Seems like PDAs are better suited for chess, which is the game I would play the most on a portable. The interface is superior (a stylus and a touch-screen display), and I suspect the extra memory and computing power that is typically available on a PDA makes them better suited for chess. Not to mention the fairly low graphics requirements which means having enough resolution to effectively display the board in grayscale. My old Visor did a decent job at 160x160 until it stopped working.
I think for many people who are looking to be entertained when waiting for a plane, strategy games and puzzles do the trick. They aren't looking for Sonic the Hedgehog XXVII for the GBA. PDAs are more than capable for this segment.
Isn't this just one way to implement a P2P network? By selling it for enterprise use, IBM is supporting the argument that P2P networks have legitimate use and should not be outlawed as the RIAA has attempted.
I have not used either, but Storage Tank seems to deliver similar functionality as Waste, though on a larger scale and with a different UI paradigm. Perhaps if Nullsoft had released Waste as a way for small and medium sized businesses to share files, AOL would have acted differently.
I'm not sure Hawking is representative. His best work came after he was struck with a debilitating disease that left him with little to do but think. I am in awe that rather than languishing in self-pity, as I might if faced with similar circumstances, he resolved to have a singular focus on his work, and thus produced amazing results.
At the bottom of every outgoing MSN email message, Microsoft appends an advertisement without the sender's consent. Often, it touts MSN's anti-spam features.
Only Microsoft could sell itself as an anti-spam company by adding spam to every email from its subscribers.
I think this should be considered a tournament of skill, rather than gambling. I see it somewhat akin to chess tournaments where entry fees contribute to cash prizes.
Games exist on a continuum from pure chance to pure skill. At the pure chance end, people play things like the lottery and slot machines. Players with skill fare a little better at blackjack and poker, but are still considered gamblers by the U.S. government. Scrabble tournaments are probably not considered gambling, though an element of chance persists in the random drawing of tiles. Chess has no chance element whatsoever. Playing fps for money isn't really gambling. Either you're good enough to beat your opponent, or you're not.
Don't get me started on double standard that exists in the blind eye that is turned toward bingo nights.
I want to do the same. You could get a big, high resolution display from a small box. I find there are two drawbacks to this scheme:
Brightness. Projectors have come a long way, but don't expect to be able to watch football on a Sunday afternoon without drawing the shades.
Bulb life. The bulbs in these things only last for a thousand hours or so, then cost hundreds of dollars to replace. I don't know of any that can be user-serviced, but I might be mistaken. This is fine if they're used for a few powerpoint presentations a week, but it doesn't work so well for a home TV.
Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it protects works. Patents protect ideas (for far less time than copyrights). The distinction is important.
Regarding the painter your know: How would this kill her living? The end of copyright does not mean that you can no longer profit from your work. It simply means the work is no longer protected. The value of original artwork is very much a function of the artist who creates it. I doubt the woman you discuss would loose any revenue at all if copyright simply did not exist. Paintings are difficult to copy convincingly, and folks won't pay nearly as much for an imposter.
Figuring profit, as you mention, is more difficult, and a little subjective, but not impossible. On the one hand, movies would be easy. We're always told that Terminator 47 cost $670 million to produce. Books can be assigned value based on the time the author spends writing them, and I would give authors more of a protected profit margin than movie studios. And I would start the clock on TV series until after the finale.
I grant that the implementation must balance maintaining simplicity with being fair, but consumers aren't being served when Disney chooses to release the 97th special edition of Cinderella rather than produce new works.
Also, just because Paramount's rights to Terminator end, they can still make money producing Terminator 125. So can anyone else. They can use the fact that they originated the series as a marketing advantage, and they can protect new characters introduced in the movie, but if you want to make your own terminator movie with a handycam and release it on the internet, you should be allowed to do so.
Instead of paying lobbyists for copyright extension for everyone, Disney pays the government to only extend their own. This is stupid.
How about instead of having time limits, we have profit limits? The copyright expires once your work has turned a 1,000% profit or after 50 years, whichever is less.
