I have never seen any of those people before. Have their lives been ruined somehow? That Max Mosely guy definitely didn't need privacy for instance. Who cares if you hook up with 5 prostitutes and act out some Nazi fantasy? Does that affect anyone?
Rather than sue the newspaper, Max should have been suing anyone who discriminated against him based on his personal sexual fetish preferences, including companies he had relationships with or anyone else.
Star Wars Kid should have sued You Tube or anyone else who published his property without his consent and they should have sued whomever uploaded it and taken them to criminal court for defrauding them.
Yes it's a serious issue but not to do with *privacy*. Nobody cares about Star Wars Kid anymore. Now he's got a story to tell his grandkids.
OTOH if he is kept from getting a proper education or is left unemployed, then he's got a discrimination lawsuit and rightly so... again who cares.
"and that means we will gang up and rip someone apart as easily as we gather together and cooperate on anything else. All we need is sufficient excuse."
This is what we need laws against. Not laws that let us hide from people but laws that allow us to be open and free without worrying that a gang of people can come and attack us for being different.
Your privacy laws just perpetuate the problem... it's a walled garden and not a very good one. You can't enforce privacy laws. You can only provide judgements after privacy has been infringed. They don't even act as a deterrent, not for individuals and not for businesses... they only put up a false security through obscurity defense for you.
"belonging to a class of activities that my peers and I disagree with or find distasteful."
YES. These people don't need LAWS protecting their right to hide such information from public view.
Nobody needs LAWS to keep other people from finding out what they are doing. They need LAWS to protect their right to do things.
The best example I can think of is "Don't ask don't tell". A homosexual man or woman can be enlisted in the military as long as they don't disclose that they are homosexual. This is a protection of ONLY their privacy, not a protection of their lifestyle. The reality is that homosexuals are still discriminated against and if they want to stay in the military they can not even discuss the discrimination as it would disclose their sexual preference which would be grounds for dismissal.
Homosexuals don't need laws to protect their privacy, they need laws to protect their right to live the lifestyle of their choice without fear of persecution.
The same argument goes for nearly all activities which some may find unethical or immoral. You don't need laws protecting your right to hide your behavior, you need laws protecting the behavior itself.
Some may say that privacy laws are a bridge from when society decides something is worthy of discrimination until the day it decides that something actually should be protected. I say it is a crutch people use to avoid taking a side.
Unless some activity is criminal in that it harms your person or your property - the other person should be allowed to do that activity.
This applies to guns, drugs, sex, marriage and any other topic you can think of.
We have laws which govern the use of guns - guns themselves do not commit crimes. Enforce those laws which say that a gun owner must be a free citizen (no felony convictions), must register the gun and add in some mandatory safety and training - we do it for a driver's license, why not for a gun license... and then let anyone who qualifies buy whatever kind of gun they are rated for (not everyone can drive a motorcycle legally on the street, you must pass a special course).
We have laws to prohibit driving under the influence of any drug, marijuana included, and which make robbery, loitering, vandalism, etc. illegal - we don't need special laws just for drug users. Now I am all for adding rehab to the penalty to those crimes if you commit them under the influence. You obviously have a problem and need treatment if you're committing crimes while high. Maybe you're just a criminal who likes to get high. You should go to jail for being a criminal, not for doing drugs.
My point is that we don't need more laws to make more things illegal. We need more laws to make more things explicitly legal and to protect those who participate in these behaviors from any sort of discrimination.
You are making the false assertion not I. I didn't say anything about the legality of yours or anyone else's actions. I said that unless you are doing something illegal - as in already determined to be a crime - your actions can not be in need of laws to protect them. Your actions do need laws to protect your right to perform them - not to hide them from public view.
I stand for legislation that allows more freedoms not less. Privacy laws are not enforceable, they don't protect you when they are infringed and they can not put the cat back in the bag so all they are good for is gaining compensation for a perceived transgression, nothing more.
I'm saying that you should not be able to take me to court for publishing some information about you that I know or for not *protecting* data that you store on my servers.
This is what contractual agreements are for. You want me to not disclose some information you want kept undisclosed - have me sign an NDA. You want your phone company to not publish the transcripts of your phone conversations - make sure the contract you sign has that as a stipulation.
If someone breaks a contract with you then you have every right to sue them into bankruptcy.
