Cloud computing offers nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing new. Nor does it fix anything. The internet already works.
There, I said it.
For 99% of us, a web server does everything we need it to. Redundancy and fault tolerance are already very easy to buy in other forms that are perfectly reliable and non-invasive (RAID, adding servers for specific services, buying better hardware etc). These problems were solved long ago.
Yes, for the rare corporation that requires huge server clusters, cloudifying their infrastructure is the right direction to go. But that and buying a cloud are two completely different stories. If your server count is already that high, then you most likely already have the budget and the people to create your own cloud optimized for your specific needs, that works only for you.
Just like businesses love dedicated servers even when a shared server would do fine, businesses also love dedicated clouds.
Cloud providers need to think again about what and to whom they are selling. I see a market for super cheap hosting for the masses by selling competitive hosting packages by leveraging the cost efficiency and performance benefits of a cloud. I also see a market for dedicated custom cloud solutions for the high end market. However, both of these markets are extremely saturated, and if you are not selling anything new, you are primarily competing by price alone. Any such market is a lot of hard work for not so much money.
From the power glove to the nintendo Wii balancing board to wheels for racing games, a peripheral has never changed the face of anything. They are business as usual.
And anyone with a clue knows that game makers are extremely cautious when making titles which require specific peripherals. Those who have them are always a fraction of the entire target console market, and those who do not need enough incentive to buy the peripheral with the game. And the more sophisticated the peripheral, the higher the cost.
Since I don't know the writer of the original article better, I'm going to say he is an idiot.
This is the criminal case. Anywhere else where there is a P2P related case, they are usually civil, like a record label suing for damages. Only in Japan would the cops take you away in cuffs based on a tip from Sony Records. Well, maybe apart from if you were selling pirated DVDs on Hollywood Blvd...
Of course, this is truly absurd. If he was found guilty, they might as well arrest the inventor of every device that allows data to transfer while retaining the original. Copiers, recorders, VCRs, CDRs, DVDs... They have all been extensively utilized for criminally liable copyright infringing behavior, and surely the inventors would have had a slight clue about their use cases.
If every soldier got to personally know their enemy, there would be no war.
The lack of communication, and the alienation and dehumanization of the foe are what justifies violent recourse. If only saddam hussein hadn't denied Bush's friend request on facebook...
It depends on the phone, period. Since the first mobile phone, some phones have had longer battery life than others, and the only reason why some newer phones have less battery life is because the guys who made them decided it was OK.
Battery life is directly proportional to the size of the battery!
It is about form over function. If they wanted to they could make the iPhone last 15% longer by making the battery however bigger it needs to be to accomplish that.
As for behavior, the reason why the iPhone sucks so bad in this area is because it doesn't have a removable battery. Even non-smart phone users that need their phone for prolonged periods of time know how to "adjust" their behavior... It's known as keeping a spare battery . Whether its digital cameras or laptops or whatever, that is the only trade-off for most devices.
Also, I don't see how mobile phones could be all that different from mobile computers, which recently have all doubled or even tripled in battery life, with a combination of market demand and the prioritizing of more efficient CPUs and computer parts.
If people want phones to last longer, they will. The trade-offs will be made by the manufacturers, not the users.
For one simple reason, micropayments as they are debated here will never work.
When the product is too cheap, then the time and effort buying the product is the true cost to the buyer.
In other words, after a certain point, it just has to be free, or it simply isn't worth it.
What's more, if the seller doesn't value their product enough to charge a non-micro amount for it, then what they are doing is failing to make a value proposition, which is the essence of a business transaction.
No one will pay pennies for something worth pennies.
Newspapers are already cheap, but they are not free. But they aren't micro-priced either. Whether it is buying a paper at the stand or subscribing months at a time, there is a valid value proposition there.
On-line media has yet to find that value proposition. Without that proposition, debating the technical details concerning how payments will be made is getting waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of yourself.
If this impresses you now, I suggest you delete all your stock bookmarks and go back to school.
