A capital punishment decision that was only 5-4 is going to be extended so far as to justify prior restraint on free expression. In fact - yes, this is a legal argument but it just barely passes the laugh test.
Pray tell, you "informative" and "insightful" fellows, what is the term of art definition of "Patent Troll". See, I understand NTP and SCO, etc, but in that case Rambus is far from a troll - over 80% of their 500+ employees are EE's, not lawyers, and they regularly produce products that are freely licensed by Major manufacturers (Sony, IBM, Toshiba, Texas Instruments). It would appear there are "trolls" in this conversation, but not the one you are implicating.
This marks a particularly sad moment in the history of News for Nerds political activism.
While I agree that specifically allowing taxation of voip "for which there is a charge" (the language in the actual law) is a bad idea, it was a bad idea back in 2003 when it was included in the LAST internet tax renewal that became law. The voip language in the current bill is just a restatement of what has been law for 4 years. The fact that an editor here, particularly an editor who feels comfortable passing on political stories, is ignorant of a pretty important provision in one of the most prominent pieces of technology legislation (and a one page piece of legislation at that) does not give a lot of aid and comfort to those who support the tech community on these issues.
Now, if you want to complain about something, this new House bill, and the one currently in the Senate Commerce committee (Not the Wyden (author of the original internet tax ban) Senate bill S.156, or Eshoo House bill H.743) both include a revised definition that specifically only covers services offered by ISPs, opening up non-isp web services (net radio, youtube, joost) to taxation. Big surprise, these narrower definitions are the ones championed by Verizon and ATT and the now ironically named "don't tax the web" coalition.
having been part of/. since almost day one (hb, at 71000, was my third id) it is sad to see how far things have slid. When I try to explain why/. is still superior to new comers like digg due to the initial filtering of stories; yet another scuttlemonkey shift comes around to shoot that argument all to heck. And always the junk stories are calculated to be the kind to drive maximum traffic to whatever site (we can only hope) he's getting some kind of incentive to pimp. It is just sad to see how little the remaining powers that be seem to care.
I know America bashing is fun, and yes, in may ways we've become a corporate state, BUT, in this case you would never be able to get away with this under U.S. law. The title company would be entirely on the hook - in fact, it's why we have title companies, and why they make so much money - to pay for the times when they screw up and allow this sort of thing. Somehow the title companies in canada have lobbied they gov't to provide them with legal protections for risks that they are being paid to take. It happens here too, but just not in this case.
Isn't it great when companies use AC posts on Slashdot to astroturf? We really have grown up. For thje record, if a huge competitor was libeling my better, and FREE, product out of existance for its' own gain, I'd give it 7 minutes, not 7 days to correct itself before taking more agressive action, and the/. community should be right behind them. Syamntec had the business, and moral, obligation to verify this fully before saying word one, the fact that they didn't gives greatest weight to the charge that this is just a tactic to destroy a superior competitor.
Caesar's wife is exactly my point - if you have the appearance of impropriety in a community like this you are creating the same problem (turning off users, cutting down on submissions from discouraged members) that you try to avoid by taking a more laissez-faire approach.
Still Taco - no answer to #1? Given the power of/. in page views, and the ability to monetize clicks these days, it seems incumbent upon you to make sure that/. doesn't become a haven for the scum and villains who want to use it primarily for their own benefit.
Taco, You did not even touch on the two main objections here - frankly, and I mean this with all affection, your post sounded a great deal like the corporate pr gloss that old style companies use to non-respond to customer issues.
1) This Beatles fella appears to be using his story submissions and the high traffic of/. to drive up his page rank for commercial gain. Such a practice should be a defacto reason for blocking out a submitter, or, if you really don't want to lose their submissions, blocking their links. This is a no-brainer. If the motivation for submitting a story is anything other then the community "respect" and "fame" that came from have a story accepted in the old days you are introducing incentives that are destructive to the community that you've built.
2) Every, or almost every, one of the accepted stories have been posted by the same editor. Given the commerical issues mentioned above, you appear to be blindly allowing the exploitation of/. for personal gain, and you appear to not care. If other users stop submitting stories because they lose faith in any kind of impartiality of the editing system (and it does take more then a couple of minutes to make a good submission) then you will lose access to many more insightful and interesting links then you ever would by limiting the few users who are abusing the system.
perhaps because your description of what happened is so laughably far from the truth that it qualifies as creative writing. Read the 300 page description of everything that happened (linked above), prepared by a Federal Judge and come back educated.
