Opera Mini - this is the Java-based app that runs on virtually any JVM-capable phone and does a lot of the processing on a proxy server.
So... who's paying for the proxy server, and why?
Call me a bit jaded, but I try not to use anything until I can at least figure out what their business model is. Last I checked, Opera is commercial software, at least nominally. What's their take from all this?
Why assume that the government isn't acting in good faith? If they wanted the IA to be shut down, they wouldn't have granted the exemption in the first place.
Why assume that the government isn't acting in good faith... well, maybe for one, because I've seen time and time again how the government can be bought practically on the open market for sufficient sums of money.
Just because they might be trying to act in good faith today doesn't mean that they won't change their tune tomorrow, when Disney/Sony/Vivendi/Universal comes shaking their thirty pieces of silver.
So no, I'm not saying that the government wants the IA shut down now, I'm saying that next month or next year, if and when the IA became a significant repository of cultural artifacts, one of those big content monopolies might decide that it would prefer if people didn't have access to that big "back catalog," because it's cutting into sales of their remanufactured folk tales, and the government is only ever a few bags of cash away from changing its mind.
Unlike a law, which Congress would actually have to repeal or change, this grant can just be allowed to quietly expire through inaction; something that's far easier to slip under the public radar until it's too late.
When Apple paid Creative, it was for the use of Creative's patents. I don't necessarily agree with the judgment, but that's what it was about. So you're right, that certainly doesn't give me any moral or ethical -- much less legal -- right to go out and steal stuff from Creative, at least not unless you espouse a somewhat extreme form of IP anarchism.
Anyway, the difference between that deal, and the Zune deal (or the Canadian 'media tax') is that Creative's deal with Apple doesn't make any comment about the actions of the users. It's purely between Apple and Creative. What Universal is saying in demanding its pound of flesh, is that users are criminals, and therefore the users should be made to pay for their criminal behavior, before they even do it. That's fundamentally different from a patent licensing deal.
In short, Universal is engaging in collective punishment -- trying to extort money from everyone who buys an Apple product, because they assume they will all be used for piracy. Since I'm going to get punished in that case either way, whether I pirate or not, then I might as well pirate.
I thought that was hilarious. Apparently Zonk doesn't even read the links that he inserts into other articles for no apparent reason...
That aside, the article also has one of the worst examples of corporatese that I've heard in a while:
Sony is going to sell as many units as they can ship in the U.S. I think that's true. Given the quantities we are talking about, I'm confident they will sell all of them. I don't know that a lower price would make a difference in the outcome. As you go out into later years, cost and price are both important issues. I've been on the other side of this equation. It's a hard problem.
To be clear, we have said that in fiscal 08, entertainment and devices makes money. That's not exactly Xbox. We don't break profit down by business. And there are parts of entertainment and devices that make money. Xbox doesn't. Xbox has to make significant progress to enable E&D to get there. We feel we are on track.
Yeah, we said we'd make money in Entertainment. Yes, one of our biggest Entertainment products is Xbox. No, it's not going to make money. In fact, Sony is going to cream us at Christmas. Yes, we're okay with that. Everything is going according to plan.
This guy sounds like if he were born a generation ago, he'd be working on the USSR's latest Five Year Plan, to go into effect three and a half years after the last one.
Does this mean that they can ignore DMCA takedown orders on all content? Or just that they're immune to prosecution if they reverse-engineer and break a copy-protection system of a work that's already in the public domain and out of copyright?
If it's the latter, while it's a nice move, there isn't really any software (except stuff on Hollerith cards) that's anywhere near getting into the public domain anyway. So it would seem to be a moot point. If they have permission to archive all content though, even stuff that's still in copyright, that would be decent.
I've read elsewhere though that the exemptions from the Copyright Office aren't permanent, but need to be renewed every few years or they expire. So all that has to happen to destroy everything is for an administration to pressure the Copyright Office to let the exemption slip, and then threaten to prosecute the IA if they don't destroy the de-protected works. Someone in another thread likened it to being given a Band-Aid after you've gotten the crap beaten out of you with a lead pipe; a nice gesture, but ultimately it would have been nicer to not get beaten in the first place.
They are about the right to profit from the ownership of guns, which is not in the public interest.
