content providers have been irresponsible with their delivery
Hm?
For example, not allowing users to download off-hours
Aren't most of them streaming services which probably don't have a license to allow downloads (DRMed or otherwise)? Even if they did allow downloads, don't most people these days favor streaming options? Why would I fret with starting a download at 8am (programming it into a DVR-like device, making sure it gets saved somewhere proper, etc.) when I can just hit play at 8pm anyway?
even encouraging them to all download at peak times
Did I miss a memo where e.g. Netflix tells people to watch Star Trek:TNG on Wednesday at 7pm just to piss off the infrastructure providers? Otherwise, it seems to me that 'peak times' just happen to coincide with when people get home, or when a new episode of a popular series is made available, etc. That's not so much 'encouragement' as it is just the natural ebb and flow of media consumption.
and not using proper compression
Maybe you can just explain exactly what you mean here. If it's compression on the protocol level - well, maybe there are better options than what's being used now (what IS being used now?) - though the datastream tends to be not-so-easily-compressed anyway. If it's the actual media - e.g. "they should use lower bitrates in their encoding" - then I fear what the 'industry' is suggesting here, as most streams and downloads are quite block-artifacty enough, tyvm.
Google, for example, loves weaker copyright protection so they can sell 3rd party content. Media companies and small-time authors love copyright because it rewards the creation of works.
One of the things Amelia Andersdotter suggests people say 'yes' to, is required copyright registration. I'm sure the idea is that it makes it harder for some random person or company to come after you for placing their image (usually with all credits cropped out, if posts on imgur and such are any indication) on your blog/tumblr/whatever.
Of course this does cut both ways. If you take a news-worthy photo, you'd better register the copyright first - which takes some time and I have no doubt may eventually lead to some processing fees - or every news outlet in the world is just going to yoink it, use it, may not even bother with attribution, and enjoy all the advertising income it helped generate. Maybe you don't mind, maybe that's what you want to happen for your photo. Then again, maybe you do mind and only want 'the little guy' to use it and not the big media companies (think BSD-type licensed software and some people complaining about companies using that without giving back, with the usual co-comments 'should have used GPL instead').
Slapping a CC-BY-NC type license on an image previously got you the best of both worlds - at least where the license is respected.. the 'little guy' can still drop it on their tumblr, while Fox News, CNN, etc. will have to contact you and at least request permission first.
That is an immediately available choice that required copyright registration takes away entirely, and puts up a barrier (be that in time taken for the registration or, and don't think it wouldn't happen, a processing fee required to be paid) for most other avenues.
I understand her goal with this (one more step to abolishing copyright - and I'm in favor of that, but also in favor of more stringent distribution rights - via making sure that anything not registered is essentially public domain), but I disagree with the method. If anything, it favors big media.
Kickstarter and IndieGoGo aren't really affected by this for the reasons outlined by AC above.
Rockethub, on the other hand, will probably try and give a positive spin to it. Rockethub has been courting the idea of actual investment type projects and has been present in many leading talks on the subject, such as congress's hearing on the JOBS Act.
( There are also some purely investment-oriented 'crowdfunding' sites, but they're mostly little more than putting a Kickstarter-face on existing investment mechanisms. )
I want to extend the right click context menu - same as Win 7-zip managed to add itself to my context menu. I rarely add anything to it but it's clearly possible
That is to say - it's clearly possible with some hacking or by downloading a third party tool to do it for you. It wasn't easy to do so in Windows XP, and it's still not easy to do so in Windows 7. It's not necessarily something that's meant to be easy to do, of course.
For what it's worth, I've only ever added one for exiftools since it makes working with exiftools for my specific purpose (copy/paste EXiF data) so much easier:
Fire up regedit. Yep, you'll be mucking around in there.
Find 'HKLM\Software\Classes\.jpg' and note the '(Default)' value. That'll be your file handler for most jpeg files (you can also check.jpeg if you want). In my case, that's 'IrfanView.jpg'
In that new key, add a new string value named 'MUIVerb' and give it the value 'exif (&x)'. That ampersand makes the 'x' key the keyboard shortcut.
Add another string value there named 'SubCommands' and give it the value 'exifcopy;exifpaste;exifclear' - these are the command names the explorer shell will look for when handling the submenu (did I mention this makes a nice submenu type context menu entry, rather than a bunch of flat items?)
