In most US states, there are implied warranties that are part of a sales contract. They are things like warranty of title (that the seller owns the thing he's selling you), warranty of merchantability (that the product will do what the seller purports it will), and in some cases if you seek the advice of the seller, there can be an implied warranty of fitness for a particular use.
However, in most states, items that are sold "AS IS" are exempt. This allows things like estate auctions to happen, where the seller is in no position to offer warranties on the goods.
Well, I have yet to see a EULA that doesn't claim that the software is sold "AS IS."
The pedantic fundamentals you speak of are not actual legal precedent.
The communications act of 1934, the basis for the FCC's jurisdiction, had a 'secrecy of communications' section. It said that you could monitor any transmission you liked, so long as you did not disclose the content of that transmission to a 3rd party or make any pecuniary gain from it (unless the transmission was directed to you, or was transmitted by a licensed broadcaster, or fit a limited number of exception cases involving CB, amateur and stations in distress).
This was the law of the land until the 1970s, when HBO started up. Various hobbyiests discovered that relatively inexpensive equipment could be used to build a downconverter and watch HBO for free. HBO responded in two ways. First, they encrypted their signal (starting a legal C band subscription service in the process), and second the lobbied the FCC to add a bar against decryption to the communications secrecy section of the communications act.
Satellite radio, by legal definition, is not broadcasting. Decrypting encrypted services which you do not have a right to receive is a violation of federal law.
You can talk about 'spewing electromagnetic radiation into your home without your consent' all you want, but it ain't the law of the land.
The big difference between terrestrial broadcasting and satellite radio is that the latter is not, in fact, "broadcasting." You have to pay to receive it. All of the arguments that have been posted have not taken this into account. Because it involves a contract, no minor can sign up for service on their own, so the whole idea of empowering parents to shield their children from naughty concepts, should they choose to, remains intact. And both services will, if you request it, block any channels you wish from your receiver.
A child can buy an AM/FM radio - there is no contract involved. That is the fundamental difference.
That is also true of TVs, but they're significantly more expensive, making it much more likely a parent would know if his child had a personal TV set.
TVs now must, because of type acceptance rules, have ratings enforcement mechanisms (the so-called "V" chip). The reason that the rules have not been loosened significantly is that those rules do not apply universally - TVs smaller than a certain size are exempt. If we *knew* that every TV had a parental control mechanism, then TV-MA programming *should* have no decency rules at all.
The first ammendment does not allow content based censorship unless it is the least intrusive means available to achieve the end of allowing parents to keep offensive programming away from their children. We are rapidly approaching the time when it won't be anymore. I'm looking forward to it.
And by the way, before anyone brings up Cable / Satellite TV channels... I believe that they actually do *not* have to abide by the same decency standards. I believe they do voluntarily (except for the premium tiers, of course, like HBO, Showtime, etc).
Fair enough, but I'll worry that my wife's iBook won't be able to do dual monitor with this hack the moment I see His Steveness stand up before the cameras and vow to put a stop to it.:-)
I thought the reason you couldn't use a phone on the plane actually had more to do with FCC regulations than FAA ones.
Cell phones work by assigning a particular set of frequencies to a particular geographic area, and then reusing those frequencies further away where there is no chance for interference (phones that use spread spectrum work more or less the same way, only the frequency separation is more dynamic). When you take a phone operating within such an arrangement and suddenly raise its altitude a few thousand feet, it can suddenly be present in many, many cells. This causes interference in every cell where the phone is not actually communicating with that cell's tower.
I have heard of plans to put micro-cells aboard planes. Such micro-cells would instruct the phones to use low enough power that this wouldn't happen. THAT is a much different scenario, but I wonder how many different modulation types (and therefore customer populations) will be able to be handled by such a scheme. Those who aren't covered by a cell in the plane should not be using their phones for the technical reasons described above.
As for whether people can talk on a phone or not, I fail to see the distinction between talking on a phone and talking to a person next to you. I've seen drivers distracted by their fellow passengers with equal frequency to drivers distracted on a phone. I've seen loud, obnoxious boors talking way too loud to people 3 feet away with equal frequency to the same boors shouting into a phone. What's the difference? Rudeness is the same whether technology is involved or not.
Schemes like this are easy to defeat: Put the calendar month and year in your passphrase. A password scheme that requires upper and lower case letters, special characters, numbers and must be between 6 and 12 characters, and must be changed every 30 days can be
Dec,04
this month. I'm sure you can guess what it will be next month.
Lousy password, sure, but that just points out how easy rule-based schemes can be thoroughly gamed.
