Meanwhile if some weird corn or wheat fungus emerged that threatened to bring massive starvation to first world countries, people would be blaming geneticists for not developing modified crops fast enough.
As others have pointed out, the administration can refuse and still be fully compliant with FOIA since it contains an exemption for national defense.
"and stop pretending he is the fucking emperor who can decide willy nilly about state security."
Deciding matters of national security is what was elected for. You should stop pretending that Obama is somehow doing something egregious, it's a totally ahistorical perspective. Perhaps somewhere on this earth is a nation where there are no secrets and everything is up for immediate popular review, but the USA is not, and never has been such a place. Not even before 2008. Maybe the government should put detailed H-bomb schematics online as well? Troop movements and nuclear sub locations should be on Google Earth, perhaps? Trotting out "Freedom of Information" isn't gonna get you that stuff either.
And oddly enough, the Bush II administration suppressed images of our own fallen soldiers for years and there was less of an outcry than over this one, er, photo op.
In this instance, the administration is fully compliant with FOIA since it contains an exemption for national defense.
"and stop pretending he is the fucking emperor who can decide willy nilly about state security."
Deciding matters of national security is what was elected for. Stop pretending that Obama is somehow doing something egregious, it's a totally ahistorical perspective. Perhaps somewhere on this earth is a nation where there are no secrets and everything is up for immediate popular review, but the USA is not, and never has been such a place. Not even before 2008. Maybe the government should put detailed H-bomb schematics online as well? Troop movements and nuclear sub locations should be on Google Earth, perhaps? Trotting out "Freedom of Information" isn't gonna get you that stuff either.
And oddly enough, the Bush II administration suppressed images of our own fallen soldiers for years and there was less of an outcry than over this one, er, photo op.
Why is it necessary to trust, to believe anything to a metaphysical certainty? We don't even know we're real people or just brains in vats, after all. Generally it seems to me that we need only provisionally, operationally trust things. I got up this morning because I believed the outside world would still be there -- even if I didn't know it for a certainty, I acted as if it were true, and that's all the trust I needed. If I chose to believe otherwise, maybe I'd still be in bed. Or at least,
But here's a situation where, as far as I can tell acting under the belief that "Bin Laden has been killed" yields identical results, on my part, as the belief that "Bin Laden was already dead." So I have no grounds to behave with disbelief. I (provisionally) trust, not because I'm gullible, but because I gain nothing from not trusting. In this instance.
I don't know why people are fixated on "Honeycomb" like it is somehow going to make a tablet more usable than Gingerbread. People at large don't really care about the OS. How many people are still running XP or basically switched only because it's been withdrawn from the market? Users care about applications and "ecosystem," not about an OS per se.
The problem with Android tablets, in a nutshell, is that they don't have a killer app yet. However, that may soon change.
I've often thought that this is something YouTube should implement, on an opt-in basis. For example:
$10/mo. gets you "Silver Tube" status. You know those uploads that get taken down, or the sound gets stripped? Player status would unblock a blocked video and restore your ability to here the sound of those with stripped audio tracks.
$15/mo. gets you "Gold Tube" status. Same as above but with the option of turning off those ad overlays. And maybe a download/watch offline button on the mobile version of YT.
$20/mo. gets you "Producer" status. Same as above but with the ability to UPLOAD videos/mixes without fear of copyright infringment. Maybe some revenue sharing.
The details of the categories/prices is not important. The point is that if YouTube sold some kind of opt-in copyright protection, it could make a mint for itself and for the copyright holders, make the users happy, implement the whole thing without government interference, and (even better for songwriters) use their stats to make sure that the proceeds are distributed fairly.
Also, If it's safe and inexpensive enough to upload a mashup legally, people would much rather pay than risk a lawsuit. And if they're too cheap to pay, they would get little sympathy from others.
You claim that smartphones need to be more functional like netbooks before they're widely accepted? Like NETBOOKS?? Worldwide, 302 million smartphones were shipped in 2010. In comparison, Gartner's high estimate of Netbook sales in 2010 was only about 42 million, although I think when all was said and done the total was even lower, blunted by the iPad. Heck, total PC shipments of all types in 2010 were only about 376 million, with smartphones sure to surpass that total either this year or next. Regardless, smartphones are certainly closer to "dominating" the American phone market than netbooks are to dominating the PC market.
