ack; in my hates, didn't notice the other author mentioned on wiki. That poem is atributed to Rudyard Kipling, not Shakespeare, though they both speak similarly on the subject.
I think you're probably strongly underestimating just how bad the *accusation* of such a charge can be,; especially with how easy it is to plant any sort of incrimnating file. Really, though, America's panic over that entire topic is a topic for another thread.
the story is now that you've payed someone to keep quiet
Of course, THAT obviously-wrong solution to being blackmailed has been know for a long time. As Shakespeare put it:
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!"
It may have bad consequences, and it may nto even work, but irunning fighting the blackmailer is still a much, much better option than giving in to what they want, which only invites more of the same.
Why are you all pre-supposing that the threat has to be about something you actually did? If $ENEMY calls you with threats to reveal that secret child-pornography studio you have hidden away in your house, it doesn't matter if it isn't actually true - they can still ruin your life with just the accusation. Really, blackmail doesn't rely on you on something you did that you try to hide, but instead preys upon people who have something to lose, such as your family or job.
A traditional way isn't even to go after *YOU*. They just see to it that your parents -or kids start losing their jobs or are subject toother threats. To quote from a particularly well-written reddit post (which everybody should read!)
With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail..... they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired. All you have to do is... report back every week [and rat out your friends], or you dad might lose his job. So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings off grid, you're reporting on them to protect your dad.
[...]
Everyone walking around is scared. They can't talk to anyone else because they don't know who is reporting for the government. Hell, at one time YOU were reporting for the government. Maybe they just want their kid to get through school. Maybe they want to keep their job. Maybe they're sick and want to be able to visit the doctor. It's always a simple reason. Good people always do bad things for simple reasons.
The copyright infringement problem you describe is only the beginning. The long-term flaw in this plan, I suspect, is that they are claiming to be able to detect a class of "illegal"/"bad" data.
In the early days of the net, this kind of detection was a major part of the pornography debate in addition to the usual copyright stuff. A major defense (one I suspect lead to the creation of the "safe harbor" provisions in the DMCA) was that it is patently unreasonable to force an ISP to decide the legality of each bit that moves across their network. Comparisons were made to the Common Carriers, etc. The consensus seems to be more or less that "safe harbor" idea - that it was only reasonable to request the ISP act after the fact, instead of trying to make them invent some sort of magic "evil bit" detector.
If an ISP wants to ignore all that, though, and volunteer that they have such detection capability... they might be asking for a long line of lawsuits for each item they *failed* to warn about. Even better: it's all the excuse the anti-porn (or anti-whatever) busybodies need to impose their ideas of a "child safe" internet. After all, if you can detect something complicated like copyright infringement, detecting pornography must be trivial.
TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for
"The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem. Those corporations are overwhelmingly interconnected with the interests of a vast array of other unrelated businesses, be it just advertising revenue or outright arms of the same corporation. The mass corporate media is using FUD/muddying the waters/dumbing down just enough to make the majority of voters for political reasons, they are doing so because it is good business for other arms of their corporation and their partners. [...snip...]
TL;DR version: "The Media is just a few more Lords. It's what we get for letting our government degrade back into feudalism."
Really? I guess my ISP doesn't count as "major"? They may not be the biggest player, but they've not exactly "small" either. Frankly I respect their business decision of going with the "slow and steady"growth rate instead of the "quickly oversubscribe as many people as possible" that most other ISPs seem to be going with. More importantly, they have a specific policy of treating all data equally:
At Sonic.net, we believe that customers buy our service with the understanding that we will simply deliver their traffic without inspection, modification or artificial limitations.
In summary: We don't touch yer bits! (We believe that would be inappropriate.) Just because you have an anti-competitive and restricting contract with your ISP doesn't mean everybody does.
You should be careful not to project your own bad decisions onto others - some of us do research first, and choose the businesses we want associate with on more than just price.
"We paid for the internet one dialup account at a time."
Not really, though dialup paid for a bit of it. Much of the cash came from the federal government, in the form the grants that made ARPA/DARPA, and later the subsidies to AT&T/etc to build out fiber-optic to the entire country... which we're still waiting for... over a decade later.
Now, the big questions is: do you or anybody else truly believe that the NSA's (or anybody else's) search tools and data mining heuristics can magically avoid making that exact same mistake?