Data tends to be created (or fetched and saved), have a relatively short period of activity, and then turn read-mostly (if accessed at all). So I periodically sweep my homedir and just write stuff to CD-R. I've got about a half dozen of them going back quite a ways. I suspect some day this weekend I will take them all and make a single DVD-R out of them (mostly to avoid any potential for CD-R bit rot), and then put that back on the shelf until the next time I think of it (and the state of the art for writable optical has gone up to the dozens of GB. By that time I should have a few DVD-Rs worth of cruft).
I'm not a big windows fan. Nevertheless, what I do know about the architecture of Windows NT (yes, that includes 2k and XP - they're just newer versions of NT for all the marketing hype) suggests that porting it to a new architecture should not be that different from porting, say, Darwin.
0. We presume there's already a toolchain available to generate binaries from C.
1. Write a new HAL. The HAL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer at the bottom of the NT kernel. It is the interface to a bunch of very low level services, like memory management and basic I/O. Probably more things I can't think of right now. It's important, but relatively straightforward.
2. If this new machine doesn't, more or less, have a PCI bus for most of the major peripherals, then there will be a bunch of driver work at this point.
3. I wave my hands here, as I do not know all of the details of booting NT. You need to load the HAL and the kernel. I am not sure when control is handed to the kernel to load the rest of the drivers from the boot media. But the boot procedure will need to at least load the HAL, the kernel and at least a few drivers. If the new machine uses OpenFirmware, then this will likely involve a primitive NTFS filesystem reader in FORTH. Such a thing may, in fact, already exist.
4. Compile the source. Presuming the machine is either LP64 or ILP32, there ought not to be any real difficulties, depending on how together Microsoft has their shit. They've been down those two roads already. I am less sure about endian issues.
5. ??? (usually involves violations of anti-trust laws)
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers (X) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:Allow copying and increase profits!
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
The problem with this is the same problem with compulsory license schemes for music - both ideas live and die on how the content owner measures usage. If NBC can *know* how many times people watched an episode with product placement, then they'll know what to charge their advertisers. In that universe, they'd be happy to let the episode fly free.
The problem is that there is no way for them to know that without controlling the playback device so that they can put a hit counter in it. That means that all the media players have to be hit count compliant and that takes us right back into the world created for us by the Audio Home Recording Act (Even at the time, I thought that was a much more pernicious piece of legislation than the DMCA that rode on its shoulders - mainly because it was the camel's nose).
For me, it doesn't really matter which of the various open source POSIX-like operating systems wins. So long as the source really is open, it's relatively easy to pop in a syscall / library emulation layer into one to run the binaries compiled for another. I use FreeBSD primarily, and the Linuxulator can run things like the Linux JRE 1.5 and other things for which I don't have source code.
The real losers here continue to be purveyors of closed-source operating systems. Open source has comoditized POSIX, and is well on its way towards comoditizing the entire broad OS category (listening, Microsoft?).
Will the service know if I'm FF over a commercial or for some other purpose?
Yes. Lexus is going to buy the right to replace a fast-forwarded Lexus ad with a billboard lasting the duration of the FFed ad. That's all. Just like now they presently add the 'Thumbs up for more info' thing for the duration of that ad (whether it's being FFed or not). When you're FFing a show, nothing different will happen than happens today.
I don't mind if it obscures the whole screen, so long as it is just like the 'thumbs up' stuff they do now - it only occupies the amount of time the replaced commercial occupies. So long as they do not alter the fast-forward speed or insert extra commercial time, I'm fine with it.
My understanding is that, for example, Lexus will be buying the rights to have a billboard replace a fast-forwarded Lexus ad. That doesn't bother me in the least. Since I don't like to pay HALF as much for a car as Lexus charges, I'll ignore the billboards the same way I ignore the blur that once was a 30 second Lexus commercial.
The way I read the article it's either option 2, but with this modification:
They're going to put the billboards over individual ads only. That is, a billboard for Smirnoff will appear only over a Smirnoff ad. Sort of like the way the Thumbs Up stuff works today. Thus, they could have the billboard cover the whole screen and it won't make it more difficult to spot the end of the commercial break, since the billboard would have gone away by then. The billboard will, for a 30 second commercial, last a bit longer than 4 seconds. I'm betting marketers will be quite happy to pay to stick a 4 second still print-like ad under your nose, even if you do ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're in favor of the DMCA, then?
Actually, there is a 15 euro per day cap. Read the DB site referenced in TFA.
In most US states, there are implied warranties that are part of a sales contract. They are things like warranty of title (that the seller owns the thing he's selling you), warranty of merchantability (that the product will do what the seller purports it will), and in some cases if you seek the advice of the seller, there can be an implied warranty of fitness for a particular use.