That's not to say that netbooks are not useful; I agree they are. But it's simply wrong to categorize smartphones as mere toys. True, they can't easily do spreadsheets, but OTOH how many netbooks serve as a primary phone, a primary camera, a primary music device, a gps device, and are carried around every single day by their owners? And factor in competiton from the tablet form factor and devices like the Motorola Atrix and HP's Pre3 with the so-called "touch-to-share" feature, it can be argued that in fact it's the netbook which needs to learn to be more useful.
You're right, in a sense, about the price though. Dumbphones dominate because they're cheaper and the battery lasts MUCH longer. That's basically it. But do smartphones need to "dominate" the phone market in the first place, and is their lack of doing so a failure? Does the Volvo S80 need to dominate the global car market, maybe become more Honda Civic-y?
"Copied from Google." What you are missing is that they are NOT "copying from Google." They are establishing results heuristics based upon clicks by Bing Toolbar users. The fact that the users are using Google at the time that the data is being collected is incidental to how this works. If we want to say that this method of collating results based upon user clicks is inappropriate then that is a discussion possibly worth having.
"Nonsensical search results." Talk about misdirection. Search engine results (broadly speaking) are not based upon sense, but upon frequency. If A strongly links to B, then putting in A will turn up B on the results page. It doesn't matter if A is a "sensical" phrase like Cheesy Fries, or a nonsensical phrase like pontneddfechan, if A strongly links to B, then a search engine linkage may be established.
Basically my spin on this is that Google realized that Bing had this vulnerability in the way that it weights Bing Toolbar data, and decided to exploit it to embarrass Bing. Essentially, Google Googlebombed Bing.
Bing could probably minimize the risk of this happening in the future by using toolbar results only to refine existing data, and not to allow it to become a primary piece of data. In other words, if a link between two terms shows up in the Bing Toolbar and elsewhere, then weight it accordingly. But if it is ONLY showing up in the Bing Toolbar, discard it as anomalous. (Of course, they could also just blacklist google.com results in their entirety as well, but obviously they don't want to do that.)
Disclaimer: I don't actually use Bing and certainly not any damned 3rd party spybar, so my understanding of how it works is just taken from the various articles on the subject.
Mod parent up. The summary is misleading to the point of being wrong. It's not "app developers that sell e-books outside their apps," it's app developers that sell e-books INSIDE their apps, either directly, or by the app jumping to a website. If the developer just happens to sell e-books, and the app happens to read such e-books, there's no problem. The problem only arises if a purchase is made via the app, and Apple doesn't get a cut.
So, the way I see it, Amazon have three main choices here, if Apple pushes the issue and gets away with it (and I have a feeling that Europe will slap them down if nothing else)
1) Do nothing. Dare Apple to remove the app, and risk turning this into a PR nightmare and boost Android's cred. 2) Stop having their app link to their retail site. Just make it strictly a reader. Of course it can still get previously purchased books pushed to it, just customers now have to take the extra step of manually opening their browsers to the Kindle web page and purchasing from there, big deal. 3) Try some tricky method to work around the rules. Such as, have two apps, a Kindle reader and a Kindle browser. Kindle browser just starts Safari and goes to the Kindle web page, then unloads. On the Kindle Web page, they can make regular online purchases. There's also link to start the Kindle reader. On the Kindle reader they can read books and link to the Kindle browser. From the end user's perspective, it works almost the same way as now. Or, in the alternative, contract out their reader to a third party developer. Let's call the app Vinnie's Kindle Reader. VKR can read books in exactly the same way as the Amazon Kindle Reader. Because it's not a part of Amazon and doesn't sell anything, it doesn't run across the developer rules regarding purchases. It does however, link to the Kindle web site.
Apple and Google aren't eating Microsoft's lunch. Admittedly Microsoft isn't so dominant as it used to be, but this is supposed to be a good thing for consumers, right? Not a cause for alarm.
In their most recently reported fiscal quarters: Apple revenue of $20.34 billion, net profit of $4.31 billion Google revenue $7.29 billion, net profit of $2.17 billion Microsoft revenue $16.20 billion, net profit of $3.25 billion. Revenue was a MS all-time quarterly record, in fact. And the profit shattered estimates and was up 51% from last year.
