Delivering 100 Mbit/s Internet to 1000 people before over-subscription seems like a nice application. Unless you're in the US in which case it probably covers New York.
I guess it depends on which parts you're talking about - a certain OS kernel that runs everything from mobile phones to supercomputers seems to get a lot of praise around here. Presentation can be a rather thin layer compared to everything below you can share.
a certain expectation that iOS and MacOS will merge, leading to a single DRM locked OS on your MacBook and your iPad.
Without a doubt, Apple will try to make them more similar to develop for. This is plain obvious and the same like for example the Qt toolkit has been adding multitouch support while still being a Win/Mac/Linux GUI toolkit. Or Microsoft making Windows and Xbox360 similar to develop for, if you want another example. This is clearly beneficial both for developer time, a consistent user experience, creating reusable code and more.
The other part, does the DRM lockdown come to OS X? Well, that's not really a related question, it'd be fairly easy to lock down OS X to only run signed software and quite easy to make a version of iOS that doesn't. This is more a matter of what Apple can get away with marketwise, with software developers, with anti-trust regulation than any technical issue. But there's no doubt that Apple at the moment is warming up the frog, by showing that yes consumers will take a locked down platform.
Take it a step farther: What market is there for a company selling ports of decade-old games for a system with few users and fewer gamers for $40-$50 each? I love Linux. I love using Linux. But there is simply no way to make money porting games to Linux.
At least not that way. I use Linux, I'm a gamer. But either you're so ideologically pure you wouldn't touch a closed source port anyway, or you're enough of a pragmatist you have a Windows box/dual boot. I'm the latter, and then it just doesn't make sense to pay $50 rather than buy a $5 bargain bin Windows edition, assuming it also doesn't already run well on WINE.
Admit it, if you're not so excited about a new release that you want to go buy it RIGHT NOW, you're not much of a fan. Maybe you can stretch that a little, but not until there might be a Linux port some years from now. Which means you probably got it, played it and paying for the port is really just for the privilege of playing it on Linux.
I'm sure there's exceptions to the generalizations above, but they're just that - exceptions. I bought World of Goo the day it came out on Linux because it was at least somewhat close to release time and "one price for all platforms". As far as I can tell, it was a huge hit but they already had a fairly cross-platform engine.
That's the kind of ports that should be happening, find some game approaching release using Linux-friendly technology and have a port inside six months of release at the maximum. Preferably just for the sales boost but I could throw in a little extra for running on Linux and a reasonable "upgrade" from the Windows version, usually there isn't one.
I'll gladly admit that the Linux gaming market is rather starved. Yes, I know about the Indie Bundle but still. But there's something to being a big fish in a little pond than a small fish in a big pond. You will get lots of free press. You will get people buying to support Linux gaming. You will get more evangelics for your game. I just wish it'd happen with some major game, maybe not an AAA title but at least a game title people would recognize.
There are times when Free speech and Copyright may cross paths.. (such as I dunno.. someone putting out a scathing unauthorized biography of a political figure.. and selling that book/movie.. and then suing someone else for trying to copy his or her work and sell it)
Uh, like for example most of fair use?
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
This section largely exists because of the first amendment, without it you'd be almost unable to talk about a work because you'd be infringing copyright. It's funny how you talk about others getting passing knowledge but yourself seem clueless.
Copyright is, at it's core, the government-enforced ability for a private entity to say "you're not allowed to say that, because I said it first". This is by definition an impingement on free speech.
Which is why unfortunately I don't think this is any more or less of a violation of the first amendment than copyright itself is. If you say copyright for 50 years is constitutional and 70 years is constitutional, then I don't see how copyright for years 1-50 and 60-70 can be unconstitutional. Some people would say the deal is whatever copyright was when the work was made, but if you look at other laws Congress might very well decide to allow something for ten years then forbid it again. When it comes to products, sometimes there's a grandfather clause and sometimes there's not. It's not truly a retroactive law either, since it only applies forward in time. Don't get me wrong, I think this is asshattery of the highest order but I don't formally see that it can't be done.
