A more effective financial act would be to stop buying those DVDs you want to watch under Linux -- your $20 donation to the EFF evaporates when your credit card gets charged this fall for your gee-whiz extra-deluxe wonder-wow "Fellowship of the Ring" special edition collector's cut.
Actually, Nevada played no role in the development of the weapons that ended the war. The Test Site was established afterwards when the cost of going out to the South Pacific to blow up islands got exorbitant and someone pointed out that we had a Big Empty right here at home.
Sadly, that goddamned balloon fiesta has commandeered any and all "Yay, NM!" stuff. Dollars to dildoes when our state quarter comes out it (like the license plates) will sport a Zia-marked balloon.
Uhh, we didn't "let" the Russians develop it with us, unless your definition of "let" involves failing despite heroic effort to keep the hows and such secret.
"It's pretty obvious to me that Pepsico should have the rights to pepsi.com, pepsicola.com, and pepsico.com. It's a unique name, it shouldn't be a surprise that the judges would rule in Pepsi's favor."
There are a lot of products that are flavored with pepsin and I'd be willing to wager that at least one of them is called "Pepsi". They have as much justification for the pepsi.com domain as the soft drink giant. Note: not "right". No one, not the major corporations or the plucky kid with a computer in his mom's basement, has a right to a domain name.
"We're lucky 'The National Nuclear Security Administration' even lasted through that mess of 8 years. Thoughts anyone?"
Yeah, here's a thought:
With all due respect, kwishot, like many Slashdot posters you're posting out of your ass and while you might win points among the equally ignorant you turn yourself into a laughingstock for those with a greater understanding.
The nuclear weapons complex is under the purview of the US Department of Energy. Almost since it was created from AEC/ERDA in the mid 1970s, DOE has been under attack for its poor organization, poor administration, and poor security record. Multiple panels and commissions and auditors spent their time submitting final reports and recommendations suggesting that the security aspect of the weapons complex be removed from DOE control or at least placed in the hands of a semi-autonomous agency.
After the _annus horribilis_ that was 2000 for Los Alamos, support both public and Congressional was high for these recommendations to be implemented. New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici introduced legislation which would create the National Nuclear Security Administration as a semi-autonomous agency within DOE and that legislation passed with support from both parties and was signed into law by Democratic President Clinton. (Side note: then Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, former Democratic Congressman from, yep, New Mexico, took a well-publicized pummeling from members of both parties, not least of which was West Virginia's Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, who told Richardson that he could never vote to confirm Richardson for another government position again.)
I'm not a supporter of Clinton's -- his decision to appoint Hazel O'Leary as his first Energy Secretary will be a long, Long, LONG time in overcoming (among her since-revoked brilliant ideas was eliminating the color-coded badges which were used to provide a visual cue of a person's clearance level in favor of a less "discriminatory" monochrome badge). To fall to your knees and give thanks that an agency created in the closing year of his administration survived the eight year Reign of Terror just reveals that you don't have the first clue what you're addressing. Next time you're tempted to fire off a post on a topic to whose table you bring complete ignorance, may I suggest that you instead spend a few moments educating yourself -- and only then, if you feel you have something of value to contribute, should you click on "Submit".
Look, guys, I know that most people named "Gilmore" spell it that way but you reference Dan's tech writing often enough here that you ought to know how to spell his name by now. Set your autocorrector to change "Gilmore" to "Gillmor" and you'll come out way ahead of the game, at least here on/.
Light's color is a function of its frequency, which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. Higher frequency lasers can read pits which are closer together on a disc substrate, allowing them to put more data in the same areal density as lower frequency lasers. Blue is better than red for this purpose.
Alas, it's also harder (read: more expensive) to make blue lasers and the industry has already spent a lot of money on reds, so a blue-laser technology would require the writeoff of existing gear AND the purchase of new. Not an easy sell these days.
No Amendment would be needed. Article I gives Congress the power to provide copyrights and patents, and gives a reason why it's doing that. There is no requirement that they provide such.
The difference is that with postal mail, the advertiser bears the cost. With electronic mail, the recipient does. If you have a great product that will help me INCREASE my EJACULATION by 6000%!! then by all means you're free to try to get me to buy it -- but at your expense, not mine. Unless, that is, I have been in touch with you before and been so pleased by your FREE! and LEGAL! DVD COPYING! and CABLE! DESCRAMBLER! that I've given you blanket permission to let me know of any other miracle products you have to offer.