Listen to yourself. You don't understand your own metaphor. The reason why it's called "dirty laundry" is because it's unsavory but nevertheless unavoidable - we all have it and do our best to conceal it from company.
All facets of life involve keeping secrets. You don't want your doctor telling your friends or your employer nd family about your STDs. You don't want your shrink telling your parents all those dreams you had about killing them. You don't want your best friend telling your girlfriend about that time you cheated on her. You don't want your boss to know that you're looking around for a better job. You don't want Nigerians knowing your Social Security number and mother's maiden name. You don't want your prospective employer to know that you narrowly escaped jail time back in college. You don't want your buddies to know about that weird fling you had in Amsterdam. Etc.
Governments work the same way. They don't need ally A to know about the deal they're making with ally B. They don't need Ally B to know up front exactly how much they're willing to negotiate. They don't need their enemies to know about troop movements, or shift changes or the secret rescue that is still in the planning stages or the embargoed technology they're trying to acquire. There are a lot of things, some not even bad, that require secrecy to work.
What Assange is doing is a kind of guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately the end result of his efforts will not be liberation for anybody but less freedom, less trust and less safety in the world. And not just for Americans.
I'd say the opposite. They should've released the OS later, when they figured out some kind of compelling difference that Windows Phone 7 could offer over the competition. If they can't differentiate over must-have OS features (and a different skin doesn't count) , they should've worked on something like ultra-long battery life, SDXC expandability, unlimited streaming save-to-the-handset music free with a charter contract, or even free copies of Windows Home & Student. Some "top this" feature they could flog over the competition.
At this point, if someone can't figure a way to be at least 9 months ahead of Apple, they shouldn't even bother to play.
And yes, fire Ballmer. Let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft is still making money, but basically by sheer brute force, not through any brilliant strategizing. XBOX360 should've cleaned PS3's clock, but couldn't close the deal because of quality control issues. Vista should've run rings around OSX, but fumbled because of quality control issues. Kin1, Kin 2? MS knew those were direct-to-video flicks even before wrapping up production. Windows Phone 7, despite the hype, will be a failure unless Microsoft is willing to do an XBOX redux and take years of real losses for market share and bribe or buy a crapload of hot-shot appmakers the way they did with Bungie.
US, imma only tell you dis once: You is stupid! (derp d'oh dat dat d'oh) And for ya money I'm grabbin like I'm Keith Rupert! (Murdoch dat dat ho!) Give me cash for my CDs and aac's and crap mp3's You're like a candy store And I'm a toddlor You got me suing more and mo- mo- more For your dough, your dough etc.
Maybe you were kidding but, "the place where the big bang happened" is located in the past, and everywhere on the expanding bubble of the spacetime manifold that is our observable universe is equidistant from it. So you can't point to the big bang -- any point could arbitrarily be the center of the universe.
Don't know anything about Android but PlayReady is software. The DRM that the studios want extends to hardware, e.g. ports not visible to app unless they say so, per title limitations on what sorts of information gets passed through usb, devices designed in such a way as to prevent titles from being saved to SD card, etc. Can't do that unless the hardware is consistent across devices or each device has its own version of the Netflix app.
OK, I was unclear. By "decriminalized," I meant the end result of being ONLY decrimalized - no civil remedy. IOW:
* no statutory civil penalties * no punitive or compensatory damages * criminal penalties in normal cases treated as a minor infraction similar to a parking ticket, no jail time, minimal fine.
So for example, if you are caught torrenting 10 mp3s, you might get a $500 fine at most, and the copyright holder is not permitted to file suit on its own behalf. The end result being that the copyright holders would have no incentive to enforce their copyright at all against private citizens, and so even the minimal fines would rarely be collected for want of reporting the crime.
And, about the DRM, you sound confused if you think that people need to individually break their own DRM for every book they want to read. A person doesn't need to know how to decrypt Apple or Amazon's book formats when they can easily type in the name of a book plus "torrent" into a search engine. Downloading isn't esoteric knowledge anymore, least of all for people who own Kindles and other such devices.
Good point, but the answer to that would be to decriminalize copyright violation on the end consumer level while retaining the penalties for corporations. In essence it would leave us with the status quo, especially with apps like Photoshop/Word etc, where the bulk of the copies possessed by private individuals are pirated or minimally-priced student editions but profits are still made through sales to corporate accounts.
