XP and Win 7 trade first place back and forth on test after test and the ones that XP wins is frankly by a VERY small amount
Those are not really the right sort of benchmarks to show OS differences. The fact that they're so close together is pretty clear evidence of that. For one thing, they're running the tests one at a time, whereas the real test comes when you're running several programs at once which collectively use 85% of the physical memory in the machine and it comes down to whether the OS itself is using 15% or 25%.
On top of that, Maximum PC managed to invalidate their entire series of tests by using the 64-bit version of Windows 7 against the 32-bit version of Windows XP: You end up measuring the benefit of having twice as many general purpose registers and the other architectural improvements that come with the x86-64 ISA against the cost of making pointers twice as big.
which when you consider that honestly WinXP doesn't really DO much of anything when compared to Win 7, which has performance measuring and superfetch and a new GPU accelerated subsystem all going on at the same time that they were able to make them switch back and forth like that is pretty impressive.
It sounds to me like the thing that isn't very impressive is all the whiz bang superfetch stuff, since it can't even consistently show a performance improvement, even with the advantage of a better ISA.
On top of that, those features are primarily only relevant to faster machines with more memory: They're designed to take advantage of the fact that you have 8GB of RAM you aren't using for anything. But when the question is which performs well on slower processors with less memory, as is the case for ARM devices, none of that stuff is going to help -- you can't prefetch a 512MB program into 512MB of memory, and if you try you're going to end up evicting things you probably didn't want to.
As for Linux honestly i wouldn't even bring it up in discussion because if anything its like WinXP Mini or one of those other hacked all to bits OSes. Sure they have gotten pretty good on initial install but frankly do an in place upgrade or two (which you HAVE to do, because its length of support even on LTS is frankly like a bad joke) and then the thing quickly falls apart.
Have you ever actually done an in place upgrade? They occasionally break something, but there is no material performance difference between an upgraded system and a fresh install. And even when something breaks, the fix is easy: You back up/home and you do a fresh install. It takes about an hour once every two years.
if you are willing to invest the time in learning ALL its quirks, learning to do everything the way IT wants it done
Your anti-Linux arguments are cliche and outdated. Sure, if you run Slackware or Gentoo you have to futz with a million things to get it working... so don't. Use Ubuntu. The stock configuration will almost always find all your hardware and get you on the internet... and these days what more do you need?
Sorry, wasn't the driver unless you are saying MSFT can't code a driver to save their lives, that we may agree on.
I don't think Microsoft generally writes their own drivers for third party hardware, they just get a driver from the manufacturer and certify it. And the fact that other users experienced the same thing is unsurprising: If the drivers for extremely common hardware are crap then everybody is going to have problems because they've all got the same crap drivers.
if you had Intel NIC you were fine, Realtek or Nvidia, you were boned.
...which should only really happen if the drivers are crap. (Or if the hardware is, but it seems to work fine under XP and Linux.) If it was the OS itself then using a different brand of NIC should have no effect.
And when you have 8Gb of RAM and 6 cores the amount of time it does take to load so little is frankly disappointing.
Sure, if you have 8GB of RAM and 6 cores. But the ARM devices don't.
compare the same situation with XP Sp3 and you'll find on first boot its sucking 342Mb of RAM and beating swap like a pimp that ain't got his money.
False. I got my XP machine out of the closet to check and on boot it uses 150MB, which is 50MB less than you allege for Windows 7.
And no even remotely sane OS (including XP) will do any swapping whatsoever until you've exhausted physical memory, so I don't know what you're talking about.
NOTHING frankly runs great on a netburst Celeron
I've actually found that they run Linux pretty well. Mind you no one would mistake one for a fast machine, but you don't get the conspicuous hesitations that you do with Windows. I can only speculate as to the reason but I guess the code is just better optimized to run on a processor with less cache.
While this is a great effort, and I really congratulate the Tor proyect for all that they've done and continue to do, this still is nowhere close to the solution on the real issue here: governments that over and over again limit people's freedom of speech and privacy.
That is sort of missing the big picture. Yes, you have to fight governments that oppress and censor... but this is one of the ways you do it. It's a lot easier to convince someone that censorship is wrong if it is, in any event, totally ineffective -- because you take away any possible upside. It no longer becomes a weighing of the benefits of censorship against its costs, because the benefits are destroyed by developing this type of technology. Censorship becomes something that has only costs, and there ceases to be any incentive for a self-interested government to impose it.
Be afraid of the brain (i.e. money that buys the machine controls) actually realizing what's going on.
That might not be such a bad thing, actually. Think about whose interests the state department is supporting by producing these tools: The US military and defense contractors, the CIA and NSA, oil companies... Remember all that talk about how much bigger the tech industry is than the entertainment industry? Look at the size of the defense and intelligence industry sometime.
I ran Vista on what was a pretty nice machine at the time, an Intel Pentium D 2.66Ghz, 2Gb of RAM, and a Geforce 7600GS and the thing was a dog, it would have "senior moments" and forget the network shares and not see them before being rebooted, would drag down the entire system when doing simple multitasking like watching a movie while doing a file transfer, and this was seen all the way through SP1 which is when i finally gave up on the POS. Now that exact same machine is running Win 7 Home and has been since Oct 09, and its fast, it runs great on the network, nothing about the hardware has been changed, still the same Pentium D, still the same GPU, same everything but when I use that machine its like night and day.
It sounds to me like you had driver problems with Vista. The symptoms you're describing sound like a bad NIC or GPU driver. Obviously the driver situation has improved somewhat with Windows 7, but compare Windows 7 with Windows XP on the same hardware and the slowness of Windows 7 is readily apparent.
I would also point out that the Pentium D was the fastest Netburst architecture processor ever sold (excluding the couple of Pentium EE-branded chips that were just higher clocked Pentium Ds), and were really not all that slow, they just ran very hot. Your 2.66GHz Pentium D is something like twice as fast as the fastest ARM chips sold today, maybe more. Compare that to a lot of the machines sold with Vista on Prescott-based Celeron Ds: The Pentium D has 16 times as much L2 cache (4MB vs. 256KB), and the fact that cache misses are so expensive on Netburst was one of the main reasons it had such low IPC. Both Vista and Windows 7 run like a dog on Netburst Celerons. And yet the Celeron D is still a fair amount faster than current ARM processors.
And what person is gonna want a Win 8 ARM that doesn't run Windows programs?
I don't think anybody is disagreeing with you on that one. It boggles the mind who they think their target market is. "Windows on ARM: The performance of ARM combined with the polish of first generation Microsoft products and the software support of NetBSD."
It remains to be seen how long the momentum of more-or-less-open x86 IBM compatibles will carry them into the future; but so long as the legacy/in-house/custom demand is there, they'll be hard to kill entirely. However, I'd say that it is "outlook not so good" for open platforms any time somebody starts a new one from scratch...
I don't think the in-house and custom software is going to save anything, because the large majority of new business applications have the application itself running in the data center and the users access it through a web interface. And legacy software is replaced by new stuff the more time passes.
But I don't think the future is as bleak as all that, for different reasons. The largest impetus for closed platforms comes from the wireless carriers who want to make sure you aren't doing anything as unscrupulous as making a VOIP phone call over WiFi without paying them for minutes, and who subsidize your phone and in so doing become the "customer" of the device who gets to decide how open it is.
