Parent poster said he/she got HD. They didn't say 1080p, 720p still counts as HD. 720X1280 really does look pretty good, and it is about half the bitrate of 1080p. I know 1080p is the holy grail (currently) of an HD system, but 720 will stream across a 802.11g network.
Another option, 1080i, uses less bandwidth without a huge quality loss. 1080i is 1080p interpolated: basically even rows refresh, then odd rows, alternating. This way you only have to send about half the signal and the quality is pretty close to as good.
So again, if you use a good codec, and use 1080i or 720p, you can get pretty good HD for under 20Mb/s. Of course when the 802.11n standard comes out (if ever), aside from the increased reach, it is supposed to offer roughly 10x the bandwidth currently offered by 802.11g.
Adapted from my blog.
I know this is blasphemous, but there isn't enough litigation over patents. By this I mean actual court cases, there are plenty of threats. Only 1.5% of all patents are litigated, and only.1% are litigated to trial (of that.1%, over 50% are invalidated). This is far too little. Let me explain.
We know the level of litigation is too little because of positive externalities associated with litigation. If the accusor loses, invalidating a patent benefits everyone, not just the firm that sues for the invalidation. If the accusor wins, clarity in validity also benefits others. So there is a free riding problem with litigation (especially since it is so costly).
Lets say I hold a patent on tennis shoes and I expect to make a million dollars from that patent. If another shoe maker named Nike sues me over the patent, how much would I be willing to spend to defend the patent? $999,999. How much would Nike be willing to spend to invalidate the patent? Invalidating the patent doesn't give Nike a monopoly, so assuming in a competitive model there are no (or lower than monopoly) profits for Nike. So Nike would be willing to spend less to invalidate the patent than I would to keep the patent valid. Thus it may in Nike's best interest to just license a completely ludicrous patent. That seems to be what happened here.
Not only is this litigation costly, but anyone found infringing on a patent in court pays TRIPLE the claimed damages! That is high stakes indeed. To add to this problem, the alleged infringer bears the burden of proof, that the patent is invalid or that they didn't violate the patent. The wording for proof is "clear and convincing evidence," that is strong wording. So it shouldn't be surprising to find that 95% of all defendants settle without going to court.
A good way to produce more clarifying litigation is to create incentives to litigate. One idea (which I think is a bad one) is to allow the government to challenge patents. A better idea is to offer a bounty on invalidated patents. One problem with the bounty idea is that mostly worthless patents would be invalidated this way, but if you limited the bounty to licensed patents, you could eliminate a lot of this problem. The bounty could be grant the patent to the challenger for a few years, or be a flat rate payment. Lastly, there are public interest groups already doing great work towards this end (such as the EFF and Public Patent Foundation), by funding them with incentives or grants we could improve the situation.
Another fix is to force firms to litigation. By capping the dollar value of settling, firms my opt for a court remedy rather than an out of court secret agreement. Limiting settling and other forms of collusion makes more information public, which can benefit more people.
The third option for getting more litigation is to reduce costs of litigation. Removing the 3X payout, decreasing the time in court, and changing the wording from "clear and convincing evidence" to something less strong. Even shifting some of the burden of proof towards the accusor would speed things along. One other option to make litigation more affordable is to penalize accusers for refuted claims--since the general practice is to claim as much as possible and see what sticks (see SCO for an example).
It is a crying shame that Apple just paid off the patent trolls here. Had they put up the $100 million into a legal fund and gotten this rediculous patent invalidated, it would have benefitted society. Who knows who else will get hit with this silly patent claim now? It isn't Apple's job to benefit society, but as long as we keep feeding the trolls, we'll have to keep paying.
Actually, ATI/AMD is talking about open-sourcing their drivers too. nVidia already has pretty functional GNU/Linux drivers (albeit closed source), so with these other two GNU/Linux could finally have the support it needs to be a viable desktop alternative.
Now if only we could get some open sourced drivers for higher end sound cards and more obscure wireless cards.
Don't forget the famous settlers of Catan from Germany, as well as for sale and bohnanza. All spectacular games in their own right - the first through pure strategy - the second two through haggling. Citadels is also a fun little game, rife with strategy particularly through guessing about opponents. My wife, myself and our couple friends play these games fairly frequently.