And the fact that this guy is using the term WebOS which has been coined most recently by Palm* tells me he is either careless with his terms, doesn't care, or thinks he coined the phrase first**... all which put him in the LOSE column.
I did oversimplify a complex gadget, only to make a point, but I will add to parts of what you are saying that help illustrate my point.
I am talking about a processor at its lowest level. The only technology you mentioned that I would consider doing two tasks at once would be with multiple processors. But still, one processor is only processing one line, so it is still no exception. That is my point.
With pipelining and hyperthreading they are adding ways to manage the line, but aren't increasing the numbers of lines that go into the core processor. They don't have to. If you want two lines, get another processor. Processors are about doing one line fast.
And with every higher level of abstraction there will be more tasks and more lines. They may even appear to be parallel or even simultaneous. The point is, under every abstraction layer, there is convergence, and ultimately at the lowest level, the core processor is only blindly chewing one cycle at a time.
Of course, depending on where you draw the line, the "processor" has more and more features. If you draw it where Intel wants you to draw it, then the latest processors do have multiple cores. But at some point someone does need to tell an instruction whether to use the processor to its left or to its right.
No really, we write more because we can feed more literature to our computer, and the submit and send buttons just eat it. Be it rants in emails, time wasting posts on forums, or publishing a blog no one looks at, there is so much more to writing to throw around and that sticks to more and more places.
And twitter is making us all poets. Not really, but I'm trying to see positive.
Define "one". A processor cannot do two operations at once. Everything is put into a line, and that one line is dealt with really really fast. On the surface, we see windows, video, audio, web pages reloading, mail clients fetching mail, and incoming chats making sounds. But the processor is only really doing "one" thing.
There are a few critical flaws with what this study is trying to prove and how it claims to have proved it. If you can play a piano with both hands, why test each finger?
1) You may define multitasking as doing 3 things at once, but is it really? It is multiple tasks to a monotasker who prefers to only do one thing at a time, or who considers a task whole that others simply do not. IM, email, surfing, while listening to HULU , monitoring stocks, and checking your phone... The TV may be on in the background too. There may even be multiple monitors and a cupcake in one hand. To a mutlitasker, that is just "being online." 1 task. Can he do his math and biology homework at the same time? No. Does he do his taxes while he plays basketball? No. Does he want to? No.
2) What are multitaskers good at? Losing focus. It's A.D.D. by design. So for them to not be able to focus on irrelevant rectangles could be because they aren't focused on any of the rectagles to begin with. The whole study bores them, so their brains are listening for the other channels. For those channels to not be there is why the subject slows. I bet if you put a TV next to the rectangles, his eyes would start glancing at the remote.
3)These tests are designed for the monotasker who can think and concentrate out of context. This is a skill. When a mutlitasker is doing 8 things at once, it is all about context and gear shifting. In fact, I would go as far as to say focus is the distraction. Being focused on one thing prevents you from being focused on the whole picture.
4) Memory is overrated. Seriously, it is faster these days to look something up than try to remember it. If you have tried to print a Wikipedia article it may surprise you how many pages they take up. Personal information, addresses, numbers, dates... everything fits neatly in a small device that never forgets. Why compete with it? Just master how to dig and how to use these new tools. Our brains are for other things.
I would have been more impressed if the study went deeper to analyze the types of tasks that these people really do, and how they compare with each other. A multitasker has to be faster at switching between tasks. They have to be better at digging rapidly for information and scanning multiple channels for relevance. And how about brain activity levels, reflexes, and overall information consumption rates?
In defense of the monotaskers though, it must be said that focus and being able to do one thing at a time is in itself a skill that is more difficult, and is becoming more valuable as the rest of us become random sensory input junkies. And it is easier to teach someone who can focus to multitask than someone who cannot to focus.
Art and music are extremely important with this regard. They teach focus. Habitual focus. The kind that matters.
This is a perfect example of the scientific method being subjective at its deepest level.
