I mean, if you want to do something, and *someone* will patent it because our broken system lets them, shouldn't you try to patent it first? That's what most corporate patents seem to be these day -- defensive patents.
But who was going to hold the click-and-hold patent gun to Microsoft's head in this case? I agree with you somewhat that "smaller" companies patenting things just to litigate for money can drive this bad patent cycle but I don't think this particular case fits the defensive patent scenario.
It's pretty clear that no one should be receiving this patent based on its obvious nature. There are some pretty good prior art posts up already, I think one of the best ones pointed out that since the advent of the digital watch you've had to hold the fxn button down to get into set mode.
I think in this case Microsoft wasn't trying to cover its ass against someone picking up this patent, I think more likely they're the ones who were planning to bully with this patent. After all, since Macs only have one mouse button you have to hold it down to get the dropdown menu, a clear infringement of M$'s "Intellectual Property" that I'm sure they'd love to leverage for all Jobs is worth.
if all else fails, how about not getting knocked on your ass in the first place
If I could consistently play the game at a level where I never got knocked down I think I'd be done with it, or at least the people I was playing against. There's no fun to be had if someone can't even score a knock down hit against you even once, clearly they're not at your level and pose no challenge.
As to your masterfully crafted retard comment you have proven once again that ACs aren't good for anything more than flamebait comments with no clue what they're talking about. I specifically said in my original post that we fight-tested this. There's only so many moves one can execute, and guess what, we tried them all, yes a few times each, and were unable to prevent an immediate attack from a faster character.
Does that mean there's 100% no way to prevent it? No, it's possible we missed a move or were slightly off in timing, but having played the game for as long as I have it seems that whatever move might prevent the attack is so difficult to execute that it may as well be nonexistant for anyone casually playing.
if you're continually beaten by someone doing the exact same thing, maybe you need to learn a new tactic to deal with it
The problem is this is not always even possible, hence the whole idea of the "cheese" move in the first place. The best example I can give is in DOA2 for the XBox, some of the characters are faster than the others, but to balance gameplay the slower ones deal more damage on average. You can get into situations though where if a faster character (like Kasumi or Ayani) knocks you down and stands over you, you can never get back up without being immediately knocked down again.
I've had this problem with my brothers quite often and so we actually spent some time fight-testing the scenario to see how to escape that situation and we were unable to find any effective way to stop it. Even holding the block button as your character stood up was useless because the slower fighter executed the block command just slightly after the game considered him "in play" giving the faster opponent a moment to execute a hit.
At this point it comes down to whether your opponent misses their timing, but that doesn't mean they're a better player, it just means they can hit the red button at the right time, over and over and over in the same scenario. Part of being a better player is being flexible in your playing and mastering all parts of a game, not the one exploit that can't be defended against.
In Halo my brothers and I have all become adept at owning other players in certain levels with certain weapons, so sometimes we agree on slightly altered rulesets beforehand to help balance play. We all know the exploits, and we all use them from time to time, but we've found that our skill has increased tremendously when we force ourselves to not rely on the easy kill ever. How will you ever get good at hitting someone with a pistol shot from 200 yards if you're always using the sniper rifle? Nowadays we're so good with pistols we may have to phase those out as well.
The Xport is a nifty little device that turns your GBA into a microcontroller, with a bunch of I/Os, 4 Megs of RAM and a fully programmable FPGA. This looks like a good application for overclocking too, in case you need faster computing for something like image processing or mapping from multiple sonars, etc.
I haven't used one but it seems like a real useful way to do robotics platform development, especially since you can output to the GBA screen, that sure would make debugging all my Sharp IR sensors a lot easier than reading a binary LED display.
We built the most perfect spheres ever made, constructed the quietest chamber ever made to put them in, sent them into orbit and started them spinning to test the frame dragging of earth's gravitational field. So, maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but after creating all these technological wonders and spending an ass-load of money and four decades to get this shit into space to test this theory, what happened to the results??
It's been in orbit for what, two weeks or less and already we've reconfigured it for something else? Either we very efficiently proved/disproved frame dragging and moved on and I missed it or else someone screwed up royally and had to go to plan B: hey look, it can detect gravity lenses!
