> Therefore, you have both sides presented as being equally correct and both sides being given plenty of opportunity to state their claims,
What color is the sky on your planet? Both sides treated equally by the media? Name an issue where that is true? It certainly isn't on climate science. They start from a preconceived narrative and write their stories to reinforce it. And they are all believers in the Green religion. NBC does green week... of course their previous parent and current 49% owner stands to make Sagans of cash off carbon trading and 'alternate' energy (via subsidies).
As for politics in science, that would be the AGW camp. They have gotten away with redefining "Climate Science" to be "the study of Climate Change and Man's negative impact on the environment" so that, by definition, anyone who isn't in the AGW camp isn't a "Climate Scientist". Then we endlessly hear the circular argument that all "Climate scientists" are in consensus. As if science was ever about consensus. Of course we now live in the age of "post normal science" so Truth is whatever the Party says it is.
> Those issues become wedge issues, and elections often turn on them even though neither side ever has > any intention of actually doing anything about them..
Speak for yourself. But the only way to do anything about them is for one side to finally triumph over the other because neither side will ever yield. Because neither side can, the gulf between the American and Progressive positions is so wide that neither side is willing to live in the other side's vision of what the country should look like, so we are stuck in an unsustainable middle where the country is self destructing. Either one side wins soon or we are going to just implode. Personally of course I dream of ending the Democrat party and finally restoring the Old Republic.
> AT&T put in all the miles of fiber we now have back in the 40's?
Ok, you asked for it. So sit right down and lemme tell ya a tale.
Back in the 90's there were first stirrings of the sort of reform I am talking about. They didn't split em but they did force the telcos to allow competition of a sort. Remember the CLECs? There was a lot wrong in how that scheme was setup, with the incumbent carrier retaining an unhealthy advantage but it was a start and it scared the piss out of the telcos. So they got their pet congressman (Rep Billy Tauzin R-LA in fact but R-BellSouth in reality) to knife the CLECs. This set off a chain reaction that led killed off the CLECs, and most small ISPs because they had become CLECs to get access to low enough rates to stay in the game; that in turn killed the equipment makers that depended on them, i.e. Lucent, Nortel, et al. The contagion spread until it became known as the.bomb.
Perhaps you read about that back in 2000 if you were the sort to read business pages. The rest of the country found out in 2001 after the Presidential race was over with, a major market meltdown didn't fit the media's narrative of that race you see; the story of the Clinton economic miracle that we could keep going if we elected Algore.
While the threat was solved for now, the telcos were determined a shift in their political fortunes wouldn't see a rebirth of competition. So while they had the power they used it. They bought themselves a law that would exempt any new fiber investment from being subject to being opened to competition. They told us that without that promise we would all be stuck on dialup and become uncompetitive in the world economy. And so Congress gave them what they wanted and then some, heck they even threw direct cash at em! And they are slowly rolling out fiber.... and rolling up the copper as they go. So they just refreshed the monopoly. Who cares what it cost, that gets passed to the end customer anyway.
Note that the government is just as liable for the Kaboom! as the telcos. So giving any of them more power is a bad idea.
> If we let Comcast and AT&T decide what the internet is going to become...
Yes, letting Comcast or AT&T decide the fate of the net would be a disaster. So would letting the government decide. Putting that decision into ANY select group's hand means we get hosed, the only difference is HOW we get hosed by WHO. Don't know about you but I don't like getting hosed. So why not pick a course of action that doesn't involve getting hosed?
> You can reach a point where some peoples' heads are so filled with free-market talking points that they just can't see the monitor in front of their face.
You are missing the point. The current telco situation isn't a Free Market. Two massive government sponsored/controlled enterprises wielding monopoly power has exactly zero to do with a free market. Sure they are listed on the stock exchanges, big whoop. So do Freddie and Fannie. None of them take a dump without government permission right now and act safe in the knowledge that it is pretty much ILLEGAL to compete with them.
We need more free market not less. Break off the monopoly over the physical plant and make it lease out access to all comers, including the other part which could then be safely deregulated almost entirely.
> Just a quick question: Who paid for/subsidized those wires?
You are getting close to the truth of the matter. Yes the telcos paid to put in the wires but it was subsidized in a way. It was part of a deal where AT&T would run wires to MOST[1] of the country in exchange for a monopoly.
So every time this topic comes up I remind people of the only long term solution that would actually work and get ignored. Break up the phone companies one more time, this time along the correct lines. Company A gets the monopoly, the local loops and the COs and sells access at rates set by the government. Company B puts dialtone, IP or video on the wire along with as many other companies who want to compete. And do it for the cable companies as well, they have had enough time extracting monopoly rents they can be split along the same lines of the natural monopoly vs the value added services.
But of course what we get is the government will essentially nationalize the Internet. Service will go to hell if you can even get past the political cleansing. And with Big Media having achieved regulatory capture decades ago the p2p scene will be toast.
[1] Even then they carved out a lot of really rural areas that they wouldn't serve, which is why there are small local phone companies that have been around for a really long time. But all are way out in flyover country where 'real' people never go and thus are ignored.
> Either way I look forward to your HTML5 X11 client!
Why would anyone want that? You appear to be confusing your X terms, remember the display is the server. Anyway, if I'm already running an X server why would I want to nest one in a browser?
