IANAL, but the legal term in question is "promissory estoppel", and applies in most common law jurisdictions. Essentially if you make a promise and someone acts based on that promise, and it would be inequitable for the person who made the promise to go back on it later, the promise will be seen by the court as binding.
In this case it would clearly be inequitable for the BPI to make this promise and then turn around and sue someone who's copied music because of the promise.
But ote that nothing would stop the BPI from going back on their promise and state that from date X they WILL start suing, but the courts would likely hold that the current promise constitutes promissory estoppel until the BPI makes a statement contradicting their current promise.
Exactly my thoughts too - if they only cut it in half now, the salary pressure for tech workers in India will wipe out all advantages in no time, and leave them with a significantly more complex management situation.
It seems extremely shortsighted.
Outsourcing has it's place, but with the cost increases they are mainly useful for short term projects where you cash in on the gains immediately AND for cases where you have problems actually finding qualified staff locally - tapping into overseas resources is going to be vital for companies that need a large amount of highly educated IT staff, but outsourcing won't stay a major cost cutting opportunity for long as the salary levels equalize.
As others have said, it's not in Apples right to choose whatever jurisdiction it wants. If they sell to Norwegian consumers from a Norwegian subsidiary running a site targetted at Norwegian users, then Norwegian courts will claim jurisdiction no matter what Apple says in their license. Granted, they would probably be unable to significantly punish Apple Inc., but they could fine and potentially shut down the Norwegian subsidiary and prevent Apple from trading in Norway if they are found to violate Norwegian law.
Norway has very strict consumer protection laws, and not only can companies not pick whatever jurisdiction they want without a good reason, but a whole lot of things foreign companies like to put in their licenses are null and void in Norway no matter whether or not the customer has signed a contract in blood and sworn on their mothers life that they'd accept it - many rights simply can't be signed away without proper consideration, because companies are considered to have a strength advantage in terms of pushing their terms through at the expense of consumers.
By your arguments consumers should just bend over and accept whatever corporations want to shaft them with, because that's what will give us the greatest choice - the more friendly we are to companies, the more interested they will be in selling to us.
The problem with that argument is that selling out to corporations damages our long term choices. If we allow companies to lock us in to their DRM schemes or whatever else they feel like and stitch up the market between them, they will quickly eliminate choice and competition.
If history has shown one thing very clearly, it is that "free markets" don't work without some level of regulation to ensure they stay free.
Sometimes that regulation hurt consumer choice temporarily, but without it there's no incentive for big business to give in. In this case, if the RIAA keeps seeing their ability to reach the European market shrink because of terms that are incompatible with laws of a variety of European countries, they will eventually cave in.
Keep in mind that the stated erase cycles are per erase unit, and each erase unit is rarely more than 128KB. You can write multiple times to each erase unit too, so you can write a block at a time to each erase unit, and as long as you run a sensible filesystem or a flash driver that remap blocks properly the number or erases will be fairly low and can be reasonably evenly distributed over all the erase units.
The number of erase cycles PER erase unit is typically in the millions. Typical flash units have erase units of anywhere from around 256 bytes to 128KB. Assuming 256KB, to make it even wrose, that means 1K erase units in this unit. Assuming each of them can be erased one million times, erasing a 256KB block per second still means a lifetime of more than 3 years.
And keep in mind that is erases not writes. A typical flash based system will remap blocks so that no erase units are erased until the unit is more or less full (and you can write multiple times to the same erase unit - you just can't reset any bits you have flipped without erasing the whole erase unit).
There's lots of RAM based HD "replacements" available today. The problem with them is that they are ridiculously expensive, and have a very low storage density (even assuming 4GB or 8GB DIMM's, it'll take far more physical space than a harddisk). It's not worth it unless you have apps that are entirely limited by disk IO.
And how exactly would that benefit the Chinese people?
As long as Google does it best to limit the censorship as much as possible, the end result is still far better than not providing it at all.
