The problem with your theory is that it has to be true for every single person for it to work, and I'm willing to bet that that's not the case. If it only holds for 999 out of 1000 people, then everything will get shared.
Your outrage shouldn't be aimed at the Supreme Court but at Congress. I disagree with the CTEA but I don't disagree with this decision. The court said that, while the CTEA may be a bad law, they don't have the power to tell Congress what's a bad law, only what's an unconstitutional law. It seems obvious to me that the CTEA is a bad law, but it's pretty unobvious whether it's unconstitutional or not, so I don't think the courts decision was bad.
I got one from Brookstone, which has a 60 day return policy, and I'm going to return mine soon. It's been entertaining to play with, but it's not very practical.
Problem #1: It gets stuck on thresholds (the little raised piece of wood in some doorways). Roomba gets beached on mine and emits a little "uh oh!" tone, and I have to come rescue him. (I've decided it's a he.) Ideally I'd like to start him up when I go to work and come home to a clean room, but I have to be there in case he gets stuck.
Problem #2: Weak suction. Roomba tends to push dirt around first before vacuuming it up. Not usually a problem, except that in my bedroom I have an area rug, maybe 1/2 inch tall. He'll push the dirt up to the edge of the rug, but then he can't vacuum it up there, because he's at a slight incline when he's half on and half off the rug. So I end up with a ring of dirt on the floor around the edge of the rug.
Plus, of course, you can't get rid of your regular vacuum (or at least a dust buster), because Roomba only does floors, not couches, stairs, etc.
Overall, a fun experiment, and somewhat useful, but not worth keeping (for $200, anyway).
There are also some things in.Net that I have real problems with - the first being lack of checked exceptions. To me this is a BIG issue and will cause a lot of software reliability problems.
There's a lot of debate about this - e.g. see here.
Uncaught exceptions are the main reason that Sun is adding generics to Java 1.5
Well, generics reduce *uncaught* exceptions, but that has nothing to do with *unchecked* exceptions. A language w/o generics can have class-cast exceptions thrown at runtime, and a language with generics doesn't have this problem, whether that language has checked exceptions or not. Sun adding generics to Java 1.5 has nothing to do with checked exceptions.
For instance, I'd like to see templates ("generics") added to java. I'd like to see type-safe enums. I'd like to see some "syntactic sugar" to make programs easier to write and read (hello, iterators).
Speaking of amateur medics, anyone know how much training they're giving people on using those defibrillators? I have this nightmare that they'll zap me not realizing I'm just a deep napper.
Automatic External Defibrillators require very little training. The have a built-in computer that analyzes your heart rhythm, and won't shock you unless you need it.
I don't know anything about this stuff, but could a person hide this dangerous radioactive material on or in their body?
If the person who sets off this detector is carrying a really heavy briefcase, then just run each one through the machine separately and you've caught him, special ID or no.
How did 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 happen? Too much information gathering, not enough information interpretation.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know about Pearl Harbor, but certainly for 9/11 it might be that there was simply not enough information present to know that an attack was going to happen, especially as compared to the loads of other, unrelated information that the authorities get every day. Who knows, maybe the FBI/CIA routinely get information even more suspicious-looking than they got prior to 9/11, which turns out to be nothing. Even with all the post-hoc analysis in the world, it's not clear that someone should have known before the fact that something was going to happen.
Produce might be one of the few exceptions where this won't work. So self-checkout will work almost anywhere else, like K-Mart, the Gap, etc., but not grocery stores. Or maybe the produce section will be sectioned off and have its own cashiers, and the rest will be self-service.
Sometimes these things don't show up in Add/Remove. When I got AT&T/MediaOne, it installed SAUpdate.exe and CFD.exe, and they're not in Add/Remove. See http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup _full.htm.
Hm, maybe the previous poster figured it out - maybe http://robots.cnn.com is a server that users aren't likely to type into their browser, but that Google and others can hit for their news?
Interestingly, the robots.txt file is identical on each one.
Several other companies have done this. It seems to make some things faster and some things slower. Overall, the cost doesn't seem worth the moderate speedup in some apps. See this report.
Um no, you're paying for 24/7 bandwidth in your household. They'd be happy to sell you the same bandwidth for you and anyone you'd like to share it with, but they'd charge you more, because obviously the average bandwidth usage per customer will go up.
If everyone could set up a wireless network for their neighbors, then the bandwidth provider is going to raise its prices (which will hurt those people who aren't going to set up such a network). In a few years, with wireless becoming very popular, this might actually happen.
Re:Chance *is* significant, given the consequences
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 2
(1) If the chance remained 4 in a million until 2019, then it would be a very serious concern. But the exact trajectory will be determined well before that (seems like in a matter or days or weeks). So very soon, the odds will either be much greater than that, or zero. In this case, we can wait a year before we have to scramble to design the mission that sends up Bruce Willis or whoever.
