Now, the price of the content will go down due to competition and may be some type of extended financial crisis where the 99% gets more squeezed. There is no need to pay $5 or more for any content - book/TV show/Movie tickets and so on.
Here is the problem with your assumption. You assume that with an absence of or reduction in piracy rates, the content owners will be compelled to reduce the price of their content. Why would they do that?
In terms of competition, the content owners are already competing among themselves today. This has not resulted in any visible reduction in prices. Even assuming piracy is entirely wiped out, it will have no net effect on the degree of competition the contents owners face. The same rivals they face today will still be there tomorrow.
You should also know that movie ticket prices have never been reduced since 1948. This also holds true even for the period before the internet was born or piracy became widespread.
There are literally hundreds of emails there to plow through. Although there are many strong objections raised by different parties, the one who really seems to be pushing DRM is Netflix.
It also appears that the CEO of W3C is the one who made the decision.
Are concerns taken seriously on the other mailing list, or is it a spot to send people to voice their concerns with other likeminded people?
This discussion has gone all the way up to the CEO of the W3C, and that's where he has requested that the discussion take place. Given that this is ultimately a CEO decision, if you want to effect a change, following his advice makes the most sense.
Movie execs are capitalists. They'll make whatever people will open up their wallets for.
Which would be good, except that they have no idea what people will pay to watch.
So being mindful of the bottom line, they chose to keep pumping out movies they perceive as carrying lesser risk of failure, i.e. remakesof old previously successful movies (eg Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), sequel after sequel of tired franchises (Scary Movie 2 anyone?), and any movie with excessive violence, explosions, gore, profanity or sex, preferably all of the above.
Which is not to say such movies cannot be fun, mindless entertainment on occasion but watching this steady unending stream of clone movies is the equivalent of living on a diet of popcorn and soda exclusively.
Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies which require millions of dollars to produce.
And nothing of value was lost. I doubt I will weep if Batman 23 or Fast and Furious -Grandaddy's Race is cancelled. It might actually be a good thing if the big conglomerates step out of the movie making business so that real filmmakers who have a passion for the craft have a chance to screen their movies at theatres instead of the Hollywood drivel currently crowding them out.
Interestingly, the hiragana letters for the word "kibo" on their website means hope/aspiration.
I do wonder what's the purpose of the trip though, since the robots can jolly well try to communicate with another human on Earth. Its not to test the effects of weighlessness since their video shows that they already tested for zero-G.
Its pretty much a known fact that MS employs shills to hawk their products online. Only, they don't call it shilling, they call it Technology Evangelism.
Opera is not the first nor the last victim of certificate theft. There is evidence that the use of digitally signed malware is increasing since the Stuxnet incident gave this attack vector worldwide exposure.
Both Kaspersky Lab and BitDefender have confirmed seeing a steady increase in the number of malware threats with digitally signed components during the last 24 months. Many use digital certificates bought with fake identities, but the use of stolen certificates is also common, Craiu and Botezatu said.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, revoking stolen certificates do not prevent malware signed with it from running. Most casual users I think tend to trust certificates (that is what it's for, after all, to certify that its from a trusted source). Not many will bother to check the authenticity of the certificate.
1. I heard Microsoft and Verisign revoked the stolen Realtek certificate, does it mean I’m safe now?
Due to the way certificates work, a revoked certificate doesn’t mean the malware will not run anymore. You will still get infected by Stuxnet and the driver will still load without any warning. The only effect of the revoke process is that the bad guys will not be able to sign any further malware with it.
It might be premature to talk about its impact being limited until the full scope of the intrusion and loss of data is made known, and the number of users affected by the intrusion (not disclosed so far).
Did you recently... - copy any html codes from someone else's website? - save any pictures or files from the web? - cut and paste an article or link it to a friend? - take any screenshots of any interesting pages you found? - download any movies, music or porn?
Congrats, you may be a cyberthief. This way please, for your appointment with Mr. Noose.
Reading the advisory from Opera, the only information on the possible consequences of the breach is that:-
It is possible that a few thousand Windows users, who were using Opera between 01.00 and 01.36 UTC on June 19th, may automatically have received and installed the malicious software. To be on the safe side, we will roll out a new version of Opera which will use a new code signing certificate.
Are users of other OSes similarly exposed to malicious software, such as those using Mac, Lunix, Android or iOS?
An even more fundamental assumption he makes is that intellectual property legislation is desirable because it encourages innovation. Why should that be a given?
Take for example, the very same example cited in TFA, Sir Issac Newton and his mathematical principles. Isaac Newton composed Principia Mathematica during 1685 and 1686, and it was published in a first edition on July 5, 1687. Copyright did not exist at that time; the very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne was enacted only 23 years later in 1710.