Re:I used this before for network monitoring.
on
The Sound of Cells
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ditto, I wrote a quick routine to play.wav files and plugged that into my code in place of MessageBox alerts for debugging an automated chemistry cell that was running in another lab.
I used babelfish and AT&Ts text-to-speech page to make a bunch of alert sound files in french. Besides being extremely useful (no more interrupting my workflow with a popup message everytime something happened in the lab) it was amusing as hell to watch my coworkers' reactions whenever my workstation started babbling in french about the status of sample sets.
Wow, I wish I could work full time talking a load of hypothetical crap out of my ass like Thomas Hazlett.
Yes, I agree that with a la carte pricing very likely the individual cost of channels will increase, for a number of reasons including re-pricing, industry-imposed "technology fees" to implement the change (which are mostly bullshit anyway, just like the $0.85 fee for number portability I'll be charged for the rest of my cellular-using life), etc. However, the only way you will end up paying more is if you elect to retain most of the channels you have now. The central idea to this a la carte movement is that people don't want, need, or use all of the channels they get now and would pay less by using less, even with an average higher per-channel cost.
As to Mr. Hazlett's wonderful analogy of two subscribers both getting half the channels for the same price as before after the new pricing scheme - it's based on the unscalable assumption that new pricing will be based on the idea that each subscriber will choose a subset of channels not chosen by any other subscriber.
In other words, yes, when you have less than 10 ppl holding up a hypothetical market, the economies of that market will dictate rediculous price hikes, but we're not talking about 2 or 10 or 1000 customers here, we're talking hundreds of millions. If a la carte goes into effect my prices are not going to go from roughly $1 per channel now to $85 per channel, more likely something on the order of 150% to 400% inflation, depending on what the market will bear.
And his rhetoric about viewing those extra channels you don't really care for as "freebies" to surf through just pisses me off. Let's face it, no matter how broad your viewing tastes there are going to be some channels that each household will never view, "freebie" or no. I'm not into sports, so the 12 sports channels I get are totally wasted on me. All sports, all day you say? Well then I press Menu, Channel, Delete - problem solved, I won't even have to waste an extra thumb press as I surf to what I do want to watch.
And the final thing in his article, at the very end, that pisses me off to no end is this bit right here: The political reaction to the illusion of higher prices. I understand that from an economics professor point of view where we talk about product value not just price, that yes, the higher prices are illusory. But this ain't no lecture hall, this is the real fucking world. Bottom line is that my cable bill went up 5 real dollars per month as of March. So whether your tattered Econ 1 book says this is all in my head or not is irrelevant, I'm still out $5 for the tennis channel and two Lifetime channels, $5 that could go towards something way more important, like my gas tank.
But gas prices are a rant for another day.
This is a good debate.:) But I think we're visualizeng two different things here. For a moment I'll disregard what the Snail actually does and what the purpose of its foils are.
I'm imaging the entire device being more or less anchored to the seabed, and the foils move up and down, in turn using a piston to turn a generator crank, similar to the action you see in the classic texas oil-pump.
I see from your second post you mean to move then entire snail up and down, which could be easily accomplished with some air-filled drums mounted to it.
Using a little armchair physics (i.e. a paper airplane) to remind me of how angle effects lift, i see that angling the foils upward would result in less downward force, not more. So I concede your point in either application.
The only question remaining now is where can we get some funding to develop one or both of these ideas into a better generator than this snail?
I'm afraid you're missing a bit of the obvious too, friend. What's generating that 200 tons of down-force is the water rushing over the foils (think of it as an upside down airplane wing) so in order to crank those foils to an up position you're not only going to have to provide enough energy to the servos to do it, but generate a hell of a lot of force, which means more gearing, which costs more energy, etc. In addition as the foils go out of parallel (with the sea floor) the force that is generated on/over the foils will change dynamically with their angle. I'm no MechE (yet) but that's gonna either decrease their force coming back into position, or possibly make it even harder to raise them the higher you go. In theory while the device might produce enough power for a positive net gain after powering these foil servos, between energy lost due to mechanical transferrance and friction you'll consume at least as much if not more than you produce.
