But you're not a master thief who pulled off some great robbery. You're opportunistic. This guy is not a cracker in any sense of the word. He guessed a password
I understand it's philosophy but you're one of few people I can discuss this with civilly and I never really understood how it could work.
In your philosophical idea, if the only fee and funding is the 1/2% of the total value of a contract, how does the government fund its military or court system? I find it very hard to believe that the 1/2% of a contract would be enough to fund even the small amount of government you think is moral.
Aside from that situation, without consumer protection laws such as the guarantee of being able to return defective products the result is a large separation between classes of people. Among many other problems that can arise. I'm curious how this all fits in with your philosophy.
Well, that is where we will have to depart in ideology. I don't see how government can exist without a mandatory tax of some kind and an across-the-board flat tax cannot possibly be fair in any way. It favors the rich over the poor whereas a progressive tax is fair.
I'm curious why you are against taxation or how you can believe that a government can function without a mandatory tax? It doesn't have to be an income tax, but there has to be some kind of mandatory taxation.
Isn't it obvious? I presume that Google, along with several other browsers, would refuse to ship with the runtime. They would instead point customers to Adobe's site to download the plugin. Granted it would be suicide for Adobe to do this considering that everyone is looking for a reason to remove flash support and that would universally give reason to the entire web to drop flash like a rock.
Wrong. If you distribute a decoder for h.264 video you must pay a licensing fee. Thus unless you're simply passing it off to the OS layer, if you incorporate the ability to play h.264 video directly in the browser you are including a decoder in the browser. Distributing the browser means you're distributing the decoder. If your browser gets more than 100,000 downloads you have to pay royalties.
You realize that as a result of the OpenScreen Project anyone can implement something that plays Flash video based on the open specs that are freely available without having to pay any royalties?
Removing licensing fees: Adobe is making the next major releases of Flash Player and AIR for devices royalty free — across all platforms, desktops, and devices — for Open Screen Project participants. Current products such as Adobe Flash Lite® software are not affected.
Providing a standard open framework, code named "Strobe", for creating Flash video players: Strobe code is expected to be released in Q3 2009. Strobe has a pluggable and extensible architecture and supports the workflows around video playback, like advertising and reporting, and enables the latest features of the Flash platform. Strobe will provide an open standard video player – production-ready code that can be incorporated into customers' websites.
Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player: The device porting layer APIs will enable Flash Player and Adobe AIR technologies to be delivered on devices without direct support from Adobe and will be published on the Adobe website when the APIs are finalized. More details will be available in the coming months.
If you could prove that you actually believe that are not just faking to get an insanity plea, then yea, that would qualify. Considering the amount of tests you'd get put through by psychologists, I doubt you'd get away with it though....
Not that I disagree that people say dumb shit on the internet, but both parties tend to support the rich and not the working class. And when someone does try to support the working class, it tends not to be the RIght, aka. Tax Cuts for the rich
What about when you're shipping a browser or some other software that needs to embed a decoder? Then if you're getting millions of downloads, you're paying millions per year. When you're talking about free software like Firefox and Opera, they don't have the money to spend millions per year. If you're a small company trying to make a product that licensing fee is by no means trivial.
You miss the point though. What if someone had an idea to innovate and wanted to implement a better H264 encoder/decoder? They are restricted from distributing their innovation unless they also negotiate with the MPEG-LA. Thus if they are a small group of people who have no bartering power, why would the MPEG-LA let them? They have their scheme with x264. The small player gets locked out and innovation becomes stifled.
Isn't the desire to snuff out WebM and only use H.264, threatening it that it might infringe on patents or otherwise an attempt to stifle the innovation that created the new codec?
WebM is fully open. And WebM is demonstrably just as good as H.264 Main Profile. Currently there are many hardware manufacturers working on the next generation of hardware having WebM embedded in them. So while yes, you do have all the current devices that are in people's hands to compete with, it's not like it would be impossible for WebM to get the same amount of penetration.
They could always build the support for WebM directly into the browser. Unlike h.264, they wouldn't have to pay anything to do that.:) and no plugin, yay
However distributing a decoder is not free regardless whether you distribute it for free. So:
1) Google pays nothing for Youtube to show videos using mp4, h.264 etc.
2) Google would have been paying over $6 million annually to be able to distribute the h.264 support in Chrome. Thus they save themselves a lot of money.
