Actually, they do own the physical media, and they own a copy of the software.
Read his post again. He never mentions anything of the media. He only mentions IP, which is the blanket term for copyrights and patents, and I think they bundle trademarks in there too.
There's a big difference between ownership and utilization. For example, if McDonalds employs the use of WinXP workstations in their facilities, that does not mean that they own, but instead license Microsoft's IP.
I completely agree. Just to expand on that, it should also be noted that the GPL does not transfer ownership of IP unto you, it merely gives you license to modify and reuse it. A company would then have to disclose their IP after they changed that code.
Reading the article, it appears that the author is a little confused. The second sentence talks about violating the GPL. You don't violate the GPL by simply using Linux. So maybe the real issue is with companies that release GPLed software without proper attribution and GPL compliance, but that's not the way the article reads.
Alas, not for us who run 64-bit linux distros, unless we want to install a 32 bit web browser (and all of its 32 bit dependencies).
I still can't fault Google for this. If they're delivering video via Flash, which is very widely available, and that video works in the Flash that is available to most distributions of Linux, then I can credit them with finding a solution that will give content providers the sort of content control that they want and yet is highly available to most users on most OSes. They could have gone the cheap route of using WMV with DRM, then they would be locking people into Windows.
Aside from that, you have to acknowledge Google for making in-browser apps that work exceptionally well in FireFox. This means that they aren't showing favoritism to one OS or another for in-browser apps. (though they seem to favor FireFox over IE, I can't blame them for that either though:) The problem with a lot of their stand-alone apps is that they are either purchased or created as one of their programmers personal projects.
Also, the gvideo service seems to allow you to use their Flash player for most videos. Macromedia has a Linux version of Flash, so I'm not sure it's accurate to say that it's unavailable. Google Earth is more of a toy than anything else, you can get most of the usable functionality via Google Local in-browser on any OS.
Franklin was a man of diverse talents: publisher, inventor, ambassador, politician, wit with some human frailities says NPR
You should notice that "wit" is part of his list of talents. There are other problems with the sentence, and it could certainly be better phrased, but the writer did not omit a letter in the word "wit". I think it would read better if it were as such:
Franklin was a man of diverse talents: publisher, inventor, ambassador, and politician who possessed great wit with some human frailities, says NPR.
The look of this thing reminds me of the Shinza MAPP mouse by Masamune Shiro.
Uhh...how? Just because it's blocky? Sorry, I just don't see it. The mouse in the article is flat, rectangular, and cordless. The mouse you linked to is not flat, of a complex shape, and corded. Perhaps the article's mouse has a stand alone complex or something.
Since I'm posting, I may as well throw this question out there: Why does this thing have a stand to prop it up when it's outside of the pc card slot? It seems that little piece is just begging to break, and I can't imagine how it'd be more comfortable to use like that than to just leave it flat on the surface you're using it on.
btw- Counties in Ohio have different tax rates. It has nothing to do with municipalities, so you only need to know the tax rates for each of our 88 counties... (Mine is Summit county, 6 3/4 percent)
I don't know if that's even the case. This law pertains to state sales tax. I think you'll find that the state tax is currently 5.5%, and the county adds onto that. The question is whether this law would be interpreted to be applicable to all local taxes, or just the state ones.
I grew up in Dayton, so this is partly just my memory of how it works, but I checked The Ohio Department of Taxation, and if you use their finder you'll see that it shows a 5.5% state tax, then the county tax.
True. Then again, without copyright what value does the source have? Any binary you create can be distributed everywhere at no cost, so the value is almost $0. You might possibly earn a few bucks writing improvements on demand, but 99% of the COTS market would vanish in an instant.
The same value that it has now. The important thing is that you can always go in and modify the source code. The fact that it is required to be free as in beer is merely a way to ensure that it is always Free as in speech to everyone, regardless of their financial situation. Sure, this is unimportant to end-users, but it is highly important to developers. It means that I can satisfy a small amount of end users (even just 1) by making changes to something that I didn't code. It means I don't have to beg and play games with the original coders to get a feature that I require implemented. It also means that, should the developers kick the bucket or give up programming for a lucrative career in car sales, I have the source to upkeep myself or find new developers to work on.
