One can always dream solutions to those issues with a little (or a lot) of standardization.
See for example how many electronics use standard AA or AAA batteries. Of course you are going to say that many other electronics such as laptops and digital camera use proprietary battery packs and thats a fair point.
Also you can say that even with all the electronics using AA batteries, it would be hard to build a robot that can actually open the battery door and replace the battery. One way to solve this could be to have the car itself contain enough parts to "eject" the battery so that its accessible to a robot in a standard way...
Its not inconceivable that in a distant future, the fleet of personal vehicles, is standardized to a point where battery standardization is possible. This would probably mean that all the cars in a given category would have to be built to support a standardized battery interface, which doesnt mean that car manufacturer wont find other ways to differentiate their products from one another.
This is far fetched, but I have seen stupider ideas....
the FSF hates on the RIAA, not the "recording industry", but I suspect the RIAA doesn't see the difference.
Well, frankly, I dont really see the difference either...
For one thing, RI in RIAA stands for "Recording Industry" so it would be easy to assume they are indeed the Industry
The other thing is if you just look at the members list and the board of directors list, its hard to see which parts of the Recording Industry is NOT mixed up with the RIAA... I'm sure there are some independent record labels not part of it, but frankly I would not classify those little guys as an Industry...
they dont need books outside of the one required for their classes
There's a strong argument to be made that most books will contribute to a child's education, which of course is the point you're making.
Well, no, it is not the point I am making.
However, the vast majority of the Internet won't contribute to a child's education more than they could get by just reading a decent book. In addition, websites tend to promote extreme views which is exactly what you don't want to present to children in an educational setting.
Definitely not the point I am making,... I feel so misunderstood !
Anyway it is not obvious that the vast majority of the Internet is less educational than the vast majority of books out there. Or that the Internet is more extreme than books. A decent website can be just as educational as a decent book. Controversial books and controversial websites can also be quite educational.
Schools is not just the place where my kids are learning how to calculate and conjugate verbs. Thats where they will spend most of their childhood, and thats where they will meet this society you are talking about. Thats were they will find out what society expect of them, and what they can expect of society. Two parents, even the most open and multicultural ones, cannot possibly be enough to teach kid what the world is like.
Yes, I wish my kids are like me, because I believe I'm a decent enough character, but there is no way I'm going to try to "teach" them to be like me. This would be a recipe for disaster. So sure, they might end up watching porn on the Internet, or turn gay, or turn republicans, or NRA members. But thats their life, not mine. I'll do everything I can for them to become a good person, but controlling their Internet access is definitely not the way to do it.
Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment.
Yeah, and they dont need books outside of the one required for their classes. Nor should they being able to watch any videos programs unless they are some kind of homework... Good lord, I dont want my kids to ever develop any kind of independent thoughts that might reflect bad on me. They dont need to hear the thoughts from other people than their parents. Those are MY children after all, they should think like me and act like me...
Unfortunately, the 800HP fire breathing engine is so big that it took up all the space of your SUV trunk and the back seats (second and third row). It made your wife mad, so you ended up buying here the minivan she wanted to replace your other car, a small sedan, so at least she can truck the kids around and go grocery shopping.
Then the extra weight on your monster reduce your mileage from 25MPG to 5MPG when you use the 50-states street legal engine on your daily commute. Your gas bills are getting so huge that you decide to buy another vehicle for your daily commute. You are really struggling to make the payments on your wife's minivan and your 800HP monster, so you end up buying a used Vespa scooter.
On a rainy day, you are riding to work wondering if Obama's bailout will help you out, when suddenly you get crushed by somebody who is driving another one of these 800HP monster car, illegally set in Fire-Breathing mode, at the corner of 3rd and Market. RIP jerkychew.
You leave your wife with a mortgage payment and two car payments she cant afford on her part time job... but she is glad your madness is over. And maybe now Obama's bailout is going to help her....
"Can I run iTunes and use my iPhone with Linux?"
