I have to agree, A Civil Campaign is probably her best book. I feel like it showed a level of cohesiveness and pacing a head above the rest of her work. As much as I like the 'earlier' books, some of the later ones (CC and Memory) are just more solid. Diplomatic Immunity did leave the taste of being a book written to appease Vorkosigan fans (such as myself).
I think she has built such a lush world in the Vorkosigan universe. I absolutely love the combination of politics and intrigue, and that's what makes it interesting for me.
After testing a piece of software I had written, I was left with a lot of generated images in the directory, all starting with my username (same as the web system user name I was writing the software for. So I went to clean them out, so I meant to type "rm -rf myname*" but I accidentally put a space between there, typing "rm -rf myname *". After about 10 seconds I thought "Man, this is taking a long time," I looked at what I had typed. DOH! Deleted a considerable amount of data and required a recovery from tape. The server was down for ~4 hours. >_
The anime industry in Japan has mostly moved away from cels to to computer-based animation. Only a few legacy shows, like Chibi Maruko-chan or Sazae-san (which has been running since the 60s, I think) still use cels. Most new shows are of the digital ink-and-paint variety and many also feature a lot of 3D CGI assist. 5 years ago this was not so true, but practically every show made in the last 2 years is almost entirely digital.
This has stemmed the flood of outsourcing to a small leak. Almost any show you watch has a batch of Korean names in the end credits, but it's still mostly japanese. And all the top jobs are still held by japanese animators.
I know someone who was a former animator, ran a small studio in the late 90s, and was later a consultant for a DIP software company (Animo). One thing he said sparked the changeover was this: In order to make sure that work farmed out to studio XYZ in Korea matched the next scene farmed out to studio ABC in Thailand, the industry created a standard set of colors for cel paint. Being a relatively small industry, this led to one company making all the cel paint for everyone. A small, old, established company that had been doing it forever. And an old man who had been doing the job of master pigment mixer forever, having things his way, etc. Well, one day he, the only guy who really knew how to mix all the colors, had a heart attack and the industry realized their livlihood rested on the health of some crotchety old man at the paint company. Most studios switched over to digital within a year. ^_^
I've heard of Kalisto -- I probably have several dozen PSX games they 'released'. I will mourn their loss.
And to the preachy ones, I mostly get import games (ie not for sale here in the US), tho I also have been getting more out-of-print ones. Looks like they reprinted Super Puzzle Fighter tho, I'll have to go buy it...
That's true for other languages, but you might have consulted a dictionary before attempting (incorrectly and pedantically) to correct the poster regarding English usage. As seen from definitions 2-3, gender is an acceptable term in English to refer to a male/female distinction for humans.
My high school english teacher used to say: Words have gender. People have sex.
I installed a mod chip in my PSX (PS1) back in 1997 or so. Over the years I used it to play TWO (2) legitimate import games and probably 200+ copied games, almost all imports. Over the life of my PSX I bought probably 40-50 games, and still have about 25-30 of them.
I bought the 2 import games because one was for sale at my local EB for like $8. The other was such an incredibly rare puzzle game that I never saw a copy floating around on the net, ever.
Most of the rest of my copied games were never offered for sale in the US, so I do not feel as I have really cost the games industry anything. I was never a potential customer in their eyes, since my PSX would never have been able to play their games. Obscure fighting games (Lightning Legend, Gundam Battle Master), music games (beatmania, Pop'n Music), puzzle games (Puzzle Arena Toshinden, CC Sakura tetris, Magical Drop 3), anime games (Cowboy Bebop, lots of Gundam and Macross games), and even a few neat original games (Speedpower Gunbike).
Some of my copied games were released in the US. Some inspired me to buy legit US copies (Japanese GT2 made me want to buy US GT2, etc.). Others were so bad they saved me the trouble of buying or renting them. In all, I spent a fair amount of money on legit NTSC-US games and SONY-brand peripherals. In all I bought FOUR additional controlers (1 regular, one dual analog, 2 dual-shock), two memory cards, a mouse (for the mousepad mostly, plus it was only like $5), and the Konami lightgun.
