Then you'll not only be free of trying to balance on the edge of infringement, but also have some claim at satire.
Fair use covers using elements of Pacman to make a parody of Pacman. It probably doesn't cover using elements of Pacman to make a parody of the way the MAFIAA is chasing pirates. Basically it comes down to need, you can't make a parody of Pacman if no one would recognize it as Pacman - it would be like prohibiting parody, while you could make fun of the MAFIAA in a number of other ways.
Mostly it involves them talking up a vague notion, which is somehow the Next Big Thing. "It's like eBay! Except it's on your iPhone! And I know eBay already has an iPhone app, but they haven't been successful with it and I will be!" And then it involves me doing all the work and them taking their big cut for the "inspiration." It's fairly easy to come up with an idea that's "like X for your Y." And so I smile and nod and discuss it a bit and then go on my merry way.
Mostly I get the impression it's these same people that waste a few hundred dollars on a piss poor execution on a piss poor idea. They deserve each other.
And they would be reimplementing large portions of X's job by doing so. So instead of a known common protocol that is consistent with a few implementation problems, you have a whole new untested drawing system that is GTK specific too... great.
Well it's not like DRI is untested, it's being used by drivers today to provide hardware acceleration for OpenGL. It's more that now everyone talks OpenGL rather than the X protocol. The upside is a greatly simplified display server, the hardware (or the software fallback) does all the rendering and compositing. This makes Linux work like a modern desktop same as OS X or Win7 with every application a hardware accelerated 3D client. The downside is that what works locally - send everything to the graphics card and let the hardware work it out - works terribly over the network as you go from an extremely wide pipe (PCIe x16 mostly) to whatever the network/internet speed is.
To be honest I think remote applications need a simpler rendering protocol, it's just not realistic to have an application look the same across a 56k dial-up link as it does locally where a thousand shaders can process 1 GB of textures to render something. Either you go down the VNC route and display the output our you need a simplified protocol which is better covered by web applications or some more "real" remote application protocol. X is neither, from what I gather most rendering toolkits no longer use the X primitives because they're too primitive, so they render it and send it as pixmaps anyway.
If they were using proprietary software, they would be at the mercy of the company that owned the rights to that software for any fixes or improvements.
If they're interested in that, which IMHO they are mostly not. Many companies have learned the hard way the true cost of custom software, which in many ways can be worse than proprietary software. If there's at least a semi-functioning marketplace, the proprietary companies have to evolve their solutions and keep their prices (thus your costs) to what the market will bear. Custom software OTOH stands dead still unless you pay every inch of the way, which is why they're not interested in doing anything custom. And if you talk "small custom changes" they think the kind of rates proprietary tools charge them for small changes, which are normally disproportionally expensive.
Well, more people = more developers. But when it comes to paid developers, I'm not sure the same is true. If it becomes too common an itch that you're trying to collect microfunding from millions of people then it's not doing that great. Even though millions of people need a little photo editing they aren't funding GIMP and the professionals rather end up paying for Photoshop, same goes for OpenOffice vs MS Office. Firefox is a bit different in that Google is paying indirectly rather than the users directly, but in general OSS fans are very opposed to any kind of applications that "sells" your eyeballs or your data or direct you to specific services. It seems easier to make one company pay $1000 for RHEL than to make 100 people pay $10 or 1000 people pay $1.
Not on the time scales we're talking here, if you're doing biannual or rolling releases has very little impact on driver removal. That depends far more on whether the upsteam project (kernel or userspace drivers) are doing API changes and whether there is a maintainer for that driver.
More unneeded and unwanted API changes.
Unless you mean UI changes, people don't work much with APIs. That's more for the next point.
Harder to develop own applications for a faster movin target.
Libraries like Qt, Gtk etc. usually take great care to be backwards compatible.
More forced upgrades, more forced training costs, less bug fixes for older, but mission critical versions.
At least if we compare biannual versus rolling releases you get pretty much only security fixes anyway, I don't think rolling releases are any direct competitor to RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu LTS releases you should use for mission critical applications.
No way to avoid bad "improvements".
It's not easy to pin an old version through a distro version upgrade either.