That's a good point. More than once, early research and nutritional advice on "fats" has been shaded by later research which distinguishes between kinds of fats. The heart dangers of "fat" turned out to be for saturated fats. Then we decided that trans fats, which are unsaturated, are even worse. Then we decided that conjugated linoleic acid, is good, and that's a trans fat.
At every step the scientists may have done good work, but with more information, details and premises will change, and most times the definitions will change with them.
So "fat == unhealthy" was, but is no more. Now it is an invalid comparison.
What is crucial is that this is not about correcting a mistake or being correct. There really was a time when "fat == unhealthy" yielded true. It is instead about becoming outdated. And if you are someone who works with science, always assume what you know today will eventually become outdated. Your goal is to out date what others have done, and what you yourself have done.
The guy admitted guilt under oath, no? And further lying under oath?
There are laws against his actions that make them criminal/liable, and if he got off innocent just because this was an RIAA case with people backing his cause, then the justice system wouldn't be too stable now would it.
I don't see any good fights to be won at this level, especially in US courts. If file sharing is illegal in this country, then the law needs to be changed, and doesn't that happen somewhere else? By precedent, blurry lines get sharper, but lines are still lines, and if he admits he crossed it, then he's wasting all of our time. Courts don't make the law. They don't even attempt to interpret it. They are there to enforce it. This beef needs to be taken elsewhere.
And clearly the RIAA is picking their fights... I mean, come on.
If you are caught sharing files at this scale, bankruptcy is your best line of defense. I say put your financial dreams on hold for about 5 years and feed your passion or travel.
Yup. And most bars know that as far as I know. This is how under-aged people get in so easily, and bars get away with it. They check the age, and the quality of the card. They don't really care if it is real or not.
These guys scanning are scanning to retain information. If they weren't, then they're working too hard for no return.
It's a shame for everyone who read deeper into this, because the whole pretext of this story is based on an over approximation.
Negroponte said this:
[T]he biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application
He in no shape or form said Sugar was a mistake! He is talking about the implementation, you fools! It is like saying the automobile was a mistake, when the inventor just said he should have used a cleaner engine.
The person disagreeing with the words they put in Negroponte's mouth says:
Sugar was not a mistake, it is one of the defining aspects of the XO laptop, and saved it from even more unfavorable comparisons to traditional laptops and accusations of being underpowered.
Right. So in what way are you disagreeing with the claim that Sugar should have been more modular, the system architecture should have been simpler, and that Sugar could have been more interpolatable with other systems?
You are right. The major difference is in the proposition. Seeding a torrent is easier to accept than this proposed commercial model. Even when the technical details may be virtually the same, the way in which it is presented can make all the difference.
"Do/should we recognize a creator as having a property right to his creations because there's a moral right to control them, or only because we think it's convenient for society? Ie., is this a 'fundamental right' or a government-granted privilege?"
You are confusing philosophy, with motive, and with what works in reality. Philosophically speaking, we are free to argue over the "fundamentality of the right," but there will be no direct consequences from that argument. The real consequences (reality), if we so desire them (motive), can only come in the form of government privilege, because that is how we enforce order, and shape our behavior. Only when it is a granted privilege, can we rely on that privilege, legally.
The real question should always be about our motive. Left in the hands of the copyright lobby, we know their motive, and they make it quite clear: money. Unfortunately their behavior is within their privilege, so they are immune from ethical or moral attacks, legally. And legality is all that matters when it comes to real consequences (reality).
Here lies the real problem. Companies have one very clear motive, and that is money. They can act on it right away, and so you see rapid tactical advances on every front. They also have the capital to pay an army to achieve their goals. They are also completely immune to any moral or ethical consequences.
We the people do not have a very clear motive, nor do we have strong representation. We also spend more time fighting over morals and ethics, because it is important to us, even though they have no real consequences.
The real challenge is to implement real consequences based not on what the lobbyists want, but on what we want.
By definition, that is how we get what we want.