I wouldn't say Americans haven't created great games (balderdash & stratego come to mind), but more so Americans haven't in a long time. Americans aren't alone though - the best the Japanese have done recently is stuff like Pokemon & Yu-Gi-Oh.
This shows that any number of Closed Source companies, working in concert / collusion / tandem... have lost to one single man - Richard Stallman, and his GPL.Plus IBM's millions of dollars, lawyer expertise, and tenacity. (Just imagine if SCO sued Linus Torvaalds instead of IBM - it might be a different issue).
Seriously you believe this? Really I'm not trolling, I just don't understand why a victory in a lawsuit against IBM (and incidentally, GNU/Linux) signals the end of proprietary software. Just because the license is valid, and no one swiped any source, doesn't mean all closed-source stuff will fail - to me it just means that SCO was a crap business. As far as I can tell, companies will still produce closed-source stuff and will continue to make money doing it.
That said, the GPL has some advantages in lawsuits like this - it is quite resistant to copyright issues. If a GPL'd program has some swiped code in it, and if we know where the code is, it is much more trivial to replace and prove that the infringing code is gone. Of course due to the fragmented nature, and low cost, of Linux it'd be harder to pay damages if found guilty.
I like google groups better than the google linux search, but I don't think either are the best sites. IMHO any site that purports to have all answers to all linux questions isn't going to do very well with any semi-complex question. They just can't have the know-how.
IRC channels are good, but it is kind of like IM - if the devs aren't on you're out of luck.
Getting as specific a location as you can will help (e.g. the google group on Debian is better than the one on Linux users for Debian problems). That is why IRC is great when you have a reasonably well-researched and specific question. Before you ask a dev (who may be working on fixing the problem, or may have already fixed it, or may be plagued by the same question over and over again) please read how to ask a question properly. That way you are maximizing the chance that you get the right answer, people won't get mad at you, and you won't be wasting anyone else's time.
Our IT department actually found one through TIDF. They found the "best fit" for us for free, and quoted us a price that was slighly higher than the one found on the website. So out IT guys got the name from TIDF then went to the other firm, told them they were referred by TIDF and signed up. (It was net mass btw - it is pretty pricey, but the support is great and we don't back up much data).
Me? I've only personally used mozy and while I liked it, it fails your requirement of linux compatibility (which is why I dumped it for my own little homebrew NAS). There is a lot of advice all over the internet listing online back up souces, but make sure you personally know the referrer before you trust them with your backup source (i.e. don't trust me).
You are right, it isn't viable. Maybe when the 802.11n standard is finalized, municipal wifi will be a good idea.
I know this sounds cliche, but it is true. With the gazillion FOR profit businesses out there, if municipal wifi made sense from a cost/benefit perspective anywhere on a wide scale, businesses would fall all over themselves to offer it. May with the "N" standard, it'll make sense (if businesses have a really good way to keep leechers off), then it is fine for cities to step in.
OTOH this is Boston - the big dig has been one of the biggest wastes of tax payer money on a state level ever seen. I'm glad I don't live in Mass. & I'm not subsidizing this.
If you are going to need that money at the end of college (say 4 years) mutual funds are dangerous. Overall they do 10% or better, but over the course of any given time they may lose money. Index funds are a little safer and generally they out perform most mutual funds (since there are no brokerage fees).
CDs aren't bad either, they are safe and do better than most savings accounts, but they tie up your money. The best option I've found is hsbc online savings accounts. I don't work for HSBC, but at a guaranteed 5%, how can you go wrong? Plus it is variable interest rates, so if interest rates go up, so does your interest rate. I put a few grand in there and it started at 4%, it is up to 5.05% now. Of course the rate could go down, but it'd be surprising to see it go below what normal savings accounts give - plus if it does you can withdraw all your money electronically. The catch is that it is an entirely online account - no atm cards, no branches to withdraw - you must deposit and withdraw entirely online. But nowadays that is hardly an issue if you have another bank account that supports online transfers.
Ironically enough, the Air marshalls are basically ensuring they won't stop any terrorists. The list will become so bloated, cumbersome, invasive and obnoxious that people will stop taking it seriously. The real work of hunting down potential terrorists - that some of the marshalls did - will be drowned out by innocent people who looked at the lazy marshalls cross eyed.
