There are. Even counting only the variations so sturdy they've lasted tens or hundreds of thousands of generations, there are hundreds of primate species. If you're going to demand fossil evidence of transients, please produce the fossil evidence for Eve.
But you aren't describing random mutations and random evolution
Doesn't matter what's being selected for, the process works the same. A particular shell pattern, quicker reflexes, tolerance for chemicals, all the same. Even among sexual creatures there isn't a hard test for species boundary -- is a female chihuahua more likely to interbreed with a wolf or a mastiff? -- but the one thing sure is that traits that don't affect survival, such as ability to interbreed with absent populations, change much, much more slowly than the ones that do.
The password for nvidia-latest.crpt is "foo". Please decipher the captcha. It turns out your demo, along with turning less than 1K of shell script into 400K of encrypted file, also wiped the original. I've tried q, w, u, n, j, jv for the last letter(s). I figure you need the annoyance a lot more than I do.
That doesn't work for me on x86_64 wheezy with the Sun java plugin, under chrome or ff, and when I download the jar:
~$ cd down /home/jthill/down
~/down$ java -jar pcaptcha.jar
Failed to load Main-Class manifest attribute from
pcaptcha.jar
~/down$ java main -jar pcaptcha.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: main
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: main
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:217)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
Could not find the main class: main. Program will exit.
~/down$
Here's my try at a non-academic rendering:
Password cracking is generally "known ciphertext" -- they have/etc/shadow or whatever, probably because they just confiscated your filesystem, and can brute-force keys looking for one that produces the ciphertext they stole. Humans practically never memorize passwords long enough to defeat a brute-force search.
This makes that not work, because what's stored isn't the ciphertext. Instead, what's stored is combined with the password you supply to produce an image, which you then iteratively modify a few hundred times. Whether you've supplied the right password or not, all the modifications will look similar -- except that if you've supplied the right password, one of the iterations, while looking a lot like all the others, will also be a captcha.
The authors implicitly claim that it's as hard to answer the "is-it-a-captcha-at-all" question as it is to to decipher one, leaving a would-be brute-forcer the task of solving hundreds of thousands of captchas to find even a criminally weak password like 'm0ney'.
Solving the right captcha gets you the rest of the real password, which will be a strong one, long and random.
==
Somebody else already questioned that implicit claim, and I'll point out that the paper is written as if the number of iterations is secret ("The attacker attempting a brute-force attack has to visually analyze each image obtained by time-evolution of each incorrect state") -- as if the legitimate user is going to eyeball 350 images at every login, looking for the right one.
But the real question is whether or not it's really that hard to distinguish the payload iteration from the rest.
If you're troubleshooting problems in Red Hat kernels, call Red Hat and they'll show you how to access the individual patches. I'm guessing there's some reason you can't do that, though.
See for yourself. Basically, if your code is simple enough that their static analyzer can completely comprehend it, you're good to go.
Looks to me like they know what they're doing:
Our validator implementation
requires less than 600 C statements (semicolons), including
an x86 decoder and cpuid decoding.
.
which I figure is simple enough to tempt lots of smart people into trying to break it for kudos.
A link I didn't save says the implemented safe subset is complete enough that porting even many substantial libraries to the NaCl runtime takes no more than a recompile.
Maybe looking up the status accorded to political speech would help? If that's tl;dr for you, here's a hint: nothing gets more ironclad 1st-amendment protection than political speech.
Erasing political opponents from the Internet as presented by the state government. Where have we seen this before? Maybe it's a new phenomenon. We'll call this the first brick in the GOP's Great Firewall Of The Future.
It does not involve any artificial intelligence or machine intelligence at all
You think saying that makes it true? At this point we have machines that can read, hear, reason and plan. Fly a plane, drive a car in traffic... it isn't intelligence they're lacking, it's desire.
The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.
it tripped my bs meter, but I thought, ok, this is how they're going to make a living. Fine.
But adding that to your
It was reported elsewhere that when one of the people attending their demo tried to measure the spectrum of the gamma rays,he was stopped by the scientist.
redlined the meters. A no-touchie, no-lookie demo and there's something about the fuel we're not telling you.
Once again they pound in their lies about what neutrality.is.
The notion that neutrality means being source neutral must never be mentioned. The reporter simply uncritically accepts and repeats the premise.fed him by an."executive director of strategy and regulation".
Everything else in this article is just wrapper for that poisoned payload.
Because no one is going to think, just from looking at the name, that "World of Goo" is a Blizzard product.
