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Why is world of goo, a widely acclaimed game, available for $20 or less widely pirated? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars

I don't believe every author/artist/game maker deserves compensation, but I do think that when they deserve compensation they should get it.

Which should be shortly since Chrome on Android will not support Flash either.

I didn't know that, and you unfortunately didn't provide a citation, but I think I've found the relevant news piece. Thanks for bringing that up.

Excuse me for a moment while I do the victory dance. Good riddance, Flash!

Sounds like a brilliant design.

In many ways, it's simply a logical next step - see Nvidia's white paper for architectural details. http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_90715.html

Thing is, we're so used to minimal innovation in the stagnant Wintel-controlled X86 world, the rapid pace of change in ARM systems is exciting. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them, for example...
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/the-opposite-of-virtualization-calexdas-new-quad-core-arm-part-for-cloud-servers.ars

Indeed. While they have improved the camera, the IR seem about the same.
http://support.xbox.com/en-GB/kinect/setup-and-playspace/lighting
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/01/microsoft-bets-big-on-kinect-for-windows-but-splits-its-community.ars

Your experience doesn't mesh with reality. Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person in multiple studies.

Your experience doesn't mesh with reality. Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person in multiple studies.

Wouldn't this be an end-run around warrantless GPS tracking, which the USA Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/supreme-court-holds-warrantless-gps-tracking-unconstitutional.ars

Who needs GPS tracking if you can put these on every government building, police car, and city vehicle (including buses) to track license numbers? City surveillance cameras could be linked in too.

(I realize this article is about use in Canada, but this technology is starting to get some use in the USA as well)

Didn't a family member of one of the Kaspersky Lab head honchos get snatched by the Russian mob? Frankly they may be afraid to push for enforcement as you say, afraid they will find a loved one in a ditch. There is a good reason why Eastern EU is used so much by malware guys, its because there is still a lot of pretty wild west lawlessness there where you can get by with pretty much anything as long as you have the cash. I can't blame the Kaspersky Lab guys for not getting too nasty with someone that close to their homes. The creator of the botnet also formerly worked at an AV firm which obviously gave him good general knowledge on how to get around AV scanners.

And let me just say before we get the usual "Herp Derp use Linux" karma whoring that 1.- the number one source of infections since Vista has been the USER who bypasses the security for the malware, and 2.- Linux is not immune to vulnerabilities. Hell even Kernel.org and MySQL have been pwned before.

In the end it simply comes down to the fact that criminals are lazy, hell if they weren't they'd be working honest jobs. With over half a billion Windows machines if you even get 1% you've just made yourself a huge payday whereas with Linux you'd have to hit a much bigger percentage to get the same payout. but as we saw with both OSX and the MacDefender and Android which is of course Linux based and all the bugs its got that if you get enough numbers you'll get pwned like everybody else. Operating systems nowadays are some of the most complicated pieces of code on the planet PERIOD. Hell I doubt even Linus Torvalds could tell you with 100% certainty what even a tenth of the code on your average distro is actually calling when you launch so the odds of ANY OS being immune to these kinds of attacks is frankly laughable. Sure you CAN make one damned near immune, by using SELinux or GPOs, but the resulting system will be painful to use and nobody will want to run it.

You hit the nail on the head there, Lotana.

Thanks for the link. I knew user ignorance is the primary vector for malware spreads, but I did not know what to call it.

Corporations/Governments seem to love to keep underlings ignorant so they can be controlled - Knowledge is Power.

Ignorance of digital hygiene on the internet is just as risky as ignorance of bacterial hygiene in the kitchen.

A big problem is a few people profit immensely from privileged information. They will lobby like hell to keep it that way.

There was once a time I knew exactly how my machine worked, but with the advent of all sorts of proprietary protocols and formats, I have no idea of what is and is not legitimate traffic on my machine.

Can I trust even an antivirus company?

The Kelihos botnet that sent up to 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day before being taken offline by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab four months ago was created and controlled by a software developer who formerly worked for an antivirus firm, Microsoft said in a civil lawsuit updated yesterday.

I can't tell you how many times I have had rogue scripts pop up on my system, warning me I was infected and needed to "click here" to fix it - for free.

