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User: Dahamma

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  1. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    I assume you think the same thing for patents? Once it's "public" anyone should be able to copy it? (there really is no difference) Same thing with software. Once *anyone* other than the creator uses it, it's "public" and should be freely copyable? Great position, but it would destroy most modern entertainment and technological innovation as we know it. Proper *limited* (way more than currently done, clearly!) monopoly on innovation is one of the foundations of modern art and technology.

    How about me farting first and then, if you happen to smell it, ask for your money supported by law?

    I guess I should have realized I was arguing with a real heavyweight right here. But to humor you, that's a horrible analogy, since if you show the movie in a truly public place (not a theater where you bought a ticket with the express destruction that you not copy it), you can't charge money after the fact. And that is guaranteed by what? Copyright law.

    All copyright laws, either if you support them or not, are restrictions over inherent rights

    Inherent rights? Are you serious? You could just as easily argue that you have an "inherent right" to your neighbor's stuff as long as you have the power to take it and keep it. Laws create "rights". "Inherent rights" are a pure human legal and philosophical construct, just like copyright law.. The right to property, and even life, is granted by laws, not God or nature, or "the universe", or what have you.

  2. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    Totally agree there. Copyright could be limited. Patents should be limited. I'd be all for 25 (or even 15?) year copyrights and 5 year patents.

  3. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    Yup, that was they key point. Also the fact that he doesn't *really* have to commit any more crimes, the 90% of the crimes he already committed that weren't noticed means he has tons of friends, colleagues, and relatives with a lot of untraceable money who now owe him (and probably want his silence) and will support him in a luxurious lifestyle for as long as he needs.

  4. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    In the Bernie Madoff example? Pissing him off is just fine (why on EARTH would that be a problem??), and I don't think prison is going to make a 70 year old privileged billionaire "dangerous".

    On the other hand, you can let him out, and as you say, go after his assets and income. But by this time he already has friends and relative who can support him VERY comfortably - and that's assuming he doesn't have millions stashed in foreign accounts he can use, anyway.

    The only way to truly punish (and really, deter) those who are above our ability to punish financially, is to confine them.

  5. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or maybe making a major movie that cost millions of dollars (and employed hundreds or even thousands of people) IS creating something, and the investors would to make back their investment from the people who consume their content for entertainment.

    IMO in this case the "entitled" are not the studios wanting payment for watching their movies, it's the people who think that watching those movies is somehow their inherent right and they shouldn't have to pay for it.

  6. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    So, in that case, he might as well just keep committing crimes, since the only punishment (if he gets caught) is taking the stolen money away again. This is literally an incentive TO commit crime in this case, as it's the only way he will have money.

  7. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    So, as long as a person isn't "dangerous" (in what definition immediate threat to someone's life or health?) jail time should never be a result?

    Awesome! So, the ideal criminal pursuit is to go steal as much as you can in a non-threatening way, spend it all, and get off scot-free! Or worst case: don't spend it all, get caught, and have to give whatever is left back. Oh no, what a deterrent!

    If you commit a crime knowing beforehand that it was a crime and was punishable by jail time, you have no one to blame but yourself for your incarceration.

  8. Re:Pretty reasonable on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 2

    (it's not actually piracy, it's copyright infringement)

    Yes, it is piracy. And it's also copyright infringement. Because piracy in this case is basically a (somewhat) more colloquial term for the copyright infringement. If you don't believe me, look it up: there are TONS of citations going back to the 1600's.

  9. Re:This is reasonable? on Four Year Sentence For Running Piracy Streaming Site · · Score: 1

    12 million streams @ $5 ea. = $60 million worth of licensed streams.

    They they already determined 12M streams = £12M ie. about $18M (which seems about right - the content owners probably make about $1-3 on streaming rentals on average).

    But other than that, this is not sharing a few movies with friends, as you say this is wholesale criminal piracy for profit - he deserved what he got.