Don't get so caught up in treating online and offline businesses "equally" and "fairly" that you neglect to see that when aspects of their conduct are different it is altogether right and proper to treat them differently.
So if you gather three of these on a store shelf and select a box, then the clerk opens one of the other two and shows you that it does NOT have a burner, should you buy the one you're holding or take the final box to the register?
As a slight clarification, the marsupials _are_ mammals. With a few oddball exceptions they meet the mammal characteristics -- for example, the platypus lays eggs, but it is a fur-bearing animal and it suckles its young when they hatch.
The rest of the world's mammal population are largely placentals. The American opossum is a marsupial, the only one I know of outside of the greater Dan Unda region.
To address the story, I'm stunned that this idea is being taken seriously. All parts of the world have seen ecodisasters caused by what "seemed like a good idea at the time". Look at the introduction of kudzu to the Southeastern US as an example. Australia, though, has been especially hammered. Cats, rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, pigs, you name it. Given the unique ecosystem of Australia, the world should support them in their efforts to protect and preserve what they still have. So maybe the marsupial isn't an evolutionary ideal -- the rise of placentals pretty well shows that -- but so what? Can't we protect something just because we want to? What makes the endangered lion and elephant so precious that we risk eliminating koalas or wombats or wallabys to protect the African critters?
"Forcing Microsoft to publish the pre release information does not guarantee that they will publish the CORRECT information nor that they will publish changes. We have been here before."
Well, we have and we haven't -- the Word story is a classic example of how the company normally does business, which is why in this case the states' settlement includes some real kick-em-in-the-nuts provisions. Were such a thing as a stealth change to APIs or formats to occur under the states' settlement, the three companies that got burned would doubtless call up the Special Master and say that the company has performed an act of Material Non-Compliance. He'd take a look and almost certainly agree, at which point the company would be subject to pretty much any punishment the Court chose to lay down.
Forcing Microsoft to adhere to a schedule of announcements is not the provision that kills the getting-around-to argument; it tells the public that whenever a Windows version is to be released the platform X version will be hot on its heels. The compliance provision of the settlement tells the public that the platform X version will be feature- and file-compatible with that Windows version.
I wish everyone would take time to read the states' proposed judgment before commenting; it would ensure that we are all discussing from a position of knowledge.
To address the "intentionally making it suck" argument, Microsoft would be required to license the necessary code to third-party vendors to do the OS ports -- Windows version code, Mac version code, whatever the licensors need. Said licensors, having paid for licenses, would have every reason to make the port as good as possible.
To address the "get around to" argument, Microsoft would be required to pre-announce upcoming releases and to provide enough information to the licensors that they can have their ports out in a timely manner. That's timely as the Court defines it, too.
This remedy is almost everything I wanted. It's better than Jackson's breakup and it's DAMNSHO better than that platter of shit served up by Ashcroft and James.
The address for comments is microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov. Owing to the anthrax hysteria, DOJ is actually asking for email rather than snail, so there's every reason to fire off a lucid, spell-checked comment to the government. Granted, the fix is in so the DOJ won't act on the feedback, but they are required to bundle it up and give it all to Judge K-K for her perusal before she ultimately decides. With enough public support for the dissenting states and contempt for the US/pet states proposal, she just might go for it. Or somewhere in-between, even. Write, write, write. Please.
I just do the postin', not the moderatin'. If I knew what goes through _their_ heads I could make a zillion dollars.
I take exception at the term "Mac-friendly propaganda", though. I bought the product because I liked its specs. I like the product and I said so, and why. In the old days, that used to be considered "word of mouth" and could be good or bad. It could make or break a new movie, a new book, a new gadget or gizmo far more effectively than any amount of advertising or promotion could do.
Liking something isn't necessarily parroting the marketing hype any more than disliking something is Baseless Slander and Unfounded Scurrilousness.
Yeah, yeah...I'm wandering a bit afield of the original topic. Just wanted to burn off a karma point or two to try to clarify my position.
