To come up with a dollar amount, you must first assume that every person who watched an infringing copy of the movie would have purchased a ticket to see the movie AND THAT THEY DID NOT GO SEE IT ANYWAY. Both of these assumptions are completely incorrect. But together, they are uber-fucking-wrong. The movie made record breaking amounts. Yet people will complain that somebody watched it online at, heaven forbid, their convenience, even if the quality was sub 200p. There are so many problems with theaters and Hollywood's continual push to have movies first show up in theaters (the most inconvenient and terrible manner of distribution for viewers). I'd be willing to bet this model is so broken in this day and age that it's reducing their profits on new movies by 30-40%. So that 0.05% completely incorrect claim in losses due to piracy is absolutely dwarfed by very real losses in the draconian and ass-backwards distribution mechanism they still use. But we don't ever hear about analyses of losses like that, it's always the pirates. Always.
You're looking at this solely from the perspective of investors, which in the case of housing and doctoms was partly the owners. In this case, the sole persons to be harmed by this bubble are the entrepreneurs and engineers, because we are not financial institutions funding startups. We're the people creating products at high risk in hopes of getting funding, which is relatively low-barrier-to-entry right now. When the bubble bursts and that barrier reaches the sky, those who took the risk get nailed by the harmful effects, while the financial institutions laugh.
Just because it doesn't harm investors as much as entrepreneurs, doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
How long until Google decides all of the self-driving cars they've tested and people have used for 7 years with no problems need a massive overhaul and they decide to completely re-do the API interface unnecessarily, completely breaking usability for everyone, causing the cars to be impractically difficult to use and resulting in possible accidents?
Given Google's track record with the new GMail interface change, I can't say I'd be comfortable sitting in a car running their software, ever. You just don't change software that's business-critical willy nilly like that. You just don't. Ever.
You're overstating minor issues and making no major complaints. There are plenty of issues with Javascript, most of which we mitigate with standard practices (read: not being an idiot). These arguments are simply QQ for QQ's sake.
Wrong. There's no such thing as a "veto-proof majority." There's such a thing as a veto override, sure, but it is a response to a veto, not a presupposition that "oh we got a 2/3 vote, therefore this can't be vetoed." The act of vetoing the bill and a speech to congress could've very well massively swung the vote far below the supermajority needed to overrule a veto and thus effectively stop the bill.
What he actually did was threaten to veto for public posterity, then decided not to act on his veto power for the same reason. His image is the only thing he cares about, not this country. This action is literally the definition of treason; intentionally acting against the interest of the country for posterity. Fucking pathetic.
The vote date was changed without notification. It's hard to show up to vote when you're out campaigning and someone proposes moving the vote date up by a day and a majority of those present agree. You can say that all you want, but barring the ability to vote remotely with a last-minute notice, it's not a choice he made.
"Hey guys, it looks like we have 200+ people that will vote aye on this bill if we go ahead and take the vote tomorrow," said the sneaky silver tongued congressman from Your-Republican-State-Of-Choice at dinner with 199 of his closest evil buddies, "so let's move the vote up and get it out of the way before anyone can stop us!" The room erupted with cheers and yells "we're gonna be so rich!"
Please go tell your bosses to stop supporting CISPA. The threat here is not from the government, clearly they are willing to hand you complete impunity over a massive inadequacy to maintain privacy (and in fact, to allow the govt. to spy on users of your services without warrants at any time). The real threat here is that if you get this bill passed, you will have zero customers. Protect your users and the citizens of this country or cover your own ass and go out of business. This doesn't seem like a hard decision to make.
From what I've gleaned over reading about and using Siri is that it does nothing more than translate your request into text and find an appropriate service to handle that request. It defers actual "intelligence" to those agents. For instance, it defers to Google and Wolfram Alpha. If you haven't seen what Google and Wolfram Alpha can both do with plain English, you're still living in the last decade. It's incredible. But this is not Siri. So a mediocre STT/TTS app that heavily uses Google is going to cause Google to go the way of the dodo bird?/facepalm. TFA is a joke.
