Soulskill's "you-agree-not-to-be-google" from the dept. line is actually interesting. Google is clearly violating the "enable others to do so" policy by linking to that information, and with a few links to http://www.eff.org/files/20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf would most likely be distributing the html copy of that pdf file.
As a person who loves Mac OS X, iPhone and will absolutely buy the upcoming iPad and hump it in bed when I'm sad, I don't want to see Apple having to battle with a giant like Google about this license. It's just not fair for the good and awesome guys like Apple.
It's all within their possibility. No one forces them to go with larger organizations, but they see more value in it. That's how it should be - not forcing anything, but having the right to choose what they do with their work. Even if it is giving their copyrights to labels in exchange for money for studio time, equipment, marketing and distribution.
I don't think hiding the key has been a problem. Public-key cryptography already enables the other key to be publicly known and it doesn't reveal the private key required to encrypt in that. Also if you're using password based key, then obviously you cannot make it public. In the end all of the cryptos are breakable by brute-forcing, it's just about making that part harder. Currently "breaking" the encryption techniques have been mostly about trying to lower the amount of brute-forcing you need to do. The race is mostly about developing stronger cryptos which also wouldn't have those weaknesses.
But for that matter, even the publicly used cryptos now a day aren't really breakable. Unless, of course, if NSA at some point designed a backdoor in the algorithms. But if so, that won't be used just randomly as it would leak really fast.
And yet multi-tasking work great with other phones. Why would some idle background process drain battery anyway? It's just idling and additional memory usage doesn't take any more battery.
Apple has unleashed iPhone OS 3.2 SDK to developers today to prepare for the launch of the Apple iPad. The new iPhone OS 3.2 only runs on the iPad device and will not run on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
- No Multitasking. Only one application runs at a time according to official documentation.
At least with Linux you can code the feature in. Same with Windows (Mobile). Even with goddamn Symbian.
$60 a month for 5GB limited 3G plan with some additional device? Jeez. I pay around $20 a month for 1 Mbit/s unlimited 3G and they happily send extra sim cards if you want to use the same contract with extra devices and no bullshit clauses about tethering etc.
It's mostly because those professions work on actual physical items and things, but while digital things don't cost almost anything to copy and sell to a new customer, they cost a lot to product.
Which brings us to another question:
How will computer game developers afford making games? Games are 99% sold for personal usage. If personal file-sharing is legalized it means game developers won't be making any money and can't cover the cost of making games. Game projects are long and huge projects, take thousands of man-years to finish and employ 50-200+ people working in the process.
Usually at this point people argue that those who like making games will keep doing so as a hobby or we can just play open source games. However the fact is that most open source and most freeware games are mediocre at best. There's no art, the graphics are from last century, most of games are clones of commercial games, sounds and music are sometimes completely missing and most games don't have any story (just try to find an open source game with Lucas Arts or Sierra like stories). They're also almost never polished or finished. This is understandable as they're done by coders, not designers or people with art skills and theres no incentive to finish and polish the project as theres no monetary gain involved.
Another point is that monetary gain leads to innovation. People have incentive to think and try out things in hope of monetary gain. Most open source games don't innovate anything, they're just about freeing some proprietary game. FreeCiv is based on Civilization, Wesnoth is based on Warlords games, OpenTTD is based Transport Tycoon (and even uses their data sets) and most shooters are Quake 2 clones. Even the interesting indie-games are proprietary, financed projects and not open source games.
If personal file-sharing would be legalized it would mean the death of the games industry if they didn't evolve. But in this case evolving would be making things completely worse. Only way for game developers to survive would be adding excessive DRM in their games like the recent Ubisoft copy protection that requires you to be connected to their servers all the time. They would probably need to harden it even more and have many parts of the game code actually run on the servers, making copying impossible. This would result in games still not being available for personal file-sharing and backfire in draconian DRM systems. Would it really be better than the current system?
Discussion about copyright is usually only around music and forgets that some of the other industries have a much harder time to come up with alternative solutions, so I'd like to hear a good solution on how would gaming industry work.
If I get what you're saying correctly is, you want more DRM on games like the newest Ubisoft's be-always-connected-to-their-servers-to-play? Or encrypted and locked down game consoles? Is this really the route you want to go?
