The current financial problems are caused by the dollar being a debt based currency. Debt increases exponentially, it requires exponentially increasing economy and additional loans to service the debt and continue growing.
That's a common misconception but it's not correct. Money circulates - there's no need for the money supply to increase via new loans to pay off older loans. You can simply earn the interest payments back from the bank and use them for the next cycle. There is no mathematical reason why our economies are forced to grow, and Japan in recent times was an example of a system that didn't.
I don't think that would work. You learn a lot more in school than just what is taught in class, notably, how to make friends, get on with others, work in teams (which inherently means learning how to fit into a power structure, by the way)... and so on.
A purely self-driven online education system would be woefully inadequate: children would study what interested them and nothing else, which is not a good idea. The reason I can walk up to somebody random on the street and use a phrase like "the DNA of a politician" is because I know, without a doubt, that they will have studied basic biology in school and therefore understand what DNA is. If there was no fixed curriculum everybody had to follow then you could never make assumptions about what somebody else knew, and such a civilisation would have serious problems.
I find your ideas about separation of kids into regular school and trade schools based on "natural intelligence" problematic. The UK used to use that system, it was abandoned for many excellent reasons. One of those reasons is that people can and do change. If you're going to stream people into "good" and "bad", you need an arbitrary branching point - say at 11 years old - and if somebody discovers a thirst for learning after that they are basically fucked.
I don't have any problem with the idea of school just teaching regular subjects at a unified pace. Right now the main problem is that kids who want to go further, faster, may not have the time because (at least this was true at my high school) teachers feel the need to "max out" their students with homework leaving very little free time for anything else. This is especially true if you find a particular subject difficult and so the homework takes a lot longer than it should. Teachers would probably argue with me about this, but I don't think homework is actually fundamental to teaching. If you don't have it, sure, maybe you can cover less in the classes, but kids who want to teach themselves programming or more maths or whatever would have the time to do that, and kids who don't care would just end up with fewer skills.... more or less the result of what you're proposing but fairer.
I do agree though that more practical skills should be taught in schools, and trade schools should play a bigger part. Today there's an unfortunate perception that vocational skills are "lesser" and academic skills are "better", leading to tons of people exiting the education system worth more or less worthless degrees in history of the arts, or whatever, and basically no practical skills at all. They'd have done far better to perfect a trade at an earlier age but the current education system is systematically biased against that.
You know, that's a perfectly fine argument, but it comes with a heavy price - if you aren't willing to acknowledge your responsibility to "the greater good" as defined by (gasp) other people, then you need to evict yourself from society at large. That doesn't just mean "being mobile", it means growing your own food, generating your own power, building your own house, and basically dropping any trade with the outside world. In practice, nobody wants to do that - the freedom related benefits are too small and the cost is too large - so that means submitting the rule of law, paying your taxes, accepting some government intervention (really the intervention of other people into your life) and so on.
There is certainly a market for "Internet radio" in some form. It just isn't a market that pays anything meaningful yet.
Indeed, and you could argue that this is a circular arrangement. Not many people pay for net radio, because nobody has to.
If these new rates come in, it'll bankrupt some net radio stations, and others will go the way Digitally Imported have done with a Premium channel that you have to pay for. To be honest, I love net radio so much I'm willing to spend a significant amount of cash on it. Right now I pay for DI and I sent a regular small donation to another station, but really, I'd be willing to pay more to keep it (as long as there are no ads!).
These changes will cause a shakeup in the net radio industry. It'll shrink. But, it won't die. And arguably, having much reduced rates for net radio because it was new (the current arrangement) was always going to be a temporary thing...
Our campus dining services was mandatory - except if you joined a co-op or in limited other cases - and it was run by a company that specialized in prison services, while the administration admitted that funds from board fees were siphoned off to other areas of the school.
Haha, you think that's good? My college at university had mandatory charges for catering (breakfast, lunch and dinner). In my final year they admitted after a few weeks that they had used the food money to pay for a rebranding exercise. They spent millions of pounds on consultants who recommended they change the name from "University of Durham" to "Durham University", which they then proceeded to do, at a cost of further millions of pounds. From then on every night it was the same stuff - stew and if you got there early, rice too. Nobody ever figured out what the stew was made of.