The mod was appropriating Blizzard's reputation for quality and reliability, especially because there has already been a progression from "Warcraft" (a Blizzard RTS) to "World of Warcraft. (a Blizzard MMO) I'd think World of Starcraft is a Blizzard product too.
It was plainly not done with that intent -- the title was plainly intended for a community that knows where it came from. I'd imagine those people's first reaction on seeing the title was "it damn well better be good if he's going to call it _that_".
But there's a boatload of scum that claim comparable quality by appropriating words. Look at all the shills claiming their products are "open" when they're not: they're substantially less open than the products that gave that word its value: they are inferior substitutes pawned off as the real thing for commercial advantage. That's the kind of "dilution" trademark law is intended to protect.
The modders chose a legally improper title and got barked at by the Blizzard's legal guys. They also wrote an apparently damn good mod and got a very friendly invite from Blizzard's product guys. Nothing wrong here. If the legal guys are nice about appropriating the trademark for good mods, they're inviting a flood of cheap imitators who just claim to be good, from outside the mod community, trying to turn a buck on their name.
I think you made your point well, and this correction doesn't really undermine it at all, but so far as honey is concerned you don't have to start worrying for at least 200 times that 15 years. So far as anyone can tell, honey never goes bad.
Wandering OT, search for "nih honey burn treatment". There may be drugs better than honey for that, and for radiation burns the best is a mix, but in general honey is noticeably-to-substantially better.
Honey doesn't appear on the recommended-treatment lists published by most medical institutions. Strangely enough, those institutions tend to get substantial volume discounts for all their drugs, those discounts chosen by the drug companies.
I think that's a good and fair question too. As I see it, you answer it yourself several times -- it's plain we're coming at this from different directions.
I also say "company's actions, which in my opinion were very nearly as bad as "Sally's" are glossed over as perfectly reasonable."
I was planning on quoting that myself, and had typed "You also say" before I realized it was so fresh in my mind because I'd just seen it for a second time.
Skip the parenthetical clause: "company's actions are glossed over as perfectly reasonable." That's the part I don't see. Sally's their go-to. Spit starts splattering, she's the one they call and they treat her as one of the team. Do what you need to do, get whatever tools you need. You can bet they treated her very well personally too.
I'll emphasize the part that stood out to me as I was reading the article: the reporters lead with that. They spend the first two paragraphs on the extent of her commitment and value to that company.
They didn't have to do that. They wan to put their thumb on the scale, they eliminate most of the first two paragraphs and focus on the bit about "the company's culture". Yes, they're quoting some second-guessing consultant, and rereading it now I can see that that would focus some people's attention -- but it's precisely that blindspotting I'm objecting to: the article makes every attempt, and successfully I might add, because you and I do both see it, every attempt to portray the depth of that management team's betrayal.
If the reporters had had published much more detail I think they'd have risked revealing the company's identity -- maybe they could have reported some more, but not much, and since they made their point... well, a cardinal rule of writing is "omit needless words!" As I recall, the authors of that rendition actually put it this way: "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!". So these reporters did just that.
I haven't read all the comments here, but I did give it more than a glance. I see defence of the management, which physically nauseates me, but I don't see any defense of the reporting. I'm going to hammer on it, along the lines of Strunk & White's repetition: here is the picture they paint of the management: "oh hey, you're great, ten years of dedication, we know you, you know us, you're a damn smart lady and one of the team." And then what, they treat her like she's blind, stupid property they can kick to the curb without a word.
I had to make myself delete the word I had in place of this sentence. Not a good word to call anyone in public.
You see it, I see it, because they reported it.
And then slashdot+dog accuses them of bias because of how heinously the management behaved?
Which slashdot+dog knows because the people they're accusing of passing over it lightly portrayed the brutality so vividly?
Really?
Try reading "Sally wanted revenge" in an absolutely deadpan tone, trying to sneak raw mockery in under the radar. I actually cracked a smirk when I read that. I thought: "nice." because I'd already felt they did a really good job of shoving it in right to the haft. Twisting the blade like that was... nice.
And only after that lead do they talk about her reaction.
The view they present is not what you and TFA say it is. The view they present is that some people can be provoked to vengeful and even criminal behavior, and some get there all by themselves. That employees have no monopoly on behavior like that, that people inside the management tribe are just as prone, is beside their point, but they certainly didn't hesitate to make it all the same, now, did they? In fact, the three examples they detailed cover the spectrum: one case of flatly criminal and unprovoked fraud, one case of a vengeful but panicked reaction, and one case provoked by entirely justified hatred.
