You're not even talking about the same event! Ian Tomlinson died two years before the 2011 London riots at an EU Summit protest. The police there messed up. Way too much violence. The officer who contributed to his heath is facing manslaughter charges (goes to court in June) and the entire method of protest management (kettling, here) has been given serious scrutiny.
But what does this have to do with what we're talking about? Please try to stay on topic!
The London riots example is not great here. There was a relatively small protest followed by a shower of complete asshats (with no political agenda on show) essentially just trying to burn down London, and steal whatever they could. These morons *were* using social networking sites to organise that violence and that's what the police wanted to stem. That's how a lot of them have been prosecuted for it.
A good government can't always approach things from a freedom standpoint. They are there to maintain a peace and quality of life for people. They have to balance freedom against the ability for people to break the law (yes, inciting violence, conspiracy, etc are all against the law here) and during the riots thousands of people were being put in direct danger from these twatscroungers' want of anarchy. Stopping their ability to do that may have limited the damage.
Naturally I'm completely against trying to stop people protesting or organising their peaceful protests online but I don't think it's as black and white as you're making out. I think there might be plausible situations where certain blackouts might be the better evil.
However, copyright infringement is not one of those situations.
But to try and stop this you could hamper your terms and conditions so that it has certain immutable clauses. Most services' T&Cs have a ambiguous little clause in them that essentially allows the owner to change any clause in the document without notification or permission. If you excluded certain clauses from this the people who bought the service from you would still have to follow those terms for them to be binding. That is to say they'd either not change them or if they did, they'd have to get people to re-agree to the new terms (allowing them to jump ship).
When you're selling the service, you're as much selling the userbase as the service itself. A user in sale terms is essentially this agreement with the user so that's why the terms matter so much. Much, much more than a promise between you and the buyer, pointedly because your users can see it! If they care, they'll be thankful for you taking this step.
Oh and you'll want to take into account how prospective buyers are going to view this hand-tying. It may lower the saleability of your product.
I wrote this several years ago when the PS3 was on the verge of being released. They're a company that you just can't trust to do the sane thing let alone the right thing. I bet most of you forget that the original PS3 controller was fifteen-feet wide and curved like a boomerang.
How is different from people who need and can't afford (or just can't get) certain drugs? TFA's daughter can't talk but millions die because they can't get a $1 vaccine or super-expensive healthcare and cancer treatments.
Any for-profit company delivering healthcare, drugs and and assistive devices is pitting what they think the market will support against their bottom line. The parent in TFA is losing out because they can't find a device that follows the required IP structure that works for them in the market but why is their need [for parent reform] greater than somebody dying because certain drugs aren't available because they'd never be commercially viable? In both cases people lose out and it's morally atrocious that something as transitory and meaningless as money is hindering quality of life.
I'll be honest, I don't know the solution. Nuking all patents from space sounds great if you're allergic to showers and buy into the Occupy Everything movements people in the real world realise that RND costs are real. Destroying patents would have a significant and fairly unpredictable effect on the world.
And you can be sure, whatever the real solution is, whenever it comes along, the companies that own all this IP aren't going to let their patents go without a fight.
To clarify - I hand them a DVD and some cash, and they hand me back a USB drive with the video on it. Bonus points for being able to give them a USB HD to fill up with DVDs you give them.
... they let me trade in a DVD for a DRM-free 10-15GB h.264 MKV with the digital HD audio track. I'll happily pay money for that because it adds value for me. I could just buy the Bluray but this would save me filling up my house with those infernal things and would save me a fair chunk of transcoding time. I don't even care if you watermark the hell out of them (if the watermarks aren't visible) - just as long as they're DRM-free, so I can use them how I like.
I'm not going to spend extra money so I can trade one crappy format for another.
And just remember TPB offers this service for free. That's who you're competing against.
I thought 3 and 5 core tablets were supposed to be coming out, where the "odd" core is so underpowered it can be left on when the screen and other cores are off, using practically no battery but still letting the tablet run its background processes.
I'm surprised more emphasis isn't being put on improving "standby" battery time because that seems to be the real killer in so many mobile applications these days (like my 14h SGS2 battery of doom).