And yet, can you find a single case where this has actually happened? Which wouldn't cause a world wide cybersecurity panic as countries realize their banks can be forged by foreign governments, I might add.
If you don't want to trust a CA, there's no problem establishing a point-to-point security. It's just incredibly much more work than the CA system. And until you got anything more solid than a conspiracy theory, nothing will change.
In January of this year, the labels offered to settle the case for $25,000, to be donated to a music charity, but Thomas-Rasset declined the offer; her attorney said, "Jammie will not accept anything offer that requires her to pay money to or on behalf of the Plaintiffs."
What kind of meaningful settlement discussion can there be then? Said "Special Master" should just say "no can do" and return it to the court.
Saying you take responsibility for fixing something is entirely different than the blame game of whose fault it is. Particularly all those that present it like you are incompetent fuckups, I'm the knight in shining armor are extremely frustrating, since 99% of the time they're just looking to kick a man that's down. BP will take a beating at least as bad as their misdeeds already, Obama is just scoring polictically. Not unlike corporate politics.
I didn't go back and check the epsiode for the timestamps, but severe radiation poisoning is triggered fairly fast. From WP:
Very severe (5.58 Gy of radiation) exposure is followed by the onset of nausea and vomiting in less than 30 minutes followed by the appearance of dizziness, disorientation, and low blood pressure in addition to the symptoms of lower levels of exposure.
If the investigation was triggered by the most severe cases, and lesser cases will show up in a few days then that's by far not the most impossible part of this series.
They can actually do much better, from what I gather on this site. Their highest 300 MHz high resolution spotlight mode will do down to 1.1x1.1 meter, but the main mode that'll sweep the earth is significantly coarser. Still in relative terms I must say the development here is huge...
Also they're hardly the first to monetize and create a grass root movement for what's essentially a pilot, Sanctuary with their for-pay webisodes was actually one step further.
It worked, and continued to work just fine for any other browser and it passed W3C's validator which you don't see too many do - you'd see the alt numbers in Lynx and if you scale both images and text there was no layout problem. The calendar would be somewhat more blurry on other browsers because you'd be zooming an image and not a truetype font, but still usable. It's funny that you think I don't know about other browsers, the reason I don't talk about those is that all the others just work - Firefox, Safari and Opera did just fine while IE took a ton of hacks in addition to that one. The users were on a computer lab where some administrator had thought that forcing larger text as default due to monitor size would be a good idea, and I'm sure that for the main text it was fine but it completely broke everything that came out of the box on that CMS. Our job was to implement a CMS, not spend ten times their budget trying to rewrite it. But in the land of fairies and unicorns and clients with endless pockets I'm sure we would have... let me guess, you've defintively never done this for a living?
I don't think the OP understands the purpose of a markup language, a browser, or the idea the pages should render gracefully on different devices. And that's okay so long as he's not a Web developer.
Except that in practise they never do because you're mixing fixed size (images, banners, logos etc.) and dynamic size (text mostly) content and making sure that it always reflows well just doesn't happen. Of course you can blame the developers but it's a little like saying no buffer overflow is the language's fault, if all developers were perfect it wouldn't happen. Slashdot is one of extremely few sites that do it and it only works because slashdot is extremely simple, for example I just checked the five biggest online newspapers in Norway, 5/5 use fixed width. Anecdotally I would say that holds true for most complex websites.
Very often if you want it to work *well*, it probably can't be done automatically anyway. For example on these news sites, if you want to make a good mobile site you must make a narrower newspaper with less items side by side. You can somewhat do that with CSS trickery, but it won't look pretty because they mix on using 1/1, 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4th of the width and you would like to use a smaller version of some and to make sure each line fills up and so on. If sites did a few fixed versions and made sure they looked good you'd get 80% of the benefit with 20% of the headache.
