Really? We have a bunch (10) of Sun java terminals (woohoo, the X terminal is back... the id cards and session freezing is really cool tho:) running off a Ultra-60 dual cpu machine, and Ximian Gnome is pretty snappy. Unless you have some serious configuration issues I cant imagine it would be that much slower for a single Blade machine.
It's pretty fast on my own HP B2000 machine too, even running over dual monitors. Well, the using it part is pretty fast. Compiling it all from scratch um... wasnt.
Not for government agencies. Anyway, as the MS proponents are so fond of saying, nobody's _forcing_ you to use free software, you just wont be able to communicate with anyone else with those.doc files anymore. Oh, and those taxes should be filed with GnuCash. Heh.
The software was expressly designed to make it possible to move your book to a new computer when your old one breaks down (that ever happen to you?), or to allow people with disabilities to access their legally purchased book.
What Adobe and the publishing industry wants is to either force you to keep a server room with 20 computers at home to be able to read the books you accumulate over time (and pray that you never have to reinstall one of them or they break down), or to buy the books again if you wish to read them more than once. I think you have gotten the who a bit wrong in who is doing the stealing part.
Bottom line is, the interested parties in this want to use the DMCA to violate every tradition of consumer rights in copyright law.
It isnt really possible to specify an exact false positive rate since it depends so much on how you use the technology. According to the visionics website they have a 0.68% equal error rate with a standardized database test. That means that you have 0.68% false negatives when you have 0.68% false positives on that specific test. Going above or below that threshold may or may not make sense depending on the application, for example, "match this up with someone!" or "dont let anyone pass unless you are absolutely without any doubt sure its them". First case you get loads more of false positives, second you'll get loads more of false negatives.
You have several completely different problem spaces. For example, matching a cctv snapshot of a robber in a store to a database to check if the robber is in a police register, this would be great. It works with disguises and beards, and even aging, and it can find out who the person on the picture is with a very good probability of a match if its in the register, especially since you can manipulate the required match percentage of the features (between 12-40 features, IIRC, less when matching obscured, bearded, disguised people). This is the (IMO) correct, but limited, use of facial recognition technology. This will also make people go 'oooh, ahhh, this works so well!', so it would make for a very good promotional for such technology. In the worst case you get multiple possible matches for the ID.
When you have the other problem space on the other hand, your percentage will be dependent on the people you are matching. How many times will the computer say 'this is John Cleese' if you try to match the people in a John Cleese lookalike contest? Probably a whole lot more than one in a hundred. In a case like Borders, it would depend on the size of the database, and how strict they set the match requirements, and wether or not they allow it to decrease match requirements with partial obscuring of features. The likelyhood that any given person will be mistakenly identified as a positive will depend on the size of the database and those settings.
My rather uneducated guess (and the way I would set it up, had I been the one to implement something like this) would be that they simply trim the settings to keep their store detectives at a manageable workload, and calculating costs of security vs. costs of possible theft. Maybe 50 suspects per day per security person? Wether or not they will be true or false matches is left to the imagination and isnt really relevant to the setup either, altho I doubt that you really get that many known shoplifters in a store in a day.
The reason you cant really improve the software that much is mostly that as humans we have a fairly limited number of features in the face. The amount of distortion you get because people dont keep their heads straight up smiling at the camera, they dont keep the same expression on their face, differing lighting conditions etc make some form of fuzzy matching a necessity for it to work at all. This adds up to the problem that you cannot get an exact match even if you increase the number of features a bit and improve resolution because you cannot look for an exact match, which means you're stuck with the reality of some people being within the matching parameters for eachother, which is a problem that grows as your database grows and will guarantee large numbers of false positives when you have a great number of people compared to your database.
Anyway, Im not really that qualified to comment:). The only reference I can cite off my head would be Visionics own website. And my only qualifications would be some work on OCR once upon a time plus some cognitive psychology studies (the theory is the human brain uses pretty similar ways to recognize and store information about objects (shapes, features, angles, distances rather than some form of per-pixel comparison)).
