We can't simply redesign it into a read only medium to serve ONE industry's interests, nor should we.
Well, technically we can, and that's their preferred option... make all technology subservient to copyright.
I agree we shouldn't, but that won't stop them from trying to do it. Sony et al would happily outlaw the general purpose computer to make sure we were all running only industry approved devices which give them all of the control.
Netflix's Mark Watson responded to the message and acknowledged that strong copy protection can't be implemented in an open source Web browser. He deflected the issue by saying that copy protection mechanisms can be implemented in hardware, and that such hardware can be used by open source browsers.
Or, they'll eventually decide to outlaw open source browsers, since they're clearly designed to allow for copyright infringement.
Of course, that is exactly what the copyright lobby wants... absolutely nothing will be allowed if it could even remotely be used to violate copyright.
This is good for Netflix and the people pushing this... but it isn't good for the rest of us.
Whenever I've had conversations with libertarians about how free trade would actually work in the real world
See, there's your problem.
Sadly, the Libertarian model more or less assumes that nothing about current reality applies, and that we can hit a big reset button and start from scratch in a bubble where all of their little assumptions would hold true by sheer force of will.
It's like bed-time stories for economists.
There will always be inequalilties that keep that perfectly free market from happening, and countries will always try to bolster their own industry over others. The US does this in many areas (agriculture, steel, lumber) and seems to expect they can protect their own companies while trying to skew the playing field against foreign competition who have a different cost structure.
To me, there's simply nothing to actually support the notion that the Libertarian free market could ever exist. And, if it did, it sure isn't going to bring about all of the positive things it claims... mostly the world would devolve into the rich having all of the privileges, and the rest of us being left to duke it out for scraps. But apparently, that's a good thing somehow.
Her many bills, if passed, would criminalize both pat-downs and 'naked scanning,' as well as require better health warnings for X-ray scanners and even studies of airport screenings' physical and psychological effects.
Contrasted with
The last time that bill was being considered the Federal government threatened to turn all of Texas into a 'no-fly zone'.
It's too late to try to bring rationality into this discussion. The industry that has sprung up to service the security theatre is not going to back down, and enough lawmakers have been scared into the "zomg, the terrorists" knee jerk reactions that you can't change anything.
If you're against an intrusive TSA, you're in favor of terrorism. Heavens forbid you refuse to get into the machine because the rent a cop tells you it's safe -- based on the extensive medical training they're required to receive, why wouldn't you take them at their word? It was only built by the lowest bidder, what could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, it seems like 1984 and Big Brother just keep happening around us. And the loss of those pesky constitutional rights just keeps going.
I wonder if there are accurate stats which show how much visits to the US are down? Of course, if you keep all of the foreigners out, you've accomplished half the battle I guess. Of course, if other countries started fingerprinting US citizens and gathering biometric information, the US would be up in arms at how unfair it is.
Canada's laws allow Canadians to pirate whatever they like at will with no fear of repercussions.
No. Canada has some explicit "fair use" exceptions in our copyright legislation. It's still illegal to distribute widely.
You can't just give away copies of digital things willy nilly, but you can make a rip of a CD your friend loans you. Though, if the current government have their way, breaking any form of 'digital lock' would become a criminal offense, even if it's to exercise your existing rights.
And, since the media companies insisted on it, we pay a levy on blank recordable media. So, to many of us, they've already secured payment from us. So I don't particularly care if I rip a CD -- though, I generally prefer to buy them so I have a physical copy that I rip. They've got their piracy slush fund, so fuck 'em.
He points out that "illegal camcording had largely disappeared from the Canadian market", so I'm not sure why you're claiming it's widespread. He's also talking about how Canada has a thriving digital music market place, which means people are buying music here. Hell, I've bought several hundred CDs over the last bunch of years... but, I know I'm likely the exception.
And, I wouldn't be so quick to accuse Geist of confusing correlation and causation... he's a law professor who studies this kind of stuff in depth. He's not some n00b who makes a habit of bad logic.
This sounds like the old Berkeley DB/Sleepy Cat software.
Key/Value pairs instead of relational stuff. Worked with a product years ago that was built on Berkeley -- offered some pretty useful features that simply didn't map to object-relational stuff.
For some applications, you really do need something that works a little differently than an RDB... however, there's still loads of things I can't imagine trying to do without one.
LOL... I though Flash was an annoying piece of shit before I owned anything produced by Apple.
