Fun with cards -- Use a reader/writer to exchange the data on different cards. (E.g., swap your gas station card with a retail store card. It's kind of like paying for fast food with $2 bills.)
An interesting social experiment: rewrite your old, expired credit card with the mag information from the new card, and see how many cashiers notice. Better yet, use a card that expired years ago (this experiment will take a little longer to do). Usually, if the authorization goes through on the cash register, the cashiers don't care. Most places don't even check signatures anymore.
Ding ding ding. You've said the magic word of the decade. Your argument now has immediate credibility, and anyone who disagrees with you is unpatriotic.
terrorism, n. The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
In this case, the RIAA is using force (lawsuits), or threat of force, to intimidate companies and lawmakers for their own political and financial reasons.
The word was used correctly by the grandparent post. Just because *you* can't separate an appropriate word from it's current fad status doesn't mean everyone can't.
I'm not going to whine about how the money could be better spent on feeding the poor etc etc. I firmly believe that the money should be spent on science but come on.... Why fritter it away so that a couple of people can walk around on a not very interesting bit of rock.
Because we have to crawl before we can walk. Creating entirely new technologies to send humans to an entirely new frontier costs a great deal of money. There will always be excuses to not spend that money, based on "we could use it in other areas." But if we continually gave space travel money away to other areas of science, we'd never get off this rock. We have to start somewhere.
The moon is as good a place to start as any, and, barring any plug-pulling on funding as Congress did during the Cold War, will get us to places beyond, such as Mars. Forty years ago, the Moon was the destination. Now it's just the first rest stop.
So in order for something to be "literature" it has to obtuse and inaccessible? This is the posturing sort of attitude that had me laughing all through my university writing course.
Heartily agree with you there. There are lots of titles of supposed "great literature" that were written for children; The Jungle Book (Kipling) and Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) both come to mind.
And, of course, anyone who has actually READ the Harry Potter series knows that Rowling's writing style has grown right along with Harry. She designed the series so that kids who were the same age as Harry when the first book was released would be able to read more difficult and complex books as the series progressed. The first book may have been written for fifth graders, but the most recent couple deal with issues and situations that I would not expose a 12-year-old to just yet; they would probably be classified as high-school level reading material. Parents may be handing copies of the "Half-Blood Prince" to their 10-year-olds, but I don't agree with it. They are much too complex and intense for that age group.
Hey, I agree with you. Anime sucks. It's not because of the tits, it's because the writing is bad, the dubs are bad, and the plots go nowhere.
Hey, now. Let's not make sweeping generalizations. Anime is not a genre, it's a medium, with all the good and bad that go with it. Yes, there is an embarrassingly large pile of anime that sucks a whole lot. But the same could be said for any other medium, such as movies, novels, paintings, poetry, television shows, even internet sites. In any form of expression, there will be a fair percentage of it that will suck. But don't let that large amount of suckage deter you from the gems hidden within.
As to the grandparent post's comments about the anatomical correctness of anime, I say just this: get over it. It's a style. News flash-- the men in anime are just as stylized, over exaggerated and poorly clad as the women. You don't think men really bulge with those kinds of ridiculous muscles, do you? And in the rare case they do, they certainly are not shaped like an upended triangle, with three foot shoulders and a six inch waist. Try not to think too hard about the "anatomical correctness" of the majority of our television and movie stars, either: they seem to fit into a category of person not attainable by mere mortals. Which is fine by me, by the way; I would much rather watch attractive people on my teevee than my neighbors.
...probably think Harry Potter novels are great literature.
Anyone who thinks Harry Potter is not a great series of books is far too cynical to appreciate anything pure. They have successfully injected both compelling storytelling and believable, likable characters into the tired and wheezing fantasy genre, which has not happened since Tolkien.
Home users will encounter Vista when they decide to buy a brand new computer, and from that perspective, they'll have gotten a shiny new OS with their shiny new hardware.
So how does Dell continue to sell $400 computers with a crazy HDCP monitor, 2GB of RAM, a 256MB accelerated video card, and a brand-spanking-new install of Vista, and still stay in business?
My guess is that for the foreseeable future, Dell will continue to put Windows XP on those lower-end models, which a significant percentage of the non-commercial population buy (I'm sure when corporate entities upgrade, it's not the $400 model. But they have no reason to upgrade for many more years). Microsoft will not get nearly the market penetration they are looking for, and they will be forced to either lower the hardware requirements with some clever re-coding, or else just release a crippled, useless, and cheaper version of Vista (called, perhaps, Vista Home?) which will only frustrate and infuriate users with its lack of built-in functionality. I'm betting on Vista Home.