THIS is +5 interesting???? RTMFA. No wonder why there are so many other ignorant comments about this case posted here.
Samsung admitted guilt because the US DOJ had there ass in a sling and was about to hit them with Billion dollar penalties and jail time for many of their executives if they didn't plead guilty (as opposed to the hundreds of millions and likely jail time they did get.) Infineon pled guilty in this case and the DOJ still jailed 5 of their executives (even the Enron guys didn't go to jail - yet) Imagine what the penalties would have been if they hadn't pled guilty. Micron is the "stool pigeon" in all this - they are negotiating an better deal by turning state's evidence on their competitiors - though their deal has yet to be worked out.
While we're at it, for all the ignorant posts about RMBS submarining the industry with patents and other alleged actions, take a look at another case - the FTC held the longest trial in it's history to prosecute Rambus on those charges. At the end of it, the judge, the senior judge, and AN FTC EMPLOYEE, Made a 300 page ruling in which he enumerated 12 reasons why Rambus was NOT GUILTY of any of the charges leveled against them. Before you go believing the PR of convicted felons you might want to read the reasoned opinions of a federal ALJ. http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9302/040223initialde cision.pdf
My new car has twelve fm presets. After I set the THREE NPR (well two npr and one that just plays cspan) stations, the one sorta modern fock station (the alt station is gone) the classical station, the 3 other stations that play some kind of rock or oldies, and the talk station (home of don and mike and the junkies, (and formerly howard stern)) I have nothing to tune to those other presets. Literally nothing - there is a hip hop station, a latin station and a christian rock station - it is a vast radio wasteland.
In the same 18 month period that the most optomistic forcasts have 500,000 HD-DVD players sold Sony is projected to sell 15-20 million PS3's - which will include a BD player. Given the forecast price of the PS3 you can bet a large percentage of families are not going to be willing to buy that and a seperate hd-disk player when they get both in the Sony package.
Given that the studios are complete whores and given the substantial decline in DVD sales, they are going to sell BDs for the PS3 no matter how much they prefer HD-DVD - they won't have a choice if they want to keep their phony-baloney jobs.
After two years - an installed base of 20M+ vs. an installed base of 2M+.... It won't even be a contest, and there are no viable theories that contest these well hashed over market projections (with the possible exception of the PS3 never being released.) Even if the X-box takes 50% of the market (Microsofts finest dream, not considered likely) that's still 15M PS3s in the first 18 months.
Oh, and for all the HD-DVD partisans who try to say that Sony will drop BD from the PS3 (other the n the complete absurdity of that contention) Just keep in mind that Sony can count the royalties it gets from every BD sold (and into the future) to subsidize the market price of the PS3 from day one due to the lock it will give it on the next generation format.
Seriously, this is actually quite cool - the differences in vegatation and physical features is very interesting. It would be nice if they could offer us four season views on demand. Of course it would also be nice if we had real time 1 foot per pixel images. Of course it would be even nicer if I had $1 Billion dollars and dated an actress, but that's probably equally likely.
They say never to argue with an idiot, as people might not know the difference, but I think I'll talk my chances here.
1) "Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet." - Vint Cerf
well afayk, you are very very wrong. The fraud conviction and fine were thrown out entirely and the judge in that case was roundly spanked by the most senior panel of patent judges in the country. That case is moving toward a retrial under terms mandated by the court of appeals in order to limit that judges mistakes.
Unfortunately for anyone who believes in speedy justice for all this bozo has now allowed new claims of fraud (in this case that Rambus destroyed discoverable documents) in order to muddy the waters again in what is supposed to be an intellectual property trial. Interestingly, apparently the Rambus attorneys have recently submitted to that same judge the documents that they were alledged to have destroyed, so we'll see what new creative line of attack he comes up with.
Perhaps getting your facts straight is difficult when you post at 5am?
The tiles are, of course, not the only solution, as many other spacecraft have reentered using other techniques, including discardable heat shields - It is likely that one of the new light weight ceramics would serve just fine for a LEO spaceship2. Why don't we all just agree to be impressed but Burt and Cos. efforts to here and look forward to what they'll come up with next.
Hate to crap on another poster (I really do) but this fella got modded up for this post and I thought a clarification would be helpful...
