> First, the vast majority of people will not pay a hefty monthly fee for > immediate access to recent movies and TV shows. So there really is not market > for it. You cannot compete with free by putting a "hefty" fee on it.
A significant chunk of the population already pays a hefty monthly fee for whatever crap their cable/satellite providers choose to send them. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people might be willing to transfer that hefty bit of change to something they actually want to view enough that they'll go through the hassle of downloading it (which, easy as it is, is still more of a pain than flipping on the TV and channel surfing).
> Second, the movie industry makes a lot of money with its gated approach to releasing movies.
That's certainly (was) true. But the gates are getting closer together, to the point that it doesn't make much sense to have them.
> As far as the story goes, however, the rocket itself was most likely a failure.
Of course, that won't stop the North Korean population from throwing a spontaneous demonstration celebrating their newly launched space satellite from which their Dear Leader can now beam his messages of strength and hope throughout the world.
Rockets are great for brainwashed populations. They see it go up, they don't see it come down, so it must be in space!
> Do they think he is making it up or are they afraid of losing face?
Maybe they bought a large quantity of images from a third party which included this bunch?
Think that third party would just sell them a few fraudulently obtained pictures?
If it turns out the company wasn't entitled to use these ones and they're liable for damages, then there's a good chance that every sale of every image they purchased/licensed from that third party is copyright infringement and becomes a statuatory damages situation. Depending on how many images were talking about (and, if I were to guess, stock image companies don't do small volumes when they acquire images), that would be a fuckton of money. Like, company goes bankrupt kinds of money.
> they all attended group-based French language classes, and they > were required to pass in order to continue on in their roles.
Anglophones can often attain a B level proficiency in group classes. C level, which is what is required by pretty much everyone at mid-to-senior management levels (even the ones working in the west), is practically unobtainable for an anglophone using only group classes. C in oral, in particular, usually requires months or years of one-on-one coaching (1000 hours of training seems to be typical).
Every anglophone I know of who has been trained to C level has required mostly one-on-one instruction.
> I don't see how this is much different than your employer investing in job training
Existing practice goes waaaaaaaayyyyyy beyond job training, unless your idea of job training is roughly equivalent to paying for an MBA for every public service employee above mid-level management while accepting the business disruptions required to cover their positions while they're away getting the degree.
> And if people in government has what is deemed an inadequate level of french, > the government pays for one-on-one french lessons INSTEAD of for doing your job
The truly unfortunate part of this is that the people supposed to operate at the highest levels are also the most senior people. So those who are being trained are older (i.e. more difficult/expensive to train in a new language), within a few years of retirement and will never be retested, so they have no incentive to retain what they learned.
Of course, once the money is blown training those folks, there's nothing left to train the people who would be in the pipeline to replace them and all hiring now requires that the person being hired already be at the level of the job (i.e. no being hired and then trained at the required level).
The net effect, right now, is that we have a tremendous number of vacancies which cannot be permanently staffed solely because the language profile is so out-of-sync with the language skills of the general population, and it's only going to get worse; according to the demographics, approximately 20% of public service employees in certain hard-to-replace categories are within five years or retirement.
The military went through this exact same situation in the 80's, until someone came to the realization that having 80% of your flag officers being from Quebec was maybe not an ideal situation when the topic of separation comes up.
> Cicconi said the notices worked. The company saw very few repeat offenders.
If the RIAA is randomly selecting from IP addresses on P2P networks, the probability of any particular user being hit twice... I'm thinking that the notices might not have much to do with the lack of repeat offenders.
> The connector isn't enough. There has to be standardised voltages > and currents to make the scheme work.
Approach it from the other direction. Make it illegal to ship a power brick which doesn't provide standard mini-USB power. Proprietary connectors would still be legal, of course, but if you had to provide mini-USB and you built a device which could operate with that kind of power you'd have to be pretty dumb to add the extra expense of a proprietary connector...
> I don't see how a WISP can really survive against the traditional competition.
Well, they can't. But, then, what kind of moron is going to target a WISP at a market where they'd go against traditional competition (if you can call the local telco and cable monopolies "competition")?
I'm on a WISP and while the speeds aren't anywhere near the DSL I used to have in town, the only other option where I live is dial-up. On rural phone lines. Maxing out at about 28kbps. If you want to talk about price and speed sucking, I can tell you all about it. I did the dial-up thing for a bit after being on DSL for years, and it's almost bearable if you have a second phone line, a dedicated dial-up server/router, a wireless LAN, and you know how to batch downloads at night.
