I'm not completely familiar with the US disability system, but I know that in other countries, disability cheques are protected income...they can't be garnished or otherwise taken from the recipient by any means, as the money is legally considered to be the bare minimum the person needs to live. Can the sued guy not just say to the court "Yup, I did it. I'll send the RIAA a cheque as soon as I can afford it." (meaning never)?
Setting completely aside the appropriateness of the actual content, I'm wondering about the purveyors. Since when is it the responsibility of the federal government to create laws to police specific marks? If the federal government (I guess it would have to be the US, to make this analogy work) were to pass a law specifically reserving the word "Microsoft" to MSFT or "Apple" to AAPL, would that be the same thing, and would it be within their realm of responsibility in the first place? Why don't the Olympics use the existing legal remedies to protect their interests?
I just don't see how it's the federal government's business.
Who needs a dock? This device is a 20GB drive that can sit in the bottom of your bag and connect wirelessly to your phone. How much of a stretch is a drive with Bluetooth or whatever (wireless USB?) that sits in the bottom of your bag, syncs to your phone or iPod when you're out, syncs to your PC when you get home or to work (from the bottom of your bag), syncs to your girlfriend's PC when you're at her place, etc., and contains your entire setup, say, in some kind of self-contained cross-platform VM? Is such a device possible with the technology we have now?
Your petition sounds good on the surface, but I'd be concerned about the unintended consequences. Canada has way fewer people than the US, and that means we're considerably less important of a market. If our rules are sufficiently different that US companies have a hard time conducting business in the way that they choose to do it, many companies will just abandon the Canadian market, and we get nothing. It's already happening (although for different reasons) in the content industry...the recent TV show 'Vanished' is a good example. Global aired the show here, for a time, until Global discovered more people were watching 'Heroes' at the time, and so Global stopped airing the 'Vanished' well before the US network did. And when the US network stopped airing the show, the put the remaining episodes up on the web for people to stream and watch online...but not for Canadians. I don't like DRM, but I also don't like draconian laws in either direction, and I don't want to end up with a dearth of content available because our own laws have made it too inconvenient for the content producers to provide it to us.
Worse still would be giving the corporations an excuse for their propaganda..."Sorry, we won't be releasing any titles in HQ-RVD in Canada...the restrictions required to comply with Canadian law would require us to remove our rights management technology, which would leave us vulnerable to American piracy, as the Canadian format discs could be easily smuggled into the US."
Wikipedia says 40GB, but it doesn't say the physical size. Based on the size of the unit itself, it'd have to be pretty small, but 40GB is a decent amount of music, and it's networked, anyways. It's an interesting device, especially if and when it gets modified...would put XBMC to shame for some uses.
Sounds like you want an Apple TV. Doesn't have the 3.5 inch hard drive you wanted, but it probably does everything else you listed, and probably easier than most other options.
SleepyHappyDoc added italics to his Slashdot post today. An unnamed source decryed this move as "unnecessary" and strongly implied that this action was not noteworthy. Film at eleven.
Thanks for telling. An ATI card probably doesn't work with MythTV, anyways (I haven't looked up that specific card, but going on past information, I'd think it's a safe guess). You've actually brought up an aspect of the whole Vista DRM problem that I hadn't considered, that being HDTV. My HDTV tuner box is also running on XP, and I haven't ruled out the possibility of an upgrade to Vista Ultimate down the road (the sports thing they showed off at CES looks pretty cool)...however, my display is not HDCP, nor is my video card, and I seriously doubt my HDTV tuner supports any kind of copy protection. Makes me wonder if down the road, Vista will degrade or even outright refuse to record HD content, possibly with some variation on the broadcast flag. Till now, all my concerns about HD content were pretty much focused on the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD issues...I hadn't thought about them flagging OTA HDTV content or the stuff I capture from my cable box. Something to watch out for, I guess.
I wouldn't want to go out packing, for the simple fact that the weapon would more than likely be taken from me by the assailant. Sure, I could spend a lot of time and money learning how to use the gun, how to defend myself and the gun from having it taken away from me, etc, but I don't want to spend my whole life doing nothing but learning how to defend myself. And I sure as hell don't like the idea of a small mugging, where some thug punches me in the nose and steals my iPod, turning into a shooting, where some thug punches me in the nose, steals my iPod and my gun, and then shoots me with it. At least (although I'd be out an iPod and I might need my nose set) I would probably get to go home that night.