Here's the thing: I expect that inside of five years, flip phones are going to be almost completely dead. Tomorrow's top end Android handsets will still be ~$500, but today's will be $50. Some handset maker who still has a tooled factory churning out "obsolete" phones will realize that with nothing more than a software patch, they can sell them retail as WiFi-only devices that still make phone calls and browse the 'net as long as you're at work, at home, at school or anywhere else that has WiFi. The poorest customers will quickly realize that $50 or $100 once is much less expensive than $50/month indefinitely, even if it means they can't make calls in their cars, and many will do that. The carriers will then realize they're getting $0/month from these customers and that if they offered a cheap bring-your-own-device plan, they could be making $20 or $30/month from customers who by and large don't actually tax the cellular network because they use WiFi 90% of the time, and a big chunk of those people will pay that so their phones will work in their cars etc. And so will a big chunk of the people who had been buying subsidized phones, who realize that $500 once + $30/month is a lot cheaper than $200 once + $100/month. (The savings for everyone comes from the fact that you're taking a massive load off of the cell towers and putting it on DSL and cable lines where adding bandwidth doesn't require outbidding everyone else for finite wireless spectrum.)
With any luck that will be the end of carrier device subsidies and with it the end of locked boot loaders etc. Even the carriers seem to be looking for a way out of subsidizing premium devices for most of their customers. But do that and you open the door back up for innovation: Once people no longer need carrier approval to sell Android and other Linux-based devices that work away from home, you have the possibility of things like the Spark tablet or whatever Canonical feels like producing start to take hold, which can easily be made to run both Android apps and Linux native apps, and you can see the possibility of an open platform gaining a sigificant foothold. Not to mention whatever products come out of Google buying Motorola Mobility.
If that happens then Microsoft will have to decide whether to go the Apple route and try to keep their ARM platform closed, or stick with their traditional forte and open it up. And I kind of feel like there isn't any room in the market for more than one Apple.
Does that really surprise anyone? Half the failure of Vista was because it was too slow. Windows 7 isn't really any faster, it's just that we now have Core processors with 4GB+ of RAM instead of Pentium 4s with ~1GB.
But current ARM processors are slower than late model Pentium 4s and have less memory. What did people expect was going to happen?
Do you want to lower your carbon impact on this planet? Have less children. Contributing to negative population growth is the greenest thing you can do.
You're doing it wrong. What you have to do is convince global warming skeptics and Sarah Palin fans to have less children. If you have less children, the next generation has one less citizen brought up in a socially responsible household. If they have less children, the next generation has one less pickup-driving NASCAR fan.
Pick a single scene - 30 seconds or so, and give it over to the "algorithmic rendering department" for millions of variations to be produced. Not today, maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now I think it will be easy if they want to.
Oh sure, maybe in a few decades it wouldn't be computationally infeasible, but that's assuming those decades don't bring anything the pirates can use to break it. Making predictions that far out is pretty futile.
Not to mention, there is no type of individualized watermarking that can't be defeated by a prepaid (or, failing that, stolen) credit card. And you only need one single copy for the whole system to break.
Hundreds - plural - and one engineer working full time on encryption schemes that include security by obscurity should be able to stay a couple of years ahead of the rabble trying to break him.
They haven't been able to so far. It's not like the idea of DRM is new. I imagine they already have a bunch of engineers on staff. They release it, people hate it, it gets broken, they release something new... but at the end of the day, there are still high definition rips of new releases on pirate websites.
All cryptography is breakable, it's just a matter of how long it takes.
That's not really true. RSA is what, going on 35 years old now? All we've got is some speculation that in theory a quantum computer could be built with enough qubits to break it, but maybe not. DES only really failed because the keyspace was too small -- a couple of attacks weakened it, but even knowing then what we know now, you couldn't have broken DES in a realistic amount of time using hardware available the year it was approved as a standard (1976). As far as I'm aware no one has ever cracked 3DES to this day.
The problem for Hollywood is that what they're engaged in isn't cryptography. It's just obfuscation. There is no keyspace margin of safety. There is no NP hard problem to solve. It's only a matter of simple (though tedious) reverse engineering.
Your only rationale seems to be that you can't accept a world in which there are companies other than patent trolls making money off of patents.
A patent troll is defined as a company that makes money off of [licensing] patents. You are trying to make a frivolous technical argument that because you make a nominal product that you are not a troll. But how does being a leech instead of a troll help your case? You are still sucking money out of the R&D fund of a competitor who has proven that they can offer more value for money to prospective customers than you can, by the simple fact that they are the ones making the sales for which you receive royalties.
Notice how your behavior differs from e.g. pharmaceutical companies, who are not trolls and leeches: When they patent something, they use the patent to exclude competitors from the patented market and collect the monopoly rent that was given them as the reward for their invention. You, and do correct me if I'm wrong, but like all software patent holders, you wait until an innocent competitor has implemented your "invention" not knowing it was patented, or you have the patent inserted into an industry standard, and then once you have the competition over a barrel because they have shipped or must ship infringing units, you "negotiate" a license agreement. That's patent trolling, I don't care if you ship a few dozen copies of some nominal product in the same market.
Describing physical constraints in software does not become easier, require less costly R&D, or cease to be innovative.
"Describing" physical constraints is not invention, it is a statement of fact. Creating something that usefully operates within them can be, but software imposes no such constraints other than those of mathematics itself, and math is not patentable. It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D, the first person to "invent" calculus isn't allowed to patent it.
Video codecs are very complex. There are decades old codecs that haven't been reverse-engineered, and when they do, it's only for playback.
Lots of things are very complex. A disassembler doesn't much mind the complexity. Moreover, you reverse engineer the decoder from the decoder and the encoder from the encoder. In theory you can try to keep the encoder private, but you can't very well sell it to anyone but refuse to give it to them.
As for old codecs that haven't been reverse engineered, no. There are no codecs that are better than all existing codecs but have not been reverse engineered. And the fact that they aren't better is the obvious reason why no one has bothered to reverse engineer them.
On top of all that, you're still ignoring that most of this research is done by universities. It gets published. It doesn't have to be reverse engineered.
It's hard work. You've clearly never done any of it. How great that you can assume others will do all kinds of hard work for you...
Do people often tell you to go fuck yourself? Because I bet they wouldn't do it as often if you weren't such a tool.
Except they didn't do that at all. They bought the company for other reasons, and happened to get a codec for free. The FSF and others had to publicly urge Google to release it.
On2 is a codec company. All they do is codecs. "The FSF and others" had urged them to open source the codec before they actually did so, but it was my understanding that that was their intention the whole time and they didn't announce it sooner because they had to do their homework first to make sure what they released wasn't infringing any known patents. What evidence do you have to the contrary? For that matter, what possible other reason would they have to buy a codec company other than for its codecs?
If you're paying several million in patent license fees, it makes lots of sense to pay a few million to develop an
Furthermore, what happens when the security's price goes down? Does everyone holding it get a rebate?
The same thing as happens if you had actually sold them at a loss: You get a capital loss that can be used to offset other capital gains either this year or in some recent or future year.
wealth tax
It's not a wealth tax. A wealth tax is when you pay based on how much stuff you own, like property tax. "Mark to market" just eliminates deferred realization of gains: If you have stock you paid $60 for and at the end of the year it's still worth $60, you pay no tax even though you have $60 in assets. If the stock goes up to $80, you don't pay tax on $80, you pay tax on $20. And you only pay it once. If it goes up to $80 this year but next year it stays at $80 the whole year, you only pay tax on $20 this year and nothing next year.
The difference between mark to market and what we have now is that if your stock goes up from $60 to $80, right now you don't pay any tax on the gain until you actually sell the stock.
