In the world of acting and cinema, there is the concept of the '4th wall' - this is the wall of the room that would normally be where the front of the stage is (which obviously isn't there, so the audience can see what's going on in the room).
The term breaking the 4th wall is when any kind of fictional performance breaks the carefully crafted illusion and distracts people from the presentation.
Well, product placements can be like that. I saw the episode of Medium that the article refers to, and it was rather jarring. It's kind of like interrupting the show for an add, *while the show is still running*. I suppose they can get away with this a little, but at a certain point, it just gets too distracting and you lose the flow of the story.
About the same time that I saw that episode of Medium, I remember seeing a couple other shows with prominent product placements that were equally jarring. I don't exactly remember the products (I try to block it out, so I don't reward the morons who are ruining my entertainment by remember the damn products), but the show was NIS, and they kept having characters discuss gadgets like I don't know, probably iPod and gameboy or something like that. Like I said, I try not to remember.
I mean, I don't mind product placements that are non-obtrusive, like someone working on a certain brand of laptop, in a scene that is logically part of the story, where the person would really be working at a laptop. I think both Apple and Dell have bought such product placements for their computers. But if the show goes out of it's way to highlight a product, it definitely breaks the 4th wall for me.
You are quite correct. Podcasting is a slightly misleading term, that seems to give undue credit to Appple. But, from a marketting standpoint, it's a great word (which is why it is used so much). It's short, it's catchy, it's fairly understandable (although it tends to lead people to think iPods are the only audio player the technology works with), and most importantly, it relates to ideas people already are familiar with and use on a daily basis.
Most people listen to broadcasts, so listening to 'podcasts' is an easy conceptual jump - it seems like a natural extension of what people already do. Proposed alternatives like 'blogcast' or 'audio blog' are unfamiliar to most people, because most people aren't used to reading blogs (a lot of people have no idea what the term even means), and view blogs as different than broadcast programming.
I might be intersted in listening to 'digital broadcasts', but not to listening to 'audioblogs'. It's a difference in perception of what a blog is (someones personal 'web-diary', or professional opinion page), and what a broadcast is.
Unfortunately, for awhile, I think we are going to be stuck with this term. If someone can come up with an alternative word, that is just as catchy, and wants to start popularizing it, by all means, be my guest. I prefer terms that are vendor-neutral, when talking about a technology.
The question, in natural selection is, can a gene reproduce? Even if a lower IQ really correllated to a lower level of intelligence (which there seems to be a lot of debate about - I'm no expert in the field, but I've read that it is more an indicator of your education and culture than your actual intelligence), it still doesn't seem to have any effect on reproduction - dumb guys have children all the time.
So, I contest your assertion that "A gene that depresses intelligence, without any trade-off, would be quickly eliminated by natural selection". Truth is, for a gene to be eliminated by natural selection, it has to have a highly negative impact on the host. Slightly negative impacts will not be detrimental enough to prevent propagation.
Well, if you read farther in the article, he suggests that incongito travellers *should* be searched thouroughly (and their baggage) to ensure they aren't a threat. As long as you know they aren't a threat, the reasoning goes, why do you care who they are?
This is one of those things that I, personally, could go either way on. Does it really hurt public safety if unidentified passengers are on a flight? Maybe - I don't know, I'm not an expert in this kind of thing. But it does seem like, if someone is willing to go through a more thourough and invasive check, in order to remain anonymous, that they should be allowed.
I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember the Cold War rhetoric about how the Soviet Union restricted travel throughout it's territories/member states, with many border checkpoints and things, and how the USA was so much better because you could freely travel, without having to always stop and identify yourself, and how this was an example of American Freedom. How the Soviet Union was an invasive Police State. Well, while you can still travel by car relatively freely, any time you get on a plane, you MUST identify yourself.
As long as it can be demonstrated that you have no weapons/exlplosives/biological weapons, etc, and are just a normal, harmless traveller, why should you have to identify yourself as a matter of Federal Law? Now, the argument also could go that as long as the airlines want you to identify yourself, since the airplane is their private property, you have to do so, or else forfeit the privelege of flying on that plane. I would be more comfortable with airlines that require identification, than having it mandated by Federal Law, and more comfortable if the airlines had to protect my identity unless due process (subpeonas/warrants) was followed to get that info from them.
"The correct solution is to provide appropriate and easily understood ACLs or sandboxes for new applications."
I agree. This would be nice. But the way most operatings systems are currently architected (including Windows, Unix and Unix-likes), while this is certainly an *option*, it is completely voluntary on the software developers' part. (How many Linux/Unix programs can be cleanly installed in just a sub-directory of a user's home directory? It should be possible [and some do] - but most of them want to install libraries to system paths, config files to/etc, etc).
I think what you propose is a great idea, but it might just be too late. There's an old story about a little dutch boy who sticks his finger in the hole of a dike, to prevent the water from rushing through the hole making it bigger and bigger - if the hold got any bigger, it'd be too late to stop it and the entire dike would wash away, and his town would be flooded. I think this is kind of like that. There's a lot of stupid, crappy ideas that made their way into the mainstream, and will never go away, despite how aweful they are - like popup windows stealing keyboard focus. I'm not just talking about advertising popups from the likes of gator and 180solutions. I'm also talking about notification popups from legitimate programs.
I have, on quite a few occawions, been typing something innocently in a text editor, or email, or in a web-browser textarea like the one I'm typing this message into (in fact, this happened to me while I was typing this message), and a popup jumps up, but I'm right in the middle of typing and can't stop myself fast enough, and keystrokes that were intended for the window I *used* to have the focus on now go off to the popup window, doing GOD KNOWS WHAT (in the case of the popup a minute ago, it disappeared and I have no idea what it was about - I think it was something related to my VoIP phone, but hell if I know).
The point is, good ideas come and go, but ideas are FOREVER. I've had this beef about popups for 10 years, hoping that someday they would go away. But do they? No. I don't know why, but bad design sticks around forever. Honestly, it's not so much the popping up that bothers me as the stealing the keyboard focus - couldn't someone create a GUI system where popups don't actually get the focus - they just display at the 'front' of the stack *without* getting keyboard input?
So, the best we can really do, for now, is anti-spyware software, and (maybe) some user education to avoid some of the spyware to begin with.
All that said, I think what you say is completely correct, and I wish that was how operating systems were commonly set up - that I as a user have more priviledges that the applications I install initially have, but right now we have this simplistic model where applications have all the rights that the user does. Sandboxing every application initially, and then allowing the user/system administrator to grant additional privileges if necessary, would be a great step forward in simplifying system administration, and killing stuff like this.
Ok, I agree with this idea, generally - let's disallow stuff that's not known good. But, ultimately, you gotta give the user the opportunity to run stuff that is not known to be good (let's say I'm a programming student, and writing my own programs - if I can't run them, I can't test them).
The problem is, if someone wants to try a new program they got off the internet, once the spyware is installed and they realized what happened, they need a way to get the crap off their computer - but most of it provides you no good way to remove it. This is where these spyware scanners are handy - they provide, essentially, an uninstaller for the spyware crap you want to get rid of.
The truth of the matter is, there are many more legitimate programs than illegitimate ones. It sounds good to block 'unknown' programs, in theory, but would mostly cause users a lot of hassle, and introduces the 'Click This' phenomena - similar to software firewalls that popup a 'keep blocked/unblock' dialog - most users will just allow stuff they don't know to run anyhow, because they think they probably need it if it's on their computer.
And that brings you back to needing to remove stuff once it *does* get on the system. There's no way around it - while trying to take preventative measures is certainly good (for example, a public library system I was working at for awhile finally got around to upgrading all their computers to Win2k/WinXP and locking users' ability to install anything, which made support dramatically simpler), you STILL need a way to fix things when they break.