  10. Though note, this is all in reference to Jobs' work at Apple.

    The Mac that was even a moderate "success" was something built after he left. The original Mac was never really financially successful, which in the end is the most important metric. And even the later Macs, while not being technology disasters, weren't big sellers - Apple basically tread water for the next decade while the rest of the PC industry exploded.

    Actually, if you really think about it, you could say it was a "reboot" of the original Mac (the iMac) - *15 years later* (and notably after Jobs returned to Apple having learned from his previous mistakes) before "the Mac" finally started becoming a true (financial) success.

  11. The original Macs had way too little memory for a GUI OS, they were not color compared to their competitors (eventually that changed, but the color Macs were even *more* expensive!) And of course, the biggest issue: there just wasn't nearly as much software. They were intended initially to be used for business, but they had no networking, disk storage, or decent printing options.

    Eventually they tried to address the networking (though AppleShare was never that successful beyond university labs) and hit a home run on the printing (LaserWriter). But they never really solved the software availability issue vs Windows, or the price.

    They basically struggled from the late 80s through late 90s, and only really turned around the company as a whole around 2000 (give or take a couple years) with the iMac, the G4/G5 PowerMacs/PowerBooks, and of course the iPod.

  12. Go look up any interview with Woz, and he will tell you differently - that the Mac was not a great computer compared to the Apple III, and that the Lisa was just a couple years ahead of it's time (ie. too expensive with current parts).

    In fact, here's one for free: http://www.businessinsider.com...

    You remember the conventional wisdom of what the media says, not what happened :) The truth is Apple almost went bankrupt after the Mac, and they never really had any significant market share outside of education until MUCH later (2000s). See my quote from Woz below on the topic - he says many times that the original Mac almost killed Apple, and it took years for it to get back to the previous Apple II revenues, let alone *grow* in the time of a massive PC market.

  13. No, at the time Jobs worked there the future was was neither, it was almost bankruptcy. Apple only turned it around after Jobs left. Here's a direct quote from Woz (responding to comments abut the new documentary). You don't have to trust the movies, trust the sources:


    Woz: One thing nobody likes to point out is that John Sculley himself, as well as almost all of us at Apple, believed that the Macintosh was Apple's future. We all sacrificed the growing personal computer market (10x over a decade and MS got all the growth) in this belief. We (Sculley leading) had to work very hard for 3 years to make the Macintosh as successful (in dollars) as the Apple ][ had ever been, following Jobs' vision. The choices can be argued because you can never go back and say what decisions would have what results, but it was a business decision to SAVE Apple as a company, after the stock dropped by a third in about a day when the Macintosh failed to sell due to not much software. Steve Jobs wasn't pushed out of the company. He left. I supported him in his belief that he was made to create computers. But up until then he'd only had failures at creation. He was great at productizing and marketing the Apple ][ and the revenues financed the failures Apple ///, LISA, Macintosh and NeXT. This is not shown in the movie. After the Macintosh failure it's fair to assume that Jobs' left out of his feeling of greatness, and embarrassment about not having achieved it. That is not shown either. This movie is more about Steve Jobs inside, his non-feeling about a lot of things including how others thought of him, and some pushes to reform that in the end.

  14. Without Jobs, Woz's designs would have been brilliant one-offs

    Not true at ALL. Most people don't know it, but the Macintosh almost destroyed Apple. Woz wanted to go along the Apple III/Lisa route (since he understood Apple's market in the 80's much better than Jobs, honestly), but Jobs (who was basically kicked out of the Lisa project) pushed the Mac and "won" (to Apple's detriment). Eventually (after Steve left) they fixed the Mac and made it a reasonably successful product - but he had almost nothing to do with that.

    After Jobs rejoined Apple (with a lot more wisdom, but also way after Woz left) he helped integrate a real OS (NeXT) into Macs, drastically improved their performance and design, and drove the iPod/iPhone projects which let to Apple's current domination. But in the Woz years at Apple, Steve Jobs was NOT the visionary he was later in life...

  15. Article subtitle: on Larry Lessig Reaches Funding Goal and Is Running For President · · Score: 1

    "How to spend $1 million dollars and have nothing to show for it"

  16. Re:She was lucky on Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy · · Score: 1

    Except we are talking about Ada Lovelace, who lived IN ENGLAND and died 50 years before that.

