I'd sooner go by rail than air anyday - I've been on too many planes, they never get any more comfortable. On the train you can put your feet back, relax, eat off a real table, sleep lying down, go for a stroll - the benefits far outweigh the trip time. Something like this railroad puts Beijing on my list of destinations that I would plan to visit casually once in my life, and hopefully works the other way round for people in China wanting to have a nosey around London.
I sense a deep wave of cynicism about the safety of traveling through central asia, but the majority of ordinary people don't wish harm on anyone. So there's a few loonies - so what? You have to live in spite of the gun toting loonies, not in fear of them... and more to the point, how do you think China would react if some merry band of robbers tried to mess with their pet project?
One question I do have, is what will the reaction of the open source community be in 70 years when the first copyrights of Linux become public domain? This is not a indication of support for long copyrights, but trying to understand the reaction of the community when the shoe is on the other foot.
Thats a bit obvious. The whole purpose of open source is to turn copyright on its head, to enforce peoples right to copy, and their responsibility of allowing their copies to be copied. So of course if people 70 years from now take advantage of expired rights on linux to do whatever (I dunno what you imagine 70 year old code would be useful for...), but for the sake of argument lets say use it to secretly take over the moon, then of course it would be insulting to the spirit of open source.
But that would unfortunately be impossible to defend against because open source uses the rules of the system to break the system, so technically still plays by the rules. This is unfortunately an implicit acknowledgement of the rules, even if open source is idealogically opposed to them. No one who wrote the laws actually predicted that a movement would spawn to specifically dump the restrictions introduced by copyright. They thought they had it all figured out. The irony of your question is, the 70 year expiration period is specifically to force locked up copyrighted works into the public domain - and the open source movement just purposefully does it a bit quicker for everyone's benefit!
(and I think its probably very difficult to see the situation that clearly if you are remotely involved in the legal soup that constitutes all this bullshit...)
I hate to burst your bubble, but half of the 'IP' manufactured in the US be it music, television, or software probably isn't as much intrest in the international market as you would like to believe, outside of Europe and Australia. Even in other countries where it does strike an intrest, I have seen time and time again that it is distributed by extremely organised, entrenched and even socially accepted, high street located 'pirate' outlets, in nearly every country in SE Asia, the Middle East, probably India as well although I can't personally vouch for that. Most people in these places would balk at paying prices that the US Domestic market would, so as we have seen in China with the case of MS, they have had to lower the prices down to human levels just to be even taken seriously!
Really, the only places that would see more eye to eye with the US way is Europe and Australia, and thats probably more to do with cultural linkage than any actual moral solidarity. That is a fragile relationship though, and if the US decides to get stroppy and demand too much of those markets, when it hasn't even begun to find a good way to target the rest of the world with fairer prices, then it could all go tits up! The average person I could ask already sees US copyright/patents/DRM as a convoluted mess, and would resent having it forced upon them by any government that is supposed to be working in their intrests and not those a few bean counters in hollywood who have worked out how to prolong the gravy train!
I agree, Its a comically over dramatic way of saying it - it really betrays the low opinion the government/media has on the intelligence of its audience, that they can't be interested in anything unless it is on the same scale as an armed conflict. Its even more depressing hearing the general population ape it.
It's easy to say that linux is impossible to target because of the fragmentation, but you draw out the situation in a very inflexible, pessimistic way. If a big publisher like Valve decided to pick just one flavour of linux to target, every other distribution would be bending over backwards to implement compatibility to whatever they target because it is in the nature of free software to gravitate towards whatever is the most useful for a purpose. Plus they would have the defense of being able to say 'our software is only designed for Platform X, and using it on other platforms may require some user assembly', which is a damn sight of an improvement on 'our software is only designed to run on windows, and if you dont like it, you can fuck off!'
So they wouldn't have to do all the work of testing every single distribution out there, and neither should anyone be expected to - otherwise, any large scale venture is doomed to be bogged down in useless pandering to each and every part of linux! Being able to reach a large audience easily is a serious issue, and it doesnt help the linux cause to be obstinately difficult to please. You can't have your cake and eat it, as the cliche goes.
IMHO, there is really only one linux anyway, it just happens to have lots of faces...