Re:How is this /.-worthy news?
on
Wine 0.9.44 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Badly written doesn't even begin to describe InstallShield. Where would I begin? Its 3 step install process that exists not because it makes sense, but because of InstallShield tortured history of an app? The amazing overhead it imposes on any app that uses it? Its custom programming language? Its heavy abuse of DCOM? The typos in its internal class names? The way it does an inter-thread RPC for every file copied (to update the label in the gui), meaning that if you want to install lots of small files most of the installers cpu time will be spent on RPC? As an ex-Wine developer, I spent many hours wrestling with this app. You haven't experienced true despair until you have encountered the hopeless, labrythine and worthless complexity of the InstallShield internals.
More to the point what is the false negative rate? There is tons of really useful code out there that doesn't make any system or library calls at all. It just takes data, processes it in some way, and hands back the results. That description could apply to something like an image decoder library like libpng to a fully blown 3D graphics engine.
That entire post is a collection of non-sequiturs.
Let's take it one at a time shall we? "The British economy is almost entirely based on debt". This is a meaningless statement. All modern capitalist economies are based on debt (not just the developed ones), this is how fiat currencies work. If you don't understand the role debt plays in the money supply system, I can see that it'd be confusing, but to say that is to imply other countries aren't. Money is debt. That's what our money systems are.
I think what you want to say is that the UK economy does not produce much. This is provably false. The UK had exports of over $460 billion in 2006, in a variety of industries. Big ones include financial services, engineering, and tourism. To pick a random example, ARM is a successful British company whos chips power hundreds of millions of mobile phones, portable games consoles and so on. ARM does not manufacture its own chips - the Chinese do that. They design them, and take a cut on every chip sold. Foreigners pay the UK for all kinds of things. Just look at how many Chinese tourists there are in London. Is the UK paid as much as before? Well, no, but then "before" the UK had a world-spanning empire so that's not a useful standard to compare to.
You say the island is overpopulated. Such a statement is meaningless. What population size would not be overpopulated? 30 million? 10 million? Nobody who makes statements like these ever attempts to quantify them, making them worthless. Those "millions of immigrants" incidentally are the only thing keeping the population stable, for what it's worth. Without them the UK would be in permenant population decline, leading to endemic shortages of skilled labor across the economy.
Does the UK have problems? Yes. Is it "the worlds biggest pyramid scheme"? Please, don't be absurd. The UK economy is one of the strongest around right now. A pound is worth two dollars, unemployment is low, the economy is moving and air quality is high... compared to other industrial countries like Japan, America or China it's not doing so bad at all.
It doesn't matter. A slow starting program is a program they will avoid, regardless of what they internally pin the blame on. The purpose of making apps start fast isn't to get kudos from the user, it's to encourage them to use it more.
OK, fair points. The spend on "UK creative industry" probably includes all the money spent on small indie production companies that produce some of the best BBC programming though, so I doubt it makes sense to cut that. I'd have been willing to pay more money to make the BBCs output (specifically news) available for free to people, but that's orthogonal to the DRM issue and is more a political statement.
It's not a choice between DRM and no DRM, it's a choice between DRM or (say) an extra 80 pounds on the license fee to make up for lost export revenue. Given the giant bitch-fest that occurs when the license fee goes up by 5 pounds I wouldn't even bother asking most people "Would you be willing to pay an extra 80 pounds a year so 4% of the computer using population can avoid buying Windows?" - I'd know the answer ahead of time.
As pointed out by another poster, The Sunday Times is owned by Murdoch who has no qualms at all about forcing a very strong right-wing bias on all his publications. His orifices generally delight in lampooning the BBC (and any other institution that competes with Murdoch) whenever possible and factual accuracy is deemed optional in these cases. I'd ignore any such article from his publications, especially one written from an "insider perspective" that is 40 years old!
Anyway, the whole idea of a pervasive "liberal bias" in the BBC is nonsense - even if you think such a thing exists, so what? Given how poorly the Tories do in the polls even after years of Labour disillusionment and given how left-wing the UK is in comparison to the US, perhaps such a bias would just reflect the bias of the British people?