Too much data-capture just adds noise. Any database of sufficient size is going to be full of this kind of incorrect association. In the end, with the vast amounts of data available, you can probably find "data" that "supports" any conclusion you want.
This is the danger of sweeping data collection: not that they care about any traditional concern, but that decisions are being made because of sombody saw animals^Wterrorists in the clouds^Wemail and cell-phone metadata.
I normally don't resort to what is basically name-calling, but given how the 4th Amendment patently requires a number of criteria they are stating they will no longer bother with, that would normally make them criminals. However, with this statement, they've removed much of the ambiguity surrounding the searching issue, and added a significant amount of intent on their part. So instead of "merely" having criminals in high places at the DoJ, we have traitorous and un-American criminals instead.
This isn't, unfortunately, a conflict of law at the core, but instead a conflict of basic ideology and philosophy. If you believe in the constitution and the ideas about "freedom" and "equality" that it was built to maintain, you wouldn't try to argue your way around the spirit of the law. Everybody involve here knows damn well that the founders tried to stress the importance of limiting government's power and reach. So what do you call someone who willfully makes a point of acting against those very core ideas and protections? Someone who promises to continue violating the highest law of the land, in their own words?
Simple: "un-American traitors".
*sigh*
I guess I will keep trying to teach people gpg/otr/etc. One positive thing to come of this is that there have been more people receptive to learning some basic crypto the last month or so, than in the last ~12 years. "Better late than never?"
Bricks can be fixed with JTAG; if you have to outright replace the hardware, that's fried, toasted, nuked. (How the HELL does software do something THAT bad, anyway? Even flashing a ROM for an entirely incorrect model on a smartphone is still technically reparable..)
WipeoutHD renders many frames at the full 1080p60, but uses a trick for "complex" areas with too much overdraw, that, at least in my opinion, is quite clever. They start rendering at full resolution, but time how long each row is taking, and if it looks like they won't reach the 1/60s deadline, they start rending the frame in half resolution in the horizontal direction only. This way, they always maintain a solid 60Hz which is important for such a dexterity-based game, and only degrade the image in the frames that need it.
Because it maintains the framerate and the full 1080 rows, any slight blur is totally hidden. Even better: because the blur only engages on the frames with *lots* of stuff happening on the screen, it's pretty much guaranteed you will always be distracted by the crazy stuff happening to even notice any quality change.
I really wish more games used this (or similar) tricks - just keeping the framerate consisten (at the expense of quality) really helps - you don't have those stutters that end up just drawing attention to the problem areas.
Of course, this "civil-vs-criminal law" being one of the most common distinctions made in all jurisprudence, I'm sure you already knew this... but i never like to accuse random people of willfully lying to blur a political issue, in the hopes of serving some hypothetical self-interest. So I'll assume this is a freak case of ignorance instead. Links to easily cure yourself of this unfortunate condition have been provided.
It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)
As long as windows apps scale badly, there's a strong incentive to *not* produce a high-PPI display; customers would likely blame the monitor for "screwing up windows".
Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.
But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.
And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")
Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...
ext4, which was somewhat light on tools last i checked (have to look into that...)
More to the point, though... halting writes wasn't really possible, due to a lot of unrelated (and probably more important) things thrashing the disk.
It's a beautify example of why a well though-through backup plan is important, unfortunately. RAID doesn't protect against being an idiot with 'rm', and it's probably a good idea to research things like those undelete tools before you need them...
especially when combined with 'find' and 'xargs', in what is supposed to be a simple task.
If you don't, you'll do something like what i just did ("worst typo in a decade"): you see, i was trying to update emacs and wanted to purge all the.elc files from ~/.emacs.d Unfortunately, through a bad typo, some miss-applied keyboard shortcuts, and rushing through without mounting a scratch monkey... what actually ran was effectively "find ~/.emacs.d | xargs rm".
accidently deleted the 'grep'. Oops. 15+ years of elisp/etc destroyed.
Was it backed up? Nope! Been meaning to check it all into git, but always put it off as a "minor, unimportant" task I'd get to later. Of course, we all think that way up until the disaster hits...
It seems that we've come full-circle back to "brown".
I thought we had left that with Q1. D3 may have been way too dark, but at least they used some bright colors now and then. I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.