"For example, the definition of 'location information' is so sweeping that it could implicate information generally considered basic subscriber information under federal law. Since the implications of this definition are unclear, wireless providers will have difficulty figuring out how to respond to requests for such information. It could place providers in the position of requiring warrants for all law enforcement requests."
We're talking government limitation here. When a law is passed that makes X illegal or allows companies to sue individuals over Y, we are never, ever OK with over-broad generic terms describing actions that can be construed as illegal. This describes actions deemed illegal to be performed by citizens. We're talking about the reverse in this case, describing limitations to government; a law that is overbroad in specifying what information the government requires a warrant to get from telcos. This is a good thing. I would much rather it be a pain in the ass / more difficult for my government to invade the privacy of its citizens. This "too general" argument only works in the opposite direction, not when it's describing limitations to the government.
As to the arguments against that, citing it would be difficult for them to know what they can and can't give to the government, have the government tell them then make it public record what information was given, so if the government lies or gets it wrong, we can use this in an actionable way. I see no downside to this.
How about theoretical & particle physics? I mean, after all, in SG:A and SG-1, Rodney McKay and Samantha Carter are physicists yet are capable of writing entire operating systems, reprogramming the "base code" of replicators (you know, sentient machines that constantly rewrite their own code and adapt, you'd think that's trillions to quadrillions of lines of code!), and they can write these awesome software applications to interface with Lantean technology millions of years ahead of our understanding in their spare time, and only in a few short years! Surely, we have a lot to learn from physicists.
Sounds like the Salem witch trials. Get accused, defend yourself at great personal risk else face unreasonable punishment. This is not a criminal matter, so they don't need proof either. And if you want to defend yourself, I hope you have super, super deep pockets. What's next? Do we throw them in water and determine that they are guilty if they float?
What we need above almost everything else in this country is Tort reform. Being able to sue another person with such impunity (especially massive corporations) is quite simply retarded. Perhaps it could start with judges throwing out these claims in the first place. I have a feeling doing so would be tied in somehow to them losing their office, so they don't. Perhaps repealing corporate personhood could lead to a ruling that corporations have no right to civil damages because they are not people?
How is proliferating a broken and unmaintained battle.net system that's littered with bots clogging all chat channels with spam, flooding the custom list with fake games (unjoinable games or games that will never start), and permitting blatant cheating "protecting your IP" ? All of these problems can be solved in a maintained battle.net server. The real problem here is Blizzard, when faced with pioneering engineers who saw these problems and wanted to fix them on their own so they could continue to enjoy the games they had purchased, were unwilling to cooperate at no expense to themselves. That makes Blizzard stupid. But when these engineers decided, correctly, that in the game's current state, no person would ever again purchase it because it was literally unplayable, it was obvious what the next step would be: continue, even without Blizzard's support. And then, instead of realizing the potential profits a community-maintained battle.net server would bring (you know, not needing to pay people to develop and maintain it, nor to police it), Blizzard spends millions of dollars to spew lawsuits all over everything they can touch. Making money was not the goal of these actions, as clearly the costs of these suits far outweighed any actual demonstrable damages. The ONLY goal Blizzard has was to destroy bnetd and to prevent any future community involvement in bettering Blizzard's services.
THIS is what makes Blizzard evil. Nobody has denied that Blizzard has a right to profit from each user of its software (what you call "IP"), but Blizzard outright rejected that offer and proceeded to destroy a project aimed at making a Blizzard title far better at no cost to Blizzard.
1. We assume that this "technology" is saving Comcast money and this is the premise for it not counting towards bandwidth caps.
2. We also assume that since Comcast employs this method in their own VOD streaming service that it would be beneficial for competitors. Since this is clearly a win for customers, this is strongly validated.
3. Netflix is complaining that they have no means to stream to users in a manner that does not count towards bandwidth caps.
4. As a corollary to 2, Netflix, if given the opportunity, would've also decided to use this method due to its benefits (this is also strongly validated by the complaint the Netflix CEO has, essentially "it's not fair.")