The point is, I have some 60GB of MP3s on my machines...and increasing as I slowwwwly get my CDs ripped. No, I don't completely replace all the music on the iPod every time I sync it -- but I could, and it would take less time than a single trip through my.newsrc. USB types don't have that luxury.
Something I found amusing about Apple's promotional material for the iPod was the way they gushed that it would hold 100 CDs -- your Entire! Collection! Chyeah...I'm at a shade under 700 and counting. And I don't think I'm _that_ unusual with music.
As for whether we're the exceptions, I don't think we are. The people who only own a few CDs aren't going to buy a gizmo like this: they're going to take the wallet o' CDs and their DiscMan(tm)(c)(r)(pat pend) when they go out.
Now, you can call kvetching about USB a "whine" if you like, but if you could transfer data at 400 Mb/s with one connector and 12Mb/s with another -- why on earth would you tolerate the dog-slow version?
I ordered an iPod the day Apple announced it. So far since its arrival, I've taken it halfway across country patched into my car stereo, I've taken it hiking in the Jemez Mountains, I've tuned out all the banal MallMusik to get my Christmas shopping done without killing anyone, and I patch it into the ministereo in my bedroom so I can be lulled gently to sleep by whatever the randomizer kicks out.
Oh, and I've got all my important OS X data backed up onto it.
I'm completely sold on the iPod. This thing for me is to music what my TiVo is to TV: you'd have to kill me to get it outta my meaty paws.
Now, for the Treo. USB? 10GB? Are they high? Syncing a portable to (in my case) a slightly less portable shouldn't ever be something that takes an overnighter plus to accomplish. That alone would kill the Treo for me.
I'm guessing from the fact that special "music management" software is provided that there's some kind of DRM scheme involved. I like Apple's approach: every iPod comes in a plastic sleeve with "Don't steal music" on it. My machine. My ethical conundrum. They stayed out of it, as they should have.
Still, it'll be nice to get some feedback from folks who've actually used one -- I'm especially curious about the DRM speculation.
While the broken-down state of our patent system leads me to suggest that you're probably right, that's not how the system is _supposed_ to work. If you invent something new and release it to the world without a patent, your invention is prior art that would preclude anyone else from acquiring a patent on the invented technology.
I couldn't help noticing that within a few paragraphs the writeup mentioned that (1) the research was partly sponsored by DARPA and (2) patents have been applied for with one already issued. Color me bitter, but as one of the taxpayers who funded the research I can't say I'm overjoyed at the prospect of paying licensing fees to MIT through the eventual commercial implementors.
I'm all in favor of government-sponsored research. They have the resources to investigate stuff with great benefits but staggering R&D costs. I'm all in favor of universities conducting the sponsored research. Grad students are cheap (I know, I was one for many years) and the brainpower is not less than one finds in industry. However, when the government pays a university to do something new, the university's benefits should be the equipment bought for the research and the prestige that comes from doing it first/best/cheapest.
Don't worry: all that time spent wiring will not be wasted. Worst-case, they can all share a 56k dialup!
My parents are in Jeff City, MO, also under Mediacom after an AT&T unload. They lost their DNS but when I gave a fallback nameserver IP to my dad he was back in business. Mailservers were still working, too, which I find rather odd. Why pull the plug on your nameservers and leave the mailservers up?
Dan Parisi owns a ton of "sucks" websites with no content on them. His name turns up time and again in these UDRP stories because of that.
Is he a squatter? Of course he is. But he's not registering these domains in bad faith to shake down the entities which purportedly "suck", he's doing it to shake down the pissed-off people who get burned by Corporation X and want to put up a "sucks" site.
This has implications well beyond music. A tiny disc like this with a decent capacity can fit into the little devices we've all come to know and love: PDAs, digital stillcams, those little voice recorders for saving interviews and lectures for later transcription or transfer to parent Big Iron (and whoever thought that a PC would one day represent "Big Iron" in our portable lives?) and on and on and on.
So let's set aside "dethroning the CD" for a bit and talk about dethroning the other storage technologies: Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Smart Media, MicroDrive, and whatever else is floating around out there. For now, I own a couple of iPaqs with CF jackets, a stillcam with CF, and a camcorder which can save stills onto MemStick were I so inclined (I'm not). To integrate DataPlay's technology into _that_ aspect of my digital life would require the purchase of replacement technology or of adapters that add bulk and subtract convenience. Why change from my effective standardization on CF?
