, but always to a point.
You can't wrap them up in a blanket of ignorance, but at the same time you can't give them free reign to run their own lives when they're barely into the double digit age bracket.
No, they don't need free reign, however, they learn what we teach them. If we teach them that tracking is good, and it helps with various things, they will be more likely to move onto the next step for more intrusive tracking (ala chips under the skin.) After all, all parents should know at all times where their kids are.
"A parent could give a child $20 and within two days that money's gone. This allows them to see if they bought chips," Bennett said. "What we're really hoping is to get parents' involvement, to let them know what's happening."
Whatever happened to giving your kids a little bit of responsibility? If they can't handle buying lunch, don't give them lunch money. This system of telling parents what their kids bought is solving a problem that only exists because parents created it by not making lunch for their kids, and instead give them 25 dollars a week.
If the kid spends that 20 dollars in two days, don't give them anymore lunch money. If they want lunch, they can either bum food off their friends, or they can make lunch at home. Continually giving kids money, and then tracking what they eats is bad for noone, since it builds no responsibility.
Even if you no longer have the means of playing your music, whether it be off of reel-to-reel or a CD (at some point in the future), there will always be ways to transfer formats.
Just like some camera shops maintain a side business of doing VHS and DVD transfers of old 8mm film, there will be companies that will do the same thing with music and obsolete video formats in the years to come.
However, if you'd like to avoid paying someone, I recommend capturing everything to your HD in whatever your favorite format is, and then creating a backup of that on DVD. Don't toss your reel-to-reel tapes (just in case), just store them someplace that's out of the way. If you have a safe deposit box, store a copy of your DVD's there.
Off site and multiple backups are the only way to safely store things in the even of a fire or natural disaster.
If you want to get paranoid, you can setup an IDE mirroring raid with two harddrives.
At least, when you have a licensed copy of MS office, and it goes whacko, you can call up MS and demand that they fix it.
Microsofts 'fix' typically consists of 'format and restore.' Heck, that's most PC manufacturers as well. Learning how to use the event log and google is invariably better in all situations.
I can understand she is upset and wants some compensation for the "emotional stress" such an incident might have caused, but... $3 million...are you serious?
I do not understand how it is that she is upset. She let someone, who was not married to her, take nude pictures of her. If it's your husband (or wife) taking the pictures, you have a bond that is both a moral and legal one. However, if you let some guy you met in a bar and have been dating for a while take pictures of you, when you break up on bad terms, don't be surprised if those pictures end up somewhere you don't want them.
Uh... Maybe because not everybody HAS credit cards.
However, it's not too difficult to get a credit card, even if you've been in bad financial situations. If you cannot get a card through typical means (applying via mail order stuff and on cc websites), there are other avenues.
First, you can try and apply for those in-store Visa cards. Target has a Visa card (it's valid everywhere, not just Target).
A second possibility is secured credit cards. To get one of these, you basically send 500 or so dollars to the CC company, and they give you a card with a 500 dollar declining balance. In practice, it's like a debit card, only it functions as a credit card. It's very much like those credit cards with declining balances being marketed to parents as gifts for their children.
The map claims that there are no laws against municipal projects in Pennsylvania, and this after the huge fight over Philly's muni project, which eventually included legal concessions that, while Philly get's to build their project, anyone else has to ask Verizon first.
Sounds an awful lots like laws against municipal projects to me.
To obtain the key, a passport officer would need to physically scan the machine-readable text that's printed on the passport page beneath the photo
Ok, at this point, they're already scanning the passport, why not just put all the information on the magnetic strip, rather than waste money on an additional RFID chip?
This is exactly, 100%, the reason I don't have a facebook account. My friends can social interweb link themselves to everyone in the world to their hearts content, but if you want to track me down, I'm not going to unlock my door and put a huge sign on my lawn saying 'come on in and steal my TV.'
Voice recognition is still not there. From stuff I've read rather recently, voice recognition stuff still can't understand southern accents. I'm not talking about deep dixie, or Louisiana, either.
President Clinton's voice is too southern for todays voice recognition software to accurately recognize.
They were decided by the market, but there were multiple competitors making each of those choices, because the standards were available for licensing to anyone at relatively reasonable prices. To a first approximation, the Apple iTunes DRM "standard" is available for licensing to noone. Certainly it's not available to just any company that wants to publish music in the Apple format, nor to just any company that wants to build compatible players.
This isn't entirely true. One of the big reasons that Betamax failed was because Sony was essentially unwilling to license the technology.
Of course, there were other reasons, but that was a big part of it. Perhaps Apple is headed down the same path, although Betamax never dominated the market like Apple does right now (for iTunes anyway)
Passing another car is not a license to speed. You are still bound by the speed limit.
