Example...LCD panels reduce electricity consumption and decrease cooling costs. Do people buy them because they help mitigate "climate change"? No, they buy them because the panels help cut their expenses.
There are so many things wrong with your example that it's not funny.
LCD panels took many decades to develop. They weren't something that could be developed in a short period of time at little expense.
Their popularity never had to do with cutting costs. The momentum behind LCD panels for desktop computers began at a time when LCD panels cost typically four or five times the price of a much "better" (larger, higher resolution) CRT. When LCDs started to take off, the cost of a standalone 15" 1024x768 LCD was around $400, vs around $50-100 for an equivalent CRT, and around $150-200 for a 19" 1280x1024 CRT. While CRTs use more energy than LCDs, the notion anyone would save $300 in electricity bills over a two or three year expected use of such a device is questionable.
Why did LCDs take off? Because the reduced glare and flicker, the better (to most eyes, I appreciate it's still a matter of controversy) color, the more consistent resolution, and lighter, smaller, shape of the LCD was infinitely preferable to the giant, flickering, blurry, CRTs.
LCDs took off because of issues entirely unrelated to their energy consumption. That they saved energy was a happy accident, not a conspiracy by green monitor makers. It was almost a matter of luck that we didn't get stuck with plasma instead (LCDs had an edge for high resolution/high density displays because they needed to be used by laptops.)
It's not easy to create a technology that's unambiguously cheaper to run due to its energy efficiency and that large enough numbers of people will buy. The only example I can think of would be the CFL, where people have bought slightly more expensive CFLs knowing that they'll pay for themselves several times over. Even then, to get CFLs used by a majority, several governments have taken steps to ban incandescents.
Hybrid vehicles remain ultimately so much more expensive than their gas guzzling cousins that there are still relatively few of them on the road. They remain a small subset of the vehicles sold, and despite recent energy shortages, people continue to buy very inefficient vehicles regardless of income. Travel by air remains the default in the US, because the cost of producing a viable high speed rail alternative is simply astronomical and will take decades to do in an environment where people care more about the deficit than our ability to pay it down in the future, and because other, more efficient, alternatives, such as airships, will also take decades to fully develop, and may never be successful.
Yes, it's always a good thing that someone can produce something that does the same thing as something else, but uses so much less power it's more efficient in the long run. But in the majority of cases, it's not easy to do, and proposing it as a solution to our energy problems is a non-starter. To deal with our energy issues, we need a systematic approach, that deals as much with the causes of energy use as the technologies we use. Until we do so, we cannot pretend we're taking the energy issue seriously.
In the submitter's defense, he said "When corporations become publishers" not "when publishers become corporations". Random House was a publisher from the beginning, it never "became" a publisher after just being a corporation.
Geez guys. There's more finger pointing in here than a meeting between BP, Transocean, and Haliburton.
It's not a flaw in any of the technologies used, it's a flaw in how they were used together. The programmers who wrote the scripts didn't properly validate incoming data. That's all there is too it.
Yes, aspects of SQL probably didn't help, but quite honestly, it was a programming decision to use SQL in the first place.
Kinda sorta. Unless they team up with Exxon, Shell, and the numerous other giant oil companies, it'll be difficult for them to charge anything beyond a market price for gasoline. The fact BP needs to charge more will have a slight impact on consumer prices, but it's unlikely to have a significant effect.
(And even if they made an illegal cartel agreement with the other oil companies, the other oil companies would make huge amounts of money on the higher prices, while BP would break even - they'd be given an enormous advantage over BP in the longer term.)
The more likely result of this is BP losing an enormous amount of business and possibly entering a death spiral. Dying or not, the shareholders will collectively lose tens of billions of dollars. Once dead, the other oil companies will fill the gap, taking over the existing production business.
The Russians have done it 5 times and it's worked 4 of those times.
A better way of stating it would be: "The Soviet Union, a secretive dictatorship whose track record for telling the truth was even lower than BPs, used the Nuclear option five times. Of these, one time is known to have resulted in an even bigger environmental catastrophe than the original, while the exact results of the other remains largely unknown."