The point I am trying to make is that people will innovate and create, even without the protection of intellectual property laws.
On a separate point, if the whole rationale for intellectual property legislation is to promote innovation, shouldn't the focus be on protecting the rights of the actual person doing the creating, as opposed to whichever faceless entity who may own the contractual right to make use of the invention? Start by making intellectual property rights vest only in the creator, and make it non transferrable. This will force commercial entities to grant a fair share of the profits to the real innovators instead of the giving an unearned bonus to the patent troll who own a large number of the patents today. The way it is structured today, it is very clear that intellectual property legislation only benefits those with the capital to buy over the rights and not the creators themselves.
I forgot to add that while I'm sympathetic to your point of view, it appears that from a purely legal point of view, the authorities appear to have ensured that their actions are clothed with a fig-leaf of legality. Whether their actions have any moral justifications is an entirely different matter.
What is particularly repugnant is that these overly broad surveillance powers may have already been used to target civil liberty groups in the UK. I would think that it is a clear abuse of power to spy on parties perceived to be 'anti-government' instead of the terrorists they ostensibly were meant to root out when the laws were enacted.
It is clear that FISA allows the US to target ‘persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information’. Arguably, when intelligence already in the hands of an agency such as the NSA is handed over to the GCHQ, there is little, if any, legal regulation or oversight in that situation as the RIPA applies only when the GCHQ gathers the data itself. If the data is simply provided to the GCHQ by the NSA pursuant to The Security Service Act 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act 1994 there is no legal requirement for a UK court warrant.
Also RIPA does not apply where the information on UK residents is harvested outside of the UK (e.g. harvested from Google servers based in the US).
In 2012, Governor Brown introduced a wide-ranging government reorganization plan to improve efficiencies within state government. As part of the Governor's Reorganization Plan (GRP), the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) and Department of Corporations (DOC) will become divisions under the new Department of Business Oversight, effective July 1st.
The core functions of the DFI and DOC Departments will remain the same, and consumers, financial institutions and other stakeholders will continue to receive the same level of excellent service. The examination, enforcement, legal, licensing and other programs will be organized under the Division of Financial Institutions and the Division of Corporations under the new Department of Business Oversight (DBO).
The new Department of Business Oversight will license and regulate all state-licensed depository and non-depository financial services and institutions.
Sure, this move benefits Google greatly -you're tagging their database and giving them more personal info, for free.
For the user though, not so much. If you've bought a hot new phone and want to show it off, its much more satisfying to do it in person where you can gush over it and more importantly, see your friend's reaction.
If you must share the news online, theres so many other ways to do it, over FB or Twitter for instance. All this instrusiveness achieves is make people more wary of using G+.
Yup, found plenty of dirt here, no idea how true all this is but it seems to be some bad blood involved.
Freivald, who also ran for West Orange’s town council (and briefly created another website expressing dissatisfaction with a Weichert realtor a while back), tried to find out why his WestOrange.info website was being targeted by the town. Freivald gave a speech about his website and his surprise at receiving the letter, at a town council meeting on June 11. He expressed concerns about why the town didn’t address the “confustion” they were worried about through other methods, other than sending the cease and desist letter. Then Freivald asked for transparency.
The morning after the meeting, Freivald received this email in response to his questions about the letter from West Orange Mayor Robert Parisi:
Good morning the Administration authorized the sending of the cease and desist letter at the request of members of the Public Relations Commission that believe the sites and the confusion they arouse, undermines the efforts of the Commission and the work they do in promoting the Township. As the Commission is officially sanctioned and funded by the Township, the Administration respected their concerns and agreed to send the letter.
There’s just one problem. Freivald is a member of the Public Relations Commission (PRC), along with Prakash Khaitan, Chair; Michelle Cadeau; Cynthia Cumming; MaryEllen Morrow; Jonathon Ridley; Josefina Velez, Vice Chair; Patrecia West.
It does seem unusual that the town council is messing around with their own PR committee.
Hi, all. Welcome to the site. I’m sorry that it has been hard to use this site over the past few days (the week of June 17, 2013) because the traffic has been so high. If you get a “Resource Limit Is Reached”, just refresh the page and it should load after a try or two.
I believe the traffic is organic: There is no evidence lending credence to the rumor that the Township orchestrated the viral response as a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack to take me out. (Just for the record, that’s a joke, probably mostly for the CNET visitors.)
I find it ironic curious visitors are doing what the West Orange County failed to do.
So, it's educated middle class people in the city protesting that politicians aren't giving them stuff cheaper and that politicians are wasting their money.
