A monopoly doesn't necessarily mean 100% of the market. And since one of the findings of fact in a certain court case you may have heard of was that Microsoft *does* have a monopoly (in the desktop operating systems market, which they used to give Internet Explorer its current prominince), I think it's a reasonable accusation to make.:-)
Requiring you to download MusicMatch is still a bit off. Your 99.9% figure is also a little questionable - I would expect Apple, Linux and other operating systems to have a much higher take-up among the consumers Philips targets with this product than in the market as a whole.
I have friends who read books (from Project Gutenberg) on their Palms while commuting. It's certainly not as silly an idea as you make out.
Anyway, there are many reasons why mainstream p2p book sharing hasn't caught on in a big way yet: the fact that not everyone owns a Palm yet, the fact that they're still a poor interface for novel reading compared to a book (as you point out), the fact that the existing distribution format (books again) is much harder to "rip" than CDs are, for example... I wouldn't like to rule it out in the future though. In fact, I'd go further and say that I'd be surprised if p2p book sharing *didn't* become a problem for the publishing industry.
...when you purchase a bit of land you are provided with very specific rights on that land. For example, you have the right of exclusion; you can bar people from entering it. I am not aware of any such right on the internet.
Well the analogous entity is the server: when you buy (or rent part of) a server, you have the right to bar people from using it. Just as the people who access the web pages you serve are under no obligation to render them in the way you want, you are under no obligation to continue serving pages to clients who don't appear to be rendering them in a way you approve of.
Similarly, taking your sidewalk analogy, having painted your picture you're perfectly free to cover it up and refuse to show it to people unless they pay you. I doubt you'd make much money, just as I'd expect sites that use these "anti-leech" techniques to haemhorrage regular visitors, but there's nothing illegal or immoral about it.
You're right about the use of the word "thieves" being specious though.
Direction finding is becoming more and more based on GPS than anything. GPS has nothing to do with the magnetic field. It disappearing wouldn't cause it to fail at all
It's the earth's magnetic field that diverts the solar wind away from us. Without it, the GPS satellites would almost certainly be destroyed by the increase in ionising particle flux. Along with all the communications satellites.
Aha - that just shows how cunning the conspiracists are: allowing the conspiracy theory to be aired on (inter)national TV ensures that the intelligent minority will automatically dismiss it as nonsense:-)
How did they get perfect camera shots of Armstrong emerging?
Think about it - the first person on the moon was going to be the most important television moment of the twentieth century, and NASA knew it. Don't you think that when they installed the camera on the Lunar Module, they might have spent a few minutes getting some guy to climb up and down the ladder a few times to make sure they were in-frame?
Big problem, for the same reason they won't play in cdrom's these new cd's won't play in a spdif enabled cd audio player.
I tried a CDS-protected CD in my player (an aging Marantz CD-63 with both optical and digital outputs) - works fine. YMMV of course...
Re:Ok, so microsoft trides to do this now
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Neither PS or PDF can be modified significantly or easilly. Even with Acrobat, you can change some text, but you can't move anything around.
That's the whole point of Acrobat - it's designed to replace printing out hardcopies, so editing is limited to the kind of thing you'd do with a bottle of tipp-ex. You're not supposed to delete the original document when you make the pdf...
The only thing HTML needs to match PDF is a page-break character, so you can closely control the page layout (if you want to), and someone else could easilly change that layout you wanted, for their own needs/preferences.
What about cryptographic signing? Portable font embedding? Exact cross-platform reproduction on screen and in hard copy? PDF documents are good enough to send straight to press; html was designed for a completely different purpose (*reasonable* reproduction on a variety of user agents).
Water vapour is transparent to visible light, as demonstrated by the fact that you can still see when the weather gets humid. Things are a bit worse for IR and UV light - the absorption coefficient of water increases (up to a point) the further you get from the visible spectrum, but stay close to it and you're fine.
Slashdot Mirror
A monopoly doesn't necessarily mean 100% of the market. And since one of the findings of fact in a certain court case you may have heard of was that Microsoft *does* have a monopoly (in the desktop operating systems market, which they used to give Internet Explorer its current prominince), I think it's a reasonable accusation to make. :-)
Requiring you to download MusicMatch is still a bit off. Your 99.9% figure is also a little questionable - I would expect Apple, Linux and other operating systems to have a much higher take-up among the consumers Philips targets with this product than in the market as a whole.
