If the US and UK hadn't intervened and overthrown the democratically elected government of Iran just because said government decided it was going to kick out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (one of the ancestors of the modern BP oil company) and take full control over Iranian oil, its likely that Iran would have continued as a democratic constitutional monarchy instead of becoming the strict Muslim state it is today.
How do you determine what is an orphan work? (and who gets to make that determination?) I bet Warner or Fox or MGM or Sony or EMI or Universal or Electronic Arts or Disney or any other major entity with a large body of work will have all kinds of things they own the copyright to but dont even know they own. (including all the stuff they may have picked up through acquisitions and mergers)
If I needed to do that, I would look things up with either Google or with the online Yellow Pages set, both of which are likely to be more up-to-date than any dead tree edition.
Around here (Perth, Australia) I see ads for "junior" positions where they want 1-2 years experience in ASP.NET or J2EE or Oracle or whatever it is and so far its proving impossible for someone like me with no experience to get a job in software development.
I wish Telstra would stop dumping the phone books on my doorstep, especially the Yellow Pages. But Telstra still makes too much money from Yellow Pages ads for that to happen.
You cant "buy" MPEGLA. The patents that are part of the H.264 patent pool are held by a diverse range of entities including Apple, Microsoft, LG, Phillips, Cisco, Columbia University, Daewoo Electronics, Dolby, Fraunhofer, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and others.
Actually, a big reason Microsoft and Apple wont touch VP8 is that they hold H.264 patents and are members of the H.264 patent pool and that because of the extremely broad patent grant attached to VP8, supporting it would mean giving up the rights to use their patents as part of a future VP8 patent pool and extract money from those who ARE using VP8.
Oh yeah one more thing, bring back (or improve) creative subjects like Music, Art, Performing Arts, Woodwork/Metalwork/Design, Auto Shop and others where kids actually get to exercise the creative half of the brain.
1.Eliminate seniority pay and tenure for teachers and make it easier to fire those teachers who are clearly doing a bad job. Pay new teachers more to encourage new teachers who are genuinely interested in teaching to join the profession.
2.Eliminate "no child left behind" and have a culture where teachers CAN and DO issue fails to those students who dont understand the work. And yes, hold students back if that's what it takes. This includes students who fail in class but are allowed to keep going anyway because they happen to be good at Basketball or Football or some other sport.
3.Eliminate standardized tests as a way of measuring student performance or setting school funding.
4.Make it easier for those kids who dont want to go to college but go to a trade school or something similar instead
5.Rewrite curricula to be more than just memorization of facts.
Make the science curriculum fun again and bring back actual experiments the kids can do (and not just classes where the kids watch the science teacher do something and make notes on it)
Make the social science curriculum more than just memorization of facts and find ways to show more.
In math, come up with real world examples (in the textbooks etc) kids can relate to and show kids that yes they will use it in the real world
In English, bring in more creative writing
In general though, we should be encouraging creativity and most importantly we need to have kids that aren't afraid to ask why something is the way that it is and to question the world instead of just accepting what they are told.
6.Get rid of all the soft drinks, chocolate bars, chips, deep fried gunk and other unhealthy food from the schools. Start offering healthier food to students (and yes there ARE ways to offer healthy food that students will eat AND that don't cost too much per serve). Start by removing ALL the vending machines selling all those empty calories.
7.Find ways to make P.E. fun AND provide exercise at the same time (and make sure EVERY student is getting good exercise as part of their school week, not just those that are good enough to be on one of the top sports teams).
8.Introduce some new subjects to schools, particularly health education (which would include education on how to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle as well as why tobacco and other drugs are bad for you) and financial education (which would include teaching kids about budgets and saving and that credit cards and loans are NOT free money and how much they will end up paying back on those loans)
I am with TPG mobile (and bought my last phone, a Nokia N900, outright from a 3rd party). I pay $19.99 per month (actually $14.99 because I have ADSL internet with TPG) and get $300 of value that I can use towards voice, data, SMS and MMS and some other things. I also get 1000 minutes per month to use on calls to other mobiles on the same carrier between 8pm and midnight and 1GB of data included.
The only things I cant use my cap on is: International Calls Premium rate numbers and premium rate SMS Premium content and international roaming.