Well, fuck that. As soon as they stuck their gear on the nearest tower, I was signed up. For maybe $200 installation costs and $50/month (which is about $5 more than dial-up and a second phone line), I get well over 20x dial-up speeds and all I have to worry about is the occasional drop out due to weather and tower maintenance.
If you live anywhere close to a DSL or cable operation, a WISP is a terrible choice. Anywhere else, it's a no-brainer.
> The equivalent 2009 model has 1MPG less efficiency than my model.
You're not comparing the original sticker mileage of a '94 with a '09, are you? Remember that they changed the rules a few years back, and newer cars on paper tend to be less efficient than the original values of older cars.
> Isn't the way this worded presuming guilt before innocence?
An innocent multinational corporation is a lot like an honest politician, and they're both extremely endangered for approximately the same sort of reasons.
> In normal RO systems, the waste water to good water ratio is 8:1.
Mine is approx 3:1. Not fantastic, but I've got the RO purely because of taste, and even then it's not my taste. I think our regular tap water is okay. So we're maybe using the RO for a couple of litres per day. If I was really worried about not wasting it, I could pipe the waste back to one of the cisterns. Or, eventually, if I get around to a grey water system...
> How about you skip the RO system and distill your water?
Convenience.
> That'll probably save you a ton.
Running the toilet from rain-filled cisterns saves a ton. Waste from the RO barely registers in comparison.
Ah... you must live in a large built-up area where water comes out of a big pipe provided by a municipality of some sort.
I'm on a dug well with extremely hard water and a tendency to go dry during droughts. Between the filters, UV treatment, water softener, RO filter system, pumps, cisterns, etc... there's probably $5000 for all the bits and parts of my water system. I've spent $1200 on far dumber things than drinking water. For someone with, say, a sulphur problem... $1200 would be darn cheap.
> So they refused to build one. Then the city said well we are gonna build one > and proceeded to build it. Then they sued the city because they built it?
I'm kinda wondering how that isn't estoppel? Did TDS not put anything in writing? Or does the city think it's more important to fight on the basis that the city can legally do this sort of thing than on a legal ground which is really only applicable to this one situation?
More or less. Some players choke on oddball frequencies and bitrates and things like VBR; the 8 year old player in my truck being a good example, but I've even seen it on other cheap players in the last couple of years. Then there's meta-data support (ID3) and niceties like replay gain.
It's fair to say that MP3 is the best supported format, but 100%? Not so much.
> If most BluRay players are hardware based, then as a movie studio I'd be tempted to simply write > some BD+ code that looked for existing software players and banned all of them. Then the > "trace a licensed player" step outlined above suddenly turns into a silicon reverse engineering > problem instead of a software reverse engineering problem. Much harder.
Even then, you can still run the BD+ code in the VM, and trace it under the VM, and figure out what makes it fail, and ensure that it sees a VM environment which doesn't look like an existing software player. Or any kind of software player. And you may have the ability to modify the software player to explore what triggers the problem (a lot of people who's software players no longer play the latest releases would be rather thankful for a patch).
Harder, but a boatload easier than tracing silicon.
The BD group pretty much has to outlaw software players entirely to avoid this kind of attack.
> I do like the idea of electric vehicles btw, I just think a standard truck is a dumb place to start.
From what I've read, a truck (usually a compact pickup like a Ford Ranger) is the easiest way to get decent range and cargo space from an electric without adding a trailer. And the chassis and suspension are already beefy enough to handle the extra battery weight.
Slashdot Mirror
> First, the vast majority of people will not pay a hefty monthly fee for
> immediate access to recent movies and TV shows. So there really is not market
> for it. You cannot compete with free by putting a "hefty" fee on it.
A significant chunk of the population already pays a hefty monthly fee for whatever crap their cable/satellite providers choose to send them. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people might be willing to transfer that hefty bit of change to something they actually want to view enough that they'll go through the hassle of downloading it (which, easy as it is, is still more of a pain than flipping on the TV and channel surfing).
> Second, the movie industry makes a lot of money with its gated approach to releasing movies.
That's certainly (was) true. But the gates are getting closer together, to the point that it doesn't make much sense to have them.
c.
> Ballmer Squirt Tax
Now, you do have to admit that the Zune marketing team probably got hit (squirted?) more for that tax than anyone else.
c.