The purpose of intellectual property protection should be to foster creativity, not maximize profit. Disney will still create the next Pocohantas movie if they 'only' expect a 10x return, as opposed to the drag-it-out-for-50-years -get-40x-return thing they've done with Snow White, and the consumers will be far better served.
Copyright should be viewed as the minimum incentive necessary to maintain a productive, creative environment, no more.
To what extent to you use cryptography in everyday life? For instance, under what circumstances do you digitally sign or encrypt email? What information do you encrypt on your hard drive? How do you communicate securely with folks who aren't technically adept with current encryption tools? Are the tools at your disposal easy enough to use to keep up with your level of paranoia?
Why aren't they suing Intuit for QuickBooks, which requires an expensive subscription in order to continue to generate payroll checks after the first year?
I've been subscribing to listen.com since they came out with their new subscription model a few months ago and have been very pleased. $10/month for unlimited music on demand, with a very broad catalog. Even more reasonable is the $4/month radio plan. You can create stations based on favorite artists and hit a button to skip songs you don't like.
They typically charge $1 per song to burn, but have an offer going through March 31 to charge $0.49 per song. This seems to be the pricing point that folks on Slashdot have been claiming they would support. I plan to burn a few CDs just to show my support.
Also, when I had problems getting their new software to work through my University's firewall, a developer worked diligently with me through email before finally sending me a patch to test. It worked great and ended up being included in the next release. It was a level of support I don't encounter with software much anymore.
I'm not affiliated with listen.com, but I do endorse them and I seriously doubt AOL/Time Warner will be able to match up.
I'm a little more cynical. While I have no doubt Intuit et al. raised a fuss, I think the government also realized that they would lose money through more widespread distribution of tax prep software. With all the talk about tax fraud, it is seldom mentioned that most people overpay their taxes. Tax prep software always reduces how much I pay over what I would have computed by filling out the forms manually. The software's interview process this year helped me find an educational deduction I wasn't aware of, optimize our IRA contributions, run different scenarios for next year, etc. It's virtually impossible to figure all this stuff out with a 1040 and a pencil, which is how most people do their taxes. If prep software were free, officially sanctioned by the IRS and as full-featured as TurboTax, I suspect revenue from individual and joint returns would drop substantially.
American Express doesn't really want no one linking to its site. From a marketing standpoint it's ludicrous to expect google to issue them a letter asking for permission to send potential credit card customers over. Rather, they want a basis on which to send a threatening, yet legally hollow, threat to the owner of a site that criticizes AmEx and does so with supporting hyperlinks.
For instance, it would be difficult to pick apart AmEx's Privacy Statement in its entirety without either linking to (linking policy violation), or reprinting it (copyright violation).
However, if you make a statement in your blog regarding how much you love their blue card and include a link to the application page, don't expect an ominous letter sent certified mail anytime soon.
from your first link: "long latency times produced in satellite data communications; this is largely due to the 22,000 miles between the earth and the satellite".
A satellite 22,000 miles away will get you a little bit more latency than a balloon that is 13 miles away.
Round trip for light to travel 22,000 miles and back: 235 ms
Round trip for light to travel 13 miles and back: 0.139 ms
A satellite link will yield 1700 times greater latency than a balloon.
Where on earth do you get these numbers? If there is a distance-proportional latency, it should only be related to the speed of light, which is roughly 300,000 km/s. So the additional latency should only be 1/300,000 s for each km.
This message was recently posted to alt.comp.financial.quicken. It appears Turbotax 2002 may be installing and starting a spyware service without any notice. I just checked my machine, where I installed Turbotax last week, and indeed, this service is running:
--
Recently I found a running Service named C-DillaCdaC11BA on my Windows XP Pro system. Being an individual interested with Internet Security (viruses, etc), I naturally became concerned that my system may have become compromised. Starting my investigation revealed the associated file (called "CDAC11BA.EXE") located in the Windows\System32\Drivers directory. In addition, I found a hidden directories under the C drive. This first directory was named C_DILLA" and below it was a directory named "SafeCast Product Licenses". Contained within this directory was a single file called "BD6FD000.DAT".