Discount Linux. Linux isnt competition in any ordinary market sense. Linux isnt bound by the restraints of actually having to work within an economic context, which any ordinary competitor would be. This, of course, is the only reason that Linux has not and never will go the same way as Be and OS/2. Linux is rather the proof that competition in the x86 market is dead and extinct. You can neither make money from nor finance development of an OS that competes with MS, so the only even remotely successful competition is Linux, which needs none of those factors for its survival.
Can you secure financing to write a new proprietary OS to compete in the x86 market segment, enter the market and compete? No. No way, no how, ever. Not unless MS is severely restrained.
Yes. The method of observation matters. As a person you are aware of the difficulty when comparing faces. You are open to the possibility of making mistakes, and you will be predisposed to doubt your judgement.
When a computer does the same thing, the programmers will have been working overtime to meet deadlines, they'll have cut corners, the salesmen will inflate and improve their products performance, and bedazzled believers will actually trust the computer to make the right call.
I read they were thinking about installing the same system in the London underground. With the addition of showing the suspects face on monitors so other passengers can watch out for the suspect. How long do you think it would be before some poor sod, mistakenly identified as a rapist or something, has an unfortunate 'accident' and falls under an approaching train?
Sure, that idea is even more appalling, but the problem is the same, you'll have a huge amount of false positives in the average day and people have a really really bad habit of actually trusting computers. They have no implicit feeling of personal responsibility, because it's not a question of their own judgement.
In my opinion, facial recognition software is of limited use, and in cases such as these it would be a grave misuse of the technology. The false positive rate is in the order of several magnitudes too large to be acceptable, and I dont think it will be possible to improve it enough to matter. Faces simply arent unique enough to support identification on their own when you are talking about comparing thousands or hundreds of thousands of faces per day to a database. Mixing that with the implicit trust a lot of people place in technology is not a good idea.
Well, too bad that the other guy that sorta looks like you in certain lighting conditions didnt. Hope you'll enjoy your discussion with security.
Like they say in the article, 'It is very difficult to distinguish one face from another with the human eye,'. Well, no shit sherlock. But here, we haf this maaagik compuuuuter prooogram, that has noooo such proooooblems. Yah, right. Sounds like the pr0n blocker based on image recognition that could be replaced with a blocker that randomly blocks half of all pictures and still is just as accurate. Except in this case it will randomly recognize one shoplifter in every 100 customers. Or?
IMO, is sounds like just another bullshit product company selling wannabe smart 'blahblah recognition software' to gullible companies. It's hard for people to tell faces apart, especially if you dont have pictures taken the same day, and it would be a freaking nightmare to get a program even close to any form of accuracy. Except, of course, you can always use marketing to trick people to buy the product anyway.
Um, they've done it before. Several times. They're are pretty dumb. Or smart, depending how you look at it. Sure, some people will catch them at it, some will remember the times they've been caught, but frankly, how many 'ordinary' people even remember their little episode of perjury and forging evidence in court?
Sure, _I_ know that noone who isnt paid by MS will ever say anything positive about the company. Any test that shows their products favorably is very likely faked. You probably know that too. But most ignorant people will see mostly the commercials. They'll trust the salesman in the store. They'll think the consultant has their companys best interest at heart when he recommends Exchange. They'll believe the paid-for Gartner/Giga/whatever report.
They'd send letters from someones dead grandmothers poodle if they felt like it. Because it doesnt really matter if they're found out. The message wont get out, people wont remember, and they're safe from the law.
Of course, lying in court isnt something they have a problem with either way, is it? So it doesnt really matter if it's illegal or not. They're above the law anyway.
Of course they're paying them to fake letters. It isnt exactly the first time they do this you know. I can recall at least two previous times that they've been caught at it. Faking letters is nothing for a company that forges evidence in court.
Perhaps one day you will realize there is no level that Microsoft would not stoop to. The company has long since lost all sense of ethics and is run by people who need serious medication and a long time in therapy.
Say screw'em both and develop for neither, just using lowest common denominator stuff, and spend the saved time on improving the other parts of the game.
If your game cant stand on its own using that... well, maybe, just maybe, it sucks?
