These are the same guys who think they can set standards by copyrighting the standards and charging hundreds of dollars for a copy. I've implemented ISO standards; it was NOT pretty. Beleive me, the IETF model is orders of magnitude better. IETF: All standards available for free download. Draft standards require several independent implementations before approved. ISO: Argue about standard for several years in committee. Solve arguement by adding all the features competing companies ask for. Publish standard. Then spend next couple years publishing addendums to standard as people try to implement it and discover it's ambiguous and unimplementable. Why do you think we're all still running TCP/IP instead of the ISO/OSI protocol stack? Hint: Many years ago a company called Touch Communications implemented the entire ISO/OSI stack under DOS. It took around 600K -- leaving about 40K leftover for your application!
If they could just give this car six times the range at one eleventh the cost... then it would be competive with my new Honda Civic Hybrid for commuting to work. Maybe if I was into drag racing it would make more sense to pay more for a car than I payed for my house... but personally, I'd rather have a house.
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Irony: Moderating a post as "Redundant" for pointing out that something is redundant. Too bad we can't metamoderate that moderation as "Funny"!
Re:So what does this mean to the average user?
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You forgot: "Can I still download pron?"
Re:Was there really anything important on there?
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 1
PBS broadcasts (today's schedule) using Telstars, but is that really vital?
You've OBVIOUSLY never had to deal with a 3-year old that hasn't gotten her daily fix of Sesame Street! (I'll resist the urge to use the phrase "You insensitive clod!")
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
As long as they tell you their "20GByte" drive is actually 20,000,000,000 bytes unformated (which Maxtor does), then I don't see the problem. I was under the impression that every hard driver manufacturer used a multiplier of 1000 instead of 1024, in which case it is pretty hard to call this anticompetive behaviour. In fact, it is just the opposite -- every manufacturer was forced to use this definition to avoid unfavorable price/size comparisons with other vendors.
Dude, here in the states, there is a tradition that radio stations play the album en toto every thanksgiving, so we assume everybody has heard it... "I cannot tell a lie... I put that letter under all that garbage!"
And despite the fact that kevlar vests have been out for years, people are still being killed or injured by being shot in the chest, and they still blame it on the shooters! Amazing!
Maybe, just maybe, the IT department was too busy reseting passwords every time a user forgot their password to patch thousands of systems? Or perhaps their managers refused to pay for the overtime that would be required because they beleived the M$ party line they their systems were now "Trustworthy Computing" secure?
Not the same. ISPs no either the sender or receiver of an email is a customer. With IMs both sender and receiver could be non-customers (as I understand it). So you could conceivably be handling 100 million requests a day even if you only have 10 real customers...
As for funding, why bother with a centralized server?
Uh, 'cause most dial-up users IP addresses change every time they log in? Makes 'em a little hard to find with multicasting to everyone in the world. You've got to have a service somewhere to translate the IM name into current IP... after that, sure, the messages can go direct. Remember P2P networks don't let you find a specific user amongst millions connected -- they only let you find one of many thousands of copies of a file, which is much easier.
Let's see... AOL provides an IM service for AOL users to leverage AOL sales. If they let just anybody connect to the servers, what incentive would you have to shell out $27/month for AOL. Ditto for MSN. Not sure what Yahoo's econmic model is, but presumably it has something to do with advertising that you don't see if you don't use their client. Let's put it this way: how long could the phone company stay in business if all calls were free and their only revenue stream was from selling phones... but anybody else could connect a phone not made by them to the network? Think they might have some powerful incentive to force you to use their phones?
where is the economic incentive to provide an IM service that everybody in the world can use? Servers do cost money... any ideas on how one could fund this?
So it should be ok to distribute photocopies of a copyrighted book, because the photocopies do not have the same quality as the original book? Quality is a technical problem, it should not be a legal one. Should FM stations pay higher royalties per song played than AM, because the sound quality is better? The fact the a 64kbit/s ISDN channel does not not have the same sound quality as a 64kbit/s MP3 because it's not using decent compression could change tomorrow... what if the phone company started using a better codec than the MP3? Why are the bits going over the ISDN line ok if it's a dialed point-to-point virtual circuit, but not ok if it's a connection to a server streaming live audio over the internet? Isn't it basically the same bitstream? If I call someone from my digital cellphone while sitting in a Steely Dan concert, am I infringing on their IP by allowing my friend to hear the concert?