What sort of crack are you smoking? That's not even close to right. The original purpose of the NRA was to promote marksmanship and other shooting sports, because at the time of its founding, Americans really sucked hard when it came to hitting anything with a gun, and this meant the military had to spend a lot of extra time training people. It was a public service organization.
Today, depending on which part of the NRA you're talking about (i.e. the NRA Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, has as its mission statement: "to promote firearms and hunting safety, to enhance marksmanship skills of those participating in the shooting sports, and to educate the general public about firearms in their historic, technological and artistic context,") it's all about preserving the right to own and use firearms as a good thing per se. There's no "profit" motive involved in any sense. The NRA is founded on the assumption that citizens should have access to personal weapons, and society is better off when this is the case. Based on that assumption, they are acting in the public interest when they attempt to preserve this right.
The motivation driving most NRA members is no more or less selfish than the motivation driving most pro-gun-control supporters: it's a personal issue to them either way. Most people who support the NRA, do so because they own firearms; most people who support gun control do so because they feel in some way threatened by firearms. Both groups' members are looking out for what they see as their own interests.
There's a reason why "special interest" gets bandied about so much in politics: it's because you can use it against anybody that you don't agree with. I could easily describe the gun-control lobby (for instance, Handgun Control Inc.) as a "special interest," and many people frequently do, in order to disparage it. If you're a Republican, Democratic contributors are special interests; if you're a Democrat, Republican contributors clearly are.
The term is essentially meaningless, because what is in the "public interest" is endlessly debatable. What you think is in the 'public interest' probably isn't what I think is in it, and therefore our perceptions of various groups are going to be skewed accordingly. That's why people who attempt any sort of neutral position don't use it -- they refer to groups on either side of an issue as "interest groups."
Sounds like a damn fine idea compared to trying to legislate away every possible thing that bad parents could possibly blame their obnoxious kneebiter's problems on.
What we need is somebody to do some germline genetic engineering, and make it so that people are infertile unless they take some special hormonal supplement. In order to get the supplement, you have to have a job, and demonstrate that you can raise a child, perhaps after demonstrating their competence by raising a puppy for 3-5 years.
That's the most elegant one-sentence summary of true conservatism that I've heard in a long time. You sure you don't want to run for office?
I think the GP's biggest mistake is in thinking that being a "conservative" means pining for the past; something that happened long ago, or perhaps never at all. That's not, in my opinion, true at all. To be a conservative is to see the good in the situation as it is currently, and to use caution in changing it, lest the situation become worse due to poorly-thought-out meddling. Thus I think it's fundamentally a optimistic philosophy, and not at all the pessimistic 'good old days' point-of-view that liberals and progressives make it out to be.
Although I did find the GP's explanation of the philosophical difference between progressives and liberals interesting (I had always assumed that a "progressive" was just a pretentious college-student word for "liberal").
Unpiloted passenger aircraft are certainly a bad idea, but I could see a place for it. Think about cargo aircraft, particularly ones on trans-oceanic routes. You could build whole fleets of very inexpensive cargo carriers, because you wouldn't have to have a flight deck or windows, or run all of the control lines up to the front of the plane (all those miles of wiring); the computer "flying" the plane doesn't even all have to be in one spot, it could be in semi-independent pieces throughout the airframe. That means the only limitations to the design are technical and aerodynamic.
Such a plane could fly low and slow to save fuel, because it wouldn't have to worry about pilots or passengers getting tired. And if the plane started to deviate course and fly towards a populated area, you'd shoot it down or self-destruct it up while it's still somewhere safe, just like a Range Safety Officer does for satellite/rocket launches.
The lower cost of these flights could bring air cargo to parts of the world where it's currently not economically feasible (basically anyplace outside the First World or its major manufacturing centers), or bring goods that currently aren't economical to ship by air. Anything that lowers the cost of transportation can have wide-ranging effects.
I think there's a definite market for self-piloted aircraft for cargo duty, on long-haul flights over unpopulated areas.
but somehow I didn't expect they'd put guns on them. Silly me.
Obviously you hang out with a different kind of R/C geeks than I do.