Who cares about SSL? SSL is important for maybe one billionth billionth of the time your data is in someone elses hands. Ok, so the data is encrypted in transfer. Who cares, when the recieving company is happily saving away your data on a NT machine running It Isnt Secure? Every script kiddie and their grandmothers little dog can wait until two seconds after you press submit and dig the data out of there after that soooo secure SSL transaction.
To protect yourself:
Never enter nondisposable data. Use a disposable email address. Use a disposable CC number (or at the very least a low-limit creditcard). Never enter Social Security numbers (fake one, or use another option). Avoid using your real name. Avoid entering your real phone nr. Dont enter your age. Dont enter your profession. Make the data worthless and corrupt.
In my opinion the only way to handle this problem is to make it illegal for any company to store any sensitive information at all. They need the information? Fine, they get to have it for the 5 minutes they need it, then it MUST be wiped.
Hackers stealing the data is just one simple way the data gets out. Social engineering to disloyal employees through mergers acquisitions etc etc are other ways.
If you ever give out the information it will be stolen and misused.
And the RIAA corporations will just say 'Well, too bad that your fans arent buying your music, you still owe us some huge gobs of money for production, studio time, mastering and marketing, so pay up, and then you get the distinct pleasure of having to release another 3 albums for a huge loss and spend the rest of your life penniless and in debt. And after we get this new inheritable debt law for music contracts passed, your children down to the last generation will be working for us. Without pay.'.
Im not buying any CD's from any artist or company I can ascertain is connected to the big ones anymore. Its just a pita to know who owns what.
Never. There will never be unmetered low earth satellite coverage. Simply because the 8 people for whom it would be the most practical and cheap alternative would have to pay 3 billion dollars each per year in flat fees to keep it running.
Latency and ease of upgradability is stacked entirely in the favour of groundbased solutions. They will reach 99% of the potential customers. And the 1% left, well, they just cannot ever even dream of beginning to have a hope of cheaply obtaining satellite access, because there just arent enough potential customers to make it cheap. Most people simply will not accept always having a sorta sucky costly connection when they can have a fast cheap connection 50 weeks of the year and a modem connection the two weeks they are in the boondocks.
And for those who like living without a neighbour for 5 miles, well, suck it up and pay or use a modem or move.
I've already moved to opt-in mail. You want to get into my mailbox? Well, since I dont feel a real need of having you there, its up to *you* to figure out how to contact me in some other way to get me to add your mail address to acccepted senders (oh, and I screen calls, and dont answer the door without prior notice).
My free time is valuable to me, and I appreciate a mailbox where each and every mail is a mail Im actually interested in recieving.
Well, Mr Beluzzo has always been working for Microsoft. Planting people loyal to you in other companies is standard good buisness practice, and one of the best ways to destroy competition.
There is no actual place where the programs look for the libs. Dynamic linking is handled by the dynamic linker, which has a list of places where libraries are found (often/etc/ld.so.conf).You can edit this and run ldconfig -v to update your list.
If you wish to use a very specific version for a special application you can always set LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting the application to ensure it gets the right libs.
And during those 2 years you were not making money, nor likely doing retirement investment, which equals quite a lot of money, $120k-$160k for 2 years for a reasonably paid programmer or sysadmin.
It's very much touch and go wether or not its actually worth it in the long run. If money is the sole consideration I doubt it.
The problem with satellite services is that they have a hard time competing. Everyone in any city or village larger than a few thousand people will have cheaper and faster connections through cable or DSL. And for reasonable roaming the cell networks will do it cheaper and faster. So the satellite services are left with trying to get the few interested subscribers in the boondocks and on antarctica to pay for a worldwide satellite communications network.
The ground based ways cant ever compete with the coverage of a sat network, but they can take almost every potential profitable customer there is. And the day that one in five penguins want Internet, you can be sure there will be a ground based provider opening up on the south pole too.
Actually, this is becoming a more and more annoying problem. Not just with games, but with music and books (im starting to get really really annoyed that some books I _want_ are out of print) and what have you. It goes out of print, replaced with the mindboggling overproduction of entertainment today, and disappears for long before copyright can even expire.
