Democracy isn't perfect, but what the hell is the alternative? Every time something you don't like gets passed you pull out the guns and start an rebellion?
The guns are for when your ability to change things by speech and voting have been curtailed. You think blocking the pirate bay is censorship? You think that this is a terrible threat to humanity? Go out and convince people, hold a protest, grab a stump somewhere. Sure there have been some limits put on free speech lately(within range on the president or for prolonged periods of time), and I don't necessarily agree with those limits either, but it hasn't been entirely abolished.
The solution to the tyranny of the majority is to convince the majority you're right, any other alternative is both doomed to fail and could only succeed through some sort of brutal dictatorship.
If you want to change things, get engaged. Go door knocking, run for office or find someone else to run for you, third party candidates don't really have a lot of luck with the presidency, but they can take positions in local and state government and once you've got enough of those you can go further.
Heck for all that the tea party are a bunch of loons their political ideology was fringe 3 years ago and now they 68 seats in congress.
FFS I'm so god damned tired of this attitude that the answer to all our problems is to start shooting people. There are times when that becomes necessary, but for all its problems the US isn't anywhere near that point yet. If you live in Syria maybe it's time to pull out the ammo box, but stop crying that people don't agree with you and try to convince them instead of threatening to shoot them and then going back to your mom's basement.
Microsoft still need a tame hardware manufacturer, but they don't actually want to make phones, largely because the Europeans would never actually let them. So long as Nokia is, at least in theory, an independent company, everyone is cool. Nokia's patents are also unnecessary, partially because the whole endless destructive war thing has already happened and also because it would be Nokia actually being sued.
As for RIM, I don't think anyone really wants that company. They aren't corporate anymore, they're BBM in the third world which isn't exactly a money spinner. If they had any game changer patents they'd have sued someone by now to try and pay the bills.
From either the launch vehicle itself or parts thereof crashing into a populated area. It's not like the entire flight path is over the ocean. When they say "launch" they don't mean just the minute or so after the rockets fire, they mean the entire trip initiated by said launch.
9/11 cost 7 billion just in terms of victim compensation plus about 21 billion to replace the buildings. Sure 9/11 was deliberate, but that doesn't mean you couldn't have an airline accident on that scale. 2.7 billion in damage from a commercial space vehicle crashing into something isn't by any stretch of the imagination beyond the pale.
The Greens won't go along with anything they decide, the opposition will support anything the government tries to do when hell freezes over, and so no one has the numbers to do anything. Copyright issues barely even get a blip on the radar here so the government isn't going to expend a whole lot of energy on it. They'll talk about it, try to make the content people feel they care and then do nothing much at all.
Java's one and only strength is it's portability. It's not as powerful as C or C++ and it's not as easy to work with as C#/Mono. It's full of ugly cruft caused by bad design decisions(most of which Google copied in order to capitalize on the Java programming base). What it does, which no other language on earth does, is run on pretty much any system you care to try it on. This doesn't really apply to phones anymore, but once upon a time it did. When developers choose Java as their language, a lot of the reason they choose it is that portability. Java apps run everywhere using software most people already have installed. It was something that I've seen dozens of articles from the early days saying they'd never achieve, but they pretty much did. You could write Java code and run it on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, pretty much any variation. You can't run it in some of the mobile walled gardens, but those are still the exception rather than the rule, and even for those apps, the back end server is running Java.
The problem with Dalvik is it stops that being the case. Dalvik will end up on Desktops and on Servers It'll be a plugin in your browser and it will do this because for all the hoopla about HTML 5, none of the reasons Java was needed have changed. The problem we have now is that we're back to the bad old days of J++ when you had to deal with different and competing Java-like run times. Developers will pick based on supposed superiority, or worse, ideology and if in the end Google wins, they'll have to be responsible for maintaining an unprofitable product which doesn't tie into their advertising business.
Oracle fought this stupid lawsuit because they need Java, it's a large part of why they bought Sun in the first place(they certainly didn't need either Solaris or SPARC to build Oracle appliances), they'll appeal this lawsuit for the same reasons, it's not and never was about money. So many people on Slashdot believe that somehow copyrighting APIs was going to destroy everything in spite of common sense telling them that that wouldn't be allowed to happen. These same people don't seem to understand how much of the inroads open source has made in the last ten years have come on the back of Java and what it can do. If you work in a corporate environment, take a look at how many *nix machines you have in your environment and look at how many have Java as a core part of their installed software. You'll find some that don't, try the same thing with systems which have been switched to Linux over the last ten years. In most industries you'll find few of the former and even fewer of the latter.
Now I'm far from the most ardent supporter of the open source movement(I think ideology and elitism gets in the way of creating good products too often), but that doesn't mean I don't understand what competition does for this industry or appreciate some of the extremely high quality open source software I use on a regular basis.