And don't even get me started on swearing! Did you know that the cursing words are not in the same part of your brain where other words are regularly stored? Therefore recent studies have showed that cursing is more a physiological necessity than a habit!
Ok, I call bullshit. Show me a link to a respectable article that makes such a claim, and I will accept it.
However, I think you are confusing several issues. Swear words are just words; it's the meaning attached to them and the social stigma surrounding them that gives them power. The word itself would be stored in the same neural database that holds all other words, but since they evoke such emotional responses, I would say that those emotions would be stored somewhere different than the emotional response to a word like "chair." Other words with large emotional responses, like your family's names, or compliments, or hurtful epithets, would have their own area of brain activity when compared with words that do not contain emotional responses. I'm sure everyone has a different set of words that they react strongly to (although many may overlap). Triggering a wide range of appropriate emotional responses is probably quite healthy, psychologically, but it's not about the word itself.
One only has to look at the evolution of language to see that the power of strong words is not in the word itself, but in the meaning attached to it by a community. Words considered offensive have come in and out of style for hundreds of years (and not even counting the evolution of politically correct racial descriptions).
I think what's important to remember about swearing is whether the person you talk to would be offended by what you say. If they would, then I recommend you don't use the word. But if they have no problem with it, then by all means go ahead and use the word. After all, if there's no social stigma attached to it, it's just a word.
(Incidentally, I'm only offended by overuse of swear words; if you can't be more creative with your vocabulary than to use the word "fuck" as every part of speech you can think of, then you're not expressing yourself well. By conservative estimates, there are 20,000 words at the average educated English speaker's disposal; don't focus on just eight or nine.)
It's about modifying it. Whether or not you use it for illegal purposes doesn't matter...I think once you BUY something, you can do whatever you want with it. You can take it apart, whatever.
Of course you can. That's what property ownership means. Now, if the company I bought the product from wants to void my warranty and disavow all knowledge of my purchace once I've modified it, that's fine. But I don't think they can legally take away my right to use that product if I fiddle with it.
If Sony actually goes through with this anti-mod scheme, it will only be a matter of time before someone mods their Blu-Ray for an innocuous reason (say, to integrate it with MythTV or something). Once Sony disables their Blu-Ray machine, the modder hauls Sony into court. My hope is be that this case would be just the situation the Supreme Court needs to strike down (or, at the very least, modify the wording) in the DMCA, section 1201. This section of the DMCA effectively contradicts and nullifies the protections granted to consumers in Title 17, Section 1008, and needs to be changed.
Somehow, I don't think the phones could acheive the same bandwidth if there was 1 million of them withing an area the size of a normal city. There's limited bandwidth on the airwaves. Might be good for broadcasting video streams, but if everyone wants different data, it won't work.
But that's precisely what it would be used for. Verizon has their new V-Cast service (I'm not sure of the tech specifics on that, I'm a Cingular guy), and that's used to push corporate-created media out to the phones of people who pay for it.
You didn't seriously think the cell phone companies would allow two-way data transfer at that speed, did you? The media companies already clamp upload speeds on regular broadband, and part of the reason is that they don't trust the data that people upload (read: piracy). This is no different. No one will be able to achieve the same speeds up and down in this system, partly because there's limited bandwidth, and partly because the push-media is where the money is.
I still think the best fix for copyright is an initial 20 years, renewable for small periods with increasing renewal fees--something like 1 year periods, $10 the first year and doubling every year after that.
The 28th additional year would cost the copyright holder $2.6 billion. How desperate is Disney to keep the Micky Mouse image copyrighted?
I would like to see a copyright term of the life of the author, not to exceed 50 years. Period. No extensions, no changes, no nothing. If your company can't move on in 50 years, then you're stuck in the past.
Trademarks relating to company logos are a different matter; I don't think they should expire at all, as long as the company who owns them is defending them. Thus, Disney could still use their "mouse ears" logo on everything they make until the heat death of the universe, and no one would mind. But for the love of God, let Steamboat Willie rest in peace.
The current copyright system in this country might be a little cold and uninviting, but it is certainly not stifling innovation.
By selling a machine that is capable of recording copyrighted materials in an unencrypted, non-DRMed, and easily duplicable format, I would leave myself open to a situation where I'm held liable for a separate instance of copyright violation for every single program recorded by every single client,
Wrong. You leave yourself open to a situation where the users of your commercial MythTV box could get sued for infringement. In the Betamax Case, a judge ruled that a company cannot be held liable for unlawful actions taken by the users of a company's product, as long as the product was not created for the specific purpose of breaking the law. The more recent ruling against Grokster clearly stated that Grokster promoted and fostered infringing use of their software. Format shifting is still legal by precident, and companies who manufacture format-shifting devices and promote non-infringing use are still not liable for their users' actions.