I'm sure there are some people who buy modded consoles and never buy games, but I think those people are rare. Most of my friends who had modded PSX or Dreamcast or whatever bought a lot of legit games. They just didn't pay for the crap ones.
I recently took to downloading PS2 games off usenet. My PS2 is not modded (yet) so I have not played any of them. Most of them are imports. I see little need to download and burn games I can easily buy at the mall or online for $15-$40. But for import games that would cost me $75 (assuming I could find them), plus shipping, plus they might suck, plus they might have too much japanese in them for me to play... It's just not worth the risk to me. So I download those. At worst, I'm out $2 for a blank DVDR or two.
In all, SONY has made a lot of money off me. I have bought 2 PS2s (first one quit reading CD games), an extra controller, 2 mem cards, and 3rd-party stuff including extension cords, DJ controllers (for bemani games), etc. I also have about 12-15 games. 2-3 of which I have never actually played yet (despite having them for 6-12 months or more).
Hurting the industry? sure, some titles sales will be hurt, but I think it increases a console's popualrity and drives higher overall sales of both hardware and software. If you can afford to buy say 6 games a year, a console does not look so appealing aan investment. However if you can buy 6 games and get another 20 for free... It looks better.
Dish Network holds about 8% of the TV audience. What that means is that there will be an instant drop in the audience by 8% on all of the affected stations.
Not quite. The real number will be considerably lower, perhaps less than half that. CBS and UPN are networks, and there are crappy rules about receiving them on satellite (I am a former DISH subscriber). I suspect only about half the DISH users actually receive CBS and UPN over their dish.
I have not found another player that supports video playlists as well as WMP, but even so I rarely use WMP anymore. I find that rescaling in full-screen and keyboard-based fast-forward and rewind are far more useful features.
Bsplayer is currently my player of choice. It does everything better than WMP except playlists.
Not to be a nitpicky bastard, but you left out 'store' in your example. You only supplied the adjective phrase.
I disagree that it's hard to translate J->E. Japanese is just kind of backwards from english in many cases like this:
last week my little sister's birthday present when I bought my bag was stolen [shop]
Pretty easily becomes "The shop where my bag was stolen when I bought my little sister's birthday present last week."
Personally, I think the hardest things to translate are colloquialisms. "To kill two birds with one stone" or "Like a bat out of hell" from E-J, or the one or two-word japanese phrases that the word kind of means nothing, but the Kanji that comprises it says it all.
Someone was claiming that the raid on foonet was triggered by evidence/a complaint from cjb.net. As a result, said script kiddie from foonet got annoyed and atatcked CJB's irc network, mirc-x (irc.mircx.com) last weekend.
On Sunday, CJB announced they were shutting down their IRC network.
Many of the channels on mirc were anime/manga channels, and they scrambled to set up temporary homes on other nets, with many going to Aniverse (irc.aniverse.com). Said script kiddie followed, pissed off the Aniverse IRCops and then started attacking aniverse.com's IRC net. It was still down as of last night.
Good riddance to the kind of NP that caters to these kind of people, and I hope the FBI is knocking on this guy's door soon.
My dad got stopped for speeding (and subsequently DWI) in 1990 and as part of a Pennsylvania first-time offenders program he paid a fine, did time in AA meetings, and had one of these installed in his car. By doing so he avoided the mandatory 48 hours jail time and loss of license.
It cost around $2500 to install, and he had to keep it in the car for a year. You had to blow in a pattern, and the thing was fussy as hell. Like blow for 5 seconds, stop, blow for 2 seconds, stop, blow for 2 seconds and pray you did it close enough. Don't blow too hard, or too softly. It was easy to screw it up and have to redo it. It was right around then that I started to drive, so I got the old car and my mom started driving the car with the interlock on it. She had a hell of a time getting it to work under normal conditions. On more than one occasion she failed the 3 times and was stuck waiting 30 minutes for the lock to time out.
Maybe the technology on these has improved in the last 14 years, but I'd bet they're just as fussy as they ever were. Bad idea, too expensive, and why are we punishing 100% of the citizens for something.08% or less of them do? I'm all for whoever suggested the politicians all 'test' this idea for a year to see how it goes before enacting it as law.