    But sure, when your argument is already irrelevant might as well throw an ad hominem in there as well, couldn't hurt...

  17. Re:She was lucky on Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy · · Score: 1

    Except we are talking 1840's England, not 1890's America. Very little of what you said has any relevance, particularly as far as property rights of married women (of which there was NONE).

    Anyway, by the way you try to insult feminists, etc. it's clear what your opinions are. I'd imagine you also think that slaves had it better back then because they were valuable property?

  18. Re:She was lucky on Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy · · Score: 1

    Specifically until the Representation of the People Act 1867, only around 15% of the adult males in the United Kingdom could vote.

    And that changes the fact that women were totally unable to vote back then vs today exactly *how*?

    The one restriction was that when they married their property became that of their husbands to do as they saw fit

    Oh, such a tiny technicality, that! So, in other words, *not* flat out wrong, but right for 90%+ of women at the time.

    On the first issue of voting that needs to be seen a wider context.

    No, it doesn't, as the CONTEXT is the simple OP statement that Victorian women were treated better and had less patriarchy than today. Both of which points are still bullshit, and your typical /. pedantry changes it not one bit.

  19. Re:She was lucky on Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy · · Score: 1

    She had as much power as the (all male) Parliament let her have. You might want to brush up on "Constitutional Monarchy".

    Also, read the original post "women", not "woman". One woman having nominal power does not equal "women treated better than today". But you knew that, and were just trolling, I'm sure...

  20. Re:She was lucky on Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Yeah, except for that pesky not being able to vote or own property issue...

  21. Re: Programming on You Don't Have To Be Good At Math To Learn To Code · · Score: 1

    I'm going to have to say web "coding" is not coding/programming at all. Which makes the article pointless (though we all knew that). Editing HTML/XML (or IMO even most Javascript) is about as much programming as learning to add oil to your car (Javascript is more like learning to change your own oil). Neither one makes you a mechanic.

  22. Re:Programming on You Don't Have To Be Good At Math To Learn To Code · · Score: 1

    The article subtitle (and the summary) says "learning to program involves a lot of Googling, logic, and trial-and-error..."

    If you are going to be pedantic, here you go: "to program" is the infinitive verb form of the corresponding gerund "programming". GRAMMAR HAMMER BAM!

  23. t's also not pointless for software decoders such as VLC that have access to a bit more memory and CPU capability to deal with it.

    If you are talking flexibility of decoders and extra CPU, why make a non-compatible file based on a decade+ old codec when you could just re-encode to H.265? Same with JPEG92 vs JPEG2000.

    Along those lines it doesn't seem that long ago that arguments about using floating point in mp3 decoding was seen as a flaw.

    Totally different issue, since it wasn't about making the codec non-compatible, but how it's decoded.

    So, not entirely pointless, but not nearly as interesting as the article pretends it is, which is typical of business journalists who don't really understand tech. Many of the "inefficiencies" have already been solved with more recent codecs. Retrofitting things like variable macroblock sizes and alternate compression strategies onto old formats is not particularly revolutionary...

  24. Re:This isn't really a new thing. on Ten Dropbox Engineers Build BSD-licensed, Lossless 'Pied Piper' Compression Algorithm · · Score: 1

    Postprocessing software like Beamr (look it up yourself...) can often do even better for video. Basically the H.264 codecs are fairly conservative on their quantizers, with a minimum that's way above what they could get away with. Way better off throwing away useless data than figuring out how to compress it.

  25. And they probably say mobile-encoded for a reason, simple encoders have to work on low power and in real time,

    Actually, the encoders are rarely limited by power or CPU cycles. The decoders are, but the great thing about lossy encoding like JPEG/H.264/H.265 is the encoders can continually be improved without affecting the decoders.

    That said, the reason this article is pointless is you can't USE the results - it breaks H.264 standards so HW decoders can't handle it, and no one wants to decode some proprietary format on the fly to stream to standard H.264 decoders...