It will succeed or fail based on what content it can access. If Apple and News Corp. work out a deal, and you can view all News Corp. content on the thing, it will be a big success.
I disagree. News Corp's content is far too expensive. It's currently only succeeded as a pay for content model because many corporations pay for employee's WSJ subscriptions. If the actual consumers have to pay for it themselves, I doubt many of them would be paying for such overpriced content.
Few sites are done *entirely* in flash like this, most of them are promotional sites for Movies and TV shows. While people do want flash games, most of us really just want flash video content to work on the iPhone.
The truth of the matter is this: Despite what Steve Jobs wants you to believe, HTML5 will *NOT* replace flash as the video standard on the internet anytime soon. Let's assume the whole Ogg vs h.264 debate gets settled, there's still the larger issue of there being *no* DRM whatsoever supported within html5. Does anyone honestly think there's a snowball's chance in hell that the movie studios will allow Hulu to move to a distribution method where it's trivial for ANYONE to simply download content off hulu and watch it whenever without advertisements? It's just not gonna happen.
I believe the way its handled is that X amount of un-countered claims, you get taken down where X is a super-secret number based on your date of birth, weight on the moon, and proximity to the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
So it is possible to have filed a counter-claim in one instance, have nothing more come of it, and then still get taken down later due to other uncountered claims.
Also, apparently Google handled this better than it was reported in the media as apparently every DMCA takedown notice they send out does apparently contain links to ChillingEffects.org which has a form and instructions on how to file a counter-claim. So it's not as if they didn't try, it seems as though some people just didn't really understand the rules and ignored the notices since they had permission.
I don't see why this post is modded down as Flamebait. It seems like a perfectly reasonable question. Are we supposed to assume that Apple customers are more honest than average folk and therefore express surprise that they, of all people, would commit fraud? This doesn't seem like a story unique to iPhones or Apple so I wonder why it's framed as such.
Just FYI, the rights holder's did file the claims in this instance -- they also gave permission for the song to be hosted. In short, they have NFI what they're doing. One branch of the company says "Sure, use this for promotional purposes" and the other is doing random Google searches for their IP and sees the mp3 up and fires off the complaint without another thought. In other words, the complaint was filed in good, albeit very stupid, faith by the proper rights holder.
Google could have handled the situation a bit better, perhaps, but they're really stuck in the middle. They must comply with the takedown notice UNLESS a counter-claim is filed or they become liable. What Google *could* do is make it easier for people to file counter-claims when they receive takedown notices -- which effectively ends the issue unless the original claimant decides to take it to court.
But there's still only so much they can do. At the end of the day, most people who receive a takedown notice for something they have the rights to post are going to just say "Pfft, whatever. I have permission." and ignore it and then cry foul later when their stuff is removed. They simply don't realize that the way the DMCA works is that it has put a burden of declaring their innocence upon them or they are presumed guilty.
Do you own your own fiber on your own island nation? Otherwise, it's impossible to truly protect yourself from this sort of thing . If not a third party hosting site complying with a DMCA notice, it would be your ISP. In this case, Google is simply doing what they are bound by a stupid, stupid law to do. They know it's stupid, but unless you file a counter-claim after someone sends a DMCA takedown notice to you, expect your stuff to get taken down. The burden is on you, unfairly, and that's just the way it is.
A DDOS attack on Verizon's servers maybe not so effective, but what about one on their technical support phone numbers? Can they really handle the influx of thousands of callers or maybe just a couple hundred people calling in repeatedly. Real customers need to use those numbers too, and when they can't get through -- they'll be pissed.
But beyond that, 4chan won't just go after Verizon, they'll go after specific Verizon executives in more direct ways. I suspect the CEO of Verizon is about to get blocked from delivery by every pizza place in town, at the very least. Childish? Yes. Effective? Possibly.
At the very least, I'd be interested to see what happens if Verizon doesn't backpedal on this relatively soon. It could get uglier than you think. What 4chan members lack in intelligence, they make up for in numbers. It doesn't take as many people as you think, acting in concert, to gum up the works. I strongly suspect very soon they'll use the same "We were blocking a DDOS attack *against* 4chan" excuse that AT&T used.