I think BSD license would be a lot closer in subverting copyrights using it's own rules. GPL clearly states that if you GPL'd code, along with the binaries you need to make your own source code available too. Having the source code available is something the author wanted and is using his right over his work. Without copyrights anyone could take anyones code and never release the modifications or even relicense it under non-compliant license like BSD license.
All it says is that sharing copyrighted files is fine (authors have less control over how their work is distributed noncommercially), but it doesn't imply licenses are invalid: You still can't produce a GPL'd derivative work and not provide source, you still can't violate the attribution/share-alike/non-commercial provisions of Creative Commons, etc.
If it wouldn't affect licenses at all, wouldn't EULA's then just state that to legally run the program or game you need to have a license which is only obtainable via proper channels (ie. buy the product)?
It seems Pirate Party UK's one of the core policies is reformin copyright and patent law so that non-commercial file sharing would be legalized. While certainly a noble goal, shouldn't content producers, artists, programmers, and basically anyone producing something have a right to their work?
This is not only limited to music, movies or other kind of entertainment - among other things, it also affects open source coders who release their code under GPL. If there weren't copyrights, there couldn't be GPL either, nor Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivative Works and Share Alike licenses. In this exact case copyright is used to allow the author to make sure he is attributed and his work isn't misused.
Wouldn't the world be less controlling if the authors actually had some saying over their works instead of being forced to lose control over their work?
I would guess a lot of slashdotters fall in to this category or at least at some point have. But the difference is that I enjoy the quiet and alone time during night and hence would stay away from sites like Facebook. You get insane amount of work done during night time - there's no people chitchatting all the time nor can you really go out somewhere so you don't get lazy. It does however lead to weird sleeping patterns, but as long as you don't need to go anywhere in the morning it doesn't really matter anymore.
There are various techniques to battle against DDoS even on network level. But as we know nothing about their systems, it's quite impossible to say anything towards that matter. Maybe it's network, maybe it's software, maybe it's hardware. But if they go for a system like this, they have to do it properly. These things shouldn't be run off someones basement with an old P3. I bet theres been a lot of DDoS and other kind of attacks against Google, Microsoft, Slashdot, even any kind of smaller site or IRC network and they cope with it well. Unless you can sustain the same amount of service level, then you just won't do it.
Does it really matter though? If they're using something like this, they should had have hardened and test the system properly. Things like this are completely unacceptable. I would have thought they did as otherwise its going to backfire so good, but it seems stupid people never cease to amaze you.
The availability of faster broadband only means more services can start using it. I buy all of my games from Steam and like to get them as fast as possible so I can start playing right away. 6meg is too slow for that, something like 20-30meg is probably tolerable. But the faster the better. It's a lot nicer to wait only 5-10 minutes after buying to start playing, instead of hours.
Another use for fast bandwidth is downloading TV programs. I'm not talking about those illegal downloads, but I use a service that saves past 2 weeks tv programs on a remote device. I can then use their website to download the tv programs I like to see. Obviously I also want this to be as fast as possible (even though I can start playing it with VLC right away because it's.ts and it keeps downloading in the background, but for example PS3 requires a complete file before playing)
The great thing about faster bandwidth is also that when it's fast enough, you don't need to think about the time it takes downloading. There's no reason why it should be much different than copying something on your own computer. Faster bandwidth also create more great online services that depend on it, like the above I listed.
Yes it's symmetric, and we've tested it across the city and it's pretty much what you would get on LAN. While you obviously don't get full of it from elsewhere (100 Mb/s is common in other cities, maybe slower in towns), you basically never run out of your own bandwidth. No caps, either.
Stuck inside? If something the winters were awesome as a kid. Snowboarding, playing in the snow, cute girls with red cheeks and all the crazy stuff we used to do (and as a little vigilante throw snowballs at cars and run hiding:). Of course, when you got inside you could enjoy a game of Civilization. I would take all of that anytime over surfing or making sand castles on the beach as a kid, as these things I can do now as an adult.
And I still like winters, but just for other reasons - they're romantic time and nothing better than putting woolen socks on with a girl and enjoy the warmness together. Though excluding this year it's been way too warm for that, damn global warming.
I can personally say that you do. Of course I won't be getting that 1Gb/s from most http sites especially if they're in the US, just because they either don't have the bandwidth, are limiting per user or that you just can't deliver that fast from other countries - but the bandwidth is still available and will work 99% of the time to its full extend, provided you have the hardware capability. Now you don't really need that fast yet, but that's an another matter and will change over time.
