That's kind of what I was saying - he had the DVD - he could have made his own.
The article does say that he never downloaded the file - so he might not have done anything wrong.
I bet that because of how bittorrent works - if that file passed through his system and he passed it on to someone else (as a peer) then they could say that he was not only downloading but uploading it. I'm not 100% sure, maybe bittorent uses incoherent bits and then re-assembles but it could be that is how they are trying to make it stick.
Actually I agree with almost everything you are saying. I guess someone should do some kind of write-up to really see if when you buy a DVD you are either A) buying the DVD itself as a product which happens to have a movie on it or B) Buying the product itself as well as a license to play the movie on said product or C) Really just buying a license to watch the movie on the DVD.
What if you owned Meet The Fockers and got a scratch on it - and went to download it from the internet. What if the version of the movie you owned was the extended version and the version you downloaded was the non extended version? What if that non extended version was never on the DVD you owned? I think morally/ethically you are fine - but legally I doubt it.
Because just like you don't know that he really downloaded the movie - you don't know that he owned the movie prior to that.
Anyone can walk into a used DVD shop and buy a copy of anything for cash and toss it in their collection after getting a phone call - that's what I would do. As far as proving that he downloaded it - that's probably the easiest part of all.
Years ago in the 8 bit computer days, when you had to type in programs from magazines - I called a magazine and asked them if I could distribute the keyed in programs to members of a computer club providing that they brought a copy of the magazine with the program with them (to prove ownership). They had a lawyer write me a letter threatoning to sue me if I tried any such thing. And that was me just talking about simply saving someone the trouble of manually keying in his own program.
The article mentioned that Hogan was challenging whether or not an IP could really be traced back to an individual in the world of WiFi.
A friend and I once joked about starting up our own company - ABC ISP - or something like that. Anyway, the idea was that we just were really really bad at running our own ISP and had really bad security. The whole point being that we could connect to our own ISP privately via wifi without worrying about getting busted.
I'm sure there would be a lot of "gotchas" like my cable provider suing me for breaking my "will not resell" contract, but still - fun to entertain the thought.
Unless he comes up with a sales ticket dated back a few months - the "ownership" is irrelevent. Also - just because you own a particular brand of car stereo doesn't mean you can go out and steal it too. He had the DVD, he should have converted it from his pre-existing copy.
I know, I know - fair use, blah blah - I'm not talking about what I would do or what I think is right but this is the way that the system works right now and you have to work within the parameters.
What is interesting about this case is that so far, I don't think anyone has been busted for DOWNLOADING - it's always been uploading. I wonder if because of how nature of bittorrent works, they were able to possibly establish that he was not only downloading but also assisting in the distribution.
It should be obvious - the self checkout will start offering different impulse items. Things that people forget about or are a hassle to go out and buy might start coming up as offers in the form of pop-ups - and they will be conveniently located a short distance past the checkout lane. For example "would you like to add charcoal to this order?" or "did you remember to buy laundry detergent? Press 1 to add 1 gallon of Tide" - or "take advantage of our hot summer savings - enjoy a cool Diet Sprite on the way home.89 cents - click HERE!". Because of the preferred savings cards - all kinds of information is stored. They can do all kinds of marketing - and charge.75 cents per "click through" to the co-reg that benefits (like - getting a landscaping quote from a landscaper near you, or a siding quote or whatever).
It's just a matter of time for someone to figure it out.
I work in a secured building - it's a federally protected building right above a train hub and across from the sears tower. Anyway - security is similar to what was described - barely flashing anything that resembles a photo ID card with a splash of red on it is sufficient to get in. I keep fighting the urge to do it, but what I really want to do is just draw a half assed I.D. card with crayon and construction paper and see if it gets me through.
The Walkman was once the rage and before the cheap knock offs came, a walk man was $120 or $150 for the super fancy walkman that was the size of a boxed tape - no one attributed a rise in crime to those.
When the portable CD players came out, people paid $250 for them and walked around with them as well - no one attributed a rise in crime to those either.
Before Ipods there were GameBoys, MP3 players, Cell Phones, you name it.
I think you'd have better luck linking crime to unemployment than to Ipods.