I think the older ones are not the issue, it's the new ones that won't usually stream h.264. They do the basic low-quality flash stream first, then encode HD and then iPhone versions. I think iPhone is usually last, so sometimes it takes up to a day after a video is posted before you can watch it on your iPhone.
Is that really so impossible a problem to engineer around? Just make it so you have to tap flash elements of a webpage to run them. Then their not just draining my battery life with regular usage -- but if there's some specific reason that i want to be using flash, I can. Win/win, right?
Meh, I guess if you see this as something set to infiltrate the business environment.
I'm seeing it missing a lot of things that *I* would want in a tablet.
Multi-tasking? I want to listen to pandora and browse the web while I lay on the couch, k?
I want Netflix/Hulu/Etc. I'm sorry, iTunes is not good enough. Throw in some actual codec support while you're at it.
With a real tablet I can do all these things, and maybe throw boxee on it to and use it as a HTPC when I'm not using it -- and you know what? I still haven't bought one, anyways. I can do so much more with a regular tablet PC and it's still not particularly compelling . .
I just finished watching the Official keynote from Apple's website and even Steve Jobs didn't seem very enthusiastic. He spoke slowly and constantly repeated himself, it was as if he was just filling time. He had a device that did stuff we've ALL already seen in the iPhone and yet went through feature by feature like we didn't already know how mobile safari or google maps worked. "It's the web in the palm of your hand" he exclaimed -- and I thought "Isn't that what my iPhone was and still is?"
It's just not an impressive device and even Steve Jobs couldn't make it seem like one. The whole thing sorta made me think I might want a tablet -- but *not* an iPad. I was sorta thinking "You know, I might like a windows 7 tablet to watch netflix in bed with . . . too bad this won't do that." In other words, I was more impressed by the features that were glaringly omitted than the ones that were included.
I will, however, say that I did find the 3g pricing to be mildly impressive. It left me wondering if you can activate a Sim with that price plan and then pop it into some other device . . .
Since we'll know for sure tomorrow, I'd just like to toss out a crazy conspiracy theory. I think tomorrow there's a chance, perhaps not a very large one, that Apple will announce integrated Google Voice support in iPhone OS 4.0. I think it's just the sort of curve ball Apple likes to throw, especially since it makes their past bad behavior/decisions look magically justified to the fanboys. That's exactly the sort of thing Apple likes to do:
"You know how we've stuck with the single button mouse all these years? It wasn't a display of terrible judgment and stubbornness at all! We just wanted to do the mouse *right* and do multi-touch with it! This was our plan all along!"
"I know we said we didn't think people wanted a video ipod -- but that's because we knew nobody would want it without the amazing video service we're now prepared to offer via iTunes. Now everybody WILL want it!"
"We were always going to add Copy and Paste! We just wanted to take our time and and ensure we delivered the quality, simple Apple experience that we knew you'd want!"
etc, etc.
Apple loves turn their negatives into positives and get carried off the stage by packs of rabid apple fanboys. So it wouldn't surprise me a bit if Apple did something completely unexpected like built-in Google voice support if it scores them a win, catches the press off guard, and gets the FCC off their back. When you think about it, there's really no good reason not to. Sure they might want to stick it Google now that they are direct competitors, but it won't honestly make much difference either way. Frankly, they're better off in that competition supporting anything that android can already do since it's not like Apple has a competing product to Google Voice.
Ok, I'm grounding enough in reality to realize that this probably *won't* happen. But I do think it *could* happen and it definitely *should* happen. Fingers crossed!
Microsoft started down this road and said screw it.
Forget the difficulties and cost of securing an agreement with the Authors guild (the lack of which ensures a doomed project as Google quickly found out) -- there's the very real and very substantial difficulties in digitizing the books in the first place. Scanning books in, page by page, correcting OCR software mistakes, gaining permission libraries to digitize their collections and organizing the workers and equipment to get it done. This is not an easy process.
It took google several years and ridiculous amounts of manpower and money to make this happen. No other company will do this in our lifetimes, I can almost guarantee it.
If this doesn't happen now, some of these works may be lost forever. We're talking, in some cases, about very region specific titles that may have only had a few hundred copies printed ever. It's not unrealistic that some of these books may not exist outside of the 1 or 2 libraries that happen to have copies.