Of the fact that they have split off the 'linux' hackable version from the mainstream consumer model. Linux has always thrived on cheap commodity hardware. That is, Linux is a niche market that integrates well, in a lot of cases, as a subset of a large market, and the large market keeps prices low and products in production for the niche Linux users.
While I think it's cool that Linksys has at least made the option available, currently, to buy basically the 'older' model that is hackable and runs Linux, I wonder how long this will last? If it's true that the Linux hacker sales only account for a very small percent of the overall sales, will Linksys consider it worthwhile, in the long run, to continue to market the seperate product?
I suppose that depends on a few things - if some companies spring up that use the WRT54GL to create other products for resale to a mainstream market (for example, selling small-office wireless PBX's using Asterix on one of these devices - and I think there might be companies doing things like this), perhaps this secondary market would be large enough to justify the continued production of these units.
This kind of reminds me of the Corel Netwinder. I don't know how many people remember the netwinder. For some reason Corel (you know, the makers of WordPerfect and CorelDraw), in it's history, has experimented with various other businesses, including being a Linux Distro vendor for about 5 minutes (anyone ever try Corel Linux? It was based on Debian, but there was only ever one release that I know of), and before that, they tried creating a small, arm-based Linux computer.
It was a nice design - extremely compact, quite - really it was about the size of most WAPs in it's physical form-factor, and had a very visually pleasing case design. I think Corel eventually split the netwinder off as a seperate company, which I think struggled along until May of 2005 (the current status of netwinder seems to be a little fuzzy to me - based on a google search, it apepars that as recently as May of 2005, there was a company continuing to develop and sell small Linux-based hardware under the Netwinder name).
The netwinder was a very cool device, but unfortunately, I don't think there was enough market for it, as it targetted people who wanted small, relatively cheap, low-end Linux servers and workstations - but alot of that same market just bought intel or amd based commodity hardware (tower servers, rack servers, blade servers, etc). Linux thrives as a being a subset of a large market, not as a seperate niche market.
Yeah, sure, maybe a lot of the games *are* available for PC. Is that a bad thing? I'm no Microsoft lover, but come on people, get over it.
The fact is, a lot of people don't have a 'game pc'. To get a PC that is capable of running a lot of the games, you need to drop like $600-1200 (depending on how much power you want, and you can probably spend more than 1200 if you really want to, I'm sure). An XBox 360, at launch, costs 300 (ebay auctions notwithstanding), and will likely come down in price over time, and is powerful enough to run fairly high-end games.
Plus, it is much simpler for most users, than trying to get PC games working right. "I need to upgrade my drivers? For my motherboard, video card, sound card? I need to get a better powersupply, because the voltage is dropping during peak processing times"?
Maybe the XBox was "basically a PC", but it brought PC gaming to people at a lower price, and with less technical hassles. The XBox 360, supposedly, gives the console more power, so developers can potentially develop more computationally complex games (which may or may not be more fun), but continues to be incredibly easy to use, and fairly reasonably priced, for what you get. The same could be said of any console.
And what the hell is wrong with profit anyhow? Nobody is forced to buy an XBox 360. If they choose to spend the money on it, and Microsoft can make a profit, then I say good for Microsoft. They provided a product that people wanted to buy, and made some money. This is one field where MS doesn't (yet), have a monopoly, and competition is good.
Yes, the article is intended to be funny, but a lot of people also seem to miss the point that it is intended to TEACH good programming by listing bad programming habits. I.e if you want to be a good programmer, don't do this stuff. It amazes me how so many 'smart' slashdot readers can completely miss the point of something like this.
Ok, I don't really know for sure, but I think I've seen somewhere that there is a principle in law, based upon the constitutional right to due process, I believe, I'm not sure. Anyhow, the gist of it is, you can't sign away your constitutional rights. And, the right to sue is considered, I believe, a constitutional right. There are some exceptions, apparently - like the fairly standard 'arbitration' clauses, where you have to agree to that you will take grievances to an arbitrator of some sort.
But in this case, the license agreement would be purporting to have more authority, I think, than it legally would be allowed to. If someone wants to sue a third party, using non-free software, over infringement of their product, would this prohibit them from excersing their legal rights? Ok, if you have no idea what I just said, here's a more spelled out example.
Tom gets GPL'ed software from Joe, which includes the clause proposed by the parent poster. Tom also rights software, that's completely different from Joe's software, and distributes it under the Tom EULA (his legal right to do), and Tom has a software patent on his software also. Mike sees Tom's software, and decides to clone it, stepping on his patent. Tom now decides to sue Mike - does he now owe Joe $1M dollars/yr?
Possibly, but I don't think that the courts would really uphold this. IANAL.
Well, for one thing, software creators already have the protections of copyright. That is, really, a significant protection. Does it mean no one can clone your software without infringing? No, of course not.
Fundamentally, patents protect that part of society which least needs protections. There are different kind of practical protections on software. There is a concept in economics, which applies here, called barriers to entry. That is, how difficult is it to enter a market?
Consider any non-trivial piece of software (which seems to be what you think should be patentable - you say that simple, obvious algorithms shouldn't be patentable). Even to clone a piece of software would take some considerable investment. Some software is easier to clone than other software, because the software itself might be simpler, and more obvious how to clone it. But, in addition to copyright, you still have to deal with the issue of actually figuring out the functionality of software, and be able to reproduce it, which in many cases, would require a lot of work. In the meantime, your competition, that you are trying to rip-off, potentially is continue to develop the product with more features, new functionality, etc, and so they are staying a step ahead of you.
Now, the theory goes that patents are supposed to protect the small inventor, who doesn't have the resources to protect his invention from being ripped off by a large, deep-pockets company that can overcome that particular barrier to entry. Someone like a Microsoft or IBM, if they like your product, and decide not to buy it outright, has the resources to reverse engineer it, and redevelop it without infringing your copyright.
But who do we see hold the majority of software patents? Large software companies. And so, the whole system is turned on it's head. Companies with a lot of resources, who can out-market (spending lots of money on ad campaigns, etc), out-lobby, and out-patent (patents are very expensive, and so only people with a lot of money to burn on patents can afford to get a lot of patents) most of the small and mid-size players.
There is another fundamental problem with patents. Software patents are basically giving people a monopoly on using tools (development tools in this case) the way the tools were designed to be used, by *other people*, in many cases. Take for example the Amazon.com infamous one-click patent. The reason so many people were in an uproar about it is that, fundamentally, they were using html and cgi the way html and cgi were designed to be used (that is, present users with a form, and when the user clicks on something on that form, the form is processed and some software is triggered to run on the server). Too many of the software patents that are out there simply cover people using tools invented by other people, the way the tool inventors intended the tools to be used (granted, the tool inventors might not have conceived of every possible, specific use of the tool, but they designed it to allow this variety of things to be done).
Finally, it's arguable whether the first person/company to implement a specific idea should have a monopoly on that idea, when many others may have had the same idea, and just come to market a few months later. Most of the times, ideas are not that original - but specific implementations might be. However, software patents have been allowed to become ever more and more generic, to the point where software patents have created a true minefield for software developers. Far too many 'simple algorithms' have been patented, and obvious ideas have been patented, because the patent office doesn't really have the ability to correctly arbitrate what should and should not be patentable.
And so, now we find ourselves in a situation where there are a lot of patents that need to be litigated to be declared invalid, but the sheer number of patents will quickly cause the cost of litigating to outweigh any 'benefit' of the patent concept. That is, the overhead costs of putting up with softwar
I got a chance to play CoV beta. I haven't purchased it. I just can't see paying $50 for the exact same game. I mean, seriously, when people say it is the same game, re-skinned, they are quite literal. Most of the buildings and missions maps have the exact same geometry, with different textures (granted, some of the new textures are quite well done), and a few different 'scenery' objects in the mission (like slightly different furniture lieing around, or slightly different piles of junk).