I traced the dates/times the files and directories were created to the same date/time I had installed this years version of Intuit's TurboTax. This is interesting because last year's version of TurboTax did not install this application and nowhere in this year's installation did it make mention of installing it, a third-party application that attempts to hide itself and runs as an additional service! A search of Google for C-DILLA revealed the following article, entitled "C-Dilla! "Copy Protection or Spyware?". It's located at http://www.tswn.com/modules/news/article.php?item_ id=45
Nowhere on Intuit's website does it offer a description of this service or appropriate removal instructions. Is it really copyright
protection or is Intuit utilizing spyware with their latest version of TurboTax?
The exit poll service that suddenly announced they would have no polling data late this afternoon is a monopoly owned by the major TV news outlets. Instead of nearly all the election outcomes being known when the polls in CA closed an hour ago, most races are still up in the air and the TV coverage is going full tilt. This has to be very good for ratings.
Logo is great for teaching basic programming structures (loops, functions, etc). It uses one turtle that you command to move around and draw things. You aren't aware that you're learning to program, just having fun making a circle (pen down; repeat 360: forward 1, right 1; pen up)
What's cool about StarLogo is that it teaches object-oriented programming the same way. You can have as many turles as you like, and the domain over which they roam is cut into discrete patches. Each turtle and each patch is an incarnation of an object, and can be assigned behaviors. You're not struggling to understand what objects are, you just have fun writing a routine that tells a turtles to head for the nearest grass patch when they're hungry. When one gets there, you make the turtle's hunger factor go down and the patch become less grassy. The turtles can also interact with one another. In the process, you've easily created a complex simulation of how a group competes for scarce resources. It looks cool, too. StarLogo (and its more powerful cousin, StarLogo T1) has been used in research for quite awhile.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like PDAs are better suited for chess, which is the game I would play the most on a portable. The interface is superior (a stylus and a touch-screen display), and I suspect the extra memory and computing power that is typically available on a PDA makes them better suited for chess. Not to mention the fairly low graphics requirements which means having enough resolution to effectively display the board in grayscale. My old Visor did a decent job at 160x160 until it stopped working.
I think for many people who are looking to be entertained when waiting for a plane, strategy games and puzzles do the trick. They aren't looking for Sonic the Hedgehog XXVII for the GBA. PDAs are more than capable for this segment.
Isn't this just one way to implement a P2P network? By selling it for enterprise use, IBM is supporting the argument that P2P networks have legitimate use and should not be outlawed as the RIAA has attempted.
I have not used either, but Storage Tank seems to deliver similar functionality as Waste, though on a larger scale and with a different UI paradigm. Perhaps if Nullsoft had released Waste as a way for small and medium sized businesses to share files, AOL would have acted differently.
I'm not sure Hawking is representative. His best work came after he was struck with a debilitating disease that left him with little to do but think. I am in awe that rather than languishing in self-pity, as I might if faced with similar circumstances, he resolved to have a singular focus on his work, and thus produced amazing results.
They aren't spamming their subscribers, they're spamming recipients of email FROM their subscribers.
I don't solicit the advertisements simply by receiving email from a subscriber.
I'm not a subscriber, I've merely received email from MSN subscribers.
I'm curious why the post was moderated off-topic, though.
At the bottom of every outgoing MSN email message, Microsoft appends an advertisement without the sender's consent. Often, it touts MSN's anti-spam features.
Only Microsoft could sell itself as an anti-spam company by adding spam to every email from its subscribers.
Given that it lacks the ability to refuse to play files via DRM, this is almost certainly not "the media PC Microsoft has been trying to create".
I think this should be considered a tournament of skill, rather than gambling. I see it somewhat akin to chess tournaments where entry fees contribute to cash prizes.
Games exist on a continuum from pure chance to pure skill. At the pure chance end, people play things like the lottery and slot machines. Players with skill fare a little better at blackjack and poker, but are still considered gamblers by the U.S. government. Scrabble tournaments are probably not considered gambling, though an element of chance persists in the random drawing of tiles. Chess has no chance element whatsoever. Playing fps for money isn't really gambling. Either you're good enough to beat your opponent, or you're not.