Often, beurocracy cannot sustain its own weight. It expands and expands until it cannot do the purpose for which it was designed. Then it gets axed by a budget cutter, is reincarnated as lightweight version of itself, and expands until... you get the idea. It isn't a viscious cycle so much as a waste of resources and failed programs.
Maybe it has to do with leisure. Will you take more vacation when you are getting paid more or less? For most people they'll take more vacation when they are paid more - the difference between 10 & 11 million isn't as big to them as the difference between 1 and 2 million. As such, you'd expect the highest paid CEOs to take the most time off - and do the least work. The difference gets more significant as workers are salaried and have more control over their schedules.
Now this assumes the CEOs matter a lot, and that an extra month of vacation in a year hurts the entire company. I'm not sure I buy that entirely, but it is worth considering.
I did that once to my father. He insisted that IE was fine and he didn't want Mozilla, but hated popups & spyware - so he ran like 4 other programs to stop popups, find spyware and whatnot.
Anyhow, I installed firefox, then installed the firefoxie theme that skins ff to look like IE, and changed the FF icon to the IE one. He didn't know the difference, except he thought his anti-popup software was working better than ever. When I told him he'd been using Mozilla he was surprised, pleased and stuck with FF (but ditched the IE theme).
Clearplay sells a customized DVD player (both the hardware type and the computer software type) that accepts "filter" files - files that contain timecodes as to what and when to skip stuff. They even have a version you can hook up to the internet that gets the filters automatically, but they still sell versions that accept filters from USB drive or CD.
With Clearplay you can still watch the original versions if you'd like, or you can set up the DVD player to only play "clean" versions (unless you enter an override).
Perhaps OYAHHH was suggesting a more open version of Clearplay, where anyone can create a filter. That'd be nice, but I'm willing to pay for someone else (whom I trust) to compile all the timecodes into such a file for me.
I guess the problem most thinking LDS people have with most of what you mention is that it doesn't just affect the individuals. Many of these things affect (in my opinion) society in general in a negative way. Because they have negative externalities that can't really be estimated precisely, the goods tend to be overconsumed - thus hurting society in general.
GP post was wrong too, though. You are right, this is absolutely a clear case of derivative works - if I was a director I'd be mad if they cut up my work too.
I'm LDS too, but your argument is silly. Directors often make movies not just for entertainment but also for instruction. Some movies, like Schindlers list, are meant to change the way you think about certain things. This is often accomplished by showing shocking and sometimes disturbing images. I'd be pissed too if someone took my movie and cut out all the parts might impact the audience.
As I said in another post - check out clearplay if you want a cleaner version of a movie. Their DVD player just skips the "naughty bits" - no derivative works, no copyright issues.
A good alternative for those who don't want their young children to see "bad" stuff is clearplay. We've had it for a while, here is how it works.
1. Buy a normal DVD with all the "naughty bits"
2. Get the filter from the clearplay website for that DVD
3. Transfer the filter via USB or CD to the clearplay DVD player
4. Watch your DVD - the filter tells the DVD player where to skip the naughty bits - no editing, just timecodes to be skipped.
I thought it'd be jumpy but it really isn't. Most of the time I can't even figure out what has been skipped. Plus you can set the level of each "naughty bit" - violence, profanity and sex - from low to high. Pretty neat stuff I'd say.
As long as we are bringing this up - check out Tremulous. It is kind of like and RTS and FPS at the same time. It is tough to imagine (it was for me) until you experience it. Truly innovative gameplay really.
Alien Arena is similar to CUBE - good multiplayer, virtually no single player.
All three have source available and are available on Windows and Linux.
Change may be a huge obstacle, but not as big as you think. Everyone, who is literate, knows phonetics and so most people could switch fairly easily.
IMHO there are bigger problems. What about dialects? Will southerners spell things differently than northerners? Northerners differently than westerners? This is tricky, we might have to select an "accepted" dialect to base our phonetic spellings on. Of course that is doable, but I'm not sure it is worth it.