If the Nuclear option was likely to work and unlikely to result in decades of radioactive oil pumping into the sea, I think the powers that be would be seriously considering it.
If people stop treating it as a "All oil or no oil" thing, then the alternatives multiply.
The most obvious big solution to our oil dependency problem is to invest in public transport, and to change planning and zoning laws to ensure that the limitations on the viability of PT in many areas today becomes lessened through time, so people really don't face the choice of having to either walk a mile or more, or else drive for five minutes a longer distance, to get a bottle of milk.
Will that be the end of oil? In the short term, no. It'll quantify a substantial reduction in the amount of oil, even more so in the medium term when the centralized nature of public transport makes it easier to switch over to anything from wood gas (CO) to vastly improved future battery technologies (and, of course, rail based systems can be electric, and thus Nuclear/solar/hydo/wind/etc powered from day 1)
A massive and substantial reduction in oil dependency and thus demand will reduce the value of oil, making uneconomic much of the off-shore disaster areas we've seen over the last few decades. Burning less fossil fuels through a combination of carbon neutral energy sources and increased efficiency will also help reduce the CO2 imbalance and give the Earth a greater chance of finding an equilibrium.
The sad part is that a concerted public transport migration could occur now, it could be a significant part of an economic infusion to get us out of our current depression state, it would easily pay for itself in reducing deficits in the medium to long term given the US's current dependence on expensive foreign oil, and yet the bizarre nature of US politics, where as many people seem to think the Gulf crisis means we need to drill more, not less, as the opposite, and the extreme anti-tax anti-spending ideology of a massive proportion of the population, means this isn't going to happen.
How many burglaries are not premeditated? "Oops, I just broke into the house, it was practically an accident, I don't know what came over me!" How would Google Maps prove premeditation? "Oops, I was using Google street view, and I suddenly saw this house I practically had to burgle!"
Put another way, do you as a/. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot?
I don't think that, but I do think it's possible for someone to be smart about some things, and not terribly knowledgeable or understanding of something else. One of the issues the Internet has had since its explosion has been the number of established industries (and successful people associated with those industries) that suddenly found it a threat. These people, from studio bosses to booksellers, weren't idiots, they got where they were by knowing their industries inside out, but how to deal with the free flow of information itself became a particular issue they were ill-equipped to manage.
Murdoch, thus far, has a terrible record with the Internet. While Fox News might have more viewers than CNN or MSNBC, its website is one of the least popular. While Murdoch can't be blamed, given the recentness of the acquisition, for the WSJ's low presence compared to, say, the NYT, the UK situation is staggering with the Guardian's website attracting 37 million unique visitors every month, vs the Time's less than 20M. Try as I may, I can't think of a single online operation primarily managed by Murdoch that's attracted any serious level of serious success compared to its direct rivals.
It's possible Murdoch will turn that around, but it's hard to see how removing your sites from Google and discouraging bloggers from deep linking can help you in the short or long term. Even if the aim is to change every hundred free readers into one paying subscriber and become successful that way, is it probable that this would work? Is the Times of such perceived high quality by a substantial number of people that those people would chose it and chose to pay for it over a high quality free alternative like The Guardian? Can The Times survive if the only people reading it are those who have already heard of it, and haven't gotten into the habit of reading an easier to find quality news website?
Do I think Murdoch "gets" the Internet? No. I suspect News International will, eventually, figure out how to work with it, but it may require an individual who knows more than centralized media to do it. Murdoch, just about, knows centralized media. Even there, his skills tend to be overstated: Murdoch's business plan within centralized media has always been fairly simple: run profitable populist media enterprises (The Sun, Fox, Fox News, etc), and run one or two loss making "serious" journals to ensure he has higher level political clout. Murdoch's skills are with populist, low-end, centralized media. I wouldn't assume he knows how to monetize news on the Internet any more than I'd expect Einstein to run a movie studio.
