ISP records don't have anything to do with it either. This is naked imperialism - a power grab without disguise. It's not about "protecting" brand names, it's about silencing political dissent.
The third page of the article explains how the US is able to get away with such outrageous requests:
In a situation similar to what happened in the Softwood Lumber trade dispute, Canadians could face hefty penalties if it does not comply with ACTA after the agreement has been completed.In a situation similar to what happened in the Softwood Lumber trade dispute, Canadians could face hefty penalties if it does not comply with ACTA after the agreement has been completed.
So the proposal is, "surrender your citizens rights or we will make it cost you." The answer should be, "without rights, you will just take our money anyway, no thanks."
You are stepping around the issue by claiming these companies "actively" indexed content owned by the MPAA. The issue is that any service can be stuffed by the MPAA. If you bother to index it and eliminate duplicates and noise files, you will get burnt. Indexing should be allowed and sharing should be allowed. You can't have those things and give copyright holders the ability to police things. What you are left with is a rather stark choice: freedom or copyright. There may be some middle ground, such a allowing personal copy, but it's hard to imagine a way to enforce copyright that won't sabotage everyone's network freedom, free press and free speech.
Anyone can be shut down with this, not just "thugs". Google's YouTube service has been in the crosshairs for a while now. All the legacy copyright owners have to do is stuff the channel to shut it down. Copyright must be changed to prevent that kind of denial of service. One of PJ's first entries was about P2P and industry's fear of a richer world.
How do you know that these two sites did not intend for people to share their own movies? How can you keep the MPAA from loading up any "legitimate" site with all of their own files they way they have with Media Sentry? The ability to DoS legitimate services mandates a change in copyright law. If cases like these continue to win, there will be no alternate distribution channels or free press on the internet.
So now any service can be DoS'd by the RIAA and MPAA. You know they will stuff any independent index with their crappy content and so destroy all alternative distribution channels.
All of them have their $4,000 laptops and Media Centers, but Apple sells twice as many as them combined. Tell me another good joke about vendors not being interested in high margin business and I'll tell you a good joke about a $400 OS and a $450 Office suite. Steve Ballmer is blowing smoke from his crack pipe.
Vista might come on a large fraction of retail computers but those computers are not really selling well. The biggest reason Apple dominates sales of $1000 and up PC sales is because no one is willing to pay that much for Vista.
This threadjack was supposed to move this conversation AWAY from masturbation. Please quit telling us about your favorite Slashdot user's exploits. Your obsession is disturbing. I'd rather you just bought Vista and vanished in a cloud of DRM induced logic.
Almost any laptop is silent these days and desktops are not far behind, software is the real difference. I bought an HP media machine mini. It's a little larger and uses more power than a mac mini but it is quiet and small enough. I got it cheap because it was worthless with Vista on it. Debian makes it worth owning again, but there are some minor problems. The wireless won't work and Intel's HD audio crap is little more than functional now. If HP and other vendors would jump on the free sotware bandwagon, they would have something people would buy.
You have GNU/Linux. Windows users are buying Macs for twice as much as they are willing to pay for Vista machines because they don't know enough about free software. The party will be over for both Microsoft and Apple when more vendors join the free software movement. EEEPC and Dells with Linux preinstalled just work and that's a large measure of what Apple customers are spending premium dollars on.
A side note to all of this is that premium is not what it used to be. $1,000 is what people used to spend on middle of the road desktops... fifteen years ago. The same equipment would sell for $2,500 if it's worth had kept up with inflation. Obviously, that has not happened even for Apple. Premium computers were selling for $5,000 back then and that's what they are going for today, despite tremendous strides it convenience and utility.
Sure it's spin - he ignores the ongoing failure of non free software in education to lambast free software and it's advocates. The article is filled with every kind of free software FUD and inflammatory comment there is. If talking about having to compile kernels did not clue you off, the talk about zealots and Richard Stallman being "pure evil" should have. Sure, he spends a few paragraphs at the end softpedalling these gaffs but that's not enough to wash the bad taste away. He ignores the larger picture of non free failure that OLPC was designed to correct. Talk about XP ignores the more immediate problems, as detailed in Australia, Windows does not work on the devices and is irrelevant to the device mission.
There's a lot of spin and intentional ignorance here and it spills out best when he says this:
we don't know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software on their laptops. Indeed, I bet they'd largely prefer the damn software works and doesn't need fixing. While we think and even hope that constructionist principles, as embodied in the free software culture, are helpful to education, presenting the hopes as rooted in fact is simply deceitful.
The project in Sengal was not the only place non free software has bombed in education - it's bombed everywhere, not due to "intense competition" but to greed and planned obsolescence. Non free software is mostly designed for business, not education. What little non free software there is is quickly obsoleted by the upgrade treadmill and must be replaced at great expense. The dominant OS has been even worse from the very beginning with poor security - from macro viruses on floppies to today's modern botnets. The net result is that only the richest of schools has been able to afford a good ratio of computers to children and they do little more with them than write papers. They lacked free libraries, text books and other useful references until these things showed up on line. Schools like MIT did better because they helped themselves, in part with free software. The non free way has been an unmitigated dissaster and should not be pushed onto anyone else.
BECTA may not have any formal power but they are an authority. They are independent and know what they are talking about. It's not about Microsoft pissing them off, it's about Microsoft offering a bad deal.
