I'm using Office XP Pro side by side with OO. There is really no major differences now between the two in my use of office packages. One thing is for certain, at this update rate I could not afford the MS version of updates, but with OpenOffice... meh, this is great. If I could get a car manufacturer to upgrade my vehicle for free once a year (new cupholders, dash panel, etc.) It would also be great, but I'll settle for what I get with OpenOffice thank you very much.
I'm with you on that one. A bit too anthropomorphic for my tastes, and I like hobby robotics. We are a long way from having to hold hands with a robot, they are little more than very expensive tools. Robots like the Aibo are little more than very expensive pets. Then again, some people think poison ivy looks pretty. There is no accounting for tastes. To my way of thinking, the robots we have sent to Mars already is an amazing thing so putting on in orbit is hardly a major leap forward in robotics technology. The whole hand holding things is rather sophomoric really.
projects like this are not just put out for bid, but offered up like an X Prize. For a mere 10 million dollars they would probably end up with a device agnostic system that works with wireless and not, and compiles statistics for serving up to the web automatically. I can see the Google mashup now.
Ferchrisakes, this is WHAT GEEKS DO all day long.
Add a blind double check security login so that people can be counted at home on their computers. Then only check those with addresses and no data as well as addresses with more than one set of data.
Then off you go, into the wild digital yonder of mashups and web pages with pie charts and 'stuff'
Yes, I truly do believe it is that simple. The one guy that has a chance for the netflix prize all on his own is one of those bumps in the bell curve of design. If you put it up for bid, the only developers working on the project will be bound to follow orders from those above, and bright ideas will be lost in the suffle of stale coffee and boring meetings.
Post the bid specs and lets see what happens? why not? I realize this has to secure information about persons but it's not like the system would lose any nuclear weaponry in Taiwan? right?
This is going to stop what kind of crime? Are they going to spot bank robbers in their hideout planning to rob banks? Are they going to stop illegals from going to work? What exactly are they planning to stop?
If it's drug crimes.. well, think of the children.... sigh
Oh wait!
"We intend to use this to benefit us in carrying out our mission," he added, saying the wingless Honeywell aircraft, which fits into a backpack and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, seems ideally suited for use by SWAT teams in hostage situations or dealing with "barricaded subjects." Clearly they are going to use it for drug busts... nice. Wonder where the police departments would spend all that money if they didn't have to fight drug crimes because some of them had been made legal? The espionage on private citizens elevates continuously in the war on drugs, war on crime, war on civil liberties without making anyone safer IMO. They already use helicopters, now this will put the capability of putting an eye in the sky in multiple locations without the expense of a helicopter and raise the danger level to ordinary citizens most likely.
Perhaps I'm cynical, but wasn't the last great advance for police forces the taser? Yep, that worked out pretty good, don't you think?
The US appears to have been dealing in nuclear information and weapons for quite some time now. A few lost shipments of this and that are to be expected when you are shipping with fly-by-night-drugs-R-us airlines.
Seriously, I'm amazed that we don't find more shipping accidents. A CIA plane crash lands with a buttload of cocaine on it, nuclear fuses get shipped to a foreign country like lost luggage on an airliner? Rumors and stories everywhere of secretly selling nuclear secrets to now declared enemies of the USA. Where does it stop? Ooops, Sorry Los Angeles. We mistakenly sent that suitcase bomb to Iran. Brown was supposed to handle that, but Columbian based DruglordCo came in at a cheaper price.
In other news, the US government looks foolish for trying to stop Iran's non-weapons nuclear program with war if need be, while misplacing EVERY FUCKING THING Iran needs to build a bomb, through some shipping miscommunication...
Fuck, I give up. Either the Whitehouse and government is full of evil geniuses or they are incompetent as to be less useful than tits on a boar hog as my grandfather used to say. How can they pull off the media circus they did to get us into war with Iraq but clumsily admit "oh, yes, we made a mistake with some nuclear weapons stuff, sorry about that" ?!?!?!?!?!?
it is clear that to rebuild D.C. you need to sweep away the rubbish from the old system to bring in the new. The 'new' in this case include new technology that bypasses the current old boy network. New voters that are not yet tainted by the old boy network. New rules of political interaction (via technology and new voters), new representation for those previously under-represented... in short a revolution. Communication has always been part and parcel of war. The side with the best communication always has an advantage. Technology brings that to any political revolution that would happen in the USA.
I think of such things as good but I wonder how long before the right wingers begin calling him the antichrist?
even one stating the 'while' and 'meanwhile' clauses for patent denial. The USPTO patent system is obviously broken as this falls in the category of obvious extension to existing technology that is neither novel or unique. It should never have been allowed in the first place, and I question the legality of it's value in a sale proposition.
While that sounds good, in this case the RIAA didn't even know if they were suing the right person. The case was dropped when it was shown that it was not this guy doing downloading, so that essentially he is having to pay court costs to prove he wasn't guilty. A good counter suit to the tune of 3 times his costs or more should help set the right precedent. If the **AA continues to sue people without being sure they are even suing the right people, their evidence is flawed horrendously. Sure, there is some purchase here for using the probable cause phrase, but in the end they were wrong and significantly distressed and inconvenienced this guy.