If you wouldn't take 20 seconds to google "Assassins Creed 2 DRM" and make an even slightly informed decision, then you would have deserved it. It's 2010 people, if you haven't learned that companies will screw you with DRM by now, then you really need to start paying attention.
Ah thats right, you have to know its there before you go looking for it. I can see the logic there! What sort of market do you think they would rather target - the principled, uncompromising people who will kick up a fuss if they don't like it, or the people that are unfortunately through no fault of their own too naive to imagine a scenario where they would be forcibly bent over and raped up the ass by a reputable company?
I'd like to step back a bit and say that if you need the law to intervene in a petty minor dispute with your neighbour over usage of what is essentially a glorified newspaper, then you probably have bigger problems... like an insufferably regulated and micro-managed society, for one thing...
it's not the only monolithic app storage system in the world - individual linux distributions have their own repositories of apps as well. Ubuntu lately is making it really easy to go package picking. All of that is 100% free to the user. You may get what you pay for, ie it doesn't have the greasy slick commercial polish, but why does Apple get the only mention? Free, unlocked and open not good enough a benefit to the end user?
Doesn't anybody want to see a non-geek, easy to use platform that plays nicely with more technical platforms? That's my gripe with Apple anyway, it's not the stuff they make, its the way they purposefully snub everyone else while doing it. People revere them for 'getting it' with what everyday users need, but they are as no better than MS holding the PC Game industry hostage with DX, (then murdering it with the Xbox) when if everyone had stuck with OGL.... Both of them are smug pricks, dividing people into camps and fucking up everybody elses fun by fighting all the time.
I'm sure its a pain in the ass now, but I don't think it can last forever. In the UK in the eighties, loads of fringe films were banned for being violent, and all it served to do was make them famous! Driller Killer, anybody? These days every so often one of them gets free publicity from being unbanned. I guess they changed their minds. So they shoot themselves in the foot, because without the list, Mortal Kombat would just be a crap game with lots of blood and gore!
Can't be a pioneer unless you pioneer something. If I could wish for anything to happen in politics, it would be to get rid of parties with uninspiring, pretentious names like "The Conservatives" or "New Labour" or "The National Socialist Party". At least when you vote for "The Monster Raving Loony Party" you get what it says on the tin! http://www.omrlp.com/
Don't be a bedroom know-it-all. I'm a complete atheist heathen, and I wouldn't expect any of my Arab friends to kill me any more than I would expect the Queen to be a Robot Lizard from Outer Space. You have no idea how ludicrously simple minded you appear. And don't lump me together with Christians! They're just as much a buch of lunatics as the rest of the fundies. The only difference is the Christians have already gone through their murderous totalitarian faze in history (you know, crusades, conquistadors, roman empire...), and are all over it now, honest!
The most aggravating thing about this three strikes rule is that it is so obviously based on an obsessive baseball fanaticism.... making it impossible to disguise the fact that it is actually the kind of half baked idea thought up in 30 seconds in a bar somewhere and scribbled on the back of a beer coaster so that it wouldnt be forgotten in tomorrows hangover. That is exactly the kind of flippant attitude to problems that nobody in the world deserves to have forced upon them.
Besides, if you yanks were going to try and pull a fast one on the rest of the world, you should have used a football analogy - its the international sport!
He didn't imply a comparison, if he had he would have said so. Try reaching for the names of three historical or modern figures convicted of slightly dubious crimes to the mild consternation of a significant minority. You can't can you. He was pointing out how ridiculous it is to take the authoritarian definition of criminal at face value, because they can be a bunch of criminals themselves:)
As someone who has pined for a decent affordable PC based tablet for years (so I can switch between doodling in painter and mucking about with classic Command and Conquer with a stylus, as God always intended from the beginning) I have to say this is the worst idea I have ever seen in the history of tablet PC's. Why would anyone want to use the in house built operating system over a standard, established OS? The only people who've ever gotten away with that is Apple! It's the worst case scenario of the crapware that gets shoveled into brand name laptops, only this time it isnt just plastered into the OS, it is an OS in itself!
Instead of doing something intelligent, like combining the guts of the computer into the tablet part and having a super cool detachable keyboard/disc drive dock/heat induction leg warmer module, so you have a dual purpose machine that plays nice with all existing software you can name, they have come up with a hideous schizoid machine with two identities, which will no doubt be hastily stiched together with even more sub-useful crapware... and only because they have approached the idea from the wrong angle!