If you think my hatred of Flash is because Jobs (or anyone) told me to, you're something of a sheep yourself. It was crap in the late 90's, and it's crap now. I've steadfastly avoided it for a very long time because to me it's only ever been annoying ads.
So far, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by refusing to use Flash... but, hey, I wouldn't want to deprive you of Farmville. That's the beauty of choice, you make yours, and I'll make mine.
Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year's end
Holy crap! If China and Russia are in favor of this, it simply can't be allowed to happen.
I can only imagine how badly the internet would be broken by every piss-pot government bureaucrat around the world decides the internet should (or shouldn't) be allowed to work in a given way.
Criticize the government? Banned. Point out that a politician is a philandering, lying bastard? Banned.
There's already actions in the UN to make it a crime to say mean things about religion... this will only make it worse, and then some. It's my legal right to say that your imaginary friend can mind his own damned business and that I don't wish to be bound by your scripture.
Go with a central control over the internet, and you're in a race to the bottom to appease the most backwards of governments, and pretty much do whatever the copyright lobby wants out of it.
Got one for my wife for Christmas for an incredible price. So far, we've been underwhelmed with the app choices... there weren't very many.
Once we updated to 2.0 yesterday, there were a lot more apps, and several of them were clearly from the Android marketplace.
So, hopefully this will be the beginning of having more on it. I don't think she cares if she can fetch her email natively (since she uses gmail), but the lack of apps available for it were making it not much more than a web browser and something you could play a movie on an airplane.
Use Flashblock so you don't have to run every flash object out there, thus reducing the performance and security problems.
It's not a security or performance problem if it's not installed.
And, as I said, I have yet to find a single use of it that makes me willing to install it unless it's a work computer and I don't get a vote. Sites that need Flash for navigation? Well, the back button solves that problem generally.
You must not get out much. I just checked BBC, CNN and they both use flash... Okay they all use them for ads but for a business based on showing people ads that's a rather essential use.
See, I don't consider CNN to be worth reading -- they lost anything like journalistic integrity years ago in my opinion.
And, I don't give a damn about the ads people are running. All I see is Ad Block Plus or NoScript telling me that "this rectangle contains something you didn't want to see anyway". It was ads that made me hate Flash in the first place.
Let me clarify... sure, sites that I use have Flash crap on them all of the time. But I don't have a player installed, and any of the stuff they are using Flash for has so far failed to make me think "oooh, I gotta get me some of that". It's just the crap in the corners I wasn't going to look at anyway. If I can't see the rest of your web page without it, I'll find another one.
In fact, every time I am forced to use a browser that does have Flash on it, it makes me want to kill someone from Adobe.
I'm not interested in their ads, and I'm sure as hell not giving them CPU cycles to animate some fucking monkey.:-P
Please, enjoy Flash to your heart's content... but for me, it is, and always has been something I don't want on my machine. As such, I simply don't use it.
So you never use youtube then? Or any of the TV catch up services? You never view any lectures on TED?
Actually, no apparently. And, if I do, I have native apps on my iPad for them... none of them are running Flash.
My work computer has Flash, because that's part of the build, but I haven't had Flash on a machine I own in at least 10 years.
I don't see the attraction to You Tube for the most part (oooh, another cat video, I believe I'll vomit); I've got a PVR; and I've been meaning to watch a TED lecture but somehow never gotten around to it.
It may be hard to believe if you use Flash regularly, but some of us actually manage to exist without using it, and have for quite some time. It's literally not installed on my personal machine, and I believe never has been on this one.
I might have a VM that has it installed on it in case I find I absolutely do need it, but it would have to be something quite specific to make me go looking for something which will run Flash.
Oh, sure, I'm sure some people will complain that their favorite game or whatever runs on Flash, and therefore it's a horrible and tragic loss.
But for some of us, it's a performance hog, a security risk, and a general nuisance. I've been avoiding the use of Flash whenever I can get away with it for over a decade. I associate it with annoying ads and ever-cookies more than I do anything useful. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a single site I use that makes use of Flash.
I look forward to the demise of Flash. Sorry that some of you will miss out of Super Duper Happy Fun Cow Clicker or whatever, but I personally will not mourn its loss.
Someone must be paying the lawyers just to hassle Linux generally and/or IBM specifically.
Well, I can only imagine that some troll somewhere believes that if only they can finally win in this case, the huge amount of windfall it would generate would be massive.
