When I run a callto: URL in my Firefox/Linux, I get a dialog asking me if I want to open gnomemeeting. It's not opened by default, although there is a checkbox to do that for future invocations.
What is clear is that I don't expect my web browser to launch external programs without my consent. Even starting an email client for mailto: urls annoys me. Displaying a dialog before running an url handler needs to be the default behaviour. I suppose you might want to give the user the option to opt-out of the dialog for an individual protocol on a per-domain basis, although I don't see what the big deal is with quickly displaying a confirmation dialog when I'm leaving the browser.
And while Skype does have domain specific knowledge, it does not know whether the URL is coming from a trusted context or not. In a desktop environment, I might add links to Skype call urls on my desktop, I wouldn't want a confirmation when running those.
Let me get this straight: you think that a US economy completely closed off from the rest of the world would be an improvement? What do you figure would be the consequences of doing that? (Ignoring for the moment how you'd do it.)
For the most part, the US is far away from drinking muddy water and eating bugs. It'd be a wealthy country even with half the wealth. Maybe you should think about ways and means to redistribute some of that wealth so that it benefits all of you as opposed to just the top 1%. Anyway, I doubt there's any way to prevent the developing countries from getting a fairer share of the pie short of using your comically large military force, and I just hope you're collectively not dumb enough to do that.
Good thoughts, but I doubt you'd argue that those kinds of commercial services would generate as much money as the copyright industry does now. Of course, a (much) bigger cut of that money could go to the artists.
And then what happens? Post like yours aren't wrong, but they always end at the point where all the artists are starving and stop producing work for money. If nothing else, I think it's an interesting thought experiment to figure out what would happen after that. Would zero new works be created? Would they all suck? What would happen to all the third parties that currently make their money from copyrighted works? Would our taste change when there isn't such a massive, financially-motivated PR industry out there to form it? Would we re-instate copyright after a few years?
Of course, with no legal downside to file-sharing, it would get a whole lot easier to pirate. Right now, buying a song in iTunes is really convenient and easy, but there's really no technical problem at all to create a P2P network that looks and works exactly like the iTunes Music Store. In fact I'm almost surprised nobody has done that in order to share free/libre music/media (ostensibly...).
You are aware that this destroys the value of human labor on a massive scale, right?
I wouldn't put it that way, but the phrasing in your other post is better - it destroys (diminishes, I'd say) the financial incentive to create works. Lots of people wouldn't be able to make living doing what they do now. However, it's a grant given by society that they can do so now, and it's not inconceivable that this grant be modified.
I'm not sure how a system based on a different incentive structure would look like, and more importantly, what kind of works it would produce. I mean, you can look at what kind of stuff was created when the structure was different in the past. Even though copyright is quite old, I'd argue the incentive system hasn't always worked the way it does now. I guess you had fewer works (even per capita), but then again, distribution is incomparably easier today. You had patrons of the arts (lords, rich people, religious authorities, governments), and we still do in many areas of culture, such as museums and performance art.
You can also look at what kind of stuff is generated every day on YouTube, much of which is created without a financial incentive. (And much of which, to be sure, is based on other copyrighted works.) I guess that paints a pretty dire picture, actually, but it's not all garbage.
I think it's pretty difficult to imagine what exactly would happen in the mid- to long-term, although it's easy to say that producing high-quality stuff needs money, and thus no high-quality stuff would be created.
A lot of things you write are wrong -- for instance, attacking one country's citizens does not declare war. Regarding the relationship between cyber war and conventional war: There are several kinds of computer attacks. Simple computer espionage certainly is no reason for a way, and neither are computer attacks that merely inconvenience the other party. Simple economic damage falls under that category. However, computer attacks that cause or can be expected to cause injury, death, damage or destruction qualify as an "armed attack," very similar to using conventional weapons. A simple armed attack (no matter if virtual or conventional, e.g. a contained border skirmish) is not enough to start a war, though, you'd need to check some publications on jus ad bellum. I suspect a (super-hypothetical, non-real) large scale cyber attack by a country's military that crashes all commercial or all military air planes in another country would qualify; the former would also be a war crime.
What adversaries? Who would have anything to gain from starting a war with the US? People might hate you (and the Europeans, for that matter) for all kinds of reason, but they don't have anything to gain from violence. You expect fundamentalist terrorists to conduct a large scale cyber attack? Or is there any other actor out there irrational enough to attack the US against their own interest? I don't think even Kim Jong Il has it in him. Why are so many Americans constantly obsessed with warfare? It's like you get off of fear, of conjuring up ever new scenarios of your own demise.
Yeah, real scary. Also: outlandish. Prices would rise, I guess, and the US diet would get more monotonous -- probably still a lot healthier, though. I doubt a whole lot of people would starve apart from those who you let starve, with or without such a crisis.
Electric engines might be extremely efficient, but in most cases, you're just pushing the combustion step further away. Most of that electricity will still be derived from combustion of fossil fuels (of course, power plants are a lot more efficient than car engines). Storing energy in a battery (any kind of battery) is also subject to losses.