There's your value. That doesn't require copyright to exist. Unfortunately, the current license that enables (forces) all of that does require copyright to exist. Should copyright cease to exist a new contract would be required that relied entirely on contract law to enable such a system.
How about making the advertised company the default responsible party for illegal spam unless they can point at a third party or fraud, isn't it the same thing as fining car owners with traffic cameras?
No. What you were looking for as an analogy is receiving stolen property. Red light cameras simply assume that you're guilty and issue a ticket to the owner of the car, where you can go to court and argue that someone else was driving it. With receiving stolen property you are assumed innocent until proven guilty and the prosecutor has the burden of proving that you knew the item was stolen.
It should be treated as conspiring to commit an illegal act and the party who conspired should be held accountable just as the party who committed the act is. This is different from the red light cameras in that if you can prove it wasn't you who did it then you don't get the fine.
You do know the difference between the animation used in early South Park and the animation used in Family Guy?
Early South Park was done in flash. It's always been done very cheaply with simple shapes that do very little, if any, bending or movement. The whole style of that show is that it's kinda cheap and shotty, but up yours because if you don't like it then you can go sit and spin.
Family Guy is, to the best of my knowledge, a hand animated/inked deal done in a similar style to old Looney Toons, and, well, most other cartoons. Instead of drawing a shape on the screen and saying that over the span of 120 frames you want it to rotate 180 degrees (as South Park would have done) you have to draw 120 frames with slight movement in each one. Then you have to ink those frames. Of course, to get the best results you normally want to have the voices done first and then try to have the animators sync to the voices.
As for Fox vs. Comedy Central.. Well, the big difference is that Fox has to deal extensively with the FCC when they put something on air. They have to be sure that the content isn't going to get them fined, etc. Comedy Central, on the other hand, is cable-only. That means that they don't have to adhere to the same decency regulations that apply to broadcast television (Fox).
Family Guy does take small pieces of content from other shows, but normally it's done in a way that someone will get the reference, not just trying to steal the gag outright. Also, it doesn't happen in such a short time span. I mean, if a gag done on Family Guy is similar to one done on the Simpsons then perhaps that's simply because the topic was recently infront of writers for both shows, or it could just be that great minds think alike.
I'm okay with Yahoo! as a whole. I like some of their services. I use Yahoo! Mail, because I've had that address since it ended with @geocities.com and I like their sports section, just to name a few. The thing is that their ads are typically ineffective and useless to me. I do my best to ignore them and work around them. About the only time I notice them is when they annoy me, and I've actually avoided products that had annoying advertisement.
If they had sold the games without a modded console would they have been charged, or if they just modded the console?
Short answer: Yes, they probably would have.
As that grandparent had noted the story makes the modding out to be the real wrong doing, when infringement truly was. However, the enforcement of the DMCA almost always has big business in mind, and thus I think that the enforcers were making the modding out as the crime as much as the press did. Big business, in this case Microsoft, does not want these people messing with their products. They're trying to send a message without testing the limits of the DMCA. That message, of course: We say modding is illegal.
Granted, I agree with them that this modding was illegal. Reading the article it becomes fairly clear that the mods they were doing were aimed more at pirating games than legitimate uses. The thing is that it probably would have been illegal even if the DMCA were better written, and it is what the DMCA should have been carefully worded to include. This is something we shouldn't be cheering for as a DMCA success, we should be jeering the fact that the DMCA was so poorly worded that this is bundled in with modding the XBox so it can run Linux, or selling replacement ink cartridges that are refillable.
Ultimately this is akin to reinacting prohibition because drunk driving is a problem, it looks good on paper, but in reality the alcoholics would just go to speakeasies and drive drunk on their way home. The DMCA has been used effectively in so very few cases against those who are willfully committing major infringements, yet it has been used effectively against so many who are incidental infringers, minor infringers, or shouldn't be considered infringers at all. This is just one case where it can get good PR.
The new episodes do seem to be a bit more derivative than the old though, so maybe that's what's putting some people off. Case in point, both the Soundwave and Cobra Commander cameos aired within a few weeks of the same '80s cartoon characters being featured in skits on Robot Chicken. Same thing with a number of Simpsons gags as well... Family Guy usually manages to give these mini-plagarisms their own, sometimes funnier twist, but recent "borrowing" from other animated shows have seemed a bit more contrived and less amusing to me.