Seems that simple doesn't it? You bring 11 tools to the table, you make sure you have 11 when you are done. I can't picture a doctor opening someone up and saying "hmm... you know what tool would work great on that bladder? Give me my X024 - it's in the top drawer next to my desk...".
My wife has gone under the knife a couple of times and that's what seemed to be the common theme - count before, count after - a human CRC of sorts.
This reminds me of when I was a kid and had my first 8 bit computer - for the first few months I bought all of my software one tape at a time. I would play the games, good or bad all the way through - picking through every nugget I could find, playing some games for weeks on end.
Some time later - I met a friend at school who had the same computer and offered to bring his disks over. Holy cow - he must have had two hundred disks of software that I spent a weekend or two copying. That pretty much killed it for me since I didn't really have any pressure to play anything and since I didn't invest anything into the software - I would just load a game, decide it didn't look all that great and move on to the next.
Well most of the machines I've installed it on have already had.net framework installed (since other programs require it as well). The program itself isn't bloated or a memory hog. I show it as taking up 30 megs when running. By contrast - Photoshop registers at 60 megs (without a picture loaded) and Outlook registers at 90 megs - and Thunderbird registers at 24 megs. So for about the same footprint as a typical email program you get a reasonable paint program for free - unless you have a better free suggestion.
Try Paint.Net - a great free alternative to Photoshop. I use it alongside Photoshop CS because it saves Jpegs much more accurately with a smaller filesize than photoshop.
http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/index.html
This was all covered a few years ago by an MSN contest that challenged a group of people to live in a house and get and do everything over the internet. It's been a while and it might have just been a long ad campaign but it was explored pretty fully back then.
You could write the same article about the telephone - Some folks can work over a telephone, get entertainment over a telephone and order food over a telephone - big deal.
Dragonlance is a big deal - can't wait to see it but I was personally hoping for some Raymond E. Feist action coming to the big screen. Ever since Dragon Heart came out I'd been thinking that it was now possible to bring all of these great books to the screen - hopefully this opens more doors (just like lord of the rings did).
The teachers union objecting to anything that will require fewer teachers? I can't believe it.
Of course they are going to object - why would they want this to ever get popular?
The way I see it - this is just a good way for more regulated home schooling. It allows a parent who is interested in the home schooling concept to adopt it much more readilly than designing their own course work (although I guess to some extent - that's why certain parents prefer to home school).
Anyway - this is a great idea to ease conjestion at the schools. It's not for everyone - you have to be even more disciplined to accomplish it but if it works then great. Guess some teachers will have to find another decent paying job with 3 months vacation, lots of sick time and all public holidays off.
You are correct - that's what I meant when I said "if you want a good example of what it would look like". Sorry I didn't make it clear - I meant that ZSNES would be a good example of what you were asking for (but ZSNES is a simpler implementation than what you were discussing). Another good example would be EPSX or any other PSX emulator that uses OpenGL or DirectX - the games look better but there still isn't much they could do for the textures getting sharper.
Another consideration is to look at HDTV's and their analog upconversion - it still doesn't perform miracles and they have had a few years to develop it.
The reason that AA works is that it knows about lines and polygons - a monitor doesn't.
Very crude AA on a monitor would be to run a game in a lower resolution than the monitor supports (on LCD) - so if your LCD is 1280x1024, running a game at 1024x768 will provide you with crude anti-aliasing because the LCD monitor actually has to do the downsampling into the lower resolution (whereas on a CRT monitor the video card sends the appropriate sync level).
Also - if you expected a monitor to do everything you asked - then the same thing that would pretty up the textures (sharpening) would do the opposite to the lines (taking away any smoothing). It would be extremely complicated to put a processor into a monitor to handle all of that.
If you want a good example of what it might look like - just take a look at ZSnes with 2xSuperEagle enabled - that's kind of in the right spirit of things - it's taking something old and without changing the content - upgrading it to something new.
Considering that the folks at http://calmira.net/ have been breathing life into Windows 3.0 for some time now - I don't see why hordes would abandon Windows 98 anytime soon if they don't need to. There are still plenty of folks out there using DOS or GEOS or Breadbox to keep their slower machines going.