Now find this monstrosity: 'HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CommandStore\shell'. Windows will relocate things to Wow6432Node anyway so might as well place it there to begin with.
Create new keys there called 'exifclear', 'exifcopy' and 'exifpaste'
In each of those keys, modify the '(Default)' value to 'clear (&z)', 'copy (&c)' and 'paste (&v)' respectively. Again, the ampersands make nice keyboard shortcuts out of the letters following them, and the 'z' is used so you don't accidentally double-tap the 'x' key and clear EXiF data accidentally.
In each of those keys, add another subkey named 'command'.
In those 'command' subkeys, modify the '(Default)' value to e.g. '"c:\Program Files (x86)\EXiFtool\exifcvz.bat" CommandHere "%1"' changing the path to match your EXiFtool location and CommandHere being 'clear', 'copy' and 'paste' for each as appropriate.
Create the exifcvz.bat file to handle the commands as appropriate ('copy' copies the original file to a temporary location, 'paste' instructs exiftool to copy the exif data from the temporary location to the given file (and yes, you can select multiple as explorer will simply invoke it for each selected file), and 'clear' runs the exif cleaning tool.
Once done, you should be able to pull up the context menu when a jpg file is selected, hit 'xc' to copy, select target jpg file(s) and hit 'xv' and the exif data is copied. No messing about with exiftoolgui or any other clumsy GUI, nevermind futzing about with the CLI (which is fine for many things, but not so much when dealing with images).
And yes, all those steps above would be why there's 3rd party utilities out there that will happily simplify the process. But it is doable by them, and by you, whether you're using Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8 - and equally painful in all.
But they're not -and depending on one's point of view, they have good reasons for it.
The other difficulty is making a fold or SETI search accomplishment a proof-of-work without it being wide open to abuse (and, therefore, hugely detrimental to those projects).
A less stringent method would be to set a transaction bit and message to an online solution, and allow clients to check the bit (and the solution) and accept that as the transaction fee - thus allowing anybody who doesn't want to pay a transaction fee to have the option of helping cancer research of the search for little green men instead. Unfortunately, this then runs into a large portion of the Bitcoin community not being open to that idea, since any such framework could easily be abused (see also: Coin Validation).
Given that it's stated that you can't trust a chip's encryption routines, which at the basis means that you don't trust its random number generator, and given that 'a chip' extends down from the latest Intel to a relatively lowly PIC, is anybody aware of an actually available TRNG (true/hardware random number generator) built out of discrete components?
However, I haven't seen any actual implementation. My Google-fu may be failing me, though.
* Barring some pretty sweet shenanigans like those pulled by Henryk Gasperowicz; [Spoiler video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KMLmpC7-Ls). I can't see manufacturers including any crypto-defeatery bits into a basic transistor thinking that it just might possibly be used in an actual crypto application, and eat the cost somehow.
This is particularly disturbing because they should well have known about this. Disqus used (uses?) Gravatar, and Gravatar's failure in this exact same fashion has been previously covered and was not even fixed for a long time afterward (disclaimer: that AC is me. At least, I think it was. The company I referred to in there did respond to my complaint and fixed it on their side (making Gravatar use opt-in and using a generic 'profile picture' when it wasn't enabled) - not sure if there's statistics on how many people decided to enable it.)
This sounded so, so much worse when I glossed over the second 'and' in that first sentence there.
I doubt this was a case of last resort, though. At the same time, death as karma for theft? Bit much. On the other hand, in some countries that would mean the thieves would have standing to sue if their lawyer finds the cases were not clearly identifying the substance as hazardous/radioactive, etc. and that's more than a bit much.
Of course there's always going to be a subset of people who will choose the option where they don't pay at all. However, I do think that the size of the audience for these streaming sites can be reduced greatly if the rights holders decided to make their material available in a superior form.
