Why? Because I was playing some MP3's that I downloaded from Napster in my car with the windows rolled down as I was driving down the street = unauthorized public performance. Honda should be ashamed. of themselves for robbing hard working artists this way.
RIAA will soon insist that car manufactures locked windows in the upright positions when music is being played unless it comes from a royalty-paying souce.
On a side note...this is why you NEVER EVER settle a case out of court. MP3.Com settled and has been taking up the ass ever since (insert obligatory goatse reference). The newest game in the music industry is to flaggelate the expired equinine. Napster is still fighting. And really, if they do lose, could they possibly any worse off than MP3.Com?
Sacramento is hardly the land of Bob's Hardware and Feed Lot. Earthlink and Sprint both have their headquarters here, WINFirst is rolling out fiber-to-the-home service, those little plastic "call before you dig" markers everywhere. Despite this, @Home doesn't seem to have any peering agreements with backbone providers in this area. Living in Sacramento, I shouldn't be getting 700-800ms ping times to other Sacramento residents under any circumstances. If that's happening there is something fundamentally wrong with the network design.
Here, Mr. Anonymous Expert. This is the tracert to someone who lives TWO BLOCKS AWAY. Yes, I know, they are DSL and I am cable but as best as I can read this the packets are flowing down home.net all the way to the Bay Area, going through a hugely saturated router, and hitching a ride all the way back on SprintLink. You tell me if you think this is "efficient" network design:
Never mind, the lameness filter won't let me. But the above description pretty much summarizes everything with the only change being the backbone provider.
I have to say, I saw this coming back when we had the story about @Home dropping the high-traffic movie newsgroups. Can anyone say bandwidth cost cutting?
I live in Sacramento. @Home has me routing through San Francisco. If I want to connect to something in Sacramento, my tracert shows it travelling all the way to the SFBA router, out a backbone provider, back on Sacramento. This is because @Home doesn't think it is cost effective for Sacramento to have their own NOC/POP.
Not to mention, it is @Home that sets these assinine policies. When Comcast first planned to bring @Home service to Sacramento, they priced it out (and beta tested it) at 3000kbps down and 400kbps up service, just like a few of the Canadian @Home companies. But apparently when the service went live, @Home did not want to have that kind of traffic running through their already-bloated SFBA pipes and so the service was quietly dropped back to 128 upstream. Also, even though @Home owns a buttload of Class A/B address blocks they continue to insist on charging $7 a month for each extra IP...the same price as leasing a second cable modem. This forces everyone to use NAT/ICS which then means if you ever have trouble you have to disconnect everything, reconfigure a single machine for access, install their crappy NetDiags tool before they will open a trouble ticket.
No thanks. The first thing I hope happens after @Home dies is the introduction of several new levels of service, such as "basic" and "advanced" with different levels of service, such as faster upstream, permission to run non porn/warez servers, additional IPS...just like DSL providers.
Oh, FYI...no one on @Home will be able to change their password for the past couple days because the ONE SERVER responsible for providing that service had a hard drive crash and is still down.
Well, seeing as how the movie studios are under no obligation to abide by the DivX releases specifications developed by the dupechecking groups...it's a simple matter of just encoding at a lower resolution or bitrate.
You see, all those DivX movies you find floating around the Internet have to conform to a list of guidelines if they want to get "credit" for releasing it first. One of the specifications of these standards is to ensure you put the most quality on each CD.
That means you first see if the movie will fit on one CD at minimum quality. If it won't fit on one CD at minimum quality, then break it into two CDs and encode at maximum quality. If it will fit on one CD and there is room to spare, use a bitrate calculator to determine exactly how much you can improve the bitrate and still have it fit within the 700MB size limit. This size limit represents the total capacity of an 80-minute CD-R (not everyone can use 90/99-minute ones).
The movie studios:
A) don't care that they aren't going to be on the dupecheckers,
B) will probably just release it at VCD-level resolution (352x240) instead of the current DVDRip resolution (640x360 or something like that)
C) will probably tag the movie file an ugly intro and a stupid logo during the first few minutes so you will be reminded where you got it.
D) will be released it a couple weeks after everyone else already has downloaded it in a higher quality format.
In short, the movie industry is becoming PURiTY-DivX.
I have been a fan of RTS games since, well, Blizzard practically invented them with Warcraft on the Macintosh.
But the big downfall of RTS games, and why I think many people hate them, is that as the genre has progressed, the interfaces have not. Ultimately victory comes down to not managing resources or having brilliant strategy, but being nimble enough to control the interface.