"Err... well, almost, with wine, iTunes version 7.3 works... kind of, but its okay... you can just use one of the numerous other free media player... But you better backup your iphone on a mac or windows machine before you start playing with it on linux, because it might just eat all your songs and apps... But anyway you just just get a Google android phone that is open source and run Linux on the phone itself!... hey, no dont run away... come back! You'll see, linux its so much fun..."
We use TWiki at work, and we convert to PDF all the time. There are many ways.
The one I use for quick one shot is just choose the printable view and do a print to PDF. Cups-PDF on linux will do that for you. I also have a free (as in beer) PDF printer for windows.
You can also save the printable view as HTML. HTML to PDF converters do exist you know...
There are various plugins to help publication of bigger documents in a cleaner way (eg: remove the Twiki logo that you get on the "printable view" page, publish only a portion of a page...).
You would probably want to enforce strong rules about the formatting.
I'm not saying that TWiki is the best thing you could use, but it is definitely a possibility...
Visible video watermark is easily removable *if* you take the time to do it. I didnt noticed "red dots" yet, so I'm assuming its fairly unobtrusive and one would need to watch the whole movie a couple of time very carefully to make sure you removed all the watermarks.
They are betting it will discourage enough people, or that somebody will be sloppy and get caught and made a good example of...
The next step for the pirates would be to have an automated process to detect and remove the marks.
Then the studios would try to produce more subtle marks, that are more difficult to detect and remove, and you would get into an race between the pirates and the studios...
But keep in mind that, assuming the studios can indeed come up with always better technologies, it will be much more risky for the pirates to know they are safe.
On the copy protection/DRM side, its always easy and safe for the hackers: They know when they succeeded. Where the studio never know where the next exploitable flaws in their system is going to be.
Now for watermark: the pirates will probably never really know if they succeeded in removing the watermarks because the studio will keep the technology and the detectors secrets until they have to publish them for court cases.
Obviously, it remains to be seen if any video/audio watermark system is robust enough to survive the basic trans-coding algorithm that are usually applied by the pirates, and also if they are robust enough to be admissible in courts.
But then again, if you knew that your dvds or camcorded movies were watermarked with information that could eventually be linked to you, would you take the effort and risk to share it on bittorrent ? If you were in it for the money, I'm sure you will take some risks, but if you were doing it just for the heck of it ?
I think thats what the studio are thinking: "If they think we have the technology to track them, or if its just good enough that we can catch just one of them and make an example of it, that will be a string deterrent..."
If health insurance was like auto or home insurance:
- your premium would go up every time you get sick - your premium would go down every year you didnt go to see a doctor - your premium would go up if there is any history of diabetes, heart disease, etc.. in your family - your premium would go up if they cant trace your health history. - your premium would go down if you live close to an ER. - your premium would go down if you can prove you go to the gym once a week. (But if you go hiking outdoor... cant prove it too bad) - your premium would go up or down depending on which neighborhood you lives in. - they would refuse to insure you if you are too sick...
When people have to pay more for regular care (also called "preventive" care) they dont do it as much, and then the number of medical emergencies rise and we all pay for it.
They do already on physical items (ie: books, computers) but not on downloads (songs, ebook,...) because, obviously, it was not required in Wisconsin yet. It is required in other states, and they do collect on those items too.
Obviously it all depends what your input data is. I think your $15K premium is too low, since the article stated the price of the new aptera between 25K and 45K. I took the middle at $35K. The cheapest cars you can buy are less than 11K. So with those numbers the break even point is 12 years. Not even counting the cost of electricity.
Now how you count depends on your own perspective. Some things you cant put a price on it either.