Linux doesn't even register the new CD copy-protection schemes, which may in itself be a DMCA violation
We'll see. The law in this country is based heavily on precident, so if a court hasn't ruled on a law yet, no one is sure whether the law will stand. That is the best part of the checks and balances in this country: Congress can write all kinds of wacky laws and even have them signed, but if a judge decides the law is unconstitutional, that's it. (As a side note, I would love to see this specific part of the DMCA battled in court, since I think it clearly squashes the consumer's rights to non-infringing copying, which was spelled out in the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, and which the DMCA contradicts.)
Remeber (sic) that this machine was not designed to distribute copyrighted content without consent, but to time-shift (or format-shift) content that the user has already bought. This used to be legal. MythTV can also catalog and play back your music collection, as well as burn compilation CDs (which also used to be legal).
Since when is this not legal? Please specify a court case where the consumer's right to copy media in a non-commercial, non-ditributive manner was revoked. Until the court rules that such things are illegal, the DMCA is just smoke and mirrors.
Now, if you'd like to discuss the current situation of patents in this country, I would be happy to state that yes, they are stifling innovation. Somewhere along the line, the USPO decided that people can patent an idea, and not merely and implimentation, and that's where things got screwed up for software patents. (For example, one should not be able to patent "a device that wakes people up in the morning", but they should be able to patent "the AlarmWaker3000." In the context of software, someone should not be able to patent "causing a video game character to hallucinate", but they have every right to patent "this bit of code that makes video game characters hallucinate". If I write a different bit of code to do the same thing, I should not be violating the patent, as long as the code I write is significantly different than the pantented code, which would be determined by a court.)
I also suggest you put together something a bit more edifying and worthwhile that a collection of cheat codes for video games before you start considering yourself literary.
And on behalf of Mr. Marks, I'd like to ask you to lay off the personal attacks. This is a discussion of opposing viewpoints, not a flamewar.
The only major uses for Bluetooth in cell phones I've heard of are chatting on a wireless headset, syncing or file transfer with a computer, and the aforementioned bluespamming (or splue, to quote another comment). But I would guess that the "killer feature" for BT-enabled cell phones would be a localized IM-type service; i.e., you could make a list of your friends' BT MAC addresses in your phone, and get alerts when they are nearby (or at least near enough for your phone to detect them). Sort of a "hey, Bob's within 100m of here; I should call him and see if he'd like to join me for lunch" type thing.
Would such a feature still be possible if your phone was not in "discoverable" mode to block the advertisements? Does a feature like that even exist (I am new to the world of BlueTooth)?
does this mean that you can in fact view the images that the test describes by closing your eyes? therefore noticing the added images?
Perhaps, because I think afterimages are always present, but usually too faint to register. In theory, you could see the images if you a) closed your eyes at the exact moment the target image changed to the next, and b) were sensitive enough to see afterimages of low-brightness objects. In practice, however, a 1/10 second window and normal vision sensitivity is not sufficient by a long shot.
why is it then, that when i shift my eye about the room, i can see the light trails?
for example... look towards a light source (preferably not directly) and look on different sides of it. then close your eyes (for best effect) and you will be able to see the movements of your eyes in relation to the light trails. explain this one... (i dont doubt you, i would just like to know why this is, when you strongly 'argue' 'against' it)
Because the retina is still gathering information; it's just not sending it to the brain. Basically, the retina is made up of a layer of light-sensitive cells, some that detect certain colors, others that detect intensity, etc. When they are exposed to a very bright light source, they tend to still register information to the brain, even after the light source is no longer there. These are called "afterimages." In the case you are describing, the retina still gathered the light of the bright source, even though that information was not sent to the brain during the actual move. Once the move is completed, and you close your eyes, the brain starts interpreting the data from the retina again, and finds afterimages.
The one thing no one ever mentions is the CD replacement effect. People who grew up listening to cassettes and LPs in the 70s and 80s got jobs in the 90s and could afford to dump their cassettes and buy CDs. This sort of generational shift in media will never happen again, and the RIAA's sales figures were bloated by people buying albums they already had. The effect is over. Everone now is buying music on CDs from the beginning, and has nothing to replace.
Of course it will happen again, when the next great music technology comes along. CDs are fairly entrenched now, of course, but they won't be forever. Just as we will all have to repurchase our movies on Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD, whoever wins), we will also have to repurchase our music in some other form; perhaps the next-gen DVD in those 2.5" buisiness card-sized discs, or maybe in a solid state memory stick. Who knows? Of course, you could just keep all your music from the CD era, and rip-burn to the new medium, but Joe Average won't do that, and you won't be getting the latest, greatest, digitally remastered, remixed, and re-Surround-Sounded versions of everything. Heh... imagine someone keeping their music in a stupid lo-fi format like 44.1 kHz stereo.