5. From 3 and 4 it follows that Comcast has offered neither this "technology" nor its associated "savings" to Netflix.
Sure, but this requires a really heavy client and very clever caching so that your out-of-band request is minimized. This is not ideal for a lot of reasons, and it's still unfair that Netflix can't do the same over Comcast's network. And as a point, Netflix has apps on all sorts of low-powered hardware devices that don't have the storage capacity necessary to timeshift enough to synchronize to a multicast. So either you sit staring at a "waiting for next airing" or you have to stream it all out of band. And that's without even considering scene skipping, etc, which streaming can do effortlessly but requires significant work and lots of storage to do in timeshifted systems.
Shill alert. This 99% number is blasted all over Comcast's Xfinity website without substantiation. There is no source nor evidence to back up this claim.
Watching the entirety of SG:A in one month in HD over Netflix will achieve ~150GB of usage. That's 100 episodes / 30 days = ~3 episodes a day (2 hours). That's literally the most casual consumption I can imagine. Now throw in someone playing a video game at a moderate amount (2-3 hours a day) and listening to music while doing work. Maybe a few downloads here and there, or heaven forbid more Netflix streaming. So hard to go over guys, so hard. Must be running video 18/7 and a massive LAN of people playing WoW and video-over-IP chatting with people to even get close! FYI: 5 hours of HD netflix a day = roughly 11GB/day = 330GB/month.
I've used well over 400GB a month. Adjusting Netflix to use SD *ONLY* and I'm already at 200GB for this month. I'm NOT hosting any servers. I'm NOT hosting a LAN of people playing high-bandwidth games. I'm just ONE GUY who watches YouTube videos, Netflix, and plays a few video games. Don't listen to these obvious shills about how the 250GB cap covers 99% of all customers. Substantial claims require substantial proof, and when almost everyone I know is easily flirting with the 250GB cap while trying to conserve bandwidth, I'd say it's bullshit.
I should point out that my VPS has 2.5TB of bandwidth available per month. Yet it costs me less than 1/5th of my internet bill from Comcast. Makes sense, right?
So how can competitors get in on this "in-network doesn't count towards bandwidth cap" thing? They can't? So since I have no other choices on my ISP, why then would anyone but Comcast want something like this to be legal? Tweak bandwidth cap to 50GB/month and then laugh as people are required to use your services else have internet services terminated. It would appear this is incredibly simple to abuse to force out any competition.
Use Comcast's $60/month service or use Netflix, break your cap, and get service terminated. It's anti-competitive, and Comcast doesn't offer Netflix the ability to host on their network for the same savings. I fail to see any savings being passed onto the customers, rather just a blatant money grab.
Gotta love how you can multicast the same content to 200 different people who on-demand decide to watch it at completely different times. That's some kind of temporal shifting engineering technology to reduce bandwidth costs, right? Man, 2012 really is the future.
But why can't Netflix have a datacenter hosted on their network and get the same benefit? Oh, but you say they can? If they pay Comcast $100,000/month? Wait... oh yeah, this is what Net Neutrality was meant to prevent. It doesn't matter how you try to justify it with cost-based arguments, it provides an uncompetitive advantage and should not be permitted.
And what about Comcast + AT&T + Verizon effectively being "the only choices available" for internet services but have the exact same costs for the exact same service with the exact same terms? Looks an awful lot like no competition is going on between the major monopolies, but a whole lot of trustful-lovin. Would love to see a massive lawsuit dissolve these monopolies. Unfortunately, so long as money = speech and corporations run this country, that'll never happen, regardless of how obviously they're violating anticompetitive legislation.
