The group founded the Pirate Bay who is alive and well and had good ties with the pirate party which, with 9% of ballots in Sweden, is alive and well.
The Pirate Party got 7.13% in the EU election, but they've been struggling to get visibility in polls in the run for the national election in September with 1-2% support when mentioned. The minimum limit is 4%, so they're okayish but it's a long way to go to become an established political party in parliament. In general many support their politics but they have taken a neutral stance outside their core politics to remain united so many end up voting left/right instead.
That said, they're not that far off as it sounds. While in the US there is problems with third parties with how the system works, it's a little bit like that with the 4% limit too as below that you get no representation and a lot of people won't vote for a party that "doesn't matter". If they start making people think they actually can make it and have a positive upswing in the polls they can get a positive feedback loop going and climb rapidly.
Polls aside, they are doing grassroot activity and they do have a good recruitment among young voters so they're alive and healthy that way. But gaining new voters by aging is a slow process, only something like 1/70th of the voters are replaced each year. But if all else fails, that bears promise for 2014...
This is why organizations should not depend on one or a few people. In my life when I part of something that is run by a single person, even if that single person is me, i don't see much value in it.
As much as you'd like to think that everyone in an organization or a company should be equally important, it's not true. There's always a few that really blaze the trail and many that tag along. If you're small, the organization may shut down or the company may fold. But being big doesn't mean it'll be the same if someone else takes over. You can look at Apple without Steve Jobs. You can try imagining the FSF without Stallman, or Linux without Linus. They'd go on but they wouldn't be the same. I think the cause and effect goes the other way around, if nobody else really cares about what you do then you'll be alone. If they do care, they might but not until you tell them you're stepping down and vacating the position. Most of the time - unless you're doing a really poor job, people want you to continue and not let you push it over on someone else. In the end I don't think many organizations have really succeeded by stopping up and turning the trailblazers into regulars, it's more that the trailblazers have built a big enough wake that you'll survive losing them.
As for Piratbyrån, there is now a political party (Piratpartiet) that's doing very much the same as what Piratbyråen would do so I doubt this is a big loss.
My memory bandwidth on the GTX480 is 177 GB/sec. The fastest DDR3 module is PC3-17000 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM ) which gives approx 17000 MB/s which is approx 17GB/sec.
And the high end CPUs have as far as I know triple channel memory now so a total of 51 GB/s. Not sure how valid that comparison is but graphics card tend to get their fill rate from having a much wider memory bus - the GTX480 has a 384 bit wide bus - rather than that much faster memory so it's probably not too far off. If CPUs move towards doing GPU-like work which can be loaded in wider chunks they'll probably move towards a wider bus too.
Ah, reminds me of me when I had just graduated. The market had been in a slump (post dot-crash) and it was full of people with 1-2 years experience looking for work. I had very good degree with good grades, but it always ended up being:
1) Overqualified, they fear I'll bail as soon as I have some experience. or 2) Not qualified for the really good ones, because I lack any experience. or 3) Not doing well in interviews, way too much respect for the "real world"
Took me on a long round-about way but I'm finally heading back to where I "belong" after about 7 years and from a rather good angle. If you have to get out, try getting some kind of experience that'll help you get back in. Being a mixed IT/subject matter expert is always highly priced.
It's fairly easy to create a good, strong password for the really important stuff. I usually suggest the following:
1. Pick a phrase, any phrase "maryhadalittlelamb" 2. Add three "typos" with digit, capital and special character "marXyhadali6ttlel!amb" 3. Remember the typos as part of the words: "marXy" "li6ttle" "l!amb"
It'll never match a dictionary attack. It's too long with too large a character set to be brute forced, close to 128 bits. A hybrid attack possibly might but even if you know the phrase in 1. and exectly the method I told you guessing both the position and character will take about (21*20*19 * 10 (0-9) * 26 (A-Z) * 30 (the easy special chars) = 60 million permutations per phrase and in reality you won't know the phrase or if I did something slightly different, like adding two digits.
The most general fault people make is too short passwords, because they get annoyed by typos and because many systems don't handle more than 8 characters. That's too little if the attacker can run the password cracker locally, it's only good as network passwords where first off the network slows you down and second you can have slowdowns and lock-outs in place.
And "on call duty" is just normal work, and should be considered as such.
Being available to be called during certain times is work.