Also, we have quite strict laws regarding advertising. What you describe wouldn't cut it.
The area size really doesn't have anything to do with it. Population density does, but that also is almost half in the EU compared to US.
That combined with the fact that most of these companies aren't even multinationals, so they don't benefit from economics of scale or small taxes like the few major US ISP's.
[ ] Can I get 1 Gb/s to home in Canada? (I can in my home town Stockholm) [ ] Is the true broadbrand penetration 98+% like in most of the Europe? [ ] Is the quality of line actually such that you get angry when the line goes down for a few minutes once per every 1-3 years?
Seeing all the complaints here on slashdot too, I really don't think it's the same. Often times I am even surprised how you put up with it.
Hell, even in the beginning of 2000 the competition was so bad that features that usually only came with business lines were offered to tech-savvy home users. Needed static ip's or a block of 32 or larger ip's? Ask for it and they gave.
I also seriously doubt North Americans using Internet more intensively. Even if I personally dislike it, P2P is pretty damn rampant and that takes a lot of bandwidth. Also everyone uses YouTube and other high bandwidth sites (which obviously have local datacenters because of the demand)
What comes to business lines, I think they are quite equivalent to each other. Premium, fail-proof lines cost in both NA and EU. But as the home-lines in EU are reliable and theres no bullshit terms to deny such, a lot of businesses who directly aren't working on the Internet use those.
You may have over-saturation of content, but it's shitty content and a lot of times copied from other sites (now before someone jumps on it, I don't include slashdot with this - the comments and discussions here are sometimes great and unique). But quality content does cost. If they can't sustain making it with ads, they will start asking users to pay for the content. I know a few sites I would pay for, just because I find their content good and a few dollars a month wouldn't really be so much (price of one beer that you wouldn't even hesitate to think about?)
I'm getting so sick and tired of this dinosaurian party line that we should be expected to pay for content!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if you as a little guy always want to get fucked over by the big guys.
Soulskill's "you-agree-not-to-be-google" from the dept. line is actually interesting. Google is clearly violating the "enable others to do so" policy by linking to that information, and with a few links to http://www.eff.org/files/20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf would most likely be distributing the html copy of that pdf file.
As a person who loves Mac OS X, iPhone and will absolutely buy the upcoming iPad and hump it in bed when I'm sad, I don't want to see Apple having to battle with a giant like Google about this license. It's just not fair for the good and awesome guys like Apple.
It's all within their possibility. No one forces them to go with larger organizations, but they see more value in it. That's how it should be - not forcing anything, but having the right to choose what they do with their work. Even if it is giving their copyrights to labels in exchange for money for studio time, equipment, marketing and distribution.
And with SELinux and NSA contributions to the Linux kernel your world domination plans aren't safe there either. They're everywhere, man.
I don't think hiding the key has been a problem. Public-key cryptography already enables the other key to be publicly known and it doesn't reveal the private key required to encrypt in that. Also if you're using password based key, then obviously you cannot make it public. In the end all of the cryptos are breakable by brute-forcing, it's just about making that part harder. Currently "breaking" the encryption techniques have been mostly about trying to lower the amount of brute-forcing you need to do. The race is mostly about developing stronger cryptos which also wouldn't have those weaknesses.
But for that matter, even the publicly used cryptos now a day aren't really breakable. Unless, of course, if NSA at some point designed a backdoor in the algorithms. But if so, that won't be used just randomly as it would leak really fast.
And yet multi-tasking work great with other phones. Why would some idle background process drain battery anyway? It's just idling and additional memory usage doesn't take any more battery.
And because this is Apple in question, fanboys would just join in thinking throwing babies into an industrial tree shedder makes them look super cool.
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/27/ipad-sdk-3-2-details-external-display-file-sharing-system-no-multitasking/
Apple has unleashed iPhone OS 3.2 SDK to developers today to prepare for the launch of the Apple iPad. The new iPhone OS 3.2 only runs on the iPad device and will not run on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
- No Multitasking. Only one application runs at a time according to official documentation.
At least with Linux you can code the feature in. Same with Windows (Mobile). Even with goddamn Symbian.
$60 a month for 5GB limited 3G plan with some additional device? Jeez. I pay around $20 a month for 1 Mbit/s unlimited 3G and they happily send extra sim cards if you want to use the same contract with extra devices and no bullshit clauses about tethering etc.
