I note that the Wikipedia illustration of a molten salt reactor design shows a pump in the cooling system, so it's not immediately clear to me that a molten salt reactor would survive the loss of emergency power reported to have occurred here.
The pump exchanges fuel between the reactor and the heat exchanger. If the pump shuts down, the heat exchanger can't provide heat to the turbines to produce electricity, but there is still coolant in the reactor. Molten salt won't boil off like water does. If the temperature in the reactor increases, it slows down the reaction, which ultimately results in a safe equilibrium temperature.
No, it's an alternative. Either an IP address is linked to a person or it isn't. If it isn't, there is no reason to provide it, because that's why anybody might want a court to give it to them. If it is, it's private, so the court shouldn't be giving it out. The doublethink is trying to have it both ways: You can't say that it isn't private because it isn't identifying and then turn around and say that the court will therefore order it be given over so that the account holder can be identified. It has to be one or the other, and in either case turning it over is the the wrong thing to do.
it's quite possible that the IP address identifies no one... so how can it possibly be personal information....
This is doublethink. The only reason they want the IP address is that it might identify someone. If it doesn't identify anyone then there is no reason to provide it, and if it does identify someone then it is personal information. In either situation it should not be provided.
Sure low income housing but, what happens when your government cheese runs out? The US gets it's "government cheese" in the form of Social Security and Medicare but the major funding for that relies on the working middle class. If the only industries left were jobs are obtainable disappear (like the grandparent post mentioned the service industry) there goes Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security was designed by a bunch of politicians (and I use that term as a pejorative) who were more concerned with doing what was politically necessary to get it passed, and then making it as difficult as possible to ever repeal, than actually doing something sensible or sustainable. The structure of social security tax is ridiculous and the idea that people who have more money should get bigger government checks is preposterous. They started out paying benefits to people who never paid in, meaning that the entire thing is a ponzi scheme that was destined from the start to go bankrupt as soon as a population bubble like the baby boomers reached the retirement age. It desperately needs to be scrapped and replaced with a negative income tax.
As for idea that there won't be anyone to tax to pay for the government cheese, it doesn't work that way. The more things get automated and require less labor to produce, the less they cost. Imagine the ultimate conclusion: Literally everything is fully automated, so that there are zero jobs for anyone. At this point you don't have to pay the machine to produce it, or pay the machine that produces the first machine's inputs, ad infinitum. There is no one left in the chain to collect a paycheck. Provided that the owner of the production equipment is not a monopoly, that means the competitive price for all goods will be approximately the marginal cost of production -- zero. So no problems supplying food there; it's free.
Of course, that's communist fairyland and will never actually happen. But suppose we get half way there. So things are 50% automated, i.e. only 50% of people have to work in order to produce all the goods and services for 100% of everyone. In that case, things should cost approximately 50% of what they would cost if it required 100% of people to produce the same stuff. But look at what that means: If you can have e.g. a 20% tax rate and buy bread for everyone when bread costs $1 and everyone is employed, what tax rate do you need if you can only tax 50% of people because everyone else is unemployed, but at the same time bread now only costs $0.50? It's still a 20% tax rate. And that works for any employment percentage you want to plug in -- if you automate and that causes unemployment, you also reduce the cost of goods and services by the same amount, which thereby reduces cost of living and therefore the amount the government needs to provide to cover it.
It does, of course, suck for whoever loses their job -- they still get to eat, but they can no longer afford e.g. a car. And you have to raise taxes more if automation comes to other industries to a greater extent than it comes to agriculture, but that isn't likely -- in general agriculture is easy to automate.
Yes of course, price discrimination is already practiced. But cross market sales act as a check on it. The easier it is for people in the US to buy the book from India, the closer the prices have to be between India and the US. Which means that what the US should want is the exact opposite of what this treaty does -- rather than prohibiting importation, we should be prohibiting all measures to prevent it.
I completely agree that juries have been effectively neutered. It takes no better example than the way that the jury selection process in the P2P file sharing trials managed to remove every juror who might have even the slightest disagreement with the ridiculousness of the laws in question, leading to what any objective observer can recognize as monstrous damage awards.