Take StarCraft, for example. To control your troops you assign them to hotkeys. The problem is that when you mix unit type within a group, you lose the ability to give them advanced commands. So you have to assign separate hotkeys by type and you end up using five or six of them just for one attack.
Unit grouping is another factor. You can carefully arrange your troops in a formation that gives them the advantage, but when you order them from point A to point B they arrive in one big jumble. Often times, unit will arrive at a destination one by one and get slaughtered.
The question I have...how hard would it be to develop some kind of basic programming language for these type of games? In StarCraft, Reavers cause an enormous amount of damage. I would want my characters to attack them first, overriding any previous attack orders. Or, for Zerg troops, if their health dips below a certain point, automatically burrow.
I know there are free software version of many strategy games in the workd (like FreeCIV) but are there projects attempting to recreate open source versions of RTS type games? So that this type of functionaly could be added?
And to Blizzard if there are any employees reading, why not work on this as a nice standby to WarCraft III? It should be very simple to develop a way of giving commands from scripts instead of point and click.
- JoeShmoe
Which begs the question...
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 3, Interesting
When you go and auction that new XBox on eBay, will it get pulled because you are including copied of Microsoft software?
Or, if you return the console...will they force you to keep the games because they have been opened (despite the fact that you didn't open them)?
This is really quite a big mess. We have software and we have hardware. When you try to mix the two (unless you are including it free of course!) there are all kinds of sticky devlopments.
As a matter of fact, there are a few gazillion patents
Please read what I said. I did not say "imagine if there were patents" because I know there are patents on practically every engineering advance. I said what if they were used restrictively. What if Ford developed seatbelts, Honda came up with safety glass, and Volvo invented air bags? Well then you, dear consumer, would have the joy of choosing whether you died in a crash from being thrown from your vehicle, bleeding to death from severe lacerations, or internal bleeding from impacting the steering column.
Instead we have different makes of cars that have all three...moreso there are even governmental laws that say you MUST have these things to sell a car in the United States. Now, if the cost of licensing these patents were prohibitive, I highly doubt we would have these situations. While I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, I'm sure there are some trade organizations who take responsability for cross-licensing and pooling patents much like computer manufacturers do.
Patents make it possible for corporations to create life-saving technology
Now let me address this...I don't think companies should be asked to eat the cost of R&D even though in an ideal world, life-saving advances would be funded by charities for the sole purpose of ending a problem and not making money. But this is not an ideal world so I can accept that investors are getting together to fund research into some drug that will provided a benefit, perhaps save lives.
But here is where the little simple model you outline breaks down...the patent system does not draw a distinction between someone who invents a new widgit that, while making people happy, is essentially a luxurty and someone who invents a new widgit that saved lives. How much should someone be allowed to profit off the second situation?
Pharmaceutical companies don't just recover their R&D costs. They don't just double their initial investment. They invest millions and make billions. The 17-year or whatever lifespan of a patent is a money-printing machine when it comes to things people MUST (not just would like) to purchase.
In the extreme case, a company could find a cure for cancer. Auction one dose of the drug per month to the highest bidder. What would be the result? Cancer-ridden billionaires would live into their 90s while kids get shuttled off to orphanages because their hard workin' mama got breast cancer at age 30. Could anyone possibly argue that this situation is any better than not having that cure in the first place?
As another example...I recently visited my grandparents and found them lying in a room with the shades drawn, damn washcloths on their foreheads with a fan blowing over a pan of water to form some sort of evaporative cooler. They were afraid if they used the air conditioning they wouldn't be able to afford their power bills. So they sat there in 90-degree heat with 85% humidity. Why? So a power producer in the midwest can make take a 500% profit increase to its giddy shareholders.
The power crisis in California was caused by moron buerocrats who did what the lobbiest told them. Now we have a big mess and I understand that we are going to have to take responability for it. But in the meantime should anyone be allowed to profit from misery?
Maybe the fault lies in our corporate system for rewarding financial gain at all costs. Maybe the fault lies in the fact that when we put on the shareholders mask we gets to throw away our moral compass and sue our board if they don't move in for the kill. Regardless, it is going to have to change if things keep going like this.
There are legislators in California that want to see to it that energy companies get capped at 200% profit and are forced to return anything above that. Likewise, shouldn't pharamaceutical companies have a similar cap?
If the goal of the patent is to promote development by securing financial gain...then why don't we have a patent system based not on time (which is completely arbitrary) but on finances? As soon as you have made 200% return on your investment then society gets to benefit as well. I'm not saying this needs to be done for every patent, but there should definitely be some consideration given to patents that can affect the health of a society.
