Can you please quote this elusive EU law that's "forcing carriers to allow unlocking FOR FREE" ? Please note that "after 1,2,5,50,500 years" doesn't qualify as "FREE" anymore as even popular expensive smartphones tend to be "left behind" after about one year or so nowadays. Because the countries are so small and close you might want to go to Germany tomorrow (for one day, one week or one month) and use (for example) a cheap local SIM for data with YOUR phone. And you can't (and the fact that your provider might unlock your phone after 245 days doesn't help you a bit).
Not only I find hard to believe that this "EU law" exists but I'm not aware of ANY EU country that has a local law that either forces the providers to sell unlocked phones or forces them to unlock the phones for free without further qualification. Wikipedia seems to be agree with me as well.
Any unexpected (and everything is unexpected at some point) regulation is "somewhat unfair"; the provider might bet on you staying with them after you finished your contract because you don't want to lose your number but then number portability comes and then they can't keep you. Fact is the provider is intentionally crippling a perfectly good phone betting there will be enough people paying for their "official" unlocking service to offset all the costs associated with these procedures and even get them some extra profit. It's a non-zero sum game in which the "total" optimal strategy would be for the provider to just stop messing up with the phones. The problem is that market will not reach this point by itself once those 2-3 big providers sell only locked phones.
.. otherwise the law might have been struck as "unfair": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#Belgium Yes, you read this right, forcing your provider not to lock your phone is "unfair" in the EU.
Why don't you quote the rest? "Google has complied with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results. However, Google does list the number of excluded results at the bottom of the search result page and links to Chilling Effects for explanation."
To put it shortly: out of 57634762346346 sites google was legally forced to remove 113 sites from the index and despite this you can still learn what URLs had the removed sites from the takedown notices.
It's not only about high speed rail, it's also about buses and subways. Of course if you drag with you two tons of car it doesn't matter much if you have one extra kilo or not. No device will fit everybody, if you buy something which you carry only on vacation and maybe sometimes from the parking lot to the building of course you don't care much about weight and size.
I never actually took my netbook anywhere except vacations because I still had to carry it. May as well bring a laptop then, the only advantage of the netbook was the weight.
Let me guess: you fly for vacation and go anywhere else by car.
"Demand"? You and which army? In Germany you pay some "copyright tax" for your fax (presumably because you COULD copy books with it?) but if you DO COPY books and they catch you're still liable for that infringement.
Nope. Immutable means no updates = nothing to prevent the malware from getting back in once you rebooted the box. Unless your idea of security is pulling the cord and leave it like that. There were worms that used RAM-only and would not survive a reboot, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witty_(computer_worm) (this would only destroy data on hdd but not install there).
As I said in the cousin post it's not a matter of "raw unedited format" and "editing station", we're talking "consumer scenario". It's just a bunch of folders and it'll be like that until the owner dies or until first disk failure if there are no backups. And if they are on a stick it's not "lugging" on your keychain. It's like mail since gmail: you don't need to file everything to some folder, you don't need to delete attachments, you don't need to decide what to take with you this week. Maybe you won't ever use 99.99% of what's there but you do need to have close to everything to find everything you search for. And if you can, why not? It might not be cost effective this week but there's no reason to be so next year, or the year after.
It's not necessarily "raw", as in it's waiting for processing, it's just the way it is. If I want to refer to some old picture or to show somebody the pictures from some random event I'll just go to the folders and use what's there. Of course I keep it on platters, but not by choice. It's not that much if I want to take it with me but I would prefer to have 20-30g (one beefy stick) compared to 2x192g for two external 2.5 inch drives.
Can you think of a scenario where data created by home users would top 2 TB?
I'm close to that and I really, really don't try too hard. Half of it it's "legacy" data from the previous millennium. And I was quite late to the game and I'm talking only about what I personally produced, not all my close friends and relatives.
So, what's all about?