These disks have moving parts. That's Bad for mobile devices -- just the kind of thing where a small, high-data-density gizmo is most valuable. At the moment, DataPlay's storage capacity is reported to be 500MB for $10. I took a quick look at B&H's website and found a 512 MB CF for $800. Definitely a price win for DataPlay even given that a little time with a search engine would undoubtedly turn up a lower price. Same place, 128 MB of Smart Media can be had for $100. 128MB MemStick is $120. So the current market leaders in solid-state are not price competitive with DataPlay right now. The key differences are that they are here, now, in the market and that as with all computer-y doodads, their price is plunging.
We'll see if DataPlay ever releases an actual product or just manages to use press releases to get newspaper stories written. If they _do_ get something out there, we'll see if it costs what they claim it will, whether it's easy to come by, and whether the medium comes so crippled with hardware-level DRM that pictures I take in a digital camera can only be dumped to a single computer using a special program (a la the Media Manager that MS uses to get music from CD-in-PC onto an iPaq). If it's easy-to-use and recognizes that I the buyer am to be the determiner of what is done with the stored content, if it can be written on a bajillion times before giving out, if it has a price-per-convenience that undercuts the other folks then it could be a winning tech despite the moving parts. If, on the other hand, they focus so hard on uncopyable recorded music that it loses its usefulness in other technologies then it'll likely die and good riddance. (Of course, with built-in DRM it could be the first medium approved by Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).)
It's interesting that Levy thinks the end of snail mail is in sight when digital means of authentication are rarely used -- when available. Now that Sen. Gregg and his like-minded compatriots have launched another offensive on crypto software, expect the issue to get even more snarled. It takes more than "Sincerely, Jim" at the bottom of an email to make me trust its source.
"Justiciable" is not a made-up word. I learned all about that particular word when I missed it in the Mid-South Spelling Bee in Memphis, TN, many years ago...thanks for dredging up memories of childhood failure...back to the therapists's couch for me, ya rascal.
Slashdot Mirror
A more effective financial act would be to stop buying those DVDs you want to watch under Linux -- your $20 donation to the EFF evaporates when your credit card gets charged this fall for your gee-whiz extra-deluxe wonder-wow "Fellowship of the Ring" special edition collector's cut.
Actually, Nevada played no role in the development of the weapons that ended the war. The Test Site was established afterwards when the cost of going out to the South Pacific to blow up islands got exorbitant and someone pointed out that we had a Big Empty right here at home.
Sadly, that goddamned balloon fiesta has commandeered any and all "Yay, NM!" stuff. Dollars to dildoes when our state quarter comes out it (like the license plates) will sport a Zia-marked balloon.
Uhh, we didn't "let" the Russians develop it with us, unless your definition of "let" involves failing despite heroic effort to keep the hows and such secret.
"It's pretty obvious to me that Pepsico should have the rights to pepsi.com, pepsicola.com, and pepsico.com. It's a unique name, it shouldn't be a surprise that the judges would rule in Pepsi's favor."
There are a lot of products that are flavored with pepsin and I'd be willing to wager that at least one of them is called "Pepsi". They have as much justification for the pepsi.com domain as the soft drink giant. Note: not "right". No one, not the major corporations or the plucky kid with a computer in his mom's basement, has a right to a domain name.
"We're lucky 'The National Nuclear Security Administration' even lasted through that mess of 8 years. Thoughts anyone?"
Yeah, here's a thought:
With all due respect, kwishot, like many Slashdot posters you're posting out of your ass and while you might win points among the equally ignorant you turn yourself into a laughingstock for those with a greater understanding.
The nuclear weapons complex is under the purview of the US Department of Energy. Almost since it was created from AEC/ERDA in the mid 1970s, DOE has been under attack for its poor organization, poor administration, and poor security record. Multiple panels and commissions and auditors spent their time submitting final reports and recommendations suggesting that the security aspect of the weapons complex be removed from DOE control or at least placed in the hands of a semi-autonomous agency.