The problem with mark to market is exactly what Scareduck points out: If you own e.g. a shopping mall, or any other small business, and the value of the business goes up, you may not have any cash with which to pay the taxes without selling the business itself. But that problem is basically solved by only subjecting those in the top 0.1% to the tax: Anybody who has that much money would be an idiot not to have diversified investments, and forcing somebody to sell 1.5% of their diversified stock holdings following a 10% increase in their value is nothing like as problematic as forcing a small business owner to sell an ownership stake in the family business.
It also has the advantage of eliminating the inefficiency caused by deferring realization: People who have owned an asset that has appreciated substantially while they've owned it have a large incentive not to sell it, even if doing so would otherwise be highly cost effective, because it would require them to immediately pay the taxes due on it. By making the taxes due immediately no matter what, you lose the incentive to make the inefficient choice (at least for people rich enough to have to pay immediately).
The problem I'm seeing with it is that the measures people take to try to get around it could be economically damaging: If there are any assets not included in program, or that are included but whose value is difficult to measure and it ends up being measured consistently too high or too low, you would see people over and under investing in those things substantially. You could also get quite a lot of capital flight if there is no other way to avoid the tax, and if there is another way to avoid it then you won't raise a fraction of the revenue you think you will because everybody will do that.
I don't know how easy/hard it is to forge a WoW account, but they seem to still be making plenty of money with their "phone home scheme."
That's because it isn't a "phone home scheme" -- it's a different business model. They're selling a service rather than software.
Practical stenography would be something in the middle of those two, perhaps a CG scene of a pleated curtain blowing in the wind where the relative wide-narrow relationship of the pleats across a hundred frames varies differently according to the serial number, or a 30 second fire-fight scene where the relative timing of the gunshots is dithered by the serial number.
Are you serious? They're obviously not going to re-film the scene for every single user, and even re-rendering a CG scene would be prohibitively expensive.
I'm struggling to imagine any sort of steganographic scheme that wouldn't be defeated by getting several copies with that many different serial numbers and either just merging them together or at worst using the differences between them to identify the scheme being used and reverse engineer it.
Even if _you_ have a cracked (open source, or whatever) player that doesn't phone home, some fool that copies your movie will play it on a player that does phone home.
An open source player is released that uses its own file format and files are distributed in that format.
Plus, if the proprietary players themselves (rather than some flatfoots with secret software) are checking the serial numbers then reverse engineering the players to figure out how to remove the serial numbers becomes substantially easier.
Studios are spending hundreds of millions a year on production, if they put even 0.1% of that resource into a technical creative stenography effort, they can stay well ahead of attempts to crack them.
0.1% of a hundred million dollars is a hundred thousand dollars. That's substantially less than the salary and benefits necessary to hire even a single decent programmer for a year. Then you release a scheme and you have a million half time pirates and a thousand full time university professors trying to break it. Somehow I think it's a losing battle.
Freenet (and similar concepts) have been around a long time, it doesn't have nearly the social adoption rate of Napster
The reason people don't use Freenet isn't that it's hard to use. (Even if you think it is, there is no inherent reason that it has to be.) The reason is that it's slow. Nobody wants to spend two days downloading a movie they can get in thirty minutes on BitTorrent.
Now ask yourself what happens when people have connections that are a hundred times faster than those of today. The two days turns into thirty minutes. OK, so people will still want to use BitTorrent, because then BitTorrent will take thirty seconds instead of thirty minutes. And they will, as long as they can. But if you somehow make it so they can't, they'll use Freenet or something like it, because tomorrow's Freenet will be as fast as today's BitTorrent.
We make lots of real hardware, and lots of real software... we are not a patent troll. However, the top executives love software patents, because they are about 90% profit.
It sounds to me like you are a patent troll. If you actually made products then you would be the ones paying the license fees rather than collecting them, which leaves you in an approximate break even situation. Certainly that is inherently the situation industry wide: The average software company has a negative ROI from the existence of software patents, because every license fee collected by anyone is paid by someone else, and some of the recipients are patent trolls, which means that the system is necessarily a net negative for the companies that actually make software: The payments between software companies are breakeven on an industry level and the payments to trolls are deadweight losses.
We're somehow fine with the extensive R&D that has gone into mechanical engineering being patentable, but as soon as you can replace these with digital systems, the same R&D effort is no longer protected in many countries. It makes no sense
It makes perfect sense. Hardware has physical constraints, software is pure abstract math. You can't patent math -- and for good reason. I'm sure Einstein worked very hard on E=mc^2, but explaining how fusion works doesn't give you any right to exclude people from using sunlight.
it's just going to drive us back to a proprietary world, where everything is fiercly protected as trade secrets, and anything open is a thing of the past.
How do you expect trade secrets to be maintained within software that is distributed to the general public?
The most "pure" use case for software patents is MPEG. They wouldn't represent the best technology companies around the world have to offer, if software implementations could not be capitalized upon. And don't tell me about free software... Theora and WebM were both developed by On2, which made its money with proprietary codecs which could be licensed for less than patent licenses for the MPEG technologies. If not for software patents, we probably wouldn't have made it past Cinepak, or MPEG-1 at best, before falling back into proprietary-only solutions.
What are you talking about? You can't have a "proprietary" video codec without software patents. It would get reverse engineered inside of two weeks. On top of that, most of the codec research is done by universities rather than private companies.
But never mind that, let's talk about On2. If Google found it cost effective to pay the money (in the form of buying the company) to develop a new codec so that it would be available for everyone to use for free, what makes you think they wouldn't have done the same thing without software patents? If anything the free codec would have been better, because it wouldn't have had to make intentionally inefficient choices specifically to avoid the MPEG patent pool.
The biggest source of lobbying for software patents are companies like MS and groups like the Business Software Alliance
What makes you think they want software patents? They're the ones having to pay record damage awards to patent trolls. At best they're agnostic.
Granted Microsoft has been getting into the patent trolling business with Android to some extent, but that isn't evidence of software companies wanting software patents, it's evidence of patent trolls wanting them: Any company that collects more revenue from patent licensing than they do from selling their own software is no longer a software company.
You need a Java developer. And an Oracle DBA. And a Linux admin. And a Windows server admin. And someone to babysit your NetApp. And a network admin. And a.NET person. And on, and on, and on.
I don't understand what a list of job titles has anything to do with it? Obviously some companies hire a lot of techs, but it's not at all for the same reason that they have to hire a bunch of lawyers. The techs each do something productive. The lawyers only exist to cancel out the other side's lawyers: You don't have to hire another Java developer just because one of your competitors hired another Java developer. You do generally have to hire more patent lawyers if one of your competitors hires more patent lawyers.
Let me summarise as simply as possible: lawyers provide advice and speak on your behalf in defending your rights under the law. That's all they do.
No, they do one other thing, which is the thing people hate them for: They self-replicate. If you encounter a lawyer, you need to get your own lawyer to deal with them. When it turns out that your lawyer has a conflict of interest, you need another lawyer to take on the work the first lawyer had, the lawyer's other client that created the conflict needs another lawyer for the same reason, you then need a different kind of lawyer to consider going after the first lawyer for malpractice for not disclosing the conflict, your old lawyer needs his own lawyer to defend against the possible malpractice claim, on and on. By the time you're the size of Google you're drowning in a sea of lawyers.
While it's true that the legislature is in part responsible for the laws that result in anyone attempting to do business in this country needing to hire an entire division of attorneys, the attorneys themselves are the ones who lobby to keep it that way.