500 GB is less than 20 mini-DV tapes and no, I'm not going to convert it to anything else. I like originals and I don't want to deal with the whole deinterlacing mess. This is not some footage digitized at ridiculous resolution, this is digital data generated just like that around 10 years ago. I'm not going to mess up with it NIOW, when 2x2TB drives are less than one tank of gas.
Then there are the random videos I took for the last 5-6 years. It's not much at all, I use the camera a couple of times per year. However, as I went from mini-DV to video taken with "photo" camera I have tons of video compressed with MJPEG or something similar, at about 12 min/4GB. You can imagine that's easily over 500GB as well.
Then there are some (not many) hundreds GBs of (digital, recent) pictures and a couple more hundreds GB for the digitized negatives (not many but yes, this time I used the maximum resolution on the film scanner, I'm not going back scanning them).
No documents, no image of the laptop drive, no backups of my parents' pictures, nothing else. Just my "legacy" and digital era pictures.
An OEM license is for the machine it was installed on and that machine only. So the only way to transfer the license is if you are giving/selling the whole PC to someone else.
That's what they would like you to believe. This was successfully challenged in Germany and as a result you can buy naked OEM licenses both from known shops and from Ebay.
Even if you aren't in Germany I'm sure they won't legally go after you if you just treat the OEM as a normal copy, they are satisfied enough with people being scared and can't take the risk of "upgrading" all OEM copies in a country to full copies overnight if they lose a lawsuit.
Please note that Microsoft are well known for wild claims related to OEM copies, to the point where they were claiming you can't even trash the OEM copy you got:
http://slashdot.org/story/02/04/18/1623240/Microsofts-Guide-to-Accepting-Donated-PCs
... they better forget it. It costs from 55 eurocents to send one "email" (to multiple euros if you want confirmation, even if there is no snail-mail/paper involved). The interface is arcane with no 3rd party integration, of course there's no end-to-end encryption (and the "mails" are way less legally protected than normal post) and there are some really nasty conditions attached: - you have to check your mail EVERY WORKING DAY (that includes Saturdays, not that it matters) - you can't delegate this "check mail" duty to anybody (note that there isn't anything wrong in letting your wife/neighbour/etc in charge of your physical mailbox if you trust them).
$29, and it's unlikely Apple makes much money on them.
You can buy now SDHC readers for $.99 and that is retail price including shipping around the world. As GP said we're talking cents for parts and it's a long way to $29... I bet there are ipods that are sold with less margin than that $28+
It's not 3 to 5 cents a shot but 3 to 5 cents for 14 MB or whatever you consider a shot to be. And you reuse those MB for a few (or many) pictures so the price per shot goes down as you use your equipment. Of course you still need to store and backup eventually the pictures but there the prices per MB are tens of times lower.
What's available and prices are awful on Kindle store (baring what's in public domain and available from Gutenberg Project). Of course you CAN have something to read for multiple lifetimes with what's now in Kindle store but if you're looking for something in particular it's more likely than not to be unavailable. Examples now that we're talking SF. Take Heinlein. As far as I can tell (hard to make Amazon to display ONLY what you want...) there are only 4 books really from Heinlein available, from $9.xx to $13.99. Of course the paperback is 3-5$ (usually new!) plus dirt cheap or free shipping...
THIS is why I love slashdot. It "just happened" that some user knew there was already somebody using freaking rockets for maritime rescue. AND has a link well prepared for people who aren't ready to dig through 200 years old diaries they can't access anyway, with nice pictures to boot. Thank you!
Why would anyone running XP fork over the dough for a 3TB HDD?
Uh, why shouldn't? Right now 2TB hard drives are the best bang for the buck (or close to, especially if you consider that smaller drives need more ports for the same total disk space). Did we suddenly decide 2TB is enough for anybody with XP? I know now quite a few people with more than 5TB (multiple drives) and running XP (in fact I have never seen a desktop with win7, only notebooks with "Microsoft Tax"). Can't people with XP save their home videos on hard drive (20GB+ for a 1.5h mini-DV tape)? Can't they get porn? Aren't they allowed to have giganews subscriptions? This is before even starting to think about using one large hard drive with more computers of various ages (exchanging data, backups, etc).