Still, I like the idea, you just might need to take a different approach, like adding rudders and aerons to the foils so you can alter thier lift and use much less energy to raise the foil, then snap the rudders back into place and left the damn thing WHOOSH back down into place.
Hmmm.... pardon me, I have a patent to write....
I remember back in the day, when only limited run boosters were packaged in the foil packs, and the Magic Revised Edition 15 card boosters came in red printed packs with a convenient white border at the top and bottom. Most book and gaming stores that carried them back then, at least around me, let kids pick out their own packs so they could get the "lucky" ones or whatever. That was perfect for the discerning kid like me who wanted a little more for his $3.95 than just a guaranteed number of uncommons and rares.
If you pulled down on the packaging you could force the top border of the cards under the white area near the seal and quite clearly read what the first three or four cards were. Usually whoever was at the counter didn't pay attenttion to what you were doing as long as your hands stayed in the box and didn't go near your pockets. In all I got 2 Shivan Dragons, a Force of Nature, and a couple Sera Angels using that little trick.
But to keep this post a bit more on-topic, I agree, these kinds of games are disgustingly addictive. Even after you have a considerable collection to trade and play from (I have 11 playable magic decks right now, none of them prebuilt decks) you can always seem to find just one more card that will tweek this or that deck's strategy that you just have to spend $5 or $10 or $25 to get it from some uber-dork in a dusty comicbook basement somewhere.
Leave it to a moron to criticize the recording industry when Apple is the one raising prices.
Wow, and leave it to an Anonymous Coward to not RTFA. Here are some choice quotes from that article for ya big guy. (any emphasis added is my own)
All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases...
Several record-company executives acknowledged that pricing changes are being discussed at all five major companies.
...digital-music services say they base their retail prices directly on the wholesale prices the music companies charge. "Our pricing comes when the fees come in from the labels," said Musicmatch's Mr. Csathy.
The issue of online music prices raises philosophical debates for music executives. Some executives, for example, believe they should be charging a premium for the online versions of older tracks because consumers may be willing to pay more for harder-to-find material.
Of course the scarrier point that the article makes is that the actual physical CD is often for sale in stores for $3-5 less than these elevated digital prices. That's just messed up.
No, that's what's called a value-added charge. The value added in this case is convenience. A) You don't need to go farther than your computer to buy the music.
B) You're buying it in a format that can be put directly onto your music player. (iPod, etc)
C) You get the option of only the songs you want.
If you intend to buy the whole album you should probably do just that, and if you do it through iTunes or whatever you're paying more because you're still getting values A and B. Are they worth the extra cost? Well, that's up to the consumer individually.
When did I miss the week that every content consumer in the world turned into a pirate and stopped buying media? And who are they copying it from if no one's buying it?
Seriously, how is it possible that series DVD sales are through the roof yet piracy is supposedly so rampant that it warrents an international treaty to spend billions of dollars to develop and disseminate technology to stop people from recording a show broadcast on tv?
Here's the end result: now I can't record my favorite program 'x' and watch it later because I have to work late.
Wow, awesome. Who did we put into office that treats the entire population like criminals because a miniscule fraction actually are? I think it's time to pass some laws about lobbying - you should be able to mail one(1) letter, 2,000 words or less, stating your case to the politician of your choice. That's it, fini. Nada mas. No more big business can afford 3 full time lobbyists to push and pull the administration at their whim. Everyone gets an equal opportunity to affect policy decisions, because policy is what determines our laws and how our society functions. Only the elections are democratic, the rest of the system is as corrupt and elite money-driven as any communist state.
Nevertheless, some music services are eager to drive more consumers to subscription plans, since per-song download stores have tiny or even nonexistent profit margins.
Just another work-around that ignores the underlying problem! The reason why these stores have nonexistent profit margins is because the Music Labels are taking 99% - 100% of the song price. And, as we all know, it's not because most of it is going to the artist.
The issues of song pricing and profit margin on a pay-per-download scheme is never going to be resolved in a way that benefits consumer and provider (i.e. music download service) until the greedy middleman of the RIAA is taken out of the picture.