And, as others have pointed out, most of the character types/powersets are almost identical, with some changes to the numbers (like, for example, the offensive and defensive powers of the Tanker set from CoH were moved over, and swapped in effectiveness [that is, tankers had high defense and only moderate offense - in CoV you get high offense and moderate defense], and called 'Brute' in CoV).
I might have let this pass if the game lived up to a villainous feel. But most of the missions, as others have pointed out, were going around fighting other villains, with no ability to attack any 'good' people, for the most part. The whole experience was too locked down to feel villainous. Heroes have to abide by a certain moral standard, so I understand why you can't attack citizens or rob stores in CoH. But in CoV, I ought to be able to take a risk by mugging one of my contacts, nicking a few enhancments, but in the process, losing faction with that contact and whoever he is aligned with. Things like that, which would give it a truly criminal feel.
It's just not there. And I'm not gonna pay $50 for the same game I'm already playing.
I think I'd have to mostly agree with the parent. The problem with most games isn't the hardware. It's the developers. No, seriously. Developers can develop games for XBox, PS2 and Gamecube just fine. Fun games, that sell a *lot* of copies. The whole fricken console costs less than one of the video cards. Am I gonna spend close to $300 on just a video card? Hell no.
PC Game developers need to start designing the games down a little bit, to run great on most 3D video cards, instead of designing them for the latest and greatest. My computer is an Athlon 900 with a GeForce ti 4200 video card and 600 Megs of ram. It is technically a better 'game machine' than an XBox, but it seems it's getting long in the tooth because nobody is designing the games to run on it anymore.
Yes, I can still run most games, but even with detail turned way down I get pretty crappy frame rates at times - like with FFXI Online, or City of Heroes/Villains. I think, ultimately, my video card is less of a problem than the fact that I have a 900Mhz cpu, but it seems like what I have should be considered a pretty good base for a 'value' gaming system. (IIRC, Xbox only has a 600Mhz CPU - yet it runs the games designed for it just fine).
I bet if game developers tried to design more games that were fun and ran well on older hardware, they'd sell a lot more PC games. Sure, some people are gonna buy the $1600 'gaming' systems with $300 video cards, a Gig of RAM, and 3+ Ghz processors, but that can't possibly be the majority of the market.
Google also will make available more content from a book, if they explicitely *have the publishers permission*. And, in such a case, Google will Share the wealth. Go read the page for details. Basically, they will give you a portion of the revenue from contextual ads that are displayed with the page from your book.
This lawsuit is basically about people who are too stupid to exist (although, alas, they do), trying to fight something that will be *very* good for them. It's Sony vs. MPAA all over again, it really is. The MPAA thought they new so much better than the VCR manufacturers what is good for the motion picture industry. They are too small-brained to think creatively about how to exploit new opportunities that are opened up by the new technology. The MPAA members eventually did, and now they make, from what I've heard, the majority of their revenues from VHS/DVD sales (although they still make plenty at the box-office - it's just that VCRs and later DVD created brand-new revenue streams that eventually surpassed the box office + TV revenue).
Re:You are confusing two issues
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Reining in Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Could, would, should. . . vague words. All we have is the law. The question isn't whether Google should be allowed to make money off the books. . . the question is, do they violate copyright? You might think it's 'not fair' that Google can make money from allowing the users to search the books, and sell ads next to the search results, but that doesn't mean that what Google is doing *IS* or *IS NOT* legal. It may be that what Google is doing is in violation of copyright, or maybe not. I'm not a lawyer.
The thing is, copyright law doesn't govern making money off of someone else's copyrighted work. It only governs specific actions - namely, making copies and distributing those copies. For example, I could arguably have a for-profit library, where I buy copies of books, and then rent them out to people (would be tough, since there are free public libraries, but I believe would be essentially legal). Now, in this specific example, I've had to first buy my copies from the publishers, so the publisher and author are getting paid, and probably nobody would care.
But, consider another example. I go to the public library. I read a *LOT* of books. I now decide to publish a newsletter of my book reviews, including maybe a few choice quotes, or even a couple paragraphs of text, and I sell ad space in my newsletter. I've made money off your books, without paying you anything. Am I in violation of copyright law for making book recommendations/reviews? No - even if I include short pieces of your text to illustrate my review/recommendation. That is *fair use*. And this happens all the time. Most newspapers have book review sections, magazines as well, and nobody complains about them.
I personally don't see much difference between what I've outlined above, and what Google is doing. I personally think it comes down to fair use. I suppose, at this point, it will be up to the courts (most likely the Supreme Court) to decide if this constitutes fair use.
The main points of question seem to be, 1) Does scanning/digitizing the entire work, even if Google isn't distributing the entire work, constitute an illegal copy or not, 2) If Google is making only a small portion available to any one searcher, but over the course of thousands of requests, makes the entire work available (albeit piece-by-piece to potentially hundreds of different users), does that constitute illegal copying/distribution (I personally think Google would be on much safer territory here if they only made available like the preface, or a couple paragraphs from the first chapter from the book, so that regardless of what you search on, you would only ever see that one small portion of the work - and *possibly* like the single sentence that the search terms were found in)?
Ultimately, though, as copyright holders fight Google, they may just be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Authors and publishers need to seriously consider this: do you want your competitors works to be findable through Google Print, but *your* work not to be? The outcome of Google 'losing' this legal battle would simply be that they would continue on, but only indexing and returning search results for public domain books, and books from publishers/authors who have explicitely granted them permission (and many will, as they will see it for the opportunity it is). Do you *really* want your books to be the only books that people *can't* find through Google? You might want to have your book listed, *and* get a royalty from Google. Not gonna happen. Ever. Get over it. Google will just pull you out of the index and move on, and not really care. It would take an industry-wide boycott for Google to care, and again, that's not gonna happen, because it's too tempting to be on Google when your competitors are not.
The problem is, Google, et. al. already pay for their pipes, too. Nobody is getting a free ride. The end-user pays for their broadband connection (as you've pointed out), Google pays for its Internet connection (Google must have one helluva broadband bill), and the ISP's have traffic interchange agreements between them (I think it boils down to whoever passes more data has to pay - if they 'trade' an equal amount of data, then they probably don't charge each other - although I'm sure it all boils down to the individual contracts that govern peering).
The point is, this guy is a greedy jackass who is trying to make out like other companies are getting a free ride using the bandwidth I and they *already* payed for. If google, et. al have to start paying SBC for the bandwidth I already payed for, SBC better start giving me free DSL service (all this is hypothetical, as I currently use TimeWarner cable for internet access).
The one potentially hopefull thing in all this is, because of the fact that cable companies are competing with the phone companies, (and things like city-wide WiFi networks are being created) SBC doesn't really quite have the clout that its CEO seems to think it does - just imagine what would happen if SBC suddenly disallowed access to all the websites/services that people normally use the internet for, because they didn't pay this fee? All SBC's customers would probably switch ISP's pretty fast, leaving SBC wondering what happened. Simply put, SBC needs Google, Vonage, and the rest of the Internet more than the rest of the Internet needs SBC.
I still do wonder, though, what *geniuses* at the FTC have allowed the re-aggregation of all the baby bells after government spent massive amounts of money, and 10 years of litigation, trying to break them up.
The reason people can make such profoundly ignorant statements as "The FCC is obsolete", is precisely because the FCC has done a pretty darn good job of doing it's job. The FCC, at least in terms of frequency regulation and enforcement, has done a good enough job that they are largely invisible to the general public. Hence, a lot of people might think they are irrelevant.
Let me explain: the reason we are getting technology to make ever-more-efficient use of available radio spectrum, is in part due to the fact that the FCC, the ITU, and all the counterpart communications agencies of governments around the world recognized the need to regulate the radio spectrum, to slice it up for use by many different 'users'. Part of the FCC's job is to make sure the USA abides by the international radio-spectrum treaties, so that a resource that is fairly scarce, can have optimal usage.