- I didnt count financing yet . At 35K, I'm pretty sure I would need financing, at $11K not so much. - You're going to say that the Aptera comes with more features than a cheapo chevy Aveo or Hyunday accent. - But I'm going to say that you can carry 4 persons, including a car seat, in the cheapos cars. - You're going to say less maintenance on the Aptera, I'm going to say my neighborhood shop wont know how to change the brakes or the windshield wipers on the Aptera. - Depreciation could go either way. - I'm counting people will keep the car 10 years, if you count 20 years, then bonus for the Aptera. - If gas prices are going $8/gal or more, then even better for the Aptera.
At then end, Aptera might prove a better deal depending what your assumptions are. But you cant predict the future. The fact is we have a lot more data to judge the current crop of cars for depreciation, maintenance cost etc. than we have for the Aptera.
Thats funny you have to remind Slashdot of that. Actually its funny that everybody is always covering their ass by saying IANAL when talking about this issue.
I'm not even sure what makes anybody think that a Lawyer would have better or definitive answers than the guys who actually wrote the licenses and the software...
I'm sure the lawyers have their own language that says that whatever they are telling you might not be the truth.
Its very... frustrating... If only laws and software licenses were as simple as code...
Maybe somebody should write the licenses as a program that output 0 (cant use) or 1 (can use).
Three wheels helps them get a vehicle to market faster and cheaper, that's quite true. But there are also a wide range of other benefits. Insurance is cheaper. The car can more easily follow the optimal teardrop shape. Reaction time to driver input is faster. Cost of construction is lower. Maintenance is lower. The car is lighter, and thus has less rolling drag. Lower rolling drag and lower aero drag means faster charging times and less power consumed. And so on down the line.
Even with all that reduction in cost, it still doesn't make economical sense for me (and most people I would assume) to own this.
I mean, somebody needs to compare owning this to a subcompact car, for 10 years and about 12000 miles/year. My quick calculation shows me its not worth it, even at $5/gallon.
Add on top of the economic factors, the practicability factors, and the only reason I see today to buy this is if you have money to spare and want to be green. Sadly most people cant afford to be green at that price.
Because people dont want to pay $65 but $35 or $45 ? And because they already have Phone or Cable TV anyway ? Or because the fiber guy is not going to pull its fiber to their neighborhood ?
Seriously, if I could get $65 fiber, I might, but where do I need to live ?
Opera's complaint specifically addressed the fact that MS's abuse has resulted in a huge portion of the Web no longer being standards compliant and that this was part of MS's intention as revealed by their internal memos. I suspect Opera hopes for several things possibly including, Windows shipping with multiple browsers and MS being forced to make IE standards compliant and supporting a reasonable level of new standards on par with all the other browsers. Both moves would significantly benefit Opera both in market share and because they would not have to try to write a noncompliant mode for their browser to deal with all the pages designed to work with IE instead of standards and there would no longer be such a barrier to companies looking to switch browsers.
Firefox or Apple with Safari didnt need a lawsuit. They are doing fine. They are standard compliant. And IE keeps loosing market shares.
It looks like Opera is convinced that their product is the best, and its only Microsoft fault if they are not on everybody's desktop.
But maybe it has to with the fact that their browser wasn't free for a long time.
And maybe they are just not that good, maybe their product is not much better compared to the other ones, or maybe their Marketing failed.. who knows?
Maybe they didnt realize that a browser product by itself has little value for the end user (not enough value to pay for it in any case). And that its all about the devices and the content.
Now, if you want to go after HP, DELL etc who sell PC's with bundled software, with that bundle not including any decent browser, media player etc and yet including some crap that serves advertisements, well I say go at it. It is certainly not Microsoft's fault.
Well, actually thats possibly MS fault. If they had deal such as "if you include a competing browser, you dont get the discount".
I would think thats probably the main "abuse of monopoly" they committed...
Slashdot Mirror
One can always dream solutions to those issues with a little (or a lot) of standardization.
See for example how many electronics use standard AA or AAA batteries. Of course you are going to say that many other electronics such as laptops and digital camera use proprietary battery packs and thats a fair point.
