And uses this service to offer: 1.Movies and TV not currently proffitable to offer on DVD (because not enough people would buy it to cover the production, marketing and distribution) and 2.Movies and TV available on DVD but has such a limited distribution because no stores want to carry it.
One of the problems with standards in web design is the number of PHBs etc that say "this has to work in IE 5.x" which means all the stuff MS did in IE 6 towards standards is meaningless.
The right solution is to implement a group policy setting that can be applied by admins (the very admins that are complaining about this feature) which disables the feature completly.
The GPL v3 does not exclude DRM, what it basicly says is that someone releasing code under GPL v3 is aggreeing not to sue under DMCA or similar laws if someone takes the GPL v3 code and figures out how it works (e.g. protected media content).
If not, it should. It would finally put an end to annoying popups/ads (well annoying until you add them to the blocklists:) from companies like www.888.com.
And, unlike the casinos which are generally located in foriegn countries, the advertising providers are generally US based and therefore subject to US laws.
Another option is to modify the phone to re-enable the disabled features. Motorolas in particular are good for this, you can often find "SEEM" edits that re-enable disabled features. Or you can sometimes find (and load on) a "generic" firmware image that will remove all the carrier specific stuff. Even for CDMA phones you can often find such modifications.
Bear in mind that making such changes to the phone will probobly void the warranty and may violate aggreements with carriers.
Basicly, my real point is that ISPs are facing problems because high bandwidth users are downloading a lot more than they are paying for and ISPs see discriminating based on port, protocol and/or network (i.e. charge google more) as the solution when the right solution is to find a way (doesnt much matter how) to make the high bandwidth users pay more for their internet. As for competition, most people are stuck with either one cable provider or one DSL provider with maybe a provider like verizon offering fibre as well. If Verizon increased prices for its DSL and fiber somehow to make high bandwidth users pay (whilst not making normal users pay), normal users would probobly not care (since normal users wouldnt have to pay any more) and high bandwidth users would either pay up or move to someone else (either way, it solves the problem of the high bandwidth users not paying their way without the need to penalize any particular protocol, port or destination.
Another alternative would be to do what the ISP I am with here in australia does. I get 20GB a month download quota and if I ecxeed it, I get throttled back to 64kbps speed untill the end of the month.
What I am really saying is that US ISPs are finding out that they cant offer "unlimited" and get away with it because of all the p2p users etc. And so they want to solve it by blocking or throttling p2p and other things when the better solution is a user pays model which means that the people who are downloading from bittorrent/p2p/etc 24/7 pay more for their internet than people who use it less. Dont discriminate on the content, protocols, ports or networks. Discriminate based on the customer and make the bandwidth hogs pay more (or make them get throttled back if they use too much bandwidth).
What I think US ISPs should do
on
Own the Last Mile
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If the companies that own the copper, coax and fibre were to change the way they operate, they could continue to make globs of money AND do better for the customer (better yet, they can make MORE money from the bandwidth hogs downloading over bittorrent)
Here is my 5 step plan: 1.Stop selling/advertising "Unlimited" bandwidth. 2.Give customers a limited amount of bandwidth per month. Once that has been exceeded, they have to pay $x per gig or part thereof over the limit. (which means the bandwidth hogs pay more). Make sure that the monthly fee, the bandwidth you get for that fee and the extra charges are clearly spelt out in the terms of service. 3.Give customers a full open internet. Do not give preferential treatement to (or conversly, limit/throttle) any ports, protocols or networks/machines except where necessary to maintain network security/integrity (e.g. blocking mailservers running on residential DSL/cable/fibre accounts to prevent spam zombies). Do not restrict the running of servers unless necessary to maintain network security/integrity. 4.Make a full range of extra options available and dont make them expensive. Static IPs should be available to ALL customers (including those on "residental" connections) and should be in a different network block to the normal pool of residential dynamic IP addresses. (if they cost a little extra, thats perfectly ok). Also, it should be possible to "pre purchase" extra bandwitdh for a per-gig price that is lower than what you would get charged at the end of the month (so if you are doing a really big file download such as a linux ISO and you think it will push you over the limit, prepurchase the bandwidth to save money). If you dont use the prepurchased bandwidth, it would be forfited at the end of the month. and 5.Be honest to your customers. (not like all the cable companies etc that will cut you off or cut your speed if you exceed a certain amount of bandwidth but wont tell you what that amount is or how much you have used already)
If US ISPs followed this plan, the bandwidth hogs that download TV shows, movies, XBOX/PS2/PC ISOZ, linux ISOs or whatever else would pay extra whilst the normal users who dont download large stuff wouldnt be subsidising the heavy users anymore.