And since I was viewing VNC sessions in Netscape 4 this really isn't much new other than moving the Java part onto a backend server.
Had the Free Software folks put more than lip service into the notion that Linux/* was a good way to keep older hardware in service, i.e. rejected the list below, when the EeePC shipped with Linux it's specs would have been so lowball Microsoft would have had to drug Win98 out of storage to offer a competing product that would run on em. We would have a firm grip on the bottom of the ladder and be working our way up to Total World Domination.
Bad ideas just from looking as "ps ax" on the F12 install I'm typing this on:
1. 2.2MB resident set for modem-manager.... when I don't have any sort of modem installed.
2. 3.7MB resident set for CUPS to listen for network printers and print jobs.
3. 616KB resident set to process ACPI events
4. 1.4MB resident set for wpa_supplicant when I'm plugged into ethernet and don't even have wifi associated to anything.
5. And don't forget 5.4MB for NetworkManager to manage a wired ethernet connection..... totally seperate from the 1.4MB the actual dhcp client is resident in.
6. 4MB resident set because some process might emit an email and sendmail needs to be ready..
7. Toss in another 12MB resident for policykit, devkit and dbus.
8. 7.5MB resident for pulseaudio.... with no sound active.
Believe it or not, I actually used a 486SX-33 notebook with 40MB of ram in the long long ago. It ran RedHat 4.x and Netscape. A bit slowly but it was usable once everything settled down. The list of plumbing bits above wouldn't fit in 40MB and thus begin furiously swapping before even trying to load X so we can forget trying to run a browser.
Think larger. For example, the House of Mouse is part of the Apple family these days. Steve is thinking bigger than just Apple. Big media have a dream with h264. Get the Internet addicted to it and in a few years they start the fees. A revenue stream from every frame of video passing over the net. A fee from every frame of video encoded. Total control over who can even do it. They get to lock down the net and tax it. Sagans of cash, enough yummy cash to make up for the impending losses on cable and dvd royalties.
If Google ends up in control (or just blows the monopoly with a royalty free codec) Steve and his friends in Big Media don't get all that cash. Follow the money.
> ps3, which uhm, is probably the most up to date bluray player on the market?
Maybe he KNEW it wouldn't play there because he runs Linux on his PS3 and was intentionally avoiding the new firmware?
The DRM problem is way out of hand. DVDs shouldn't even be called that anymore because what is on them bears little resemblence to a DVD. Look at the structure of current one, it is a miracle most hardware players even read them. The cat and mouse game on BD is just kicked up a couple of notches while still being the same problem of trying to make water not wet. If Windows can play it, making a copy is a foregone conclusion regardless how much crypto pixie dust they sprinkle on it.
> I don't think that's a legislative action item. It's not the government's job to make sure people make smart decisions.
No but if they themselves set the right example the Microsoft document monopoly would end overnight. Simply forbid the use of Microsoft document formats within or between government agencies or the distribution to the public in those formats. Program their mail gateways to automagically transform Microsoft attachments into something benign. We have an ISO standard now, governments should use it. Then if Office gained the ability to faithfully interoperate in those formats it wouldn't matter what anyone else wanted to use anymore than it matters if a JPG was originally created or modified with Photoshop.
> For those of us who are not intimate with American politics -- why is this moderated insightful, flamebait and troll?
Because Senator Edward M. "Swim Bitch!" Kennedy is a very polarizing figure. To people like me he represents everything wrong with Progressivism and the Democrat Party. A repulsive scion of a gangster family who made a career out of demagoguery and debauchery. To them he was sort of a god, the Liberal Lion of the Senate and the last fading glory of Camelot.
But everyone agrees with this much: he was he was a very powerful politician with essentially a lifetime appointment to the Senate who single handedly stopped the Cape Cod wind project cold in its tracks while he lived.
I'm not very green but I certainly like the idea of wind energy in places like that where it is both abundant and close enough to population centers to make delivery simple. That couldn't happen because one wicked yet powerful man stood in the way. He is now safely roasting in Hell and now we can tap a practical source of energy. Yea!
All the other objections were just bullcrap political cover for the real reason the project never got off the ground until now; Senator Kennedy didn't want to see the turbines in HIS view. Now that he has went to Hell progress will be rapid.
No, it is an indicator of a worse problem. We used to have the Rule of Law. Now we have the Rule of Men. Problem is what I wrote above is so self evidently correct that this case shouldn't have made it into a courtroom at all. In a sane world, any competent attorney would have explained the law, charged the client for an hour and that would have been that. But because both sides correctly understand the bizarro reality we actually live in they are rolling the dice; since justice is now whatever a judge says and their views are randomly distributed.
The difference is when you have the Rule of Law the laws are knowable and mostly predictable. Courts are mostly occupied with determining the facts of the particular case and then applying the law to them. The occasional case will test an unexpected corner of the law but it an exception. Now the written laws mean little and judges apply their opinions of 'justice' to cases and their rulings are thus mostly unknowable beforehand. This of course means everyone take a try at court as soon as they have nothing left to lose.
> Neither is true today, which is what this case is all about.
Nope, that is exactly what this case is about. You can't go to some third world pesthole, print up a bunch of books and then import them into the US. The rights holder of course can outsource the printing. Every book/CD/DVD/etc offered for sale in the US must have a chain of authority tracable to the author, and only through US connections. Some of the newer treaties get a little more complex but the idea is still the same as a practical matter. You aren't allowed to find the country with the lowest royalty rates, buy a container or two there and bring them to the 1st world and expect to be allowed to sell them.