I'll give you an example: Software patents. The strongest lobby preventing software patents from being eliminated is the software patent lawyers. Larger software companies hate them (because of patent trolls), smaller software companies hate them (because it allows larger companies to crush them), individual software engineers hate them (because it's all a giant waste of time). The only people who want them are patent lawyers and patent trolling companies that are full of patent lawyers.
It's a pretty big stretch to call a company logo an "advertisement". If that were the case, then why do TV networks carry ads for other companies? Why don't they just put their own logo everywhere, and advertise themselves only?
Obviously because there comes a saturation point past which the value of selling the ad space is more than the value of further advertising of one product to the same prospective customers: It's the same reason that GM buys one or two ad slots on each network rather than 100% of the ad slots on a single network.
In addition to that, the context is different. If you're already watching CNN, an ad for CNN isn't very effective: Anybody who sees the ad is already watching CNN; there is little prospect to convert new users. By contrast, the maps API gets used by other websites, whose users may not already be users of Google products, who are exactly the users that Google would like to get their name in front of. This also explains why they would want to charge money to high volume sites: It doesn't cost them any less to serve a hundred thousand maps across a thousand different websites than to serve them all to the users of a single site, but in the latter case there may be less diversity in the user population: Better that a hundred thousand unique users each see the map than only a thousand users see it a hundred times each.
Expecting tons of people to click on a Google logo on a website's embedded map is a bit silly.
Why does it have to be tons of people? The cost of serving the maps is totally trivial. Even an extremely low conversion rate would be enough to cover the cost.
Intelligence? Talent? By definition, 50% of the population is below average in intelligence.
Intelligence and talent are both a combination of genetics and education. For most people the problem is not genetics: Look at the children who are adopted into affluent families.
For the remainder, not every non-manual job is rocket surgery. John Travolta is a lunatic Scientologist, but Pulp Fiction is nonetheless a great movie.
I draw a distinction between "warez" privately shared on hard encrypted links and Napster style public posting of well known works "in the clear" for all to access. The former may go on for a very long time, but the latter is already shorter lived today than it was 10 years ago, and there will probably come a day when it is not practical to go to a search engine, and find and download any piece of pop culture (music, videos, etc.) at will. What I am saying is that using the public internet to get pirated/bootlegged content from people you don't know is the thing that's going to become increasingly difficult, and well nigh impossible in another 100 years, assuming society itself lasts that long.
What I'm saying is that the distinction you're drawing will be short-lived. You can operate something in the nature of TOR or Freenet in such a way that you can obtain any data that exists on the entire network without making a direct connection to any node not operated by someone you personally know and trust. Doing it that way is very slow, which is why today hardly anybody does it, but "slow" goes away as time passes and networks become faster and cheaper.
Encryption, too, may fall to quantum computing, and quantum computers will be prohibitively expensive for some time after they arrive. During that era, I wouldn't be surprised if "the authorities" "read the mail" and censor protected works from transit on the public internet. Of course, you can still trade memory chips with your friends, but that's a far cry from Napster style distribution.
Quantum computing doesn't break symmetric encryption, it only requires you to use keys that are twice as long (which is no big deal). It does ostensibly break public key cryptography, but that primarily hurts banks and the like who can no longer distribute keys as easily. For pirates who almost inherently have to distribute keys using side channels it has minimal consequence.
Also, I will be surprised if distributed digital works don't start carrying stenographic serial numbers unique to the purchaser within the next 20 years... so, you can give your friend a copy, but if he gives it to 2 friends and they each give it to 2 friends, etc., it will have your identifying information embedded in it. Yes, there will be stenographic stripper programs, then stealthier stenography, etc. etc. in an ever escalating arms race, just like software serial numbers, but, just like software and more recently video games, expect your new media to "check in with the cloud" before operating properly, even if there is no good reason for it to.
You can't really use steganography for that. Embedding data within an image or audio file requires you to change how it is rendered for the user. You can "see" all the changes made if you look closely enough at all the individual pixels. As a result you almost have to use the least significant bit(s), e.g. you have a bunch of 16-bit numbers and you encode using the least significant bit, because generally the color represented by 18,552 is so close to the color represented by 18,553 that the difference is immaterial. Flipping any of the more significant bits would alter the image in an unacceptable way: The color represented by 16,388 is not at all the same as the color represented by 4. But such steganographic data can then be trivially removed just by randomizing the least significant bits.
In addition to that, a motion picture or audio file can't "phone home" in the same way that a game can. The game is software. You can't convert a game into an MP4 file and still have a game. You can convert any song or movie into an MP3 or MP4 and there will be nothing left to phone home. (This even before considering that most games with phone home nonsense have been cracked.)
How would we know? When patents are discussed around here they're assumed to be six words long, mainly because not one person here has ever actually read any of the patents in question. If we can't do that, then no, we cannot agree the patent system is idiotic We actually have to understand it, first.
I don't think reading the patents is the problem. If you look at individual patents then you will undoubtedly find some that are reasonable and have narrow claims (though generally nobody infringes those) and others that take the form "{thing the Post Office has done for 200 years} but on the internet" or "{thing secretaries have done for 500 years} but on a phone."
The thing is, the individual patents have never been the problem. The problem is that each major company has thousands of patents on thousands of possible features, and each product has thousands of features. Some overlap in the two sets is inevitable, so you have a situation where everybody is infringing everything. Which means that whenever a company starts to fail in the marketplace, or just feels like being a dick, they can bog down the entire industry in a series of multimillion dollar lawsuits and there is no cost-effective precaution that anyone can take to inoculate themselves against it. Or if a company fails entirely and gets liquidated, its patents can end up in the hands of trolls who use them to extort money from the people who actually make stuff.
Even when things are working "well," the result is merely that everyone cross-licenses one another and all the money spent on patent prosecution and license negotiations for thousands of patents only goes to cancel out the money wasted by the other guy on the same thing. It's a complete waste of resources at best and a full employment program for patent litigation lawyers if the slightest thing goes wrong.
In the United States, the term "treaty" is used in a more restricted legal sense than in international law. U.S. law distinguishes what it calls treaties from congressional-executive agreements and sole-executive agreements.[1] All three classes are considered treaties under international law; they are distinct only from the perspective of internal United States law.
The fact that France would call it a treaty doesn't have a whole lot to do with whether it ought to be ratified by the Senate under the US Constitution.
As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity.
That is the exact opposite of what will happen.
The reason that piracy is so difficult to stop is that copying bits is very inexpensive. As technology improves, that cost will only go down further, making it even more difficult to stop. How much easier is it to "smuggle" information once you can fit the entire Library of Congress on a USB stick, or transfer it over a wire in seconds rather than days?
The only piracy you can even hope to stop is the kind between strangers. In theory you can scare people into not sharing with people they don't trust. But that doesn't really get you anywhere, does it? One person can get a copy of the Library of Congress through whatever means, then share it with his friends, who share it with their friends ad infinitum until a week later everybody has it. There is no opportunity to catch those people once the cat is out of the bag. It can all take place in private spaces.
Stopping information from spreading requires the total elimination of private communications. And heads will roll before anything like that is allowed to happen: Not because we want it, but because corporate executives demand privacy for business reasons. Nobody outside of Apple's supply chain is getting a copy of the secret plans for the next iPad, but as long as it's a secret no third party has any way to tell whether a thing is iPad plans or pirated music.