It is definitively work in the sense that you should get paid for it. You can't go away for the weekend, you can't get drunk, you have to keep the phone on, you might have to stop whatever you're doing and leave as at least normally the condition is that you must be able to report at work within one hour. I've been on call in case there are potential problems with an upgrade at 1/3rd my regular pay, and if I have to come in it's full overtime pay. But it's not full work at full pay, if it were they'd require me to sit on-site and do something useful while I was there too.
Being on call is quite standard practice for occupations where you might urgently need additional personnel, like fire fighters, doctors, nurses, police officers and yes, IT staff. It's common practice and it's nothing wrong with doing it for a fair compensation. It's just not a good fit for a parent of a young child, no matter how well they pay it's on practical to be on call. Just like I wouldn't recommend a young mother to work on our oil platforms with a 4 weeks on, 4 weeks off rotation. Doesn't mean it's bad for everyone else, the pay is good if works for you.
Wrong. There is a finite amount of matter and energy (and hence computing power) in the universe. With AES 256 these limits are already very close and possibly exceeded.
With no or infinitesimally low entropy spent per operation, it could still be infinite. Though with energy being quantized, the lower bound is believed to be kT ln 2. With that you can show that even the sun converted by E=mc^2 couldn't flip through a 256 bit register. Burning up the universe technically could, but I think we can say that's close enough.
Quite possibly. Very many IT positions is high on or more of:
a) On call duty b) Unplanned overtime c) Planned out of hours work d) Crunch times
Parents of small children are naturally not very flexible, and certainly two inflexible parents just does not work. If you need to come in on call, then you need your partner or a babysitter to be on call. You can't phone your daycare and say "Sorry, I'm working overtime tonight but I'll be there by 8 PM". Planned work is better, but hardly optimal. And unlike a relationship you can't put a toddler on hold for a few weeks during crunch time. I'm not surprised many pick a job where you leave your desk on time every day.
If the NSA could have unlocked it for them, I believe the FBI would have been there in a split second. They probably already asked.
You must remember that the NSA is in the national security business. Revealing that AES can be broken would be beyond huge, it'd be bigger than the breaking of the Enigma codes during WWII. It'd also destroy the value, because afterwards everyone would migrate to something else. So even if NSA has that capability it'd be Top Secret and not revealed just to catch this guy. It's something they'd use in secret for signals intelligence and only reveal if it was absolutely necessary in defense of the United States.
Gotta ask, does AES have a backdoors that they can go "compell" an organization to give them the keys to it?
AES itself? No. Any particular encryption software? Possibly, but as TrueCrypt is open source that's unlikely. Same with the full disk encryption in Linux. As pure brute force, there's not enough energy in the sun to break a 256-bit encryption. But there can always be some kind of algorithmic attack. I think for AES256 there was an attack lowering the strength to about AES128 strength. Still plenty strong but you can't knew if there's a better one.
Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid as a result of ASCAP and similar lobbying.
The ASCAP letter is throwing an awful lot of FUD around, but in essence it comes down to the freedom to engage in legal contracts. Open source and CC licenses are not unconscionable or obfuscated, they're some of the most well analyzed and straight forward IP licensing agreements there are. They're generally given as a voluntary offer, and are in no way coercive or presenting you with terms after the fact like an EULA. Those who agree to these terms are generally professionals who have to deal with IP laws in their general line of business. In short, those that agree to the terms have no reason to cry foul.
If there's one thing that would be un-American, it's to limit what people can agree to. Compared to us here in Europe I'm surprised at how poorly consumers can be treated and how easily companies can get rid of problematic customers who things they don't like, for example using the advertised bandwidth. Why? Because you're free to enter almost any contract short of slavery, no matter how poor it is for you and how unequal the parties are. To seriously reach at the heart of open source and the creative commons, they would have to impose a whole new doctrine of only allowing contracts that are good for the country or the economy or whatever. It's as unlikely as snowball fights between flying pigs.
So just stack man-months as if they werent mythical?
I think you're repeating a slashdot meme, because clearly you haven't understood it. The mythical man month is about adding project members to a project very late in the process to deliver faster on a delayed project. In practice the new members not only aren't very productive, they suck up time from everyone else to teach them about the system so it ends up taking as long or longer to finish anyway.
That does not preclude large software projects, producing the game itself is one of them. If a Linux port would take 5 manyears you don't need one man for five years, with some planning you can have 10 people working on it for six months. But if it after 4 months it looks like it'll take 7 months (30 manmonths), you don't add 5 more thinking you'll still finish in six doing 2z15 instead of 3x10. That's the mythical man month.
