I suppose that's why AMZN has been on such a tear, and why the company is worth several billion dollars. Who would of thought it, but "irrational" investors end up being right after all.
That said, I would think that a better way for ABC to handle it is to drop the musical numbers for all songs, such that they don't have to worry about playing it, but not play any of the others, as to be fair. Rewriting the song to avoid censoring is IMO a bad choice, as that can ruin the effect of the song in the first place.
I agree with your statement regarding censorship -- but they can't just drop all the songs, it's one of their hallmarks.
A better solution would be to play the song as is but just "bleep" out the offending words when the orignal song lyrics are performed. That way, no one in TV-land can be offended if they successfully "bleep" (put it on a few second time delay or whatever) and they don't force the artist to censor his own work. It's the simplist solution -- that's why the "bleep" was invented in the first place!
Mars structures in the desert. This one does truly intruge me. The concept is taken from his book distractions. I could see this happening. When you think of it, the desert has a lot to recommend it. Homogenious terrain, plenty of solar energy. Lacks H2O but oxygen is in plentyful supply, and H is farily easily obtainable from hydrocarbons with a bit of technological advancment. Wouldn't be the first space application to see real world use.
But why would you want to? I mean, the world isn't at all crowded yet -- we don't have to go live in the desert until the rest of the world is full. If we had the population density of Hong Kong or Singapore in a country like the US or Canada or Russia we have a lot more room for people without having to rely on desert occupation. Now if we could grow food in the desert -- that would be something else! Then we could live in non-Mars-like terrain but still take advantage of the deserts so they won't be empty space. If we could genetically engineer veggies to grow with less water, I bet it could be done.
Of course the solar energy idea is brilliant and I am sure that it will start happening very soon -- depends on the price of energy I suppose. Imagine a desert full of plants and solar panels -- a different world indeeed!
NEWS:/. readers not fond of Microsoft Posted by emmett on Thursday March 02, @10:37AM from the who-would-have-thought dept.
LtBurrito writes, "According to a recent poll,/. readers are not happy with the recent activities of Microsoft. Major areas of concern: protocol bending, patent enforcing, non-open-sourcing, and profit making. This shocking news item means that most/. readers may not have bothered to switch over to Win2k as previously reported"
Well, I wasn't the moderator but I agree with his (her) decision. The post seemed like a "quickie" post that was meant to look like a valid post but was really just a first post in disguise. It really added nothing to any discussion, and the words "first post" clue in that the fellow was looking to post anything in order to get up front.
If it was mis-moderated, I don't think it was severe enough to warrant meta-moderation.
I know Amazon has been stupid about the whole patent thing -- but you have to give them credit for being early, and being good at e-Commerce. It only took them a couple years to become one of the biggest booksellers in the world -- that takes a lot of skill.
I am not saying that Amazaon should be forgiven for their patent abuses... or that it is "right" for a company to lose as much money as they do. But you have to admit that they have been successful so far.
Yeah... I was talking about the Celebration city -- I was (am) under the impression that it was at least similar to Walt's dream city. Perhaps you're right and his ideas were butchered -- but everything about Disney (past and future) seems so consistant with the "moral american corporation" idea behind Celebration that I still have a suspicion that Walt was somewhat responsible for what Disney has become. I mean, we have to hold Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner responsible for their creations, why not Walt?
The more I read/hear about Disney, the more I think the man was just born too early. He had dreams of robots, immersive dynamic content, and thoughts of the future.
I don't know about that. Some of his ideas were obviously brilliant, but others were questionable. I mean, Disney City (a city where everything was engineered to be disney-clean and disney-efficient) was a total disaster, and it was a brainchild of Walt himself.
The whole image of American culture that he helped spawn has had questionable effects as well. Walt is the person most responsible for the corporatization of American culture, and the squeaky-clean moral image based on greed. I'm not saying I have a problem with it -- I'm for free markets yada yada. But don't hold him up as a geek saint, because that he's not.
I know what you are saying... and it makes sense. Of course, the RIAA is in a bad spot as well because it is their job to try to raise piracy awareness. Since MP3s obviously cut into their clients business (I know they are growing -- but it still cuts from what the total would be) they have to equate MP3 with piracy. It's just so easy to pirate MP3s, and if you download Napster you can't argue with that.
