This actually makes me wonder if there is a military/intel datacentre that does this already.
Probably, but not for the reasons you think. Tor is known to be used by the military (how much is anybody's guess) for the same reasons anybody else would use it.
Both Firefox and Opera set their defaults in pixels
Dang. For a second, I thought that there as at least one thing consistent across all browsers. For what it's worth, Safari uses points, as does Camino, and get this, so does Firefox on Mac OS X, making Firefox inconsistent with itself. I think I'm just going to stay the hell away from the font: property from now on.
The old classic 'Design of Everyday Things' is very dry and it probably was really useful when most people didn't know the usability fundamentals. But now, it just seems like everyone already knows the basic principles and it's not adding much more value anymore.
Emotional Design, by the same author, is a lot juicier. It almost entirely concerns industrial design as well, but as with any good design book the valuable concepts can be applied elsewhere.
He'll tell you that you should stick to primary colors or simple textures, but he'd try to dissuade you from adding a drop shadow to your graphic (indeed, from even adding a graphic if it wasn't intimately related to the data set you were trying to present)
I wouldn't say this a bad recommendation, it's just not in line with web design trends, and thus useless to anyone that has to listen to client requests. While I agree with your premise that he doesn't say anything about web design in particular, I would still suggest that anyone doing web design should at least be familiar with his work.
That's the most idiotic thing I ever heard. Do you realize if such was done torrents would just start using port 80/110?
BitTorrent doesn't need low latency. Web traffic generally does. Prioritizing web traffic, if done properly, wouldn't change anything about use of BitTorrent except imperceptibly increased latency.
If I'm offered 5Mits/s from my cable provider, that is an obligation for them to fill my order. If they can't fulfill my expectations, then they shouldn't have offered the service to begin with.
If your ISP didn't oversell at all, they might not be able to offer you even 500Kbps, much less 5Mbps. Worse than that, there would be a tremendous amount of bandwidth being wasted at any given time. Overselling to a certain ratio makes a lot more sense.
It's locked in to the worst wireless provider that is out there. Cingluar/AT&T.
You have to remember that wireless provider suckitude varies by locale. There are some places where Cingular either doesn't suck, or at least sucks significantly less than the alternatives. There are also many places where there are no alternatives.
I've been recording everything in my life for the past 23 years. The storage requirements aren't too bad: I'm able to carry it all around with me with room to spare. Acquisition and retrieval are the real issues, as there is a lot of metadata to sort through, and not everything encodes well. For instance, there is a huge chunk at the beginning that is practically illegible, as well as a long section in the teens that seems to be recorded as a bunch of flesh-colored RLE bitmaps, followed by a few years where every entry is punctuated by the string "GU1INNE55 W4Z H3R3". I also get similar errors when I try running Scotch 2.1; I contacted the author, but they just said it "works as intended".
You can implement whatever the hell you want, and let the carriers decide what they're going to implement.
And if none of them implement your features you've just designed a failure. By partnering with a carrier, they don't have to beg and plead for carriers to implement those features. A few years and a few million units later, it will be the odd carrier that doesn't support visual voicemail.
Unfortunately, I always remember the Apple ][ file formats...with a Basic that couldn't easily be saved as text. There were good arguments for the strange disk format. You got more storage on each floppy. But to not be ABLE to save to an ASCII file on a standard format... well, I'm a bit dubious when Apple says it doesn't want DRM.
If those disk formats were intended lock consumers onto the Apple ][ and protect market dominance, it seems they failed. No, I think it probably had more to do with the fact that Woz designed it. Also consider that 5" disks were only a few years old at the time, and never stopped being a fustercluck of variations in layouts. It may sound analogous, but I don't think there's any connection.
For me, buying a player that doesn't play AAC would be a major pain, and I don't want a Zune.
The situation is that there aren't any good AAC players other than the iPod. I don't think that situation would change if other manufacturers started supporting AAC -- Zune represents the best the market has to offer, and you're able to dismiss it in a single clause, and for good reason. Basically, if it comes down to one product being superior to all the others, I don't think that counts as lock-in.
What doesn't make sense though, is given the energy efficiency and easy-to-read high contrast functionality of E Ink, why other than Motorola with its Motofone, has no other cell phone manufacturer incorporated E Ink technology into its handsets?"
Phone manufacturers are more interested in bright, vibrant, color displays that look attractive. The efficiency gains aren't a big advantage given the frequency with which people are used to charging their phones, and the readability is only an issue when reading large amounts of text, which isn't (yet) something that cell phones are often used for.
Hold on... the non-GM potatoes still caused ill-effects? How much potato were they feeding these rats?