These regulatory agencies, by the very work they do, encourage maximum usage of the available spectrum, and keep people from stepping on each other's signals. This is why we live in a world of wireless devices, wireless digital communications, cell phones, amateur radio, marine radio, military radio, tv, commercial radio, etc, etc and everyone can make use of the airwaves with minimal interference to each other. Once allocations have been made, you need someone to do enforcement (investigation and prosecutions of violations of the allotment), or else the allocations mean nothing.
If you got rid of the FCC, some people would stop playing nice with each other (even though the technology exists to co-exist). Some people would get frequency 'greedy'. And then the whole system would collapse. The sad thing about humans is, a certain percentage of the population always need 'police' to keep them honest (and some are crooked anyway, but at least you have a chance to stop them before they do too much damage, if you have police).
Another important thing to remember about radio frequency, is that different radio frequencies *behave differently*, and allocations need to take this into account (and currently, largely do). Shortwave radio allows worldwide communication with relatively low power output. But, because it is world-wide, it means you also have a truly global 'collision domain', to borrow a term from digital networking. So, if you just need to do local communications, you *don't* use these 'global' frequencies.
The FCC provides a truly useful service to the public (despite all the snarking about decency standards - something the FCC doesn't really want to be involved in, but is forced to by public demand, btw - remember, the FCC ultimately answers to politicians, whose chief concern is keeping the most people 'happy' so they can get re-elected). Let's give them a little respect.
Ok, so they might not be able to track you with this. But, if they find you, and raid you, and seize your printer, they can prove that a document was printed by your printer. So they can more easily tie you to the counterfeit money, cooked accounting sheets, or whatever it is that you printed that is evidence against you.
Well,
While you are mostly correct, you could perhaps give people a little more explanation. To people not familiar with the reasons, it might seem a little arbitrary that in an emergency, they have to "stay the hell off the air". And, as I seem to recall, it's been awhile since I read part 97, the FCC does make exemptions for life-threatening emergencies - that you can operate unlicensed, or in areas of the spectrum your license does not cover, to save lives.
And, since the parent did a very poor job of supporting his statement, let me give you some reasons why you should not operate if you are unlicensed, unless it is a life-threatening emergency: chiefly, because untrained people can cause a lot of wasted time and interfere with communication in emergencies. In emergency situations, those who are best equipped to best serve the public, are those who have learned how to operate their equipment optimally (so as to most effectively use available radio spectrum), and are trained in standard procedures for quickly and efficiently passing communications.
When unlicensed, untrained individuals start hopping on the spectrum dedicated for amateur radio (or police, or whatever service is allocated that frequency), they can cause disruptions that could *cost* lives by disrupting command-and-control messages during emergencies (like, for example, health workers requesting that blood be sent to a specific hospital because they are running short and need more for transfusions, etc).
If you truly have a desire to help with emergency communications, anyone can get the training, and take the test to become an Amateur Operator, and for real emergency work, their are ham orginasations that provide additional emergency comms training (I'm a licensed ham, but, for example, I would generally stay off the air during an emergency, because I don't have the emergency training).
Here's a situation where the LSB could, theoretically, be useful:
I work for a small software developer, who primarily deals with Windows, but recently, we have ported 2 out of our 3 products to also run on Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X.
On Linux, we had to make a decision as to what version of libstdc++ to compile against. We're talking about the STANDARD c++ library here - the API's are pretty much set, and should retain backward compatibility.
Well, in order to make sure to be able to support older versions of Linux distros, as well as newer version, we compiled against a version of the C++ library that dates back to the days of RedHat 6 and Debian 2.0.
Unfortunately, newer versions of the gnu libstdc++ have broken binary compatibility with older versions of the gnu libstdc++. Mainly, what this means, is that customers with newer distros just need to install the old version of the libstdc++, but it would be *really* nice if something like the LSB would ensure that this older version (well, some *standard* version anyhow) of the library was available, universally, as a part of the LSB package for any given distro. Then, if my company develops to the LSB, that should guarantee binary compatibility with the standard system libraries.
Basically, it would be nice to know that if I compile a package on one Linux distro, I could fairly easily take that package and run it on both older and newer versions of Linux distros. That is why developers want LSB.
And, I can already here someone saying, "Just include the source and let the customers compile it against their own versions of the standard libraries." That works for some companies, but my company is *not* an open source company, and has no plans to release their source code (which is their right).
The solution we've found is not elegant, but basically we are going to start including the library we compile against as part of our installer. That solves that problem for us and our customers, however, it also potentially means that the same library is installed twice on the same computer, and potentially loaded twice (or more times) into memory (and the point of dynamic libraries is to try to avoid such duplication).
Well, I don't know for sure, but I've heard of technologies where you can take multiple low-res captures of the same scene, and interpolate a higher-res image from the multiple low-res images. (I first heard of this technique in conjunction with some NASA mars rover, I believe, where it would get higher-rez images from low rez CCD's, by this type of technique).
Perhaps this does the same thing? You scan the camera around, and as it's moving, you get multiple captures of the page, and between each capture, there is a certain amount of 'overlay' between them, and you can then use the portion of 'overlay' from each to interpolate a higher-resolution than the camera is physically capable of?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that there is no global warming. But I've noticed a growing tendency over the last few years, that any time you have bad weather events, that you get a lot of non-scientists raising the global warming alarm.
It reminds me of a documentary I was watching recently on Benjamin Franklin, and they were talking about the cultural environment of Boston during the late 1700's, and how if someone's house or business was struck by lighting, the Boston FD would put out neighboring houses and buildings, but not the original house or building, because it was deemed that God had chosen to punish the occupents by striking them with lightning.
People never seem to accept that bad weather, lightning strikes, and even severe hurricanes are just a normal part of the weather cycle (even if a hurricane this strong might only happens once or twice a century - in geological terms that would be pretty normal).
I think that Global Warming has become the new superstition of the 20th century. Looking for something to blame fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, anything you want on? Global Warming!!!!!
I believe my certs helped me get my current job. While I agree with others that certs don't prove you know what you are doing, they can at least get you looked at seriously enough to get an interview. It's the interview that usually is going to make or break the decision by the employer.
I was in the situation where I know a lot about computers, but don't have a good way to show that on a resume. I was a college student, who excelled at my computer science courses (but you don't usually put that on your resume - although I suppose you could), and had a few years of lower-level computer support/helpdesk work experience.
My current job listed Linux/Unix experience as a desired skillset. I have been using Linux at home as a geek, and as a computer science student, for about oh, 6 years all together, but had never had a Linux/Unix job. There would otherwise be nothing on my resume to indicate that I actually knew how to use and configure Linux. So, I got the Linux Professional Instituge level 1 Certification. Sure, that doesn't necessarily prove that I'm ready to be a Linux administrator, but it at least shows I was serious enough about learning and using Linux to go out and pass a test about it. (In this particular case, I'm not a Linux administrator, but have a higher-level helpdesk job than I have had in the past, and supporting Linux is a part of this position - and to tell the truth, I know a lot more about Linux than some of the 'administrators' I support pretty frequently).
It got me an interview, and in the interview I had the chance to explain my background and experience with Linux, and demonstrate my proficiency to the department manage, who was satisfied, and hired me.
For people who already have years of experience and a degree under their belt, they can probably skip getting certs. For people just starting out, it's a great way to get your foot in the door.
I've polled the entire Netscape 8 user-base
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 1
Apparently, 4 out of 5 don't care - and that's not a statistical breakdown, that's the entire result set.
Slashdot Mirror
In the world of acting and cinema, there is the concept of the '4th wall' - this is the wall of the room that would normally be where the front of the stage is (which obviously isn't there, so the audience can see what's going on in the room).
