You deserve a mod point but I'm sure you're not going to get one here. I'll fully support the Slashdot community's criticism of MS for the security failures and frequent virus problems, but stability (with NT-based stuff like XP or 2000) and ease of use are not valid categories in which to run them down any more. Having something installed or configured in a minute or two is usually worth the oversimplified OS or extra cost.
Remember the urban legend crap emails about "Congress is going to start taxing email!!!" Well for the same reason email can't be taxed, this can't be taxed. Let's suppose someone with a VOIP phone calls someone else with a VOIP phone. They are communicating entirely over the internet with no use of any telephone wires. That is almost exactly the same as a voice chat session over AIM, Yahoo IM, etc. except for different software. Congress has already passed a law that they will not tax any communication over the internet.(online purchase is something else entirely) Now they sure as Hell aren't going to tax IM services as phone companies, so they had better not tax VOIP, either.
With the capability of VOIP to connect to regular telephones, that is a capability that they are paying the phone companies for. When it gets onto telephone wires at the receiving end, that is already being paid for, taxed, regulated, etc. by the receiver of the call.
ICQ has this feature, and I don't know about others, but it will show "Away" when the person has switched programs, so it's not the active app. When my wife chats with her sister, it drives her crazy because she sees her sister going into away mode like every 10 seconds, and then has to sit there waiting for her to answer while she can see that her sister isn't even looking at the chat window.
Phone could also do multiple chat--you could keep inviting more people into the conversation, and it would just keep splitting the screen farther, so it was still real-time with each person's section having a few lines displayed.
"It looks like you're trying to mod down the anarchist hippie open source zealots. Would you like help with that?" oops, it looks like Clippy got a little too much of Bill's personality.
Holy cow, I never thought I would hear of Irfanview again. My roommate in college used it, and I haven't thought of that in years. He also introduced me to another old program that would be good to have around. It was called Awave and could open just about any format of audio file and save it as any other format. That was great back when I used to find some stuff in *.na (Netscape audio) format, and the only player I've ever found that could play those came with Netscape 2.0 or 3.0 and was discontinued in 4. Awave used the concept of "nag-ware", where it would give you a "Please buy the full version." message when you opened it. It would let you open and convert only one file, and then you would have to close and re-open the program, where it got to remind you again how great it would be to buy the full version. Free utility software was great, even if it came with a little bit of hassle.
This is a case where I totally agree with the words you said, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with what you really meant. You are correct that "...free expression of ideas are a constitutionally guaranteed right. Nowhere in the first amendment does it say that free speech is limited to only those ideas that you come up with yourself." (emphasis mine) Yes, you are totally free to express your ideas, even if they are not original to you. Ideas such as freedom, patriotism, love, religious worship, etc. have been around for a long time, and are very unlikely to be original as ideas. But, you must use your own words to do it. If someone else used very eloquent phrasing to express the idea you believe in, you may not copy those words and pretend you came up with them.
Wow, I had missed the original story on the cable modem uncappers. I used to live in Toledo, and I know how horribly the Block family runs things. The Toledo Blade newspaper was especially bad. The thing that blows me away about that uncapping case was how they got the FBI called in. The FBI policy is (and rightly so) that they don't get involved with cases like that...unless the amount of the theft is over $250,000. It infuriates me how they guy from Buckeye cable "calculated":P the amount of theft each person stole, and Hey! Whaddaya know? It came out to just over $250,000 so they could call in the federal whoopin' stick. That is a total load of BS. The only "calculation" they did was $250,000 / 23 uncappers = "Yeah, they must have stolen about this much bandwidth." There's no way bandwidth is that expensive. I am totally supporting that Buckeye Cable should have cut their service and/or brought some kind of civil case fine against them, but confiscating their own stuff through a false statement of damage amount is inexcusable.
I didn't see anyone answer this so I don't know if it's a common misconception or what. You said "it's only Disney movies." That would really suck, but it's not the case. From the article:
To fill out the library of movies available via the service, Disney signed on a number of Hollywood film studios as partners in the effort. Among the other companies already involved in the project are MGM, Miramax Films, New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox.