Of course, this will never happen. Why? Because for the ISPs, its NOT about money, its about CONTROL. One of the things that makes the internet great is that anyone can publish their own origonal content. The internet can be used by garage bands and amatuer film makers everwhere as a way to disseminate their work and get it seen. The internet can be used by bloggers and others to post their own options even if those opinions conflict with the "collective groupthink". The internet can be used by programmers to post and share free code, free software and free ideas.
This is what those in power want to stop. If the ISPs implement tiered internet, you can bet they will use it to make the big guys bigger and the small guys smaller.
Search engines like MSN will be in the high tier and engines like google will be in the low tier. Microsoft.com will be in the high tier whereas sourceforge.net and gnu.org will be in the low tier. Sites like nytimes.com, news.com.au, cnn.com, foxnews.com and abcnews.com will be in the high tier while sites that dont follow the "groupthink" such as news.bbc.co.uk or slashdot.org will be in the low tier. Sites like geocities.com (with all the restrictions like a ban on posting any audio file even if you can prove you own the copyright) will be in the high tier whereas sites that give you hosting without the restrictions (paid or free) will be in the low tier. And so on.
Now is the time to rise up and fight the large ISPs to keep the internet open. Fight the push to turn normal people into consumers with no abillity to publish their origonal content. Fight the push to tell us what we can and cant watch on our TVs. Fight the push to tell us what software we can run on our computers. Fight the push by the big media co
Adding any kind of smarts to a gun is bad
on
Encrypted Ammunition?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Adding any kind of smarts, computers or eletronics to the firing path of a gun (including any kind of "authorized user" checking) is bad. The parts of a gun required to fire are all mechanical and most guns are (or at least should be) built so that the number of parts which can fail and prevent the gun from firing is as few as possible.
Adding things like "encrypted bullets" or judge-dredd like DNA checks for authorized users just makes it less likely that the gun is going to fire when it needs to.
I expect that, like Orrin Hatch (I think), this senator is being picked not because he has constituants in his electorate that will benifit but because he is someone who has such a stable position (i.e. there are so many people who aggree with his views on stuff like abortion, gay marrage or whatever else that there is little chance he will get voted out so he doesnt need to care about his other constituants and can do whatever will get him the most bribes)
FYI, i-mode was invented by NTT DoCoMo and is aparently HUGE in Japan (as is all the "3G" stuff like video calls and such). But then again, the japanese always get the cool technology first:)
I do aggree though that i-mode is a piece of crap:)
The problem is that the average bandwidth per customer of these ISPs is going up (because they are downloading more). The solution is to increase costs. ISPs should stop offering "Unlimited" and start adding either bandwidth limits (use more than that and you get a bill at the end of the month) or traffic shaping (I dont mean discriminating by protocol, I mean that you get full speed on all protocols untill you have used a certain amount of bandwidth then you go down to a slower speed on all protocols, my ISP here in australia uses 64k with a 20gb bandwidth limit on a 512k connection) ISPs over there have enough of a monopoly (most people can only get cable from one company and DSL from another) that they could impose these sort of changes without loosing customers. (since their competitor is imposing them too)
The telcos claim people are using more bandwidth, right.