Also you can say that even with all the electronics using AA batteries, it would be hard to build a robot that can actually open the battery door and replace the battery. One way to solve this could be to have the car itself contain enough parts to "eject" the battery so that its accessible to a robot in a standard way...
Its not inconceivable that in a distant future, the fleet of personal vehicles, is standardized to a point where battery standardization is possible. This would probably mean that all the cars in a given category would have to be built to support a standardized battery interface, which doesnt mean that car manufacturer wont find other ways to differentiate their products from one another.
This is far fetched, but I have seen stupider ideas....
the FSF hates on the RIAA, not the "recording industry", but I suspect the RIAA doesn't see the difference.
Well, frankly, I dont really see the difference either...
For one thing, RI in RIAA stands for "Recording Industry" so it would be easy to assume they are indeed the Industry
The other thing is if you just look at the members list and the board of directors list, its hard to see which parts of the Recording Industry is NOT mixed up with the RIAA... I'm sure there are some independent record labels not part of it, but frankly I would not classify those little guys as an Industry...
they dont need books outside of the one required for their classes
There's a strong argument to be made that most books will contribute to a child's education, which of course is the point you're making.
Well, no, it is not the point I am making.
However, the vast majority of the Internet won't contribute to a child's education more than they could get by just reading a decent book. In addition, websites tend to promote extreme views which is exactly what you don't want to present to children in an educational setting.
Definitely not the point I am making,... I feel so misunderstood !
Anyway it is not obvious that the vast majority of the Internet is less educational than the vast majority of books out there. Or that the Internet is more extreme than books. A decent website can be just as educational as a decent book. Controversial books and controversial websites can also be quite educational.
Schools is not just the place where my kids are learning how to calculate and conjugate verbs. Thats where they will spend most of their childhood, and thats where they will meet this society you are talking about. Thats were they will find out what society expect of them, and what they can expect of society. Two parents, even the most open and multicultural ones, cannot possibly be enough to teach kid what the world is like.
Yes, I wish my kids are like me, because I believe I'm a decent enough character, but there is no way I'm going to try to "teach" them to be like me. This would be a recipe for disaster. So sure, they might end up watching porn on the Internet, or turn gay, or turn republicans, or NRA members. But thats their life, not mine. I'll do everything I can for them to become a good person, but controlling their Internet access is definitely not the way to do it.
Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment.
Yeah, and they dont need books outside of the one required for their classes. Nor should they being able to watch any videos programs unless they are some kind of homework... Good lord, I dont want my kids to ever develop any kind of independent thoughts that might reflect bad on me. They dont need to hear the thoughts from other people than their parents. Those are MY children after all, they should think like me and act like me...
Unfortunately, the 800HP fire breathing engine is so big that it took up all the space of your SUV trunk and the back seats (second and third row).
It made your wife mad, so you ended up buying here the minivan she wanted to replace your other car, a small sedan, so at least she can truck the kids around and go grocery shopping.
Then the extra weight on your monster reduce your mileage from 25MPG to 5MPG when you use the 50-states street legal engine on your daily commute.
Your gas bills are getting so huge that you decide to buy another vehicle for your daily commute.
You are really struggling to make the payments on your wife's minivan and your 800HP monster, so you end up buying a used Vespa scooter.
On a rainy day, you are riding to work wondering if Obama's bailout will help you out, when suddenly you get crushed by somebody who is driving another one of these 800HP monster car, illegally set in Fire-Breathing mode, at the corner of 3rd and Market. RIP jerkychew.
You leave your wife with a mortgage payment and two car payments she cant afford on her part time job... but she is glad your madness is over. And maybe now Obama's bailout is going to help her....
And Yes, You are alone.
We use TWiki at work, and we convert to PDF all the time. There are many ways.
The one I use for quick one shot is just choose the printable view and do a print to PDF. Cups-PDF on linux will do that for you. I also have a free (as in beer) PDF printer for windows.
You can also save the printable view as HTML. HTML to PDF converters do exist you know...
