There are a lot of "counterfieting" operations where the work involved makes you wonder why they didn't go legit. People selling "fake" iPod Shuffles, for instance, that actually work, they're just not real shuffles. Someone's taken the time and trouble to organize the manufacturing of this item, including a certain amount of R&D, for a working product. And then they proceed to spoil the entire enterprise by putting someone's else's name on it, meaning:
- they can't sell via legitimate distributors
- they can't get funding except from organized crime.
- they have to do business constantly looking over their shoulders.
Well, yeah. So it doesn't make sense to set up a business like this -- unless you are organized crime. I mean, everything you do already requires you to look over your shoulder, legitimate businesses don't want to have anything to do with you, and you probably already have connections to gray- and black-market distribution channels.
Well, it would make sense that the most efficient generating system would be used at all times, with less efficient ones activated to meet peak needs. Though, clearly, there may be limits to that where the most efficient is wind or solar and peak need doesn't coincide with availability.
Wouldn't the mass adoption of this product just shift the peak usage time - therefore negating some of the benefits of using it?
Because of efficiency losses, using such devices will necessarily increase total energy usage; it will tend to level out demand the more widely they are adopted, so in the limit case they increase overall prices and eliminate price fluctuations.
Though, if you could really save money this way in the long run, I'd expect the energy companies themselves to build storage systems and use them to store energy when demand was low and deliver it when it was high. What this really seems like is a clever way for the manufacturer to make money off people's perception of the potential to save/make money by playing volatility.
There may well come a time where this typ eof device would help defay your bill enough to make a difference over say 3-5 years.
At which point, everyone would buy them, and there would soon be virtually no individual benefit having them, as the price fluctuations would be mostly levelled out.
...this optional feature will do nothing to prevent dual booting, and, if the user has one of the Vista editions that has it installed, and chooses to use it, will make it impossible to read the data it protects from Linux?
Why would someone pretend this is a big deal?
It doesn't seem to be a big advance in security, or big blow against dual booting, or a big...well, anything.
Well, I'd think it would be to prevent unauthorized people from accessing; with any reasonable encryption system, that means "people that don't have the right key", not "people that aren't using the right OS".
What is being locked that defeats dual booting? The MBR or partition table?
Or just the content of the Windows partition? If it is the latter, it doesn't stop dual booting, it just limits some of the uses by making it harder to share data between the different OS's -- but you can still dual boot just as well, and there are other ways of interchanging data.
Can someone please care to explain how Google Desktop and Google Base (and *all* other services except Gmail) make mokey for Google?
They make money by developing goodwill and customer affinity and keeping users attached to the Google brand, and by integrating with and therefore encouraging use of the main search engine, Gmail and the other advertising-supported services.
Given that Intel still, as the article says, has around 80% marketshare, they are hardly falling behind AMD in that respect.
They seem to be "falling behind" where they have historically been in terms of marketshare, goodwill, etc., in large part due to AMD's advances in those areas.
That doesn't mean they are falling behind AMD in those areas, though.
Google is currently somewhat insulated because its Class A stock (the publicly traded one) has 1 vote per share, and its Class B stock (held only by a narrow group of insiders) has 10 votes per share, which give those insiders something like 2/3 of the voting power.
MThat's a good parallel, but not really the case. If you compare the level of violence in an M game to an R movie, you'll find the M is (often) much higher.
I don't think that's true at all in terms of graphic violence, and if you compare the level of sexual situation and nudity in R movie versus an M, I think you'll find that the R is very clearly often much higher. Consider the actual content of the material in GTA:SA that raised the objection that it should have been rated AO -- nothing that wouldn't have been acceptable in an R movie, not anything that would have demanded an NC-17.
There are free programs that import and export many of the widely-used formats, so it is not accurate to say that the formats require an expensive product (other than on the SketchUp end) to work with.
Sure, the product which makes each of the big formats popular is expensive, but that's not the same thing.
(Well, when the EU was founded, what other example of a democratic federalised state did they have to work with?)
The Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland come immediately to mind as examples of federal, democratic states that might have been familiar (particularly the former, a founding member of the EU) to the founders of the EU.
To me, that sounds like you care more about image and less about substance. You don't think it's strange that the name is your deciding factor about whether or not you buy something.
Seems to me the function of an entertainment product is to provide a subjective, nonrational feeling of enjoyment, so its really not at all strange for subjective, nonrational responses to association conjured up by the name, product design, or whatever that interfere with that feeling of enjoyment to play a role in purchase decisions, rather than pure technical functionality.
Copyright registration (was Re: Patents)
on
Public Patents?
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· Score: 1
Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. [...]
There is a big distinction between applying foreign law to questions where involved matters cross jurisdictional boundaries and using foreign precedent to guide the interpretation of domestic law in domestic applications, and between either of those and using the success of a particular foreign law to seek to have similar law enacted in your own country.
Your post, it seems to me, conflates all of these into the same issue, and then goes on to say that since some people argue on side, and some people argue the other, that this is hypocrisy rather than disagreement.
The parent here should not have been modded "troll". Its a legitimate question.
And how exactly does US law apply to EU courts? Do EU courts ever use US laws? That would seem utterly stupid to me.
I don't know much about EU law specifically, but I do know that national courts are sometimes called upon to apply for foreign law for cases where the issues cross jurisdictional boundaries, see for instance this summary of a UK House of Lords ruling resting, in part, on a determination of Iraqi law made by a lower UK court. US courts do this as well.
So? Again, monitors (and laptops) with built-in cameras already exist. They show no sign of overturning the market. Even if they did, there is nothing scary about them unless someone else has control of your computer, not you.
And that is scary, whether or not there is a camera built into the monitor one way or another.
Seriously. My cell phone has a still/video camera and a microphone built into it. Plus, its connected to a network pretty much 24/7. And yet, I don't sit cowering under my bed afraid its being used to spy on everything I do or say in its presence.
I'm certainly not going to worry that people might be watching me through the monitor attached to my computer that lives behind my router.
Yes, and you can put material in the public domain that would otherwise be subject to copyright.
OTOH, nothing stops people from creating proprietary products with public domain material (whether of the type that is amenable to copyright or the type amenable to patent). In the copyright world, the desire to make material free but keep it from being boxed up in closed derivative products resulted in open licensing (both open source licensing, and similar models applied to things that aren't source code).
Similarly, one can imagine a similar regime applied to patents, but given that patents aren't immediate, and are far from free, and create more expense for the holder, its a lot harder to see it working, unless perhaps there was a charitable foundation that acted as clearinghouse for "open patents" that would actually do the work of managing the patents.
That's not entirely true (registration is required to pursue certain actions to enforce the copyright, not merely additional evidence of it), but my point was that an unregistered copyright (i.e., a work with no proof of when it was created) doesn't provide evidence of prior art existing at a particular time that would be of much use against a later patent some third party attempted to secure on the same idea.
A registered copyright, OTOH, does.
Re:Taking it one step further....
on
Public Patents?
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· Score: 1
Copyrights, patents, etc., are things that Congress has the express Constitutional power and discretion to provide for, not a Constitutional right. The Copyright Clause no more creates a Constitutional right to IP than the clause providing Congress the power to issue letters of marquee and reprisal makes privateering a Constitutional right.
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Well, it would make sense that the most efficient generating system would be used at all times, with less efficient ones activated to meet peak needs. Though, clearly, there may be limits to that where the most efficient is wind or solar and peak need doesn't coincide with availability.
Because of efficiency losses, using such devices will necessarily increase total energy usage; it will tend to level out demand the more widely they are adopted, so in the limit case they increase overall prices and eliminate price fluctuations.
Though, if you could really save money this way in the long run, I'd expect the energy companies themselves to build storage systems and use them to store energy when demand was low and deliver it when it was high. What this really seems like is a clever way for the manufacturer to make money off people's perception of the potential to save/make money by playing volatility.