The issue here is NOT a new TV card, those are common and would not rate a story on/. What WAS interesting is this cards ability to receive CABLE hdtv. So "These cards aren't for receiving digital cable" wins at least the weekly, if not monthly award for missing the point entirely.
What people want to do is record their Sopranos, or concerts or HD ESPN football games, and right now, and forever more, none of the current crop of HDPC cards can do that. Apparently this one really can't either, but including the feature is a step in the right direction. Next maybe someone with real customer orientation and some coding skills may actually put out a working card with a "cable card" slot for decryption, and then we'd be cooking with gas. Watch this space.
Revenge - 199something, I loath this movie too much to look it up.
Sure, Manos and some of the others are bad, but given the level of their directing and acting and budget, what could they aspire to? This move had Anthony Quinn, Kevin Costner and a bunch of other name actors. It is the only movie I have ever seen that started with a sold out house and ended with almost no one in the theatre - yes, to my everlasting shame, I went to see this thing in the theatre. Now, Highlander 2 was BAD, but it was still dealing with a cult, genre audience. This movie had no excuses for the bad acting, bad directing, bad screenplay, and just the all around stench that emanated from the screen every moment it was up there. I don't even recommend that you check it out as a monument to bad film-making - it is so bad nothing positive could ever come from any experience with it. Sometimes we don't learn from out mistakes, sometimes they're just unmitigated crap.
Jesus Christ. This dope gets +5 "informative" - The only way his comment even makes sense is if one believes that that 419 spammers are ACTUALLY going to SEND and ASSASSIN after you. Otherwise the only thing "informative" about this post is that ajs has no sense of humor. I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but sometimes this crap just makes you cringe.
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, It's the opening line. A prescient take on the equality of outcomes philosophy and political correctness, decades before it became a real societal issue. A unique (well, not for K.V.) piece of work that has served as a useful parable throughout my career. It can be best found in the collection, "Welcome to the Monkey House" with one of my other favorite short K.V. pieces, Miss Temptation./Off Topic
Slashdot Mirror
A capital punishment decision that was only 5-4 is going to be extended so far as to justify prior restraint on free expression. In fact - yes, this is a legal argument but it just barely passes the laugh test.
Pray tell, you "informative" and "insightful" fellows, what is the term of art definition of "Patent Troll". See, I understand NTP and SCO, etc, but in that case Rambus is far from a troll - over 80% of their 500+ employees are EE's, not lawyers, and they regularly produce products that are freely licensed by Major manufacturers (Sony, IBM, Toshiba, Texas Instruments). It would appear there are "trolls" in this conversation, but not the one you are implicating.
This marks a particularly sad moment in the history of News for Nerds political activism.
While I agree that specifically allowing taxation of voip "for which there is a charge" (the language in the actual law) is a bad idea, it was a bad idea back in 2003 when it was included in the LAST internet tax renewal that became law. The voip language in the current bill is just a restatement of what has been law for 4 years. The fact that an editor here, particularly an editor who feels comfortable passing on political stories, is ignorant of a pretty important provision in one of the most prominent pieces of technology legislation (and a one page piece of legislation at that) does not give a lot of aid and comfort to those who support the tech community on these issues.
Now, if you want to complain about something, this new House bill, and the one currently in the Senate Commerce committee (Not the Wyden (author of the original internet tax ban) Senate bill S.156, or Eshoo House bill H.743) both include a revised definition that specifically only covers services offered by ISPs, opening up non-isp web services (net radio, youtube, joost) to taxation. Big surprise, these narrower definitions are the ones championed by Verizon and ATT and the now ironically named "don't tax the web" coalition.
having been part of /. since almost day one (hb, at 71000, was my third id) it is sad to see how far things have slid. When I try to explain why /. is still superior to new comers like digg due to the initial filtering of stories; yet another scuttlemonkey shift comes around to shoot that argument all to heck. And always the junk stories are calculated to be the kind to drive maximum traffic to whatever site (we can only hope) he's getting some kind of incentive to pimp. It is just sad to see how little the remaining powers that be seem to care.
I know America bashing is fun, and yes, in may ways we've become a corporate state, BUT, in this case you would never be able to get away with this under U.S. law. The title company would be entirely on the hook - in fact, it's why we have title companies, and why they make so much money - to pay for the times when they screw up and allow this sort of thing. Somehow the title companies in canada have lobbied they gov't to provide them with legal protections for risks that they are being paid to take. It happens here too, but just not in this case.