I think that your premise and TFA's accusation, that Computerworld's post is self-serving and blinkered, constitute exactly the tribally-motivated defensive projection you're attributing to them.
I think that there's far more than enough of that going around, and if you want to find tribal and stupid managers pointing fingers only outside the camp you won't have to look very far.
That I can look at the mod scores and see a lot of people inside my own camp doing the exact same thing doesn't surprise me a bit. But don't ask me to like it or stay silent about it. If you want to claim "their" behavior is worse than "ours", then act like it. But don't expect any group that accepts tribalism to ever achieve it. None ever have. Go take a listen to "For What It's Worth", or "Us and Them", to pick only two examples of people making that point rather more gently than I just did.
Sally gets no sympathy for her response just as her management gets no sympathy for what produced it. But yeah, if it was just hers I might not have posted. Other cases presented (as real, bs-meters didn't twitch)... flat criminals, given no-oversight keys to core business systems.
So I also don't agree with your summary of the takeaway. You've got an organization that large, you're obligated to protect it. You're admin'ing a large server, do you turn off security because having it on is insulting? Not keep logs, or just never check them? They're talking about sensible basics.
Let's start with basics: if you want to see actual license terms, you have to ask pretty-please will they send you a hardcopy. A unique, one-off artifact sent specifically to you.
When most companies offer a summary of a license, they include language like "while this description is believed to be a fair summary of the terms of the agreement, in the event of any discrepancy the text of the actual license must prevail".
MPEG-LA says its description "may not be relied upon for any purpose." Full stop.
You could call noticing that perhaps-excessive paranoia on my part, or wording it that way perhaps-excessive paranoia on theirs. It's worth considering.
So let's look at the details. I don't care about the viewer-pays scenarios, let's look at the ad- or donation- or plain old volunteer-supported scenarios.
For TV, if they're going to charge at all, they're going to charge either a one-time fee of $2,500 per encoder or recurring fees that start at $2,500/yr until you start getting into millions of reachable viewers. Very reasonable for even an indie TV station or the like.
No royalties at all on videos 12 minutes or less.
For service over the capital-I Internet, if viewers pay no fee (and if there's some unavoidable and ~no more than nominal~ fee they say they can probably arrange to treat that as no fee) to receive the video, there's no license fee either.
That last is new as of about five months ago; for the first ~90% of their existence they explicitly intended to charge you fees even if you weren't charging your audience any. Good luck getting $2500 in ad revenue on your blog.
So why did it take them seven years to momentarily give up on the attempt? They explicitly state they're going to revisit this issue next round: they intend to charge for it if they think they can get away with it. Why would they even consider that? Do they really believe they deserve an extra special tip for so clearly showing us your zits?
Note:No license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less ahan US$100 000.00
[Thompson says that about MP3. MPEG-LA refuses to say that about H.264]
Google's taking a big hit to do what they're doing. It's true that H.264 currently has the best of the contending encoders, and probably the best hardware and industry support. It's difficult (not to say impossible) to believe they'd do this purely to kick MPEG-LA to the curb for this -- it's almost laughably low-grade moneygrubbing -- but that's certainly one effect of what they're doing, and there's not much else apparent in the license.
Except for one thing: mpla also say they might unilaterally eliminate their caps on yearly royalty payments.
Yeah. I have to believe Google might just be doing this just because a world in which they don't have to do business with these people is that much better than a world in which they do.
it is easy to agree that this is going to make implementation of the video tag by web developers more difficult and less likely to happen in the next couple of years
orly? That's the simplest way I know if, seems to me it doesn't get easier than no-js HTML. FFmpeg is drop-dead easy to encode with, at least for those who can read.
Read the article. I hope Peter Bright is trolling for hits, but whether it's that or he actually means it my estimation of ars just took a(nother, after Protalinski's recent Google hitjob [.. that's two Google hitjobs in a week, by ars's Microsoft "reporters".. ] so biased ars had to withdraw it) big hit.
Slashdot Mirror
they're going to send a email, right? Click this link to authorize the FBI to remove an infection from your computer?
shouldn't there be dozens... maybe hundreds...
There are. Even counting only the variations so sturdy they've lasted tens or hundreds of thousands of generations, there are hundreds of primate species. If you're going to demand fossil evidence of transients, please produce the fossil evidence for Eve.