But don't concentrate so much on the word "jury" -- the judicial system is admittedly and beyond the shadow of a doubt stacked against anyone without competent legal representation, but if you get two sides who each have good lawyers, the ultimate outcomes are pretty reasonable most of the time. Heck, look at all the courts throwing sand in the gears of the various P2P settlement scams.
And if your concern will be that not everyone can afford a good lawyer, your response is this.
those peasants won't just go quietly starve to death.
No, but bread is cheap and so are circuses.
Negative income tax pretty much solves all of capitalism's problems. You set the lowest (negative) tax bracket such that no matter how little money you make, you can afford to eat and pay rent on a very small apartment. Then nobody needs to work to not starve, but you still need to work if you want a car or a house or to send your kids to a decent school.
And people want those things enough to work for them, but not enough to riot over not having them. So if you can find a job, good for you. And if you can't, enjoy your government cheese.
Things that can be copyrighted: Books, nicknacks, travel brochures, the pattern on my boxers... Not only will you have to strip naked for the TSA, you'll have to remain naked while crossing national borders.
Forget about the logistics. That's just the collateral damage. The real issue is that it enables price discrimination. Which makes the US and other countries with a high standard of living even more uncompetitive by compounding the cost advantage of foreign countries: Foreign students will get our textbooks for 5% of the US price, which means they have even lower costs and can more easily undercut our wages. Corporations license software in foreign countries for 5% of the US price, making it more cost effective to set up shop Anywhere But Here. On and on.
The fear is that with enough lawyers and money, someone could undercut the things that we here on Slashdot generally accept to be true, and re-open the debate.
But that's always the case. It's like the Linux patent FUD. They can spread FUD all they want, but until they identify specific patents or specific code they're just pissing in the wind. And as soon as they identify something specific, it immediately gets replaced and the threat dissipates.
I've made this point before in the patent context: There are only two ways it makes business sense to enforce a software patent. The first is if you're a patent troll so that your target can't make any counterclaims against your products since you don't have any. The second is if you're a huge conglomerate and your target is a small software developer, in which case software patents allow you to destroy them because you have a thousand patents that will read on anything they could possibly make and just the legal fees will bankrupt them, so they have to do what you want.
Patent litigation doesn't work between large companies because they each have enough patents the other is infringing that if they don't cross license, neither of them can actually sell any of their own products -- and on top of that the target has enough resources to try to invalidate your patents, which if they succeed leaves you vulnerable to suit by third parties because you've weakened your defensive arsenal. Which is why everybody cross-licenses everything. I heard someone say that the way they do it is to have each side bring a stack of their patents in to a meeting and whoever has the smaller stack of patents pays the other party based on the number of inches difference in the stacks of paper. It's preposterous.
But as long as software patents exist, the same pretty much goes for copyright. Let's say Microsoft gets the UNIX copyrights. Now they're going to sue IBM over Linux and try to keep IBM from selling Linux servers. The problem is that IBM has a zillion software patents that Microsoft is almost certainly infringing hundreds or thousands of. And so does everybody else that it could possibly be worth Microsoft's time to sue.
So plan B: Instead of Microsoft buying the copyrights, they make sure they get into the hands of some troll who will go after Linux vendors. But that's a recipe for a proxy war where each side starts laying mines for the other by selling patents and copyrights the other is infringing to various trolls. Which in the best case just leads to the same truce where each side agrees to stop doing that and just cross-license. And in the worst case it leads to litigation Armageddon because you get a bunch of loose nukes in the hands of unconstrained trolls -- which makes it exceptionally dangerous for anyone be the first mover toward that sort of outcome.
UNIX and a lot of the concepts (and code) in it are the foundation for a lot of stuff that's used in modern operating systems. If you can own that, you can have leverage over most operating systems.
UNIX is from the 1970s. Patents last 20 years. Anybody can do the math on that one.
And the copyright is largely muted by the license Berkeley distributed so much of it under. How much of UNIX do you really care about that isn't available under the BSD license?