In my opinion it's time to add a clause to copyright stating that if, at any time, production and sale of the product ceases in such a way that the product becomes unavailable for those who wish to obtain or purchase it, the copyright lapses and anyone should be allowed to copy or publish it. After all, the only reason there is a copyright at all is to promote more production of art through compensation, which means that if nobody is selling it anymore, there is no reason to allow the holder to retain that copyright.
Are there really any Hotmail users anymore? I know lots of people who have hotmail accounts, but none that use them seriously. The occasional 'need email to send game registration to but dont want to end up on spamlist with real mail address' mail, but not any daily use. Most dont even bother to remember the account, if they need a throwaway mail account they set another one up somewhere.
Seems like its just one huge spamfest over there by now. Still, its sorta amazing how many servers theyre having to dedicate to the spammers, the millions of mail accounts to recieve the spam and the couple of dozens of actual users...
Umm... exactly why should a company that tries to falsify evidence in court be given any form of benefit of the doubt?
Eventually, if you are consistent enough in your constant unethical behaviour, you forfeit that benefit.
I dont think that Microsoft as a corporation any longer has any kind of concept of right or wrong or truth or lies. The corporate mindset is that of a severely spoiled child.
Since modification means addition of material which Mr Reeds opinions has no legal bearing on at all, what is important is that the license allows redistribution of source and binaries, no but if or when specified. Once you release something under a certain license you cannot change it retroactively for those to which you have granted the license, unless you add a termination clause.
The lesson is: Either consult a number of lawyers before writing a license or make damn sure you use a well known one whose properties you understand. The well known licenses like the GPL arent complicated as hell and full of legalese for fun, they are that way because they have to represent the whole concept and prevent any form of use not intended.
If his idea was to make just some more proprietary software then he should have said so. Of course, nobody would be actually using it in that case...
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Really? We have a bunch (10) of Sun java terminals (woohoo, the X terminal is back... the id cards and session freezing is really cool tho :) running off a Ultra-60 dual cpu machine, and Ximian Gnome is pretty snappy. Unless you have some serious configuration issues I cant imagine it would be that much slower for a single Blade machine.
It's pretty fast on my own HP B2000 machine too, even running over dual monitors. Well, the using it part is pretty fast. Compiling it all from scratch um... wasnt.
Not for government agencies. Anyway, as the MS proponents are so fond of saying, nobody's _forcing_ you to use free software, you just wont be able to communicate with anyone else with those .doc files anymore. Oh, and those taxes should be filed with GnuCash. Heh.
The software was expressly designed to make it possible to move your book to a new computer when your old one breaks down (that ever happen to you?), or to allow people with disabilities to access their legally purchased book.
What Adobe and the publishing industry wants is to either force you to keep a server room with 20 computers at home to be able to read the books you accumulate over time (and pray that you never have to reinstall one of them or they break down), or to buy the books again if you wish to read them more than once. I think you have gotten the who a bit wrong in who is doing the stealing part.
Bottom line is, the interested parties in this want to use the DMCA to violate every tradition of consumer rights in copyright law.
It isnt really possible to specify an exact false positive rate since it depends so much on how you use the technology. According to the visionics website they have a 0.68% equal error rate with a standardized database test. That means that you have 0.68% false negatives when you have 0.68% false positives on that specific test. Going above or below that threshold may or may not make sense depending on the application, for example, "match this up with someone!" or "dont let anyone pass unless you are absolutely without any doubt sure its them". First case you get loads more of false positives, second you'll get loads more of false negatives.
:). The only reference I can cite off my head would be Visionics own website. And my only qualifications would be some work on OCR once upon a time plus some cognitive psychology studies (the theory is the human brain uses pretty similar ways to recognize and store information about objects (shapes, features, angles, distances rather than some form of per-pixel comparison)).