One suspects most of that time was learning a new platform. If Linux was a target from the start and the game house had done it before the porting time would be less. To begin a cross platform library like SDL would probably be selected at the start of the project.
Quote TFA:
The code was engineered to be cross-platform from the start, built on libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg/libvorbis, freetype, etc.
If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name game with much higher technical demands and support requirements.
Two manmonths of work is extremely little. Development studios like Inifinity Ward has 60 employees, Telltale Games 70, Bizarre Creations 165, Valve 225, Turbine 300, Bioware 500, Take Two 2000, Blizzard 4600. Some do publishing and other game-related stuff, but still two months is a drop in the ocean compared to the manyears laid down in many games. Even a small increase in sales would pay for much, much more. Enough? Tough to say, depends on how it scales. True this isn't proof but you also brought nothing but a very spurious argument for why it couldn't.
I personally think so, but I would be willing to be a large portion of voters wouldn't be comfortable with that...which, if true, is freakin' hilarious.
That's because you live in a safe and civilized country, or at least you think you do. Here's what happens if you go voting in Afghanistan when the Taliban tell you to boycott it, so any vote is seen as a vote against them: link. What do you think would happen in all half civilized, half corrupt countries if there was no secret vote and you vote for the "wrong" party? They might be slightly more subtle than the Taliban who rely on terror but don't think it'd be pretty.
It's always funny when those who try to wrap themselves in the veils of freedom and democracy are generally the first ones who don't want others to know what they're up to.
Yeah, ban secret elections too as obviously you need to own up to who you voted for. I very much like the supreme court quote here:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views... Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority... . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society.
However, in the context of a petition I don't think anonymity makes sense. The whole point of a petition is to show that X individuals chose to sign a petition, and unlike voting there's no process to make sure each person only gets one vote. The closest you can come is scrutiny of the list and you can't assume the government will - particularly if it supports the government's position. So if you want to post a scathing opinion on the subject, I'll support your anonymity. If you want to count in a petition I won't.
That could be trivially organized otherwise, for example by taking the final letters. So for "slashdot" you'd first ask the root server for the "t" master server, and the "t" server for the "ot" server. That'd give you 26^2 = 676 domain servers which is far more divided than we have today.
That is assuming you couldn't just make one namespace and do round robin, already the ".com" domain has something like 50% of all domain names. Getting rid of all the duplicates from everyone registering trademark.* should bring the rest down to the point where they could just be folded in.
If it's really important enough, it'll hopefully end up in some archival vault in a mountain somewhere with would be very stable. However, if we're going for the post-apolalyptic scenario then it's a good question... if the power supplies are nuked, the vault abandoned for years, how much can be recovered then?
All porn is designed to arouse you sexually. Everything designed to arouse you sexually is not porn. Take this pic (Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition). Is that porn? No. Is that arousing, is it sexy? Yes. Amd some people are so twisted, they consider anything less than this arousing (Burqa). Is a mini skirt intended to arouse one sexually? Well it's intended to show off more flesh than a regular one, and quite many find that arousing so you're using a very dangerous definition. Porn is much more direct. At the very least explicit nudity with intent to arouse (i.e. not breast cancer documentaries or nudists or whatever) or the inexplicit sex acts found in soft porn. But no matter how much booty shaking a woman does, it'll never amount to porn.
I'd really like to see some statistical data showing that it's quieter month-to-month just because it's livelier minute-to-minute. At the first level, you have the real economy with profits and dividends. Some invest based on the real economy relative to the stock price, let's call these first order investors. Above these there's a layer of macro traders, trying to figure out what the real economy investors will do, those are of the second order. For each level you get shorter timespans trying to outguess the order below, until you reach the last levels which used to be a day trader. Today it's the computers with their microsecond trades.
It's a little bit of a bull whip, the real economy makes a little jolt and the whip goes up and down, faster and faster in increasingly bigger motions until it ends with a snap. Now, if you want to try outsmarting other investors I guess that's fine, but if you're interested in the real economy the stock price the whip is getting longer and longer and where the tip is - the current price - has less and less to do with where the handle is. If you think there's a steady 4% profit but the stock price keep fluttering up and down 20%+ like a hummingbird you too get caught up in that, it overshadows all the real economy in it.
