"This case is about a fellow who made available 600 copyrighted works," Roberts said. "Is there any legitimate purpose for making available for copying 600 copyrighted works?"
"This case is also about a corporation which wants to sue millions of people," GillBates0 said. "Is there any legitimate purpose for suing millions of people?"
But what was the answer to that question, dammit! I'm dying to know.
I think we need to switch back to a more tried and tested technology: Icarus-767 (tm). This way there are no cumbersome electronic displays and guages to monitor. No need for complex cockpits and interference from assholes using cellphones on flights. This way each person is responsible for his own safety. If the passenger (cum pilot) wants to talk on the cellphone during the flight, so be it. If he forgets to flap his wings, who cares, he asked for it. No more airports, $10/hour parking lots, noisy engines, and those 'orrible pretzels.
I, for one, would like to welcome you all aboard Icarus Airways.
So global companies grow globally. Shouldn't India be a little upset that we have most of their software programmers here?' Heh."
The Indian government has been concerned about the "brain drain" since 1990 or so. Atleast that's around the time they started acknowledging the fact that it was a serious problem.
The government puts in a lot of money into the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Regional Engineering Colleges. Tuition fees and on-campus living expenses are greatly subsidized for students who are admitted to these colleges based on national-level exams (like the IIT-JEE believed to be the toughest exam at it's level in the world).
A large percentage of graduates from these colleges look for higher salaries and better jobs outside of India: in the US and Europe or Asia, and given the huge amount of resources that the government (and tax payers) pumped into their education, it naturally gets the jitters when students choose to work abroad.
The Indian government has lately taken to giving pep talks in colleges, in addition to distributing booklets explaning the effect of brain drain on the local economy.
I think brain-drain is essentially an outcome of globalization. Technology, irrespective of where it is developed benefits the world as a whole.
An authentic Native American open pit salmon barbeque (salmon run permitting) will be offered on Friday evening. Lunch on Saturday will be the Willow Creek version of a mall food court. Various fund-raising groups will provide a wide variety of luncheon choices, including Indian tacos, hot dogs, hamburgers, desserts, and snacks. A classic pit-barbequed beef dinner by the Willow Creek Kiwanis Club is on tap for Saturday evening.
If only the/. editors had posted this before the weekend, I could've presented my research on big feet at the conference.:(
During the economic boom, and even before that, the US has always needed employees. The high job to population ratio meant less qualified people to fill up job vacancies. That's how the H1 visa program came into being, and was greatly appreciated during the 1990's boom.
Unlike the US, India, being a developing nation, with a very large economy has always had a dirth of jobs. There are a few hundred people to fill up a single job vacancy. Thus, India has *never* felt the need for foreign employees.
However, I know for a fact that a large number of Americans/Europeans (and even Russians in defense companies) regularly work on contract basis. I had a Russian neighbor long back, working in India on a 2 year contract with a defense company.
So people, before you start flaming, ponder over the fact that a law for hiring outside employees doesn't exist because there hasn't ever been a need for it. Now with the outsourcing, it may not be too long before the government comes up with an H-1 like plan.
Potter's team at the Laboratory for Neuroengineering, shared by Emory University and Georgia Tech, might be best able to deliver on that wild vision. He's already created the Hybrot, a machine controlled by rat neurons sealed in a patented dish spiked with micro-electrodes. You can actually see those cells growing more complex and hairy with dendrites as they learn and interact with the outside world. The work could spawn an entirely new class of adaptable robot combatants. But there's a hitch: Potter won't take a penny from the military. Sure, the Department of Defense might crib from his published research, but Potter wants to grasp new knowledge without bloody hands.
Aah, "unreasonable proprietary licensing obligations" made it clearer.
Great job with the letter, though...hope it makes it somewhere in the main press. I was giving it a critical read because I thought it deserved it, with the amount of effort you put in.
Response to Paragraph 9: Most enterprise customers have accepted Open Source because of unreasonable licensing obligations, and because Linux has proven to be more robust than most proprietary Unixes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't that be REASONABLE and not UNREASONABLE?
I'm still done reading only till this point. Posted this quickly incase people are copy/pasting it on other sites.
Okay, bear with me for this one. iTunes does allow me to make as many copies as I want for personal use right? I should be able to do that with music I have bought: play it in the car, or any place else. I may be required to use a special player, but that's still fine.