As I've said before, both sides needed to lose this lawsuit, or even better it could never have begun. If Google had decided to implement Java in its entirety on Android, or taken the Harmony project onto their phone and Oracle had sued them under the same terms I'd have been rooting for Google all the way, but that's not what happened.
Google will get shit all until this hits the Supreme Court and they either decide or refuse to hear it, Oracle and/or Google depending on who wins the next appeal will make that happen. A decision in Google's favor by the Jury would have gotten them total victory, but they didn't get that(largely because they couldn't). They might not even get legal fees(IANAL, but good faith law suits don't always require payment of fees if both parties can afford it).
Maybe you don't care if Dalvik damages Java, but language forks are not the same as software forks. When you fork software, the best one wins, when you fork languages, both lose. Programmers using a language aren't like people using software, they invest time and effort into learning a particular language, and companies invest even more into their choice of language because they have legacy systems to deal with. Google can't undo what it's done, it can't put that genie back in the bottle, and it needs Java as much as everyone else does. They can try to keep Dalvik completely on par with Java, but that won't work any better with Java than any other fork. They can try to play some licensing tricks to keep Dalvik mobile only, but at the end of this they'll have pretty much proven you can't do that.
Both sides needed to lose this case, I said Oracle winning wouldn't have been the end of the world because some perspective was needed, but it would have still been shockingly bad, Dalvik spells the end of Java, and likely the end of itself, Java syntax is a pig and without the benefits of Java why would you bother.
Google have maybe won a lawsuit, but unless they plan on getting into the business of creating a general purpose language, they've kind of shafted themselves in the process.
Which is all fine and dandy if you live in the US. If you don't that list either won't exist, will be substantially delayed, or will be the kind of gray market the studios hate.
The only reason I have any of those options with any kind of flexibility as the our legal system has said screw you to the MPAA on region coding and is in the process of currently saying screw you to them again on forcing online stores like Amazon not to sell US items to me, they've also of course just said the big "screw you" mentioned in TFA. For all the talk of a mandatory filter(which didn't happen), we've been pretty good about saying "screw you" to content holders who want to do ridiculous things. I haven't even seen any proposed new legislation in the wake of the iiNet case as yet(nor will I till at least the next election, Labor and the LNP couldn't agree the sky is blue and they both like money right now and the Green's won't vote for it so it'd be stuffed).
You see this is why people should read more(or even watch the previous versions of a story or check it on wikipedia or something). If they'd made a movie like Narnia out of that book, the producers would have deserved the death penalty. I don't really know why they had to make an all singing all dancing version anyway, the story can be told perfectly well with a rope and a fake stump as pretty much the only props(as I've seen it done).
Well the corollary to that attitude is that just because content owners demand their content is sold in a specific way doesn't mean they're entitled to it. No one on either side is entitled to Jack.
The problem for JMS is that in this world of pulp media the only power the distributor has is based around controlling the distribution channel. If he won't offer me content the way I want it then someone else will and the content they produce will be just as shitty, cliched and shoddily produced as the stuff he does(and everyone else does for that matter). It's the same problem that's facing newspapers. If all you're going to give me is a poorly researched 3 paragraph blurb, why should I pay that when I can get a hundred poorly researched 3 paragraph blurbs on the internet for free, plus a tweet from someone who was actually there. Controlling the distribution channel isn't enough any more because the distribution channel is failing. Piracy aside, people are no longer watching TV in the same ways they used to, they're no longer willing to put up with content being delivered to their region 6 months later after everyone's already done talking about it, they're not happy with people telling them when to watch what they want to watch. This is a real challenge for current content publishers, their revenue models are seriously challenged by this idea, but three strikes laws won't fix their problems. Governments are sort of going along with the idea at the moment, but they won't allow a substantial percentage of the voting public to be affected by this sort of stuff whatever bribes they get paid.
The world she is a changing, and no on really knows what it's going to look like. Personally I see a rather grim future for anyone trying to make a living making low grade content or who doesn't have some sort of additional revenue stream(dvd, merchandising, etc) in mind. Micro-payment will continue to be a bust so long as it's not financially viable to transfer amounts in the range of cents, which leaves either longer term subscription models or premium prices both of which require you to have a product people are willing to pay enough for to make a profit. I just don't really see either the old advertising model or the new one being able to sustain the kind of quality which can put you ahead of every other yokel with an internet connection.
I didn't say it was a good thing, I said it wasn't the end of the fucking world the way people keep saying.
WINE disappearing would suck, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. Most free software people would argue that WINE is solving the wrong problem anyway(allowing people to run software written for Windows on Linux as opposed to either porting that software or replacing it with something free).
What wouldn't happen from the copyrighting of APIs would be the complete and total end of programming, you wouldn't have to buy a license to use a language, because that would be insane. Whoever owns that copyright would blanket license that before the day was out or face the death of the language, and that's if it wasn't deemed to be legally license free to being with. Pretending the sky is falling just makes you look like an idiot and makes it harder to convince people of actual dangers(of which some exist).