Copyright is an artificial government grant of monopoly over reproduction and public performance of a work. A foreign import isn't reproduced under that monopoly grant and is thus illegal to import or sell in the US. Black letter law guys. The fact that in small quantities (and marked up over the closest local version as in the typical import album) the rights holders don't mind, but they still possess an absolute legal monopoly on reproduction of copies for sale inside the US so if they do decide they don't like an import they have the right to forbid it.
And the same legal theory exists in most, but not all, other countries.
You don't have to agree with the reasoning behind copyright, you don't even have to belive they should exist. The fact is they do exist and unless you want to change the law it is what it is. This isn't even a DMCA like abuse of the copyright clause in the US Constitution, it is the very heart of what copyright is.
> Instead of using that timber for paper, it'll be used for lumber or for biomass electricity generation (which has a net zero carbon emission).
Perhaps, perhaps not. Take your example of biomass. Think that doesn't have as much pollution as paper production? Hint: it ain't carbon neutral anymore than paper production is. To get decent land utilization you will be growing something faster growing than trees, probably with fertilizer. Then there is the energy to irrigate it, plant and harvest and there still isn't a biomass to usable fuel cycle that doesn't waste close to as much energy as it produces.
But regardless, land must produce more revenue than the property taxes so one way or another value WILL be reaped, regardless the environmental impact. Some will get flattened for development, some will become pasture land, farmland, whatever. That law of unintended consequences always bits ya. Ponder that before dreaming of a world without paper.
> There are very valid reasons to the FDAs laws governing drugs.
For the FDA, i.e. you. If the FDA approves a drug and problems turn up it causes a sh*tstorm and people (your peeps) can get sacked. However if the FDA drags its feet for a few years being extra safe the people who WILL die are voiceless so nobody gets sacked. All of the incentives are thus to delay and delay we get. Simple really, if a newly approved drug saves X lives per year all you have to do is multiply X by the number of years the drug took to move through the overly constipated FDA pipeline to calculate the FDA base death toll. Harder is to calculate the lives saved by avoiding the couple of total fiascos that do get avoided by the extra delay, but considering how many drugs still end up being recalled after going through the decade plus of paperwork the number is almost certain to be smaller than the base deaths by government so the FDA is a net cause of death.
The FDA still might could justify its existence if submission to it's so called exaustive testing provided legal immunity to the drug makers when a drug ends up having bad effects in general use but it doesn't. The trial lawyers fixed that. So it really serves no positive purpose and should be reformed or abolished. Besides, the FDA isn't constitutional; don't even try that Commerce Clause bullshit on me.
No, just a little out of date. I only look at the HD world every once in a while. Don't have an HDTV and even when I do don't expect to have any content anytime soon. Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon did his thing and BD is such a cat and mouse game it appears you spend as much time updating firmware in players as watching anything on them. The HD offering from the local cable co is vastly overpriced and underperforming.
> HDTV DVB broadcasts use H.264, as do IPTV systems.
Some do NOW. But they were originally built out as MPEG-2. Heck, DirectTV was still MPEG-1.5 only a couple of years ago because they didn't want to rip and replace the number of installed receivers required to upgrade.
And yes I notice they did add H.264 as an option to ATSC in 2008 but if anyone expects to ever see an over the air transmission in the US using it anytime soon you are daft. They just rammed through mandatory HD capable receivers in zillions of installed units that, considering their date of design and sale mostly predate July '08, just do MPEG; it would cause a PR nightmare.
> H.264 support is in my Intel, nVidia, and Intel GPUs
Almost certainly as software running on the GPU, i.e. upgradable.
> Considering that H.264 is used in Blu-rays, ATSC, DVB-T/DVB-S2, video streaming services like Netflix > and of course, sites like YouTube, I don't think H.264 will go away anytime soon.
BLuRay doesn't matter, it is a closed universe. And most current titles use VC-1 and old ones used MPEG-2, not H.264. ATSC is strictly MPEG-2 based. Some DVB might have added H.264 in addition to MPEG-2 but when they launched they were also just MPEG-2. So if they support two or three codecs already getting another phased in over the next couple of years shouldn't be a problem... if they even need to. Netflix will use whatever is deployed as they aren't any sort of standard and don't really have dependencies on much physical hardware yet.
No, H.264 as a format that isn't just encapsulated in some other locked DRM hell like Flash, the Netflix player, a cable company settop box, etc. is almost entirely an Apple only thing at this point. If we can keep it there we might be able to defeat it. Remember that most 'hardware solutions' that matter right now are just ARM cpus with a DSP and those are totally programmable to add new codecs. The little mini-PCIe decoders from Broadcom might be SOL, don't know how much is hard coded vs DSP code downloaded by the device driver.
I'd think the die is now cast. Enough folks yelled "STOP!" loud enough they backed off from making mono a core dependency and replaced a pair of otherwise keeper apps out of the default install. It would be pretty hard to introduce a must have dep now, what would they say to the authors of F-Spot and Tomboy?
> But is that the "installed" or did they remove Tomboy and the rest in the repositories too?