If you had done some proper research, you would have discovered that the "middle class" did not support the protest, it started off peacefully and only gained traction after abusive police crackdowns.
The marches began this month with a small protest in Sao Paulo against a small increase in bus and subway fares. The demonstrations initially drew the scorn of many middle-class Brazilians after protesters vandalized storefronts, subway stations and buses on one of the city's main avenues. But the movement quickly gained support and spread to other cities as police used heavy-handed tactics to try to quell the demonstrations. The biggest crackdown happened on Thursday in Sao Paulo when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas in clashes that injured more than 100 people, including 15 journalists, some of whom said they were deliberately targeted.
There's even a eyewitness report, together with pictures and videos of the police brutality by the poster "Canslli" here .
But the problem, again, was the government and it's police. They cowardly shot tear gas and rubber bullets on people who were peacefully protesting or just passing by (many reporters say that the police shot first, creating chaos)...
A journalist from Folha de São Paulo was hit in the eye by a rubber bullet while she was sitting on a sidewalk talking with some other journalists...
A lady who was just passing by, also hit by rubber bullets...
Protesters surrendering to the police, only to be shot after...
A homeless boy, that lives on one of the streets engulfed in chaos, was shot in the leg by a rubber bullet. Some people took him to a drugstore to receive treatment...
Here is a video of some people who were chanting "No Violence!" until the cops shot rubber bullets at them...
So while you sit safely at home smugly spinning lies to support your ideological war against the left, understand that there are real people with real issues who are bleeding and dying in the riots. At least respect that.
They could have of course taken it one step further and hired them to make the apps, but that would have been monumentally expensive and I think they underestimated the lack of developer interest in Win8.
"the company is increasing investments in research, including developing robots for manufacturing. In March, the company said it wanted to hire 5,000 people in Taiwan with skills in hardware, automation, and robotics.
On Thursday, Foxconn said it was looking to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 people in order to bolster its research into software. It's looking for software engineers with skills in HTML5 operating systems, HTML5 apps, and cloud computing, the company said.
It intends to design Firefox OS reference models that will cover smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs.
Taken together, Foxconn is gearing to build what it hopes will be the next iPhone replacement. After all, why settle for a scrap of the profits when you can have it all?
Most gamers appear content to just play games on their platform of choice, be it on consoles, PC or smartphone. I doubt that many of them care whether or not 'gaming consoles face an existential threat from mobile devices'. If they can't get their fix on their current platform, they will switch to a new one, just as they have always done in the past and will continue to do in the future.
The decline of the console market is relevant to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft and their fanboys, but not really anyone else.
I agree. The true problem is not the plea bargain system, its the fact that the badly and loosely drafted CFAA passed by politicians allowed the prosecutor to file so many ridiculous charges against Aaron in the first place.
Here's a summary of the charges Aaron faced, from wiki:
On July 11, 2011, Swartz was indicted in Federal District Court on four felony counts: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. On September 12, 2012, the prosecution filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts.
And as I've said before - they don't like him. They really don't like him. Previously the indictment had alleged four "counts" of different legal violations each, making four felonies in total. There are now 13 felony counts in the new indictment, derived from claims of multiple instances of breaking those four laws. In specific:
Wire Fraud - 2 counts Computer Fraud - 5 counts Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer - 5 counts Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer - 1 count
It's beyond my pay grade to figure out how many years in prison that all could be, when taking into account the complexities of sentencing law. Let's leave it at a large scary number. Enough to ruin someone's life.
CFAA is too loosely drafted, provides for punishments grossly exceeding the nature of the crime, with no sense of proportionality and is abusive. That is the real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
If you watch the video, there's clearly someone pointing a video cam at the Google employee with the backpack as he walks around.
So a party of at least 2? Barring supernatural options, of course.
On a side note, Gunkanjima is seriously creepy/cool. Good job Google!
Now, the price of the content will go down due to competition and may be some type of extended financial crisis where the 99% gets more squeezed. There is no need to pay $5 or more for any content - book/TV show/Movie tickets and so on.
Here is the problem with your assumption. You assume that with an absence of or reduction in piracy rates, the content owners will be compelled to reduce the price of their content. Why would they do that?
In terms of competition, the content owners are already competing among themselves today. This has not resulted in any visible reduction in prices. Even assuming piracy is entirely wiped out, it will have no net effect on the degree of competition the contents owners face. The same rivals they face today will still be there tomorrow.
You should also know that movie ticket prices have never been reduced since 1948. This also holds true even for the period before the internet was born or piracy became widespread.