Without discovery (in this case a fishing trip) the RIAA cannot even be sure if there is anyone to sue. They don't have direct evidence of copyright infringement. They don't have anything more than circumstantial evidence in most cases.
IANAL but...
If Mr X has a gun that is the same kind as used to kill Mr Y, and Mr X was in the area of the murder at the time of the murder and had previously fought with Mr Y. The bullet was too damaged to do ballistics on it. That is circumstantial evidence. Pretty good but circumstantial
If Mr X has a gun that is the same kind as used to kill Mr Y, and Mr X was in the area of the murder at the time of the murder and had previously fought with Mr Y. The bullet ballistically matched Mr X's gun. Witnesses saw them together within minutes of the estimated time of death. That is strong evidence. This is what the RIAA does not have.
Taking Mr X to trial on circumstantial evidence has a matter of risk to it. They might not be able to convince a jury that Mr X killed Mr Y. He might have a good alibi. OR They may convict him only to find out 30 years later that Mrs Y killed him with the same kind of gun.
Basically, the RIAA uses bad evidence, circumstantial evidence, and other techniques to get convictions and runs away when they think they will lose. It's a shotgun approach. Sue everyone we can, let the complainers go free.
Right now the RIAA is telling artists that they represent that there is little to nothing left of all the money they got from Napster, so the RIAA can't really give them much of the rewards for that effort. It all went to lawyers.
Add all that up and the case against the RIAA looks bad for them. They are suing the wrong people, causing harm, ruining credibility, and their efforts are not even benefiting those they represent in court. I would not call that frivolous, I'd call it malicious.
How to bring that all together in court is a problem I'm not sure how to handle though. Clearly some retribution is called for against a bully that uses the legal system to bludgeon ordinary citizens with few resources into paying them 'protection' money.
Know what? If something changes Cuba's mind about OOXML and very shortly after the US embargo of Cuba is ended... fuck, I just don't have words for that.
The critical human thought phrase has been struck down, though I think for many of the wrong reasons. A long time ago (car analogy incoming) people used to work on their own vehicles much more so than today. The onboard computer stopped a lot of that, and general complexity stopped more. With home computers and the Internet both problems exist and for many people (until this recession hits hard) it is cheaper to pay someone else to find stuff than to figure out how to find it themselves.
It's not really difficult, many of those sufferers know how to use a library, which is the real world equivalent of searching on the Internet. (not that the Internet is not real world) Most people were taught how to use a library in their school days and that usage has not changed much with time. The usage of Internet searching does change, and there are multiple ways of doing it. People who are not interested in learning new ways will always just say it is too difficult.
Using boolean modifiers or advanced search is always there, people just don't use it. They also don't fix their own lawnmowers or other things. They just replace them or pay someone else to do the 'hard' stuff. There is enough information on the Internet to allow anyone to learn to protect their home computer from infections and malware, yet it still is a problem.
The human problem of search engines will NOT go away, it can only be made to look less with smarter UIs. A tag cloud system of bookmarking could be used to refine search results but would not work in all cases. The URL history with timestamps might help, but not in all cases. Analysis of search results and those pages actually visited might help narrow the criteria to personal bias but not in all cases. That is why the operator has to be smart enough to know what they want and don't. The Internet does not come with your very own personal cruise director to make sure all goes well. People just believe that it is supposed to be easy because they want to do the cool things that they hear about on television and from their friends etc.
Perhaps one day the interface will be fast enough to be considered good when our brains can be plugged into the computer itself, something like The Matrix, reducing click delays and reading to milliseconds. Until then, teaching people how to use complex search strings will help reduce the angst and pain.
"cars +toyota -hummer 2005" aobut 2.98M hits is better than "cars 2005" about 19 million hits but you have to teach people that those extra characters really REALLY do help.
If people don't know how to use a soldering gun, please don't give them one... or something like that. Oh yeah, car analogy: you apparently can't drive on the streets of the USA legally without a license, which you cannot obtain without demonstrating proficient control of the vehicle.
and with digital television on the way, much easier to implement without interference. The UHF channels used on your television (most households in the USA have some cable or Satellite feed so don't use broadcast television really) have a small amount of bandwidth between each. If you combined that bandwidth with multiple radio links or some transmission technique, you could use it for WiFi like services locally in the home. The strength of signal could be such that it wouldn't interfere with neighbors reception ( as most aren't using broadcast television anyway) and it gives out more spectrum for home use.
Additionally, there are methods to use a small footprint in the WiFi band to herd the small signals between tv channels. It would look like frequency hopping, require much smaller signal strength, and would cause negligible interference to broadcast television. Simpler still is to allow the user to input the television channels they do watch so that interference is even more remote. If you can steal (locally only) use of channels that are not used at all in the area (how many stations are on channel 63 or 42?), there is literally TONS of bandwidth to use, and all of it at a better frequency range for non-line-of-sight transmissions. That is to say; better signal quality at lower signal strengths.
I fully aware of varying different bandwidth caps between my computer and the rest of the Internet. It is part of the field I work in to know such things. That is not the problem.