I can see the Robot Chicken gags as being related. Seth Green works on both shows. Although the difference is that Robot Chicken tends to cameo characters that are action figures simply because, well, it's all shot using dolls and cheap claymation. However, your assertion of "mini-plagarisms" is pretty funny. How long do you think it takes to storyboard, draw, ink, voice, edit, and master one of these shows? Are you insinuating that they have spies in the Simpsons' production unit or something?
I also think that American Dad might have put some people off. I generally find American Dad to be about as funny as the new Family Guy episodes, but it feels like a slightly altered rehash of Family Guy a lot of the time.
Well, Seth MacFarlane actually admitted that it is basically the same show on The Late Show last year. Honestly, it is very similar and it has it's moments, but it's just not quite as good.
As an aside...
My favorite new Family Guy moment was when Brian hit Peter and you expect him to say something like "That's for being stupid", but instead he says "That's for rolling up the window on the General Lee." Most shows don't bother to self-reference from one episode to the next, but this one made a joke that you'd only get if you'd watched an episode from a couple years ago.
The problem with the pervasiveness of advertising today is that eventually you become numb to it and just wade through it trying to get to wherever you were going (the next exit, the next page, the next tv show...). So then they have to ramp up the volume on their message to try to break the monotony and make you pay attention (loud commercials, bulky magazine inserts, moving billboards...).
What Google has done is take us back to a time when advertising was little more than attempting to get the word out for something that may not be widely known. They put ads on pages in a classy way, then attempted to ensure those ads were context sensitive so that it may actually help people find things. Adding classy touches that are subtle but noticeable, like small graphics and preferred placement, make a difference without changing the purpose.
Of course, they also are a precursor to the inundation of advertisement that we get everywhere else. The good news is that the people at Google acknowledged this problem long ago and may be aware that their success is tied to it.
At least it appears that the graphics they'll be using will be limited in scope. Hopefully this isn't a precursor to flash ads and animated gifs. The day they start using pop-over flash ads is the first day of Google's demise.
Though, having a preference that says a user will only accept (or be bothered with requests from) user's already in their buddy list would seem to solve this for the most part. These settings have been around for years (on AIM, atleast, where you can have only Buddy List members IM you, as a form of spam/parental control).
The first client I saw that feature in was, like so many other features we take for granted in IM, ICQ. It's really effective in keeping spammers and other unwanteds away. The problem is, how different would that be from what we have now? It's been my experience that you have to accept someone as a contact before the client will tell them you're online.
The other part of this is that with gmail/gtalk once a spammer has your IM they have your email and vice versa. So what does a filter like that do if a spammer knows that your account exists? Your mail box is still going to get spammed.
Then again, I've not been spammed in gtalk. Does anyone have any firsthand experience with a spammer using it?
What I'm curious about is this: How the hell did Paramount have the police seize four of his computers? IANAL, but last time I checked, that would have required a search warrant obtained by a judge with probable cause that he commited a crime. Even assuming that they went through that trouble, it would be law enforcement officers who would investigate the computers, not Paramount. But TFA specifically says, "Paramount has looked at all four computers in Lee's home..." Hmmm...
IANAL either, but as I recall they can't use the DMCA to demand identities anymore. That means that they had to file a John Doe lawsuit, get a subpoena to find out the guys identity from his carrier, and then bring him into the case. By that time I would imagine a warrant to search the computers is trivial.
As for the wording about Paramount looking at his computers, I would assume that this was done after they were entered as evidence. I would also assume that it was probably done by an independent security expert in the presence of Paramount and the authorities. They would need to be very careful with how they did it or their entire case against the guy would be blown due to the potential claim of mishandled evidence.
I figure the more likely scenario is that Paramount told the guy, "If you let us have your computers, we won't sue you." The guy, not being a lawyer and thinking that was a good deal, said, "Okay," then erased one of his hard drives, since he was at least smart enough to know that if Paramount found what they were looking for they would have sued him anyway. (Or maybe he's innocent and just didn't want them to see his downloaded porn collection; either way doesn't matter.) Then Paramount, mad, sued him anyway.
People stupid enough to hand over their computers on such a verbal contract deserve to be sued out of existence. If that is the case then the only reason why I'd pull for the guy is because I don't want this case to set a precedent that people are responsible for open wifi connections. Eventually I'd like to see people held accountable, but for right now I think it's impractical and dangerous to do so.