So if I'm allowed to do that, I can hand over the portable copy that I was allowed to make by law (along with the player) to the buyer, as long as I destroy all other copies I made.
I don't see the technical problems behind selling a song, unless they take away my right to create copies/backups for personal use, to play where/how I want to. If they do allow me to do that, I don't see why I would need to hand over my account details to the buyer.
Any/.'ers able to provide the location of additional tiles, or perhaps clues for solving the mystery?"
I've seen a large number of these mysterious tiles. They too have strange writing on them, which sometimes makes lewd suggestions or tells offensive jokes. I have always wondered how that writing was created on all those tiles. I've usually noticed these mystery tiles in restrooms stalls at schools, offices, and even airports in many major cities around the world! It's good to know people are starting to investigate the matter.
If Infrasound can be produced by normal speakers/woofers, it could be used to add a significant chill factor in horror movies.
I bet howling and those spine-chilling wooooooo wooooo sounds *shudder* classify as Infrasound? Because they certainly scare the shit out of me.
And what's the big deal here...instead of the ghosts scaring people, it's the ghosts producing infrared sound that scares people. I'm still scared of my Infrasound producing ghost-overlords.
The Camera Watch project is part of our Surveillance of Surveillances ( SOS) effort. We are constructing a repository of links to publicly available on-line webcams, where the webcams of interest are those that observe the public in public spaces. At present, we estimate there are about 10,000 such cameras displaying public places in the United States. Our goals are to assess the number and nature of such cameras, explore potential uses, and analyze and propose related policies and best practices.
I don't usually like to downplay a research project without hearing it through, and/or talking with the project members, but I'm going to make an exception this time.
From the project page, it looks like a lot of valuable time and resources are being wasted on reinventing the wheel.
Many databases of online webcams already exist. EarthCam is just one of them. This is another, as was posted in an earlier comment.
Moreover, surveillance cameras act as deterrents for a reason: their presence. A would be criminal is less likely to commit a crime, if he/she knows that a camera is watching/recording his/her moves. Then it doesn't matter if somebody is actually watching the video, or whether it is being recorded for later auditing, or neither. This is the reason why you see " Warning Surveillance Cameras in USE" Notices at many gas stations/etc. It doesn't really matter whether the camera is being watched or not.
Concealed surveillance cameras on the other hand, are meant to actually catch criminals instead of acting as deterrents. They usually require action on part of the surveillance team in order to identify criminals, or even detect suspicious activity in the first place. To prove useful, such a camera would require constant/reliable monitoring, for which dedicated teams are hired anyway. People would not want to depend on a random number of remote users to monitor such camers.
So, to end the rant, I think the concept of using webcams for any purpose other than entertainment/traffic monitoring etc is inherently flawed, and hence QED.
Can we fit an anti-MS rant here
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...He was struggling with the odd wheelbarrow across which he had slung his prize deer. It was a thing full of seams and joins and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled his burden, covering the ground by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the tree, it was terrifying...
...He was struggling with the odd OS to which he had entrusted his daily living. It was a thing full of hitherto unexploited bugs and exception failures and untimely blue screens. Though it appeared altogether large enough to function adequately, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair. And as the unfortunate man shoved and hauled, pushed and pulled at his mouse, covering the screen by inches, the extent of his rage became apparent. To Michael, observing from the neighboring Linux PC, it was terrifying...
After taking his "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" feature film and turning it into a successful TV series, Joss Whedon is about to do the reverse with another one of his creations.
So, after giving his Firefly TV series and turning it into an unsuccessful feature film, Joss Whedon is about to do the same with another one of his non-creations?
Make any sense to anybody? These producers sure are a weird lot.
I submitted this story yesterday, but it got rejected.
According to this story over at the Washington Post, a study conducted by Forrester Research has "predicted" that online music distribution will kill off compact discs as a music distribution medium.
While this may seem painfully obvious to most of us here on/., since the suggestion comes up in almost every RIAA related article, it is good to see an "authoritative" organization come up with the same prediction. They may be heard better by the record companies and the entertainment industry.
I've been doing R&D work with compilers (Ada/C(++)/Java(bytecode generators)) for quite a while now, and the first thought that occurred to me was that this is an article/book about the code generator pass in compilers.
But apparently, it is not. I, for one, wasn't too happy seeing the term "code generator" applied to superficial software that generates HTML/user level code for standard dialog boxes etc. HTML isn't code in the first place, anyway.