Every modern Java IDE will be happy to create the trivial getters/setters for you with zero effort. Or just declare it public, if it really is trivial code. Tiny refactorings have really changed the way I write code. For instance, I rarely declare fields and even local variables manually anymore, it's just easier to just start writing and introduce it later. "Semantic" selection is also nice, using shift+alt+up/down to select increasingly larger (/smaller) expressions.
Eclipse Mylin is supposed to adjust the IDE views to hide away complexity that's not relevant to the current task (e.g. fold away functions until you view/modify them the first time). Not sure how well it works in practice.
You're overgeneralizing. What you're saying might be true for some areas of the world, but I doubt any of it is true for most urban Chinese. And even if you're living in a shack, often you'll have to pay some sort of rent, possibly not to the owner of the land.
Yeah I actually have a 64GB and a 128GB Patriot xporter. But that is not my point. In the article there are linked pictures, where it actually shows the devices, prior to them being just a connector sticking from the wall and based on their small size they could not be any bigger than 4-8GB.
I've got a phone with a resistive screen, and all those advantages don't mean much, because it's just not much fun to use with your fingers. You have to press really hard, and ideally with your fingernails. Other people using my phone have a really hard time getting it to work at all.
If you're using a halfway decent torrent app, you can easily download an arbitrary percentage of it, stop the download (slow it down to 0 kps) and continue uploading the parts you do have. Better use a filesystem and a torrent app that understand sparse files, though.
Sure, reading the driver might work. The code that turns off the LED could still be hidden in the device's firmware, though. The path/sys/class/leds does not exist when I connect my USB webcam with its apparently software-controlled LED.
My Webcam also has an LED that turns on whenever the camera is accessed. Except, in Linux it acts the opposite way. Oops. I wouldn't trust those LEDs too much.
Is that the Eastern EU perspective, or the Eastern EU perspective from 25 years ago? Because that all sounds a bit excessive -- removing kids from their families, taking away the right to vote because you flunked school. Centralized tests have their own problems, and are most useful for corporations who want to have an easy way to categorize people. Your 50% level for passing a grade is arbitrary, and most educators seem to think that -- at least in the first years -- pupils should not be able to fail a grade; or alternatively, that grades should be less rigid in general.
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When I run a callto: URL in my Firefox/Linux, I get a dialog asking me if I want to open gnomemeeting. It's not opened by default, although there is a checkbox to do that for future invocations.
What is clear is that I don't expect my web browser to launch external programs without my consent. Even starting an email client for mailto: urls annoys me. Displaying a dialog before running an url handler needs to be the default behaviour. I suppose you might want to give the user the option to opt-out of the dialog for an individual protocol on a per-domain basis, although I don't see what the big deal is with quickly displaying a confirmation dialog when I'm leaving the browser.
And while Skype does have domain specific knowledge, it does not know whether the URL is coming from a trusted context or not. In a desktop environment, I might add links to Skype call urls on my desktop, I wouldn't want a confirmation when running those.
Sadly, the reverse is often equally true.
Let me get this straight: you think that a US economy completely closed off from the rest of the world would be an improvement? What do you figure would be the consequences of doing that? (Ignoring for the moment how you'd do it.)
For the most part, the US is far away from drinking muddy water and eating bugs. It'd be a wealthy country even with half the wealth. Maybe you should think about ways and means to redistribute some of that wealth so that it benefits all of you as opposed to just the top 1%. Anyway, I doubt there's any way to prevent the developing countries from getting a fairer share of the pie short of using your comically large military force, and I just hope you're collectively not dumb enough to do that.
Good thoughts, but I doubt you'd argue that those kinds of commercial services would generate as much money as the copyright industry does now. Of course, a (much) bigger cut of that money could go to the artists.
And then what happens? Post like yours aren't wrong, but they always end at the point where all the artists are starving and stop producing work for money. If nothing else, I think it's an interesting thought experiment to figure out what would happen after that. Would zero new works be created? Would they all suck? What would happen to all the third parties that currently make their money from copyrighted works? Would our taste change when there isn't such a massive, financially-motivated PR industry out there to form it? Would we re-instate copyright after a few years?
Of course, with no legal downside to file-sharing, it would get a whole lot easier to pirate. Right now, buying a song in iTunes is really convenient and easy, but there's really no technical problem at all to create a P2P network that looks and works exactly like the iTunes Music Store. In fact I'm almost surprised nobody has done that in order to share free/libre music/media (ostensibly...).
You are aware that this destroys the value of human labor on a massive scale, right?
I wouldn't put it that way, but the phrasing in your other post is better - it destroys (diminishes, I'd say) the financial incentive to create works. Lots of people wouldn't be able to make living doing what they do now. However, it's a grant given by society that they can do so now, and it's not inconceivable that this grant be modified.