I absolutely hate this circus certain "businessmen" have foisted on us by "working with" other trusted businesses to use proprietary technologies which I cannot verify whether or not they have other motives. The simplest apps now require megabytes of code and use tunneling protocols. Its now illegal to even discuss who is using what and how to see into what it is doing. How do I know if they are honest?

As far as I am concerned, these botnets are the internet equivalent of typhoid Mary .

So how does a citizen have any hope of not breaking the law when the laws themselves are kept secret from citizens?

I dunno, but it looks like there is another secret trade agreement called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Ars Technica has the story

Beyond ACTA: next secret copyright agreement negotiated this week—in Hollywood
By Nate Anderson | Published February 1, 2012 6:30 PM ..
But negotiators still insist of shielding their work from the public, even on matters of increasing public concern, such as digital copyrights. And each agreement they negotiate mysteriously ends up just a bit tougher than the one before it. The time for "trust us" is over, and unlike ACTA, people want meaningful access to TPP documents before the draft text has been so worked over that no substantive change is possible. But without significant public pressure, that's not going to happen. Again. ..

Suggest calling your Congressional representatives and them you don't another trade agreement negotiated in secret and to put pressure on the administration to keep its promise of keeping government transparent.

Oh, and as far as the pledge to fix the Openstack code here's my source. Next time do a bit of research before accusing someone of astroturfing just because the post happens to be pro-microsoft (if you bothered to check my posting history you'd see I'm no MS fanboy).

When asked if he's happy with Microsoft's contributions to Linux, he said "I am very happy with their contributions. The work that they have done on their drivers is amazing. The original driver submission was over 20 thousand lines long. Two new drivers have been added to the codebase, and lots of cleanup, making the final line count around 7 thousand lines. link

Chances are the website is also hosted on the botnet, thousands of times over, across possibly as many domains and sub-domains. The spammers can then use Fast Flux DNS to cycle between random selections of hosts every few minutes or so. That means you need to take out the C&C servers to take down the website(s) as well, and even then there's no reason that the bots could not keep on operating in autopilot while the operators try to regain control.

Realistically, there is only one way to stop spam and that's to disrupt the money flow between the people that buy products from spam and the spammers to such an extent that it is no longer profitable. That's certainly not going to be easy, but for all its faults SOPA would have provided some of the necessary muscle needed to force Mastercard and Visa to try and prevent payments to known spam operators through its provisions to block financial flow to such sites (it's potential use for preventing sales of fake Viagra is why Pfizer is on the SOPA supporter's list). Another avenue of attack is blacklisting banks that can be shown to be processing spam related payments, especially since research has shown that there may only be a handful of banks prepared to deal with spammers in the first place.

I wish I was joking. IE 6 as a precent of desktop web browser views went up by 0.72% last month. FF as a whole went down, as did Chrome.

How much do games cost in the store? How much did they cost 10 years ago? 20? 30? Games have gotten cheaper when inflation is taken into account. Here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/10/an-inconvenient-truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time.ars

OK, so looking at that ad, adjusted for inflation, the average game seems to be about $15 more expensive than today. But, today games are made on DVD/BR discs, where they are pressed for a penny each. But back in those days, games were made in cartridges with more expensive ROM chips in them. So how much of that extra $15 cost was due to the higher manufacturing cost (and subsequently the retailer markup on that increased cost)? I'm guessing it was probably close to that. As I recall, N64 games were typically $10-$15 more than PSX games ($50 for PSX vs $60-65 for N64). And then you had those occasional games with the extra RAM/ROM/GFX chips that were like $20 more than the rest of the games on that system.

No it isn't. It isn't a compromise at all.

How much do games cost in the store? How much did they cost 10 years ago? 20? 30? Games have gotten cheaper when inflation is taken into account. Here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/10/an-inconvenient-truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time.ars

we have decided to offer the base game without any of the optional expansions for a reduced price

It's believed that consumers take the price of good as a reflection of quality. If you see a game that is $40 on a shelf that's filled with $60 games most people will assume that there is something wrong with that $40. I'm not saying that the American games retail market can't change but I doubt it.