Instead of this whole "tiered internet" crap where things like YouTube and Google Video get hit, why not take the logical step and either increase costs (to cover the fact that the average bandwidth use per customer has gone up) or better yet, stop offering truely unlimited accounts.
Most ISPs here in australia offer either unlimited downloads but shaped back to slow speed after a certain amount (in my case I get shaped back to 64k after 20gb of download) or they offer "pay as you go" downloads where you get a certain amount per month included in your monthly fee and anything above that costs money.
Of course, the telcos wont do this because "tiered internet" is not about money, its about control. The telcos want to use it to shut out all the things they (and their friends the media companies) dont like. This means BitTorrent and other P2P methods. This means VoIP (at least the kind that doesnt generate revenue for the Telcos anyway). This means people who run their own web/email/ssh/ftp/half-life/cvs servers from a home connection. This means people sharing content (not just illegal content but content that, whilst legal, is not distributed through a **AA approved distribution channel)
Common sense says that the best way to get a company to change their behaviour is to get enough of their customers to complain about said behaviour. Unfortunatly, most US telcos (like many really big companies) are now in a position where they consider themselves so large that they can do whatever will increase their profits and to hell with their customers.
The answer is to press harder for co-operatives and other alternatives. And to switch from the encumbants to existing alternatives like Covad/Speakeasy/etc when they exist (how will this "tiered internet" crap affect them?). And to continue the fight in washington (although the US political system is so screwed up these days that the things that worked in the past to get things done on capitol hill (people power etc) would probably either be totally useless, get you locked up under anti-terror laws or both).
I believe GSM (and by extention UMTS 3G which is based on GSM) features encryption for over-the-air voice traffic. How strong it is (and whether "The Man" can listen in by plugging into the base station) I dont know.
Hollywood needs to offer movies & TV shows for download. They need to be: 1.Available (one big reason people pirate, especially for TV shows, is because they cant watch it legally). This includes making stuff that is not currently cost-effective to put onto DVD and distributing and marketing and etc available (the costs of putting all those old TV shows that you just cant get anymore onto an online download service would probobly be negligable other than the inital one-off cost to digitize the shows into a digital master format) 2.Cheap (how cheap depends on how they compare quality/features/extras/etc wise to buying the DVD). Especially what is needed is the abillity to buy single episodes of a TV show (but by the same token, buying a whole season or the whole series should be cheaper than buying each episode seperatly) 3.Non-restrictive (This doesnt necessarily mean DRM free, what it does mean is that it has to be something one can burn onto a DVD or load over a network link or something and watch in full quality on the big expensive home theater setups and NOT something limited to watching on your PC (or iPod for that matter) 4.World-wide (making it US only wont help all the people in other parts of the world downloading from BitTorrent because they cant get the content locally) and 5.Free of crap. If its ad-supported, it better be free (or very close to it). If it costs money, it should be free of ads, anti-piracy messages, anti-fast-forward locks etc etc.
I havent read the details yet but I dont think this is intended to be a competitor to PNG at all. For photos (and in fact anything that is captured via a camera, scanner or other device like that), PNG is NOT the right format to use. JPEG is. It appears as though this is an attempt by Microsoft to replace the use of JPEG in photographic applications (those where people arent using camera RAW data files anyway) with a new "Windows Media Photo" format.
I fail to see what makes this format any better that JPEG.
Video games have been a "target" of the "thought police" (as it were) ever since the days when a video game was a large wooden cabinet that you needed to put 20c into in order to play.
And even before that, electromechanical and mechanical machines of amusment were targets (Pinball was a big target for years).
I grew up playing games on the Nintendo and on PC (including Doom and C&C) and I am perfectly normal. Oh wait, no-one who posts to slashdot can be perfectly normal:)
Slashdot Mirror
And uses this service to offer:
1.Movies and TV not currently proffitable to offer on DVD (because not enough people would buy it to cover the production, marketing and distribution)
and 2.Movies and TV available on DVD but has such a limited distribution because no stores want to carry it.