So you're right -- MP3s have a good legal right if used properly (I'm listening to legal MP3s as I'm writing this). But the RIAA is right to pursue more secure music formats. What else can they do?? Give up and say "well, that's the end of the music business"? Nope, that's not good enough.
If you find an artist that you enjoy but don't have any desire to buy their CD, write them a letter. Most musicians that care are more delighted to hear how their music has touched a fan, not that they are the most prophitable band in history (yes this is a generalization, but it is not false - I know from experience).
If a musician wants that -- great! But I know for a fact that most established ones do want money for their efforts. How do I know??? Because they don't release their music on MP3 except as a promotion. If they did that themselves, then of course it would be okay. But just because its your impression that "musicians don't want money" because of your college station bands don't... that gives you no right to steal from those who do.
It's the same reason that people pirate MS applications. They say "they can afford to lose me as a customer, look how big there are".
It's justification, a silly excuse that helps people sleep at night. But the end is the same, whether its software piracy or music piracy, content producers lose out. I know I'm biased because I'm a software producer... but why shouldn't I expect that people pay for my products if they want to use them? It's my right to expect that in a free-market system such as ours. Oh damn, I'm ranting again aren't I? =)
Last point -- if you can't afford something that you want, that doesn't mean you should steal it no matter how big or evil the company may be.
It will be a while before they put up all historical content online, because of the work involved. I do think that TV shows made for syndication and cable networks (such as my fav "Cleopatra 2525") will begin to show their current episodes up on their websites. I say it will start within the year (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some already).
I suppose the historical archives will be next -- anybody know how successful xoom.com has been with their streaming classic movies? (BTW, check out "Killer Bats", its really cool).
As for network TV, that probably won't go for quite some time, before there has been an "Internet TV" hit. I suppose it depends on bandwidth, they probably would want a 300kb+ stream. 80 or 120k is okay, but it's still no substitute for "the real thing"
I don't really think that Transmeta will be able to compete on the desktop front against AMD and Intel. Don't get me wrong, emulation is great, and Transmeta has shown that it can work wonders for processors designed for low power. But I doubt very strongly that an emulated processor will be able to beat out a native processor head to head (including cost factors).
At the same time, I hope that Transmeta manages to challenge the dominance of AMD/Intel on the desktop front as well. AMD has already shown what competition does for the processor market -- more would be even better!
The 800 MHz Coppermine IS available - I know of many systems which are shipping with them. Okay, I checked and you are right... Dell is shipping 800s, so I am wrong there. But they DID just start a while ago. They certainly pre-announced for a couple of weeks.
Of course... there is one obvious advantage to cloning: scientific testing.
If we could clone people and do testing on them, it would be very beneficial to medial research... all of the genetic variance would be gone, so you could easily find the difference in medicines -- amongst other things. Psychologists would love it too.
OF course, looking at our current laws this wouldn't quite work. But in theory those are the benefits.
My point is that Willamette wasn't rushed out to compete with Athlon, since Willamette designs must have started before anyone had even heard of the K6-2. Obviously they were planning the Willamette processor for quite some time, but I still think that Intel rushed the processor to market because of the Athlon. They are going beyond their traditional Moore's Law pace (maybe it should be renamed "The Old Intel Monopoly Law" instead) which they rarely did before.
So now you think that Intel has mentioned a future laptop chip just because of Transmeta??? We all know how bad MS is at vaporware... now Intel is playing the same game. 800 mHz coppermines were announced over a month ago, and yet you can't buy them. Just as Intel is trying to prevent Athlon purchases, they will try to prevent Crusoe purchases throught vaporware. Isn't it interesting that vaporware applies to HW as much as it does to SW?
Sure... Intel may not use marking FUD such as MS... but that does not mean that they have played "fairly"
Intel is legendary for suing any of their competitors just to slow the introduction of their processors. For example, Intel sued AMD over the K5 (okay, it's a long time ago... but still) and managed to get a temporary injunction against AMD which stopped them from shipping the K5 until the PII was almost ready for release.
You should read some books on Intel such as "Inside Intel" (I don't have the link on me) that tell the story of how brutal intel is against their perceived competitors. I remember that they made MS seem like a couple of puppy dogs in terms of their ruthlessness.
this clause: "Note, this contract need not be read to be enforceable..." That's insane! I know from my Law class that the clause goes totally against contract law. And why should software contracts be any different than that?