To many people perhaps, backward compatibility for the PS2 was not a big deal. They would never play the dozen or so PSX games they had, opting instead to play the newer, better PS2 games coming out. These games were mostly in the sports, racing, fighting, and action/adventure genres. They'll go on to their Metal Gear 3s, their Silent Hill 4s, their Sport XYZ 2005 and love the improvements in graphics, physics, and play quality. And more power to them.
The people who appreciate backward compatibility are the ones who play games in the other genres. RPGs were a big draw for PSX, and people still pay big money for certain titles on ebay. Many would argue the PS2 has yet to field a better RPG than the best PSX RPGs. They would claim the PS2 has simply made them more 'movie-like' (FFX,X-2).
Puzzle games are another draw, as there are very few puzzle games on PS2. Puzzle games are not graphically demanding, and there are a TON of good, cute anime-like puzzle games from Japan. I still Play Puzzle Fighter, Magical Drop 3, the Puzzle Bobble series (aka Bust-a-Move in the US), and others.
But the one I am thinking most of these days are the dance/rythym games. Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) is extremely popular, but it's not the only game out there. Konami's other bemani games such as beatmania and Pop'n Music (DJ/keyboard games) or the DrumMania and Guitar Freaks games, the Parappa series, the Bust-a-Groove series, and the many other lesser-known rythym games (PacaPaca Passion and Dance!Dance!Dance! just to name a few). I was an early entry into this segment (1998), and have been playing these games ever since. Only a few games (A few DDR games, a couple beatmania and DrumMania games, and a ParaPara game) in this genre are PS2 games.
Personally, I still use my PSX to play these (many are imports and my PS2 isn't modded), but plenty of others don't.
I don't think it's the fact that there are a growing number of programmers in India that is the problem. What people see is the problem is American Boards of Directors cutting jobs and sending them to India with little forethought to the consequences. Their rationale may be that they're saving the company money and helping stockholders, but that's false. Their actions may bump the stock price in the short term, but they hurt the long-term ability of the company to function. Their motivation is simple: fat bonuses and stock options linked to short-term performance. And if they screw up, they still have golden parachutes.
But understand DVD sales, while important, aren't the ONLY source of revenue for movie makers. Each movie makes money by selling tickets in theaters
Ahem, concert tickets?
selling ads before (and sometimes during) movies
CDs might not have ads, but concerts often have sponsors. And radio is half ads.
product tie-ins, etc.
I guess the $30 T-shirts sold at concerts don't count then. Or posters, key chains, or the tons of other merchandising I've seen. And I _have_ seen action figures for bands, KISS for example.
I got the impression they installed the software from the 'hand-me-down' on the new computer they put together. Now they had two machines and one license. All the MS OEM weirdness seemed to be about seperating the copy of Windows from the machine, not who was using the machine.
Lastly, to the original poster, apostrophes go where the missing letters were. ^_^
If the RIAA is the rights holders to a song, and they put the song on a public P2P share for the world to download, what is illegal about downloading it? By putting the file where they did, they are essentially granting permission for P2P users to copy the song.
How is this different from, say, the RIAA setting up a table at the local mall (a place where their market gathers) and handing out free CDs, and then accusing the people they gave the CDs to that they 'stole' that music because they did not pay for it?
It seems to me that these 'honeypot' P2P traps are on tenuous legal ground for this reason.
You really have 2 types of documents, and the chosen format needs to support them both well. PDF is well-suited to Magazines or other content with lots of graphics where the layout of the page is important. Such content could be standardized one or more standards of 'page size' for this kind of thing is chosen.
The other type of content is more like a novel, where it's just a very plain free-flow of text. Here, it would be nice to have the device render layout, allow the user to up the font size, etc. Something along the lines of plain vanilla HTML 1.0 would fit well. PDF explicitly positions everything, so it would be bulkier and less flexible.
As I see it, 2 formats are needed, one with set layout and positioning, and one for free-flowing text. PDF and a stripped-down HTML would seem to fit the bill nicely.