If you can get a court to say that everyone who is running Linux owes you a bunch of money, that would represent a huge sum. Quite possibly something they project in the billions.
Now, with luck IBM will finally grind these guys into the ground. So far they've lost any legal claim to the copyright of UNIX, and they've failed to show what was actually infringing... so hopefully other than trying to wave their peckers around, they'll rapidly discover they haven't got any legal claim to what they're saying.
I fear it's going to take an actual final court ruling that says "no you don't have any claim and you have no more recourse". Because they're just going to keep coming back until they exhaust all of their legal options. The last case just sort of petered out as they failed to show any evidence, I'd like to see this one end in a pretty firm ruling.
Drug prohibition is about increasing police power, increasing corporate profits, and attacking civil liberties.
And, as often as lot, it's one group of people trying to make sure the rest of the world is legally bound by their morality.
Anytime someone passes a law about what someone else can't do -- you have to ask, are they doing it to protect people from harm, or are they doing it to impose their own morality? If anybody ever says something should be illegal because God says you shouldn't, they're trying to impose their own morality -- and should be promptly told to mind their own damned business.
So, prostitution, gay marriage, not using certain kinds of drugs, prohibition against alcohol, sodomy laws, or trying to make sure you can't criticize their god... that's about them, not the people doing it.
Unfortunately, many people figure that their morality needs to be accepted by everyone else. The more strict and fanatical you are about your beliefs, the more likely you are to believe everyone else should be required to adhere to them.
I'm sorry, but if your religion thinks you should refrain from wearing a goofy yellow hat with floppy ears, WTF does that have to do with me? The rules your chosen deity impose on you (not you betterthanunix, but the general 'you') have nothing at all to do with me -- I'll worry about how such things affect me, not you.
I fail to see why watching porn between consenting adults in the privacy of my own home has anything to do with anybody else... but some people would like to outlaw porn because they find it distasteful and don't think we should be able to watch it. Wanna get your rocks off wearing a Batman costume? Knock your self out. Wanna do it in my front yard? I don't think so.
Man religious groups are very much about imposing their morality on the rest of the world (and I mean all religions, not anything in particular). They can bugger off and stay out of the rest of our business, and we'll leave them to go about theirs.
Show of hands... all whose government doesn't fall into this category? Anybody?
It seems like when most governments try to pass laws on technology, they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what it is they're passing laws about and how it works. That never seems to stop them, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, technically we can, and that's their preferred option ... make all technology subservient to copyright.
I agree we shouldn't, but that won't stop them from trying to do it. Sony et al would happily outlaw the general purpose computer to make sure we were all running only industry approved devices which give them all of the control.
Or, they'll eventually decide to outlaw open source browsers, since they're clearly designed to allow for copyright infringement.
Of course, that is exactly what the copyright lobby wants ... absolutely nothing will be allowed if it could even remotely be used to violate copyright.
This is good for Netflix and the people pushing this ... but it isn't good for the rest of us.
OK, Reno then. :-P
Las Vegas called ... apparently that infringes on their business model.
See, there's your problem.
Sadly, the Libertarian model more or less assumes that nothing about current reality applies, and that we can hit a big reset button and start from scratch in a bubble where all of their little assumptions would hold true by sheer force of will.
It's like bed-time stories for economists.
There will always be inequalilties that keep that perfectly free market from happening, and countries will always try to bolster their own industry over others. The US does this in many areas (agriculture, steel, lumber) and seems to expect they can protect their own companies while trying to skew the playing field against foreign competition who have a different cost structure.
To me, there's simply nothing to actually support the notion that the Libertarian free market could ever exist. And, if it did, it sure isn't going to bring about all of the positive things it claims ... mostly the world would devolve into the rich having all of the privileges, and the rest of us being left to duke it out for scraps. But apparently, that's a good thing somehow.
Contrasted with
It's too late to try to bring rationality into this discussion. The industry that has sprung up to service the security theatre is not going to back down, and enough lawmakers have been scared into the "zomg, the terrorists" knee jerk reactions that you can't change anything.
If you're against an intrusive TSA, you're in favor of terrorism. Heavens forbid you refuse to get into the machine because the rent a cop tells you it's safe -- based on the extensive medical training they're required to receive, why wouldn't you take them at their word? It was only built by the lowest bidder, what could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile, it seems like 1984 and Big Brother just keep happening around us. And the loss of those pesky constitutional rights just keeps going.