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XP and Win 7 trade first place back and forth on test after test and the ones that XP wins is frankly by a VERY small amount
Those are not really the right sort of benchmarks to show OS differences. The fact that they're so close together is pretty clear evidence of that. For one thing, they're running the tests one at a time, whereas the real test comes when you're running several programs at once which collectively use 85% of the physical memory in the machine and it comes down to whether the OS itself is using 15% or 25%.
On top of that, Maximum PC managed to invalidate their entire series of tests by using the 64-bit version of Windows 7 against the 32-bit version of Windows XP: You end up measuring the benefit of having twice as many general purpose registers and the other architectural improvements that come with the x86-64 ISA against the cost of making pointers twice as big.
which when you consider that honestly WinXP doesn't really DO much of anything when compared to Win 7, which has performance measuring and superfetch and a new GPU accelerated subsystem all going on at the same time that they were able to make them switch back and forth like that is pretty impressive.
It sounds to me like the thing that isn't very impressive is all the whiz bang superfetch stuff, since it can't even consistently show a performance improvement, even with the advantage of a better ISA.
On top of that, those features are primarily only relevant to faster machines with more memory: They're designed to take advantage of the fact that you have 8GB of RAM you aren't using for anything. But when the question is which performs well on slower processors with less memory, as is the case for ARM devices, none of that stuff is going to help -- you can't prefetch a 512MB program into 512MB of memory, and if you try you're going to end up evicting things you probably didn't want to.
As for Linux honestly i wouldn't even bring it up in discussion because if anything its like WinXP Mini or one of those other hacked all to bits OSes. Sure they have gotten pretty good on initial install but frankly do an in place upgrade or two (which you HAVE to do, because its length of support even on LTS is frankly like a bad joke) and then the thing quickly falls apart.
Have you ever actually done an in place upgrade? They occasionally break something, but there is no material performance difference between an upgraded system and a fresh install. And even when something breaks, the fix is easy: You back up /home and you do a fresh install. It takes about an hour once every two years.
if you are willing to invest the time in learning ALL its quirks, learning to do everything the way IT wants it done
Your anti-Linux arguments are cliche and outdated. Sure, if you run Slackware or Gentoo you have to futz with a million things to get it working... so don't. Use Ubuntu. The stock configuration will almost always find all your hardware and get you on the internet... and these days what more do you need?
Sorry, wasn't the driver unless you are saying MSFT can't code a driver to save their lives, that we may agree on.
I don't think Microsoft generally writes their own drivers for third party hardware, they just get a driver from the manufacturer and certify it. And the fact that other users experienced the same thing is unsurprising: If the drivers for extremely common hardware are crap then everybody is going to have problems because they've all got the same crap drivers.
if you had Intel NIC you were fine, Realtek or Nvidia, you were boned.
...which should only really happen if the drivers are crap. (Or if the hardware is, but it seems to work fine under XP and Linux.) If it was the OS itself then using a different brand of NIC should have no effect.
And when you have 8Gb of RAM and 6 cores the amount of time it does take to load so little is frankly disappointing.
Sure, if you have 8GB of RAM and 6 cores. But the ARM devices don't.
compare the same situation with XP Sp3 and you'll find on first boot its sucking 342Mb of RAM and beating swap like a pimp that ain't got his money.
False. I got my XP machine out of the closet to check and on boot it uses 150MB, which is 50MB less than you allege for Windows 7.
And no even remotely sane OS (including XP) will do any swapping whatsoever until you've exhausted physical memory, so I don't know what you're talking about.
NOTHING frankly runs great on a netburst Celeron
I've actually found that they run Linux pretty well. Mind you no one would mistake one for a fast machine, but you don't get the conspicuous hesitations that you do with Windows. I can only speculate as to the reason but I guess the code is just better optimized to run on a processor with less cache.
While this is a great effort, and I really congratulate the Tor proyect for all that they've done and continue to do, this still is nowhere close to the solution on the real issue here: governments that over and over again limit people's freedom of speech and privacy.
That is sort of missing the big picture. Yes, you have to fight governments that oppress and censor... but this is one of the ways you do it. It's a lot easier to convince someone that censorship is wrong if it is, in any event, totally ineffective -- because you take away any possible upside. It no longer becomes a weighing of the benefits of censorship against its costs, because the benefits are destroyed by developing this type of technology. Censorship becomes something that has only costs, and there ceases to be any incentive for a self-interested government to impose it.
Be afraid of the brain (i.e. money that buys the machine controls) actually realizing what's going on.
That might not be such a bad thing, actually. Think about whose interests the state department is supporting by producing these tools: The US military and defense contractors, the CIA and NSA, oil companies... Remember all that talk about how much bigger the tech industry is than the entertainment industry? Look at the size of the defense and intelligence industry sometime.
I ran Vista on what was a pretty nice machine at the time, an Intel Pentium D 2.66Ghz, 2Gb of RAM, and a Geforce 7600GS and the thing was a dog, it would have "senior moments" and forget the network shares and not see them before being rebooted, would drag down the entire system when doing simple multitasking like watching a movie while doing a file transfer, and this was seen all the way through SP1 which is when i finally gave up on the POS. Now that exact same machine is running Win 7 Home and has been since Oct 09, and its fast, it runs great on the network, nothing about the hardware has been changed, still the same Pentium D, still the same GPU, same everything but when I use that machine its like night and day.
It sounds to me like you had driver problems with Vista. The symptoms you're describing sound like a bad NIC or GPU driver. Obviously the driver situation has improved somewhat with Windows 7, but compare Windows 7 with Windows XP on the same hardware and the slowness of Windows 7 is readily apparent.
I would also point out that the Pentium D was the fastest Netburst architecture processor ever sold (excluding the couple of Pentium EE-branded chips that were just higher clocked Pentium Ds), and were really not all that slow, they just ran very hot. Your 2.66GHz Pentium D is something like twice as fast as the fastest ARM chips sold today, maybe more. Compare that to a lot of the machines sold with Vista on Prescott-based Celeron Ds: The Pentium D has 16 times as much L2 cache (4MB vs. 256KB), and the fact that cache misses are so expensive on Netburst was one of the main reasons it had such low IPC. Both Vista and Windows 7 run like a dog on Netburst Celerons. And yet the Celeron D is still a fair amount faster than current ARM processors.
And what person is gonna want a Win 8 ARM that doesn't run Windows programs?
I don't think anybody is disagreeing with you on that one. It boggles the mind who they think their target market is. "Windows on ARM: The performance of ARM combined with the polish of first generation Microsoft products and the software support of NetBSD."
It remains to be seen how long the momentum of more-or-less-open x86 IBM compatibles will carry them into the future; but so long as the legacy/in-house/custom demand is there, they'll be hard to kill entirely. However, I'd say that it is "outlook not so good" for open platforms any time somebody starts a new one from scratch...
I don't think the in-house and custom software is going to save anything, because the large majority of new business applications have the application itself running in the data center and the users access it through a web interface. And legacy software is replaced by new stuff the more time passes.
But I don't think the future is as bleak as all that, for different reasons. The largest impetus for closed platforms comes from the wireless carriers who want to make sure you aren't doing anything as unscrupulous as making a VOIP phone call over WiFi without paying them for minutes, and who subsidize your phone and in so doing become the "customer" of the device who gets to decide how open it is.