...this optional feature will do nothing to prevent dual booting, and, if the user has one of the Vista editions that has it installed, and chooses to use it, will make it impossible to read the data it protects from Linux? Why would someone pretend this is a big deal? It doesn't seem to be a big advance in security, or big blow against dual booting, or a big...well, anything.
Well, I'd think it would be to prevent unauthorized people from accessing; with any reasonable encryption system, that means "people that don't have the right key", not "people that aren't using the right OS".
What is being locked that defeats dual booting? The MBR or partition table?
Or just the content of the Windows partition? If it is the latter, it doesn't stop dual booting, it just limits some of the uses by making it harder to share data between the different OS's -- but you can still dual boot just as well, and there are other ways of interchanging data.
Given that Intel still, as the article says, has around 80% marketshare, they are hardly falling behind AMD in that respect. They seem to be "falling behind" where they have historically been in terms of marketshare, goodwill, etc., in large part due to AMD's advances in those areas. That doesn't mean they are falling behind AMD in those areas, though.
Microsoft paying domain parkers to use IIS affects HTTP, but not HTTPS, stats, perhaps? Just a possibility.
Google is currently somewhat insulated because its Class A stock (the publicly traded one) has 1 vote per share, and its Class B stock (held only by a narrow group of insiders) has 10 votes per share, which give those insiders something like 2/3 of the voting power.
I don't think that's true at all in terms of graphic violence, and if you compare the level of sexual situation and nudity in R movie versus an M, I think you'll find that the R is very clearly often much higher. Consider the actual content of the material in GTA:SA that raised the objection that it should have been rated AO -- nothing that wouldn't have been acceptable in an R movie, not anything that would have demanded an NC-17.
There are free programs that import and export many of the widely-used formats, so it is not accurate to say that the formats require an expensive product (other than on the SketchUp end) to work with. Sure, the product which makes each of the big formats popular is expensive, but that's not the same thing.
There is a big distinction between applying foreign law to questions where involved matters cross jurisdictional boundaries and using foreign precedent to guide the interpretation of domestic law in domestic applications, and between either of those and using the success of a particular foreign law to seek to have similar law enacted in your own country.
Your post, it seems to me, conflates all of these into the same issue, and then goes on to say that since some people argue on side, and some people argue the other, that this is hypocrisy rather than disagreement.
I thought it was simpler than that:
So? Again, monitors (and laptops) with built-in cameras already exist. They show no sign of overturning the market. Even if they did, there is nothing scary about them unless someone else has control of your computer, not you. And that is scary, whether or not there is a camera built into the monitor one way or another. Seriously. My cell phone has a still/video camera and a microphone built into it. Plus, its connected to a network pretty much 24/7. And yet, I don't sit cowering under my bed afraid its being used to spy on everything I do or say in its presence. I'm certainly not going to worry that people might be watching me through the monitor attached to my computer that lives behind my router.
Yes, and you can put material in the public domain that would otherwise be subject to copyright. OTOH, nothing stops people from creating proprietary products with public domain material (whether of the type that is amenable to copyright or the type amenable to patent). In the copyright world, the desire to make material free but keep it from being boxed up in closed derivative products resulted in open licensing (both open source licensing, and similar models applied to things that aren't source code). Similarly, one can imagine a similar regime applied to patents, but given that patents aren't immediate, and are far from free, and create more expense for the holder, its a lot harder to see it working, unless perhaps there was a charitable foundation that acted as clearinghouse for "open patents" that would actually do the work of managing the patents.
That's not entirely true (registration is required to pursue certain actions to enforce the copyright, not merely additional evidence of it), but my point was that an unregistered copyright (i.e., a work with no proof of when it was created) doesn't provide evidence of prior art existing at a particular time that would be of much use against a later patent some third party attempted to secure on the same idea.
A registered copyright, OTOH, does.
Copyrights, patents, etc., are things that Congress has the express Constitutional power and discretion to provide for, not a Constitutional right. The Copyright Clause no more creates a Constitutional right to IP than the clause providing Congress the power to issue letters of marquee and reprisal makes privateering a Constitutional right.