I've seen a lot of planes that are built with an extra servo for use as a bomb release (also good for clicking the shutter of a camera). And I know some guys that tried to put CO2-powered BB cannons on R/C aircraft, but they ended up just being too hard to use and too heavy to be practical. The gas systems required limit them to rather large aircraft and helis, the vibration causes them to jam a lot, and the obvious safety issues keep you from flying them in most places. Plus unless you have full-auto guns (they do exist) you can't do a whole lot with them, even in ground attack or against targets.
However, they're pretty cool when mounted on balsa-wood ships...
This is true, of course. It comes about because there are a lot of people in America who like to call themselves "conservative," but have no concept of what that means and really would be best described as "authoritarian." The basic tenets of authoritarianism are the subjugation of the individual to the group's ideals, something that you can see any time a so-called 'conservative' starts talking about how those pesky "rights" need to be "re-examined" because of "national security." (Sound familiar?) The authoritarian focus also comes through on other typical key issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. In each case, emphasis is placed on 'shared values' instead of individual choice. This isn't conservative. It's just giving small, petty people an opportunity to regulate the lives of others; something which they do with gusto, given the opportunity.
The problem is, when a large group of people essentially hijack a term and take it as their own, there's not a lot you can do about it. I used to call myself a conservative, until I realized that I didn't agree with any of the new Evangelical would-be "conservatives." Like a lot of other people I know, I now tend to describe myself more in terms of libertarianism.
Bush, I think, will be viewed as an interesting figure in hindsight. He was neither a conservative nor really an authoritarian, because by all accounts he doesn't have much in the way of personal convictions or opinions either way. He and others in the Republican party seem to see themselves as having played the Evangelical bloc, secretly scorning them even as they paid lip service to whatever issues and stances that were required to stay on top and consolidate power. In terms of straight political maneuvering, the neo-con takeover of the Republican party and subsequent rise to power is quite amazing. I think you'd have to look back to the days of organized crime and the labor movement to find a time when a small group of people so thoroughly took over a part of the political process and got away with it, less so because of their own secrecy but because of the public's unwillingness to confront what was plainly happening.
Imagine cybersex where you can touch the actual bodies as UIs to control the lighting, heating, music, cameras, vibrators. In the room and across the Net.
From 1975 to 2006 they made a lot of stuff for the U.S. market in their factory in Enfield, Connecticut. (Which apparently was quite the state-of-the-art operation when it was constructed.) You can read the local paper's article about the first round of layoffs here.
Ultimately, their plan is to offshore everything including manufacturing and logistics. The Enfield operations will mostly go to Mexico and China, where the production is being subcontracted out to Flextronics; about a third of their headquarters factory in Denmark is being cut, with production moving to the Czech Republic.
Apparently they're going to keep making some of the Bionicle parts in the Billund factory, but the writing is pretty much on the wall: it's all headed East eventually.
As for the apparent decline in quality, I can't find any information on whether they've started to ramp up production from Flextronics or the Czech factories yet, or if they have, how long it would take those parts to get into circulation (the layoffs in CT only started in 3Q2006) so I'm not sure that the decline is attributable to offshoring quite yet. It could just be that simultaneous with or prior to the decisions to move production, they attempted to cut costs by reducing QC expenditures, and that's why things have slipped.
I've actually seen (well, as far as you can "see") Lego bricks in production. Up until this year when they announced they were going to close it (as part of moving all their production to Eastern Europe, China, or Mexico), Lego ran a factory in Connecticut. Once upon a time, they used to allow kids to tour it. I must have been in middle school or so when I saw it.
IIRC, there's nothing particularly special about the production process. It's basic injection-molding. The plastic comes in bulk as small pellets, pre-dyed (I think, I'm a little fuzzy on this), and gets fed into machines that produce the bricks. I don't think that they make or dye the plastic on-site. The vast majority of the plant, as I remember it, was actually devoted to inspection, sorting/packing, and packaging for shipment. At the time this really surprised me; the "making stuff" part of the factory was far smaller than I had thought. It was cool to see them wheeling around big bins of bricks, though. (This was before they made quite as many special pieces as they seem to now.) I really should have brought a camera but never thought about it at the time. (I think I was probably in that period of life where I was trying hard not to show that I still thought Legos were really cool.) Somebody else visited and has a few photos here.
About the only thing I never worked out is how they get them to release from the molds so cleanly, and with such straight walls (normally to guarantee mold release you avoid straight walls and sharp edges/corners). On some bricks if you look closely though, you can see mold lines and sprues if you look in the bottom carefully.
