For what it's worth, this story appears to be fake.
Imagine that. A made up Russian story. For those who don't know, some Russian online "news agencies" (that term is used very loosely) regularly run stories that would fit perfectly in Weekly World News in the USA. Note to future article submitters - just because some Russian dude with a blog says it's true, that doesn't mean it necessarily is.
What a great idea. A very visible device that announces to the entire world that the unfortunate wearer is an epileptic. Epilepsy is a disease that many people are ashamed of because it makes them "different" from everyone else. Can you imagine a child being taunted for such a device? I certainly can.
Even adults are reluctant to admit that they have the disease for fear of being different. About 9 years ago I played in a recreational coed volleyball league run every fall by my apartment complex. I was a team captain and I complained to the league organizer about halfway through the season about a very strange young lady on my team who didn't drive a car and didn't have normal reflexes. Public transportation is very poor where I lived at the team, so it was definitely quite abnormal for someone to live there and not drive a car. She had to get rides from other people for everything - to go to games, to go to work, etc. I was told by the league organizer that she didn't drive because she had epilepsy. I was quite shocked because this young woman never mentioned it to me when I took her to our games and she acted like she never drove because she never needed to in the past. In reality she couldn't get a driver's license because her epilepsy was too severe. So if even adults are afraid to admit that they have it, I'm having a hard time believing that very many people are going to volunteer for such an obvious display to the world that something is different about them.
It's really very easy to understand why TVBoxSet.com is in business and the MPAA seems to not care. 1) They operate out of the Philippines. I don't know how strong or weak copyright law is in the Philippines, but it could be that these boxed sets are legal there. 2) Not that many people know about them, so sales really aren't all that great. 3) From everything I've read about them (I knew about them a long time before this article on Slashdot), the quality is bad. The MPAA may know that and figure that the product is so bad that letting people buy crap teaches a better lesson than fighting it publicly and making sure that a lot more people know about the website than do right now. Right now not that many people know about the website and a lot of those who bought product from it aren't real happy. Unhappy customers work in favor of the MPAA. 4) Going after file sharers is low hanging fruit and doesn't involve the complications and risk and cost of dealing with foreign legal systems. I can't speak about the Philippines as I have never been there, but I can tell you from personal experience that if this was happening in certain parts of the ex-USSR that any court case would not at all be about laws but it would be all about the bribes and whoever paid the highest bribe would get the decision in their favor. The local guys would have huge advantages over the MPAA. The local guys would have access to the judge to pay him off, they would be able to hire hitmen to kill any attorneys working for the MPAA in the country, and so on. The MPAA might be afraid to try to bribe the judge or believe it or not, actually get outbribed by the locals. It happens. The locals could pay a big bribe to the judge and then get him to rat out the MPAA for trying to bribe him, even though he got bribed already by the local guys. Fighting such a court case in a place that has strong rule of law and low corruption is one thing. Fighting such a case in a country where justice goes to the highest bidder in something else.
A verdict of $222,000.00, for infringement of 24 song files worth a total of $23.76?
In a case where there was zero evidence of the defendant having transferred any of those files?.
It is one of the most irrational things I have ever seen in my life in the law.
If the Judge doesn't set aside the verdict sua sponte, I expect there to be motion practice to set aside the verdict, based on its obvious unconstitutionality and numerous other reasons, and if that fails I expect there to be a successful appeal.
While your arguments are valid, I'm guessing that you have never served on a jury in the USA. I have. I can't say I'm surprised at all. Jury decisions sometimes (maybe even most times) make no sense at all. I've been on a jury twice. Didn't like it either time. Juries are not generally composed of well educated people who grasp technology. On the last jury I served on, nobody was under 30 years old. Most of the jury members worked in construction. I was the only IT guy on the jury and I seriously doubt that anyone on the jury besides me had ever used an operating system other than Windows. I would be surprised if anyone on that jury even knew how to download a song at all. So you see, it's not difficult to get a jury that doesn't understand technology at all.
Then you add to the mix that some jurors are crazed, wild-eyed "Kill them all if they broke the law!" types who look to stick it to "evil doers". We had one of these guys on the last jury I was on and let me tell you, he was incredibly difficult to deal with. 11 of us reached agreement on our case pretty quickly. We voted for convicting the defendant on 2 of 3 counts he was charged with and 11 of us felt that the final count was unfair, but the one guy threatened to hang the jury (that means the jury is stalled because they can't reach an agreement - that might be an Americanism that some of you don't know) unless we convicted on all 3 counts. It took a lot of persuasion from the jury foreman to get this jerk to agree that 2 convictions out of 3 was enough. We had some people who said that they reluctantly agreed to 2 convictions and if that one guy wanted to hold out for all 3, they were going to pull back their votes and vote for either 1 or zero convictions and that they would NEVER agree to 3 convictions. So 2 out of 3 convictions was the best we could do because 11 people thought it was fair and 1 thought it wasn't harsh enough, but he finally agreed to it.
You sometimes get a few of these bloodthirsty people who want to stick to the evil downloaders for "breaking the law and stealing" and "send a message to other people that stealing won't be tolerated!" If you've ever served on a jury, you might understand how you could get 3 or 4 people like this who are demanding blood. Then you get the other jurors who basically go "Yeah, the defendant is guilty and while I'm not in favor of a $200,000 fine, they did break the law and I do want to go home" so they agree to it. Juries make all kinds of crazy decisions. Surely many Americans here are familiar with the infamous "McDonalds coffee case" where a jury awarded $2.9 million (!!!) to a woman who got 3rd degree burns from accidentally spilling hot coffee on herself from McDonalds. The actual award was reduced by a judge and settled between her and McDonalds for an undisclosed amount, yet the original jury award was $2.9 million. Judges rarely overturn jury verdicts because such actions get appealed and it just creates more work for the judge because he has to justify why he overturned it. So I don't think there is any realistic hope of this verdict being reduced.
And since the subject matter of the whole industry had been brought up by the plaintiffs, the defense would be free to ask about the industry as a whole - for instance, what is the industrywide average revenue earned by individual artists on a CD sale? What are the terms of the industry standard contract artists regarding copyrights? Did the industry not collude to fix CD prices, as evidenced by their conviction in Federal court?
None of which have any relevance to the matter of the trial, which is whether she did or did not install Kazaa and thus share music with others on the internet. All that would have to happen is that the RIAA attorney would argue that the questions are irrelevant and have the judge agree. The plantiff's attorney made the right call in arguing against the testimony of the RIAA guy.
You might remember the Menedez brothers trial of some years ago where they were originally acquitted of murdering their parents at their first trial, but then re-tried and convicted. At the first trial their lawyer had them testify that they were supposedly sexually abused by the father, which is why they killed him, and the jury bought it. In the second trial, the judge ruled that whether or not they had been abused was irrelevant to the case at hand and denied them the ability to testify about it, so without a "justification" for the crime, they were convicted.
