Ichitaro had been around for 13 years when Matsushita applied for its help system patent. Presumably (1) this technology is different enough from the standard context-sensitive help that's been around for a decade already, and (2) it was placed in Ichitaro after Matsushita's patent was granted.
So why not just take the patented technology out? Why order the company destroyed?
And I though the US patent system was messed up...
I emailed info@mp3licensing.com for clarification, and they insist the royalty-free-for-noncommercial-use arrangement is no longer available. Looks like the MP3 submarine has surfaced for good.
Thanks for contacting mp3 Licensing.
Although we have tried many times, so far we have been unsuccessful in our efforts to get the MPEG site updated.
You are right, there is no free license to distribute an mp3 decoder.
Distribution of a free mp3 decoder on your web site may not directly influence your revenues, but we believe the use of mp3 even without a specific charge may have business enhancing abilities. It may increase ad sales, web traffic, etc.
On the other hand, as Windows Media Player includes a full bitrate mp3 codec, and access to their decoder ACM by third party applications is easily done, I am not sure if the consumer really needs another decoder.
However, for your information, the mp3 license terms are:
Patents only: $0.75 per decoder - only PC software application; or $50,000.00 one time paid up mp3 decoder - only PC software application; or $2.50 per codec (encode+decode) - PC application with no paid up license available.
Patents and our Software: $1.50 per decoder - only PC software applications; or $60,000 one time paid up mp3 decoder, including the use our Object code - only PC software application; or $100,000 one time paid up mp3 decoder, including the use our Source code - only PC software application; or $5.00 per codec (encode+decode) - PC application with no paid up license available.
Royalties are reported and paid on a calendar quarter basis.
There is an annual minimum royalty (AMR) of $15,000.00 due every Jan. 1, against which the above running royalties are credited during the same calendar year.
If this is too large a sum, we can reduce the AMR to $5,000.00, with double the per unit royalties.
You may offer a limited free trial for codecs, that limit the encoding (i) after a maximum of 20 files, or (ii) after a maximum of 30 days, with the intent of promoting full licensed codec versions.
To draft a license, we need: - Official company name, headquarter address, and country/state/province of incorporation; - Contact person, address, phone, fax, and email, responsible for this agreement; - Date you expect to ship mp3 products or did ship.
Please send me the answers for above and we can get started on the appropriate agreement.
Thanks.
Rocky Caldwell
Director, mp3 Licensing
Thomson Patents and LIcensing
RB Courtyard, Suite 100 16935 W. Bernardo Drive Rancho Bernardo, CA 92127 rocky.caldwell@thomson.net
"LibTorrent is a BitTorrent library written in C++ for *nix. It is designed to avoid redundant copying and storing of data that other clients and libraries suffer from. Licensed under the GPL."
Then download the source. There is a file named COPYING in the root directory of the archive, which contains (surprise) the GPL, version 2.
Libtorrent is an open source GPL'd C++ implementation of the bittorrent protocol.
You're right--it is GPL. Not LGPL.
This means eXeem needs to release the source code of their client, rather than shipping a spyware-encrusted binary, or they're infringing libtorrent's copyright.
Then again, why would I expect the authors of eXeem to respect anyone's copyright?
You can't throw meta-data (DRM) onto an analog recording.
Macrovision and CGMS did just that to video. Try plugging your VCR into a set-top DVD recorder and copying a commercial VHS movie to DVD. The recorder will refuse to do so.
Doing this with digital audio will be harder, since there's no unused portion of the signal in audio like the vertical blanking period in video, which is where MV corrupts the signal. But it's conceivable that some sort of watermark could be inserted, and equipment manufacturers legally blackmailed into refusing to record anything with said watermark. It hasn't happened yet, but once it does, hang on to that old Sound Blaster...
I'm serious. Please put down your tomatoes, **AA, and listen.
It doesn't matter what form(s) of DRM you use; it will be defeated, and your content will find its way to P2P networks, bootleggers, and so forth. DRM just punishes honest customers.
Yet another DRM standard, even one with multiple backers, is an inferior solution to no DRM at all.