At this point one might point out that if you can't watch Hulu or Netflix (we're talking about OpenSUSE here), cannot put in a credit card number to buy or rent a movie from Amazon Unbox or iTunes, and must install separate pieces of software in order to watch DVDs, this OS may not be "broken" but it might not really be meeting modern consumer expectations.
So there exist Linux distributions that don't include Flash player or libdvdread in the default install. Either install them or use something like this that includes them by default.
As for Netflix and other Windows-DRM-using things, you might as well complain that you can't watch over-the-air TV on YouTube. You can't do it because Hollywood bought some legislation that prevents honest people from doing reasonable things. The only way to fix the problem is to fix the law.
Of course you could argue they shouldn't be paying money for content, and that the DRM is illiberal or something, but you're still keeping the customer from doing what they want to do and what other platforms don't think twice about forbidding for what are essentially elitist moral reasons.
In actual fact it has nothing to do with "elitist moral reasons" and everything to do with the DMCA and software patents. There is no technical reason why there can't exist e.g. a GPL DVD player -- they exist already. But they aren't included in most default installs because of legal stupidity. So I say again, you want to fix the problem, fix the law.
But I also want to say that I agree with you. Linux needs to support these things natively and seamlessly. It's just that you need to direct your efforts toward a different set of people. It isn't that SUSE needs to hire a cadre of programmers to get Netflix working on Linux, it's that everybody who thinks this is important should cut a cheque to the EFF so they can do something about it.
The OS needs better ATI drivers, stop making excuses.
There are three ways to get drivers for Linux:
1) The hardware manufacturer publishes all the information the community needs to make working drivers, and the community makes drivers. 2) The hardware manufacturer itself releases Linux drivers. 3) The community reverse engineers the hardware and makes drivers.
(1) is clearly the best option and anybody who isn't a lawyer or lawyer sympathizer can see that. (2) is a second best which is satisfactory as long as the manufacturer's drivers work. (3) generally doesn't lead to high quality drivers, or at least takes a very long time and consumes overly many resources.
There is nothing "Linux" can do to change this. The actions of hardware makers determine the quality of the drivers for their hardware. It's exactly the same situation on Windows: If a hardware manufacturer releases a crappy Windows driver, there really isn't anything Microsoft can do about it. The epic amount of older hardware that has no drivers for Vista/7 is clear evidence of that.
This is really a non-story. Dip ship antagonizes lawyers and provides confession to feed them. Idiot is amazed lawyers pursue.
I think the story is that the justice system is sufficiently wrongheaded as to allow them to.
Well, really the problem is that we have the best justice money can buy. We give the court all these powers to issue subpoenas and force people to defend themselves against unproven allegations and the thing we seem to forget is that forcing the accused to defend himself itself is orders of magnitude greater punishment than that of the alleged harm, so that even if you win, you lose -- and therefore that simply by conducting the proceedings it works an injustice.
In fact, normally the justice system has a bunch of rules to prevent this sort of thing. You can't get into federal court for most claims unless the amount in controversy is over $75,000. State courts send disputes over small amounts to small claims court which limits litigation costs in many ways. And that's exactly where all of this P2P copyright stuff should be, except that it ends up in federal court because it's a federal law and lawyers are abusing the statutory damage amounts to threaten everybody with bankruptcy if they don't settle for an amount which is still two or three orders of magnitude more than any reasonable estimate of the actual damages.
The converter was probably gimped on purpose so people stick with Flash.
Maybe, but I don't really see the point of that. They probably just haven't spent enough time polishing it yet.
Adobe wants to promote Flash so that people will buy Flash Creator. But the output format is irrelevant to them. If people want HTML5, it's in their interest to make Creator output HTML5 -- because all they care is that people are buying Creator.
Of course, most browsers have Flash Block as a plugin, and sliverlight does not have such a plugin, so this may mean that Silverlight will win that part, that is the ad part, of the market in the coming year.
That seems highly unlikely. The lack of an equivalent to Flash Block is due to the unpopularity of Silverlight. If ads are delivered using Silverlight then the large plurality if not majority of people who don't have Silverlight installed won't see the ads, which defeats the purpose.
Moreover, even assuming a sufficient critical mass of people eventually install Silverlight that advertisers will be willing to ignore users without it, it will take about thirty six seconds after advertisers start using it for ads before someone releases Silverlight Block for all major web browsers.