You obviously have never served on a jury if you think that a jury would necessarily find it relevant whether or not the RIAA has engaged in all the things you mention. A jury might hear such testimony and decide that while all those things are bad and believe that the RIAA did them all, they have nothing to do with whether or not the plantiff broke the law. Juries are rarely made up of well educated people with a grasp of technology and technological issues.
I'm glad to see this offer. I am on the email list of a business that sells classical recordings and also apparently does a big business in turntables and various ridiculously priced gizmos to improve the sound of vinyl records. I like their email because sometimes they have SACDs or DVD-Audio discs for sale that I am interested in, but I abandoned records back in the late 80s. Apparently there are quite a few people out there with more money than sense who are convinced that "digital = suxor" and "vinyl = great". These people think nothing of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on gizmos like record clamps and such to supposedly "improve" the sound of their records. The choice is yours - you can buy the CD for $15 or you can buy the record for $30, the record clamp for $1994.99, the stylus force gauge to adjust your turntable needle for only $195, and so on. I'm not going to provide a link as I think they don't deserve to be Slashdotted. Nobody forces their idiotic customers spend so much money on turnables and accessories when they could just buy the CDs for a fraction of the cost. There are huge drawbacks to records - surface noise, every play of the disc technically causes it to degrade if only a little, less dynamic range than CD, and so on, yet apparently there is a group of rich boy vinylphiles out there who really can't spend enough money on things to improve the sound of their records. I congratulate Randi for calling b.s. on this whole subculture, but expect it to make no difference and for no one to take up his challenge.
Well that odd. I have nothing against George and I'm fan of most of the recipients listed. But it seems out of perspective to honor actors hundreds of years earlier than people who accomplish such monumental, world changing achievements. "Here's a guy who died to take out a bunker so that others can free France. Oohh, No wait, here's an actor!"
What a strange post. What's the deal about "hundreds of years earlier"? Do you think it's necessary to wait until someone has been dead for hundreds of years before they are honored? For example, would it mean anything to you if you heard that an asteroid was named after Lionel Barrymore? Would you even know who he was? At least Takei is still alive to enjoy this honor.
By the way, I met George Takei over a year ago and he was an incredibly nice person. I think it's great that he got this honor.
I think the RIAA would be perfectly consistent and argue that people were stealing in the 80's when they made mix tapes. Keep in mind that in those days that few people were on the internet. CD-R didn't exist. The only way consumers could copy music was to do so via low quality cassette tapes. The RIAA wasn't happy about home taping from day one and fought a losing battle against it, but since practical concerns (time involved in duplication, generational quality loss, and cost of media) made it impractical for people to engage in large scale duplication of music at home, they just turned a blind eye to the idea that a few people would share music with their friends via cassette tapes. However, choosing not to prosecute some guy for making one or two tapes for friends doesn't mean that they ever agreed that the practice was legal. It just would cost more to prosecute than it was worth.
So HD content can be written on plain DVD's....cool..Now we only need DVD players that can read HD content off DVD's
HD-DVD has been supported since the beginning on DVD discs. The format specification explicitly allows for DVD media. I have a dual layer DVD+R disc that contains HD-DVD format video and it plays fine on my PC. I've read on various video forums that those who own HD-DVD players have reported being able to play such discs. The only news here is that BluRay apparently is now supported on DVD discs.
The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Only because of the vast population of China. It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one. I don't see Chinese making any serious inroads in the West just for that reason alone. As someone who has studied several foreign languages, I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
No language is the best. English became a major world language in part because of the spread of the British Empire and in part because English grammar is pretty simple. Yes, much of the spelling makes no sense (well, there are reasons for it, but I'll skip the long explanation), but the grammar is basically easy. English is non-inflected, lacks grammatical genders, and the verbs have very simple conjugations. All of these make the language relatively easy to learn. Let's take Russian for an example now. It is inflected (6 cases), has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and almost all verbs come in pairs (perfective and imperfective). English got a big boost from the rise of American culture, but the relative simplicity of the grammar is why it became a world language. Mark Twain wrote a famous piece on his attempts to learn German and the insane grammar of the language where the word for "wife" in German is a masculine (!!!) word. Twain said that any reasonably intelligent person could come to grips with English a lot quicker than they could German just because the grammar of English is so much easier.
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech?
I totally agree with your excellent post. I know Russian very well and in the past I have used what is considered to be the best EnglishRussian translation program. It was certainly better than nothing, but it had many flaws. Many European languages, including Russian, use double negatives. For example, it is quite to correct to say in Russian "I don't have nothing". This use of double negatives was something that caused the translation program to have all kinds of difficulties and it would incorrectly translate negative statements between English and Russian, often turning them into the exact opposite of what was said in the original language. I used to use the program for quick Russian -> English translations, but I would always have to refer to the original Russian text to be sure that the translation really was correct. Translating double negatives was its biggest problem, but I remember a few other sentences that it just completely botched and rendered them into something that was the opposite of what was actually said.
I have read of many English speaking men who've met Russian speaking women through the internet and tried to use cheap or free translation programs to correspond with them and had the "relationship" (if you can call it that) end very quickly due to some big mistake the translation program made. Nobody with any sense would rely on machine translation in a business or personal setting. There's just too much potential for mistakes.
Moderators: PLEASE check the stories BEFORE you allow them to post. According to the folks on demonoid IRC, they were NOT shut down by the CRIA.
Geez slashdot is turning into DIGG where every moron can post "the truth"
You get a hearty second from me on this. It just seems that a lot of stuff on Slashdot these days is FUD and fearmongering. Just this week we had a big story on how evil Apple was going to deliberately brick your iPhone if you unlocked. I am not an Apple apologist or fanboy by the way and I own no Apple products, not even a iPod.
The real story apparently was that Apple tested its new firmware update on the iPhone on some unlocked iPhones and found that it bricked them. Apple decided to warn people - "Hey, if you unlocked your iPhone, you better skip this firmware update". Of course no good deed goes unpunished and the tin foil hat brigade swung into full force about how "evil Apple" had deliberately decided to brick unlocked iPhones in conjunction with some sort of unholy alliance with AT&T. Sadly, the truth seems to have been lost in this discussion.
Then we have the story that Slashdot had to update from earlier this week about how some open source program supposedly sent all kinds of private information to evil overlords who would use it in nefarious ways before the update arrived that said that the program in question only sent a few bits of information that in no way could identify its user. All you have to do any more these days is post something untrue but sure to ruffle some feathers and it shows up immediately.
You want her hanged if you want her executed by hanging. You want her hung if you want her be a hermaphrodite.:)
This is not funny. It's also not correct. From dictionary.com, the definition of hang includes: 4. to put to death by suspending by the neck from a gallows, gibbet, yardarm, or the like.