It doesn't warrant protests or hype. This is a massive own-goal for the open source movement in the UK, and I speak as a British card carrying Linux user. I don't live there any more but I did used to pay the license fee. Of course it will be annoying to Mac and Linux users that iPlayer doesn't work for them, however, it's also not the BBCs problem - they have a set of fairly sensible requirements that can be met by 95%+ of the computer using population.
It makes no sense at all for the remaining few percent to try and get the BBC in trouble for this. The worst case scenario is that the iPlayer program is cancelled because of some legal challenge. Then nobody has it, and the vast majority of people will get their first experience of Linux as "the thing used by those whiny bastards that ruined the party for everything". Who wants that?
The anti-DRM zealots have no good alternative answer that doesn't involve giving away high-quality expensive TV and radio shows to the entire world, for free. Somebody suggested RealPlayer or Flash - RealPlayer for Linux doesn't have any DRM support and Flash doesn't even try, it's trivial to download the underlying video file from a SWF player. The BBC isn't just funded by the license fee, but also gets a significant chunk of its budget from selling/syndicating its shows overseas, so it's really not an option for them without making the license fee a lot more expensive which is hardly fair. As there is no other "open" (haha) DRM platform other than the one provided by Microsoft, right now it appears to be the only way forward. Complaining won't change that economic reality.
I guess it seems harmless to me because I usually listen to DJ mixes which are by definition overlapping.... I never find it all that troublesome even with pop music though. It's annoying to the ripper because they probably will listen to the songs out of order which make the crossfades jarring.
It's a convenience thing. Recording stuff to cassette then separating it out to get more or less what you would have bought on CD is/was a pain in the ass and took a lot of time. Stream-ripping might be theoretically equivalent but it's a lot easier - click a few buttons, go to work, come back and you have a ton of MP3s more or less identical to what you could have bought. Yes I know people wouldn't actually buy every track they hear on the radio, but even if you assume the average person might buy 1 in 100 songs they hear on the radio, with streamripping that's still lost sales because they have no incentive to do it.
Do people streamrip? Well, most stations I listen to (and I listen to net radio a lot) have text on their website saying "don't do that" so I assume it's not entirely obscure.
I suspect this will be quite easy to fix though, without DRM. Cross-fading/jingles are all simple solutions because they are fairly harmless for an actual listener, but if somebody wants to stick that track on their iPod or whatever it'll [a] be annoying for them and [b] be obvious to all their friends that they record their music off the radio, which is lame.
There is no open specification for time-limited DRM. What you are saying the BBC should use, does not exist. What's more, it's not even clear it can exist - whilst there are open DRM systems (like AACS) they would probably not be "open" enough to please the Slashdot crowd, and besides, they aren't designed to be backwards compatible with the installed base of PCs. If and when there is a well specified, open DRM system that provides the features the BBC needs, which has well defended implementations on Windows, MacOS and Linux, then I'll support the call for the BBC to use it. Until then I think this is just an inevitable consequence of idealogical choices the free software movement has made. You can't have your cake and eat it in this case - and I say that as a Brit and a Linux user.
OK, but the lack of an API to disable Vistas indexing isn't what's being contested. In fact, you can read the amicus brief Google submitted to the courts about the issue here.
Here's the key quote:
Google welcomes the efforts of the parties to address Microsoft's violation by taking
steps to promote user and OEM choice. At the same time, from what Google understands of the
remedies, it appears that more may need to be done to provide a truly unbiased choice of desktop
search products in Vista and achieve compliance with the Final Judgment.
The proposed remedial measures regarding user access points are only vaguely described
in the status report, and it is not immediately apparent that they will give users and OEMs the
rights to which they are entitled under III.H. 1 (a) of the Final Judgment. For example, it
appears that Microsoft will continue to show its own desktop search results when users run
searches from prominent shortcuts and menu entries throughout the operating system, though
users will now be given a mechanism to request results from their chosen desktop search product
by taking a second step after they have first viewed results from Microsoft's product.
In addition, although the status report does not mention the fact that one of the menu entries in the
Vista Start menu and in various "right-click" menus is the word "Search," Google understands
that Microsoft may intend to remove these menu entries from Vista and deprive users of these
access points altogether rather than provide the user choice required under III.H. 1 (a) of the
Final Judgment. With respect to the automatic invocation of Microsoft's desktop search product
following the boot sequence, which implicates III.H. I1(b) of the Final Judgment, it appears that
the proposed measures would not result in any changes being made in the operating system.