Mono, F-Spot and Tomboy are all still in the repo. No problem with that, use it or don't. Heck, outside the US where software patents don't exist there isn't any reason not to use em. The problem was if we allowed those camels to put their nose under the tent there wouldn't be any way to stop the conversion of GNOME into a.NET project. Having a few.NET apps or using mono to run foreign code isn't going to be a problem because Microsoft won't drop the patent bomb on those uses. They would lose more than we would.
Much the same as Wine is probably an even greater patent minefield but nobody objects to it being in every distro's repo. But we would be daft to let some Microsoft sockpuppet con us into using winelib as a reason to adopt Win32 as the basis for the Free Software desktop stack. Think of the arguments in favor that could be made. Apps run as fast, or faster, under Wine as Windows so performance isn't an issue. With only a little care binaries would run unmodified on x86 Linux and x86 Windows; just like mono/.net! Lots more potential developers know Win32. Develop Free Software on Windows with their 'superior' tools. And so on. Then once a critical mass of can't live without apps were Win32 only the patent hammer comes down and we all run Windows.
Everything works just fine. They ditched F-Spot for Shotwell and replaced Tomboy with the C++ port GNote. With those gone mono doesn't need to be installed. Somebody caught the cluetrain and stopped Novell from infecting GNOME with their patent poison.
> Hmmm... I wasn't aware that virtualization was a security failure, and that every instance of VM implementation failed to maintain security of the host OS.
Google is yer friend. "security bug vmware" "security bug xen", etc. will quickly hit exploitable bugs that allow an attacker to escape. Meanwhile "security bug kvm" only gets crash bugs and potential escapes but then it is the new kid on the block. Not having any luck finding the bugs in the hardware, but pretty sure/. had something on it in the last year or so.... even though a quick search here didn't hit it.
You might want to read the details a bit more than the overly sensationalized version at pwnie-awards. None of the bogus packages have been seen in the wild. That incident was about as close of a near miss as you can get without a kaboom! but there was in fact no kaboom!. Will something like it happen eventually? Probably. Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova said it best, "Sooner or later, BOOM!" But it doesn't happen on a daily basis.
> The problem is your false assumption that a radio station must be profitable.
It must at least break even and to a good approximation ratings == profit. It must at minimum take in enough to make payroll, buy electricity for the transmitter, do maintaince, pay licensing fees, etc. Even if you imagine sucking at the public teat to be a better revenue model than paid advertising those public resources aren't free either, you have to convince a congresscritter to give YOU the money over pissing it away on some other socialist crapola and ratings are going to matter in that argument because listeners == voters in the congresscritter's calculus. Of course if you have ratings you don't need the public teat.
But more generally, yes I do assume a radio station should be in it to turn a profit. The ability to turn a profit is the ultimate indicator of success in providing a useful product in a free market system. Excepting stations operated by non-profit organizations of course.
> Well, that's the point. If an app is sandboxed, it doesn't matter if that app is insecure... your OS won't get hosed by that app.
Except history tells us it never works that way in the real world. Java? Nope. BSD Jails? Nope. Virtualization? Nope. Containers? Nope. All promised to build a perfect isolated subsystem that apps couldn't escape from. All have had exploits. It helps, but it can also harm by leading to a false sense of security that causes people to do things they never would have done without that belief that it was safe. It was faith in sandboxes that made the idea of everything becoming a carrier of executable content possible. We would have never accepted the notion of every random webpage we visit being chockablock full of potentially evil executable content (Javascript, Flash, JAVA,.NET, PDF) served up by random ad networks that loads and runs on our side of the link if it weren't for the false promise that it could be safely isolated.
> This is an implementation issue, not a theoretical issue.
Here in reality we only deal with implementations, not theory. EVERY sandboxing scheme attempted to date has failed, some more messy than others, some more publicly than others, but ALL have failed. A 100% failure rate after dozens of independent implementaions says either the idea is flawed or requires tools/skills we do not currently possess to implement. Either way, trusting sandboxing is asking for trouble. I remember when an email that could infect your computer was an April's Fool joke. Microsoft and Netscape Communications made the joke reality.
> When a web dialog box can mimic a system dialog box saying "Your Computer is Infected CLICK HERE to fix it", > which downloads and installs Antivirus 2010 crapware, the problem isn't Firefox, Windows or anything any > programmer can fix. PEBAC, PICNIC and 1D10T errors aren't fixable by programmers.
Yes it is. Firefox should never set the executable bit on a download. (On Windows I guess it could neuter executables with an extra extension?) I don't care how 'convienient' it might be, just don't allow it. Second, a properly configured Linux machine isn't subject to that sort of attack because we use signed packages. If the scammer can get a user to click past enough dialog boxes to install a bogus repo or accept an unsigned package there really isn't much to do to help that user. None of those protections exist for Windows or Mac users which is why they can get 0wned with one bad click. We get 90+% of the security of Apple's closed i* DRM with 0% of the evil.
> "Stupid should hurt"
I agree in principle but submit that if almost two decades of Windows has failed to hurt enough to inspire change it is hard to imagine what would.
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> Therefore, you have both sides presented as being equally correct and both sides being given plenty of opportunity to state their claims,
What color is the sky on your planet? Both sides treated equally by the media? Name an issue where that is true? It certainly isn't on climate science. They start from a preconceived narrative and write their stories to reinforce it. And they are all believers in the Green religion. NBC does green week... of course their previous parent and current 49% owner stands to make Sagans of cash off carbon trading and 'alternate' energy (via subsidies).