If Google were to make it hard to circumvent the censorship for users who find a way to bypass the Chinese governments filter, THEN I would consider it evil - in that case they are explicitly helping the Chinese government in restricting freedoms. As it stands they are making the best out of a bad situation, and if they pull out the only real result will be that they benefit competing companies that may care a lot less about limiting the damage.
Consider this: The Chinese government will never manage to filter every "bad" site out there. Making it easier to find those "bad" sites for Chinese citizens is a good outcome even if a lot of content isn't available.
If "good" companies pull out of China the net result is less access to information that can help lead to change.
I'm all for limiting business with countries that restrict human rights, but less so for services and products that help propagate change. The problem is defining which those are.
In China's case, the economic growth has been a major catalyst for change, even though there's still far to go. As much of a hardliner as Deng Xiaoping was (he was a major factor in causing the Tiannamen square massacre for instance), he still realised the enormeous benefits China could derive from loosening up government control over the economy, and with those reforms a lot more Chinese got access to information sources that allow government critical information from filtering through.
It's easy to filter a few major newspapers. Not so to filter foreign satellite channels, foreign radio channels, or to prevent sites here and there from getting through their internet filtering.
The current government is still restrictive, but there's still signs that as long as the economic growth continues regulations will keep softening up as long as they don't cause any major political upheaval. In this case I think it's more helpful to keep giving the Chinese as much access to information as possible, even with censorship.
The situation is very different from Apartheid in South Africa, for instance, where the government as long as possible refused to give as much as an inch, and where the benefits of trade etc. went mainly to the white upper class and where a boycott thus was strongly favored by the black opposition as a result. In China, even though there clearly IS an elite that benefits more than the average worker, the economic growth does benefit large parts of the population (and in fact parts of the economic elite is not associated with the political elite - the Chinese Communist Party has a lot of restrictions in place that at least massively limit the prospect of business owners to join the party, though I think even those restrictions recently were softened up or under reconsideration), so even if there long term could be things to gain from limiting trade with China, it would also massively hurt the general population.
China is already the worlds largest cellphone market - significantly ahead of both the US and Europe, and computer ownership and internet access is rapidly following. It's only a matter of a few years before China overtakes the US in number of internet users, as the increase in internet users in the US has stagnated for several years while China's growth rate is still accelerating.
That's just it - events like this look identical to a drop in visitors. So "when you see them" never applies, because you don't know when you are seeing an event like this and when you are simply seeing fewer visitors.
The only thing you are demonstrating with your comments is that you haven't got the faintest clue about what you are talking about. In any real web company, the marketing and ad sales and data mining people go frantic at ANY change that isn't predicted in advance, and spend a lot of time and effort ensuring they understand exactly why, and how to compensate for those effects, and do so very well.
Why?
Because it translates in very real terms into huge amounts of money lost if they can't get accurate estimates of the return on investment of the sales and marketing expenditure, and experience has shown tracking trends in website accesses works for that purpose.
People commit to multi-million dollar advertising campaigns and sales campaigns on a regular basis based on the track record of trend tracking of website traffic, and do so successfully because tracking these things is a lot easier than what you seem to think.
Yes, there are deviations and errors on a regular basis, but except for large events which are easily spotted and corrected for (if you think the sales people won't wonder WHY the data change, or even why they don't change, you are sadly mistaken), they generally cancel eachother out.
Think what you will, but real life experience contradict you.
Speaking as someone who's been doing engineering management all my career: Since when does a VP of Engineering in a company the size of Google qualify as someone who is "actually doing things" as opposed to a "PR-filled spokesbot" in this context?
He's a high level exec, and as any high level exec in a company that size his primary role is setting strategy and tracking projects at the line item level and fronting his department to partners, the outside world and the rest of the executive layer. Is it a demanding job? Yes. Is it a highly technical job? No. Is he trained to respond in a way that meets the company's PR needs? Yes.
This is not to diminish his role, but to point out that nobody gets to that level in a company of Google's size without either being a founder or knowing and understanding the importance of managing external communication in accordance with the company's overall communications strategy, and carrying out that kind of communication IS a key part of his job.