Selling a dlc expecting game for the price of a full title, selling the dlc for premium prices on top of that, and offering some dlcs as special exclusives is *not* a compromise.

...

Don't shut out second-hand buyers. Offer them the missing content for a reasonable fee. This way you stand to monetize the 2nd and 3rd hand sales.

I don't know what game you're complaining about but it isn't Amular. If you buy Amular new then you also receive a code to buy the dlc for free. If you buy Amular used and if it doesn't come with an unused code then you can purchase the dlc like normal. You seem to be arguing that the companies should be doing exactly what they are doing.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

"We performed six tasks that would be considered to be local tasks. These queries included things like, "Set an alarm for 3 hours from now," "Make an appointment for 2pm on Friday" (and then telling Siri to cancel the task), "Remind me to file expense reports when I get home," and "What is the contact info for Ars Technica?"

These tasks added up to a total of 220KB of data usage, or an average of 36.7KB per query. The actual numbers ranged from 60KB down to 18KB, and we believe this is correlated to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.

The five other tasks were ones that required lookups online—some of them were questions that Siri could get from Wolfram Alpha, while others prompted us to continue to search on the Web (thereby bringing up a Google search page with the wording that we had asked Siri). Some sample questions included "How many calories in a muffin?", "How many movies has Kevin Bacon been in?" (this required a Google lookup, which we said yes to), and "What is Lady Gaga's real name?"

These five tasks added up to a total of 473.5KB of data use, or an average of 94.72KB per query. The range went from 23KB to 187KB, depending on the question at hand.

The silly notion that Siri is a data hog has been all over the internet, although if you think about it, it is obviously ridiculous. All Siri sends upstream some highly compressed voice, which doesn't take much bandwidth, and all it gets back is text and some simple commands to Apple's apps, which also doesn't take much bandwidth. Ars Technica measured the amount of data Siri sends back and forth, and it's just as modest as you'd expect.

So why are owners of the iPhone 4s using more data? Apples latest version of iOS, which was released about the same time as the 4s, dispenses with the requirement to tether the iPhone to a computer running iTunes, for the first time making it possible to use an iPhone as a stand-alone device. You can back up your iPhone and even install iOS updates wirelessly. In addition, Apple's Match service will stream your entire music library to your iPhone wirelessly via Apple's iCloud. Owners of earlier iPhone models are already set up to do these things via a wired connection to iTunes, and many of them doubtless have continued to do it this way even if they've upgraded to iOS version 5. But new owners of the iPhone 4s (of which there are a great number, based on Apple's quarterly report) are probably mostly using their iPhones as stand-alone devices, which is now the default. And of course, this involves more data usage, of which the biggest contributor is likely music streaming.

So Siri has almost nothing to do with the increased data usage of iPhone 4s owners--it just happens to correlates with people who are using their iPhones untethered.

Considering Ars reported heavy use results in about 20 MB a month, this is hardly a huge concern.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

iCloud and the updated 4S camera is indeed partially to blame if indeed data usage is as high as reported, however the article is flawed if this Ars article is correct.

The WaPo article is nothing more than sensationalist journalism, designed to foment controversy for the sake of attention and readership.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars

http://gigaom.com/2012/01/27/siri-is-not-a-bandwidth-hog-and-users-are-not-the-problem/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753694/siri-isnt-ruining-your-cellphone-service

And from my own personal experience as someone who has used an iPhone since the very first model, I have not found that Siri has noticeably increased my data usage. Other types of data access are far more intensive, such as streaming video and music, as well as sharing images/video taken with the iPhone's camera.

This article is stupid and the Washington Post should be ashamed. ArsTechnica ran the numbers 2 months ago and came up with an average of 63KB per query, and even less for queries that were just voice commands for the phone itself (as opposed to an internet lookup).

In total, our 11 queries added up to 693.6KB, or an average of 63KB per query. As you can see above, Siri tasks that are local to the phone appear to require less data than ones that need further lookups on the Internet, which makes sense.

If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

If Siri is a bandwidth hog, $deity help us all, because that means all that voice traffic and streaming video we do on our phones and tablets must be killing cellular networks and running their bodies through the wood chipper.

