The writing's on the wall here, kids. H.264 is where web video is going.
Theora's a non-starter, and unless VP8 is stunning as fuck and Google indemnifies everyone and his kid brother against lawsuits, it's not going anywhere either.
And yet, using H.264 in a Free manner still remains illegal. This legal and philosophical roadblock won't go away by wishing, no matter how many people think it's cool and trendy.
I'll repeat this for those who are hard of understanding:
If you use H.264 and distribute it freely to others you are breaking the law.
Do you want to be a criminal? Or are you happy to sacrifice your freedom? Then go ahead and let the Web go H.264.
However, if you DON'T want to be a criminal, then you don't have a choice: you cannot distribute H.264. It's not about politics or posturing. It's simply illegal, because, hey, software patents.
The only way this conversation makes any kind of sense is that it seems like a generation has grown up in the last ten years who simply don't understand or respect either the concept of law or freedom.
Some people are confusing patent issues with closed-sourcedness.
This is why software freedom is a more useful term, because it doesn't just require the source to be available, but that it not contain any legal encumbrances - copyright, patent, trademark or any others - which prevent end-user modification and redistribution with the same rights as they received.
Correct, but then you'd have an 'OEM-branded Firefox-derived non-free product' which you, as an ordinary consumer, would NOT be legally allowed to download from mozilla.com and install. Because Mozilla would still not be allowed to grant you the right to distribute and install bits containing H.2.64 yourself.
these scientists did not fabricate or manipulate data in dubious ways as part of a grand conspiracy to keep funding for climate research flowing.
Who said anything about there needing to be a grand conspiracy? Isn't it bad enough that they performed non-transparent manipulations on data - and then blocked attempts at transparency - at all?
The issue for me isn't deliberate deception but the potential for self-deception and groupthink - and that academia seems to flirt heavily with operations and methods which assume that the general public has no need to know or critique work which will affect public resources.
Some of the best scientists who were also writers, who got their education in the pre-WW2 era, such as Isaac Asimov, didn't have this view. They believed that the public needed to understand what science is about and that they could be trusted with that knowledge. But today's scientists seem to often prefer to work in the dark, in small clusters, and avoid even interdisciplinary communication, believe that science naturally is split into multiple specialties and that generalism is the same thing as ignorance, and seem to believe that releasing 'trade secret' knowledge to the public is bad and scary, because who knows what that ignorant generalist public might do with the knowledge? The public might stampede! The horror! Only we specialists understand the truth! We must protect it from the knowlessmen!
This seems like a dangerously anti-democratic trend to me. In fact, it seems downright anti-scientific, frankly. It resembles more the old days of alchemy: small groups zealously guarding their secret ideas and methods.
I don't know what the solution is - the sheer volume of scientific data makes some kind of abstraction and summarising essential, and gives huge power to the gatekeepers of those abstractions - but it does seem a problem.
In the ordinary scheme of things, where science proceeds at a slow and deliberate pace, and the stakes rarely exceed ego and pride and lifetime accomplishment
Ahem.
When exactly did this golden age of slow, sober science with no real-world stakes exist? Certainly not after 1945. Are you thinking of sometime before 287 BC perhaps?
Altruism is always a disguised form of selfishness. Even anonymous donors donate because it makes them feel good.
It's not necessarily about anything as mushy as 'feeling'. They may well donate for hard-nosed rational reasons: they sincerely want to live in the kind of world their donation will bring about. That's just good strategic thinking - otherwise called 'investment'.
Not everything real can be measured by money unless your money is defined strictly in terms of real things. Even gold isn't as real as water, food and oxygen in the sense of translating directly into human happiness. What you measure, you get; if your society's money measures fleeting social popularity (exchange value), then making hard-nosed rational decisions about the true value of things will necessarily involve making decisions that, valued in transient monetary terms, seem irrational - but aren't.
Pretty much. 'Enlightened self-interest' and 'altruism' are just different words for expanding the horizon of the self.
Thinking about 'me in the future' rather than just acting on the current desires of 'me in the past' is a form of altruism, but it's usually called 'self-control' or 'good planning'. Thinking about 'me in another person's situation' is usually called empathy' but is pretty much the same thing. What goes around, comes around.