What happens if a venerable old library burns down tomorrow? There's a very real chance that they might have the only known copies of some obscure book (say a study on 18th century New England thimble themes) that might have little value to most people, but might have tremendous value to someone else.
I agree that there some aspects of the situation do leave a bitter taste in your mouth, but not nearly as bitter a taste as current copyright law and to not go ahead with the project because of these reservations is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, shooting the baby, and then burning down the house to cover the evidence with grandma still inside.
Yes, copyright reform would be a far, far, better solution (Grandma gets ice cream, in that analogy) -- but it doesn't seem to be a real option at this point. It would be great if there was a way to petition a work into the public domain if the author could not be found -- of course such a system would be just as vulnerable to the type of abuse you suggest (where an author is continually forced to confirm his copyright or risk losing it).
Again, I think your argument is strictly a philosophical one. That's what all the objections seem to boil down to. It's wrong that they are able to do this because it would mean "insert long hypothetical situation that'll never happen here".
For starters, Google tried just do this and got sued immediately. They weren't going to do any in-print works at all (Well they were going to scan them, but only for search indexing, not for ebook versions). They only decided to do that after their settlement had been reached.
Ultimately, Google is the only company big enough to do this and if they don't do it, probably nobody ever will. So we can all object to what Google is doing on a philosophical basis, or let them go ahead with a potentially revolutionary project with obvious benefits to society.
Any company that tries to do what Google is doing without a settlement with the Authors guild would be sued into the ground. There's no reason to think this is likely to be anything more than a one time event.
Here's the problem. The opt-out approach is entirely necessary to Google's goals in this project, specifically with regards to so-called "orphaned works".
There are many books out there who's copyright status is questionable. For whatever reason, the right's holders cannot be contacted. These works are essentially lost to us. Many were produced in very limited runs in the first place, and there are few copies still floating around. If your library happens to have one, then you can read one of these works -- but otherwise you're out of luck.
While ideally, copyright law could be reformed to put these works into the Public Domain so that they can be reproduced and made available to anyone -- this is not something Google can realistically do.
The opt-out implementation of the settlement gives them a way to put these works back into the public space -- though not quite into the public domain. It gives people a way to access works that are otherwise lost to them. It rescues them from obscurity and dusty bookshelves so that they can once again be read and enjoyed.
And that, in a nut-shell, is why the settlement has to be opt-out instead of opt-in. Call it cheating if you want, but certainly it does far more to benefit everyone than it does to harm authors by forcing the hardship of opting out upon them. Yes, it does feel backwards to have someone say to you "I'm going to do xyz with your stuff unless you say 'no'" -- but at the end of the day, if it only takes you 5 seconds to say "no" and it only happens one time -- it's not that big of a deal.
Her strongly worded objection doesn't seem to match what Google is doing/planning to do anyways. The only way in which you might view rights holders as being denied the right to control how their works are disseminated is in the very limited sense that the whole scheme is opt-out instead of opt-in. But to the extent that anyone CAN opt-out, it's clear that she or anybody else still has ultimate control of their own works. With that in mind, I just can't quite grasp what her true objection is.
Your post had good arguments, sadly I couldn't see past the fact that you were not capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. I felt as though perhaps you should have been arguing passionately for ponies, rather than copyright reform.
If flash is an alternative, then certainly Ogg is as well. Ogg clearly beats out flash . . . Now you can make an argument about which is the greater evil or greater cost when it comes to Ogg vs H.264 of license costs vs bandwidth costs -- but ultimately its a moot point. This isn't really a case of Ogg vs H.264 -- it's h.264 vs any other free and open alternative.
Ultimately, there will be something better. If that means a delay in adopting the video tag in html5, then so be it. It's better for everyone in the long run.
They just hadn't bought any companies for like, 2 whole days, and so they said "screw it" and bought one at random. That's whole Google rolls these days.
It is slow, it does crash alot, and it does take a lot of resources. It crashes more often than flash, in my experience, but flash is the bigger resource hog (both in cpu and memory). It's very unstable as a browser plugin and when using Firefox I avoid anything that might try to use quicktime as a browser plugin. It's pretty awful.