Forgot to ask - what license will Open WebOS be released under?

Apache

Are you telling me Firefox users have problems finding extensions, especially when they're linked directly from the "what happened to the status bar" help topic? If they don't care enough to google "Firefox status bar", they don't count towards the "number of people who care about the status bar" statistic.

Even if you assume that every Firefox 3.6 user is on 3.6 solely because of the status bar, that means no more than six percent of web users actually care.

Ars had an article about the most recent case, and seems to come to the conclusion that it's stupid to have rules that can't be enforced except by the people who are subject to them, and points out the dichotomy between jurors being required to draw on their life experience without being allowed to do things such as looking up terms they may not understand. Do we want knowledgeable juries, or do we not? (Who lawyers want on juries is another question altogether.)

Anyway, my takeaway was to do as you please, but to keep your mouth shut about it. You can't introduce outside evidence, but you can emphasize points that lawyers may have made that best fit with the law and the facts as you see them. That's the role of the jury after all, and I don't begrudge anyone who takes that role seriously enough to do their own research, whether I agree with their conclusions or not.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/enthusiasm-for-ibooks-author-marred-by-licensing-format-issues.ars

So creating an open editor for this would require a lot of reverse engineering.

In Google's earning call 5 days ago they claimed that 60% of Google+ members "engaged" daily and 80% weekly. After being pressed on the issue they confirmed that they were counting Google+ members who accessed any of their services at least daily/weekly, not just ones who visited Google+ daily/weekly.

Monticello, Minnesota fight with TDS...

(Link fail Q.Q.)

of thwarting FBI requests: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/exclusive-how-the-fbi-investigates-the-activities-of-anonymous.ars

Well, DMCA notices have been sent to sites carrying the 3D shapefiles to have them removed, so ...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/the-next-napster-copyright-questions-as-3d-printing-comes-of-age.ars

Funny, the boxen from major vendors with Linux on them tend to cost more than the very same hardware with Windows somehow.

Wrong again. Once more you demonstrate your failed recollection and need a history lesson:
So it turns out that not including Windows saves the consumer $50 from the regular list price. This amount is not too far off from what a large OEM like Dell would pay for a volume discount for Windows Vista Home Basic

The fact that you can't remember is excusable, but then you go and claim to remember and don't even bother using google to find out that you're wrong.

It's also fairly uncommon even on servers where Linux is very much a popular option.

More unsubstantiated crap.

It's noteworthy that MS has been CONVICTED several times in multiple countries for unethical business practices in that area.

Of course, and as we've seen orders handed down and action has been taken, what would be the point of such convictions and orders if nothing got done about them? What's noteworthy is that there has been reform in the wake of these convictions as demonstrated by the availability - at a reduced cost - of linux side-by-side with windows on PCs, it's just that it turned out nobody wanted linux.

My assertion is a matter of record.

As above you can see your assertion is a demonstration of failure to recall history correctly.

As for the Phones, MS has a very weak bargaining position there, so they can't use their usual strongarm tactics.

How is their bargaining position in arm phones any different from in arm tablets? They're targeting the same manufacturers. Any manufacturers who don't want those restrictions but still want the certification are likely to go to x86, which actually has some relevance to desktop windows as it can run the applications, unlike windows on arm which is as compatible with desktop windows as windows phone is.

This sanctimonious misdirection about private property gets a "Insightful" mod?

This has been demonstrated to be a bullshit, strawman argument. This is just the "zero sum" thinking of cancerous, middle-man industries which produce nothing of value themselves, while claiming "sacred property rights" over the art of others. This is corporate-leech-lawyer logic. And you are guilty of the lowest, pseudo-moral posturing, in rushing to enforce their deception.

The fact is, "file sharers" are the VERY BEST customers of film and music industries.

Media Cos.' Best Customers: Those Who Steal Their Content

File-sharers are content industry's "largest customers"

The situation we have today is the mis-application of an exploitative economic model, poorly adapting to change, when confrofronted by the essentially non-tangible value of their wares.