Yeah, but if they do live that far out in the country, what are the chances of them getting a clear enough broadcast signal to watch these movies? That's why people out there have to do satellite TV. Cable doesn't service it, and the broadcast antennas are too far to get the signal there.
Oh, that's brilliant. That's right where the market is. People don't care as much about renting movies that are older, but people are desperate to see movies on opening day. That will be really good for the movie studios that they can get more people to watch it on opening day, thereby avoiding the "Hulk sucked!" word of mouth that drops off attendance after the first day/weekend. Unfortunately, I don't think that would happen because the theaters would put up a huge fuss over that because that's where they make their money. If people could see movies on opening day at home, the theaters would lose revenue on the $6 bag of popcorn and $4 pop that people buy in there.
First, I'll mention the obvious thought that will come to people's minds: "It has a HDD in it. I wonder if we can run Linux on it!" Aside from that, there is going to be more potential for hacking/modding the boxes to pirate movies and, voila! copyright infringement lawsuits galore! Pretty soon, all their lawyers are going to be sitting lopsided because of how fat their wallets are becoming. This will probably get into the same grey area that is being worked out in the courts now about unsecured WIFI networks since these movies are being broadcast on regular TV waves. "You are broadcasting your signals through my body; why don't I have a right to decode them?"
I agree that the monthly rental fee for the box is awful; it's bad enough that they are charging you about $3 for a one day rental, without even the replaying value of a DVD. I guess this does play to the old standard of marketing in this country. There's always money to be made from banking on the laziness of the American people.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but the hand-held microcassette recorders usually had a 2X playback option. I guess it has been known about for quite a while.
1) The offending, potentially infringing code is being removed.
IMMATERIAL. You cannot just "take back" code and say everything is OK.
However, under copyright law, normal legal practices, and their license agreements, SCO is obliged to attempt to deal with things without litigation, get the code removed, find a mutually acceptable solution. They have made no such good-faith efforts, whatsoever.
Is that really the case though? That seems strange that copyright law would be so different from many other kinds of laws. What you are saying would make it equivalent to saying that it's OK to steal stuff as long as you don't get caught. If you get caught, you can just give it back or repay and everything's A-OK. That's not how it works. My wife had a cool class in college called "The Economics of Crime"--pretty cool, but one of the main things they talked about is that crime is very basically a risk-evaluation scheme. You have to weigh what do I potentially gain by doing this against 1. The chance of geting caught, and 2. The penalty for getting caught. If there is no penalty, then the chance of getting caught doesn't matter, and we should just steal everything we can any chance we get. Before the obvious flame starts against me, I know there is a difference between intentional and accidental, but legally, that is hard to prove in some cases, so they can't just do away with the penalty if you say it was an accident.
We have detected some SCO IP illegally used in your recently released "OpenBSD Song". The musical note designated by the letter C is the property of SCO, as evidenced in its usage in our company name, which is copyrighted, and in our company song, "C Us Sue the Hell Out of U". You must cease and desist from publishing this song or pay the licensing fee of $699/instance of the C note in your song.
Hmm, a good thought, but revoking their license doesn't necessarily make any money for you. Here's a better one: 1. Form a public corporation 2. Publicly claim that everyone and their brother stole your IP but refuse to reveal exactly what. 3. Watch the media coverage push your stock up several thousand percent. 4. Sell your stock holdings. 5. Profit!!
Here's a small item from the end of the Business Review article.
SCO has also filed a motion with the court in Utah asking for more time - until February 4, 2004 - to amend its pleadings and add parties. The case is not expected to go to trial until 2005.
Why would they really need any more time? They say they have already identified over 1M lines of code that infringe--should be enough. And "add parties"?! Who else are they going to add??? They have already said that basically the whole world owes them royalties/licensing fees, so what's next--posthumous lawsuits? I hope the eventual SEC investigation will notice little correlations like this delaying of the trial to coincide with Darl McBride's incentive bonus for keeping SCO profitable for 4 quarters. The longer he can hold out the crash, the better off he is.