Not just ill-effects. According to the last paragraph of the article, half of the rats in the study died, and the results were recorded only for the ones that survived. That's such astonishingly bad science that I don't see how anti-GM activists can claim it as a victory.
You said "Accusing someone of supporting slavery and Nazism because they happen to think that artists should have rights?" My point was that people defend the accepted ways that things work not because of the reasons, but because that's the way things work. Do you see my point? I still think that that is what you are doing.
Instead of just accusing people of supporting Nazism and slavery, you're also accusing them of being unable to think for themselves? You really are an asshole.
But your quote from the constitution makes no claim to such a moral right -- monopoly power is given in order to encourage the creation;
The claim to a moral right is inherent in the languge: "to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This was not some new idea at the time, and it isn't particular to the U.S. Constitution. If a person creates a work, it is theirs, not "everybody's". Hence my posting in reply to your claim that "A VERY small part [of copyright] was some sort of planned-out way to encourage artists or some sort of philosophical ideological agreement about inherent ownership of ideas or expression." The extent to which any artistic creation is engendered by the culture surrounding it is addressed in "limited Times" -- a work will become everybody's. There is no implication that an artist's moral right is eternal.
I prefer to think of art as belonging to us all, rather than to try to insist that the film belongs to the director, say, and not to the writer, producer, star, etc...
You can prefer to think that all you want, but that doesn't make your arguments any more sensible. Also, your example is terrible. Why would the writer of a screenplay, assuming he authorized the creation of a derivative work, inherently have rights over a film that he didn't create?
[And here you ignore a whole paragraph where I entreat you to explain how artists are being deprived of their rights.]
You say "The exclusive right to copy and the exclusive right to sell are two separate provisions of the same law." So? The law could well be different. blah blah blah DMCA blah blah blah P2P blah blah blah
Don't change the subject. You were making the claim (repeatedly) that copyright is all about selling and economic benefit to the creator. It isn't, and I have repeatedly explained how. All you have done is continue to make the same claim with more words.
I thought your opinion...
The only opinion I'm expressing here is that I think you're a goddamn idiot. I haven't argued a single point from my personal opinion -- I have only pointed out the places where you are making shit up.
I'm sorry, but you did: "Am I claiming that the current "content distribution system" as you see it is as bad as foot-binding, slavery, or Nazi-ism? Not at all. But no matter: you'd defend them anyway, like you defend this."
A VERY small part was some sort of planned-out way to encourage artists or some sort of philosophical ideological agreement about inherent ownership of ideas or expression.
If by "a very small part" you mean Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, upon which all U.S. copyright law is based: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." There are earlier examples, too. The idea of copyright has always included the moral rights of the creator.
The way you talk, you'd think think that it was a "natural law" -- "artists should have rights" you say. Artists rights means that people can't share a digital copy of art?
The artist has an exclusive right to reproduce his or her creation. That's what makes it theirs. It's up to the artist to decide whether to maintain that exclusivity (i.e., "All Rights Reserved") or not. So, the answer to your question is : that's up to the person that created it. Also, the fact that it is digital makes no difference regarding the moral right of the creator.
I think a much more important "artists right" is the right to make your art incorporate others' art -- this is the way art has always worked, but it is this "copyright" which is now being used to deprive artists of this fundamental "right."
I don't see how artists are being deprived of anything that they have ever had. I've never had the right to simply take an existing work and call it my own, if that's what you mean. That wouldn't be art so much as plagiarism. If you actually mean incorporation, the burden is on you to explain how artists are being deprived of it, as the doctrine of fair use still applies. Also, I'd like to point out that you started this thread talking about downloading things to watch on your TV--when I say you're conflating, I mean it.
Copyright has everything to do with selling... they would be provided with a monopoly to copy -- that is sell -- it, to give them a special leg-up on the competition.
Let me say this again, as you seem to have ignored it the first time: Even a work freely given away is under copyright. Even a work performed or displayed in public, but never sold or given to anyone is under copyright. The exclusive right to copy and the exclusive right to sell are two separate provisions of the same law.
And it very much does dictate meaning -- the forbidding of "copying" inherently makes the claim that I Micky Mouse, say, is not the kind of person who would ever [insert your interesting Mickey Mouse film idea here].
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. For one, you're conflating copying with the creation of derivative works (the exclusive right to which is a third provision under copyright law). Stop doing that. Secondly, where you say "meaning" you mean "expression". I can interpret "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as an endorsement of baby-eating devil-worship without having to duplicate it and insert scenes of Mickey Mouse eating a baby. I can even create my own animation featuring a baby-eating anthropomorphic mouse in a wizard hat. Either way, Disney has not dictated the meaning of the work, only the expression.