Wouldn't actually matter. The author's not the one distributing the app, Apple is the distributor. Therefore Apple requires a distribution license. The GPs debates of angels on pinheads notwithstanding, Wal-mart's situation with the router is not something I can comment upon, beyond pointing out it's not an acceptable analogy. Apple is copying the product and distributing those copies. Morally, legally, and in every other way possible, Apple must abide by the license.
That's not a miss, then, is it? You visited Facebook. It doesn't make the technique invalid in the slightest.
No, it's a miss, for the application we're talking about. The fact I "visited" a site, doesn't mean I'm a user of that site, in the sense that a history snooper is interested in. Snoopers are trying to gather information about you, whether it's to sell you viagra or to steal your passwords. So a technique that happens to register true for a large subset of websites regardless of whether the user of the webbrowser has actually spent any time there is useless.
What you end up with, using this technique, is a situation where thousands of websites will end up in 90% of people's histories, but only a much smaller portion will actually be useful. Sure, it's quite possible the majority of people with Facebook in their histories are Facebook users, but that's only because, in my experience, the majority of web users are Facebook users. A much better question is "Do the majority of non-Facebook users actually have Facebook in their histories?" to which the answer is almost certainly "Yes."
The:visited: hack is an interesting technique that has little technical use. Outside of a small set of speciality sites (and, no, I'm not talking porn, given porn redirects are common too) you're not going to get any useful information out of the hack that tells you what websites the user actually frequents.
I would hazard a guess that if anyone using the technique is successful, it'll not be because they used the hack, but rather because the hack picked a popular target. That is to say, there's probably no difference in success rate for a site that puts up Facebook without checking the user's history, and a site that checks the user's history first before putting it up.
FWIW I've seen the proof-of-concept sites that supposedly bring up every site you've ever visited, and using the system is very hit-or-miss. I have no Facebook account, for example, but the site came up, presumably because at some point in the past I clicked on a link that turned out to be a FB profile.
Even banks might be more awkward than it appears: numerous banks and credit card companies appeared on my list of visited links, despite me not recalling ever visiting them, until I remembered that I'd done some research into getting a new card a year or so ago.
The bottom line is that a site that uses such a system to determine the phishing sites to pick will more likely than not create numerous fake "You have been logged out" pages for sites you never logged into, and you know you never logged into.
Otherwise, there's no way to tell the difference between an actual claim and some hobo with a spoon in his ear taking out a legal ad in a newspaper of record
I don't see why that would matter, to be honest. The issue with Estoppel isn't one where the issue is someone failed to notify another of a claim, but whether their actions or inactions made it appear that the party they're suing was permitted to do what they're being sued over. Estoppel by laches, and Estoppel by silence, would appear to be the two forms of estoppel people are concerning themselves with here, and clearly neither applies: the MPEG LA has not been silent, and laches is a hard one to prove given the lack of any serious entity actually using Theora at the moment, the fact that the MPEG LA does apply different licensing regimes to different types of usage, and the fact it might, legitimately, prevent the MPEG LA from suing for past breaches, but it certainly wouldn't prevent it from suing over future breaches.
At best, the estoppel argument can be used to assume that if the MPEG LA were to bring a lawsuit right now against, say, Canonical, for shipping Theora with Ubuntu, without forewarning them, the LA might not be able to claim damages for patent violations in, say, Ubuntu 6.10. But it almost certainly could prevent Canonical shipping Theora in future, unless they paid license fees.
Disclaimer: IANAL either, but I know enough about the subject to know that Estoppel is not a "get out of jail free" card for patent violations.
Theora's been out for years, but nobody's using it. Patent holders are well within their rights to argue that it wasn't worth chasing at a time when virtually nobody used the format.
Remember that H.264 streaming is currently license free too. That doesn't stop the MPEG-LA from slapping on license fees at some point in the future, especially as they've openly said they will (and, likewise, they've openly said they're considering setting up a licensing regime for Theora.)
There's a difference between "Not filing a lawsuit yet", and "Saying it's OK". The MPEG-LA has not said it's OK to use Theora, they've said the opposite. What they haven't done, as yet, is set up a licensing regime. So far as I'm aware, they can decide to do that on the last day of the last patent's validity, and it'd still be valid.