Wow. What TV card did you use to give you that message? I have quite a few different TV tuner devices, and I've never seen anything like that. Does your card work (undegraded) with MythTV, or is it a Windows thing?
Sorry, but I gotta disagree with you. The fact that they are convicted monopolists means that they've broken the law. When you break the law, and get caught and convicted, you are supposed to stop breaking the law right then and there. Not next Tuesday, not when the Q4 results come in, immediately. Your argument sounds good on the surface, but it ignores the imperative that the law is supposed to be. It's supposed to be like a gun to the head.
I see this as fairly huge. If I was a schoolteacher, as soon as I heard about this, I would immediately stop teaching anything to do with computers or the internet in my classroom. Setting aside the question of whether or not the images in this case resulted from the teacher's actions or from spyware, the case sets a precedent that if students are exposed to pornographic images in your class, you become responsibly, criminally. And, just for gravy, you get to be a sex offender. The cost of this is way too high to make it worth the risk of an accident (say, if a malicious student installed something nasty to set me up), so I would just treat my class as if computers and the internet didn't exist. And so my students wouldn't gain the benefits of these tools, nor any education in their use.
One would think the possibility that the images were the result of spyware would create reasonable doubt, but since it doesn't...
You must be thinking of Burger King. For years, Dell didn't sell systems with AMD processors at all. They used to (maybe they still do) make their systems slightly off-standard, so you couldn't use the motherboard in another case, or replace the power supply with a non-Dell supply. I don't think Dell has ever been about "what you want". The perception that they are is merely spin on the fact that they don't actually have to buy the parts and make your computer until after they've made their profit from you.
Hmm. The free brain anyone can edit. This conjures up strange images of large groups of people suddenly stopping still with vacant expressions, after being hit by a brain-blanking vandal.
Then again, that doesn't sound much different than television.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not completely familiar with the US disability system, but I know that in other countries, disability cheques are protected income...they can't be garnished or otherwise taken from the recipient by any means, as the money is legally considered to be the bare minimum the person needs to live. Can the sued guy not just say to the court "Yup, I did it. I'll send the RIAA a cheque as soon as I can afford it." (meaning never)?
I don't want to imagine Harper, Dion, Duceppe and Layton dressed up as the Village People, performing that (but I bet you just did :)
Setting completely aside the appropriateness of the actual content, I'm wondering about the purveyors. Since when is it the responsibility of the federal government to create laws to police specific marks? If the federal government (I guess it would have to be the US, to make this analogy work) were to pass a law specifically reserving the word "Microsoft" to MSFT or "Apple" to AAPL, would that be the same thing, and would it be within their realm of responsibility in the first place? Why don't the Olympics use the existing legal remedies to protect their interests?
I just don't see how it's the federal government's business.
Who needs a dock? This device is a 20GB drive that can sit in the bottom of your bag and connect wirelessly to your phone. How much of a stretch is a drive with Bluetooth or whatever (wireless USB?) that sits in the bottom of your bag, syncs to your phone or iPod when you're out, syncs to your PC when you get home or to work (from the bottom of your bag), syncs to your girlfriend's PC when you're at her place, etc., and contains your entire setup, say, in some kind of self-contained cross-platform VM? Is such a device possible with the technology we have now?
Your petition sounds good on the surface, but I'd be concerned about the unintended consequences. Canada has way fewer people than the US, and that means we're considerably less important of a market. If our rules are sufficiently different that US companies have a hard time conducting business in the way that they choose to do it, many companies will just abandon the Canadian market, and we get nothing. It's already happening (although for different reasons) in the content industry...the recent TV show 'Vanished' is a good example. Global aired the show here, for a time, until Global discovered more people were watching 'Heroes' at the time, and so Global stopped airing the 'Vanished' well before the US network did. And when the US network stopped airing the show, the put the remaining episodes up on the web for people to stream and watch online...but not for Canadians. I don't like DRM, but I also don't like draconian laws in either direction, and I don't want to end up with a dearth of content available because our own laws have made it too inconvenient for the content producers to provide it to us.
Worse still would be giving the corporations an excuse for their propaganda..."Sorry, we won't be releasing any titles in HQ-RVD in Canada...the restrictions required to comply with Canadian law would require us to remove our rights management technology, which would leave us vulnerable to American piracy, as the Canadian format discs could be easily smuggled into the US."
All I can think of now is Smoke versus Goro. Let's hope they don't blow up the world.