Even if you agree with the "plight" of the music industry and the fact that they do make upfront expenditures on artists and need to reclaim those funds plus return on investment (hey this is still America, no one is investing money with no expectation of something in return) - there comes a point when enough is enough. Just because they took a chance and invested $2M in Britney Spears to start her career hardly justifies taking in 75% of her music profits until the end of time. (note: figures are made up, but you get the picture, I'm just too lazy to find the real numbers)
Even the problem of recovering upfront investments (much of which is lost on artists who do not take off) would be moot if the music industry would stop the practice of paying these fledgling artists millions upfront and just provide them the tools to get their careers started, laying the burden of success on the would-be artists, and then if they fail the company is out a couple dozen thousand instead of half a million.
Forcing end-users into subscription service plans creates waste and bloated pricing (just look at the cable industry's package plans) and is a finger-in-the-dyke solution, when really the problem is miles upstream.
Plan A:
Step 1) Get a dual B.S. degree in Computer Science and Signals and Systems.
Step 2) Get a M.S. in Physics, with a core focus on Aerodynamics.
Step 3) Get a P.H.D. (or 8 years of field experience with Boeing equivalent) in Advanced Automated Flight Systems Development.
Step 4) Obtain a suitable number (50 ought to do) of gyro-guided surface-to-air missles for testing (try www.ebay.co.ussr, they usually have great deals this time of year what with munitions bunker spring cleanings and all)
Step 5) Develop!
Plan B:
Step 1) Break into NORAD and steal the source for their guidance systems.
Step 2) Sell it.
I gotta say, Plan B sounds a whole lot easier than A.
April 1, 2004: Aluminium foil sells record amounts worldwide. History will refer to it as "The Slashdot-Bauxite Phenomena" which seems to predominately strike teen->30ish single male geeks.
Hey, just because I actually have a girlfriend doesn't mean I'm tossing out my foil hat! I'm just not allowed to wear it in public anymore.:(
At CasinoCity.com (this is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of the site) there used to be a search engine that allowed you to find/sort casinos and resorts by dozens of criteria like what games they have, if the there's a hotel, hotel amenities, etc.
Well, someone had to find out all that information and that someone was me. I spent a whole summer creating lists of literally every casino in the world, and then calling every single one and entering all their information into a ColdFusion DBI. You'd be amazed at how suspicious casino operators are when you start asking questions like "Exactly how many slot machines do you have?" Every now and then I'd reach a place that was no more than a bar with a couple poker tables and I'd get cursed out because the person thought I was working for the Feds or something. The only upside to the whole ordeal was when I was calling casinos in Quebec I got to talk to a woman with a Japanese-French-Canadian accent. The most hilarious and incomprehensible dialect I've ever heard. It's also completely impossible to reproduce in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what kind of car you're driving but my Mustang's gas pedal only has one function no matter how long you press it for: acceleration.
But who was going to hold the click-and-hold patent gun to Microsoft's head in this case? I agree with you somewhat that "smaller" companies patenting things just to litigate for money can drive this bad patent cycle but I don't think this particular case fits the defensive patent scenario.
It's pretty clear that no one should be receiving this patent based on its obvious nature. There are some pretty good prior art posts up already, I think one of the best ones pointed out that since the advent of the digital watch you've had to hold the fxn button down to get into set mode.
I think in this case Microsoft wasn't trying to cover its ass against someone picking up this patent, I think more likely they're the ones who were planning to bully with this patent. After all, since Macs only have one mouse button you have to hold it down to get the dropdown menu, a clear infringement of M$'s "Intellectual Property" that I'm sure they'd love to leverage for all Jobs is worth.
If I could consistently play the game at a level where I never got knocked down I think I'd be done with it, or at least the people I was playing against. There's no fun to be had if someone can't even score a knock down hit against you even once, clearly they're not at your level and pose no challenge.
As to your masterfully crafted retard comment you have proven once again that ACs aren't good for anything more than flamebait comments with no clue what they're talking about. I specifically said in my original post that we fight-tested this. There's only so many moves one can execute, and guess what, we tried them all, yes a few times each, and were unable to prevent an immediate attack from a faster character.
Does that mean there's 100% no way to prevent it? No, it's possible we missed a move or were slightly off in timing, but having played the game for as long as I have it seems that whatever move might prevent the attack is so difficult to execute that it may as well be nonexistant for anyone casually playing.