As to the rest of it. True they probably didn't need to license Java from a legal perspective, but they could have and it would have been cheaper than all this bullshit and wouldn't have risked APIs being found to be copyrightable. At the very least they could have actually done a clean room implementation of Java instead of forking the language.
As to the other to DALVIK IS A JAVA FORK, IT IS NOT A JAVA IMPLEMENTATION, IT IS BAD FOR THE JAVA ECOSYSTEM, IT IS BAD FOR OPEN SOURCE, AND IT HAS FUCK ALL TO DO WITH FREE ENTERPRISE.
Dalvik needs to be stopped because it's a Java fork. It might be a java fork which isn't particularly different than normal Java right at this particular moment, but it is none the less a Java fork. Emulators and Virtual Machines are fine, forks of programming languages, especially languages which are designed for portability are not.
VMWare, and more importantly MS and Oracle claim that the access speeds of disks accessed through VMWare are slightly slower than the same access to a native drive. In the vast majority of cases this won't matter even a tiny bit, the company I work runs virtual databases on VMWare with no problems. However, if you have real performance requirements you probably shouldn't run you DB as a virtual machine because whether those access times actually are slower or not, your database vendor will tell you to put it on a physical machine before they help you with any performance issues you might have.
That said, the number of instances where the kind of latency differences we're talking about here actually matter are vanishingly small so do what you will.
It would have been bad, but not the end of the world as people keep believing. Calling APIs would have almost certainly been a fair use exemption and pretty much no vendor is likely actually sue over it even if it wasn't. You might have had some issues calling undocumented APIs, and stuff like WINE and SAMBA could have had issues if Microsoft had felt particularly inclined to do so.
The biggest problem with this case is that both sides need to lose. Dalvik needs to be stopped, and copyrighting APIs needs to be stopped, more importantly someone needs to take the execs at Google into the alley out the back and beat them until they promise to stop doing this kind of shit. They knew damned well what they were doing and they've rolled the dice at terrible risk to everyone and spent millions of dollars getting into a pissing match they never should have started. If they'd just licensed Java in the first place none of this would have been necessary.
This is true, but most of the vendors(both DB and VM) still say that the virtualized disk access isn't quite as efficient as direct access is. Now this isn't really so much an issue of "busy" as it is an issue of "high performance", and I haven't actually tested it myself, but the reality of life is that if performance is a significant concern, you might want to stick the DB on an actual server.
I said a living wage, not $15/hr, and none of that excuses the treatment of these people. Even if Apple wants to stick with China and Foxconn, these workers could be paid enough that they could actually afford to live outside the factory, and given enough respect that the concept of dragging them out of bed to fix some dipshit in Cupertino's high paid mistake and bragging about it wouldn't happen.
Apple makes more than enough profit to make these devices in the US and actually help grow the US economy instead of dodging taxes and shipping jobs overseas, but even if they won't do that, they could at least give their contractors a little human dignity.
The problem with lawyers is that the law seems to be a combination of being "correct" and/or "convincing" rather than right. This tends to lead even the more honorable lawyers down a rather crooked path as the means they have to use to deliver a just outcome are not exactly ethical if that makes any sense. The law is about technicalities when dealing with judges and charisma with juries.
I've long believed that laws should be written as a statement of intent combined with a reason for their passage, which could then be more easily interpreted by judges. If the crime doesn't match the intent of the law, or further evidence shows that the reason isn't correct we can toss out cases and/or laws and our justice system could get back to being about right and wrong again. You'd obviously need some traditional pieces to deal with penalties and the like, but can you imagine a world where congress had to spell out both the intent of a law and its reasoning. No more loopholes, no more using laws designed for one thing being abused for another(generally at the expense of the little guy).
Pretty much anyone could give a reasonable verdict if they knew what they were actually deciding on.
Which is a bit of a stupid tactic given that the first strike in any war with Iran will come from Israel which doesn't care about civilian population or foreign nationals when it comes to this sort of thing. The US(and most of the rest of the world) will end up involved partially due to treaties, but mostly in a potentially vain effort to try and mitigate the damage. No one will win a war with Iran, not Israel, not Iran, not the US, everyone will lose. In all likelihood the folks in the Middle East will lose in a more direct way than countries a bit further away, but it won't be good for anyone.
It seems likely that there won't be enough hawkish lunatics in congress to push this through from the US end(and neither Romney nor Obama appear insane enough), so it'll most likely be an Israeli strike that starts the whole thing off.
What doesn't add up is actually really really simple to understand.
If you fund your project through industry connections, those industry connections actually expect you to provide them with some kind of financial return. If you get your project funded by kick starter all you have to do is send them some merchandise which costs you virtually nothing. This goes doubly so if you're nominally famous in geek circles or attached to something which is nominally famous in geek circles. If they can get this thing off the ground and it does even moderately well at the box office that's 100 grand they don't have to do anything for.