The correct past tense of hang is hung , so the original poster is right. I hereby order you to turn in your official grammar Nazi card and order you to take remedial English classes for the next 3 months.
I think what he's trying to imply is that iTunes (not iTMS) allows people to rip their own CD's unencumbered by DRM. In fact, it doesn't even have an option to force DRM on songs. I was curious about this too, until I realized that MS Windows Media Player has an option to "Copy Protect Music" and presumably has the ability to force people to "copy protect music" if Micrsoft deems it important. Imagine if iTunes never became the dominant music software; I'm guessing this option would already be turned on.
Actually, I think what he's saying is that he's so stupid that he thinks that all iTunes songs lack DRM, thus one person buys from iTunes and then all their friends have it. Never underestimate the stupidity of those in the entertainment industry.
I am one of the few people that actually has bought DRMed WMA files. Long story short - what I wanted was not available on iTunes and a site that legally sold WMA files was my only source as this was not available on CD anywhere. Windows Media Player very happily let me burn a normal audio CD of my purchased songs, which I could then rip if I so chose. So even if you buy DRMed WMA files, you can still burn normal audio CDs from them.
It is blindingly obvious that this guy got exactly what he was looking for.
I think so too. I am surprised that no one has commented on his question, which was whether or not Kerry belonged to the secret "Skull And Bones Society" at Yale. The fact that he would even ask this question at all says a lot about his political views. They fall under the category of "conspiracy theorist".
He clearly resisted arrest at first. There is no doubt at all about that. I only watched one video and I can't tell from that whether or not he continued to resist at the time he was tasered. I think it could be a case of an idiot escalating a problem by not cooperating with the police. It's been years since this happened, but more than 10 years ago I was temporarily arrested along with 2 friends while police considered the possibility that we were driving a stolen car. It's a long story, but we were eventually let go when it was finally determined that the driver did own the car. And there was a very valid reason that the police thought the car might be stolen. I cooperated with the police immediately and did not resist and the cop who arrested me calmed down real quick and I had no problems of any kind and suffered no mistreatment. If you cooperate with the police, situations calm down quickly and believe me, nobody wants to deal with cops when they are hyped up and on an adrenaline rush.
In other words Vista will display HD images but only in un-DRM mode, and if you try to pay a movie that you have bought and paid for but which has the flag set for 'trusted output path' or whatever they call it, Vista will refuse to display it. Which is, I think, the point Peter Gutmann was trying to make.
It's also worth noting that the only software players capable of playing BluRay and HD-DVD discs on PCs are the commercial products PowerDVD and WinDVD. Both of these players restrict output to something like 900x500 if the player detects that anything other than HDMI is being used. The discs themselves and the OS are not responsible for this decision. Both PowerDVD and WinDVD decided on their own to restrict output on HD-DVD and BluRay if HDMI is not in use. None of the movie studios have objected to this policy. So while the discs themselves and Windows Vista are not restricting HD content output, the only players available are restricting this output. None of the currently available HD-DVD and BluRay discs have turned on the flag on the disc that restricts output if HDMI is not in use, but that could change at any point in the future.
while I am as glad as most people here about SCO's deserved and inevitable downfall, sometimes I couldn't help thinking whether it would have been better if Novell hadn't stepped into this fight.
Sure, I understand that they are protecting their rights and IP and that they are right to do so. But by pulling the carpet out from under SCO's feet, they also prevented SCO's claims that "millions of lines of codes were copied from UNIX to Linux" being thoroughly tested (and debunked) in court.
I think it's a valid argument to say that you don't really want to go to court if you can win like this. Anything can happen when you go to court. Do you really want this case decided by a jury? I served on a jury 2 years ago and I was the only IT guy on it. Many of the people on the jury with me were roofers and guys in construction. These guys are not running Linux at home, that's for sure. A judge deciding a case is not necessarily better. Judges rarely understand the "interweb" and you could easily get a judge who is persuaded by SCO's b.s. to rule in their favor.
This may not be what you want to hear but any copy-protection will burden legitimate users. Pirates will remove the copy protection from your software and the unprotected version they create will be more usable than the version you offer.
I could not agree more. I'm going to give a real life personal example of how I stopped using a commercial product that I bought because of the copy protection and general "all our customers are thieves" attitude of the company that made it.
I am not going to go into too many details because I have a lot of negative stuff to say and companies are very litigious these days. I bought a computer translation program that can translate each way between English and an Eastern European language that speak and read very well, but not fluently. I had a relationship with a girl who spoke this language and her ability to speak English was very poor, so we communicated in her language. She wrote to me in her language and there were always some words I didn't know. To save time, I used the translation program for quick and dirty translations of her email into English, which I would then compare against the foreign language original to be sure the translation made sense and I'd look up in a dictionary anything that seemed wrongly translated. It saved me a lot of time to have English language translations of her email available, plus, when I wrote to her in her language, I would run in through the program to translate back into English and any words that didn't translate at all were misspellings by me in her language, so it was a nice way to spell check what I wrote to her.
This program runs under Windows, of course, so as often happens with Windows, I had some serious problems and I had no choice but to reinstall everything from scratch. The problem with the translation program is that it has a key that gets activated after you purchase a license. It's a one time activation. If you reinstall the software and use the same key, it won't ever activate. I contacted the company and explained how I had to reinstall Windows from scratch (and I had to do so because my PC had become inoperative) and they told me to buy another copy. They offered me a marginal discount on the price, but they were adamant that I would buy another copy and it was too bad that I reinstalled, but they wouldn't help me to make that original copy work again. I was very unhappy, but I bought another copy of the program. I really did not like at all the implication that I was a thief, but that's what I thought they were thinking. Some time later Windows screwed me over again and I had to reinstall everything from scratch. I didn't buy another copy of the program. I just used the free Babelfish translator instead. It's not as good as the commercial product I was using and it has limitations as to how much text it can translate at a time, but it's free. Windows is so sucky that I know that I will eventually have to reinstall everything from scratch again, so I'm tired of wasting my money buying a product that will cease to work on my next reinstall. The company in question has lost me forever as a customer. My relationship ended with the girl and I have no need for such software now, but even if I did, I would never buy from the company again.
If you treat your customers like thieves when they are not, you will lose them. The more you protect yourself against thieves, the more likely it is that it will actually encourage people to try to crack your software so they can use it properly. Since my experience, I have been told by somebody how to reactivate an existing license of the product after a reinstall of Windows so I could, in theory, reactivate my old purchased version of the product since my most recent reinstall. I just don't care anymore to use the product because I don't like the attitude of the people who make it toward their customers. I can tell you all that their attitude of "the customer is always wrong" is very typical of the country where this software is made.