3) This is on top of whatever they had to pay for distributing non-commercial videos.
Theora has been "claimed" to be infringing on H.264 patents for years and to date no one has found a single one, filed a lawsuit, or otherwise successfully proved the claim. I, for one, don't think they ever will.
The terms are very clear, only if you make more than x amount of money (somewhere in the neighbourhood of a few hundred thousand dollars) you have to pay a very reasonable royalty fee as a compensation for using the work done by the MPEG group and ITU. I don't see what's wrong with that.
You're only talking about products that were encoded with h.264. The actual encoders and decoders are NOT free for non-commercial use. If Firefox or Opera included H.264 support in their browser they would have royalty fees at around $6.5 million due to the number of downloads they get (it goes by units shipped, not by income). Therefore it is not feasible for Firefox or Opera to include it for financial reasons. As for Google, aside from this move saving them quite a bit of money by not having to pay for a license for their free browser, they are supporting a royalty free codec, that happens to be one they purchased and continue to develop. It's also an open codec with the specifications posted.
For H.264 to develop an encoder or decoder you must pay to distribute it once you pass 100,000 units (downloads). For WebM there is no royalty no matter what. Hmm.....who's spreading FUD?
Except you can change your settings to view these posts of 0 or lower thus they are not invisible nor censored. You have chosen yourself that you do not want to view them and you want to ignore them. Sure you can consider it a form of "voluntary censorship" but that's not a problem. If I do not want to read something, I am not censoring the writer by choosing not to read it myself.
Flash player is free to download and free to develop for. Adobe charges for its own flash development software but anyone can make software for it. Adobe has published the file spec. Thus distributing a browser with the built in flash plugin, as far as I know, does not require payment to Adobe.
Except that a company distributing a flash plugin wouldn't have to pay Adobe a helluva lot of money, whereas a company that distributes an h.264 decoder has to pay a damn lot of money for a license.
Except they only got the key for the metLdr which is not sufficient for piracy. Using similar techniques to what they did they COULD get the keys for piracy, but explicitly decided against it and said so when asked. It's like suing someone who put instructions to copy a key online because someone else copied your key and broken into your house.
This is a falsehood. People didn't start trying to crack the PS3 until Sony removed the Other OS feature. It only took about 10 - 12 months to crack the PS3, which is not unusual.
Slashdot Mirror
But you're not a master thief who pulled off some great robbery. You're opportunistic. This guy is not a cracker in any sense of the word. He guessed a password
Except that the judge reccomended he be placed in a halfway house. Which would have been closer and less restrictive.
I understand it's philosophy but you're one of few people I can discuss this with civilly and I never really understood how it could work.
In your philosophical idea, if the only fee and funding is the 1/2% of the total value of a contract, how does the government fund its military or court system? I find it very hard to believe that the 1/2% of a contract would be enough to fund even the small amount of government you think is moral.
Aside from that situation, without consumer protection laws such as the guarantee of being able to return defective products the result is a large separation between classes of people. Among many other problems that can arise. I'm curious how this all fits in with your philosophy.
Well, that is where we will have to depart in ideology. I don't see how government can exist without a mandatory tax of some kind and an across-the-board flat tax cannot possibly be fair in any way. It favors the rich over the poor whereas a progressive tax is fair.
I'm curious why you are against taxation or how you can believe that a government can function without a mandatory tax? It doesn't have to be an income tax, but there has to be some kind of mandatory taxation.
Isn't it obvious? I presume that Google, along with several other browsers, would refuse to ship with the runtime. They would instead point customers to Adobe's site to download the plugin. Granted it would be suicide for Adobe to do this considering that everyone is looking for a reason to remove flash support and that would universally give reason to the entire web to drop flash like a rock.
Wrong. If you distribute a decoder for h.264 video you must pay a licensing fee. Thus unless you're simply passing it off to the OS layer, if you incorporate the ability to play h.264 video directly in the browser you are including a decoder in the browser. Distributing the browser means you're distributing the decoder. If your browser gets more than 100,000 downloads you have to pay royalties.
You realize that as a result of the OpenScreen Project anyone can implement something that plays Flash video based on the open specs that are freely available without having to pay any royalties?
Something has changed: there's a viable alternative in WebM.