If you're just pissed that everyone now knows about your love affair with Jar-Jar Binks - so what, I don't want my tax dollars or any other public interest going to your defense. You chose the lifestyle and if you're not man (or woman) enough to accept public ridicule for your choice then maybe it wasn't such a good choice to make.
OTOH I do think there should be more strict laws and greater penalties for the public if they discriminate against you based on your preference for fantasy flops. Certainly if anyone trespasses on your property or threatens you or harasses you they should be held accountable.
Certainly your CC, SSN and Bank Account information should not be treated with disrespect, however again this is a contractual issue not a privacy issue. Security of financial data and personal IDs have little to do with privacy and everything to do with fraud, impersonation, and other crimes.
What we need are more clarity about laws regarding basic rights and their nemesis discrimination.
The average person in their average life does not need privacy. They need discretion from their peers and the public regarding their personal life and laws which protect their right to live how they choose without discrimination.
Yes I advocate transparency. The truth will set you free and all that...
The only people who *need* privacy are those who are a) doing something illegal or unethical and want to keep others from finding out or b) doing something competitive and want to keep their progress from their competition.
People in category (a) deserve no legal cover for their actions.
People in category (b) have a thing called security which they should implement to provide a deterrent to unwanted attention or disclosure.
Everyone else just needs to know that their insurance won't go up if they are found to practice aggressive sexual methods or that they suck at cooking and start fires on the range every other weekend trying to cook.
People will be better off when their neighbors know about their weird behavior and learn to accept it (just like those neighbors will be better off when you find out about their quirks). This is called living in a community and it's about time we got back to it instead of trying to live in isolated 'privacy' gardens where we think we're the only ones who have issues and everyone else's lives are perfect.
Think of all the anxiety and social problems this would prevent. It's hard to discriminate against some group of people when you find out that all of your friends are in that group.
Not necessarily... Paypal Express checkout does not send you to Paypal - you send the data to be processed from your own site via SSL of course and receive confirmation of processing completion.
OTOH this doesn't require you to store the CC info. In fact no payment system requires that you store the CC info and it is bad practice to do so. Some businesses like to store the CC info to enable the 1-Click purchase method because they are very much impulse buy stores or think they are.
The only reason to do any of this is to become the processing agent yourself (ie: you become Authorize.net / Paypal / Amazon ) and talk directly to the CC or Merchant Bank yourself.
Why any company would take the time and spend the money to put together their own payment gateway in order to save money on transaction fees and then hand over those same fees to a Cloud computing data center is beyond me.... why not also set up your own cloud?
The short list: ABC (and all of ABCs channels), ESPN, 1/3 of A&E (History, Military, Biography plus A&E), Multiple major movie studios (Miramax, Dimenions, Touchstone, Pixar...), GO.com and of course all of the Disney branded stuff (theme parks, cruise liners, consumer goods, kids stuff, movies and animation studios).
Their Market Cap is currently at 46.59 Billion... Comcast is at 41.58 Billion
Let them buy a content provider. There's no track record of any network operator ever doing well with creating and publishing content.
They have two options:
1) Buy the content provider and then let it run itself and enjoy the cash proceeds.
2) Get involved in the business of content creation and ruin it.
WIth #1 nothing changes except the name of the company who owns the majority stake.
With #2 everyone who used to enjoy the content is disappointed but begins to look elsewhere for their content and the rest of us ignore the whole thing.
I'll reiterate, "Who Cares?" - they have no game changing opportunity to bring to the table, no example of how the two businesses work together to make a new 'Awesome Service' and no significant overlap of services that would provide economies of scale and a lower cost - higher quality product.
I second the idea of a property tax. If the intellectual property is worth a significant amount of money then there should be no shortage of investors willing to pay a tax for the exclusive right to benefit from that IP. Filing fees are not the right way to do it at all, though they do of course have their place as the USPTO should cover their costs to assess the patent application.
If the property tax were to go directly to the USPTO for other operational expenses they would be flush with cash and able to hire enough staffing to do the job right.
So a property tax on IP assessed annually would solve several problems.