Throttling all http connections while I'm using a bittorrent client is the problem. I have no empirical evidence at hand to show that even the bittorrent traffic is throttled. As soon as I make a bittorrent connection, all other protocols are throttled to zero throughput. When I close the bittorrent client all returns to normal. It's that simple. If my http download rate can hit the 3.5Mbps as advertised but bittorrent cannot, and while using bittorrent total bandwidth allowed seems to drop to some 56kbps... well, that is not protecting anyone, it is forcibly throttling my traffic. I can download ISOs using http connections ALL FUCKING DAY LONG... start one P2P connection and I get roughly 56kbps total. What is happening is NOT about managing bandwidth usage, it's about mangling P2P usage.
I would be just fine and happy if all I could get was 3.5Mbps all day long with any protocol. I'd happily share that among my vonage, internet radio, several computers etc. When I open the bittorrent client, all bandwidth is dropped to near nothing and http traffic and smtp traffic (as far as I can tell) are cut off.
So, what you think is merely bandwidth management is actually p2p mangling, pure and simple. This was not always the case, it is something new that TimeWarner has started recently. No, I do not download movies and music illegally, so it is me, the honest user who is inconvenienced by all these anti-file sharing methods. I am penalized by the dimwitted people who think they know how to stop the **AA from dying. It takes a great deal of effort not to take out large WSJ ads telling the **AA to fuck off and die right along with timewarner et al.
Sure, you can say that I signed the contract etc. but god damnit people, I signed up for 3.5Mbps without regard to protocol used. Thanks to my good fortune, in the nice area where I live it's Time Warner or satellite. I don't have a choice of three or four ISP's.
So what is a cable company supposed to do? So many customers, so big is the Internet. How are they to balance the traffic and needs? Well, I can tell you this, it's not nearly as difficult as they would like congress and the fcc to believe. If you promise 3.5Mbps, deliver it or discount the price! period!
If you bought a 1st class ticket to the Orient, and half way through the stewardess tells you that you have the share your seat with someone else and there will be no discount or rebate... well, you have every right to be pissed off. I'm paying for 3.5Mbps worth of room in the tube and I EXPECT to get that much. I don't want half a lane for my car, or a bike path, I want the full passenger vehicle lane width. If my family is in the damn car I don't want to be forced to use the back roads. It really is THAT simple.
If they want to throttle traffic and shape it, then fucking discount the price of the service. period. If you take your car to be worked on and pay for guaranteed workmanship, you don't want to find out later that the work was faulty, that oh, that doesn't apply to YOUR type of vehicle, whether it was in the fine print of the last page of the contract or not.
Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance or stupidity. (don't know who I'm (mis)quoting there)
The idea that corporate power causes corruption is slightly off base. Corporate power causes greed, which in turn spawns unsound business decisions. Any successful product, it's launch, it's essence will be copied. iPod => Zune as an example. When the beta launch of Google products worked (Gmail as an example) it's success spawns similar product launches. And so the song plays on until someone notices "Hey, they are not innovating much anymore" or the internal standards for cost and pricing continue to spiral in the wrong direction. Eventually it becomes too much. This is not due to corruption nor greed per se' but is more about momentum. Huge corporations are notoriously difficult to get organized, and once in place the organization rarely ever changes direction. As the organization grows it costs more to keep moving. There are very few execs that want to report upcoming profit losses, that is not what they are there for, so prices spiral upwards till they can't be supported.
In truth, $75 USD for a copy of XP would have been perfect, more or less. OSX on x86 at $75 would have been great. All that with the caveat that they keep their crap-proprietary-call-home-buy-our-other-lock-in-products shit out of it. The problem is that this does not drive further sales, nor protect revenue streams. In the end, to maintain the profits and growth things have to be costing consumers something, somewhere. Google has offset this by deriving revenue not from customers but from advertisers. If Google became a $10/month subscription I'd pay for it, if there were no ads. The trend on the Internet is zero customer cost. Google can sustain that. MS could never sustain that, though you have to wonder how they got so big when everyone used to copy their software illegally and with impunity?
Evil does not creep in. It's just too much momentum to turn back away from bad when you get started off in that direction. Large corporations are NOT nimble enough. I think that Google will finally figure out just how many ads people are willing to put up with, and what types work and don't. Google continues to innovate and compete (whether that is from within house or by acquiring a few pieces here or there) where others are not doing as well. It's a shame really, as I believe that if there were fierce competition to Google at every step from other companies (plural) then we would all benefit greatly.
If it is advertised that I will get x number of tubes, and the contract I have signed with my ISP states that I will get x number of tubes, then goddamnit, I need to get x number of tubes. If your infrastructure is incapable of suppling all the people with the contracted number of tubes then you need to increase the capacity of your infrastructure. If your business plan was 'counting on users to not use the contractual number of tubes' then your business plan sucks and you should be penalized handily.
If your infrastructure is big enough you need to stop limiting the number of tubes I use except at the contracted rate.
Either way it is not something that should be arbitrary. If you don't want me to download using P2P, fucking say so up front and I will not sign a contract with you and will get my tubes from somewhere else and you can try to stay afloat with customers who are happy for you to filter their traffic and limit their tubes. Yeah, I'm sure that will work out well for you.