But what if we didn't select an "accepted" base for spellings? Southerners might not be able to read British literature, and Australians might not be able to read Western US writings. Splintering our written language is one step to creating new languages, and I think for compatibility reasons we'd rather not do that.
IMO a more important issue is basically backwards compatibility. In 200 years how many people will be able to easily read the entire corpus of english literature printed before the change? Right now I can read Shakespeare, and though he uses many different words than I do (and I can look those up), the words he used that I know are spelled basically the same. English has done a few switches like this before and it basically broke backwards compatibility. Have you ever tried to read middle english? It isn't pretty.
Not really support story per se. One time I was helping a girl with a Final Cut project. She seemed pretty computer savvy, not a hand holder like some of the people we get in there.
She had some audio files on her laptop we needed to get onto the G5. She asked about emailing them to herself, I said that'd work but a flash drive would be faster. She said she had one with her but was reluctant to use it. She wanted to just burn a CD instead.
I asked why - she said flash drives were too expensive.
"$20 for 256MB? I can get a 700MB CD for $1."
I said "Yeah but flash drives are faster and you can't really reuse a CD like you can a flash drive" (CDRWs suck, admit it).
She looked really surprised and said - "you can delete from a flash drive?"
As it turns out she was on something like her 5th flash drive and had never even tried to delete from them.
That argument may work in public high schools, it probably works in trade schools, but it does not work in Universities. Universities are trying to give a deep, not a vocational, education. It is debatable what high schools are trying to do. Tech trade schools might hurt their students by using non-standard tools, assusming the students aren't given enough tools/abilities to learn new software quickly.
I TA a computer lab at the university I am at. When people come in and want to learn about the tools they are going to use, I don't refer them directly to Final Cut. Any idiot can learn final cut on their own by playing around, or reading a book. The same goes for about any other program. Learn the basics - framerates, compression formats, broadcast formats, and whatnot - don't learn how to point an click. Because when the next great thing comes along, anyone who knows just programs is screwed, anyone who knows what the program is doing behind the scenese will be just fine. The general skillls are the most important.
You can still find anything on google, it just takes a little more know-how. For example, add this string to your search intitle:index.of +"mp3" -htm -html -php -asp "Last Modified". Just add the band or song in quotes and you'll be amazed at how much more accurate it'll make an mp3 search. For example - a search for Gorillaz & Feel Good Inc turns up quite a few copies of the MP3. The filetype:mp3 command works well too.
The same goes for any filetype. Google is doing well at giving copyrighted materials low rankings, their livelihood depends on it, but as long as they index everything, everything is available.
Massive user migration - yes. Guess where? My money is on Vista.
Microsoft is famous for using a stick rather than a carrot to 'encourage' upgrades. With all the bad press Vista is getting for removing features, Microsoft knows DX10 isn't going to be enough to drive people to upgrade. This might just do it.
so perfect information certainly doesn't exist, thus perfectly competitive markets dont exist. But that doesn't mean we don't have free markets, and it doesn't mean capitalism supports fraud (it doesn't, fraud causes inefficiencies and can break down capitalism - look at africa).
Enforcement (anti-fraud) is necessary to ensure contracts, which are the basis for any economic system, adam smith, barter or whatever. I know it is cool to hate the status quo, but give it a think.
If you look at the last slide of their presentation you'll see the presenter didn't even know Blizzards products. While the Vivendi presentation claims there was no console version of any of the Blizzard series, there was in fact a console version of starcraft. It was awful (N64 controls were not suited for starcraft at all), but it was made.
The fact that Vivendi didn't even know this doesn't lend a lot of credence to the rumor.
This is a no brainer. Obvious to anyone but the current president of the RIAA. She did blog on Lawrence Lessigs site a while back and I think some posters made some intelligent responses to her points.
The same thing happened with Jack Valenti after he stepped down. All of a sudden he grew a brain and realized that some of the practices/technologies the MPAA developed/pushed while he was president weren't good for customers. Surprise surprise!
I think what has happened is that now they are just normal consumers and the realize what a pain in the rear the stuff they pushed is to real people.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent poster said he/she got HD. They didn't say 1080p, 720p still counts as HD. 720X1280 really does look pretty good, and it is about half the bitrate of 1080p. I know 1080p is the holy grail (currently) of an HD system, but 720 will stream across a 802.11g network.