1) it would help to fund the USPTO which is badly in need of such funding
2) it would discourage submarine patents and encourage legitimate investment
3) it would help to set the fair market value of IP for legitimate patent infringement or disputes
4) with a reduction in filing fees offered in parallel it could lower the entry price for new inventors
. The only problem (and it's not insignificant) is how to set the value of the IP to begin with. Not every idea is valuable. OTOH why maintain a patent if the idea isn't valuable... so a minimum value would have to be set and anyone who doesn't want to pay could forfeit to the public domain. Possibly a grace period of 5 years before the minimum kicks in during which time if an offer to buy occurs and the offer amount is put into escrow the value of the IP could be set at the offered amount. The owner could then choose to hold on to the patent and start paying the tax or they could sell the the buyer. 10% may be high, 1% would be better. An offer of 10 million for a patent is not unknown and is not out of the ballpark for a deep pocket company to put into escrow.
If the patent is that valuable the owner should have no problems getting investment to pay for the tax and help to monetize if they choose to do so.
If the offer is much less say $100,000 then a tax of $1000 per year is not so much that you'd need investment and if planning to monetize should be able to afford.
If the offer is in between, you have a legitimate valuation of your IP that should get you a bank loan or angel investors interest.
Hmmm one point. It's easy to catch up to the leader - they've already set the pace and broken the path. Forging ahead is much more difficult. It's uncharted territory. It's the same reason Apple was able to jump into the MP3 player space so quickly and overtake everyone else even though there were players with much more experience.
I would say that it's now a competition for whose platform can be adapted the quickest. Apple still has a really really strong entry with the iPhone OS. Much stronger IMHO than Android or Palm's WebOS - the API and SDK are much more mature and the foundation is really really good.
The only way Android and WebOS can compete right now is by being less restrictive (not necessarily better) and they will run into a limit with the carriers at some point so that will only get them so far.
FYI there are at least 1000x more developers for the iPhone than there have ever been for any other mobile platform. That is a pretty big barrier to overcome. Much like the barrier Apple had on the desktop for the last 2 decades, where most developers targeted Windows.
WebOS at least has leveraged a much larger community of potential developers by going with Javascript. We'll see how that works out.
Android OTOH has shot themselves in the foot by going with Java. Unless they build a Visual Java Studio or some such that lets you author apps with a WYSIWYG interface the pool of developers is going to remain fairly small and small minded. Java is the language of banking and financial systems... that's it really, nobody else uses it. Not the most creative bunch of people.
Ah but the whole point of GPL is to keep it and any derivatives free and public domain does not do that... it only makes the original free with no consideration for derivatives, so when someone improves upon the public domain version - to the point that their version becomes the defacto standard, the public domain version may as well not exist.
Public domain works well for many things - art, photography, music, novels, poetry, algorithms - ie: anything that is a final work of expression. It does not work for software which is never a final work of expression, which is intended to be modified and improved upon via derivative forks or simply new versions.
Copyright is not a good protection scheme for software as it is too restrictive and public domain is no good as it is too permissive, which is why the elaborate licensing contracts have come about, GPL being one of them.
When/If you do you'll get to know the joy of children handling their Dora, Diego, Strawberry Shortcake, Wiggles, Weebles, Big Red Dog, Elmo, Baby/Young Einstein, the list goes on - DVDs with peanut butter encrusted fingers. These titles aren't cheap and even if you get them used at garage sales for $1 a piece, replacing them could be $20 - $30 or your child getting pissed randomly because their favorite episode is no longer available (no it's not the end of the world but they act like it is).
Burning to disk and putting them in a media center for quick easy access is a godsend on cranky days when nothing else will work... no more having to wait 10 minutes while the non-skippable commercials and anti-copy notices play through - just straight to the episode you've set as a favorite and peaceful tranquility in your home.
More robust media would actually mean that the media in question should come with it's own backup, in a burnable format so that a consumer could make a duplicate of the DVD/BlueRay/CD/etc *when* that physical media gets scratched or damaged in such a way as to make it non-playable on the intended media reader.
If consumers want to rent a movie or music there are options available. If they want to purchase a movie with a lifetime license to view said movie then they deserve either a) lifetime warranty on the physical media or b) a means to backup and duplicate the media to ensure continued viability of their purchase.
Anything less should be a violation of consumers rights and a violation of the law.
Yes it is a burden the media companies may not like. OTOH they do profit from the sale of the media on these portable yet fragile formats and therefore assume the risk themselves out of business interest.
Where do you get your inspiration from? If it's only from your own personal experience I suspect that your books may have an audience of 1. Games, TV, Books these are all shared experiences with millions of other people. Without incorporating shared experiences you seriously undermine the value other people will get out of your contribution. You are also in serious danger of producing work which has already been done by other expressionists many many times before and likely better, not that your version won't have it's own charm and intriguing twists on the theme.