You have several completely different problem spaces. For example, matching a cctv snapshot of a robber in a store to a database to check if the robber is in a police register, this would be great. It works with disguises and beards, and even aging, and it can find out who the person on the picture is with a very good probability of a match if its in the register, especially since you can manipulate the required match percentage of the features (between 12-40 features, IIRC, less when matching obscured, bearded, disguised people). This is the (IMO) correct, but limited, use of facial recognition technology. This will also make people go 'oooh, ahhh, this works so well!', so it would make for a very good promotional for such technology. In the worst case you get multiple possible matches for the ID.
When you have the other problem space on the other hand, your percentage will be dependent on the people you are matching. How many times will the computer say 'this is John Cleese' if you try to match the people in a John Cleese lookalike contest? Probably a whole lot more than one in a hundred. In a case like Borders, it would depend on the size of the database, and how strict they set the match requirements, and wether or not they allow it to decrease match requirements with partial obscuring of features. The likelyhood that any given person will be mistakenly identified as a positive will depend on the size of the database and those settings.
My rather uneducated guess (and the way I would set it up, had I been the one to implement something like this) would be that they simply trim the settings to keep their store detectives at a manageable workload, and calculating costs of security vs. costs of possible theft. Maybe 50 suspects per day per security person? Wether or not they will be true or false matches is left to the imagination and isnt really relevant to the setup either, altho I doubt that you really get that many known shoplifters in a store in a day.
The reason you cant really improve the software that much is mostly that as humans we have a fairly limited number of features in the face. The amount of distortion you get because people dont keep their heads straight up smiling at the camera, they dont keep the same expression on their face, differing lighting conditions etc make some form of fuzzy matching a necessity for it to work at all. This adds up to the problem that you cannot get an exact match even if you increase the number of features a bit and improve resolution because you cannot look for an exact match, which means you're stuck with the reality of some people being within the matching parameters for eachother, which is a problem that grows as your database grows and will guarantee large numbers of false positives when you have a great number of people compared to your database.
Anyway, Im not really that qualified to comment
Well, with NASDAQ running on NT, it's no surprise it's been going down a lot over the last year...
Discount Linux. Linux isnt competition in any ordinary market sense. Linux isnt bound by the restraints of actually having to work within an economic context, which any ordinary competitor would be. This, of course, is the only reason that Linux has not and never will go the same way as Be and OS/2. Linux is rather the proof that competition in the x86 market is dead and extinct. You can neither make money from nor finance development of an OS that competes with MS, so the only even remotely successful competition is Linux, which needs none of those factors for its survival.
Can you secure financing to write a new proprietary OS to compete in the x86 market segment, enter the market and compete? No. No way, no how, ever. Not unless MS is severely restrained.
Yes. The method of observation matters. As a person you are aware of the difficulty when comparing faces. You are open to the possibility of making mistakes, and you will be predisposed to doubt your judgement.
When a computer does the same thing, the programmers will have been working overtime to meet deadlines, they'll have cut corners, the salesmen will inflate and improve their products performance, and bedazzled believers will actually trust the computer to make the right call.
I read they were thinking about installing the same system in the London underground. With the addition of showing the suspects face on monitors so other passengers can watch out for the suspect. How long do you think it would be before some poor sod, mistakenly identified as a rapist or something, has an unfortunate 'accident' and falls under an approaching train?
Sure, that idea is even more appalling, but the problem is the same, you'll have a huge amount of false positives in the average day and people have a really really bad habit of actually trusting computers. They have no implicit feeling of personal responsibility, because it's not a question of their own judgement.
In my opinion, facial recognition software is of limited use, and in cases such as these it would be a grave misuse of the technology. The false positive rate is in the order of several magnitudes too large to be acceptable, and I dont think it will be possible to improve it enough to matter. Faces simply arent unique enough to support identification on their own when you are talking about comparing thousands or hundreds of thousands of faces per day to a database. Mixing that with the implicit trust a lot of people place in technology is not a good idea.
Well, too bad that the other guy that sorta looks like you in certain lighting conditions didnt. Hope you'll enjoy your discussion with security.