The guy needs to go get a really lawyer pronto. Whether he's innocent or guilty, Paramount is going to do their best to screw him, and personally, even if he's guilty, I hope he comes out of this clean. Not because I think that sharing files illegally is okay, but becuase they (Paramount) are using crooked tactics that are much worse than the crimes this guy may or may not have committed.
We don't know what tactics Paramount is using. Heck, that incredibly short article doesn't even mention whether the guy has a lawyer or not, so we don't even know that. How can you draw such conclusions? In the picture you paint, this guy is really dumb and I couldn't care less if her were punished so long as it doesn't set bad precedent.
Re:Had it for about 6 months
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Gmail Gets RSS
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I have had it for about 6 months. No one else I knew that had Gmail had the webclips...
As have I. I had thought for a while that it was just a live feature until I realized that my wife didn't have it and asked some friends about it.
I think they added some before they released it, I hadn't looked in months and I don't remember some of the feeds they have listed.
My favorite is the SPAM recipes in the spam folder and recycling tips in the trash.
This guy seems more interested in cheaply pursuing someone for libel, regardless of the affect it might have on freedom of speech. What I found particularly telling was his rant that you cannot sue online services for what their users post. Is he saying that he wanted to sue Wikipedia, Answers.com, and Reference.com, or is he saying that he wants to sue Bellsouth?
The entire article seems like a rant that he can't cheaply sue the poster for libel. Notice that I say cheaply, because he can sue for libel via a John Doe lawsuit (which he acknowledges in the article) but he chooses not to because the judge has the option of whether to issue a subpoena. Does it say something that he's afraid the judge wouldn't find this worthy of a subpoena to find the identity of this person? Didn't the RIAA prove thousands of times over that these subpoena's can actually lead to real defendants?
I just think he doesn't want this in court. He wants to sue someone in such a way that he can get a fat settlement without the validity of the claims going into public record.
Then we can all go back to the poll about XBox and change our answers from Never to Got Mine.
I mean, how sweet of a deal would that be? We get good hardware cheap for our use, and Microsoft gets shafted $126. It's like putting a Linux tax on them in retribution to the fabled Microsoft tax.
Of course, that's until people still go out and buy the games and pay MS the money back.
Re:Your show is great fun to watch and all, but...
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Ask The Mythbusters
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Some of the newer trucks are designed with aerodynamics in mind. However, that was not the original intention of the pickup design and it's something that's product of more modern aerodynamics testing. Obviously the tailgate was originally added for function much more than form.
As for CAFE... They don't tend to worry about their big trucks very much, so long as they can put out smaller fuel efficient trucks. Remember that light trucks are a separate CAFE category, and the average fuel economy need only be just over 20mpg for the fleet. Of course, that's easy to accomplish, even if your fleet is full of vehicles that only manage 13-18mpg. All you do is put in a small or compact SUV underpowered by a 4c motor.
Take a look at this. It's the 2003 Annual Update for the Fuel Economy program. Notice how the import light trucks economy has slipped to be in-line with the domestic trucks? That's not because the importers have gotten sloppy with their engines, or that the domestics have improved their's so greatly. No, it's because the importers started with smaller (more import friendly) vehicles and slowly started importing larger and less fuel efficient vehicles. Meanwhile, the gas mileage on your average full size pickup isn't that much greater than in '78. Nope, it's just being offset by manufacturers offering more compact, small, and mid sized trucks with 6c and 4c engines.
My critique of the show is that they only tested one model of pickup. Even their scale models that were tested in the water with oatmeal were only one type of truck, the same type as in their practical test. This may be a minor problem, except they were using a crew cab with a short bed. The myth that you get better mileage with the tailgate down is surely older than the advent and/or popularization of the crew cab pickup. If they were to test with a full bed, full size pickup then they may see different results.
Fair point. In either case, the hybrids are selling like hotcakes, and the gas guzzlers are not selling, which is hurting the us automakers. If you ask me, I'd say regardless of your stance on the oil companies and the like, all businesses are in the business of staying in business. Pun aside, big oil would still want the automakes to stay in business then; otherwise they'd lose their investments!