Has anybody considered the possibility that Andover.net would consider buying the linux.net domain? It would make a good fit for their most profitable businesses, and would probably make their stock price jump.
"The Linux Network" says a lot more than "Andover Net", besides, look at their index page and see that they are calling themselves "The Leading Linux Desination" so it's a fit.
Tognazzini calls it "inexplicable" that VBScript is not cross-browser and cross-platform, and seems to imply that this is due to engineers... not on the Microsoft attempt to turn the Web into their proprietary fiefdom.
I doubt that MS has any patents on BASIC (correct me if I'm wrong) and other organizations could start making VBScript interpreters since MS does not.
Besides... VB is great for quick and dirty solutions, especially for companies that use simple databases. You don't have to go through that much effort to make a functional program. Of course it is a given that they are not as efficient or as stable as a mySQL solution... but I guarantee that I could build most simple projects MUCH faster with VB, and VBscript.
They could still be tracking us. I just opted out and looked at my cookie files (Netscape 4.7 for Win98) and it didn't set the cookie to a string starting with "OPT_OUT". Here is my cookie strings in Netscape Before: www.doubleclick.com FALSE / FALSE 951372615 q4_popup 1 .doubleclick.net TRUE / FALSE 1920499068 id d7ee54a9
Check this out on other systems/platforms I know on my IE5.5 install, it does set it to "id~OPT_OUT~doubleclick.net/~0~1468938752~31583413 ~866453120~29321155~*" which doubleclick may still be able to track based on the complex numbers following the OPT_OUT.
That would eliminate a lot of pages out there. And since it is just an annoyance, and not an actual barrier to viewing the page, it is still worth it. And besides... I would guess most people have access to a Windows box if you really need one.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that's why AMZN has been on such a tear, and why the company is worth several billion dollars. Who would of thought it, but "irrational" investors end up being right after all.
That said, I would think that a better way for ABC to handle it is to drop the musical numbers for all songs, such that they don't have to worry about playing it, but not play any of the others, as to be fair. Rewriting the song to avoid censoring is IMO a bad choice, as that can ruin the effect of the song in the first place.
I agree with your statement regarding censorship -- but they can't just drop all the songs, it's one of their hallmarks.
A better solution would be to play the song as is but just "bleep" out the offending words when the orignal song lyrics are performed. That way, no one in TV-land can be offended if they successfully "bleep" (put it on a few second time delay or whatever) and they don't force the artist to censor his own work. It's the simplist solution -- that's why the "bleep" was invented in the first place!
Mars structures in the desert. This one does truly intruge me. The concept is taken from his book distractions. I could see this happening. When you think of it, the desert has a lot to recommend it. Homogenious terrain, plenty of solar energy. Lacks H2O but oxygen is in plentyful supply, and H is farily easily obtainable from hydrocarbons with a bit of technological advancment. Wouldn't be the first space application to see real world use.
But why would you want to? I mean, the world isn't at all crowded yet -- we don't have to go live in the desert until the rest of the world is full. If we had the population density of Hong Kong or Singapore in a country like the US or Canada or Russia we have a lot more room for people without having to rely on desert occupation. Now if we could grow food in the desert -- that would be something else! Then we could live in non-Mars-like terrain but still take advantage of the deserts so they won't be empty space. If we could genetically engineer veggies to grow with less water, I bet it could be done.
Of course the solar energy idea is brilliant and I am sure that it will start happening very soon -- depends on the price of energy I suppose. Imagine a desert full of plants and solar panels -- a different world indeeed!
NEWS: /. readers not fond of Microsoft Posted by emmett on Thursday March 02, @10:37AM
/. readers are not happy with the recent activities of Microsoft. Major areas of concern: protocol bending, patent enforcing, non-open-sourcing, and profit making. This shocking news item means that most /. readers may not have bothered to switch over to Win2k as previously reported"
from the who-would-have-thought dept.
LtBurrito writes, "According to a recent poll,
( Read More... | 456 of 468 comments
Well, I wasn't the moderator but I agree with his (her) decision. The post seemed like a "quickie" post that was meant to look like a valid post but was really just a first post in disguise. It really added nothing to any discussion, and the words "first post" clue in that the fellow was looking to post anything in order to get up front.