It appears that others in the W3C mailing lists have in fact objected to the implementation of DRM in HTML5.
They were instead shunted off to 'more appropriate forums' to discuss their objections.
There are literally hundreds of emails there to plow through. Although there are many strong objections raised by different parties, the one who really seems to be pushing DRM is Netflix.
Even the EFF have formally objected to the DRM scheme.
It also appears that the CEO of W3C is the one who made the decision.
The current W3C CEO is Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe.
So in a nutshell, if you're wondering who to blame for EME in HTML5, thats the story.
Movie execs are capitalists. They'll make whatever people will open up their wallets for.
Which would be good, except that they have no idea what people will pay to watch.
So being mindful of the bottom line, they chose to keep pumping out movies they perceive as carrying lesser risk of failure, i.e. remakesof old previously successful movies (eg Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), sequel after sequel of tired franchises (Scary Movie 2 anyone?), and any movie with excessive violence, explosions, gore, profanity or sex, preferably all of the above.
Which is not to say such movies cannot be fun, mindless entertainment on occasion but watching this steady unending stream of clone movies is the equivalent of living on a diet of popcorn and soda exclusively.
Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies which require millions of dollars to produce.
And nothing of value was lost. I doubt I will weep if Batman 23 or Fast and Furious -Grandaddy's Race is cancelled. It might actually be a good thing if the big conglomerates step out of the movie making business so that real filmmakers who have a passion for the craft have a chance to screen their movies at theatres instead of the Hollywood drivel currently crowding them out.
Interestingly, the hiragana letters for the word "kibo" on their website means hope/aspiration.
I do wonder what's the purpose of the trip though, since the robots can jolly well try to communicate with another human on Earth. Its not to test the effects of weighlessness since their video shows that they already tested for zero-G.
Promotional event, maybe?
Its pretty much a known fact that MS employs shills to hawk their products online. Only, they don't call it shilling, they call it Technology Evangelism.
Fascinating read.
Opera is not the first nor the last victim of certificate theft. There is evidence that the use of digitally signed malware is increasing since the Stuxnet incident gave this attack vector worldwide exposure.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, revoking stolen certificates do not prevent malware signed with it from running. Most casual users I think tend to trust certificates (that is what it's for, after all, to certify that its from a trusted source). Not many will bother to check the authenticity of the certificate.
It might be premature to talk about its impact being limited until the full scope of the intrusion and loss of data is made known, and the number of users affected by the intrusion (not disclosed so far).
Did you recently ...
- copy any html codes from someone else's website?
- save any pictures or files from the web?
- cut and paste an article or link it to a friend?
- take any screenshots of any interesting pages you found?
- download any movies, music or porn?
Congrats, you may be a cyberthief. This way please, for your appointment with Mr. Noose.
Reading the advisory from Opera, the only information on the possible consequences of the breach is that :-
Are users of other OSes similarly exposed to malicious software, such as those using Mac, Lunix, Android or iOS?
Here's another similar plan hatched by a Canadian company .
An even more fundamental assumption he makes is that intellectual property legislation is desirable because it encourages innovation. Why should that be a given?
Take for example, the very same example cited in TFA, Sir Issac Newton and his mathematical principles. Isaac Newton composed Principia Mathematica during 1685 and 1686, and it was published in a first edition on July 5, 1687. Copyright did not exist at that time; the very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne was enacted only 23 years later in 1710.
The point I am trying to make is that people will innovate and create, even without the protection of intellectual property laws.
On a separate point, if the whole rationale for intellectual property legislation is to promote innovation, shouldn't the focus be on protecting the rights of the actual person doing the creating, as opposed to whichever faceless entity who may own the contractual right to make use of the invention? Start by making intellectual property rights vest only in the creator, and make it non transferrable. This will force commercial entities to grant a fair share of the profits to the real innovators instead of the giving an unearned bonus to the patent troll who own a large number of the patents today. The way it is structured today, it is very clear that intellectual property legislation only benefits those with the capital to buy over the rights and not the creators themselves.
I forgot to add that while I'm sympathetic to your point of view, it appears that from a purely legal point of view, the authorities appear to have ensured that their actions are clothed with a fig-leaf of legality. Whether their actions have any moral justifications is an entirely different matter.
What is particularly repugnant is that these overly broad surveillance powers may have already been used to target civil liberty groups in the UK. I would think that it is a clear abuse of power to spy on parties perceived to be 'anti-government' instead of the terrorists they ostensibly were meant to root out when the laws were enacted.
Full credit to this article at the London School of Economics and Politic Science .