Another option, 1080i, uses less bandwidth without a huge quality loss. 1080i is 1080p interpolated: basically even rows refresh, then odd rows, alternating. This way you only have to send about half the signal and the quality is pretty close to as good.
So again, if you use a good codec, and use 1080i or 720p, you can get pretty good HD for under 20Mb/s. Of course when the 802.11n standard comes out (if ever), aside from the increased reach, it is supposed to offer roughly 10x the bandwidth currently offered by 802.11g.
Adapted from my blog. I know this is blasphemous, but there isn't enough litigation over patents. By this I mean actual court cases, there are plenty of threats. Only 1.5% of all patents are litigated, and only .1% are litigated to trial (of that .1%, over 50% are invalidated). This is far too little. Let me explain.
We know the level of litigation is too little because of positive externalities associated with litigation. If the accusor loses, invalidating a patent benefits everyone, not just the firm that sues for the invalidation. If the accusor wins, clarity in validity also benefits others. So there is a free riding problem with litigation (especially since it is so costly).
Lets say I hold a patent on tennis shoes and I expect to make a million dollars from that patent. If another shoe maker named Nike sues me over the patent, how much would I be willing to spend to defend the patent? $999,999. How much would Nike be willing to spend to invalidate the patent? Invalidating the patent doesn't give Nike a monopoly, so assuming in a competitive model there are no (or lower than monopoly) profits for Nike. So Nike would be willing to spend less to invalidate the patent than I would to keep the patent valid. Thus it may in Nike's best interest to just license a completely ludicrous patent. That seems to be what happened here.
Not only is this litigation costly, but anyone found infringing on a patent in court pays TRIPLE the claimed damages! That is high stakes indeed. To add to this problem, the alleged infringer bears the burden of proof, that the patent is invalid or that they didn't violate the patent. The wording for proof is "clear and convincing evidence," that is strong wording. So it shouldn't be surprising to find that 95% of all defendants settle without going to court.
A good way to produce more clarifying litigation is to create incentives to litigate. One idea (which I think is a bad one) is to allow the government to challenge patents. A better idea is to offer a bounty on invalidated patents. One problem with the bounty idea is that mostly worthless patents would be invalidated this way, but if you limited the bounty to licensed patents, you could eliminate a lot of this problem. The bounty could be grant the patent to the challenger for a few years, or be a flat rate payment. Lastly, there are public interest groups already doing great work towards this end (such as the EFF and Public Patent Foundation), by funding them with incentives or grants we could improve the situation.
Another fix is to force firms to litigation. By capping the dollar value of settling, firms my opt for a court remedy rather than an out of court secret agreement. Limiting settling and other forms of collusion makes more information public, which can benefit more people.
The third option for getting more litigation is to reduce costs of litigation. Removing the 3X payout, decreasing the time in court, and changing the wording from "clear and convincing evidence" to something less strong. Even shifting some of the burden of proof towards the accusor would speed things along. One other option to make litigation more affordable is to penalize accusers for refuted claims--since the general practice is to claim as much as possible and see what sticks (see SCO for an example).
It is a crying shame that Apple just paid off the patent trolls here. Had they put up the $100 million into a legal fund and gotten this rediculous patent invalidated, it would have benefitted society. Who knows who else will get hit with this silly patent claim now? It isn't Apple's job to benefit society, but as long as we keep feeding the trolls, we'll have to keep paying.
Actually, ATI/AMD is talking about open-sourcing their drivers too. nVidia already has pretty functional GNU/Linux drivers (albeit closed source), so with these other two GNU/Linux could finally have the support it needs to be a viable desktop alternative.
Now if only we could get some open sourced drivers for higher end sound cards and more obscure wireless cards.
Don't forget the famous settlers of Catan from Germany, as well as for sale and bohnanza. All spectacular games in their own right - the first through pure strategy - the second two through haggling. Citadels is also a fun little game, rife with strategy particularly through guessing about opponents. My wife, myself and our couple friends play these games fairly frequently.
/sarcasm
I wouldn't say Americans haven't created great games (balderdash & stratego come to mind), but more so Americans haven't in a long time. Americans aren't alone though - the best the Japanese have done recently is stuff like Pokemon & Yu-Gi-Oh.