The term breaking the 4th wall is when any kind of fictional performance breaks the carefully crafted illusion and distracts people from the presentation.
Well, product placements can be like that. I saw the episode of Medium that the article refers to, and it was rather jarring. It's kind of like interrupting the show for an add, *while the show is still running*. I suppose they can get away with this a little, but at a certain point, it just gets too distracting and you lose the flow of the story.
About the same time that I saw that episode of Medium, I remember seeing a couple other shows with prominent product placements that were equally jarring. I don't exactly remember the products (I try to block it out, so I don't reward the morons who are ruining my entertainment by remember the damn products), but the show was NIS, and they kept having characters discuss gadgets like I don't know, probably iPod and gameboy or something like that. Like I said, I try not to remember.
I mean, I don't mind product placements that are non-obtrusive, like someone working on a certain brand of laptop, in a scene that is logically part of the story, where the person would really be working at a laptop. I think both Apple and Dell have bought such product placements for their computers. But if the show goes out of it's way to highlight a product, it definitely breaks the 4th wall for me.
You are quite correct. Podcasting is a slightly misleading term, that seems to give undue credit to Appple. But, from a marketting standpoint, it's a great word (which is why it is used so much). It's short, it's catchy, it's fairly understandable (although it tends to lead people to think iPods are the only audio player the technology works with), and most importantly, it relates to ideas people already are familiar with and use on a daily basis.
Most people listen to broadcasts, so listening to 'podcasts' is an easy conceptual jump - it seems like a natural extension of what people already do. Proposed alternatives like 'blogcast' or 'audio blog' are unfamiliar to most people, because most people aren't used to reading blogs (a lot of people have no idea what the term even means), and view blogs as different than broadcast programming.
I might be intersted in listening to 'digital broadcasts', but not to listening to 'audioblogs'. It's a difference in perception of what a blog is (someones personal 'web-diary', or professional opinion page), and what a broadcast is.
Unfortunately, for awhile, I think we are going to be stuck with this term. If someone can come up with an alternative word, that is just as catchy, and wants to start popularizing it, by all means, be my guest. I prefer terms that are vendor-neutral, when talking about a technology.
The question, in natural selection is, can a gene reproduce? Even if a lower IQ really correllated to a lower level of intelligence (which there seems to be a lot of debate about - I'm no expert in the field, but I've read that it is more an indicator of your education and culture than your actual intelligence), it still doesn't seem to have any effect on reproduction - dumb guys have children all the time.
So, I contest your assertion that "A gene that depresses intelligence, without any trade-off, would be quickly eliminated by natural selection". Truth is, for a gene to be eliminated by natural selection, it has to have a highly negative impact on the host. Slightly negative impacts will not be detrimental enough to prevent propagation.
Well, if you read farther in the article, he suggests that incongito travellers *should* be searched thouroughly (and their baggage) to ensure they aren't a threat. As long as you know they aren't a threat, the reasoning goes, why do you care who they are?
This is one of those things that I, personally, could go either way on. Does it really hurt public safety if unidentified passengers are on a flight? Maybe - I don't know, I'm not an expert in this kind of thing. But it does seem like, if someone is willing to go through a more thourough and invasive check, in order to remain anonymous, that they should be allowed.
I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember the Cold War rhetoric about how the Soviet Union restricted travel throughout it's territories/member states, with many border checkpoints and things, and how the USA was so much better because you could freely travel, without having to always stop and identify yourself, and how this was an example of American Freedom. How the Soviet Union was an invasive Police State. Well, while you can still travel by car relatively freely, any time you get on a plane, you MUST identify yourself.
As long as it can be demonstrated that you have no weapons/exlplosives/biological weapons, etc, and are just a normal, harmless traveller, why should you have to identify yourself as a matter of Federal Law? Now, the argument also could go that as long as the airlines want you to identify yourself, since the airplane is their private property, you have to do so, or else forfeit the privelege of flying on that plane. I would be more comfortable with airlines that require identification, than having it mandated by Federal Law, and more comfortable if the airlines had to protect my identity unless due process (subpeonas/warrants) was followed to get that info from them.
"The correct solution is to provide appropriate and easily understood ACLs or sandboxes for new applications."
/etc, etc).
I agree. This would be nice. But the way most operatings systems are currently architected (including Windows, Unix and Unix-likes), while this is certainly an *option*, it is completely voluntary on the software developers' part. (How many Linux/Unix programs can be cleanly installed in just a sub-directory of a user's home directory? It should be possible [and some do] - but most of them want to install libraries to system paths, config files to
I think what you propose is a great idea, but it might just be too late. There's an old story about a little dutch boy who sticks his finger in the hole of a dike, to prevent the water from rushing through the hole making it bigger and bigger - if the hold got any bigger, it'd be too late to stop it and the entire dike would wash away, and his town would be flooded. I think this is kind of like that. There's a lot of stupid, crappy ideas that made their way into the mainstream, and will never go away, despite how aweful they are - like popup windows stealing keyboard focus. I'm not just talking about advertising popups from the likes of gator and 180solutions. I'm also talking about notification popups from legitimate programs.
I have, on quite a few occawions, been typing something innocently in a text editor, or email, or in a web-browser textarea like the one I'm typing this message into (in fact, this happened to me while I was typing this message), and a popup jumps up, but I'm right in the middle of typing and can't stop myself fast enough, and keystrokes that were intended for the window I *used* to have the focus on now go off to the popup window, doing GOD KNOWS WHAT (in the case of the popup a minute ago, it disappeared and I have no idea what it was about - I think it was something related to my VoIP phone, but hell if I know).
The point is, good ideas come and go, but ideas are FOREVER. I've had this beef about popups for 10 years, hoping that someday they would go away. But do they? No. I don't know why, but bad design sticks around forever. Honestly, it's not so much the popping up that bothers me as the stealing the keyboard focus - couldn't someone create a GUI system where popups don't actually get the focus - they just display at the 'front' of the stack *without* getting keyboard input?
So, the best we can really do, for now, is anti-spyware software, and (maybe) some user education to avoid some of the spyware to begin with.
All that said, I think what you say is completely correct, and I wish that was how operating systems were commonly set up - that I as a user have more priviledges that the applications I install initially have, but right now we have this simplistic model where applications have all the rights that the user does. Sandboxing every application initially, and then allowing the user/system administrator to grant additional privileges if necessary, would be a great step forward in simplifying system administration, and killing stuff like this.
Ok, I agree with this idea, generally - let's disallow stuff that's not known good. But, ultimately, you gotta give the user the opportunity to run stuff that is not known to be good (let's say I'm a programming student, and writing my own programs - if I can't run them, I can't test them).
The problem is, if someone wants to try a new program they got off the internet, once the spyware is installed and they realized what happened, they need a way to get the crap off their computer - but most of it provides you no good way to remove it. This is where these spyware scanners are handy - they provide, essentially, an uninstaller for the spyware crap you want to get rid of.
The truth of the matter is, there are many more legitimate programs than illegitimate ones. It sounds good to block 'unknown' programs, in theory, but would mostly cause users a lot of hassle, and introduces the 'Click This' phenomena - similar to software firewalls that popup a 'keep blocked/unblock' dialog - most users will just allow stuff they don't know to run anyhow, because they think they probably need it if it's on their computer.
And that brings you back to needing to remove stuff once it *does* get on the system. There's no way around it - while trying to take preventative measures is certainly good (for example, a public library system I was working at for awhile finally got around to upgrading all their computers to Win2k/WinXP and locking users' ability to install anything, which made support dramatically simpler), you STILL need a way to fix things when they break.