Now, with the current system, the corporations will always have the advantage. So I say we need to back pedal, and first decide on how we want the system to work for us.
United, we are bigger than any corporation. The moment we make the system work for the people, everything else will follow.
From CDs to DVDs to HDDVDs to Blu-Rays to Pink Discs to ADDs to Blu-Balls, no one needs a 1000 year DVD. I say in 20 years we'd be storing a million DVDs on a RW key-chain that lasts forever.
Aren't we already charged based on estimated car usage? This article is about privacy objections and laws regarding monitoring miles, is it not?
I've always assumed the miles I enter when renewing my insurance went towards calculating the total premium. Actually, my insurer even told me so when I thought my rate went up - they said I was driving more.
If they wanted us to drive less, there are plenty of other ways to do it, rather than hacking our insurance. Idiots.
The publisher has no other supplier of the game with whom to agree a price, thus no proce fixing.
No. The publisher isn't the one selling the games to the consumers. We are talking about Walmart, Target, EBGames, and all the retailers. They should be able to compete amongst themselves for more business. Instead, they are forced to sell their product above a certain price, or they risk violating their contract with their suppliers. It's called vertical price fixing, and it is legal in the US.
It is amazing how many people believe there is no price fixing going on... Just look at the prices! They are DAMN FIXED!
Slashdot Mirror
Cloud computing offers nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing new. Nor does it fix anything. The internet already works.
There, I said it.
For 99% of us, a web server does everything we need it to. Redundancy and fault tolerance are already very easy to buy in other forms that are perfectly reliable and non-invasive (RAID, adding servers for specific services, buying better hardware etc). These problems were solved long ago.
Yes, for the rare corporation that requires huge server clusters, cloudifying their infrastructure is the right direction to go. But that and buying a cloud are two completely different stories. If your server count is already that high, then you most likely already have the budget and the people to create your own cloud optimized for your specific needs, that works only for you.
Just like businesses love dedicated servers even when a shared server would do fine, businesses also love dedicated clouds.
Cloud providers need to think again about what and to whom they are selling. I see a market for super cheap hosting for the masses by selling competitive hosting packages by leveraging the cost efficiency and performance benefits of a cloud. I also see a market for dedicated custom cloud solutions for the high end market. However, both of these markets are extremely saturated, and if you are not selling anything new, you are primarily competing by price alone. Any such market is a lot of hard work for not so much money.
So good luck! PS. I am not buying.
Anything Motorola has built in the past... however long I can remember has pretty much been a piece of shit. Can anyone back me up on this?
I am all for iPhone killers, but to think Motorola can challenge Apple at anything seems a bit too optimistic... I'm just sayin'.
To think crooks are anonymous is naive. They are "other people."
The very first Nintendo/Famicom had a glove. I present to you exhibit A:
http://hybridsnick.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/powerglovead.jpg
From the power glove to the nintendo Wii balancing board to wheels for racing games, a peripheral has never changed the face of anything. They are business as usual.
And anyone with a clue knows that game makers are extremely cautious when making titles which require specific peripherals. Those who have them are always a fraction of the entire target console market, and those who do not need enough incentive to buy the peripheral with the game. And the more sophisticated the peripheral, the higher the cost.
Since I don't know the writer of the original article better, I'm going to say he is an idiot.
Ya. And you can't miss them with all the damn marketing they've been doing the past week!!!
I can't &%"$# stand their new yodel!!!
And WHAT THE "'#&$%&# are they advertising!?!
"You you you you you... YAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooo!!!"
Ya, get out of my face. I have plenty of me, thank you very much.
This is the criminal case. Anywhere else where there is a P2P related case, they are usually civil, like a record label suing for damages. Only in Japan would the cops take you away in cuffs based on a tip from Sony Records. Well, maybe apart from if you were selling pirated DVDs on Hollywood Blvd...