The problem is this is not always even possible, hence the whole idea of the "cheese" move in the first place. The best example I can give is in DOA2 for the XBox, some of the characters are faster than the others, but to balance gameplay the slower ones deal more damage on average. You can get into situations though where if a faster character (like Kasumi or Ayani) knocks you down and stands over you, you can never get back up without being immediately knocked down again.
I've had this problem with my brothers quite often and so we actually spent some time fight-testing the scenario to see how to escape that situation and we were unable to find any effective way to stop it. Even holding the block button as your character stood up was useless because the slower fighter executed the block command just slightly after the game considered him "in play" giving the faster opponent a moment to execute a hit.
At this point it comes down to whether your opponent misses their timing, but that doesn't mean they're a better player, it just means they can hit the red button at the right time, over and over and over in the same scenario. Part of being a better player is being flexible in your playing and mastering all parts of a game, not the one exploit that can't be defended against.
In Halo my brothers and I have all become adept at owning other players in certain levels with certain weapons, so sometimes we agree on slightly altered rulesets beforehand to help balance play. We all know the exploits, and we all use them from time to time, but we've found that our skill has increased tremendously when we force ourselves to not rely on the easy kill ever. How will you ever get good at hitting someone with a pistol shot from 200 yards if you're always using the sniper rifle? Nowadays we're so good with pistols we may have to phase those out as well.
I haven't used one but it seems like a real useful way to do robotics platform development, especially since you can output to the GBA screen, that sure would make debugging all my Sharp IR sensors a lot easier than reading a binary LED display.
You can't hook up a wire to a box and change the paper trail either, that's the point.
Yeah, her desire to kick him in the nuts for choosing a PS2 over her on national TV. That's not a list I'd want to be on.
Look at it this way, he got a PS2, and she got embarrassed in return. I agree he chose right but she got the short end of the stick on this one.
It's been in orbit for what, two weeks or less and already we've reconfigured it for something else? Either we very efficiently proved/disproved frame dragging and moved on and I missed it or else someone screwed up royally and had to go to plan B: hey look, it can detect gravity lenses!
I used babelfish and AT&Ts text-to-speech page to make a bunch of alert sound files in french. Besides being extremely useful (no more interrupting my workflow with a popup message everytime something happened in the lab) it was amusing as hell to watch my coworkers' reactions whenever my workstation started babbling in french about the status of sample sets.
Hey man, just relax and bend over the examining table while I prep this guitar tuner for insertion....
Yes, I agree that with a la carte pricing very likely the individual cost of channels will increase, for a number of reasons including re-pricing, industry-imposed "technology fees" to implement the change (which are mostly bullshit anyway, just like the $0.85 fee for number portability I'll be charged for the rest of my cellular-using life), etc. However, the only way you will end up paying more is if you elect to retain most of the channels you have now. The central idea to this a la carte movement is that people don't want, need, or use all of the channels they get now and would pay less by using less, even with an average higher per-channel cost.
As to Mr. Hazlett's wonderful analogy of two subscribers both getting half the channels for the same price as before after the new pricing scheme - it's based on the unscalable assumption that new pricing will be based on the idea that each subscriber will choose a subset of channels not chosen by any other subscriber.
In other words, yes, when you have less than 10 ppl holding up a hypothetical market, the economies of that market will dictate rediculous price hikes, but we're not talking about 2 or 10 or 1000 customers here, we're talking hundreds of millions. If a la carte goes into effect my prices are not going to go from roughly $1 per channel now to $85 per channel, more likely something on the order of 150% to 400% inflation, depending on what the market will bear.
And his rhetoric about viewing those extra channels you don't really care for as "freebies" to surf through just pisses me off. Let's face it, no matter how broad your viewing tastes there are going to be some channels that each household will never view, "freebie" or no. I'm not into sports, so the 12 sports channels I get are totally wasted on me. All sports, all day you say? Well then I press Menu, Channel, Delete - problem solved, I won't even have to waste an extra thumb press as I surf to what I do want to watch.