Instead, Microsoft will provide unspecified technical information about indexing to OEMs Independent Software Vendors, and end users.
It seems to me that the complaint is about Microsofts solution either making users jump through hoops (extra clicking for each search) to access the newly installed desktop search engine, or about them possibly just removing UI elements instead of making them configurable. Now you could argue that it's OK for parts of the Vista UI to die or become useless if you disable Vista search on the grounds that you can always create your own UI elsewhere, but I think that would be a bit silly. A key part of the way IE 4 was tied into Windows was via ubiquitous UI integration - whilst users could certainly install an alternative browser, the fact that most parts of the Windows UI still started up IE if you clicked them was a serious problem for Netscape.
My disclaimer is here - I do work for Google but not on anything related to desktop search. I contacted one of our legal/PR people about these Vista Search stories and they told me about this brief, which was released to reporters. As should hopefully be obvious, the opinions I stated here are only my own. As to why this brief is not on our own website, I do not know....
Er, so I watched the video with Ed Whitacres quotes in it. You realise that it's a cartoon, right? I can well believe this is what AT&T actually thinks but please - quoting things he "said" which are actually satire is really stupid.
Yes but that's the base rate. Usually you pay $X per month for Y calls, and if you make more calls, you pay for them as well. I know many people on contracts who spend hundreds of dollars a month on their phones - it's certainly not an all-you-can-eat deal. Usually the incentive for using a contract is that you get nicer hardware, that it's more convenient billing wise, and that the actual calls themselves can be cheaper (because you get free minutes/texts every month).
More to the point he only started registering his trademark abroad after GMail itself launched. Read the article, he registered G-Mail as a trademark in Switzerland in 2005.
The subsidy is based on the idea that you'll use your shiny new phone a lot. People who get a phone cheap and then hardly make any calls are money-losers for the phone companies, they're balanced out by those who use their phones a lot. This balancing has tremendous benefit for society - it means I can basically assume somebody will have a mobile phone regardless of their personal wealth, because the actual equipment is so damn cheap. Without locking, people would sign up for a contract to get a phone that is subsidised on the assumption of usage, then immediately swap the SIM for a cheaper pay as you go module. Now the original phone company is losing money because they bought you a phone but you aren't making any calls with them.
Now you could argue that any business model that involves (temporarily!) tying the phone to the company who paid for it is somehow immoral or wrong because it sounds like DRM, but that's an argument that won't carry much weight outside of slashdot. The system has worked well for a long time and has meant everybody can afford a phone regardless of their usage. Are there alternative business models that don't involve locking, yes of course, but would they allow poorer people who want a phone but don't use it much to be a part of the system... probably not.
I'll repeat the point I made above - I'd be interested to know why Apple did an exclusive deal with AT&T. What's in it for AT&T is obvious, but what's in it for Apple if AT&T aren't subsidising the price and hoping to make their money back by attracting high-paying power users? I can't see any reason why Apple would do that if not to reduce the price for the consumer significantly, which is what sim locking is normally about, so it makes sense. If AT&T are not subsidising the product in any way, then I would also join those wondering what the point is. I'd really like to see a citation for your claim that AT&T don't subsidise the iPhone. Is that announced anywhere?
On a lot of contracts if you void it, you pay the cost of the phone and then it's unlocked for you (if that was a part of the package you signed up for). Locking isn't here to screw you over, it's to ensure that if the phone company pays for the cost of the phone they get to make their money back on your calls. If your phone company IS screwing you over, go to a different one. Or just buy the phone yourself unlocked - this is perfectly feasable for many phones (iPhone excepted) but most people prefer to get it as part of their contract and amortize the cost over a longer period of time.
It's not a legal thing, it's a commercial thing. SIM locking makes a lot of sense and is one of the features that allowed for such a massive and fast rollout of ubiquitous GSM communications. Essentially it means the providers can heavily subsidise the price of the phone, making an advanced piece of electronics extremely cheap (and therefore affordable to lots of people), while still turning a profit. Everybody wins. But without locking, subsidising such a phone is equivalent to simply giving away money - so robust locking (a form of DRM in a way) is pretty important if you value everybody having a mobile phone. As phones usefulness is very much related to how many people have them, I'd say that's pretty important, especially as many countries now have laws around how long a phone can remain locked for and on some contracts (like mine) after you've had it for a year you own the phone and can get it unlocked.