Your point about the inflated numbers due to the Repurchase Effect remains valid, but I think it will happen again 10-20 years from now.
Ultimately radio served as an advertising medium and wasn't hurting sales at all. The music industry eventually made its peace with radio.
We can only hope that eventually the music industry will relearn this old lesson...
No, we really don't want P2P services to turn into the monolithic, streamlined corporate marketing scheme that radio has become. The only reason the RIAA "made peace" with radio is because they effectively took control of it. Only a very tiny fraction of stations are not owned by some corporate monstrosity like ClearChannel, who hand down playlist edicts from on high as if they were carved in stone tablets.
The music industry has truly embraced the Marketing Age, and thus (popular) music has transformed from a pull medium to a push medium. The only records in stores, basically, are the ones you hear on the radio, on TV, and are advertised everywhere; they are the low-risk, high-profit "mass-appeal" products. Once in a while a great musician will become popular, and that will allow him/her/them to overcome their indentured servitude to their recording contract. However, the majority of the "popular" acts are only semi-talented, very attractive people who are being marketed like they're the Second Coming. The internet (P2P), on the other hand, is still a haven for slightly less popular, but vastly more talented, people. I would love to see more record companies on the internet dedicated to artist's rights and proud of the music they underwrite and sell, instead of focusing so much on the business end of things that an artist becomes a "product" instead of a person (I know a few of these exist, but I can't think of any off the top of my head).
Do we really want P2P services, and by extension, the internet, to turn in to radio?
Congress should pass a law prohibiting bills from coattail-riding on other unrelated bills. If its important enough to pass a law about, its important enough to deserve its own vote.
Yeah, but that would never pass on its own. We better attach it to a farm subsidies bill and hope no one notices.
Corporate buzzword speech reminds me of Treknobabble:
"Captain! A Romulan warbird just decloaked in front of us!"
"Let's reconfigure the dilithium crystals into a transition matrix so we can force a sub-gamma tachyon anti-matter stream into the reactor core. That should disrupt the space-time fabric, creating a vortex and opening a temporal anomaly. Then we can take the ship through the anomoly to the 20th Century and kill Rick Berman, whose utilization of the value-add paradigm Gene Roddenberry oversighted helped him up-sell the product into a quality-driven deliverable and monetize the vertical market of television scifi."
"Someone get the doctor! I think the Captain's having some kind of seizure!"
"Copying music for your own personal use is explicitly legal"
I've heard repeatedly that this is not the case, as in there is no law that makes copying for personal use legal. It's only the Betamax ruling that makes it legal.
Not true. The Betamax case was certainly the first time it was ruled on, but it has since been codified into law by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which added Chapter 10 to U.S. Title 17. Check out Section 1008, "Prohibition on certain infringement actions":
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings. (Emphasis mine.)
Basically, if your copy is for non-commercial, non-distributive, personal use, then it's not infringement.
Now I'd like to see that language extended to all forms of copyrightable media, including television shows, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, speeches, even prints/reproductions of artwork and sculpture. I should be able to do anything I want with things I own a copy of, as long as the use is non-commercial and non-distributive (i.e., I can't make money off it, and I can't give it to anyone else).
Nor have I ever finished the paper, laid it down, and then found an ad laying in my lap underneath it!
This does, however, happen with magazines. Every time I pick up a magazine, half a dozen of those 3"x5" subcription cards fall out. Although, to be fair, none of those cards have asked me to punch a monkey.
But you would think somebody in R&D would at some point read the latest press on Batman say "Hey! I remember working on that project!"
I think the people in Wayne Enterprises all work on parts and pieces of the projects, never really knowing what they were for, and I think Alfred was supposed to be the one who assembled them into their final form. (I guess that means he also gives the Batmobile a tuneup once in a while.) With that sort of divide-and-conquer strategy, the only employees you'd have to keep quiet would be those in the Bat-Shaped Black Plastic Casings Division.
When MS-DOS 2 came out with directory support, they wanted to stay compatible (so you could use batch files from DOS 1, etc.) but with the primitive state of the applications back then, using / as both the command switch thing and directory separator would confuse them, so MS decided to use \ as the directory separator instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Fun with cards -- Use a reader/writer to exchange the data on different cards. (E.g., swap your gas station card with a retail store card. It's kind of like paying for fast food with $2 bills.)
An interesting social experiment: rewrite your old, expired credit card with the mag information from the new card, and see how many cashiers notice. Better yet, use a card that expired years ago (this experiment will take a little longer to do). Usually, if the authorization goes through on the cash register, the cashiers don't care. Most places don't even check signatures anymore.