I think this is a fairly common sentiment towards Apache from developers who have to deploy their own stuff. I've certainly been in that camp more than a few times in the past. We're talking about:
- RAM usage
- Just being slow to push out simple files
- mod_php being the worst thing ever written
- mod_python disproving the last statement and taking the crown
- Various FastCGI/WSGI toolchains just not being up to scratch either.
I moved to nginx and Cherokee and suddenly configuration was both compact and modular and the settings seemed to make a real difference. RAM usage is completely minimal and performance is scorchingly hot. In more than one case I took an Apache box, switched Apache out and we were using half the RAM for the same jobs, and getting better performing websites, with less configuration.
I'm certain Apache could have been tuned but I don't think it's unreasonable for a developer to blame the software if you have to do a three year BSc in Apache Administration just to get something equivalent to 30 minutes playing in nginx.
I truly do hope that things are improving (competition is key in this environment!) but now I've left Apache on multiple servers, they're going to need to do more than just say "If you tune it, it can now match nginx speed", because my time is valuable too. I'm not going to jump back in until for most deployments it "just works".
1 and 3 can be done by online retailers. They tend to have a margin advantage if they're big enough, some just choose not to because they feel they're only competing against other online retailers.
2 is an interesting one. I live at least 20 minutes away from a serious retailer and that's probably fairly average for most people. My time getting to and from the shop and then dealing with somebody is not free. It might be convenient, eg if I needed the item for work, then, sure, there's no debate, but for something like your vacuum cleaner where I'll happily wait a week, it's opportunistically better value to just walk it down the road five minutes to the post office and send it back, or book collection from a courier for £5-10.
Given that all these things have to be done in business hours, paying for a courier is often cheaper and more convenient for *most* medium-sized electronics than wasting your own time getting something fixed face-to-face.
Isn't it more likely that patriotic USPTO staff will just rush through any old rubbish (worse than now) to make sure every vague hint of an idea is owned by the US?
Oh that's right, there's somebody like you calling deathwatch on every new thing ever released. You talk about people moving to KDE - a few years ago when KDE 4 was released, you, or one of your many clones was saying exactly the same thing about KDE.
Gnome Shell will prevail. It might not look like it does in a few years but it's flexible enough and most importantly, hackable in a simple language that doesn't need compiling. Power users will latch onto that and we'll start seeing some really awesome things and then Gnome becomes desirable. And that's already starting to happen.
Anyway, thank you for yet another very incorrect prediction. You're bound to get it right one day.
The British government has an appalling record when it comes to protecting data. It all comes down to individual failures. Individuals in ministries, local government, etc have been loading up laptops and USB sticks with swathes of very personal, very sensitive data and then losing these devices or having them stolen.
I do understand that the cloud technically may technically make a data theft much more easy but given the volume of data that has been physically stolen in the past decade, it's hard to imagine it being worse than the status-quo. At least they can wrap everything in umpteen layers of security and DRM and attempt to standardise the way councils and hospitals manage sensitive data.
Ooo, there probably aught to be a `sudo apt-get update` between those lines. I aliased that into the command so keep forgetting to tell other people to do it >_
I can't tell if that's an improvement over the "This is how MS Office works" ICT training that most UK students get now. I had to teach myself relational database basics and a few programming languages while in school because the school didn't have the courses (or the teachers) to push a real syllabus. A very few of the bigger A-Level colleges get it right but they need to be offering this sort of thing to 10 year olds.
And yes, if this if going to work, it'll need teachers who know how to program. Given that there are about three of those in the entire country, the government is going to have to get working on this now if it wants to make a change within the next five years.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not even talking about the same event! Ian Tomlinson died two years before the 2011 London riots at an EU Summit protest. The police there messed up. Way too much violence. The officer who contributed to his heath is facing manslaughter charges (goes to court in June) and the entire method of protest management (kettling, here) has been given serious scrutiny.
But what does this have to do with what we're talking about? Please try to stay on topic!
The London riots example is not great here. There was a relatively small protest followed by a shower of complete asshats (with no political agenda on show) essentially just trying to burn down London, and steal whatever they could. These morons *were* using social networking sites to organise that violence and that's what the police wanted to stem. That's how a lot of them have been prosecuted for it.