It is on a one lane (each direction) highway. If the speed limit is 65, and you cross the broken center line to pass the person in front of you, who is going 60, are you going to speed up to just 65? Or are you going to hit 70-80 to complete that manuver as quickly as possible in order to avoid creating an accident when oncoming traffic thwacks into your car?
Ok, I did way too much research (I found his livejournal), and figured out that this guy goes to Transylvania University, in Kentucky. They have the worst website addy ever: http://www.transy.edu/
This is all I could find that would even vaguely relate to BitTorrent:
7. The Residential Network is a shared resource. Thus network use or applications which inhibit or interfere with the use of the network by others are not permitted. (For example, applications which use an unusually high portion of the bandwidth for extended periods of time, thus inhibiting the use of the network by others, are not permitted). Users may be asked to cease any system activity that directly or indirectly creates interference in the operation and administration of the network.
8. Use of Residential Network facilities to make copyrighted materials available on the network in a manner contrary to copyrights or license agreements is prohibited regardless of the source of the copied materials.
Interestingly, the University is using packet shaping (which some suggested the school might try in order to avoid the situation they are in right now.)
13. Residential Network connections are subject to packet-shaping which may affect speed performance in certain applications that are not deemed supported by the University.
It sounds, to me, like someone low level person at the university probably did something they shouldn't have, and that this kid will end up getting off scott free (although his access may get cut for a few days while the bureacracy sorts itself out.)
The last thing we need is automated building that are tied into computers.
I was having a conversation last night with a friend about how annoyed I am with the current crop of auto mechanics. I have a minor problem with my vehicle that I can't diagnose, but the shop won't even look at it.
Why?
"Because it isn't throwing a code."
Just because the check engine light isn't on doesn't mean there isn't a problem. The last thing we need are building supers who look at their computer screen and say, "I don't see a problem", because the water leak up on 17 hasn't gotten big enough for the computer to notice it.
This article talks about using a fan speed controller to slow down your fans and thus, reduce noise. I accomplished the same thing, without spending any extra money.
It is important to note that while President Bush has limited federal funding for stem cell research, that is all he has done. There is no federal ban on stem cell research, the only ban is on federal funds being used in such research. Our country's medical companies and educational institutions are free to do their own research.
Fan campaigns have worked in the past. One needs to look no further than Family Guy. However, there is an even better example, the now cancelled Mystery Science Theater 3000.
MST3K was nearly cancelled in 1989 and 1990, and then subsequently truly canned in 1995. A massive letter writing campaign got the show picked up by the Scifi channel for 3 additional seasons.
As well, MST has the distinct honor that it's feature film marks the only time in history that such a large group of fans wrote to a movie studio demanding that a movie be made that it actually worked.
Never underestimate the power of fans... and the idiocy of TV executives, for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, it's not that simple. From the FAQ on the settlement:
Q. What kind of documentation is necessary to establish whether my hard disk drive is covered by the Settlement?
A. The documentation must demonstrate your purchase of the 75GXP hard disk drive from an authorized seller. Invoices, receipts or purchase agreements, in combination with the credit / debit card statements, are the best form of documentation. The validity of information and/or documentation demonstrating your purchase of a 75GXP will be determined by the Settlement Administrator.
In determining the sufficiency of information and documentation provided as proof of purchase, the Settlement Administrator may request that additional information be provided. Failure to provide the Settlement Administrator with the requested additional information may result in the rejection of your claim.
So if you have your five year old original receipt, you're ok.
Having read slashdot for some time, it seems that, in almost all circumstances where group of elected, or non-elected officials in power do something that the /. community decides is, well, stupid, said officials get thousands of emails from slashdotters.
Within a few days, administrators have a change of heart simply to stop the flow of email.
In other news, burglers are the reason people have to have locks on their doors and windows.
Maybe Scifi has their collective heads on straight now, but they've really had some bizarro priorities when it comes to programming in the past, particularly shows they pick up from elseware.
Case(s) in point:
Sliders : Cancelled at it's peak of popularity, and as I remember, it was the No. 1 rated show on the channel.
MST3K : Cancelled because the show couldn't bring in more ratings, or because it was too expensive, depending on what time of day it is when you ask. Of course, the fact that Scifi never ran promos for the show helped.
Farscape : Cancelled when it was the No. 1 rated show on the channel, because it was too expensive. How is it possible for your most popular show to be too expensive?
Failing that, how about starting the patent challenge clock when the patent holder issues a claim instead of starting the clock when the patent is issued. It'd deal with submarine patents as well as eliminate the need to look over the patent office's shoulder on each and every patent they issue.
What the patent system needs is to take a page from the trademark system, which is the only part of intellectual property law in the US that works well.