Don't get me wrong, market liquidity is good. Liquidiy is what makes it possible to invest and divest without committing to binding up your money for years. Even for projects that aren't traded daily like real estate it's important with a functioning second hand market. However, there's liquidity and liquidity, nobody needs to be out of their investment in 0.0001 second instead of 1 second. I saw an interesting suggestion in another post, the option to have a "heartbeat" on the market. Basically that trades aren't instant, they're queued for a pulse and then all settled at once before a new pulse begins. It'd cut down on a lot of the absurdity and I don't think it'd hurt the economy at all.
Personally I think this borders on cyber-absurdity, but if really there's open war-like conditions and the Chinese are doing massive hacking attempts over the trans-osceanic cables, I certainly see the advantage of killing the links between USA and China. Maybe there's compromised core routers on the inside waiting for a trigger signal to trash about and create as much disruption as possible and you need to take those out too. How much can a core router spewing false BGP routes, sending false ACKs and in general trashing about saturating all its links do? Certainly far more than just going dark, which is what the Internet is designed to route around. Still, I don't see what this really gives that the backbone operators wouldn't immidiately start fixing themselves.
Has there ever been a show getting canceled that slashdot doesn't blame on the time slots and/or episode ordering? Seriously people, if the audience had been big enough and the ratings high enough, they would have moved them to prime time slots. The last pick of the shows also get last pick of the time slots, either deal with it or stay off the air then. It's just getting really tiring to hear every time someone's pet show gets canceled that it was never the show's fault. It was never a weird and obscure show that not many liked, it was always some external reason for its failure. I'd like to say the same about a series of space cowboys, but then I'd probably get lynched even though I bought both the DVD set and the movie. I liked it, but I also know it was way off mainstream. Same goes for almost everything sci-fi, almost by definition it's a narrow genre. At least fantasy has had a real uptake with LotR and Harry Potter and the Narnia series, though something like the Legend of the Seeker still gets canceled.
The Simpsons has a broad appeal to the typical soccer mom family. Futurama is a nerdy show which was a Leela/Fry romance about as awkward as The Big Bang Theory with a lobster from outer space. Futurama has to hit home runs with their target demographic because it's small, the Simpsons haven't done that in years. They keep being sufficiently successful because they don't age, every year there's a new year's worth of children identifying themselves with Bart and Lisa. Live actors won't be the same, for example right now we have the Harry Potter generation, people that grew up alongside the actors but the next generation will find someting else. They might still watch the Simpsons though.
That's probably less than half true, there are four exceptions to USC 17512 and each have their own requirements. The two first paragraphs are easy to achieve that cover routing and caching, like for example if you have a home router for some tenants or an open wifi. However, the material question in such cases will be who did it, and the DMCA will only protect you if the court finds it probable it was somebody else. Then and only then are you protected from liability from routing or caching it.
The third paragraph which is for hosting and among other things require that you have a designated agent registered with the copyright office, most people will not qualify. The fourth is for search engines, and also have a fair amount of limitations but less than for hosting. Your hand edited collection of links will certainly not be protected under this paragraph, you have to operate something far more automated where you don't have actual knowledge that the material or activity is infringing and is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent. And for both of those, you must have a DMCA takedown process in place and follow it.
if there was an option for unlimited downloads of the things I watch for a fair (think ~$5 per month) cost I'd jump all over that and kiss my cable subscription goodbye.
So you pay for cable. On top of that they make money on cable ads, that'd quickly be removed from such a service. On top of that you probably pay for some DVD box sets of TV shows. Possibly a DVR subscription on top. I bet that totals up to more than $5/month, particularly the money not coming out of your pocket but the advertisers. You know what I hear as a corporation? "Blah blah blah blah please sell your products for 10% of the money you make today blah blah blah". I guess you can always ask, but if you want it to save a lot of money and make them lose a lot of money I'm not surprised they're unenthusiastic.
For me the selling points are convenience, simultaneous worldwide release, maximum quality and freedom to watch it under any OS, on any hardware from anywhere on my own schedule for all time. I don't expect them to go for anything that's less profitable than what they have today, they're a corporation and per definition is profit-seeking. It's not going to be like I don't watch 80%, so my bill would get cut 80%. They know you won't watch everything and that's priced in, if they split it up they'd have to raise prices on each item to have the same income. It's the same as with the people that started when iTunes went up, for 10 cents/song they'd buy but not a dollar as if 90%+ of the cost was printing the CD.
Slashdot Mirror
The group founded the Pirate Bay who is alive and well and had good ties with the pirate party which, with 9% of ballots in Sweden, is alive and well.