I'm just waiting for the first bright spark to work out they don't even actually have to have a project to run a kick starter project. You could get someone like Summer Glau starting up a project to product signed pictures of herself and geeks would line up around the block donating to fund it, keep the reward brackets right and you could walk away with a tidy profit.
There exist in every society a small number of people who get offended by pretty much everything. They attack anyone who violates their version of the norms of society, and they tend to write an awful lot of letters. They are however, for the most part, just sad pathetic individuals with a form of personality disorder, the actual societal framework they supposedly follow is for the most part immaterial, they just like moral outrage. Some get upset when a woman wears a short skirt, some when something is "politically incorrect". They're really just the left and right leaning versions of example the same noxious person. That doesn't mean that these people are never right, just that whether they're right or not isn't actually important to them. Some "politically incorrect" phrases are actually particularly offensive, some have consequences in terms of thought patterns(disabled people vs people with disabilities for example), and some are just nitpicking, the letter writers don't care. The problem comes in that a lot of letters from a very small number of people can have a disproportionate impact, which is offensive no matter who is doing the writing and no matter the cause they believe in.
About 80% of the price of an iPhone, even in the US where they're cheaper than most places, is pure profit for Apple. That's not 20% of the cost to manufacturing it's 20% of the cost to manufacture, package, market, ship, and sell. Apple can afford to pay living wages(or at least treat their employees like human beings instead of slaves) and still make a healthy profit.
Unfortunately somewhere in the last couple of hundred years we've lost our moral compass when it comes to money. At present we seem to live in a society where if it's not illegal then it's just fine to do it whatever the costs or consequences and if it is illegal you buy off some politicians to change the law.
This is why we need so much legislation these days because business seems to have become incapable of making moral decisions, if we don't outlaw it and require them to fill in huge amounts of wasteful paperwork to prove they aren't doing it, they'll continue to do it.
Apple is a purely immoral company, in every possible way. They pay the people who make their stuff nothing and those people are treated like something less than human(I'm not talking about any of the accidents, I'm talking about the story straight from an Apple exec of waking the entire factory crew up in the middle of the night to redo the iPad screens). On the other end they gouge consumers and restrict their freedom above and beyond what is justifiable. All in the name of profit at any consequence, and it's become rampant in our society. Society will not survive this continued concentration of all wealth into the hands of a small minority.
Very few artists ever made a living selling music because even if the entire album cost was pure profit for the artist you'd still need to be selling 2000 a year to make a 30 grand a year, which isn't exactly rolling in cash, and that's in a dream world where you have no costs and can sell at $15 per album(which as a no name band you can't). Add to that the fact that unless you're producing an album a year which is fairly uncommon, you're looking at increasing that basic fan base by an proportional factor.
In reality you might sell your album for $10 on iTunes, you'd probably produce an album about once every 3 years, Apple would take 30% of that and probably at least half the rest of it would go into production costs. Leaving you with 3.50 per album and requiring you to have a fan base of 30,000 just to eat and pay your rent.
Getting 30,000 people who will buy your album is hard, and given the way that popularity tends to snowball, if you can get 30,000 people to buy your album you can probably get 100,000 to buy your album or even substantially more.
The big difference between the old system and the new system is that in the old system the record company took all the risk. A shitty band who got signed would get paid even if their album did incredibly poorly, which is why the RIAA takes such a big cut.
Alternatively, if you got a million dollar loan from the Bank(even if they would give it to you) and then your business failed you'd still be on the hook for a million dollars. If you signed to a record label and your record failed they still pay you.
The Dutch(and for that matter British) East India companies were not the norm, nor were they anything like current multinationals.
They might have operated in multiple nations, but they were controlled, legislated, and taxed solely in their country of origin. They were also both crown monopolies with the full weight of their respective governments up to and including the armed forces behind them. There were no questions about where the Dutch East India company was legislated from or to whom it would pay taxes. These companies operated within their home country, in other countries on terms largely determined by treaty, and in countries their respective governments didn't really believe were actually countries.
For one thing, security in Firefox is a heap of crap and always has been. The browser is excessively paranoid, which is great I install stuff which makes my Firefox is even more paranoid. The difficulty however is that it's very difficult to mark content as trusted. Zones are one of the few things that IE has always had right in terms of security(possibly the only thing), to perform the same thing in Firefox you have to edit a config file and manually grant the specified permission to a site which is just moronic.
For another, it's about the purpose of the site. Sharing your search results with others without your consent or knowledge would be evil, sharing them because that's what you wanted it to do is not. Firefox is, as per usual, detecting a potential security threat correctly but not allowing the user to respond correctly. Using So.cl involves opting into a sharing situation that in another circumstance would be an indication of massive malware.
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Democracy isn't perfect, but what the hell is the alternative? Every time something you don't like gets passed you pull out the guns and start an rebellion?