Maybe I'm being too fussy about this, but a code generator, traditionally has always meant a part of the compiler back-end which actually translates intermediate code to machine-level instructions. VB and other UI tools generate stubs for the most part...well maybe they are code generators, but I'm just not too happy about the choice of terms.
Where is the Broad?
1. At home, cooking dinner
1. Working
2. Not working
3. Reloading Slashdot
4. I don't know a broad, you insensitive clod!
5. Making out with CowBoyNeal
Posted by: Sack at September 3, 2003 02:08 PM
Interesting concept, except, there is a big flaw in you experiment.You need either an iTunes or iPod to listen to any song from ITMS. Only way you can give this song to anyone that does not have either one of these is by burning a CD, which I dont think you are allowed to do.
That was one of the comments posted on the website. Does anybody know if the contract/agreement actually prevents you from making backups for personal use?
Aah, I see it now, just struck me: you are allowed to make as many copies as you want (of CDs, tapes or any media for that matter) for PERSONAL use. BUT you cannot sell the backups. You could go ahead and sell the original, but then you would actually have to destroy all the backups.
In the iTunes case, the guy would have to devise some way of selling the original version (not the backups on secondary media), which would be accessible only through iTunes or iPod.
Though this is just an experiment to test the current copyright laws, just the fact that you would need iTunes or iPod to listen to the stuff would prevent it from being a commercially viable practice, which could harm iTunes and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
"This case is also about a corporation which wants to sue millions of people," GillBates0 said. "Is there any legitimate purpose for suing millions of people?"
But what was the answer to that question, dammit! I'm dying to know.
I, for one, would like to welcome you all aboard Icarus Airways.
The Indian government has been concerned about the "brain drain" since 1990 or so. Atleast that's around the time they started acknowledging the fact that it was a serious problem.
The government puts in a lot of money into the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Regional Engineering Colleges. Tuition fees and on-campus living expenses are greatly subsidized for students who are admitted to these colleges based on national-level exams (like the IIT-JEE believed to be the toughest exam at it's level in the world).
A large percentage of graduates from these colleges look for higher salaries and better jobs outside of India: in the US and Europe or Asia, and given the huge amount of resources that the government (and tax payers) pumped into their education, it naturally gets the jitters when students choose to work abroad.
The Indian government has lately taken to giving pep talks in colleges, in addition to distributing booklets explaning the effect of brain drain on the local economy.
I think brain-drain is essentially an outcome of globalization. Technology, irrespective of where it is developed benefits the world as a whole.
If only the /. editors had posted this before the weekend, I could've presented my research on big feet at the conference. :(
Unlike the US, India, being a developing nation, with a very large economy has always had a dirth of jobs. There are a few hundred people to fill up a single job vacancy. Thus, India has *never* felt the need for foreign employees.
However, I know for a fact that a large number of Americans/Europeans (and even Russians in defense companies) regularly work on contract basis. I had a Russian neighbor long back, working in India on a 2 year contract with a defense company.
So people, before you start flaming, ponder over the fact that a law for hiring outside employees doesn't exist because there hasn't ever been a need for it. Now with the outsourcing, it may not be too long before the government comes up with an H-1 like plan.
I, fo' on', welcom da' new musubi cookin' overlords
Earlier /. story about Hybrot
Homepage of the Laboratory for Neuroengineering at Georgia Tech
News release about Hybrot.
What a way to start a Tuesday! Yaaaaaahoooooo!
12 year old kid: Mommmmeeee come quick! There's a big bad slobbering RIAA-man under my bed! *sob*
Mommy: Don't worry sweetheart, we will make the big nasty RIAA-man go away. Take that *biff* *bash*. There you go honey, go to sleep now, he's dead.
Great job with the letter, though...hope it makes it somewhere in the main press. I was giving it a critical read because I thought it deserved it, with the amount of effort you put in.
Most enterprise customers have accepted Open Source because of unreasonable licensing obligations, and because Linux has proven to be more robust than most proprietary Unixes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't that be REASONABLE and not UNREASONABLE?
I'm still done reading only till this point. Posted this quickly incase people are copy/pasting it on other sites.
So if I'm allowed to do that, I can hand over the portable copy that I was allowed to make by law (along with the player) to the buyer, as long as I destroy all other copies I made.
I don't see the technical problems behind selling a song, unless they take away my right to create copies/backups for personal use, to play where/how I want to. If they do allow me to do that, I don't see why I would need to hand over my account details to the buyer.