You may want to re-evaluate your position on popular culture and culture in general. You really don't want to write Buffy the Vampire Slayer thinking that it's a completely new and original idea.
I have the distinct feeling that there is a misunderstanding of the intent of the article.
What is being called for is an SDK which will apply to a multitude of hardware platforms. Call it an OS, call it an API either way it isn't the BIOS equivalent aka firmware. The firmware manages the motors, turns on and off power to sensors, fans, power supplies, etc. Additionally you would have driver equivalents to provide base operating routines for specific modules of hardware ie: a "hand" driver would provide instructions telling the fingers of the hand to contract or extend. These are not things that need to be made common, nor can they. Certainly they would also benefit from a standardized methodology but that is not the topic today.
What is being called for is that the makers of the drivers and the firmware provide a common set of hooks as an abstraction layer and that some higher level OS be developed which knows about said abstraction layer and can interoperate with it, pass instructions to it and generally manage when and what the drivers or the firmware instruct the hardware to do.
This 3rd level of abstraction (firmware, drivers, OS) should have an Open SDK. Individual drivers may or may not be open - up to the manufacturer (think printers, video cards, etc) how much community support they feel will benefit their product.
With an Open SDK independent developers can write software for multiple hardware platforms potentially with several versions which take advantage of available hardware which is not universal.
So for example I could write a program that tells a robot how to perform a particular dance move. I'll call it the "electric slide" - my instructions will tell the robot to move forward 4 units, shake an appendage, move back 4 units shake, move forward 2 units hop or shake, slide left with some easing then start over. How the robot accomplishes this feat is up to it's drivers and firmware... tracks, wheels, 4 feet or 2 feet - but I could add in some checks to discover each type of mobility and enhance the movement routine to make each mobility type perform the movements with slight adjustments to add "character" to the dance.
Additionally my dance may need to be updated so I'll add in an update function which will download the latest version and prompt the owner to install it (never auto install). Each device may have it's own internet connection capability - some will have wifi, some 3G, some will connect through their base station while recharging and others may need a USB drive plugged in with the update. I shouldn't need to write my own TCP stack, WiFi handler, etc. my app just asks for an outside connection and the platform gives me back what is available.
Hopefully this has clarified something for someone.
I dont need my super Roomba 40000 to have a filesystem and keep detailed records. It really does not need to remember that the living room was cleaned 109 minutes ago and the ratio of Cheeri-o's was higher tan the last time, I better twitter about this and watch a movie from the SMB share in the house.
You may not want those things but there are plenty of people who would love to have access to that kind of information (not just Google mind you). Not to mention that the same functionality that allows for your inane examples also allows for finding out that you have mice, monitoring for allergens and keeping track of what your toddler has been getting into lately. All useful information to a lot of people. Enough people that it would be nice to be able to download such tools and not necessarily have to pay the manufacturer's development costs but rather pay for them as after market updates from independent developers.
Without a common platform you are stuck with whatever the manufacturer decides is the lowest common denominator features that will sell the most units and bring a return on their investment. With a common platform you get an extensible hardware device which can be adapted to a variety of individual wants or needs.
Ah to be old... I'm not there yet but it looks so smug and satisfying. I'm really looking forward to the day I can tell everyone around me "Everything before my time was crap and everything after my time is crap" - then take a big poop right in my pants and grin;-p Must be *loads* of fun gents.
Adrian Bateman did himself and his team a disservice by putting so many unrelated comments into a single post. Yes they are all related to HTML 5 but then again the mailing list itself is about HTML 5 so the context is set and individual posts should be scoped more narrowly. The end result is that the list lacks priority and appears that each of the comments/feedback sections have the same priority when they really do not.
They bring up some interesting thoughts about a few of the tags/implementations but these are lost in the general negativity of the post.
Additionally some of their comments seem to be focused on unrelated topics such as how the header and footer elements should be handled when printing... ??? as if they are expecting the header and footer to be placed at the top of each printed page in a multi-page print out of a web page. While interesting as a topic of discussion this should not be lumped in with other comments as it is obviously a very low priority for a specification dealing with digital media primarily.
Add to this that they had previously stated that the header and footer elements appear to be unnecessary and I as a reader am left wondering which statement is more important - either they are unnecessary or they are useful but not as useful unless they implement something to do with printing the document... pick a stance Adrian. You can't state conflicting opinions like this and hope to be taken seriously.