"In some cities, rent is cheap even in the nice areas." Yeah, it is amazing the difference in cost of living between different areas of the country and how people living in one situation have no clue about how it can be in a very different situation. I got married at the beginning of my 4th year (out of 5) of college, and we lived in 545 square foot 1 bedroom apartment in Toledo Ohio. It was pretty small, but it was only $300 a month rent. We learned what it is to not go out to eat much, to get creative with making meals with what's cheap or on sale at the grocery store. (hmm, noodles with cream of mushroom soup, peas, tuna, and kidney beans?...not bad.) One of the best things we learned during that time is about making a budget and STICKING TO IT! That is always the hardest part. When I was looking for a job nearing graduation, I was looking at housing in the silicon valley area because I had gotten an interview there, and I was a bit confused at the rent amounts of apartments out there. "Do they pay rent like quarterly or something? This says $1500! That can't be per month." I have now gotten(and kept--praise God) a good-paying job, but I value that time in learning what it takes to live on and what I can do without. I know that if it came down to it, I could do without a car, TV, DVD, cable internet, air conditioning, etc. The only thing my wife and I agreed we would not do without is hot water--cold showers are out of the question. I've also had a few crappy, low paying, hard working jobs, and I could tolerate that again if I had to to pay the bills.
It's funny you mention this because I now live in Idaho, where it's all about the wildlife. I moved out here from Toledo Ohio, where everything was about industry. It was quite a shock to hear our Idaho governor give the annual state of the state address, and the fish got more coverage in the speech than the people in the state! Here's how fish-focused our state is. The minor league hockey team here in Boise has a fish as their mascot. They are the Idaho Steelheads (steelhead salmon). Um, yeah, vicious fish--great. In this situation, I'm sure the immediate reaction from the environmental community will be that it will kill fish, (or better yet, whales or dolphins! That will bring a tear to their eyes.) no matter how many precautions they may have taken with it.
Wow. I wish I had an "insightful" point for you today on this. It's good to note that he did nothing wrong by stating opposition to this, but should acquiesce when congress overrules. Thank you for stating how things legally are, rather than how personal opinion says they "should be."
Yeah, from a legal perspective, this Do-non-call legislation should pretty much pave the way for passage of anti-spam laws, but from a reality view, spammers frequently hide their origin, making it hard to track down, and usually come from other countries, where we won't have the jurisdiction to enforce it.
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You deserve a mod point but I'm sure you're not going to get one here. I'll fully support the Slashdot community's criticism of MS for the security failures and frequent virus problems, but stability (with NT-based stuff like XP or 2000) and ease of use are not valid categories in which to run them down any more. Having something installed or configured in a minute or two is usually worth the oversimplified OS or extra cost.
Remember the urban legend crap emails about "Congress is going to start taxing email!!!" Well for the same reason email can't be taxed, this can't be taxed. Let's suppose someone with a VOIP phone calls someone else with a VOIP phone. They are communicating entirely over the internet with no use of any telephone wires. That is almost exactly the same as a voice chat session over AIM, Yahoo IM, etc. except for different software. Congress has already passed a law that they will not tax any communication over the internet.(online purchase is something else entirely) Now they sure as Hell aren't going to tax IM services as phone companies, so they had better not tax VOIP, either.
With the capability of VOIP to connect to regular telephones, that is a capability that they are paying the phone companies for. When it gets onto telephone wires at the receiving end, that is already being paid for, taxed, regulated, etc. by the receiver of the call.
ICQ has this feature, and I don't know about others, but it will show "Away" when the person has switched programs, so it's not the active app. When my wife chats with her sister, it drives her crazy because she sees her sister going into away mode like every 10 seconds, and then has to sit there waiting for her to answer while she can see that her sister isn't even looking at the chat window.
Phone could also do multiple chat--you could keep inviting more people into the conversation, and it would just keep splitting the screen farther, so it was still real-time with each person's section having a few lines displayed.
"It looks like you're trying to mod down the anarchist hippie open source zealots. Would you like help with that?"
oops, it looks like Clippy got a little too much of Bill's personality.