As somebody else already said, it is crucial for the Linux ecosystem to stop bundling applications and the base systems, and to unpredictably couple application updates to system updates. This unpredictability and instability is killing Linux in the enterprise. It needs a stable, very stable base companies can develop for without fear that they'll obsolete in 5 years or having to adapt to wild unpredictable API changes every 6 months.
It's been a long, long time since I've heard of something like a bad kernel version. The problem is more that application upgrades trigger other application upgrades, not so much the whole system. That actually has the potential to be better with rolling releases or increased availability of backports, not worse.
Linux software may be "stable" in terems of performance, but it is the exact opposite in terms of development and long term planing, and this is killing it in the industry.
All development is unstable. If you're trying to run your business on the most bleeding edge of software, you will suffer. With open source you can go beyond releases into RCs and betas and alphas and experimental code, but you're a fool if you do so and expect stability.
Basically it comes down to this, users have conflicting goals. On the one side, they want to get product fixes and features as soon as they are "ready". At the same time they don't want experimental code that is not "ready". Taking a "snapshot" of all applications and libraries at the same time is the easiest, you just polish it up and call it ready even though you caught them in the middle of a big development cycle. Unstable rolling systems just apply this simple formula often. Rolling stable releases can, if executed well, be better than this. They pick stable versions for each package individually, never taking more or less randomly timed snapshots (at least random relative to the project's development cycle). The downside is that it takes a lot more work to determine the "right" time. They have to deal with libraries making changes where some applications are ready and others aren't. It's more complicated and if done poorly it could turn out worse. But the idea is not bad.
Each layer of indirection removes power from the people. For example, the European Commission - formed by the national parliaments - have been far more hostile to normal people than the European Parliment, that has been voted in directly. Likewise, the EU passes directives that people only learn about years later when they're being forced into national laws. So you need to vote in people that'll vote in other people that'll pass directives that that'll be law. By the time it gets through that process the public will is so perverted you barely knew it was there. Same with every other hierarchical system, it gets full of politicians voting in other politicians by completely different criteria than the people want.
The kind that says "We haven't tested it on your browser, we don't guarantee it'll work and if it doesn't we don't guarantee we'll fix it but here's our site anyway" is quite legitimate if you ask me. Even when I've had a site work properly on IE (with IE-specific hacks), Firefox and Opera - this was before Chrome - and the W3C validator, I got reports about a rendering bug in Safari. And I have spotted rendering differences between Firefox and Opera too, so this "create once to standards and it'll work everywhere" is overrated. The only way to really be sure is to have actually tested it with the browser in question, and if nobody ever did it's fair to call it unsupported.
The main stumbling block I can think of is how to set up a procedure for handing off an account. You have to verify that the person in question really is authorized to execute the deceased's estate, and that procedure might vary from state to state or country to country, which might cause some administrative hassles for Facebook.
That's the process to legally act as the deceased, but can't Facebook simply make their own process by amending the ToS? Something like "On conditions X, Y and Z, Facebook will provide the account login information." That might be death certificate, signed statements, perhaps a delay to prevent it being used to steal live accounts and so on. Assuming they provide that, it should be legal for Facebook to hand over the information even if it's according to some local estate protocol.
If you are not interested in an ad you don't get a sour grapes impression of the product going forward by being force to watch. If you are interested you can watch it and in anycase you are being asked to decide if its interesting in order to dismiss it so you are at least recognizing what the product is and associating an name with it. Those are all huge wins in advertisers books.
The last one is really the basic idea. Many people will just completely zone out of the ads or switch tabs and come back to it in 10-15 seconds or whatever when the real content starts. If you can make them mentally "register" the ad at all like by making them take a decision about it, you've already scored big.
According to copyright law, yes. Only the copies in the direct chain of copying matter, any other version or copy you have don't matter. A copy of an illegal copy - such as one distributed without permission on P2P - is also illegal. Even if it is the exact same bits you could have legally ripped from your own disc under fair use. Identical bits have different legal status based on their pedigree.
Of course, your Jesus analogy also fails, because Jesus made those loafs and fishes he gave away. The analogy to Jesus would be best reserved for those groups that give their own work away, like the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, the FSF or the Blender Foundation.
No. According to the legend he clearly copied the bread and fish, he did not bake the bread or fish the fish.
"We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish," they answered. "Bring them here to me," he said.