There's a big difference between some fat cat sitting on a pile of money because he invented the next Cabbage Patch/Tickle Me Elmo/Kirby and a fat cat sitting on a pile of money while people starve because poor farmers can only afford to buy a single generation of patented non-reproducing seeds.
Say, Mr. Founding Father...what was that again about patents and copyrights providing a BENEFIT to society? Is this what was intended?
Seriously, I think I remember reading that Benjamin Franklin was against the concept of patents because he himself invented a new type of indoor stove (Franklin stove I'm guessing) that was much much safer than the other indoor stoves at the time, which cause deaths from fire and smoke inhilation. A company in England tried to patent the stove's design after it was in use in the colonies and Franklin saw that there could be potentially lifesaving advances that would be unavailable thanks to patents.
Imagine patents on seatbelts and airbags being used restrictively...like you could only get them or use them in Ford vehicles. AIDS vaccines are another key example. It is inexcusable that WIPO and other intellectual property organizations put corporate profit protection above human life.
benefit of society".
1) American Revolutionary soldier hanged by the British as a spy. According to tradition, his last words were "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
2) An asterisk ("*") Notionally, from the misquote "I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!" of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged ("life to give" -> "ass to risk" -> "asterisk").
2. Name used in many companies (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character.
3. Name used by some Massachusetts Institute of Technology people for the pound ("#") character.
3. Name used by some Rochester Institute of Technology people for the feature (alt) key on a Mac.
4. Name used by some Stanford/ITS people for the extended ASCII circle-x character, or an obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character.
Pretty wacky, huh? I think the first definition must have come from a party college.:)
Advocating change in current system because you don't like it (what I am stating) --> not the same argument --> worthwhile endevour.
Refusing to support current system because you don't like it (what you were stating) --> same old tired argument --> futile endevour.
If a measure to raise taxes in order to provide unified broadband service in my area came up, i would vote yes, you would vote no, and whichever side was defeated would have to accept they don't have the majority opinion and hope that the tide changes in time for the next elections. But you can't blame the people who proposed the measure for the fact that everyone voted for it.
There is obviously some cost involved. MSN did away with their own mail servers, all MSN customers now use Hotmail.
Several low-budget ISPs don't provide e-mail at all...they refer you to Yahoo! and other free e-mail providers. Someone has to manage, maintain and monitor servers. And, as Microsoft adds more and more web features to the basic OS, they become even more redundant.
Same old argument that has been made about government-sponsored abortion programs, $40000 ugly sculptures in front of city hall, and $9 billion dollar spy planes.
If you don't want to see your taxes spent on something you don't want then vote against it. But if you lose the vote then shut up and pay because the IRS doesn't accept the "I don't like how you are spending my money" defense.
Rather than repost everything I just said in the thread above this one, let me just simply remind you that GOVERNMENT BUILT THE INTERNET in the first place.
Now that they want to control it simply means that we all have to abide by those controls or find something new (I2 anyone?)
So then let's take the opposite viewpoint...why don't we privatize everything?
Let's have three companies providing water:
"I'm sorry, sir, you are 7500 yards from the supply depot, so you can only get reclaimed sewage water service."
Five or six providing garbage service:
"Gee, honey, isn't it great how everyone on our block gets 4AM garbage pickup on a different day so i never oversleep?"
Oh, let's make the roads private while we are at it:
"Thank you, please drive a miles and stop at the next toll booth."
Infrastructure should not be redundant. As badly mismanaged as you think governments are, they can't possibly be worse than the resources wasted as several companies reinvent the wheel. Local monopolies were started to get around that problem. It used to be that in California, we didn't have to worry about getting enough power. We had local monopolies that ran everything, with strict community oversight. Then things were deregulated and suddenly nobody wants to pay to fix infrastructure that someone else was also using. So things didn't get done and now we are in a big mess. This is progress?
We didn't worry about not being within reach of phone service. We had local telco monopolies that provided it, again with community oversight. Then suddenly they were deregulated and other companies began to provide service, but everyone had to play by rules established by the local telco long ago. As a resuly, competition dies out and we are left with a local monopoly but now without the oversight.
Water, power, gas and connectivity (telephone/cable/data) should all be done by a single contractor according to standards voted by the local community. In the middle of Nowhere Iowa if the community doesn't want anything more than dialup service, so be it. In net-centric SF if the city wants fiber even in homeless shelters and the taxpayers are willing to pay for it...so be it.