The last I heard, the total cost of compliance with our income tax, personal and corporate, is about $286B a year in lost productivity, added bureaucracy, etc. It's ironic, but ending the variable-rate (I'm loathe to call such a stupid system "progressive") income tax in the United States alone, and replacing it with a very simple flat tax would constitute a sweeping tax cut just in terms of the resources freed up from the bullshit compliance efforts.
I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, but I'd like to know if you've been, uh, shall we say "smoking something" since you seem to imply that such cost savings would go towards creating more jobs in the USA. My experience has been that the more money companies save, the more of it that goes into the pockets of upper executives.
It doesn't help too that many Americans view things like health care as their God-given right. Many people don't want to even pay for their own health care. They foist those costs onto their employers, and the result is that we have an auto industry that is collapsing because it has to cut corners on the quality of its cars to price them at the same rate that Japanese companies, which don't lavish effectively unlimited health care coverage, onto their employees. GM, for example, has about $1,500/car in expenses just for health care that it has to pay for its union workers, many of whom haven't gotten the memo: most corporate employees don't get these benefits, why should they?
Now your post veers into the irrational. You take the single most extreme example you can of a totally atypical industry and act like it's typical. Yes, we know that the American automobile industry is on a path of self-destruction thanks the autoworkers union. Why pull this extreme example out and go on about it when you even admit "most corporate employees don't get these benefits"? Indeed. Everyone I know has to pay something for their own health care, even if some of the cost is paid by their employer. In fact, the cost me and my co-workers pay goes up every year.
Deregulation, a simplified tax code and making people pay their own way are the only things that will make America able to compete with these leaner, cheaper countries.
Not only am I skeptical that this will work (deregulation doesn't solve every problem, it sometimes leads to worse situations - have you forgotten the California energy deregulation debacle of a few years ago?), again, my experience has been that the more money American companies save, the more money that goes to the upper executives. I would not expect such a plan to result in more jobs. In fact, it might actually result in less because the executives would have even more money to keep to themselves. Never underestimate the greed of business executives or their ability to safeguard or even increase their own perks.
Hey, don't worry, their stock is around 60 cents and was at 44 cents. If they drop below a quarter a share, they get delisted (just like SGI). As far as Wall Street (and investors are concerned), you might as well be dead once that happens.
You can tell how much each of their moves is worth by watching their stock. Lose the Unix case, your stock drops from $1.56 to $0.44. Make a shill appeal and win back 16 cents. Laughable at best.
SCO is the perfect example of how the stock market makes no sense. After the judge ruled that SCO didn't have the copyrights to Unix, their stock plummetted to about 50 cents from being worth over a dollar a share. As I right this, 15 minutes ago (I'm using free trackers which lag behind the market by 15 minutes), SCOX is trading at 68 cents a share. This means that SCOX has actually gained in value since it got hammered. Does that make any rational sense? It doesn't to me, yet there appear to be many people out there who still think that SCOX has value.
Actually, stocks get delisted if they trade for under a dollar a share for a long enough period. SCO already faced a delisting action, but they did a reverse split where they converted 3 old shares for 1 new share. It's an artificial way to pump up a stock's value and it almost never works, yet in this case it did. I wouldn't be surprised to see SCO do yet another reverse split if necessary to get the share price back over a dollar and there would be somebody stupid enough to buy it.
I have 2 friends who several years ago got out of the stock market permanently. It was stuff like this that just defies all logic that made them decide that the stock market was too much black magic for their tastes.
I don't find CDs particularly expensive. In the UK they're £10 (£8 if I could really be arsed to shop around) and I only buy 1 or 2 a month (with the next purchase being Athlete's latest effort on Monday).
It's all relative. For Americans and Canadians, £10 is $20 US and about that much Canadian. As an American I can tell you that that price for a single CD is outrageous and similar pricing was what drove Tower Records out of business in most of the USA. Tower could never really get their costs down to sell anything for much less than $18 a disc and nobody in the USA wants to pay that. I almost always buy from Amazon because it's almost impossible to beat their prices even in places like Best Buy.
So judges in this country can't reason if I don't hire a $200/hr lawyer?
I'm not saying it's fair, but in the USA if you don't have a lawyer, you are asking for trouble in court. Part of this may be in the old days that some clients used to represent themselves when facing jail time and then after they lost, they would argue that they had "incompetent representation" and thus deserved a new trial. The argument didn't hold up, but it could have been chaotic had a few crazy judges bought into it. Also, judges were practicing attorneys at one time and they don't like the idea at all that anyone can adequately defend themselves without 3 years of law school because it makes what they do look like it's just not all that hard.
My best friend from high school has successfully represented himself a number of times in court. Most of the cases have been child support issues involving his ex-wife. It's really helped him that she has consistently hired the most incompetent, bottom of the barrel attorneys to represent her. My friend has told me stories about his time in court and the lack of preparation he's seen by her attorneys is shocking. I know that his ex-wife doesn't have a lot of spare cash and she gets the cheapest and thus lowest quality attorneys she can. A few times he's had stuff decided by arbitrators, not judges, and in those cases you don't really need an attorney. I get the impression that the judges don't like it when he represents himself, but he reads up on case law and has evidence to back his position up and given that he consistently faces incompetent attorneys in the stuff he has to deal with, so he wins every time because the opposition basically can't refute his evidence. I don't think he would represent himself for something that was life or death, but basically the stuff he does is just slam dunk stuff where he can prove conclusively that his ex-wife is not living up to her legal obligations with regards to their kids and she can't disprove it, so it's pretty easy for the judges to rule in his favor. I suppose the point of this is that you can represent yourself for things where you can conclusively prove your side is right, but only a fool would represent himself when facing a case like the one in the original post. My friend doesn't really need the child support he always has to sue her over, but she abandoned him and the kids to chase some crazy dream of restarting a relationship with her old high school boyfriend, so it just makes him determined that she will live up to her obligations and he represents himself to keep costs down.
There's probably a very good chance this is related to Vista's heavy handed DRM software. It's been reported that Vista does constant checking to see if you (gasp!) might be playing a file it thinks you don't have rights to. I could certainly believe that this kind of overkill DRM might effect network performance.
It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long.
I would call this "an overly optimistic projection by someone who doesn't follow the industry very deeply". Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.
I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting is kind of like being given a high bit rate MP3 file and then wanting to convert it to Ogg Vorbis in some mistaken belief that doing so will make it "better". Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files and maybe if you do a really good job you can't tell that the quality has dropped, but the video certainly won't be better. Given the lack of standalone H.264 playback devices, I don't know what would be hoped to be gained by this at this time. You'd only end up with a slightly smaller file that is even less likely to be able to be played back on anything but a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, this story appears to be fake.