If it weren't for my iPhone, I'd just uninstall quicktime. Unfortunately, Apple married the iPhone to iTunes and iTunes to quicktime -- so there's simply no way to avoid it. By the way, iTunes is also terrible. It might well be the worst software experience known to me. I cannot express enough how much I hate iTunes. It's the anti-iphone: slow as shit, super confusing to use, highly unstable, and weak on features. I could write you a 12 page essay on iTunes and why I hate it, and still probably have forgotten several points a long the way. It's TERRIBLE.
Sorry, I just can't miss any opportunity to rant about iTunes.
They have enough market share to push us all towards Ogg instead for HTML5 video -- and I'm pretty sure that's where Google would rather go too. At this point, everything is in flash video and nobody complains about having to install a plugin to support it. Are they going to suddenly cry foul if they need a plugin to support h264? My guess is if one format is easier, thanks to Firefox's stubborness, then many websites may simply adopt ogg as the standard in the first place.
Apple, on the other hand, may not agree, but Safari is mostly irrelevant. It sneaks in with iTunes (another terrible piece of software) but it's not actually used much. It's currently 4th place in a 3-way competition.
It wasn't pretty, I'll grant you that -- but it wasn't a very obtuse representation. It very clearly shows a pattern, and it's vaguely interesting -- if you're into that sort of thing. The guy found something neat and thought he could talk about it and maybe promote his software at the same time. It's not that big of a deal. Yes, it's a bit deceptive the way its worded that he says "I used XXXX Software" without disclosing that he's the guy who made it -- it's clearly shameless self-promotion, but that sort of thing is par for the course with most Ask Slashdot posts. Nobody really cares as long as there's some actual content to discuss.
I don't think it's super mysterious, however. It's clearly botnet activity. You get a sudden influx of connections from all over the world creating each of the 4-5 lines, and the countries which show the significant increase in activity past that point happen to be the ones which are known to be the most "wired" (and thus have the most bots): Russia, India, Brazil, China.
I'm sure there's more to the story than that, but asking why a botnet attacks a US Government Agency is like asking why the sun shines. If you really want to know more than that, you need more data than you apparently have.
Slashdot Mirror
It will succeed or fail based on what content it can access. If Apple and News Corp. work out a deal, and you can view all News Corp. content on the thing, it will be a big success.
I disagree. News Corp's content is far too expensive. It's currently only succeeded as a pay for content model because many corporations pay for employee's WSJ subscriptions. If the actual consumers have to pay for it themselves, I doubt many of them would be paying for such overpriced content.
I hope he did jazz hands when he said "magic".
Few sites are done *entirely* in flash like this, most of them are promotional sites for Movies and TV shows. While people do want flash games, most of us really just want flash video content to work on the iPhone.
The truth of the matter is this: Despite what Steve Jobs wants you to believe, HTML5 will *NOT* replace flash as the video standard on the internet anytime soon. Let's assume the whole Ogg vs h.264 debate gets settled, there's still the larger issue of there being *no* DRM whatsoever supported within html5. Does anyone honestly think there's a snowball's chance in hell that the movie studios will allow Hulu to move to a distribution method where it's trivial for ANYONE to simply download content off hulu and watch it whenever without advertisements? It's just not gonna happen.
I believe the way its handled is that X amount of un-countered claims, you get taken down where X is a super-secret number based on your date of birth, weight on the moon, and proximity to the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
So it is possible to have filed a counter-claim in one instance, have nothing more come of it, and then still get taken down later due to other uncountered claims.
Also, apparently Google handled this better than it was reported in the media as apparently every DMCA takedown notice they send out does apparently contain links to ChillingEffects.org which has a form and instructions on how to file a counter-claim. So it's not as if they didn't try, it seems as though some people just didn't really understand the rules and ignored the notices since they had permission.
I don't see why this post is modded down as Flamebait. It seems like a perfectly reasonable question. Are we supposed to assume that Apple customers are more honest than average folk and therefore express surprise that they, of all people, would commit fraud? This doesn't seem like a story unique to iPhones or Apple so I wonder why it's framed as such.
I agree. People should only host stuff on private intranets.
Or I guess you could host it locally and instead of losing data, you'd only have your internet access cut off. Is that better, though?
Just FYI, the rights holder's did file the claims in this instance -- they also gave permission for the song to be hosted. In short, they have NFI what they're doing. One branch of the company says "Sure, use this for promotional purposes" and the other is doing random Google searches for their IP and sees the mp3 up and fires off the complaint without another thought. In other words, the complaint was filed in good, albeit very stupid, faith by the proper rights holder.