Holy cow, I never thought I would hear of Irfanview again. My roommate in college used it, and I haven't thought of that in years. He also introduced me to another old program that would be good to have around. It was called Awave and could open just about any format of audio file and save it as any other format. That was great back when I used to find some stuff in *.na (Netscape audio) format, and the only player I've ever found that could play those came with Netscape 2.0 or 3.0 and was discontinued in 4. Awave used the concept of "nag-ware", where it would give you a "Please buy the full version." message when you opened it. It would let you open and convert only one file, and then you would have to close and re-open the program, where it got to remind you again how great it would be to buy the full version. Free utility software was great, even if it came with a little bit of hassle.
This is a case where I totally agree with the words you said, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with what you really meant. You are correct that "...free expression of ideas are a constitutionally guaranteed right. Nowhere in the first amendment does it say that free speech is limited to only those ideas that you come up with yourself." (emphasis mine) Yes, you are totally free to express your ideas, even if they are not original to you. Ideas such as freedom, patriotism, love, religious worship, etc. have been around for a long time, and are very unlikely to be original as ideas. But, you must use your own words to do it. If someone else used very eloquent phrasing to express the idea you believe in, you may not copy those words and pretend you came up with them.
Wow, I had missed the original story on the cable modem uncappers. I used to live in Toledo, and I know how horribly the Block family runs things. The Toledo Blade newspaper was especially bad. The thing that blows me away about that uncapping case was how they got the FBI called in. The FBI policy is (and rightly so) that they don't get involved with cases like that...unless the amount of the theft is over $250,000. It infuriates me how they guy from Buckeye cable "calculated" :P the amount of theft each person stole, and Hey! Whaddaya know? It came out to just over $250,000 so they could call in the federal whoopin' stick. That is a total load of BS. The only "calculation" they did was $250,000 / 23 uncappers = "Yeah, they must have stolen about this much bandwidth." There's no way bandwidth is that expensive. I am totally supporting that Buckeye Cable should have cut their service and/or brought some kind of civil case fine against them, but confiscating their own stuff through a false statement of damage amount is inexcusable.
Yeah, but if they do live that far out in the country, what are the chances of them getting a clear enough broadcast signal to watch these movies? That's why people out there have to do satellite TV. Cable doesn't service it, and the broadcast antennas are too far to get the signal there.
Oh, that's brilliant. That's right where the market is. People don't care as much about renting movies that are older, but people are desperate to see movies on opening day. That will be really good for the movie studios that they can get more people to watch it on opening day, thereby avoiding the "Hulk sucked!" word of mouth that drops off attendance after the first day/weekend. Unfortunately, I don't think that would happen because the theaters would put up a huge fuss over that because that's where they make their money. If people could see movies on opening day at home, the theaters would lose revenue on the $6 bag of popcorn and $4 pop that people buy in there.
First, I'll mention the obvious thought that will come to people's minds: "It has a HDD in it. I wonder if we can run Linux on it!"
Aside from that, there is going to be more potential for hacking/modding the boxes to pirate movies and, voila! copyright infringement lawsuits galore! Pretty soon, all their lawyers are going to be sitting lopsided because of how fat their wallets are becoming. This will probably get into the same grey area that is being worked out in the courts now about unsecured WIFI networks since these movies are being broadcast on regular TV waves. "You are broadcasting your signals through my body; why don't I have a right to decode them?"
I agree that the monthly rental fee for the box is awful; it's bad enough that they are charging you about $3 for a one day rental, without even the replaying value of a DVD. I guess this does play to the old standard of marketing in this country. There's always money to be made from banking on the laziness of the American people.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but the hand-held microcassette recorders usually had a 2X playback option. I guess it has been known about for quite a while.
I thought that law says that you have to discuss your opinions, whether they matter or not.
Is that really the case though? That seems strange that copyright law would be so different from many other kinds of laws. What you are saying would make it equivalent to saying that it's OK to steal stuff as long as you don't get caught. If you get caught, you can just give it back or repay and everything's A-OK. That's not how it works. My wife had a cool class in college called "The Economics of Crime"--pretty cool, but one of the main things they talked about is that crime is very basically a risk-evaluation scheme. You have to weigh what do I potentially gain by doing this against 1. The chance of geting caught, and 2. The penalty for getting caught. If there is no penalty, then the chance of getting caught doesn't matter, and we should just steal everything we can any chance we get. Before the obvious flame starts against me, I know there is a difference between intentional and accidental, but legally, that is hard to prove in some cases, so they can't just do away with the penalty if you say it was an accident.