If you want a convertible dual purpose tablet, its probably because you would like to have a tablet, but haven't convinced yourself you can live without the keyboard yet. So how can you get any more straightforward than a tablet that acts as a tablet most of the time but then quickly and painlessly reverts back to a laptop when you realise you want to type a novel out in word?
Oh well, I guess sometimes the most obvious solution is too obvious for some...
That may sound good, but it is still being taught how think - its actually quite ironic isn't it, you can't teach people how to be free thinkers because the act of teaching it as absolute would negate the 'freeness' of it:)
What really teaches you how to think freely is watching stupid people hit themselves over the head with their own beliefs, for that you only need to step back and observe. Unfortunately, there isn't a popular method to tell if you are doing the same thing without realising it, possibly because people hate being wrong so much they get rather upset and emotional and lose focus on reality when it is pointed out to them... therefore not sharing their personal insight as to what led them to make a fool of themself!
I've looked after chickens, so I know its not as simple as keeping a housecat. But I would never have been anal enough to reach for my calculator to work out the average cost of eggs based on a new bag of feed every x days. It doesn't come down to bits of paper with numbers on them, it comes down to personal choice. Of course then you get the pleasure of having a much clearer conscience and a feeling of self satisfaction when you make your free range omlette.
Public institutions ought to have enough salt in them to get over the issue of TCO, and instead look at it as making a little extra effort to work in a way that benefits the local public, rather than lazily and continuously sinking notes into MS because it happens to be easier.
But obviously doing things in a positive way is not on the agenda for any current world government.
however, if some civilized nations would secretly ship some containers of arms and ammunition in there, however, and perhaps train people on guerrilla tactics.
I suppose you'd also be in favour of giving knives to kids who get bullied, so that the problem neatly solves itself eh? No forget what I said, I am sure you have given your opinion much careful thought!
You are just being unreasonably pedantic. What I was illustrating was the difference between something decentralised and largely independant, and another thing that is completely in thrall of a large corporate entity and its whims.
And to answer your second point, google odamex, skulltag, zdaemon - all client server upgrades to the venerable Doom. I'm sure there are more since it is open source, but those are the ones I know. I grant you these open source upgrades were not available in 1993, but the internet didn't even exist in most peoples heads back then either, and in fact their very existance proves how allowing independant modification can preserve something indefinitely.
Why would you even bother home schooling your kids unless it was to go against the grain of recommended curriculum? Obviously if you are fiercely independant enough to go against the norm and home school your kids, then its because you either think you can do better, or you are trying to shield them from something you disagree with. So trying to impose standard curriculum crushes the original motive!
Don't be daft. I can set myself up an audience and read a book to as many people as I like, they all get the benefit of the story without paying the author a penny. There's a classic example of a physical book being 'read' by more than one person at the same time! Just because the internet is inherently more flexible and powerful than that example, doesn't mean it's not an extension of the same thing. Is there something illegal there? Should all the kids in a classroom be expected to own a copy of a book that is being read to them or else they are breaking the law? Should families be carted away in black vans because Johnny and Timmy don't have a seperate licence to hear the material their mother is reading to them?
I'm not about depriving writers of earning a living, but you have to admit, sharing on the internet is nothing more than an extension of existing habits that have been a part of human culture since the beginning of time, hearing a story, recanting it to others...it just happens that it suddenly is impossibly easy to do. which is why telling people not to do it is like telling dogs not to bark...
I disagree, if no one is prepared to put themselves at risk to see just what happens in the real world, then we end up in the situation we are in now, where the software patents are 100% effective at stifling the motivation of the competition. If people are afraid to even freely take code that is available and use it, then something is very wrong with the picture...
Let's say Mozilla did use ffmpeg to sidestep the whole licence issue - at the very least, it would force the mpeg group to get off their perch and get their hands bloody, then we'd see the true colours eh?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd sooner go by rail than air anyday - I've been on too many planes, they never get any more comfortable. On the train you can put your feet back, relax, eat off a real table, sleep lying down, go for a stroll - the benefits far outweigh the trip time. Something like this railroad puts Beijing on my list of destinations that I would plan to visit casually once in my life, and hopefully works the other way round for people in China wanting to have a nosey around London.