In terms of printed material, book DRM is already broken yet people still buy books, for the convenience, for the knowledge of having an up-to-date edition, for knowing they can support their favorite authors. A few value-added propositions like access to author chats, signed/dedicated copies, acknowledgements, etc., would make paid content more attractive than the free bare-bones pdf.
I initially agreed with you, but I've now reconsidered.
What if the bike had fallen in the past a few times, and the rim was bent, and now hard to steer? And the parent let the child go riding with a bent rim, leading to the accident? Would you then say no one was responsible?
What if the child had told the mom, "I'm afraid of riding. What if I hit somebody?" And the mom's reply was, "Don't worry about hitting anybody, people should know to get out of your way -- so just keep going if you see someone in your path."
What if it turns out this is the fourth person this little child has hit?
What if it turns out that the kid's friend had dared the kid into hitting the old lady?
What if it turns out that the old lady had scolded the child just moments before?
I'm not saying that any of these things happened, or were likely to have happened. But the point of having a trial is to ascertain exactly what did occur. And THEN we can say that the child bears some liability or not.
Consider that, five whole years after the introduction of the first flash iPod, Apple still sells the spinning ones. In fact they're your only choice if you want more than 64GB in your iPod. So, sure, let's revisit the subject of laptop HDD's being obsoleted in another five years. But who even knows if it will be traditional flash SSD's or if memristors or some other tech (MRAM, NRAM, etc.) will win.
At or below the 32GB level, hard drives have already been effectively replaced by SD cards and their variants But if you need, say 50GB, it doesn't really matter if they throw in an "extra" 30 gigs or so.
"All you can eat" music plans are substantially less than €25. Why doesn't ask "unlimited play" providers to bid on the purchase of a blanket license to everyone under 18. Then the music companies get paid, the kids get free music, it winds up costing the state the same or less than the current crazy plan, and everybody's happy. Except maybe the lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile if some weird corn or wheat fungus emerged that threatened to bring massive starvation to first world countries, people would be blaming geneticists for not developing modified crops fast enough.
"Obama needs to comply with FOIA law"
As others have pointed out, the administration can refuse and still be fully compliant with FOIA since it contains an exemption for national defense.
"and stop pretending he is the fucking emperor who can decide willy nilly about state security."
Deciding matters of national security is what was elected for. You should stop pretending that Obama is somehow doing something egregious, it's a totally ahistorical perspective. Perhaps somewhere on this earth is a nation where there are no secrets and everything is up for immediate popular review, but the USA is not, and never has been such a place. Not even before 2008. Maybe the government should put detailed H-bomb schematics online as well? Troop movements and nuclear sub locations should be on Google Earth, perhaps? Trotting out "Freedom of Information" isn't gonna get you that stuff either.
And oddly enough, the Bush II administration suppressed images of our own fallen soldiers for years and there was less of an outcry than over this one, er, photo op.
"Obama needs to comply with FOIA law"
In this instance, the administration is fully compliant with FOIA since it contains an exemption for national defense.
"and stop pretending he is the fucking emperor who can decide willy nilly about state security."
Deciding matters of national security is what was elected for. Stop pretending that Obama is somehow doing something egregious, it's a totally ahistorical perspective. Perhaps somewhere on this earth is a nation where there are no secrets and everything is up for immediate popular review, but the USA is not, and never has been such a place. Not even before 2008. Maybe the government should put detailed H-bomb schematics online as well? Troop movements and nuclear sub locations should be on Google Earth, perhaps? Trotting out "Freedom of Information" isn't gonna get you that stuff either.
And oddly enough, the Bush II administration suppressed images of our own fallen soldiers for years and there was less of an outcry than over this one, er, photo op.
Why is it necessary to trust, to believe anything to a metaphysical certainty? We don't even know we're real people or just brains in vats, after all. Generally it seems to me that we need only provisionally, operationally trust things. I got up this morning because I believed the outside world would still be there -- even if I didn't know it for a certainty, I acted as if it were true, and that's all the trust I needed. If I chose to believe otherwise, maybe I'd still be in bed. Or at least,
But here's a situation where, as far as I can tell acting under the belief that "Bin Laden has been killed" yields identical results, on my part, as the belief that "Bin Laden was already dead." So I have no grounds to behave with disbelief. I (provisionally) trust, not because I'm gullible, but because I gain nothing from not trusting. In this instance.