Of course, this is truly absurd. If he was found guilty, they might as well arrest the inventor of every device that allows data to transfer while retaining the original. Copiers, recorders, VCRs, CDRs, DVDs... They have all been extensively utilized for criminally liable copyright infringing behavior, and surely the inventors would have had a slight clue about their use cases.
If every soldier got to personally know their enemy, there would be no war.
The lack of communication, and the alienation and dehumanization of the foe are what justifies violent recourse. If only saddam hussein hadn't denied Bush's friend request on facebook...
It depends on the phone, period. Since the first mobile phone, some phones have had longer battery life than others, and the only reason why some newer phones have less battery life is because the guys who made them decided it was OK.
Battery life is directly proportional to the size of the battery!
It is about form over function. If they wanted to they could make the iPhone last 15% longer by making the battery however bigger it needs to be to accomplish that.
As for behavior, the reason why the iPhone sucks so bad in this area is because it doesn't have a removable battery. Even non-smart phone users that need their phone for prolonged periods of time know how to "adjust" their behavior... It's known as keeping a spare battery . Whether its digital cameras or laptops or whatever, that is the only trade-off for most devices.
Also, I don't see how mobile phones could be all that different from mobile computers, which recently have all doubled or even tripled in battery life, with a combination of market demand and the prioritizing of more efficient CPUs and computer parts.
If people want phones to last longer, they will. The trade-offs will be made by the manufacturers, not the users.
For one simple reason, micropayments as they are debated here will never work.
When the product is too cheap, then the time and effort buying the product is the true cost to the buyer.
In other words, after a certain point, it just has to be free, or it simply isn't worth it.
What's more, if the seller doesn't value their product enough to charge a non-micro amount for it, then what they are doing is failing to make a value proposition, which is the essence of a business transaction.
No one will pay pennies for something worth pennies.
Newspapers are already cheap, but they are not free. But they aren't micro-priced either. Whether it is buying a paper at the stand or subscribing months at a time, there is a valid value proposition there.
On-line media has yet to find that value proposition. Without that proposition, debating the technical details concerning how payments will be made is getting waaaaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of yourself.
... and nothing came of it. Exhibit A
If this impresses you now, I suggest you delete all your stock bookmarks and go back to school.
And the fact that this guy is using the term WebOS which has been coined most recently by Palm* tells me he is either careless with his terms, doesn't care, or thinks he coined the phrase first**... all which put him in the LOSE column.
*It is official if they wikipedia it first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
** Hyperoffice acquired WebOS.com back in 2000/2001
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperoffice
I did oversimplify a complex gadget, only to make a point, but I will add to parts of what you are saying that help illustrate my point.
I am talking about a processor at its lowest level. The only technology you mentioned that I would consider doing two tasks at once would be with multiple processors. But still, one processor is only processing one line, so it is still no exception. That is my point.
With pipelining and hyperthreading they are adding ways to manage the line, but aren't increasing the numbers of lines that go into the core processor. They don't have to. If you want two lines, get another processor. Processors are about doing one line fast.
And with every higher level of abstraction there will be more tasks and more lines. They may even appear to be parallel or even simultaneous. The point is, under every abstraction layer, there is convergence, and ultimately at the lowest level, the core processor is only blindly chewing one cycle at a time.
Of course, depending on where you draw the line, the "processor" has more and more features. If you draw it where Intel wants you to draw it, then the latest processors do have multiple cores. But at some point someone does need to tell an instruction whether to use the processor to its left or to its right.
I submit my post as exhibit A.
No really, we write more because we can feed more literature to our computer, and the submit and send buttons just eat it. Be it rants in emails, time wasting posts on forums, or publishing a blog no one looks at, there is so much more to writing to throw around and that sticks to more and more places.
And twitter is making us all poets. Not really, but I'm trying to see positive.
Good enough is what most people can afford; past, present and future. The question is not will we be satisfied with less. It is can we afford better?
Personally, I see more mass happiness and leisure in a future where the answer is YES. So let's all work to make it that way. Screw this article.