Ding ding ding. You've said the magic word of the decade. Your argument now has immediate credibility, and anyone who disagrees with you is unpatriotic.
terrorism, n.
The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
In this case, the RIAA is using force (lawsuits), or threat of force, to intimidate companies and lawmakers for their own political and financial reasons.
The word was used correctly by the grandparent post. Just because *you* can't separate an appropriate word from it's current fad status doesn't mean everyone can't.
I'm not going to whine about how the money could be better spent on feeding the poor etc etc. I firmly believe that the money should be spent on science but come on. ... Why fritter it away so that a couple of people can walk around on a not very interesting bit of rock.
Because we have to crawl before we can walk. Creating entirely new technologies to send humans to an entirely new frontier costs a great deal of money. There will always be excuses to not spend that money, based on "we could use it in other areas." But if we continually gave space travel money away to other areas of science, we'd never get off this rock. We have to start somewhere.
The moon is as good a place to start as any, and, barring any plug-pulling on funding as Congress did during the Cold War, will get us to places beyond, such as Mars. Forty years ago, the Moon was the destination. Now it's just the first rest stop.
[T]he Gossamer Albatross has a wingspan of over 29 meters and it runs on the leg muscles of a human.
What you meant to say was, "The Gossamer Albatross has a wingspan of over 29 meters and it runs on a diet of beef, pasta, and PowerBars."
- Vista Source Edition: Compile your own! Comes with GCC 4.0
http://www.gentoo.org/
So in order for something to be "literature" it has to obtuse and inaccessible? This is the posturing sort of attitude that had me laughing all through my university writing course.
Heartily agree with you there. There are lots of titles of supposed "great literature" that were written for children; The Jungle Book (Kipling) and Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) both come to mind.
And, of course, anyone who has actually READ the Harry Potter series knows that Rowling's writing style has grown right along with Harry. She designed the series so that kids who were the same age as Harry when the first book was released would be able to read more difficult and complex books as the series progressed. The first book may have been written for fifth graders, but the most recent couple deal with issues and situations that I would not expose a 12-year-old to just yet; they would probably be classified as high-school level reading material. Parents may be handing copies of the "Half-Blood Prince" to their 10-year-olds, but I don't agree with it. They are much too complex and intense for that age group.
Hey, I agree with you. Anime sucks. It's not because of the tits, it's because the writing is bad, the dubs are bad, and the plots go nowhere.
...probably think Harry Potter novels are great literature.
Hey, now. Let's not make sweeping generalizations. Anime is not a genre, it's a medium, with all the good and bad that go with it. Yes, there is an embarrassingly large pile of anime that sucks a whole lot. But the same could be said for any other medium, such as movies, novels, paintings, poetry, television shows, even internet sites. In any form of expression, there will be a fair percentage of it that will suck. But don't let that large amount of suckage deter you from the gems hidden within.
As to the grandparent post's comments about the anatomical correctness of anime, I say just this: get over it. It's a style. News flash-- the men in anime are just as stylized, over exaggerated and poorly clad as the women. You don't think men really bulge with those kinds of ridiculous muscles, do you? And in the rare case they do, they certainly are not shaped like an upended triangle, with three foot shoulders and a six inch waist. Try not to think too hard about the "anatomical correctness" of the majority of our television and movie stars, either: they seem to fit into a category of person not attainable by mere mortals. Which is fine by me, by the way; I would much rather watch attractive people on my teevee than my neighbors.
Anyone who thinks Harry Potter is not a great series of books is far too cynical to appreciate anything pure. They have successfully injected both compelling storytelling and believable, likable characters into the tired and wheezing fantasy genre, which has not happened since Tolkien.
Home users will encounter Vista when they decide to buy a brand new computer, and from that perspective, they'll have gotten a shiny new OS with their shiny new hardware.
So how does Dell continue to sell $400 computers with a crazy HDCP monitor, 2GB of RAM, a 256MB accelerated video card, and a brand-spanking-new install of Vista, and still stay in business?
My guess is that for the foreseeable future, Dell will continue to put Windows XP on those lower-end models, which a significant percentage of the non-commercial population buy (I'm sure when corporate entities upgrade, it's not the $400 model. But they have no reason to upgrade for many more years). Microsoft will not get nearly the market penetration they are looking for, and they will be forced to either lower the hardware requirements with some clever re-coding, or else just release a crippled, useless, and cheaper version of Vista (called, perhaps, Vista Home?) which will only frustrate and infuriate users with its lack of built-in functionality. I'm betting on Vista Home.
Your move, Tux.