I sense a deep wave of cynicism about the safety of traveling through central asia, but the majority of ordinary people don't wish harm on anyone. So there's a few loonies - so what? You have to live in spite of the gun toting loonies, not in fear of them... and more to the point, how do you think China would react if some merry band of robbers tried to mess with their pet project?
One question I do have, is what will the reaction of the open source community be in 70 years when the first copyrights of Linux become public domain? This is not a indication of support for long copyrights, but trying to understand the reaction of the community when the shoe is on the other foot.
Thats a bit obvious. The whole purpose of open source is to turn copyright on its head, to enforce peoples right to copy, and their responsibility of allowing their copies to be copied. So of course if people 70 years from now take advantage of expired rights on linux to do whatever (I dunno what you imagine 70 year old code would be useful for...), but for the sake of argument lets say use it to secretly take over the moon, then of course it would be insulting to the spirit of open source.
But that would unfortunately be impossible to defend against because open source uses the rules of the system to break the system, so technically still plays by the rules. This is unfortunately an implicit acknowledgement of the rules, even if open source is idealogically opposed to them. No one who wrote the laws actually predicted that a movement would spawn to specifically dump the restrictions introduced by copyright. They thought they had it all figured out. The irony of your question is, the 70 year expiration period is specifically to force locked up copyrighted works into the public domain - and the open source movement just purposefully does it a bit quicker for everyone's benefit!
(and I think its probably very difficult to see the situation that clearly if you are remotely involved in the legal soup that constitutes all this bullshit...)
Today, the US economy "manufactures" IP.
I hate to burst your bubble, but half of the 'IP' manufactured in the US be it music, television, or software probably isn't as much intrest in the international market as you would like to believe, outside of Europe and Australia. Even in other countries where it does strike an intrest, I have seen time and time again that it is distributed by extremely organised, entrenched and even socially accepted, high street located 'pirate' outlets, in nearly every country in SE Asia, the Middle East, probably India as well although I can't personally vouch for that. Most people in these places would balk at paying prices that the US Domestic market would, so as we have seen in China with the case of MS, they have had to lower the prices down to human levels just to be even taken seriously!
Really, the only places that would see more eye to eye with the US way is Europe and Australia, and thats probably more to do with cultural linkage than any actual moral solidarity. That is a fragile relationship though, and if the US decides to get stroppy and demand too much of those markets, when it hasn't even begun to find a good way to target the rest of the world with fairer prices, then it could all go tits up! The average person I could ask already sees US copyright/patents/DRM as a convoluted mess, and would resent having it forced upon them by any government that is supposed to be working in their intrests and not those a few bean counters in hollywood who have worked out how to prolong the gravy train!
I agree, Its a comically over dramatic way of saying it - it really betrays the low opinion the government/media has on the intelligence of its audience, that they can't be interested in anything unless it is on the same scale as an armed conflict. Its even more depressing hearing the general population ape it.
It's easy to say that linux is impossible to target because of the fragmentation, but you draw out the situation in a very inflexible, pessimistic way. If a big publisher like Valve decided to pick just one flavour of linux to target, every other distribution would be bending over backwards to implement compatibility to whatever they target because it is in the nature of free software to gravitate towards whatever is the most useful for a purpose. Plus they would have the defense of being able to say 'our software is only designed for Platform X, and using it on other platforms may require some user assembly', which is a damn sight of an improvement on 'our software is only designed to run on windows, and if you dont like it, you can fuck off!'
So they wouldn't have to do all the work of testing every single distribution out there, and neither should anyone be expected to - otherwise, any large scale venture is doomed to be bogged down in useless pandering to each and every part of linux! Being able to reach a large audience easily is a serious issue, and it doesnt help the linux cause to be obstinately difficult to please. You can't have your cake and eat it, as the cliche goes.
IMHO, there is really only one linux anyway, it just happens to have lots of faces...
If you wouldn't take 20 seconds to google "Assassins Creed 2 DRM" and make an even slightly informed decision, then you would have deserved it. It's 2010 people, if you haven't learned that companies will screw you with DRM by now, then you really need to start paying attention.