The guns are for when your ability to change things by speech and voting have been curtailed. You think blocking the pirate bay is censorship? You think that this is a terrible threat to humanity? Go out and convince people, hold a protest, grab a stump somewhere. Sure there have been some limits put on free speech lately(within range on the president or for prolonged periods of time), and I don't necessarily agree with those limits either, but it hasn't been entirely abolished.
The solution to the tyranny of the majority is to convince the majority you're right, any other alternative is both doomed to fail and could only succeed through some sort of brutal dictatorship.
If you want to change things, get engaged. Go door knocking, run for office or find someone else to run for you, third party candidates don't really have a lot of luck with the presidency, but they can take positions in local and state government and once you've got enough of those you can go further.
Heck for all that the tea party are a bunch of loons their political ideology was fringe 3 years ago and now they 68 seats in congress.
FFS I'm so god damned tired of this attitude that the answer to all our problems is to start shooting people. There are times when that becomes necessary, but for all its problems the US isn't anywhere near that point yet. If you live in Syria maybe it's time to pull out the ammo box, but stop crying that people don't agree with you and try to convince them instead of threatening to shoot them and then going back to your mom's basement.
Microsoft still need a tame hardware manufacturer, but they don't actually want to make phones, largely because the Europeans would never actually let them. So long as Nokia is, at least in theory, an independent company, everyone is cool. Nokia's patents are also unnecessary, partially because the whole endless destructive war thing has already happened and also because it would be Nokia actually being sued.
As for RIM, I don't think anyone really wants that company. They aren't corporate anymore, they're BBM in the third world which isn't exactly a money spinner. If they had any game changer patents they'd have sued someone by now to try and pay the bills.
From either the launch vehicle itself or parts thereof crashing into a populated area. It's not like the entire flight path is over the ocean. When they say "launch" they don't mean just the minute or so after the rockets fire, they mean the entire trip initiated by said launch.
9/11 cost 7 billion just in terms of victim compensation plus about 21 billion to replace the buildings. Sure 9/11 was deliberate, but that doesn't mean you couldn't have an airline accident on that scale. 2.7 billion in damage from a commercial space vehicle crashing into something isn't by any stretch of the imagination beyond the pale.
The Greens won't go along with anything they decide, the opposition will support anything the government tries to do when hell freezes over, and so no one has the numbers to do anything. Copyright issues barely even get a blip on the radar here so the government isn't going to expend a whole lot of energy on it. They'll talk about it, try to make the content people feel they care and then do nothing much at all.
Java's one and only strength is it's portability. It's not as powerful as C or C++ and it's not as easy to work with as C#/Mono. It's full of ugly cruft caused by bad design decisions(most of which Google copied in order to capitalize on the Java programming base). What it does, which no other language on earth does, is run on pretty much any system you care to try it on. This doesn't really apply to phones anymore, but once upon a time it did. When developers choose Java as their language, a lot of the reason they choose it is that portability. Java apps run everywhere using software most people already have installed. It was something that I've seen dozens of articles from the early days saying they'd never achieve, but they pretty much did. You could write Java code and run it on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, pretty much any variation. You can't run it in some of the mobile walled gardens, but those are still the exception rather than the rule, and even for those apps, the back end server is running Java.
The problem with Dalvik is it stops that being the case. Dalvik will end up on Desktops and on Servers It'll be a plugin in your browser and it will do this because for all the hoopla about HTML 5, none of the reasons Java was needed have changed. The problem we have now is that we're back to the bad old days of J++ when you had to deal with different and competing Java-like run times. Developers will pick based on supposed superiority, or worse, ideology and if in the end Google wins, they'll have to be responsible for maintaining an unprofitable product which doesn't tie into their advertising business.
Oracle fought this stupid lawsuit because they need Java, it's a large part of why they bought Sun in the first place(they certainly didn't need either Solaris or SPARC to build Oracle appliances), they'll appeal this lawsuit for the same reasons, it's not and never was about money. So many people on Slashdot believe that somehow copyrighting APIs was going to destroy everything in spite of common sense telling them that that wouldn't be allowed to happen. These same people don't seem to understand how much of the inroads open source has made in the last ten years have come on the back of Java and what it can do. If you work in a corporate environment, take a look at how many *nix machines you have in your environment and look at how many have Java as a core part of their installed software. You'll find some that don't, try the same thing with systems which have been switched to Linux over the last ten years. In most industries you'll find few of the former and even fewer of the latter.
Now I'm far from the most ardent supporter of the open source movement(I think ideology and elitism gets in the way of creating good products too often), but that doesn't mean I don't understand what competition does for this industry or appreciate some of the extremely high quality open source software I use on a regular basis.
As I've said before, both sides needed to lose this lawsuit, or even better it could never have begun. If Google had decided to implement Java in its entirety on Android, or taken the Harmony project onto their phone and Oracle had sued them under the same terms I'd have been rooting for Google all the way, but that's not what happened.
