The MPAA members are "storytellers" - they make their billions by telling stories that hook people's emotions. So it makes sense that instead of hiring an outside PR firm, they would use movies to sway people to their side.
The problem is, the MPAA's favorite story is inherently anti-establishment. They like to entertain us with the plucky rebel taking on the corrupt and archaic regime. So now their challenge is to cast themselves (bloated plutocrats) as plucky starving artists. Sounds difficult.
The bad news is that only members of the Academy will receive them.
Why is this bad news? Who should receive them? Why do you care about the movie industry's ritual pat-on-the-back?
I though the only interesting aspect of this ongoing story was that the proliferation of fast internet access was forcing the industry to restrict screeners. Nothing really good or bad in that. And no, I don't care if some less mainstream film wins an Emmy or Grammy or whatever. The only outcome I'd find "good" is if the industry stops being profitable, so cultural energy flows into less centralized channels.
That definition is totally inadequate. It makes the question of "unlawfulness" paramount. How do you apply that definition to the US's attempted assassination of Castro, or an Israeli soldier killing Rachel Corrie?
You are simply linking to the same page I already responded to. That page actually doesn't back up his claim. Rather than responding to the criticism, it evades it. This Wall Street Journal piece says:
But Jan Jacobson, the bank employee who worked with Mr. Moore on his account, says that only happened because Mr. Moore's film company had worked for a month to stage the scene. "What happened at the bank was a prearranged thing," she says. The gun was brought from a gun dealer in another city, where it would normally have to be picked up. "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period," she says. Ms. Jacobson feels used: "He just portrayed us as backward hicks."
Moore, in the page you cited, does not deny this. Rather, he evades it. First he sarcastically pretends to misunderstand the allegation. Then he loudly reiterates the reality of items which are not in dispute: an advertisement, the gun, etc. He also tells us that he didn't personally enter the bank before the day of shooting.
Nothing that Moore says contradicts anything that Jacobson says.
No. The rule does not discriminate against any vendor. It is a rule about what kind of goods government will procure, not about what vendor they are procured from. Microsoft is perfectly welcome to offer open-source solutions.
When the government buys combat boots, the boots have to meet a government spec. That means Nike can't sell them Air Jordans instead. Is that unfair? No; Nike is free to bid on the item requested.
Not that I care, but Moore has not backed up his claim that the bank customarily hands out guns on the spot. He has vented a lot of outrage, that's all. The page you linked to was a news story about the bank offering guns to depositors. It doesn't address the specific (and I agree, pointless) issue of whether the bank physically stores and hands over the guns.
This seems to be a pretty common idea. I'm surprised anyone thinks it would work. Telephones do not have infinite dynamic range. At best they have 48 dB dynamic range. The telemarketer is probably wearing a headset that meets Bellcore specifications for an operator headset. Those specs include not being able to produce too loud a sound, no matter what the input. Your airhorn will not make a louder sound at the far end than pressing a touch tone key.
Who cares. What kind of fool is going to be running a telemarketing operation out of friggin' Bermuda. If you do get a call from Bermuda, just keep them on the phone as long as possible, letting the long distance charges run them into the ground.
Call centers don't buy retail long distance. Quite likely they are using VOIP and coming out of a POP near you, paying no toll charges. Or else they have a T1 (encapsulated in someone's ATM network) from the Bermuda call center to a US switch. The labor savings more than pay for the circuit.
Then you must live in a place that gets like one telemarketing call a month, or has one big friggin' police force. Or a helluva lot of charities...
Apparently, most of the "police charity" callers are scammers operating just within the law. They end up giving like 15% of their proceeds to a real police charity. Some, of course are out and out scammers and keep it all.
For many corporations, just getting you off the net is a benefit. Maybe the net is competing with them in their role as entertainment, news provider, long distance phone company. Maybe the net lets you know that their latest much-hyped product is crap. They would rather have you isolated and incommunicado.
At least the factory owner won't run without maintenance and ruin all his machine tools 20 years early, like the socialist will. By then, it'll be someone else problem, right?
Actually, that behavior is very characteristic of real-world capitalism. Anyone who's worked in corporate America for a few years can tell horror stories of management wilfully ignoring the long-term issues for immediate gain. And using the phrase "factory owner" is a bit misleading. Factories worth calling factories are generally owned by corporations. That means the decision-makers are not much different from Soviet bureaucrats.