HD-DVD and BluRay can join DAT, SACD, and DVD-Audio as formats that were killed by greed.
Don't forget about DIVX. Not Circuit City's finest hour.
And don't even get me started on swearing! Did you know that the cursing words are not in the same part of your brain where other words are regularly stored? Therefore recent studies have showed that cursing is more a physiological necessity than a habit!
Ok, I call bullshit. Show me a link to a respectable article that makes such a claim, and I will accept it.
However, I think you are confusing several issues. Swear words are just words; it's the meaning attached to them and the social stigma surrounding them that gives them power. The word itself would be stored in the same neural database that holds all other words, but since they evoke such emotional responses, I would say that those emotions would be stored somewhere different than the emotional response to a word like "chair." Other words with large emotional responses, like your family's names, or compliments, or hurtful epithets, would have their own area of brain activity when compared with words that do not contain emotional responses. I'm sure everyone has a different set of words that they react strongly to (although many may overlap). Triggering a wide range of appropriate emotional responses is probably quite healthy, psychologically, but it's not about the word itself.
One only has to look at the evolution of language to see that the power of strong words is not in the word itself, but in the meaning attached to it by a community. Words considered offensive have come in and out of style for hundreds of years (and not even counting the evolution of politically correct racial descriptions).
I think what's important to remember about swearing is whether the person you talk to would be offended by what you say. If they would, then I recommend you don't use the word. But if they have no problem with it, then by all means go ahead and use the word. After all, if there's no social stigma attached to it, it's just a word.
(Incidentally, I'm only offended by overuse of swear words; if you can't be more creative with your vocabulary than to use the word "fuck" as every part of speech you can think of, then you're not expressing yourself well. By conservative estimates, there are 20,000 words at the average educated English speaker's disposal; don't focus on just eight or nine.)
It's about modifying it. Whether or not you use it for illegal purposes doesn't matter...I think once you BUY something, you can do whatever you want with it. You can take it apart, whatever.
Of course you can. That's what property ownership means. Now, if the company I bought the product from wants to void my warranty and disavow all knowledge of my purchace once I've modified it, that's fine. But I don't think they can legally take away my right to use that product if I fiddle with it.
If Sony actually goes through with this anti-mod scheme, it will only be a matter of time before someone mods their Blu-Ray for an innocuous reason (say, to integrate it with MythTV or something). Once Sony disables their Blu-Ray machine, the modder hauls Sony into court. My hope is be that this case would be just the situation the Supreme Court needs to strike down (or, at the very least, modify the wording) in the DMCA, section 1201. This section of the DMCA effectively contradicts and nullifies the protections granted to consumers in Title 17, Section 1008, and needs to be changed.
Somehow, I don't think the phones could acheive the same bandwidth if there was 1 million of them withing an area the size of a normal city. There's limited bandwidth on the airwaves. Might be good for broadcasting video streams, but if everyone wants different data, it won't work.
But that's precisely what it would be used for. Verizon has their new V-Cast service (I'm not sure of the tech specifics on that, I'm a Cingular guy), and that's used to push corporate-created media out to the phones of people who pay for it.
You didn't seriously think the cell phone companies would allow two-way data transfer at that speed, did you? The media companies already clamp upload speeds on regular broadband, and part of the reason is that they don't trust the data that people upload (read: piracy). This is no different. No one will be able to achieve the same speeds up and down in this system, partly because there's limited bandwidth, and partly because the push-media is where the money is.
I still think the best fix for copyright is an initial 20 years, renewable for small periods with increasing renewal fees--something like 1 year periods, $10 the first year and doubling every year after that.
The 28th additional year would cost the copyright holder $2.6 billion. How desperate is Disney to keep the Micky Mouse image copyrighted?
I would like to see a copyright term of the life of the author, not to exceed 50 years. Period. No extensions, no changes, no nothing. If your company can't move on in 50 years, then you're stuck in the past.
Trademarks relating to company logos are a different matter; I don't think they should expire at all, as long as the company who owns them is defending them. Thus, Disney could still use their "mouse ears" logo on everything they make until the heat death of the universe, and no one would mind. But for the love of God, let Steamboat Willie rest in peace.
The current copyright system in this country might be a little cold and uninviting, but it is certainly not stifling innovation.
By selling a machine that is capable of recording copyrighted materials in an unencrypted, non-DRMed, and easily duplicable format, I would leave myself open to a situation where I'm held liable for a separate instance of copyright violation for every single program recorded by every single client,
Wrong. You leave yourself open to a situation where the users of your commercial MythTV box could get sued for infringement. In the Betamax Case, a judge ruled that a company cannot be held liable for unlawful actions taken by the users of a company's product, as long as the product was not created for the specific purpose of breaking the law. The more recent ruling against Grokster clearly stated that Grokster promoted and fostered infringing use of their software. Format shifting is still legal by precident, and companies who manufacture format-shifting devices and promote non-infringing use are still not liable for their users' actions.