Here's the thing: I expect that inside of five years, flip phones are going to be almost completely dead. Tomorrow's top end Android handsets will still be ~$500, but today's will be $50. Some handset maker who still has a tooled factory churning out "obsolete" phones will realize that with nothing more than a software patch, they can sell them retail as WiFi-only devices that still make phone calls and browse the 'net as long as you're at work, at home, at school or anywhere else that has WiFi. The poorest customers will quickly realize that $50 or $100 once is much less expensive than $50/month indefinitely, even if it means they can't make calls in their cars, and many will do that. The carriers will then realize they're getting $0/month from these customers and that if they offered a cheap bring-your-own-device plan, they could be making $20 or $30/month from customers who by and large don't actually tax the cellular network because they use WiFi 90% of the time, and a big chunk of those people will pay that so their phones will work in their cars etc. And so will a big chunk of the people who had been buying subsidized phones, who realize that $500 once + $30/month is a lot cheaper than $200 once + $100/month. (The savings for everyone comes from the fact that you're taking a massive load off of the cell towers and putting it on DSL and cable lines where adding bandwidth doesn't require outbidding everyone else for finite wireless spectrum.)
With any luck that will be the end of carrier device subsidies and with it the end of locked boot loaders etc. Even the carriers seem to be looking for a way out of subsidizing premium devices for most of their customers. But do that and you open the door back up for innovation: Once people no longer need carrier approval to sell Android and other Linux-based devices that work away from home, you have the possibility of things like the Spark tablet or whatever Canonical feels like producing start to take hold, which can easily be made to run both Android apps and Linux native apps, and you can see the possibility of an open platform gaining a sigificant foothold. Not to mention whatever products come out of Google buying Motorola Mobility.
If that happens then Microsoft will have to decide whether to go the Apple route and try to keep their ARM platform closed, or stick with their traditional forte and open it up. And I kind of feel like there isn't any room in the market for more than one Apple.
Windows on Arm = Slooooooow...
Does that really surprise anyone? Half the failure of Vista was because it was too slow. Windows 7 isn't really any faster, it's just that we now have Core processors with 4GB+ of RAM instead of Pentium 4s with ~1GB.
But current ARM processors are slower than late model Pentium 4s and have less memory. What did people expect was going to happen?
Do you want to lower your carbon impact on this planet? Have less children. Contributing to negative population growth is the greenest thing you can do.
You're doing it wrong. What you have to do is convince global warming skeptics and Sarah Palin fans to have less children. If you have less children, the next generation has one less citizen brought up in a socially responsible household. If they have less children, the next generation has one less pickup-driving NASCAR fan.
Pick a single scene - 30 seconds or so, and give it over to the "algorithmic rendering department" for millions of variations to be produced. Not today, maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now I think it will be easy if they want to.
Oh sure, maybe in a few decades it wouldn't be computationally infeasible, but that's assuming those decades don't bring anything the pirates can use to break it. Making predictions that far out is pretty futile.
Not to mention, there is no type of individualized watermarking that can't be defeated by a prepaid (or, failing that, stolen) credit card. And you only need one single copy for the whole system to break.
Hundreds - plural - and one engineer working full time on encryption schemes that include security by obscurity should be able to stay a couple of years ahead of the rabble trying to break him.
They haven't been able to so far. It's not like the idea of DRM is new. I imagine they already have a bunch of engineers on staff. They release it, people hate it, it gets broken, they release something new... but at the end of the day, there are still high definition rips of new releases on pirate websites.
All cryptography is breakable, it's just a matter of how long it takes.
That's not really true. RSA is what, going on 35 years old now? All we've got is some speculation that in theory a quantum computer could be built with enough qubits to break it, but maybe not. DES only really failed because the keyspace was too small -- a couple of attacks weakened it, but even knowing then what we know now, you couldn't have broken DES in a realistic amount of time using hardware available the year it was approved as a standard (1976). As far as I'm aware no one has ever cracked 3DES to this day.
The problem for Hollywood is that what they're engaged in isn't cryptography. It's just obfuscation. There is no keyspace margin of safety. There is no NP hard problem to solve. It's only a matter of simple (though tedious) reverse engineering.
Your only rationale seems to be that you can't accept a world in which there are companies other than patent trolls making money off of patents.
A patent troll is defined as a company that makes money off of [licensing] patents. You are trying to make a frivolous technical argument that because you make a nominal product that you are not a troll. But how does being a leech instead of a troll help your case? You are still sucking money out of the R&D fund of a competitor who has proven that they can offer more value for money to prospective customers than you can, by the simple fact that they are the ones making the sales for which you receive royalties.
Notice how your behavior differs from e.g. pharmaceutical companies, who are not trolls and leeches: When they patent something, they use the patent to exclude competitors from the patented market and collect the monopoly rent that was given them as the reward for their invention. You, and do correct me if I'm wrong, but like all software patent holders, you wait until an innocent competitor has implemented your "invention" not knowing it was patented, or you have the patent inserted into an industry standard, and then once you have the competition over a barrel because they have shipped or must ship infringing units, you "negotiate" a license agreement. That's patent trolling, I don't care if you ship a few dozen copies of some nominal product in the same market.
Describing physical constraints in software does not become easier, require less costly R&D, or cease to be innovative.
"Describing" physical constraints is not invention, it is a statement of fact. Creating something that usefully operates within them can be, but software imposes no such constraints other than those of mathematics itself, and math is not patentable. It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D, the first person to "invent" calculus isn't allowed to patent it.
Video codecs are very complex. There are decades old codecs that haven't been reverse-engineered, and when they do, it's only for playback.
Lots of things are very complex. A disassembler doesn't much mind the complexity. Moreover, you reverse engineer the decoder from the decoder and the encoder from the encoder. In theory you can try to keep the encoder private, but you can't very well sell it to anyone but refuse to give it to them.
As for old codecs that haven't been reverse engineered, no. There are no codecs that are better than all existing codecs but have not been reverse engineered. And the fact that they aren't better is the obvious reason why no one has bothered to reverse engineer them.
On top of all that, you're still ignoring that most of this research is done by universities. It gets published. It doesn't have to be reverse engineered.
It's hard work. You've clearly never done any of it. How great that you can assume others will do all kinds of hard work for you...
Do people often tell you to go fuck yourself? Because I bet they wouldn't do it as often if you weren't such a tool.
Except they didn't do that at all. They bought the company for other reasons, and happened to get a codec for free. The FSF and others had to publicly urge Google to release it.
On2 is a codec company. All they do is codecs. "The FSF and others" had urged them to open source the codec before they actually did so, but it was my understanding that that was their intention the whole time and they didn't announce it sooner because they had to do their homework first to make sure what they released wasn't infringing any known patents. What evidence do you have to the contrary? For that matter, what possible other reason would they have to buy a codec company other than for its codecs?
If you're paying several million in patent license fees, it makes lots of sense to pay a few million to develop an
The pharmaceutical companies care about drug patents for obvious reasons. Why should they care whatsoever about software patents?
Furthermore, what happens when the security's price goes down? Does everyone holding it get a rebate?
The same thing as happens if you had actually sold them at a loss: You get a capital loss that can be used to offset other capital gains either this year or in some recent or future year.
wealth tax
It's not a wealth tax. A wealth tax is when you pay based on how much stuff you own, like property tax. "Mark to market" just eliminates deferred realization of gains: If you have stock you paid $60 for and at the end of the year it's still worth $60, you pay no tax even though you have $60 in assets. If the stock goes up to $80, you don't pay tax on $80, you pay tax on $20. And you only pay it once. If it goes up to $80 this year but next year it stays at $80 the whole year, you only pay tax on $20 this year and nothing next year.
The difference between mark to market and what we have now is that if your stock goes up from $60 to $80, right now you don't pay any tax on the gain until you actually sell the stock.