Sometimes it just spirals way out of control. For example, i once had to deal with a calendar and users using IEs function to zoom text, it completely broke everything. Try making the days flow right in a dynamic way, but of course seven to a line like you expect and they need to align properly vertically despite numbers having different widths. Oh and it's in a sidebar that's fixed width, recode everything else too. Yeah right, in the end we took a screenshot of each day from 1-31 and made it out of images instead, that way you couldn't zoom it. Problem solved and nobody complained about the way it was solved. Fixed with is KISS, dynamic reflow is very hard and often for very little gain.
I don't know about the rest of the EU, but the Danish implementation of the directive requires ISPs to record what sites I visit.
I don't know if this is one of the requirements that are voluntary for the member states to implement, though.
It is, the directive only requires you log what IP a subscriber has. However, here too police have demanded you store email records, web records, IM records and whatnot.
Athiests - who think all religions are crap, and just hope people won't be jerks about their religions.
I disagree. They're all annoying when people use religious teachings as the basis of their argument, which is quite often even when they aren't jerks. To the rest of us, it's like arguing that cutting down the forest will kill the unicorns, it's a position that can't be reasoned with because it has no basis in reason. That's minor however compared to what really differentiates the religions.
Let's take adultery as an example. Huge breach of Christian and Muslim belief, in the ten commandments and lust is one of the seven deadly sins. What happens to you in most of the Christian world? Nothing - at least legally. Maybe God will send you downstairs for it, but that's for Him when the time comes. How is it to be a non-Christian in a Christian country? No problem. Now, in large parts of the Muslim world that'll get you death by stoning. Does it help if you're not a Muslim? Does it help if you renounce your religion and so is no longer bound by its rules? No.
That is what makes it scary, there's no real freedom of religion if you'll be punished by a different religion's law, including the freedom not to believe. That is what makes Islam a real threat, not religion in general. And to get back to where I started, you can't reason about Sharia because no secular argument will ever compare to the claim that it's dictated by Allah himself. It's not the spirituality in itself that is scary but it's the idea of religious law, judge, jury and executioner that frightens me. If Muslims let Allah do the judging, I wouldn't worry at all.
But you're also making the assumption that if the code was under the GPL would he have bothered to rewrite it since the sales value would have been near zero. There's no guarantee there'd be more open code using the GPL, there'd possibly be one less proprietary competitor but the Google explicitly released it under a license that permits it and I doubt they're so incompetent they didn't know it. If Google don't like it then it's their own mistake and they'll choose a better license next time. If they don't care, then this is just someone in the open source community being butthurt over code they didn't get the same way the MAFIAA is over a sale they didn't make.
I'm not sure those days ever left, Hollywood commissions a movie based on what they think people will pay for and so does this movie so what exactly is the difference there? I would probably even say that a huge group of tiny investors will have a much harder time agreeing to influence the production than one huge Hollywood studio, leaving more artistic freedom to the makers. However, I think that's also the downside, you have no idea what will come of your money. Can they start making it when $100,000 is in, risking they'll never reach the $200,000 goal? Will they stop midway, leaving the money spent and those that paid with nothing? Or do they wait until the money is in, make the crappiest cheapest movie they can and disappear? Promises are cheap, for example I bought some of the webisodes of Sanctuary, before they they got a contract with SyFy and reverted on all their promises that they would always be an online series with web releases equal or prior to any TV release. I call it a scam to pay their way through the pilot. Things will have to work a lot differently for this to succeed, I doubt "give us money please" will be enough.
This is like demanding all protests disperse because they are inconvenient to the security forces and because potentially the protest can grow violent and lives will be lost. You take a souped up meteorologist with an abstract possibility that he might find out something significant enough to save lives and make it sound like he's a paramedic on his way to save a wounded. Probably everyone in medicine can claim this much and more. So can everyone in construction by making houses not collapse. I'm sorry but throwing "it will save lives" into the ring on this one smells a lot like throwing "think of the children" in every time you want to strip some freedoms. It's only so marginally true that you could reduce the death count many other ways without making it even less of a free country.
With secure connections between peers so that 3rd parties can't see who's getting what, from where.