...who were Lewis and Clark?
Buying a gun isn't illegal (and shouldn't be, for reasons of freedom) just because it could potentially be used to commit a crime.
The same should go for atom bombs! And anthrax!
I have friends who read books (from Project Gutenberg) on their Palms while commuting. It's certainly not as silly an idea as you make out.
Anyway, there are many reasons why mainstream p2p book sharing hasn't caught on in a big way yet: the fact that not everyone owns a Palm yet, the fact that they're still a poor interface for novel reading compared to a book (as you point out), the fact that the existing distribution format (books again) is much harder to "rip" than CDs are, for example... I wouldn't like to rule it out in the future though. In fact, I'd go further and say that I'd be surprised if p2p book sharing *didn't* become a problem for the publishing industry.
That was a joke. (Hint: that thread was about duplication.)
That's the second time you've made that comment.
Politicians carrying out policy is hardly a breach of your human rights.
Well the analogous entity is the server: when you buy (or rent part of) a server, you have the right to bar people from using it. Just as the people who access the web pages you serve are under no obligation to render them in the way you want, you are under no obligation to continue serving pages to clients who don't appear to be rendering them in a way you approve of.
Similarly, taking your sidewalk analogy, having painted your picture you're perfectly free to cover it up and refuse to show it to people unless they pay you. I doubt you'd make much money, just as I'd expect sites that use these "anti-leech" techniques to haemhorrage regular visitors, but there's nothing illegal or immoral about it.
You're right about the use of the word "thieves" being specious though.
The BBC's overseas operations are commercial.
To be fair, there are a very large number of people in the Open Source and Free Software movements who spend their free time copying Microsoft back :-)
I'm not sure that follows - if it were the outside of the safe that melted shut, it needn't be the case that the inside melt too...
:-) I think that Joseph Heller beat you to that one though...
hmmm... how about "off-loading"? :-)
The BBC mentions their use of RedSheriff in their privacy policy. RedSheriff have their own privacy policy.
Moderators! Mod parent up!
;-)
Direction finding is becoming more and more based on GPS than anything. GPS has nothing to do with the magnetic field. It disappearing wouldn't cause it to fail at all
It's the earth's magnetic field that diverts the solar wind away from us. Without it, the GPS satellites would almost certainly be destroyed by the increase in ionising particle flux. Along with all the communications satellites.
http://www.javassh.org may be of interest them (assuming you can persuade an IS representative to install the J2SE 1.4 RTE with Java WebStart...)
One thing that jumps to mind is that you could have some kind of ratio between images and html which has to be adhered to for any x second period.
lynx users wouldn't be too impressed.
romanji? :-)
Aha - that just shows how cunning the conspiracists are: allowing the conspiracy theory to be aired on (inter)national TV ensures that the intelligent minority will automatically dismiss it as nonsense :-)
</raving paranoia>
How did they get perfect camera shots of Armstrong emerging?
Think about it - the first person on the moon was going to be the most important television moment of the twentieth century, and NASA knew it. Don't you think that when they installed the camera on the Lunar Module, they might have spent a few minutes getting some guy to climb up and down the ladder a few times to make sure they were in-frame?
Big problem, for the same reason they won't play in cdrom's these new cd's won't play in a spdif enabled cd audio player.
I tried a CDS-protected CD in my player (an aging Marantz CD-63 with both optical and digital outputs) - works fine. YMMV of course...
Neither PS or PDF can be modified significantly or easilly. Even with Acrobat, you can change some text, but you can't move anything around.
That's the whole point of Acrobat - it's designed to replace printing out hardcopies, so editing is limited to the kind of thing you'd do with a bottle of tipp-ex. You're not supposed to delete the original document when you make the pdf...
The only thing HTML needs to match PDF is a page-break character, so you can closely control the page layout (if you want to), and someone else could easilly change that layout you wanted, for their own needs/preferences.
What about cryptographic signing? Portable font embedding? Exact cross-platform reproduction on screen and in hard copy? PDF documents are good enough to send straight to press; html was designed for a completely different purpose (*reasonable* reproduction on a variety of user agents).
Water vapour is transparent to visible light, as demonstrated by the fact that you can still see when the weather gets humid. Things are a bit worse for IR and UV light - the absorption coefficient of water increases (up to a point) the further you get from the visible spectrum, but stay close to it and you're fine.