Now, in this case, there are some things that aren't really clear. The first is how much AT&T are subsidising the cost of the phone. My Sony Ericsson W800i, which is now about 2 years old and has most of the features (if not the nice ui) of the iPhone cost me 30 UK pounds when I bought it on contract (locked for a year), which is about $60. But the high end iPhone costs 10 times that. I can well believe it's more expensive to make, as it's newer, has a nicer screen etc, but is AT&T subsidising the cost at all? If they are then I guess Apple have serious problems with the manufacturing price. If they aren't doing so then the original rationale for allowing locking (which is otherwise an unwarranted distortion of the free market) disappears, and it should be looked at closely.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a common misconception but it's not correct. Money circulates - there's no need for the money supply to increase via new loans to pay off older loans. You can simply earn the interest payments back from the bank and use them for the next cycle. There is no mathematical reason why our economies are forced to grow, and Japan in recent times was an example of a system that didn't.
You are, however, using the internet, and therefore trading with an ISP, using currency that was presumably earned using some other kind of trade.
So nerds are libertarians because they think it'll get them free sex and psychic powers?
I don't think that would work. You learn a lot more in school than just what is taught in class, notably, how to make friends, get on with others, work in teams (which inherently means learning how to fit into a power structure, by the way) ... and so on.
A purely self-driven online education system would be woefully inadequate: children would study what interested them and nothing else, which is not a good idea. The reason I can walk up to somebody random on the street and use a phrase like "the DNA of a politician" is because I know, without a doubt, that they will have studied basic biology in school and therefore understand what DNA is. If there was no fixed curriculum everybody had to follow then you could never make assumptions about what somebody else knew, and such a civilisation would have serious problems.
I find your ideas about separation of kids into regular school and trade schools based on "natural intelligence" problematic. The UK used to use that system, it was abandoned for many excellent reasons. One of those reasons is that people can and do change. If you're going to stream people into "good" and "bad", you need an arbitrary branching point - say at 11 years old - and if somebody discovers a thirst for learning after that they are basically fucked.
I don't have any problem with the idea of school just teaching regular subjects at a unified pace. Right now the main problem is that kids who want to go further, faster, may not have the time because (at least this was true at my high school) teachers feel the need to "max out" their students with homework leaving very little free time for anything else. This is especially true if you find a particular subject difficult and so the homework takes a lot longer than it should. Teachers would probably argue with me about this, but I don't think homework is actually fundamental to teaching. If you don't have it, sure, maybe you can cover less in the classes, but kids who want to teach themselves programming or more maths or whatever would have the time to do that, and kids who don't care would just end up with fewer skills .... more or less the result of what you're proposing but fairer.
I do agree though that more practical skills should be taught in schools, and trade schools should play a bigger part. Today there's an unfortunate perception that vocational skills are "lesser" and academic skills are "better", leading to tons of people exiting the education system worth more or less worthless degrees in history of the arts, or whatever, and basically no practical skills at all. They'd have done far better to perfect a trade at an earlier age but the current education system is systematically biased against that.
You know, that's a perfectly fine argument, but it comes with a heavy price - if you aren't willing to acknowledge your responsibility to "the greater good" as defined by (gasp) other people, then you need to evict yourself from society at large. That doesn't just mean "being mobile", it means growing your own food, generating your own power, building your own house, and basically dropping any trade with the outside world. In practice, nobody wants to do that - the freedom related benefits are too small and the cost is too large - so that means submitting the rule of law, paying your taxes, accepting some government intervention (really the intervention of other people into your life) and so on.
Indeed, and you could argue that this is a circular arrangement. Not many people pay for net radio, because nobody has to.
If these new rates come in, it'll bankrupt some net radio stations, and others will go the way Digitally Imported have done with a Premium channel that you have to pay for. To be honest, I love net radio so much I'm willing to spend a significant amount of cash on it. Right now I pay for DI and I sent a regular small donation to another station, but really, I'd be willing to pay more to keep it (as long as there are no ads!).