The costs I pay (which come out of my cap until the cap is run out then I just pay on top of that) 40c per 30 seconds with 35c flagfall for voice calls (landline and mobile) 25.3c for a SMS 50c for MMS 0.2c for 10KB of data (once I use up my free 1gb of data that is)
Plus various rates for international calls, SMS and MMS and some other things like voicemail and call connect.
The carrier is a reseller for the Optus network (second largest in terms of coverage) which supports GSM on 900/1800 and UMTS on 900/2100 and TPG will let me use any phone that supports those frequencies that isn't locked to another carrier (including an unlocked iPhone) They dont care if I use my data (be it my included 1GB, my included cap value or otherwise) for tethering.
The only people who believe that drinking soda containing sugar is worse for you than drinking the same soda containing HFCS are those people who have some kind of tie to the corn industry.
Its not just Californians who are affected by the stupid crap California does. One good example is the California Air Resources Board. Because they insist on such strict emissions standards, especially on diesel engines (far stricter than is the norm in most of the world) and because car makers generally wont sell cars in the US that don't meet CARB rules (since they want to sell their cars in California), the US misses out on many of the cool cars that exist in Europe (especially the diesels)
Now I am not saying that if CARB disappeared, all these cars would magically come to the USA. But I bet if the CARB rules didn't exist, lots of car markers would be more inclined to re-consider bringing these cars stateside.
The problem with VR was and still is the fact that your eyes and ears are telling you that you are moving forward but other parts of your body (especially the balance organs in your ear) are telling you you are not. This screws up your brain in various ways and leads to headaches and other things IIRC (I am not an expert so I dont know exactly what symptoms it causes)
It may not be perfect but the new GTA04 hardware is the closest thing you can get to a truly open phone. Right now you need to obtain a case yourself from a GTA02 phone as they dont have a way to produce cases cheaply enough (there are people working on ways to order cases from 3d printing services though).
You get full schematics for the hardware (including a board layout diagram). The only closed source user-space bits that exist are 3D drivers for the GPU (which are only required if you need 3D) and a binary firmware that's downloaded to the WiFi chip (and there are efforts to write a free replacement for that AFAIK). The cellular modem module is supported by open source software such as oFono.
Due to the regulations surrounding WiFi, cellular standards like GSM and UMTS, bluetooth and other radio transmitters (and in the case of the cellular standards, the secret/proprietary nature of some parts of the standards like the crypto), its unlikely you will see any company release a device that talks those frequencies with no closed software at all. Same with GPS where restrictions exist on what civilian GPS receivers are allowed to do and where the details of the GPS protocol are only available if the manufacturer is willing to follow the rules (mostly concerned with making sure civilian GPS devices cant be built or re-purposed in a way that would allow their use on ICBMs and other missiles)
Given the success of the open source noveau drivers for the nvidia GPUs, I see no reason why a similar project to reverse engineer e.g. PowerVR GPUs or Qualcomm Adreno GPUs could not succeed in the same way.
If I had the skills required, I would have a go at that myself for the PowerVR GPU in my Nokia N900 but I dont have the skills necessary to reverse engineer ARM software (especially ARM drivers)
A good example of Apple doing less contribution back to the open source community is with GCC where Apple is not allowing mainline GCC to use a lot of their apple-specific changes (some of those changes are things mainline GCC wouldn't want anyway but that should be up to mainline GCC developers to decide and not Apple)
Although these days they are moving towards clang and LLVM instead of GCC (whether that's because clang/LLVM are better than GCC, whether its because its easier to work on/maintain/improve or for some other reason I dont know)
At least Google is better than the Nokia Maps app on my Nokia N900.
If there was an OpenStreetMap app for the N900 that I could load up with the entire OSM dataset for my city (Perth, Australia) and then load up with a diff file every so often and that wouldn't suck up my bandwidth or require fast data speeds, I would switch. But I haven't found one yet:( (bonus would be if someone made an app that could use Google Transit GTFS feed data)
1.If they price the digital copies too far below the print copies (or more specifically, too far below the RRP of the print copies), retailers who stock the print copies will complain and may buy less print copies (which then feeds into the up-front costs of a production run for the print books and increases the costs for the publisher of the print run) 2.A desire to use price as a marketing tool (i.e. certain books cost more or cost less in order to influence peoples purchasing habits towards certain titles) 3.A desire to stop e-booksellers from engaging in price wars to try and gain market share (although neither Apple nor Amazon seems interested in open competition or a price war anyway since both bookstores have policies prohibiting the sale of the same title cheaper on another store)
Its not just chemistry and the war on drugs, go ask model rocketry hobbyists how its getting harder to engage in their hobby because the things used to fuel their rockets are considered "explosives" by the US government (even though these fuels are specifically designed NOT to explode which is what you want when you shoot off a rocket).