I've seen a large number of these mysterious tiles. They too have strange writing on them, which sometimes makes lewd suggestions or tells offensive jokes. I have always wondered how that writing was created on all those tiles. I've usually noticed these mystery tiles in restrooms stalls at schools, offices, and even airports in many major cities around the world! It's good to know people are starting to investigate the matter.
And what's the big deal here...instead of the ghosts scaring people, it's the ghosts producing infrared sound that scares people.
I'm still scared of my Infrasound producing ghost-overlords.
I know what happens next...the "good guys" will try to save him from the agents.
Remember Lamo, choose the red pill.
The Camera Watch project is part of our Surveillance of Surveillances ( SOS) effort. We are constructing a repository of links to publicly available on-line webcams, where the webcams of interest are those that observe the public in public spaces. At present, we estimate there are about 10,000 such cameras displaying public places in the United States. Our goals are to assess the number and nature of such cameras, explore potential uses, and analyze and propose related policies and best practices.
I don't usually like to downplay a research project without hearing it through, and/or talking with the project members, but I'm going to make an exception this time.
From the project page, it looks like a lot of valuable time and resources are being wasted on reinventing the wheel. Many databases of online webcams already exist. EarthCam is just one of them. This is another, as was posted in an earlier comment.
Moreover, surveillance cameras act as deterrents for a reason: their presence. A would be criminal is less likely to commit a crime, if he/she knows that a camera is watching/recording his/her moves. Then it doesn't matter if somebody is actually watching the video, or whether it is being recorded for later auditing, or neither. This is the reason why you see " Warning Surveillance Cameras in USE" Notices at many gas stations/etc. It doesn't really matter whether the camera is being watched or not.
Concealed surveillance cameras on the other hand, are meant to actually catch criminals instead of acting as deterrents. They usually require action on part of the surveillance team in order to identify criminals, or even detect suspicious activity in the first place. To prove useful, such a camera would require constant/reliable monitoring, for which dedicated teams are hired anyway. People would not want to depend on a random number of remote users to monitor such camers.
So, to end the rant, I think the concept of using webcams for any purpose other than entertainment/traffic monitoring etc is inherently flawed, and hence QED.
So, after giving his Firefly TV series and turning it into an unsuccessful feature film, Joss Whedon is about to do the same with another one of his non-creations?
Make any sense to anybody? These producers sure are a weird lot.
According to this story over at the Washington Post, a study conducted by Forrester Research has "predicted" that online music distribution will kill off compact discs as a music distribution medium.
While this may seem painfully obvious to most of us here on /., since the suggestion comes up in almost every RIAA related article, it is good to see an "authoritative" organization come up with the same prediction. They may be heard better by the record companies and the entertainment industry.
But apparently, it is not. I, for one, wasn't too happy seeing the term "code generator" applied to superficial software that generates HTML/user level code for standard dialog boxes etc. HTML isn't code in the first place, anyway.
Maybe I'm being too fussy about this, but a code generator, traditionally has always meant a part of the compiler back-end which actually translates intermediate code to machine-level instructions. VB and other UI tools generate stubs for the most part...well maybe they are code generators, but I'm just not too happy about the choice of terms.
1. At home, cooking dinner
1. Working
2. Not working
3. Reloading Slashdot
4. I don't know a broad, you insensitive clod!
5. Making out with CowBoyNeal
ooh...broadBand....
never mind.
Interesting concept, except, there is a big flaw in you experiment.You need either an iTunes or iPod to listen to any song from ITMS. Only way you can give this song to anyone that does not have either one of these is by burning a CD, which I dont think you are allowed to do.
That was one of the comments posted on the website. Does anybody know if the contract/agreement actually prevents you from making backups for personal use? Aah, I see it now, just struck me: you are allowed to make as many copies as you want (of CDs, tapes or any media for that matter) for PERSONAL use. BUT you cannot sell the backups. You could go ahead and sell the original, but then you would actually have to destroy all the backups.
In the iTunes case, the guy would have to devise some way of selling the original version (not the backups on secondary media), which would be accessible only through iTunes or iPod.
Though this is just an experiment to test the current copyright laws, just the fact that you would need iTunes or iPod to listen to the stuff would prevent it from being a commercially viable practice, which could harm iTunes and the like.
Does it have any good ideas on how to get there and back?