It's sad to hear that they're closing the plant in CT; I had always hoped that maybe it was heavily automated enough to cope with the higher costs of labor in a high-cost area, but it seems not. I wonder what this leaves for industry in Connecticut these days? Without Lego, their principal exports are going to be nothing but a handful of helicopter parts and lawyers.
This is because nobody has yet found a way to make an inexpensive handheld display that has anything approaching the resolution, reflectivity, and contrast ratio of ink on paper; not to mention the battery life.
To simulate a paper book you'd need something that had a contrast ratio of about 80:1, an ISO brightness (reflectivity at 457nm held at 45deg incident) of 80-90, and a resolution of somewhere around 300 dpi, which means a 2400x3000 pixel display for 8"x10".
I think it might just be that making an ebook reader that can compete with a technology that we've perfected over the last 1,000-plus years, is harder than putting a person on the moon or making an artificial eye.
I think that it's time to start thinking of BitTorrent the company and bittorrent the protocol as two totally separate entities. The BitTorrent (corporate) movie service will probably use some sort of bittorrent-type P2P sharing technology at its core (the better to save on bandwidth costs and increase their profit margin -- why pay for hosting when your users can do it for you?), it will probably not interact with the bittorrent networks used by Azureus and uTorrent. I can't imagine that they would -- anything that allowed you to download "Happy Feet.asf ($9.99 - Click to Purchase)" right next to "Happy Feet.dvdrip.LoL.avi" is probably going to be seen by the MPAA as legitimizing or at least enabling the latter.
In terms of what a BitTorrent movie player would be like, I think it'll be Peer to Peer in the same way that Skype is: it uses your computer and its network connection as part of the service's infrastructure without any real input from you, transparently. I further suspect that BitTorrent (corporate) clients will only interact with other BitTorrent (corporate) clients, and there will be some sort of central authentication server to keep you from injecting an unsecured (read: DRM-free) client program into it.
I know absolutely next to nothing about its technical details, but since the service is MPAA sanctioned, I can guarantee that it will not be DRM-free. There's no possible way.
I've been thinking though about how you could do DRM on bittorrent-delivered files, and it seems like a problem. Bittorrent only works because you have many people distributing the same file; if each client's copy is encrypted with a personal key (which is the only way to keep people from redistributing them) then P2P won't work.
I suspect that they try to dodge this problem by using a client program that's really, really ugly -- lots of obfuscation, use of keys stored on remote servers, encryption of everything that's written to disk, etc. I assume that all peer nodes are authenticated against a central database as well, and that their communication is encrypted or at least obfuscated (and naturally, the whole thing will be a 'Trade Secret').
There's really not going to be anything good about this service, except as a technical challenge to hackers. Maybe there are some recently-unemployed programmers in Russia who'd like to give it a go?
The RIAA might be bastards, but if they championed a model where the artists got zero, as opposed to 'not very much', you'd hate them even more.
Actually, I wouldn't, because at least I'd be able to appreciate their honesty and forthrightness in being utter bastards. I can't abide someone who hides their assholery behind a facade of do-goodery.
I'll take an unrepentant asshole over a hypocritical one any day.
However the content owners in this case felt they were not being looked after, and so used whatever leverage they could get.
A fine justification of government corruption that is. Don't like the laws? Just use 'whatever leverage you can get' to get them changed. Who cares if it involves furthering the subordination of our government to corporations; everyone else is doing it, therefore it must be okay.
Here's a thought: since it's obvious that the music companies are at the very least amoral, and are going to use whatever means they possibly can in order to further their revenue stream and business models, I don't see any reason why any "morality" is due them from consumers. When they start to show any signs of a moral sense other than the economic law of the jungle, then I'll stop trying to screw them for every penny I possibly can.
I'll save my morals for people and entities that might actually have some in return.
Is that what it takes to be a "considerable power" nowadays ?
Don't forget the 3,000-odd nuclear weapons. I think that's "considerable."
I suspect that if the Russians really did cave as far as this document suggests, it's because of internal powermongering between Putin and other factions. Someone -- Putin, probably -- is cozying up to the U.S., probably because they already have, or are about to do, something objectionable.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, pirating Linux off of bittorrent ... how low can you get?