Imagine that. A made up Russian story. For those who don't know, some Russian online "news agencies" (that term is used very loosely) regularly run stories that would fit perfectly in Weekly World News in the USA. Note to future article submitters - just because some Russian dude with a blog says it's true, that doesn't mean it necessarily is.
What a great idea. A very visible device that announces to the entire world that the unfortunate wearer is an epileptic. Epilepsy is a disease that many people are ashamed of because it makes them "different" from everyone else. Can you imagine a child being taunted for such a device? I certainly can.
Even adults are reluctant to admit that they have the disease for fear of being different. About 9 years ago I played in a recreational coed volleyball league run every fall by my apartment complex. I was a team captain and I complained to the league organizer about halfway through the season about a very strange young lady on my team who didn't drive a car and didn't have normal reflexes. Public transportation is very poor where I lived at the team, so it was definitely quite abnormal for someone to live there and not drive a car. She had to get rides from other people for everything - to go to games, to go to work, etc. I was told by the league organizer that she didn't drive because she had epilepsy. I was quite shocked because this young woman never mentioned it to me when I took her to our games and she acted like she never drove because she never needed to in the past. In reality she couldn't get a driver's license because her epilepsy was too severe. So if even adults are afraid to admit that they have it, I'm having a hard time believing that very many people are going to volunteer for such an obvious display to the world that something is different about them.
It's really very easy to understand why TVBoxSet.com is in business and the MPAA seems to not care.
1) They operate out of the Philippines. I don't know how strong or weak copyright law is in the Philippines, but it could be that these boxed sets are legal there.
2) Not that many people know about them, so sales really aren't all that great.
3) From everything I've read about them (I knew about them a long time before this article on Slashdot), the quality is bad. The MPAA may know that and figure that the product is so bad that letting people buy crap teaches a better lesson than fighting it publicly and making sure that a lot more people know about the website than do right now. Right now not that many people know about the website and a lot of those who bought product from it aren't real happy. Unhappy customers work in favor of the MPAA.
4) Going after file sharers is low hanging fruit and doesn't involve the complications and risk and cost of dealing with foreign legal systems. I can't speak about the Philippines as I have never been there, but I can tell you from personal experience that if this was happening in certain parts of the ex-USSR that any court case would not at all be about laws but it would be all about the bribes and whoever paid the highest bribe would get the decision in their favor. The local guys would have huge advantages over the MPAA. The local guys would have access to the judge to pay him off, they would be able to hire hitmen to kill any attorneys working for the MPAA in the country, and so on. The MPAA might be afraid to try to bribe the judge or believe it or not, actually get outbribed by the locals. It happens. The locals could pay a big bribe to the judge and then get him to rat out the MPAA for trying to bribe him, even though he got bribed already by the local guys. Fighting such a court case in a place that has strong rule of law and low corruption is one thing. Fighting such a case in a country where justice goes to the highest bidder in something else.
A verdict of $222,000.00, for infringement of 24 song files worth a total of $23.76?
In a case where there was zero evidence of the defendant having transferred any of those files?.
It is one of the most irrational things I have ever seen in my life in the law.
If the Judge doesn't set aside the verdict sua sponte, I expect there to be motion practice to set aside the verdict, based on its obvious unconstitutionality and numerous other reasons, and if that fails I expect there to be a successful appeal.
While your arguments are valid, I'm guessing that you have never served on a jury in the USA. I have. I can't say I'm surprised at all. Jury decisions sometimes (maybe even most times) make no sense at all. I've been on a jury twice. Didn't like it either time. Juries are not generally composed of well educated people who grasp technology. On the last jury I served on, nobody was under 30 years old. Most of the jury members worked in construction. I was the only IT guy on the jury and I seriously doubt that anyone on the jury besides me had ever used an operating system other than Windows. I would be surprised if anyone on that jury even knew how to download a song at all. So you see, it's not difficult to get a jury that doesn't understand technology at all.
Then you add to the mix that some jurors are crazed, wild-eyed "Kill them all if they broke the law!" types who look to stick it to "evil doers". We had one of these guys on the last jury I was on and let me tell you, he was incredibly difficult to deal with. 11 of us reached agreement on our case pretty quickly. We voted for convicting the defendant on 2 of 3 counts he was charged with and 11 of us felt that the final count was unfair, but the one guy threatened to hang the jury (that means the jury is stalled because they can't reach an agreement - that might be an Americanism that some of you don't know) unless we convicted on all 3 counts. It took a lot of persuasion from the jury foreman to get this jerk to agree that 2 convictions out of 3 was enough. We had some people who said that they reluctantly agreed to 2 convictions and if that one guy wanted to hold out for all 3, they were going to pull back their votes and vote for either 1 or zero convictions and that they would NEVER agree to 3 convictions. So 2 out of 3 convictions was the best we could do because 11 people thought it was fair and 1 thought it wasn't harsh enough, but he finally agreed to it.
You sometimes get a few of these bloodthirsty people who want to stick to the evil downloaders for "breaking the law and stealing" and "send a message to other people that stealing won't be tolerated!" If you've ever served on a jury, you might understand how you could get 3 or 4 people like this who are demanding blood. Then you get the other jurors who basically go "Yeah, the defendant is guilty and while I'm not in favor of a $200,000 fine, they did break the law and I do want to go home" so they agree to it. Juries make all kinds of crazy decisions. Surely many Americans here are familiar with the infamous "McDonalds coffee case" where a jury awarded $2.9 million (!!!) to a woman who got 3rd degree burns from accidentally spilling hot coffee on herself from McDonalds. The actual award was reduced by a judge and settled between her and McDonalds for an undisclosed amount, yet the original jury award was $2.9 million. Judges rarely overturn jury verdicts because such actions get appealed and it just creates more work for the judge because he has to justify why he overturned it. So I don't think there is any realistic hope of this verdict being reduced.
And since the subject matter of the whole industry had been brought up by the plaintiffs, the defense would be free to ask about the industry as a whole - for instance, what is the industrywide average revenue earned by individual artists on a CD sale? What are the terms of the industry standard contract artists regarding copyrights? Did the industry not collude to fix CD prices, as evidenced by their conviction in Federal court?
None of which have any relevance to the matter of the trial, which is whether she did or did not install Kazaa and thus share music with others on the internet. All that would have to happen is that the RIAA attorney would argue that the questions are irrelevant and have the judge agree. The plantiff's attorney made the right call in arguing against the testimony of the RIAA guy.
You might remember the Menedez brothers trial of some years ago where they were originally acquitted of murdering their parents at their first trial, but then re-tried and convicted. At the first trial their lawyer had them testify that they were supposedly sexually abused by the father, which is why they killed him, and the jury bought it. In the second trial, the judge ruled that whether or not they had been abused was irrelevant to the case at hand and denied them the ability to testify about it, so without a "justification" for the crime, they were convicted.