And how is getting an electronic copy and promising "cross-my-heart!" that I'm going to delete it when I'm done with it really any different than borrowing a book from a library and promising I won't scan the whole thing in with my scanner into OCR software? Why do we take it as a given that just because digital information is easier to copy, it's subject to different rules? Art has always been subject to copying, and it always will be. For thousands of years, if your performed your song in front of another musician, or told your story in front of another storyteller, they could "steal" it and claim it as their own! Now we have a small group of people insisting the government protect their income streams by forcing other people not to sing their songs or tell their stories... doesn't this violate the equal protection clause of the constitution?
Obviously, the people that panic because of a one-in-a-million chance of an asteroid hitting the earth are the same ones that buy lottery tickets because of a one-in-sixty-million chance of winning the lottery. Apparently a large segment of the population suffers from a Rainman-like inability to comprehend either large numbers or statistics. Perhaps we SHOULD be careful what we tell these people. It's like when I was babysitting the 7-year old next store, and causually mentioned that because rivers meander, some day the river slough a half mile from his house would be where his house his. He started screaming and crying -- he couldn't comprehend the fact that "some day" would be long after he was dead and his house had been torn down anyway.
Problem is, so far scientists have done more to annihilate us then anything else -- or at least they're providing the tools to do so. Remember, the Nobel prize was set up by somebody that felt guilty about inventing dynamite! If we had a group of scientists dedicated to watching out for things that could potentially annihilate us, most of them would be watching other scientists! Just try getting a grant from the NSF for that!
How often do you talk to someone on the phone and hear copyrighted music playing in the background? Clearly the phone networks are rife with piracy! SHould the phone company be made to detect music being played over the phone, and block it? Shouldn't the phone company report to the RIAA all customers that are using the phone network to illegally distribute copyrighted music? Isn't that exactly what the RIAA is asking the ISPs to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Check your browser languages settings. In HTTP, it is "en-us".
I thought that's why we spelled it "center" and not "centre" -- to avoid paying royalities to the Brits!
These are the same guys who think they can set standards by copyrighting the standards and charging hundreds of dollars for a copy. I've implemented ISO standards; it was NOT pretty. Beleive me, the IETF model is orders of magnitude better. IETF: All standards available for free download. Draft standards require several independent implementations before approved. ISO: Argue about standard for several years in committee. Solve arguement by adding all the features competing companies ask for. Publish standard. Then spend next couple years publishing addendums to standard as people try to implement it and discover it's ambiguous and unimplementable. Why do you think we're all still running TCP/IP instead of the ISO/OSI protocol stack? Hint: Many years ago a company called Touch Communications implemented the entire ISO/OSI stack under DOS. It took around 600K -- leaving about 40K leftover for your application!
If they could just give this car six times the range at one eleventh the cost... then it would be competive with my new Honda Civic Hybrid for commuting to work. Maybe if I was into drag racing it would make more sense to pay more for a car than I payed for my house... but personally, I'd rather have a house.
Irony: Moderating a post as "Redundant" for pointing out that something is redundant. Too bad we can't metamoderate that moderation as "Funny"!
You forgot: "Can I still download pron?"
You've OBVIOUSLY never had to deal with a 3-year old that hasn't gotten her daily fix of Sesame Street! (I'll resist the urge to use the phrase "You insensitive clod!")
Isn't "CW carrier" redundant?
I don't know... how well did the advertising slogan "Nothing sucks like a Vax!" work?
Strips clubs. You can never spend too much money on strippers...
Meanwhile, as a Software Engineer, I've taken a 33% pay cut... well, at least we know where the increased profitability is coming from...
As long as they tell you their "20GByte" drive is actually 20,000,000,000 bytes unformated (which Maxtor does), then I don't see the problem. I was under the impression that every hard driver manufacturer used a multiplier of 1000 instead of 1024, in which case it is pretty hard to call this anticompetive behaviour. In fact, it is just the opposite -- every manufacturer was forced to use this definition to avoid unfavorable price/size comparisons with other vendors.
Dude, here in the states, there is a tradition that radio stations play the album en toto every thanksgiving, so we assume everybody has heard it...