Ultimately, we're all sufficiently interconnected and interdependent and share so many critical resources (as the ecologists are starting to realise) that it's as true to say 'I am you' as it is to say 'I am me'. So self-interest is altruism, and that's where Rand fails. She thought people were strictly separated point-source singularities with absolutely zero interests in common; that's not actually true either of matter (overlapping waveforms and fields of forces is a better model), or of personality, but the connections are becoming startlingly obvious in the world of information, which does exist in multiple 'places' at once.
Now, if you're talking about string escaping, as is very popular on PHP/MYSQL stacks...well, yeah, thats swiss cheeze, dangerous, and bad practice (and unfortunately extremely popular)
So why is the obvious Wrong Way To Do It so popular? Or perhaps more to the point, why is the Right Way To Do It apparently so off-putting to developers that it doesn't get used? And is there a Better Right Way To Do It?
You have the right to upgrade no less than once every eighteen months. If you choose not to upgrade, any software on your system may be rooted by a botnet and used against you. You have the right to one help desk call...
The problem is that there are "Progressives" in BOTH parties. It's not about left/right or liberal/conservative or even Republican/Democrat.
That seems incorrect. 'Progressive' as a political label means 'having left of center tendencies'. It's basically the modern label for 'Fabian socialist' or 'social democrat' - incremental movement toward resource sharing through democratic means, as opposed to revolutionary or radical socialist, who would advocate completely disestablishing the democratic system.
Unless you take the word 'progressive' to merely mean 'anyone in favour of a vaguely defined idea of progress, such as increase of the science budget and fewer restrictions on corporate capitalism'?
With a BUSINESS, you can choose to go to a different business. One who's product more closely reflects what you want.
With a GOVERNMENT... there is only one.
Nonsense. You can always choose to move to another nation-state in exactly the same way that you can 'choose' to move to another business. That's why different nations exist in the first place. It's just that a nation is a bigger thing than a corporation by virtue of being a bigger property-owner.
And a business can (has a strong financial incentive to) prevent you from making such a move, usually by asserting ownership of 'property' - for example, a patent over an idea or copyright on a song in your head, or the house you live in (if it's rental or mortgage) . How can you escape the jurisdiction of such an entity, especially when multiple nations have harmonised property rights regimes? It might even become harder than changing citizenship. You can leave a house and job (and risk the consequences - starvation and death), but you certainly can't clear the contents of your brain.
If you think about it, rental property relations are exactly the same as the medieval landlord-peasant relationship. One entity asserts 'ownership' if not of the person, then of critical resources used by the other, and leverages that 'ownership' into forced appropriation of labour in order to 'pay their fair share' or 'fulfil the contract'.
This is why it can be said that 'property is theft'. Strong property rights, with no overriding state entity to counterbalance the claims of the strong, lend themselves very easily to exploitation of the labour of others. So true freedom would really require that no one person be able to claim 'ownership' of productive assets used by another.
Let me know when private industry gets its funding via taxation, and uses the information it gathers for more than simply increasing profit.
You mean, other than getting funding via monopoly rent of 'property', enforcing this funding using contracts (with the excuse that 'if you don't like using this idea / living on this piece of land then go elsewhere') and using the information to eliminate competitors from the marketplace? In other words, functioning exactly like a state in every respect in all the property that it has jurisdiction over, except not having to pay even lip-service to any form of democratic governance?
ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes
:O
How can a shrinkwrap restriction like that possibly be legal?
(there are free implementations of H.264, even if there are patent issues).
That's a contradiction in terms.
If a piece of software has patent issues, by definition (according to the GPL) it can't be Free if the users are not allowed to redistribute it with no further conditions.
I think you meant 'available-for-no-money-but-without-freedom'.
Re:You don't "code" HTML
on
Zen Coding
·
· Score: 1
I'd call it coding, I just wouldn't call it programming. Programming implies imparting methodical logic into something.
What about declarative and functional languages? Would writing a one-line function definition in Haskell or a Prolog rule count as 'programming' by your definition? What about writing a bunch of data blocks in Lua? Or the same ones in JSON or YAML?
Does marking up data magically become 'programming' if you write a loop or do it in an imperative language, or should we focus more on whether it's done cleanly and done right?