After the _annus horribilis_ that was 2000 for Los Alamos, support both public and Congressional was high for these recommendations to be implemented. New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici introduced legislation which would create the National Nuclear Security Administration as a semi-autonomous agency within DOE and that legislation passed with support from both parties and was signed into law by Democratic President Clinton. (Side note: then Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, former Democratic Congressman from, yep, New Mexico, took a well-publicized pummeling from members of both parties, not least of which was West Virginia's Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, who told Richardson that he could never vote to confirm Richardson for another government position again.)
I'm not a supporter of Clinton's -- his decision to appoint Hazel O'Leary as his first Energy Secretary will be a long, Long, LONG time in overcoming (among her since-revoked brilliant ideas was eliminating the color-coded badges which were used to provide a visual cue of a person's clearance level in favor of a less "discriminatory" monochrome badge). To fall to your knees and give thanks that an agency created in the closing year of his administration survived the eight year Reign of Terror just reveals that you don't have the first clue what you're addressing. Next time you're tempted to fire off a post on a topic to whose table you bring complete ignorance, may I suggest that you instead spend a few moments educating yourself -- and only then, if you feel you have something of value to contribute, should you click on "Submit".
Look, guys, I know that most people named "Gilmore" spell it that way but you reference Dan's tech writing often enough here that you ought to know how to spell his name by now. Set your autocorrector to change "Gilmore" to "Gillmor" and you'll come out way ahead of the game, at least here on /.
"A democracy is 2 wolves and one sheep voting on whats for dinner."
Whereas a republic is two wolves and one sheep voting for the person who will decide what's for dinner.
The color.
Light's color is a function of its frequency, which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. Higher frequency lasers can read pits which are closer together on a disc substrate, allowing them to put more data in the same areal density as lower frequency lasers. Blue is better than red for this purpose.
Alas, it's also harder (read: more expensive) to make blue lasers and the industry has already spent a lot of money on reds, so a blue-laser technology would require the writeoff of existing gear AND the purchase of new. Not an easy sell these days.
No Amendment would be needed. Article I gives Congress the power to provide copyrights and patents, and gives a reason why it's doing that. There is no requirement that they provide such.
The difference is that with postal mail, the advertiser bears the cost. With electronic mail, the recipient does. If you have a great product that will help me INCREASE my EJACULATION by 6000%!! then by all means you're free to try to get me to buy it -- but at your expense, not mine. Unless, that is, I have been in touch with you before and been so pleased by your FREE! and LEGAL! DVD COPYING! and CABLE! DESCRAMBLER! that I've given you blanket permission to let me know of any other miracle products you have to offer.
Don't get so caught up in treating online and offline businesses "equally" and "fairly" that you neglect to see that when aspects of their conduct are different it is altogether right and proper to treat them differently.
Goddammit, people. This ain't rocket science.
So if you gather three of these on a store shelf and select a box, then the clerk opens one of the other two and shows you that it does NOT have a burner, should you buy the one you're holding or take the final box to the register?
As a slight clarification, the marsupials _are_ mammals. With a few oddball exceptions they meet the mammal characteristics -- for example, the platypus lays eggs, but it is a fur-bearing animal and it suckles its young when they hatch.
The rest of the world's mammal population are largely placentals. The American opossum is a marsupial, the only one I know of outside of the greater Dan Unda region.
To address the story, I'm stunned that this idea is being taken seriously. All parts of the world have seen ecodisasters caused by what "seemed like a good idea at the time". Look at the introduction of kudzu to the Southeastern US as an example. Australia, though, has been especially hammered. Cats, rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, pigs, you name it. Given the unique ecosystem of Australia, the world should support them in their efforts to protect and preserve what they still have. So maybe the marsupial isn't an evolutionary ideal -- the rise of placentals pretty well shows that -- but so what? Can't we protect something just because we want to? What makes the endangered lion and elephant so precious that we risk eliminating koalas or wombats or wallabys to protect the African critters?
"Forcing Microsoft to publish the pre release information does not guarantee that they will publish the CORRECT information nor that they will publish changes. We have been here before."
Well, we have and we haven't -- the Word story is a classic example of how the company normally does business, which is why in this case the states' settlement includes some real kick-em-in-the-nuts provisions. Were such a thing as a stealth change to APIs or formats to occur under the states' settlement, the three companies that got burned would doubtless call up the Special Master and say that the company has performed an act of Material Non-Compliance. He'd take a look and almost certainly agree, at which point the company would be subject to pretty much any punishment the Court chose to lay down.