...33MHz 486 PCs were $1500. Now you get a 2GHz P4 for half that (or less even). (price/performance increase: around +12,000%)
...16MB of RAM cost $500. You get 2GB of much faster RAM these days. (price/perf: +12,800%)
...office LANs were 10-base-T (or worse). Now you'll get gigabit-ethernet for the same prices. (price-perf: +10,000%)
...a 100MB hard drive was $200. Now you get a 200GB drive for that that transfers 10X as fast to boot. (price/perf: +200,000%) (!)
... T1 line cost a business ~$1000 a month. Nowadays, it's... the same.
Why is it that every other aspect of the computer industry has dropped so dramatically in price/performance, except this one?
It's because Telcos can charge $1000 for a T1, and businesses will pay. The Telcos could run fiber and offer OC3 or OC48 service for the same price and still be profitable, but why bother? Sprint and UUNet sit there price-gouging ISPs, but of course it's the end users who are bad for using the bandwidth they are sold.
For the record, I use IRC extensively for file trading, and I probably use 15GB of bandwidth a week or more on my 768/128 DSL connection. I'm sure I am costing Verizon money but it's their own fault. Until they demand better rates from the backbone providers they are only screwing themselves.
I for one couldn't care less if hikers' GPS accuracy is reduced to 100m, but for the industry I work in (Precision Agriculture), this presents a huge problem. Many of our clients used DGPS back in the day, and in some areas where it is freely available (along the coast, mostly), still do. However, most do not. 3m was already bad enough, but 100m is a real problem. I'm sure there are other industries being affected by the use of SA as well.
I can't believe I didn't see anyone post this yet.
When you run Windows, you must purchase a copy for each machine you plan to install it on. With Linux, you usually buy/download one copy and install it on all the machines, don't you?
Our small IT company has about 50 computers in the office. About half of them are workstations with Win2K, and the other half are servers running Red Hat. I'm pretty confident we bought 25 copies of Win2K and maybe 3-4 copies of pre-loaded Linux + a download or two. That's 1:1 usage, but 5:1 purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
VHS came out after Beta, BUT, VHS had a larger capacity than Beta. I think we all know how THAT turned out.
What will push Blu-ray? Playstation 3. Microsoft's support of the other team should come as no surprise, but in the end I expect they will support it.
I have to agree, A Civil Campaign is probably her best book. I feel like it showed a level of cohesiveness and pacing a head above the rest of her work. As much as I like the 'earlier' books, some of the later ones (CC and Memory) are just more solid. Diplomatic Immunity did leave the taste of being a book written to appease Vorkosigan fans (such as myself).
I think she has built such a lush world in the Vorkosigan universe. I absolutely love the combination of politics and intrigue, and that's what makes it interesting for me.
--
Dave
After testing a piece of software I had written, I was left with a lot of generated images in the directory, all starting with my username (same as the web system user name I was writing the software for. So I went to clean them out, so I meant to type "rm -rf myname*" but I accidentally put a space between there, typing "rm -rf myname *". After about 10 seconds I thought "Man, this is taking a long time," I looked at what I had typed. DOH! Deleted a considerable amount of data and required a recovery from tape. The server was down for ~4 hours. >_
The anime industry in Japan has mostly moved away from cels to to computer-based animation. Only a few legacy shows, like Chibi Maruko-chan or Sazae-san (which has been running since the 60s, I think) still use cels. Most new shows are of the digital ink-and-paint variety and many also feature a lot of 3D CGI assist. 5 years ago this was not so true, but practically every show made in the last 2 years is almost entirely digital.
This has stemmed the flood of outsourcing to a small leak. Almost any show you watch has a batch of Korean names in the end credits, but it's still mostly japanese. And all the top jobs are still held by japanese animators.
I know someone who was a former animator, ran a small studio in the late 90s, and was later a consultant for a DIP software company (Animo). One thing he said sparked the changeover was this: In order to make sure that work farmed out to studio XYZ in Korea matched the next scene farmed out to studio ABC in Thailand, the industry created a standard set of colors for cel paint. Being a relatively small industry, this led to one company making all the cel paint for everyone. A small, old, established company that had been doing it forever. And an old man who had been doing the job of master pigment mixer forever, having things his way, etc. Well, one day he, the only guy who really knew how to mix all the colors, had a heart attack and the industry realized their livlihood rested on the health of some crotchety old man at the paint company. Most studios switched over to digital within a year. ^_^
Who needs encryption? Just move from Songname.mp3 to Songname.mp3.zip/rar/ace/lzh/whatever. The compression should remove any 'fingerprint'.