(2) I don't think anyone was saying that this was "pure hype", just that it was way over-hyped. If these articles said that the asteroid was "on a collision course" with Earth, that's wrong - they should say that there's a very small (but not zero) chance that it's on a collision course.
A small one - say 10 Mt worth - comes across the Atlantic from the direction of Iraq and lands near a US city. Effects not easily distinguished from a nuclear strike during the first few hours. US launches "retaliatory" strike against whomever - a few hundred million dead.
Dude, the idea of a big asteroid hitting us is scary enough, you don't need to make stuff up. I'm pretty sure that NORAD can tell the difference between an asteroid and a missle. Not to mention people on the ground, who would presumably see a big fireball streaking toward the impact site, which a missle wouldn't have.
So why doesn't the media want to report on what it is that the protesters are protesting for? Because that doesn't get ratings.
That's certainly true, but it's also because it's not actually news. There are probably several dozen medium-to-large protests about something each year. The definition of "news" is something that's out of the ordinary, which means that only the violent, or extrememly large, protests really qualify.
I've seen a total of 5 minutes devoted to what the people were protesting.
Just because someone is protesting, that doesn't make their cause newsworthy.
Re:Changes the dynamic of the business
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 2
Of course, "fair use" states that you can lend, borrow, and sell used merchandise...
A few problems with this:
1) The license agreement that you (in theory) agree to when you open the box says that you agree not to do this. 2) There's a technical distinction between giving someone a physical CD, and copying the bits for them and agreeing not to use it while the other person has it. Whether a court would say that they're basically the same thing, I don't know. 3) Presumably this gizmo has no good way of determining if the ROM images came from different cartridge or not, so it could be used for piracy too, though not as easily as Napster-like systems.
So I don't think "fair use" really applies here. (Which means that I agree with your conclusion, that it'll eventually go away.)
The most important thing for your company to do is to keep your shareholders happy, but one of the best ways to do this is to keep your customers happy. However, you also need to keep costs low, keep your employees happy, keep from getting sued, etc. It's a big balancing act. "Keep the customers happy, give them what they want, and your business will succeed" sounds good but of course it's not that simple. Your customers want a great product for free, and you can't give them that.
These guys tried to keep their shareholders happy by illegal, and short-term, means. They gambled that they could keep it going, and not get caught, and they lost. Companies that use different means to keep their shareholders happy in the long term will eventually win out, in the long run. It's those kinds of companies that care about keeping their customers happy (among other things).
More importantly, it appears to patent a process rather than an implementation, which is, in the physical world, a no-no.
This seems to contradict your next sentence - did you mean to say that it appears to patent an implementation rather than a process?
They can't (or shouldnt be able to) patent "A tool for filtering content based on national laws, etc".. but they can patent new implementations of such a tool.
I think you're reading too much in to the exact wording. They're patenting the concept of a tool that does this, not just one specific tool. Just read it as "A type of tool..." instead.
For the plaintiffs to win their suit against SB, they have to prove contributory copyright infringement on SB's part; to prove that, they have to prove direct infringement on SB's customers' part. The plaintiffs repeatedly refer to R4k users as copyright infringers in both the court filings and, yes, the media.
Right - the lawsuit against SonicBlue says that the customers are direct infringers because they're illegally sharing shows, not because they're skipping commercials.
Trying to prove that commercial-skipping by itself is illegal would be impossible, I think. My interpretation is that this was just an exec who was running off at the mouth, and said something silly just to make a point, and everyone knows would it never stand up in court, so it'll never actually go to court, but the EFF is pouncing on it as if it were real, just to get some publicity.
My understanding is that the networks are suing SonicBlue because ReplayTV lets you easily upload shows (with their commercials deleted) to lots of other people. And, this EFF lawsuit has nothing to do with that lawsuit. Instead, they heard an industry executive say that commercial skipping as "theft", even without the uploading, so now they're pre-emptively suing to establish that this is legal, even though no company has actually tried to stop the commercial-skipping feature.
So, one media exec says something questionable, and the EFF decides to sue over this? Isn't that a little excessive? Does this sound more like publicity for the EFF (and maybe the plaintiffs) rather than something really worthwhile?
Since copyright has historically covered things that couldn't be generated automatically
Huh? Where'd you get this from? If you can generate a key automatically then you can generate a book like Jurassic Park automatically, so that doesn't sound right to me.
(Besides, it should be short enough for fair use, anyway.)
Length is only one of the considerations to apply when deciding if something falls under fair use. Other factors might tip the scale one way or the other. Besides, I think it's more the percentage of the excerpt that matters, not the absolute length. If you publish the whole key, that's 100%, so fair use probably doesn't apply.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your theory is that it has to be true for every single person for it to work, and I'm willing to bet that that's not the case. If it only holds for 999 out of 1000 people, then everything will get shared.