Google could have handled the situation a bit better, perhaps, but they're really stuck in the middle. They must comply with the takedown notice UNLESS a counter-claim is filed or they become liable. What Google *could* do is make it easier for people to file counter-claims when they receive takedown notices -- which effectively ends the issue unless the original claimant decides to take it to court.
But there's still only so much they can do. At the end of the day, most people who receive a takedown notice for something they have the rights to post are going to just say "Pfft, whatever. I have permission." and ignore it and then cry foul later when their stuff is removed. They simply don't realize that the way the DMCA works is that it has put a burden of declaring their innocence upon them or they are presumed guilty.
Do you own your own fiber on your own island nation? Otherwise, it's impossible to truly protect yourself from this sort of thing . If not a third party hosting site complying with a DMCA notice, it would be your ISP. In this case, Google is simply doing what they are bound by a stupid, stupid law to do. They know it's stupid, but unless you file a counter-claim after someone sends a DMCA takedown notice to you, expect your stuff to get taken down. The burden is on you, unfairly, and that's just the way it is.
A DDOS attack on Verizon's servers maybe not so effective, but what about one on their technical support phone numbers? Can they really handle the influx of thousands of callers or maybe just a couple hundred people calling in repeatedly. Real customers need to use those numbers too, and when they can't get through -- they'll be pissed.
But beyond that, 4chan won't just go after Verizon, they'll go after specific Verizon executives in more direct ways. I suspect the CEO of Verizon is about to get blocked from delivery by every pizza place in town, at the very least. Childish? Yes. Effective? Possibly.
At the very least, I'd be interested to see what happens if Verizon doesn't backpedal on this relatively soon. It could get uglier than you think. What 4chan members lack in intelligence, they make up for in numbers. It doesn't take as many people as you think, acting in concert, to gum up the works. I strongly suspect very soon they'll use the same "We were blocking a DDOS attack *against* 4chan" excuse that AT&T used.
I think the older ones are not the issue, it's the new ones that won't usually stream h.264. They do the basic low-quality flash stream first, then encode HD and then iPhone versions. I think iPhone is usually last, so sometimes it takes up to a day after a video is posted before you can watch it on your iPhone.
Is that really so impossible a problem to engineer around? Just make it so you have to tap flash elements of a webpage to run them. Then their not just draining my battery life with regular usage -- but if there's some specific reason that i want to be using flash, I can. Win/win, right?
Meh, I guess if you see this as something set to infiltrate the business environment.
I'm seeing it missing a lot of things that *I* would want in a tablet.
Multi-tasking? I want to listen to pandora and browse the web while I lay on the couch, k?
I want Netflix/Hulu/Etc. I'm sorry, iTunes is not good enough. Throw in some actual codec support while you're at it.
With a real tablet I can do all these things, and maybe throw boxee on it to and use it as a HTPC when I'm not using it -- and you know what? I still haven't bought one, anyways. I can do so much more with a regular tablet PC and it's still not particularly compelling . .
I just finished watching the Official keynote from Apple's website and even Steve Jobs didn't seem very enthusiastic. He spoke slowly and constantly repeated himself, it was as if he was just filling time. He had a device that did stuff we've ALL already seen in the iPhone and yet went through feature by feature like we didn't already know how mobile safari or google maps worked. "It's the web in the palm of your hand" he exclaimed -- and I thought "Isn't that what my iPhone was and still is?"
It's just not an impressive device and even Steve Jobs couldn't make it seem like one. The whole thing sorta made me think I might want a tablet -- but *not* an iPad. I was sorta thinking "You know, I might like a windows 7 tablet to watch netflix in bed with . . . too bad this won't do that." In other words, I was more impressed by the features that were glaringly omitted than the ones that were included.
I will, however, say that I did find the 3g pricing to be mildly impressive. It left me wondering if you can activate a Sim with that price plan and then pop it into some other device . . .