FF already has WebM :)
If you could prove that you actually believe that are not just faking to get an insanity plea, then yea, that would qualify. Considering the amount of tests you'd get put through by psychologists, I doubt you'd get away with it though....
Not that I disagree that people say dumb shit on the internet, but both parties tend to support the rich and not the working class. And when someone does try to support the working class, it tends not to be the RIght, aka. Tax Cuts for the rich
What about when you're shipping a browser or some other software that needs to embed a decoder? Then if you're getting millions of downloads, you're paying millions per year. When you're talking about free software like Firefox and Opera, they don't have the money to spend millions per year. If you're a small company trying to make a product that licensing fee is by no means trivial.
You miss the point though. What if someone had an idea to innovate and wanted to implement a better H264 encoder/decoder? They are restricted from distributing their innovation unless they also negotiate with the MPEG-LA. Thus if they are a small group of people who have no bartering power, why would the MPEG-LA let them? They have their scheme with x264. The small player gets locked out and innovation becomes stifled.
Isn't the desire to snuff out WebM and only use H.264, threatening it that it might infringe on patents or otherwise an attempt to stifle the innovation that created the new codec?
WebM is fully open. And WebM is demonstrably just as good as H.264 Main Profile. Currently there are many hardware manufacturers working on the next generation of hardware having WebM embedded in them. So while yes, you do have all the current devices that are in people's hands to compete with, it's not like it would be impossible for WebM to get the same amount of penetration.
Chrome, Firefox, and Opera
They could always build the support for WebM directly into the browser. Unlike h.264, they wouldn't have to pay anything to do that. :) and no plugin, yay
However distributing a decoder is not free regardless whether you distribute it for free. So:
1) Google pays nothing for Youtube to show videos using mp4, h.264 etc.
2) Google would have been paying over $6 million annually to be able to distribute the h.264 support in Chrome. Thus they save themselves a lot of money.
3) This is on top of whatever they had to pay for distributing non-commercial videos.
Theora has been "claimed" to be infringing on H.264 patents for years and to date no one has found a single one, filed a lawsuit, or otherwise successfully proved the claim. I, for one, don't think they ever will.
The terms are very clear, only if you make more than x amount of money (somewhere in the neighbourhood of a few hundred thousand dollars) you have to pay a very reasonable royalty fee as a compensation for using the work done by the MPEG group and ITU. I don't see what's wrong with that.
You're only talking about products that were encoded with h.264. The actual encoders and decoders are NOT free for non-commercial use. If Firefox or Opera included H.264 support in their browser they would have royalty fees at around $6.5 million due to the number of downloads they get (it goes by units shipped, not by income). Therefore it is not feasible for Firefox or Opera to include it for financial reasons. As for Google, aside from this move saving them quite a bit of money by not having to pay for a license for their free browser, they are supporting a royalty free codec, that happens to be one they purchased and continue to develop. It's also an open codec with the specifications posted.
For H.264 to develop an encoder or decoder you must pay to distribute it once you pass 100,000 units (downloads). For WebM there is no royalty no matter what. Hmm.....who's spreading FUD?
Except you can change your settings to view these posts of 0 or lower thus they are not invisible nor censored. You have chosen yourself that you do not want to view them and you want to ignore them. Sure you can consider it a form of "voluntary censorship" but that's not a problem. If I do not want to read something, I am not censoring the writer by choosing not to read it myself.
Flash player is free to download and free to develop for. Adobe charges for its own flash development software but anyone can make software for it. Adobe has published the file spec. Thus distributing a browser with the built in flash plugin, as far as I know, does not require payment to Adobe.
Except that a company distributing a flash plugin wouldn't have to pay Adobe a helluva lot of money, whereas a company that distributes an h.264 decoder has to pay a damn lot of money for a license.
Except they only got the key for the metLdr which is not sufficient for piracy. Using similar techniques to what they did they COULD get the keys for piracy, but explicitly decided against it and said so when asked. It's like suing someone who put instructions to copy a key online because someone else copied your key and broken into your house.
This is a falsehood. People didn't start trying to crack the PS3 until Sony removed the Other OS feature. It only took about 10 - 12 months to crack the PS3, which is not unusual.
Hmm....PNG was originally introduced as a replacement for GIF because it was higher quality and did not require a patent license.....