And by superior form I don't necessarily mean that it has to be 4k with the full DTS tracks and DRM-free - though that would be nice; it could be as simple as just being vastly more convenient. Take Netflix - I like railing against Netflix because I think its scope of offerings is entirely too narrow. At the same time, though, if I wanted to watch some movie that the Netflix app on my Roku tells me they have available and all I need to do is press a button and it plays... I'll sign up for that anytime over having to wait for a torrent download, or hunt down that one 'news' server that lets me get it at 10MB/s (and still have to wait a long time and find out it's a 540p rip in an MP4 container format that VLC manages to choke on).
The more questionable sources can't match that superior experience, simply because it means a lot of (relatively expensive) high bandwidth hosting. This, too, will change in the (far) future.. which is why rights holders should have gotten their sh*t together 8 years ago. But as the saying goes, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
The people who will continue to use the questionable sources should be ignored as they could never be convinced without very strict legislation that by its very nature requires severe impinging on privacy anyway.
While I agree that the copyright term is too long (for that matter, copyright needs to go - distribution rights is what matters), this only has impact on the streaming sites insofar as a user actually saying "because of the ridiculous copyright term, I'm gonna watch this episode of Walking Dead that aired an hour ago."
Otherwise, the copyright term could be 13 years, 5 years, 1 year or even 1 month.. and the streaming sites would still find themselves with practically the same audience; after all, what good is it to watch an episode 1 month later when everybody at the watercooler (or on your facebook or whatever) is already 3 or even 4 episodes further along?
A complaint about the lack of appropriate coverage for a global audience would make more sense.
There's plenty of free software licenses, libre and otherwise, open source and otherwise, you can choose from that have little to nothing to do with GNU (not sure if you're just referring to GPL there, or..)
Github suggests using this site, but there's other comparative / flowchart-based ones if you google about: http://choosealicense.com/
While popularly torrents get messed about with in terms of available bandwidth, the same applies to several other P2P protocols. It's the painted nature of the beast - lots of potentially high-bandwidth connections established for essentially low-priority purposes - that hurts it in that respect. (Yet) An(other) archive of wikipedia isn't going to change that - unless you can think of a convincing reason to submit to ISP decisionmakers that would cause them to believe that throttling the download and/or upload of such an archive to be substantially detrimental to their users (and, ultimately, their bottom line).
It's already legitimate and doesn't need legitimizing.
Of course that doesn't mean that just because your favorite popular zero-day movie/series/albums/ebooks/software site of rather unauthorized nature magically gains "but what about the copy of wikipedia!?"-protection from the likes of MPAA/RIAA/Wiley?/BSA.. at least not in most courts of law.
Which is different from closed source software, how?
Take SpaceMonger, for example. There one day, gone the next. Guy's still around, personal blog notes the disappearance, and essentially told people to just not ask. Well alright, then.
I do agree that when an open source software project goes stagnant because one or more active developers quit, it's rather indicative of the fact that just because the source is available that there is no guarantee whatsoever that somebody else will pick it up. But at least they can.
Some of the tests may need to be weighted differently
Which is why the data should be made publicly available, so the weighting can be checked. I'm fine with them saying that Score X on head-on colission at 60mph is worth less than Score X on rear-end colission at 15mph simply because the first probably leaves you in a world of hurt anyway and isn't nearly as likely to happen as some jackass rear-ending you at the lights.
But then...
may not even be able to be weighted in a rational manner
...just means gut-feeling work. That's not a test.
It's an approximation, an educated guess at how safe a vehicle is
The whole point of testing isn't to make guesses. You can't just go around running a bunch of tests, getting measurable data from it, knowing with some certainty what the error in the test methodology is, and then check the alignment of the planets before factoring the test score into what a bunch of tea leaves say.
Essentially...
you can't really claim that one car is safer than another based on the score
...would preclude a stars rating entirely. If there's no demonstrable greater safety in a car with 5 stars vs one with 4 stars, then why does the first have 5 and the latter 4 to begin with? And if there is that demonstrable safety difference, then surely the one with 5 stars can at least claim theirs is safer than the one with 4 stars. And if that is the case, assume there was never a car with 5 stars before - they surely could claim that they do have the safest car evar.
I do get the psychological, PR and industry flak aspect that the NHTSA is trying to address - but that would be a lot easier by dropping the scores and only issuing stars.. or by keeping the scores and dropping the stars.