Linux doesn't even register the new CD copy-protection schemes, which may in itself be a DMCA violation
We'll see. The law in this country is based heavily on precident, so if a court hasn't ruled on a law yet, no one is sure whether the law will stand. That is the best part of the checks and balances in this country: Congress can write all kinds of wacky laws and even have them signed, but if a judge decides the law is unconstitutional, that's it. (As a side note, I would love to see this specific part of the DMCA battled in court, since I think it clearly squashes the consumer's rights to non-infringing copying, which was spelled out in the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, and which the DMCA contradicts.)
Remeber (sic) that this machine was not designed to distribute copyrighted content without consent, but to time-shift (or format-shift) content that the user has already bought. This used to be legal. MythTV can also catalog and play back your music collection, as well as burn compilation CDs (which also used to be legal).
Since when is this not legal? Please specify a court case where the consumer's right to copy media in a non-commercial, non-ditributive manner was revoked. Until the court rules that such things are illegal, the DMCA is just smoke and mirrors.
Now, if you'd like to discuss the current situation of patents in this country, I would be happy to state that yes, they are stifling innovation. Somewhere along the line, the USPO decided that people can patent an idea, and not merely and implimentation, and that's where things got screwed up for software patents. (For example, one should not be able to patent "a device that wakes people up in the morning", but they should be able to patent "the AlarmWaker3000." In the context of software, someone should not be able to patent "causing a video game character to hallucinate", but they have every right to patent "this bit of code that makes video game characters hallucinate". If I write a different bit of code to do the same thing, I should not be violating the patent, as long as the code I write is significantly different than the pantented code, which would be determined by a court.)
I also suggest you put together something a bit more edifying and worthwhile that a collection of cheat codes for video games before you start considering yourself literary.
And on behalf of Mr. Marks, I'd like to ask you to lay off the personal attacks. This is a discussion of opposing viewpoints, not a flamewar.
The only major uses for Bluetooth in cell phones I've heard of are chatting on a wireless headset, syncing or file transfer with a computer, and the aforementioned bluespamming (or splue, to quote another comment). But I would guess that the "killer feature" for BT-enabled cell phones would be a localized IM-type service; i.e., you could make a list of your friends' BT MAC addresses in your phone, and get alerts when they are nearby (or at least near enough for your phone to detect them). Sort of a "hey, Bob's within 100m of here; I should call him and see if he'd like to join me for lunch" type thing.
Would such a feature still be possible if your phone was not in "discoverable" mode to block the advertisements? Does a feature like that even exist (I am new to the world of BlueTooth)?
does this mean that you can in fact view the images that the test describes by closing your eyes? therefore noticing the added images?
Perhaps, because I think afterimages are always present, but usually too faint to register. In theory, you could see the images if you a) closed your eyes at the exact moment the target image changed to the next, and b) were sensitive enough to see afterimages of low-brightness objects. In practice, however, a 1/10 second window and normal vision sensitivity is not sufficient by a long shot.
why is it then, that when i shift my eye about the room, i can see the light trails?
for example... look towards a light source (preferably not directly) and look on different sides of it. then close your eyes (for best effect) and you will be able to see the movements of your eyes in relation to the light trails. explain this one... (i dont doubt you, i would just like to know why this is, when you strongly 'argue' 'against' it)
Because the retina is still gathering information; it's just not sending it to the brain. Basically, the retina is made up of a layer of light-sensitive cells, some that detect certain colors, others that detect intensity, etc. When they are exposed to a very bright light source, they tend to still register information to the brain, even after the light source is no longer there. These are called "afterimages." In the case you are describing, the retina still gathered the light of the bright source, even though that information was not sent to the brain during the actual move. Once the move is completed, and you close your eyes, the brain starts interpreting the data from the retina again, and finds afterimages.
I hope that answered your question.
The one thing no one ever mentions is the CD replacement effect. People who grew up listening to cassettes and LPs in the 70s and 80s got jobs in the 90s and could afford to dump their cassettes and buy CDs. This sort of generational shift in media will never happen again, and the RIAA's sales figures were bloated by people buying albums they already had. The effect is over. Everone now is buying music on CDs from the beginning, and has nothing to replace.