The problem is that most users won't. So Google's arrogance is randomly breaking the CSS stylesheets for any site that happens not to know that Googles toolbar makes lots of users web browsers ignore normal CSS declarations in certain cases.
It's a chilling return to the Microsoft and Netscape arrogance in terms of randomly extending and changing the behaviour of HTML rendering whenever they felt like it.
So the big question is, does it cost $100 to make? Of did they just make it look like a $100 laptop?
Last I heard it cost MORE than $100 to make. They are hoping the costs will drop below $100 pretty quickly.
In all honestly, I still don't see the reason for this laptop, especially since they are gearing it towards 3rd world countries. I have always said, and I stand by it, that these people need access to clean drinking watter, food, and medicine before they need the luxury of internet access. Even as an educational tool, this laptop is pointless as I am sure any kid or parent would hawk this thing in the local flea market in order to get enough money to pay the rent and/or just pay for food.
The third world is more than countries where most people are starving. There are hundreds of millions of people out there who have clean water, food and medicine, but who are still poor and have a hard time improving their lives. As India is a great example of, investing in education has a huge impact in terms of helping people improve their own lives.
And while it's all nice and well to help people get access to clean drinking water, food and medicine, unless these people get help to get an education for their children, their children are going to grow up to be in just the same position as their parents, dependent on foreign aid just to survive.
Solving the poverty problem is about more than solving basic needs - it also requires an investment in making it easier for people to improve their own lives.
I can see this being ideal in G8 countries. Kids living below the poverty line still should be able to access the top rate schools in those countries, but without being able to afford a computer and thus the tools and technologies that could give them an edge, they fail to be recognized or qualify for scholarships and grants that could allow them to turn their life around.
True, there are certainly people in rich countries who could benefit from this too, and nothing is stopping G8 governments from buying these for parts of their own populations.
But I just don't see some child in Ethiopia ever having the same access to education that even the poorest in America has.
There are lots of children in Ethiopia that HAS far better access to education than the poorest in USA has, as there is throughout the developing countries. Education is available - as you'll see from the number of people from third world countries attending even expensive US and European universities. The third world isn't all starving people in mud huts - it's a vastly diverse set of countries with huge differences in overall wealth and size of their middle and upper classes and vastly diverse educational systems, ranging from countries where most children don't even get primary school to countries where most people have access to high quality universities (like Cuba...)
A laptop isn't going to turn this child in Ethiopia into a doctor or a MIT engineer. There are easier and more ideal ways to ensure this child will be able to read and write and have enough understanding of life in order to hopefully get a decent job to provide for his/her family, but a computer isn't one of those ways.
Perhaps the child in Ethiopia won't, but what about a child in Mexico, for instance? And even if the child in Ethiopia doesn't become a doctor or a MIT engineer, if that child gets an opportunity to learn to read, and to learn to use the internet to look up agricultural information and weather forecasts, or quickly check the prices his family can get for their produce in the various surrounding cities, that is enough to potentially improve his familys life immensely.
All over Africa and the rest of the world there are millions of impoverished people already that have had their lives transformed by access to cellphones and the internet because it has helped streamline the businesses their lives depend on in ways that we'd never think about. So
It is an issue, but the file systems used on flash devices are designed to minimise writes to the same region. They tend to do that by remapping blocks so that even if you overwrite the same block in a file the physical write happens somewhere else on the unit. Since the limit is generally the number of erases per erase unit on the device, I don't think it would be much of an issue.
Either a species learns peace or they destroy themselves.
Or they learn how to carry out effective space travel and colonization in time to survive through extreme expansionism that ensures any planet wide destruction won't be a significant detriment to the overall size of the population.... In which case you really wouldn't want to meet them.
The problem with bacteriophages is that they are extremely specific - for the most part you need to determine the precise strain of a disease, which requires more expensive tests. You then need to fine a bacteriophage that fits that specific strain of bacteria.
So until we start seeing much more significant resistance to antibiotics they're not likely to be cost effective.