The problem with mark to market is exactly what Scareduck points out: If you own e.g. a shopping mall, or any other small business, and the value of the business goes up, you may not have any cash with which to pay the taxes without selling the business itself. But that problem is basically solved by only subjecting those in the top 0.1% to the tax: Anybody who has that much money would be an idiot not to have diversified investments, and forcing somebody to sell 1.5% of their diversified stock holdings following a 10% increase in their value is nothing like as problematic as forcing a small business owner to sell an ownership stake in the family business.
It also has the advantage of eliminating the inefficiency caused by deferring realization: People who have owned an asset that has appreciated substantially while they've owned it have a large incentive not to sell it, even if doing so would otherwise be highly cost effective, because it would require them to immediately pay the taxes due on it. By making the taxes due immediately no matter what, you lose the incentive to make the inefficient choice (at least for people rich enough to have to pay immediately).
The problem I'm seeing with it is that the measures people take to try to get around it could be economically damaging: If there are any assets not included in program, or that are included but whose value is difficult to measure and it ends up being measured consistently too high or too low, you would see people over and under investing in those things substantially. You could also get quite a lot of capital flight if there is no other way to avoid the tax, and if there is another way to avoid it then you won't raise a fraction of the revenue you think you will because everybody will do that.
I don't know how easy/hard it is to forge a WoW account, but they seem to still be making plenty of money with their "phone home scheme."
That's because it isn't a "phone home scheme" -- it's a different business model. They're selling a service rather than software.
Practical stenography would be something in the middle of those two, perhaps a CG scene of a pleated curtain blowing in the wind where the relative wide-narrow relationship of the pleats across a hundred frames varies differently according to the serial number, or a 30 second fire-fight scene where the relative timing of the gunshots is dithered by the serial number.
Are you serious? They're obviously not going to re-film the scene for every single user, and even re-rendering a CG scene would be prohibitively expensive.
I'm struggling to imagine any sort of steganographic scheme that wouldn't be defeated by getting several copies with that many different serial numbers and either just merging them together or at worst using the differences between them to identify the scheme being used and reverse engineer it.
Even if _you_ have a cracked (open source, or whatever) player that doesn't phone home, some fool that copies your movie will play it on a player that does phone home.
An open source player is released that uses its own file format and files are distributed in that format.
Plus, if the proprietary players themselves (rather than some flatfoots with secret software) are checking the serial numbers then reverse engineering the players to figure out how to remove the serial numbers becomes substantially easier.
Studios are spending hundreds of millions a year on production, if they put even 0.1% of that resource into a technical creative stenography effort, they can stay well ahead of attempts to crack them.
0.1% of a hundred million dollars is a hundred thousand dollars. That's substantially less than the salary and benefits necessary to hire even a single decent programmer for a year. Then you release a scheme and you have a million half time pirates and a thousand full time university professors trying to break it. Somehow I think it's a losing battle.
Freenet (and similar concepts) have been around a long time, it doesn't have nearly the social adoption rate of Napster
The reason people don't use Freenet isn't that it's hard to use. (Even if you think it is, there is no inherent reason that it has to be.) The reason is that it's slow. Nobody wants to spend two days downloading a movie they can get in thirty minutes on BitTorrent.
Now ask yourself what happens when people have connections that are a hundred times faster than those of today. The two days turns into thirty minutes. OK, so people will still want to use BitTorrent, because then BitTorrent will take thirty seconds instead of thirty minutes. And they will, as long as they can. But if you somehow make it so they can't, they'll use Freenet or something like it, because tomorrow's Freenet will be as fast as today's BitTorrent.
We make lots of real hardware, and lots of real software... we are not a patent troll. However, the top executives love software patents, because they are about 90% profit.
It sounds to me like you are a patent troll. If you actually made products then you would be the ones paying the license fees rather than collecting them, which leaves you in an approximate break even situation. Certainly that is inherently the situation industry wide: The average software company has a negative ROI from the existence of software patents, because every license fee collected by anyone is paid by someone else, and some of the recipients are patent trolls, which means that the system is necessarily a net negative for the companies that actually make software: The payments between software companies are breakeven on an industry level and the payments to trolls are deadweight losses.
We're somehow fine with the extensive R&D that has gone into mechanical engineering being patentable, but as soon as you can replace these with digital systems, the same R&D effort is no longer protected in many countries. It makes no sense
It makes perfect sense. Hardware has physical constraints, software is pure abstract math. You can't patent math -- and for good reason. I'm sure Einstein worked very hard on E=mc^2, but explaining how fusion works doesn't give you any right to exclude people from using sunlight.
it's just going to drive us back to a proprietary world, where everything is fiercly protected as trade secrets, and anything open is a thing of the past.
How do you expect trade secrets to be maintained within software that is distributed to the general public?
The most "pure" use case for software patents is MPEG. They wouldn't represent the best technology companies around the world have to offer, if software implementations could not be capitalized upon. And don't tell me about free software... Theora and WebM were both developed by On2, which made its money with proprietary codecs which could be licensed for less than patent licenses for the MPEG technologies. If not for software patents, we probably wouldn't have made it past Cinepak, or MPEG-1 at best, before falling back into proprietary-only solutions.
What are you talking about? You can't have a "proprietary" video codec without software patents. It would get reverse engineered inside of two weeks. On top of that, most of the codec research is done by universities rather than private companies.
But never mind that, let's talk about On2. If Google found it cost effective to pay the money (in the form of buying the company) to develop a new codec so that it would be available for everyone to use for free, what makes you think they wouldn't have done the same thing without software patents? If anything the free codec would have been better, because it wouldn't have had to make intentionally inefficient choices specifically to avoid the MPEG patent pool.
The biggest source of lobbying for software patents are companies like MS and groups like the Business Software Alliance
What makes you think they want software patents? They're the ones having to pay record damage awards to patent trolls. At best they're agnostic.
Granted Microsoft has been getting into the patent trolling business with Android to some extent, but that isn't evidence of software companies wanting software patents, it's evidence of patent trolls wanting them: Any company that collects more revenue from patent licensing than they do from selling their own software is no longer a software company.
You need a Java developer. And an Oracle DBA. And a Linux admin. And a Windows server admin. And someone to babysit your NetApp. And a network admin. And a .NET person. And on, and on, and on.
I don't understand what a list of job titles has anything to do with it? Obviously some companies hire a lot of techs, but it's not at all for the same reason that they have to hire a bunch of lawyers. The techs each do something productive. The lawyers only exist to cancel out the other side's lawyers: You don't have to hire another Java developer just because one of your competitors hired another Java developer. You do generally have to hire more patent lawyers if one of your competitors hires more patent lawyers.
Let me summarise as simply as possible: lawyers provide advice and speak on your behalf in defending your rights under the law. That's all they do.
No, they do one other thing, which is the thing people hate them for: They self-replicate. If you encounter a lawyer, you need to get your own lawyer to deal with them. When it turns out that your lawyer has a conflict of interest, you need another lawyer to take on the work the first lawyer had, the lawyer's other client that created the conflict needs another lawyer for the same reason, you then need a different kind of lawyer to consider going after the first lawyer for malpractice for not disclosing the conflict, your old lawyer needs his own lawyer to defend against the possible malpractice claim, on and on. By the time you're the size of Google you're drowning in a sea of lawyers.
While it's true that the legislature is in part responsible for the laws that result in anyone attempting to do business in this country needing to hire an entire division of attorneys, the attorneys themselves are the ones who lobby to keep it that way.