And maybe you don't understand what "basic IP dialtone" means. It means that local governement is no more responsibile for managing content than PacBell is making sure I don't sign Happy Birthday over the phone without paying royalties or talking dirty on some adult chat service.
And there is nothing wrong with charging people based on usage. I wouldn't mind paying more for my cable modem to get a higher level of service. The problem is, because they decide and there is nothign I or my local government can do to change it, I'm stuck with what I got.
...ISPs stop bundling services that people don't want don't need to offset higher costs.
If I want a webhost, then I can contract for the best webhosting provider. My ISP shouldn't matter. Right now I have four, count them four, webspaces that I am basically being taxed for by my various ISPs, but would never dare use because I have zero faith in their reliability. I'm paying for news servers that have speed-limited connections and don't carry any binaries groups. I'm paying for seven e-mail accounts that i have to throw away if I ever change ISPs, get filled with spam on a regular basis, and are POP3 only.
Why is my $40/50 going towards crap like this? I don't want any of it. I understand that the ISP is a cutthroat business but to me it still constitutes illegal bundling of services.
I want a basic IP dialtone. I think it should be provided as infrastructure by local government. It makes no sense to have four providers of high speed internet service running four lines to every neighborhood when for the same piece the city could run fiber and then lease it to any ISP that wanted to offer service. I am willing to see my taxes go towards that.
As far as webhosting/e-mail/etc I will run those myself. For anything I lack the experience to run, I'll sign up on my own. Everything is a la carte, that is the best way to foster competition and a healthy selection of services in a market where everyone pays based on their actual use of shared resources.
I don't think so. The matter at hand is "reasonable doubt" and I think it would be easy to produce reasonable doubt that Ferguson was the source of the master keys, especially if the protection is trivial.
We here in the US have a stupid law that says if I flip the bits in my content then it is "encrypted" and it is illegal for you to distribute a decryption device (a bit flipper).
However, if I find a "decrypted" copy of my content floating around the internet, all you have to do is say "look, it's just bit flipping, anyone with a basic knowledge of math could have decrypted it" and then at that point it is up to me to find something that conclusively pins it to you...like a copy of "BiTFLiPPER 1.2 by rkn0p" floating around.
This is a Good Thing(tm)! If the details aren't released, then it's just rumor, speculation and slander against the HDCP standard!
That means the HDCP consortium can continue on their merry way to rolling out their video solution...and then after we have all this great content available...THEN we can have someone release the information (I see Lawrence Lessig waving his hand there in the back).
Think about it. If the Crack SDMI has come back with nothing but failure...then maybe we would all have GB of juicy full-quality (minus watermarks, ahem) songs sitting on our harddrive awaiting a simple watermark snipper.
Thank you DMCA! Chilling research only delays the inevitable! It doesn't stop it!
Ahhh...so the comments that were on Yahoo were primarily about the company and not necessarily the service or provider attorneys? Yes, I must say that I did get kind of an Amway vibe from the guy who signed me up.
I'm have Pre-Paid Legal and I've found it to be well worth the $25/month. I call my lawyers practically every week on some issue and have thrice had nice letters with a two-inch letterhead sent to companies who immediately fixed my problems.
I've yet to actually be sued and use my primary coveraged, but as far as I'm concerned it is a good deal. But I'd be interested in knowing what problems other people are having.
I tried searching Yahoo but I end up with a bunch of categories and can't seem to find a place to search posting or wherever these complaints took place.
FUNimation would have no rights to a script that someone else wrote. Fanscripts are still copyright the script author, even though technically according to current laws the scripts themselves are infringing on the copyright of the characters themselves. It's a fine line and a stupid one at that.
That case could be made if the mod did in fact fall under the category of parody. However, it does not
Says unimportant you. That's an opinion, not a fact.
When I think Q3...I think ugly horrid monsters roaming castles and courtyards. DBZ seems a complete mockery of that. I mean, what if someone make a damn Pokemon Q3 mod? How about Strawberry Shortcake? At what point do we say, hey that's definitely different than the original work?
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Why? Because I was playing some MP3's that I downloaded from Napster in my car with the windows rolled down as I was driving down the street = unauthorized public performance. Honda should be ashamed. of themselves for robbing hard working artists this way.
RIAA will soon insist that car manufactures locked windows in the upright positions when music is being played unless it comes from a royalty-paying souce.
On a side note...this is why you NEVER EVER settle a case out of court. MP3.Com settled and has been taking up the ass ever since (insert obligatory goatse reference). The newest game in the music industry is to flaggelate the expired equinine. Napster is still fighting. And really, if they do lose, could they possibly any worse off than MP3.Com?