That is more or less how Zopa work: A loan is split into a number of contracts, typically between 20 and 100 GBP, and and each lender will only participate up to a certain predefined amount per loan. If you invest only a small amount you'd probably leave that at 20 pounds per borrower. If you want to lend your money out quicker, at higher risk, you might up that amount.
The risk to default in a scenario like that is very well knowable, and it's very low with proper credit assessment upfront. Zopa rejects something like 70% of all loan applications, from what I remember.
The only downside of that is that it means that it can take a fair while before your money has been lent out, because the processing takes a few days, during which your money is off the market, with a 70% chance that it'll be back in the pool at the end of it, so in my experience getting a large amount lent out at a decent interest rate will take some time.
Yes, UK police do actually monitor a lot of cameras. Most of the public streets in inner London is covered by actively monitored CCTV cameras in some form or other, for instance. Of course, how thorough that monitoring is is another matter, but it's not an issue of just recording. Many cameras on high streets are also actively operated - that is, they can be moved and zoom in. UK police have even to some extent experimented with mobile CCTV vans to add additional cover to crime hotspots.
Add to that the automatic number place recognition in use in some areas (such as City of London, the financial district, where every road in/out is covered with ANPR - if you ever steal a car in London don't drive it into City...) and the UK is one of the nations in the world with the most extensive surveillance.
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In this case it would clearly be inequitable for the BPI to make this promise and then turn around and sue someone who's copied music because of the promise.
But ote that nothing would stop the BPI from going back on their promise and state that from date X they WILL start suing, but the courts would likely hold that the current promise constitutes promissory estoppel until the BPI makes a statement contradicting their current promise.
It seems extremely shortsighted.
Outsourcing has it's place, but with the cost increases they are mainly useful for short term projects where you cash in on the gains immediately AND for cases where you have problems actually finding qualified staff locally - tapping into overseas resources is going to be vital for companies that need a large amount of highly educated IT staff, but outsourcing won't stay a major cost cutting opportunity for long as the salary levels equalize.
Your argument could just as well be used to pretend alcoholism or drug abuse isn't and issue.
You know, when I grew up, we had to make do with 22x23 characters on screen at once :)
Norway has very strict consumer protection laws, and not only can companies not pick whatever jurisdiction they want without a good reason, but a whole lot of things foreign companies like to put in their licenses are null and void in Norway no matter whether or not the customer has signed a contract in blood and sworn on their mothers life that they'd accept it - many rights simply can't be signed away without proper consideration, because companies are considered to have a strength advantage in terms of pushing their terms through at the expense of consumers.
The problem with that argument is that selling out to corporations damages our long term choices. If we allow companies to lock us in to their DRM schemes or whatever else they feel like and stitch up the market between them, they will quickly eliminate choice and competition.
If history has shown one thing very clearly, it is that "free markets" don't work without some level of regulation to ensure they stay free.
Sometimes that regulation hurt consumer choice temporarily, but without it there's no incentive for big business to give in. In this case, if the RIAA keeps seeing their ability to reach the European market shrink because of terms that are incompatible with laws of a variety of European countries, they will eventually cave in.
The difference is that Apple is intentionally and artifically restricting the ability of consumers to use a product on other companies hardware.
Keep in mind that the stated erase cycles are per erase unit, and each erase unit is rarely more than 128KB. You can write multiple times to each erase unit too, so you can write a block at a time to each erase unit, and as long as you run a sensible filesystem or a flash driver that remap blocks properly the number or erases will be fairly low and can be reasonably evenly distributed over all the erase units.
And keep in mind that is erases not writes. A typical flash based system will remap blocks so that no erase units are erased until the unit is more or less full (and you can write multiple times to the same erase unit - you just can't reset any bits you have flipped without erasing the whole erase unit).
There's lots of RAM based HD "replacements" available today. The problem with them is that they are ridiculously expensive, and have a very low storage density (even assuming 4GB or 8GB DIMM's, it'll take far more physical space than a harddisk). It's not worth it unless you have apps that are entirely limited by disk IO.
As long as Google does it best to limit the censorship as much as possible, the end result is still far better than not providing it at all.