The gap of difference between the ramdisk and SSD is wide enough to say that the 'inventions' are different even though the idea is as vastly different as say the colors on new Honda Accords in the dealer's parking lot. In such cases I am against allowing patents for something that is an extension of existing technology unless the differences are vast. Okay, here is a hard drive interface XYZ. No patent should be allowed on other hard drive interfaces unless they are vastly different, different enough to cause the obsoleting of the previous work, or compete directly with it to split the market.
Have you ever noticed how a lot of new cars look pretty much the same? Hard drive interfaces are a lot like that if you allow anyone to patent minor differences. Oh, but hard drive interface ABC uses blue connectors instead of grey. Minor differences and logical extensions of existing patented inventions are things that make for bs patents. SSD is an enhancement to existing technology, NOT some "OMG, how did they think of that" technology. Back in '92 people were talking about that.
Logical extension of existing things: email on wireless devices, methods to store data on a computer, using RAM to replace the mechanical magnetic materials in hard drives, and on and on
I think you have nailed it exactly. First responder network requirements are an absolute brick around the neck. Generator backup for every site for 8 hours is an expensive brick, 24 hours for major sites. There are probably calea requirements also that go beyond normal 'here is the subpoena, not give me the records' kind of thing.
The requirements on existing networks to support the government(s) during emergency are nearly enough to put you out of business if you have low margins. Imagine how many lights you'd put in your house if you had to supply each with 8 hour battery backup and one outlet in every room with 24 hour battery backup plus data recorders for who used the lights and when.
Yep, you'd be asking yourself why you want to spend 1.3 Billion Dollars for the privilege of building a network that is 3-10 times more expensive than regular networks. It probably also has to be tied into the latest NSA data dragnet system as well.
Notoriously, emergency services teams/groups don't really have the funds to pay you extra money for that huge network you built. They like to get things cheaply too, saving your taxpayer dollars and such.
Not only is that insightful, but brilliantly used. People get all wishy washy when libertarians talk about state's rights. Uhmmmm this is one of those times folks, where state's rights protect your own rights. For some truly interesting reading you might try this link I saw yesterday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia It's a long read but I think an important one when you consider what the Federal government is trying to foist upon us all. The entire notion of ID kind of falls apart when you actually dig into the constitution and laws which govern this country, your state, and local municipality... at least here in the US.
Data is data. If you are like me, you won't be seeing the ads anyway. When I'm searching data, complex searches reveal the best results in most cases. Being able to search within results is a form of complex search and can be specified by the searcher to start with, Google has simply made this easier. If Google is doing something bad, people are welcome to not have their data indexed by Google. Anyone can search your site via Google and present their own ads next to it. Yes Google is the 800 lb search gorilla, but get real here.
No, I do not think Google is beyond doing evil. I just haven't seen them do any yet.
No matter how technology changes what data we see and how we see it someone is going to be inconvenienced. I am sincerely hoping the US government is the next to be inconvenienced by large amounts of publicly available data. If a few website owners get caught in the mix... meh.
Talk to the buggy makers and shoe cobblers, I'm certain that they will have great sympathy for you.
I can go one better for you. Technically, MS is correct. MS is thumbing it's nose at standards because they can say "Look, we did it your way. We made IE8 extremely secure and now you claim it's broke. We are not the people that broke web browsing and the Internet, you did it. If we did everything people suggest the Internet just doesn't work."
To a point, they are right, but they did this to show they are better and only seem insecure because if they don't do such things as they have done the Internet will not work. Oh yes, btw, those other browsers are not secure either... see how their stuff still works?
I thought as much, but "they don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we are in their country."
Even if it 'looks' like Christians and Jews are more tolerant, they are not. Christian countries have been making a mess of the Muslim world for a long time. This is old news, not breaking news. Your comment simply tries to state that only Muslims are violent as if only suicide bombings are violent. They throw rocks at their Israeli tormentors in their tanks. This whole thread could get long and boring with astronomically large volumes of details. My point is simple: Christians, Jews, AND Muslims believe in the very same god of Abraham and yet they are all violent toward each other. There is no love, no fellowship, no brotherhood of believers. If you want to think that Jews and Christians are 'not as violent' as Muslims because they don't do suicide bombings... well, ok, and btw I have some land to sell you. Beautiful place.. about 75 miles east of Miami.
Seriously, the world is fucked up where religions are concerned. If it's not one major religion fucking with another, it's a government killing peaceful monks so there will be no protests during the Olympics. I'm NOT saying that you have to be religious to be violent or intolerant but I am saying that religions claim to be non-violent and tolerant yet show neither virtue to the rest of the world. Yes, you read that right. I'm tarring you with the same brush as the radical and extreme members of your religion. If you don't like that, get rid of those people. Kick them out, denounce them, fight them, save your name and good reputation that you claim. Maybe then I'll tend to believe you.
Christians are currently killing Muslims in foreign lands. Jews are killing Muslims. Muslims are killing Jews and Christians. Why is there so much violence associated with religion if they all believe in the SAME god?