Silverlight has all of the same drawbacks of Flash in addition to not being supported by as many platforms. There is basically no reason for anyone to use it unless by doing so they can get Microsoft to give then a bag of money, and even then you have to seriously weigh the cash against losing the ever-growing number of non-Windows customers.
For example, whilst Safari and IE fell on day one, Firefox isn't scheduled to be available to anyone to try to hack till day two. Thus you can't say Safari is somehow less than Firefox.
Sure you can. We know there is 0% probability that Safari will not fall on the first day it was available, because the contrary has already happened. If Firefox doesn't fall on the first day it's available then Safari is less than Firefox. The probability that Firefox will not fall on the first day it is available, until we actually know the answer, will be more than 0%. Therefore "Safari is somehow less than Firefox." QED.
I think it will have the opposite effect you suggest, bringing MORE secrecy rather than less. You dare not let anyone see even an early demonstrator or model, or even talk about something you have in the works for fear they could run out and file a patent EVEN WITHOUT inventing anything. If you don't have to prove you invented it first, you can shut down your competitors with mere paperwork, while you labor in the back room to actual make something.
I haven't read the bill, but generally speaking, I don't think first to file really does that. The only way someone can do that under first to file is by breaking the law by claiming they invented it when they really got the invention from your publication. And if the troll is willing to break the law then the problem you're expressing still exists under a first to invent system, because the troll can just claim they independently invented the invention before you did and produce a bunch of backdated documents "proving" as much.
First to file even improves on the situation because it allows the actual inventor to simply file a patent application before they publish the invention, thereby precluding anyone else from lying and claiming they invented it first, because no one (other than a bona fide independent inventor) can file before the inventor if the inventor files before publishing the invention.
Of course, what would be even better is "first to publish" (and filing a patent application counts as publication). That way everybody has an incentive to publish ASAP because publication is the only way to reserve a priority date, and publication is much easier for smaller inventors than filing a patent application, but publication is much harder to fake than a bunch of backdated notes because you can verify it with e.g. archive.org.
Yeah, so? It's better than not being protected at all. Plus, there's nothing saying you can only have two of something. It's perfectly possible to have a 3-, 4-, or more-drive RAID-1 mirror. Obviously, the storage efficiency sucks, but if you want excellent redundancy, you can easily mirror 4 drives, and suffer 3 failures before you're not protected.
Plus there is always RAID-6. A six or eight disk RAID-6 has better storage efficiency than normal RAID-1/RAID-10 and you still need three simultaneous disk failures to fall over. Or if you have a large number of disks and you need an exceptional level of redundancy, RAID-15 or RAID-16, which has only slightly worse storage efficiency than RAID-10 and is pretty much only going to fall over as a result of a lightning strike or some other force of nature.
I'd be more inclined to ask where the creative expression is. It's a random number. It's entirely functional with no creativity whatsoever. You can't copyright the entries in a phone book, right? So how is this different?
This is a bad thing because the potential for misidentification is high. Couple this system with the notorious unreliability of eye witnesses and the potential for unintended coercion and you have a recipe for a constitutional disaster.
The especially bad problem is that it has a high likelihood of reinforcing misidentification: The witness comes in and works with the sketch artist, they run the picture through the database and out comes a picture of someone who looks like the sketch. The police ask the witness, "is this the perp?" Of course, the picture looks like the sketch or the computer wouldn't have spit it out, so most likely the witness says yes. Now the witness has had a better look at the mugshot than they ever got at the perpetrator, and in their mind they now know exactly what the perpetrator looks like -- like the mugshot. By the time they drag this poor sap into the police station, the witness is thoroughly convinced that the perpetrator is the person in the mugshot. And if that isn't the case, another innocent person is put behind bars.
Slashdot Mirror
I note that the Wikipedia illustration of a molten salt reactor design shows a pump in the cooling system, so it's not immediately clear to me that a molten salt reactor would survive the loss of emergency power reported to have occurred here.