- JoeShmoe
Sacramento is hardly the land of Bob's Hardware and Feed Lot. Earthlink and Sprint both have their headquarters here, WINFirst is rolling out fiber-to-the-home service, those little plastic "call before you dig" markers everywhere. Despite this, @Home doesn't seem to have any peering agreements with backbone providers in this area. Living in Sacramento, I shouldn't be getting 700-800ms ping times to other Sacramento residents under any circumstances. If that's happening there is something fundamentally wrong with the network design.
Here, Mr. Anonymous Expert. This is the tracert to someone who lives TWO BLOCKS AWAY. Yes, I know, they are DSL and I am cable but as best as I can read this the packets are flowing down home.net all the way to the Bay Area, going through a hugely saturated router, and hitching a ride all the way back on SprintLink. You tell me if you think this is "efficient" network design:
Never mind, the lameness filter won't let me. But the above description pretty much summarizes everything with the only change being the backbone provider.
- JoeShmoe
Amen to local control!
I have to say, I saw this coming back when we had the story about @Home dropping the high-traffic movie newsgroups. Can anyone say bandwidth cost cutting?
I live in Sacramento. @Home has me routing through San Francisco. If I want to connect to something in Sacramento, my tracert shows it travelling all the way to the SFBA router, out a backbone provider, back on Sacramento. This is because @Home doesn't think it is cost effective for Sacramento to have their own NOC/POP.
Not to mention, it is @Home that sets these assinine policies. When Comcast first planned to bring @Home service to Sacramento, they priced it out (and beta tested it) at 3000kbps down and 400kbps up service, just like a few of the Canadian @Home companies. But apparently when the service went live, @Home did not want to have that kind of traffic running through their already-bloated SFBA pipes and so the service was quietly dropped back to 128 upstream. Also, even though @Home owns a buttload of Class A/B address blocks they continue to insist on charging $7 a month for each extra IP...the same price as leasing a second cable modem. This forces everyone to use NAT/ICS which then means if you ever have trouble you have to disconnect everything, reconfigure a single machine for access, install their crappy NetDiags tool before they will open a trouble ticket.
No thanks. The first thing I hope happens after @Home dies is the introduction of several new levels of service, such as "basic" and "advanced" with different levels of service, such as faster upstream, permission to run non porn/warez servers, additional IPS...just like DSL providers.
Oh, FYI...no one on @Home will be able to change their password for the past couple days because the ONE SERVER responsible for providing that service had a hard drive crash and is still down.
- JoeShmoe
Yeah, those are the ones the computer uses to play against human opponents. You can actually modify them to make them harder/easier.
- JoeShmoe
Well, seeing as how the movie studios are under no obligation to abide by the DivX releases specifications developed by the dupechecking groups...it's a simple matter of just encoding at a lower resolution or bitrate.
You see, all those DivX movies you find floating around the Internet have to conform to a list of guidelines if they want to get "credit" for releasing it first. One of the specifications of these standards is to ensure you put the most quality on each CD.
That means you first see if the movie will fit on one CD at minimum quality. If it won't fit on one CD at minimum quality, then break it into two CDs and encode at maximum quality. If it will fit on one CD and there is room to spare, use a bitrate calculator to determine exactly how much you can improve the bitrate and still have it fit within the 700MB size limit. This size limit represents the total capacity of an 80-minute CD-R (not everyone can use 90/99-minute ones).
The movie studios:
A) don't care that they aren't going to be on the dupecheckers,
B) will probably just release it at VCD-level resolution (352x240) instead of the current DVDRip resolution (640x360 or something like that)
C) will probably tag the movie file an ugly intro and a stupid logo during the first few minutes so you will be reminded where you got it.
D) will be released it a couple weeks after everyone else already has downloaded it in a higher quality format.
In short, the movie industry is becoming PURiTY-DivX.
- JoeShmoe
I have been a fan of RTS games since, well, Blizzard practically invented them with Warcraft on the Macintosh.
But the big downfall of RTS games, and why I think many people hate them, is that as the genre has progressed, the interfaces have not. Ultimately victory comes down to not managing resources or having brilliant strategy, but being nimble enough to control the interface.
Take StarCraft, for example. To control your troops you assign them to hotkeys. The problem is that when you mix unit type within a group, you lose the ability to give them advanced commands. So you have to assign separate hotkeys by type and you end up using five or six of them just for one attack.
Unit grouping is another factor. You can carefully arrange your troops in a formation that gives them the advantage, but when you order them from point A to point B they arrive in one big jumble. Often times, unit will arrive at a destination one by one and get slaughtered.