There is near unanimity in the technical world that OOXML is not a worthwhile or well written standard. It is not complete or consistent. There is not even a working reference and it is also patent encumbered. That it passed is a textbook example of how position and power can be abused. The ISO is taking steps to fix this.
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16 hour work days, food that's poison, obesity, insurance and medicine they can't afford. At some point it collapses on itself because there's only so much greed an economy can stand. We are entering a recession exactly as predicted by Former World Bank Vice President, Chief Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz in 2006.
ISP records don't have anything to do with it either. This is naked imperialism - a power grab without disguise. It's not about "protecting" brand names, it's about silencing political dissent.
The third page of the article explains how the US is able to get away with such outrageous requests:
So the proposal is, "surrender your citizens rights or we will make it cost you." The answer should be, "without rights, you will just take our money anyway, no thanks."
You are stepping around the issue by claiming these companies "actively" indexed content owned by the MPAA. The issue is that any service can be stuffed by the MPAA. If you bother to index it and eliminate duplicates and noise files, you will get burnt. Indexing should be allowed and sharing should be allowed. You can't have those things and give copyright holders the ability to police things. What you are left with is a rather stark choice: freedom or copyright. There may be some middle ground, such a allowing personal copy, but it's hard to imagine a way to enforce copyright that won't sabotage everyone's network freedom, free press and free speech.
Anyone can be shut down with this, not just "thugs". Google's YouTube service has been in the crosshairs for a while now. All the legacy copyright owners have to do is stuff the channel to shut it down. Copyright must be changed to prevent that kind of denial of service. One of PJ's first entries was about P2P and industry's fear of a richer world.
How do you know that these two sites did not intend for people to share their own movies? How can you keep the MPAA from loading up any "legitimate" site with all of their own files they way they have with Media Sentry? The ability to DoS legitimate services mandates a change in copyright law. If cases like these continue to win, there will be no alternate distribution channels or free press on the internet.
So now any service can be DoS'd by the RIAA and MPAA. You know they will stuff any independent index with their crappy content and so destroy all alternative distribution channels.
All of them have their $4,000 laptops and Media Centers, but Apple sells twice as many as them combined. Tell me another good joke about vendors not being interested in high margin business and I'll tell you a good joke about a $400 OS and a $450 Office suite. Steve Ballmer is blowing smoke from his crack pipe.
Vista might come on a large fraction of retail computers but those computers are not really selling well. The biggest reason Apple dominates sales of $1000 and up PC sales is because no one is willing to pay that much for Vista.
This threadjack was supposed to move this conversation AWAY from masturbation. Please quit telling us about your favorite Slashdot user's exploits. Your obsession is disturbing. I'd rather you just bought Vista and vanished in a cloud of DRM induced logic.
Almost any laptop is silent these days and desktops are not far behind, software is the real difference. I bought an HP media machine mini. It's a little larger and uses more power than a mac mini but it is quiet and small enough. I got it cheap because it was worthless with Vista on it. Debian makes it worth owning again, but there are some minor problems. The wireless won't work and Intel's HD audio crap is little more than functional now. If HP and other vendors would jump on the free sotware bandwagon, they would have something people would buy.
You have GNU/Linux. Windows users are buying Macs for twice as much as they are willing to pay for Vista machines because they don't know enough about free software. The party will be over for both Microsoft and Apple when more vendors join the free software movement. EEEPC and Dells with Linux preinstalled just work and that's a large measure of what Apple customers are spending premium dollars on.
A side note to all of this is that premium is not what it used to be. $1,000 is what people used to spend on middle of the road desktops ... fifteen years ago. The same equipment would sell for $2,500 if it's worth had kept up with inflation. Obviously, that has not happened even for Apple. Premium computers were selling for $5,000 back then and that's what they are going for today, despite tremendous strides it convenience and utility.
Sure it's spin - he ignores the ongoing failure of non free software in education to lambast free software and it's advocates. The article is filled with every kind of free software FUD and inflammatory comment there is. If talking about having to compile kernels did not clue you off, the talk about zealots and Richard Stallman being "pure evil" should have. Sure, he spends a few paragraphs at the end softpedalling these gaffs but that's not enough to wash the bad taste away. He ignores the larger picture of non free failure that OLPC was designed to correct. Talk about XP ignores the more immediate problems, as detailed in Australia, Windows does not work on the devices and is irrelevant to the device mission.
There's a lot of spin and intentional ignorance here and it spills out best when he says this:
The project in Sengal was not the only place non free software has bombed in education - it's bombed everywhere, not due to "intense competition" but to greed and planned obsolescence. Non free software is mostly designed for business, not education. What little non free software there is is quickly obsoleted by the upgrade treadmill and must be replaced at great expense. The dominant OS has been even worse from the very beginning with poor security - from macro viruses on floppies to today's modern botnets. The net result is that only the richest of schools has been able to afford a good ratio of computers to children and they do little more with them than write papers. They lacked free libraries, text books and other useful references until these things showed up on line. Schools like MIT did better because they helped themselves, in part with free software. The non free way has been an unmitigated dissaster and should not be pushed onto anyone else.
BECTA may not have any formal power but they are an authority. They are independent and know what they are talking about. It's not about Microsoft pissing them off, it's about Microsoft offering a bad deal.
There is near unanimity in the technical world that OOXML is not a worthwhile or well written standard. It is not complete or consistent. There is not even a working reference and it is also patent encumbered. That it passed is a textbook example of how position and power can be abused. The ISO is taking steps to fix this.