Too often the police have their priorities totally wrong, they will go to the ends of the earth to enforce an unpaid parking or speeding ticket or to catch/arrest/charge some guy with a few joints in their car but they wont do a thing when someone steals thousands of dollars worth of stuff even if the guy has been caught on security camera.
I meant eliminating the data plans completly (including the requirement to buy one because AT&T thinks your phone is a "smartphone") and replacing it with the ability to buy data in 1gb blocks at a discount to the normal per-megabyte price. In particular, there wouldn't be a hard limit on how many of these data blocks you can buy.
Better yet, get rid of the ridiculous idea of "data plans" in the first place. Charge users a certain per-megabyte fee on their bill for the data they use and offer them the option to pre-purchase data per-gigabyte at a discount.
How about we start by getting rid of some of the obstacles to walking/bicycling, especially for school kids.
Too many schools (or local authorities in some cases) are restricting or banning kids from walking to school or riding bikes or other human powered wheeled transport, usually in the name of "safety".
Do what they did at the place I went to (at least in the computer labs) and give students a quota.
So data transfer to things on the local network (such as the sites containing lecture recordings/notes) is unmetered as is traffic to those sites the university deems important for legit academic work but if you want to access other sites, you have to pay for it after you use up your monthly allotment.
Need more quota? Log into the top-up page and buy more.
To prevent people tying up machines in the labs that might be needed for important work, you can have different restrictions on what can be accessed by students in the labs vs what can be accessed by students with a personal PC in the dorm room or connected to the campus WiFi.
Of course the quota idea doesn't help for things that are blocked for reasons other than bandwidth such as things that are blocked because they contain things that could get the university in trouble or things that are blocked because they contain things that go against the teachings or belief systems of the university (religious universities are probably likely to do this in the name of blocking "heretical" content)
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If the US and UK hadn't intervened and overthrown the democratically elected government of Iran just because said government decided it was going to kick out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (one of the ancestors of the modern BP oil company) and take full control over Iranian oil, its likely that Iran would have continued as a democratic constitutional monarchy instead of becoming the strict Muslim state it is today.
How do you determine what is an orphan work? (and who gets to make that determination?)
I bet Warner or Fox or MGM or Sony or EMI or Universal or Electronic Arts or Disney or any other major entity with a large body of work will have all kinds of things they own the copyright to but dont even know they own. (including all the stuff they may have picked up through acquisitions and mergers)
If I needed to do that, I would look things up with either Google or with the online Yellow Pages set, both of which are likely to be more up-to-date than any dead tree edition.
Around here (Perth, Australia) I see ads for "junior" positions where they want 1-2 years experience in ASP.NET or J2EE or Oracle or whatever it is and so far its proving impossible for someone like me with no experience to get a job in software development.
I wish Telstra would stop dumping the phone books on my doorstep, especially the Yellow Pages.
But Telstra still makes too much money from Yellow Pages ads for that to happen.
You cant "buy" MPEGLA.
The patents that are part of the H.264 patent pool are held by a diverse range of entities including Apple, Microsoft, LG, Phillips, Cisco, Columbia University, Daewoo Electronics, Dolby, Fraunhofer, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and others.
Actually, a big reason Microsoft and Apple wont touch VP8 is that they hold H.264 patents and are members of the H.264 patent pool and that because of the extremely broad patent grant attached to VP8, supporting it would mean giving up the rights to use their patents as part of a future VP8 patent pool and extract money from those who ARE using VP8.
Oh yeah one more thing, bring back (or improve) creative subjects like Music, Art, Performing Arts, Woodwork/Metalwork/Design, Auto Shop and others where kids actually get to exercise the creative half of the brain.
1.Eliminate seniority pay and tenure for teachers and make it easier to fire those teachers who are clearly doing a bad job. Pay new teachers more to encourage new teachers who are genuinely interested in teaching to join the profession.
2.Eliminate "no child left behind" and have a culture where teachers CAN and DO issue fails to those students who dont understand the work. And yes, hold students back if that's what it takes. This includes students who fail in class but are allowed to keep going anyway because they happen to be good at Basketball or Football or some other sport.