Like BitTorrent clients with encryption? As long as we are talking about an open network, you must presume that the 3rd parties are part of the system. Trying to prevent nodes in the system from finding out is very hard because you can do:
a) Pattern attacks, send a unique traffic pattern and follow it b) Latency attacks, the faster you get replies the closer you are to the source. c) Statistical attacks, gather where bits are coming from and follow it
The first two are a big problem for the website over proxynetwork model. The last is a big problem for distributed networks like Freenet, on upload too if it's a reinsert and you can predict all the keys that are coming. There are ways it can be fought but they often incur a huge cost in performance and usability.
P.S. If you ever thought goatse was bad, wait until you're on an anonymous network...
You really have to wonder though, if that market can be oversaturated. After all, porn changes the least over time so if there's already 100GB+ or 1TB+ of whatever fetish rocks your boat on the market, how much room is there for yet another standard flick with quite "standard" girls - for porn anyways?
I guess there'll always be the Jenna Jamesons but most of that market I think will disappear. At least here in Norway the two major production companies have folded, there's just not enough money in it. Porn is definitively a race to the bottom (pun intended).
On the floor, then usually rolls under some file archive and gets lost. On a more serious note though, it's mostly outsourced but what's left is under Operations.
At least some of the estimates I've seen seem to have a very high degree of "if we could, we would". But look at us, we haven't been to the Moon in decades, we probably could go to Mars at some huge expense, but we don't. Now scale this up to interstellar distances and you're looking at an absurdly expensive project that quite probably never will pay off, and at least with current technology take many thousands of years to do. Of course that time is a blink of an eye on the universal timescale, but as a barrier to actually doing it that's huge. And even a self-sustained colony wouldn't be scaled to launch crafts of its own, perhaps if you had terraforming technology so that in time that colony could become another "earth" they could but that's also stuff of serious science fiction. Otherwise it'll never evolve past the home star and a small circle of colonies.
Slashdot Mirror
Delivering 100 Mbit/s Internet to 1000 people before over-subscription seems like a nice application. Unless you're in the US in which case it probably covers New York.
I guess it depends on which parts you're talking about - a certain OS kernel that runs everything from mobile phones to supercomputers seems to get a lot of praise around here. Presentation can be a rather thin layer compared to everything below you can share.
a certain expectation that iOS and MacOS will merge, leading to a single DRM locked OS on your MacBook and your iPad.
Without a doubt, Apple will try to make them more similar to develop for. This is plain obvious and the same like for example the Qt toolkit has been adding multitouch support while still being a Win/Mac/Linux GUI toolkit. Or Microsoft making Windows and Xbox360 similar to develop for, if you want another example. This is clearly beneficial both for developer time, a consistent user experience, creating reusable code and more.
The other part, does the DRM lockdown come to OS X? Well, that's not really a related question, it'd be fairly easy to lock down OS X to only run signed software and quite easy to make a version of iOS that doesn't. This is more a matter of what Apple can get away with marketwise, with software developers, with anti-trust regulation than any technical issue. But there's no doubt that Apple at the moment is warming up the frog, by showing that yes consumers will take a locked down platform.
Take it a step farther: What market is there for a company selling ports of decade-old games for a system with few users and fewer gamers for $40-$50 each? I love Linux. I love using Linux. But there is simply no way to make money porting games to Linux.
At least not that way. I use Linux, I'm a gamer. But either you're so ideologically pure you wouldn't touch a closed source port anyway, or you're enough of a pragmatist you have a Windows box/dual boot. I'm the latter, and then it just doesn't make sense to pay $50 rather than buy a $5 bargain bin Windows edition, assuming it also doesn't already run well on WINE.
Admit it, if you're not so excited about a new release that you want to go buy it RIGHT NOW, you're not much of a fan. Maybe you can stretch that a little, but not until there might be a Linux port some years from now. Which means you probably got it, played it and paying for the port is really just for the privilege of playing it on Linux.