I don't know why people are fixated on "Honeycomb" like it is somehow going to make a tablet more usable than Gingerbread. People at large don't really care about the OS. How many people are still running XP or basically switched only because it's been withdrawn from the market? Users care about applications and "ecosystem," not about an OS per se.
The problem with Android tablets, in a nutshell, is that they don't have a killer app yet. However, that may soon change.
I've often thought that this is something YouTube should implement, on an opt-in basis. For example:
$10/mo. gets you "Silver Tube" status. You know those uploads that get taken down, or the sound gets stripped? Player status would unblock a blocked video and restore your ability to here the sound of those with stripped audio tracks.
$15/mo. gets you "Gold Tube" status. Same as above but with the option of turning off those ad overlays. And maybe a download/watch offline button on the mobile version of YT.
$20/mo. gets you "Producer" status. Same as above but with the ability to UPLOAD videos/mixes without fear of copyright infringment. Maybe some revenue sharing.
The details of the categories/prices is not important. The point is that if YouTube sold some kind of opt-in copyright protection, it could make a mint for itself and for the copyright holders, make the users happy, implement the whole thing without government interference, and (even better for songwriters) use their stats to make sure that the proceeds are distributed fairly.
Also, If it's safe and inexpensive enough to upload a mashup legally, people would much rather pay than risk a lawsuit. And if they're too cheap to pay, they would get little sympathy from others.
You claim that smartphones need to be more functional like netbooks before they're widely accepted? Like NETBOOKS?? Worldwide, 302 million smartphones were shipped in 2010. In comparison, Gartner's high estimate of Netbook sales in 2010 was only about 42 million, although I think when all was said and done the total was even lower, blunted by the iPad. Heck, total PC shipments of all types in 2010 were only about 376 million, with smartphones sure to surpass that total either this year or next. Regardless, smartphones are certainly closer to "dominating" the American phone market than netbooks are to dominating the PC market.
That's not to say that netbooks are not useful; I agree they are. But it's simply wrong to categorize smartphones as mere toys. True, they can't easily do spreadsheets, but OTOH how many netbooks serve as a primary phone, a primary camera, a primary music device, a gps device, and are carried around every single day by their owners? And factor in competiton from the tablet form factor and devices like the Motorola Atrix and HP's Pre3 with the so-called "touch-to-share" feature, it can be argued that in fact it's the netbook which needs to learn to be more useful.
You're right, in a sense, about the price though. Dumbphones dominate because they're cheaper and the battery lasts MUCH longer. That's basically it. But do smartphones need to "dominate" the phone market in the first place, and is their lack of doing so a failure? Does the Volvo S80 need to dominate the global car market, maybe become more Honda Civic-y?
"Copied from Google." What you are missing is that they are NOT "copying from Google." They are establishing results heuristics based upon clicks by Bing Toolbar users. The fact that the users are using Google at the time that the data is being collected is incidental to how this works. If we want to say that this method of collating results based upon user clicks is inappropriate then that is a discussion possibly worth having.
"Nonsensical search results." Talk about misdirection. Search engine results (broadly speaking) are not based upon sense, but upon frequency. If A strongly links to B, then putting in A will turn up B on the results page. It doesn't matter if A is a "sensical" phrase like Cheesy Fries, or a nonsensical phrase like pontneddfechan, if A strongly links to B, then a search engine linkage may be established.
Basically my spin on this is that Google realized that Bing had this vulnerability in the way that it weights Bing Toolbar data, and decided to exploit it to embarrass Bing. Essentially, Google Googlebombed Bing.
Bing could probably minimize the risk of this happening in the future by using toolbar results only to refine existing data, and not to allow it to become a primary piece of data. In other words, if a link between two terms shows up in the Bing Toolbar and elsewhere, then weight it accordingly. But if it is ONLY showing up in the Bing Toolbar, discard it as anomalous. (Of course, they could also just blacklist google.com results in their entirety as well, but obviously they don't want to do that.)
Disclaimer: I don't actually use Bing and certainly not any damned 3rd party spybar, so my understanding of how it works is just taken from the various articles on the subject.