So my suggestion for Adrian Bateman is to break up your feedback into more narrowly scoped questions so that they can be responded to in the priority they deserve. I can only think that your intent was to force others to do this work for you and thereby discover what others felt were the priority items to discuss or to set off a generally chaotic discussion of issues and thereby create dissension within the group, bringing up old concerns that have been discussed at length long ago and resolved or agreed to already.
Typically the performance issue in Flash is that designers choose to use compositing at run time so their effects can be dynamic based on user input. Video despite requiring heavy computation to decode is always the same. This makes it easier to optimize and offload to a dedicated processor.
huh... as a temporary fix for others... go and edit your spotlight indexing preferences so that it does not index your entire 2TB filesystem (maybe some subset).
Go to Spotlight in System Prefs and click on Privacy... then add whatever folders you DON'T want indexed.
It's not "putting up with" if the other person isn't "playing a game" - these things can be so ingrained by nurture from childhood that the other party - though educated and sensible and not at all self-centered may go through the motions without realizing it. What's worse is that they may become defensive about it as well being that it is something that is a part of their family culture and denying it is like denying who they are.
It's only a game if the other person is conscious of their role and can step out of that role willfully.
Often this is a result of having been neglected in some way emotionally as a child or watching a family member being neglected in such a way.
For example if a girl sees her mother abandoned by her father and having to take on the role of both parents - she will likely need to test her husband's endurance in the beginning to see if he's going to do the same, before she gets too emotionally invested. It shouldn't be this way but it can be. Doesn't make that girl/woman less of a person - just means that any husband will need to be patient. Communication is of course key here. The girl/woman should admit her past and talk about her concerns to give her husband a "heads up" that he's going to have to work through it with her... and no it's not something she could have done earlier, prior to the relationship - there has to be the husband role involved in this issue for it to be resolved.
There are lots of other relationship issues that need a relationship to get resolved. It sucks that the problems of the parents have to be dealt with by the children when they grow up - c'est la vie.
As a married person I'll agree with one of your statements.. it is even easier to fall out of love than it is to fall in love. It's easy to go on a bender and then not apologize or make up for it. It's easy to have a disagreement about future plans and not choose to compromise. It's easy to cheat - I mean see other people and not respect the emotional bond you've established with someone.
There are so many ways to let a perfectly good relationship fall apart. It's like owning your own house. You can ignore the plumbing problems, ignore the weeds in the yard, ignore the cracking paint on the eaves, ignore the sagging beams in the garage... and when it all piles up and starts to come apart - just sell the house and move to a new one.
It's so much easier to rent or lease right? Heck don't even sign a multi-year agreement, just go month to month so you can pick up and move when the passion strikes you to see someplace new.
Home ownership isn't for everyone - that's a given, but it doesn't have to end in disrepair. Same thing with marriage. You can take care of your relationship and making it a formal contracted arrangement is a part of the investment you choose to make in that decision.
No, not all... just Word and Word clones... the article is arguing that there is no longer a place for a general purpose word processor whose goal is to create a document formatted to be printed.
Wikis and blogs and all other online publishing tools ARE word processors - but their target is not print. They provide the features needed to format for online publishing.
Who needs a word processor for print? Magazine publishers, book publishers, etc. and even they don't use Word except maybe for drafting and editing purposes... when it comes to the formatting they use InDesign or some other full featured publishing tool - not Word.
Who uses a word processor for print... all kinds of companies that never print anything - which is the point of the article. If you're not going to print and instead you need collaborative editing, online publishing, version control, indexed search, etc. then there are way better options available, such as WikiMedia.
Somebody mentioned a paper trail... yes there is that... but it seems that when you're accounting is all online, your banking is all online, your payroll is all online, your invoicing, purchase orders, time tracking - all online - there's not much left. Why would you want to keep a paper trail of memos, reports, research, articles, press releases, etc. which are the least legally important documents?
Besides, you get version control and offsite backups... much better (if you set it up that way, if not it's likely your paper trail wasn't going to do you much good either as you obviously don't put much effort into records management).
It's likely that 90% of the uses for word processors are no longer relevant and should be updated to use an online, networked collaborative tool.
How about during the install ( or on first boot ) - you get a prompt, "How would you like to access web sites? There are several products available to you. Here are a few options: [list of icons, links ] or you can type in the internet address of your favorite web browser here - [input box]" Include an HTTP library like CURL (not necessarily CURL) that will then download the installer for the web browser and auto launch it.