In fact, from the full story it is obvious he took away potential income from the bakers and fishermen:
As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a remote place, and it's already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food." Jesus replied, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat."
I use my own computer to copy bits, I own the bits as such. I only use a file someone else has as a template, just like Jesus used that bread and fish as his template. If those are his, then so are my copies mine.
The story of humanity is full of whole chapters which basically boil down to a bright spark being smothered by a bunch of ignorant fuckwads attached to their idea of how the world works. Every once in a great while the spark lands in a pile of tinder not in the furnace-equipped basement of a firetrap and something wonderful is born, but mostly people shun what they don't understand and it's their children or their children's children who are willing to incorporate it into their lives as an escape from the previous generation who doesn't "get it". This is why the technological singularity is the religion most appealing to the technological elite...
But perhaps just as much due to the ratio of crackpots to revolutionary scientific insight as the fuckwads. Ok, the world has sometimes been in a "burn them at the stake" mode but most of the time it's just lack of sufficiently compelling evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it's often reasonable to assume that you've simply done something wrong or ignored some parts that didn't make sense but still punt your pet theory anyway.
No one can by themselves determine if a returned DNS is correct or a DNS update is genuine. If you have no trust, it'll be overrun by bots faster than you can blink. If you have different trust, different nodes will give different answers and it'll all be a mess because some users can access your site and others can't.
You need a single authoritative source for trust for all nodes to agree that this node really has the right to change the DNS entry for google.com. Any attempt at a web of trust would quickly deteriorate into trusting some central nodes that'll act much like the root servers today because otherwise they'll be flooded with trust decisions.
Trying to propagate DNS as a push system is hopeless, my DNS server here doesn't need to know about 99% of the DNS changes in the world. It needs to be able to query some server on demand that it trusts.
I would say the simplest solution is "in addition to" rather tather than instead of. Some other top domains? Put in some kind of registrar field into urls? Like google.com~icann and google.com~opendns with some defaults system.
We're too dependent on big telcos and governments infrastructures.
Well, who else do you expect to lay big undersea cables and through mountains and desert areas populated by nearly no one? Alternate nets only work in big cities, and even if that were the case I'd say you rather build some kind of VPN on top. It'll be simpler and cheaper than trying to implement a completely separate network.
Well, it does say photo and video market. My TM-700 can record 2h40 of 1080p60 video to 32 GB of memory. At 2TB you're talking something like 270 hours of video or 20,000 raw 50MP/16bpp images. At the risk of pulling a 640k, it'll be enough for almost everyone. Particularly since you need to lug around a few car batteries to power stuff that long.
SSDs may be different but it's not going for even the remotely the same market. CF cards have more in common with thumbdrives than SSDs, and while you can get those at up to 256 GB capacity it's a very niche use case. Actually the most common use case I've seen is moving powerpoints, and despite the rumors of Microsoft's bloatware the thumbdrives have vastly outpaced them.
In the non-legal practical and ethical sense people also say "He stole my girlfriend" or "He stole a kiss". It might be somewhat rude but not illegal, same way I think that if you've gotten lots of entertainment out of a band you ought to show some gratitude. But it's not under penalty of 150,000$/song.
She knew exactly what she was doing. That would be like me shoplifting from a store that did not have a Shoplifters will be prosecuted sign" and claiming that I did not know I could not shoplift.
It is reasonable to assume that all items in a store with a price tag are for sale, not given away. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that everything you download from P2P is distributed without permission. Obviously a lot of it is, but some will be all sorts of demo/promo/free music under creative commons or other permissive licenses. Some rather big name bands have given away tracks like that, not just garage bands. At least it would make the RIAA very happy if all alternative distribution except from "official" places like iTunes goes away.
When I put forth the proposition that marketing and advertising are the most powerful influences in every single one of our lives (especially those that believe they are not affected by it), I am being very serious. Every single one of our tastes, from our preference for skinny and shiny to our political beliefs, our concept of beauty, our desires, hopes, even the structure of our families has been brought to you by our sponsors. Do you think a Lexus coupe is more attractive than a 1973 toyota pickup truck? Well thank J. Walter Thompson.