Also, not sure about Verizon, but Comcast & AT&T have the exact same data cap. It's such an arbitrary number and is not consistent with modern usage habits nor the speeds available. If I'm paying significantly more ($200/month) for 100Mbit, why is my cap the same as someone on a 10Mbit connection? Monopolies -- fun stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
To come up with a dollar amount, you must first assume that every person who watched an infringing copy of the movie would have purchased a ticket to see the movie AND THAT THEY DID NOT GO SEE IT ANYWAY. Both of these assumptions are completely incorrect. But together, they are uber-fucking-wrong. The movie made record breaking amounts. Yet people will complain that somebody watched it online at, heaven forbid, their convenience, even if the quality was sub 200p. There are so many problems with theaters and Hollywood's continual push to have movies first show up in theaters (the most inconvenient and terrible manner of distribution for viewers). I'd be willing to bet this model is so broken in this day and age that it's reducing their profits on new movies by 30-40%. So that 0.05% completely incorrect claim in losses due to piracy is absolutely dwarfed by very real losses in the draconian and ass-backwards distribution mechanism they still use. But we don't ever hear about analyses of losses like that, it's always the pirates. Always.
Projects which Google owns entirely vs projects to which they merely contribute. Apples meet oranges.
You're looking at this solely from the perspective of investors, which in the case of housing and doctoms was partly the owners. In this case, the sole persons to be harmed by this bubble are the entrepreneurs and engineers, because we are not financial institutions funding startups. We're the people creating products at high risk in hopes of getting funding, which is relatively low-barrier-to-entry right now. When the bubble bursts and that barrier reaches the sky, those who took the risk get nailed by the harmful effects, while the financial institutions laugh.
Just because it doesn't harm investors as much as entrepreneurs, doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
How long until Google decides all of the self-driving cars they've tested and people have used for 7 years with no problems need a massive overhaul and they decide to completely re-do the API interface unnecessarily, completely breaking usability for everyone, causing the cars to be impractically difficult to use and resulting in possible accidents?
Given Google's track record with the new GMail interface change, I can't say I'd be comfortable sitting in a car running their software, ever. You just don't change software that's business-critical willy nilly like that. You just don't. Ever.
You're overstating minor issues and making no major complaints. There are plenty of issues with Javascript, most of which we mitigate with standard practices (read: not being an idiot). These arguments are simply QQ for QQ's sake.
Wrong. There's no such thing as a "veto-proof majority." There's such a thing as a veto override, sure, but it is a response to a veto, not a presupposition that "oh we got a 2/3 vote, therefore this can't be vetoed." The act of vetoing the bill and a speech to congress could've very well massively swung the vote far below the supermajority needed to overrule a veto and thus effectively stop the bill.
What he actually did was threaten to veto for public posterity, then decided not to act on his veto power for the same reason. His image is the only thing he cares about, not this country. This action is literally the definition of treason; intentionally acting against the interest of the country for posterity. Fucking pathetic.
The vote date was changed without notification. It's hard to show up to vote when you're out campaigning and someone proposes moving the vote date up by a day and a majority of those present agree. You can say that all you want, but barring the ability to vote remotely with a last-minute notice, it's not a choice he made.
"Hey guys, it looks like we have 200+ people that will vote aye on this bill if we go ahead and take the vote tomorrow," said the sneaky silver tongued congressman from Your-Republican-State-Of-Choice at dinner with 199 of his closest evil buddies, "so let's move the vote up and get it out of the way before anyone can stop us!" The room erupted with cheers and yells "we're gonna be so rich!"
When does this revolution start?
Please go tell your bosses to stop supporting CISPA. The threat here is not from the government, clearly they are willing to hand you complete impunity over a massive inadequacy to maintain privacy (and in fact, to allow the govt. to spy on users of your services without warrants at any time). The real threat here is that if you get this bill passed, you will have zero customers. Protect your users and the citizens of this country or cover your own ass and go out of business. This doesn't seem like a hard decision to make.
From what I've gleaned over reading about and using Siri is that it does nothing more than translate your request into text and find an appropriate service to handle that request. It defers actual "intelligence" to those agents. For instance, it defers to Google and Wolfram Alpha. If you haven't seen what Google and Wolfram Alpha can both do with plain English, you're still living in the last decade. It's incredible. But this is not Siri. So a mediocre STT/TTS app that heavily uses Google is going to cause Google to go the way of the dodo bird? /facepalm. TFA is a joke.