Actually, the game looks pretty decent; it's just that an all-brown color scheme gets boring after a while.
Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.
On the other side you'll have Safari (on iOS and OS X) and IE (partially, see above) who will support H.264. This is not exactly a clear-cut battle.
Chrome also supports H.264. Including the partial IE support, it's really only firefox that's left out.
You'll also have recording devices like video cameras, cell phone cameras,
And these all support H.264, often with specialized DSP support. This is also the fastest growing market for the web, and likely to be increasingly important in the near future. Ignore mobile support at your own peril.
But first, before any major moves, Google has to make WebM workable - i.e. fully optimized encoders, decoders, quality, etc.; then start making major moves towards its adoption.
This is not even remotely relevant. It's important to us geeks, but we basically don't count. Managers don't make decisions based on quality or decoder speed. They offer their web pages in what they believe to be the popular, common choice.
This puts WebM, as a newcomer, at the very bottom of the list.
Removing patents would only benefit RedHat? What about smart investors that want to compete in the future against cheap knockoffs from China, that totally ignore patents? This myth that patents are necessary (or even relevant) reeks of a limited, USA-centric point of view.
The problem is that Open Source distributions can't license the patents and remain Open Source.
Of course. Which is why the problem should be side-stepped, by leaving things to the OS. We successfully distribute MP3 support from international/contrib branches in many distributions, and video should be no different. Forcing such software to be included in Firefox or other user-visible software is asking for trouble.
That doesn't change the fact that people are buying cameras that output H.264 now, and non-tech people won't understand why "firefox won't play my video - it must be broken".
The fact is, anyone can install a plugin to play any format they like, and most browser users will
Hilarious!
Nobody installs extra plugins. The only reason flash became popular, was that it was distributed with the browser itself. And even more important, managers will make the same decision they always make: targeting the non-plugin, popular solution, which usually maps to "Microsoft/IE". The fact that mozilla (the org) is actively fighting against allowing such plugins makes this irrelevant in any case.
Note, I'm not arguing against lobbying for Open codecs. That's the ideal solution, of course. But the pragmatist in me says that normal people don't even notice patent issues, and will trend towards the software that "just works" with their fancy new camera. Free Software can adapt to that use-case, or be seen as irrelevant.
It's worth mentioning: this has happened before, and the solution was to adapt. I install linux for family/friends, and things like "how do I play my [commercial] DVD?" come up. Discussions of how it's technically illegal to play such a video file with Free Software just cause them to tune out, often moving back to Windows to avoid the issue. Fortunately, many distributions now work around the problem, fetching some DeCSS equivalent from international souces on first use.
Normally, yes, that's a great idea. But in this case, fighting H.264 is going to drive normal, non-technical people away and into the waiting arms of non-free software.
Fighting for an open codec isn't worth it, if it destroys the market share of Firefox in the meantime.
Yes, pragmatically speaking, patent reform is likely also a hopeless fight. But if you are going to fight an unlikely battle, you might as well fight the one that will pay off more in the long run.
Many people in the Free Software press seem to be putting a lot of faith behind WebM. There seems to be this belief that Google can come in and magically make the entire video codec situation go away. WebM might be able to find a home in a few niche markets, but the hopes that it will displace H.264? It's laughable.
I love Free Software, and generally strive to run as near to 100% Free as I can on my own systems. Yet even I can recognize that the video codec war is not one that will be winnable by fiat and propaganda. The critical-mass of users are those that are buying cameras that output H.264 today, and possibly various managers, that are going to be arguing "nobody got fired for using MPEG".
The video codec war is not winnable right now, but the container and codec implementation wars might be. Striving to replace Flash with x264/ffmpeg implementations in the browser is a huge win, and one that can be realistically accomplished. Sure, it'd be great if people used a free codec like Theora/WebM (make it a prominent option! advertise it!), but not supporting H.264 at all will have one effect, and it's not the one we Free Software advocates will like: people will see the player as broken, and move to alternatives that are "not broken". Your parents, boss, and other non-technical people don't care about the alphabet soup of codecs; they just care about "software that works".
So dodge the problem and make codecs an external, OS-level issue like they always have been, and win the battles that actually can be won.