It's people like you that make "Linux Genuine Advantage" necessary.
Opera Mini - this is the Java-based app that runs on virtually any JVM-capable phone and does a lot of the processing on a proxy server.
... who's paying for the proxy server, and why?
So
Call me a bit jaded, but I try not to use anything until I can at least figure out what their business model is. Last I checked, Opera is commercial software, at least nominally. What's their take from all this?
Why assume that the government isn't acting in good faith? If they wanted the IA to be shut down, they wouldn't have granted the exemption in the first place.
... well, maybe for one, because I've seen time and time again how the government can be bought practically on the open market for sufficient sums of money.
Why assume that the government isn't acting in good faith
Just because they might be trying to act in good faith today doesn't mean that they won't change their tune tomorrow, when Disney/Sony/Vivendi/Universal comes shaking their thirty pieces of silver.
So no, I'm not saying that the government wants the IA shut down now, I'm saying that next month or next year, if and when the IA became a significant repository of cultural artifacts, one of those big content monopolies might decide that it would prefer if people didn't have access to that big "back catalog," because it's cutting into sales of their remanufactured folk tales, and the government is only ever a few bags of cash away from changing its mind.
Unlike a law, which Congress would actually have to repeal or change, this grant can just be allowed to quietly expire through inaction; something that's far easier to slip under the public radar until it's too late.
No, you're constructing a straw man.
When Apple paid Creative, it was for the use of Creative's patents. I don't necessarily agree with the judgment, but that's what it was about. So you're right, that certainly doesn't give me any moral or ethical -- much less legal -- right to go out and steal stuff from Creative, at least not unless you espouse a somewhat extreme form of IP anarchism.
Anyway, the difference between that deal, and the Zune deal (or the Canadian 'media tax') is that Creative's deal with Apple doesn't make any comment about the actions of the users. It's purely between Apple and Creative. What Universal is saying in demanding its pound of flesh, is that users are criminals, and therefore the users should be made to pay for their criminal behavior, before they even do it. That's fundamentally different from a patent licensing deal.
In short, Universal is engaging in collective punishment -- trying to extort money from everyone who buys an Apple product, because they assume they will all be used for piracy. Since I'm going to get punished in that case either way, whether I pirate or not, then I might as well pirate.
That aside, the article also has one of the worst examples of corporatese that I've heard in a while: Yeah, we said we'd make money in Entertainment. Yes, one of our biggest Entertainment products is Xbox. No, it's not going to make money. In fact, Sony is going to cream us at Christmas. Yes, we're okay with that. Everything is going according to plan.
This guy sounds like if he were born a generation ago, he'd be working on the USSR's latest Five Year Plan, to go into effect three and a half years after the last one.
Does this mean that they can ignore DMCA takedown orders on all content? Or just that they're immune to prosecution if they reverse-engineer and break a copy-protection system of a work that's already in the public domain and out of copyright?
If it's the latter, while it's a nice move, there isn't really any software (except stuff on Hollerith cards) that's anywhere near getting into the public domain anyway. So it would seem to be a moot point. If they have permission to archive all content though, even stuff that's still in copyright, that would be decent.
I've read elsewhere though that the exemptions from the Copyright Office aren't permanent, but need to be renewed every few years or they expire. So all that has to happen to destroy everything is for an administration to pressure the Copyright Office to let the exemption slip, and then threaten to prosecute the IA if they don't destroy the de-protected works. Someone in another thread likened it to being given a Band-Aid after you've gotten the crap beaten out of you with a lead pipe; a nice gesture, but ultimately it would have been nicer to not get beaten in the first place.
They are about the right to profit from the ownership of guns, which is not in the public interest.
What sort of crack are you smoking? That's not even close to right. The original purpose of the NRA was to promote marksmanship and other shooting sports, because at the time of its founding, Americans really sucked hard when it came to hitting anything with a gun, and this meant the military had to spend a lot of extra time training people. It was a public service organization.
Today, depending on which part of the NRA you're talking about (i.e. the NRA Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, has as its mission statement: "to promote firearms and hunting safety, to enhance marksmanship skills of those participating in the shooting sports, and to educate the general public about firearms in their historic, technological and artistic context,") it's all about preserving the right to own and use firearms as a good thing per se. There's no "profit" motive involved in any sense. The NRA is founded on the assumption that citizens should have access to personal weapons, and society is better off when this is the case. Based on that assumption, they are acting in the public interest when they attempt to preserve this right.