If Google were to make it hard to circumvent the censorship for users who find a way to bypass the Chinese governments filter, THEN I would consider it evil - in that case they are explicitly helping the Chinese government in restricting freedoms. As it stands they are making the best out of a bad situation, and if they pull out the only real result will be that they benefit competing companies that may care a lot less about limiting the damage.
Consider this: The Chinese government will never manage to filter every "bad" site out there. Making it easier to find those "bad" sites for Chinese citizens is a good outcome even if a lot of content isn't available.
If "good" companies pull out of China the net result is less access to information that can help lead to change.
I'm all for limiting business with countries that restrict human rights, but less so for services and products that help propagate change. The problem is defining which those are.
In China's case, the economic growth has been a major catalyst for change, even though there's still far to go. As much of a hardliner as Deng Xiaoping was (he was a major factor in causing the Tiannamen square massacre for instance), he still realised the enormeous benefits China could derive from loosening up government control over the economy, and with those reforms a lot more Chinese got access to information sources that allow government critical information from filtering through.
It's easy to filter a few major newspapers. Not so to filter foreign satellite channels, foreign radio channels, or to prevent sites here and there from getting through their internet filtering.
The current government is still restrictive, but there's still signs that as long as the economic growth continues regulations will keep softening up as long as they don't cause any major political upheaval. In this case I think it's more helpful to keep giving the Chinese as much access to information as possible, even with censorship.
The situation is very different from Apartheid in South Africa, for instance, where the government as long as possible refused to give as much as an inch, and where the benefits of trade etc. went mainly to the white upper class and where a boycott thus was strongly favored by the black opposition as a result. In China, even though there clearly IS an elite that benefits more than the average worker, the economic growth does benefit large parts of the population (and in fact parts of the economic elite is not associated with the political elite - the Chinese Communist Party has a lot of restrictions in place that at least massively limit the prospect of business owners to join the party, though I think even those restrictions recently were softened up or under reconsideration), so even if there long term could be things to gain from limiting trade with China, it would also massively hurt the general population.
China is already the worlds largest cellphone market - significantly ahead of both the US and Europe, and computer ownership and internet access is rapidly following. It's only a matter of a few years before China overtakes the US in number of internet users, as the increase in internet users in the US has stagnated for several years while China's growth rate is still accelerating.
The only thing you are demonstrating with your comments is that you haven't got the faintest clue about what you are talking about. In any real web company, the marketing and ad sales and data mining people go frantic at ANY change that isn't predicted in advance, and spend a lot of time and effort ensuring they understand exactly why, and how to compensate for those effects, and do so very well.
Why?
Because it translates in very real terms into huge amounts of money lost if they can't get accurate estimates of the return on investment of the sales and marketing expenditure, and experience has shown tracking trends in website accesses works for that purpose.
People commit to multi-million dollar advertising campaigns and sales campaigns on a regular basis based on the track record of trend tracking of website traffic, and do so successfully because tracking these things is a lot easier than what you seem to think.
Yes, there are deviations and errors on a regular basis, but except for large events which are easily spotted and corrected for (if you think the sales people won't wonder WHY the data change, or even why they don't change, you are sadly mistaken), they generally cancel eachother out.
Think what you will, but real life experience contradict you.
He's a high level exec, and as any high level exec in a company that size his primary role is setting strategy and tracking projects at the line item level and fronting his department to partners, the outside world and the rest of the executive layer. Is it a demanding job? Yes. Is it a highly technical job? No. Is he trained to respond in a way that meets the company's PR needs? Yes.
This is not to diminish his role, but to point out that nobody gets to that level in a company of Google's size without either being a founder or knowing and understanding the importance of managing external communication in accordance with the company's overall communications strategy, and carrying out that kind of communication IS a key part of his job.
It's a chilling return to the Microsoft and Netscape arrogance in terms of randomly extending and changing the behaviour of HTML rendering whenever they felt like it.
Last I heard it cost MORE than $100 to make. They are hoping the costs will drop below $100 pretty quickly.