Oh, and if you really want to make a political stand, here's an idea: instead of fighting stupid technical issues about what falls under the various MPEG patents with things that may or may not be infringing (WebM), fight the patent system itself. This whole stupid issue only exists because we stupidly allow software patents. That fight is way more important, and applies to a wide variety of topics, not just video.
Slashdot Mirror
ack; in my hates, didn't notice the other author mentioned on wiki. That poem is atributed to Rudyard Kipling, not Shakespeare, though they both speak similarly on the subject.
I think you're probably strongly underestimating just how bad the *accusation* of such a charge can be,; especially with how easy it is to plant any sort of incrimnating file. Really, though, America's panic over that entire topic is a topic for another thread.
the story is now that you've payed someone to keep quiet
Of course, THAT obviously-wrong solution to being blackmailed has been know for a long time. As Shakespeare put it:
It may have bad consequences, and it may nto even work, but irunning fighting the blackmailer is still a much, much better option than giving in to what they want, which only invites more of the same.
Why are you all pre-supposing that the threat has to be about something you actually did? If $ENEMY calls you with threats to reveal that secret child-pornography studio you have hidden away in your house, it doesn't matter if it isn't actually true - they can still ruin your life with just the accusation. Really, blackmail doesn't rely on you on something you did that you try to hide, but instead preys upon people who have something to lose, such as your family or job.
A traditional way isn't even to go after *YOU*. They just see to it that your parents -or kids start losing their jobs or are subject toother threats. To quote from a particularly well-written reddit post (which everybody should read!)
The copyright infringement problem you describe is only the beginning. The long-term flaw in this plan, I suspect, is that they are claiming to be able to detect a class of "illegal"/"bad" data.
In the early days of the net, this kind of detection was a major part of the pornography debate in addition to the usual copyright stuff. A major defense (one I suspect lead to the creation of the "safe harbor" provisions in the DMCA) was that it is patently unreasonable to force an ISP to decide the legality of each bit that moves across their network. Comparisons were made to the Common Carriers, etc. The consensus seems to be more or less that "safe harbor" idea - that it was only reasonable to request the ISP act after the fact, instead of trying to make them invent some sort of magic "evil bit" detector.
If an ISP wants to ignore all that, though, and volunteer that they have such detection capability... they might be asking for a long line of lawsuits for each item they *failed* to warn about. Even better: it's all the excuse the anti-porn (or anti-whatever) busybodies need to impose their ideas of a "child safe" internet. After all, if you can detect something complicated like copyright infringement, detecting pornography must be trivial.
TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for
TL;DR version: "The Media is just a few more Lords. It's what we get for letting our government degrade back into feudalism."
Really? I guess my ISP doesn't count as "major"? They may not be the biggest player, but they've not exactly "small" either. Frankly I respect their business decision of going with the "slow and steady"growth rate instead of the "quickly oversubscribe as many people as possible" that most other ISPs seem to be going with. More importantly, they have a specific policy of treating all data equally:
You should be careful not to project your own bad decisions onto others - some of us do research first, and choose the businesses we want associate with on more than just price.
"We paid for the internet one dialup account at a time."
Not really, though dialup paid for a bit of it. Much of the cash came from the federal government, in the form the grants that made ARPA/DARPA, and later the subsidies to AT&T/etc to build out fiber-optic to the entire country... which we're still waiting for... over a decade later.
Exactly!
Now, the big questions is: do you or anybody else truly believe that the NSA's (or anybody else's) search tools and data mining heuristics can magically avoid making that exact same mistake?
Too much data-capture just adds noise. Any database of sufficient size is going to be full of this kind of incorrect association. In the end, with the vast amounts of data available, you can probably find "data" that "supports" any conclusion you want.
This is the danger of sweeping data collection: not that they care about any traditional concern, but that decisions are being made because of sombody saw animals^Wterrorists in the clouds^Wemail and cell-phone metadata.
I normally don't resort to what is basically name-calling, but given how the 4th Amendment patently requires a number of criteria they are stating they will no longer bother with, that would normally make them criminals. However, with this statement, they've removed much of the ambiguity surrounding the searching issue, and added a significant amount of intent on their part. So instead of "merely" having criminals in high places at the DoJ, we have traitorous and un-American criminals instead.