No, Flash uses H.264 (at least modern Flash does.)
Apple is opposed to Flash because they have a competing infrastructure called Quicktime, and would really rather everyone license Apple's DRM over Adobe's. (To those who take its supposed support for HTML5 seriously: few organizations currently using Flash for streaming video would ever switch over to HTML5. They're using Flash to prevent you from saving their content.)
MP3 may be up against better codecs, but it's hardly obsolete. It's the one format virtually everything plays. Even my car stereo supports it, and that doesn't even support MPEG 1 Audio Layer II.
I suspect that none of the lossy compression systems will ever supplant MP3. Apple's pushed AAC, but only realized limited success, as has Microsoft with WMA. Vorbis just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. MP3Pro and HE-AAC have yet to make a dent. AC-3 has virtually no presence outside of audio accompanying video. Meanwhile, bandwidth and storage space are increasing to the point that the "lossless" codecs just seem like better and better value with each passing day.
I would be enormously surprised if MP3 is gone in ten years. I would expect it to continue to exist for low end audio, with either a "lossless" codec or PCM becoming the major standard for audio storage, and AC-3 remaining the primary soundtrack format for everything except Blu-ray.
That's not a joke or a typo. The codec world has moved on quite considerably since the release of MPEG-1, and development of MPEG-2 encoders has resulted in stunning improvements in the last few years, in part because of the requirements of ATSC, and in part because of the improvements in processor technology.
I've been wondering for a while if the right approach for the whole codec mess is to wait until MPEG-1 is truly free and clear, and adopt that. You may laugh, but try encoding something in MPEG-1 with ffmpeg, using large (> 100) GOP sizes, and high numbers of B-frames (16+.)* On a normal high performance computer in 2010, the speed of compression is too low to be practical, but the results are excellent, even at relatively low bitrates. 4-6Mbps is more than enough for high quality 720p24, in most cases.
For that reason, I think the Internet video codec debate will be over sooner than people think. The real work has to be done on the encoder side, improving the capabilities of encoders for older formats that'll be patent free soon. But if you look at the bigger picture, MPEG-1 video (and MPEG-1 layers 1/2 audio) will soon be free (some claim they already are), bandwidth is improving, CPU power is improving, While a superb MPEG-1 encoder will never be as good as a superb H.264 encoder, the necessity of one over the other will diminish in time.
With Vorbis, Franhoffer has actually been very public about the fact it considers the technology patentable and warning people it's considering its options. I strongly doubt that Estoppel prevents an organization from instituting a licensing regime once a technology is popular if they always said that's exactly what they plan to do.
I also have to admit to being unsure that estoppel means what Slashdotters think it does. While a party might be prevented from suing someone for past breaches of patents that they knew about at the time, it certainly doesn't stop Franhoffer from saying "From January 1st 2011, all developers of Ogg Vorbis decoders will need a license for Patent 5,214,742."
There's no patent pool concerning MP3 (or at least, there wasn't when the new claims arose.) On top of that, MP3 kind of took everyone by surprise, it was never supposed to be an online media distribution format. At the time of the original release of MPEG-1, the assumption was it would be used primarily by creators of CD based content, which had a direct impact on the number of organizations who cared at the time to get involved.
It's an established principle because limiting anonymous speech would, indeed, have the effect of limiting speech. To not protect anonymous speech but to claim to be still supportive of "Freedom of speech" would be a little like banning printing presses but arguing that you still support Freedom of Speech because, well, people can always talk to one another.
It's always been the case, in any regime, no matter how liberal, that intimidation and discrimination that follows the expression of certain viewpoints will result in those viewpoints not being expressed unless the protection of anonymity is provided. Long after the US became free, anonymous and pseudonymous journalism remained a bastion of debate, and nothing has changed to suggest that the same principles do not apply today.
Slashdot Mirror
There are so many things wrong with your example that it's not funny.
LCD panels took many decades to develop. They weren't something that could be developed in a short period of time at little expense.