A good government can't always approach things from a freedom standpoint. They are there to maintain a peace and quality of life for people. They have to balance freedom against the ability for people to break the law (yes, inciting violence, conspiracy, etc are all against the law here) and during the riots thousands of people were being put in direct danger from these twatscroungers' want of anarchy. Stopping their ability to do that may have limited the damage.
Naturally I'm completely against trying to stop people protesting or organising their peaceful protests online but I don't think it's as black and white as you're making out. I think there might be plausible situations where certain blackouts might be the better evil.
However, copyright infringement is not one of those situations.
You need legal advice. Talk to a lawyer.
But to try and stop this you could hamper your terms and conditions so that it has certain immutable clauses. Most services' T&Cs have a ambiguous little clause in them that essentially allows the owner to change any clause in the document without notification or permission. If you excluded certain clauses from this the people who bought the service from you would still have to follow those terms for them to be binding. That is to say they'd either not change them or if they did, they'd have to get people to re-agree to the new terms (allowing them to jump ship).
When you're selling the service, you're as much selling the userbase as the service itself. A user in sale terms is essentially this agreement with the user so that's why the terms matter so much. Much, much more than a promise between you and the buyer, pointedly because your users can see it! If they care, they'll be thankful for you taking this step.
Oh and you'll want to take into account how prospective buyers are going to view this hand-tying. It may lower the saleability of your product.
Polo drivers don't care about 0-60. If they did they'd buy a Golf.
You'd think database experts would know how to keep their site up, wouldn't you?
Sorry that's unfair. The site is still up but I can make and eat a sandwich between pageloads.
... welcome my government agency overlords. I feel safer already.
I'm glad our taxes are so well spent.
I'm sure you were aiming for funny... But you missed.
I wrote this several years ago when the PS3 was on the verge of being released. They're a company that you just can't trust to do the sane thing let alone the right thing. I bet most of you forget that the original PS3 controller was fifteen-feet wide and curved like a boomerang.
http://thepcspy.com/read/how_sony_screwed_up/
How is different from people who need and can't afford (or just can't get) certain drugs? TFA's daughter can't talk but millions die because they can't get a $1 vaccine or super-expensive healthcare and cancer treatments.
Any for-profit company delivering healthcare, drugs and and assistive devices is pitting what they think the market will support against their bottom line. The parent in TFA is losing out because they can't find a device that follows the required IP structure that works for them in the market but why is their need [for parent reform] greater than somebody dying because certain drugs aren't available because they'd never be commercially viable? In both cases people lose out and it's morally atrocious that something as transitory and meaningless as money is hindering quality of life.
I'll be honest, I don't know the solution. Nuking all patents from space sounds great if you're allergic to showers and buy into the Occupy Everything movements people in the real world realise that RND costs are real. Destroying patents would have a significant and fairly unpredictable effect on the world.
And you can be sure, whatever the real solution is, whenever it comes along, the companies that own all this IP aren't going to let their patents go without a fight.
To clarify - I hand them a DVD and some cash, and they hand me back a USB drive with the video on it. Bonus points for being able to give them a USB HD to fill up with DVDs you give them.
... they let me trade in a DVD for a DRM-free 10-15GB h.264 MKV with the digital HD audio track. I'll happily pay money for that because it adds value for me. I could just buy the Bluray but this would save me filling up my house with those infernal things and would save me a fair chunk of transcoding time. I don't even care if you watermark the hell out of them (if the watermarks aren't visible) - just as long as they're DRM-free, so I can use them how I like.
I'm not going to spend extra money so I can trade one crappy format for another.
And just remember TPB offers this service for free. That's who you're competing against.
We should definitely consider putting Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Aerosmith into cryo right now. Without them, we won't have a chance.
I thought 3 and 5 core tablets were supposed to be coming out, where the "odd" core is so underpowered it can be left on when the screen and other cores are off, using practically no battery but still letting the tablet run its background processes.
I'm surprised more emphasis isn't being put on improving "standby" battery time because that seems to be the real killer in so many mobile applications these days (like my 14h SGS2 battery of doom).