Mod parent up. The summary is misleading to the point of being wrong. It's not "app developers that sell e-books outside their apps," it's app developers that sell e-books INSIDE their apps, either directly, or by the app jumping to a website. If the developer just happens to sell e-books, and the app happens to read such e-books, there's no problem. The problem only arises if a purchase is made via the app, and Apple doesn't get a cut.
So, the way I see it, Amazon have three main choices here, if Apple pushes the issue and gets away with it (and I have a feeling that Europe will slap them down if nothing else)
1) Do nothing. Dare Apple to remove the app, and risk turning this into a PR nightmare and boost Android's cred.
2) Stop having their app link to their retail site. Just make it strictly a reader. Of course it can still get previously purchased books pushed to it, just customers now have to take the extra step of manually opening their browsers to the Kindle web page and purchasing from there, big deal.
3) Try some tricky method to work around the rules. Such as, have two apps, a Kindle reader and a Kindle browser. Kindle browser just starts Safari and goes to the Kindle web page, then unloads. On the Kindle Web page, they can make regular online purchases. There's also link to start the Kindle reader. On the Kindle reader they can read books and link to the Kindle browser. From the end user's perspective, it works almost the same way as now. Or, in the alternative, contract out their reader to a third party developer. Let's call the app Vinnie's Kindle Reader. VKR can read books in exactly the same way as the Amazon Kindle Reader. Because it's not a part of Amazon and doesn't sell anything, it doesn't run across the developer rules regarding purchases. It does however, link to the Kindle web site.
Facebook does this now.
You left out the important part.
WHY do you think Basic is a terrible choice for learning to program, and WHY is Scheme better?
Apple and Google aren't eating Microsoft's lunch. Admittedly Microsoft isn't so dominant as it used to be, but this is supposed to be a good thing for consumers, right? Not a cause for alarm.
In their most recently reported fiscal quarters:
Apple revenue of $20.34 billion, net profit of $4.31 billion
Google revenue $7.29 billion, net profit of $2.17 billion
Microsoft revenue $16.20 billion, net profit of $3.25 billion. Revenue was a MS all-time quarterly record, in fact. And the profit shattered estimates and was up 51% from last year.
Listen to yourself. You don't understand your own metaphor. The reason why it's called "dirty laundry" is because it's unsavory but nevertheless unavoidable - we all have it and do our best to conceal it from company.
All facets of life involve keeping secrets. You don't want your doctor telling your friends or your employer nd family about your STDs. You don't want your shrink telling your parents all those dreams you had about killing them. You don't want your best friend telling your girlfriend about that time you cheated on her. You don't want your boss to know that you're looking around for a better job. You don't want Nigerians knowing your Social Security number and mother's maiden name. You don't want your prospective employer to know that you narrowly escaped jail time back in college. You don't want your buddies to know about that weird fling you had in Amsterdam. Etc.
Governments work the same way. They don't need ally A to know about the deal they're making with ally B. They don't need Ally B to know up front exactly how much they're willing to negotiate. They don't need their enemies to know about troop movements, or shift changes or the secret rescue that is still in the planning stages or the embargoed technology they're trying to acquire. There are a lot of things, some not even bad, that require secrecy to work.
What Assange is doing is a kind of guerrilla warfare. Unfortunately the end result of his efforts will not be liberation for anybody but less freedom, less trust and less safety in the world. And not just for Americans.
I'd say the opposite. They should've released the OS later, when they figured out some kind of compelling difference that Windows Phone 7 could offer over the competition. If they can't differentiate over must-have OS features (and a different skin doesn't count) , they should've worked on something like ultra-long battery life, SDXC expandability, unlimited streaming save-to-the-handset music free with a charter contract, or even free copies of Windows Home & Student. Some "top this" feature they could flog over the competition.
At this point, if someone can't figure a way to be at least 9 months ahead of Apple, they shouldn't even bother to play.
And yes, fire Ballmer. Let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft is still making money, but basically by sheer brute force, not through any brilliant strategizing. XBOX360 should've cleaned PS3's clock, but couldn't close the deal because of quality control issues. Vista should've run rings around OSX, but fumbled because of quality control issues. Kin1, Kin 2? MS knew those were direct-to-video flicks even before wrapping up production. Windows Phone 7, despite the hype, will be a failure unless Microsoft is willing to do an XBOX redux and take years of real losses for market share and bribe or buy a crapload of hot-shot appmakers the way they did with Bungie.