3.Eliminate standardized tests as a way of measuring student performance or setting school funding.
4.Make it easier for those kids who dont want to go to college but go to a trade school or something similar instead
5.Rewrite curricula to be more than just memorization of facts.
Make the science curriculum fun again and bring back actual experiments the kids can do (and not just classes where the kids watch the science teacher do something and make notes on it)
Make the social science curriculum more than just memorization of facts and find ways to show more.
In math, come up with real world examples (in the textbooks etc) kids can relate to and show kids that yes they will use it in the real world
In English, bring in more creative writing
In general though, we should be encouraging creativity and most importantly we need to have kids that aren't afraid to ask why something is the way that it is and to question the world instead of just accepting what they are told.
6.Get rid of all the soft drinks, chocolate bars, chips, deep fried gunk and other unhealthy food from the schools. Start offering healthier food to students (and yes there ARE ways to offer healthy food that students will eat AND that don't cost too much per serve). Start by removing ALL the vending machines selling all those empty calories.
7.Find ways to make P.E. fun AND provide exercise at the same time (and make sure EVERY student is getting good exercise as part of their school week, not just those that are good enough to be on one of the top sports teams).
8.Introduce some new subjects to schools, particularly health education (which would include education on how to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle as well as why tobacco and other drugs are bad for you) and financial education (which would include teaching kids about budgets and saving and that credit cards and loans are NOT free money and how much they will end up paying back on those loans)
I am with TPG mobile (and bought my last phone, a Nokia N900, outright from a 3rd party).
I pay $19.99 per month (actually $14.99 because I have ADSL internet with TPG) and get $300 of value that I can use towards voice, data, SMS and MMS and some other things.
I also get 1000 minutes per month to use on calls to other mobiles on the same carrier between 8pm and midnight and 1GB of data included.
The only things I cant use my cap on is:
International Calls
Premium rate numbers and premium rate SMS
Premium content
and international roaming.
The costs I pay (which come out of my cap until the cap is run out then I just pay on top of that)
40c per 30 seconds with 35c flagfall for voice calls (landline and mobile)
25.3c for a SMS
50c for MMS
0.2c for 10KB of data (once I use up my free 1gb of data that is)
Plus various rates for international calls, SMS and MMS and some other things like voicemail and call connect.
The carrier is a reseller for the Optus network (second largest in terms of coverage) which supports GSM on 900/1800 and UMTS on 900/2100 and TPG will let me use any phone that supports those frequencies that isn't locked to another carrier (including an unlocked iPhone)
They dont care if I use my data (be it my included 1GB, my included cap value or otherwise) for tethering.
The only people who believe that drinking soda containing sugar is worse for you than drinking the same soda containing HFCS are those people who have some kind of tie to the corn industry.
Its not just Californians who are affected by the stupid crap California does. One good example is the California Air Resources Board. Because they insist on such strict emissions standards, especially on diesel engines (far stricter than is the norm in most of the world) and because car makers generally wont sell cars in the US that don't meet CARB rules (since they want to sell their cars in California), the US misses out on many of the cool cars that exist in Europe (especially the diesels)
Now I am not saying that if CARB disappeared, all these cars would magically come to the USA. But I bet if the CARB rules didn't exist, lots of car markers would be more inclined to re-consider bringing these cars stateside.
The problem with VR was and still is the fact that your eyes and ears are telling you that you are moving forward but other parts of your body (especially the balance organs in your ear) are telling you you are not. This screws up your brain in various ways and leads to headaches and other things IIRC (I am not an expert so I dont know exactly what symptoms it causes)
It may not be perfect but the new GTA04 hardware is the closest thing you can get to a truly open phone. Right now you need to obtain a case yourself from a GTA02 phone as they dont have a way to produce cases cheaply enough (there are people working on ways to order cases from 3d printing services though).
You get full schematics for the hardware (including a board layout diagram). The only closed source user-space bits that exist are 3D drivers for the GPU (which are only required if you need 3D) and a binary firmware that's downloaded to the WiFi chip (and there are efforts to write a free replacement for that AFAIK). The cellular modem module is supported by open source software such as oFono.
