Android locks the user into a firmware jail, so that he can't interfere with the platform DRM. Android devices that support "rooting" will clear the phone storage before giving the user root access, and applications providing DRM-exclusive content (I don't know about Netflix, but I know that the Sky app behaves this way) will refuse to run on a "rooted" device.
There is no industry standard for DRM in HTML5. The EME proponents didn't agree on any DRM standard. For stupid political reasons, all theirs.
Before: in order to watch Netflix, you needed an HTML browser AND the Flash plugin.
Now: in order to watch Netflix, you need Internet Explorer 11 on Windows. Firefox, Chrome and Linux users need not apply.
Where's the practical, workable value of this evolution?
But not on Linux (or any other free operating system). Otherwise the DRM would be ineffective, as one could simply rip the rich, premium videos by running Firefox, the matching Linux plugin and, say, recordmydesktop. DRM plugins for Linux cannot, and will not, happen.
You can't implement DRM in open source, so Firefox and Linux are out of the question. Chrome will probably implement some EME-compliant DRM, since Google are among the main proponents of EME. But you'll probably have to run it under a closed OS, such as Windows or (unrooted) Android in order to make it work.
EME = having Flash, Silverlight, whatnot encysted in HTML, forever.
Even worse, as CDMs aren't really meant to be implemented as browser plugins, we'll end up with sites that work only in a specific browser, or in a specific OS, or even in a specific OS under certain circumstances.
More than 95% of the population actually have a life that goes beyond watching youtube and reading reduced versions of web sites. For example they'll have to work.
They'll want, sooner or later, to use office, to embed a movie clip into a powerpoint slide, to collect the pictures from their digital camera, to open large zipped files, to send a properly formatted email, to read a DVD with video clips from their 2004 holidays, to play a game beyond the limited subset allowed by touch controls, to make a video chat while they're working on a document, to access that web site that requires Flash or even Java.
And even when the stuff they want to do can be done on a tablet, the user experience there is clumsy and the applications are almost always limited - many essential features are outright missing because the "app" designers give for granted that the user will use a desktop PC in order to access them.
In that case you have to fix your government first, for a government that is allowed to do maneuvers behind the back of the people who elected it, can screw them in much more severe ways other than installing cameras in their back yards.
I can merely walk away or choose not to be around the person wearing Glass...
Not if both of you want to be in the same place.
or perhaps kindly ask them to remove them or otherwise disable it.
And they're free to ignore your request, to lie to you about the thing being disabled, and/or film your reaction and upload it to YouTube.
People are upset not because government agencies are doing the same thing, but mainly because there's not a damn thing citizens can do to stop it, or prevent massive abuse.
On the contrary, people have the right to interrogate the authorities about the images they're collecting and the scope of the collection. They can propose laws regulating, limiting or even preventing the collection. They can elect politicians who are against it, and vote against, or no longer vote for, the politicians who are in favour of it.
It's true that the GPL isn't particularly indicated for documentation, but the problem here is that the license they've chosen is much worse, it's non-free. You can't even distribute printed copies of the manpages without authorization from Oracle!
I'm calling that selection and not evolution because the bacteria selected by a particular kind of antibiotic still belong to the same species as their progenitors and that's why antibiotics are, in most cases, still effective.
The first result of that search reports a measurement of the time of divergence between two species of bacteria between 120 and 160 million years with a substitution rate in protein-coding DNA of 0.7-0.8 million years which is remarkably similar to that observed in the nuclear genes of mammals, invertebrates, and flowering plants.
This is no evolution. Evolution can't show its effects in such a short time span. We're just seeing existing species eating the trash that we're dumping into the ocean.
It seems that any change to the ecological status quo is regarded as a problem or disaster. We know from the historical record that nothing in nature stays in a steady state. We know that changes in ecology are often boom bust cycles that eventually find an equilibrium
The problem is that most of the “changes in ecology” that happened in the last two centuries boil down to the human species consistently and predictably expanding into new territories and displacing any other species originally living there. This phenomenon is a complete novelty in the historical record, and the only possible equilibrium it can eventually lead to is the survival of a very limited amount of species: ours, the domestic ones that we need to eat, and the ones that live on our dejections. These bacteria apparently belong to the latter group.