Does this replace the soon to be discontinued Frontpage for the unsophisticated user? Is MS retreating from the field just as Google takes it?
Isn't it great when companies use AC posts on Slashdot to astroturf? We really have grown up. For thje record, if a huge competitor was libeling my better, and FREE, product out of existance for its' own gain, I'd give it 7 minutes, not 7 days to correct itself before taking more agressive action, and the /. community should be right behind them. Syamntec had the business, and moral, obligation to verify this fully before saying word one, the fact that they didn't gives greatest weight to the charge that this is just a tactic to destroy a superior competitor.
Caesar's wife is exactly my point - if you have the appearance of impropriety in a community like this you are creating the same problem (turning off users, cutting down on submissions from discouraged members) that you try to avoid by taking a more laissez-faire approach.
/. in page views, and the ability to monetize clicks these days, it seems incumbent upon you to make sure that /. doesn't become a haven for the scum and villains who want to use it primarily for their own benefit.
Still Taco - no answer to #1? Given the power of
Taco, You did not even touch on the two main objections here - frankly, and I mean this with all affection, your post sounded a great deal like the corporate pr gloss that old style companies use to non-respond to customer issues.
/. to drive up his page rank for commercial gain. Such a practice should be a defacto reason for blocking out a submitter, or, if you really don't want to lose their submissions, blocking their links. This is a no-brainer. If the motivation for submitting a story is anything other then the community "respect" and "fame" that came from have a story accepted in the old days you are introducing incentives that are destructive to the community that you've built.
/. for personal gain, and you appear to not care. If other users stop submitting stories because they lose faith in any kind of impartiality of the editing system (and it does take more then a couple of minutes to make a good submission) then you will lose access to many more insightful and interesting links then you ever would by limiting the few users who are abusing the system.
1) This Beatles fella appears to be using his story submissions and the high traffic of
2) Every, or almost every, one of the accepted stories have been posted by the same editor. Given the commerical issues mentioned above, you appear to be blindly allowing the exploitation of
humbly submitted.
perhaps because your description of what happened is so laughably far from the truth that it qualifies as creative writing. Read the 300 page description of everything that happened (linked above), prepared by a Federal Judge and come back educated.
Samsung admitted guilt because the US DOJ had there ass in a sling and was about to hit them with Billion dollar penalties and jail time for many of their executives if they didn't plead guilty (as opposed to the hundreds of millions and likely jail time they did get.) Infineon pled guilty in this case and the DOJ still jailed 5 of their executives (even the Enron guys didn't go to jail - yet) Imagine what the penalties would have been if they hadn't pled guilty. Micron is the "stool pigeon" in all this - they are negotiating an better deal by turning state's evidence on their competitiors - though their deal has yet to be worked out.
While we're at it, for all the ignorant posts about RMBS submarining the industry with patents and other alleged actions, take a look at another case - the FTC held the longest trial in it's history to prosecute Rambus on those charges. At the end of it, the judge, the senior judge, and AN FTC EMPLOYEE, Made a 300 page ruling in which he enumerated 12 reasons why Rambus was NOT GUILTY of any of the charges leveled against them. Before you go believing the PR of convicted felons you might want to read the reasoned opinions of a federal ALJ. http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9302/040223initialde cision.pdf
We have very few radio stations, comparitively.
My new car has twelve fm presets. After I set the THREE NPR (well two npr and one that just plays cspan) stations, the one sorta modern fock station (the alt station is gone) the classical station, the 3 other stations that play some kind of rock or oldies, and the talk station (home of don and mike and the junkies, (and formerly howard stern)) I have nothing to tune to those other presets. Literally nothing - there is a hip hop station, a latin station and a christian rock station - it is a vast radio wasteland.
the HD-DVD folks just don't know it yet.
In the same 18 month period that the most optomistic forcasts have 500,000 HD-DVD players sold Sony is projected to sell 15-20 million PS3's - which will include a BD player. Given the forecast price of the PS3 you can bet a large percentage of families are not going to be willing to buy that and a seperate hd-disk player when they get both in the Sony package.
Given that the studios are complete whores and given the substantial decline in DVD sales, they are going to sell BDs for the PS3 no matter how much they prefer HD-DVD - they won't have a choice if they want to keep their phony-baloney jobs.