Google will get shit all until this hits the Supreme Court and they either decide or refuse to hear it, Oracle and/or Google depending on who wins the next appeal will make that happen. A decision in Google's favor by the Jury would have gotten them total victory, but they didn't get that(largely because they couldn't). They might not even get legal fees(IANAL, but good faith law suits don't always require payment of fees if both parties can afford it).
Maybe you don't care if Dalvik damages Java, but language forks are not the same as software forks. When you fork software, the best one wins, when you fork languages, both lose. Programmers using a language aren't like people using software, they invest time and effort into learning a particular language, and companies invest even more into their choice of language because they have legacy systems to deal with. Google can't undo what it's done, it can't put that genie back in the bottle, and it needs Java as much as everyone else does. They can try to keep Dalvik completely on par with Java, but that won't work any better with Java than any other fork. They can try to play some licensing tricks to keep Dalvik mobile only, but at the end of this they'll have pretty much proven you can't do that.
Both sides needed to lose this case, I said Oracle winning wouldn't have been the end of the world because some perspective was needed, but it would have still been shockingly bad, Dalvik spells the end of Java, and likely the end of itself, Java syntax is a pig and without the benefits of Java why would you bother.
Google have maybe won a lawsuit, but unless they plan on getting into the business of creating a general purpose language, they've kind of shafted themselves in the process.
Which is all fine and dandy if you live in the US. If you don't that list either won't exist, will be substantially delayed, or will be the kind of gray market the studios hate.
The only reason I have any of those options with any kind of flexibility as the our legal system has said screw you to the MPAA on region coding and is in the process of currently saying screw you to them again on forcing online stores like Amazon not to sell US items to me, they've also of course just said the big "screw you" mentioned in TFA. For all the talk of a mandatory filter(which didn't happen), we've been pretty good about saying "screw you" to content holders who want to do ridiculous things. I haven't even seen any proposed new legislation in the wake of the iiNet case as yet(nor will I till at least the next election, Labor and the LNP couldn't agree the sky is blue and they both like money right now and the Green's won't vote for it so it'd be stuffed).
You see this is why people should read more(or even watch the previous versions of a story or check it on wikipedia or something). If they'd made a movie like Narnia out of that book, the producers would have deserved the death penalty. I don't really know why they had to make an all singing all dancing version anyway, the story can be told perfectly well with a rope and a fake stump as pretty much the only props(as I've seen it done).
Well the corollary to that attitude is that just because content owners demand their content is sold in a specific way doesn't mean they're entitled to it. No one on either side is entitled to Jack.
The problem for JMS is that in this world of pulp media the only power the distributor has is based around controlling the distribution channel. If he won't offer me content the way I want it then someone else will and the content they produce will be just as shitty, cliched and shoddily produced as the stuff he does(and everyone else does for that matter). It's the same problem that's facing newspapers. If all you're going to give me is a poorly researched 3 paragraph blurb, why should I pay that when I can get a hundred poorly researched 3 paragraph blurbs on the internet for free, plus a tweet from someone who was actually there. Controlling the distribution channel isn't enough any more because the distribution channel is failing. Piracy aside, people are no longer watching TV in the same ways they used to, they're no longer willing to put up with content being delivered to their region 6 months later after everyone's already done talking about it, they're not happy with people telling them when to watch what they want to watch. This is a real challenge for current content publishers, their revenue models are seriously challenged by this idea, but three strikes laws won't fix their problems. Governments are sort of going along with the idea at the moment, but they won't allow a substantial percentage of the voting public to be affected by this sort of stuff whatever bribes they get paid.
The world she is a changing, and no on really knows what it's going to look like. Personally I see a rather grim future for anyone trying to make a living making low grade content or who doesn't have some sort of additional revenue stream(dvd, merchandising, etc) in mind. Micro-payment will continue to be a bust so long as it's not financially viable to transfer amounts in the range of cents, which leaves either longer term subscription models or premium prices both of which require you to have a product people are willing to pay enough for to make a profit. I just don't really see either the old advertising model or the new one being able to sustain the kind of quality which can put you ahead of every other yokel with an internet connection.
I didn't say it was a good thing, I said it wasn't the end of the fucking world the way people keep saying.
WINE disappearing would suck, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. Most free software people would argue that WINE is solving the wrong problem anyway(allowing people to run software written for Windows on Linux as opposed to either porting that software or replacing it with something free).
What wouldn't happen from the copyrighting of APIs would be the complete and total end of programming, you wouldn't have to buy a license to use a language, because that would be insane. Whoever owns that copyright would blanket license that before the day was out or face the death of the language, and that's if it wasn't deemed to be legally license free to being with. Pretending the sky is falling just makes you look like an idiot and makes it harder to convince people of actual dangers(of which some exist).