The pump exchanges fuel between the reactor and the heat exchanger. If the pump shuts down, the heat exchanger can't provide heat to the turbines to produce electricity, but there is still coolant in the reactor. Molten salt won't boil off like water does. If the temperature in the reactor increases, it slows down the reaction, which ultimately results in a safe equilibrium temperature.
that's only a probability..
No, it's an alternative. Either an IP address is linked to a person or it isn't. If it isn't, there is no reason to provide it, because that's why anybody might want a court to give it to them. If it is, it's private, so the court shouldn't be giving it out. The doublethink is trying to have it both ways: You can't say that it isn't private because it isn't identifying and then turn around and say that the court will therefore order it be given over so that the account holder can be identified. It has to be one or the other, and in either case turning it over is the the wrong thing to do.
it's quite possible that the IP address identifies no one... so how can it possibly be personal information....
This is doublethink. The only reason they want the IP address is that it might identify someone. If it doesn't identify anyone then there is no reason to provide it, and if it does identify someone then it is personal information. In either situation it should not be provided.
Someone would almost certainly get charged with obstruction of justice.
Is that the thing they charge newspaper reporters with when they refuse to reveal their sources?
This comment incorrectly assumes the the US Trade Representative in any way gives a shit about the American people.
Quite right. And it is for this very reason that I would at this time like to formally request that the US Trade Representative die in a fire.
Sure low income housing but, what happens when your government cheese runs out? The US gets it's "government cheese" in the form of Social Security and Medicare but the major funding for that relies on the working middle class. If the only industries left were jobs are obtainable disappear (like the grandparent post mentioned the service industry) there goes Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security was designed by a bunch of politicians (and I use that term as a pejorative) who were more concerned with doing what was politically necessary to get it passed, and then making it as difficult as possible to ever repeal, than actually doing something sensible or sustainable. The structure of social security tax is ridiculous and the idea that people who have more money should get bigger government checks is preposterous. They started out paying benefits to people who never paid in, meaning that the entire thing is a ponzi scheme that was destined from the start to go bankrupt as soon as a population bubble like the baby boomers reached the retirement age. It desperately needs to be scrapped and replaced with a negative income tax.
As for idea that there won't be anyone to tax to pay for the government cheese, it doesn't work that way. The more things get automated and require less labor to produce, the less they cost. Imagine the ultimate conclusion: Literally everything is fully automated, so that there are zero jobs for anyone. At this point you don't have to pay the machine to produce it, or pay the machine that produces the first machine's inputs, ad infinitum. There is no one left in the chain to collect a paycheck. Provided that the owner of the production equipment is not a monopoly, that means the competitive price for all goods will be approximately the marginal cost of production -- zero. So no problems supplying food there; it's free.
Of course, that's communist fairyland and will never actually happen. But suppose we get half way there. So things are 50% automated, i.e. only 50% of people have to work in order to produce all the goods and services for 100% of everyone. In that case, things should cost approximately 50% of what they would cost if it required 100% of people to produce the same stuff. But look at what that means: If you can have e.g. a 20% tax rate and buy bread for everyone when bread costs $1 and everyone is employed, what tax rate do you need if you can only tax 50% of people because everyone else is unemployed, but at the same time bread now only costs $0.50? It's still a 20% tax rate. And that works for any employment percentage you want to plug in -- if you automate and that causes unemployment, you also reduce the cost of goods and services by the same amount, which thereby reduces cost of living and therefore the amount the government needs to provide to cover it.
It does, of course, suck for whoever loses their job -- they still get to eat, but they can no longer afford e.g. a car. And you have to raise taxes more if automation comes to other industries to a greater extent than it comes to agriculture, but that isn't likely -- in general agriculture is easy to automate.
Yes of course, price discrimination is already practiced. But cross market sales act as a check on it. The easier it is for people in the US to buy the book from India, the closer the prices have to be between India and the US. Which means that what the US should want is the exact opposite of what this treaty does -- rather than prohibiting importation, we should be prohibiting all measures to prevent it.
I completely agree that juries have been effectively neutered. It takes no better example than the way that the jury selection process in the P2P file sharing trials managed to remove every juror who might have even the slightest disagreement with the ridiculousness of the laws in question, leading to what any objective observer can recognize as monstrous damage awards.