If I can't make a copy to listen to in the car, or play in my MP3 player thats older than the last eight DRM standards but perfectly usable otherwise, Im not interested.
Likewise, if I have to get permission from the publisher to read a book I've already paid for after I upgrade my computer, I wont buy it.
If I cant make unencumbered backup copies, then I havent bought anything. Ive just leased some media until my hard drive crashes, or I get a new computer, or the DRM du jour goes out of style, or the file format becomes obsolete. I refuse to shell out cold hard cash for media effectively printed on disappearing ink.
Almost any imaginable content is available, free and unrestricted, online. While I dont condone piracy myself, I cant understand how you hope to encourage people to pay for their media by offering a vastly inferior product in exchange.
The robots with inadvertently break the legs of the human playes. These players will be replaced by a robotic team equiped with rocket launchers. Soon both sides will be armed and the team with the most robots with their heads still attached will win.
So this is how the real-life Unreal Tournament will begin.
Following your logic, over 50,000 US citizens living today will die via commercial airline crash.
I can't vouch for Young's statistic; I was just correcting the impression that he's saying the odds that any given airplane flight will end in a crash are 1 in 4500. Clearly he wasn't saying that, or planes would be falling out of the sky left and right.
If he's not saying your odds of dying in a commercial plane crash are 1 in 4550 (and again, I'm not saying I agree with this statistic), then what is he saying?
Let's see.. this would put the odds of getting wiped out in a commercial airline crash at 1 in 4550 -- meaning, if this were true, that there would be dozens of commerical airline crashes every day. Three per week out of O'Hare alone.
I don't think Young is saying that your odds of dying on one particular flight are 1 in 4550. He's saying those are the odds your life will end in a plane crash, most likely assuming you fly an average amount, maybe a couple times a year.
So this is basically two 6600GT cards glued together on one PCB. That's all well and good, but it's barely faster than one 6800 Ultra. It would probably be slower when gobs of video memory are required, because the quoted 256MB on a 256-bit bus is really split half and half between the two GPUs, and texture data will have to be duplicated in both, so there's less usable video memory on one of these contraptions than on a single-GPU 256MB card.
Two 6800s on a single card would be nice, though, as it would obviate the need to get a special SLI motherboard. Of course, if you could afford to buy such a monstrosity (and the gargantuan power supply and tornado of case fans you'd need too), you could probably afford a new motherboard too.
If we had stuck to what was "within the realm of known physics" we'd still be living in caves.
Point taken, but moving a spacecraft (freely, as opposed to using a light sail or space elevator) without using reaction mass isn't just beyond known physics, but it flies in the face of the first principles of physics (e.g., conservation of momentum). It's not that a radically new free-space propulsion system that doesn't require shooting mass out of the back end wouldn't be profitable, it's that it would be lumped in the same category as perpetual motion machines, and anybody working on one would be viewed as a crackpot.
Maybe a Zefram Cochrane will emerge and disprove the last 300 years of physics in one fell swoop, but I'm not holding my breath.
This doesn't mean millions of gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen are the only way to get away from Earth, though. The faster you shoot reaction mass out the tail end of the rocket, the less fuel you need. Rockets propelled by antimatter annihilation could theoretically reach Mars on a miniscule amount of fuel.
We're pissing in the wind in trying to get to Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system, using rockets. Where is the big money for research into something that doesn't require you to throw mass out the ass end to make the thing move?
I'm curious how else you could make something move in the vacuum of space (within the realm of known physics). Can you think of anything? Do the "impulse engines" on the Enterprise have any grounding in real science, however tenuous?
Using aerodynamic lift (i.e., taking off like an airplane) and increasing exhaust velocity seem to be the best points of attack to me. But IANARS.
My company recently outgrew our office in Orem, Utah, and we moved to one in Lindon. Right next to SCO's headquarters, in fact (we're not affiliated with SCO or the Canopy Group).
Anyhow, it's a very cold morning. Want to know how cold? Well, I just saw Darl McBride walk into his office, and he had his hands in his own pockets.