This isn't, unfortunately, a conflict of law at the core, but instead a conflict of basic ideology and philosophy. If you believe in the constitution and the ideas about "freedom" and "equality" that it was built to maintain, you wouldn't try to argue your way around the spirit of the law. Everybody involve here knows damn well that the founders tried to stress the importance of limiting government's power and reach. So what do you call someone who willfully makes a point of acting against those very core ideas and protections? Someone who promises to continue violating the highest law of the land, in their own words?
Simple: "un-American traitors".
*sigh*
I guess I will keep trying to teach people gpg/otr/etc. One positive thing to come of this is that there have been more people receptive to learning some basic crypto the last month or so, than in the last ~12 years. "Better late than never?"
Bricks can be fixed with JTAG; if you have to outright replace the hardware, that's fried, toasted, nuked. (How the HELL does software do something THAT bad, anyway? Even flashing a ROM for an entirely incorrect model on a smartphone is still technically reparable..)
http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text
WipeoutHD renders many frames at the full 1080p60, but uses a trick for "complex" areas with too much overdraw, that, at least in my opinion, is quite clever. They start rendering at full resolution, but time how long each row is taking, and if it looks like they won't reach the 1/60s deadline, they start rending the frame in half resolution in the horizontal direction only. This way, they always maintain a solid 60Hz which is important for such a dexterity-based game, and only degrade the image in the frames that need it.
Because it maintains the framerate and the full 1080 rows, any slight blur is totally hidden. Even better: because the blur only engages on the frames with *lots* of stuff happening on the screen, it's pretty much guaranteed you will always be distracted by the crazy stuff happening to even notice any quality change.
I really wish more games used this (or similar) tricks - just keeping the framerate consisten (at the expense of quality) really helps - you don't have those stutters that end up just drawing attention to the problem areas.
The kind of argument made by someone who understands the difference between criminal , reckless act likely to lead a nasty manslaughter, and an act that is simply a civil tort, likely to only incur statutory damages?
Of course, this "civil-vs-criminal law" being one of the most common distinctions made in all jurisprudence, I'm sure you already knew this... but i never like to accuse random people of willfully lying to blur a political issue, in the hopes of serving some hypothetical self-interest. So I'll assume this is a freak case of ignorance instead. Links to easily cure yourself of this unfortunate condition have been provided.
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html
It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)
As long as windows apps scale badly, there's a strong incentive to *not* produce a high-PPI display; customers would likely blame the monitor for "screwing up windows".
Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.
But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.
And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")
Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...
ext4, which was somewhat light on tools last i checked (have to look into that...)
More to the point, though... halting writes wasn't really possible, due to a lot of unrelated (and probably more important) things thrashing the disk.
It's a beautify example of why a well though-through backup plan is important, unfortunately. RAID doesn't protect against being an idiot with 'rm', and it's probably a good idea to research things like those undelete tools before you need them...
especially when combined with 'find' and 'xargs', in what is supposed to be a simple task.
If you don't, you'll do something like what i just did ("worst typo in a decade"): you see, i was trying to update emacs and wanted to purge all the .elc files from ~/.emacs.d
Unfortunately, through a bad typo, some miss-applied keyboard shortcuts, and rushing through without mounting a scratch monkey... what actually ran was effectively "find ~/.emacs.d | xargs rm".
accidently deleted the 'grep'. Oops. 15+ years of elisp/etc destroyed.
Was it backed up? Nope! Been meaning to check it all into git, but always put it off as a "minor, unimportant" task I'd get to later. Of course, we all think that way up until the disaster hits...
*sigh*
It seems that we've come full-circle back to "brown".
I thought we had left that with Q1. D3 may have been way too dark, but at least they used some bright colors now and then. I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.
Actually, the game looks pretty decent; it's just that an all-brown color scheme gets boring after a while.
Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.
You don't need to split the screen to play Contra!
Proper co-op should be one screen.
So I'm running FF3.6.9 and click on the first of the video tests, which they claim they got "no result" for in both FF 3 and 4.
It seems to pass just fine, and matches their example image.
This makes me wonder if anybody even bothered to check the results.
IE and Netscape came bundled with the flash plugin in various versions.
On the other side you'll have Safari (on iOS and OS X) and IE (partially, see above) who will support H.264. This is not exactly a clear-cut battle.