The question I have...how hard would it be to develop some kind of basic programming language for these type of games? In StarCraft, Reavers cause an enormous amount of damage. I would want my characters to attack them first, overriding any previous attack orders. Or, for Zerg troops, if their health dips below a certain point, automatically burrow.
I know there are free software version of many strategy games in the workd (like FreeCIV) but are there projects attempting to recreate open source versions of RTS type games? So that this type of functionaly could be added?
And to Blizzard if there are any employees reading, why not work on this as a nice standby to WarCraft III? It should be very simple to develop a way of giving commands from scripts instead of point and click.
- JoeShmoe
When you go and auction that new XBox on eBay, will it get pulled because you are including copied of Microsoft software?
Or, if you return the console...will they force you to keep the games because they have been opened (despite the fact that you didn't open them)?
This is really quite a big mess. We have software and we have hardware. When you try to mix the two (unless you are including it free of course!) there are all kinds of sticky devlopments.
- JoeShmoe
As a matter of fact, there are a few gazillion patents
Please read what I said. I did not say "imagine if there were patents" because I know there are patents on practically every engineering advance. I said what if they were used restrictively. What if Ford developed seatbelts, Honda came up with safety glass, and Volvo invented air bags? Well then you, dear consumer, would have the joy of choosing whether you died in a crash from being thrown from your vehicle, bleeding to death from severe lacerations, or internal bleeding from impacting the steering column.
Instead we have different makes of cars that have all three...moreso there are even governmental laws that say you MUST have these things to sell a car in the United States. Now, if the cost of licensing these patents were prohibitive, I highly doubt we would have these situations. While I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, I'm sure there are some trade organizations who take responsability for cross-licensing and pooling patents much like computer manufacturers do.
Patents make it possible for corporations to create life-saving technology
Now let me address this...I don't think companies should be asked to eat the cost of R&D even though in an ideal world, life-saving advances would be funded by charities for the sole purpose of ending a problem and not making money. But this is not an ideal world so I can accept that investors are getting together to fund research into some drug that will provided a benefit, perhaps save lives.
But here is where the little simple model you outline breaks down...the patent system does not draw a distinction between someone who invents a new widgit that, while making people happy, is essentially a luxurty and someone who invents a new widgit that saved lives. How much should someone be allowed to profit off the second situation?
Pharmaceutical companies don't just recover their R&D costs. They don't just double their initial investment. They invest millions and make billions. The 17-year or whatever lifespan of a patent is a money-printing machine when it comes to things people MUST (not just would like) to purchase.
In the extreme case, a company could find a cure for cancer. Auction one dose of the drug per month to the highest bidder. What would be the result? Cancer-ridden billionaires would live into their 90s while kids get shuttled off to orphanages because their hard workin' mama got breast cancer at age 30. Could anyone possibly argue that this situation is any better than not having that cure in the first place?
As another example...I recently visited my grandparents and found them lying in a room with the shades drawn, damn washcloths on their foreheads with a fan blowing over a pan of water to form some sort of evaporative cooler. They were afraid if they used the air conditioning they wouldn't be able to afford their power bills. So they sat there in 90-degree heat with 85% humidity. Why? So a power producer in the midwest can make take a 500% profit increase to its giddy shareholders.
The power crisis in California was caused by moron buerocrats who did what the lobbiest told them. Now we have a big mess and I understand that we are going to have to take responability for it. But in the meantime should anyone be allowed to profit from misery?
Maybe the fault lies in our corporate system for rewarding financial gain at all costs. Maybe the fault lies in the fact that when we put on the shareholders mask we gets to throw away our moral compass and sue our board if they don't move in for the kill. Regardless, it is going to have to change if things keep going like this.
There are legislators in California that want to see to it that energy companies get capped at 200% profit and are forced to return anything above that. Likewise, shouldn't pharamaceutical companies have a similar cap?
If the goal of the patent is to promote development by securing financial gain...then why don't we have a patent system based not on time (which is completely arbitrary) but on finances? As soon as you have made 200% return on your investment then society gets to benefit as well. I'm not saying this needs to be done for every patent, but there should definitely be some consideration given to patents that can affect the health of a society.
There's a big difference between some fat cat sitting on a pile of money because he invented the next Cabbage Patch/Tickle Me Elmo/Kirby and a fat cat sitting on a pile of money while people starve because poor farmers can only afford to buy a single generation of patented non-reproducing seeds.
- JoeShmoe
Say, Mr. Founding Father...what was that again about patents and copyrights providing a BENEFIT to society? Is this what was intended?