One of the problems with standards in web design is the number of PHBs etc that say "this has to work in IE 5.x" which means all the stuff MS did in IE 6 towards standards is meaningless.
The right solution is to implement a group policy setting that can be applied by admins (the very admins that are complaining about this feature) which disables the feature completly.
The GPL v3 does not exclude DRM, what it basicly says is that someone releasing code under GPL v3 is aggreeing not to sue under DMCA or similar laws if someone takes the GPL v3 code and figures out how it works (e.g. protected media content).
If not, it should. It would finally put an end to annoying popups/ads (well annoying until you add them to the blocklists :) from companies like www.888.com.
And, unlike the casinos which are generally located in foriegn countries, the advertising providers are generally US based and therefore subject to US laws.
Another option is to modify the phone to re-enable the disabled features.
Motorolas in particular are good for this, you can often find "SEEM" edits that re-enable disabled features.
Or you can sometimes find (and load on) a "generic" firmware image that will remove all the carrier specific stuff.
Even for CDMA phones you can often find such modifications.
Bear in mind that making such changes to the phone will probobly void the warranty and may violate aggreements with carriers.
I wish someone would make a peer-to-peer file sharing program that is just as hard to block.
Basicly, my real point is that ISPs are facing problems because high bandwidth users are downloading a lot more than they are paying for and ISPs see discriminating based on port, protocol and/or network (i.e. charge google more) as the solution when the right solution is to find a way (doesnt much matter how) to make the high bandwidth users pay more for their internet.
As for competition, most people are stuck with either one cable provider or one DSL provider with maybe a provider like verizon offering fibre as well. If Verizon increased prices for its DSL and fiber somehow to make high bandwidth users pay (whilst not making normal users pay), normal users would probobly not care (since normal users wouldnt have to pay any more) and high bandwidth users would either pay up or move to someone else (either way, it solves the problem of the high bandwidth users not paying their way without the need to penalize any particular protocol, port or destination.
Another alternative would be to do what the ISP I am with here in australia does.
I get 20GB a month download quota and if I ecxeed it, I get throttled back to 64kbps speed untill the end of the month.
What I am really saying is that US ISPs are finding out that they cant offer "unlimited" and get away with it because of all the p2p users etc. And so they want to solve it by blocking or throttling p2p and other things when the better solution is a user pays model which means that the people who are downloading from bittorrent/p2p/etc 24/7 pay more for their internet than people who use it less.
Dont discriminate on the content, protocols, ports or networks. Discriminate based on the customer and make the bandwidth hogs pay more (or make them get throttled back if they use too much bandwidth).
If the companies that own the copper, coax and fibre were to change the way they operate, they could continue to make globs of money AND do better for the customer (better yet, they can make MORE money from the bandwidth hogs downloading over bittorrent)
Here is my 5 step plan:
1.Stop selling/advertising "Unlimited" bandwidth.
2.Give customers a limited amount of bandwidth per month. Once that has been exceeded, they have to pay $x per gig or part thereof over the limit. (which means the bandwidth hogs pay more). Make sure that the monthly fee, the bandwidth you get for that fee and the extra charges are clearly spelt out in the terms of service.
3.Give customers a full open internet. Do not give preferential treatement to (or conversly, limit/throttle) any ports, protocols or networks/machines except where necessary to maintain network security/integrity (e.g. blocking mailservers running on residential DSL/cable/fibre accounts to prevent spam zombies). Do not restrict the running of servers unless necessary to maintain network security/integrity.
4.Make a full range of extra options available and dont make them expensive. Static IPs should be available to ALL customers (including those on "residental" connections) and should be in a different network block to the normal pool of residential dynamic IP addresses. (if they cost a little extra, thats perfectly ok). Also, it should be possible to "pre purchase" extra bandwitdh for a per-gig price that is lower than what you would get charged at the end of the month (so if you are doing a really big file download such as a linux ISO and you think it will push you over the limit, prepurchase the bandwidth to save money). If you dont use the prepurchased bandwidth, it would be forfited at the end of the month.
and 5.Be honest to your customers. (not like all the cable companies etc that will cut you off or cut your speed if you exceed a certain amount of bandwidth but wont tell you what that amount is or how much you have used already)
If US ISPs followed this plan, the bandwidth hogs that download TV shows, movies, XBOX/PS2/PC ISOZ, linux ISOs or whatever else would pay extra whilst the normal users who dont download large stuff wouldnt be subsidising the heavy users anymore.