In all honestly, I still don't see the reason for this laptop, especially since they are gearing it towards 3rd world countries. I have always said, and I stand by it, that these people need access to clean drinking watter, food, and medicine before they need the luxury of internet access. Even as an educational tool, this laptop is pointless as I am sure any kid or parent would hawk this thing in the local flea market in order to get enough money to pay the rent and/or just pay for food.
The third world is more than countries where most people are starving. There are hundreds of millions of people out there who have clean water, food and medicine, but who are still poor and have a hard time improving their lives. As India is a great example of, investing in education has a huge impact in terms of helping people improve their own lives.
And while it's all nice and well to help people get access to clean drinking water, food and medicine, unless these people get help to get an education for their children, their children are going to grow up to be in just the same position as their parents, dependent on foreign aid just to survive.
Solving the poverty problem is about more than solving basic needs - it also requires an investment in making it easier for people to improve their own lives.
I can see this being ideal in G8 countries. Kids living below the poverty line still should be able to access the top rate schools in those countries, but without being able to afford a computer and thus the tools and technologies that could give them an edge, they fail to be recognized or qualify for scholarships and grants that could allow them to turn their life around.
True, there are certainly people in rich countries who could benefit from this too, and nothing is stopping G8 governments from buying these for parts of their own populations.
But I just don't see some child in Ethiopia ever having the same access to education that even the poorest in America has.
There are lots of children in Ethiopia that HAS far better access to education than the poorest in USA has, as there is throughout the developing countries. Education is available - as you'll see from the number of people from third world countries attending even expensive US and European universities. The third world isn't all starving people in mud huts - it's a vastly diverse set of countries with huge differences in overall wealth and size of their middle and upper classes and vastly diverse educational systems, ranging from countries where most children don't even get primary school to countries where most people have access to high quality universities (like Cuba...)
A laptop isn't going to turn this child in Ethiopia into a doctor or a MIT engineer. There are easier and more ideal ways to ensure this child will be able to read and write and have enough understanding of life in order to hopefully get a decent job to provide for his/her family, but a computer isn't one of those ways.
Perhaps the child in Ethiopia won't, but what about a child in Mexico, for instance? And even if the child in Ethiopia doesn't become a doctor or a MIT engineer, if that child gets an opportunity to learn to read, and to learn to use the internet to look up agricultural information and weather forecasts, or quickly check the prices his family can get for their produce in the various surrounding cities, that is enough to potentially improve his familys life immensely.
All over Africa and the rest of the world there are millions of impoverished people already that have had their lives transformed by access to cellphones and the internet because it has helped streamline the businesses their lives depend on in ways that we'd never think about. So
It is an issue, but the file systems used on flash devices are designed to minimise writes to the same region. They tend to do that by remapping blocks so that even if you overwrite the same block in a file the physical write happens somewhere else on the unit. Since the limit is generally the number of erases per erase unit on the device, I don't think it would be much of an issue.
Or are you saying that Chinese should outsource all their labour to high cost countries for no good reason?
Or they learn how to carry out effective space travel and colonization in time to survive through extreme expansionism that ensures any planet wide destruction won't be a significant detriment to the overall size of the population.... In which case you really wouldn't want to meet them.
So until we start seeing much more significant resistance to antibiotics they're not likely to be cost effective.
Yes, it's a good business model. It's called being a bank.
The risk to default in a scenario like that is very well knowable, and it's very low with proper credit assessment upfront. Zopa rejects something like 70% of all loan applications, from what I remember.
The only downside of that is that it means that it can take a fair while before your money has been lent out, because the processing takes a few days, during which your money is off the market, with a 70% chance that it'll be back in the pool at the end of it, so in my experience getting a large amount lent out at a decent interest rate will take some time.
That was exactly the argument people used to use against MMU's too: Just write correct software. Unfortunately humans are fallible.
It would appear yours might be. There's no implied connection between the two in the general case.
Add to that the automatic number place recognition in use in some areas (such as City of London, the financial district, where every road in/out is covered with ANPR - if you ever steal a car in London don't drive it into City...) and the UK is one of the nations in the world with the most extensive surveillance.