Ah thats right, you have to know its there before you go looking for it. I can see the logic there! What sort of market do you think they would rather target - the principled, uncompromising people who will kick up a fuss if they don't like it, or the people that are unfortunately through no fault of their own too naive to imagine a scenario where they would be forcibly bent over and raped up the ass by a reputable company?
I'd like to step back a bit and say that if you need the law to intervene in a petty minor dispute with your neighbour over usage of what is essentially a glorified newspaper, then you probably have bigger problems... like an insufferably regulated and micro-managed society, for one thing...
it's not the only monolithic app storage system in the world - individual linux distributions have their own repositories of apps as well. Ubuntu lately is making it really easy to go package picking. All of that is 100% free to the user. You may get what you pay for, ie it doesn't have the greasy slick commercial polish, but why does Apple get the only mention? Free, unlocked and open not good enough a benefit to the end user?
Doesn't anybody want to see a non-geek, easy to use platform that plays nicely with more technical platforms? That's my gripe with Apple anyway, it's not the stuff they make, its the way they purposefully snub everyone else while doing it. People revere them for 'getting it' with what everyday users need, but they are as no better than MS holding the PC Game industry hostage with DX, (then murdering it with the Xbox) when if everyone had stuck with OGL.... Both of them are smug pricks, dividing people into camps and fucking up everybody elses fun by fighting all the time.
Sorry, I'm ranting sideways now....
I'm sure its a pain in the ass now, but I don't think it can last forever. In the UK in the eighties, loads of fringe films were banned for being violent, and all it served to do was make them famous! Driller Killer, anybody? These days every so often one of them gets free publicity from being unbanned. I guess they changed their minds. So they shoot themselves in the foot, because without the list, Mortal Kombat would just be a crap game with lots of blood and gore!
Can't be a pioneer unless you pioneer something. If I could wish for anything to happen in politics, it would be to get rid of parties with uninspiring, pretentious names like "The Conservatives" or "New Labour" or "The National Socialist Party". At least when you vote for "The Monster Raving Loony Party" you get what it says on the tin! http://www.omrlp.com/
Don't be a bedroom know-it-all. I'm a complete atheist heathen, and I wouldn't expect any of my Arab friends to kill me any more than I would expect the Queen to be a Robot Lizard from Outer Space. You have no idea how ludicrously simple minded you appear. And don't lump me together with Christians! They're just as much a buch of lunatics as the rest of the fundies. The only difference is the Christians have already gone through their murderous totalitarian faze in history (you know, crusades, conquistadors, roman empire...), and are all over it now, honest!
Prick!
The most aggravating thing about this three strikes rule is that it is so obviously based on an obsessive baseball fanaticism.... making it impossible to disguise the fact that it is actually the kind of half baked idea thought up in 30 seconds in a bar somewhere and scribbled on the back of a beer coaster so that it wouldnt be forgotten in tomorrows hangover. That is exactly the kind of flippant attitude to problems that nobody in the world deserves to have forced upon them.
Besides, if you yanks were going to try and pull a fast one on the rest of the world, you should have used a football analogy - its the international sport!
(thats the one with the round ball by the way)
He didn't imply a comparison, if he had he would have said so. Try reaching for the names of three historical or modern figures convicted of slightly dubious crimes to the mild consternation of a significant minority. You can't can you. He was pointing out how ridiculous it is to take the authoritarian definition of criminal at face value, because they can be a bunch of criminals themselves :)
As someone who has pined for a decent affordable PC based tablet for years (so I can switch between doodling in painter and mucking about with classic Command and Conquer with a stylus, as God always intended from the beginning) I have to say this is the worst idea I have ever seen in the history of tablet PC's. Why would anyone want to use the in house built operating system over a standard, established OS? The only people who've ever gotten away with that is Apple! It's the worst case scenario of the crapware that gets shoveled into brand name laptops, only this time it isnt just plastered into the OS, it is an OS in itself!
Instead of doing something intelligent, like combining the guts of the computer into the tablet part and having a super cool detachable keyboard/disc drive dock/heat induction leg warmer module, so you have a dual purpose machine that plays nice with all existing software you can name, they have come up with a hideous schizoid machine with two identities, which will no doubt be hastily stiched together with even more sub-useful crapware... and only because they have approached the idea from the wrong angle!