I'm sure there's exceptions to the generalizations above, but they're just that - exceptions. I bought World of Goo the day it came out on Linux because it was at least somewhat close to release time and "one price for all platforms". As far as I can tell, it was a huge hit but they already had a fairly cross-platform engine.
That's the kind of ports that should be happening, find some game approaching release using Linux-friendly technology and have a port inside six months of release at the maximum. Preferably just for the sales boost but I could throw in a little extra for running on Linux and a reasonable "upgrade" from the Windows version, usually there isn't one.
I'll gladly admit that the Linux gaming market is rather starved. Yes, I know about the Indie Bundle but still. But there's something to being a big fish in a little pond than a small fish in a big pond. You will get lots of free press. You will get people buying to support Linux gaming. You will get more evangelics for your game. I just wish it'd happen with some major game, maybe not an AAA title but at least a game title people would recognize.
There are times when Free speech and Copyright may cross paths.. (such as I dunno.. someone putting out a scathing unauthorized biography of a political figure.. and selling that book/movie.. and then suing someone else for trying to copy his or her work and sell it)
Uh, like for example most of fair use?
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
This section largely exists because of the first amendment, without it you'd be almost unable to talk about a work because you'd be infringing copyright. It's funny how you talk about others getting passing knowledge but yourself seem clueless.
Copyright is, at it's core, the government-enforced ability for a private entity to say "you're not allowed to say that, because I said it first". This is by definition an impingement on free speech.
Which is why unfortunately I don't think this is any more or less of a violation of the first amendment than copyright itself is. If you say copyright for 50 years is constitutional and 70 years is constitutional, then I don't see how copyright for years 1-50 and 60-70 can be unconstitutional. Some people would say the deal is whatever copyright was when the work was made, but if you look at other laws Congress might very well decide to allow something for ten years then forbid it again. When it comes to products, sometimes there's a grandfather clause and sometimes there's not. It's not truly a retroactive law either, since it only applies forward in time. Don't get me wrong, I think this is asshattery of the highest order but I don't formally see that it can't be done.
So for anyone outside the US, there aren't any legal problems with the code
You wish... Even in Norway where DeCSS was written has now implemented the EUCD.
And yet, can you find a single case where this has actually happened? Which wouldn't cause a world wide cybersecurity panic as countries realize their banks can be forged by foreign governments, I might add.
If you don't want to trust a CA, there's no problem establishing a point-to-point security. It's just incredibly much more work than the CA system. And until you got anything more solid than a conspiracy theory, nothing will change.
From this link:
In January of this year, the labels offered to settle the case for $25,000, to be donated to a music charity, but Thomas-Rasset declined the offer; her attorney said, "Jammie will not accept anything offer that requires her to pay money to or on behalf of the Plaintiffs."
What kind of meaningful settlement discussion can there be then? Said "Special Master" should just say "no can do" and return it to the court.
Saying you take responsibility for fixing something is entirely different than the blame game of whose fault it is. Particularly all those that present it like you are incompetent fuckups, I'm the knight in shining armor are extremely frustrating, since 99% of the time they're just looking to kick a man that's down. BP will take a beating at least as bad as their misdeeds already, Obama is just scoring polictically. Not unlike corporate politics.
I didn't go back and check the epsiode for the timestamps, but severe radiation poisoning is triggered fairly fast. From WP:
Very severe (5.58 Gy of radiation) exposure is followed by the onset of nausea and vomiting in less than 30 minutes followed by the appearance of dizziness, disorientation, and low blood pressure in addition to the symptoms of lower levels of exposure.
If the investigation was triggered by the most severe cases, and lesser cases will show up in a few days then that's by far not the most impossible part of this series.
They can actually do much better, from what I gather on this site. Their highest 300 MHz high resolution spotlight mode will do down to 1.1x1.1 meter, but the main mode that'll sweep the earth is significantly coarser. Still in relative terms I must say the development here is huge...
Also they're hardly the first to monetize and create a grass root movement for what's essentially a pilot, Sanctuary with their for-pay webisodes was actually one step further.