The Pirate Party got 7.13% in the EU election, but they've been struggling to get visibility in polls in the run for the national election in September with 1-2% support when mentioned. The minimum limit is 4%, so they're okayish but it's a long way to go to become an established political party in parliament. In general many support their politics but they have taken a neutral stance outside their core politics to remain united so many end up voting left/right instead.
That said, they're not that far off as it sounds. While in the US there is problems with third parties with how the system works, it's a little bit like that with the 4% limit too as below that you get no representation and a lot of people won't vote for a party that "doesn't matter". If they start making people think they actually can make it and have a positive upswing in the polls they can get a positive feedback loop going and climb rapidly.
Polls aside, they are doing grassroot activity and they do have a good recruitment among young voters so they're alive and healthy that way. But gaining new voters by aging is a slow process, only something like 1/70th of the voters are replaced each year. But if all else fails, that bears promise for 2014...
This is why organizations should not depend on one or a few people. In my life when I part of something that is run by a single person, even if that single person is me, i don't see much value in it.
As much as you'd like to think that everyone in an organization or a company should be equally important, it's not true. There's always a few that really blaze the trail and many that tag along. If you're small, the organization may shut down or the company may fold. But being big doesn't mean it'll be the same if someone else takes over. You can look at Apple without Steve Jobs. You can try imagining the FSF without Stallman, or Linux without Linus. They'd go on but they wouldn't be the same. I think the cause and effect goes the other way around, if nobody else really cares about what you do then you'll be alone. If they do care, they might but not until you tell them you're stepping down and vacating the position. Most of the time - unless you're doing a really poor job, people want you to continue and not let you push it over on someone else. In the end I don't think many organizations have really succeeded by stopping up and turning the trailblazers into regulars, it's more that the trailblazers have built a big enough wake that you'll survive losing them.
As for Piratbyrån, there is now a political party (Piratpartiet) that's doing very much the same as what Piratbyråen would do so I doubt this is a big loss.
My memory bandwidth on the GTX480 is 177 GB/sec. The fastest DDR3 module is PC3-17000 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM ) which gives approx 17000 MB/s which is approx 17GB/sec.
And the high end CPUs have as far as I know triple channel memory now so a total of 51 GB/s. Not sure how valid that comparison is but graphics card tend to get their fill rate from having a much wider memory bus - the GTX480 has a 384 bit wide bus - rather than that much faster memory so it's probably not too far off. If CPUs move towards doing GPU-like work which can be loaded in wider chunks they'll probably move towards a wider bus too.
Ah, reminds me of me when I had just graduated. The market had been in a slump (post dot-crash) and it was full of people with 1-2 years experience looking for work. I had very good degree with good grades, but it always ended up being:
1) Overqualified, they fear I'll bail as soon as I have some experience.
or
2) Not qualified for the really good ones, because I lack any experience.
or
3) Not doing well in interviews, way too much respect for the "real world"
Took me on a long round-about way but I'm finally heading back to where I "belong" after about 7 years and from a rather good angle. If you have to get out, try getting some kind of experience that'll help you get back in. Being a mixed IT/subject matter expert is always highly priced.
It's fairly easy to create a good, strong password for the really important stuff. I usually suggest the following:
1. Pick a phrase, any phrase "maryhadalittlelamb"
2. Add three "typos" with digit, capital and special character "marXyhadali6ttlel!amb"
3. Remember the typos as part of the words: "marXy" "li6ttle" "l!amb"
It'll never match a dictionary attack. It's too long with too large a character set to be brute forced, close to 128 bits. A hybrid attack possibly might but even if you know the phrase in 1. and exectly the method I told you guessing both the position and character will take about (21*20*19 * 10 (0-9) * 26 (A-Z) * 30 (the easy special chars) = 60 million permutations per phrase and in reality you won't know the phrase or if I did something slightly different, like adding two digits.
The most general fault people make is too short passwords, because they get annoyed by typos and because many systems don't handle more than 8 characters. That's too little if the attacker can run the password cracker locally, it's only good as network passwords where first off the network slows you down and second you can have slowdowns and lock-outs in place.
And "on call duty" is just normal work, and should be considered as such.
Being available to be called during certain times is work.
It is definitively work in the sense that you should get paid for it. You can't go away for the weekend, you can't get drunk, you have to keep the phone on, you might have to stop whatever you're doing and leave as at least normally the condition is that you must be able to report at work within one hour. I've been on call in case there are potential problems with an upgrade at 1/3rd my regular pay, and if I have to come in it's full overtime pay. But it's not full work at full pay, if it were they'd require me to sit on-site and do something useful while I was there too.