These changes will cause a shakeup in the net radio industry. It'll shrink. But, it won't die. And arguably, having much reduced rates for net radio because it was new (the current arrangement) was always going to be a temporary thing ...
Haha, you think that's good? My college at university had mandatory charges for catering (breakfast, lunch and dinner). In my final year they admitted after a few weeks that they had used the food money to pay for a rebranding exercise. They spent millions of pounds on consultants who recommended they change the name from "University of Durham" to "Durham University", which they then proceeded to do, at a cost of further millions of pounds. From then on every night it was the same stuff - stew and if you got there early, rice too. Nobody ever figured out what the stew was made of.
Badly written doesn't even begin to describe InstallShield. Where would I begin? Its 3 step install process that exists not because it makes sense, but because of InstallShield tortured history of an app? The amazing overhead it imposes on any app that uses it? Its custom programming language? Its heavy abuse of DCOM? The typos in its internal class names? The way it does an inter-thread RPC for every file copied (to update the label in the gui), meaning that if you want to install lots of small files most of the installers cpu time will be spent on RPC? As an ex-Wine developer, I spent many hours wrestling with this app. You haven't experienced true despair until you have encountered the hopeless, labrythine and worthless complexity of the InstallShield internals.
More to the point what is the false negative rate? There is tons of really useful code out there that doesn't make any system or library calls at all. It just takes data, processes it in some way, and hands back the results. That description could apply to something like an image decoder library like libpng to a fully blown 3D graphics engine.
That entire post is a collection of non-sequiturs.
Let's take it one at a time shall we? "The British economy is almost entirely based on debt". This is a meaningless statement. All modern capitalist economies are based on debt (not just the developed ones), this is how fiat currencies work. If you don't understand the role debt plays in the money supply system, I can see that it'd be confusing, but to say that is to imply other countries aren't. Money is debt. That's what our money systems are.
I think what you want to say is that the UK economy does not produce much. This is provably false. The UK had exports of over $460 billion in 2006, in a variety of industries. Big ones include financial services, engineering, and tourism. To pick a random example, ARM is a successful British company whos chips power hundreds of millions of mobile phones, portable games consoles and so on. ARM does not manufacture its own chips - the Chinese do that. They design them, and take a cut on every chip sold. Foreigners pay the UK for all kinds of things. Just look at how many Chinese tourists there are in London. Is the UK paid as much as before? Well, no, but then "before" the UK had a world-spanning empire so that's not a useful standard to compare to.
You say the island is overpopulated. Such a statement is meaningless. What population size would not be overpopulated? 30 million? 10 million? Nobody who makes statements like these ever attempts to quantify them, making them worthless. Those "millions of immigrants" incidentally are the only thing keeping the population stable, for what it's worth. Without them the UK would be in permenant population decline, leading to endemic shortages of skilled labor across the economy.
Does the UK have problems? Yes. Is it "the worlds biggest pyramid scheme"? Please, don't be absurd. The UK economy is one of the strongest around right now. A pound is worth two dollars, unemployment is low, the economy is moving and air quality is high ... compared to other industrial countries like Japan, America or China it's not doing so bad at all.
It doesn't matter. A slow starting program is a program they will avoid, regardless of what they internally pin the blame on. The purpose of making apps start fast isn't to get kudos from the user, it's to encourage them to use it more.
OK, fair points. The spend on "UK creative industry" probably includes all the money spent on small indie production companies that produce some of the best BBC programming though, so I doubt it makes sense to cut that. I'd have been willing to pay more money to make the BBCs output (specifically news) available for free to people, but that's orthogonal to the DRM issue and is more a political statement.
It's not a choice between DRM and no DRM, it's a choice between DRM or (say) an extra 80 pounds on the license fee to make up for lost export revenue. Given the giant bitch-fest that occurs when the license fee goes up by 5 pounds I wouldn't even bother asking most people "Would you be willing to pay an extra 80 pounds a year so 4% of the computer using population can avoid buying Windows?" - I'd know the answer ahead of time.
As pointed out by another poster, The Sunday Times is owned by Murdoch who has no qualms at all about forcing a very strong right-wing bias on all his publications. His orifices generally delight in lampooning the BBC (and any other institution that competes with Murdoch) whenever possible and factual accuracy is deemed optional in these cases. I'd ignore any such article from his publications, especially one written from an "insider perspective" that is 40 years old!