Since we'll know for sure tomorrow, I'd just like to toss out a crazy conspiracy theory. I think tomorrow there's a chance, perhaps not a very large one, that Apple will announce integrated Google Voice support in iPhone OS 4.0. I think it's just the sort of curve ball Apple likes to throw, especially since it makes their past bad behavior/decisions look magically justified to the fanboys. That's exactly the sort of thing Apple likes to do:
"You know how we've stuck with the single button mouse all these years? It wasn't a display of terrible judgment and stubbornness at all! We just wanted to do the mouse *right* and do multi-touch with it! This was our plan all along!"
"I know we said we didn't think people wanted a video ipod -- but that's because we knew nobody would want it without the amazing video service we're now prepared to offer via iTunes. Now everybody WILL want it!"
"We were always going to add Copy and Paste! We just wanted to take our time and and ensure we delivered the quality, simple Apple experience that we knew you'd want!"
etc, etc.
Apple loves turn their negatives into positives and get carried off the stage by packs of rabid apple fanboys. So it wouldn't surprise me a bit if Apple did something completely unexpected like built-in Google voice support if it scores them a win, catches the press off guard, and gets the FCC off their back. When you think about it, there's really no good reason not to. Sure they might want to stick it Google now that they are direct competitors, but it won't honestly make much difference either way. Frankly, they're better off in that competition supporting anything that android can already do since it's not like Apple has a competing product to Google Voice.
Ok, I'm grounding enough in reality to realize that this probably *won't* happen. But I do think it *could* happen and it definitely *should* happen. Fingers crossed!
But it will be, in fact, a one time thing.
Microsoft started down this road and said screw it.
Forget the difficulties and cost of securing an agreement with the Authors guild (the lack of which ensures a doomed project as Google quickly found out) -- there's the very real and very substantial difficulties in digitizing the books in the first place. Scanning books in, page by page, correcting OCR software mistakes, gaining permission libraries to digitize their collections and organizing the workers and equipment to get it done. This is not an easy process.
It took google several years and ridiculous amounts of manpower and money to make this happen. No other company will do this in our lifetimes, I can almost guarantee it.
If this doesn't happen now, some of these works may be lost forever. We're talking, in some cases, about very region specific titles that may have only had a few hundred copies printed ever. It's not unrealistic that some of these books may not exist outside of the 1 or 2 libraries that happen to have copies.
What happens if a venerable old library burns down tomorrow? There's a very real chance that they might have the only known copies of some obscure book (say a study on 18th century New England thimble themes) that might have little value to most people, but might have tremendous value to someone else.
I agree that there some aspects of the situation do leave a bitter taste in your mouth, but not nearly as bitter a taste as current copyright law and to not go ahead with the project because of these reservations is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, shooting the baby, and then burning down the house to cover the evidence with grandma still inside.
Yes, copyright reform would be a far, far, better solution (Grandma gets ice cream, in that analogy) -- but it doesn't seem to be a real option at this point. It would be great if there was a way to petition a work into the public domain if the author could not be found -- of course such a system would be just as vulnerable to the type of abuse you suggest (where an author is continually forced to confirm his copyright or risk losing it).
Again, I think your argument is strictly a philosophical one. That's what all the objections seem to boil down to. It's wrong that they are able to do this because it would mean "insert long hypothetical situation that'll never happen here".
For starters, Google tried just do this and got sued immediately. They weren't going to do any in-print works at all (Well they were going to scan them, but only for search indexing, not for ebook versions). They only decided to do that after their settlement had been reached.
Ultimately, Google is the only company big enough to do this and if they don't do it, probably nobody ever will. So we can all object to what Google is doing on a philosophical basis, or let them go ahead with a potentially revolutionary project with obvious benefits to society.
Any company that tries to do what Google is doing without a settlement with the Authors guild would be sued into the ground. There's no reason to think this is likely to be anything more than a one time event.
Here's the problem. The opt-out approach is entirely necessary to Google's goals in this project, specifically with regards to so-called "orphaned works".
There are many books out there who's copyright status is questionable. For whatever reason, the right's holders cannot be contacted. These works are essentially lost to us. Many were produced in very limited runs in the first place, and there are few copies still floating around. If your library happens to have one, then you can read one of these works -- but otherwise you're out of luck.
While ideally, copyright law could be reformed to put these works into the Public Domain so that they can be reproduced and made available to anyone -- this is not something Google can realistically do.