Don't get me started on double standard that exists in the blind eye that is turned toward bingo nights.
I want to do the same. You could get a big, high resolution display from a small box. I find there are two drawbacks to this scheme:
where do you get your data from? Is there a single, free place to download price data for every NYSE and NASDAQ stock since 1980?
Funny, I don't see people complaining that articles about proposed censorship laws in New Zealand are kiwi-centric.
Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it protects works. Patents protect ideas (for far less time than copyrights). The distinction is important.
Regarding the painter your know: How would this kill her living? The end of copyright does not mean that you can no longer profit from your work. It simply means the work is no longer protected. The value of original artwork is very much a function of the artist who creates it. I doubt the woman you discuss would loose any revenue at all if copyright simply did not exist. Paintings are difficult to copy convincingly, and folks won't pay nearly as much for an imposter.
Figuring profit, as you mention, is more difficult, and a little subjective, but not impossible. On the one hand, movies would be easy. We're always told that Terminator 47 cost $670 million to produce. Books can be assigned value based on the time the author spends writing them, and I would give authors more of a protected profit margin than movie studios. And I would start the clock on TV series until after the finale.
I grant that the implementation must balance maintaining simplicity with being fair, but consumers aren't being served when Disney chooses to release the 97th special edition of Cinderella rather than produce new works.
Also, just because Paramount's rights to Terminator end, they can still make money producing Terminator 125. So can anyone else. They can use the fact that they originated the series as a marketing advantage, and they can protect new characters introduced in the movie, but if you want to make your own terminator movie with a handycam and release it on the internet, you should be allowed to do so.
Instead of paying lobbyists for copyright extension for everyone, Disney pays the government to only extend their own. This is stupid.
How about instead of having time limits, we have profit limits? The copyright expires once your work has turned a 1,000% profit or after 50 years, whichever is less.
The purpose of intellectual property protection should be to foster creativity, not maximize profit. Disney will still create the next Pocohantas movie if they 'only' expect a 10x return, as opposed to the drag-it-out-for-50-years -get-40x-return thing they've done with Snow White, and the consumers will be far better served.
Copyright should be viewed as the minimum incentive necessary to maintain a productive, creative environment, no more.
To what extent to you use cryptography in everyday life? For instance, under what circumstances do you digitally sign or encrypt email? What information do you encrypt on your hard drive? How do you communicate securely with folks who aren't technically adept with current encryption tools? Are the tools at your disposal easy enough to use to keep up with your level of paranoia?
thanks.
Why aren't they suing Intuit for QuickBooks, which requires an expensive subscription in order to continue to generate payroll checks after the first year?
you're now a hot contender for 'most anal-retentive post'.
regardless, I did indeed mean album rather than CD
I've been subscribing to listen.com since they came out with their new subscription model a few months ago and have been very pleased. $10/month for unlimited music on demand, with a very broad catalog. Even more reasonable is the $4/month radio plan. You can create stations based on favorite artists and hit a button to skip songs you don't like.
They typically charge $1 per song to burn, but have an offer going through March 31 to charge $0.49 per song. This seems to be the pricing point that folks on Slashdot have been claiming they would support. I plan to burn a few CDs just to show my support.
Also, when I had problems getting their new software to work through my University's firewall, a developer worked diligently with me through email before finally sending me a patch to test. It worked great and ended up being included in the next release. It was a level of support I don't encounter with software much anymore.
I'm not affiliated with listen.com, but I do endorse them and I seriously doubt AOL/Time Warner will be able to match up.