It's mostly because those professions work on actual physical items and things, but while digital things don't cost almost anything to copy and sell to a new customer, they cost a lot to product.
Which brings us to another question:
How will computer game developers afford making games? Games are 99% sold for personal usage. If personal file-sharing is legalized it means game developers won't be making any money and can't cover the cost of making games. Game projects are long and huge projects, take thousands of man-years to finish and employ 50-200+ people working in the process.
Usually at this point people argue that those who like making games will keep doing so as a hobby or we can just play open source games. However the fact is that most open source and most freeware games are mediocre at best. There's no art, the graphics are from last century, most of games are clones of commercial games, sounds and music are sometimes completely missing and most games don't have any story (just try to find an open source game with Lucas Arts or Sierra like stories). They're also almost never polished or finished. This is understandable as they're done by coders, not designers or people with art skills and theres no incentive to finish and polish the project as theres no monetary gain involved.
Another point is that monetary gain leads to innovation. People have incentive to think and try out things in hope of monetary gain. Most open source games don't innovate anything, they're just about freeing some proprietary game. FreeCiv is based on Civilization, Wesnoth is based on Warlords games, OpenTTD is based Transport Tycoon (and even uses their data sets) and most shooters are Quake 2 clones. Even the interesting indie-games are proprietary, financed projects and not open source games.
If personal file-sharing would be legalized it would mean the death of the games industry if they didn't evolve. But in this case evolving would be making things completely worse. Only way for game developers to survive would be adding excessive DRM in their games like the recent Ubisoft copy protection that requires you to be connected to their servers all the time. They would probably need to harden it even more and have many parts of the game code actually run on the servers, making copying impossible. This would result in games still not being available for personal file-sharing and backfire in draconian DRM systems. Would it really be better than the current system?
Discussion about copyright is usually only around music and forgets that some of the other industries have a much harder time to come up with alternative solutions, so I'd like to hear a good solution on how would gaming industry work.
If I get what you're saying correctly is, you want more DRM on games like the newest Ubisoft's be-always-connected-to-their-servers-to-play? Or encrypted and locked down game consoles? Is this really the route you want to go?
It wouldn't count as "close friend or family member", especially if using system like that.
I think BSD license would be a lot closer in subverting copyrights using it's own rules. GPL clearly states that if you GPL'd code, along with the binaries you need to make your own source code available too. Having the source code available is something the author wanted and is using his right over his work. Without copyrights anyone could take anyones code and never release the modifications or even relicense it under non-compliant license like BSD license.
All it says is that sharing copyrighted files is fine (authors have less control over how their work is distributed noncommercially), but it doesn't imply licenses are invalid: You still can't produce a GPL'd derivative work and not provide source, you still can't violate the attribution/share-alike/non-commercial provisions of Creative Commons, etc.
If it wouldn't affect licenses at all, wouldn't EULA's then just state that to legally run the program or game you need to have a license which is only obtainable via proper channels (ie. buy the product)?
It seems Pirate Party UK's one of the core policies is reformin copyright and patent law so that non-commercial file sharing would be legalized. While certainly a noble goal, shouldn't content producers, artists, programmers, and basically anyone producing something have a right to their work?
This is not only limited to music, movies or other kind of entertainment - among other things, it also affects open source coders who release their code under GPL. If there weren't copyrights, there couldn't be GPL either, nor Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivative Works and Share Alike licenses. In this exact case copyright is used to allow the author to make sure he is attributed and his work isn't misused.
Wouldn't the world be less controlling if the authors actually had some saying over their works instead of being forced to lose control over their work?
I would guess a lot of slashdotters fall in to this category or at least at some point have. But the difference is that I enjoy the quiet and alone time during night and hence would stay away from sites like Facebook. You get insane amount of work done during night time - there's no people chitchatting all the time nor can you really go out somewhere so you don't get lazy. It does however lead to weird sleeping patterns, but as long as you don't need to go anywhere in the morning it doesn't really matter anymore.
There are various techniques to battle against DDoS even on network level. But as we know nothing about their systems, it's quite impossible to say anything towards that matter. Maybe it's network, maybe it's software, maybe it's hardware. But if they go for a system like this, they have to do it properly. These things shouldn't be run off someones basement with an old P3. I bet theres been a lot of DDoS and other kind of attacks against Google, Microsoft, Slashdot, even any kind of smaller site or IRC network and they cope with it well. Unless you can sustain the same amount of service level, then you just won't do it.