I agree with you on every point. Thing is, that doesn't really excuse the grandparent poster from either trolling or just spouting nonsense as though it were fact without any amount of knowledge about the subject.
I'm not in the financial industry as you are (readers: see his other reply to my original post). However, I do take an avid interest in the the automotive sector. I follow the automotive news from the "car guy" standpoint, yet I'm quite interested in the trends of the industry as a whole. So, needless to say, I've read my fair share about the ins and outs of being GM or Toyota.
Most people will find that the Japanese are taking hydrogen seriously, but they don't want to sink their money into more than delivering the vehicles that can run off of it. GM, on the other hand, has pretty much accepted that it's not competing well in the combustion engine market and Toyota and Honda hold too many patents for it to compete well in the hybrid market. That's why GM, to a much greater extent than the others, is investing in anything to do with hydrogen. They're betting the companies future on it and they know that without infrastructure it'll take too long to adopt and they won't be able to survive.
You can buy a ford focus with the option fuel cell option already. Rumor has it that ford is read to introduce a fuel cell Ford f150 truck sometime in a few years.
GMC is the only one who refuses to go along with fuel cells.
That is blatantly false. For one thing, GMC is a division of GM. For another, if you actually researched you'd find that GM is footing the largest part of the hydrogen fuel cell research. Honda is busy putting cars out and getting PR, GM is busy investing money in figuring out how to deliver hydrogen to the world efficiently.
Also it should be mentioned that the oil industry owns stock in these American automobile companies so they have a financial incentive to create gas guzzlers.
I don't know about this first-hand, but given the track record of your post I wouldn't take only your word for it.
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Read his post again. He never mentions anything of the media. He only mentions IP, which is the blanket term for copyrights and patents, and I think they bundle trademarks in there too.
Actually, the article does read that way. Oops.
I completely agree. Just to expand on that, it should also be noted that the GPL does not transfer ownership of IP unto you, it merely gives you license to modify and reuse it. A company would then have to disclose their IP after they changed that code.
Reading the article, it appears that the author is a little confused. The second sentence talks about violating the GPL. You don't violate the GPL by simply using Linux. So maybe the real issue is with companies that release GPLed software without proper attribution and GPL compliance, but that's not the way the article reads.
I still can't fault Google for this. If they're delivering video via Flash, which is very widely available, and that video works in the Flash that is available to most distributions of Linux, then I can credit them with finding a solution that will give content providers the sort of content control that they want and yet is highly available to most users on most OSes. They could have gone the cheap route of using WMV with DRM, then they would be locking people into Windows.
Aside from that, you have to acknowledge Google for making in-browser apps that work exceptionally well in FireFox. This means that they aren't showing favoritism to one OS or another for in-browser apps. (though they seem to favor FireFox over IE, I can't blame them for that either though :) The problem with a lot of their stand-alone apps is that they are either purchased or created as one of their programmers personal projects.
Also, the gvideo service seems to allow you to use their Flash player for most videos. Macromedia has a Linux version of Flash, so I'm not sure it's accurate to say that it's unavailable. Google Earth is more of a toy than anything else, you can get most of the usable functionality via Google Local in-browser on any OS.
You should notice that "wit" is part of his list of talents. There are other problems with the sentence, and it could certainly be better phrased, but the writer did not omit a letter in the word "wit". I think it would read better if it were as such:
Uhh...how? Just because it's blocky? Sorry, I just don't see it. The mouse in the article is flat, rectangular, and cordless. The mouse you linked to is not flat, of a complex shape, and corded. Perhaps the article's mouse has a stand alone complex or something.
Since I'm posting, I may as well throw this question out there: Why does this thing have a stand to prop it up when it's outside of the pc card slot? It seems that little piece is just begging to break, and I can't imagine how it'd be more comfortable to use like that than to just leave it flat on the surface you're using it on.
I don't know if that's even the case. This law pertains to state sales tax. I think you'll find that the state tax is currently 5.5%, and the county adds onto that. The question is whether this law would be interpreted to be applicable to all local taxes, or just the state ones.
I grew up in Dayton, so this is partly just my memory of how it works, but I checked The Ohio Department of Taxation, and if you use their finder you'll see that it shows a 5.5% state tax, then the county tax.