Instead Americans have been busy with other great games.
This shows that any number of Closed Source companies, working in concert / collusion / tandem... have lost to one single man - Richard Stallman, and his GPL. Plus IBM's millions of dollars, lawyer expertise, and tenacity. (Just imagine if SCO sued Linus Torvaalds instead of IBM - it might be a different issue).
Seriously you believe this? Really I'm not trolling, I just don't understand why a victory in a lawsuit against IBM (and incidentally, GNU/Linux) signals the end of proprietary software. Just because the license is valid, and no one swiped any source, doesn't mean all closed-source stuff will fail - to me it just means that SCO was a crap business. As far as I can tell, companies will still produce closed-source stuff and will continue to make money doing it.
That said, the GPL has some advantages in lawsuits like this - it is quite resistant to copyright issues. If a GPL'd program has some swiped code in it, and if we know where the code is, it is much more trivial to replace and prove that the infringing code is gone. Of course due to the fragmented nature, and low cost, of Linux it'd be harder to pay damages if found guilty.
I like google groups better than the google linux search, but I don't think either are the best sites. IMHO any site that purports to have all answers to all linux questions isn't going to do very well with any semi-complex question. They just can't have the know-how.
IRC channels are good, but it is kind of like IM - if the devs aren't on you're out of luck.
I think it really depends on the distro. For Ubuntu, there is Ubuntu forums for SuSE there are SuSE forums. The same goes for Gentoo, Mepis, Debian, Redhat, Fedora or any other distro out there. The larger projects also have their own forums.
Getting as specific a location as you can will help (e.g. the google group on Debian is better than the one on Linux users for Debian problems). That is why IRC is great when you have a reasonably well-researched and specific question. Before you ask a dev (who may be working on fixing the problem, or may have already fixed it, or may be plagued by the same question over and over again) please read how to ask a question properly. That way you are maximizing the chance that you get the right answer, people won't get mad at you, and you won't be wasting anyone else's time.
Our IT department actually found one through TIDF. They found the "best fit" for us for free, and quoted us a price that was slighly higher than the one found on the website. So out IT guys got the name from TIDF then went to the other firm, told them they were referred by TIDF and signed up. (It was net mass btw - it is pretty pricey, but the support is great and we don't back up much data).
Me? I've only personally used mozy and while I liked it, it fails your requirement of linux compatibility (which is why I dumped it for my own little homebrew NAS). There is a lot of advice all over the internet listing online back up souces, but make sure you personally know the referrer before you trust them with your backup source (i.e. don't trust me).
You are right, it isn't viable. Maybe when the 802.11n standard is finalized, municipal wifi will be a good idea.
I know this sounds cliche, but it is true. With the gazillion FOR profit businesses out there, if municipal wifi made sense from a cost/benefit perspective anywhere on a wide scale, businesses would fall all over themselves to offer it. May with the "N" standard, it'll make sense (if businesses have a really good way to keep leechers off), then it is fine for cities to step in.
OTOH this is Boston - the big dig has been one of the biggest wastes of tax payer money on a state level ever seen. I'm glad I don't live in Mass. & I'm not subsidizing this.
If you are going to need that money at the end of college (say 4 years) mutual funds are dangerous. Overall they do 10% or better, but over the course of any given time they may lose money. Index funds are a little safer and generally they out perform most mutual funds (since there are no brokerage fees).
CDs aren't bad either, they are safe and do better than most savings accounts, but they tie up your money. The best option I've found is hsbc online savings accounts. I don't work for HSBC, but at a guaranteed 5%, how can you go wrong? Plus it is variable interest rates, so if interest rates go up, so does your interest rate. I put a few grand in there and it started at 4%, it is up to 5.05% now. Of course the rate could go down, but it'd be surprising to see it go below what normal savings accounts give - plus if it does you can withdraw all your money electronically. The catch is that it is an entirely online account - no atm cards, no branches to withdraw - you must deposit and withdraw entirely online. But nowadays that is hardly an issue if you have another bank account that supports online transfers.