As far as I can tell, Tesla claims - as do several news outlets - that the NHTSA also releases some other raw numbers to the manufacturers which Tesla then decided to 'combine' (whether that's adding or averaging or whatever - who knows.) to give a 5.4 .
Really, the issue is lack of transparency - since we, the public, don't get to see those numbers. Thus we can't really give a good opinion other than "NHTSA says 5 is the maximum. THE MAXIMUM!" and all nod in agreement at the overlord's words apparently for fear of getting booted out.
So it had the best overall test score.. but is not necessarily the safest. But the test is on safety. So it's the best in safety.. but not necessarily the best in safety.
Maybe while they're quibbling they could come up with a system that makes sense to themselves, the manufacturers and, most importantly, the public. If in the end that means Tesla does get a 5.4 and they want to hang on to 5 stars - well I guess they'll just have to lower the rating on a bunch of other cars.
They did not take away game functionality or limit BluRay playback
That's not entirely true. 3D BluRay is not supported at launch. I know not many tears will be shed over that with most people, but it's yet another thing in a long line of things (along the same lines: no audio CD support, no mp3 file playback) that inspire head-scratching.
Bitcoin has made its stock in trade the fact that it is unregulated by anything but a few algorithms. Like Adam Smith'e "invisible hand", we are to trust to these algorithms to provide a certain Deus ex Machina for providing security.
The algorithms provide quite a bit of security. It's not Bitcoin's security that is an issue, it's websites, people's computers, and people's trust. In this case, it was the latter. People trusted a 3rd party with their Bitcoin, and that 3rd party proved that trust to be misplaced. That does not reflect poorly on the algorithms involved with Bitcoin in any way; It's about as ludicrous as saying that keepass is horribly insecure because there's no 'credible authority' who can magically give you back access to all your sites after somebody grabbed your keepass master password off the post-it on your monitor and logged into all those sites changing your passwords for teh lulz (or do worse).
You mean the Earth: Final Conflict communicator. We're already there - the problem is with yield (which makes the displays expensive) and longevity (entire rows/columns dropping out), though.
Their argument is reasonably solid (VIDs are for a specific vendor, and if you sublicense the PIDs to somebody else, that makes the VID pointless - as it is, of course, but that's another discussion), and concerns raised in this discussion regarding e.g. microcontroller vendors doing this are addressed in the USB-IF Policy Regarding Vendor Identification Numbers (VIDs)
Ultimately, hobby-level makers may indeed have to 'squat' F055 (shouldn't that be F054?) which may in return result in a backlash from certain operating system vendors in blocking these devices (by default) - but that shouldn't be a major barrier to actually doing this.
The only other 'reasonable' solution that I can think of right now would be to actually form a business, get a VID, and anybody who wants a PID would have to become part of that business. Tricky legal territory.
Late reply, you're AC and might not even read this, but as a former AC who did check for replies, let's give it a whirl anyway.
I already seen IronMan at the movies for $12
That's an expensive theater - is this including drinks and such? Don't forget to factor those in with home viewing.
Do I need to pay to see it second time online?
Yes. No. Maybe. I'm from NL - in NL it's legal to download, so the answer is no. But let's say you think that's iffy all the same and look for a fully licensed distributor. If that distributor says "That'll be $1.99", then yes.. I guess you would need to. And why wouldn't you? You seem to have a desire to watch the movie again and you didn't opt for a form of media that would let you do this.
What about third time?
If it was a rental - yes. You did basically agree to this when you went with those options. Of course if it's a digital download rather than a rental, then no.. you don't.
Is it a lost sale if I don't see it online for free?
That question makes no sense. Nor do 'lost sales' arguments from the MPAA, for the most part, but your question really makes no sense:)
Did you mean to ask "Is it a lost sale if I don't see it online?". Well, if you had initially intended to buy it but got scared off due to any aspect of the deal (price, rental period if applicable, DRM, etc.) - then yes, it is.. your earlier theater-going has no bearing on this.
If you meant to ask "Is it a lost sale if I see it online, but 'illegally'?". Again, this depends on whether you had intended to buy it but got enticed by the alternative quality global entertainment provider.
How would you estimate the value lost?