The motivation driving most NRA members is no more or less selfish than the motivation driving most pro-gun-control supporters: it's a personal issue to them either way. Most people who support the NRA, do so because they own firearms; most people who support gun control do so because they feel in some way threatened by firearms. Both groups' members are looking out for what they see as their own interests.
There's a reason why "special interest" gets bandied about so much in politics: it's because you can use it against anybody that you don't agree with. I could easily describe the gun-control lobby (for instance, Handgun Control Inc.) as a "special interest," and many people frequently do, in order to disparage it. If you're a Republican, Democratic contributors are special interests; if you're a Democrat, Republican contributors clearly are.
The term is essentially meaningless, because what is in the "public interest" is endlessly debatable. What you think is in the 'public interest' probably isn't what I think is in it, and therefore our perceptions of various groups are going to be skewed accordingly. That's why people who attempt any sort of neutral position don't use it -- they refer to groups on either side of an issue as "interest groups."
legislate better parenting?
Sounds like a damn fine idea compared to trying to legislate away every possible thing that bad parents could possibly blame their obnoxious kneebiter's problems on.
What we need is somebody to do some germline genetic engineering, and make it so that people are infertile unless they take some special hormonal supplement. In order to get the supplement, you have to have a job, and demonstrate that you can raise a child, perhaps after demonstrating their competence by raising a puppy for 3-5 years.
That's the most elegant one-sentence summary of true conservatism that I've heard in a long time. You sure you don't want to run for office?
I think the GP's biggest mistake is in thinking that being a "conservative" means pining for the past; something that happened long ago, or perhaps never at all. That's not, in my opinion, true at all. To be a conservative is to see the good in the situation as it is currently, and to use caution in changing it, lest the situation become worse due to poorly-thought-out meddling. Thus I think it's fundamentally a optimistic philosophy, and not at all the pessimistic 'good old days' point-of-view that liberals and progressives make it out to be.
Although I did find the GP's explanation of the philosophical difference between progressives and liberals interesting (I had always assumed that a "progressive" was just a pretentious college-student word for "liberal").
Unpiloted passenger aircraft are certainly a bad idea, but I could see a place for it. Think about cargo aircraft, particularly ones on trans-oceanic routes. You could build whole fleets of very inexpensive cargo carriers, because you wouldn't have to have a flight deck or windows, or run all of the control lines up to the front of the plane (all those miles of wiring); the computer "flying" the plane doesn't even all have to be in one spot, it could be in semi-independent pieces throughout the airframe. That means the only limitations to the design are technical and aerodynamic.
Such a plane could fly low and slow to save fuel, because it wouldn't have to worry about pilots or passengers getting tired. And if the plane started to deviate course and fly towards a populated area, you'd shoot it down or self-destruct it up while it's still somewhere safe, just like a Range Safety Officer does for satellite/rocket launches.
The lower cost of these flights could bring air cargo to parts of the world where it's currently not economically feasible (basically anyplace outside the First World or its major manufacturing centers), or bring goods that currently aren't economical to ship by air. Anything that lowers the cost of transportation can have wide-ranging effects.
I think there's a definite market for self-piloted aircraft for cargo duty, on long-haul flights over unpopulated areas.
but somehow I didn't expect they'd put guns on them. Silly me.
Obviously you hang out with a different kind of R/C geeks than I do.
I've seen a lot of planes that are built with an extra servo for use as a bomb release (also good for clicking the shutter of a camera). And I know some guys that tried to put CO2-powered BB cannons on R/C aircraft, but they ended up just being too hard to use and too heavy to be practical. The gas systems required limit them to rather large aircraft and helis, the vibration causes them to jam a lot, and the obvious safety issues keep you from flying them in most places. Plus unless you have full-auto guns (they do exist) you can't do a whole lot with them, even in ground attack or against targets.
However, they're pretty cool when mounted on balsa-wood ships...