Give enough support like yours, Sony BMI and GE will be able to soon charge us for access to the Gettysburg Address, Shakespere's First Folio and the very music of J.S. Bach.

By all means, post an example - just one would be more than sufficient since I stated an absolute - of a corporation lobbying on the behalf of the public good AND that is detrimental to their profits.

Just one to blow me out of the water and I'll kiss goatse on the ass.

How about this one:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/01/why-one-game-developer-is-skipping-e3-to-start-an-anti-sopa-crusade.ars

A games company boycotting E3, and using the $50k they would have spent going to set up a group protesting SOPA instead.

In early 2010, somewhere high above the northern hemisphere, Mark Krywko decided he’d had enough. The CEO of Sleek Audio, a purveyor of high-end earphones, Krywko was flying home to Florida after yet another frustrating visit to Dongguan, China, where a contract factory assembled the majority of his company’s products. He and his son, Jason, Sleek Audio’s cofounder, made the long trip every few months to troubleshoot quality flaws. Every time the Krywkos visited Dongguan, their Chinese partners assured them everything was under control. Those promises almost always proved empty.

Today, a year since Krywko’s decision to go against the offshoring tide, Sleek Audio has a full-scale manufacturing operation that can be reached via a 15-minute car ride rather than a 24-hour flight. Each earphone costs roughly 50 percent more to produce in Florida than in China. But Krywko is more than happy to pay the premium to know that botched orders and shipping delays won’t ruin his company. And so far, the gambit appears to be paying off: Based on enthusiastic customer response, Sleek Audio is now projecting 2011 to be its most profitable year ever.

Just because Apple and other top tier companies (Corning is mentioned in the article) had a good experience with overseas manufacturing doesn't mean everyone will. If you're pretty much any business smaller than Apple, you might not get the results you want since they simply may not care about you as much.

I also saw people complaining how Megaupload didn't take down some files, even if someone reported them as pirated content. However, only copyright owner is able to fill a proper DMCA notice. You can not, as a random citizen, submit a DMCA notice and expect the file to be taken down. Let alone just reporting a 'pirated file' via email.

There is a lot of copyright management companies out there that do the work for the *AA. There is no provided way to validate a specific takedown. Say you run a site like MegaUpload and you receive a takedown notice from a gmail account. Could you really beleive in the email as being done in good faith? What about all those companies that don't even take the time to publish SPF records.

As reported by MegaUpload, 70% of fortune 500 companies had accounts linked to them. How would you sort out what is infringing from what isn't? It could happen that works in progress and final works get distributed internally that way.

What about remixes?

As for just having a bunch of regexes, Hotfile lawsuits against Warner show how it can fail (see: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/hotfile-turns-tables-accusing-warner-brothers-of-dmca-abuse.ars )

There is also the the matter of volume. In the indictment, it says that Carpathia (a hosting provided) provided 25PB to megaupload. This would be a lot of files to verify. And even then you could make a lot of false positive and a lot of false negative. It is not specified how much data capacity was at Leaseweb, however the amount of servers was similar.

As for deleting the files, the DMCA doesn't require that. It says:

"(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;"

Removing the link in question would disable access to the material, which is what MegaUpload did.

Even before the ICE seizures began, Hollywood already succeeded in putting innocent websites out of business due the high cost of defending themselves. Rapidshare has to worry about loosing in court. Everyone else has to worry about being shutdown despite being on the right side of the law.

They had more than a thousand servers in the US, they collected money through US-based paypal from US customers for premium accounts, they made money through US-based ad networks, and they paid money to top up loaders in the US. In other words, they were doing substantial business in the US and therefore come under US law.

Ars Technica goes into it in more detail.

(As a commercial artist, I don't know many professional artists/artisans/creative professionals who feel this way, unless they've already made a mound of money on TV and film and now use that popularity as a platform to market stuff on the Internet, but let's just roll with what you're saying for the moment.)

Most artists who support copying generally are satisfied to do so as long as no one else is selling their work for profit.

Thus, we'd better have better solutions than torrents and trackers:

[...] money was mainly routed through US-based PayPal, which is how Megaupload collected subscriptions from users looking for premium accounts. This wasn't chump change; the government claims that the Megaupload PayPal account has "received in excess of $110,000,000 from subscribers and other persons associated with Mega Conspiracy."