Their popularity never had to do with cutting costs. The momentum behind LCD panels for desktop computers began at a time when LCD panels cost typically four or five times the price of a much "better" (larger, higher resolution) CRT. When LCDs started to take off, the cost of a standalone 15" 1024x768 LCD was around $400, vs around $50-100 for an equivalent CRT, and around $150-200 for a 19" 1280x1024 CRT. While CRTs use more energy than LCDs, the notion anyone would save $300 in electricity bills over a two or three year expected use of such a device is questionable.
Why did LCDs take off? Because the reduced glare and flicker, the better (to most eyes, I appreciate it's still a matter of controversy) color, the more consistent resolution, and lighter, smaller, shape of the LCD was infinitely preferable to the giant, flickering, blurry, CRTs.
LCDs took off because of issues entirely unrelated to their energy consumption. That they saved energy was a happy accident, not a conspiracy by green monitor makers. It was almost a matter of luck that we didn't get stuck with plasma instead (LCDs had an edge for high resolution/high density displays because they needed to be used by laptops.)
It's not easy to create a technology that's unambiguously cheaper to run due to its energy efficiency and that large enough numbers of people will buy. The only example I can think of would be the CFL, where people have bought slightly more expensive CFLs knowing that they'll pay for themselves several times over. Even then, to get CFLs used by a majority, several governments have taken steps to ban incandescents.
Hybrid vehicles remain ultimately so much more expensive than their gas guzzling cousins that there are still relatively few of them on the road. They remain a small subset of the vehicles sold, and despite recent energy shortages, people continue to buy very inefficient vehicles regardless of income. Travel by air remains the default in the US, because the cost of producing a viable high speed rail alternative is simply astronomical and will take decades to do in an environment where people care more about the deficit than our ability to pay it down in the future, and because other, more efficient, alternatives, such as airships, will also take decades to fully develop, and may never be successful.
Yes, it's always a good thing that someone can produce something that does the same thing as something else, but uses so much less power it's more efficient in the long run. But in the majority of cases, it's not easy to do, and proposing it as a solution to our energy problems is a non-starter. To deal with our energy issues, we need a systematic approach, that deals as much with the causes of energy use as the technologies we use. Until we do so, we cannot pretend we're taking the energy issue seriously.
Aw wow! *slaps forehead* If only I'd known it was that SIMPLE!
We generally use them indoors, where it's air conditioned.
In the submitter's defense, he said "When corporations become publishers" not "when publishers become corporations". Random House was a publisher from the beginning, it never "became" a publisher after just being a corporation.
Geez guys. There's more finger pointing in here than a meeting between BP, Transocean, and Haliburton.
It's not a flaw in any of the technologies used, it's a flaw in how they were used together. The programmers who wrote the scripts didn't properly validate incoming data. That's all there is too it.
Yes, aspects of SQL probably didn't help, but quite honestly, it was a programming decision to use SQL in the first place.
Either way, fix it!
Fuck off.
Seriously. Fuck off. You're on a tech site, full of people who do things because it interests them, for the sake of doing it.
You don't belong here. You're everything we fight against. Go watch Glee or whatever it is you people do.
Yeah, and Slashdot is also a site that covers this kind of thing.
Plus it beats yet another "Something has tenuous link with iPad"/"Someone wrote hype piece about iPad"/"iPadipadipadipadipad!" story.
Kinda sorta. Unless they team up with Exxon, Shell, and the numerous other giant oil companies, it'll be difficult for them to charge anything beyond a market price for gasoline. The fact BP needs to charge more will have a slight impact on consumer prices, but it's unlikely to have a significant effect.
(And even if they made an illegal cartel agreement with the other oil companies, the other oil companies would make huge amounts of money on the higher prices, while BP would break even - they'd be given an enormous advantage over BP in the longer term.)
The more likely result of this is BP losing an enormous amount of business and possibly entering a death spiral. Dying or not, the shareholders will collectively lose tens of billions of dollars. Once dead, the other oil companies will fill the gap, taking over the existing production business.
And good riddance.
I don't know what post you think you're summarizing, but your summary doesn't in any way remotely resemble what I wrote.