Easy-peasy... done and done... [your quip to indicate something simple to do here]
Just FYI Bonjour is the best thing since sliced bread.... you really should try it before you dismiss it. Makes setting up a printer a snap. All modern printers support the ZeroConf protocol (which is the tech behind Bonjour)...
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I have never seen any of those people before. Have their lives been ruined somehow? That Max Mosely guy definitely didn't need privacy for instance. Who cares if you hook up with 5 prostitutes and act out some Nazi fantasy? Does that affect anyone?
Rather than sue the newspaper, Max should have been suing anyone who discriminated against him based on his personal sexual fetish preferences, including companies he had relationships with or anyone else.
Star Wars Kid should have sued You Tube or anyone else who published his property without his consent and they should have sued whomever uploaded it and taken them to criminal court for defrauding them.
Yes it's a serious issue but not to do with *privacy*. Nobody cares about Star Wars Kid anymore. Now he's got a story to tell his grandkids.
OTOH if he is kept from getting a proper education or is left unemployed, then he's got a discrimination lawsuit and rightly so... again who cares.
"and that means we will gang up and rip someone apart as easily as we gather together and cooperate on anything else. All we need is sufficient excuse."
This is what we need laws against. Not laws that let us hide from people but laws that allow us to be open and free without worrying that a gang of people can come and attack us for being different.
Your privacy laws just perpetuate the problem... it's a walled garden and not a very good one. You can't enforce privacy laws. You can only provide judgements after privacy has been infringed. They don't even act as a deterrent, not for individuals and not for businesses... they only put up a false security through obscurity defense for you.
"belonging to a class of activities that my peers and I disagree with or find distasteful."
YES. These people don't need LAWS protecting their right to hide such information from public view.
Nobody needs LAWS to keep other people from finding out what they are doing. They need LAWS to protect their right to do things.
The best example I can think of is "Don't ask don't tell". A homosexual man or woman can be enlisted in the military as long as they don't disclose that they are homosexual. This is a protection of ONLY their privacy, not a protection of their lifestyle. The reality is that homosexuals are still discriminated against and if they want to stay in the military they can not even discuss the discrimination as it would disclose their sexual preference which would be grounds for dismissal.
Homosexuals don't need laws to protect their privacy, they need laws to protect their right to live the lifestyle of their choice without fear of persecution.
The same argument goes for nearly all activities which some may find unethical or immoral. You don't need laws protecting your right to hide your behavior, you need laws protecting the behavior itself.
Some may say that privacy laws are a bridge from when society decides something is worthy of discrimination until the day it decides that something actually should be protected. I say it is a crutch people use to avoid taking a side.
Unless some activity is criminal in that it harms your person or your property - the other person should be allowed to do that activity.
This applies to guns, drugs, sex, marriage and any other topic you can think of.
We have laws which govern the use of guns - guns themselves do not commit crimes. Enforce those laws which say that a gun owner must be a free citizen (no felony convictions), must register the gun and add in some mandatory safety and training - we do it for a driver's license, why not for a gun license... and then let anyone who qualifies buy whatever kind of gun they are rated for (not everyone can drive a motorcycle legally on the street, you must pass a special course).
We have laws to prohibit driving under the influence of any drug, marijuana included, and which make robbery, loitering, vandalism, etc. illegal - we don't need special laws just for drug users. Now I am all for adding rehab to the penalty to those crimes if you commit them under the influence. You obviously have a problem and need treatment if you're committing crimes while high. Maybe you're just a criminal who likes to get high. You should go to jail for being a criminal, not for doing drugs.
My point is that we don't need more laws to make more things illegal. We need more laws to make more things explicitly legal and to protect those who participate in these behaviors from any sort of discrimination.
You are making the false assertion not I. I didn't say anything about the legality of yours or anyone else's actions. I said that unless you are doing something illegal - as in already determined to be a crime - your actions can not be in need of laws to protect them. Your actions do need laws to protect your right to perform them - not to hide them from public view.
I stand for legislation that allows more freedoms not less. Privacy laws are not enforceable, they don't protect you when they are infringed and they can not put the cat back in the bag so all they are good for is gaining compensation for a perceived transgression, nothing more.
I'm saying that you should not be able to take me to court for publishing some information about you that I know or for not *protecting* data that you store on my servers.