Error 381: Too damn many variables. No, seriously, there's no good formula or data for coming up for value lost/gained in these matters because there's way too much that has an effect on it. Example:
I want to buy a movie that costs $10, but decide to download it instead when I realize it can be downloaded. The value lost is $10 (throughout the entire chain - the movie studio gets a small portion of this). I give it a glowing thumbs up on twitter, and 10 of my 'friends' decide to buy it. Now the value gained is $90. They retweet my tweet and before you know it the Dutch twittersphere picks up on it, and 100 more people buy it. Now the value gained is $1090. Except they're Dutch, and not as silly as the former group of friends - realizing instead that downloading is legal, so they download instead. Now the value lost is -$910. But two thirds would never have bought it anyway (or so they'll claim), so it's actually just -$243. But maybe a third of those lie, so it's actually -$577. Oh, but we're in a recession of sorts and 90% of the people would really never have bought it, having better things to spend money on, so it's actually just -$10. Except one of them just won the lottery and has no excuse, so it's $0 lost or gained. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm?
Aren't most of them streaming services which probably don't have a license to allow downloads (DRMed or otherwise)?
Even if they did allow downloads, don't most people these days favor streaming options? Why would I fret with starting a download at 8am (programming it into a DVR-like device, making sure it gets saved somewhere proper, etc.) when I can just hit play at 8pm anyway?
Did I miss a memo where e.g. Netflix tells people to watch Star Trek:TNG on Wednesday at 7pm just to piss off the infrastructure providers?
Otherwise, it seems to me that 'peak times' just happen to coincide with when people get home, or when a new episode of a popular series is made available, etc. That's not so much 'encouragement' as it is just the natural ebb and flow of media consumption.
Maybe you can just explain exactly what you mean here. If it's compression on the protocol level - well, maybe there are better options than what's being used now (what IS being used now?) - though the datastream tends to be not-so-easily-compressed anyway. If it's the actual media - e.g. "they should use lower bitrates in their encoding" - then I fear what the 'industry' is suggesting here, as most streams and downloads are quite block-artifacty enough, tyvm.
One of the things Amelia Andersdotter suggests people say 'yes' to, is required copyright registration. I'm sure the idea is that it makes it harder for some random person or company to come after you for placing their image (usually with all credits cropped out, if posts on imgur and such are any indication) on your blog/tumblr/whatever.
Of course this does cut both ways. If you take a news-worthy photo, you'd better register the copyright first - which takes some time and I have no doubt may eventually lead to some processing fees - or every news outlet in the world is just going to yoink it, use it, may not even bother with attribution, and enjoy all the advertising income it helped generate.
Maybe you don't mind, maybe that's what you want to happen for your photo. Then again, maybe you do mind and only want 'the little guy' to use it and not the big media companies (think BSD-type licensed software and some people complaining about companies using that without giving back, with the usual co-comments 'should have used GPL instead').
Slapping a CC-BY-NC type license on an image previously got you the best of both worlds - at least where the license is respected.. the 'little guy' can still drop it on their tumblr, while Fox News, CNN, etc. will have to contact you and at least request permission first.
That is an immediately available choice that required copyright registration takes away entirely, and puts up a barrier (be that in time taken for the registration or, and don't think it wouldn't happen, a processing fee required to be paid) for most other avenues.
I understand her goal with this (one more step to abolishing copyright - and I'm in favor of that, but also in favor of more stringent distribution rights - via making sure that anything not registered is essentially public domain), but I disagree with the method. If anything, it favors big media.
Kickstarter and IndieGoGo aren't really affected by this for the reasons outlined by AC above.
Rockethub, on the other hand, will probably try and give a positive spin to it. Rockethub has been courting the idea of actual investment type projects and has been present in many leading talks on the subject, such as congress's hearing on the JOBS Act.
( There are also some purely investment-oriented 'crowdfunding' sites, but they're mostly little more than putting a Kickstarter-face on existing investment mechanisms. )
That is to say - it's clearly possible with some hacking or by downloading a third party tool to do it for you. It wasn't easy to do so in Windows XP, and it's still not easy to do so in Windows 7. It's not necessarily something that's meant to be easy to do, of course.