I know some patent applications are obfuscated enough that USPTO workers can't tell whether they're patentable so they just rubber stamp them--but this is absurd. If it weren't on uspto.gov, I'd assume it was a hoax.
The != operator does essentially the same thing in C++, and it's been around for decades. Why is applying a well-known, absolutely trivial concept to another domain patentable? Heads should roll at the USPTO for this.
I'd be very very surprised if major Toy Story and Shrek characters were not remodeled in sequels, to provide more detail and realism. Disney already makes (or oversees manufacture by slave labor as the case may be) all sorts of Toy Story figurines, most of which don't look like Frankenstein; I'm sure new character models for a Toy Story 3 would not even be a speedbump.
Great, they have released it just one day before Firefox Final.
They could have wait 1 day.
Why? To make the traffic spike even worse?
FC3 has been in code freeze for a couple of weeks; it's not like they could have thrown in Firefox 1.0 if they released tomorrow. So we'll just have to download the RPM.
It's not like half the distro won't be obsolete in a week anyway...;)
There was a _reason_ the electoral college came into being: so that populous states would not "drown" out the less populous ones. It had nothing to do with "information technology".
Okay, how about we keep the electoral college, but ditch the "winner takes all" aspect. Each state's electoral votes get split according to the popular vote in that state. This more closely approximates the popular vote while leaving less populous states with the same influence in the election.
"The patent is ridiculously broad. It's purely McKool Smith trying to make money"
Actually, I don't want to waste my breath calling McKool Smith names. The big perpetrator here is the patent system and the patent offices who allows these general patents.
Just because it's legal to abuse the patent system like this, that doesn't make it ethical. I think napalm is too light a punishment for parasite companies like McKool Smith.
It's the equivalent of the early Mercury-Redstone flights from 1961(Freedom 7 and Liberty Bell 7) - short sub-orbital hops. The difference is that with a new booster (the Atlas) Mercury was capable of re-entry from orbital speeds.
SpaceShipOne has much more in common with the X-15 from the early 1960s. Both are reusable rocket planes launched from an airplane, both reach the edge of space (about 100km), and both land on a runway. Neil Armstrong actually got his astronaut wings aboard an X-15, not a Gemini or Apollo flight.
The Mercury-Redstone missions, on the other hand, involved single-use capsules launched on ballistic trajectories which reached more than twice the altitude of the X-15 or SS1 before splashing down in the ocean. And, like you said, the Mercury was capable of re-entering from orbit, while the SS1 (and X-15) are not.
According to law officers, Mathers was hysterical when police arrived and told them that she killed her boyfriend only after he accused her of illegally downloading music and erased about 2,000 of her MP3s. Mathers complained that it took 3 months to build her music collection.
An autopsy performed Friday afternoon at Methodist Hospital showed that Brad Pulaski had been beat multiple times in the face and chest by a blunt metal object, and died of internal bleeding, said Dr. Felix Klamut, deputy coroner.
They're the ones who did that funny trick with DVDs so the screen brightness would flicker which prevented anyone from running the television signal through any device that adhered to a standard.
They're also behind Safedisc, one of the more common video game copy protection schemes around.
Macrovision makes me sick. Their entire business model is to screw consumers over by stealing their fair use rights while (indirectly) taking their money for the privilege of doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Ichitaro had been around for 13 years when Matsushita applied for its help system patent. Presumably (1) this technology is different enough from the standard context-sensitive help that's been around for a decade already, and (2) it was placed in Ichitaro after Matsushita's patent was granted.
So why not just take the patented technology out? Why order the company destroyed?
And I though the US patent system was messed up...
Apparently there are two libtorrent projects. One of them is GPL, and the other is BSD.
Go to the libtorrent home page. In the first paragraph, we read:
Then download the source. There is a file named COPYING in the root directory of the archive, which contains (surprise) the GPL, version 2.
That information is from 1998.
Try to find any royalty-free arrangement here:
http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/developer.html
I couldn't find any.
Libtorrent is an open source GPL'd C++ implementation of the bittorrent protocol.