The same value that it has now. The important thing is that you can always go in and modify the source code. The fact that it is required to be free as in beer is merely a way to ensure that it is always Free as in speech to everyone, regardless of their financial situation. Sure, this is unimportant to end-users, but it is highly important to developers. It means that I can satisfy a small amount of end users (even just 1) by making changes to something that I didn't code. It means I don't have to beg and play games with the original coders to get a feature that I require implemented. It also means that, should the developers kick the bucket or give up programming for a lucrative career in car sales, I have the source to upkeep myself or find new developers to work on.
There's your value. That doesn't require copyright to exist. Unfortunately, the current license that enables (forces) all of that does require copyright to exist. Should copyright cease to exist a new contract would be required that relied entirely on contract law to enable such a system.
No. What you were looking for as an analogy is receiving stolen property. Red light cameras simply assume that you're guilty and issue a ticket to the owner of the car, where you can go to court and argue that someone else was driving it. With receiving stolen property you are assumed innocent until proven guilty and the prosecutor has the burden of proving that you knew the item was stolen.
It should be treated as conspiring to commit an illegal act and the party who conspired should be held accountable just as the party who committed the act is. This is different from the red light cameras in that if you can prove it wasn't you who did it then you don't get the fine.
Early South Park was done in flash. It's always been done very cheaply with simple shapes that do very little, if any, bending or movement. The whole style of that show is that it's kinda cheap and shotty, but up yours because if you don't like it then you can go sit and spin.
Family Guy is, to the best of my knowledge, a hand animated/inked deal done in a similar style to old Looney Toons, and, well, most other cartoons. Instead of drawing a shape on the screen and saying that over the span of 120 frames you want it to rotate 180 degrees (as South Park would have done) you have to draw 120 frames with slight movement in each one. Then you have to ink those frames. Of course, to get the best results you normally want to have the voices done first and then try to have the animators sync to the voices.
As for Fox vs. Comedy Central.. Well, the big difference is that Fox has to deal extensively with the FCC when they put something on air. They have to be sure that the content isn't going to get them fined, etc. Comedy Central, on the other hand, is cable-only. That means that they don't have to adhere to the same decency regulations that apply to broadcast television (Fox).
Family Guy does take small pieces of content from other shows, but normally it's done in a way that someone will get the reference, not just trying to steal the gag outright. Also, it doesn't happen in such a short time span. I mean, if a gag done on Family Guy is similar to one done on the Simpsons then perhaps that's simply because the topic was recently infront of writers for both shows, or it could just be that great minds think alike.
I'm okay with Yahoo! as a whole. I like some of their services. I use Yahoo! Mail, because I've had that address since it ended with @geocities.com and I like their sports section, just to name a few. The thing is that their ads are typically ineffective and useless to me. I do my best to ignore them and work around them. About the only time I notice them is when they annoy me, and I've actually avoided products that had annoying advertisement.
Short answer: Yes, they probably would have.
As that grandparent had noted the story makes the modding out to be the real wrong doing, when infringement truly was. However, the enforcement of the DMCA almost always has big business in mind, and thus I think that the enforcers were making the modding out as the crime as much as the press did. Big business, in this case Microsoft, does not want these people messing with their products. They're trying to send a message without testing the limits of the DMCA. That message, of course: We say modding is illegal.
Granted, I agree with them that this modding was illegal. Reading the article it becomes fairly clear that the mods they were doing were aimed more at pirating games than legitimate uses. The thing is that it probably would have been illegal even if the DMCA were better written, and it is what the DMCA should have been carefully worded to include. This is something we shouldn't be cheering for as a DMCA success, we should be jeering the fact that the DMCA was so poorly worded that this is bundled in with modding the XBox so it can run Linux, or selling replacement ink cartridges that are refillable.
Ultimately this is akin to reinacting prohibition because drunk driving is a problem, it looks good on paper, but in reality the alcoholics would just go to speakeasies and drive drunk on their way home. The DMCA has been used effectively in so very few cases against those who are willfully committing major infringements, yet it has been used effectively against so many who are incidental infringers, minor infringers, or shouldn't be considered infringers at all. This is just one case where it can get good PR.