I think it's a non-issue. People have been enjoying HDTV movie content for a couple of years now and the leap from DVD to HDTV isn't all that huge so by the time these formats even get a chance to take off, we'll be ordering our movies ITunes style through our cable providers.
You aren't the networks customer if you aren't watching the ads - so this isn't "anti-customer" technology.
The agreement between viewer and content provider is that in order for us to get the content for free - we watch the commercials. HBO, Showtime, Starz - all charge a premium and don't need to show commercials - but then again, we all knew that didn't we?
It's not our right to skip commercials - it just so happens to be a cool thing we can do for now.
Ok - so the teaser on Slashdot points out the Chicken experiment - in fact, the whole quote on Slashdot is all they say about this Chicken experiment - so don't bother reading if you thought the Chicken thing sounded interesting because the rest of the article is common sense stuff.
I found the article a pain in the ass to read because she kept switching between the two (which was probably her intent). I have a lot of European visitors and all of them tease us about our spelling system. They find it impossible to learn when they come from places where words are always spelled as they are pronounced. I think that the only way it's going to happen is slowly, word by word (like the example that was offered - night for nite).
Get me a spell checking pen and I won't care.
I'd get one if it was a reasonable add-on. Just knowing that I could squeeze a couple more years of life out of a laptop would be worth it for me. The PCI boxes they sell for laptops today sell for $1000 or so, way too pricey.
What I don't understand is why someone hasn't released a cardbus powerVR (like the old Matrox3D). If you don't remember - it was an internal PCI card that worked with the overlay of your existing video card - no cables required. One would just pop the card in, install the drivers and get decent (for the time) 3d. I'm surprised someone hasn't used this idea for the cardbus slot on a PC. Bandwidth might be an issue but I think it would still be sufficient.
I smell what your steppin' in. I don't think I've ever impulsively clicked on an ad in google - in fact, it's so unobtrusive in gmail that I don't even notice them. I have intentionally clicked on an ad or two to signal that "it's working" though.
As for Picassa, I think that ordering prints and using the blogger and emailing pictures signals them plenty whether it's working or not so in effect, you are buying it (I order prints through Picassa all the time - since I get to choose my vendor).
Slashdot Mirror
That's kind of what I was saying - he had the DVD - he could have made his own.
The article does say that he never downloaded the file - so he might not have done anything wrong.
I bet that because of how bittorrent works - if that file passed through his system and he passed it on to someone else (as a peer) then they could say that he was not only downloading but uploading it. I'm not 100% sure, maybe bittorent uses incoherent bits and then re-assembles but it could be that is how they are trying to make it stick.
Actually I agree with almost everything you are saying. I guess someone should do some kind of write-up to really see if when you buy a DVD you are either A) buying the DVD itself as a product which happens to have a movie on it or B) Buying the product itself as well as a license to play the movie on said product or C) Really just buying a license to watch the movie on the DVD.
What if you owned Meet The Fockers and got a scratch on it - and went to download it from the internet. What if the version of the movie you owned was the extended version and the version you downloaded was the non extended version? What if that non extended version was never on the DVD you owned? I think morally/ethically you are fine - but legally I doubt it.
It's more complicated than it seems.
Because just like you don't know that he really downloaded the movie - you don't know that he owned the movie prior to that.
Anyone can walk into a used DVD shop and buy a copy of anything for cash and toss it in their collection after getting a phone call - that's what I would do. As far as proving that he downloaded it - that's probably the easiest part of all.
Years ago in the 8 bit computer days, when you had to type in programs from magazines - I called a magazine and asked them if I could distribute the keyed in programs to members of a computer club providing that they brought a copy of the magazine with the program with them (to prove ownership). They had a lawyer write me a letter threatoning to sue me if I tried any such thing. And that was me just talking about simply saving someone the trouble of manually keying in his own program.
The article mentioned that Hogan was challenging whether or not an IP could really be traced back to an individual in the world of WiFi.
A friend and I once joked about starting up our own company - ABC ISP - or something like that. Anyway, the idea was that we just were really really bad at running our own ISP and had really bad security. The whole point being that we could connect to our own ISP privately via wifi without worrying about getting busted.