> Add a third wheel and suddenly now you don't need thousands
> of dollars of gyroscopes and such.
Yes, but how will you know you're living in the future?
c.
> As far as the story goes, however, the rocket itself was most likely a failure.
Of course, that won't stop the North Korean population from throwing a spontaneous demonstration celebrating their newly launched space satellite from which their Dear Leader can now beam his messages of strength and hope throughout the world.
Rockets are great for brainwashed populations. They see it go up, they don't see it come down, so it must be in space!
c.
> Do they think he is making it up or are they afraid of losing face?
Maybe they bought a large quantity of images from a third party which included this bunch?
Think that third party would just sell them a few fraudulently obtained pictures?
If it turns out the company wasn't entitled to use these ones and they're liable for damages, then there's a good chance that every sale of every image they purchased/licensed from that third party is copyright infringement and becomes a statuatory damages situation. Depending on how many images were talking about (and, if I were to guess, stock image companies don't do small volumes when they acquire images), that would be a fuckton of money. Like, company goes bankrupt kinds of money.
c.
> they all attended group-based French language classes, and they
> were required to pass in order to continue on in their roles.
Anglophones can often attain a B level proficiency in group classes. C level, which is what is required by pretty much everyone at mid-to-senior management levels (even the ones working in the west), is practically unobtainable for an anglophone using only group classes. C in oral, in particular, usually requires months or years of one-on-one coaching (1000 hours of training seems to be typical).
Every anglophone I know of who has been trained to C level has required mostly one-on-one instruction.
> I don't see how this is much different than your employer investing in job training
Existing practice goes waaaaaaaayyyyyy beyond job training, unless your idea of job training is roughly equivalent to paying for an MBA for every public service employee above mid-level management while accepting the business disruptions required to cover their positions while they're away getting the degree.
c.
> And if people in government has what is deemed an inadequate level of french,
> the government pays for one-on-one french lessons INSTEAD of for doing your job
The truly unfortunate part of this is that the people supposed to operate at the highest levels are also the most senior people. So those who are being trained are older (i.e. more difficult/expensive to train in a new language), within a few years of retirement and will never be retested, so they have no incentive to retain what they learned.
Of course, once the money is blown training those folks, there's nothing left to train the people who would be in the pipeline to replace them and all hiring now requires that the person being hired already be at the level of the job (i.e. no being hired and then trained at the required level).
The net effect, right now, is that we have a tremendous number of vacancies which cannot be permanently staffed solely because the language profile is so out-of-sync with the language skills of the general population, and it's only going to get worse; according to the demographics, approximately 20% of public service employees in certain hard-to-replace categories are within five years or retirement.
The military went through this exact same situation in the 80's, until someone came to the realization that having 80% of your flag officers being from Quebec was maybe not an ideal situation when the topic of separation comes up.
Now that they're actually applying some form of DRM to the system, maybe they think they can hit Boxee up with a DMCA-based injunction.
I know, I know, it's a weak argument technically, but it's not like that's ever stopped the lawyers before.
c.
> Cicconi said the notices worked. The company saw very few repeat offenders.
If the RIAA is randomly selecting from IP addresses on P2P networks, the probability of any particular user being hit twice... I'm thinking that the notices might not have much to do with the lack of repeat offenders.
c.
> > Obama can stimulate my ass.
> That might make your prostate happy but what about the rest of us?
Wait your turn. He's got about eight years left to fuck everyone.
c.
> Is myspace fundamentally different to the homepage?
>
> They are still gaudy shrines to the ego, constructed of copy-pasted crappy code.
But just look at the tools available to make gaudy shrines... In 1996, all you had was page backgrounds, font colors, and the blink tag.
c.
> The connector isn't enough. There has to be standardised voltages
> and currents to make the scheme work.
Approach it from the other direction. Make it illegal to ship a power brick which doesn't provide standard mini-USB power. Proprietary connectors would still be legal, of course, but if you had to provide mini-USB and you built a device which could operate with that kind of power you'd have to be pretty dumb to add the extra expense of a proprietary connector...
c.
> I don't see how a WISP can really survive against the traditional competition.
Well, they can't. But, then, what kind of moron is going to target a WISP at a market where they'd go against traditional competition (if you can call the local telco and cable monopolies "competition")?