Due to the regulations surrounding WiFi, cellular standards like GSM and UMTS, bluetooth and other radio transmitters (and in the case of the cellular standards, the secret/proprietary nature of some parts of the standards like the crypto), its unlikely you will see any company release a device that talks those frequencies with no closed software at all. Same with GPS where restrictions exist on what civilian GPS receivers are allowed to do and where the details of the GPS protocol are only available if the manufacturer is willing to follow the rules (mostly concerned with making sure civilian GPS devices cant be built or re-purposed in a way that would allow their use on ICBMs and other missiles)
Given the success of the open source noveau drivers for the nvidia GPUs, I see no reason why a similar project to reverse engineer e.g. PowerVR GPUs or Qualcomm Adreno GPUs could not succeed in the same way.
If I had the skills required, I would have a go at that myself for the PowerVR GPU in my Nokia N900 but I dont have the skills necessary to reverse engineer ARM software (especially ARM drivers)
A good example of Apple doing less contribution back to the open source community is with GCC where Apple is not allowing mainline GCC to use a lot of their apple-specific changes (some of those changes are things mainline GCC wouldn't want anyway but that should be up to mainline GCC developers to decide and not Apple)
Although these days they are moving towards clang and LLVM instead of GCC (whether that's because clang/LLVM are better than GCC, whether its because its easier to work on/maintain/improve or for some other reason I dont know)
At least Google is better than the Nokia Maps app on my Nokia N900.
If there was an OpenStreetMap app for the N900 that I could load up with the entire OSM dataset for my city (Perth, Australia) and then load up with a diff file every so often and that wouldn't suck up my bandwidth or require fast data speeds, I would switch. But I haven't found one yet :( (bonus would be if someone made an app that could use Google Transit GTFS feed data)
1.If they price the digital copies too far below the print copies (or more specifically, too far below the RRP of the print copies), retailers who stock the print copies will complain and may buy less print copies (which then feeds into the up-front costs of a production run for the print books and increases the costs for the publisher of the print run)
2.A desire to use price as a marketing tool (i.e. certain books cost more or cost less in order to influence peoples purchasing habits towards certain titles)
3.A desire to stop e-booksellers from engaging in price wars to try and gain market share (although neither Apple nor Amazon seems interested in open competition or a price war anyway since both bookstores have policies prohibiting the sale of the same title cheaper on another store)
Its not just chemistry and the war on drugs, go ask model rocketry hobbyists how its getting harder to engage in their hobby because the things used to fuel their rockets are considered "explosives" by the US government (even though these fuels are specifically designed NOT to explode which is what you want when you shoot off a rocket).
Too often the police have their priorities totally wrong, they will go to the ends of the earth to enforce an unpaid parking or speeding ticket or to catch/arrest/charge some guy with a few joints in their car but they wont do a thing when someone steals thousands of dollars worth of stuff even if the guy has been caught on security camera.
I meant eliminating the data plans completly (including the requirement to buy one because AT&T thinks your phone is a "smartphone") and replacing it with the ability to buy data in 1gb blocks at a discount to the normal per-megabyte price. In particular, there wouldn't be a hard limit on how many of these data blocks you can buy.
Better yet, get rid of the ridiculous idea of "data plans" in the first place. Charge users a certain per-megabyte fee on their bill for the data they use and offer them the option to pre-purchase data per-gigabyte at a discount.
I license most of the code I write/release personally as GPL because I want people to be able to re-use it but I want them to give back their changes.
How about we start by getting rid of some of the obstacles to walking/bicycling, especially for school kids.
Too many schools (or local authorities in some cases) are restricting or banning kids from walking to school or riding bikes or other human powered wheeled transport, usually in the name of "safety".
Do what they did at the place I went to (at least in the computer labs) and give students a quota.
So data transfer to things on the local network (such as the sites containing lecture recordings/notes) is unmetered as is traffic to those sites the university deems important for legit academic work but if you want to access other sites, you have to pay for it after you use up your monthly allotment.
Need more quota? Log into the top-up page and buy more.
To prevent people tying up machines in the labs that might be needed for important work, you can have different restrictions on what can be accessed by students in the labs vs what can be accessed by students with a personal PC in the dorm room or connected to the campus WiFi.
Of course the quota idea doesn't help for things that are blocked for reasons other than bandwidth such as things that are blocked because they contain things that could get the university in trouble or things that are blocked because they contain things that go against the teachings or belief systems of the university (religious universities are probably likely to do this in the name of blocking "heretical" content)