That marketing is always involved in marketing a product, doesn't mean the demand is due to marketing. It might be the reason why you bought a Lexus instead of a Toyota, but it's highly unlikely it's the reason you'd want a car in the first place. I'm fairly sure most of the people that buy one now would have bought it anyway, had you banned advertising for cars. In fact here in Norway you can't advertise alcohol, but it's still very much selling because people like getting intoxicated. If you think ridiculous and unrealistic standards of beauty is a modern invention, you haven't looked a 19th century wasp waists and various other crazy things dating back thousands of years.
The only thing that's happened is that like the rest of the world, it's been professionalized and specialized. Now there's dedicated individuals working only on the sales appeal of the products, but the basic trade is the same as the first hunter-gatherer who started bartering "juicy fresh" apples instead of just apples. Now you just have a company where different people do the gathering, the QA, the distribution, the sales and so on. Obviously marketing is more essential when the market is flooded with supply, why should I buy your apples when there's five others selling on the same market. But it won't fix the problem that your apples are rotten and theirs isn't.
As if the problem was firepower. I don't remember where exactly I read it, but it was a comment that if it was just about killing the insurgents they could have used any number of heavy weaponry, air strikes and whatnot. If this will let you take out positions without calling in even heavier guns, it will cause less collateral damage. It does sound rather nasty if the enemy got their hands on it though, sounds like just the right weapon to take out an enemy patrol from much greater range than you could lob a grenade.
Who are these people that you have to deal so much with? Seriously. Pretty much every older person I know seem to enjoy their life as long as they have their health. Then their bodies start to ache, their minds start to fog up and the prospects for the future are more of the same or worse. Old friends they've known for many years start dying off, they can't drive no more, they can't walk that far and end up and become very closed off and dependent on others.
None of that needs to be true if age becomes only another candle on the cake. And if all that is still too much to deal with, waiting around to die of old age must be the worst way of committing suicide. Either you want to live and there's better ways of living or you want to die and there's better ways of dying. Old age is something you go through only for lack of alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you'll not only be free of trying to balance on the edge of infringement, but also have some claim at satire.
Fair use covers using elements of Pacman to make a parody of Pacman. It probably doesn't cover using elements of Pacman to make a parody of the way the MAFIAA is chasing pirates. Basically it comes down to need, you can't make a parody of Pacman if no one would recognize it as Pacman - it would be like prohibiting parody, while you could make fun of the MAFIAA in a number of other ways.
The ideas should have already been flushed out...
You probably mean fleshed out, it's the others ideas that should be flushed out.
Ti quote another post:
Mostly it involves them talking up a vague notion, which is somehow the Next Big Thing. "It's like eBay! Except it's on your iPhone! And I know eBay already has an iPhone app, but they haven't been successful with it and I will be!" And then it involves me doing all the work and them taking their big cut for the "inspiration." It's fairly easy to come up with an idea that's "like X for your Y." And so I smile and nod and discuss it a bit and then go on my merry way.
Mostly I get the impression it's these same people that waste a few hundred dollars on a piss poor execution on a piss poor idea. They deserve each other.
And they would be reimplementing large portions of X's job by doing so. So instead of a known common protocol that is consistent with a few implementation problems, you have a whole new untested drawing system that is GTK specific too... great.
Well it's not like DRI is untested, it's being used by drivers today to provide hardware acceleration for OpenGL. It's more that now everyone talks OpenGL rather than the X protocol. The upside is a greatly simplified display server, the hardware (or the software fallback) does all the rendering and compositing. This makes Linux work like a modern desktop same as OS X or Win7 with every application a hardware accelerated 3D client. The downside is that what works locally - send everything to the graphics card and let the hardware work it out - works terribly over the network as you go from an extremely wide pipe (PCIe x16 mostly) to whatever the network/internet speed is.
To be honest I think remote applications need a simpler rendering protocol, it's just not realistic to have an application look the same across a 56k dial-up link as it does locally where a thousand shaders can process 1 GB of textures to render something. Either you go down the VNC route and display the output our you need a simplified protocol which is better covered by web applications or some more "real" remote application protocol. X is neither, from what I gather most rendering toolkits no longer use the X primitives because they're too primitive, so they render it and send it as pixmaps anyway.
If they were using proprietary software, they would be at the mercy of the company that owned the rights to that software for any fixes or improvements.