If it was mis-moderated, I don't think it was severe enough to warrant meta-moderation.
Check out the user name:
Re:oh my gawd (Score:-1, Troll)
by Bruce Parens (bruce@perens.com) on Tuesday
Parens != Perens. It seems we have a real imposter here... though I have to admit it fooled me for a sec! =)
I know Amazon has been stupid about the whole patent thing -- but you have to give them credit for being early, and being good at e-Commerce. It only took them a couple years to become one of the biggest booksellers in the world -- that takes a lot of skill.
I am not saying that Amazaon should be forgiven for their patent abuses... or that it is "right" for a company to lose as much money as they do. But you have to admit that they have been successful so far.
Yeah... I was talking about the Celebration city -- I was (am) under the impression that it was at least similar to Walt's dream city. Perhaps you're right and his ideas were butchered -- but everything about Disney (past and future) seems so consistant with the "moral american corporation" idea behind Celebration that I still have a suspicion that Walt was somewhat responsible for what Disney has become. I mean, we have to hold Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner responsible for their creations, why not Walt?
The more I read/hear about Disney, the more I think the man was just born too early. He had dreams of robots, immersive dynamic content, and thoughts of the future.
I don't know about that. Some of his ideas were obviously brilliant, but others were questionable. I mean, Disney City (a city where everything was engineered to be disney-clean and disney-efficient) was a total disaster, and it was a brainchild of Walt himself.
The whole image of American culture that he helped spawn has had questionable effects as well. Walt is the person most responsible for the corporatization of American culture, and the squeaky-clean moral image based on greed. I'm not saying I have a problem with it -- I'm for free markets yada yada. But don't hold him up as a geek saint, because that he's not.
I know what you are saying... and it makes sense. Of course, the RIAA is in a bad spot as well because it is their job to try to raise piracy awareness. Since MP3s obviously cut into their clients business (I know they are growing -- but it still cuts from what the total would be) they have to equate MP3 with piracy. It's just so easy to pirate MP3s, and if you download Napster you can't argue with that.
So you're right -- MP3s have a good legal right if used properly (I'm listening to legal MP3s as I'm writing this). But the RIAA is right to pursue more secure music formats. What else can they do?? Give up and say "well, that's the end of the music business"? Nope, that's not good enough.
If you find an artist that you enjoy but don't have any desire to buy their CD, write them a letter. Most musicians that care are more delighted to hear how their music has touched a fan, not that they are the most prophitable band in history (yes this is a generalization, but it is not false - I know from experience).
If a musician wants that -- great! But I know for a fact that most established ones do want money for their efforts. How do I know??? Because they don't release their music on MP3 except as a promotion. If they did that themselves, then of course it would be okay. But just because its your impression that "musicians don't want money" because of your college station bands don't... that gives you no right to steal from those who do.
It's the same reason that people pirate MS applications. They say "they can afford to lose me as a customer, look how big there are".
It's justification, a silly excuse that helps people sleep at night. But the end is the same, whether its software piracy or music piracy, content producers lose out. I know I'm biased because I'm a software producer... but why shouldn't I expect that people pay for my products if they want to use them? It's my right to expect that in a free-market system such as ours. Oh damn, I'm ranting again aren't I? =)
Last point -- if you can't afford something that you want, that doesn't mean you should steal it no matter how big or evil the company may be.
Of course... if you lose 10% of your Guiness through your beard, you might end up with that much on your face (or the floor) if you shave.
It will be a while before they put up all historical content online, because of the work involved. I do think that TV shows made for syndication and cable networks (such as my fav "Cleopatra 2525") will begin to show their current episodes up on their websites. I say it will start within the year (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some already).
I suppose the historical archives will be next -- anybody know how successful xoom.com has been with their streaming classic movies? (BTW, check out "Killer Bats", its really cool).
As for network TV, that probably won't go for quite some time, before there has been an "Internet TV" hit. I suppose it depends on bandwidth, they probably would want a 300kb+ stream. 80 or 120k is okay, but it's still no substitute for "the real thing"
I don't really think that Transmeta will be able to compete on the desktop front against AMD and Intel. Don't get me wrong, emulation is great, and Transmeta has shown that it can work wonders for processors designed for low power. But I doubt very strongly that an emulated processor will be able to beat out a native processor head to head (including cost factors).