Your outrage shouldn't be aimed at the Supreme Court but at Congress. I disagree with the CTEA but I don't disagree with this decision. The court said that, while the CTEA may be a bad law, they don't have the power to tell Congress what's a bad law, only what's an unconstitutional law. It seems obvious to me that the CTEA is a bad law, but it's pretty unobvious whether it's unconstitutional or not, so I don't think the courts decision was bad.
I got one from Brookstone, which has a 60 day return policy, and I'm going to return mine soon. It's been entertaining to play with, but it's not very practical.
Problem #1: It gets stuck on thresholds (the little raised piece of wood in some doorways). Roomba gets beached on mine and emits a little "uh oh!" tone, and I have to come rescue him. (I've decided it's a he.) Ideally I'd like to start him up when I go to work and come home to a clean room, but I have to be there in case he gets stuck.
Problem #2: Weak suction. Roomba tends to push dirt around first before vacuuming it up. Not usually a problem, except that in my bedroom I have an area rug, maybe 1/2 inch tall. He'll push the dirt up to the edge of the rug, but then he can't vacuum it up there, because he's at a slight incline when he's half on and half off the rug. So I end up with a ring of dirt on the floor around the edge of the rug.
Plus, of course, you can't get rid of your regular vacuum (or at least a dust buster), because Roomba only does floors, not couches, stairs, etc.
Overall, a fun experiment, and somewhat useful, but not worth keeping (for $200, anyway).
There are also some things in .Net that I have real problems with - the first being lack of checked exceptions. To me this is a BIG issue and will cause a lot of software reliability problems.
There's a lot of debate about this - e.g. see here.
Uncaught exceptions are the main reason that Sun is adding generics to Java 1.5
Well, generics reduce *uncaught* exceptions, but that has nothing to do with *unchecked* exceptions. A language w/o generics can have class-cast exceptions thrown at runtime, and a language with generics doesn't have this problem, whether that language has checked exceptions or not. Sun adding generics to Java 1.5 has nothing to do with checked exceptions.
For instance, I'd like to see templates ("generics") added to java. I'd like to see type-safe enums. I'd like to see some "syntactic sugar" to make programs easier to write and read (hello, iterators).
o rg/en/jsr/detail?id=201
These 3 are all coming from Sun in JDK 1.5.
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=14
http://jcp.
Speaking of amateur medics, anyone know how much training they're giving people on using those defibrillators? I have this nightmare that they'll zap me not realizing I'm just a deep napper.
Automatic External Defibrillators require very little training. The have a built-in computer that analyzes your heart rhythm, and won't shock you unless you need it.
Did new tires really use to be this bald? There's no way you could get me to drive today with those things on my car.
I don't know anything about this stuff, but could a person hide this dangerous radioactive material on or in their body?
If the person who sets off this detector is carrying a really heavy briefcase, then just run each one through the machine separately and you've caught him, special ID or no.
How did 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 happen? Too much information gathering, not enough information interpretation.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know about Pearl Harbor, but certainly for 9/11 it might be that there was simply not enough information present to know that an attack was going to happen, especially as compared to the loads of other, unrelated information that the authorities get every day. Who knows, maybe the FBI/CIA routinely get information even more suspicious-looking than they got prior to 9/11, which turns out to be nothing. Even with all the post-hoc analysis in the world, it's not clear that someone should have known before the fact that something was going to happen.
Produce might be one of the few exceptions where this won't work. So self-checkout will work almost anywhere else, like K-Mart, the Gap, etc., but not grocery stores. Or maybe the produce section will be sectioned off and have its own cashiers, and the rest will be self-service.
Sometimes these things don't show up in Add/Remove. When I got AT&T/MediaOne, it installed SAUpdate.exe and CFD.exe, and they're not in Add/Remove. See http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup _full.htm.
Hm, maybe the previous poster figured it out - maybe http://robots.cnn.com is a server that users aren't likely to type into their browser, but that Google and others can hit for their news?
Interestingly, the robots.txt file is identical on each one.
I think this would be a good example.
Like this?
Several other companies have done this. It seems to make some things faster and some things slower. Overall, the cost doesn't seem worth the moderate speedup in some apps. See this report.
Um no, you're paying for 24/7 bandwidth in your household. They'd be happy to sell you the same bandwidth for you and anyone you'd like to share it with, but they'd charge you more, because obviously the average bandwidth usage per customer will go up.
If everyone could set up a wireless network for their neighbors, then the bandwidth provider is going to raise its prices (which will hurt those people who aren't going to set up such a network). In a few years, with wireless becoming very popular, this might actually happen.