In the case of the Apple TV (and iTunes)...blah...blah...blah...the full force of the law come down on me.
What does this have to do with dictating meaning?
As you see it, the law is was and will be the law no matter what it says, and there is no room for the rest of us.
See, this is the kind of garbage I was talking about. You're making the wickedly flawed assumption that anyone that disagrees with you is doing so just because "that's the way things are". I, for one, disagree with you because you are saying things that are not true. My opinion on the subject hasn't even entered into it.
I think you would need to be able to install that codec on the iTV device and if it is a closed box that might not be an option.
Once you get the file into iTunes, iTunes' "Convert for iPod" command would do the trick. The downside is that it is slow and doesn't give you any control over the encoding, but it is the simplest thing that will definitely work. I know, I know, transcoding is bad, but it means that getting movies onto an AppleTV will only be as difficult as you want it to be.
I think that art shouldn't be put into a box and denied any meaning except that imposed on it by the person who wants to sell it to you.
Copyright has nothing to do with selling. Even a work freely given away is under copyright. Nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with dictating meaning and interpretation. You're conflating and building strawmen at an alarming rate. Accusing someone of supporting slavery and Nazism because they happen to think that artists should have rights? Grow up.
Whatever your opinion is, it is lost in this kind of garbage.
What I'm talking about is participating in culture, and about benefiting from expression, and about enjoying art.
Odd. It sure sounded like you were talking about pirating copyrighted material. And now it sounds like you're trying to justify it with a smokescreen of psuedo-intellectual garbage.
if it is true that the internet won't scale in the scenarios outlined above, it won't scale only in a specific context: the context of bps hungry applications
Bandwidth congestion causes increased latency and packet loss, which affects all traffic. In combination, this can make even the web unusable.
Slashdot Mirror
This actually makes me wonder if there is a military/intel datacentre that does this already.
Probably, but not for the reasons you think. Tor is known to be used by the military (how much is anybody's guess) for the same reasons anybody else would use it.
Tor tells you at the start that you shouldn't rely on it for strong anonymity.
Tor also tells you to not use it for BitTorrent, but clueless Diggers continue to do so.
The outer surface of the human eye isn't transparent to that wavelength, so you wouldn't have to worry about eye damage.
Unless of course you count burning off the outer surface of your eyes as eye damage.
Both Firefox and Opera set their defaults in pixels
Dang. For a second, I thought that there as at least one thing consistent across all browsers. For what it's worth, Safari uses points, as does Camino, and get this, so does Firefox on Mac OS X, making Firefox inconsistent with itself. I think I'm just going to stay the hell away from the font: property from now on.
default to 16px font sizes which is HUGE for the majority of people
You mean 16pt., which properly should be just under 1/4 of an inch. In reality, it's usually smaller. How is that huge?
The old classic 'Design of Everyday Things' is very dry and it probably was really useful when most people didn't know the usability fundamentals. But now, it just seems like everyone already knows the basic principles and it's not adding much more value anymore.
Emotional Design, by the same author, is a lot juicier. It almost entirely concerns industrial design as well, but as with any good design book the valuable concepts can be applied elsewhere.
He'll tell you that you should stick to primary colors or simple textures, but he'd try to dissuade you from adding a drop shadow to your graphic (indeed, from even adding a graphic if it wasn't intimately related to the data set you were trying to present)
I wouldn't say this a bad recommendation, it's just not in line with web design trends, and thus useless to anyone that has to listen to client requests. While I agree with your premise that he doesn't say anything about web design in particular, I would still suggest that anyone doing web design should at least be familiar with his work.
That's the most idiotic thing I ever heard. Do you realize if such was done torrents would just start using port 80/110?
BitTorrent doesn't need low latency. Web traffic generally does. Prioritizing web traffic, if done properly, wouldn't change anything about use of BitTorrent except imperceptibly increased latency.
If I'm offered 5Mits/s from my cable provider, that is an obligation for them to fill my order. If they can't fulfill my expectations, then they shouldn't have offered the service to begin with.
If your ISP didn't oversell at all, they might not be able to offer you even 500Kbps, much less 5Mbps. Worse than that, there would be a tremendous amount of bandwidth being wasted at any given time. Overselling to a certain ratio makes a lot more sense.
It's locked in to the worst wireless provider that is out there. Cingluar/AT&T.
You have to remember that wireless provider suckitude varies by locale. There are some places where Cingular either doesn't suck, or at least sucks significantly less than the alternatives. There are also many places where there are no alternatives.