A better way of stating it would be: "The Soviet Union, a secretive dictatorship whose track record for telling the truth was even lower than BPs, used the Nuclear option five times. Of these, one time is known to have resulted in an even bigger environmental catastrophe than the original, while the exact results of the other remains largely unknown."
If the Nuclear option was likely to work and unlikely to result in decades of radioactive oil pumping into the sea, I think the powers that be would be seriously considering it.
If people stop treating it as a "All oil or no oil" thing, then the alternatives multiply.
The most obvious big solution to our oil dependency problem is to invest in public transport, and to change planning and zoning laws to ensure that the limitations on the viability of PT in many areas today becomes lessened through time, so people really don't face the choice of having to either walk a mile or more, or else drive for five minutes a longer distance, to get a bottle of milk.
Will that be the end of oil? In the short term, no. It'll quantify a substantial reduction in the amount of oil, even more so in the medium term when the centralized nature of public transport makes it easier to switch over to anything from wood gas (CO) to vastly improved future battery technologies (and, of course, rail based systems can be electric, and thus Nuclear/solar/hydo/wind/etc powered from day 1)
A massive and substantial reduction in oil dependency and thus demand will reduce the value of oil, making uneconomic much of the off-shore disaster areas we've seen over the last few decades. Burning less fossil fuels through a combination of carbon neutral energy sources and increased efficiency will also help reduce the CO2 imbalance and give the Earth a greater chance of finding an equilibrium.
The sad part is that a concerted public transport migration could occur now, it could be a significant part of an economic infusion to get us out of our current depression state, it would easily pay for itself in reducing deficits in the medium to long term given the US's current dependence on expensive foreign oil, and yet the bizarre nature of US politics, where as many people seem to think the Gulf crisis means we need to drill more, not less, as the opposite, and the extreme anti-tax anti-spending ideology of a massive proportion of the population, means this isn't going to happen.
Make it happen. Now.
Don't buy the argument anyway.
How many burglaries are not premeditated? "Oops, I just broke into the house, it was practically an accident, I don't know what came over me!" How would Google Maps prove premeditation? "Oops, I was using Google street view, and I suddenly saw this house I practically had to burgle!"
Complete load of crap.
What the hell difference does it make whether someone used Google maps?
I don't think that, but I do think it's possible for someone to be smart about some things, and not terribly knowledgeable or understanding of something else. One of the issues the Internet has had since its explosion has been the number of established industries (and successful people associated with those industries) that suddenly found it a threat. These people, from studio bosses to booksellers, weren't idiots, they got where they were by knowing their industries inside out, but how to deal with the free flow of information itself became a particular issue they were ill-equipped to manage.
Murdoch, thus far, has a terrible record with the Internet. While Fox News might have more viewers than CNN or MSNBC, its website is one of the least popular. While Murdoch can't be blamed, given the recentness of the acquisition, for the WSJ's low presence compared to, say, the NYT, the UK situation is staggering with the Guardian's website attracting 37 million unique visitors every month, vs the Time's less than 20M. Try as I may, I can't think of a single online operation primarily managed by Murdoch that's attracted any serious level of serious success compared to its direct rivals.
It's possible Murdoch will turn that around, but it's hard to see how removing your sites from Google and discouraging bloggers from deep linking can help you in the short or long term. Even if the aim is to change every hundred free readers into one paying subscriber and become successful that way, is it probable that this would work? Is the Times of such perceived high quality by a substantial number of people that those people would chose it and chose to pay for it over a high quality free alternative like The Guardian? Can The Times survive if the only people reading it are those who have already heard of it, and haven't gotten into the habit of reading an easier to find quality news website?
Do I think Murdoch "gets" the Internet? No. I suspect News International will, eventually, figure out how to work with it, but it may require an individual who knows more than centralized media to do it. Murdoch, just about, knows centralized media. Even there, his skills tend to be overstated: Murdoch's business plan within centralized media has always been fairly simple: run profitable populist media enterprises (The Sun, Fox, Fox News, etc), and run one or two loss making "serious" journals to ensure he has higher level political clout. Murdoch's skills are with populist, low-end, centralized media. I wouldn't assume he knows how to monetize news on the Internet any more than I'd expect Einstein to run a movie studio.