Anyway, the whole idea of a pervasive "liberal bias" in the BBC is nonsense - even if you think such a thing exists, so what? Given how poorly the Tories do in the polls even after years of Labour disillusionment and given how left-wing the UK is in comparison to the US, perhaps such a bias would just reflect the bias of the British people?
It doesn't warrant protests or hype. This is a massive own-goal for the open source movement in the UK, and I speak as a British card carrying Linux user. I don't live there any more but I did used to pay the license fee. Of course it will be annoying to Mac and Linux users that iPlayer doesn't work for them, however, it's also not the BBCs problem - they have a set of fairly sensible requirements that can be met by 95%+ of the computer using population.
It makes no sense at all for the remaining few percent to try and get the BBC in trouble for this. The worst case scenario is that the iPlayer program is cancelled because of some legal challenge. Then nobody has it, and the vast majority of people will get their first experience of Linux as "the thing used by those whiny bastards that ruined the party for everything". Who wants that?
The anti-DRM zealots have no good alternative answer that doesn't involve giving away high-quality expensive TV and radio shows to the entire world, for free. Somebody suggested RealPlayer or Flash - RealPlayer for Linux doesn't have any DRM support and Flash doesn't even try, it's trivial to download the underlying video file from a SWF player. The BBC isn't just funded by the license fee, but also gets a significant chunk of its budget from selling/syndicating its shows overseas, so it's really not an option for them without making the license fee a lot more expensive which is hardly fair. As there is no other "open" (haha) DRM platform other than the one provided by Microsoft, right now it appears to be the only way forward. Complaining won't change that economic reality.
I guess it seems harmless to me because I usually listen to DJ mixes which are by definition overlapping .... I never find it all that troublesome even with pop music though. It's annoying to the ripper because they probably will listen to the songs out of order which make the crossfades jarring.
It's a convenience thing. Recording stuff to cassette then separating it out to get more or less what you would have bought on CD is/was a pain in the ass and took a lot of time. Stream-ripping might be theoretically equivalent but it's a lot easier - click a few buttons, go to work, come back and you have a ton of MP3s more or less identical to what you could have bought. Yes I know people wouldn't actually buy every track they hear on the radio, but even if you assume the average person might buy 1 in 100 songs they hear on the radio, with streamripping that's still lost sales because they have no incentive to do it.
Do people streamrip? Well, most stations I listen to (and I listen to net radio a lot) have text on their website saying "don't do that" so I assume it's not entirely obscure.
I suspect this will be quite easy to fix though, without DRM. Cross-fading/jingles are all simple solutions because they are fairly harmless for an actual listener, but if somebody wants to stick that track on their iPod or whatever it'll [a] be annoying for them and [b] be obvious to all their friends that they record their music off the radio, which is lame.
There is no open specification for time-limited DRM. What you are saying the BBC should use, does not exist. What's more, it's not even clear it can exist - whilst there are open DRM systems (like AACS) they would probably not be "open" enough to please the Slashdot crowd, and besides, they aren't designed to be backwards compatible with the installed base of PCs. If and when there is a well specified, open DRM system that provides the features the BBC needs, which has well defended implementations on Windows, MacOS and Linux, then I'll support the call for the BBC to use it. Until then I think this is just an inevitable consequence of idealogical choices the free software movement has made. You can't have your cake and eat it in this case - and I say that as a Brit and a Linux user.
OK, but the lack of an API to disable Vistas indexing isn't what's being contested. In fact, you can read the amicus brief Google submitted to the courts about the issue here.
Here's the key quote:
It seems to me that the complaint is about Microsofts solution either making users jump through hoops (extra clicking for each search) to access the newly installed desktop search engine, or about them possibly just removing UI elements instead of making them configurable. Now you could argue that it's OK for parts of the Vista UI to die or become useless if you disable Vista search on the grounds that you can always create your own UI elsewhere, but I think that would be a bit silly. A key part of the way IE 4 was tied into Windows was via ubiquitous UI integration - whilst users could certainly install an alternative browser, the fact that most parts of the Windows UI still started up IE if you clicked them was a serious problem for Netscape.