Also, if your dealing with a shop that has to be PCI-DSS or as part of a PA-DSS application, the PCI folks want to see at least 256bit AES encryption. The 128-bit solution isn't enough. So far the closest we've found is Logmein and we only support clients on Windows or OSX.
So, let me get this straight. 128-bit AES in a popular, trusted , open source, "point to point" application isn't good enough. However Logmein, originally developed in Eastern Europe (and probably now supported from India or China) which is a closed box controlled by servers you have no idea what they're doing is fine because they somewhere have the magical text "256bit AES". Right.
I've created a lot of things in my life which are now either lost or rendered curiosities because technology has moved on (including 2 years spent working on a project using interactive Laservision discs*). I guess it is just an occupational hazard. However, if our race survives for another few centuries I think future historians are going to find a big black hole in the record circa 2000 AD.
I strongly disagree with the "black hole" statement. Barring some "Mad Max" (or worse) future there will be information overload about current times, at least compared with how we view recorded history today. Yes, maybe we'll need many times more information if future generations want to experience "holodeck quality" Paris ~2000AD but compared with past times we're doing great. There will be tens of thousands of pictures from any stupid place you can imagine (I'm not talking about Louvre and such). There will be a lot of crap archived just "because we can". Never mind Sandra Palin's yahoo emails but think about for example Obama's Amazon (or Ebay or Paypal or Amex) purchases. As it happens much of the digital data we generate is lost; you can't guarantee some specific data will be there tomorrow unless you take great care to make backups verify them, etc. But we generate so much digital data that even if some really small portion survives it's still a lot of it left. Compare this with past times. There are countries where the whole history, everything they know about themselves can be saved on a floppy disc. Put yourself in the past, anywhere before the "digital revolution". 1950AD? 1850AD? 1500AD? 500AD? 1000BC? What were the chances of your projects (whatever they could be in those times) could survive even 50 years after your death (assuming you didn't know the future so you could "trick the system")?
So, gmail has this (quite unique) feature that it shows you a couple IPs used to log in to your account ("Last account activity:"). However the feature is quite basic but still there can be many things to do with a little more intelligence on the client. A firefox extension could easily store all these logs somewhere and alert when it sees suspicious activity (based for example on white-listing current IP and some manually entered ranges). Anybody knows about such beast?
I'm sure it works for you but it depends a lot how disciplined are the drivers anyway. I've seen places where these count down timers are a major nuisance. 10s before green cars start creeping (technically running the light but hey, no camera); if you don't start moving at -2s people are honking, if there's a slowdown at the end of the green light those who can't make it start again honking, sometimes somebody decides to overtake (going wrong way) everybody who's waiting just because there are only a couple of seconds to green and nobody's moving... These kind of things are highly dependent on the context. For example I've seen places where they put speed bumps only in one direction. The next thing that happened is that drivers going at high speed were swerving in the opposite lane to avoid the speed bumps (vastly increasing the dangers compared to previous situation without speed bumps).
2000 apps might be a lot (never used that many on all platforms) or nothing at all (my old Sony C702 had at some point more than 3500 apps available and it wasn't even really a smartphone). Let me ask you for example if there is any application similar to Garmin Mobile XT or iGo/Amigo with nice (off-line) routable vector maps from most of the world? Or some chess program that can compete at least with a 5-8 years old Pocket Fritz 2 ? What about fring or skype? Or something similar to Pocket Stars? Or to put it simply: how many apps from those 2000 are as far as complexity goes above iFart or similar?