The opt-out implementation of the settlement gives them a way to put these works back into the public space -- though not quite into the public domain. It gives people a way to access works that are otherwise lost to them. It rescues them from obscurity and dusty bookshelves so that they can once again be read and enjoyed.
And that, in a nut-shell, is why the settlement has to be opt-out instead of opt-in. Call it cheating if you want, but certainly it does far more to benefit everyone than it does to harm authors by forcing the hardship of opting out upon them. Yes, it does feel backwards to have someone say to you "I'm going to do xyz with your stuff unless you say 'no'" -- but at the end of the day, if it only takes you 5 seconds to say "no" and it only happens one time -- it's not that big of a deal.
Her strongly worded objection doesn't seem to match what Google is doing/planning to do anyways. The only way in which you might view rights holders as being denied the right to control how their works are disseminated is in the very limited sense that the whole scheme is opt-out instead of opt-in. But to the extent that anyone CAN opt-out, it's clear that she or anybody else still has ultimate control of their own works. With that in mind, I just can't quite grasp what her true objection is.
Your post had good arguments, sadly I couldn't see past the fact that you were not capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. I felt as though perhaps you should have been arguing passionately for ponies, rather than copyright reform.
How is 1.1.1.1 one of the "least desirable" ip addresses? I'd love to have it!
If flash is an alternative, then certainly Ogg is as well. Ogg clearly beats out flash . . . Now you can make an argument about which is the greater evil or greater cost when it comes to Ogg vs H.264 of license costs vs bandwidth costs -- but ultimately its a moot point. This isn't really a case of Ogg vs H.264 -- it's h.264 vs any other free and open alternative.
Ultimately, there will be something better. If that means a delay in adopting the video tag in html5, then so be it. It's better for everyone in the long run.
Firefox has implemented the video tag. It just only works with ogg.
They just hadn't bought any companies for like, 2 whole days, and so they said "screw it" and bought one at random. That's whole Google rolls these days.
It is slow, it does crash alot, and it does take a lot of resources. It crashes more often than flash, in my experience, but flash is the bigger resource hog (both in cpu and memory). It's very unstable as a browser plugin and when using Firefox I avoid anything that might try to use quicktime as a browser plugin. It's pretty awful.
If it weren't for my iPhone, I'd just uninstall quicktime. Unfortunately, Apple married the iPhone to iTunes and iTunes to quicktime -- so there's simply no way to avoid it. By the way, iTunes is also terrible. It might well be the worst software experience known to me. I cannot express enough how much I hate iTunes. It's the anti-iphone: slow as shit, super confusing to use, highly unstable, and weak on features. I could write you a 12 page essay on iTunes and why I hate it, and still probably have forgotten several points a long the way. It's TERRIBLE.
Sorry, I just can't miss any opportunity to rant about iTunes.
They have enough market share to push us all towards Ogg instead for HTML5 video -- and I'm pretty sure that's where Google would rather go too. At this point, everything is in flash video and nobody complains about having to install a plugin to support it. Are they going to suddenly cry foul if they need a plugin to support h264? My guess is if one format is easier, thanks to Firefox's stubborness, then many websites may simply adopt ogg as the standard in the first place.
Apple, on the other hand, may not agree, but Safari is mostly irrelevant. It sneaks in with iTunes (another terrible piece of software) but it's not actually used much. It's currently 4th place in a 3-way competition.
It wasn't pretty, I'll grant you that -- but it wasn't a very obtuse representation. It very clearly shows a pattern, and it's vaguely interesting -- if you're into that sort of thing. The guy found something neat and thought he could talk about it and maybe promote his software at the same time. It's not that big of a deal. Yes, it's a bit deceptive the way its worded that he says "I used XXXX Software" without disclosing that he's the guy who made it -- it's clearly shameless self-promotion, but that sort of thing is par for the course with most Ask Slashdot posts. Nobody really cares as long as there's some actual content to discuss.
I don't think it's super mysterious, however. It's clearly botnet activity. You get a sudden influx of connections from all over the world creating each of the 4-5 lines, and the countries which show the significant increase in activity past that point happen to be the ones which are known to be the most "wired" (and thus have the most bots): Russia, India, Brazil, China.
I'm sure there's more to the story than that, but asking why a botnet attacks a US Government Agency is like asking why the sun shines. If you really want to know more than that, you need more data than you apparently have.