Like they say in the article, 'It is very difficult to distinguish one face from another with the human eye,'. Well, no shit sherlock. But here, we haf this maaagik compuuuuter prooogram, that has noooo such proooooblems. Yah, right. Sounds like the pr0n blocker based on image recognition that could be replaced with a blocker that randomly blocks half of all pictures and still is just as accurate. Except in this case it will randomly recognize one shoplifter in every 100 customers. Or?
IMO, is sounds like just another bullshit product company selling wannabe smart 'blahblah recognition software' to gullible companies. It's hard for people to tell faces apart, especially if you dont have pictures taken the same day, and it would be a freaking nightmare to get a program even close to any form of accuracy. Except, of course, you can always use marketing to trick people to buy the product anyway.
Um, they've done it before. Several times. They're are pretty dumb. Or smart, depending how you look at it. Sure, some people will catch them at it, some will remember the times they've been caught, but frankly, how many 'ordinary' people even remember their little episode of perjury and forging evidence in court?
Sure, _I_ know that noone who isnt paid by MS will ever say anything positive about the company. Any test that shows their products favorably is very likely faked. You probably know that too. But most ignorant people will see mostly the commercials. They'll trust the salesman in the store. They'll think the consultant has their companys best interest at heart when he recommends Exchange. They'll believe the paid-for Gartner/Giga/whatever report.
They'd send letters from someones dead grandmothers poodle if they felt like it. Because it doesnt really matter if they're found out. The message wont get out, people wont remember, and they're safe from the law.
Of course, lying in court isnt something they have a problem with either way, is it? So it doesnt really matter if it's illegal or not. They're above the law anyway.
Of course they're paying them to fake letters. It isnt exactly the first time they do this you know. I can recall at least two previous times that they've been caught at it. Faking letters is nothing for a company that forges evidence in court.
Perhaps one day you will realize there is no level that Microsoft would not stoop to. The company has long since lost all sense of ethics and is run by people who need serious medication and a long time in therapy.
Oh, but you forgot the fourth option:
Say screw'em both and develop for neither, just using lowest common denominator stuff, and spend the saved time on improving the other parts of the game.
If your game cant stand on its own using that... well, maybe, just maybe, it sucks?
Who cares about SSL? SSL is important for maybe one billionth billionth of the time your data is in someone elses hands. Ok, so the data is encrypted in transfer. Who cares, when the recieving company is happily saving away your data on a NT machine running It Isnt Secure? Every script kiddie and their grandmothers little dog can wait until two seconds after you press submit and dig the data out of there after that soooo secure SSL transaction.
To protect yourself:
Never enter nondisposable data. Use a disposable email address. Use a disposable CC number (or at the very least a low-limit creditcard). Never enter Social Security numbers (fake one, or use another option). Avoid using your real name. Avoid entering your real phone nr. Dont enter your age. Dont enter your profession. Make the data worthless and corrupt.
In my opinion the only way to handle this problem is to make it illegal for any company to store any sensitive information at all. They need the information? Fine, they get to have it for the 5 minutes they need it, then it MUST be wiped.
Hackers stealing the data is just one simple way the data gets out. Social engineering to disloyal employees through mergers acquisitions etc etc are other ways.
If you ever give out the information it will be stolen and misused.
And the RIAA corporations will just say 'Well, too bad that your fans arent buying your music, you still owe us some huge gobs of money for production, studio time, mastering and marketing, so pay up, and then you get the distinct pleasure of having to release another 3 albums for a huge loss and spend the rest of your life penniless and in debt. And after we get this new inheritable debt law for music contracts passed, your children down to the last generation will be working for us. Without pay.'.
Im not buying any CD's from any artist or company I can ascertain is connected to the big ones anymore. Its just a pita to know who owns what.
Never. There will never be unmetered low earth satellite coverage. Simply because the 8 people for whom it would be the most practical and cheap alternative would have to pay 3 billion dollars each per year in flat fees to keep it running.
Latency and ease of upgradability is stacked entirely in the favour of groundbased solutions. They will reach 99% of the potential customers. And the 1% left, well, they just cannot ever even dream of beginning to have a hope of cheaply obtaining satellite access, because there just arent enough potential customers to make it cheap. Most people simply will not accept always having a sorta sucky costly connection when they can have a fast cheap connection 50 weeks of the year and a modem connection the two weeks they are in the boondocks.