The point was that palm sucks for apps, app-store or not. Of course the manufacturers/carriers don't HAVE to use the app-store to lock in users but they usually do it: - really aggressively in Apple's case - somehow inefficiently and without a compass for Palm (but they still do it), see http://www.weboshelp.net/all-webos-news-articles/490-palm-webos-104-released-closes-e-mail-install-loophole-on-pre - mixed bag with symbian, it usually depends on the carrier - quite rarely but still Android lock-out happened already (with some Australian carrier if I remember correctly).
Slashdot Mirror
Can you please quote this elusive EU law that's "forcing carriers to allow unlocking FOR FREE" ? Please note that "after 1,2,5,50,500 years" doesn't qualify as "FREE" anymore as even popular expensive smartphones tend to be "left behind" after about one year or so nowadays.
Because the countries are so small and close you might want to go to Germany tomorrow (for one day, one week or one month) and use (for example) a cheap local SIM for data with YOUR phone. And you can't (and the fact that your provider might unlock your phone after 245 days doesn't help you a bit).
Not only I find hard to believe that this "EU law" exists but I'm not aware of ANY EU country that has a local law that either forces the providers to sell unlocked phones or forces them to unlock the phones for free without further qualification. Wikipedia seems to be agree with me as well.
Any unexpected (and everything is unexpected at some point) regulation is "somewhat unfair"; the provider might bet on you staying with them after you finished your contract because you don't want to lose your number but then number portability comes and then they can't keep you.
Fact is the provider is intentionally crippling a perfectly good phone betting there will be enough people paying for their "official" unlocking service to offset all the costs associated with these procedures and even get them some extra profit.
It's a non-zero sum game in which the "total" optimal strategy would be for the provider to just stop messing up with the phones. The problem is that market will not reach this point by itself once those 2-3 big providers sell only locked phones.
.. otherwise the law might have been struck as "unfair": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#Belgium
Yes, you read this right, forcing your provider not to lock your phone is "unfair" in the EU.
Why don't you quote the rest?
"Google has complied with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results. However, Google does list the number of excluded results at the bottom of the search result page and links to Chilling Effects for explanation."
To put it shortly: out of 57634762346346 sites google was legally forced to remove 113 sites from the index and despite this you can still learn what URLs had the removed sites from the takedown notices.
Doesn't sound evil to me.
It's not only about high speed rail, it's also about buses and subways. Of course if you drag with you two tons of car it doesn't matter much if you have one extra kilo or not.
No device will fit everybody, if you buy something which you carry only on vacation and maybe sometimes from the parking lot to the building of course you don't care much about weight and size.
Let me guess: you fly for vacation and go anywhere else by car.
http://www.blueseed.co/
Now let's see if we can flood it :-)
"Demand"? You and which army?
In Germany you pay some "copyright tax" for your fax (presumably because you COULD copy books with it?) but if you DO COPY books and they catch you're still liable for that infringement.
Nope.
Immutable means no updates = nothing to prevent the malware from getting back in once you rebooted the box. Unless your idea of security is pulling the cord and leave it like that.
There were worms that used RAM-only and would not survive a reboot, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witty_(computer_worm) (this would only destroy data on hdd but not install there).
As I said in the cousin post it's not a matter of "raw unedited format" and "editing station", we're talking "consumer scenario". It's just a bunch of folders and it'll be like that until the owner dies or until first disk failure if there are no backups. And if they are on a stick it's not "lugging" on your keychain.
It's like mail since gmail: you don't need to file everything to some folder, you don't need to delete attachments, you don't need to decide what to take with you this week. Maybe you won't ever use 99.99% of what's there but you do need to have close to everything to find everything you search for. And if you can, why not? It might not be cost effective this week but there's no reason to be so next year, or the year after.
It's not necessarily "raw", as in it's waiting for processing, it's just the way it is. If I want to refer to some old picture or to show somebody the pictures from some random event I'll just go to the folders and use what's there.