Re:You don't "code" HTML
on
Zen Coding
·
· Score: 1
I dunno - you look up a big telephone book of business practices, pick a cryptic utterance that matches your needs and is utterly obscure to everyone else in the industry, then tap it into a telegraphic keyboard - HTML sounds like coding to me!
Wouldn't they just back a company they knew, trusted, and had some reason to believe in, and stay with that company throughout its life? Wearing the damage if that enterprise fails? (Because everyone else will - a failed enterprise is a failed enterprise, especially if it causes social and environmental damage on the way down.)
Why does supporting causes you believe in require liquidity? Why the need to jump in and out of positions in the first place? It takes years for companies to gear up infrastructure - wouldn't it be a good thing if investors needed to show the same kind of patience and vision that founders have to have?
Making markets might minimise risk to investors by virtualising their involvement with companies - but does it minimise actual risk to the actual people involved in those companies and their operations?
hmm, or is it more like there's a big high-stakes poker game going on (the long-term investors), but then there's a secondary game of bookies and punters (the day traders) betting on the outcome of each hand? And with the ability for the high rollers to borrow funds from the bookies, and/or buy each other's hands?
But then there are syndicates among the bookies (the hedge funds) which are themselves so big that they become high rollers in themselves... they have no stake in the main game but are looking to clean up from whatever movement happens, up or down.
And then the chips they're betting with turn out to be their monthly pay cheques, and they all have starving wives and kids at home, and no matter who wins, someone's going home drunk and in a beating mood.
Day trading fixes this. Day traders don't really care about the long-term direction of the market - they make money on minor intra-day price fluctuations. Because of this, they are nearly always willing to take on and shed positions. And because there are a lot of them chasing the same tiny fluctuations, they "shrink the spread" - they're going to give you a very good price because they shrink the difference between the bid and offer (price to buy/price to sell).
So basically, at the poker table of share trading, day traders are the designated suckers?
Slashdot Mirror
The writing's on the wall here, kids. H.264 is where web video is going.
Theora's a non-starter, and unless VP8 is stunning as fuck and Google indemnifies everyone and his kid brother against lawsuits, it's not going anywhere either.
And yet, using H.264 in a Free manner still remains illegal. This legal and philosophical roadblock won't go away by wishing, no matter how many people think it's cool and trendy.
I'll repeat this for those who are hard of understanding:
If you use H.264 and distribute it freely to others you are breaking the law.
Do you want to be a criminal? Or are you happy to sacrifice your freedom? Then go ahead and let the Web go H.264.
However, if you DON'T want to be a criminal, then you don't have a choice: you cannot distribute H.264. It's not about politics or posturing. It's simply illegal, because, hey, software patents.
The only way this conversation makes any kind of sense is that it seems like a generation has grown up in the last ten years who simply don't understand or respect either the concept of law or freedom.
Some people are confusing patent issues with closed-sourcedness.
This is why software freedom is a more useful term, because it doesn't just require the source to be available, but that it not contain any legal encumbrances - copyright, patent, trademark or any others - which prevent end-user modification and redistribution with the same rights as they received.
Correct, but then you'd have an 'OEM-branded Firefox-derived non-free product' which you, as an ordinary consumer, would NOT be legally allowed to download from mozilla.com and install. Because Mozilla would still not be allowed to grant you the right to distribute and install bits containing H.2.64 yourself.
these scientists did not fabricate or manipulate data in dubious ways as part of a grand conspiracy to keep funding for climate research flowing.
Who said anything about there needing to be a grand conspiracy? Isn't it bad enough that they performed non-transparent manipulations on data - and then blocked attempts at transparency - at all?
The issue for me isn't deliberate deception but the potential for self-deception and groupthink - and that academia seems to flirt heavily with operations and methods which assume that the general public has no need to know or critique work which will affect public resources.
Some of the best scientists who were also writers, who got their education in the pre-WW2 era, such as Isaac Asimov, didn't have this view. They believed that the public needed to understand what science is about and that they could be trusted with that knowledge. But today's scientists seem to often prefer to work in the dark, in small clusters, and avoid even interdisciplinary communication, believe that science naturally is split into multiple specialties and that generalism is the same thing as ignorance, and seem to believe that releasing 'trade secret' knowledge to the public is bad and scary, because who knows what that ignorant generalist public might do with the knowledge? The public might stampede! The horror! Only we specialists understand the truth! We must protect it from the knowlessmen!