And for those who like living without a neighbour for 5 miles, well, suck it up and pay or use a modem or move.
I've already moved to opt-in mail. You want to get into my mailbox? Well, since I dont feel a real need of having you there, its up to *you* to figure out how to contact me in some other way to get me to add your mail address to acccepted senders (oh, and I screen calls, and dont answer the door without prior notice).
My free time is valuable to me, and I appreciate a mailbox where each and every mail is a mail Im actually interested in recieving.
Well, Mr Beluzzo has always been working for Microsoft. Planting people loyal to you in other companies is standard good buisness practice, and one of the best ways to destroy competition.
There is no actual place where the programs look for the libs. Dynamic linking is handled by the dynamic linker, which has a list of places where libraries are found (often /etc/ld.so.conf).You can edit this and run ldconfig -v to update your list.
If you wish to use a very specific version for a special application you can always set LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting the application to ensure it gets the right libs.
And during those 2 years you were not making money, nor likely doing retirement investment, which equals quite a lot of money, $120k-$160k for 2 years for a reasonably paid programmer or sysadmin.
It's very much touch and go wether or not its actually worth it in the long run. If money is the sole consideration I doubt it.
The problem with satellite services is that they have a hard time competing. Everyone in any city or village larger than a few thousand people will have cheaper and faster connections through cable or DSL. And for reasonable roaming the cell networks will do it cheaper and faster. So the satellite services are left with trying to get the few interested subscribers in the boondocks and on antarctica to pay for a worldwide satellite communications network.
The ground based ways cant ever compete with the coverage of a sat network, but they can take almost every potential profitable customer there is. And the day that one in five penguins want Internet, you can be sure there will be a ground based provider opening up on the south pole too.
Actually, this is becoming a more and more annoying problem. Not just with games, but with music and books (im starting to get really really annoyed that some books I _want_ are out of print) and what have you. It goes out of print, replaced with the mindboggling overproduction of entertainment today, and disappears for long before copyright can even expire.
In my opinion it's time to add a clause to copyright stating that if, at any time, production and sale of the product ceases in such a way that the product becomes unavailable for those who wish to obtain or purchase it, the copyright lapses and anyone should be allowed to copy or publish it. After all, the only reason there is a copyright at all is to promote more production of art through compensation, which means that if nobody is selling it anymore, there is no reason to allow the holder to retain that copyright.
Are there really any Hotmail users anymore? I know lots of people who have hotmail accounts, but none that use them seriously. The occasional 'need email to send game registration to but dont want to end up on spamlist with real mail address' mail, but not any daily use. Most dont even bother to remember the account, if they need a throwaway mail account they set another one up somewhere.
Seems like its just one huge spamfest over there by now. Still, its sorta amazing how many servers theyre having to dedicate to the spammers, the millions of mail accounts to recieve the spam and the couple of dozens of actual users...
Umm... exactly why should a company that tries to falsify evidence in court be given any form of benefit of the doubt?
Eventually, if you are consistent enough in your constant unethical behaviour, you forfeit that benefit.
I dont think that Microsoft as a corporation any longer has any kind of concept of right or wrong or truth or lies. The corporate mindset is that of a severely spoiled child.
You mean those millions of companies increasing their profits through using free software?
I think you miss the point. This is ultimately about the consumers of software and they are the ones who profit. A lot.
Since modification means addition of material which Mr Reeds opinions has no legal bearing on at all, what is important is that the license allows redistribution of source and binaries, no but if or when specified. Once you release something under a certain license you cannot change it retroactively for those to which you have granted the license, unless you add a termination clause.
The lesson is: Either consult a number of lawyers before writing a license or make damn sure you use a well known one whose properties you understand. The well known licenses like the GPL arent complicated as hell and full of legalese for fun, they are that way because they have to represent the whole concept and prevent any form of use not intended.
If his idea was to make just some more proprietary software then he should have said so. Of course, nobody would be actually using it in that case...
ianal, etc.