It is clear that FISA allows the US to target ‘persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information’. Arguably, when intelligence already in the hands of an agency such as the NSA is handed over to the GCHQ, there is little, if any, legal regulation or oversight in that situation as the RIPA applies only when the GCHQ gathers the data itself. If the data is simply provided to the GCHQ by the NSA pursuant to The Security Service Act 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act 1994 there is no legal requirement for a UK court warrant.
Also RIPA does not apply where the information on UK residents is harvested outside of the UK (e.g. harvested from Google servers based in the US).
For good measure, again No.
From the last paragraph of TFA :-
This provision is likely useless against the NSA.
So, this enforcement happens just when the newly set up Department of Business Oversight comes into operation. Coincidence?
"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country." – Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson was right, and that statement far from painting him as a cokehead actually shows that he was a shrewd businessman.
These are the facts :-
1) Botanically, marijuana equals hemp. These are basically two names for the same plant.
2) Hemp was historically useful for rope, paper, and clothing, and was long promoted in Virginia as an alternative cash crop.
3) Jefferson farmed grew hemp on his Virginia farm commercially.
4) No great social stigma was attached to smoking pot in the late 1700s and early 1800s — pot use wasn't considered a problem until the early 1900s.
So, what was the problem with Jefferson's comment again?
Sure, this move benefits Google greatly -you're tagging their database and giving them more personal info, for free.
For the user though, not so much. If you've bought a hot new phone and want to show it off, its much more satisfying to do it in person where you can gush over it and more importantly, see your friend's reaction.
If you must share the news online, theres so many other ways to do it, over FB or Twitter for instance. All this instrusiveness achieves is make people more wary of using G+.
Yup, found plenty of dirt here, no idea how true all this is but it seems to be some bad blood involved.
It does seem unusual that the town council is messing around with their own PR committee.
Plus, Freivald is/was pretty active politically so that might be where he ruffled some feathers.
I find it ironic curious visitors are doing what the West Orange County failed to do.
stenvar says:
If you had done some proper research, you would have discovered that the "middle class" did not support the protest, it started off peacefully and only gained traction after abusive police crackdowns.
There's even a eyewitness report, together with pictures and videos of the police brutality by the poster "Canslli" here .
So while you sit safely at home smugly spinning lies to support your ideological war against the left, understand that there are real people with real issues who are bleeding and dying in the riots. At least respect that.
Firstly, I think they got Nokia to do most of the heavy lifting making apps for Win 8.
They also offered developers US$100 for every app in their store
They could have of course taken it one step further and hired them to make the apps, but that would have been monumentally expensive and I think they underestimated the lack of developer interest in Win8.
From TFA:
"the company is increasing investments in research, including developing robots for manufacturing. In March, the company said it wanted to hire 5,000 people in Taiwan with skills in hardware, automation, and robotics.
On Thursday, Foxconn said it was looking to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 people in order to bolster its research into software. It's looking for software engineers with skills in HTML5 operating systems, HTML5 apps, and cloud computing, the company said.
It intends to design Firefox OS reference models that will cover smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs.
Taken together, Foxconn is gearing to build what it hopes will be the next iPhone replacement. After all, why settle for a scrap of the profits when you can have it all?
Who is this 'many' that you refer to?
Most gamers appear content to just play games on their platform of choice, be it on consoles, PC or smartphone. I doubt that many of them care whether or not 'gaming consoles face an existential threat from mobile devices'. If they can't get their fix on their current platform, they will switch to a new one, just as they have always done in the past and will continue to do in the future.
The decline of the console market is relevant to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft and their fanboys, but not really anyone else.
I agree. The true problem is not the plea bargain system, its the fact that the badly and loosely drafted CFAA passed by politicians allowed the prosecutor to file so many ridiculous charges against Aaron in the first place.
Here's a summary of the charges Aaron faced, from wiki:
On July 11, 2011, Swartz was indicted in Federal District Court on four felony counts: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. On September 12, 2012, the prosecution filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts.
Seth Finkelstein analysed the charges explained what it meant :-
And as I've said before - they don't like him. They really don't like him. Previously the indictment had alleged four "counts" of different legal violations each, making four felonies in total. There are now 13 felony counts in the new indictment, derived from claims of multiple instances of breaking those four laws. In specific:
Wire Fraud - 2 counts
Computer Fraud - 5 counts
Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer - 5 counts
Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer - 1 count
It's beyond my pay grade to figure out how many years in prison that all could be, when taking into account the complexities of sentencing law. Let's leave it at a large scary number. Enough to ruin someone's life.
CFAA is too loosely drafted, provides for punishments grossly exceeding the nature of the crime, with no sense of proportionality and is abusive. That is the real problem.