I'm not sure how a system based on a different incentive structure would look like, and more importantly, what kind of works it would produce. I mean, you can look at what kind of stuff was created when the structure was different in the past. Even though copyright is quite old, I'd argue the incentive system hasn't always worked the way it does now. I guess you had fewer works (even per capita), but then again, distribution is incomparably easier today. You had patrons of the arts (lords, rich people, religious authorities, governments), and we still do in many areas of culture, such as museums and performance art.
You can also look at what kind of stuff is generated every day on YouTube, much of which is created without a financial incentive. (And much of which, to be sure, is based on other copyrighted works.) I guess that paints a pretty dire picture, actually, but it's not all garbage.
I think it's pretty difficult to imagine what exactly would happen in the mid- to long-term, although it's easy to say that producing high-quality stuff needs money, and thus no high-quality stuff would be created.
A lot of things you write are wrong -- for instance, attacking one country's citizens does not declare war. Regarding the relationship between cyber war and conventional war: There are several kinds of computer attacks. Simple computer espionage certainly is no reason for a way, and neither are computer attacks that merely inconvenience the other party. Simple economic damage falls under that category. However, computer attacks that cause or can be expected to cause injury, death, damage or destruction qualify as an "armed attack," very similar to using conventional weapons. A simple armed attack (no matter if virtual or conventional, e.g. a contained border skirmish) is not enough to start a war, though, you'd need to check some publications on jus ad bellum. I suspect a (super-hypothetical, non-real) large scale cyber attack by a country's military that crashes all commercial or all military air planes in another country would qualify; the former would also be a war crime.
What adversaries? Who would have anything to gain from starting a war with the US? People might hate you (and the Europeans, for that matter) for all kinds of reason, but they don't have anything to gain from violence. You expect fundamentalist terrorists to conduct a large scale cyber attack? Or is there any other actor out there irrational enough to attack the US against their own interest? I don't think even Kim Jong Il has it in him. Why are so many Americans constantly obsessed with warfare? It's like you get off of fear, of conjuring up ever new scenarios of your own demise.
Yeah, real scary. Also: outlandish. Prices would rise, I guess, and the US diet would get more monotonous -- probably still a lot healthier, though. I doubt a whole lot of people would starve apart from those who you let starve, with or without such a crisis.
Electric engines might be extremely efficient, but in most cases, you're just pushing the combustion step further away. Most of that electricity will still be derived from combustion of fossil fuels (of course, power plants are a lot more efficient than car engines). Storing energy in a battery (any kind of battery) is also subject to losses.
Every modern Java IDE will be happy to create the trivial getters/setters for you with zero effort. Or just declare it public, if it really is trivial code. Tiny refactorings have really changed the way I write code. For instance, I rarely declare fields and even local variables manually anymore, it's just easier to just start writing and introduce it later. "Semantic" selection is also nice, using shift+alt+up/down to select increasingly larger (/smaller) expressions.
Eclipse Mylin is supposed to adjust the IDE views to hide away complexity that's not relevant to the current task (e.g. fold away functions until you view/modify them the first time). Not sure how well it works in practice.
You're overgeneralizing. What you're saying might be true for some areas of the world, but I doubt any of it is true for most urban Chinese. And even if you're living in a shack, often you'll have to pay some sort of rent, possibly not to the owner of the land.
Yeah I actually have a 64GB and a 128GB Patriot xporter. But that is not my point. In the article there are linked pictures, where it actually shows the devices, prior to them being just a connector sticking from the wall and based on their small size they could not be any bigger than 4-8GB.
You really can't tell much about the capacity of a stick from its external dimensions. Here's a tiny 64 GB stick: http://www.supertalent.com/products/stt_usb_detail.php?type=Pico-C%2064GB (31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm)
I've got a phone with a resistive screen, and all those advantages don't mean much, because it's just not much fun to use with your fingers. You have to press really hard, and ideally with your fingernails. Other people using my phone have a really hard time getting it to work at all.
The difference is, only very few items from ancient Rome remain, while we're able to archive all of today's data in perfect quality, indefinitely.
If you're using a halfway decent torrent app, you can easily download an arbitrary percentage of it, stop the download (slow it down to 0 kps) and continue uploading the parts you do have. Better use a filesystem and a torrent app that understand sparse files, though.
Sure, reading the driver might work. The code that turns off the LED could still be hidden in the device's firmware, though. The path /sys/class/leds does not exist when I connect my USB webcam with its apparently software-controlled LED.
How do you know that it's electrically connected?
My Webcam also has an LED that turns on whenever the camera is accessed. Except, in Linux it acts the opposite way. Oops. I wouldn't trust those LEDs too much.
Is that the Eastern EU perspective, or the Eastern EU perspective from 25 years ago? Because that all sounds a bit excessive -- removing kids from their families, taking away the right to vote because you flunked school. Centralized tests have their own problems, and are most useful for corporations who want to have an easy way to categorize people. Your 50% level for passing a grade is arbitrary, and most educators seem to think that -- at least in the first years -- pupils should not be able to fail a grade; or alternatively, that grades should be less rigid in general.
"Lending" digital works really completes the circle of absurdity. It's like a metaphor taken way, way too far.
That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.