Being on call is quite standard practice for occupations where you might urgently need additional personnel, like fire fighters, doctors, nurses, police officers and yes, IT staff. It's common practice and it's nothing wrong with doing it for a fair compensation. It's just not a good fit for a parent of a young child, no matter how well they pay it's on practical to be on call. Just like I wouldn't recommend a young mother to work on our oil platforms with a 4 weeks on, 4 weeks off rotation. Doesn't mean it's bad for everyone else, the pay is good if works for you.
Wrong. There is a finite amount of matter and energy (and hence computing power) in the universe. With AES 256 these limits are already very close and possibly exceeded.
With no or infinitesimally low entropy spent per operation, it could still be infinite. Though with energy being quantized, the lower bound is believed to be kT ln 2. With that you can show that even the sun converted by E=mc^2 couldn't flip through a 256 bit register. Burning up the universe technically could, but I think we can say that's close enough.
Quite possibly. Very many IT positions is high on or more of:
a) On call duty
b) Unplanned overtime
c) Planned out of hours work
d) Crunch times
Parents of small children are naturally not very flexible, and certainly two inflexible parents just does not work. If you need to come in on call, then you need your partner or a babysitter to be on call. You can't phone your daycare and say "Sorry, I'm working overtime tonight but I'll be there by 8 PM". Planned work is better, but hardly optimal. And unlike a relationship you can't put a toddler on hold for a few weeks during crunch time. I'm not surprised many pick a job where you leave your desk on time every day.
If the NSA could have unlocked it for them, I believe the FBI would have been there in a split second. They probably already asked.
You must remember that the NSA is in the national security business. Revealing that AES can be broken would be beyond huge, it'd be bigger than the breaking of the Enigma codes during WWII. It'd also destroy the value, because afterwards everyone would migrate to something else. So even if NSA has that capability it'd be Top Secret and not revealed just to catch this guy. It's something they'd use in secret for signals intelligence and only reveal if it was absolutely necessary in defense of the United States.
Gotta ask, does AES have a backdoors that they can go "compell" an organization to give them the keys to it?
AES itself? No. Any particular encryption software? Possibly, but as TrueCrypt is open source that's unlikely. Same with the full disk encryption in Linux. As pure brute force, there's not enough energy in the sun to break a 256-bit encryption. But there can always be some kind of algorithmic attack. I think for AES256 there was an attack lowering the strength to about AES128 strength. Still plenty strong but you can't knew if there's a better one.
Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid as a result of ASCAP and similar lobbying.
The ASCAP letter is throwing an awful lot of FUD around, but in essence it comes down to the freedom to engage in legal contracts. Open source and CC licenses are not unconscionable or obfuscated, they're some of the most well analyzed and straight forward IP licensing agreements there are. They're generally given as a voluntary offer, and are in no way coercive or presenting you with terms after the fact like an EULA. Those who agree to these terms are generally professionals who have to deal with IP laws in their general line of business. In short, those that agree to the terms have no reason to cry foul.
If there's one thing that would be un-American, it's to limit what people can agree to. Compared to us here in Europe I'm surprised at how poorly consumers can be treated and how easily companies can get rid of problematic customers who things they don't like, for example using the advertised bandwidth. Why? Because you're free to enter almost any contract short of slavery, no matter how poor it is for you and how unequal the parties are. To seriously reach at the heart of open source and the creative commons, they would have to impose a whole new doctrine of only allowing contracts that are good for the country or the economy or whatever. It's as unlikely as snowball fights between flying pigs.
I think your data is a bit outdated.
Well, I used the wikipedia page which referred to this page that was updated a week ago:
http://www.cynicalsmirk.com/who_remains_at_infinity_ward.html
So just stack man-months as if they werent mythical?
I think you're repeating a slashdot meme, because clearly you haven't understood it. The mythical man month is about adding project members to a project very late in the process to deliver faster on a delayed project. In practice the new members not only aren't very productive, they suck up time from everyone else to teach them about the system so it ends up taking as long or longer to finish anyway.
That does not preclude large software projects, producing the game itself is one of them. If a Linux port would take 5 manyears you don't need one man for five years, with some planning you can have 10 people working on it for six months. But if it after 4 months it looks like it'll take 7 months (30 manmonths), you don't add 5 more thinking you'll still finish in six doing 2z15 instead of 3x10. That's the mythical man month.