Wouldn't actually matter. The author's not the one distributing the app, Apple is the distributor. Therefore Apple requires a distribution license. The GPs debates of angels on pinheads notwithstanding, Wal-mart's situation with the router is not something I can comment upon, beyond pointing out it's not an acceptable analogy. Apple is copying the product and distributing those copies. Morally, legally, and in every other way possible, Apple must abide by the license.
No, it's a miss, for the application we're talking about. The fact I "visited" a site, doesn't mean I'm a user of that site, in the sense that a history snooper is interested in. Snoopers are trying to gather information about you, whether it's to sell you viagra or to steal your passwords. So a technique that happens to register true for a large subset of websites regardless of whether the user of the webbrowser has actually spent any time there is useless.
What you end up with, using this technique, is a situation where thousands of websites will end up in 90% of people's histories, but only a much smaller portion will actually be useful. Sure, it's quite possible the majority of people with Facebook in their histories are Facebook users, but that's only because, in my experience, the majority of web users are Facebook users. A much better question is "Do the majority of non-Facebook users actually have Facebook in their histories?" to which the answer is almost certainly "Yes."
The :visited: hack is an interesting technique that has little technical use. Outside of a small set of speciality sites (and, no, I'm not talking porn, given porn redirects are common too) you're not going to get any useful information out of the hack that tells you what websites the user actually frequents.
I would hazard a guess that if anyone using the technique is successful, it'll not be because they used the hack, but rather because the hack picked a popular target. That is to say, there's probably no difference in success rate for a site that puts up Facebook without checking the user's history, and a site that checks the user's history first before putting it up.
FWIW I've seen the proof-of-concept sites that supposedly bring up every site you've ever visited, and using the system is very hit-or-miss. I have no Facebook account, for example, but the site came up, presumably because at some point in the past I clicked on a link that turned out to be a FB profile.
Even banks might be more awkward than it appears: numerous banks and credit card companies appeared on my list of visited links, despite me not recalling ever visiting them, until I remembered that I'd done some research into getting a new card a year or so ago.
The bottom line is that a site that uses such a system to determine the phishing sites to pick will more likely than not create numerous fake "You have been logged out" pages for sites you never logged into, and you know you never logged into.
I don't see why that would matter, to be honest. The issue with Estoppel isn't one where the issue is someone failed to notify another of a claim, but whether their actions or inactions made it appear that the party they're suing was permitted to do what they're being sued over. Estoppel by laches, and Estoppel by silence, would appear to be the two forms of estoppel people are concerning themselves with here, and clearly neither applies: the MPEG LA has not been silent, and laches is a hard one to prove given the lack of any serious entity actually using Theora at the moment, the fact that the MPEG LA does apply different licensing regimes to different types of usage, and the fact it might, legitimately, prevent the MPEG LA from suing for past breaches, but it certainly wouldn't prevent it from suing over future breaches.
At best, the estoppel argument can be used to assume that if the MPEG LA were to bring a lawsuit right now against, say, Canonical, for shipping Theora with Ubuntu, without forewarning them, the LA might not be able to claim damages for patent violations in, say, Ubuntu 6.10. But it almost certainly could prevent Canonical shipping Theora in future, unless they paid license fees.
Disclaimer: IANAL either, but I know enough about the subject to know that Estoppel is not a "get out of jail free" card for patent violations.
Theora's been out for years, but nobody's using it. Patent holders are well within their rights to argue that it wasn't worth chasing at a time when virtually nobody used the format.
Remember that H.264 streaming is currently license free too. That doesn't stop the MPEG-LA from slapping on license fees at some point in the future, especially as they've openly said they will (and, likewise, they've openly said they're considering setting up a licensing regime for Theora.)