I've been recording everything in my life for the past 23 years. The storage requirements aren't too bad: I'm able to carry it all around with me with room to spare. Acquisition and retrieval are the real issues, as there is a lot of metadata to sort through, and not everything encodes well. For instance, there is a huge chunk at the beginning that is practically illegible, as well as a long section in the teens that seems to be recorded as a bunch of flesh-colored RLE bitmaps, followed by a few years where every entry is punctuated by the string "GU1INNE55 W4Z H3R3". I also get similar errors when I try running Scotch 2.1; I contacted the author, but they just said it "works as intended".
The Intel chips carry 4 to 8 Mb of cache.
No. They have 2 or 4MB cache, with only the quad-core chips having 8MB.
Apple claiming that it's morally wrong to unlock a phone (such people are "bad guys") to run on other networks, is going to do that.
Apple didn't claim that. Glenn Lurie of Cingular did.
You can implement whatever the hell you want, and let the carriers decide what they're going to implement.
And if none of them implement your features you've just designed a failure. By partnering with a carrier, they don't have to beg and plead for carriers to implement those features. A few years and a few million units later, it will be the odd carrier that doesn't support visual voicemail.
Unfortunately, I always remember the Apple ][ file formats...with a Basic that couldn't easily be saved as text. There were good arguments for the strange disk format. You got more storage on each floppy. But to not be ABLE to save to an ASCII file on a standard format... well, I'm a bit dubious when Apple says it doesn't want DRM.
If those disk formats were intended lock consumers onto the Apple ][ and protect market dominance, it seems they failed. No, I think it probably had more to do with the fact that Woz designed it. Also consider that 5" disks were only a few years old at the time, and never stopped being a fustercluck of variations in layouts. It may sound analogous, but I don't think there's any connection.
For me, buying a player that doesn't play AAC would be a major pain, and I don't want a Zune.
The situation is that there aren't any good AAC players other than the iPod. I don't think that situation would change if other manufacturers started supporting AAC -- Zune represents the best the market has to offer, and you're able to dismiss it in a single clause, and for good reason. Basically, if it comes down to one product being superior to all the others, I don't think that counts as lock-in.
What doesn't make sense though, is given the energy efficiency and easy-to-read high contrast functionality of E Ink, why other than Motorola with its Motofone, has no other cell phone manufacturer incorporated E Ink technology into its handsets?"
Phone manufacturers are more interested in bright, vibrant, color displays that look attractive. The efficiency gains aren't a big advantage given the frequency with which people are used to charging their phones, and the readability is only an issue when reading large amounts of text, which isn't (yet) something that cell phones are often used for.
Hold on... the non-GM potatoes still caused ill-effects? How much potato were they feeding these rats?
Not just ill-effects. According to the last paragraph of the article, half of the rats in the study died, and the results were recorded only for the ones that survived. That's such astonishingly bad science that I don't see how anti-GM activists can claim it as a victory.
i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the two or more rats responsible for the increase in total number were siblings
If they were originally bred as lab rats, there's a good chance that they were genetic twins.
You said "Accusing someone of supporting slavery and Nazism because they happen to think that artists should have rights?" My point was that people defend the accepted ways that things work not because of the reasons, but because that's the way things work. Do you see my point? I still think that that is what you are doing.
Instead of just accusing people of supporting Nazism and slavery, you're also accusing them of being unable to think for themselves? You really are an asshole.
But your quote from the constitution makes no claim to such a moral right -- monopoly power is given in order to encourage the creation;
The claim to a moral right is inherent in the languge: "to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This was not some new idea at the time, and it isn't particular to the U.S. Constitution. If a person creates a work, it is theirs, not "everybody's". Hence my posting in reply to your claim that "A VERY small part [of copyright] was some sort of planned-out way to encourage artists or some sort of philosophical ideological agreement about inherent ownership of ideas or expression." The extent to which any artistic creation is engendered by the culture surrounding it is addressed in "limited Times" -- a work will become everybody's. There is no implication that an artist's moral right is eternal.
I prefer to think of art as belonging to us all, rather than to try to insist that the film belongs to the director, say, and not to the writer, producer, star, etc...
You can prefer to think that all you want, but that doesn't make your arguments any more sensible. Also, your example is terrible. Why would the writer of a screenplay, assuming he authorized the creation of a derivative work, inherently have rights over a film that he didn't create?
[And here you ignore a whole paragraph where I entreat you to explain how artists are being deprived of their rights.]
You say "The exclusive right to copy and the exclusive right to sell are two separate provisions of the same law." So? The law could well be different. blah blah blah DMCA blah blah blah P2P blah blah blah
Don't change the subject. You were making the claim (repeatedly) that copyright is all about selling and economic benefit to the creator. It isn't, and I have repeatedly explained how. All you have done is continue to make the same claim with more words.