My disclaimer is here - I do work for Google but not on anything related to desktop search. I contacted one of our legal/PR people about these Vista Search stories and they told me about this brief, which was released to reporters. As should hopefully be obvious, the opinions I stated here are only my own. As to why this brief is not on our own website, I do not know ....
Er, so I watched the video with Ed Whitacres quotes in it. You realise that it's a cartoon, right? I can well believe this is what AT&T actually thinks but please - quoting things he "said" which are actually satire is really stupid.
Yes but that's the base rate. Usually you pay $X per month for Y calls, and if you make more calls, you pay for them as well. I know many people on contracts who spend hundreds of dollars a month on their phones - it's certainly not an all-you-can-eat deal. Usually the incentive for using a contract is that you get nicer hardware, that it's more convenient billing wise, and that the actual calls themselves can be cheaper (because you get free minutes/texts every month).
More to the point he only started registering his trademark abroad after GMail itself launched. Read the article, he registered G-Mail as a trademark in Switzerland in 2005.
The subsidy is based on the idea that you'll use your shiny new phone a lot. People who get a phone cheap and then hardly make any calls are money-losers for the phone companies, they're balanced out by those who use their phones a lot. This balancing has tremendous benefit for society - it means I can basically assume somebody will have a mobile phone regardless of their personal wealth, because the actual equipment is so damn cheap. Without locking, people would sign up for a contract to get a phone that is subsidised on the assumption of usage, then immediately swap the SIM for a cheaper pay as you go module. Now the original phone company is losing money because they bought you a phone but you aren't making any calls with them.
Now you could argue that any business model that involves (temporarily!) tying the phone to the company who paid for it is somehow immoral or wrong because it sounds like DRM, but that's an argument that won't carry much weight outside of slashdot. The system has worked well for a long time and has meant everybody can afford a phone regardless of their usage. Are there alternative business models that don't involve locking, yes of course, but would they allow poorer people who want a phone but don't use it much to be a part of the system ... probably not.
I'll repeat the point I made above - I'd be interested to know why Apple did an exclusive deal with AT&T. What's in it for AT&T is obvious, but what's in it for Apple if AT&T aren't subsidising the price and hoping to make their money back by attracting high-paying power users? I can't see any reason why Apple would do that if not to reduce the price for the consumer significantly, which is what sim locking is normally about, so it makes sense. If AT&T are not subsidising the product in any way, then I would also join those wondering what the point is. I'd really like to see a citation for your claim that AT&T don't subsidise the iPhone. Is that announced anywhere?
On a lot of contracts if you void it, you pay the cost of the phone and then it's unlocked for you (if that was a part of the package you signed up for). Locking isn't here to screw you over, it's to ensure that if the phone company pays for the cost of the phone they get to make their money back on your calls. If your phone company IS screwing you over, go to a different one. Or just buy the phone yourself unlocked - this is perfectly feasable for many phones (iPhone excepted) but most people prefer to get it as part of their contract and amortize the cost over a longer period of time.
It's not a legal thing, it's a commercial thing. SIM locking makes a lot of sense and is one of the features that allowed for such a massive and fast rollout of ubiquitous GSM communications. Essentially it means the providers can heavily subsidise the price of the phone, making an advanced piece of electronics extremely cheap (and therefore affordable to lots of people), while still turning a profit. Everybody wins. But without locking, subsidising such a phone is equivalent to simply giving away money - so robust locking (a form of DRM in a way) is pretty important if you value everybody having a mobile phone. As phones usefulness is very much related to how many people have them, I'd say that's pretty important, especially as many countries now have laws around how long a phone can remain locked for and on some contracts (like mine) after you've had it for a year you own the phone and can get it unlocked.
Now, in this case, there are some things that aren't really clear. The first is how much AT&T are subsidising the cost of the phone. My Sony Ericsson W800i, which is now about 2 years old and has most of the features (if not the nice ui) of the iPhone cost me 30 UK pounds when I bought it on contract (locked for a year), which is about $60. But the high end iPhone costs 10 times that. I can well believe it's more expensive to make, as it's newer, has a nicer screen etc, but is AT&T subsidising the cost at all? If they are then I guess Apple have serious problems with the manufacturing price. If they aren't doing so then the original rationale for allowing locking (which is otherwise an unwarranted distortion of the free market) disappears, and it should be looked at closely.