This is true, of course. It comes about because there are a lot of people in America who like to call themselves "conservative," but have no concept of what that means and really would be best described as "authoritarian." The basic tenets of authoritarianism are the subjugation of the individual to the group's ideals, something that you can see any time a so-called 'conservative' starts talking about how those pesky "rights" need to be "re-examined" because of "national security." (Sound familiar?) The authoritarian focus also comes through on other typical key issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. In each case, emphasis is placed on 'shared values' instead of individual choice. This isn't conservative. It's just giving small, petty people an opportunity to regulate the lives of others; something which they do with gusto, given the opportunity.
The problem is, when a large group of people essentially hijack a term and take it as their own, there's not a lot you can do about it. I used to call myself a conservative, until I realized that I didn't agree with any of the new Evangelical would-be "conservatives." Like a lot of other people I know, I now tend to describe myself more in terms of libertarianism.
Bush, I think, will be viewed as an interesting figure in hindsight. He was neither a conservative nor really an authoritarian, because by all accounts he doesn't have much in the way of personal convictions or opinions either way. He and others in the Republican party seem to see themselves as having played the Evangelical bloc, secretly scorning them even as they paid lip service to whatever issues and stances that were required to stay on top and consolidate power. In terms of straight political maneuvering, the neo-con takeover of the Republican party and subsequent rise to power is quite amazing. I think you'd have to look back to the days of organized crime and the labor movement to find a time when a small group of people so thoroughly took over a part of the political process and got away with it, less so because of their own secrecy but because of the public's unwillingness to confront what was plainly happening.
I think the more money North Koreans spend on iPods, plasma televisions and Segways, the less they have to spend on nuclear weapons.
Actually, I'd vote that we export only iPods to North Korea. (I'd say only Zunes, but I feel like that's probably a crime against humanity.)
It's directed squarely at Kim Jong Il.
They probably should have put a sanction on exports of Brylcreem and hair gel, in that case.
...they're just turning off all the lights in order to capitalize on the vast demand for meteorological tourism?
"North Korea: No Electricity Means No Light Pollution!"
Imagine cybersex where you can touch the actual bodies as UIs to control the lighting, heating, music, cameras, vibrators. In the room and across the Net.
Imagine actual sex.
From 1975 to 2006 they made a lot of stuff for the U.S. market in their factory in Enfield, Connecticut. (Which apparently was quite the state-of-the-art operation when it was constructed.) You can read the local paper's article about the first round of layoffs here.
Ultimately, their plan is to offshore everything including manufacturing and logistics. The Enfield operations will mostly go to Mexico and China, where the production is being subcontracted out to Flextronics; about a third of their headquarters factory in Denmark is being cut, with production moving to the Czech Republic.
Apparently they're going to keep making some of the Bionicle parts in the Billund factory, but the writing is pretty much on the wall: it's all headed East eventually.
As for the apparent decline in quality, I can't find any information on whether they've started to ramp up production from Flextronics or the Czech factories yet, or if they have, how long it would take those parts to get into circulation (the layoffs in CT only started in 3Q2006) so I'm not sure that the decline is attributable to offshoring quite yet. It could just be that simultaneous with or prior to the decisions to move production, they attempted to cut costs by reducing QC expenditures, and that's why things have slipped.
Yes, I play legos with my kids....
Well, I'd hope so. It's the best reason for having kids, really.
I've actually seen (well, as far as you can "see") Lego bricks in production. Up until this year when they announced they were going to close it (as part of moving all their production to Eastern Europe, China, or Mexico), Lego ran a factory in Connecticut. Once upon a time, they used to allow kids to tour it. I must have been in middle school or so when I saw it.
IIRC, there's nothing particularly special about the production process. It's basic injection-molding. The plastic comes in bulk as small pellets, pre-dyed (I think, I'm a little fuzzy on this), and gets fed into machines that produce the bricks. I don't think that they make or dye the plastic on-site. The vast majority of the plant, as I remember it, was actually devoted to inspection, sorting/packing, and packaging for shipment. At the time this really surprised me; the "making stuff" part of the factory was far smaller than I had thought. It was cool to see them wheeling around big bins of bricks, though. (This was before they made quite as many special pieces as they seem to now.) I really should have brought a camera but never thought about it at the time. (I think I was probably in that period of life where I was trying hard not to show that I still thought Legos were really cool.) Somebody else visited and has a few photos here.