Of the fact that they have split off the 'linux' hackable version from the mainstream consumer model. Linux has always thrived on cheap commodity hardware. That is, Linux is a niche market that integrates well, in a lot of cases, as a subset of a large market, and the large market keeps prices low and products in production for the niche Linux users.
While I think it's cool that Linksys has at least made the option available, currently, to buy basically the 'older' model that is hackable and runs Linux, I wonder how long this will last? If it's true that the Linux hacker sales only account for a very small percent of the overall sales, will Linksys consider it worthwhile, in the long run, to continue to market the seperate product?
I suppose that depends on a few things - if some companies spring up that use the WRT54GL to create other products for resale to a mainstream market (for example, selling small-office wireless PBX's using Asterix on one of these devices - and I think there might be companies doing things like this), perhaps this secondary market would be large enough to justify the continued production of these units.
This kind of reminds me of the Corel Netwinder. I don't know how many people remember the netwinder. For some reason Corel (you know, the makers of WordPerfect and CorelDraw), in it's history, has experimented with various other businesses, including being a Linux Distro vendor for about 5 minutes (anyone ever try Corel Linux? It was based on Debian, but there was only ever one release that I know of), and before that, they tried creating a small, arm-based Linux computer.
It was a nice design - extremely compact, quite - really it was about the size of most WAPs in it's physical form-factor, and had a very visually pleasing case design. I think Corel eventually split the netwinder off as a seperate company, which I think struggled along until May of 2005 (the current status of netwinder seems to be a little fuzzy to me - based on a google search, it apepars that as recently as May of 2005, there was a company continuing to develop and sell small Linux-based hardware under the Netwinder name).
The netwinder was a very cool device, but unfortunately, I don't think there was enough market for it, as it targetted people who wanted small, relatively cheap, low-end Linux servers and workstations - but alot of that same market just bought intel or amd based commodity hardware (tower servers, rack servers, blade servers, etc). Linux thrives as a being a subset of a large market, not as a seperate niche market.
Yeah, sure, maybe a lot of the games *are* available for PC. Is that a bad thing? I'm no Microsoft lover, but come on people, get over it.
The fact is, a lot of people don't have a 'game pc'. To get a PC that is capable of running a lot of the games, you need to drop like $600-1200 (depending on how much power you want, and you can probably spend more than 1200 if you really want to, I'm sure). An XBox 360, at launch, costs 300 (ebay auctions notwithstanding), and will likely come down in price over time, and is powerful enough to run fairly high-end games.
Plus, it is much simpler for most users, than trying to get PC games working right. "I need to upgrade my drivers? For my motherboard, video card, sound card? I need to get a better powersupply, because the voltage is dropping during peak processing times"?
Maybe the XBox was "basically a PC", but it brought PC gaming to people at a lower price, and with less technical hassles. The XBox 360, supposedly, gives the console more power, so developers can potentially develop more computationally complex games (which may or may not be more fun), but continues to be incredibly easy to use, and fairly reasonably priced, for what you get. The same could be said of any console.
And what the hell is wrong with profit anyhow? Nobody is forced to buy an XBox 360. If they choose to spend the money on it, and Microsoft can make a profit, then I say good for Microsoft. They provided a product that people wanted to buy, and made some money. This is one field where MS doesn't (yet), have a monopoly, and competition is good.
Yes, the article is intended to be funny, but a lot of people also seem to miss the point that it is intended to TEACH good programming by listing bad programming habits. I.e if you want to be a good programmer, don't do this stuff. It amazes me how so many 'smart' slashdot readers can completely miss the point of something like this.
Ok, I don't really know for sure, but I think I've seen somewhere that there is a principle in law, based upon the constitutional right to due process, I believe, I'm not sure. Anyhow, the gist of it is, you can't sign away your constitutional rights. And, the right to sue is considered, I believe, a constitutional right. There are some exceptions, apparently - like the fairly standard 'arbitration' clauses, where you have to agree to that you will take grievances to an arbitrator of some sort.
But in this case, the license agreement would be purporting to have more authority, I think, than it legally would be allowed to. If someone wants to sue a third party, using non-free software, over infringement of their product, would this prohibit them from excersing their legal rights? Ok, if you have no idea what I just said, here's a more spelled out example.
Tom gets GPL'ed software from Joe, which includes the clause proposed by the parent poster. Tom also rights software, that's completely different from Joe's software, and distributes it under the Tom EULA (his legal right to do), and Tom has a software patent on his software also. Mike sees Tom's software, and decides to clone it, stepping on his patent. Tom now decides to sue Mike - does he now owe Joe $1M dollars/yr?
Possibly, but I don't think that the courts would really uphold this. IANAL.
Well, for one thing, software creators already have the protections of copyright. That is, really, a significant protection. Does it mean no one can clone your software without infringing? No, of course not.
Fundamentally, patents protect that part of society which least needs protections. There are different kind of practical protections on software. There is a concept in economics, which applies here, called barriers to entry. That is, how difficult is it to enter a market?
Consider any non-trivial piece of software (which seems to be what you think should be patentable - you say that simple, obvious algorithms shouldn't be patentable). Even to clone a piece of software would take some considerable investment. Some software is easier to clone than other software, because the software itself might be simpler, and more obvious how to clone it. But, in addition to copyright, you still have to deal with the issue of actually figuring out the functionality of software, and be able to reproduce it, which in many cases, would require a lot of work. In the meantime, your competition, that you are trying to rip-off, potentially is continue to develop the product with more features, new functionality, etc, and so they are staying a step ahead of you.
Now, the theory goes that patents are supposed to protect the small inventor, who doesn't have the resources to protect his invention from being ripped off by a large, deep-pockets company that can overcome that particular barrier to entry. Someone like a Microsoft or IBM, if they like your product, and decide not to buy it outright, has the resources to reverse engineer it, and redevelop it without infringing your copyright.
But who do we see hold the majority of software patents? Large software companies. And so, the whole system is turned on it's head. Companies with a lot of resources, who can out-market (spending lots of money on ad campaigns, etc), out-lobby, and out-patent (patents are very expensive, and so only people with a lot of money to burn on patents can afford to get a lot of patents) most of the small and mid-size players.
There is another fundamental problem with patents. Software patents are basically giving people a monopoly on using tools (development tools in this case) the way the tools were designed to be used, by *other people*, in many cases. Take for example the Amazon.com infamous one-click patent. The reason so many people were in an uproar about it is that, fundamentally, they were using html and cgi the way html and cgi were designed to be used (that is, present users with a form, and when the user clicks on something on that form, the form is processed and some software is triggered to run on the server). Too many of the software patents that are out there simply cover people using tools invented by other people, the way the tool inventors intended the tools to be used (granted, the tool inventors might not have conceived of every possible, specific use of the tool, but they designed it to allow this variety of things to be done).
Finally, it's arguable whether the first person/company to implement a specific idea should have a monopoly on that idea, when many others may have had the same idea, and just come to market a few months later. Most of the times, ideas are not that original - but specific implementations might be. However, software patents have been allowed to become ever more and more generic, to the point where software patents have created a true minefield for software developers. Far too many 'simple algorithms' have been patented, and obvious ideas have been patented, because the patent office doesn't really have the ability to correctly arbitrate what should and should not be patentable.
And so, now we find ourselves in a situation where there are a lot of patents that need to be litigated to be declared invalid, but the sheer number of patents will quickly cause the cost of litigating to outweigh any 'benefit' of the patent concept. That is, the overhead costs of putting up with softwar
I got a chance to play CoV beta. I haven't purchased it. I just can't see paying $50 for the exact same game. I mean, seriously, when people say it is the same game, re-skinned, they are quite literal. Most of the buildings and missions maps have the exact same geometry, with different textures (granted, some of the new textures are quite well done), and a few different 'scenery' objects in the mission (like slightly different furniture lieing around, or slightly different piles of junk).