Chrome also supports H.264. Including the partial IE support, it's really only firefox that's left out.
You'll also have recording devices like video cameras, cell phone cameras,
And these all support H.264, often with specialized DSP support. This is also the fastest growing market for the web, and likely to be increasingly important in the near future. Ignore mobile support at your own peril.
But first, before any major moves, Google has to make WebM workable - i.e. fully optimized encoders, decoders, quality, etc.; then start making major moves towards its adoption.
This is not even remotely relevant. It's important to us geeks, but we basically don't count. Managers don't make decisions based on quality or decoder speed. They offer their web pages in what they believe to be the popular, common choice.
This puts WebM, as a newcomer, at the very bottom of the list.
Removing patents would only benefit RedHat? What about smart investors that want to compete in the future against cheap knockoffs from China, that totally ignore patents? This myth that patents are necessary (or even relevant) reeks of a limited, USA-centric point of view.
The problem is that Open Source distributions can't license the patents and remain Open Source.
Of course. Which is why the problem should be side-stepped, by leaving things to the OS. We successfully distribute MP3 support from international /contrib branches in many distributions, and video should be no different. Forcing such software to be included in Firefox or other user-visible software is asking for trouble.
That doesn't change the fact that people are buying cameras that output H.264 now, and non-tech people won't understand why "firefox won't play my video - it must be broken".
The fact is, anyone can install a plugin to play any format they like, and most browser users will
Hilarious!
Nobody installs extra plugins. The only reason flash became popular, was that it was distributed with the browser itself. And even more important, managers will make the same decision they always make: targeting the non-plugin, popular solution, which usually maps to "Microsoft/IE". The fact that mozilla (the org) is actively fighting against allowing such plugins makes this irrelevant in any case.
Note, I'm not arguing against lobbying for Open codecs. That's the ideal solution, of course. But the pragmatist in me says that normal people don't even notice patent issues, and will trend towards the software that "just works" with their fancy new camera. Free Software can adapt to that use-case, or be seen as irrelevant.
It's worth mentioning: this has happened before, and the solution was to adapt. I install linux for family/friends, and things like "how do I play my [commercial] DVD?" come up. Discussions of how it's technically illegal to play such a video file with Free Software just cause them to tune out, often moving back to Windows to avoid the issue. Fortunately, many distributions now work around the problem, fetching some DeCSS equivalent from international souces on first use.
Normally, yes, that's a great idea. But in this case, fighting H.264 is going to drive normal, non-technical people away and into the waiting arms of non-free software.
Fighting for an open codec isn't worth it, if it destroys the market share of Firefox in the meantime.
Yes, pragmatically speaking, patent reform is likely also a hopeless fight. But if you are going to fight an unlikely battle, you might as well fight the one that will pay off more in the long run.
Many people in the Free Software press seem to be putting a lot of faith behind WebM. There seems to be this belief that Google can come in and magically make the entire video codec situation go away. WebM might be able to find a home in a few niche markets, but the hopes that it will displace H.264? It's laughable.
I love Free Software, and generally strive to run as near to 100% Free as I can on my own systems. Yet even I can recognize that the video codec war is not one that will be winnable by fiat and propaganda. The critical-mass of users are those that are buying cameras that output H.264 today, and possibly various managers, that are going to be arguing "nobody got fired for using MPEG".
The video codec war is not winnable right now, but the container and codec implementation wars might be. Striving to replace Flash with x264/ffmpeg implementations in the browser is a huge win, and one that can be realistically accomplished. Sure, it'd be great if people used a free codec like Theora/WebM (make it a prominent option! advertise it!), but not supporting H.264 at all will have one effect, and it's not the one we Free Software advocates will like: people will see the player as broken, and move to alternatives that are "not broken". Your parents, boss, and other non-technical people don't care about the alphabet soup of codecs; they just care about "software that works".
So dodge the problem and make codecs an external, OS-level issue like they always have been, and win the battles that actually can be won.
Oh, and if you really want to make a political stand, here's an idea: instead of fighting stupid technical issues about what falls under the various MPEG patents with things that may or may not be infringing (WebM), fight the patent system itself. This whole stupid issue only exists because we stupidly allow software patents. That fight is way more important, and applies to a wide variety of topics, not just video.