However, in most states, items that are sold "AS IS" are exempt. This allows things like estate auctions to happen, where the seller is in no position to offer warranties on the goods.
Well, I have yet to see a EULA that doesn't claim that the software is sold "AS IS."
The pedantic fundamentals you speak of are not actual legal precedent.
The communications act of 1934, the basis for the FCC's jurisdiction, had a 'secrecy of communications' section. It said that you could monitor any transmission you liked, so long as you did not disclose the content of that transmission to a 3rd party or make any pecuniary gain from it (unless the transmission was directed to you, or was transmitted by a licensed broadcaster, or fit a limited number of exception cases involving CB, amateur and stations in distress).
This was the law of the land until the 1970s, when HBO started up. Various hobbyiests discovered that relatively inexpensive equipment could be used to build a downconverter and watch HBO for free. HBO responded in two ways. First, they encrypted their signal (starting a legal C band subscription service in the process), and second the lobbied the FCC to add a bar against decryption to the communications secrecy section of the communications act.
Satellite radio, by legal definition, is not broadcasting. Decrypting encrypted services which you do not have a right to receive is a violation of federal law.
You can talk about 'spewing electromagnetic radiation into your home without your consent' all you want, but it ain't the law of the land.
The big difference between terrestrial broadcasting and satellite radio is that the latter is not, in fact, "broadcasting." You have to pay to receive it. All of the arguments that have been posted have not taken this into account. Because it involves a contract, no minor can sign up for service on their own, so the whole idea of empowering parents to shield their children from naughty concepts, should they choose to, remains intact. And both services will, if you request it, block any channels you wish from your receiver.
A child can buy an AM/FM radio - there is no contract involved. That is the fundamental difference.
That is also true of TVs, but they're significantly more expensive, making it much more likely a parent would know if his child had a personal TV set.
TVs now must, because of type acceptance rules, have ratings enforcement mechanisms (the so-called "V" chip). The reason that the rules have not been loosened significantly is that those rules do not apply universally - TVs smaller than a certain size are exempt. If we *knew* that every TV had a parental control mechanism, then TV-MA programming *should* have no decency rules at all.
The first ammendment does not allow content based censorship unless it is the least intrusive means available to achieve the end of allowing parents to keep offensive programming away from their children. We are rapidly approaching the time when it won't be anymore. I'm looking forward to it.
And by the way, before anyone brings up Cable / Satellite TV channels... I believe that they actually do *not* have to abide by the same decency standards. I believe they do voluntarily (except for the premium tiers, of course, like HBO, Showtime, etc).
I started to play this and it was so bad that a fight broke out about who was to blame for it.
Fair enough, but I'll worry that my wife's iBook won't be able to do dual monitor with this hack the moment I see His Steveness stand up before the cameras and vow to put a stop to it. :-)
There is a difference between what is supported and what is possible.
I thought the reason you couldn't use a phone on the plane actually had more to do with FCC regulations than FAA ones.
Cell phones work by assigning a particular set of frequencies to a particular geographic area, and then reusing those frequencies further away where there is no chance for interference (phones that use spread spectrum work more or less the same way, only the frequency separation is more dynamic). When you take a phone operating within such an arrangement and suddenly raise its altitude a few thousand feet, it can suddenly be present in many, many cells. This causes interference in every cell where the phone is not actually communicating with that cell's tower.
I have heard of plans to put micro-cells aboard planes. Such micro-cells would instruct the phones to use low enough power that this wouldn't happen. THAT is a much different scenario, but I wonder how many different modulation types (and therefore customer populations) will be able to be handled by such a scheme. Those who aren't covered by a cell in the plane should not be using their phones for the technical reasons described above.
As for whether people can talk on a phone or not, I fail to see the distinction between talking on a phone and talking to a person next to you. I've seen drivers distracted by their fellow passengers with equal frequency to drivers distracted on a phone. I've seen loud, obnoxious boors talking way too loud to people 3 feet away with equal frequency to the same boors shouting into a phone. What's the difference? Rudeness is the same whether technology is involved or not.
Schemes like this are easy to defeat: Put the calendar month and year in your passphrase. A password scheme that requires upper and lower case letters, special characters, numbers and must be between 6 and 12 characters, and must be changed every 30 days can be
Dec,04
this month. I'm sure you can guess what it will be next month.
Lousy password, sure, but that just points out how easy rule-based schemes can be thoroughly gamed.