This seems like a dangerously anti-democratic trend to me. In fact, it seems downright anti-scientific, frankly. It resembles more the old days of alchemy: small groups zealously guarding their secret ideas and methods.
I don't know what the solution is - the sheer volume of scientific data makes some kind of abstraction and summarising essential, and gives huge power to the gatekeepers of those abstractions - but it does seem a problem.
In the ordinary scheme of things, where science proceeds at a slow and deliberate pace, and the stakes rarely exceed ego and pride and lifetime accomplishment
Ahem.
When exactly did this golden age of slow, sober science with no real-world stakes exist? Certainly not after 1945. Are you thinking of sometime before 287 BC perhaps?
+1, Huge
Altruism is always a disguised form of selfishness. Even anonymous donors donate because it makes them feel good.
It's not necessarily about anything as mushy as 'feeling'. They may well donate for hard-nosed rational reasons: they sincerely want to live in the kind of world their donation will bring about. That's just good strategic thinking - otherwise called 'investment'.
Not everything real can be measured by money unless your money is defined strictly in terms of real things. Even gold isn't as real as water, food and oxygen in the sense of translating directly into human happiness. What you measure, you get; if your society's money measures fleeting social popularity (exchange value), then making hard-nosed rational decisions about the true value of things will necessarily involve making decisions that, valued in transient monetary terms, seem irrational - but aren't.
Pretty much. 'Enlightened self-interest' and 'altruism' are just different words for expanding the horizon of the self.
Thinking about 'me in the future' rather than just acting on the current desires of 'me in the past' is a form of altruism, but it's usually called 'self-control' or 'good planning'. Thinking about 'me in another person's situation' is usually called empathy' but is pretty much the same thing. What goes around, comes around.
Ultimately, we're all sufficiently interconnected and interdependent and share so many critical resources (as the ecologists are starting to realise) that it's as true to say 'I am you' as it is to say 'I am me'. So self-interest is altruism, and that's where Rand fails. She thought people were strictly separated point-source singularities with absolutely zero interests in common; that's not actually true either of matter (overlapping waveforms and fields of forces is a better model), or of personality, but the connections are becoming startlingly obvious in the world of information, which does exist in multiple 'places' at once.
Now, if you're talking about string escaping, as is very popular on PHP/MYSQL stacks...well, yeah, thats swiss cheeze, dangerous, and bad practice (and unfortunately extremely popular)
So why is the obvious Wrong Way To Do It so popular? Or perhaps more to the point, why is the Right Way To Do It apparently so off-putting to developers that it doesn't get used? And is there a Better Right Way To Do It?
So that's why aliens keep invading Earth: to get the latest Windows patches!
I prefer ecostereoics myself.
Tell that to the Moore Police, punk.
You have the right to upgrade no less than once every eighteen months.
If you choose not to upgrade, any software on your system may be rooted by a botnet and used against you.
You have the right to one help desk call...
The problem is that there are "Progressives" in BOTH parties. It's not about left/right or liberal/conservative or even Republican/Democrat.
That seems incorrect. 'Progressive' as a political label means 'having left of center tendencies'. It's basically the modern label for 'Fabian socialist' or 'social democrat' - incremental movement toward resource sharing through democratic means, as opposed to revolutionary or radical socialist, who would advocate completely disestablishing the democratic system.
Unless you take the word 'progressive' to merely mean 'anyone in favour of a vaguely defined idea of progress, such as increase of the science budget and fewer restrictions on corporate capitalism'?
With a BUSINESS, you can choose to go to a different business. One who's product more closely reflects what you want.
With a GOVERNMENT ... there is only one.
Nonsense. You can always choose to move to another nation-state in exactly the same way that you can 'choose' to move to another business. That's why different nations exist in the first place. It's just that a nation is a bigger thing than a corporation by virtue of being a bigger property-owner.