As for politics in science, that would be the AGW camp. They have gotten away with redefining "Climate Science" to be "the study of Climate Change and Man's negative impact on the environment" so that, by definition, anyone who isn't in the AGW camp isn't a "Climate Scientist". Then we endlessly hear the circular argument that all "Climate scientists" are in consensus. As if science was ever about consensus. Of course we now live in the age of "post normal science" so Truth is whatever the Party says it is.
> Those issues become wedge issues, and elections often turn on them even though neither side ever has
> any intention of actually doing anything about them..
Speak for yourself. But the only way to do anything about them is for one side to finally triumph over the other because neither side will ever yield. Because neither side can, the gulf between the American and Progressive positions is so wide that neither side is willing to live in the other side's vision of what the country should look like, so we are stuck in an unsustainable middle where the country is self destructing. Either one side wins soon or we are going to just implode. Personally of course I dream of ending the Democrat party and finally restoring the Old Republic.
> AT&T put in all the miles of fiber we now have back in the 40's?
Ok, you asked for it. So sit right down and lemme tell ya a tale.
Back in the 90's there were first stirrings of the sort of reform I am talking about. They didn't split em but they did force the telcos to allow competition of a sort. Remember the CLECs? There was a lot wrong in how that scheme was setup, with the incumbent carrier retaining an unhealthy advantage but it was a start and it scared the piss out of the telcos. So they got their pet congressman (Rep Billy Tauzin R-LA in fact but R-BellSouth in reality) to knife the CLECs. This set off a chain reaction that led killed off the CLECs, and most small ISPs because they had become CLECs to get access to low enough rates to stay in the game; that in turn killed the equipment makers that depended on them, i.e. Lucent, Nortel, et al. The contagion spread until it became known as the .bomb.
Perhaps you read about that back in 2000 if you were the sort to read business pages. The rest of the country found out in 2001 after the Presidential race was over with, a major market meltdown didn't fit the media's narrative of that race you see; the story of the Clinton economic miracle that we could keep going if we elected Algore.
While the threat was solved for now, the telcos were determined a shift in their political fortunes wouldn't see a rebirth of competition. So while they had the power they used it. They bought themselves a law that would exempt any new fiber investment from being subject to being opened to competition. They told us that without that promise we would all be stuck on dialup and become uncompetitive in the world economy. And so Congress gave them what they wanted and then some, heck they even threw direct cash at em! And they are slowly rolling out fiber.... and rolling up the copper as they go. So they just refreshed the monopoly. Who cares what it cost, that gets passed to the end customer anyway.
Note that the government is just as liable for the Kaboom! as the telcos. So giving any of them more power is a bad idea.
> If we let Comcast and AT&T decide what the internet is going to become...
Yes, letting Comcast or AT&T decide the fate of the net would be a disaster. So would letting the government decide. Putting that decision into ANY select group's hand means we get hosed, the only difference is HOW we get hosed by WHO. Don't know about you but I don't like getting hosed. So why not pick a course of action that doesn't involve getting hosed?
> You can reach a point where some peoples' heads are so filled with free-market talking points that they just can't see the monitor in front of their face.
You are missing the point. The current telco situation isn't a Free Market. Two massive government sponsored/controlled enterprises wielding monopoly power has exactly zero to do with a free market. Sure they are listed on the stock exchanges, big whoop. So do Freddie and Fannie. None of them take a dump without government permission right now and act safe in the knowledge that it is pretty much ILLEGAL to compete with them.
We need more free market not less. Break off the monopoly over the physical plant and make it lease out access to all comers, including the other part which could then be safely deregulated almost entirely.
> Just a quick question: Who paid for/subsidized those wires?
You are getting close to the truth of the matter. Yes the telcos paid to put in the wires but it was subsidized in a way. It was part of a deal where AT&T would run wires to MOST[1] of the country in exchange for a monopoly.
So every time this topic comes up I remind people of the only long term solution that would actually work and get ignored. Break up the phone companies one more time, this time along the correct lines. Company A gets the monopoly, the local loops and the COs and sells access at rates set by the government. Company B puts dialtone, IP or video on the wire along with as many other companies who want to compete. And do it for the cable companies as well, they have had enough time extracting monopoly rents they can be split along the same lines of the natural monopoly vs the value added services.
But of course what we get is the government will essentially nationalize the Internet. Service will go to hell if you can even get past the political cleansing. And with Big Media having achieved regulatory capture decades ago the p2p scene will be toast.
[1] Even then they carved out a lot of really rural areas that they wouldn't serve, which is why there are small local phone companies that have been around for a really long time. But all are way out in flyover country where 'real' people never go and thus are ignored.
> Either way I look forward to your HTML5 X11 client!
Why would anyone want that? You appear to be confusing your X terms, remember the display is the server. Anyway, if I'm already running an X server why would I want to nest one in a browser?
And since I was viewing VNC sessions in Netscape 4 this really isn't much new other than moving the Java part onto a backend server.
> If it works, why optimize it?
Well just to give one example....