I'm sure there would be a lot of "gotchas" like my cable provider suing me for breaking my "will not resell" contract, but still - fun to entertain the thought.
Unless he comes up with a sales ticket dated back a few months - the "ownership" is irrelevent. Also - just because you own a particular brand of car stereo doesn't mean you can go out and steal it too. He had the DVD, he should have converted it from his pre-existing copy.
I know, I know - fair use, blah blah - I'm not talking about what I would do or what I think is right but this is the way that the system works right now and you have to work within the parameters.
What is interesting about this case is that so far, I don't think anyone has been busted for DOWNLOADING - it's always been uploading. I wonder if because of how nature of bittorrent works, they were able to possibly establish that he was not only downloading but also assisting in the distribution.
It should be obvious - the self checkout will start offering different impulse items. Things that people forget about or are a hassle to go out and buy might start coming up as offers in the form of pop-ups - and they will be conveniently located a short distance past the checkout lane. For example "would you like to add charcoal to this order?" or "did you remember to buy laundry detergent? Press 1 to add 1 gallon of Tide" - or "take advantage of our hot summer savings - enjoy a cool Diet Sprite on the way home .89 cents - click HERE!". Because of the preferred savings cards - all kinds of information is stored. They can do all kinds of marketing - and charge .75 cents per "click through" to the co-reg that benefits (like - getting a landscaping quote from a landscaper near you, or a siding quote or whatever).
It's just a matter of time for someone to figure it out.
I work in a secured building - it's a federally protected building right above a train hub and across from the sears tower. Anyway - security is similar to what was described - barely flashing anything that resembles a photo ID card with a splash of red on it is sufficient to get in. I keep fighting the urge to do it, but what I really want to do is just draw a half assed I.D. card with crayon and construction paper and see if it gets me through.
The Walkman was once the rage and before the cheap knock offs came, a walk man was $120 or $150 for the super fancy walkman that was the size of a boxed tape - no one attributed a rise in crime to those.
When the portable CD players came out, people paid $250 for them and walked around with them as well - no one attributed a rise in crime to those either.
Before Ipods there were GameBoys, MP3 players, Cell Phones, you name it.
I think you'd have better luck linking crime to unemployment than to Ipods.
Seems that simple doesn't it? You bring 11 tools to the table, you make sure you have 11 when you are done. I can't picture a doctor opening someone up and saying "hmm... you know what tool would work great on that bladder? Give me my X024 - it's in the top drawer next to my desk...".
My wife has gone under the knife a couple of times and that's what seemed to be the common theme - count before, count after - a human CRC of sorts.
This reminds me of when I was a kid and had my first 8 bit computer - for the first few months I bought all of my software one tape at a time. I would play the games, good or bad all the way through - picking through every nugget I could find, playing some games for weeks on end.
Some time later - I met a friend at school who had the same computer and offered to bring his disks over. Holy cow - he must have had two hundred disks of software that I spent a weekend or two copying. That pretty much killed it for me since I didn't really have any pressure to play anything and since I didn't invest anything into the software - I would just load a game, decide it didn't look all that great and move on to the next.
Well most of the machines I've installed it on have already had .net framework installed (since other programs require it as well). The program itself isn't bloated or a memory hog. I show it as taking up 30 megs when running. By contrast - Photoshop registers at 60 megs (without a picture loaded) and Outlook registers at 90 megs - and Thunderbird registers at 24 megs. So for about the same footprint as a typical email program you get a reasonable paint program for free - unless you have a better free suggestion.
Try Paint.Net - a great free alternative to Photoshop. I use it alongside Photoshop CS because it saves Jpegs much more accurately with a smaller filesize than photoshop. http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/index.html
Lame article.
This was all covered a few years ago by an MSN contest that challenged a group of people to live in a house and get and do everything over the internet. It's been a while and it might have just been a long ad campaign but it was explored pretty fully back then.
You could write the same article about the telephone - Some folks can work over a telephone, get entertainment over a telephone and order food over a telephone - big deal.
Dragonlance is a big deal - can't wait to see it but I was personally hoping for some Raymond E. Feist action coming to the big screen. Ever since Dragon Heart came out I'd been thinking that it was now possible to bring all of these great books to the screen - hopefully this opens more doors (just like lord of the rings did).