When public utilities are privatized, the result is frequently the lack of maintenance you described. Here in the US we have many efficiently-run public utilities. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a public utility, has done much better than its competitor, Southern California Edison, a private utility.
I remember reading of a public electric utility in England that was sold to an American company. The company immediately started laying off maintenance workers and boasted of their "efficiency improvement." Predictably, they were soon experiencing outages.
Capitalist or socialist enterprises can succeed or fail, depending largely on the people running them. But some kind of disease is quickening within capitalism these days, some combination of twisting, evasion, fraudulent lobbying and lawsuits, willingness to sacrifice all truth and ethics for profit. I think western capitalism is approaching the toxicity of Stalinist communism.
I agree. I get restless watching a movie as it is, which is one reason I hardly ever watch them. I don't have a short attention span - I can spend all day coding or reading a book. But movies are inherently boring - nothing to do but sit in the dark and watch. Who wants to eat three delicious dinners in a row?
But that has nothing to do with the patent we're discussing. It claims a specific technique, completely different from yours, for notifying the recipient when the sender is typing. Do you understand that? If someone patents a new method for achieving a certain result, and you previously achieved that result via an old method, that does not constitute prior art.
The OSS community needs a forum for debunking these patent applications. One where the USPTO trusts it for prior art inspections.
Why would the USPTO trust it when it would be flooded with ignorant comments from people who haven't read the patent application and don't understand the first thing about patent law? Not you; I realize from your post that you read the application. But almost all the comments I've seen are ignorant.
Maybe a forum like that could provide some laughs for the PTO examiners. OSS zealots "debunking" patents are like Darl McBride "debunking" the GPL. Totally out of their depth.
Except they didn't patent a function. The patented a specific means for achieving that function. Now, even if Lotus used the same internal mechanism that Microsoft has patented, I don't think it would count as prior art because it wasn't published.
Someone should alert you that you can read the damn patent before commenting. The patent specifically cites talk as prior art. It then claims a specific improvement over the method uses in talk, and justifies that improvement.
Good point. However, I don't think the weird colors will remedy the security problem. Couldn't an attacker break into the net-connected machine and give it the same weird colors?
A man rings your doorbell. When you open the door, he punches you in the nose and runs away. The next morning he's back with a baseball bat in his hands. Do you open the door to see "what he has to offer?" Maybe he's offering a great price on a baseball bat?
Some of us are black and blue from Microsoft. We're in no hurry to open any more doors for them.
That's good, but where do you think Microsoft would have chosen to draw the perimeter of that sandbox? Should an embedded script be allowed to access the addressbook? Modify the Registry? Read files? Contact a remote server? You know that Microsoft's viewpoint is "the more capabilities the merrier."
Bill Joy is just a typical old programmer full of whimsical opinions. The only reason he's being interviewed by Fortune is that he was in the right place at the right time and is therefore rich. If you read his "six phases" description you see that he basically stopped working in 1987. After that, he just putzed around. I think it's pretty obvious that with Sun in bad financial shape, McNealy finally kicked him out.
Joy comes close to saying Solaris should be re-written in Java. He's not very realistic. When I think of secure programs, I think of qmail, postfix and djbdns. All written in C. I can't even name a Java mailserver or DNS server off the top of my head.
Another reason spam is so bad is that so many companies use Microsoft Outlook for reading e-mail. Again, because that program is written in C, it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know.
Outlook's numerous viruses are not caused by the program being written in C or C++. They are caused by Outlook's support for active content. The problem would still exist if Outlook were re-written in Java. I wonder if nobody in Joy's circle dares to correct him on this, or if he's been corrected and just didn't hear.
Take any random clever programmer over 30 and give him $100 million. He will wander off into the sunset, murmuring about his brilliant new idea for re-architecting the internet or something. He will never again do or say something relevant.
Sometimes the word "cool" is stretched too far. Anything involving Star Trek is extremely uncool. It may be amusing, entertaining, though-provoking, etc. Not cool.