Had the Free Software folks put more than lip service into the notion that Linux/* was a good way to keep older hardware in service, i.e. rejected the list below, when the EeePC shipped with Linux it's specs would have been so lowball Microsoft would have had to drug Win98 out of storage to offer a competing product that would run on em. We would have a firm grip on the bottom of the ladder and be working our way up to Total World Domination.
Bad ideas just from looking as "ps ax" on the F12 install I'm typing this on:
1. 2.2MB resident set for modem-manager.... when I don't have any sort of modem installed.
2. 3.7MB resident set for CUPS to listen for network printers and print jobs.
3. 616KB resident set to process ACPI events
4. 1.4MB resident set for wpa_supplicant when I'm plugged into ethernet and don't even have wifi associated to anything.
5. And don't forget 5.4MB for NetworkManager to manage a wired ethernet connection..... totally seperate from the 1.4MB the actual dhcp client is resident in.
6. 4MB resident set because some process might emit an email and sendmail needs to be ready..
7. Toss in another 12MB resident for policykit, devkit and dbus.
8. 7.5MB resident for pulseaudio.... with no sound active.
Believe it or not, I actually used a 486SX-33 notebook with 40MB of ram in the long long ago. It ran RedHat 4.x and Netscape. A bit slowly but it was usable once everything settled down. The list of plumbing bits above wouldn't fit in 40MB and thus begin furiously swapping before even trying to load X so we can forget trying to run a browser.
> How does this hurt Apple?
Think larger. For example, the House of Mouse is part of the Apple family these days. Steve is thinking bigger than just Apple. Big media have a dream with h264. Get the Internet addicted to it and in a few years they start the fees. A revenue stream from every frame of video passing over the net. A fee from every frame of video encoded. Total control over who can even do it. They get to lock down the net and tax it. Sagans of cash, enough yummy cash to make up for the impending losses on cable and dvd royalties.
If Google ends up in control (or just blows the monopoly with a royalty free codec) Steve and his friends in Big Media don't get all that cash. Follow the money.
> ps3, which uhm, is probably the most up to date bluray player on the market?
Maybe he KNEW it wouldn't play there because he runs Linux on his PS3 and was intentionally avoiding the new firmware?
The DRM problem is way out of hand. DVDs shouldn't even be called that anymore because what is on them bears little resemblence to a DVD. Look at the structure of current one, it is a miracle most hardware players even read them. The cat and mouse game on BD is just kicked up a couple of notches while still being the same problem of trying to make water not wet. If Windows can play it, making a copy is a foregone conclusion regardless how much crypto pixie dust they sprinkle on it.
> I don't think that's a legislative action item. It's not the government's job to make sure people make smart decisions.
No but if they themselves set the right example the Microsoft document monopoly would end overnight. Simply forbid the use of Microsoft document formats within or between government agencies or the distribution to the public in those formats. Program their mail gateways to automagically transform Microsoft attachments into something benign. We have an ISO standard now, governments should use it. Then if Office gained the ability to faithfully interoperate in those formats it wouldn't matter what anyone else wanted to use anymore than it matters if a JPG was originally created or modified with Photoshop.
> For those of us who are not intimate with American politics -- why is this moderated insightful, flamebait and troll?
Because Senator Edward M. "Swim Bitch!" Kennedy is a very polarizing figure. To people like me he represents everything wrong with Progressivism and the Democrat Party. A repulsive scion of a gangster family who made a career out of demagoguery and debauchery. To them he was sort of a god, the Liberal Lion of the Senate and the last fading glory of Camelot.
But everyone agrees with this much: he was he was a very powerful politician with essentially a lifetime appointment to the Senate who single handedly stopped the Cape Cod wind project cold in its tracks while he lived.
I'm not very green but I certainly like the idea of wind energy in places like that where it is both abundant and close enough to population centers to make delivery simple. That couldn't happen because one wicked yet powerful man stood in the way. He is now safely roasting in Hell and now we can tap a practical source of energy. Yea!
All the other objections were just bullcrap political cover for the real reason the project never got off the ground until now; Senator Kennedy didn't want to see the turbines in HIS view. Now that he has went to Hell progress will be rapid.
No, it is an indicator of a worse problem. We used to have the Rule of Law. Now we have the Rule of Men. Problem is what I wrote above is so self evidently correct that this case shouldn't have made it into a courtroom at all. In a sane world, any competent attorney would have explained the law, charged the client for an hour and that would have been that. But because both sides correctly understand the bizarro reality we actually live in they are rolling the dice; since justice is now whatever a judge says and their views are randomly distributed.
The difference is when you have the Rule of Law the laws are knowable and mostly predictable. Courts are mostly occupied with determining the facts of the particular case and then applying the law to them. The occasional case will test an unexpected corner of the law but it an exception. Now the written laws mean little and judges apply their opinions of 'justice' to cases and their rulings are thus mostly unknowable beforehand. This of course means everyone take a try at court as soon as they have nothing left to lose.
> Neither is true today, which is what this case is all about.
Nope, that is exactly what this case is about. You can't go to some third world pesthole, print up a bunch of books and then import them into the US. The rights holder of course can outsource the printing. Every book/CD/DVD/etc offered for sale in the US must have a chain of authority tracable to the author, and only through US connections. Some of the newer treaties get a little more complex but the idea is still the same as a practical matter. You aren't allowed to find the country with the lowest royalty rates, buy a container or two there and bring them to the 1st world and expect to be allowed to sell them.