Seriously, I think I remember reading that Benjamin Franklin was against the concept of patents because he himself invented a new type of indoor stove (Franklin stove I'm guessing) that was much much safer than the other indoor stoves at the time, which cause deaths from fire and smoke inhilation. A company in England tried to patent the stove's design after it was in use in the colonies and Franklin saw that there could be potentially lifesaving advances that would be unavailable thanks to patents.
Imagine patents on seatbelts and airbags being used restrictively...like you could only get them or use them in Ford vehicles. AIDS vaccines are another key example. It is inexcusable that WIPO and other intellectual property organizations put corporate profit protection above human life.
benefit of society".
- JoeShmoe
Nathan Hale
1) American Revolutionary soldier hanged by the British as a spy. According to tradition, his last words were "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
2) An asterisk ("*") Notionally, from the misquote "I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!" of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged ("life to give" -> "ass to risk" -> "asterisk").
Weird, wild stuff there, Ed.
- JoeShmoe
From the dictionary:
:)
1) "*", ASCII code 42.
Common names include: star; splat; asterisk; wild card; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob; Nathan Hale; multiplication operator; Kleene star.
Intrigued, I looked up "splat":
1. A smacking or splashing noise.
2. Name used in many companies (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character.
3. Name used by some Massachusetts Institute of Technology people for the pound ("#") character.
3. Name used by some Rochester Institute of Technology people for the feature (alt) key on a Mac.
4. Name used by some Stanford/ITS people for the extended ASCII circle-x character, or an obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character.
Pretty wacky, huh? I think the first definition must have come from a party college.
- JoeShmoe
From the same dictionary:
1) "!", ASCII code 33.
Common names: bang; pling; excl; shriek; exclamation mark; factorial; not; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; soldier; spark-spot.
pling pling, you're dead!
- JoeShmoe
From the dictionary:
1. "#", ASCII code 35.
Common names: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex; mesh; grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; square; pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat.
Personally, I like "C-octothorpe"
- JoeShmoe
Advocating change in current system because you don't like it (what I am stating) --> not the same argument --> worthwhile endevour.
Refusing to support current system because you don't like it (what you were stating) --> same old tired argument --> futile endevour.
If a measure to raise taxes in order to provide unified broadband service in my area came up, i would vote yes, you would vote no, and whichever side was defeated would have to accept they don't have the majority opinion and hope that the tide changes in time for the next elections. But you can't blame the people who proposed the measure for the fact that everyone voted for it.
- JoeShmoe
There is obviously some cost involved. MSN did away with their own mail servers, all MSN customers now use Hotmail.
Several low-budget ISPs don't provide e-mail at all...they refer you to Yahoo! and other free e-mail providers. Someone has to manage, maintain and monitor servers. And, as Microsoft adds more and more web features to the basic OS, they become even more redundant.
- JoeShmoe
Same old argument that has been made about government-sponsored abortion programs, $40000 ugly sculptures in front of city hall, and $9 billion dollar spy planes.
If you don't want to see your taxes spent on something you don't want then vote against it. But if you lose the vote then shut up and pay because the IRS doesn't accept the "I don't like how you are spending my money" defense.
- JoeShmoe
Rather than repost everything I just said in the thread above this one, let me just simply remind you that GOVERNMENT BUILT THE INTERNET in the first place.
Now that they want to control it simply means that we all have to abide by those controls or find something new (I2 anyone?)
- JoeShmoe
So then let's take the opposite viewpoint...why don't we privatize everything?
Let's have three companies providing water:
"I'm sorry, sir, you are 7500 yards from the supply depot, so you can only get reclaimed sewage water service."
Five or six providing garbage service:
"Gee, honey, isn't it great how everyone on our block gets 4AM garbage pickup on a different day so i never oversleep?"
Oh, let's make the roads private while we are at it:
"Thank you, please drive a miles and stop at the next toll booth."
Infrastructure should not be redundant. As badly mismanaged as you think governments are, they can't possibly be worse than the resources wasted as several companies reinvent the wheel. Local monopolies were started to get around that problem. It used to be that in California, we didn't have to worry about getting enough power. We had local monopolies that ran everything, with strict community oversight. Then things were deregulated and suddenly nobody wants to pay to fix infrastructure that someone else was also using. So things didn't get done and now we are in a big mess. This is progress?
We didn't worry about not being within reach of phone service. We had local telco monopolies that provided it, again with community oversight. Then suddenly they were deregulated and other companies began to provide service, but everyone had to play by rules established by the local telco long ago. As a resuly, competition dies out and we are left with a local monopoly but now without the oversight.