After two years - an installed base of 20M+ vs. an installed base of 2M+.... It won't even be a contest, and there are no viable theories that contest these well hashed over market projections (with the possible exception of the PS3 never being released.) Even if the X-box takes 50% of the market (Microsofts finest dream, not considered likely) that's still 15M PS3s in the first 18 months.
Oh, and for all the HD-DVD partisans who try to say that Sony will drop BD from the PS3 (other the n the complete absurdity of that contention) Just keep in mind that Sony can count the royalties it gets from every BD sold (and into the future) to subsidize the market price of the PS3 from day one due to the lock it will give it on the next generation format.
And the Darwin Award goes to.....
Why am I beset by the image of huge metal german shepards chasing me through the woods and then sitting up and flexing over my lifeless corpse.
German... Robot... Dogs... Chilling.
Got enough lakes in your old neighborhood?
Seriously, this is actually quite cool - the differences in vegatation and physical features is very interesting. It would be nice if they could offer us four season views on demand. Of course it would also be nice if we had real time 1 foot per pixel images. Of course it would be even nicer if I had $1 Billion dollars and dated an actress, but that's probably equally likely.
1) "Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet." - Vint Cerf
and
2) the whole thing -- http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html
An AC calling Vint Cerf a liar and claiming to know more then him about the creation of the internet.
how slashdot
and
how very sad
well afayk, you are very very wrong. The fraud conviction and fine were thrown out entirely and the judge in that case was roundly spanked by the most senior panel of patent judges in the country. That case is moving toward a retrial under terms mandated by the court of appeals in order to limit that judges mistakes.
Unfortunately for anyone who believes in speedy justice for all this bozo has now allowed new claims of fraud (in this case that Rambus destroyed discoverable documents) in order to muddy the waters again in what is supposed to be an intellectual property trial. Interestingly, apparently the Rambus attorneys have recently submitted to that same judge the documents that they were alledged to have destroyed, so we'll see what new creative line of attack he comes up with.
Perhaps getting your facts straight is difficult when you post at 5am?
The tiles are, of course, not the only solution, as many other spacecraft have reentered using other techniques, including discardable heat shields - It is likely that one of the new light weight ceramics would serve just fine for a LEO spaceship2. Why don't we all just agree to be impressed but Burt and Cos. efforts to here and look forward to what they'll come up with next.
Hate to crap on another poster (I really do) but this fella got modded up for this post and I thought a clarification would be helpful...
/. What WAS interesting is this cards ability to receive CABLE hdtv. So "These cards aren't for receiving digital cable" wins at least the weekly, if not monthly award for missing the point entirely.
The issue here is NOT a new TV card, those are common and would not rate a story on
What people want to do is record their Sopranos, or concerts or HD ESPN football games, and right now, and forever more, none of the current crop of HDPC cards can do that. Apparently this one really can't either, but including the feature is a step in the right direction. Next maybe someone with real customer orientation and some coding skills may actually put out a working card with a "cable card" slot for decryption, and then we'd be cooking with gas. Watch this space.
Revenge - 199something, I loath this movie too much to look it up.
Sure, Manos and some of the others are bad, but given the level of their directing and acting and budget, what could they aspire to? This move had Anthony Quinn, Kevin Costner and a bunch of other name actors. It is the only movie I have ever seen that started with a sold out house and ended with almost no one in the theatre - yes, to my everlasting shame, I went to see this thing in the theatre. Now, Highlander 2 was BAD, but it was still dealing with a cult, genre audience. This movie had no excuses for the bad acting, bad directing, bad screenplay, and just the all around stench that emanated from the screen every moment it was up there. I don't even recommend that you check it out as a monument to bad film-making - it is so bad nothing positive could ever come from any experience with it. Sometimes we don't learn from out mistakes, sometimes they're just unmitigated crap.
Damn, nice obscure Bradbury reference, too bad I can't mod you up.
Jesus Christ. This dope gets +5 "informative" - The only way his comment even makes sense is if one believes that that 419 spammers are ACTUALLY going to SEND and ASSASSIN after you. Otherwise the only thing "informative" about this post is that ajs has no sense of humor. I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but sometimes this crap just makes you cringe.
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, It's the opening line. A prescient take on the equality of outcomes philosophy and political correctness, decades before it became a real societal issue. A unique (well, not for K.V.) piece of work that has served as a useful parable throughout my career. It can be best found in the collection, "Welcome to the Monkey House" with one of my other favorite short K.V. pieces, Miss Temptation. /Off Topic