Under trademark law, if you find something you think it infringing, you HAVE to defend your trademark... or your lose it. If you aren't using your trademark, you lose it (after 5 years.) This would largely eliminate intellectual property companies (that have no real products), and would also end the process of submarine patents.
Google and A9 are a lot like little kids on the playground:
"I've got the best search technology in the world."
"Oh yea, well mines better now."
"What?!? Well, now I've got maps of the world... from space."
"Huh? No, I've got maps from space and ground level pictures of buildings in American cities."
"Regular maps? I've got maps in 3D now."
Of course, the difference is, Google and A9 are actually telling the truth, although I'd be wary if A9 starts talking about 'their Dad's flying car.'
But Stallman is right about the other Nokia stance on European patents. They're bad, for Nokia like everyone else in the long run. They prevent Nokia from improving on innovation elsewhere. With a big company that can't take risks like small developers, Nokia benefits from unimpeded traffic in software. And as a hardware vendor, more software sells their products, with a protected base that can be protected by valid, traditional hardware patents.
Actually, they aren't bad for Nokia, or any large software company. Software patents will not stop large software companies in the list bit. When they are sued by another large software company (think Sun and IBM), they will simply sign a cross-licensing agreement.
Software patents allow Nokia, and others, to go after smaller software companies, and force them into massive lawsuits, or sell themselves to Nokia.
Effectively, software patents preserve bad business models.
"Why don't we simply pre-emptively incarcerate all kids in padded cells?"
Seriously, what the fuck is it with these "all or nothing" attitudes?
They're children. They need to be treated as such, but always to a point. You can't wrap them up in a blanket of ignorance, but at the same time you can't give them free reign to run their own lives when they're barely into the double digit age bracket.
No, they don't need free reign, however, they learn what we teach them. If we teach them that tracking is good, and it helps with various things, they will be more likely to move onto the next step for more intrusive tracking (ala chips under the skin.) After all, all parents should know at all times where their kids are.
"A parent could give a child $20 and within two days that money's gone. This allows them to see if they bought chips," Bennett said. "What we're really hoping is to get parents' involvement, to let them know what's happening."
Whatever happened to giving your kids a little bit of responsibility? If they can't handle buying lunch, don't give them lunch money. This system of telling parents what their kids bought is solving a problem that only exists because parents created it by not making lunch for their kids, and instead give them 25 dollars a week.
If the kid spends that 20 dollars in two days, don't give them anymore lunch money. If they want lunch, they can either bum food off their friends, or they can make lunch at home. Continually giving kids money, and then tracking what they eats is bad for noone, since it builds no responsibility.
Even if you no longer have the means of playing your music, whether it be off of reel-to-reel or a CD (at some point in the future), there will always be ways to transfer formats.
Just like some camera shops maintain a side business of doing VHS and DVD transfers of old 8mm film, there will be companies that will do the same thing with music and obsolete video formats in the years to come.
However, if you'd like to avoid paying someone, I recommend capturing everything to your HD in whatever your favorite format is, and then creating a backup of that on DVD. Don't toss your reel-to-reel tapes (just in case), just store them someplace that's out of the way. If you have a safe deposit box, store a copy of your DVD's there.
Off site and multiple backups are the only way to safely store things in the even of a fire or natural disaster.
If you want to get paranoid, you can setup an IDE mirroring raid with two harddrives.
At least, when you have a licensed copy of MS office, and it goes whacko, you can call up MS and demand that they fix it.
Microsofts 'fix' typically consists of 'format and restore.' Heck, that's most PC manufacturers as well. Learning how to use the event log and google is invariably better in all situations.
I can understand she is upset and wants some compensation for the "emotional stress" such an incident might have caused, but... $3 million...are you serious?
I do not understand how it is that she is upset. She let someone, who was not married to her, take nude pictures of her. If it's your husband (or wife) taking the pictures, you have a bond that is both a moral and legal one. However, if you let some guy you met in a bar and have been dating for a while take pictures of you, when you break up on bad terms, don't be surprised if those pictures end up somewhere you don't want them.
Uh... Maybe because not everybody HAS credit cards.
However, it's not too difficult to get a credit card, even if you've been in bad financial situations. If you cannot get a card through typical means (applying via mail order stuff and on cc websites), there are other avenues.
First, you can try and apply for those in-store Visa cards. Target has a Visa card (it's valid everywhere, not just Target).
A second possibility is secured credit cards. To get one of these, you basically send 500 or so dollars to the CC company, and they give you a card with a 500 dollar declining balance. In practice, it's like a debit card, only it functions as a credit card. It's very much like those credit cards with declining balances being marketed to parents as gifts for their children.
A true hacker would take a brute force approach and wash his or her undies by hand.
Of course, this would be made illegal under the DMUA (Digital Millenium Underwear Act.) No analog holes here.