Define "one". A processor cannot do two operations at once. Everything is put into a line, and that one line is dealt with really really fast. On the surface, we see windows, video, audio, web pages reloading, mail clients fetching mail, and incoming chats making sounds. But the processor is only really doing "one" thing.
There are a few critical flaws with what this study is trying to prove and how it claims to have proved it. If you can play a piano with both hands, why test each finger?
1) You may define multitasking as doing 3 things at once, but is it really? It is multiple tasks to a monotasker who prefers to only do one thing at a time, or who considers a task whole that others simply do not. IM, email, surfing, while listening to HULU , monitoring stocks, and checking your phone... The TV may be on in the background too. There may even be multiple monitors and a cupcake in one hand. To a mutlitasker, that is just "being online." 1 task. Can he do his math and biology homework at the same time? No. Does he do his taxes while he plays basketball? No. Does he want to? No.
2) What are multitaskers good at? Losing focus. It's A.D.D. by design. So for them to not be able to focus on irrelevant rectangles could be because they aren't focused on any of the rectagles to begin with. The whole study bores them, so their brains are listening for the other channels. For those channels to not be there is why the subject slows. I bet if you put a TV next to the rectangles, his eyes would start glancing at the remote.
3)These tests are designed for the monotasker who can think and concentrate out of context. This is a skill. When a mutlitasker is doing 8 things at once, it is all about context and gear shifting. In fact, I would go as far as to say focus is the distraction. Being focused on one thing prevents you from being focused on the whole picture.
4) Memory is overrated. Seriously, it is faster these days to look something up than try to remember it. If you have tried to print a Wikipedia article it may surprise you how many pages they take up. Personal information, addresses, numbers, dates... everything fits neatly in a small device that never forgets. Why compete with it? Just master how to dig and how to use these new tools. Our brains are for other things.
I would have been more impressed if the study went deeper to analyze the types of tasks that these people really do, and how they compare with each other. A multitasker has to be faster at switching between tasks. They have to be better at digging rapidly for information and scanning multiple channels for relevance. And how about brain activity levels, reflexes, and overall information consumption rates?
In defense of the monotaskers though, it must be said that focus and being able to do one thing at a time is in itself a skill that is more difficult, and is becoming more valuable as the rest of us become random sensory input junkies. And it is easier to teach someone who can focus to multitask than someone who cannot to focus.
Art and music are extremely important with this regard. They teach focus. Habitual focus. The kind that matters.
This is a perfect example of the scientific method being subjective at its deepest level.
That's a good point. More than once, early research and nutritional advice on "fats" has been shaded by later research which distinguishes between kinds of fats. The heart dangers of "fat" turned out to be for saturated fats. Then we decided that trans fats, which are unsaturated, are even worse. Then we decided that conjugated linoleic acid, is good, and that's a trans fat.
At every step the scientists may have done good work, but with more information, details and premises will change, and most times the definitions will change with them.
So "fat == unhealthy" was, but is no more. Now it is an invalid comparison.
What is crucial is that this is not about correcting a mistake or being correct. There really was a time when "fat == unhealthy" yielded true. It is instead about becoming outdated. And if you are someone who works with science, always assume what you know today will eventually become outdated. Your goal is to out date what others have done, and what you yourself have done.
The guy admitted guilt under oath, no? And further lying under oath?
There are laws against his actions that make them criminal/liable, and if he got off innocent just because this was an RIAA case with people backing his cause, then the justice system wouldn't be too stable now would it.
I don't see any good fights to be won at this level, especially in US courts. If file sharing is illegal in this country, then the law needs to be changed, and doesn't that happen somewhere else? By precedent, blurry lines get sharper, but lines are still lines, and if he admits he crossed it, then he's wasting all of our time. Courts don't make the law. They don't even attempt to interpret it. They are there to enforce it. This beef needs to be taken elsewhere.
And clearly the RIAA is picking their fights... I mean, come on.