"I cannot tell a lie... I put that letter under all that garbage!"
Maybe, just maybe, the IT department was too busy reseting passwords every time a user forgot their password to patch thousands of systems? Or perhaps their managers refused to pay for the overtime that would be required because they beleived the M$ party line they their systems were now "Trustworthy Computing" secure?
Are you sure you want every bored pervert on the web to watch your wife breast feeding the baby? Or are you considering some form of password access?
Not the same. ISPs no either the sender or receiver of an email is a customer. With IMs both sender and receiver could be non-customers (as I understand it). So you could conceivably be handling 100 million requests a day even if you only have 10 real customers...
Uh, 'cause most dial-up users IP addresses change every time they log in? Makes 'em a little hard to find with multicasting to everyone in the world. You've got to have a service somewhere to translate the IM name into current IP... after that, sure, the messages can go direct. Remember P2P networks don't let you find a specific user amongst millions connected -- they only let you find one of many thousands of copies of a file, which is much easier.
Let's see... AOL provides an IM service for AOL users to leverage AOL sales. If they let just anybody connect to the servers, what incentive would you have to shell out $27/month for AOL. Ditto for MSN. Not sure what Yahoo's econmic model is, but presumably it has something to do with advertising that you don't see if you don't use their client. Let's put it this way: how long could the phone company stay in business if all calls were free and their only revenue stream was from selling phones... but anybody else could connect a phone not made by them to the network? Think they might have some powerful incentive to force you to use their phones?
where is the economic incentive to provide an IM service that everybody in the world can use? Servers do cost money... any ideas on how one could fund this?
So it should be ok to distribute photocopies of a copyrighted book, because the photocopies do not have the same quality as the original book? Quality is a technical problem, it should not be a legal one. Should FM stations pay higher royalties per song played than AM, because the sound quality is better? The fact the a 64kbit/s ISDN channel does not not have the same sound quality as a 64kbit/s MP3 because it's not using decent compression could change tomorrow... what if the phone company started using a better codec than the MP3? Why are the bits going over the ISDN line ok if it's a dialed point-to-point virtual circuit, but not ok if it's a connection to a server streaming live audio over the internet? Isn't it basically the same bitstream? If I call someone from my digital cellphone while sitting in a Steely Dan concert, am I infringing on their IP by allowing my friend to hear the concert?
And how is getting an electronic copy and promising "cross-my-heart!" that I'm going to delete it when I'm done with it really any different than borrowing a book from a library and promising I won't scan the whole thing in with my scanner into OCR software? Why do we take it as a given that just because digital information is easier to copy, it's subject to different rules? Art has always been subject to copying, and it always will be. For thousands of years, if your performed your song in front of another musician, or told your story in front of another storyteller, they could "steal" it and claim it as their own! Now we have a small group of people insisting the government protect their income streams by forcing other people not to sing their songs or tell their stories... doesn't this violate the equal protection clause of the constitution?
Convincing the blond next door that an asteroid is about to hit the earth may be the only chance most slashdotters have of getting laid...
Obviously, the people that panic because of a one-in-a-million chance of an asteroid hitting the earth are the same ones that buy lottery tickets because of a one-in-sixty-million chance of winning the lottery. Apparently a large segment of the population suffers from a Rainman-like inability to comprehend either large numbers or statistics. Perhaps we SHOULD be careful what we tell these people. It's like when I was babysitting the 7-year old next store, and causually mentioned that because rivers meander, some day the river slough a half mile from his house would be where his house his. He started screaming and crying -- he couldn't comprehend the fact that "some day" would be long after he was dead and his house had been torn down anyway.
Problem is, so far scientists have done more to annihilate us then anything else -- or at least they're providing the tools to do so. Remember, the Nobel prize was set up by somebody that felt guilty about inventing dynamite! If we had a group of scientists dedicated to watching out for things that could potentially annihilate us, most of them would be watching other scientists! Just try getting a grant from the NSF for that!
How often do you talk to someone on the phone and hear copyrighted music playing in the background? Clearly the phone networks are rife with piracy! SHould the phone company be made to detect music being played over the phone, and block it? Shouldn't the phone company report to the RIAA all customers that are using the phone network to illegally distribute copyrighted music? Isn't that exactly what the RIAA is asking the ISPs to do?