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I'm using Office XP Pro side by side with OO. There is really no major differences now between the two in my use of office packages. One thing is for certain, at this update rate I could not afford the MS version of updates, but with OpenOffice... meh, this is great. If I could get a car manufacturer to upgrade my vehicle for free once a year (new cupholders, dash panel, etc.) It would also be great, but I'll settle for what I get with OpenOffice thank you very much.
I'm with you on that one. A bit too anthropomorphic for my tastes, and I like hobby robotics. We are a long way from having to hold hands with a robot, they are little more than very expensive tools. Robots like the Aibo are little more than very expensive pets. Then again, some people think poison ivy looks pretty. There is no accounting for tastes. To my way of thinking, the robots we have sent to Mars already is an amazing thing so putting on in orbit is hardly a major leap forward in robotics technology. The whole hand holding things is rather sophomoric really.
My head just asploded!
Even though I had hoped that bit torrent would become the ISP's friend, I had not expected the devil himself to be one of the first to cozy up... WTF?
projects like this are not just put out for bid, but offered up like an X Prize. For a mere 10 million dollars they would probably end up with a device agnostic system that works with wireless and not, and compiles statistics for serving up to the web automatically. I can see the Google mashup now.
Ferchrisakes, this is WHAT GEEKS DO all day long.
Add a blind double check security login so that people can be counted at home on their computers. Then only check those with addresses and no data as well as addresses with more than one set of data.
Then off you go, into the wild digital yonder of mashups and web pages with pie charts and 'stuff'
Yes, I truly do believe it is that simple. The one guy that has a chance for the netflix prize all on his own is one of those bumps in the bell curve of design. If you put it up for bid, the only developers working on the project will be bound to follow orders from those above, and bright ideas will be lost in the suffle of stale coffee and boring meetings.
Post the bid specs and lets see what happens? why not? I realize this has to secure information about persons but it's not like the system would lose any nuclear weaponry in Taiwan? right?
in a word... YES
If it's drug crimes.. well, think of the children.... sigh
Oh wait! "We intend to use this to benefit us in carrying out our mission," he added, saying the wingless Honeywell aircraft, which fits into a backpack and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, seems ideally suited for use by SWAT teams in hostage situations or dealing with "barricaded subjects." Clearly they are going to use it for drug busts... nice. Wonder where the police departments would spend all that money if they didn't have to fight drug crimes because some of them had been made legal? The espionage on private citizens elevates continuously in the war on drugs, war on crime, war on civil liberties without making anyone safer IMO. They already use helicopters, now this will put the capability of putting an eye in the sky in multiple locations without the expense of a helicopter and raise the danger level to ordinary citizens most likely.
Perhaps I'm cynical, but wasn't the last great advance for police forces the taser? Yep, that worked out pretty good, don't you think?
flamebait? why? Can anyone explain please?
The US appears to have been dealing in nuclear information and weapons for quite some time now. A few lost shipments of this and that are to be expected when you are shipping with fly-by-night-drugs-R-us airlines.
Seriously, I'm amazed that we don't find more shipping accidents. A CIA plane crash lands with a buttload of cocaine on it, nuclear fuses get shipped to a foreign country like lost luggage on an airliner? Rumors and stories everywhere of secretly selling nuclear secrets to now declared enemies of the USA. Where does it stop? Ooops, Sorry Los Angeles. We mistakenly sent that suitcase bomb to Iran. Brown was supposed to handle that, but Columbian based DruglordCo came in at a cheaper price.
In other news, the US government looks foolish for trying to stop Iran's non-weapons nuclear program with war if need be, while misplacing EVERY FUCKING THING Iran needs to build a bomb, through some shipping miscommunication...
Fuck, I give up. Either the Whitehouse and government is full of evil geniuses or they are incompetent as to be less useful than tits on a boar hog as my grandfather used to say. How can they pull off the media circus they did to get us into war with Iraq but clumsily admit "oh, yes, we made a mistake with some nuclear weapons stuff, sorry about that" ?!?!?!?!?!?
it is clear that to rebuild D.C. you need to sweep away the rubbish from the old system to bring in the new. The 'new' in this case include new technology that bypasses the current old boy network. New voters that are not yet tainted by the old boy network. New rules of political interaction (via technology and new voters), new representation for those previously under-represented... in short a revolution. Communication has always been part and parcel of war. The side with the best communication always has an advantage. Technology brings that to any political revolution that would happen in the USA.
I think of such things as good but I wonder how long before the right wingers begin calling him the antichrist?
even one stating the 'while' and 'meanwhile' clauses for patent denial. The USPTO patent system is obviously broken as this falls in the category of obvious extension to existing technology that is neither novel or unique. It should never have been allowed in the first place, and I question the legality of it's value in a sale proposition.
While that sounds good, in this case the RIAA didn't even know if they were suing the right person. The case was dropped when it was shown that it was not this guy doing downloading, so that essentially he is having to pay court costs to prove he wasn't guilty. A good counter suit to the tune of 3 times his costs or more should help set the right precedent. If the **AA continues to sue people without being sure they are even suing the right people, their evidence is flawed horrendously. Sure, there is some purchase here for using the probable cause phrase, but in the end they were wrong and significantly distressed and inconvenienced this guy.