There are various plugins to help publication of bigger documents in a cleaner way (eg: remove the Twiki logo that you get on the "printable view" page, publish only a portion of a page...).
You would probably want to enforce strong rules about the formatting.
I'm not saying that TWiki is the best thing you could use, but it is definitely a possibility...
Oh please, try to bring this laptop on your next flight and tell us what happen at airport security... That should be fun.
Netcraft confirms ? ...
Okay, i'm not even going to bother going further with this stupid joke....
TWiki has some extension for LaTeX/MathML...
Thats just the first step.
Visible video watermark is easily removable *if* you take the time to do it. I didnt noticed "red dots" yet, so I'm assuming its fairly unobtrusive and one would need to watch the whole movie a couple of time very carefully to make sure you removed all the watermarks.
They are betting it will discourage enough people, or that somebody will be sloppy and get caught and made a good example of...
The next step for the pirates would be to have an automated process to detect and remove the marks.
Then the studios would try to produce more subtle marks, that are more difficult to detect and remove, and you would get into an race between the pirates and the studios...
But keep in mind that, assuming the studios can indeed come up with always better technologies, it will be much more risky for the pirates to know they are safe.
On the copy protection/DRM side, its always easy and safe for the hackers: They know when they succeeded. Where the studio never know where the next exploitable flaws in their system is going to be.
Now for watermark: the pirates will probably never really know if they succeeded in removing the watermarks because the studio will keep the technology and the detectors secrets until they have to publish them for court cases.
Obviously, it remains to be seen if any video/audio watermark system is robust enough to survive the basic trans-coding algorithm that are usually applied by the pirates, and also if they are robust enough to be admissible in courts.
But then again, if you knew that your dvds or camcorded movies were watermarked with information that could eventually be linked to you, would you take the effort and risk to share it on bittorrent ? If you were in it for the money, I'm sure you will take some risks, but if you were doing it just for the heck of it ?
I think thats what the studio are thinking: "If they think we have the technology to track them, or if its just good enough that we can catch just one of them and make an example of it, that will be a string deterrent..."
But all in all I would not be too worried...
If health insurance was like auto or home insurance:
- your premium would go up every time you get sick
- your premium would go down every year you didnt go to see a doctor
- your premium would go up if there is any history of diabetes, heart disease, etc.. in your family
- your premium would go up if they cant trace your health history.
- your premium would go down if you live close to an ER.
- your premium would go down if you can prove you go to the gym once a week. (But if you go hiking outdoor... cant prove it too bad)
- your premium would go up or down depending on which neighborhood you lives in.
- they would refuse to insure you if you are too sick...
When people have to pay more for regular care (also called "preventive" care) they dont do it as much, and then the number of medical emergencies rise and we all pay for it.
They do already on physical items (ie: books, computers) but not on downloads (songs, ebook, ...)
because, obviously, it was not required in Wisconsin yet. It is required in other states, and they do collect on those items too.
He was just proving his point. You too btw.... and me too...
Yeah right... he was not a pedophile suspect either ....
Should the judge ask 1000 pedophiles suspect what their expectation of privacy be...
Obviously it all depends what your input data is. I think your $15K premium is too low, since the article stated the price of the new aptera between 25K and 45K. I took the middle at $35K. The cheapest cars you can buy are less than 11K. So with those numbers the break even point is 12 years. Not even counting the cost of electricity.
Now how you count depends on your own perspective. Some things you cant put a price on it either.
- I didnt count financing yet . At 35K, I'm pretty sure I would need financing, at $11K not so much.
- You're going to say that the Aptera comes with more features than a cheapo chevy Aveo or Hyunday accent.
- But I'm going to say that you can carry 4 persons, including a car seat, in the cheapos cars.
- You're going to say less maintenance on the Aptera, I'm going to say my neighborhood shop wont know how to change the brakes or the windshield wipers on the Aptera.
- Depreciation could go either way.