If they're interested in that, which IMHO they are mostly not. Many companies have learned the hard way the true cost of custom software, which in many ways can be worse than proprietary software. If there's at least a semi-functioning marketplace, the proprietary companies have to evolve their solutions and keep their prices (thus your costs) to what the market will bear. Custom software OTOH stands dead still unless you pay every inch of the way, which is why they're not interested in doing anything custom. And if you talk "small custom changes" they think the kind of rates proprietary tools charge them for small changes, which are normally disproportionally expensive.
Well, more people = more developers. But when it comes to paid developers, I'm not sure the same is true. If it becomes too common an itch that you're trying to collect microfunding from millions of people then it's not doing that great. Even though millions of people need a little photo editing they aren't funding GIMP and the professionals rather end up paying for Photoshop, same goes for OpenOffice vs MS Office. Firefox is a bit different in that Google is paying indirectly rather than the users directly, but in general OSS fans are very opposed to any kind of applications that "sells" your eyeballs or your data or direct you to specific services. It seems easier to make one company pay $1000 for RHEL than to make 100 people pay $10 or 1000 people pay $1.
Removal of old, but still used hardware.
Not on the time scales we're talking here, if you're doing biannual or rolling releases has very little impact on driver removal. That depends far more on whether the upsteam project (kernel or userspace drivers) are doing API changes and whether there is a maintainer for that driver.
More unneeded and unwanted API changes.
Unless you mean UI changes, people don't work much with APIs. That's more for the next point.
Harder to develop own applications for a faster movin target.
Libraries like Qt, Gtk etc. usually take great care to be backwards compatible.
More forced upgrades, more forced training costs, less bug fixes for older, but mission critical versions.
At least if we compare biannual versus rolling releases you get pretty much only security fixes anyway, I don't think rolling releases are any direct competitor to RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu LTS releases you should use for mission critical applications.
No way to avoid bad "improvements".
It's not easy to pin an old version through a distro version upgrade either.
As somebody else already said, it is crucial for the Linux ecosystem to stop bundling applications and the base systems, and to unpredictably couple application updates to system updates. This unpredictability and instability is killing Linux in the enterprise. It needs a stable, very stable base companies can develop for without fear that they'll obsolete in 5 years or having to adapt to wild unpredictable API changes every 6 months.
It's been a long, long time since I've heard of something like a bad kernel version. The problem is more that application upgrades trigger other application upgrades, not so much the whole system. That actually has the potential to be better with rolling releases or increased availability of backports, not worse.
Linux software may be "stable" in terems of performance, but it is the exact opposite in terms of development and long term planing, and this is killing it in the industry.
All development is unstable. If you're trying to run your business on the most bleeding edge of software, you will suffer. With open source you can go beyond releases into RCs and betas and alphas and experimental code, but you're a fool if you do so and expect stability.
Basically it comes down to this, users have conflicting goals. On the one side, they want to get product fixes and features as soon as they are "ready". At the same time they don't want experimental code that is not "ready". Taking a "snapshot" of all applications and libraries at the same time is the easiest, you just polish it up and call it ready even though you caught them in the middle of a big development cycle. Unstable rolling systems just apply this simple formula often. Rolling stable releases can, if executed well, be better than this. They pick stable versions for each package individually, never taking more or less randomly timed snapshots (at least random relative to the project's development cycle). The downside is that it takes a lot more work to determine the "right" time. They have to deal with libraries making changes where some applications are ready and others aren't. It's more complicated and if done poorly it could turn out worse. But the idea is not bad.
Each layer of indirection removes power from the people. For example, the European Commission - formed by the national parliaments - have been far more hostile to normal people than the European Parliment, that has been voted in directly. Likewise, the EU passes directives that people only learn about years later when they're being forced into national laws. So you need to vote in people that'll vote in other people that'll pass directives that that'll be law. By the time it gets through that process the public will is so perverted you barely knew it was there. Same with every other hierarchical system, it gets full of politicians voting in other politicians by completely different criteria than the people want.
The kind that says "We haven't tested it on your browser, we don't guarantee it'll work and if it doesn't we don't guarantee we'll fix it but here's our site anyway" is quite legitimate if you ask me. Even when I've had a site work properly on IE (with IE-specific hacks), Firefox and Opera - this was before Chrome - and the W3C validator, I got reports about a rendering bug in Safari. And I have spotted rendering differences between Firefox and Opera too, so this "create once to standards and it'll work everywhere" is overrated. The only way to really be sure is to have actually tested it with the browser in question, and if nobody ever did it's fair to call it unsupported.