Without discovery (in this case a fishing trip) the RIAA cannot even be sure if there is anyone to sue. They don't have direct evidence of copyright infringement. They don't have anything more than circumstantial evidence in most cases.
IANAL but...
If Mr X has a gun that is the same kind as used to kill Mr Y, and Mr X was in the area of the murder at the time of the murder and had previously fought with Mr Y. The bullet was too damaged to do ballistics on it. That is circumstantial evidence. Pretty good but circumstantial
If Mr X has a gun that is the same kind as used to kill Mr Y, and Mr X was in the area of the murder at the time of the murder and had previously fought with Mr Y. The bullet ballistically matched Mr X's gun. Witnesses saw them together within minutes of the estimated time of death. That is strong evidence. This is what the RIAA does not have.
Taking Mr X to trial on circumstantial evidence has a matter of risk to it. They might not be able to convince a jury that Mr X killed Mr Y. He might have a good alibi. OR They may convict him only to find out 30 years later that Mrs Y killed him with the same kind of gun.
Basically, the RIAA uses bad evidence, circumstantial evidence, and other techniques to get convictions and runs away when they think they will lose. It's a shotgun approach. Sue everyone we can, let the complainers go free.
Right now the RIAA is telling artists that they represent that there is little to nothing left of all the money they got from Napster, so the RIAA can't really give them much of the rewards for that effort. It all went to lawyers.
Add all that up and the case against the RIAA looks bad for them. They are suing the wrong people, causing harm, ruining credibility, and their efforts are not even benefiting those they represent in court. I would not call that frivolous, I'd call it malicious.
How to bring that all together in court is a problem I'm not sure how to handle though. Clearly some retribution is called for against a bully that uses the legal system to bludgeon ordinary citizens with few resources into paying them 'protection' money.
Know what? If something changes Cuba's mind about OOXML and very shortly after the US embargo of Cuba is ended... fuck, I just don't have words for that.
The critical human thought phrase has been struck down, though I think for many of the wrong reasons. A long time ago (car analogy incoming) people used to work on their own vehicles much more so than today. The onboard computer stopped a lot of that, and general complexity stopped more. With home computers and the Internet both problems exist and for many people (until this recession hits hard) it is cheaper to pay someone else to find stuff than to figure out how to find it themselves.
It's not really difficult, many of those sufferers know how to use a library, which is the real world equivalent of searching on the Internet. (not that the Internet is not real world) Most people were taught how to use a library in their school days and that usage has not changed much with time. The usage of Internet searching does change, and there are multiple ways of doing it. People who are not interested in learning new ways will always just say it is too difficult.
Using boolean modifiers or advanced search is always there, people just don't use it. They also don't fix their own lawnmowers or other things. They just replace them or pay someone else to do the 'hard' stuff. There is enough information on the Internet to allow anyone to learn to protect their home computer from infections and malware, yet it still is a problem.
The human problem of search engines will NOT go away, it can only be made to look less with smarter UIs. A tag cloud system of bookmarking could be used to refine search results but would not work in all cases. The URL history with timestamps might help, but not in all cases. Analysis of search results and those pages actually visited might help narrow the criteria to personal bias but not in all cases. That is why the operator has to be smart enough to know what they want and don't. The Internet does not come with your very own personal cruise director to make sure all goes well. People just believe that it is supposed to be easy because they want to do the cool things that they hear about on television and from their friends etc.
Perhaps one day the interface will be fast enough to be considered good when our brains can be plugged into the computer itself, something like The Matrix, reducing click delays and reading to milliseconds. Until then, teaching people how to use complex search strings will help reduce the angst and pain.
"cars +toyota -hummer 2005" aobut 2.98M hits
is better than
"cars 2005" about 19 million hits
but you have to teach people that those extra characters really REALLY do help.
If people don't know how to use a soldering gun, please don't give them one... or something like that. Oh yeah, car analogy: you apparently can't drive on the streets of the USA legally without a license, which you cannot obtain without demonstrating proficient control of the vehicle.
and with digital television on the way, much easier to implement without interference. The UHF channels used on your television (most households in the USA have some cable or Satellite feed so don't use broadcast television really) have a small amount of bandwidth between each. If you combined that bandwidth with multiple radio links or some transmission technique, you could use it for WiFi like services locally in the home. The strength of signal could be such that it wouldn't interfere with neighbors reception ( as most aren't using broadcast television anyway) and it gives out more spectrum for home use.
Additionally, there are methods to use a small footprint in the WiFi band to herd the small signals between tv channels. It would look like frequency hopping, require much smaller signal strength, and would cause negligible interference to broadcast television. Simpler still is to allow the user to input the television channels they do watch so that interference is even more remote. If you can steal (locally only) use of channels that are not used at all in the area (how many stations are on channel 63 or 42?), there is literally TONS of bandwidth to use, and all of it at a better frequency range for non-line-of-sight transmissions. That is to say; better signal quality at lower signal strengths.
I fully aware of varying different bandwidth caps between my computer and the rest of the Internet. It is part of the field I work in to know such things. That is not the problem.