We're talking government limitation here. When a law is passed that makes X illegal or allows companies to sue individuals over Y, we are never, ever OK with over-broad generic terms describing actions that can be construed as illegal. This describes actions deemed illegal to be performed by citizens. We're talking about the reverse in this case, describing limitations to government; a law that is overbroad in specifying what information the government requires a warrant to get from telcos. This is a good thing. I would much rather it be a pain in the ass / more difficult for my government to invade the privacy of its citizens. This "too general" argument only works in the opposite direction, not when it's describing limitations to the government.
As to the arguments against that, citing it would be difficult for them to know what they can and can't give to the government, have the government tell them then make it public record what information was given, so if the government lies or gets it wrong, we can use this in an actionable way. I see no downside to this.
How about theoretical & particle physics? I mean, after all, in SG:A and SG-1, Rodney McKay and Samantha Carter are physicists yet are capable of writing entire operating systems, reprogramming the "base code" of replicators (you know, sentient machines that constantly rewrite their own code and adapt, you'd think that's trillions to quadrillions of lines of code!), and they can write these awesome software applications to interface with Lantean technology millions of years ahead of our understanding in their spare time, and only in a few short years! Surely, we have a lot to learn from physicists.
So what you're saying is that the defendant is guilty until proven innocent?
Sounds like the Salem witch trials. Get accused, defend yourself at great personal risk else face unreasonable punishment. This is not a criminal matter, so they don't need proof either. And if you want to defend yourself, I hope you have super, super deep pockets. What's next? Do we throw them in water and determine that they are guilty if they float?
What we need above almost everything else in this country is Tort reform. Being able to sue another person with such impunity (especially massive corporations) is quite simply retarded. Perhaps it could start with judges throwing out these claims in the first place. I have a feeling doing so would be tied in somehow to them losing their office, so they don't. Perhaps repealing corporate personhood could lead to a ruling that corporations have no right to civil damages because they are not people?
How is proliferating a broken and unmaintained battle.net system that's littered with bots clogging all chat channels with spam, flooding the custom list with fake games (unjoinable games or games that will never start), and permitting blatant cheating "protecting your IP" ? All of these problems can be solved in a maintained battle.net server. The real problem here is Blizzard, when faced with pioneering engineers who saw these problems and wanted to fix them on their own so they could continue to enjoy the games they had purchased, were unwilling to cooperate at no expense to themselves. That makes Blizzard stupid. But when these engineers decided, correctly, that in the game's current state, no person would ever again purchase it because it was literally unplayable, it was obvious what the next step would be: continue, even without Blizzard's support. And then, instead of realizing the potential profits a community-maintained battle.net server would bring (you know, not needing to pay people to develop and maintain it, nor to police it), Blizzard spends millions of dollars to spew lawsuits all over everything they can touch. Making money was not the goal of these actions, as clearly the costs of these suits far outweighed any actual demonstrable damages. The ONLY goal Blizzard has was to destroy bnetd and to prevent any future community involvement in bettering Blizzard's services.
THIS is what makes Blizzard evil. Nobody has denied that Blizzard has a right to profit from each user of its software (what you call "IP"), but Blizzard outright rejected that offer and proceeded to destroy a project aimed at making a Blizzard title far better at no cost to Blizzard.
1. We assume that this "technology" is saving Comcast money and this is the premise for it not counting towards bandwidth caps.
2. We also assume that since Comcast employs this method in their own VOD streaming service that it would be beneficial for competitors. Since this is clearly a win for customers, this is strongly validated.
3. Netflix is complaining that they have no means to stream to users in a manner that does not count towards bandwidth caps.
4. As a corollary to 2, Netflix, if given the opportunity, would've also decided to use this method due to its benefits (this is also strongly validated by the complaint the Netflix CEO has, essentially "it's not fair.")