And, as others have pointed out, most of the character types/powersets are almost identical, with some changes to the numbers (like, for example, the offensive and defensive powers of the Tanker set from CoH were moved over, and swapped in effectiveness [that is, tankers had high defense and only moderate offense - in CoV you get high offense and moderate defense], and called 'Brute' in CoV).
I might have let this pass if the game lived up to a villainous feel. But most of the missions, as others have pointed out, were going around fighting other villains, with no ability to attack any 'good' people, for the most part. The whole experience was too locked down to feel villainous. Heroes have to abide by a certain moral standard, so I understand why you can't attack citizens or rob stores in CoH. But in CoV, I ought to be able to take a risk by mugging one of my contacts, nicking a few enhancments, but in the process, losing faction with that contact and whoever he is aligned with. Things like that, which would give it a truly criminal feel.
It's just not there. And I'm not gonna pay $50 for the same game I'm already playing.
I think I'd have to mostly agree with the parent. The problem with most games isn't the hardware. It's the developers. No, seriously. Developers can develop games for XBox, PS2 and Gamecube just fine. Fun games, that sell a *lot* of copies. The whole fricken console costs less than one of the video cards. Am I gonna spend close to $300 on just a video card? Hell no.
PC Game developers need to start designing the games down a little bit, to run great on most 3D video cards, instead of designing them for the latest and greatest. My computer is an Athlon 900 with a GeForce ti 4200 video card and 600 Megs of ram. It is technically a better 'game machine' than an XBox, but it seems it's getting long in the tooth because nobody is designing the games to run on it anymore.
Yes, I can still run most games, but even with detail turned way down I get pretty crappy frame rates at times - like with FFXI Online, or City of Heroes/Villains. I think, ultimately, my video card is less of a problem than the fact that I have a 900Mhz cpu, but it seems like what I have should be considered a pretty good base for a 'value' gaming system. (IIRC, Xbox only has a 600Mhz CPU - yet it runs the games designed for it just fine).
I bet if game developers tried to design more games that were fun and ran well on older hardware, they'd sell a lot more PC games. Sure, some people are gonna buy the $1600 'gaming' systems with $300 video cards, a Gig of RAM, and 3+ Ghz processors, but that can't possibly be the majority of the market.
Replying to my own post, because I've found some links that people *really* should go read.
One of Google's staff members wrote a piece and put it on his blog that gives a better idea of what a 'snippet' means.
Google also will make available more content from a book, if they explicitely *have the publishers permission*. And, in such a case, Google will Share the wealth. Go read the page for details. Basically, they will give you a portion of the revenue from contextual ads that are displayed with the page from your book.
This lawsuit is basically about people who are too stupid to exist (although, alas, they do), trying to fight something that will be *very* good for them. It's Sony vs. MPAA all over again, it really is. The MPAA thought they new so much better than the VCR manufacturers what is good for the motion picture industry. They are too small-brained to think creatively about how to exploit new opportunities that are opened up by the new technology. The MPAA members eventually did, and now they make, from what I've heard, the majority of their revenues from VHS/DVD sales (although they still make plenty at the box-office - it's just that VCRs and later DVD created brand-new revenue streams that eventually surpassed the box office + TV revenue).
Could, would, should. . . vague words. All we have is the law. The question isn't whether Google should be allowed to make money off the books. . . the question is, do they violate copyright? You might think it's 'not fair' that Google can make money from allowing the users to search the books, and sell ads next to the search results, but that doesn't mean that what Google is doing *IS* or *IS NOT* legal. It may be that what Google is doing is in violation of copyright, or maybe not. I'm not a lawyer.
The thing is, copyright law doesn't govern making money off of someone else's copyrighted work. It only governs specific actions - namely, making copies and distributing those copies. For example, I could arguably have a for-profit library, where I buy copies of books, and then rent them out to people (would be tough, since there are free public libraries, but I believe would be essentially legal). Now, in this specific example, I've had to first buy my copies from the publishers, so the publisher and author are getting paid, and probably nobody would care.
But, consider another example. I go to the public library. I read a *LOT* of books. I now decide to publish a newsletter of my book reviews, including maybe a few choice quotes, or even a couple paragraphs of text, and I sell ad space in my newsletter. I've made money off your books, without paying you anything. Am I in violation of copyright law for making book recommendations/reviews? No - even if I include short pieces of your text to illustrate my review/recommendation. That is *fair use*. And this happens all the time. Most newspapers have book review sections, magazines as well, and nobody complains about them.
I personally don't see much difference between what I've outlined above, and what Google is doing. I personally think it comes down to fair use. I suppose, at this point, it will be up to the courts (most likely the Supreme Court) to decide if this constitutes fair use.
The main points of question seem to be, 1) Does scanning/digitizing the entire work, even if Google isn't distributing the entire work, constitute an illegal copy or not, 2) If Google is making only a small portion available to any one searcher, but over the course of thousands of requests, makes the entire work available (albeit piece-by-piece to potentially hundreds of different users), does that constitute illegal copying/distribution (I personally think Google would be on much safer territory here if they only made available like the preface, or a couple paragraphs from the first chapter from the book, so that regardless of what you search on, you would only ever see that one small portion of the work - and *possibly* like the single sentence that the search terms were found in)?
Ultimately, though, as copyright holders fight Google, they may just be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Authors and publishers need to seriously consider this: do you want your competitors works to be findable through Google Print, but *your* work not to be? The outcome of Google 'losing' this legal battle would simply be that they would continue on, but only indexing and returning search results for public domain books, and books from publishers/authors who have explicitely granted them permission (and many will, as they will see it for the opportunity it is). Do you *really* want your books to be the only books that people *can't* find through Google? You might want to have your book listed, *and* get a royalty from Google. Not gonna happen. Ever. Get over it. Google will just pull you out of the index and move on, and not really care. It would take an industry-wide boycott for Google to care, and again, that's not gonna happen, because it's too tempting to be on Google when your competitors are not.
The problem is, Google, et. al. already pay for their pipes, too. Nobody is getting a free ride. The end-user pays for their broadband connection (as you've pointed out), Google pays for its Internet connection (Google must have one helluva broadband bill), and the ISP's have traffic interchange agreements between them (I think it boils down to whoever passes more data has to pay - if they 'trade' an equal amount of data, then they probably don't charge each other - although I'm sure it all boils down to the individual contracts that govern peering).
The point is, this guy is a greedy jackass who is trying to make out like other companies are getting a free ride using the bandwidth I and they *already* payed for. If google, et. al have to start paying SBC for the bandwidth I already payed for, SBC better start giving me free DSL service (all this is hypothetical, as I currently use TimeWarner cable for internet access).
The one potentially hopefull thing in all this is, because of the fact that cable companies are competing with the phone companies, (and things like city-wide WiFi networks are being created) SBC doesn't really quite have the clout that its CEO seems to think it does - just imagine what would happen if SBC suddenly disallowed access to all the websites/services that people normally use the internet for, because they didn't pay this fee? All SBC's customers would probably switch ISP's pretty fast, leaving SBC wondering what happened. Simply put, SBC needs Google, Vonage, and the rest of the Internet more than the rest of the Internet needs SBC.
I still do wonder, though, what *geniuses* at the FTC have allowed the re-aggregation of all the baby bells after government spent massive amounts of money, and 10 years of litigation, trying to break them up.
The reason people can make such profoundly ignorant statements as "The FCC is obsolete", is precisely because the FCC has done a pretty darn good job of doing it's job. The FCC, at least in terms of frequency regulation and enforcement, has done a good enough job that they are largely invisible to the general public. Hence, a lot of people might think they are irrelevant.