But you aren't describing random mutations and random evolution
Doesn't matter what's being selected for, the process works the same. A particular shell pattern, quicker reflexes, tolerance for chemicals, all the same. Even among sexual creatures there isn't a hard test for species boundary -- is a female chihuahua more likely to interbreed with a wolf or a mastiff? -- but the one thing sure is that traits that don't affect survival, such as ability to interbreed with absent populations, change much, much more slowly than the ones that do.
The password for nvidia-latest.crpt is "foo". Please decipher the captcha. It turns out your demo, along with turning less than 1K of shell script into 400K of encrypted file, also wiped the original. I've tried q, w, u, n, j, jv for the last letter(s). I figure you need the annoyance a lot more than I do.
~$ cd down
/home/jthill/down
~/down$ java -jar pcaptcha.jar
Failed to load Main-Class manifest attribute from
pcaptcha.jar
~/down$ java main -jar pcaptcha.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: main
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: main
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:217)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
Could not find the main class: main. Program will exit.
~/down$
Here's my try at a non-academic rendering:
Password cracking is generally "known ciphertext" -- they have /etc/shadow or whatever, probably because they just confiscated your filesystem, and can brute-force keys looking for one that produces the ciphertext they stole. Humans practically never memorize passwords long enough to defeat a brute-force search.
This makes that not work, because what's stored isn't the ciphertext. Instead, what's stored is combined with the password you supply to produce an image, which you then iteratively modify a few hundred times. Whether you've supplied the right password or not, all the modifications will look similar -- except that if you've supplied the right password, one of the iterations, while looking a lot like all the others, will also be a captcha. The authors implicitly claim that it's as hard to answer the "is-it-a-captcha-at-all" question as it is to to decipher one, leaving a would-be brute-forcer the task of solving hundreds of thousands of captchas to find even a criminally weak password like 'm0ney'. Solving the right captcha gets you the rest of the real password, which will be a strong one, long and random.
==
Somebody else already questioned that implicit claim, and I'll point out that the paper is written as if the number of iterations is secret ("The attacker attempting a brute-force attack has to visually analyze each image obtained by time-evolution of each incorrect state") -- as if the legitimate user is going to eyeball 350 images at every login, looking for the right one.
But the real question is whether or not it's really that hard to distinguish the payload iteration from the rest.
Beyond the actual communications assistance, I think the effect on morale would be incalculable.
If you're troubleshooting problems in Red Hat kernels, call Red Hat and they'll show you how to access the individual patches. I'm guessing there's some reason you can't do that, though.
That's why they're going for PNaCl.
Looks to me like they know what they're doing:
Our validator implementation requires less than 600 C statements (semicolons), including an x86 decoder and cpuid decoding.
. which I figure is simple enough to tempt lots of smart people into trying to break it for kudos.
A link I didn't save says the implemented safe subset is complete enough that porting even many substantial libraries to the NaCl runtime takes no more than a recompile.
Maybe looking up the status accorded to political speech would help? If that's tl;dr for you, here's a hint: nothing gets more ironclad 1st-amendment protection than political speech.
Erasing political opponents from the Internet as presented by the state government. Where have we seen this before? Maybe it's a new phenomenon. We'll call this the first brick in the GOP's Great Firewall Of The Future.
It can't be easy to provoke, was the bug found by audit?
It does not involve any artificial intelligence or machine intelligence at all
You think saying that makes it true? At this point we have machines that can read, hear, reason and plan. Fly a plane, drive a car in traffic ... it isn't intelligence they're lacking, it's desire.
The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.
it tripped my bs meter, but I thought, ok, this is how they're going to make a living. Fine. But adding that to your
It was reported elsewhere that when one of the people attending their demo tried to measure the spectrum of the gamma rays,he was stopped by the scientist.
redlined the meters. A no-touchie, no-lookie demo and there's something about the fuel we're not telling you.
No doubt you'd be happy to give your kid anything calling itself ampicillin.
Once again they pound in their lies about what neutrality.is.
The notion that neutrality means being source neutral must never be mentioned. The reporter simply uncritically accepts and repeats the premise.fed him by an."executive director of strategy and regulation".
Everything else in this article is just wrapper for that poisoned payload.
Because no one is going to think, just from looking at the name, that "World of Goo" is a Blizzard product.
The mod was appropriating Blizzard's reputation for quality and reliability, especially because there has already been a progression from "Warcraft" (a Blizzard RTS) to "World of Warcraft. (a Blizzard MMO) I'd think World of Starcraft is a Blizzard product too.