If you are caught sharing files at this scale, bankruptcy is your best line of defense. I say put your financial dreams on hold for about 5 years and feed your passion or travel.
that should be as far as it needs to go
Yup. And most bars know that as far as I know. This is how under-aged people get in so easily, and bars get away with it. They check the age, and the quality of the card. They don't really care if it is real or not.
These guys scanning are scanning to retain information. If they weren't, then they're working too hard for no return.
It's a shame for everyone who read deeper into this, because the whole pretext of this story is based on an over approximation.
Negroponte said this:
[T]he biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application
He in no shape or form said Sugar was a mistake! He is talking about the implementation, you fools! It is like saying the automobile was a mistake, when the inventor just said he should have used a cleaner engine.
The person disagreeing with the words they put in Negroponte's mouth says:
Sugar was not a mistake, it is one of the defining aspects of the XO laptop, and saved it from even more unfavorable comparisons to traditional laptops and accusations of being underpowered.
Right. So in what way are you disagreeing with the claim that Sugar should have been more modular, the system architecture should have been simpler, and that Sugar could have been more interpolatable with other systems?
You are right. The major difference is in the proposition. Seeding a torrent is easier to accept than this proposed commercial model. Even when the technical details may be virtually the same, the way in which it is presented can make all the difference.
"Do/should we recognize a creator as having a property right to his creations because there's a moral right to control them, or only because we think it's convenient for society? Ie., is this a 'fundamental right' or a government-granted privilege?"
You are confusing philosophy, with motive, and with what works in reality. Philosophically speaking, we are free to argue over the "fundamentality of the right," but there will be no direct consequences from that argument. The real consequences (reality), if we so desire them (motive), can only come in the form of government privilege, because that is how we enforce order, and shape our behavior. Only when it is a granted privilege, can we rely on that privilege, legally.
The real question should always be about our motive. Left in the hands of the copyright lobby, we know their motive, and they make it quite clear: money. Unfortunately their behavior is within their privilege, so they are immune from ethical or moral attacks, legally. And legality is all that matters when it comes to real consequences (reality).
Here lies the real problem. Companies have one very clear motive, and that is money. They can act on it right away, and so you see rapid tactical advances on every front. They also have the capital to pay an army to achieve their goals. They are also completely immune to any moral or ethical consequences.
We the people do not have a very clear motive, nor do we have strong representation. We also spend more time fighting over morals and ethics, because it is important to us, even though they have no real consequences.
The real challenge is to implement real consequences based not on what the lobbyists want, but on what we want.
By definition, that is how we get what we want.
Now, with the current system, the corporations will always have the advantage. So I say we need to back pedal, and first decide on how we want the system to work for us.
United, we are bigger than any corporation. The moment we make the system work for the people, everything else will follow.
Couldn't have put it better.
The last thing anyone wants is to host other peoples data with an open pipe to a commercial web site.
From CDs to DVDs to HDDVDs to Blu-Rays to Pink Discs to ADDs to Blu-Balls, no one needs a 1000 year DVD. I say in 20 years we'd be storing a million DVDs on a RW key-chain that lasts forever.
The great thing about data is you can copy it.
Aren't we already charged based on estimated car usage? This article is about privacy objections and laws regarding monitoring miles, is it not?
I've always assumed the miles I enter when renewing my insurance went towards calculating the total premium. Actually, my insurer even told me so when I thought my rate went up - they said I was driving more.
If they wanted us to drive less, there are plenty of other ways to do it, rather than hacking our insurance. Idiots.
The publisher has no other supplier of the game with whom to agree a price, thus no proce fixing.
No. The publisher isn't the one selling the games to the consumers. We are talking about Walmart, Target, EBGames, and all the retailers. They should be able to compete amongst themselves for more business. Instead, they are forced to sell their product above a certain price, or they risk violating their contract with their suppliers. It's called vertical price fixing, and it is legal in the US.
It is amazing how many people believe there is no price fixing going on... Just look at the prices! They are DAMN FIXED!