Makes for a few challenges but it would easily defeat the system by the sounds of it.
I've heard of Kalisto -- I probably have several dozen PSX games they 'released'. I will mourn their loss.
And to the preachy ones, I mostly get import games (ie not for sale here in the US), tho I also have been getting more out-of-print ones. Looks like they reprinted Super Puzzle Fighter tho, I'll have to go buy it...
That's true for other languages, but you might have consulted a dictionary before attempting (incorrectly and pedantically) to correct the poster regarding English usage. As seen from definitions 2-3, gender is an acceptable term in English to refer to a male/female distinction for humans.
My high school english teacher used to say: Words have gender. People have sex.
I miss high school...
I installed a mod chip in my PSX (PS1) back in 1997 or so. Over the years I used it to play TWO (2) legitimate import games and probably 200+ copied games, almost all imports. Over the life of my PSX I bought probably 40-50 games, and still have about 25-30 of them.
I bought the 2 import games because one was for sale at my local EB for like $8. The other was such an incredibly rare puzzle game that I never saw a copy floating around on the net, ever.
Most of the rest of my copied games were never offered for sale in the US, so I do not feel as I have really cost the games industry anything. I was never a potential customer in their eyes, since my PSX would never have been able to play their games. Obscure fighting games (Lightning Legend, Gundam Battle Master), music games (beatmania, Pop'n Music), puzzle games (Puzzle Arena Toshinden, CC Sakura tetris, Magical Drop 3), anime games (Cowboy Bebop, lots of Gundam and Macross games), and even a few neat original games (Speedpower Gunbike).
Some of my copied games were released in the US. Some inspired me to buy legit US copies (Japanese GT2 made me want to buy US GT2, etc.). Others were so bad they saved me the trouble of buying or renting them. In all, I spent a fair amount of money on legit NTSC-US games and SONY-brand peripherals. In all I bought FOUR additional controlers (1 regular, one dual analog, 2 dual-shock), two memory cards, a mouse (for the mousepad mostly, plus it was only like $5), and the Konami lightgun.
I'm sure there are some people who buy modded consoles and never buy games, but I think those people are rare. Most of my friends who had modded PSX or Dreamcast or whatever bought a lot of legit games. They just didn't pay for the crap ones.
I recently took to downloading PS2 games off usenet. My PS2 is not modded (yet) so I have not played any of them. Most of them are imports. I see little need to download and burn games I can easily buy at the mall or online for $15-$40. But for import games that would cost me $75 (assuming I could find them), plus shipping, plus they might suck, plus they might have too much japanese in them for me to play... It's just not worth the risk to me. So I download those. At worst, I'm out $2 for a blank DVDR or two.
In all, SONY has made a lot of money off me. I have bought 2 PS2s (first one quit reading CD games), an extra controller, 2 mem cards, and 3rd-party stuff including extension cords, DJ controllers (for bemani games), etc. I also have about 12-15 games. 2-3 of which I have never actually played yet (despite having them for 6-12 months or more).
Hurting the industry? sure, some titles sales will be hurt, but I think it increases a console's popualrity and drives higher overall sales of both hardware and software. If you can afford to buy say 6 games a year, a console does not look so appealing aan investment. However if you can buy 6 games and get another 20 for free... It looks better.
Dish Network holds about 8% of the TV audience. What that means is that there will be an instant drop in the audience by 8% on all of the affected stations.
Not quite. The real number will be considerably lower, perhaps less than half that. CBS and UPN are networks, and there are crappy rules about receiving them on satellite (I am a former DISH subscriber). I suspect only about half the DISH users actually receive CBS and UPN over their dish.
I have not found another player that supports video playlists as well as WMP, but even so I rarely use WMP anymore. I find that rescaling in full-screen and keyboard-based fast-forward and rewind are far more useful features.