- I'm counting people will keep the car 10 years, if you count 20 years, then bonus for the Aptera.
- If gas prices are going $8/gal or more, then even better for the Aptera.
At then end, Aptera might prove a better deal depending what your assumptions are.
But you cant predict the future. The fact is we have a lot more data to judge the current crop of cars for depreciation, maintenance cost etc. than we have for the Aptera.
The Aptera is basically still a gamble.
BPINAL: Bruce Perens Is Not A Lawyer...
Thats funny you have to remind Slashdot of that. Actually its funny that everybody is always covering their ass by saying IANAL when talking about this issue.
I'm not even sure what makes anybody think that a Lawyer would have better or definitive answers than the guys who actually wrote the licenses and the software...
I'm sure the lawyers have their own language that says that whatever they are telling you might not be the truth.
Its very... frustrating... If only laws and software licenses were as simple as code...
Maybe somebody should write the licenses as a program that output 0 (cant use) or 1 (can use).
So, we should arrest all the underage kids that are going to mexico to get drunk when they come back ?
Or all the people who are going to Amsterdam and have a smoke there ?
I'd be thrilled if any of those foreign cell phone companies came here.
You mean like T-mobile ? The 3rd largest network in the US is headquartered in Germany....
They didnt do much better did they ?
Three wheels helps them get a vehicle to market faster and cheaper, that's quite true. But there are also a wide range of other benefits. Insurance is cheaper. The car can more easily follow the optimal teardrop shape. Reaction time to driver input is faster. Cost of construction is lower. Maintenance is lower. The car is lighter, and thus has less rolling drag. Lower rolling drag and lower aero drag means faster charging times and less power consumed. And so on down the line.
Even with all that reduction in cost, it still doesn't make economical sense for me (and most people I would assume) to own this.
I mean, somebody needs to compare owning this to a subcompact car, for 10 years and about 12000 miles/year. My quick calculation shows me its not worth it, even at $5/gallon.
Add on top of the economic factors, the practicability factors, and the only reason I see today to buy this is if you have money to spare and want to be green. Sadly most people cant afford to be green at that price.
Because people dont want to pay $65 but $35 or $45 ? And because they already have Phone or Cable TV anyway ? Or because the fiber guy is not going to pull its fiber to their neighborhood ?
Seriously, if I could get $65 fiber, I might, but where do I need to live ?
Opera's complaint specifically addressed the fact that MS's abuse has resulted in a huge portion of the Web no longer being standards compliant and that this was part of MS's intention as revealed by their internal memos. I suspect Opera hopes for several things possibly including, Windows shipping with multiple browsers and MS being forced to make IE standards compliant and supporting a reasonable level of new standards on par with all the other browsers. Both moves would significantly benefit Opera both in market share and because they would not have to try to write a noncompliant mode for their browser to deal with all the pages designed to work with IE instead of standards and there would no longer be such a barrier to companies looking to switch browsers.
Firefox or Apple with Safari didnt need a lawsuit. They are doing fine. They are standard compliant.
And IE keeps loosing market shares.
It looks like Opera is convinced that their product is the best, and its only Microsoft fault if they are not on everybody's desktop.
But maybe it has to with the fact that their browser wasn't free for a long time.
And maybe they are just not that good, maybe their product is not much better compared to the other ones, or maybe their Marketing failed.. who knows?
Maybe they didnt realize that a browser product by itself has little value for the end user (not enough value to pay for it in any case). And that its all about the devices and the content.
Now, if you want to go after HP, DELL etc who sell PC's with bundled software, with that bundle not including any decent browser, media player etc and yet including some crap that serves advertisements, well I say go at it. It is certainly not Microsoft's fault.
Well, actually thats possibly MS fault. If they had deal such as "if you include a competing browser, you dont get the discount".
I would think thats probably the main "abuse of monopoly" they committed...
but what about the prosperity of Hollywood and the Labels Executives !