For what it's worth, I've only ever added one for exiftools since it makes working with exiftools for my specific purpose (copy/paste EXiF data) so much easier:
Once done, you should be able to pull up the context menu when a jpg file is selected, hit 'xc' to copy, select target jpg file(s) and hit 'xv' and the exif data is copied. No messing about with exiftoolgui or any other clumsy GUI, nevermind futzing about with the CLI (which is fine for many things, but not so much when dealing with images).
And yes, all those steps above would be why there's 3rd party utilities out there that will happily simplify the process. But it is doable by them, and by you, whether you're using Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8 - and equally painful in all.
And in a parallel universe, the SETI project would be more open to the idea.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=71623
But they're not -and depending on one's point of view, they have good reasons for it.
The other difficulty is making a fold or SETI search accomplishment a proof-of-work without it being wide open to abuse (and, therefore, hugely detrimental to those projects).
A less stringent method would be to set a transaction bit and message to an online solution, and allow clients to check the bit (and the solution) and accept that as the transaction fee - thus allowing anybody who doesn't want to pay a transaction fee to have the option of helping cancer research of the search for little green men instead. Unfortunately, this then runs into a large portion of the Bitcoin community not being open to that idea, since any such framework could easily be abused (see also: Coin Validation).
Given that it's stated that you can't trust a chip's encryption routines, which at the basis means that you don't trust its random number generator, and given that 'a chip' extends down from the latest Intel to a relatively lowly PIC, is anybody aware of an actually available TRNG (true/hardware random number generator) built out of discrete components?
Comments to a Bruce Schneier post titled "Surreptitiously Tampering with Computer Chips" once suggested this would be the only way to 1. be certain* of no tampering and 2. have reasonably sufficient output bandwidth to be used in practical applications.
However, I haven't seen any actual implementation. My Google-fu may be failing me, though.
* Barring some pretty sweet shenanigans like those pulled by Henryk Gasperowicz; [Spoiler video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KMLmpC7-Ls). I can't see manufacturers including any crypto-defeatery bits into a basic transistor thinking that it just might possibly be used in an actual crypto application, and eat the cost somehow.
This is particularly disturbing because they should well have known about this. Disqus used (uses?) Gravatar, and Gravatar's failure in this exact same fashion has been previously covered and was not even fixed for a long time afterward (disclaimer: that AC is me. At least, I think it was. The company I referred to in there did respond to my complaint and fixed it on their side (making Gravatar use opt-in and using a generic 'profile picture' when it wasn't enabled) - not sure if there's statistics on how many people decided to enable it.)
This sounded so, so much worse when I glossed over the second 'and' in that first sentence there.
I doubt this was a case of last resort, though. At the same time, death as karma for theft? Bit much. On the other hand, in some countries that would mean the thieves would have standing to sue if their lawyer finds the cases were not clearly identifying the substance as hazardous/radioactive, etc. and that's more than a bit much.
Of course there's always going to be a subset of people who will choose the option where they don't pay at all. However, I do think that the size of the audience for these streaming sites can be reduced greatly if the rights holders decided to make their material available in a superior form.
And by superior form I don't necessarily mean that it has to be 4k with the full DTS tracks and DRM-free - though that would be nice; it could be as simple as just being vastly more convenient. Take Netflix - I like railing against Netflix because I think its scope of offerings is entirely too narrow. At the same time, though, if I wanted to watch some movie that the Netflix app on my Roku tells me they have available and all I need to do is press a button and it plays... I'll sign up for that anytime over having to wait for a torrent download, or hunt down that one 'news' server that lets me get it at 10MB/s (and still have to wait a long time and find out it's a 540p rip in an MP4 container format that VLC manages to choke on).
The more questionable sources can't match that superior experience, simply because it means a lot of (relatively expensive) high bandwidth hosting. This, too, will change in the (far) future.. which is why rights holders should have gotten their sh*t together 8 years ago. But as the saying goes, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
The people who will continue to use the questionable sources should be ignored as they could never be convinced without very strict legislation that by its very nature requires severe impinging on privacy anyway.
While I agree that the copyright term is too long (for that matter, copyright needs to go - distribution rights is what matters), this only has impact on the streaming sites insofar as a user actually saying "because of the ridiculous copyright term, I'm gonna watch this episode of Walking Dead that aired an hour ago."