Ironically enough, the Air marshalls are basically ensuring they won't stop any terrorists. The list will become so bloated, cumbersome, invasive and obnoxious that people will stop taking it seriously. The real work of hunting down potential terrorists - that some of the marshalls did - will be drowned out by innocent people who looked at the lazy marshalls cross eyed.
Often, beurocracy cannot sustain its own weight. It expands and expands until it cannot do the purpose for which it was designed. Then it gets axed by a budget cutter, is reincarnated as lightweight version of itself, and expands until... you get the idea. It isn't a viscious cycle so much as a waste of resources and failed programs.
Maybe it has to do with leisure. Will you take more vacation when you are getting paid more or less? For most people they'll take more vacation when they are paid more - the difference between 10 & 11 million isn't as big to them as the difference between 1 and 2 million. As such, you'd expect the highest paid CEOs to take the most time off - and do the least work. The difference gets more significant as workers are salaried and have more control over their schedules.
Now this assumes the CEOs matter a lot, and that an extra month of vacation in a year hurts the entire company. I'm not sure I buy that entirely, but it is worth considering.
I did that once to my father. He insisted that IE was fine and he didn't want Mozilla, but hated popups & spyware - so he ran like 4 other programs to stop popups, find spyware and whatnot.
Anyhow, I installed firefox, then installed the firefoxie theme that skins ff to look like IE, and changed the FF icon to the IE one. He didn't know the difference, except he thought his anti-popup software was working better than ever. When I told him he'd been using Mozilla he was surprised, pleased and stuck with FF (but ditched the IE theme).
I guess my comment wasn't clear enough, but what reader OYAHHH is suggesting is literally exactly what ClearPlay does.
Clearplay sells a customized DVD player (both the hardware type and the computer software type) that accepts "filter" files - files that contain timecodes as to what and when to skip stuff. They even have a version you can hook up to the internet that gets the filters automatically, but they still sell versions that accept filters from USB drive or CD.
With Clearplay you can still watch the original versions if you'd like, or you can set up the DVD player to only play "clean" versions (unless you enter an override).
Perhaps OYAHHH was suggesting a more open version of Clearplay, where anyone can create a filter. That'd be nice, but I'm willing to pay for someone else (whom I trust) to compile all the timecodes into such a file for me.
I guess the problem most thinking LDS people have with most of what you mention is that it doesn't just affect the individuals. Many of these things affect (in my opinion) society in general in a negative way. Because they have negative externalities that can't really be estimated precisely, the goods tend to be overconsumed - thus hurting society in general.
GP post was wrong too, though. You are right, this is absolutely a clear case of derivative works - if I was a director I'd be mad if they cut up my work too.
I'm LDS too, but your argument is silly. Directors often make movies not just for entertainment but also for instruction. Some movies, like Schindlers list, are meant to change the way you think about certain things. This is often accomplished by showing shocking and sometimes disturbing images. I'd be pissed too if someone took my movie and cut out all the parts might impact the audience.
As I said in another post - check out clearplay if you want a cleaner version of a movie. Their DVD player just skips the "naughty bits" - no derivative works, no copyright issues.
A good alternative for those who don't want their young children to see "bad" stuff is clearplay. We've had it for a while, here is how it works.
1. Buy a normal DVD with all the "naughty bits"
2. Get the filter from the clearplay website for that DVD
3. Transfer the filter via USB or CD to the clearplay DVD player
4. Watch your DVD - the filter tells the DVD player where to skip the naughty bits - no editing, just timecodes to be skipped.
I thought it'd be jumpy but it really isn't. Most of the time I can't even figure out what has been skipped. Plus you can set the level of each "naughty bit" - violence, profanity and sex - from low to high. Pretty neat stuff I'd say.
As long as we are bringing this up - check out Tremulous. It is kind of like and RTS and FPS at the same time. It is tough to imagine (it was for me) until you experience it. Truly innovative gameplay really.
Alien Arena is similar to CUBE - good multiplayer, virtually no single player.
All three have source available and are available on Windows and Linux.
Change may be a huge obstacle, but not as big as you think. Everyone, who is literate, knows phonetics and so most people could switch fairly easily.
IMHO there are bigger problems. What about dialects? Will southerners spell things differently than northerners? Northerners differently than westerners? This is tricky, we might have to select an "accepted" dialect to base our phonetic spellings on. Of course that is doable, but I'm not sure it is worth it.