Anyhow, even allowing an incredibly loose boundary of "cool", I don't find this vision that interesting. I don't want to talk to a computer. I think I will always get faster, more accurate results with a keyboard and a structured language than voice and English. Lastly, the idea of calling a computer "computer" just sucks. Do you call people "human"? Maybe computers would be called by their hostnames. If they are Microsoft machines with some lame name like "FZ3YN" you could call them "shitbox." That would be cool.
It's normal for a patent claim to be a superset of prior art. You are not infringing the patent unless you perform the process described in one of the claims. Performing part of the process doesn't count.
As for the obviousness, I'd like to believe that, but why isn't any free software doing this? In 20 years nobody implemented this obvious improvement?
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The MPAA members are "storytellers" - they make their billions by telling stories that hook people's emotions. So it makes sense that instead of hiring an outside PR firm, they would use movies to sway people to their side.
The problem is, the MPAA's favorite story is inherently anti-establishment. They like to entertain us with the plucky rebel taking on the corrupt and archaic regime. So now their challenge is to cast themselves (bloated plutocrats) as plucky starving artists. Sounds difficult.
Why is this bad news? Who should receive them? Why do you care about the movie industry's ritual pat-on-the-back?
I though the only interesting aspect of this ongoing story was that the proliferation of fast internet access was forcing the industry to restrict screeners. Nothing really good or bad in that. And no, I don't care if some less mainstream film wins an Emmy or Grammy or whatever. The only outcome I'd find "good" is if the industry stops being profitable, so cultural energy flows into less centralized channels.
That definition is totally inadequate. It makes the question of "unlawfulness" paramount. How do you apply that definition to the US's attempted assassination of Castro, or an Israeli soldier killing Rachel Corrie?
Having watched a not-too-geeky ipod owner replace his battery in three minutes without much difficulty, I'm not too put off by this.
Moore, in the page you cited, does not deny this. Rather, he evades it. First he sarcastically pretends to misunderstand the allegation. Then he loudly reiterates the reality of items which are not in dispute: an advertisement, the gun, etc. He also tells us that he didn't personally enter the bank before the day of shooting.
Nothing that Moore says contradicts anything that Jacobson says.
No. The rule does not discriminate against any vendor. It is a rule about what kind of goods government will procure, not about what vendor they are procured from. Microsoft is perfectly welcome to offer open-source solutions.
When the government buys combat boots, the boots have to meet a government spec. That means Nike can't sell them Air Jordans instead. Is that unfair? No; Nike is free to bid on the item requested.
Not that I care, but Moore has not backed up his claim that the bank customarily hands out guns on the spot. He has vented a lot of outrage, that's all. The page you linked to was a news story about the bank offering guns to depositors. It doesn't address the specific (and I agree, pointless) issue of whether the bank physically stores and hands over the guns.
This seems to be a pretty common idea. I'm surprised anyone thinks it would work. Telephones do not have infinite dynamic range. At best they have 48 dB dynamic range. The telemarketer is probably wearing a headset that meets Bellcore specifications for an operator headset. Those specs include not being able to produce too loud a sound, no matter what the input. Your airhorn will not make a louder sound at the far end than pressing a touch tone key.
Call centers don't buy retail long distance. Quite likely they are using VOIP and coming out of a POP near you, paying no toll charges. Or else they have a T1 (encapsulated in someone's ATM network) from the Bermuda call center to a US switch. The labor savings more than pay for the circuit.
Apparently, most of the "police charity" callers are scammers operating just within the law. They end up giving like 15% of their proceeds to a real police charity. Some, of course are out and out scammers and keep it all.
For many corporations, just getting you off the net is a benefit. Maybe the net is competing with them in their role as entertainment, news provider, long distance phone company. Maybe the net lets you know that their latest much-hyped product is crap. They would rather have you isolated and incommunicado.
Actually, that behavior is very characteristic of real-world capitalism. Anyone who's worked in corporate America for a few years can tell horror stories of management wilfully ignoring the long-term issues for immediate gain. And using the phrase "factory owner" is a bit misleading. Factories worth calling factories are generally owned by corporations. That means the decision-makers are not much different from Soviet bureaucrats.
When public utilities are privatized, the result is frequently the lack of maintenance you described. Here in the US we have many efficiently-run public utilities. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a public utility, has done much better than its competitor, Southern California Edison, a private utility.