Otherwise, the copyright term could be 13 years, 5 years, 1 year or even 1 month.. and the streaming sites would still find themselves with practically the same audience; after all, what good is it to watch an episode 1 month later when everybody at the watercooler (or on your facebook or whatever) is already 3 or even 4 episodes further along?
A complaint about the lack of appropriate coverage for a global audience would make more sense.
It can be, but it's discouraged;
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F
There's plenty of free software licenses, libre and otherwise, open source and otherwise, you can choose from that have little to nothing to do with GNU (not sure if you're just referring to GPL there, or..)
Github suggests using this site, but there's other comparative / flowchart-based ones if you google about:
http://choosealicense.com/
To the BeagleBone Black, of course.
No? The pcDuino, then? No? Cubieboard? El cheapo chinese tablet with an I/O expander? Don't leave us hanging!
While popularly torrents get messed about with in terms of available bandwidth, the same applies to several other P2P protocols. It's the painted nature of the beast - lots of potentially high-bandwidth connections established for essentially low-priority purposes - that hurts it in that respect. (Yet) An(other) archive of wikipedia isn't going to change that - unless you can think of a convincing reason to submit to ISP decisionmakers that would cause them to believe that throttling the download and/or upload of such an archive to be substantially detrimental to their users (and, ultimately, their bottom line).
It's already legitimate and doesn't need legitimizing.
Of course that doesn't mean that just because your favorite popular zero-day movie/series/albums/ebooks/software site of rather unauthorized nature magically gains "but what about the copy of wikipedia!?"-protection from the likes of MPAA/RIAA/Wiley?/BSA.. at least not in most courts of law.
Which is different from closed source software, how?
Take SpaceMonger, for example. There one day, gone the next. Guy's still around, personal blog notes the disappearance, and essentially told people to just not ask. Well alright, then.
I do agree that when an open source software project goes stagnant because one or more active developers quit, it's rather indicative of the fact that just because the source is available that there is no guarantee whatsoever that somebody else will pick it up. But at least they can.
Which is why the data should be made publicly available, so the weighting can be checked. I'm fine with them saying that Score X on head-on colission at 60mph is worth less than Score X on rear-end colission at 15mph simply because the first probably leaves you in a world of hurt anyway and isn't nearly as likely to happen as some jackass rear-ending you at the lights.
But then...
The whole point of testing isn't to make guesses. You can't just go around running a bunch of tests, getting measurable data from it, knowing with some certainty what the error in the test methodology is, and then check the alignment of the planets before factoring the test score into what a bunch of tea leaves say.
Essentially...
I do get the psychological, PR and industry flak aspect that the NHTSA is trying to address - but that would be a lot easier by dropping the scores and only issuing stars.. or by keeping the scores and dropping the stars.
As far as I can tell, Tesla claims - as do several news outlets - that the NHTSA also releases some other raw numbers to the manufacturers which Tesla then decided to 'combine' (whether that's adding or averaging or whatever - who knows.) to give a 5.4 .
Really, the issue is lack of transparency - since we, the public, don't get to see those numbers. Thus we can't really give a good opinion other than "NHTSA says 5 is the maximum. THE MAXIMUM!" and all nod in agreement at the overlord's words apparently for fear of getting booted out.
This in turn leads to gems like this:
"No matter what, you can't say it's the safest car ever tested, just that it had the best overall test score of any vehicle tested by NHTSA." - NHTSA ( http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tesla-crash-test-rating-high-maker-claimed/story?id=20024779 )
So it had the best overall test score .. but is not necessarily the safest. But the test is on safety. So it's the best in safety.. but not necessarily the best in safety.
Maybe while they're quibbling they could come up with a system that makes sense to themselves, the manufacturers and, most importantly, the public. If in the end that means Tesla does get a 5.4 and they want to hang on to 5 stars - well I guess they'll just have to lower the rating on a bunch of other cars.
That's not entirely true. 3D BluRay is not supported at launch. I know not many tears will be shed over that with most people, but it's yet another thing in a long line of things (along the same lines: no audio CD support, no mp3 file playback) that inspire head-scratching.