You obviously have never served on a jury if you think that a jury would necessarily find it relevant whether or not the RIAA has engaged in all the things you mention. A jury might hear such testimony and decide that while all those things are bad and believe that the RIAA did them all, they have nothing to do with whether or not the plantiff broke the law. Juries are rarely made up of well educated people with a grasp of technology and technological issues.
I'm glad to see this offer. I am on the email list of a business that sells classical recordings and also apparently does a big business in turntables and various ridiculously priced gizmos to improve the sound of vinyl records. I like their email because sometimes they have SACDs or DVD-Audio discs for sale that I am interested in, but I abandoned records back in the late 80s. Apparently there are quite a few people out there with more money than sense who are convinced that "digital = suxor" and "vinyl = great". These people think nothing of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on gizmos like record clamps and such to supposedly "improve" the sound of their records. The choice is yours - you can buy the CD for $15 or you can buy the record for $30, the record clamp for $1994.99, the stylus force gauge to adjust your turntable needle for only $195, and so on. I'm not going to provide a link as I think they don't deserve to be Slashdotted. Nobody forces their idiotic customers spend so much money on turnables and accessories when they could just buy the CDs for a fraction of the cost. There are huge drawbacks to records - surface noise, every play of the disc technically causes it to degrade if only a little, less dynamic range than CD, and so on, yet apparently there is a group of rich boy vinylphiles out there who really can't spend enough money on things to improve the sound of their records. I congratulate Randi for calling b.s. on this whole subculture, but expect it to make no difference and for no one to take up his challenge.
Well that odd. I have nothing against George and I'm fan of most of the recipients listed. But it seems out of perspective to honor actors hundreds of years earlier than people who accomplish such monumental, world changing achievements. "Here's a guy who died to take out a bunker so that others can free France. Oohh, No wait, here's an actor!"
What a strange post. What's the deal about "hundreds of years earlier"? Do you think it's necessary to wait until someone has been dead for hundreds of years before they are honored? For example, would it mean anything to you if you heard that an asteroid was named after Lionel Barrymore? Would you even know who he was? At least Takei is still alive to enjoy this honor.
By the way, I met George Takei over a year ago and he was an incredibly nice person. I think it's great that he got this honor.
I think the RIAA would be perfectly consistent and argue that people were stealing in the 80's when they made mix tapes. Keep in mind that in those days that few people were on the internet. CD-R didn't exist. The only way consumers could copy music was to do so via low quality cassette tapes. The RIAA wasn't happy about home taping from day one and fought a losing battle against it, but since practical concerns (time involved in duplication, generational quality loss, and cost of media) made it impractical for people to engage in large scale duplication of music at home, they just turned a blind eye to the idea that a few people would share music with their friends via cassette tapes. However, choosing not to prosecute some guy for making one or two tapes for friends doesn't mean that they ever agreed that the practice was legal. It just would cost more to prosecute than it was worth.
So HD content can be written on plain DVD's....cool..Now we only need DVD players that can read HD content off DVD's
HD-DVD has been supported since the beginning on DVD discs. The format specification explicitly allows for DVD media. I have a dual layer DVD+R disc that contains HD-DVD format video and it plays fine on my PC. I've read on various video forums that those who own HD-DVD players have reported being able to play such discs. The only news here is that BluRay apparently is now supported on DVD discs.
The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Only because of the vast population of China. It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one. I don't see Chinese making any serious inroads in the West just for that reason alone. As someone who has studied several foreign languages, I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
No language is the best. English became a major world language in part because of the spread of the British Empire and in part because English grammar is pretty simple. Yes, much of the spelling makes no sense (well, there are reasons for it, but I'll skip the long explanation), but the grammar is basically easy. English is non-inflected, lacks grammatical genders, and the verbs have very simple conjugations. All of these make the language relatively easy to learn. Let's take Russian for an example now. It is inflected (6 cases), has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and almost all verbs come in pairs (perfective and imperfective). English got a big boost from the rise of American culture, but the relative simplicity of the grammar is why it became a world language. Mark Twain wrote a famous piece on his attempts to learn German and the insane grammar of the language where the word for "wife" in German is a masculine (!!!) word. Twain said that any reasonably intelligent person could come to grips with English a lot quicker than they could German just because the grammar of English is so much easier.
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech?
I totally agree with your excellent post. I know Russian very well and in the past I have used what is considered to be the best EnglishRussian translation program. It was certainly better than nothing, but it had many flaws. Many European languages, including Russian, use double negatives. For example, it is quite to correct to say in Russian "I don't have nothing". This use of double negatives was something that caused the translation program to have all kinds of difficulties and it would incorrectly translate negative statements between English and Russian, often turning them into the exact opposite of what was said in the original language. I used to use the program for quick Russian -> English translations, but I would always have to refer to the original Russian text to be sure that the translation really was correct. Translating double negatives was its biggest problem, but I remember a few other sentences that it just completely botched and rendered them into something that was the opposite of what was actually said.
I have read of many English speaking men who've met Russian speaking women through the internet and tried to use cheap or free translation programs to correspond with them and had the "relationship" (if you can call it that) end very quickly due to some big mistake the translation program made. Nobody with any sense would rely on machine translation in a business or personal setting. There's just too much potential for mistakes.
Moderators: PLEASE check the stories BEFORE you allow them to post. According to the folks on demonoid IRC, they were NOT shut down by the CRIA.
Geez slashdot is turning into DIGG where every moron can post "the truth"
You get a hearty second from me on this. It just seems that a lot of stuff on Slashdot these days is FUD and fearmongering. Just this week we had a big story on how evil Apple was going to deliberately brick your iPhone if you unlocked. I am not an Apple apologist or fanboy by the way and I own no Apple products, not even a iPod.
The real story apparently was that Apple tested its new firmware update on the iPhone on some unlocked iPhones and found that it bricked them. Apple decided to warn people - "Hey, if you unlocked your iPhone, you better skip this firmware update". Of course no good deed goes unpunished and the tin foil hat brigade swung into full force about how "evil Apple" had deliberately decided to brick unlocked iPhones in conjunction with some sort of unholy alliance with AT&T. Sadly, the truth seems to have been lost in this discussion.
Then we have the story that Slashdot had to update from earlier this week about how some open source program supposedly sent all kinds of private information to evil overlords who would use it in nefarious ways before the update arrived that said that the program in question only sent a few bits of information that in no way could identify its user. All you have to do any more these days is post something untrue but sure to ruffle some feathers and it shows up immediately.
You want her hanged if you want her executed by hanging. You want her hung if you want her be a hermaphrodite. :)
This is not funny. It's also not correct. From dictionary.com, the definition of hang includes:
4. to put to death by suspending by the neck from a gallows, gibbet, yardarm, or the like.