It was plainly not done with that intent -- the title was plainly intended for a community that knows where it came from. I'd imagine those people's first reaction on seeing the title was "it damn well better be good if he's going to call it _that_".
But there's a boatload of scum that claim comparable quality by appropriating words. Look at all the shills claiming their products are "open" when they're not: they're substantially less open than the products that gave that word its value: they are inferior substitutes pawned off as the real thing for commercial advantage. That's the kind of "dilution" trademark law is intended to protect.
The modders chose a legally improper title and got barked at by the Blizzard's legal guys. They also wrote an apparently damn good mod and got a very friendly invite from Blizzard's product guys. Nothing wrong here. If the legal guys are nice about appropriating the trademark for good mods, they're inviting a flood of cheap imitators who just claim to be good, from outside the mod community, trying to turn a buck on their name.
The summary clearly says
You must be new here.
I'm guessing that's because you used "google shopping" (see that "tbs=shop" parameter?) not "google web".
honey that was packaged 15 years ago
I think you made your point well, and this correction doesn't really undermine it at all, but so far as honey is concerned you don't have to start worrying for at least 200 times that 15 years. So far as anyone can tell, honey never goes bad.
Wandering OT, search for "nih honey burn treatment". There may be drugs better than honey for that, and for radiation burns the best is a mix, but in general honey is noticeably-to-substantially better.
Honey doesn't appear on the recommended-treatment lists published by most medical institutions. Strangely enough, those institutions tend to get substantial volume discounts for all their drugs, those discounts chosen by the drug companies.
Where do you get this?
I think that's a good and fair question too. As I see it, you answer it yourself several times -- it's plain we're coming at this from different directions.
I also say "company's actions, which in my opinion were very nearly as bad as "Sally's" are glossed over as perfectly reasonable."
I was planning on quoting that myself, and had typed "You also say" before I realized it was so fresh in my mind because I'd just seen it for a second time.
Skip the parenthetical clause: "company's actions are glossed over as perfectly reasonable." That's the part I don't see. Sally's their go-to. Spit starts splattering, she's the one they call and they treat her as one of the team. Do what you need to do, get whatever tools you need. You can bet they treated her very well personally too.
I'll emphasize the part that stood out to me as I was reading the article: the reporters lead with that. They spend the first two paragraphs on the extent of her commitment and value to that company.
They didn't have to do that. They wan to put their thumb on the scale, they eliminate most of the first two paragraphs and focus on the bit about "the company's culture". Yes, they're quoting some second-guessing consultant, and rereading it now I can see that that would focus some people's attention -- but it's precisely that blindspotting I'm objecting to: the article makes every attempt, and successfully I might add, because you and I do both see it, every attempt to portray the depth of that management team's betrayal.
If the reporters had had published much more detail I think they'd have risked revealing the company's identity -- maybe they could have reported some more, but not much, and since they made their point ... well, a cardinal rule of writing is "omit needless words!" As I recall, the authors of that rendition actually put it this way: "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!". So these reporters did just that.
I haven't read all the comments here, but I did give it more than a glance. I see defence of the management, which physically nauseates me, but I don't see any defense of the reporting. I'm going to hammer on it, along the lines of Strunk & White's repetition: here is the picture they paint of the management: "oh hey, you're great, ten years of dedication, we know you, you know us, you're a damn smart lady and one of the team." And then what, they treat her like she's blind, stupid property they can kick to the curb without a word.
I had to make myself delete the word I had in place of this sentence. Not a good word to call anyone in public.
You see it, I see it, because they reported it.
And then slashdot+dog accuses them of bias because of how heinously the management behaved?
Which slashdot+dog knows because the people they're accusing of passing over it lightly portrayed the brutality so vividly?
Really?
Try reading "Sally wanted revenge" in an absolutely deadpan tone, trying to sneak raw mockery in under the radar. I actually cracked a smirk when I read that. I thought: "nice." because I'd already felt they did a really good job of shoving it in right to the haft. Twisting the blade like that was ... nice.
And only after that lead do they talk about her reaction.
The view they present is not what you and TFA say it is. The view they present is that some people can be provoked to vengeful and even criminal behavior, and some get there all by themselves. That employees have no monopoly on behavior like that, that people inside the management tribe are just as prone, is beside their point, but they certainly didn't hesitate to make it all the same, now, did they? In fact, the three examples they detailed cover the spectrum: one case of flatly criminal and unprovoked fraud, one case of a vengeful but panicked reaction, and one case provoked by entirely justified hatred.