And what did I say? CD-ROM drives were common, burners not so. About the affordability and ubiquity of burnt CDs, I should know too, as I was in high school in those years, piracy was rampant, and burnt CDs were the only kind of CD that a lot of people had at home, for $10 was still quite less than the $100 a pressed CD used to cost here.
Of course, I do not accept, condone or encourage piracy.
I challenge what Wikipedia says; I was there in 1995, and for new computers that shipped with Windows '95 having a CD-ROM drive was the norm and not the exception. Installing Windows '95 from floppy disks required a very tall pile of them, and I know few people who can recount the experience of installing the OS out of them. CD burners were much rarer, but using burnt CDs coming from a third party was commonplace.
Can the drone spy his house from 20km up in the stratosphere? If that's the case, then the fears of Schmidt about non-Google drones spying him are not addressed.
In fact, in real socialist states, the idea is that you cannot own real estate. Your house gets assigned to you, and when you leave it you give it back. So everyone would get equal treatment and opportunities. In reality, what happened is that members of the upper bureaucracy were assigned big houses while regular people got anonymous sleep points. So the class structure was there, with bureaucracy replacing aristocracy/bourgeoisie.
The importance of FLAC lies in its storage capabilities, not in its playback ones. With FLAC you can store a sound, then edit, then store it again, an infinite number of times, without the stored sound representation losing one bit of its quality. With MP3s, even high quality ones, it’s not the case.
Why, did the machines running X ever outnumber the Macs at any point in history? Also, Windows is not UNIX, and neither is Android, which isn't even a desktop OS, so why would their prosperity be a measure of the "death" of X as a windowing system for UNIX?
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They shouldn't work with a full DRM stack including video drivers. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa376846(v=vs.85).aspx
Android locks the user into a firmware jail, so that he can't interfere with the platform DRM. Android devices that support "rooting" will clear the phone storage before giving the user root access, and applications providing DRM-exclusive content (I don't know about Netflix, but I know that the Sky app behaves this way) will refuse to run on a "rooted" device.
Before: in order to watch Netflix, you needed an HTML browser AND the Flash plugin.
Now: in order to watch Netflix, you need Internet Explorer 11 on Windows. Firefox, Chrome and Linux users need not apply.
Where's the practical, workable value of this evolution?
But not on Linux (or any other free operating system). Otherwise the DRM would be ineffective, as one could simply rip the rich, premium videos by running Firefox, the matching Linux plugin and, say, recordmydesktop. DRM plugins for Linux cannot, and will not, happen.
Without OS support, the DRM-in-a-plugin would be easily cracked, for instance by copying the output of the plugin before it's sent to the screen.
You can't implement DRM in open source, so Firefox and Linux are out of the question. Chrome will probably implement some EME-compliant DRM, since Google are among the main proponents of EME. But you'll probably have to run it under a closed OS, such as Windows or (unrooted) Android in order to make it work.
Even worse, as CDMs aren't really meant to be implemented as browser plugins, we'll end up with sites that work only in a specific browser, or in a specific OS, or even in a specific OS under certain circumstances.
They'll want, sooner or later, to use office, to embed a movie clip into a powerpoint slide, to collect the pictures from their digital camera, to open large zipped files, to send a properly formatted email, to read a DVD with video clips from their 2004 holidays, to play a game beyond the limited subset allowed by touch controls, to make a video chat while they're working on a document, to access that web site that requires Flash or even Java.
And even when the stuff they want to do can be done on a tablet, the user experience there is clumsy and the applications are almost always limited - many essential features are outright missing because the "app" designers give for granted that the user will use a desktop PC in order to access them.