The correct past tense of hang is hung , so the original poster is right. I hereby order you to turn in your official grammar Nazi card and order you to take remedial English classes for the next 3 months.
I think what he's trying to imply is that iTunes (not iTMS) allows people to rip their own CD's unencumbered by DRM. In fact, it doesn't even have an option to force DRM on songs. I was curious about this too, until I realized that MS Windows Media Player has an option to "Copy Protect Music" and presumably has the ability to force people to "copy protect music" if Micrsoft deems it important. Imagine if iTunes never became the dominant music software; I'm guessing this option would already be turned on.
Actually, I think what he's saying is that he's so stupid that he thinks that all iTunes songs lack DRM, thus one person buys from iTunes and then all their friends have it. Never underestimate the stupidity of those in the entertainment industry.
I am one of the few people that actually has bought DRMed WMA files. Long story short - what I wanted was not available on iTunes and a site that legally sold WMA files was my only source as this was not available on CD anywhere. Windows Media Player very happily let me burn a normal audio CD of my purchased songs, which I could then rip if I so chose. So even if you buy DRMed WMA files, you can still burn normal audio CDs from them.
It is blindingly obvious that this guy got exactly what he was looking for.
I think so too. I am surprised that no one has commented on his question, which was whether or not Kerry belonged to the secret "Skull And Bones Society" at Yale. The fact that he would even ask this question at all says a lot about his political views. They fall under the category of "conspiracy theorist".
He clearly resisted arrest at first. There is no doubt at all about that. I only watched one video and I can't tell from that whether or not he continued to resist at the time he was tasered. I think it could be a case of an idiot escalating a problem by not cooperating with the police. It's been years since this happened, but more than 10 years ago I was temporarily arrested along with 2 friends while police considered the possibility that we were driving a stolen car. It's a long story, but we were eventually let go when it was finally determined that the driver did own the car. And there was a very valid reason that the police thought the car might be stolen. I cooperated with the police immediately and did not resist and the cop who arrested me calmed down real quick and I had no problems of any kind and suffered no mistreatment. If you cooperate with the police, situations calm down quickly and believe me, nobody wants to deal with cops when they are hyped up and on an adrenaline rush.
In other words Vista will display HD images but only in un-DRM mode, and if you try to pay a movie that you have bought and paid for but which has the flag set for 'trusted output path' or whatever they call it, Vista will refuse to display it. Which is, I think, the point Peter Gutmann was trying to make.
It's also worth noting that the only software players capable of playing BluRay and HD-DVD discs on PCs are the commercial products PowerDVD and WinDVD. Both of these players restrict output to something like 900x500 if the player detects that anything other than HDMI is being used. The discs themselves and the OS are not responsible for this decision. Both PowerDVD and WinDVD decided on their own to restrict output on HD-DVD and BluRay if HDMI is not in use. None of the movie studios have objected to this policy. So while the discs themselves and Windows Vista are not restricting HD content output, the only players available are restricting this output. None of the currently available HD-DVD and BluRay discs have turned on the flag on the disc that restricts output if HDMI is not in use, but that could change at any point in the future.
while I am as glad as most people here about SCO's deserved and inevitable downfall, sometimes I couldn't help thinking whether it would have been better if Novell hadn't stepped into this fight.
Sure, I understand that they are protecting their rights and IP and that they are right to do so. But by pulling the carpet out from under SCO's feet, they also prevented SCO's claims that "millions of lines of codes were copied from UNIX to Linux" being thoroughly tested (and debunked) in court.
I think it's a valid argument to say that you don't really want to go to court if you can win like this. Anything can happen when you go to court. Do you really want this case decided by a jury? I served on a jury 2 years ago and I was the only IT guy on it. Many of the people on the jury with me were roofers and guys in construction. These guys are not running Linux at home, that's for sure. A judge deciding a case is not necessarily better. Judges rarely understand the "interweb" and you could easily get a judge who is persuaded by SCO's b.s. to rule in their favor.
This may not be what you want to hear but any copy-protection will burden legitimate users. Pirates will remove the copy protection from your software and the unprotected version they create will be more usable than the version you offer.
I could not agree more. I'm going to give a real life personal example of how I stopped using a commercial product that I bought because of the copy protection and general "all our customers are thieves" attitude of the company that made it.
I am not going to go into too many details because I have a lot of negative stuff to say and companies are very litigious these days. I bought a computer translation program that can translate each way between English and an Eastern European language that speak and read very well, but not fluently. I had a relationship with a girl who spoke this language and her ability to speak English was very poor, so we communicated in her language. She wrote to me in her language and there were always some words I didn't know. To save time, I used the translation program for quick and dirty translations of her email into English, which I would then compare against the foreign language original to be sure the translation made sense and I'd look up in a dictionary anything that seemed wrongly translated. It saved me a lot of time to have English language translations of her email available, plus, when I wrote to her in her language, I would run in through the program to translate back into English and any words that didn't translate at all were misspellings by me in her language, so it was a nice way to spell check what I wrote to her.
This program runs under Windows, of course, so as often happens with Windows, I had some serious problems and I had no choice but to reinstall everything from scratch. The problem with the translation program is that it has a key that gets activated after you purchase a license. It's a one time activation. If you reinstall the software and use the same key, it won't ever activate. I contacted the company and explained how I had to reinstall Windows from scratch (and I had to do so because my PC had become inoperative) and they told me to buy another copy. They offered me a marginal discount on the price, but they were adamant that I would buy another copy and it was too bad that I reinstalled, but they wouldn't help me to make that original copy work again. I was very unhappy, but I bought another copy of the program. I really did not like at all the implication that I was a thief, but that's what I thought they were thinking. Some time later Windows screwed me over again and I had to reinstall everything from scratch. I didn't buy another copy of the program. I just used the free Babelfish translator instead. It's not as good as the commercial product I was using and it has limitations as to how much text it can translate at a time, but it's free. Windows is so sucky that I know that I will eventually have to reinstall everything from scratch again, so I'm tired of wasting my money buying a product that will cease to work on my next reinstall. The company in question has lost me forever as a customer. My relationship ended with the girl and I have no need for such software now, but even if I did, I would never buy from the company again.
If you treat your customers like thieves when they are not, you will lose them. The more you protect yourself against thieves, the more likely it is that it will actually encourage people to try to crack your software so they can use it properly. Since my experience, I have been told by somebody how to reactivate an existing license of the product after a reinstall of Windows so I could, in theory, reactivate my old purchased version of the product since my most recent reinstall. I just don't care anymore to use the product because I don't like the attitude of the people who make it toward their customers. I can tell you all that their attitude of "the customer is always wrong" is very typical of the country where this software is made.