Water, power, gas and connectivity (telephone/cable/data) should all be done by a single contractor according to standards voted by the local community. In the middle of Nowhere Iowa if the community doesn't want anything more than dialup service, so be it. In net-centric SF if the city wants fiber even in homeless shelters and the taxpayers are willing to pay for it...so be it.
And maybe you don't understand what "basic IP dialtone" means. It means that local governement is no more responsibile for managing content than PacBell is making sure I don't sign Happy Birthday over the phone without paying royalties or talking dirty on some adult chat service.
And there is nothing wrong with charging people based on usage. I wouldn't mind paying more for my cable modem to get a higher level of service. The problem is, because they decide and there is nothign I or my local government can do to change it, I'm stuck with what I got.
- JoeShmoe
...ISPs stop bundling services that people don't want don't need to offset higher costs.
If I want a webhost, then I can contract for the best webhosting provider. My ISP shouldn't matter. Right now I have four, count them four, webspaces that I am basically being taxed for by my various ISPs, but would never dare use because I have zero faith in their reliability. I'm paying for news servers that have speed-limited connections and don't carry any binaries groups. I'm paying for seven e-mail accounts that i have to throw away if I ever change ISPs, get filled with spam on a regular basis, and are POP3 only.
Why is my $40/50 going towards crap like this? I don't want any of it. I understand that the ISP is a cutthroat business but to me it still constitutes illegal bundling of services.
I want a basic IP dialtone. I think it should be provided as infrastructure by local government. It makes no sense to have four providers of high speed internet service running four lines to every neighborhood when for the same piece the city could run fiber and then lease it to any ISP that wanted to offer service. I am willing to see my taxes go towards that.
As far as webhosting/e-mail/etc I will run those myself. For anything I lack the experience to run, I'll sign up on my own. Everything is a la carte, that is the best way to foster competition and a healthy selection of services in a market where everyone pays based on their actual use of shared resources.
- JoeShmoe
I don't think so. The matter at hand is "reasonable doubt" and I think it would be easy to produce reasonable doubt that Ferguson was the source of the master keys, especially if the protection is trivial.
We here in the US have a stupid law that says if I flip the bits in my content then it is "encrypted" and it is illegal for you to distribute a decryption device (a bit flipper).
However, if I find a "decrypted" copy of my content floating around the internet, all you have to do is say "look, it's just bit flipping, anyone with a basic knowledge of math could have decrypted it" and then at that point it is up to me to find something that conclusively pins it to you...like a copy of "BiTFLiPPER 1.2 by rkn0p" floating around.
- JoeShmoe
This is a Good Thing(tm)! If the details aren't released, then it's just rumor, speculation and slander against the HDCP standard!
That means the HDCP consortium can continue on their merry way to rolling out their video solution...and then after we have all this great content available...THEN we can have someone release the information (I see Lawrence Lessig waving his hand there in the back).
Think about it. If the Crack SDMI has come back with nothing but failure...then maybe we would all have GB of juicy full-quality (minus watermarks, ahem) songs sitting on our harddrive awaiting a simple watermark snipper.
Thank you DMCA! Chilling research only delays the inevitable! It doesn't stop it!
- JoeShmoe
Ahhh...so the comments that were on Yahoo were primarily about the company and not necessarily the service or provider attorneys? Yes, I must say that I did get kind of an Amway vibe from the guy who signed me up.
- JoeShmoe
I'm have Pre-Paid Legal and I've found it to be well worth the $25/month. I call my lawyers practically every week on some issue and have thrice had nice letters with a two-inch letterhead sent to companies who immediately fixed my problems.
I've yet to actually be sued and use my primary coveraged, but as far as I'm concerned it is a good deal. But I'd be interested in knowing what problems other people are having.
I tried searching Yahoo but I end up with a bunch of categories and can't seem to find a place to search posting or wherever these complaints took place.
- JoeShmoe
FUNimation would have no rights to a script that someone else wrote. Fanscripts are still copyright the script author, even though technically according to current laws the scripts themselves are infringing on the copyright of the characters themselves. It's a fine line and a stupid one at that.
- JoeShmoe
That case could be made if the mod did in fact fall under the category of parody. However, it does not
Says unimportant you. That's an opinion, not a fact.
When I think Q3...I think ugly horrid monsters roaming castles and courtyards. DBZ seems a complete mockery of that. I mean, what if someone make a damn Pokemon Q3 mod? How about Strawberry Shortcake? At what point do we say, hey that's definitely different than the original work?
- JoeShmoe