I thought your opinion...
The only opinion I'm expressing here is that I think you're a goddamn idiot. I haven't argued a single point from my personal opinion -- I have only pointed out the places where you are making shit up.
I didn't make that accusation.
... they would be provided with a monopoly to copy -- that is sell -- it, to give them a special leg-up on the competition.
I'm sorry, but you did: "Am I claiming that the current "content distribution system" as you see it is as bad as foot-binding, slavery, or Nazi-ism? Not at all. But no matter: you'd defend them anyway, like you defend this."
A VERY small part was some sort of planned-out way to encourage artists or some sort of philosophical ideological agreement about inherent ownership of ideas or expression.
If by "a very small part" you mean Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, upon which all U.S. copyright law is based: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." There are earlier examples, too. The idea of copyright has always included the moral rights of the creator.
The way you talk, you'd think think that it was a "natural law" -- "artists should have rights" you say. Artists rights means that people can't share a digital copy of art?
The artist has an exclusive right to reproduce his or her creation. That's what makes it theirs. It's up to the artist to decide whether to maintain that exclusivity (i.e., "All Rights Reserved") or not. So, the answer to your question is : that's up to the person that created it. Also, the fact that it is digital makes no difference regarding the moral right of the creator.
I think a much more important "artists right" is the right to make your art incorporate others' art -- this is the way art has always worked, but it is this "copyright" which is now being used to deprive artists of this fundamental "right."
I don't see how artists are being deprived of anything that they have ever had. I've never had the right to simply take an existing work and call it my own, if that's what you mean. That wouldn't be art so much as plagiarism. If you actually mean incorporation, the burden is on you to explain how artists are being deprived of it, as the doctrine of fair use still applies. Also, I'd like to point out that you started this thread talking about downloading things to watch on your TV--when I say you're conflating, I mean it.
Copyright has everything to do with selling
Let me say this again, as you seem to have ignored it the first time: Even a work freely given away is under copyright. Even a work performed or displayed in public, but never sold or given to anyone is under copyright. The exclusive right to copy and the exclusive right to sell are two separate provisions of the same law.
And it very much does dictate meaning -- the forbidding of "copying" inherently makes the claim that I Micky Mouse, say, is not the kind of person who would ever [insert your interesting Mickey Mouse film idea here].
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. For one, you're conflating copying with the creation of derivative works (the exclusive right to which is a third provision under copyright law). Stop doing that. Secondly, where you say "meaning" you mean "expression". I can interpret "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as an endorsement of baby-eating devil-worship without having to duplicate it and insert scenes of Mickey Mouse eating a baby. I can even create my own animation featuring a baby-eating anthropomorphic mouse in a wizard hat. Either way, Disney has not dictated the meaning of the work, only the expression.
In the case of the Apple TV (and iTunes)...blah...blah...blah...the full force of the law come down on me.
What does this have to do with dictating meaning?
As you see it, the law is was and will be the law no matter what it says, and there is no room for the rest of us.
See, this is the kind of garbage I was talking about. You're making the wickedly flawed assumption that anyone that disagrees with you is doing so just because "that's the way things are". I, for one, disagree with you because you are saying things that are not true. My opinion on the subject hasn't even entered into it.
I think you would need to be able to install that codec on the iTV device and if it is a closed box that might not be an option.
Once you get the file into iTunes, iTunes' "Convert for iPod" command would do the trick. The downside is that it is slow and doesn't give you any control over the encoding, but it is the simplest thing that will definitely work. I know, I know, transcoding is bad, but it means that getting movies onto an AppleTV will only be as difficult as you want it to be.
I think that art shouldn't be put into a box and denied any meaning except that imposed on it by the person who wants to sell it to you.
Copyright has nothing to do with selling. Even a work freely given away is under copyright. Nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with dictating meaning and interpretation. You're conflating and building strawmen at an alarming rate. Accusing someone of supporting slavery and Nazism because they happen to think that artists should have rights? Grow up.
Whatever your opinion is, it is lost in this kind of garbage.
What I'm talking about is participating in culture, and about benefiting from expression, and about enjoying art.
Odd. It sure sounded like you were talking about pirating copyrighted material. And now it sounds like you're trying to justify it with a smokescreen of psuedo-intellectual garbage.
if it is true that the internet won't scale in the scenarios outlined above, it won't scale only in a specific context: the context of bps hungry applications
Bandwidth congestion causes increased latency and packet loss, which affects all traffic. In combination, this can make even the web unusable.