I wonder if there are accurate stats which show how much visits to the US are down? Of course, if you keep all of the foreigners out, you've accomplished half the battle I guess. Of course, if other countries started fingerprinting US citizens and gathering biometric information, the US would be up in arms at how unfair it is.
No. Canada has some explicit "fair use" exceptions in our copyright legislation. It's still illegal to distribute widely.
You can't just give away copies of digital things willy nilly, but you can make a rip of a CD your friend loans you. Though, if the current government have their way, breaking any form of 'digital lock' would become a criminal offense, even if it's to exercise your existing rights.
And, since the media companies insisted on it, we pay a levy on blank recordable media. So, to many of us, they've already secured payment from us. So I don't particularly care if I rip a CD -- though, I generally prefer to buy them so I have a physical copy that I rip. They've got their piracy slush fund, so fuck 'em.
He points out that "illegal camcording had largely disappeared from the Canadian market", so I'm not sure why you're claiming it's widespread. He's also talking about how Canada has a thriving digital music market place, which means people are buying music here. Hell, I've bought several hundred CDs over the last bunch of years ... but, I know I'm likely the exception.
And, I wouldn't be so quick to accuse Geist of confusing correlation and causation ... he's a law professor who studies this kind of stuff in depth. He's not some n00b who makes a habit of bad logic.
Small?? Man, according to them, they represent almost the entire economy.
Just think of all of those fictional trillions of dollars they're not bringing in in revenue.
The US also reserves the right to scramble it for their own purposes.
So, as people become more dependent on GPS, having the American government suddenly make the system unusable isn't an attractive option.
In the case of GPS, multiple suppliers is also redundancy.
I'd say you need a control group of hookers and blow. For science of course.
This sounds like the old Berkeley DB/Sleepy Cat software.
Key/Value pairs instead of relational stuff. Worked with a product years ago that was built on Berkeley -- offered some pretty useful features that simply didn't map to object-relational stuff.
For some applications, you really do need something that works a little differently than an RDB ... however, there's still loads of things I can't imagine trying to do without one.
Choice is good in technology.
Oh, that's just a hobby. :-P
LOL ... I though Flash was an annoying piece of shit before I owned anything produced by Apple.
If you think my hatred of Flash is because Jobs (or anyone) told me to, you're something of a sheep yourself. It was crap in the late 90's, and it's crap now. I've steadfastly avoided it for a very long time because to me it's only ever been annoying ads.
So far, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by refusing to use Flash ... but, hey, I wouldn't want to deprive you of Farmville. That's the beauty of choice, you make yours, and I'll make mine.
Holy crap! If China and Russia are in favor of this, it simply can't be allowed to happen.
I can only imagine how badly the internet would be broken by every piss-pot government bureaucrat around the world decides the internet should (or shouldn't) be allowed to work in a given way.
Criticize the government? Banned. Point out that a politician is a philandering, lying bastard? Banned.
There's already actions in the UN to make it a crime to say mean things about religion ... this will only make it worse, and then some. It's my legal right to say that your imaginary friend can mind his own damned business and that I don't wish to be bound by your scripture.
Go with a central control over the internet, and you're in a race to the bottom to appease the most backwards of governments, and pretty much do whatever the copyright lobby wants out of it.
Keep your hands off my fucking internet.
Got one for my wife for Christmas for an incredible price. So far, we've been underwhelmed with the app choices ... there weren't very many.
Once we updated to 2.0 yesterday, there were a lot more apps, and several of them were clearly from the Android marketplace.
So, hopefully this will be the beginning of having more on it. I don't think she cares if she can fetch her email natively (since she uses gmail), but the lack of apps available for it were making it not much more than a web browser and something you could play a movie on an airplane.
It's not a security or performance problem if it's not installed.
And, as I said, I have yet to find a single use of it that makes me willing to install it unless it's a work computer and I don't get a vote. Sites that need Flash for navigation? Well, the back button solves that problem generally.
Not especially ... even on my iPad I might look at a video on You Tube once every six months.
As I said, the solution is to simply not use Flash. If you don't care about it, you're not missing anything.
See, I don't consider CNN to be worth reading -- they lost anything like journalistic integrity years ago in my opinion.
And, I don't give a damn about the ads people are running. All I see is Ad Block Plus or NoScript telling me that "this rectangle contains something you didn't want to see anyway". It was ads that made me hate Flash in the first place.
