Personally I think a little protectionism might be in order. Not against websites (there's a justification for lower prices when you buy online), but against supermarkets - they have a tendency to drop the price of a given week's big book, DVD, game etc. down to cost or below to lure people into the store where they will then do their regular shop. Bookstores etc. then can't lure people into their stores to buy the given week's big book, plus a couple of other books with any luck, and go out of business. There's a worrying trend towards centralising your entire week's purchasing into a single store.
At the end of the day, though, this instance is just brick-and-mortar stores crying foul against online stores, which I'm sure they wish they had a legal basis for more often, and which isn't all that reasonable.
This makes me wonder if the story hasn't got it all backwards. At the time when Tivo was taking off, most of the UK got by with analogue terrestrial TV, and punching in Videoplus codes from the TV guide or Teletext to record things. There were plenty of cable and satellite TV customers, but until Sky+ appeared (at its massive premium) nobody was pushing the PVR option and all the boxes were set up to make it as easy as possible to set up a VHS recording. Meanwhile, people's VCRs were breaking down. What were they going to replace them with? PVRs just don't exist as far as stores and cable/sat companies are concerned. Not another VCR, videotape's an old technology, DVD's the new thing. And so the showrooms squeezed the VCRs out in favour of expensive, shiny new DVD recorders with customers snapped up.
That's why DVD recorders are popular - because nobody knew PVRs existed.
If it's a hoax, it's a half-decade old one. Be sure to check out the demo video if you can find it, and bear in mind that a 1.61GB Memory Stick was a big deal once upon a time.
The Atom Chip website has changed a lot since I first saw it, the only constant seeming to be the slogan about nanomicrons (femtometres?). "Back in the day", their website's images were mostly HTML-resized giganto-pics, but if you trudged through it, you found an absolute gem. They've taken it down for obvious reasons, but the Internet Archive still has the classic, the unforgettable, Solar Memory demo video.
When I was a lad, just starting out at university, back when nobody uncool knew what an iPod was, the biggest you could get was something like a 15GB version for £250, and it was a hard drive because as a rule of thumb, you couldn't fit more anything of value on a flash player. I was browsing on play.com last night, and Creative are doing a 16GB all-Flash player for about £160. That in itself wasn't surprising, as 16GB isn't much these days, but thinking back, this was one memory technology completely replacing another in a particular application. Really, I could see SSDs completely replacing hard drives in certain consumer products at the rate this is going. Joe and Jane public's internet box doesn't really need more than 50GB, does it? It'll keep them storing 10-megapixel holiday snaps for years.
It's the superconductivity which is really important. Nuclear imaging and experimental high-energy physics are pretty much dependent on magnets at liquid helium temperatures. So, no MRIs in hospitals, and the likes of CERN (and other Big Physics Things) would become multi-million-dollar holes in the ground. Both of those would be pretty disasterous steps backwards for mankind, all for the want of two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons.
That loophole was closed long before the PS3 was released. PS3 Linux is pretty obviously a continuation of the largely inexplicable Net Yaroze and PS2 Linux projects. YABASIC, for the PS2, was an effort to go for the PC classification.
This is quite a bit smaller than that, and considerably easier to assemble. Did your parents fob you off with boxes of old TV components and claim that was Lego or something?
I expect that the megalithic entertainment mills who would enjoy these changes will just pass down a list of verboten phrases to the ISPs, and anyone else who has their IP infringed can get stuffed.
It wasn't designed to have bad optics. The big-name private contractor who built the mirror screwed up because they misassembled one of the instruments used in manufacturing it. This sort of thing happens all the time of course - recall that the Genesis capsule cratered in the desert because Lockheed-Martin installed an accelerometer backwards and skipped the test which would've spotted the mistake.
I think you'll find almost all of the world recognises the concept of intellectual property, but while some countries came down on the side of protecting commercial interests, the rest of the world came down on the side of protecting the fair use provisions of their own copyright law.
RGB SCART's popularity probably has an effect too. YPbPr component video's been viewed as rather a high-end feature in my experience (coming on either progressive scan or HD TVs), but every TV in Europe since the middle of the 1990s pretty much has an RGB socket on it, from the 14" portable upwards. The video quality of any component video system in comparison to composite is pretty staggering.
Strictly speaking, they're only in trouble with Apple Records if that remote decides to set up a record label. Given the music industry's notorious, noxious racism against anthropomorphised consumer electronics, I don't think that's likely.
Evidently astronomy majors have to take what they can get. Oh, who am I kidding, I'm in chemistry. The best I get is that I can stare enviously at those biology jocks with all their hot undergrab lab assistants.
Surely the entire point of "fair use" is that it allows one to generate copies without the prior authorisation of the copyright holder ("unfair" uses would require such authorisation to be legal), and hence their use of the word "authorisation" in this context is rigorously accurate?
This happened in the last one of these stories, which was Arstechnica IIRC. Yes, the RIAA case says that taking a CD and ripping MP3s from it is making unauthorised copies. No, the RIAA case does not say that making the unauthorised copies is illegal. Those were the personal opinion of Jennifer Pariser when she was asked about it in a completely different case. It is not a part of their legal argument.
The licence agreements which came with many videogames I bought in the 1990s (PAL-land) came with those sorts of terms in the "this software is licenced, not sold" blurb. There was a clause which allows me to order a replacement in exchange for the trashed disk and a small fee. Activision's PlayStation port of Quake II had it, definitely.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think a little protectionism might be in order. Not against websites (there's a justification for lower prices when you buy online), but against supermarkets - they have a tendency to drop the price of a given week's big book, DVD, game etc. down to cost or below to lure people into the store where they will then do their regular shop. Bookstores etc. then can't lure people into their stores to buy the given week's big book, plus a couple of other books with any luck, and go out of business. There's a worrying trend towards centralising your entire week's purchasing into a single store.