Oh whoop! Another referral link!
Oh lolz. Turns out it doesn't matter how awful a suggestion this is for this purpose, as long as you get to post a referral link.
Downmod parent as spam.
I think this is a fairly common sentiment towards Apache from developers who have to deploy their own stuff. I've certainly been in that camp more than a few times in the past. We're talking about:
- RAM usage
- Just being slow to push out simple files
- mod_php being the worst thing ever written
- mod_python disproving the last statement and taking the crown
- Various FastCGI/WSGI toolchains just not being up to scratch either.
I moved to nginx and Cherokee and suddenly configuration was both compact and modular and the settings seemed to make a real difference. RAM usage is completely minimal and performance is scorchingly hot. In more than one case I took an Apache box, switched Apache out and we were using half the RAM for the same jobs, and getting better performing websites, with less configuration.
I'm certain Apache could have been tuned but I don't think it's unreasonable for a developer to blame the software if you have to do a three year BSc in Apache Administration just to get something equivalent to 30 minutes playing in nginx.
I truly do hope that things are improving (competition is key in this environment!) but now I've left Apache on multiple servers, they're going to need to do more than just say "If you tune it, it can now match nginx speed", because my time is valuable too. I'm not going to jump back in until for most deployments it "just works".
1 and 3 can be done by online retailers. They tend to have a margin advantage if they're big enough, some just choose not to because they feel they're only competing against other online retailers.
2 is an interesting one. I live at least 20 minutes away from a serious retailer and that's probably fairly average for most people. My time getting to and from the shop and then dealing with somebody is not free. It might be convenient, eg if I needed the item for work, then, sure, there's no debate, but for something like your vacuum cleaner where I'll happily wait a week, it's opportunistically better value to just walk it down the road five minutes to the post office and send it back, or book collection from a courier for £5-10.
Given that all these things have to be done in business hours, paying for a courier is often cheaper and more convenient for *most* medium-sized electronics than wasting your own time getting something fixed face-to-face.
Isn't it more likely that patriotic USPTO staff will just rush through any old rubbish (worse than now) to make sure every vague hint of an idea is owned by the US?
You're free to carry on using whatever you like but the rest of us want a usable desktop.
This guy's logic is well off. He's trying to harm Facebook by letting companies game it. He's a spammer.
I don't see how he thinks by changing his name is going to have any affect on Facebook's legal people. They'll just add harassment to the list.
Oh that's right, there's somebody like you calling deathwatch on every new thing ever released. You talk about people moving to KDE - a few years ago when KDE 4 was released, you, or one of your many clones was saying exactly the same thing about KDE.
Gnome Shell will prevail. It might not look like it does in a few years but it's flexible enough and most importantly, hackable in a simple language that doesn't need compiling. Power users will latch onto that and we'll start seeing some really awesome things and then Gnome becomes desirable. And that's already starting to happen.
Anyway, thank you for yet another very incorrect prediction. You're bound to get it right one day.
The British government has an appalling record when it comes to protecting data. It all comes down to individual failures. Individuals in ministries, local government, etc have been loading up laptops and USB sticks with swathes of very personal, very sensitive data and then losing these devices or having them stolen.
I do understand that the cloud technically may technically make a data theft much more easy but given the volume of data that has been physically stolen in the past decade, it's hard to imagine it being worse than the status-quo. At least they can wrap everything in umpteen layers of security and DRM and attempt to standardise the way councils and hospitals manage sensitive data.
Ooo, there probably aught to be a `sudo apt-get update` between those lines. I aliased that into the command so keep forgetting to tell other people to do it >_
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions
*Fixed but may break everything else.
I can't tell if that's an improvement over the "This is how MS Office works" ICT training that most UK students get now. I had to teach myself relational database basics and a few programming languages while in school because the school didn't have the courses (or the teachers) to push a real syllabus. A very few of the bigger A-Level colleges get it right but they need to be offering this sort of thing to 10 year olds.
And yes, if this if going to work, it'll need teachers who know how to program. Given that there are about three of those in the entire country, the government is going to have to get working on this now if it wants to make a change within the next five years.