(1) If the chance remained 4 in a million until 2019, then it would be a very serious concern. But the exact trajectory will be determined well before that (seems like in a matter or days or weeks). So very soon, the odds will either be much greater than that, or zero. In this case, we can wait a year before we have to scramble to design the mission that sends up Bruce Willis or whoever.
(2) I don't think anyone was saying that this was "pure hype", just that it was way over-hyped. If these articles said that the asteroid was "on a collision course" with Earth, that's wrong - they should say that there's a very small (but not zero) chance that it's on a collision course.
A small one - say 10 Mt worth - comes across the Atlantic from the direction of Iraq and lands near a US city. Effects not easily distinguished from a nuclear strike during the first few hours. US launches "retaliatory" strike against whomever - a few hundred million dead.
Dude, the idea of a big asteroid hitting us is scary enough, you don't need to make stuff up. I'm pretty sure that NORAD can tell the difference between an asteroid and a missle. Not to mention people on the ground, who would presumably see a big fireball streaking toward the impact site, which a missle wouldn't have.
So why doesn't the media want to report on what it is that the protesters are protesting for? Because that doesn't get ratings.
That's certainly true, but it's also because it's not actually news. There are probably several dozen medium-to-large protests about something each year. The definition of "news" is something that's out of the ordinary, which means that only the violent, or extrememly large, protests really qualify.
I've seen a total of 5 minutes devoted to what the people were protesting.
Just because someone is protesting, that doesn't make their cause newsworthy.
Of course, "fair use" states that you can lend, borrow, and sell used merchandise...
A few problems with this:
1) The license agreement that you (in theory) agree to when you open the box says that you agree not to do this.
2) There's a technical distinction between giving someone a physical CD, and copying the bits for them and agreeing not to use it while the other person has it. Whether a court would say that they're basically the same thing, I don't know.
3) Presumably this gizmo has no good way of determining if the ROM images came from different cartridge or not, so it could be used for piracy too, though not as easily as Napster-like systems.
So I don't think "fair use" really applies here. (Which means that I agree with your conclusion, that it'll eventually go away.)
The most important thing for your company to do is to keep your shareholders happy, but one of the best ways to do this is to keep your customers happy. However, you also need to keep costs low, keep your employees happy, keep from getting sued, etc. It's a big balancing act. "Keep the customers happy, give them what they want, and your business will succeed" sounds good but of course it's not that simple. Your customers want a great product for free, and you can't give them that.
These guys tried to keep their shareholders happy by illegal, and short-term, means. They gambled that they could keep it going, and not get caught, and they lost. Companies that use different means to keep their shareholders happy in the long term will eventually win out, in the long run. It's those kinds of companies that care about keeping their customers happy (among other things).
More importantly, it appears to patent a process rather than an implementation, which is, in the physical world, a no-no.
.. but they can patent new implementations of such a tool.
This seems to contradict your next sentence - did you mean to say that it appears to patent an implementation rather than a process?
They can't (or shouldnt be able to) patent "A tool for filtering content based on national laws, etc"
I think you're reading too much in to the exact wording. They're patenting the concept of a tool that does this, not just one specific tool. Just read it as "A type of tool..." instead.
For the plaintiffs to win their suit against SB, they have to prove contributory copyright infringement on SB's part; to prove that, they have to prove direct infringement on SB's customers' part. The plaintiffs repeatedly refer to R4k users as copyright infringers in both the court filings and, yes, the media.
Right - the lawsuit against SonicBlue says that the customers are direct infringers because they're illegally sharing shows, not because they're skipping commercials.
Trying to prove that commercial-skipping by itself is illegal would be impossible, I think. My interpretation is that this was just an exec who was running off at the mouth, and said something silly just to make a point, and everyone knows would it never stand up in court, so it'll never actually go to court, but the EFF is pouncing on it as if it were real, just to get some publicity.
My understanding is that the networks are suing SonicBlue because ReplayTV lets you easily upload shows (with their commercials deleted) to lots of other people. And, this EFF lawsuit has nothing to do with that lawsuit. Instead, they heard an industry executive say that commercial skipping as "theft", even without the uploading, so now they're pre-emptively suing to establish that this is legal, even though no company has actually tried to stop the commercial-skipping feature.
So, one media exec says something questionable, and the EFF decides to sue over this? Isn't that a little excessive? Does this sound more like publicity for the EFF (and maybe the plaintiffs) rather than something really worthwhile?
Since copyright has historically covered things that couldn't be generated automatically
Huh? Where'd you get this from? If you can generate a key automatically then you can generate a book like Jurassic Park automatically, so that doesn't sound right to me.
(Besides, it should be short enough for fair use, anyway.)
Length is only one of the considerations to apply when deciding if something falls under fair use. Other factors might tip the scale one way or the other. Besides, I think it's more the percentage of the excerpt that matters, not the absolute length. If you publish the whole key, that's 100%, so fair use probably doesn't apply.