You're right--it is GPL. Not LGPL.
This means eXeem needs to release the source code of their client, rather than shipping a spyware-encrusted binary, or they're infringing libtorrent's copyright.
Then again, why would I expect the authors of eXeem to respect anyone's copyright?
You can't throw meta-data (DRM) onto an analog recording.
Macrovision and CGMS did just that to video. Try plugging your VCR into a set-top DVD recorder and copying a commercial VHS movie to DVD. The recorder will refuse to do so.
Doing this with digital audio will be harder, since there's no unused portion of the signal in audio like the vertical blanking period in video, which is where MV corrupts the signal. But it's conceivable that some sort of watermark could be inserted, and equipment manufacturers legally blackmailed into refusing to record anything with said watermark. It hasn't happened yet, but once it does, hang on to that old Sound Blaster...
...just eschew DRM entirely.
I'm serious. Please put down your tomatoes, **AA, and listen.
It doesn't matter what form(s) of DRM you use; it will be defeated, and your content will find its way to P2P networks, bootleggers, and so forth. DRM just punishes honest customers.
Yet another DRM standard, even one with multiple backers, is an inferior solution to no DRM at all.
If I can't make a copy to listen to in the car, or play in my MP3 player thats older than the last eight DRM standards but perfectly usable otherwise, Im not interested.
Likewise, if I have to get permission from the publisher to read a book I've already paid for after I upgrade my computer, I wont buy it.
If I cant make unencumbered backup copies, then I havent bought anything. Ive just leased some media until my hard drive crashes, or I get a new computer, or the DRM du jour goes out of style, or the file format becomes obsolete. I refuse to shell out cold hard cash for media effectively printed on disappearing ink.
Almost any imaginable content is available, free and unrestricted, online. While I dont condone piracy myself, I cant understand how you hope to encourage people to pay for their media by offering a vastly inferior product in exchange.
The robots with inadvertently break the legs of the human playes. These players will be replaced by a robotic team equiped with rocket launchers. Soon both sides will be armed and the team with the most robots with their heads still attached will win.
So this is how the real-life Unreal Tournament will begin.
Following your logic, over 50,000 US citizens living today will die via commercial airline crash.
I can't vouch for Young's statistic; I was just correcting the impression that he's saying the odds that any given airplane flight will end in a crash are 1 in 4500. Clearly he wasn't saying that, or planes would be falling out of the sky left and right.
If he's not saying your odds of dying in a commercial plane crash are 1 in 4550 (and again, I'm not saying I agree with this statistic), then what is he saying?
Let's see.. this would put the odds of getting wiped out in a commercial airline crash at 1 in 4550 -- meaning, if this were true, that there would be dozens of commerical airline crashes every day. Three per week out of O'Hare alone.
I don't think Young is saying that your odds of dying on one particular flight are 1 in 4550. He's saying those are the odds your life will end in a plane crash, most likely assuming you fly an average amount, maybe a couple times a year.
So this is basically two 6600GT cards glued together on one PCB. That's all well and good, but it's barely faster than one 6800 Ultra. It would probably be slower when gobs of video memory are required, because the quoted 256MB on a 256-bit bus is really split half and half between the two GPUs, and texture data will have to be duplicated in both, so there's less usable video memory on one of these contraptions than on a single-GPU 256MB card.
Two 6800s on a single card would be nice, though, as it would obviate the need to get a special SLI motherboard. Of course, if you could afford to buy such a monstrosity (and the gargantuan power supply and tornado of case fans you'd need too), you could probably afford a new motherboard too.
And the fox's shadow looks like a shaggy panting poodle--what's up with that?
If we had stuck to what was "within the realm of known physics" we'd still be living in caves.
Point taken, but moving a spacecraft (freely, as opposed to using a light sail or space elevator) without using reaction mass isn't just beyond known physics, but it flies in the face of the first principles of physics (e.g., conservation of momentum). It's not that a radically new free-space propulsion system that doesn't require shooting mass out of the back end wouldn't be profitable, it's that it would be lumped in the same category as perpetual motion machines, and anybody working on one would be viewed as a crackpot.