And the final thing in his article, at the very end, that pisses me off to no end is this bit right here: The political reaction to the illusion of higher prices. I understand that from an economics professor point of view where we talk about product value not just price, that yes, the higher prices are illusory. But this ain't no lecture hall, this is the real fucking world. Bottom line is that my cable bill went up 5 real dollars per month as of March. So whether your tattered Econ 1 book says this is all in my head or not is irrelevant, I'm still out $5 for the tennis channel and two Lifetime channels, $5 that could go towards something way more important, like my gas tank.
But gas prices are a rant for another day.
I'm imaging the entire device being more or less anchored to the seabed, and the foils move up and down, in turn using a piston to turn a generator crank, similar to the action you see in the classic texas oil-pump.
I see from your second post you mean to move then entire snail up and down, which could be easily accomplished with some air-filled drums mounted to it.
Using a little armchair physics (i.e. a paper airplane) to remind me of how angle effects lift, i see that angling the foils upward would result in less downward force, not more. So I concede your point in either application.
The only question remaining now is where can we get some funding to develop one or both of these ideas into a better generator than this snail?
In addition as the foils go out of parallel (with the sea floor) the force that is generated on/over the foils will change dynamically with their angle. I'm no MechE (yet) but that's gonna either decrease their force coming back into position, or possibly make it even harder to raise them the higher you go. In theory while the device might produce enough power for a positive net gain after powering these foil servos, between energy lost due to mechanical transferrance and friction you'll consume at least as much if not more than you produce.
Still, I like the idea, you just might need to take a different approach, like adding rudders and aerons to the foils so you can alter thier lift and use much less energy to raise the foil, then snap the rudders back into place and left the damn thing WHOOSH back down into place.
Hmmm.... pardon me, I have a patent to write....
I remember back in the day, when only limited run boosters were packaged in the foil packs, and the Magic Revised Edition 15 card boosters came in red printed packs with a convenient white border at the top and bottom. Most book and gaming stores that carried them back then, at least around me, let kids pick out their own packs so they could get the "lucky" ones or whatever. That was perfect for the discerning kid like me who wanted a little more for his $3.95 than just a guaranteed number of uncommons and rares.
If you pulled down on the packaging you could force the top border of the cards under the white area near the seal and quite clearly read what the first three or four cards were. Usually whoever was at the counter didn't pay attenttion to what you were doing as long as your hands stayed in the box and didn't go near your pockets. In all I got 2 Shivan Dragons, a Force of Nature, and a couple Sera Angels using that little trick.
But to keep this post a bit more on-topic, I agree, these kinds of games are disgustingly addictive. Even after you have a considerable collection to trade and play from (I have 11 playable magic decks right now, none of them prebuilt decks) you can always seem to find just one more card that will tweek this or that deck's strategy that you just have to spend $5 or $10 or $25 to get it from some uber-dork in a dusty comicbook basement somewhere.
Wow, and leave it to an Anonymous Coward to not RTFA. Here are some choice quotes from that article for ya big guy. (any emphasis added is my own)
All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases...
Several record-company executives acknowledged that pricing changes are being discussed at all five major companies.
The issue of online music prices raises philosophical debates for music executives. Some executives, for example, believe they should be charging a premium for the online versions of older tracks because consumers may be willing to pay more for harder-to-find material.
No, that's what's called a value-added charge. The value added in this case is convenience.
A) You don't need to go farther than your computer to buy the music.
B) You're buying it in a format that can be put directly onto your music player. (iPod, etc)
C) You get the option of only the songs you want.
If you intend to buy the whole album you should probably do just that, and if you do it through iTunes or whatever you're paying more because you're still getting values A and B. Are they worth the extra cost? Well, that's up to the consumer individually.
RIAA Exec #2: Yes. Brilliant!!
RIAA Exec #1: Well, I've devised a new way to get even more money from them.
RIAA Exec #2: More you say? But how?
RIAA Exec #1: We'll charge them more and take it all anyway!
RIAA Exec #2: Brilliant!!
RIAA Exec #1: And you know how we can't seem to sell all this other crap?
(Points to rotting pile of Shakira singles)
RIAA Exec #1: Well I thought of a way to get rid of that too.
(Staples a worthless single to a Top-40 single and doubles the price)
RIAA Exec #2: Brilliant!!