I'm a little more cynical. While I have no doubt Intuit et al. raised a fuss, I think the government also realized that they would lose money through more widespread distribution of tax prep software. With all the talk about tax fraud, it is seldom mentioned that most people overpay their taxes. Tax prep software always reduces how much I pay over what I would have computed by filling out the forms manually. The software's interview process this year helped me find an educational deduction I wasn't aware of, optimize our IRA contributions, run different scenarios for next year, etc. It's virtually impossible to figure all this stuff out with a 1040 and a pencil, which is how most people do their taxes. If prep software were free, officially sanctioned by the IRS and as full-featured as TurboTax, I suspect revenue from individual and joint returns would drop substantially.
American Express doesn't really want no one linking to its site. From a marketing standpoint it's ludicrous to expect google to issue them a letter asking for permission to send potential credit card customers over. Rather, they want a basis on which to send a threatening, yet legally hollow, threat to the owner of a site that criticizes AmEx and does so with supporting hyperlinks.
For instance, it would be difficult to pick apart AmEx's Privacy Statement in its entirety without either linking to (linking policy violation), or reprinting it (copyright violation).
However, if you make a statement in your blog regarding how much you love their blue card and include a link to the application page, don't expect an ominous letter sent certified mail anytime soon.
from your first link: "long latency times produced in satellite data communications; this is largely due to the 22,000 miles between the earth and the satellite".
A satellite 22,000 miles away will get you a little bit more latency than a balloon that is 13 miles away.
Round trip for light to travel 22,000 miles and back: 235 ms
Round trip for light to travel 13 miles and back: 0.139 ms
A satellite link will yield 1700 times greater latency than a balloon.
Where on earth do you get these numbers? If there is a distance-proportional latency, it should only be related to the speed of light, which is roughly 300,000 km/s. So the additional latency should only be 1/300,000 s for each km.
This message was recently posted to alt.comp.financial.quicken. It appears Turbotax 2002 may be installing and starting a spyware service without any notice. I just checked my machine, where I installed Turbotax last week, and indeed, this service is running:
--
Recently I found a running Service named C-DillaCdaC11BA on my Windows XP Pro system. Being an individual interested with Internet Security (viruses, etc), I naturally became concerned that my system may have become compromised. Starting my investigation revealed the associated file (called "CDAC11BA.EXE") located in the Windows\System32\Drivers directory. In addition, I found a hidden directories under the C drive. This first directory was named C_DILLA" and below it was a directory named "SafeCast Product Licenses". Contained within this directory was a single file called "BD6FD000.DAT".
I traced the dates/times the files and directories were created to the same date/time I had installed this years version of Intuit's TurboTax. This is interesting because last year's version of TurboTax did not install this application and nowhere in this year's installation did it make mention of installing it, a third-party application that attempts to hide itself and runs as an additional service! A search of Google for C-DILLA revealed the following article, entitled "C-Dilla! "Copy Protection or Spyware?". It's located at http://www.tswn.com/modules/news/article.php?item_ id=45
Nowhere on Intuit's website does it offer a description of this service or appropriate removal instructions. Is it really copyright protection or is Intuit utilizing spyware with their latest version of TurboTax?
If not for Solidworks, I would be able to use Linux exclusively.
The exit poll service that suddenly announced they would have no polling data late this afternoon is a monopoly owned by the major TV news outlets. Instead of nearly all the election outcomes being known when the polls in CA closed an hour ago, most races are still up in the air and the TV coverage is going full tilt. This has to be very good for ratings.
Logo is great for teaching basic programming structures (loops, functions, etc). It uses one turtle that you command to move around and draw things. You aren't aware that you're learning to program, just having fun making a circle (pen down; repeat 360: forward 1, right 1; pen up)
What's cool about StarLogo is that it teaches object-oriented programming the same way. You can have as many turles as you like, and the domain over which they roam is cut into discrete patches. Each turtle and each patch is an incarnation of an object, and can be assigned behaviors. You're not struggling to understand what objects are, you just have fun writing a routine that tells a turtles to head for the nearest grass patch when they're hungry. When one gets there, you make the turtle's hunger factor go down and the patch become less grassy. The turtles can also interact with one another. In the process, you've easily created a complex simulation of how a group competes for scarce resources. It looks cool, too. StarLogo (and its more powerful cousin, StarLogo T1) has been used in research for quite awhile.