Bsplayer is currently my player of choice. It does everything better than WMP except playlists.
I disagree that it's hard to translate J->E. Japanese is just kind of backwards from english in many cases like this:
last week
my little sister's birthday present
when I bought
my bag was stolen
[shop]
Pretty easily becomes "The shop where my bag was stolen when I bought my little sister's birthday present last week."
Personally, I think the hardest things to translate are colloquialisms. "To kill two birds with one stone" or "Like a bat out of hell" from E-J, or the one or two-word japanese phrases that the word kind of means nothing, but the Kanji that comprises it says it all.
To which they of course reply...
"ii kedo... kami ni kiyotsukete, ne"
--> "Down the hall and to your left."
On Sunday, CJB announced they were shutting down their IRC network.
Many of the channels on mirc were anime/manga channels, and they scrambled to set up temporary homes on other nets, with many going to Aniverse (irc.aniverse.com). Said script kiddie followed, pissed off the Aniverse IRCops and then started attacking aniverse.com's IRC net. It was still down as of last night.
Good riddance to the kind of NP that caters to these kind of people, and I hope the FBI is knocking on this guy's door soon.
250GBP? For what is essentially an air freshener with a USB port? I think these guys spent too much time sniffing glue.
It cost around $2500 to install, and he had to keep it in the car for a year. You had to blow in a pattern, and the thing was fussy as hell. Like blow for 5 seconds, stop, blow for 2 seconds, stop, blow for 2 seconds and pray you did it close enough. Don't blow too hard, or too softly. It was easy to screw it up and have to redo it. It was right around then that I started to drive, so I got the old car and my mom started driving the car with the interlock on it. She had a hell of a time getting it to work under normal conditions. On more than one occasion she failed the 3 times and was stuck waiting 30 minutes for the lock to time out.
Maybe the technology on these has improved in the last 14 years, but I'd bet they're just as fussy as they ever were. Bad idea, too expensive, and why are we punishing 100% of the citizens for something .08% or less of them do? I'm all for whoever suggested the politicians all 'test' this idea for a year to see how it goes before enacting it as law.
Perhaps you'll learn the proper use of 'too' and 'to' in the not too distant future as well.
To many people perhaps, backward compatibility for the PS2 was not a big deal. They would never play the dozen or so PSX games they had, opting instead to play the newer, better PS2 games coming out. These games were mostly in the sports, racing, fighting, and action/adventure genres. They'll go on to their Metal Gear 3s, their Silent Hill 4s, their Sport XYZ 2005 and love the improvements in graphics, physics, and play quality. And more power to them.
The people who appreciate backward compatibility are the ones who play games in the other genres. RPGs were a big draw for PSX, and people still pay big money for certain titles on ebay. Many would argue the PS2 has yet to field a better RPG than the best PSX RPGs. They would claim the PS2 has simply made them more 'movie-like' (FFX,X-2).
Puzzle games are another draw, as there are very few puzzle games on PS2. Puzzle games are not graphically demanding, and there are a TON of good, cute anime-like puzzle games from Japan. I still Play Puzzle Fighter, Magical Drop 3, the Puzzle Bobble series (aka Bust-a-Move in the US), and others.
But the one I am thinking most of these days are the dance/rythym games. Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) is extremely popular, but it's not the only game out there. Konami's other bemani games such as beatmania and Pop'n Music (DJ/keyboard games) or the DrumMania and Guitar Freaks games, the Parappa series, the Bust-a-Groove series, and the many other lesser-known rythym games (PacaPaca Passion and Dance!Dance!Dance! just to name a few). I was an early entry into this segment (1998), and have been playing these games ever since. Only a few games (A few DDR games, a couple beatmania and DrumMania games, and a ParaPara game) in this genre are PS2 games.
Personally, I still use my PSX to play these (many are imports and my PS2 isn't modded), but plenty of others don't.
I don't think it's the fact that there are a growing number of programmers in India that is the problem. What people see is the problem is American Boards of Directors cutting jobs and sending them to India with little forethought to the consequences. Their rationale may be that they're saving the company money and helping stockholders, but that's false. Their actions may bump the stock price in the short term, but they hurt the long-term ability of the company to function. Their motivation is simple: fat bonuses and stock options linked to short-term performance. And if they screw up, they still have golden parachutes.