I remember reading of a public electric utility in England that was sold to an American company. The company immediately started laying off maintenance workers and boasted of their "efficiency improvement." Predictably, they were soon experiencing outages.
Capitalist or socialist enterprises can succeed or fail, depending largely on the people running them. But some kind of disease is quickening within capitalism these days, some combination of twisting, evasion, fraudulent lobbying and lawsuits, willingness to sacrifice all truth and ethics for profit. I think western capitalism is approaching the toxicity of Stalinist communism.
I agree. I get restless watching a movie as it is, which is one reason I hardly ever watch them. I don't have a short attention span - I can spend all day coding or reading a book. But movies are inherently boring - nothing to do but sit in the dark and watch. Who wants to eat three delicious dinners in a row?
But that has nothing to do with the patent we're discussing. It claims a specific technique, completely different from yours, for notifying the recipient when the sender is typing. Do you understand that? If someone patents a new method for achieving a certain result, and you previously achieved that result via an old method, that does not constitute prior art.
Why would the USPTO trust it when it would be flooded with ignorant comments from people who haven't read the patent application and don't understand the first thing about patent law? Not you; I realize from your post that you read the application. But almost all the comments I've seen are ignorant.
Maybe a forum like that could provide some laughs for the PTO examiners. OSS zealots "debunking" patents are like Darl McBride "debunking" the GPL. Totally out of their depth.
Except they didn't patent a function. The patented a specific means for achieving that function. Now, even if Lotus used the same internal mechanism that Microsoft has patented, I don't think it would count as prior art because it wasn't published.
Someone should alert you that you can read the damn patent before commenting. The patent specifically cites talk as prior art. It then claims a specific improvement over the method uses in talk, and justifies that improvement.
You do realize the patent discusses this, right?
Good point. However, I don't think the weird colors will remedy the security problem. Couldn't an attacker break into the net-connected machine and give it the same weird colors?
A man rings your doorbell. When you open the door, he punches you in the nose and runs away. The next morning he's back with a baseball bat in his hands. Do you open the door to see "what he has to offer?" Maybe he's offering a great price on a baseball bat?
Some of us are black and blue from Microsoft. We're in no hurry to open any more doors for them.
That's good, but where do you think Microsoft would have chosen to draw the perimeter of that sandbox? Should an embedded script be allowed to access the addressbook? Modify the Registry? Read files? Contact a remote server? You know that Microsoft's viewpoint is "the more capabilities the merrier."
Joy comes close to saying Solaris should be re-written in Java. He's not very realistic. When I think of secure programs, I think of qmail, postfix and djbdns. All written in C. I can't even name a Java mailserver or DNS server off the top of my head.
Outlook's numerous viruses are not caused by the program being written in C or C++. They are caused by Outlook's support for active content. The problem would still exist if Outlook were re-written in Java. I wonder if nobody in Joy's circle dares to correct him on this, or if he's been corrected and just didn't hear.
Take any random clever programmer over 30 and give him $100 million. He will wander off into the sunset, murmuring about his brilliant new idea for re-architecting the internet or something. He will never again do or say something relevant.
Sometimes the word "cool" is stretched too far. Anything involving Star Trek is extremely uncool. It may be amusing, entertaining, though-provoking, etc. Not cool.
Anyhow, even allowing an incredibly loose boundary of "cool", I don't find this vision that interesting. I don't want to talk to a computer. I think I will always get faster, more accurate results with a keyboard and a structured language than voice and English. Lastly, the idea of calling a computer "computer" just sucks. Do you call people "human"? Maybe computers would be called by their hostnames. If they are Microsoft machines with some lame name like "FZ3YN" you could call them "shitbox." That would be cool.
It's normal for a patent claim to be a superset of prior art. You are not infringing the patent unless you perform the process described in one of the claims. Performing part of the process doesn't count.
As for the obviousness, I'd like to believe that, but why isn't any free software doing this? In 20 years nobody implemented this obvious improvement?
Did you read the patent? Read Claim 1. It claims an innovation that you did not describe as part of ARVIS.
That moderation would apply almost every time slashdotters comment on the adult world. Law, politics and finance are three areas that come to mind.