Copyright is an artificial government grant of monopoly over reproduction and public performance of a work. A foreign import isn't reproduced under that monopoly grant and is thus illegal to import or sell in the US. Black letter law guys. The fact that in small quantities (and marked up over the closest local version as in the typical import album) the rights holders don't mind, but they still possess an absolute legal monopoly on reproduction of copies for sale inside the US so if they do decide they don't like an import they have the right to forbid it.
And the same legal theory exists in most, but not all, other countries.
You don't have to agree with the reasoning behind copyright, you don't even have to belive they should exist. The fact is they do exist and unless you want to change the law it is what it is. This isn't even a DMCA like abuse of the copyright clause in the US Constitution, it is the very heart of what copyright is.
> Instead of using that timber for paper, it'll be used for lumber or for biomass electricity generation (which has a net zero carbon emission).
Perhaps, perhaps not. Take your example of biomass. Think that doesn't have as much pollution as paper production? Hint: it ain't carbon neutral anymore than paper production is. To get decent land utilization you will be growing something faster growing than trees, probably with fertilizer. Then there is the energy to irrigate it, plant and harvest and there still isn't a biomass to usable fuel cycle that doesn't waste close to as much energy as it produces.
But regardless, land must produce more revenue than the property taxes so one way or another value WILL be reaped, regardless the environmental impact. Some will get flattened for development, some will become pasture land, farmland, whatever. That law of unintended consequences always bits ya. Ponder that before dreaming of a world without paper.
> There are very valid reasons to the FDAs laws governing drugs.
For the FDA, i.e. you. If the FDA approves a drug and problems turn up it causes a sh*tstorm and people (your peeps) can get sacked. However if the FDA drags its feet for a few years being extra safe the people who WILL die are voiceless so nobody gets sacked. All of the incentives are thus to delay and delay we get. Simple really, if a newly approved drug saves X lives per year all you have to do is multiply X by the number of years the drug took to move through the overly constipated FDA pipeline to calculate the FDA base death toll. Harder is to calculate the lives saved by avoiding the couple of total fiascos that do get avoided by the extra delay, but considering how many drugs still end up being recalled after going through the decade plus of paperwork the number is almost certain to be smaller than the base deaths by government so the FDA is a net cause of death.
The FDA still might could justify its existence if submission to it's so called exaustive testing provided legal immunity to the drug makers when a drug ends up having bad effects in general use but it doesn't. The trial lawyers fixed that. So it really serves no positive purpose and should be reformed or abolished. Besides, the FDA isn't constitutional; don't even try that Commerce Clause bullshit on me.
> You are lying.
No, just a little out of date. I only look at the HD world every once in a while. Don't have an HDTV and even when I do don't expect to have any content anytime soon. Didn't buy DVD until DVD Jon did his thing and BD is such a cat and mouse game it appears you spend as much time updating firmware in players as watching anything on them. The HD offering from the local cable co is vastly overpriced and underperforming.
> HDTV DVB broadcasts use H.264, as do IPTV systems.
Some do NOW. But they were originally built out as MPEG-2. Heck, DirectTV was still MPEG-1.5 only a couple of years ago because they didn't want to rip and replace the number of installed receivers required to upgrade.
And yes I notice they did add H.264 as an option to ATSC in 2008 but if anyone expects to ever see an over the air transmission in the US using it anytime soon you are daft. They just rammed through mandatory HD capable receivers in zillions of installed units that, considering their date of design and sale mostly predate July '08, just do MPEG; it would cause a PR nightmare.
> H.264 support is in my Intel, nVidia, and Intel GPUs
Almost certainly as software running on the GPU, i.e. upgradable.
> Considering that H.264 is used in Blu-rays, ATSC, DVB-T/DVB-S2, video streaming services like Netflix
> and of course, sites like YouTube, I don't think H.264 will go away anytime soon.
BLuRay doesn't matter, it is a closed universe. And most current titles use VC-1 and old ones used MPEG-2, not H.264. ATSC is strictly MPEG-2 based. Some DVB might have added H.264 in addition to MPEG-2 but when they launched they were also just MPEG-2. So if they support two or three codecs already getting another phased in over the next couple of years shouldn't be a problem... if they even need to. Netflix will use whatever is deployed as they aren't any sort of standard and don't really have dependencies on much physical hardware yet.
No, H.264 as a format that isn't just encapsulated in some other locked DRM hell like Flash, the Netflix player, a cable company settop box, etc. is almost entirely an Apple only thing at this point. If we can keep it there we might be able to defeat it. Remember that most 'hardware solutions' that matter right now are just ARM cpus with a DSP and those are totally programmable to add new codecs. The little mini-PCIe decoders from Broadcom might be SOL, don't know how much is hard coded vs DSP code downloaded by the device driver.
> Let's hope it stays that way.
I'd think the die is now cast. Enough folks yelled "STOP!" loud enough they backed off from making mono a core dependency and replaced a pair of otherwise keeper apps out of the default install. It would be pretty hard to introduce a must have dep now, what would they say to the authors of F-Spot and Tomboy?
> But is that the "installed" or did they remove Tomboy and the rest in the repositories too?