Maybe a Zefram Cochrane will emerge and disprove the last 300 years of physics in one fell swoop, but I'm not holding my breath.
This doesn't mean millions of gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen are the only way to get away from Earth, though. The faster you shoot reaction mass out the tail end of the rocket, the less fuel you need. Rockets propelled by antimatter annihilation could theoretically reach Mars on a miniscule amount of fuel.
Wikipedia has an informative article that I wish I would have read before I replied the first time...
We're pissing in the wind in trying to get to Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system, using rockets. Where is the big money for research into something that doesn't require you to throw mass out the ass end to make the thing move?
I'm curious how else you could make something move in the vacuum of space (within the realm of known physics). Can you think of anything? Do the "impulse engines" on the Enterprise have any grounding in real science, however tenuous?
Using aerodynamic lift (i.e., taking off like an airplane) and increasing exhaust velocity seem to be the best points of attack to me. But IANARS.
My company recently outgrew our office in Orem, Utah, and we moved to one in Lindon. Right next to SCO's headquarters, in fact (we're not affiliated with SCO or the Canopy Group).
Anyhow, it's a very cold morning. Want to know how cold? Well, I just saw Darl McBride walk into his office, and he had his hands in his own pockets.
I know some patent applications are obfuscated enough that USPTO workers can't tell whether they're patentable so they just rubber stamp them--but this is absurd. If it weren't on uspto.gov, I'd assume it was a hoax.
The != operator does essentially the same thing in C++, and it's been around for decades. Why is applying a well-known, absolutely trivial concept to another domain patentable? Heads should roll at the USPTO for this.
I'd be very very surprised if major Toy Story and Shrek characters were not remodeled in sequels, to provide more detail and realism. Disney already makes (or oversees manufacture by slave labor as the case may be) all sorts of Toy Story figurines, most of which don't look like Frankenstein; I'm sure new character models for a Toy Story 3 would not even be a speedbump.
Great, they have released it just one day before Firefox Final.
;)
They could have wait 1 day.
Why? To make the traffic spike even worse?
FC3 has been in code freeze for a couple of weeks; it's not like they could have thrown in Firefox 1.0 if they released tomorrow. So we'll just have to download the RPM.
It's not like half the distro won't be obsolete in a week anyway...
There was a _reason_ the electoral college came into being: so that populous states would not "drown" out the less populous ones. It had nothing to do with "information technology".
Okay, how about we keep the electoral college, but ditch the "winner takes all" aspect. Each state's electoral votes get split according to the popular vote in that state. This more closely approximates the popular vote while leaving less populous states with the same influence in the election.
Actually, I don't want to waste my breath calling McKool Smith names. The big perpetrator here is the patent system and the patent offices who allows these general patents.
Just because it's legal to abuse the patent system like this, that doesn't make it ethical. I think napalm is too light a punishment for parasite companies like McKool Smith.
It's the equivalent of the early Mercury-Redstone flights from 1961(Freedom 7 and Liberty Bell 7) - short sub-orbital hops. The difference is that with a new booster (the Atlas) Mercury was capable of re-entry from orbital speeds.
SpaceShipOne has much more in common with the X-15 from the early 1960s. Both are reusable rocket planes launched from an airplane, both reach the edge of space (about 100km), and both land on a runway. Neil Armstrong actually got his astronaut wings aboard an X-15, not a Gemini or Apollo flight.
The Mercury-Redstone missions, on the other hand, involved single-use capsules launched on ballistic trajectories which reached more than twice the altitude of the X-15 or SS1 before splashing down in the ocean. And, like you said, the Mercury was capable of re-entering from orbit, while the SS1 (and X-15) are not.
You know that's not real, right?
D'oh!
Wow. The RIAA has its first martyr.
They're also behind Safedisc, one of the more common video game copy protection schemes around.
Macrovision makes me sick. Their entire business model is to screw consumers over by stealing their fair use rights while (indirectly) taking their money for the privilege of doing so.