It worked, and continued to work just fine for any other browser and it passed W3C's validator which you don't see too many do - you'd see the alt numbers in Lynx and if you scale both images and text there was no layout problem. The calendar would be somewhat more blurry on other browsers because you'd be zooming an image and not a truetype font, but still usable. It's funny that you think I don't know about other browsers, the reason I don't talk about those is that all the others just work - Firefox, Safari and Opera did just fine while IE took a ton of hacks in addition to that one. The users were on a computer lab where some administrator had thought that forcing larger text as default due to monitor size would be a good idea, and I'm sure that for the main text it was fine but it completely broke everything that came out of the box on that CMS. Our job was to implement a CMS, not spend ten times their budget trying to rewrite it. But in the land of fairies and unicorns and clients with endless pockets I'm sure we would have... let me guess, you've defintively never done this for a living?
I don't think the OP understands the purpose of a markup language, a browser, or the idea the pages should render gracefully on different devices. And that's okay so long as he's not a Web developer.
Except that in practise they never do because you're mixing fixed size (images, banners, logos etc.) and dynamic size (text mostly) content and making sure that it always reflows well just doesn't happen. Of course you can blame the developers but it's a little like saying no buffer overflow is the language's fault, if all developers were perfect it wouldn't happen. Slashdot is one of extremely few sites that do it and it only works because slashdot is extremely simple, for example I just checked the five biggest online newspapers in Norway, 5/5 use fixed width. Anecdotally I would say that holds true for most complex websites.
Very often if you want it to work *well*, it probably can't be done automatically anyway. For example on these news sites, if you want to make a good mobile site you must make a narrower newspaper with less items side by side. You can somewhat do that with CSS trickery, but it won't look pretty because they mix on using 1/1, 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4th of the width and you would like to use a smaller version of some and to make sure each line fills up and so on. If sites did a few fixed versions and made sure they looked good you'd get 80% of the benefit with 20% of the headache.
Sometimes it just spirals way out of control. For example, i once had to deal with a calendar and users using IEs function to zoom text, it completely broke everything. Try making the days flow right in a dynamic way, but of course seven to a line like you expect and they need to align properly vertically despite numbers having different widths. Oh and it's in a sidebar that's fixed width, recode everything else too. Yeah right, in the end we took a screenshot of each day from 1-31 and made it out of images instead, that way you couldn't zoom it. Problem solved and nobody complained about the way it was solved. Fixed with is KISS, dynamic reflow is very hard and often for very little gain.
I don't know about the rest of the EU, but the Danish implementation of the directive requires ISPs to record what sites I visit.
I don't know if this is one of the requirements that are voluntary for the member states to implement, though.
It is, the directive only requires you log what IP a subscriber has. However, here too police have demanded you store email records, web records, IM records and whatnot.
Athiests - who think all religions are crap, and just hope people won't be jerks about their religions.
I disagree. They're all annoying when people use religious teachings as the basis of their argument, which is quite often even when they aren't jerks. To the rest of us, it's like arguing that cutting down the forest will kill the unicorns, it's a position that can't be reasoned with because it has no basis in reason. That's minor however compared to what really differentiates the religions.
Let's take adultery as an example. Huge breach of Christian and Muslim belief, in the ten commandments and lust is one of the seven deadly sins. What happens to you in most of the Christian world? Nothing - at least legally. Maybe God will send you downstairs for it, but that's for Him when the time comes. How is it to be a non-Christian in a Christian country? No problem. Now, in large parts of the Muslim world that'll get you death by stoning. Does it help if you're not a Muslim? Does it help if you renounce your religion and so is no longer bound by its rules? No.
That is what makes it scary, there's no real freedom of religion if you'll be punished by a different religion's law, including the freedom not to believe. That is what makes Islam a real threat, not religion in general. And to get back to where I started, you can't reason about Sharia because no secular argument will ever compare to the claim that it's dictated by Allah himself. It's not the spirituality in itself that is scary but it's the idea of religious law, judge, jury and executioner that frightens me. If Muslims let Allah do the judging, I wouldn't worry at all.