Mono, F-Spot and Tomboy are all still in the repo. No problem with that, use it or don't. Heck, outside the US where software patents don't exist there isn't any reason not to use em. The problem was if we allowed those camels to put their nose under the tent there wouldn't be any way to stop the conversion of GNOME into a .NET project. Having a few .NET apps or using mono to run foreign code isn't going to be a problem because Microsoft won't drop the patent bomb on those uses. They would lose more than we would.
Much the same as Wine is probably an even greater patent minefield but nobody objects to it being in every distro's repo. But we would be daft to let some Microsoft sockpuppet con us into using winelib as a reason to adopt Win32 as the basis for the Free Software desktop stack. Think of the arguments in favor that could be made. Apps run as fast, or faster, under Wine as Windows so performance isn't an issue. With only a little care binaries would run unmodified on x86 Linux and x86 Windows; just like mono/.net! Lots more potential developers know Win32. Develop Free Software on Windows with their 'superior' tools. And so on. Then once a critical mass of can't live without apps were Win32 only the patent hammer comes down and we all run Windows.
> And Gnome has been adopting mono like it doesn't matter.
You are out of date. Have Fedora 13 Alpha + all updates in a VM right now and behold:
[root@Fedora13 ~]# rpm -qa | grep mono
dejavu-sans-mono-fonts-2.30-2.fc12.noarch
liberation-mono-fonts-1.05.2.20091019-5.fc13.noarch
Everything works just fine. They ditched F-Spot for Shotwell and replaced Tomboy with the C++ port GNote. With those gone mono doesn't need to be installed. Somebody caught the cluetrain and stopped Novell from infecting GNOME with their patent poison.
> Hmmm... I wasn't aware that virtualization was a security failure, and that every instance of VM implementation failed to maintain security of the host OS.
Google is yer friend. "security bug vmware" "security bug xen", etc. will quickly hit exploitable bugs that allow an attacker to escape. Meanwhile "security bug kvm" only gets crash bugs and potential escapes but then it is the new kid on the block. Not having any luck finding the bugs in the hardware, but pretty sure /. had something on it in the last year or so.... even though a quick search here didn't hit it.
You might want to read the details a bit more than the overly sensationalized version at pwnie-awards. None of the bogus packages have been seen in the wild. That incident was about as close of a near miss as you can get without a kaboom! but there was in fact no kaboom!. Will something like it happen eventually? Probably. Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova said it best, "Sooner or later, BOOM!" But it doesn't happen on a daily basis.
> The problem is your false assumption that a radio station must be profitable.
It must at least break even and to a good approximation ratings == profit. It must at minimum take in enough to make payroll, buy electricity for the transmitter, do maintaince, pay licensing fees, etc. Even if you imagine sucking at the public teat to be a better revenue model than paid advertising those public resources aren't free either, you have to convince a congresscritter to give YOU the money over pissing it away on some other socialist crapola and ratings are going to matter in that argument because listeners == voters in the congresscritter's calculus. Of course if you have ratings you don't need the public teat.
But more generally, yes I do assume a radio station should be in it to turn a profit. The ability to turn a profit is the ultimate indicator of success in providing a useful product in a free market system. Excepting stations operated by non-profit organizations of course.
> Well, that's the point. If an app is sandboxed, it doesn't matter if that app is insecure... your OS won't get hosed by that app.
Except history tells us it never works that way in the real world. Java? Nope. BSD Jails? Nope. Virtualization? Nope. Containers? Nope. All promised to build a perfect isolated subsystem that apps couldn't escape from. All have had exploits. It helps, but it can also harm by leading to a false sense of security that causes people to do things they never would have done without that belief that it was safe. It was faith in sandboxes that made the idea of everything becoming a carrier of executable content possible. We would have never accepted the notion of every random webpage we visit being chockablock full of potentially evil executable content (Javascript, Flash, JAVA, .NET, PDF) served up by random ad networks that loads and runs on our side of the link if it weren't for the false promise that it could be safely isolated.
> This is an implementation issue, not a theoretical issue.
Here in reality we only deal with implementations, not theory. EVERY sandboxing scheme attempted to date has failed, some more messy than others, some more publicly than others, but ALL have failed. A 100% failure rate after dozens of independent implementaions says either the idea is flawed or requires tools/skills we do not currently possess to implement. Either way, trusting sandboxing is asking for trouble. I remember when an email that could infect your computer was an April's Fool joke. Microsoft and Netscape Communications made the joke reality.
> When a web dialog box can mimic a system dialog box saying "Your Computer is Infected CLICK HERE to fix it",
> which downloads and installs Antivirus 2010 crapware, the problem isn't Firefox, Windows or anything any
> programmer can fix. PEBAC, PICNIC and 1D10T errors aren't fixable by programmers.
Yes it is. Firefox should never set the executable bit on a download. (On Windows I guess it could neuter executables with an extra extension?) I don't care how 'convienient' it might be, just don't allow it. Second, a properly configured Linux machine isn't subject to that sort of attack because we use signed packages. If the scammer can get a user to click past enough dialog boxes to install a bogus repo or accept an unsigned package there really isn't much to do to help that user. None of those protections exist for Windows or Mac users which is why they can get 0wned with one bad click. We get 90+% of the security of Apple's closed i* DRM with 0% of the evil.
> "Stupid should hurt"
I agree in principle but submit that if almost two decades of Windows has failed to hurt enough to inspire change it is hard to imagine what would.