Forcing Microsoft to adhere to a schedule of announcements is not the provision that kills the getting-around-to argument; it tells the public that whenever a Windows version is to be released the platform X version will be hot on its heels. The compliance provision of the settlement tells the public that the platform X version will be feature- and file-compatible with that Windows version.
I wish everyone would take time to read the states' proposed judgment before commenting; it would ensure that we are all discussing from a position of knowledge.
To address the "intentionally making it suck" argument, Microsoft would be required to license the necessary code to third-party vendors to do the OS ports -- Windows version code, Mac version code, whatever the licensors need. Said licensors, having paid for licenses, would have every reason to make the port as good as possible.
To address the "get around to" argument, Microsoft would be required to pre-announce upcoming releases and to provide enough information to the licensors that they can have their ports out in a timely manner. That's timely as the Court defines it, too.
This remedy is almost everything I wanted. It's better than Jackson's breakup and it's DAMNSHO better than that platter of shit served up by Ashcroft and James.
The address for comments is microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov. Owing to the anthrax hysteria, DOJ is actually asking for email rather than snail, so there's every reason to fire off a lucid, spell-checked comment to the government. Granted, the fix is in so the DOJ won't act on the feedback, but they are required to bundle it up and give it all to Judge K-K for her perusal before she ultimately decides. With enough public support for the dissenting states and contempt for the US/pet states proposal, she just might go for it. Or somewhere in-between, even. Write, write, write. Please.
I just do the postin', not the moderatin'. If I knew what goes through _their_ heads I could make a zillion dollars.
I take exception at the term "Mac-friendly propaganda", though. I bought the product because I liked its specs. I like the product and I said so, and why. In the old days, that used to be considered "word of mouth" and could be good or bad. It could make or break a new movie, a new book, a new gadget or gizmo far more effectively than any amount of advertising or promotion could do.
Liking something isn't necessarily parroting the marketing hype any more than disliking something is Baseless Slander and Unfounded Scurrilousness.
Yeah, yeah...I'm wandering a bit afield of the original topic. Just wanted to burn off a karma point or two to try to clarify my position.
The point is, I have some 60GB of MP3s on my machines...and increasing as I slowwwwly get my CDs ripped. No, I don't completely replace all the music on the iPod every time I sync it -- but I could, and it would take less time than a single trip through my .newsrc. USB types don't have that luxury.
Something I found amusing about Apple's promotional material for the iPod was the way they gushed that it would hold 100 CDs -- your Entire! Collection! Chyeah...I'm at a shade under 700 and counting. And I don't think I'm _that_ unusual with music.
As for whether we're the exceptions, I don't think we are. The people who only own a few CDs aren't going to buy a gizmo like this: they're going to take the wallet o' CDs and their DiscMan(tm)(c)(r)(pat pend) when they go out.
Now, you can call kvetching about USB a "whine" if you like, but if you could transfer data at 400 Mb/s with one connector and 12Mb/s with another -- why on earth would you tolerate the dog-slow version?
I ordered an iPod the day Apple announced it. So far since its arrival, I've taken it halfway across country patched into my car stereo, I've taken it hiking in the Jemez Mountains, I've tuned out all the banal MallMusik to get my Christmas shopping done without killing anyone, and I patch it into the ministereo in my bedroom so I can be lulled gently to sleep by whatever the randomizer kicks out.
Oh, and I've got all my important OS X data backed up onto it.
I'm completely sold on the iPod. This thing for me is to music what my TiVo is to TV: you'd have to kill me to get it outta my meaty paws.
Now, for the Treo. USB? 10GB? Are they high? Syncing a portable to (in my case) a slightly less portable shouldn't ever be something that takes an overnighter plus to accomplish. That alone would kill the Treo for me.
I'm guessing from the fact that special "music management" software is provided that there's some kind of DRM scheme involved. I like Apple's approach: every iPod comes in a plastic sleeve with "Don't steal music" on it. My machine. My ethical conundrum. They stayed out of it, as they should have.
Still, it'll be nice to get some feedback from folks who've actually used one -- I'm especially curious about the DRM speculation.
While the broken-down state of our patent system leads me to suggest that you're probably right, that's not how the system is _supposed_ to work. If you invent something new and release it to the world without a patent, your invention is prior art that would preclude anyone else from acquiring a patent on the invented technology.