The last I heard, the total cost of compliance with our income tax, personal and corporate, is about $286B a year in lost productivity, added bureaucracy, etc. It's ironic, but ending the variable-rate (I'm loathe to call such a stupid system "progressive") income tax in the United States alone, and replacing it with a very simple flat tax would constitute a sweeping tax cut just in terms of the resources freed up from the bullshit compliance efforts.
I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, but I'd like to know if you've been, uh, shall we say "smoking something" since you seem to imply that such cost savings would go towards creating more jobs in the USA. My experience has been that the more money companies save, the more of it that goes into the pockets of upper executives.
It doesn't help too that many Americans view things like health care as their God-given right. Many people don't want to even pay for their own health care. They foist those costs onto their employers, and the result is that we have an auto industry that is collapsing because it has to cut corners on the quality of its cars to price them at the same rate that Japanese companies, which don't lavish effectively unlimited health care coverage, onto their employees. GM, for example, has about $1,500/car in expenses just for health care that it has to pay for its union workers, many of whom haven't gotten the memo: most corporate employees don't get these benefits, why should they?
Now your post veers into the irrational. You take the single most extreme example you can of a totally atypical industry and act like it's typical. Yes, we know that the American automobile industry is on a path of self-destruction thanks the autoworkers union. Why pull this extreme example out and go on about it when you even admit "most corporate employees don't get these benefits"? Indeed. Everyone I know has to pay something for their own health care, even if some of the cost is paid by their employer. In fact, the cost me and my co-workers pay goes up every year.
Deregulation, a simplified tax code and making people pay their own way are the only things that will make America able to compete with these leaner, cheaper countries.
Not only am I skeptical that this will work (deregulation doesn't solve every problem, it sometimes leads to worse situations - have you forgotten the California energy deregulation debacle of a few years ago?), again, my experience has been that the more money American companies save, the more money that goes to the upper executives. I would not expect such a plan to result in more jobs. In fact, it might actually result in less because the executives would have even more money to keep to themselves.
Never underestimate the greed of business executives or their ability to safeguard or even increase their own perks.
Hey, don't worry, their stock is around 60 cents and was at 44 cents. If they drop below a quarter a share, they get delisted (just like SGI). As far as Wall Street (and investors are concerned), you might as well be dead once that happens.
You can tell how much each of their moves is worth by watching their stock. Lose the Unix case, your stock drops from $1.56 to $0.44. Make a shill appeal and win back 16 cents. Laughable at best.
SCO is the perfect example of how the stock market makes no sense. After the judge ruled that SCO didn't have the copyrights to Unix, their stock plummetted to about 50 cents from being worth over a dollar a share. As I right this, 15 minutes ago (I'm using free trackers which lag behind the market by 15 minutes), SCOX is trading at 68 cents a share. This means that SCOX has actually gained in value since it got hammered. Does that make any rational sense? It doesn't to me, yet there appear to be many people out there who still think that SCOX has value.
Actually, stocks get delisted if they trade for under a dollar a share for a long enough period. SCO already faced a delisting action, but they did a reverse split where they converted 3 old shares for 1 new share. It's an artificial way to pump up a stock's value and it almost never works, yet in this case it did. I wouldn't be surprised to see SCO do yet another reverse split if necessary to get the share price back over a dollar and there would be somebody stupid enough to buy it.
I have 2 friends who several years ago got out of the stock market permanently. It was stuff like this that just defies all logic that made them decide that the stock market was too much black magic for their tastes.
I don't find CDs particularly expensive. In the UK they're £10 (£8 if I could really be arsed to shop around) and I only buy 1 or 2 a month (with the next purchase being Athlete's latest effort on Monday).
It's all relative. For Americans and Canadians, £10 is $20 US and about that much Canadian. As an American I can tell you that that price for a single CD is outrageous and similar pricing was what drove Tower Records out of business in most of the USA. Tower could never really get their costs down to sell anything for much less than $18 a disc and nobody in the USA wants to pay that. I almost always buy from Amazon because it's almost impossible to beat their prices even in places like Best Buy.
So judges in this country can't reason if I don't hire a $200/hr lawyer?
I'm not saying it's fair, but in the USA if you don't have a lawyer, you are asking for trouble in court. Part of this may be in the old days that some clients used to represent themselves when facing jail time and then after they lost, they would argue that they had "incompetent representation" and thus deserved a new trial. The argument didn't hold up, but it could have been chaotic had a few crazy judges bought into it. Also, judges were practicing attorneys at one time and they don't like the idea at all that anyone can adequately defend themselves without 3 years of law school because it makes what they do look like it's just not all that hard.
My best friend from high school has successfully represented himself a number of times in court. Most of the cases have been child support issues involving his ex-wife. It's really helped him that she has consistently hired the most incompetent, bottom of the barrel attorneys to represent her. My friend has told me stories about his time in court and the lack of preparation he's seen by her attorneys is shocking. I know that his ex-wife doesn't have a lot of spare cash and she gets the cheapest and thus lowest quality attorneys she can. A few times he's had stuff decided by arbitrators, not judges, and in those cases you don't really need an attorney. I get the impression that the judges don't like it when he represents himself, but he reads up on case law and has evidence to back his position up and given that he consistently faces incompetent attorneys in the stuff he has to deal with, so he wins every time because the opposition basically can't refute his evidence. I don't think he would represent himself for something that was life or death, but basically the stuff he does is just slam dunk stuff where he can prove conclusively that his ex-wife is not living up to her legal obligations with regards to their kids and she can't disprove it, so it's pretty easy for the judges to rule in his favor. I suppose the point of this is that you can represent yourself for things where you can conclusively prove your side is right, but only a fool would represent himself when facing a case like the one in the original post. My friend doesn't really need the child support he always has to sue her over, but she abandoned him and the kids to chase some crazy dream of restarting a relationship with her old high school boyfriend, so it just makes him determined that she will live up to her obligations and he represents himself to keep costs down.
There's probably a very good chance this is related to Vista's heavy handed DRM software. It's been reported that Vista does constant checking to see if you (gasp!) might be playing a file it thinks you don't have rights to. I could certainly believe that this kind of overkill DRM might effect network performance.
It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long.
I would call this "an overly optimistic projection by someone who doesn't follow the industry very deeply". Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.
I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting
is kind of like being given a high bit rate MP3 file and then wanting to convert it to Ogg Vorbis in some mistaken belief that doing so will make it "better". Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files and maybe if you do a really good job you can't tell that the quality has dropped, but the video certainly won't be better. Given the lack of standalone H.264 playback devices, I don't know what would be hoped to be gained by this at this time. You'd only end up with a slightly smaller file that is even less likely to be able to be played back on anything but a PC.
The prices in USA really scares me.
I am paying around $30 for 10Mbps, guaranteed, both directions. For around $50 I can get 100Mbps.
I'm curious. You didn't name the country where you live. Are you also afraid of doing that?