If you want a convertible dual purpose tablet, its probably because you would like to have a tablet, but haven't convinced yourself you can live without the keyboard yet. So how can you get any more straightforward than a tablet that acts as a tablet most of the time but then quickly and painlessly reverts back to a laptop when you realise you want to type a novel out in word?
Oh well, I guess sometimes the most obvious solution is too obvious for some...
That may sound good, but it is still being taught how think - its actually quite ironic isn't it, you can't teach people how to be free thinkers because the act of teaching it as absolute would negate the 'freeness' of it :)
What really teaches you how to think freely is watching stupid people hit themselves over the head with their own beliefs, for that you only need to step back and observe. Unfortunately, there isn't a popular method to tell if you are doing the same thing without realising it, possibly because people hate being wrong so much they get rather upset and emotional and lose focus on reality when it is pointed out to them... therefore not sharing their personal insight as to what led them to make a fool of themself!
Funny old game :)
I've looked after chickens, so I know its not as simple as keeping a housecat. But I would never have been anal enough to reach for my calculator to work out the average cost of eggs based on a new bag of feed every x days. It doesn't come down to bits of paper with numbers on them, it comes down to personal choice. Of course then you get the pleasure of having a much clearer conscience and a feeling of self satisfaction when you make your free range omlette.
Public institutions ought to have enough salt in them to get over the issue of TCO, and instead look at it as making a little extra effort to work in a way that benefits the local public, rather than lazily and continuously sinking notes into MS because it happens to be easier.
But obviously doing things in a positive way is not on the agenda for any current world government.
however, if some civilized nations would secretly ship some containers of arms and ammunition in there, however, and perhaps train people on guerrilla tactics.
I suppose you'd also be in favour of giving knives to kids who get bullied, so that the problem neatly solves itself eh? No forget what I said, I am sure you have given your opinion much careful thought!
Lets see one then. Shouldn't be hard to find if there are several.
Why should you be, all American electronics already come from Asia anyway :P
You are just being unreasonably pedantic. What I was illustrating was the difference between something decentralised and largely independant, and another thing that is completely in thrall of a large corporate entity and its whims.
And to answer your second point, google odamex, skulltag, zdaemon - all client server upgrades to the venerable Doom. I'm sure there are more since it is open source, but those are the ones I know. I grant you these open source upgrades were not available in 1993, but the internet didn't even exist in most peoples heads back then either, and in fact their very existance proves how allowing independant modification can preserve something indefinitely.
From the article, Halo 2 has a 5 year run on the internet. Wow, thats a LONG time!
Doom is still being played online.. that's about 17 years and still going?
So from this we can see, if you happen to be attached to a particular game, then in future you get to be dispersed by the company for loitering.
How many people here play chess?
High five, I've been 'doored' as well!
Some people have a death wish. What is so difficult about looking at the traffic before you open your door into it?
Why would you even bother home schooling your kids unless it was to go against the grain of recommended curriculum? Obviously if you are fiercely independant enough to go against the norm and home school your kids, then its because you either think you can do better, or you are trying to shield them from something you disagree with. So trying to impose standard curriculum crushes the original motive!
Don't be daft. I can set myself up an audience and read a book to as many people as I like, they all get the benefit of the story without paying the author a penny. There's a classic example of a physical book being 'read' by more than one person at the same time! Just because the internet is inherently more flexible and powerful than that example, doesn't mean it's not an extension of the same thing. Is there something illegal there? Should all the kids in a classroom be expected to own a copy of a book that is being read to them or else they are breaking the law? Should families be carted away in black vans because Johnny and Timmy don't have a seperate licence to hear the material their mother is reading to them?
I'm not about depriving writers of earning a living, but you have to admit, sharing on the internet is nothing more than an extension of existing habits that have been a part of human culture since the beginning of time, hearing a story, recanting it to others...it just happens that it suddenly is impossibly easy to do. which is why telling people not to do it is like telling dogs not to bark...
I disagree, if no one is prepared to put themselves at risk to see just what happens in the real world, then we end up in the situation we are in now, where the software patents are 100% effective at stifling the motivation of the competition. If people are afraid to even freely take code that is available and use it, then something is very wrong with the picture...
Let's say Mozilla did use ffmpeg to sidestep the whole licence issue - at the very least, it would force the mpeg group to get off their perch and get their hands bloody, then we'd see the true colours eh?