One suspects most of that time was learning a new platform. If Linux was a target from the start and the game house had done it before the porting time would be less. To begin a cross platform library like SDL would probably be selected at the start of the project.
Quote TFA:
The code was engineered to be cross-platform from the start, built on libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg/libvorbis, freetype, etc.
If it took two months to port a puzzle game, imagine how much time and expenses it would take to port a big-name game with much higher technical demands and support requirements.
Two manmonths of work is extremely little. Development studios like Inifinity Ward has 60 employees, Telltale Games 70, Bizarre Creations 165, Valve 225, Turbine 300, Bioware 500, Take Two 2000, Blizzard 4600. Some do publishing and other game-related stuff, but still two months is a drop in the ocean compared to the manyears laid down in many games. Even a small increase in sales would pay for much, much more. Enough? Tough to say, depends on how it scales. True this isn't proof but you also brought nothing but a very spurious argument for why it couldn't.
I personally think so, but I would be willing to be a large portion of voters wouldn't be comfortable with that...which, if true, is freakin' hilarious.
That's because you live in a safe and civilized country, or at least you think you do. Here's what happens if you go voting in Afghanistan when the Taliban tell you to boycott it, so any vote is seen as a vote against them: link. What do you think would happen in all half civilized, half corrupt countries if there was no secret vote and you vote for the "wrong" party? They might be slightly more subtle than the Taliban who rely on terror but don't think it'd be pretty.
It's always funny when those who try to wrap themselves in the veils of freedom and democracy are generally the first ones who don't want others to know what they're up to.
Yeah, ban secret elections too as obviously you need to own up to who you voted for. I very much like the supreme court quote here:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views... Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority... . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation... at the hand of an intolerant society.
However, in the context of a petition I don't think anonymity makes sense. The whole point of a petition is to show that X individuals chose to sign a petition, and unlike voting there's no process to make sure each person only gets one vote. The closest you can come is scrutiny of the list and you can't assume the government will - particularly if it supports the government's position. So if you want to post a scathing opinion on the subject, I'll support your anonymity. If you want to count in a petition I won't.
That could be trivially organized otherwise, for example by taking the final letters. So for "slashdot" you'd first ask the root server for the "t" master server, and the "t" server for the "ot" server. That'd give you 26^2 = 676 domain servers which is far more divided than we have today.
That is assuming you couldn't just make one namespace and do round robin, already the ".com" domain has something like 50% of all domain names. Getting rid of all the duplicates from everyone registering trademark.* should bring the rest down to the point where they could just be folded in.
If it's really important enough, it'll hopefully end up in some archival vault in a mountain somewhere with would be very stable. However, if we're going for the post-apolalyptic scenario then it's a good question... if the power supplies are nuked, the vault abandoned for years, how much can be recovered then?
All porn is designed to arouse you sexually. Everything designed to arouse you sexually is not porn. Take this pic (Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition). Is that porn? No. Is that arousing, is it sexy? Yes. Amd some people are so twisted, they consider anything less than this arousing (Burqa). Is a mini skirt intended to arouse one sexually? Well it's intended to show off more flesh than a regular one, and quite many find that arousing so you're using a very dangerous definition. Porn is much more direct. At the very least explicit nudity with intent to arouse (i.e. not breast cancer documentaries or nudists or whatever) or the inexplicit sex acts found in soft porn. But no matter how much booty shaking a woman does, it'll never amount to porn.
I'd really like to see some statistical data showing that it's quieter month-to-month just because it's livelier minute-to-minute. At the first level, you have the real economy with profits and dividends. Some invest based on the real economy relative to the stock price, let's call these first order investors. Above these there's a layer of macro traders, trying to figure out what the real economy investors will do, those are of the second order. For each level you get shorter timespans trying to outguess the order below, until you reach the last levels which used to be a day trader. Today it's the computers with their microsecond trades.
It's a little bit of a bull whip, the real economy makes a little jolt and the whip goes up and down, faster and faster in increasingly bigger motions until it ends with a snap. Now, if you want to try outsmarting other investors I guess that's fine, but if you're interested in the real economy the stock price the whip is getting longer and longer and where the tip is - the current price - has less and less to do with where the handle is. If you think there's a steady 4% profit but the stock price keep fluttering up and down 20%+ like a hummingbird you too get caught up in that, it overshadows all the real economy in it.