Of course, this will never happen. Why? Because for the ISPs, its NOT about money, its about CONTROL. One of the things that makes the internet great is that anyone can publish their own origonal content. The internet can be used by garage bands and amatuer film makers everwhere as a way to disseminate their work and get it seen. The internet can be used by bloggers and others to post their own options even if those opinions conflict with the "collective groupthink". The internet can be used by programmers to post and share free code, free software and free ideas.
This is what those in power want to stop. If the ISPs implement tiered internet, you can bet they will use it to make the big guys bigger and the small guys smaller.
Search engines like MSN will be in the high tier and engines like google will be in the low tier. Microsoft.com will be in the high tier whereas sourceforge.net and gnu.org will be in the low tier. Sites like nytimes.com, news.com.au, cnn.com, foxnews.com and abcnews.com will be in the high tier while sites that dont follow the "groupthink" such as news.bbc.co.uk or slashdot.org will be in the low tier. Sites like geocities.com (with all the restrictions like a ban on posting any audio file even if you can prove you own the copyright) will be in the high tier whereas sites that give you hosting without the restrictions (paid or free) will be in the low tier.
And so on.
Now is the time to rise up and fight the large ISPs to keep the internet open.
Fight the push to turn normal people into consumers with no abillity to publish their origonal content. Fight the push to tell us what we can and cant watch on our TVs.
Fight the push to tell us what software we can run on our computers.
Fight the push by the big media co
Adding any kind of smarts, computers or eletronics to the firing path of a gun (including any kind of "authorized user" checking) is bad.
The parts of a gun required to fire are all mechanical and most guns are (or at least should be) built so that the number of parts which can fail and prevent the gun from firing is as few as possible.
Adding things like "encrypted bullets" or judge-dredd like DNA checks for authorized users just makes it less likely that the gun is going to fire when it needs to.
Here in australia, there are bars and other alcohol venues on campus at the unis too (at least the ones I know of)
I expect that, like Orrin Hatch (I think), this senator is being picked not because he has constituants in his electorate that will benifit but because he is someone who has such a stable position (i.e. there are so many people who aggree with his views on stuff like abortion, gay marrage or whatever else that there is little chance he will get voted out so he doesnt need to care about his other constituants and can do whatever will get him the most bribes)
FYI, i-mode was invented by NTT DoCoMo and is aparently HUGE in Japan (as is all the "3G" stuff like video calls and such). :)
:)
But then again, the japanese always get the cool technology first
I do aggree though that i-mode is a piece of crap
The problem is that the average bandwidth per customer of these ISPs is going up (because they are downloading more).
The solution is to increase costs. ISPs should stop offering "Unlimited" and start adding either bandwidth limits (use more than that and you get a bill at the end of the month) or traffic shaping (I dont mean discriminating by protocol, I mean that you get full speed on all protocols untill you have used a certain amount of bandwidth then you go down to a slower speed on all protocols, my ISP here in australia uses 64k with a 20gb bandwidth limit on a 512k connection)
ISPs over there have enough of a monopoly (most people can only get cable from one company and DSL from another) that they could impose these sort of changes without loosing customers. (since their competitor is imposing them too)
Can someone tell me what powers this is intended to give that arent already present in copyright law as it stands?
The telcos claim people are using more bandwidth, right.
Instead of this whole "tiered internet" crap where things like YouTube and Google Video get hit, why not take the logical step and either increase costs (to cover the fact that the average bandwidth use per customer has gone up) or better yet, stop offering truely unlimited accounts.