But what if we didn't select an "accepted" base for spellings? Southerners might not be able to read British literature, and Australians might not be able to read Western US writings. Splintering our written language is one step to creating new languages, and I think for compatibility reasons we'd rather not do that.
IMO a more important issue is basically backwards compatibility. In 200 years how many people will be able to easily read the entire corpus of english literature printed before the change? Right now I can read Shakespeare, and though he uses many different words than I do (and I can look those up), the words he used that I know are spelled basically the same. English has done a few switches like this before and it basically broke backwards compatibility. Have you ever tried to read middle english? It isn't pretty.
Not really support story per se. One time I was helping a girl with a Final Cut project. She seemed pretty computer savvy, not a hand holder like some of the people we get in there.
She had some audio files on her laptop we needed to get onto the G5. She asked about emailing them to herself, I said that'd work but a flash drive would be faster. She said she had one with her but was reluctant to use it. She wanted to just burn a CD instead.
I asked why - she said flash drives were too expensive.
"$20 for 256MB? I can get a 700MB CD for $1."
I said "Yeah but flash drives are faster and you can't really reuse a CD like you can a flash drive" (CDRWs suck, admit it).
She looked really surprised and said - "you can delete from a flash drive?"
As it turns out she was on something like her 5th flash drive and had never even tried to delete from them.
That argument may work in public high schools, it probably works in trade schools, but it does not work in Universities. Universities are trying to give a deep, not a vocational, education. It is debatable what high schools are trying to do. Tech trade schools might hurt their students by using non-standard tools, assusming the students aren't given enough tools/abilities to learn new software quickly.
I TA a computer lab at the university I am at. When people come in and want to learn about the tools they are going to use, I don't refer them directly to Final Cut. Any idiot can learn final cut on their own by playing around, or reading a book. The same goes for about any other program. Learn the basics - framerates, compression formats, broadcast formats, and whatnot - don't learn how to point an click. Because when the next great thing comes along, anyone who knows just programs is screwed, anyone who knows what the program is doing behind the scenese will be just fine. The general skillls are the most important.
You can still find anything on google, it just takes a little more know-how. For example, add this string to your search intitle:index.of +"mp3" -htm -html -php -asp "Last Modified". Just add the band or song in quotes and you'll be amazed at how much more accurate it'll make an mp3 search. For example - a search for Gorillaz & Feel Good Inc turns up quite a few copies of the MP3. The filetype:mp3 command works well too.
The same goes for any filetype. Google is doing well at giving copyrighted materials low rankings, their livelihood depends on it, but as long as they index everything, everything is available.
Massive user migration - yes. Guess where? My money is on Vista.
Microsoft is famous for using a stick rather than a carrot to 'encourage' upgrades. With all the bad press Vista is getting for removing features, Microsoft knows DX10 isn't going to be enough to drive people to upgrade. This might just do it.
so perfect information certainly doesn't exist, thus perfectly competitive markets dont exist. But that doesn't mean we don't have free markets, and it doesn't mean capitalism supports fraud (it doesn't, fraud causes inefficiencies and can break down capitalism - look at africa).
Enforcement (anti-fraud) is necessary to ensure contracts, which are the basis for any economic system, adam smith, barter or whatever. I know it is cool to hate the status quo, but give it a think.
If you look at the last slide of their presentation you'll see the presenter didn't even know Blizzards products. While the Vivendi presentation claims there was no console version of any of the Blizzard series, there was in fact a console version of starcraft. It was awful (N64 controls were not suited for starcraft at all), but it was made.
The fact that Vivendi didn't even know this doesn't lend a lot of credence to the rumor.
This is a no brainer. Obvious to anyone but the current president of the RIAA. She did blog on Lawrence Lessigs site a while back and I think some posters made some intelligent responses to her points.
The same thing happened with Jack Valenti after he stepped down. All of a sudden he grew a brain and realized that some of the practices/technologies the MPAA developed/pushed while he was president weren't good for customers. Surprise surprise!
I think what has happened is that now they are just normal consumers and the realize what a pain in the rear the stuff they pushed is to real people.