Insightful? One can only hope for meta-moderation.
We have detected some SCO IP illegally used in your recently released "OpenBSD Song". The musical note designated by the letter C is the property of SCO, as evidenced in its usage in our company name, which is copyrighted, and in our company song, "C Us Sue the Hell Out of U". You must cease and desist from publishing this song or pay the licensing fee of $699/instance of the C note in your song.
Hmm, a good thought, but revoking their license doesn't necessarily make any money for you. Here's a better one:
1. Form a public corporation
2. Publicly claim that everyone and their brother stole your IP but refuse to reveal exactly what.
3. Watch the media coverage push your stock up several thousand percent.
4. Sell your stock holdings.
5. Profit!!
Why would they really need any more time? They say they have already identified over 1M lines of code that infringe--should be enough. And "add parties"?! Who else are they going to add??? They have already said that basically the whole world owes them royalties/licensing fees, so what's next--posthumous lawsuits? I hope the eventual SEC investigation will notice little correlations like this delaying of the trial to coincide with Darl McBride's incentive bonus for keeping SCO profitable for 4 quarters. The longer he can hold out the crash, the better off he is.
In Soviet Russia, OpenOffice releases... Oh, no wait, they probably wouldn't. Can it be we actually found a topic this joke won't work on?
"In some cities, rent is cheap even in the nice areas."
Yeah, it is amazing the difference in cost of living between different areas of the country and how people living in one situation have no clue about how it can be in a very different situation. I got married at the beginning of my 4th year (out of 5) of college, and we lived in 545 square foot 1 bedroom apartment in Toledo Ohio. It was pretty small, but it was only $300 a month rent. We learned what it is to not go out to eat much, to get creative with making meals with what's cheap or on sale at the grocery store. (hmm, noodles with cream of mushroom soup, peas, tuna, and kidney beans?...not bad.) One of the best things we learned during that time is about making a budget and STICKING TO IT! That is always the hardest part.
When I was looking for a job nearing graduation, I was looking at housing in the silicon valley area because I had gotten an interview there, and I was a bit confused at the rent amounts of apartments out there. "Do they pay rent like quarterly or something? This says $1500! That can't be per month."
I have now gotten(and kept--praise God) a good-paying job, but I value that time in learning what it takes to live on and what I can do without. I know that if it came down to it, I could do without a car, TV, DVD, cable internet, air conditioning, etc. The only thing my wife and I agreed we would not do without is hot water--cold showers are out of the question.
I've also had a few crappy, low paying, hard working jobs, and I could tolerate that again if I had to to pay the bills.
It's funny you mention this because I now live in Idaho, where it's all about the wildlife. I moved out here from Toledo Ohio, where everything was about industry. It was quite a shock to hear our Idaho governor give the annual state of the state address, and the fish got more coverage in the speech than the people in the state!
Here's how fish-focused our state is. The minor league hockey team here in Boise has a fish as their mascot. They are the Idaho Steelheads (steelhead salmon). Um, yeah, vicious fish--great.
In this situation, I'm sure the immediate reaction from the environmental community will be that it will kill fish, (or better yet, whales or dolphins! That will bring a tear to their eyes.) no matter how many precautions they may have taken with it.
Wow. I wish I had an "insightful" point for you today on this. It's good to note that he did nothing wrong by stating opposition to this, but should acquiesce when congress overrules. Thank you for stating how things legally are, rather than how personal opinion says they "should be."
Yeah, from a legal perspective, this Do-non-call legislation should pretty much pave the way for passage of anti-spam laws, but from a reality view, spammers frequently hide their origin, making it hard to track down, and usually come from other countries, where we won't have the jurisdiction to enforce it.
This almost makes me wish I still had a land line. :P