Opera 10.63, definitively vunerable.
Or fail to connect to the network, which makes those two the biggest no-nos when it comes to breaking a computer.
The main stumbling block I can think of is how to set up a procedure for handing off an account. You have to verify that the person in question really is authorized to execute the deceased's estate, and that procedure might vary from state to state or country to country, which might cause some administrative hassles for Facebook.
That's the process to legally act as the deceased, but can't Facebook simply make their own process by amending the ToS? Something like "On conditions X, Y and Z, Facebook will provide the account login information." That might be death certificate, signed statements, perhaps a delay to prevent it being used to steal live accounts and so on. Assuming they provide that, it should be legal for Facebook to hand over the information even if it's according to some local estate protocol.
If you are not interested in an ad you don't get a sour grapes impression of the product going forward by being force to watch. If you are interested you can watch it and in anycase you are being asked to decide if its interesting in order to dismiss it so you are at least recognizing what the product is and associating an name with it. Those are all huge wins in advertisers books.
The last one is really the basic idea. Many people will just completely zone out of the ads or switch tabs and come back to it in 10-15 seconds or whatever when the real content starts. If you can make them mentally "register" the ad at all like by making them take a decision about it, you've already scored big.
According to copyright law, yes. Only the copies in the direct chain of copying matter, any other version or copy you have don't matter. A copy of an illegal copy - such as one distributed without permission on P2P - is also illegal. Even if it is the exact same bits you could have legally ripped from your own disc under fair use. Identical bits have different legal status based on their pedigree.
Of course, your Jesus analogy also fails, because Jesus made those loafs and fishes he gave away. The analogy to Jesus would be best reserved for those groups that give their own work away, like the Grateful Dead, Radiohead, the FSF or the Blender Foundation.
No. According to the legend he clearly copied the bread and fish, he did not bake the bread or fish the fish.
"We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish," they answered. "Bring them here to me," he said.
In fact, from the full story it is obvious he took away potential income from the bakers and fishermen:
As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a remote place, and it's already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food." Jesus replied, "They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat."
I use my own computer to copy bits, I own the bits as such. I only use a file someone else has as a template, just like Jesus used that bread and fish as his template. If those are his, then so are my copies mine.
The story of humanity is full of whole chapters which basically boil down to a bright spark being smothered by a bunch of ignorant fuckwads attached to their idea of how the world works. Every once in a great while the spark lands in a pile of tinder not in the furnace-equipped basement of a firetrap and something wonderful is born, but mostly people shun what they don't understand and it's their children or their children's children who are willing to incorporate it into their lives as an escape from the previous generation who doesn't "get it". This is why the technological singularity is the religion most appealing to the technological elite...
But perhaps just as much due to the ratio of crackpots to revolutionary scientific insight as the fuckwads. Ok, the world has sometimes been in a "burn them at the stake" mode but most of the time it's just lack of sufficiently compelling evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it's often reasonable to assume that you've simply done something wrong or ignored some parts that didn't make sense but still punt your pet theory anyway.
Somehow I imagine the same will happen with IPv6. When shit hits the fan they'll throw a y2k panic round of fixes and it will get done.
No one can by themselves determine if a returned DNS is correct or a DNS update is genuine. If you have no trust, it'll be overrun by bots faster than you can blink. If you have different trust, different nodes will give different answers and it'll all be a mess because some users can access your site and others can't.
You need a single authoritative source for trust for all nodes to agree that this node really has the right to change the DNS entry for google.com. Any attempt at a web of trust would quickly deteriorate into trusting some central nodes that'll act much like the root servers today because otherwise they'll be flooded with trust decisions.
Trying to propagate DNS as a push system is hopeless, my DNS server here doesn't need to know about 99% of the DNS changes in the world. It needs to be able to query some server on demand that it trusts.
I would say the simplest solution is "in addition to" rather tather than instead of. Some other top domains? Put in some kind of registrar field into urls? Like google.com~icann and google.com~opendns with some defaults system.
We're too dependent on big telcos and governments infrastructures.