At the same time, I hope that Transmeta manages to challenge the dominance of AMD/Intel on the desktop front as well. AMD has already shown what competition does for the processor market -- more would be even better!
What are you, nuts? OF course it's real!
You can tell good quality pr0n from bad, and that's definately good stuff.
The 800 MHz Coppermine IS available - I know of many systems which are shipping with them.
Okay, I checked and you are right... Dell is shipping 800s, so I am wrong there. But they DID just start a while ago. They certainly pre-announced for a couple of weeks.
Of course... there is one obvious advantage to cloning: scientific testing.
If we could clone people and do testing on them, it would be very beneficial to medial research... all of the genetic variance would be gone, so you could easily find the difference in medicines -- amongst other things. Psychologists would love it too.
OF course, looking at our current laws this wouldn't quite work. But in theory those are the benefits.
My point is that Willamette wasn't rushed out to compete with Athlon, since Willamette designs must have started before anyone had even heard of the K6-2.
Obviously they were planning the Willamette processor for quite some time, but I still think that Intel rushed the processor to market because of the Athlon. They are going beyond their traditional Moore's Law pace (maybe it should be renamed "The Old Intel Monopoly Law" instead) which they rarely did before.
So now you think that Intel has mentioned a future laptop chip just because of Transmeta???
We all know how bad MS is at vaporware... now Intel is playing the same game. 800 mHz coppermines were announced over a month ago, and yet you can't buy them. Just as Intel is trying to prevent Athlon purchases, they will try to prevent Crusoe purchases throught vaporware. Isn't it interesting that vaporware applies to HW as much as it does to SW?
Sure... Intel may not use marking FUD such as MS... but that does not mean that they have played "fairly"
Intel is legendary for suing any of their competitors just to slow the introduction of their processors. For example, Intel sued AMD over the K5 (okay, it's a long time ago... but still) and managed to get a temporary injunction against AMD which stopped them from shipping the K5 until the PII was almost ready for release.
You should read some books on Intel such as "Inside Intel" (I don't have the link on me) that tell the story of how brutal intel is against their perceived competitors. I remember that they made MS seem like a couple of puppy dogs in terms of their ruthlessness.
this clause: "Note, this contract need not be read to be enforceable..."
That's insane! I know from my Law class that the clause goes totally against contract law. And why should software contracts be any different than that?
Has anybody considered the possibility that Andover.net would consider buying the linux.net domain? It would make a good fit for their most profitable businesses, and would probably make their stock price jump.
"The Linux Network" says a lot more than "Andover Net", besides, look at their index page and see that they are calling themselves "The Leading Linux Desination" so it's a fit.
Don't be too surprised if I'm right!
Tognazzini calls it "inexplicable" that VBScript is not cross-browser and cross-platform, and seems to imply that this is due to engineers ... not on the Microsoft attempt to turn the Web into their proprietary fiefdom.
I doubt that MS has any patents on BASIC (correct me if I'm wrong) and other organizations could start making VBScript interpreters since MS does not.
Besides... VB is great for quick and dirty solutions, especially for companies that use simple databases. You don't have to go through that much effort to make a functional program. Of course it is a given that they are not as efficient or as stable as a mySQL solution... but I guarantee that I could build most simple projects MUCH faster with VB, and VBscript.
They could still be tracking us. I just opted out and looked at my cookie files (Netscape 4.7 for Win98) and it didn't set the cookie to a string starting with "OPT_OUT". Here is my cookie strings in Netscape Before:
.doubleclick.net TRUE / FALSE 1920499068 id d7ee54a9
.doubleclick.net TRUE / FALSE 1920499068 id d7ee54a9
3 ~866453120~29321155~*" which doubleclick may still be able to track based on the complex numbers following the OPT_OUT.
www.doubleclick.com FALSE / FALSE 951372615 q4_popup 1
And after...
www.doubleclick.com FALSE / FALSE 951372615 q4_popup 1
Check this out on other systems/platforms I know on my IE5.5 install, it does set it to "id~OPT_OUT~doubleclick.net/~0~1468938752~3158341
for a plug-in that is not available for Linux.
That would eliminate a lot of pages out there. And since it is just an annoyance, and not an actual barrier to viewing the page, it is still worth it. And besides... I would guess most people have access to a Windows box if you really need one.