But don't concentrate so much on the word "jury" -- the judicial system is admittedly and beyond the shadow of a doubt stacked against anyone without competent legal representation, but if you get two sides who each have good lawyers, the ultimate outcomes are pretty reasonable most of the time. Heck, look at all the courts throwing sand in the gears of the various P2P settlement scams.
And if your concern will be that not everyone can afford a good lawyer, your response is this.
those peasants won't just go quietly starve to death.
No, but bread is cheap and so are circuses.
Negative income tax pretty much solves all of capitalism's problems. You set the lowest (negative) tax bracket such that no matter how little money you make, you can afford to eat and pay rent on a very small apartment. Then nobody needs to work to not starve, but you still need to work if you want a car or a house or to send your kids to a decent school.
And people want those things enough to work for them, but not enough to riot over not having them. So if you can find a job, good for you. And if you can't, enjoy your government cheese.
The executive branch turns the crank on the treaty sausage grinder.
Incidentally, I blame Joe Biden.
Soap boxes aren't working
Ballot boxes aren't working
Ammo boxes are illegal
Now what?
You skipped one.
Things that can be copyrighted: Books, nicknacks, travel brochures, the pattern on my boxers... Not only will you have to strip naked for the TSA, you'll have to remain naked while crossing national borders.
Forget about the logistics. That's just the collateral damage. The real issue is that it enables price discrimination. Which makes the US and other countries with a high standard of living even more uncompetitive by compounding the cost advantage of foreign countries: Foreign students will get our textbooks for 5% of the US price, which means they have even lower costs and can more easily undercut our wages. Corporations license software in foreign countries for 5% of the US price, making it more cost effective to set up shop Anywhere But Here. On and on.
The fear is that with enough lawyers and money, someone could undercut the things that we here on Slashdot generally accept to be true, and re-open the debate.
But that's always the case. It's like the Linux patent FUD. They can spread FUD all they want, but until they identify specific patents or specific code they're just pissing in the wind. And as soon as they identify something specific, it immediately gets replaced and the threat dissipates.
I've made this point before in the patent context: There are only two ways it makes business sense to enforce a software patent. The first is if you're a patent troll so that your target can't make any counterclaims against your products since you don't have any. The second is if you're a huge conglomerate and your target is a small software developer, in which case software patents allow you to destroy them because you have a thousand patents that will read on anything they could possibly make and just the legal fees will bankrupt them, so they have to do what you want.
Patent litigation doesn't work between large companies because they each have enough patents the other is infringing that if they don't cross license, neither of them can actually sell any of their own products -- and on top of that the target has enough resources to try to invalidate your patents, which if they succeed leaves you vulnerable to suit by third parties because you've weakened your defensive arsenal. Which is why everybody cross-licenses everything. I heard someone say that the way they do it is to have each side bring a stack of their patents in to a meeting and whoever has the smaller stack of patents pays the other party based on the number of inches difference in the stacks of paper. It's preposterous.
But as long as software patents exist, the same pretty much goes for copyright. Let's say Microsoft gets the UNIX copyrights. Now they're going to sue IBM over Linux and try to keep IBM from selling Linux servers. The problem is that IBM has a zillion software patents that Microsoft is almost certainly infringing hundreds or thousands of. And so does everybody else that it could possibly be worth Microsoft's time to sue.
So plan B: Instead of Microsoft buying the copyrights, they make sure they get into the hands of some troll who will go after Linux vendors. But that's a recipe for a proxy war where each side starts laying mines for the other by selling patents and copyrights the other is infringing to various trolls. Which in the best case just leads to the same truce where each side agrees to stop doing that and just cross-license. And in the worst case it leads to litigation Armageddon because you get a bunch of loose nukes in the hands of unconstrained trolls -- which makes it exceptionally dangerous for anyone be the first mover toward that sort of outcome.
UNIX and a lot of the concepts (and code) in it are the foundation for a lot of stuff that's used in modern operating systems. If you can own that, you can have leverage over most operating systems.
UNIX is from the 1970s. Patents last 20 years. Anybody can do the math on that one.