5. From 3 and 4 it follows that Comcast has offered neither this "technology" nor its associated "savings" to Netflix.
Sure, but this requires a really heavy client and very clever caching so that your out-of-band request is minimized. This is not ideal for a lot of reasons, and it's still unfair that Netflix can't do the same over Comcast's network. And as a point, Netflix has apps on all sorts of low-powered hardware devices that don't have the storage capacity necessary to timeshift enough to synchronize to a multicast. So either you sit staring at a "waiting for next airing" or you have to stream it all out of band. And that's without even considering scene skipping, etc, which streaming can do effortlessly but requires significant work and lots of storage to do in timeshifted systems.
Shill alert. This 99% number is blasted all over Comcast's Xfinity website without substantiation. There is no source nor evidence to back up this claim.
Watching the entirety of SG:A in one month in HD over Netflix will achieve ~150GB of usage. That's 100 episodes / 30 days = ~3 episodes a day (2 hours). That's literally the most casual consumption I can imagine. Now throw in someone playing a video game at a moderate amount (2-3 hours a day) and listening to music while doing work. Maybe a few downloads here and there, or heaven forbid more Netflix streaming. So hard to go over guys, so hard. Must be running video 18/7 and a massive LAN of people playing WoW and video-over-IP chatting with people to even get close! FYI: 5 hours of HD netflix a day = roughly 11GB/day = 330GB/month.
I've used well over 400GB a month. Adjusting Netflix to use SD *ONLY* and I'm already at 200GB for this month. I'm NOT hosting any servers. I'm NOT hosting a LAN of people playing high-bandwidth games. I'm just ONE GUY who watches YouTube videos, Netflix, and plays a few video games. Don't listen to these obvious shills about how the 250GB cap covers 99% of all customers. Substantial claims require substantial proof, and when almost everyone I know is easily flirting with the 250GB cap while trying to conserve bandwidth, I'd say it's bullshit.
I should point out that my VPS has 2.5TB of bandwidth available per month. Yet it costs me less than 1/5th of my internet bill from Comcast. Makes sense, right?
"if you can" -- precisely why Comcast should be shut down.
So how can competitors get in on this "in-network doesn't count towards bandwidth cap" thing? They can't? So since I have no other choices on my ISP, why then would anyone but Comcast want something like this to be legal? Tweak bandwidth cap to 50GB/month and then laugh as people are required to use your services else have internet services terminated. It would appear this is incredibly simple to abuse to force out any competition.
Use Comcast's $60/month service or use Netflix, break your cap, and get service terminated. It's anti-competitive, and Comcast doesn't offer Netflix the ability to host on their network for the same savings. I fail to see any savings being passed onto the customers, rather just a blatant money grab.
Gotta love how you can multicast the same content to 200 different people who on-demand decide to watch it at completely different times. That's some kind of temporal shifting engineering technology to reduce bandwidth costs, right? Man, 2012 really is the future.
But why can't Netflix have a datacenter hosted on their network and get the same benefit? Oh, but you say they can? If they pay Comcast $100,000/month? Wait... oh yeah, this is what Net Neutrality was meant to prevent. It doesn't matter how you try to justify it with cost-based arguments, it provides an uncompetitive advantage and should not be permitted.
And what about Comcast + AT&T + Verizon effectively being "the only choices available" for internet services but have the exact same costs for the exact same service with the exact same terms? Looks an awful lot like no competition is going on between the major monopolies, but a whole lot of trustful-lovin. Would love to see a massive lawsuit dissolve these monopolies. Unfortunately, so long as money = speech and corporations run this country, that'll never happen, regardless of how obviously they're violating anticompetitive legislation.
Also, not sure about Verizon, but Comcast & AT&T have the exact same data cap. It's such an arbitrary number and is not consistent with modern usage habits nor the speeds available. If I'm paying significantly more ($200/month) for 100Mbit, why is my cap the same as someone on a 10Mbit connection? Monopolies -- fun stuff.
I believe mine is currently functioning as intended.