Let me explain: the reason we are getting technology to make ever-more-efficient use of available radio spectrum, is in part due to the fact that the FCC, the ITU, and all the counterpart communications agencies of governments around the world recognized the need to regulate the radio spectrum, to slice it up for use by many different 'users'. Part of the FCC's job is to make sure the USA abides by the international radio-spectrum treaties, so that a resource that is fairly scarce, can have optimal usage.
These regulatory agencies, by the very work they do, encourage maximum usage of the available spectrum, and keep people from stepping on each other's signals. This is why we live in a world of wireless devices, wireless digital communications, cell phones, amateur radio, marine radio, military radio, tv, commercial radio, etc, etc and everyone can make use of the airwaves with minimal interference to each other. Once allocations have been made, you need someone to do enforcement (investigation and prosecutions of violations of the allotment), or else the allocations mean nothing.
If you got rid of the FCC, some people would stop playing nice with each other (even though the technology exists to co-exist). Some people would get frequency 'greedy'. And then the whole system would collapse. The sad thing about humans is, a certain percentage of the population always need 'police' to keep them honest (and some are crooked anyway, but at least you have a chance to stop them before they do too much damage, if you have police).
Another important thing to remember about radio frequency, is that different radio frequencies *behave differently*, and allocations need to take this into account (and currently, largely do). Shortwave radio allows worldwide communication with relatively low power output. But, because it is world-wide, it means you also have a truly global 'collision domain', to borrow a term from digital networking. So, if you just need to do local communications, you *don't* use these 'global' frequencies.
The FCC provides a truly useful service to the public (despite all the snarking about decency standards - something the FCC doesn't really want to be involved in, but is forced to by public demand, btw - remember, the FCC ultimately answers to politicians, whose chief concern is keeping the most people 'happy' so they can get re-elected). Let's give them a little respect.
Ok, so they might not be able to track you with this. But, if they find you, and raid you, and seize your printer, they can prove that a document was printed by your printer. So they can more easily tie you to the counterfeit money, cooked accounting sheets, or whatever it is that you printed that is evidence against you.
Well,
While you are mostly correct, you could perhaps give people a little more explanation. To people not familiar with the reasons, it might seem a little arbitrary that in an emergency, they have to "stay the hell off the air". And, as I seem to recall, it's been awhile since I read part 97, the FCC does make exemptions for life-threatening emergencies - that you can operate unlicensed, or in areas of the spectrum your license does not cover, to save lives.
And, since the parent did a very poor job of supporting his statement, let me give you some reasons why you should not operate if you are unlicensed, unless it is a life-threatening emergency: chiefly, because untrained people can cause a lot of wasted time and interfere with communication in emergencies. In emergency situations, those who are best equipped to best serve the public, are those who have learned how to operate their equipment optimally (so as to most effectively use available radio spectrum), and are trained in standard procedures for quickly and efficiently passing communications.
When unlicensed, untrained individuals start hopping on the spectrum dedicated for amateur radio (or police, or whatever service is allocated that frequency), they can cause disruptions that could *cost* lives by disrupting command-and-control messages during emergencies (like, for example, health workers requesting that blood be sent to a specific hospital because they are running short and need more for transfusions, etc).
If you truly have a desire to help with emergency communications, anyone can get the training, and take the test to become an Amateur Operator, and for real emergency work, their are ham orginasations that provide additional emergency comms training (I'm a licensed ham, but, for example, I would generally stay off the air during an emergency, because I don't have the emergency training).
KB8UAQ
Here's a situation where the LSB could, theoretically, be useful:
I work for a small software developer, who primarily deals with Windows, but recently, we have ported 2 out of our 3 products to also run on Linux, Solaris, and MacOS X.
On Linux, we had to make a decision as to what version of libstdc++ to compile against. We're talking about the STANDARD c++ library here - the API's are pretty much set, and should retain backward compatibility.
Well, in order to make sure to be able to support older versions of Linux distros, as well as newer version, we compiled against a version of the C++ library that dates back to the days of RedHat 6 and Debian 2.0.
Unfortunately, newer versions of the gnu libstdc++ have broken binary compatibility with older versions of the gnu libstdc++. Mainly, what this means, is that customers with newer distros just need to install the old version of the libstdc++, but it would be *really* nice if something like the LSB would ensure that this older version (well, some *standard* version anyhow) of the library was available, universally, as a part of the LSB package for any given distro. Then, if my company develops to the LSB, that should guarantee binary compatibility with the standard system libraries.
Basically, it would be nice to know that if I compile a package on one Linux distro, I could fairly easily take that package and run it on both older and newer versions of Linux distros. That is why developers want LSB.
And, I can already here someone saying, "Just include the source and let the customers compile it against their own versions of the standard libraries." That works for some companies, but my company is *not* an open source company, and has no plans to release their source code (which is their right).
The solution we've found is not elegant, but basically we are going to start including the library we compile against as part of our installer. That solves that problem for us and our customers, however, it also potentially means that the same library is installed twice on the same computer, and potentially loaded twice (or more times) into memory (and the point of dynamic libraries is to try to avoid such duplication).
Well, I don't know for sure, but I've heard of technologies where you can take multiple low-res captures of the same scene, and interpolate a higher-res image from the multiple low-res images. (I first heard of this technique in conjunction with some NASA mars rover, I believe, where it would get higher-rez images from low rez CCD's, by this type of technique).
Perhaps this does the same thing? You scan the camera around, and as it's moving, you get multiple captures of the page, and between each capture, there is a certain amount of 'overlay' between them, and you can then use the portion of 'overlay' from each to interpolate a higher-resolution than the camera is physically capable of?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that there is no global warming. But I've noticed a growing tendency over the last few years, that any time you have bad weather events, that you get a lot of non-scientists raising the global warming alarm.
It reminds me of a documentary I was watching recently on Benjamin Franklin, and they were talking about the cultural environment of Boston during the late 1700's, and how if someone's house or business was struck by lighting, the Boston FD would put out neighboring houses and buildings, but not the original house or building, because it was deemed that God had chosen to punish the occupents by striking them with lightning.
People never seem to accept that bad weather, lightning strikes, and even severe hurricanes are just a normal part of the weather cycle (even if a hurricane this strong might only happens once or twice a century - in geological terms that would be pretty normal).
I think that Global Warming has become the new superstition of the 20th century. Looking for something to blame fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, anything you want on? Global Warming!!!!!
I believe my certs helped me get my current job. While I agree with others that certs don't prove you know what you are doing, they can at least get you looked at seriously enough to get an interview. It's the interview that usually is going to make or break the decision by the employer.
I was in the situation where I know a lot about computers, but don't have a good way to show that on a resume. I was a college student, who excelled at my computer science courses (but you don't usually put that on your resume - although I suppose you could), and had a few years of lower-level computer support/helpdesk work experience.
My current job listed Linux/Unix experience as a desired skillset. I have been using Linux at home as a geek, and as a computer science student, for about oh, 6 years all together, but had never had a Linux/Unix job. There would otherwise be nothing on my resume to indicate that I actually knew how to use and configure Linux. So, I got the Linux Professional Instituge level 1 Certification. Sure, that doesn't necessarily prove that I'm ready to be a Linux administrator, but it at least shows I was serious enough about learning and using Linux to go out and pass a test about it. (In this particular case, I'm not a Linux administrator, but have a higher-level helpdesk job than I have had in the past, and supporting Linux is a part of this position - and to tell the truth, I know a lot more about Linux than some of the 'administrators' I support pretty frequently).
It got me an interview, and in the interview I had the chance to explain my background and experience with Linux, and demonstrate my proficiency to the department manage, who was satisfied, and hired me.
For people who already have years of experience and a degree under their belt, they can probably skip getting certs. For people just starting out, it's a great way to get your foot in the door.
Apparently, 4 out of 5 don't care - and that's not a statistical breakdown, that's the entire result set.
Oh ! I bet the engineers designing PoE *NEVER* thought about that problem. Guess it'll never work. . .