Data tends to be created (or fetched and saved), have a relatively short period of activity, and then turn read-mostly (if accessed at all). So I periodically sweep my homedir and just write stuff to CD-R. I've got about a half dozen of them going back quite a ways. I suspect some day this weekend I will take them all and make a single DVD-R out of them (mostly to avoid any potential for CD-R bit rot), and then put that back on the shelf until the next time I think of it (and the state of the art for writable optical has gone up to the dozens of GB. By that time I should have a few DVD-Rs worth of cruft).
"You might be a corporate idiot if..."
You send other than plain text e-mail.
You hardly need to go that far to find functional illiteracy.
Wow.
1. Misunderstood the parent.
2. Incoherent.
3. AC.
That's a hat trick. Of course, it's a pointy hat.
Like this one?
I mean, come on, people. Check your goddamn facts, please.
Q. What to you get when you combine Apple and IBM?
A. IBM.
Shamelessly stolen from Apple Confidential.
I'm not a big windows fan. Nevertheless, what I do know about the architecture of Windows NT (yes, that includes 2k and XP - they're just newer versions of NT for all the marketing hype) suggests that porting it to a new architecture should not be that different from porting, say, Darwin.
0. We presume there's already a toolchain available to generate binaries from C.
1. Write a new HAL. The HAL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer at the bottom of the NT kernel. It is the interface to a bunch of very low level services, like memory management and basic I/O. Probably more things I can't think of right now. It's important, but relatively straightforward.
2. If this new machine doesn't, more or less, have a PCI bus for most of the major peripherals, then there will be a bunch of driver work at this point.
3. I wave my hands here, as I do not know all of the details of booting NT. You need to load the HAL and the kernel. I am not sure when control is handed to the kernel to load the rest of the drivers from the boot media. But the boot procedure will need to at least load the HAL, the kernel and at least a few drivers. If the new machine uses OpenFirmware, then this will likely involve a primitive NTFS filesystem reader in FORTH. Such a thing may, in fact, already exist.
4. Compile the source. Presuming the machine is either LP64 or ILP32, there ought not to be any real difficulties, depending on how together Microsoft has their shit. They've been down those two roads already. I am less sure about endian issues.
5. ??? (usually involves violations of anti-trust laws)
6. Profit!
To this day my wife gives me a look when I tell her I need to work on AMANDA.
The problem with this is the same problem with compulsory license schemes for music - both ideas live and die on how the content owner measures usage. If NBC can *know* how many times people watched an episode with product placement, then they'll know what to charge their advertisers. In that universe, they'd be happy to let the episode fly free.
The problem is that there is no way for them to know that without controlling the playback device so that they can put a hit counter in it. That means that all the media players have to be hit count compliant and that takes us right back into the world created for us by the Audio Home Recording Act (Even at the time, I thought that was a much more pernicious piece of legislation than the DMCA that rode on its shoulders - mainly because it was the camel's nose).
For me, it doesn't really matter which of the various open source POSIX-like operating systems wins. So long as the source really is open, it's relatively easy to pop in a syscall / library emulation layer into one to run the binaries compiled for another. I use FreeBSD primarily, and the Linuxulator can run things like the Linux JRE 1.5 and other things for which I don't have source code.
The real losers here continue to be purveyors of closed-source operating systems. Open source has comoditized POSIX, and is well on its way towards comoditizing the entire broad OS category (listening, Microsoft?).
They use codes in the Vertical Blanking Interval - somewhat like closed captioning.
Yes. Lexus is going to buy the right to replace a fast-forwarded Lexus ad with a billboard lasting the duration of the FFed ad. That's all. Just like now they presently add the 'Thumbs up for more info' thing for the duration of that ad (whether it's being FFed or not). When you're FFing a show, nothing different will happen than happens today.
I don't mind if it obscures the whole screen, so long as it is just like the 'thumbs up' stuff they do now - it only occupies the amount of time the replaced commercial occupies. So long as they do not alter the fast-forward speed or insert extra commercial time, I'm fine with it.
My understanding is that, for example, Lexus will be buying the rights to have a billboard replace a fast-forwarded Lexus ad. That doesn't bother me in the least. Since I don't like to pay HALF as much for a car as Lexus charges, I'll ignore the billboards the same way I ignore the blur that once was a 30 second Lexus commercial.
The way I read the article it's either option 2, but with this modification:
They're going to put the billboards over individual ads only. That is, a billboard for Smirnoff will appear only over a Smirnoff ad. Sort of like the way the Thumbs Up stuff works today. Thus, they could have the billboard cover the whole screen and it won't make it more difficult to spot the end of the commercial break, since the billboard would have gone away by then. The billboard will, for a 30 second commercial, last a bit longer than 4 seconds. I'm betting marketers will be quite happy to pay to stick a 4 second still print-like ad under your nose, even if you do ignore it.