About the only thing I never worked out is how they get them to release from the molds so cleanly, and with such straight walls (normally to guarantee mold release you avoid straight walls and sharp edges/corners). On some bricks if you look closely though, you can see mold lines and sprues if you look in the bottom carefully.
It's sad to hear that they're closing the plant in CT; I had always hoped that maybe it was heavily automated enough to cope with the higher costs of labor in a high-cost area, but it seems not. I wonder what this leaves for industry in Connecticut these days? Without Lego, their principal exports are going to be nothing but a handful of helicopter parts and lawyers.
This is because nobody has yet found a way to make an inexpensive handheld display that has anything approaching the resolution, reflectivity, and contrast ratio of ink on paper; not to mention the battery life.
To simulate a paper book you'd need something that had a contrast ratio of about 80:1, an ISO brightness (reflectivity at 457nm held at 45deg incident) of 80-90, and a resolution of somewhere around 300 dpi, which means a 2400x3000 pixel display for 8"x10".
I think it might just be that making an ebook reader that can compete with a technology that we've perfected over the last 1,000-plus years, is harder than putting a person on the moon or making an artificial eye.
I think that it's time to start thinking of BitTorrent the company and bittorrent the protocol as two totally separate entities. The BitTorrent (corporate) movie service will probably use some sort of bittorrent-type P2P sharing technology at its core (the better to save on bandwidth costs and increase their profit margin -- why pay for hosting when your users can do it for you?), it will probably not interact with the bittorrent networks used by Azureus and uTorrent. I can't imagine that they would -- anything that allowed you to download "Happy Feet.asf ($9.99 - Click to Purchase)" right next to "Happy Feet.dvdrip.LoL.avi" is probably going to be seen by the MPAA as legitimizing or at least enabling the latter.
In terms of what a BitTorrent movie player would be like, I think it'll be Peer to Peer in the same way that Skype is: it uses your computer and its network connection as part of the service's infrastructure without any real input from you, transparently. I further suspect that BitTorrent (corporate) clients will only interact with other BitTorrent (corporate) clients, and there will be some sort of central authentication server to keep you from injecting an unsecured (read: DRM-free) client program into it.
I know absolutely next to nothing about its technical details, but since the service is MPAA sanctioned, I can guarantee that it will not be DRM-free. There's no possible way.
I've been thinking though about how you could do DRM on bittorrent-delivered files, and it seems like a problem. Bittorrent only works because you have many people distributing the same file; if each client's copy is encrypted with a personal key (which is the only way to keep people from redistributing them) then P2P won't work.
I suspect that they try to dodge this problem by using a client program that's really, really ugly -- lots of obfuscation, use of keys stored on remote servers, encryption of everything that's written to disk, etc. I assume that all peer nodes are authenticated against a central database as well, and that their communication is encrypted or at least obfuscated (and naturally, the whole thing will be a 'Trade Secret').
There's really not going to be anything good about this service, except as a technical challenge to hackers. Maybe there are some recently-unemployed programmers in Russia who'd like to give it a go?
The RIAA might be bastards, but if they championed a model where the artists got zero, as opposed to 'not very much', you'd hate them even more.
Actually, I wouldn't, because at least I'd be able to appreciate their honesty and forthrightness in being utter bastards. I can't abide someone who hides their assholery behind a facade of do-goodery.
I'll take an unrepentant asshole over a hypocritical one any day.
However the content owners in this case felt they were not being looked after, and so used whatever leverage they could get.
A fine justification of government corruption that is. Don't like the laws? Just use 'whatever leverage you can get' to get them changed. Who cares if it involves furthering the subordination of our government to corporations; everyone else is doing it, therefore it must be okay.
Here's a thought: since it's obvious that the music companies are at the very least amoral, and are going to use whatever means they possibly can in order to further their revenue stream and business models, I don't see any reason why any "morality" is due them from consumers. When they start to show any signs of a moral sense other than the economic law of the jungle, then I'll stop trying to screw them for every penny I possibly can.
I'll save my morals for people and entities that might actually have some in return.
Is that what it takes to be a "considerable power" nowadays ?
Don't forget the 3,000-odd nuclear weapons. I think that's "considerable."
I suspect that if the Russians really did cave as far as this document suggests, it's because of internal powermongering between Putin and other factions. Someone -- Putin, probably -- is cozying up to the U.S., probably because they already have, or are about to do, something objectionable.