(Both strip off their clothes and have sex with pigs on a huge pile of cash.)
--FIN--
I'm a back door ma-an!
The consumers don't know, but the Cisco guys, they understand!
Sorry, I felt the need. Jim Morrison may be rolling in his grave, but that's only if you can hear me actually "singing".
Correlation is not causation, bitch.
Seriously, how is it possible that series DVD sales are through the roof yet piracy is supposedly so rampant that it warrents an international treaty to spend billions of dollars to develop and disseminate technology to stop people from recording a show broadcast on tv?
Here's the end result: now I can't record my favorite program 'x' and watch it later because I have to work late.
Wow, awesome. Who did we put into office that treats the entire population like criminals because a miniscule fraction actually are? I think it's time to pass some laws about lobbying - you should be able to mail one(1) letter, 2,000 words or less, stating your case to the politician of your choice. That's it, fini. Nada mas. No more big business can afford 3 full time lobbyists to push and pull the administration at their whim. Everyone gets an equal opportunity to affect policy decisions, because policy is what determines our laws and how our society functions. Only the elections are democratic, the rest of the system is as corrupt and elite money-driven as any communist state.
Just another work-around that ignores the underlying problem! The reason why these stores have nonexistent profit margins is because the Music Labels are taking 99% - 100% of the song price. And, as we all know, it's not because most of it is going to the artist.
The issues of song pricing and profit margin on a pay-per-download scheme is never going to be resolved in a way that benefits consumer and provider (i.e. music download service) until the greedy middleman of the RIAA is taken out of the picture.
Even if you agree with the "plight" of the music industry and the fact that they do make upfront expenditures on artists and need to reclaim those funds plus return on investment (hey this is still America, no one is investing money with no expectation of something in return) - there comes a point when enough is enough. Just because they took a chance and invested $2M in Britney Spears to start her career hardly justifies taking in 75% of her music profits until the end of time. (note: figures are made up, but you get the picture, I'm just too lazy to find the real numbers)
Even the problem of recovering upfront investments (much of which is lost on artists who do not take off) would be moot if the music industry would stop the practice of paying these fledgling artists millions upfront and just provide them the tools to get their careers started, laying the burden of success on the would-be artists, and then if they fail the company is out a couple dozen thousand instead of half a million.
Forcing end-users into subscription service plans creates waste and bloated pricing (just look at the cable industry's package plans) and is a finger-in-the-dyke solution, when really the problem is miles upstream.
Step 1) Get a dual B.S. degree in Computer Science and Signals and Systems.
Step 2) Get a M.S. in Physics, with a core focus on Aerodynamics.
Step 3) Get a P.H.D. (or 8 years of field experience with Boeing equivalent) in Advanced Automated Flight Systems Development.
Step 4) Obtain a suitable number (50 ought to do) of gyro-guided surface-to-air missles for testing (try www.ebay.co.ussr, they usually have great deals this time of year what with munitions bunker spring cleanings and all)
Step 5) Develop!
Plan B:
Step 1) Break into NORAD and steal the source for their guidance systems.
Step 2) Sell it.
I gotta say, Plan B sounds a whole lot easier than A.
Hey, just because I actually have a girlfriend doesn't mean I'm tossing out my foil hat! :(
I'm just not allowed to wear it in public anymore.
Ah but what is the bandwidth of an unladen African Pigeon?
At CasinoCity.com (this is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of the site) there used to be a search engine that allowed you to find/sort casinos and resorts by dozens of criteria like what games they have, if the there's a hotel, hotel amenities, etc.
Well, someone had to find out all that information and that someone was me. I spent a whole summer creating lists of literally every casino in the world, and then calling every single one and entering all their information into a ColdFusion DBI.
You'd be amazed at how suspicious casino operators are when you start asking questions like "Exactly how many slot machines do you have?" Every now and then I'd reach a place that was no more than a bar with a couple poker tables and I'd get cursed out because the person thought I was working for the Feds or something.
The only upside to the whole ordeal was when I was calling casinos in Quebec I got to talk to a woman with a Japanese-French-Canadian accent. The most hilarious and incomprehensible dialect I've ever heard. It's also completely impossible to reproduce in the least.