And a business can (has a strong financial incentive to) prevent you from making such a move, usually by asserting ownership of 'property' - for example, a patent over an idea or copyright on a song in your head, or the house you live in (if it's rental or mortgage) . How can you escape the jurisdiction of such an entity, especially when multiple nations have harmonised property rights regimes? It might even become harder than changing citizenship. You can leave a house and job (and risk the consequences - starvation and death), but you certainly can't clear the contents of your brain.
If you think about it, rental property relations are exactly the same as the medieval landlord-peasant relationship. One entity asserts 'ownership' if not of the person, then of critical resources used by the other, and leverages that 'ownership' into forced appropriation of labour in order to 'pay their fair share' or 'fulfil the contract'.
This is why it can be said that 'property is theft'. Strong property rights, with no overriding state entity to counterbalance the claims of the strong, lend themselves very easily to exploitation of the labour of others. So true freedom would really require that no one person be able to claim 'ownership' of productive assets used by another.
Let me know when private industry gets its funding via taxation, and uses the information it gathers for more than simply increasing profit.
You mean, other than getting funding via monopoly rent of 'property', enforcing this funding using contracts (with the excuse that 'if you don't like using this idea / living on this piece of land then go elsewhere') and using the information to eliminate competitors from the marketplace? In other words, functioning exactly like a state in every respect in all the property that it has jurisdiction over, except not having to pay even lip-service to any form of democratic governance?
It's not "knee-jerk" because the government has a monopoly on force.
And life is so much better when we have a vibrant free market of force actively negotiating turf boundaries every day in the street.
ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes
:O
How can a shrinkwrap restriction like that possibly be legal?
Test case coming up, methinks?
(there are free implementations of H.264, even if there are patent issues).
That's a contradiction in terms.
If a piece of software has patent issues, by definition (according to the GPL) it can't be Free if the users are not allowed to redistribute it with no further conditions.
I think you meant 'available-for-no-money-but-without-freedom'.
I'd call it coding, I just wouldn't call it programming. Programming implies imparting methodical logic into something.
What about declarative and functional languages? Would writing a one-line function definition in Haskell or a Prolog rule count as 'programming' by your definition? What about writing a bunch of data blocks in Lua? Or the same ones in JSON or YAML?
Does marking up data magically become 'programming' if you write a loop or do it in an imperative language, or should we focus more on whether it's done cleanly and done right?
I dunno - you look up a big telephone book of business practices, pick a cryptic utterance that matches your needs and is utterly obscure to everyone else in the industry, then tap it into a telegraphic keyboard - HTML sounds like coding to me!
Mmm, stack underflow.
Sounds like a crispy crackling burning noise.
Wouldn't they just back a company they knew, trusted, and had some reason to believe in, and stay with that company throughout its life? Wearing the damage if that enterprise fails? (Because everyone else will - a failed enterprise is a failed enterprise, especially if it causes social and environmental damage on the way down.)
Why does supporting causes you believe in require liquidity? Why the need to jump in and out of positions in the first place? It takes years for companies to gear up infrastructure - wouldn't it be a good thing if investors needed to show the same kind of patience and vision that founders have to have?
Making markets might minimise risk to investors by virtualising their involvement with companies - but does it minimise actual risk to the actual people involved in those companies and their operations?
hmm, or is it more like there's a big high-stakes poker game going on (the long-term investors), but then there's a secondary game of bookies and punters (the day traders) betting on the outcome of each hand? And with the ability for the high rollers to borrow funds from the bookies, and/or buy each other's hands?
But then there are syndicates among the bookies (the hedge funds) which are themselves so big that they become high rollers in themselves... they have no stake in the main game but are looking to clean up from whatever movement happens, up or down.
And then the chips they're betting with turn out to be their monthly pay cheques, and they all have starving wives and kids at home, and no matter who wins, someone's going home drunk and in a beating mood.
Day trading fixes this. Day traders don't really care about the long-term direction of the market - they make money on minor intra-day price fluctuations. Because of this, they are nearly always willing to take on and shed positions. And because there are a lot of them chasing the same tiny fluctuations, they "shrink the spread" - they're going to give you a very good price because they shrink the difference between the bid and offer (price to buy/price to sell).
So basically, at the poker table of share trading, day traders are the designated suckers?
Because the money you mention never really existed.
If something doesn't exist, how come it has an effect, either good or bad, on the real world of goods and services?