I can see the Robot Chicken gags as being related. Seth Green works on both shows. Although the difference is that Robot Chicken tends to cameo characters that are action figures simply because, well, it's all shot using dolls and cheap claymation. However, your assertion of "mini-plagarisms" is pretty funny. How long do you think it takes to storyboard, draw, ink, voice, edit, and master one of these shows? Are you insinuating that they have spies in the Simpsons' production unit or something?
I also think that American Dad might have put some people off. I generally find American Dad to be about as funny as the new Family Guy episodes, but it feels like a slightly altered rehash of Family Guy a lot of the time.
Well, Seth MacFarlane actually admitted that it is basically the same show on The Late Show last year. Honestly, it is very similar and it has it's moments, but it's just not quite as good.
As an aside...
My favorite new Family Guy moment was when Brian hit Peter and you expect him to say something like "That's for being stupid", but instead he says "That's for rolling up the window on the General Lee." Most shows don't bother to self-reference from one episode to the next, but this one made a joke that you'd only get if you'd watched an episode from a couple years ago.
The problem with the pervasiveness of advertising today is that eventually you become numb to it and just wade through it trying to get to wherever you were going (the next exit, the next page, the next tv show...). So then they have to ramp up the volume on their message to try to break the monotony and make you pay attention (loud commercials, bulky magazine inserts, moving billboards...).
What Google has done is take us back to a time when advertising was little more than attempting to get the word out for something that may not be widely known. They put ads on pages in a classy way, then attempted to ensure those ads were context sensitive so that it may actually help people find things. Adding classy touches that are subtle but noticeable, like small graphics and preferred placement, make a difference without changing the purpose.
Of course, they also are a precursor to the inundation of advertisement that we get everywhere else. The good news is that the people at Google acknowledged this problem long ago and may be aware that their success is tied to it.
At least it appears that the graphics they'll be using will be limited in scope. Hopefully this isn't a precursor to flash ads and animated gifs. The day they start using pop-over flash ads is the first day of Google's demise.
The first client I saw that feature in was, like so many other features we take for granted in IM, ICQ. It's really effective in keeping spammers and other unwanteds away. The problem is, how different would that be from what we have now? It's been my experience that you have to accept someone as a contact before the client will tell them you're online.
The other part of this is that with gmail/gtalk once a spammer has your IM they have your email and vice versa. So what does a filter like that do if a spammer knows that your account exists? Your mail box is still going to get spammed.
Then again, I've not been spammed in gtalk. Does anyone have any firsthand experience with a spammer using it?
I'm a level 137 Microsoft Win-zard, I can now wield the CLI of fortitude and I've unlocked the 5th ring of the registry.
That will surely make the level 1s in this world eager to learn.
IANAL either, but as I recall they can't use the DMCA to demand identities anymore. That means that they had to file a John Doe lawsuit, get a subpoena to find out the guys identity from his carrier, and then bring him into the case. By that time I would imagine a warrant to search the computers is trivial.
As for the wording about Paramount looking at his computers, I would assume that this was done after they were entered as evidence. I would also assume that it was probably done by an independent security expert in the presence of Paramount and the authorities. They would need to be very careful with how they did it or their entire case against the guy would be blown due to the potential claim of mishandled evidence.
I figure the more likely scenario is that Paramount told the guy, "If you let us have your computers, we won't sue you." The guy, not being a lawyer and thinking that was a good deal, said, "Okay," then erased one of his hard drives, since he was at least smart enough to know that if Paramount found what they were looking for they would have sued him anyway. (Or maybe he's innocent and just didn't want them to see his downloaded porn collection; either way doesn't matter.) Then Paramount, mad, sued him anyway.
People stupid enough to hand over their computers on such a verbal contract deserve to be sued out of existence. If that is the case then the only reason why I'd pull for the guy is because I don't want this case to set a precedent that people are responsible for open wifi connections. Eventually I'd like to see people held accountable, but for right now I think it's impractical and dangerous to do so.
The guy needs to go get a really lawyer pronto. Whether he's innocent or guilty, Paramount is going to do their best to screw him, and personally, even if he's guilty, I hope he comes out of this clean. Not because I think that sharing files illegally is okay, but becuase they (Paramount) are using crooked tactics that are much worse than the crimes this guy may or may not have committed.
We don't know what tactics Paramount is using. Heck, that incredibly short article doesn't even mention whether the guy has a lawyer or not, so we don't even know that. How can you draw such conclusions? In the picture you paint, this guy is really dumb and I couldn't care less if her were punished so long as it doesn't set bad precedent.