At the end of the day, though, this instance is just brick-and-mortar stores crying foul against online stores, which I'm sure they wish they had a legal basis for more often, and which isn't all that reasonable.
This makes me wonder if the story hasn't got it all backwards. At the time when Tivo was taking off, most of the UK got by with analogue terrestrial TV, and punching in Videoplus codes from the TV guide or Teletext to record things. There were plenty of cable and satellite TV customers, but until Sky+ appeared (at its massive premium) nobody was pushing the PVR option and all the boxes were set up to make it as easy as possible to set up a VHS recording. Meanwhile, people's VCRs were breaking down. What were they going to replace them with? PVRs just don't exist as far as stores and cable/sat companies are concerned. Not another VCR, videotape's an old technology, DVD's the new thing. And so the showrooms squeezed the VCRs out in favour of expensive, shiny new DVD recorders with customers snapped up.
That's why DVD recorders are popular - because nobody knew PVRs existed.
Five, any chemist could tell you that.
Your wish is my command. (Might not be live yet.)
If it's a hoax, it's a half-decade old one. Be sure to check out the demo video if you can find it, and bear in mind that a 1.61GB Memory Stick was a big deal once upon a time.
A femtometre, clearly. I'm apalled at your scant knowledge of SI prefixes.
The Atom Chip website has changed a lot since I first saw it, the only constant seeming to be the slogan about nanomicrons (femtometres?). "Back in the day", their website's images were mostly HTML-resized giganto-pics, but if you trudged through it, you found an absolute gem. They've taken it down for obvious reasons, but the Internet Archive still has the classic, the unforgettable, Solar Memory demo video.
When I was a lad, just starting out at university, back when nobody uncool knew what an iPod was, the biggest you could get was something like a 15GB version for £250, and it was a hard drive because as a rule of thumb, you couldn't fit more anything of value on a flash player. I was browsing on play.com last night, and Creative are doing a 16GB all-Flash player for about £160. That in itself wasn't surprising, as 16GB isn't much these days, but thinking back, this was one memory technology completely replacing another in a particular application. Really, I could see SSDs completely replacing hard drives in certain consumer products at the rate this is going. Joe and Jane public's internet box doesn't really need more than 50GB, does it? It'll keep them storing 10-megapixel holiday snaps for years.
It's the superconductivity which is really important. Nuclear imaging and experimental high-energy physics are pretty much dependent on magnets at liquid helium temperatures. So, no MRIs in hospitals, and the likes of CERN (and other Big Physics Things) would become multi-million-dollar holes in the ground. Both of those would be pretty disasterous steps backwards for mankind, all for the want of two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons.
That loophole was closed long before the PS3 was released. PS3 Linux is pretty obviously a continuation of the largely inexplicable Net Yaroze and PS2 Linux projects. YABASIC, for the PS2, was an effort to go for the PC classification.
Note that Vista defaults to (and in some cases forces, I believe) write caching on USB mass storage.
This is quite a bit smaller than that, and considerably easier to assemble. Did your parents fob you off with boxes of old TV components and claim that was Lego or something?
I expect that the megalithic entertainment mills who would enjoy these changes will just pass down a list of verboten phrases to the ISPs, and anyone else who has their IP infringed can get stuffed.
Ack, dammit, that's what I get for speed-reading.
The research indicates that such a thing is more likely than we had assumed, but nobody's actually done this yet, not even on lab animals.
It wasn't designed to have bad optics. The big-name private contractor who built the mirror screwed up because they misassembled one of the instruments used in manufacturing it. This sort of thing happens all the time of course - recall that the Genesis capsule cratered in the desert because Lockheed-Martin installed an accelerometer backwards and skipped the test which would've spotted the mistake.
I think you'll find almost all of the world recognises the concept of intellectual property, but while some countries came down on the side of protecting commercial interests, the rest of the world came down on the side of protecting the fair use provisions of their own copyright law.
RGB SCART's popularity probably has an effect too. YPbPr component video's been viewed as rather a high-end feature in my experience (coming on either progressive scan or HD TVs), but every TV in Europe since the middle of the 1990s pretty much has an RGB socket on it, from the 14" portable upwards. The video quality of any component video system in comparison to composite is pretty staggering.
The moon's called friggin' Europa. We totally have dibs.
Strictly speaking, they're only in trouble with Apple Records if that remote decides to set up a record label. Given the music industry's notorious, noxious racism against anthropomorphised consumer electronics, I don't think that's likely.
Evidently astronomy majors have to take what they can get. Oh, who am I kidding, I'm in chemistry. The best I get is that I can stare enviously at those biology jocks with all their hot undergrab lab assistants.
Surely the entire point of "fair use" is that it allows one to generate copies without the prior authorisation of the copyright holder ("unfair" uses would require such authorisation to be legal), and hence their use of the word "authorisation" in this context is rigorously accurate?
This happened in the last one of these stories, which was Arstechnica IIRC. Yes, the RIAA case says that taking a CD and ripping MP3s from it is making unauthorised copies. No, the RIAA case does not say that making the unauthorised copies is illegal. Those were the personal opinion of Jennifer Pariser when she was asked about it in a completely different case. It is not a part of their legal argument.
The licence agreements which came with many videogames I bought in the 1990s (PAL-land) came with those sorts of terms in the "this software is licenced, not sold" blurb. There was a clause which allows me to order a replacement in exchange for the trashed disk and a small fee. Activision's PlayStation port of Quake II had it, definitely.
Yeah, that's the meaning I was using. I really need to get out of the lab more, for my vocabulary's sake.