The map claims that there are no laws against municipal projects in Pennsylvania, and this after the huge fight over Philly's muni project, which eventually included legal concessions that, while Philly get's to build their project, anyone else has to ask Verizon first.
Sounds an awful lots like laws against municipal projects to me.
To obtain the key, a passport officer would need to physically scan the machine-readable text that's printed on the passport page beneath the photo
Ok, at this point, they're already scanning the passport, why not just put all the information on the magnetic strip, rather than waste money on an additional RFID chip?
This is exactly, 100%, the reason I don't have a facebook account. My friends can social interweb link themselves to everyone in the world to their hearts content, but if you want to track me down, I'm not going to unlock my door and put a huge sign on my lawn saying 'come on in and steal my TV.'
Voice recognition is still not there. From stuff I've read rather recently, voice recognition stuff still can't understand southern accents. I'm not talking about deep dixie, or Louisiana, either.
President Clinton's voice is too southern for todays voice recognition software to accurately recognize.
They were decided by the market, but there were multiple competitors making each of those choices, because the standards were available for licensing to anyone at relatively reasonable prices. To a first approximation, the Apple iTunes DRM "standard" is available for licensing to noone. Certainly it's not available to just any company that wants to publish music in the Apple format, nor to just any company that wants to build compatible players.
This isn't entirely true. One of the big reasons that Betamax failed was because Sony was essentially unwilling to license the technology. Of course, there were other reasons, but that was a big part of it. Perhaps Apple is headed down the same path, although Betamax never dominated the market like Apple does right now (for iTunes anyway)
Passing another car is not a license to speed. You are still bound by the speed limit.
It is on a one lane (each direction) highway. If the speed limit is 65, and you cross the broken center line to pass the person in front of you, who is going 60, are you going to speed up to just 65? Or are you going to hit 70-80 to complete that manuver as quickly as possible in order to avoid creating an accident when oncoming traffic thwacks into your car?
Thankfully, if Adobe wants to, they could change their Acrobat license agreement to ban this sort of crap.
Ok, I did way too much research (I found his livejournal), and figured out that this guy goes to Transylvania University, in Kentucky. They have the worst website addy ever:
http://www.transy.edu/
I scavenged their pages and found their AUP.
This is all I could find that would even vaguely relate to BitTorrent:
7. The Residential Network is a shared resource. Thus network use or applications which inhibit or interfere with the use of the network by others are not permitted. (For example, applications which use an unusually high portion of the bandwidth for extended periods of time, thus inhibiting the use of the network by others, are not permitted). Users may be asked to cease any system activity that directly or indirectly creates interference in the operation and administration of the network.
8. Use of Residential Network facilities to make copyrighted materials available on the network in a manner contrary to copyrights or license agreements is prohibited regardless of the source of the copied materials.
Interestingly, the University is using packet shaping (which some suggested the school might try in order to avoid the situation they are in right now.)
13. Residential Network connections are subject to packet-shaping which may affect speed performance in certain applications that are not deemed supported by the University.
It sounds, to me, like someone low level person at the university probably did something they shouldn't have, and that this kid will end up getting off scott free (although his access may get cut for a few days while the bureacracy sorts itself out.)
The last thing we need is automated building that are tied into computers.
I was having a conversation last night with a friend about how annoyed I am with the current crop of auto mechanics. I have a minor problem with my vehicle that I can't diagnose, but the shop won't even look at it.
Why?
"Because it isn't throwing a code."
Just because the check engine light isn't on doesn't mean there isn't a problem. The last thing we need are building supers who look at their computer screen and say, "I don't see a problem", because the water leak up on 17 hasn't gotten big enough for the computer to notice it.
This article talks about using a fan speed controller to slow down your fans and thus, reduce noise. I accomplished the same thing, without spending any extra money.
a in/5-7-adapter.html
I converted my fans to run on 7 volts. All you have to do is switch the order of the wires around on the molex power connector. It's really easy:
http://www.dslwebserver.com/main/fr_index.html?/m
I didn't experience any increase in temperature, but the noise level in my case went down specifically.
It is important to note that while President Bush has limited federal funding for stem cell research, that is all he has done. There is no federal ban on stem cell research, the only ban is on federal funds being used in such research. Our country's medical companies and educational institutions are free to do their own research.
Fan campaigns have worked in the past. One needs to look no further than Family Guy. However, there is an even better example, the now cancelled Mystery Science Theater 3000.
MST3K was nearly cancelled in 1989 and 1990, and then subsequently truly canned in 1995. A massive letter writing campaign got the show picked up by the Scifi channel for 3 additional seasons.
As well, MST has the distinct honor that it's feature film marks the only time in history that such a large group of fans wrote to a movie studio demanding that a movie be made that it actually worked.
Never underestimate the power of fans... and the idiocy of TV executives, for that matter.