As have I. I had thought for a while that it was just a live feature until I realized that my wife didn't have it and asked some friends about it.
I think they added some before they released it, I hadn't looked in months and I don't remember some of the feeds they have listed.
My favorite is the SPAM recipes in the spam folder and recycling tips in the trash.
The entire article seems like a rant that he can't cheaply sue the poster for libel. Notice that I say cheaply, because he can sue for libel via a John Doe lawsuit (which he acknowledges in the article) but he chooses not to because the judge has the option of whether to issue a subpoena. Does it say something that he's afraid the judge wouldn't find this worthy of a subpoena to find the identity of this person? Didn't the RIAA prove thousands of times over that these subpoena's can actually lead to real defendants?
I just think he doesn't want this in court. He wants to sue someone in such a way that he can get a fat settlement without the validity of the claims going into public record.
I mean, how sweet of a deal would that be? We get good hardware cheap for our use, and Microsoft gets shafted $126. It's like putting a Linux tax on them in retribution to the fabled Microsoft tax.
Of course, that's until people still go out and buy the games and pay MS the money back.
As for CAFE... They don't tend to worry about their big trucks very much, so long as they can put out smaller fuel efficient trucks. Remember that light trucks are a separate CAFE category, and the average fuel economy need only be just over 20mpg for the fleet. Of course, that's easy to accomplish, even if your fleet is full of vehicles that only manage 13-18mpg. All you do is put in a small or compact SUV underpowered by a 4c motor.
Take a look at this. It's the 2003 Annual Update for the Fuel Economy program. Notice how the import light trucks economy has slipped to be in-line with the domestic trucks? That's not because the importers have gotten sloppy with their engines, or that the domestics have improved their's so greatly. No, it's because the importers started with smaller (more import friendly) vehicles and slowly started importing larger and less fuel efficient vehicles. Meanwhile, the gas mileage on your average full size pickup isn't that much greater than in '78. Nope, it's just being offset by manufacturers offering more compact, small, and mid sized trucks with 6c and 4c engines.
My critique of the show is that they only tested one model of pickup. Even their scale models that were tested in the water with oatmeal were only one type of truck, the same type as in their practical test. This may be a minor problem, except they were using a crew cab with a short bed. The myth that you get better mileage with the tailgate down is surely older than the advent and/or popularization of the crew cab pickup. If they were to test with a full bed, full size pickup then they may see different results.
I agree with you on every point. Thing is, that doesn't really excuse the grandparent poster from either trolling or just spouting nonsense as though it were fact without any amount of knowledge about the subject.
I'm not in the financial industry as you are (readers: see his other reply to my original post). However, I do take an avid interest in the the automotive sector. I follow the automotive news from the "car guy" standpoint, yet I'm quite interested in the trends of the industry as a whole. So, needless to say, I've read my fair share about the ins and outs of being GM or Toyota.
Most people will find that the Japanese are taking hydrogen seriously, but they don't want to sink their money into more than delivering the vehicles that can run off of it. GM, on the other hand, has pretty much accepted that it's not competing well in the combustion engine market and Toyota and Honda hold too many patents for it to compete well in the hybrid market. That's why GM, to a much greater extent than the others, is investing in anything to do with hydrogen. They're betting the companies future on it and they know that without infrastructure it'll take too long to adopt and they won't be able to survive.
Some light reading:2 2143455.htm n nouncements040205.html 0 32.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/0501
http://www.hydrogenforecast.com/April2005/hf_oema
http://www.forbes.com/execpicks/global/2005/0509/
Ugh. You are confusing a gasoline fuel cell with a hydrogen fuel cell. You'll find they are very different things.
GMC is the only one who refuses to go along with fuel cells.
That is blatantly false. For one thing, GMC is a division of GM. For another, if you actually researched you'd find that GM is footing the largest part of the hydrogen fuel cell research. Honda is busy putting cars out and getting PR, GM is busy investing money in figuring out how to deliver hydrogen to the world efficiently.
Also it should be mentioned that the oil industry owns stock in these American automobile companies so they have a financial incentive to create gas guzzlers.
I don't know about this first-hand, but given the track record of your post I wouldn't take only your word for it.