Most ISPs here in australia offer either unlimited downloads but shaped back to slow speed after a certain amount (in my case I get shaped back to 64k after 20gb of download) or they offer "pay as you go" downloads where you get a certain amount per month included in your monthly fee and anything above that costs money.
Of course, the telcos wont do this because "tiered internet" is not about money, its about control. The telcos want to use it to shut out all the things they (and their friends the media companies) dont like. This means BitTorrent and other P2P methods. This means VoIP (at least the kind that doesnt generate revenue for the Telcos anyway). This means people who run their own web/email/ssh/ftp/half-life/cvs servers from a home connection. This means people sharing content (not just illegal content but content that, whilst legal, is not distributed through a **AA approved distribution channel)
Common sense says that the best way to get a company to change their behaviour is to get enough of their customers to complain about said behaviour. Unfortunatly, most US telcos (like many really big companies) are now in a position where they consider themselves so large that they can do whatever will increase their profits and to hell with their customers.
The answer is to press harder for co-operatives and other alternatives.
And to switch from the encumbants to existing alternatives like Covad/Speakeasy/etc when they exist (how will this "tiered internet" crap affect them?).
And to continue the fight in washington (although the US political system is so screwed up these days that the things that worked in the past to get things done on capitol hill (people power etc) would probably either be totally useless, get you locked up under anti-terror laws or both).
Isnt that what Branson is doing with Virgin Galactic, offering that kind of flight?
And using technology he got from Scaled Composites too (IIRC)
Does ReactOS imlpement the needed APIs yet?
I believe GSM (and by extention UMTS 3G which is based on GSM) features encryption for over-the-air voice traffic. How strong it is (and whether "The Man" can listen in by plugging into the base station) I dont know.
Hollywood needs to offer movies & TV shows for download.
They need to be:
1.Available (one big reason people pirate, especially for TV shows, is because they cant watch it legally). This includes making stuff that is not currently cost-effective to put onto DVD and distributing and marketing and etc available (the costs of putting all those old TV shows that you just cant get anymore onto an online download service would probobly be negligable other than the inital one-off cost to digitize the shows into a digital master format)
2.Cheap (how cheap depends on how they compare quality/features/extras/etc wise to buying the DVD). Especially what is needed is the abillity to buy single episodes of a TV show (but by the same token, buying a whole season or the whole series should be cheaper than buying each episode seperatly)
3.Non-restrictive (This doesnt necessarily mean DRM free, what it does mean is that it has to be something one can burn onto a DVD or load over a network link or something and watch in full quality on the big expensive home theater setups and NOT something limited to watching on your PC (or iPod for that matter)
4.World-wide (making it US only wont help all the people in other parts of the world downloading from BitTorrent because they cant get the content locally)
and 5.Free of crap. If its ad-supported, it better be free (or very close to it). If it costs money, it should be free of ads, anti-piracy messages, anti-fast-forward locks etc etc.
I havent read the details yet but I dont think this is intended to be a competitor to PNG at all.
For photos (and in fact anything that is captured via a camera, scanner or other device like that), PNG is NOT the right format to use. JPEG is.
It appears as though this is an attempt by Microsoft to replace the use of JPEG in photographic applications (those where people arent using camera RAW data files anyway) with a new "Windows Media Photo" format.
I fail to see what makes this format any better that JPEG.
Video games have been a "target" of the "thought police" (as it were) ever since the days when a video game was a large wooden cabinet that you needed to put 20c into in order to play.
:)
And even before that, electromechanical and mechanical machines of amusment were targets (Pinball was a big target for years).
I grew up playing games on the Nintendo and on PC (including Doom and C&C) and I am perfectly normal. Oh wait, no-one who posts to slashdot can be perfectly normal
Think about how much money Blockbuster makes from rentals of PS2 games. They arent going to give up that revenue stream.
Most modern Motorolas can do multiple bands (either tri-band or quad-band depending on the market)