Throttling all http connections while I'm using a bittorrent client is the problem. I have no empirical evidence at hand to show that even the bittorrent traffic is throttled. As soon as I make a bittorrent connection, all other protocols are throttled to zero throughput. When I close the bittorrent client all returns to normal. It's that simple. If my http download rate can hit the 3.5Mbps as advertised but bittorrent cannot, and while using bittorrent total bandwidth allowed seems to drop to some 56kbps... well, that is not protecting anyone, it is forcibly throttling my traffic. I can download ISOs using http connections ALL FUCKING DAY LONG... start one P2P connection and I get roughly 56kbps total. What is happening is NOT about managing bandwidth usage, it's about mangling P2P usage.
I would be just fine and happy if all I could get was 3.5Mbps all day long with any protocol. I'd happily share that among my vonage, internet radio, several computers etc. When I open the bittorrent client, all bandwidth is dropped to near nothing and http traffic and smtp traffic (as far as I can tell) are cut off.
So, what you think is merely bandwidth management is actually p2p mangling, pure and simple. This was not always the case, it is something new that TimeWarner has started recently. No, I do not download movies and music illegally, so it is me, the honest user who is inconvenienced by all these anti-file sharing methods. I am penalized by the dimwitted people who think they know how to stop the **AA from dying. It takes a great deal of effort not to take out large WSJ ads telling the **AA to fuck off and die right along with timewarner et al.
Sure, you can say that I signed the contract etc. but god damnit people, I signed up for 3.5Mbps without regard to protocol used. Thanks to my good fortune, in the nice area where I live it's Time Warner or satellite. I don't have a choice of three or four ISP's.
So what is a cable company supposed to do? So many customers, so big is the Internet. How are they to balance the traffic and needs? Well, I can tell you this, it's not nearly as difficult as they would like congress and the fcc to believe. If you promise 3.5Mbps, deliver it or discount the price! period!
If you bought a 1st class ticket to the Orient, and half way through the stewardess tells you that you have the share your seat with someone else and there will be no discount or rebate... well, you have every right to be pissed off. I'm paying for 3.5Mbps worth of room in the tube and I EXPECT to get that much. I don't want half a lane for my car, or a bike path, I want the full passenger vehicle lane width. If my family is in the damn car I don't want to be forced to use the back roads. It really is THAT simple.
If they want to throttle traffic and shape it, then fucking discount the price of the service. period. If you take your car to be worked on and pay for guaranteed workmanship, you don't want to find out later that the work was faulty, that oh, that doesn't apply to YOUR type of vehicle, whether it was in the fine print of the last page of the contract or not.
Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance or stupidity. (don't know who I'm (mis)quoting there)
The idea that corporate power causes corruption is slightly off base. Corporate power causes greed, which in turn spawns unsound business decisions. Any successful product, it's launch, it's essence will be copied. iPod => Zune as an example. When the beta launch of Google products worked (Gmail as an example) it's success spawns similar product launches. And so the song plays on until someone notices "Hey, they are not innovating much anymore" or the internal standards for cost and pricing continue to spiral in the wrong direction. Eventually it becomes too much. This is not due to corruption nor greed per se' but is more about momentum. Huge corporations are notoriously difficult to get organized, and once in place the organization rarely ever changes direction. As the organization grows it costs more to keep moving. There are very few execs that want to report upcoming profit losses, that is not what they are there for, so prices spiral upwards till they can't be supported.
In truth, $75 USD for a copy of XP would have been perfect, more or less. OSX on x86 at $75 would have been great. All that with the caveat that they keep their crap-proprietary-call-home-buy-our-other-lock-in-products shit out of it. The problem is that this does not drive further sales, nor protect revenue streams. In the end, to maintain the profits and growth things have to be costing consumers something, somewhere. Google has offset this by deriving revenue not from customers but from advertisers. If Google became a $10/month subscription I'd pay for it, if there were no ads. The trend on the Internet is zero customer cost. Google can sustain that. MS could never sustain that, though you have to wonder how they got so big when everyone used to copy their software illegally and with impunity?
Evil does not creep in. It's just too much momentum to turn back away from bad when you get started off in that direction. Large corporations are NOT nimble enough. I think that Google will finally figure out just how many ads people are willing to put up with, and what types work and don't. Google continues to innovate and compete (whether that is from within house or by acquiring a few pieces here or there) where others are not doing as well. It's a shame really, as I believe that if there were fierce competition to Google at every step from other companies (plural) then we would all benefit greatly.
If it is advertised that I will get x number of tubes, and the contract I have signed with my ISP states that I will get x number of tubes, then goddamnit, I need to get x number of tubes. If your infrastructure is incapable of suppling all the people with the contracted number of tubes then you need to increase the capacity of your infrastructure. If your business plan was 'counting on users to not use the contractual number of tubes' then your business plan sucks and you should be penalized handily.
If your infrastructure is big enough you need to stop limiting the number of tubes I use except at the contracted rate.
Either way it is not something that should be arbitrary. If you don't want me to download using P2P, fucking say so up front and I will not sign a contract with you and will get my tubes from somewhere else and you can try to stay afloat with customers who are happy for you to filter their traffic and limit their tubes. Yeah, I'm sure that will work out well for you.