Megaupload made at least a hundred million dollars distributing other people's stuff -- it was really just about taking money that would have gone to filmmakers and Big Media and shifting the revenue to people who owned servers and sold ads.

People would like to pretend that the "pirate economy," as such, is just some people that run a box somewhere that are just connecting people together, when in fact it's billions of dollars a year that are flying around, not one dime of it going back to people that actually made the stuff. Megaupload ran entire server farms in Virginia at a cost of millions of dollars year just to make sure its ads and premium subscription reach was sufficient in North America. Filesharing is absolutely not free of a Big Corporate aspect.

and even #2 is pretty shaky, apparently.

The SOPA issue was raised at the recent GOP debate, and all four candidates spoke against it.

Actually, the reason why is the major conservative think-tanks made it a major issue. They realized that all it would take would be a left-wing liberal hippie to go and claim copyright infringement and knock them off the 'net, which to them is quite dangerous.

So they made it a priority to oppose the bill and told all the GOP candidates that yes, it really does matter to them.

It's isn't just about piracy, it's about censorship, and you can bet there's going to be a LOT of people wanting ot misuse the power to censor people they don't like.

Source.

Well, not long ago "it" was a kiddie-porn ring, today "it" is another group of scum.

Obama has made it a mission to eliminate illegal streaming. A while back, he was talking about it all the time.

It could become a felony.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/obama-ip-czar-wants-felony-charges-for-illegal-web-streaming.ars

".. They were compliant with the DMCA, from what I understand.."

Apparently not, try ars technica for what these scum were really up to

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

You Sir are full of crap

"...they are making an example out of an historic, legitimate, useful and well-known website. This is a prophetic glimmer of the coming war against pure free speech- the internet."

A flagrant lie on your part, the site was run by known criminals who not only profited from distributing copyrighted material, but even stole said material from their own customers who used the site to store personal files.

Try ars technica for the real story, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

Megaupload is/was run by scum, but they appear to be your kind of scum, so I guess that explains your self righteous indignation over the bust.

All this, of course, ignores that Congress and the whitehouse have ALREADY backpedeled on SOPA and that its sounding dead in the water at this point. But yea, the people can make no difference at all, keep telling yourself that.

Dead bills don't get more hearings. We're being placated.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars A bit dated article, but should be relevant. Seeing as how the site and arrests went out today...before investigations Saw 11 has been downloaded 129202 times.

Your pessimism and apathy does LOADS to fix a percieved issue. Way to discourage people from trying to make a difference. I suppose instead of writing to congress, youd feel better writing to Google and Wikipedia to tell them that they wasted their time yesterday during the blackout.

All this, of course, ignores that Congress and the whitehouse have ALREADY backpedeled on SOPA and that its sounding dead in the water at this point. But yea, the people can make no difference at all, keep telling yourself that.

Not when you consider that the bees are getting replaced by a "fun guy" with a virus. In that light, might be time to start the gun collection ;)

The article from Ars Technica on this subject brings an interesting view point on the 'simplicity' of the tool set. This is all great and wonderful, but I suspect it will end up like other 'easy' technologies in primary and secondary eduction. Companies will think there is a simple path, educators will be dumped into the middle of it and the result will be classrooms of poorly implemented technology. Worse yet will be states that create new focus groups to identify the curriculum needed in the class room and schools will be forced to purchase technology they cannot use.

Educators need open source material that allows them to quickly mix-and-match to meet their teaching needs and the needs of the children. Bringing a new technology to bear can only go so far if the material available to them is still sub-par from an industry publisher. Besides, with 'approved' material being mostly copyrighted, the educators and schools will still have to pay high prices to access the information.

Making it easy to mash-up material is not going to make it more accessible and won't help improve the ability to teach and learn.

So If I have committed a year of my life till today working with various investors for republishing these works. Should I be punished with the destruction of my business model? Based on the RIAA accounting scheme every 4 minutes(approx duration of a song) of my life amount to $22000. With this decision, Someone now owe's me $2.89 *10^9