Don't get me wrong, market liquidity is good. Liquidiy is what makes it possible to invest and divest without committing to binding up your money for years. Even for projects that aren't traded daily like real estate it's important with a functioning second hand market. However, there's liquidity and liquidity, nobody needs to be out of their investment in 0.0001 second instead of 1 second. I saw an interesting suggestion in another post, the option to have a "heartbeat" on the market. Basically that trades aren't instant, they're queued for a pulse and then all settled at once before a new pulse begins. It'd cut down on a lot of the absurdity and I don't think it'd hurt the economy at all.
Personally I think this borders on cyber-absurdity, but if really there's open war-like conditions and the Chinese are doing massive hacking attempts over the trans-osceanic cables, I certainly see the advantage of killing the links between USA and China. Maybe there's compromised core routers on the inside waiting for a trigger signal to trash about and create as much disruption as possible and you need to take those out too. How much can a core router spewing false BGP routes, sending false ACKs and in general trashing about saturating all its links do? Certainly far more than just going dark, which is what the Internet is designed to route around. Still, I don't see what this really gives that the backbone operators wouldn't immidiately start fixing themselves.
Has there ever been a show getting canceled that slashdot doesn't blame on the time slots and/or episode ordering? Seriously people, if the audience had been big enough and the ratings high enough, they would have moved them to prime time slots. The last pick of the shows also get last pick of the time slots, either deal with it or stay off the air then. It's just getting really tiring to hear every time someone's pet show gets canceled that it was never the show's fault. It was never a weird and obscure show that not many liked, it was always some external reason for its failure. I'd like to say the same about a series of space cowboys, but then I'd probably get lynched even though I bought both the DVD set and the movie. I liked it, but I also know it was way off mainstream. Same goes for almost everything sci-fi, almost by definition it's a narrow genre. At least fantasy has had a real uptake with LotR and Harry Potter and the Narnia series, though something like the Legend of the Seeker still gets canceled.
The Simpsons has a broad appeal to the typical soccer mom family. Futurama is a nerdy show which was a Leela/Fry romance about as awkward as The Big Bang Theory with a lobster from outer space. Futurama has to hit home runs with their target demographic because it's small, the Simpsons haven't done that in years. They keep being sufficiently successful because they don't age, every year there's a new year's worth of children identifying themselves with Bart and Lisa. Live actors won't be the same, for example right now we have the Harry Potter generation, people that grew up alongside the actors but the next generation will find someting else. They might still watch the Simpsons though.
That's probably less than half true, there are four exceptions to USC 17512 and each have their own requirements. The two first paragraphs are easy to achieve that cover routing and caching, like for example if you have a home router for some tenants or an open wifi. However, the material question in such cases will be who did it, and the DMCA will only protect you if the court finds it probable it was somebody else. Then and only then are you protected from liability from routing or caching it.
The third paragraph which is for hosting and among other things require that you have a designated agent registered with the copyright office, most people will not qualify. The fourth is for search engines, and also have a fair amount of limitations but less than for hosting. Your hand edited collection of links will certainly not be protected under this paragraph, you have to operate something far more automated where you don't have actual knowledge that the material or activity is infringing and is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent. And for both of those, you must have a DMCA takedown process in place and follow it.
if there was an option for unlimited downloads of the things I watch for a fair (think ~$5 per month) cost I'd jump all over that and kiss my cable subscription goodbye.
So you pay for cable. On top of that they make money on cable ads, that'd quickly be removed from such a service. On top of that you probably pay for some DVD box sets of TV shows. Possibly a DVR subscription on top. I bet that totals up to more than $5/month, particularly the money not coming out of your pocket but the advertisers. You know what I hear as a corporation? "Blah blah blah blah please sell your products for 10% of the money you make today blah blah blah". I guess you can always ask, but if you want it to save a lot of money and make them lose a lot of money I'm not surprised they're unenthusiastic.
For me the selling points are convenience, simultaneous worldwide release, maximum quality and freedom to watch it under any OS, on any hardware from anywhere on my own schedule for all time. I don't expect them to go for anything that's less profitable than what they have today, they're a corporation and per definition is profit-seeking. It's not going to be like I don't watch 80%, so my bill would get cut 80%. They know you won't watch everything and that's priced in, if they split it up they'd have to raise prices on each item to have the same income. It's the same as with the people that started when iTunes went up, for 10 cents/song they'd buy but not a dollar as if 90%+ of the cost was printing the CD.