As to the rest of it. True they probably didn't need to license Java from a legal perspective, but they could have and it would have been cheaper than all this bullshit and wouldn't have risked APIs being found to be copyrightable. At the very least they could have actually done a clean room implementation of Java instead of forking the language.
As to the other to DALVIK IS A JAVA FORK, IT IS NOT A JAVA IMPLEMENTATION, IT IS BAD FOR THE JAVA ECOSYSTEM, IT IS BAD FOR OPEN SOURCE, AND IT HAS FUCK ALL TO DO WITH FREE ENTERPRISE.
Dalvik needs to be stopped because it's a Java fork. It might be a java fork which isn't particularly different than normal Java right at this particular moment, but it is none the less a Java fork. Emulators and Virtual Machines are fine, forks of programming languages, especially languages which are designed for portability are not.
This is true, but entirely beside the point.
VMWare, and more importantly MS and Oracle claim that the access speeds of disks accessed through VMWare are slightly slower than the same access to a native drive. In the vast majority of cases this won't matter even a tiny bit, the company I work runs virtual databases on VMWare with no problems. However, if you have real performance requirements you probably shouldn't run you DB as a virtual machine because whether those access times actually are slower or not, your database vendor will tell you to put it on a physical machine before they help you with any performance issues you might have.
That said, the number of instances where the kind of latency differences we're talking about here actually matter are vanishingly small so do what you will.
It would have been bad, but not the end of the world as people keep believing. Calling APIs would have almost certainly been a fair use exemption and pretty much no vendor is likely actually sue over it even if it wasn't. You might have had some issues calling undocumented APIs, and stuff like WINE and SAMBA could have had issues if Microsoft had felt particularly inclined to do so.
The biggest problem with this case is that both sides need to lose. Dalvik needs to be stopped, and copyrighting APIs needs to be stopped, more importantly someone needs to take the execs at Google into the alley out the back and beat them until they promise to stop doing this kind of shit. They knew damned well what they were doing and they've rolled the dice at terrible risk to everyone and spent millions of dollars getting into a pissing match they never should have started. If they'd just licensed Java in the first place none of this would have been necessary.
This is true, but most of the vendors(both DB and VM) still say that the virtualized disk access isn't quite as efficient as direct access is. Now this isn't really so much an issue of "busy" as it is an issue of "high performance", and I haven't actually tested it myself, but the reality of life is that if performance is a significant concern, you might want to stick the DB on an actual server.
I said a living wage, not $15/hr, and none of that excuses the treatment of these people. Even if Apple wants to stick with China and Foxconn, these workers could be paid enough that they could actually afford to live outside the factory, and given enough respect that the concept of dragging them out of bed to fix some dipshit in Cupertino's high paid mistake and bragging about it wouldn't happen.
Apple makes more than enough profit to make these devices in the US and actually help grow the US economy instead of dodging taxes and shipping jobs overseas, but even if they won't do that, they could at least give their contractors a little human dignity.
The problem with lawyers is that the law seems to be a combination of being "correct" and/or "convincing" rather than right. This tends to lead even the more honorable lawyers down a rather crooked path as the means they have to use to deliver a just outcome are not exactly ethical if that makes any sense. The law is about technicalities when dealing with judges and charisma with juries.
I've long believed that laws should be written as a statement of intent combined with a reason for their passage, which could then be more easily interpreted by judges. If the crime doesn't match the intent of the law, or further evidence shows that the reason isn't correct we can toss out cases and/or laws and our justice system could get back to being about right and wrong again. You'd obviously need some traditional pieces to deal with penalties and the like, but can you imagine a world where congress had to spell out both the intent of a law and its reasoning. No more loopholes, no more using laws designed for one thing being abused for another(generally at the expense of the little guy).
Pretty much anyone could give a reasonable verdict if they knew what they were actually deciding on.
Which is a bit of a stupid tactic given that the first strike in any war with Iran will come from Israel which doesn't care about civilian population or foreign nationals when it comes to this sort of thing. The US(and most of the rest of the world) will end up involved partially due to treaties, but mostly in a potentially vain effort to try and mitigate the damage. No one will win a war with Iran, not Israel, not Iran, not the US, everyone will lose. In all likelihood the folks in the Middle East will lose in a more direct way than countries a bit further away, but it won't be good for anyone.
It seems likely that there won't be enough hawkish lunatics in congress to push this through from the US end(and neither Romney nor Obama appear insane enough), so it'll most likely be an Israeli strike that starts the whole thing off.
What doesn't add up is actually really really simple to understand.
If you fund your project through industry connections, those industry connections actually expect you to provide them with some kind of financial return. If you get your project funded by kick starter all you have to do is send them some merchandise which costs you virtually nothing. This goes doubly so if you're nominally famous in geek circles or attached to something which is nominally famous in geek circles. If they can get this thing off the ground and it does even moderately well at the box office that's 100 grand they don't have to do anything for.