Of course I keep it on platters, but not by choice. It's not that much if I want to take it with me but I would prefer to have 20-30g (one beefy stick) compared to 2x192g for two external 2.5 inch drives.
I'm close to that and I really, really don't try too hard. Half of it it's "legacy" data from the previous millennium. And I was quite late to the game and I'm talking only about what I personally produced, not all my close friends and relatives.
So, what's all about?
500 GB is less than 20 mini-DV tapes and no, I'm not going to convert it to anything else. I like originals and I don't want to deal with the whole deinterlacing mess. This is not some footage digitized at ridiculous resolution, this is digital data generated just like that around 10 years ago. I'm not going to mess up with it NIOW, when 2x2TB drives are less than one tank of gas.
Then there are the random videos I took for the last 5-6 years. It's not much at all, I use the camera a couple of times per year. However, as I went from mini-DV to video taken with "photo" camera I have tons of video compressed with MJPEG or something similar, at about 12 min/4GB. You can imagine that's easily over 500GB as well.
Then there are some (not many) hundreds GBs of (digital, recent) pictures and a couple more hundreds GB for the digitized negatives (not many but yes, this time I used the maximum resolution on the film scanner, I'm not going back scanning them). No documents, no image of the laptop drive, no backups of my parents' pictures, nothing else. Just my "legacy" and digital era pictures.
That's what they would like you to believe. This was successfully challenged in Germany and as a result you can buy naked OEM licenses both from known shops and from Ebay. Even if you aren't in Germany I'm sure they won't legally go after you if you just treat the OEM as a normal copy, they are satisfied enough with people being scared and can't take the risk of "upgrading" all OEM copies in a country to full copies overnight if they lose a lawsuit. Please note that Microsoft are well known for wild claims related to OEM copies, to the point where they were claiming you can't even trash the OEM copy you got: http://slashdot.org/story/02/04/18/1623240/Microsofts-Guide-to-Accepting-Donated-PCs
... they better forget it.
It costs from 55 eurocents to send one "email" (to multiple euros if you want confirmation, even if there is no snail-mail/paper involved). The interface is arcane with no 3rd party integration, of course there's no end-to-end encryption (and the "mails" are way less legally protected than normal post) and there are some really nasty conditions attached:
- you have to check your mail EVERY WORKING DAY (that includes Saturdays, not that it matters)
- you can't delegate this "check mail" duty to anybody (note that there isn't anything wrong in letting your wife/neighbour/etc in charge of your physical mailbox if you trust them).
You can buy now SDHC readers for $.99 and that is retail price including shipping around the world. As GP said we're talking cents for parts and it's a long way to $29...
I bet there are ipods that are sold with less margin than that $28+
It's not 3 to 5 cents a shot but 3 to 5 cents for 14 MB or whatever you consider a shot to be. And you reuse those MB for a few (or many) pictures so the price per shot goes down as you use your equipment. Of course you still need to store and backup eventually the pictures but there the prices per MB are tens of times lower.
What's available and prices are awful on Kindle store (baring what's in public domain and available from Gutenberg Project). Of course you CAN have something to read for multiple lifetimes with what's now in Kindle store but if you're looking for something in particular it's more likely than not to be unavailable.
Examples now that we're talking SF. Take Heinlein. As far as I can tell (hard to make Amazon to display ONLY what you want...) there are only 4 books really from Heinlein available, from $9.xx to $13.99. Of course the paperback is 3-5$ (usually new!) plus dirt cheap or free shipping...
THIS is why I love slashdot. It "just happened" that some user knew there was already somebody using freaking rockets for maritime rescue. AND has a link well prepared for people who aren't ready to dig through 200 years old diaries they can't access anyway, with nice pictures to boot.
Thank you!