But understand DVD sales, while important, aren't the ONLY source of revenue for movie makers. Each movie makes money by selling tickets in theaters
Ahem, concert tickets?
selling ads before (and sometimes during) movies
CDs might not have ads, but concerts often have sponsors. And radio is half ads.
product tie-ins, etc.
I guess the $30 T-shirts sold at concerts don't count then. Or posters, key chains, or the tons of other merchandising I've seen. And I _have_ seen action figures for bands, KISS for example.
I got the impression they installed the software from the 'hand-me-down' on the new computer they put together. Now they had two machines and one license. All the MS OEM weirdness seemed to be about seperating the copy of Windows from the machine, not who was using the machine.
Lastly, to the original poster, apostrophes go where the missing letters were. ^_^
If the RIAA is the rights holders to a song, and they put the song on a public P2P share for the world to download, what is illegal about downloading it? By putting the file where they did, they are essentially granting permission for P2P users to copy the song.
How is this different from, say, the RIAA setting up a table at the local mall (a place where their market gathers) and handing out free CDs, and then accusing the people they gave the CDs to that they 'stole' that music because they did not pay for it?
It seems to me that these 'honeypot' P2P traps are on tenuous legal ground for this reason.
PDF only meets half the goals IMHO.
You really have 2 types of documents, and the chosen format needs to support them both well. PDF is well-suited to Magazines or other content with lots of graphics where the layout of the page is important. Such content could be standardized one or more standards of 'page size' for this kind of thing is chosen.
The other type of content is more like a novel, where it's just a very plain free-flow of text. Here, it would be nice to have the device render layout, allow the user to up the font size, etc. Something along the lines of plain vanilla HTML 1.0 would fit well. PDF explicitly positions everything, so it would be bulkier and less flexible.
As I see it, 2 formats are needed, one with set layout and positioning, and one for free-flowing text. PDF and a stripped-down HTML would seem to fit the bill nicely.
...33MHz 486 PCs were $1500. Now you get a 2GHz P4 for half that (or less even). (price/performance increase: around +12,000%)
...16MB of RAM cost $500. You get 2GB of much faster RAM these days. (price/perf: +12,800%)
...office LANs were 10-base-T (or worse). Now you'll get gigabit-ethernet for the same prices. (price-perf: +10,000%)
...a 100MB hard drive was $200. Now you get a 200GB drive for that that transfers 10X as fast to boot. (price/perf: +200,000%) (!)
... T1 line cost a business ~$1000 a month. Nowadays, it's... the same.
Why is it that every other aspect of the computer industry has dropped so dramatically in price/performance, except this one?
It's because Telcos can charge $1000 for a T1, and businesses will pay. The Telcos could run fiber and offer OC3 or OC48 service for the same price and still be profitable, but why bother? Sprint and UUNet sit there price-gouging ISPs, but of course it's the end users who are bad for using the bandwidth they are sold.
For the record, I use IRC extensively for file trading, and I probably use 15GB of bandwidth a week or more on my 768/128 DSL connection. I'm sure I am costing Verizon money but it's their own fault. Until they demand better rates from the backbone providers they are only screwing themselves.
I for one couldn't care less if hikers' GPS accuracy is reduced to 100m, but for the industry I work in (Precision Agriculture), this presents a huge problem. Many of our clients used DGPS back in the day, and in some areas where it is freely available (along the coast, mostly), still do. However, most do not. 3m was already bad enough, but 100m is a real problem. I'm sure there are other industries being affected by the use of SA as well.
I can't believe I didn't see anyone post this yet.
When you run Windows, you must purchase a copy for each machine you plan to install it on. With Linux, you usually buy/download one copy and install it on all the machines, don't you?
Our small IT company has about 50 computers in the office. About half of them are workstations with Win2K, and the other half are servers running Red Hat. I'm pretty confident we bought 25 copies of Win2K and maybe 3-4 copies of pre-loaded Linux + a download or two. That's 1:1 usage, but 5:1 purchases.