I'm just waiting for the first bright spark to work out they don't even actually have to have a project to run a kick starter project. You could get someone like Summer Glau starting up a project to product signed pictures of herself and geeks would line up around the block donating to fund it, keep the reward brackets right and you could walk away with a tidy profit.
It exists, well sort of.
There exist in every society a small number of people who get offended by pretty much everything. They attack anyone who violates their version of the norms of society, and they tend to write an awful lot of letters. They are however, for the most part, just sad pathetic individuals with a form of personality disorder, the actual societal framework they supposedly follow is for the most part immaterial, they just like moral outrage. Some get upset when a woman wears a short skirt, some when something is "politically incorrect". They're really just the left and right leaning versions of example the same noxious person. That doesn't mean that these people are never right, just that whether they're right or not isn't actually important to them. Some "politically incorrect" phrases are actually particularly offensive, some have consequences in terms of thought patterns(disabled people vs people with disabilities for example), and some are just nitpicking, the letter writers don't care. The problem comes in that a lot of letters from a very small number of people can have a disproportionate impact, which is offensive no matter who is doing the writing and no matter the cause they believe in.
About 80% of the price of an iPhone, even in the US where they're cheaper than most places, is pure profit for Apple. That's not 20% of the cost to manufacturing it's 20% of the cost to manufacture, package, market, ship, and sell. Apple can afford to pay living wages(or at least treat their employees like human beings instead of slaves) and still make a healthy profit.
Unfortunately somewhere in the last couple of hundred years we've lost our moral compass when it comes to money. At present we seem to live in a society where if it's not illegal then it's just fine to do it whatever the costs or consequences and if it is illegal you buy off some politicians to change the law.
This is why we need so much legislation these days because business seems to have become incapable of making moral decisions, if we don't outlaw it and require them to fill in huge amounts of wasteful paperwork to prove they aren't doing it, they'll continue to do it.
Apple is a purely immoral company, in every possible way. They pay the people who make their stuff nothing and those people are treated like something less than human(I'm not talking about any of the accidents, I'm talking about the story straight from an Apple exec of waking the entire factory crew up in the middle of the night to redo the iPad screens). On the other end they gouge consumers and restrict their freedom above and beyond what is justifiable. All in the name of profit at any consequence, and it's become rampant in our society. Society will not survive this continued concentration of all wealth into the hands of a small minority.
Very few artists ever made a living selling music because even if the entire album cost was pure profit for the artist you'd still need to be selling 2000 a year to make a 30 grand a year, which isn't exactly rolling in cash, and that's in a dream world where you have no costs and can sell at $15 per album(which as a no name band you can't). Add to that the fact that unless you're producing an album a year which is fairly uncommon, you're looking at increasing that basic fan base by an proportional factor.
In reality you might sell your album for $10 on iTunes, you'd probably produce an album about once every 3 years, Apple would take 30% of that and probably at least half the rest of it would go into production costs. Leaving you with 3.50 per album and requiring you to have a fan base of 30,000 just to eat and pay your rent.
Getting 30,000 people who will buy your album is hard, and given the way that popularity tends to snowball, if you can get 30,000 people to buy your album you can probably get 100,000 to buy your album or even substantially more.
The big difference between the old system and the new system is that in the old system the record company took all the risk. A shitty band who got signed would get paid even if their album did incredibly poorly, which is why the RIAA takes such a big cut.
They aren't really. They're selling stock in the next X records they make where X is the number defined in the contract they sign.
Alternatively, if you got a million dollar loan from the Bank(even if they would give it to you) and then your business failed you'd still be on the hook for a million dollars. If you signed to a record label and your record failed they still pay you.
The Dutch(and for that matter British) East India companies were not the norm, nor were they anything like current multinationals.
They might have operated in multiple nations, but they were controlled, legislated, and taxed solely in their country of origin. They were also both crown monopolies with the full weight of their respective governments up to and including the armed forces behind them. There were no questions about where the Dutch East India company was legislated from or to whom it would pay taxes. These companies operated within their home country, in other countries on terms largely determined by treaty, and in countries their respective governments didn't really believe were actually countries.
Not really a meaningful result.
For one thing, security in Firefox is a heap of crap and always has been. The browser is excessively paranoid, which is great I install stuff which makes my Firefox is even more paranoid. The difficulty however is that it's very difficult to mark content as trusted. Zones are one of the few things that IE has always had right in terms of security(possibly the only thing), to perform the same thing in Firefox you have to edit a config file and manually grant the specified permission to a site which is just moronic.
For another, it's about the purpose of the site. Sharing your search results with others without your consent or knowledge would be evil, sharing them because that's what you wanted it to do is not. Firefox is, as per usual, detecting a potential security threat correctly but not allowing the user to respond correctly. Using So.cl involves opting into a sharing situation that in another circumstance would be an indication of massive malware.