I'll give you an example: Software patents. The strongest lobby preventing software patents from being eliminated is the software patent lawyers. Larger software companies hate them (because of patent trolls), smaller software companies hate them (because it allows larger companies to crush them), individual software engineers hate them (because it's all a giant waste of time). The only people who want them are patent lawyers and patent trolling companies that are full of patent lawyers.
It's a pretty big stretch to call a company logo an "advertisement". If that were the case, then why do TV networks carry ads for other companies? Why don't they just put their own logo everywhere, and advertise themselves only?
Obviously because there comes a saturation point past which the value of selling the ad space is more than the value of further advertising of one product to the same prospective customers: It's the same reason that GM buys one or two ad slots on each network rather than 100% of the ad slots on a single network.
In addition to that, the context is different. If you're already watching CNN, an ad for CNN isn't very effective: Anybody who sees the ad is already watching CNN; there is little prospect to convert new users. By contrast, the maps API gets used by other websites, whose users may not already be users of Google products, who are exactly the users that Google would like to get their name in front of. This also explains why they would want to charge money to high volume sites: It doesn't cost them any less to serve a hundred thousand maps across a thousand different websites than to serve them all to the users of a single site, but in the latter case there may be less diversity in the user population: Better that a hundred thousand unique users each see the map than only a thousand users see it a hundred times each.
Expecting tons of people to click on a Google logo on a website's embedded map is a bit silly.
Why does it have to be tons of people? The cost of serving the maps is totally trivial. Even an extremely low conversion rate would be enough to cover the cost.
I expect Microsoft has probably got a patent on 'crashes more often than Linux-based operating systems' so maybe they could.
Intelligence? Talent? By definition, 50% of the population is below average in intelligence.
Intelligence and talent are both a combination of genetics and education. For most people the problem is not genetics: Look at the children who are adopted into affluent families.
For the remainder, not every non-manual job is rocket surgery. John Travolta is a lunatic Scientologist, but Pulp Fiction is nonetheless a great movie.
I draw a distinction between "warez" privately shared on hard encrypted links and Napster style public posting of well known works "in the clear" for all to access. The former may go on for a very long time, but the latter is already shorter lived today than it was 10 years ago, and there will probably come a day when it is not practical to go to a search engine, and find and download any piece of pop culture (music, videos, etc.) at will. What I am saying is that using the public internet to get pirated/bootlegged content from people you don't know is the thing that's going to become increasingly difficult, and well nigh impossible in another 100 years, assuming society itself lasts that long.
What I'm saying is that the distinction you're drawing will be short-lived. You can operate something in the nature of TOR or Freenet in such a way that you can obtain any data that exists on the entire network without making a direct connection to any node not operated by someone you personally know and trust. Doing it that way is very slow, which is why today hardly anybody does it, but "slow" goes away as time passes and networks become faster and cheaper.
Encryption, too, may fall to quantum computing, and quantum computers will be prohibitively expensive for some time after they arrive. During that era, I wouldn't be surprised if "the authorities" "read the mail" and censor protected works from transit on the public internet. Of course, you can still trade memory chips with your friends, but that's a far cry from Napster style distribution.
Quantum computing doesn't break symmetric encryption, it only requires you to use keys that are twice as long (which is no big deal). It does ostensibly break public key cryptography, but that primarily hurts banks and the like who can no longer distribute keys as easily. For pirates who almost inherently have to distribute keys using side channels it has minimal consequence.
Also, I will be surprised if distributed digital works don't start carrying stenographic serial numbers unique to the purchaser within the next 20 years... so, you can give your friend a copy, but if he gives it to 2 friends and they each give it to 2 friends, etc., it will have your identifying information embedded in it. Yes, there will be stenographic stripper programs, then stealthier stenography, etc. etc. in an ever escalating arms race, just like software serial numbers, but, just like software and more recently video games, expect your new media to "check in with the cloud" before operating properly, even if there is no good reason for it to.
You can't really use steganography for that. Embedding data within an image or audio file requires you to change how it is rendered for the user. You can "see" all the changes made if you look closely enough at all the individual pixels. As a result you almost have to use the least significant bit(s), e.g. you have a bunch of 16-bit numbers and you encode using the least significant bit, because generally the color represented by 18,552 is so close to the color represented by 18,553 that the difference is immaterial. Flipping any of the more significant bits would alter the image in an unacceptable way: The color represented by 16,388 is not at all the same as the color represented by 4. But such steganographic data can then be trivially removed just by randomizing the least significant bits.
In addition to that, a motion picture or audio file can't "phone home" in the same way that a game can. The game is software. You can't convert a game into an MP4 file and still have a game. You can convert any song or movie into an MP3 or MP4 and there will be nothing left to phone home. (This even before considering that most games with phone home nonsense have been cracked.)
How would we know? When patents are discussed around here they're assumed to be six words long, mainly because not one person here has ever actually read any of the patents in question. If we can't do that, then no, we cannot agree the patent system is idiotic We actually have to understand it, first.
I don't think reading the patents is the problem. If you look at individual patents then you will undoubtedly find some that are reasonable and have narrow claims (though generally nobody infringes those) and others that take the form "{thing the Post Office has done for 200 years} but on the internet" or "{thing secretaries have done for 500 years} but on a phone."
The thing is, the individual patents have never been the problem. The problem is that each major company has thousands of patents on thousands of possible features, and each product has thousands of features. Some overlap in the two sets is inevitable, so you have a situation where everybody is infringing everything. Which means that whenever a company starts to fail in the marketplace, or just feels like being a dick, they can bog down the entire industry in a series of multimillion dollar lawsuits and there is no cost-effective precaution that anyone can take to inoculate themselves against it. Or if a company fails entirely and gets liquidated, its patents can end up in the hands of trolls who use them to extort money from the people who actually make stuff.
Even when things are working "well," the result is merely that everyone cross-licenses one another and all the money spent on patent prosecution and license negotiations for thousands of patents only goes to cancel out the money wasted by the other guy on the same thing. It's a complete waste of resources at best and a full employment program for patent litigation lawyers if the slightest thing goes wrong.
Did you even read your link?
In the United States, the term "treaty" is used in a more restricted legal sense than in international law. U.S. law distinguishes what it calls treaties from congressional-executive agreements and sole-executive agreements.[1] All three classes are considered treaties under international law; they are distinct only from the perspective of internal United States law.
The fact that France would call it a treaty doesn't have a whole lot to do with whether it ought to be ratified by the Senate under the US Constitution.
As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity.
That is the exact opposite of what will happen.
The reason that piracy is so difficult to stop is that copying bits is very inexpensive. As technology improves, that cost will only go down further, making it even more difficult to stop. How much easier is it to "smuggle" information once you can fit the entire Library of Congress on a USB stick, or transfer it over a wire in seconds rather than days?
The only piracy you can even hope to stop is the kind between strangers. In theory you can scare people into not sharing with people they don't trust. But that doesn't really get you anywhere, does it? One person can get a copy of the Library of Congress through whatever means, then share it with his friends, who share it with their friends ad infinitum until a week later everybody has it. There is no opportunity to catch those people once the cat is out of the bag. It can all take place in private spaces.
Stopping information from spreading requires the total elimination of private communications. And heads will roll before anything like that is allowed to happen: Not because we want it, but because corporate executives demand privacy for business reasons. Nobody outside of Apple's supply chain is getting a copy of the secret plans for the next iPad, but as long as it's a secret no third party has any way to tell whether a thing is iPad plans or pirated music.