And the copyright is largely muted by the license Berkeley distributed so much of it under. How much of UNIX do you really care about that isn't available under the BSD license?
At this point one might point out that if you can't watch Hulu or Netflix (we're talking about OpenSUSE here), cannot put in a credit card number to buy or rent a movie from Amazon Unbox or iTunes, and must install separate pieces of software in order to watch DVDs, this OS may not be "broken" but it might not really be meeting modern consumer expectations.
So there exist Linux distributions that don't include Flash player or libdvdread in the default install. Either install them or use something like this that includes them by default.
As for Netflix and other Windows-DRM-using things, you might as well complain that you can't watch over-the-air TV on YouTube. You can't do it because Hollywood bought some legislation that prevents honest people from doing reasonable things. The only way to fix the problem is to fix the law.
Of course you could argue they shouldn't be paying money for content, and that the DRM is illiberal or something, but you're still keeping the customer from doing what they want to do and what other platforms don't think twice about forbidding for what are essentially elitist moral reasons.
In actual fact it has nothing to do with "elitist moral reasons" and everything to do with the DMCA and software patents. There is no technical reason why there can't exist e.g. a GPL DVD player -- they exist already. But they aren't included in most default installs because of legal stupidity. So I say again, you want to fix the problem, fix the law.
But I also want to say that I agree with you. Linux needs to support these things natively and seamlessly. It's just that you need to direct your efforts toward a different set of people. It isn't that SUSE needs to hire a cadre of programmers to get Netflix working on Linux, it's that everybody who thinks this is important should cut a cheque to the EFF so they can do something about it.
The OS needs better ATI drivers, stop making excuses.
There are three ways to get drivers for Linux:
1) The hardware manufacturer publishes all the information the community needs to make working drivers, and the community makes drivers.
2) The hardware manufacturer itself releases Linux drivers.
3) The community reverse engineers the hardware and makes drivers.
(1) is clearly the best option and anybody who isn't a lawyer or lawyer sympathizer can see that. (2) is a second best which is satisfactory as long as the manufacturer's drivers work. (3) generally doesn't lead to high quality drivers, or at least takes a very long time and consumes overly many resources.
There is nothing "Linux" can do to change this. The actions of hardware makers determine the quality of the drivers for their hardware. It's exactly the same situation on Windows: If a hardware manufacturer releases a crappy Windows driver, there really isn't anything Microsoft can do about it. The epic amount of older hardware that has no drivers for Vista/7 is clear evidence of that.
This is really a non-story. Dip ship antagonizes lawyers and provides confession to feed them. Idiot is amazed lawyers pursue.
I think the story is that the justice system is sufficiently wrongheaded as to allow them to.
Well, really the problem is that we have the best justice money can buy. We give the court all these powers to issue subpoenas and force people to defend themselves against unproven allegations and the thing we seem to forget is that forcing the accused to defend himself itself is orders of magnitude greater punishment than that of the alleged harm, so that even if you win, you lose -- and therefore that simply by conducting the proceedings it works an injustice.
In fact, normally the justice system has a bunch of rules to prevent this sort of thing. You can't get into federal court for most claims unless the amount in controversy is over $75,000. State courts send disputes over small amounts to small claims court which limits litigation costs in many ways. And that's exactly where all of this P2P copyright stuff should be, except that it ends up in federal court because it's a federal law and lawyers are abusing the statutory damage amounts to threaten everybody with bankruptcy if they don't settle for an amount which is still two or three orders of magnitude more than any reasonable estimate of the actual damages.
The converter was probably gimped on purpose so people stick with Flash.
Maybe, but I don't really see the point of that. They probably just haven't spent enough time polishing it yet.
Adobe wants to promote Flash so that people will buy Flash Creator. But the output format is irrelevant to them. If people want HTML5, it's in their interest to make Creator output HTML5 -- because all they care is that people are buying Creator.
Of course, most browsers have Flash Block as a plugin, and sliverlight does not have such a plugin, so this may mean that Silverlight will win that part, that is the ad part, of the market in the coming year.