The teachers union objecting to anything that will require fewer teachers? I can't believe it.
Of course they are going to object - why would they want this to ever get popular?
The way I see it - this is just a good way for more regulated home schooling. It allows a parent who is interested in the home schooling concept to adopt it much more readilly than designing their own course work (although I guess to some extent - that's why certain parents prefer to home school).
Anyway - this is a great idea to ease conjestion at the schools. It's not for everyone - you have to be even more disciplined to accomplish it but if it works then great. Guess some teachers will have to find another decent paying job with 3 months vacation, lots of sick time and all public holidays off.
You are correct - that's what I meant when I said "if you want a good example of what it would look like". Sorry I didn't make it clear - I meant that ZSNES would be a good example of what you were asking for (but ZSNES is a simpler implementation than what you were discussing). Another good example would be EPSX or any other PSX emulator that uses OpenGL or DirectX - the games look better but there still isn't much they could do for the textures getting sharper.
:)
Another consideration is to look at HDTV's and their analog upconversion - it still doesn't perform miracles and they have had a few years to develop it.
If it ever does make it through - sign me up
Not really feasible.
The reason that AA works is that it knows about lines and polygons - a monitor doesn't.
Very crude AA on a monitor would be to run a game in a lower resolution than the monitor supports (on LCD) - so if your LCD is 1280x1024, running a game at 1024x768 will provide you with crude anti-aliasing because the LCD monitor actually has to do the downsampling into the lower resolution (whereas on a CRT monitor the video card sends the appropriate sync level).
Also - if you expected a monitor to do everything you asked - then the same thing that would pretty up the textures (sharpening) would do the opposite to the lines (taking away any smoothing). It would be extremely complicated to put a processor into a monitor to handle all of that.
If you want a good example of what it might look like - just take a look at ZSnes with 2xSuperEagle enabled - that's kind of in the right spirit of things - it's taking something old and without changing the content - upgrading it to something new.
Considering that the folks at http://calmira.net/ have been breathing life into Windows 3.0 for some time now - I don't see why hordes would abandon Windows 98 anytime soon if they don't need to. There are still plenty of folks out there using DOS or GEOS or Breadbox to keep their slower machines going.
I think it's a non-issue. People have been enjoying HDTV movie content for a couple of years now and the leap from DVD to HDTV isn't all that huge so by the time these formats even get a chance to take off, we'll be ordering our movies ITunes style through our cable providers.
It's not really that stupid - this is how DVD copying started out. It used to take forever and a day because it was a frame for frame capture.
The agreement between viewer and content provider is that in order for us to get the content for free - we watch the commercials. HBO, Showtime, Starz - all charge a premium and don't need to show commercials - but then again, we all knew that didn't we?
It's not our right to skip commercials - it just so happens to be a cool thing we can do for now.
Ok - so the teaser on Slashdot points out the Chicken experiment - in fact, the whole quote on Slashdot is all they say about this Chicken experiment - so don't bother reading if you thought the Chicken thing sounded interesting because the rest of the article is common sense stuff.
I found the article a pain in the ass to read because she kept switching between the two (which was probably her intent). I have a lot of European visitors and all of them tease us about our spelling system. They find it impossible to learn when they come from places where words are always spelled as they are pronounced. I think that the only way it's going to happen is slowly, word by word (like the example that was offered - night for nite). Get me a spell checking pen and I won't care.
I'd get one if it was a reasonable add-on. Just knowing that I could squeeze a couple more years of life out of a laptop would be worth it for me. The PCI boxes they sell for laptops today sell for $1000 or so, way too pricey. What I don't understand is why someone hasn't released a cardbus powerVR (like the old Matrox3D). If you don't remember - it was an internal PCI card that worked with the overlay of your existing video card - no cables required. One would just pop the card in, install the drivers and get decent (for the time) 3d. I'm surprised someone hasn't used this idea for the cardbus slot on a PC. Bandwidth might be an issue but I think it would still be sufficient.
As for Picassa, I think that ordering prints and using the blogger and emailing pictures signals them plenty whether it's working or not so in effect, you are buying it (I order prints through Picassa all the time - since I get to choose my vendor).