Let me clarify ... sure, sites that I use have Flash crap on them all of the time. But I don't have a player installed, and any of the stuff they are using Flash for has so far failed to make me think "oooh, I gotta get me some of that". It's just the crap in the corners I wasn't going to look at anyway. If I can't see the rest of your web page without it, I'll find another one.
In fact, every time I am forced to use a browser that does have Flash on it, it makes me want to kill someone from Adobe.
I'm not interested in their ads, and I'm sure as hell not giving them CPU cycles to animate some fucking monkey. :-P
Please, enjoy Flash to your heart's content ... but for me, it is, and always has been something I don't want on my machine. As such, I simply don't use it.
Actually, no apparently. And, if I do, I have native apps on my iPad for them ... none of them are running Flash.
My work computer has Flash, because that's part of the build, but I haven't had Flash on a machine I own in at least 10 years.
I don't see the attraction to You Tube for the most part (oooh, another cat video, I believe I'll vomit); I've got a PVR; and I've been meaning to watch a TED lecture but somehow never gotten around to it.
It may be hard to believe if you use Flash regularly, but some of us actually manage to exist without using it, and have for quite some time. It's literally not installed on my personal machine, and I believe never has been on this one.
I might have a VM that has it installed on it in case I find I absolutely do need it, but it would have to be something quite specific to make me go looking for something which will run Flash.
Oh, sure, I'm sure some people will complain that their favorite game or whatever runs on Flash, and therefore it's a horrible and tragic loss.
But for some of us, it's a performance hog, a security risk, and a general nuisance. I've been avoiding the use of Flash whenever I can get away with it for over a decade. I associate it with annoying ads and ever-cookies more than I do anything useful. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a single site I use that makes use of Flash.
I look forward to the demise of Flash. Sorry that some of you will miss out of Super Duper Happy Fun Cow Clicker or whatever, but I personally will not mourn its loss.
Well, I can only imagine that some troll somewhere believes that if only they can finally win in this case, the huge amount of windfall it would generate would be massive.
If you can get a court to say that everyone who is running Linux owes you a bunch of money, that would represent a huge sum. Quite possibly something they project in the billions.
Now, with luck IBM will finally grind these guys into the ground. So far they've lost any legal claim to the copyright of UNIX, and they've failed to show what was actually infringing ... so hopefully other than trying to wave their peckers around, they'll rapidly discover they haven't got any legal claim to what they're saying.
I fear it's going to take an actual final court ruling that says "no you don't have any claim and you have no more recourse". Because they're just going to keep coming back until they exhaust all of their legal options. The last case just sort of petered out as they failed to show any evidence, I'd like to see this one end in a pretty firm ruling.
And, as often as lot, it's one group of people trying to make sure the rest of the world is legally bound by their morality.
Anytime someone passes a law about what someone else can't do -- you have to ask, are they doing it to protect people from harm, or are they doing it to impose their own morality? If anybody ever says something should be illegal because God says you shouldn't, they're trying to impose their own morality -- and should be promptly told to mind their own damned business.
So, prostitution, gay marriage, not using certain kinds of drugs, prohibition against alcohol, sodomy laws, or trying to make sure you can't criticize their god ... that's about them, not the people doing it.
Unfortunately, many people figure that their morality needs to be accepted by everyone else. The more strict and fanatical you are about your beliefs, the more likely you are to believe everyone else should be required to adhere to them.
I'm sorry, but if your religion thinks you should refrain from wearing a goofy yellow hat with floppy ears, WTF does that have to do with me? The rules your chosen deity impose on you (not you betterthanunix, but the general 'you') have nothing at all to do with me -- I'll worry about how such things affect me, not you.
I fail to see why watching porn between consenting adults in the privacy of my own home has anything to do with anybody else ... but some people would like to outlaw porn because they find it distasteful and don't think we should be able to watch it. Wanna get your rocks off wearing a Batman costume? Knock your self out. Wanna do it in my front yard? I don't think so.
Man religious groups are very much about imposing their morality on the rest of the world (and I mean all religions, not anything in particular). They can bugger off and stay out of the rest of our business, and we'll leave them to go about theirs.
Show of hands ... all whose government doesn't fall into this category? Anybody?
It seems like when most governments try to pass laws on technology, they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what it is they're passing laws about and how it works. That never seems to stop them, though.
Ewww ... the rats, or the messages?
LOL ... as a vegetarian, and as a guy in his 40's, let me be the first to say that I've driven myself out of rooms before.
Sometimes, even your own stench is intolerable depending on what you've eaten. :-P