That seems highly unlikely. The lack of an equivalent to Flash Block is due to the unpopularity of Silverlight. If ads are delivered using Silverlight then the large plurality if not majority of people who don't have Silverlight installed won't see the ads, which defeats the purpose.
Moreover, even assuming a sufficient critical mass of people eventually install Silverlight that advertisers will be willing to ignore users without it, it will take about thirty six seconds after advertisers start using it for ads before someone releases Silverlight Block for all major web browsers.
That's partly what Silverlight is for, though
Silverlight has all of the same drawbacks of Flash in addition to not being supported by as many platforms. There is basically no reason for anyone to use it unless by doing so they can get Microsoft to give then a bag of money, and even then you have to seriously weigh the cash against losing the ever-growing number of non-Windows customers.
For example, whilst Safari and IE fell on day one, Firefox isn't scheduled to be available to anyone to try to hack till day two. Thus you can't say Safari is somehow less than Firefox.
Sure you can. We know there is 0% probability that Safari will not fall on the first day it was available, because the contrary has already happened. If Firefox doesn't fall on the first day it's available then Safari is less than Firefox. The probability that Firefox will not fall on the first day it is available, until we actually know the answer, will be more than 0%. Therefore "Safari is somehow less than Firefox." QED.
I think it will have the opposite effect you suggest, bringing MORE secrecy rather than less. You dare not let anyone see even an early demonstrator or model, or even talk about something you have in the works for fear they could run out and file a patent EVEN WITHOUT inventing anything. If you don't have to prove you invented it first, you can shut down your competitors with mere paperwork, while you labor in the back room to actual make something.
I haven't read the bill, but generally speaking, I don't think first to file really does that. The only way someone can do that under first to file is by breaking the law by claiming they invented it when they really got the invention from your publication. And if the troll is willing to break the law then the problem you're expressing still exists under a first to invent system, because the troll can just claim they independently invented the invention before you did and produce a bunch of backdated documents "proving" as much.
First to file even improves on the situation because it allows the actual inventor to simply file a patent application before they publish the invention, thereby precluding anyone else from lying and claiming they invented it first, because no one (other than a bona fide independent inventor) can file before the inventor if the inventor files before publishing the invention.
Of course, what would be even better is "first to publish" (and filing a patent application counts as publication). That way everybody has an incentive to publish ASAP because publication is the only way to reserve a priority date, and publication is much easier for smaller inventors than filing a patent application, but publication is much harder to fake than a bunch of backdated notes because you can verify it with e.g. archive.org.
Yeah, so? It's better than not being protected at all. Plus, there's nothing saying you can only have two of something. It's perfectly possible to have a 3-, 4-, or more-drive RAID-1 mirror. Obviously, the storage efficiency sucks, but if you want excellent redundancy, you can easily mirror 4 drives, and suffer 3 failures before you're not protected.
Plus there is always RAID-6. A six or eight disk RAID-6 has better storage efficiency than normal RAID-1/RAID-10 and you still need three simultaneous disk failures to fall over. Or if you have a large number of disks and you need an exceptional level of redundancy, RAID-15 or RAID-16, which has only slightly worse storage efficiency than RAID-10 and is pretty much only going to fall over as a result of a lightning strike or some other force of nature.
I'd be more inclined to ask where the creative expression is. It's a random number. It's entirely functional with no creativity whatsoever. You can't copyright the entries in a phone book, right? So how is this different?
This is a bad thing because the potential for misidentification is high. Couple this system with the notorious unreliability of eye witnesses and the potential for unintended coercion and you have a recipe for a constitutional disaster.
The especially bad problem is that it has a high likelihood of reinforcing misidentification: The witness comes in and works with the sketch artist, they run the picture through the database and out comes a picture of someone who looks like the sketch. The police ask the witness, "is this the perp?" Of course, the picture looks like the sketch or the computer wouldn't have spit it out, so most likely the witness says yes. Now the witness has had a better look at the mugshot than they ever got at the perpetrator, and in their mind they now know exactly what the perpetrator looks like -- like the mugshot. By the time they drag this poor sap into the police station, the witness is thoroughly convinced that the perpetrator is the person in the mugshot. And if that isn't the case, another innocent person is put behind bars.