Well, who else do you expect to lay big undersea cables and through mountains and desert areas populated by nearly no one? Alternate nets only work in big cities, and even if that were the case I'd say you rather build some kind of VPN on top. It'll be simpler and cheaper than trying to implement a completely separate network.
Well, it does say photo and video market. My TM-700 can record 2h40 of 1080p60 video to 32 GB of memory. At 2TB you're talking something like 270 hours of video or 20,000 raw 50MP/16bpp images. At the risk of pulling a 640k, it'll be enough for almost everyone. Particularly since you need to lug around a few car batteries to power stuff that long.
SSDs may be different but it's not going for even the remotely the same market. CF cards have more in common with thumbdrives than SSDs, and while you can get those at up to 256 GB capacity it's a very niche use case. Actually the most common use case I've seen is moving powerpoints, and despite the rumors of Microsoft's bloatware the thumbdrives have vastly outpaced them.
In the non-legal practical and ethical sense people also say "He stole my girlfriend" or "He stole a kiss". It might be somewhat rude but not illegal, same way I think that if you've gotten lots of entertainment out of a band you ought to show some gratitude. But it's not under penalty of 150,000$/song.
What does contracts have to do with copyright law? Good thing you have a lawyer, don't represent yourself...
She knew exactly what she was doing. That would be like me shoplifting from a store that did not have a Shoplifters will be prosecuted sign" and claiming that I did not know I could not shoplift.
It is reasonable to assume that all items in a store with a price tag are for sale, not given away. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that everything you download from P2P is distributed without permission. Obviously a lot of it is, but some will be all sorts of demo/promo/free music under creative commons or other permissive licenses. Some rather big name bands have given away tracks like that, not just garage bands. At least it would make the RIAA very happy if all alternative distribution except from "official" places like iTunes goes away.
When I put forth the proposition that marketing and advertising are the most powerful influences in every single one of our lives (especially those that believe they are not affected by it), I am being very serious. Every single one of our tastes, from our preference for skinny and shiny to our political beliefs, our concept of beauty, our desires, hopes, even the structure of our families has been brought to you by our sponsors. Do you think a Lexus coupe is more attractive than a 1973 toyota pickup truck? Well thank J. Walter Thompson.
That marketing is always involved in marketing a product, doesn't mean the demand is due to marketing. It might be the reason why you bought a Lexus instead of a Toyota, but it's highly unlikely it's the reason you'd want a car in the first place. I'm fairly sure most of the people that buy one now would have bought it anyway, had you banned advertising for cars. In fact here in Norway you can't advertise alcohol, but it's still very much selling because people like getting intoxicated. If you think ridiculous and unrealistic standards of beauty is a modern invention, you haven't looked a 19th century wasp waists and various other crazy things dating back thousands of years.
The only thing that's happened is that like the rest of the world, it's been professionalized and specialized. Now there's dedicated individuals working only on the sales appeal of the products, but the basic trade is the same as the first hunter-gatherer who started bartering "juicy fresh" apples instead of just apples. Now you just have a company where different people do the gathering, the QA, the distribution, the sales and so on. Obviously marketing is more essential when the market is flooded with supply, why should I buy your apples when there's five others selling on the same market. But it won't fix the problem that your apples are rotten and theirs isn't.
As if the problem was firepower. I don't remember where exactly I read it, but it was a comment that if it was just about killing the insurgents they could have used any number of heavy weaponry, air strikes and whatnot. If this will let you take out positions without calling in even heavier guns, it will cause less collateral damage. It does sound rather nasty if the enemy got their hands on it though, sounds like just the right weapon to take out an enemy patrol from much greater range than you could lob a grenade.
Who are these people that you have to deal so much with? Seriously. Pretty much every older person I know seem to enjoy their life as long as they have their health. Then their bodies start to ache, their minds start to fog up and the prospects for the future are more of the same or worse. Old friends they've known for many years start dying off, they can't drive no more, they can't walk that far and end up and become very closed off and dependent on others.
None of that needs to be true if age becomes only another candle on the cake. And if all that is still too much to deal with, waiting around to die of old age must be the worst way of committing suicide. Either you want to live and there's better ways of living or you want to die and there's better ways of dying. Old age is something you go through only for lack of alternatives.