Does it really matter though? If they're using something like this, they should had have hardened and test the system properly. Things like this are completely unacceptable. I would have thought they did as otherwise its going to backfire so good, but it seems stupid people never cease to amaze you.
The availability of faster broadband only means more services can start using it. I buy all of my games from Steam and like to get them as fast as possible so I can start playing right away. 6meg is too slow for that, something like 20-30meg is probably tolerable. But the faster the better. It's a lot nicer to wait only 5-10 minutes after buying to start playing, instead of hours.
Another use for fast bandwidth is downloading TV programs. I'm not talking about those illegal downloads, but I use a service that saves past 2 weeks tv programs on a remote device. I can then use their website to download the tv programs I like to see. Obviously I also want this to be as fast as possible (even though I can start playing it with VLC right away because it's .ts and it keeps downloading in the background, but for example PS3 requires a complete file before playing)
The great thing about faster bandwidth is also that when it's fast enough, you don't need to think about the time it takes downloading. There's no reason why it should be much different than copying something on your own computer. Faster bandwidth also create more great online services that depend on it, like the above I listed.
Yes it's symmetric, and we've tested it across the city and it's pretty much what you would get on LAN. While you obviously don't get full of it from elsewhere (100 Mb/s is common in other cities, maybe slower in towns), you basically never run out of your own bandwidth. No caps, either.
Stuck inside? If something the winters were awesome as a kid. Snowboarding, playing in the snow, cute girls with red cheeks and all the crazy stuff we used to do (and as a little vigilante throw snowballs at cars and run hiding :). Of course, when you got inside you could enjoy a game of Civilization. I would take all of that anytime over surfing or making sand castles on the beach as a kid, as these things I can do now as an adult.
And I still like winters, but just for other reasons - they're romantic time and nothing better than putting woolen socks on with a girl and enjoy the warmness together. Though excluding this year it's been way too warm for that, damn global warming.
I can personally say that you do. Of course I won't be getting that 1Gb/s from most http sites especially if they're in the US, just because they either don't have the bandwidth, are limiting per user or that you just can't deliver that fast from other countries - but the bandwidth is still available and will work 99% of the time to its full extend, provided you have the hardware capability. Now you don't really need that fast yet, but that's an another matter and will change over time.
Also, we have quite strict laws regarding advertising. What you describe wouldn't cut it.
The area size really doesn't have anything to do with it. Population density does, but that also is almost half in the EU compared to US.
That combined with the fact that most of these companies aren't even multinationals, so they don't benefit from economics of scale or small taxes like the few major US ISP's.
Checklist:
[ ] Can I get 1 Gb/s to home in Canada? (I can in my home town Stockholm)
[ ] Is the true broadbrand penetration 98+% like in most of the Europe?
[ ] Is the quality of line actually such that you get angry when the line goes down for a few minutes once per every 1-3 years?
Seeing all the complaints here on slashdot too, I really don't think it's the same. Often times I am even surprised how you put up with it.
Hell, even in the beginning of 2000 the competition was so bad that features that usually only came with business lines were offered to tech-savvy home users. Needed static ip's or a block of 32 or larger ip's? Ask for it and they gave.
I also seriously doubt North Americans using Internet more intensively. Even if I personally dislike it, P2P is pretty damn rampant and that takes a lot of bandwidth. Also everyone uses YouTube and other high bandwidth sites (which obviously have local datacenters because of the demand)
What comes to business lines, I think they are quite equivalent to each other. Premium, fail-proof lines cost in both NA and EU. But as the home-lines in EU are reliable and theres no bullshit terms to deny such, a lot of businesses who directly aren't working on the Internet use those.
You may have over-saturation of content, but it's shitty content and a lot of times copied from other sites (now before someone jumps on it, I don't include slashdot with this - the comments and discussions here are sometimes great and unique). But quality content does cost. If they can't sustain making it with ads, they will start asking users to pay for the content. I know a few sites I would pay for, just because I find their content good and a few dollars a month wouldn't really be so much (price of one beer that you wouldn't even hesitate to think about?)
I'm getting so sick and tired of this dinosaurian party line that we should be expected to pay for content!
Heh.