There's a difference between "Not filing a lawsuit yet", and "Saying it's OK". The MPEG-LA has not said it's OK to use Theora, they've said the opposite. What they haven't done, as yet, is set up a licensing regime. So far as I'm aware, they can decide to do that on the last day of the last patent's validity, and it'd still be valid.
No, Flash uses H.264 (at least modern Flash does.)
Apple is opposed to Flash because they have a competing infrastructure called Quicktime, and would really rather everyone license Apple's DRM over Adobe's. (To those who take its supposed support for HTML5 seriously: few organizations currently using Flash for streaming video would ever switch over to HTML5. They're using Flash to prevent you from saving their content.)
MP3 may be up against better codecs, but it's hardly obsolete. It's the one format virtually everything plays. Even my car stereo supports it, and that doesn't even support MPEG 1 Audio Layer II.
I suspect that none of the lossy compression systems will ever supplant MP3. Apple's pushed AAC, but only realized limited success, as has Microsoft with WMA. Vorbis just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. MP3Pro and HE-AAC have yet to make a dent. AC-3 has virtually no presence outside of audio accompanying video. Meanwhile, bandwidth and storage space are increasing to the point that the "lossless" codecs just seem like better and better value with each passing day.
I would be enormously surprised if MP3 is gone in ten years. I would expect it to continue to exist for low end audio, with either a "lossless" codec or PCM becoming the major standard for audio storage, and AC-3 remaining the primary soundtrack format for everything except Blu-ray.
Yeah, but even MPEG-2 is better than MPEG-2.
That's not a joke or a typo. The codec world has moved on quite considerably since the release of MPEG-1, and development of MPEG-2 encoders has resulted in stunning improvements in the last few years, in part because of the requirements of ATSC, and in part because of the improvements in processor technology.
I've been wondering for a while if the right approach for the whole codec mess is to wait until MPEG-1 is truly free and clear, and adopt that. You may laugh, but try encoding something in MPEG-1 with ffmpeg, using large (> 100) GOP sizes, and high numbers of B-frames (16+.)* On a normal high performance computer in 2010, the speed of compression is too low to be practical, but the results are excellent, even at relatively low bitrates. 4-6Mbps is more than enough for high quality 720p24, in most cases.
For that reason, I think the Internet video codec debate will be over sooner than people think. The real work has to be done on the encoder side, improving the capabilities of encoders for older formats that'll be patent free soon. But if you look at the bigger picture, MPEG-1 video (and MPEG-1 layers 1/2 audio) will soon be free (some claim they already are), bandwidth is improving, CPU power is improving, While a superb MPEG-1 encoder will never be as good as a superb H.264 encoder, the necessity of one over the other will diminish in time.
Nah.
With Vorbis, Franhoffer has actually been very public about the fact it considers the technology patentable and warning people it's considering its options. I strongly doubt that Estoppel prevents an organization from instituting a licensing regime once a technology is popular if they always said that's exactly what they plan to do.
I also have to admit to being unsure that estoppel means what Slashdotters think it does. While a party might be prevented from suing someone for past breaches of patents that they knew about at the time, it certainly doesn't stop Franhoffer from saying "From January 1st 2011, all developers of Ogg Vorbis decoders will need a license for Patent 5,214,742."
There's no patent pool concerning MP3 (or at least, there wasn't when the new claims arose.) On top of that, MP3 kind of took everyone by surprise, it was never supposed to be an online media distribution format. At the time of the original release of MPEG-1, the assumption was it would be used primarily by creators of CD based content, which had a direct impact on the number of organizations who cared at the time to get involved.
It's an established principle because limiting anonymous speech would, indeed, have the effect of limiting speech. To not protect anonymous speech but to claim to be still supportive of "Freedom of speech" would be a little like banning printing presses but arguing that you still support Freedom of Speech because, well, people can always talk to one another.
It's always been the case, in any regime, no matter how liberal, that intimidation and discrimination that follows the expression of certain viewpoints will result in those viewpoints not being expressed unless the protection of anonymity is provided. Long after the US became free, anonymous and pseudonymous journalism remained a bastion of debate, and nothing has changed to suggest that the same principles do not apply today.