Wikipedia says 40GB, but it doesn't say the physical size. Based on the size of the unit itself, it'd have to be pretty small, but 40GB is a decent amount of music, and it's networked, anyways. It's an interesting device, especially if and when it gets modified...would put XBMC to shame for some uses.
Sounds like you want an Apple TV. Doesn't have the 3.5 inch hard drive you wanted, but it probably does everything else you listed, and probably easier than most other options.
Use the TPM?
SleepyHappyDoc added italics to his Slashdot post today. An unnamed source decryed this move as "unnecessary" and strongly implied that this action was not noteworthy. Film at eleven.
Thanks for telling. An ATI card probably doesn't work with MythTV, anyways (I haven't looked up that specific card, but going on past information, I'd think it's a safe guess). You've actually brought up an aspect of the whole Vista DRM problem that I hadn't considered, that being HDTV. My HDTV tuner box is also running on XP, and I haven't ruled out the possibility of an upgrade to Vista Ultimate down the road (the sports thing they showed off at CES looks pretty cool)...however, my display is not HDCP, nor is my video card, and I seriously doubt my HDTV tuner supports any kind of copy protection. Makes me wonder if down the road, Vista will degrade or even outright refuse to record HD content, possibly with some variation on the broadcast flag. Till now, all my concerns about HD content were pretty much focused on the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD issues...I hadn't thought about them flagging OTA HDTV content or the stuff I capture from my cable box. Something to watch out for, I guess.
I wouldn't want to go out packing, for the simple fact that the weapon would more than likely be taken from me by the assailant. Sure, I could spend a lot of time and money learning how to use the gun, how to defend myself and the gun from having it taken away from me, etc, but I don't want to spend my whole life doing nothing but learning how to defend myself. And I sure as hell don't like the idea of a small mugging, where some thug punches me in the nose and steals my iPod, turning into a shooting, where some thug punches me in the nose, steals my iPod and my gun, and then shoots me with it. At least (although I'd be out an iPod and I might need my nose set) I would probably get to go home that night.
Wow. What TV card did you use to give you that message? I have quite a few different TV tuner devices, and I've never seen anything like that. Does your card work (undegraded) with MythTV, or is it a Windows thing?
Sorry, but I gotta disagree with you. The fact that they are convicted monopolists means that they've broken the law. When you break the law, and get caught and convicted, you are supposed to stop breaking the law right then and there. Not next Tuesday, not when the Q4 results come in, immediately. Your argument sounds good on the surface, but it ignores the imperative that the law is supposed to be. It's supposed to be like a gun to the head.
I was kinda happy when I heard the original story...at least, with bugs in them, the Canadian dollar would be good for something.
Maybe you should be looking for a different job, then.
I believe his point was to call the other poster a pedantic douchebag. I could be wrong, though.
I see this as fairly huge. If I was a schoolteacher, as soon as I heard about this, I would immediately stop teaching anything to do with computers or the internet in my classroom. Setting aside the question of whether or not the images in this case resulted from the teacher's actions or from spyware, the case sets a precedent that if students are exposed to pornographic images in your class, you become responsibly, criminally. And, just for gravy, you get to be a sex offender. The cost of this is way too high to make it worth the risk of an accident (say, if a malicious student installed something nasty to set me up), so I would just treat my class as if computers and the internet didn't exist. And so my students wouldn't gain the benefits of these tools, nor any education in their use.
One would think the possibility that the images were the result of spyware would create reasonable doubt, but since it doesn't...
Apparently GP also thinks Star Trek Nemesis was good. Maybe we should throw things.
Why is there a Vulcan leading the Borg?
Inquiring minds want to know
Just for grins, what is your name for the furry creatures in "The Trouble with Tribbles?
Flatcats.
You must be thinking of Burger King. For years, Dell didn't sell systems with AMD processors at all. They used to (maybe they still do) make their systems slightly off-standard, so you couldn't use the motherboard in another case, or replace the power supply with a non-Dell supply. I don't think Dell has ever been about "what you want". The perception that they are is merely spin on the fact that they don't actually have to buy the parts and make your computer until after they've made their profit from you.
I've already paid my taxes to the RIAA Gods several times over.
Well, technically, you don't pay taxes to gods.
"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." Matthew 22:21 (NIV)
Have Wikipedia in the head.
Hmm. The free brain anyone can edit. This conjures up strange images of large groups of people suddenly stopping still with vacant expressions, after being hit by a brain-blanking vandal.
Then again, that doesn't sound much different than television.
Google Web 7.0 Alpha.