Note to self: Don't try to rewrite sentences without reading them again, the post by Yoda written look.
But you're also making the assumption that if the code was under the GPL would he have bothered to rewrite it since the sales value would have been near zero. There's no guarantee there'd be more open code using the GPL, there'd possibly be one less proprietary competitor but the Google explicitly released it under a license that permits it and I doubt they're so incompetent they didn't know it. If Google don't like it then it's their own mistake and they'll choose a better license next time. If they don't care, then this is just someone in the open source community being butthurt over code they didn't get the same way the MAFIAA is over a sale they didn't make.
I'm not sure those days ever left, Hollywood commissions a movie based on what they think people will pay for and so does this movie so what exactly is the difference there? I would probably even say that a huge group of tiny investors will have a much harder time agreeing to influence the production than one huge Hollywood studio, leaving more artistic freedom to the makers. However, I think that's also the downside, you have no idea what will come of your money. Can they start making it when $100,000 is in, risking they'll never reach the $200,000 goal? Will they stop midway, leaving the money spent and those that paid with nothing? Or do they wait until the money is in, make the crappiest cheapest movie they can and disappear? Promises are cheap, for example I bought some of the webisodes of Sanctuary, before they they got a contract with SyFy and reverted on all their promises that they would always be an online series with web releases equal or prior to any TV release. I call it a scam to pay their way through the pilot. Things will have to work a lot differently for this to succeed, I doubt "give us money please" will be enough.
This is like demanding all protests disperse because they are inconvenient to the security forces and because potentially the protest can grow violent and lives will be lost. You take a souped up meteorologist with an abstract possibility that he might find out something significant enough to save lives and make it sound like he's a paramedic on his way to save a wounded. Probably everyone in medicine can claim this much and more. So can everyone in construction by making houses not collapse. I'm sorry but throwing "it will save lives" into the ring on this one smells a lot like throwing "think of the children" in every time you want to strip some freedoms. It's only so marginally true that you could reduce the death count many other ways without making it even less of a free country.
With secure connections between peers so that 3rd parties can't see who's getting what, from where.
Like BitTorrent clients with encryption? As long as we are talking about an open network, you must presume that the 3rd parties are part of the system. Trying to prevent nodes in the system from finding out is very hard because you can do:
a) Pattern attacks, send a unique traffic pattern and follow it
b) Latency attacks, the faster you get replies the closer you are to the source.
c) Statistical attacks, gather where bits are coming from and follow it
The first two are a big problem for the website over proxynetwork model. The last is a big problem for distributed networks like Freenet, on upload too if it's a reinsert and you can predict all the keys that are coming. There are ways it can be fought but they often incur a huge cost in performance and usability.
P.S. If you ever thought goatse was bad, wait until you're on an anonymous network...
You really have to wonder though, if that market can be oversaturated. After all, porn changes the least over time so if there's already 100GB+ or 1TB+ of whatever fetish rocks your boat on the market, how much room is there for yet another standard flick with quite "standard" girls - for porn anyways?
I guess there'll always be the Jenna Jamesons but most of that market I think will disappear. At least here in Norway the two major production companies have folded, there's just not enough money in it. Porn is definitively a race to the bottom (pun intended).
Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization?
On the floor, then usually rolls under some file archive and gets lost. On a more serious note though, it's mostly outsourced but what's left is under Operations.
At least some of the estimates I've seen seem to have a very high degree of "if we could, we would". But look at us, we haven't been to the Moon in decades, we probably could go to Mars at some huge expense, but we don't. Now scale this up to interstellar distances and you're looking at an absurdly expensive project that quite probably never will pay off, and at least with current technology take many thousands of years to do. Of course that time is a blink of an eye on the universal timescale, but as a barrier to actually doing it that's huge. And even a self-sustained colony wouldn't be scaled to launch crafts of its own, perhaps if you had terraforming technology so that in time that colony could become another "earth" they could but that's also stuff of serious science fiction. Otherwise it'll never evolve past the home star and a small circle of colonies.