Of course it will happen again, when the next great music technology comes along. CDs are fairly entrenched now, of course, but they won't be forever. Just as we will all have to repurchase our movies on Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD, whoever wins), we will also have to repurchase our music in some other form; perhaps the next-gen DVD in those 2.5" buisiness card-sized discs, or maybe in a solid state memory stick. Who knows? Of course, you could just keep all your music from the CD era, and rip-burn to the new medium, but Joe Average won't do that, and you won't be getting the latest, greatest, digitally remastered, remixed, and re-Surround-Sounded versions of everything. Heh... imagine someone keeping their music in a stupid lo-fi format like 44.1 kHz stereo.
Your point about the inflated numbers due to the Repurchase Effect remains valid, but I think it will happen again 10-20 years from now.
Ultimately radio served as an advertising medium and wasn't hurting sales at all. The music industry eventually made its peace with radio.
We can only hope that eventually the music industry will relearn this old lesson...
No, we really don't want P2P services to turn into the monolithic, streamlined corporate marketing scheme that radio has become. The only reason the RIAA "made peace" with radio is because they effectively took control of it. Only a very tiny fraction of stations are not owned by some corporate monstrosity like ClearChannel, who hand down playlist edicts from on high as if they were carved in stone tablets.
The music industry has truly embraced the Marketing Age, and thus (popular) music has transformed from a pull medium to a push medium. The only records in stores, basically, are the ones you hear on the radio, on TV, and are advertised everywhere; they are the low-risk, high-profit "mass-appeal" products. Once in a while a great musician will become popular, and that will allow him/her/them to overcome their indentured servitude to their recording contract. However, the majority of the "popular" acts are only semi-talented, very attractive people who are being marketed like they're the Second Coming. The internet (P2P), on the other hand, is still a haven for slightly less popular, but vastly more talented, people. I would love to see more record companies on the internet dedicated to artist's rights and proud of the music they underwrite and sell, instead of focusing so much on the business end of things that an artist becomes a "product" instead of a person (I know a few of these exist, but I can't think of any off the top of my head).
Do we really want P2P services, and by extension, the internet, to turn in to radio?
Congress should pass a law prohibiting bills from coattail-riding on other unrelated bills. If its important enough to pass a law about, its important enough to deserve its own vote.
Yeah, but that would never pass on its own. We better attach it to a farm subsidies bill and hope no one notices.
Corporate buzzword speech reminds me of Treknobabble:
"Captain! A Romulan warbird just decloaked in front of us!"
"Let's reconfigure the dilithium crystals into a transition matrix so we can force a sub-gamma tachyon anti-matter stream into the reactor core. That should disrupt the space-time fabric, creating a vortex and opening a temporal anomaly. Then we can take the ship through the anomoly to the 20th Century and kill Rick Berman, whose utilization of the value-add paradigm Gene Roddenberry oversighted helped him up-sell the product into a quality-driven deliverable and monetize the vertical market of television scifi."
"Someone get the doctor! I think the Captain's having some kind of seizure!"
I've heard repeatedly that this is not the case, as in there is no law that makes copying for personal use legal. It's only the Betamax ruling that makes it legal.
Not true. The Betamax case was certainly the first time it was ruled on, but it has since been codified into law by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which added Chapter 10 to U.S. Title 17. Check out Section 1008, "Prohibition on certain infringement actions":
Basically, if your copy is for non-commercial, non-distributive, personal use, then it's not infringement.
Now I'd like to see that language extended to all forms of copyrightable media, including television shows, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, speeches, even prints/reproductions of artwork and sculpture. I should be able to do anything I want with things I own a copy of, as long as the use is non-commercial and non-distributive (i.e., I can't make money off it, and I can't give it to anyone else).
Nor have I ever finished the paper, laid it down, and then found an ad laying in my lap underneath it!
This does, however, happen with magazines. Every time I pick up a magazine, half a dozen of those 3"x5" subcription cards fall out. Although, to be fair, none of those cards have asked me to punch a monkey.
But you would think somebody in R&D would at some point read the latest press on Batman say "Hey! I remember working on that project!"
I think the people in Wayne Enterprises all work on parts and pieces of the projects, never really knowing what they were for, and I think Alfred was supposed to be the one who assembled them into their final form. (I guess that means he also gives the Batmobile a tuneup once in a while.) With that sort of divide-and-conquer strategy, the only employees you'd have to keep quiet would be those in the Bat-Shaped Black Plastic Casings Division.
When MS-DOS 2 came out with directory support, they wanted to stay compatible (so you could use batch files from DOS 1, etc.) but with the primitive state of the applications back then, using / as both the command switch thing and directory separator would confuse them, so MS decided to use \ as the directory separator instead.
I think you have your history a little mixed up.
From Wikipedia:
"Fearing copyright infringement complaints from AT&T, Microsoft decided to use backslashes as pathname separators rather than normal forward-slashes."