I'm on a WISP and while the speeds aren't anywhere near the DSL I used to have in town, the only other option where I live is dial-up. On rural phone lines. Maxing out at about 28kbps. If you want to talk about price and speed sucking, I can tell you all about it. I did the dial-up thing for a bit after being on DSL for years, and it's almost bearable if you have a second phone line, a dedicated dial-up server/router, a wireless LAN, and you know how to batch downloads at night.
Well, fuck that. As soon as they stuck their gear on the nearest tower, I was signed up. For maybe $200 installation costs and $50/month (which is about $5 more than dial-up and a second phone line), I get well over 20x dial-up speeds and all I have to worry about is the occasional drop out due to weather and tower maintenance.
If you live anywhere close to a DSL or cable operation, a WISP is a terrible choice. Anywhere else, it's a no-brainer.
> The money barely slowed down as it exited the country.
Notice I said nothing about whether or not such a economic stimulus plan would actually work...
c.
> Because big screen TVs and beer sales would go through the roof?
Now that's an economic stimulus plan the average Joe can understand and support.
c.
> The equivalent 2009 model has 1MPG less efficiency than my model.
You're not comparing the original sticker mileage of a '94 with a '09, are you? Remember that they changed the rules a few years back, and newer cars on paper tend to be less efficient than the original values of older cars.
c.
> Isn't the way this worded presuming guilt before innocence?
An innocent multinational corporation is a lot like an honest politician, and they're both extremely endangered for approximately the same sort of reasons.
c.
> Their leadership has abdicated to Keanu Reeves
or, as the Inuit call him, "Keanu the wise". Easily the most effective and charismatic Prime Minister we've had here in Canada in decades.
Hey, it's a pretty low bar.
c.
> In normal RO systems, the waste water to good water ratio is 8:1.
Mine is approx 3:1. Not fantastic, but I've got the RO purely because of taste, and even then it's not my taste. I think our regular tap water is okay. So we're maybe using the RO for a couple of litres per day. If I was really worried about not wasting it, I could pipe the waste back to one of the cisterns. Or, eventually, if I get around to a grey water system...
> How about you skip the RO system and distill your water?
Convenience.
> That'll probably save you a ton.
Running the toilet from rain-filled cisterns saves a ton. Waste from the RO barely registers in comparison.
c.
"public water authority"?
Ah... you must live in a large built-up area where water comes out of a big pipe provided by a municipality of some sort.
I'm on a dug well with extremely hard water and a tendency to go dry during droughts. Between the filters, UV treatment, water softener, RO filter system, pumps, cisterns, etc... there's probably $5000 for all the bits and parts of my water system. I've spent $1200 on far dumber things than drinking water. For someone with, say, a sulphur problem... $1200 would be darn cheap.
c.
> So they refused to build one. Then the city said well we are gonna build one
> and proceeded to build it. Then they sued the city because they built it?
I'm kinda wondering how that isn't estoppel? Did TDS not put anything in writing? Or does the city think it's more important to fight on the basis that the city can legally do this sort of thing than on a legal ground which is really only applicable to this one situation?
c.
> most audio file player devices can play MP3
More or less. Some players choke on oddball frequencies and bitrates and things like VBR; the 8 year old player in my truck being a good example, but I've even seen it on other cheap players in the last couple of years. Then there's meta-data support (ID3) and niceties like replay gain.
It's fair to say that MP3 is the best supported format, but 100%? Not so much.
c.
> If most BluRay players are hardware based, then as a movie studio I'd be tempted to simply write
> some BD+ code that looked for existing software players and banned all of them. Then the
> "trace a licensed player" step outlined above suddenly turns into a silicon reverse engineering
> problem instead of a software reverse engineering problem. Much harder.
Even then, you can still run the BD+ code in the VM, and trace it under the VM, and figure out what makes it fail, and ensure that it sees a VM environment which doesn't look like an existing software player. Or any kind of software player. And you may have the ability to modify the software player to explore what triggers the problem (a lot of people who's software players no longer play the latest releases would be rather thankful for a patch).
Harder, but a boatload easier than tracing silicon.
The BD group pretty much has to outlaw software players entirely to avoid this kind of attack.
c.
> What is going on with anglo-saxon governments?
Anglo-saxon voters.
> I do like the idea of electric vehicles btw, I just think a standard truck is a dumb place to start.
From what I've read, a truck (usually a compact pickup like a Ford Ranger) is the easiest way to get decent range and cargo space from an electric without adding a trailer. And the chassis and suspension are already beefy enough to handle the extra battery weight.
c.