The algorithms provide quite a bit of security. It's not Bitcoin's security that is an issue, it's websites, people's computers, and people's trust. In this case, it was the latter. People trusted a 3rd party with their Bitcoin, and that 3rd party proved that trust to be misplaced. That does not reflect poorly on the algorithms involved with Bitcoin in any way; It's about as ludicrous as saying that keepass is horribly insecure because there's no 'credible authority' who can magically give you back access to all your sites after somebody grabbed your keepass master password off the post-it on your monitor and logged into all those sites changing your passwords for teh lulz (or do worse).
The release on Nov 1st had no noteworthy impact on the Bitcoin market;
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10zig6-hourzczsg2013-10-28zeg2013-11-11ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
( You can check other exchanges if you'd like. )
It had a huge impact on the number of Redditors panicking (or trying to cause panic), on the other hand.
You mean the Earth: Final Conflict communicator. We're already there - the problem is with yield (which makes the displays expensive) and longevity (entire rows/columns dropping out), though.
It's funny because bicubic
EU's been targeting optical drive makers as well (last year):
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-830_en.htm?locale=en
Another case was in 2004:
http://bonizack.com/in-re-optical-disk-drive-products-antitrust-litigation-mdl-no-2143
I also think there was one in the late 90's, but google-fu is failing me.
For those wondering about the original post, which contains a lot more information: Arachnid Labs: Usb-if: No VID for Open Source.
Their argument is reasonably solid (VIDs are for a specific vendor, and if you sublicense the PIDs to somebody else, that makes the VID pointless - as it is, of course, but that's another discussion), and concerns raised in this discussion regarding e.g. microcontroller vendors doing this are addressed in the USB-IF Policy Regarding Vendor Identification Numbers (VIDs)
Ultimately, hobby-level makers may indeed have to 'squat' F055 (shouldn't that be F054?) which may in return result in a backlash from certain operating system vendors in blocking these devices (by default) - but that shouldn't be a major barrier to actually doing this.
The only other 'reasonable' solution that I can think of right now would be to actually form a business, get a VID, and anybody who wants a PID would have to become part of that business. Tricky legal territory.
As an aside - the circuit patternstrading cards are indeed awesome.
Late reply, you're AC and might not even read this, but as a former AC who did check for replies, let's give it a whirl anyway.
That's an expensive theater - is this including drinks and such? Don't forget to factor those in with home viewing.
Yes. No. Maybe. I'm from NL - in NL it's legal to download, so the answer is no. But let's say you think that's iffy all the same and look for a fully licensed distributor. If that distributor says "That'll be $1.99", then yes.. I guess you would need to. And why wouldn't you? You seem to have a desire to watch the movie again and you didn't opt for a form of media that would let you do this.
If it was a rental - yes. You did basically agree to this when you went with those options. Of course if it's a digital download rather than a rental, then no.. you don't.
That question makes no sense. Nor do 'lost sales' arguments from the MPAA, for the most part, but your question really makes no sense :)
Did you mean to ask "Is it a lost sale if I don't see it online?". Well, if you had initially intended to buy it but got scared off due to any aspect of the deal (price, rental period if applicable, DRM, etc.) - then yes, it is.. your earlier theater-going has no bearing on this.
If you meant to ask "Is it a lost sale if I see it online, but 'illegally'?". Again, this depends on whether you had intended to buy it but got enticed by the alternative quality global entertainment provider.
Error 381: Too damn many variables.
No, seriously, there's no good formula or data for coming up for value lost/gained in these matters because there's way too much that has an effect on it. Example:
I want to buy a movie that costs $10, but decide to download it instead when I realize it can be downloaded. The value lost is $10 (throughout the entire chain - the movie studio gets a small portion of this).
I give it a glowing thumbs up on twitter, and 10 of my 'friends' decide to buy it. Now the value gained is $90. They retweet my tweet and before you know it the Dutch twittersphere picks up on it, and 100 more people buy it. Now the value gained is $1090. Except they're Dutch, and not as silly as the former group of friends - realizing instead that downloading is legal, so they download instead. Now the value lost is -$910. But two thirds would never have bought it anyway (or so they'll claim), so it's actually just -$243. But maybe a third of those lie, so it's actually -$577. Oh, but we're in a recession of sorts and 90% of the people would really never have bought it, having better things to spend money on, so it's actually just -$10. Except one of them just won the lottery and has no excuse, so it's $0 lost or gained. Etc.