In that case you have to fix your government first, for a government that is allowed to do maneuvers behind the back of the people who elected it, can screw them in much more severe ways other than installing cameras in their back yards.
I can merely walk away or choose not to be around the person wearing Glass...
Not if both of you want to be in the same place.
or perhaps kindly ask them to remove them or otherwise disable it.
And they're free to ignore your request, to lie to you about the thing being disabled, and/or film your reaction and upload it to YouTube.
People are upset not because government agencies are doing the same thing, but mainly because there's not a damn thing citizens can do to stop it, or prevent massive abuse.
On the contrary, people have the right to interrogate the authorities about the images they're collecting and the scope of the collection. They can propose laws regulating, limiting or even preventing the collection. They can elect politicians who are against it, and vote against, or no longer vote for, the politicians who are in favour of it.
BSD : Software Licenses = SONY : Companies
It's true that the GPL isn't particularly indicated for documentation, but the problem here is that the license they've chosen is much worse, it's non-free. You can't even distribute printed copies of the manpages without authorization from Oracle!
I'm calling that selection and not evolution because the bacteria selected by a particular kind of antibiotic still belong to the same species as their progenitors and that's why antibiotics are, in most cases, still effective.
The first result of that search reports a measurement of the time of divergence between two species of bacteria between 120 and 160 million years with a substitution rate in protein-coding DNA of 0.7-0.8 million years which is remarkably similar to that observed in the nuclear genes of mammals, invertebrates, and flowering plants.
It's always a pleasure to have such pleasant, enriching conversations here.
It seems that any change to the ecological status quo is regarded as a problem or disaster. We know from the historical record that nothing in nature stays in a steady state. We know that changes in ecology are often boom bust cycles that eventually find an equilibrium
The problem is that most of the “changes in ecology” that happened in the last two centuries boil down to the human species consistently and predictably expanding into new territories and displacing any other species originally living there. This phenomenon is a complete novelty in the historical record, and the only possible equilibrium it can eventually lead to is the survival of a very limited amount of species: ours, the domestic ones that we need to eat, and the ones that live on our dejections. These bacteria apparently belong to the latter group.
And what did I say? CD-ROM drives were common, burners not so. About the affordability and ubiquity of burnt CDs, I should know too, as I was in high school in those years, piracy was rampant, and burnt CDs were the only kind of CD that a lot of people had at home, for $10 was still quite less than the $100 a pressed CD used to cost here.
Of course, I do not accept, condone or encourage piracy.
I challenge what Wikipedia says; I was there in 1995, and for new computers that shipped with Windows '95 having a CD-ROM drive was the norm and not the exception. Installing Windows '95 from floppy disks required a very tall pile of them, and I know few people who can recount the experience of installing the OS out of them. CD burners were much rarer, but using burnt CDs coming from a third party was commonplace.
Can the drone spy his house from 20km up in the stratosphere? If that's the case, then the fears of Schmidt about non-Google drones spying him are not addressed.
Will Eric Schmidt allow one of those to float over his house? He doesn't like drones. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/21/drones-google-eric-schmidt
In fact, in real socialist states, the idea is that you cannot own real estate. Your house gets assigned to you, and when you leave it you give it back. So everyone would get equal treatment and opportunities. In reality, what happened is that members of the upper bureaucracy were assigned big houses while regular people got anonymous sleep points. So the class structure was there, with bureaucracy replacing aristocracy/bourgeoisie.
The importance of FLAC lies in its storage capabilities, not in its playback ones. With FLAC you can store a sound, then edit, then store it again, an infinite number of times, without the stored sound representation losing one bit of its quality. With MP3s, even high quality ones, it’s not the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_humour
Huh? Because I think that X is not dead yet? You're reading too much in my comment.
Why, did the machines running X ever outnumber the Macs at any point in history? Also, Windows is not UNIX, and neither is Android, which isn't even a desktop OS, so why would their prosperity be a measure of the "death" of X as a windowing system for UNIX?