The gap of difference between the ramdisk and SSD is wide enough to say that the 'inventions' are different even though the idea is as vastly different as say the colors on new Honda Accords in the dealer's parking lot. In such cases I am against allowing patents for something that is an extension of existing technology unless the differences are vast. Okay, here is a hard drive interface XYZ. No patent should be allowed on other hard drive interfaces unless they are vastly different, different enough to cause the obsoleting of the previous work, or compete directly with it to split the market.
Have you ever noticed how a lot of new cars look pretty much the same? Hard drive interfaces are a lot like that if you allow anyone to patent minor differences. Oh, but hard drive interface ABC uses blue connectors instead of grey. Minor differences and logical extensions of existing patented inventions are things that make for bs patents. SSD is an enhancement to existing technology, NOT some "OMG, how did they think of that" technology. Back in '92 people were talking about that.
Logical extension of existing things: email on wireless devices, methods to store data on a computer, using RAM to replace the mechanical magnetic materials in hard drives, and on and on
I think you have nailed it exactly. First responder network requirements are an absolute brick around the neck. Generator backup for every site for 8 hours is an expensive brick, 24 hours for major sites. There are probably calea requirements also that go beyond normal 'here is the subpoena, not give me the records' kind of thing.
The requirements on existing networks to support the government(s) during emergency are nearly enough to put you out of business if you have low margins. Imagine how many lights you'd put in your house if you had to supply each with 8 hour battery backup and one outlet in every room with 24 hour battery backup plus data recorders for who used the lights and when.
Yep, you'd be asking yourself why you want to spend 1.3 Billion Dollars for the privilege of building a network that is 3-10 times more expensive than regular networks. It probably also has to be tied into the latest NSA data dragnet system as well.
Notoriously, emergency services teams/groups don't really have the funds to pay you extra money for that huge network you built. They like to get things cheaply too, saving your taxpayer dollars and such.
Here is the link I meant to put in the post above: http://phoenix.craigslist.org/pol/581103415.html
Sorry about that... not back to normally scheduled reading.. or not
Not only is that insightful, but brilliantly used. People get all wishy washy when libertarians talk about state's rights. Uhmmmm this is one of those times folks, where state's rights protect your own rights. For some truly interesting reading you might try this link I saw yesterday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia It's a long read but I think an important one when you consider what the Federal government is trying to foist upon us all. The entire notion of ID kind of falls apart when you actually dig into the constitution and laws which govern this country, your state, and local municipality... at least here in the US.
Evil would be releasing data sets based on people's Google Apps data. I'm waiting for that to happen, so don't think I've really been taken in.
Data is data. If you are like me, you won't be seeing the ads anyway. When I'm searching data, complex searches reveal the best results in most cases. Being able to search within results is a form of complex search and can be specified by the searcher to start with, Google has simply made this easier. If Google is doing something bad, people are welcome to not have their data indexed by Google. Anyone can search your site via Google and present their own ads next to it. Yes Google is the 800 lb search gorilla, but get real here.
No, I do not think Google is beyond doing evil. I just haven't seen them do any yet.
No matter how technology changes what data we see and how we see it someone is going to be inconvenienced. I am sincerely hoping the US government is the next to be inconvenienced by large amounts of publicly available data. If a few website owners get caught in the mix... meh.
Talk to the buggy makers and shoe cobblers, I'm certain that they will have great sympathy for you.
I can go one better for you. Technically, MS is correct. MS is thumbing it's nose at standards because they can say "Look, we did it your way. We made IE8 extremely secure and now you claim it's broke. We are not the people that broke web browsing and the Internet, you did it. If we did everything people suggest the Internet just doesn't work."
To a point, they are right, but they did this to show they are better and only seem insecure because if they don't do such things as they have done the Internet will not work. Oh yes, btw, those other browsers are not secure either... see how their stuff still works?
I thought as much, but "they don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we are in their country."
Even if it 'looks' like Christians and Jews are more tolerant, they are not. Christian countries have been making a mess of the Muslim world for a long time. This is old news, not breaking news. Your comment simply tries to state that only Muslims are violent as if only suicide bombings are violent. They throw rocks at their Israeli tormentors in their tanks. This whole thread could get long and boring with astronomically large volumes of details. My point is simple: Christians, Jews, AND Muslims believe in the very same god of Abraham and yet they are all violent toward each other. There is no love, no fellowship, no brotherhood of believers. If you want to think that Jews and Christians are 'not as violent' as Muslims because they don't do suicide bombings... well, ok, and btw I have some land to sell you. Beautiful place.. about 75 miles east of Miami.
Seriously, the world is fucked up where religions are concerned. If it's not one major religion fucking with another, it's a government killing peaceful monks so there will be no protests during the Olympics. I'm NOT saying that you have to be religious to be violent or intolerant but I am saying that religions claim to be non-violent and tolerant yet show neither virtue to the rest of the world. Yes, you read that right. I'm tarring you with the same brush as the radical and extreme members of your religion. If you don't like that, get rid of those people. Kick them out, denounce them, fight them, save your name and good reputation that you claim. Maybe then I'll tend to believe you.
Christians are currently killing Muslims in foreign lands. Jews are killing Muslims. Muslims are killing Jews and Christians. Why is there so much violence associated with religion if they all believe in the SAME god?