I think that your premise and TFA's accusation, that Computerworld's post is self-serving and blinkered, constitute exactly the tribally-motivated defensive projection you're attributing to them.
I think that there's far more than enough of that going around, and if you want to find tribal and stupid managers pointing fingers only outside the camp you won't have to look very far.
That I can look at the mod scores and see a lot of people inside my own camp doing the exact same thing doesn't surprise me a bit. But don't ask me to like it or stay silent about it. If you want to claim "their" behavior is worse than "ours", then act like it. But don't expect any group that accepts tribalism to ever achieve it. None ever have. Go take a listen to "For What It's Worth", or "Us and Them", to pick only two examples of people making that point rather more gently than I just did.
Sally gets no sympathy for her response just as her management gets no sympathy for what produced it. But yeah, if it was just hers I might not have posted. Other cases presented (as real, bs-meters didn't twitch) ... flat criminals, given no-oversight keys to core business systems.
So I also don't agree with your summary of the takeaway. You've got an organization that large, you're obligated to protect it. You're admin'ing a large server, do you turn off security because having it on is insulting? Not keep logs, or just never check them? They're talking about sensible basics.
Chase links, please. Anybody doesn't blame the admin that article refers to is insane.
Scroll with j? I think you're doing it wrong.
h j k l are local motion like f F t T ; , . w W b B e E ( ) % -- those aren't browsing keys.
Browse motion starts { } z zt. z- H M L ^f ^u ^b ^d ^] ^o ^i and ^e ^y to taste. I don't use [[ ]] much.
Bulk and syntax motion. Targeted scrolling. Screw autorepeat.
You should check the very careful wording in their own description of the license.
Let's start with basics: if you want to see actual license terms, you have to ask pretty-please will they send you a hardcopy. A unique, one-off artifact sent specifically to you.
When most companies offer a summary of a license, they include language like "while this description is believed to be a fair summary of the terms of the agreement, in the event of any discrepancy the text of the actual license must prevail".
MPEG-LA says its description "may not be relied upon for any purpose." Full stop.
You could call noticing that perhaps-excessive paranoia on my part, or wording it that way perhaps-excessive paranoia on theirs. It's worth considering.
So let's look at the details. I don't care about the viewer-pays scenarios, let's look at the ad- or donation- or plain old volunteer-supported scenarios.
For TV, if they're going to charge at all, they're going to charge either a one-time fee of $2,500 per encoder or recurring fees that start at $2,500/yr until you start getting into millions of reachable viewers. Very reasonable for even an indie TV station or the like.
No royalties at all on videos 12 minutes or less.
For service over the capital-I Internet, if viewers pay no fee (and if there's some unavoidable and ~no more than nominal~ fee they say they can probably arrange to treat that as no fee) to receive the video, there's no license fee either.
That last is new as of about five months ago; for the first ~90% of their existence they explicitly intended to charge you fees even if you weren't charging your audience any. Good luck getting $2500 in ad revenue on your blog.
So why did it take them seven years to momentarily give up on the attempt? They explicitly state they're going to revisit this issue next round: they intend to charge for it if they think they can get away with it. Why would they even consider that? Do they really believe they deserve an extra special tip for so clearly showing us your zits?
Why does MPEG-LA not say, as Thomson does for MP3,
Google's taking a big hit to do what they're doing. It's true that H.264 currently has the best of the contending encoders, and probably the best hardware and industry support. It's difficult (not to say impossible) to believe they'd do this purely to kick MPEG-LA to the curb for this -- it's almost laughably low-grade moneygrubbing -- but that's certainly one effect of what they're doing, and there's not much else apparent in the license.
Except for one thing: mpla also say they might unilaterally eliminate their caps on yearly royalty payments.
Yeah. I have to believe Google might just be doing this just because a world in which they don't have to do business with these people is that much better than a world in which they do.
it is easy to agree that this is going to make implementation of the video tag by web developers more difficult and less likely to happen in the next couple of years
orly? That's the simplest way I know if, seems to me it doesn't get easier than no-js HTML. FFmpeg is drop-dead easy to encode with, at least for those who can read.
Read the article. I hope Peter Bright is trolling for hits, but whether it's that or he actually means it my estimation of ars just took a(nother, after Protalinski's recent Google hitjob [.. that's two Google hitjobs in a week, by ars's Microsoft "reporters" .. ] so biased ars had to withdraw it) big hit.