Uh, why shouldn't? Right now 2TB hard drives are the best bang for the buck (or close to, especially if you consider that smaller drives need more ports for the same total disk space). Did we suddenly decide 2TB is enough for anybody with XP? I know now quite a few people with more than 5TB (multiple drives) and running XP (in fact I have never seen a desktop with win7, only notebooks with "Microsoft Tax"). Can't people with XP save their home videos on hard drive (20GB+ for a 1.5h mini-DV tape)? Can't they get porn? Aren't they allowed to have giganews subscriptions?
This is before even starting to think about using one large hard drive with more computers of various ages (exchanging data, backups, etc).
So, let me get this straight. 128-bit AES in a popular, trusted , open source, "point to point" application isn't good enough. However Logmein, originally developed in Eastern Europe (and probably now supported from India or China) which is a closed box controlled by servers you have no idea what they're doing is fine because they somewhere have the magical text "256bit AES". Right.
I strongly disagree with the "black hole" statement. Barring some "Mad Max" (or worse) future there will be information overload about current times, at least compared with how we view recorded history today. Yes, maybe we'll need many times more information if future generations want to experience "holodeck quality" Paris ~2000AD but compared with past times we're doing great. There will be tens of thousands of pictures from any stupid place you can imagine (I'm not talking about Louvre and such). There will be a lot of crap archived just "because we can". Never mind Sandra Palin's yahoo emails but think about for example Obama's Amazon (or Ebay or Paypal or Amex) purchases. As it happens much of the digital data we generate is lost; you can't guarantee some specific data will be there tomorrow unless you take great care to make backups verify them, etc. But we generate so much digital data that even if some really small portion survives it's still a lot of it left. Compare this with past times. There are countries where the whole history, everything they know about themselves can be saved on a floppy disc. Put yourself in the past, anywhere before the "digital revolution". 1950AD? 1850AD? 1500AD? 500AD? 1000BC? What were the chances of your projects (whatever they could be in those times) could survive even 50 years after your death (assuming you didn't know the future so you could "trick the system")?
So, gmail has this (quite unique) feature that it shows you a couple IPs used to log in to your account ("Last account activity:"). However the feature is quite basic but still there can be many things to do with a little more intelligence on the client. A firefox extension could easily store all these logs somewhere and alert when it sees suspicious activity (based for example on white-listing current IP and some manually entered ranges). Anybody knows about such beast?
I'm sure it works for you but it depends a lot how disciplined are the drivers anyway. I've seen places where these count down timers are a major nuisance. 10s before green cars start creeping (technically running the light but hey, no camera); if you don't start moving at -2s people are honking, if there's a slowdown at the end of the green light those who can't make it start again honking, sometimes somebody decides to overtake (going wrong way) everybody who's waiting just because there are only a couple of seconds to green and nobody's moving...
These kind of things are highly dependent on the context. For example I've seen places where they put speed bumps only in one direction. The next thing that happened is that drivers going at high speed were swerving in the opposite lane to avoid the speed bumps (vastly increasing the dangers compared to previous situation without speed bumps).
2000 apps might be a lot (never used that many on all platforms) or nothing at all (my old Sony C702 had at some point more than 3500 apps available and it wasn't even really a smartphone). Let me ask you for example if there is any application similar to Garmin Mobile XT or iGo/Amigo with nice (off-line) routable vector maps from most of the world? Or some chess program that can compete at least with a 5-8 years old Pocket Fritz 2 ? What about fring or skype? Or something similar to Pocket Stars?
Or to put it simply: how many apps from those 2000 are as far as complexity goes above iFart or similar?
The point was that palm sucks for apps, app-store or not. Of course the manufacturers/carriers don't HAVE to use the app-store to lock in users but they usually do it:
- really aggressively in Apple's case
- somehow inefficiently and without a compass for Palm (but they still do it), see http://www.weboshelp.net/all-webos-news-articles/490-palm-webos-104-released-closes-e-mail-install-loophole-on-pre
- mixed bag with symbian, it usually depends on the carrier
- quite rarely but still Android lock-out happened already (with some Australian carrier if I remember correctly).