I couldn't help noticing that within a few paragraphs the writeup mentioned that (1) the research was partly sponsored by DARPA and (2) patents have been applied for with one already issued. Color me bitter, but as one of the taxpayers who funded the research I can't say I'm overjoyed at the prospect of paying licensing fees to MIT through the eventual commercial implementors.
I'm all in favor of government-sponsored research. They have the resources to investigate stuff with great benefits but staggering R&D costs. I'm all in favor of universities conducting the sponsored research. Grad students are cheap (I know, I was one for many years) and the brainpower is not less than one finds in industry. However, when the government pays a university to do something new, the university's benefits should be the equipment bought for the research and the prestige that comes from doing it first/best/cheapest.
Don't worry: all that time spent wiring will not be wasted. Worst-case, they can all share a 56k dialup!
My parents are in Jeff City, MO, also under Mediacom after an AT&T unload. They lost their DNS but when I gave a fallback nameserver IP to my dad he was back in business. Mailservers were still working, too, which I find rather odd. Why pull the plug on your nameservers and leave the mailservers up?
Dan Parisi owns a ton of "sucks" websites with no content on them. His name turns up time and again in these UDRP stories because of that.
Is he a squatter? Of course he is. But he's not registering these domains in bad faith to shake down the entities which purportedly "suck", he's doing it to shake down the pissed-off people who get burned by Corporation X and want to put up a "sucks" site.
This has implications well beyond music. A tiny disc like this with a decent capacity can fit into the little devices we've all come to know and love: PDAs, digital stillcams, those little voice recorders for saving interviews and lectures for later transcription or transfer to parent Big Iron (and whoever thought that a PC would one day represent "Big Iron" in our portable lives?) and on and on and on.
So let's set aside "dethroning the CD" for a bit and talk about dethroning the other storage technologies: Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Smart Media, MicroDrive, and whatever else is floating around out there. For now, I own a couple of iPaqs with CF jackets, a stillcam with CF, and a camcorder which can save stills onto MemStick were I so inclined (I'm not). To integrate DataPlay's technology into _that_ aspect of my digital life would require the purchase of replacement technology or of adapters that add bulk and subtract convenience. Why change from my effective standardization on CF?
These disks have moving parts. That's Bad for mobile devices -- just the kind of thing where a small, high-data-density gizmo is most valuable. At the moment, DataPlay's storage capacity is reported to be 500MB for $10. I took a quick look at B&H's website and found a 512 MB CF for $800. Definitely a price win for DataPlay even given that a little time with a search engine would undoubtedly turn up a lower price. Same place, 128 MB of Smart Media can be had for $100. 128MB MemStick is $120. So the current market leaders in solid-state are not price competitive with DataPlay right now. The key differences are that they are here, now, in the market and that as with all computer-y doodads, their price is plunging.
We'll see if DataPlay ever releases an actual product or just manages to use press releases to get newspaper stories written. If they _do_ get something out there, we'll see if it costs what they claim it will, whether it's easy to come by, and whether the medium comes so crippled with hardware-level DRM that pictures I take in a digital camera can only be dumped to a single computer using a special program (a la the Media Manager that MS uses to get music from CD-in-PC onto an iPaq). If it's easy-to-use and recognizes that I the buyer am to be the determiner of what is done with the stored content, if it can be written on a bajillion times before giving out, if it has a price-per-convenience that undercuts the other folks then it could be a winning tech despite the moving parts. If, on the other hand, they focus so hard on uncopyable recorded music that it loses its usefulness in other technologies then it'll likely die and good riddance. (Of course, with built-in DRM it could be the first medium approved by Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).)
It's interesting that Levy thinks the end of snail mail is in sight when digital means of authentication are rarely used -- when available. Now that Sen. Gregg and his like-minded compatriots have launched another offensive on crypto software, expect the issue to get even more snarled. It takes more than "Sincerely, Jim" at the bottom of an email to make me trust its source.
"Justiciable" is not a made-up word. I learned all about that particular word when I missed it in the Mid-South Spelling Bee in Memphis, TN, many years ago...thanks for dredging up memories of childhood failure...back to the therapists's couch for me, ya rascal.