US, imma only tell you dis once: You is stupid! (derp d'oh dat dat d'oh)
And for ya money I'm grabbin like I'm Keith Rupert! (Murdoch dat dat ho!)
Give me cash for my CDs
and aac's and crap mp3's
You're like a candy store
And I'm a toddlor
You got me suing more and mo- mo- more
For your dough, your dough etc.
-- RIAA
Maybe you were kidding but, "the place where the big bang happened" is located in the past, and everywhere on the expanding bubble of the spacetime manifold that is our observable universe is equidistant from it. So you can't point to the big bang -- any point could arbitrarily be the center of the universe.
Don't know anything about Android but PlayReady is software. The DRM that the studios want extends to hardware, e.g. ports not visible to app unless they say so, per title limitations on what sorts of information gets passed through usb, devices designed in such a way as to prevent titles from being saved to SD card, etc. Can't do that unless the hardware is consistent across devices or each device has its own version of the Netflix app.
OK, I was unclear. By "decriminalized," I meant the end result of being ONLY decrimalized - no civil remedy. IOW:
* no statutory civil penalties
* no punitive or compensatory damages
* criminal penalties in normal cases treated as a minor infraction similar to a parking ticket, no jail time, minimal fine.
So for example, if you are caught torrenting 10 mp3s, you might get a $500 fine at most, and the copyright holder is not permitted to file suit on its own behalf. The end result being that the copyright holders would have no incentive to enforce their copyright at all against private citizens, and so even the minimal fines would rarely be collected for want of reporting the crime.
And, about the DRM, you sound confused if you think that people need to individually break their own DRM for every book they want to read. A person doesn't need to know how to decrypt Apple or Amazon's book formats when they can easily type in the name of a book plus "torrent" into a search engine. Downloading isn't esoteric knowledge anymore, least of all for people who own Kindles and other such devices.
That would be a feature, not a bug. The GPL isn't needed in a universe where creative content is freely available.
Good point, but the answer to that would be to decriminalize copyright violation on the end consumer level while retaining the penalties for corporations. In essence it would leave us with the status quo, especially with apps like Photoshop/Word etc, where the bulk of the copies possessed by private individuals are pirated or minimally-priced student editions but profits are still made through sales to corporate accounts.
In terms of printed material, book DRM is already broken yet people still buy books, for the convenience, for the knowledge of having an up-to-date edition, for knowing they can support their favorite authors. A few value-added propositions like access to author chats, signed/dedicated copies, acknowledgements, etc., would make paid content more attractive than the free bare-bones pdf.
Idiocist!
I initially agreed with you, but I've now reconsidered.
What if the bike had fallen in the past a few times, and the rim was bent, and now hard to steer? And the parent let the child go riding with a bent rim, leading to the accident? Would you then say no one was responsible?
What if the child had told the mom, "I'm afraid of riding. What if I hit somebody?" And the mom's reply was, "Don't worry about hitting anybody, people should know to get out of your way -- so just keep going if you see someone in your path."
What if it turns out this is the fourth person this little child has hit?
What if it turns out that the kid's friend had dared the kid into hitting the old lady?
What if it turns out that the old lady had scolded the child just moments before?
I'm not saying that any of these things happened, or were likely to have happened. But the point of having a trial is to ascertain exactly what did occur. And THEN we can say that the child bears some liability or not.
Consider that, five whole years after the introduction of the first flash iPod, Apple still sells the spinning ones. In fact they're your only choice if you want more than 64GB in your iPod. So, sure, let's revisit the subject of laptop HDD's being obsoleted in another five years. But who even knows if it will be traditional flash SSD's or if memristors or some other tech (MRAM, NRAM, etc.) will win.
At or below the 32GB level, hard drives have already been effectively replaced by SD cards and their variants But if you need, say 50GB, it doesn't really matter if they throw in an "extra" 30 gigs or so.
"All you can eat" music plans are substantially less than €25. Why doesn't ask "unlimited play" providers to bid on the purchase of a blanket license to everyone under 18. Then the music companies get paid, the kids get free music, it winds up costing the state the same or less than the current crazy plan, and everybody's happy. Except maybe the lawyers.