This is what contractual agreements are for. You want me to not disclose some information you want kept undisclosed - have me sign an NDA. You want your phone company to not publish the transcripts of your phone conversations - make sure the contract you sign has that as a stipulation.
If someone breaks a contract with you then you have every right to sue them into bankruptcy.
If you're just pissed that everyone now knows about your love affair with Jar-Jar Binks - so what, I don't want my tax dollars or any other public interest going to your defense. You chose the lifestyle and if you're not man (or woman) enough to accept public ridicule for your choice then maybe it wasn't such a good choice to make.
OTOH I do think there should be more strict laws and greater penalties for the public if they discriminate against you based on your preference for fantasy flops. Certainly if anyone trespasses on your property or threatens you or harasses you they should be held accountable.
Certainly your CC, SSN and Bank Account information should not be treated with disrespect, however again this is a contractual issue not a privacy issue. Security of financial data and personal IDs have little to do with privacy and everything to do with fraud, impersonation, and other crimes.
What we need are more clarity about laws regarding basic rights and their nemesis discrimination.
The average person in their average life does not need privacy. They need discretion from their peers and the public regarding their personal life and laws which protect their right to live how they choose without discrimination.
Yes I advocate transparency. The truth will set you free and all that...
The only people who *need* privacy are those who are a) doing something illegal or unethical and want to keep others from finding out or b) doing something competitive and want to keep their progress from their competition.
People in category (a) deserve no legal cover for their actions.
People in category (b) have a thing called security which they should implement to provide a deterrent to unwanted attention or disclosure.
Everyone else just needs to know that their insurance won't go up if they are found to practice aggressive sexual methods or that they suck at cooking and start fires on the range every other weekend trying to cook.
People will be better off when their neighbors know about their weird behavior and learn to accept it (just like those neighbors will be better off when you find out about their quirks). This is called living in a community and it's about time we got back to it instead of trying to live in isolated 'privacy' gardens where we think we're the only ones who have issues and everyone else's lives are perfect.
Think of all the anxiety and social problems this would prevent. It's hard to discriminate against some group of people when you find out that all of your friends are in that group.
Not necessarily... Paypal Express checkout does not send you to Paypal - you send the data to be processed from your own site via SSL of course and receive confirmation of processing completion.
OTOH this doesn't require you to store the CC info. In fact no payment system requires that you store the CC info and it is bad practice to do so. Some businesses like to store the CC info to enable the 1-Click purchase method because they are very much impulse buy stores or think they are.
The only reason to do any of this is to become the processing agent yourself (ie: you become Authorize.net / Paypal / Amazon ) and talk directly to the CC or Merchant Bank yourself.
Why any company would take the time and spend the money to put together their own payment gateway in order to save money on transaction fees and then hand over those same fees to a Cloud computing data center is beyond me.... why not also set up your own cloud?
Uh Disney is a lot bigger than you seem to think:
A list of Disney assets
The short list: ABC (and all of ABCs channels), ESPN, 1/3 of A&E (History, Military, Biography plus A&E), Multiple major movie studios (Miramax, Dimenions, Touchstone, Pixar...), GO.com and of course all of the Disney branded stuff (theme parks, cruise liners, consumer goods, kids stuff, movies and animation studios).
Their Market Cap is currently at 46.59 Billion... Comcast is at 41.58 Billion
Let them buy a content provider. There's no track record of any network operator ever doing well with creating and publishing content.
They have two options:
1) Buy the content provider and then let it run itself and enjoy the cash proceeds.
2) Get involved in the business of content creation and ruin it.
WIth #1 nothing changes except the name of the company who owns the majority stake.
With #2 everyone who used to enjoy the content is disappointed but begins to look elsewhere for their content and the rest of us ignore the whole thing.
I'll reiterate, "Who Cares?" - they have no game changing opportunity to bring to the table, no example of how the two businesses work together to make a new 'Awesome Service' and no significant overlap of services that would provide economies of scale and a lower cost - higher quality product.
I second the idea of a property tax. If the intellectual property is worth a significant amount of money then there should be no shortage of investors willing to pay a tax for the exclusive right to benefit from that IP. Filing fees are not the right way to do it at all, though they do of course have their place as the USPTO should cover their costs to assess the patent application.
If the property tax were to go directly to the USPTO for other operational expenses they would be flush with cash and able to hire enough staffing to do the job right.
So a property tax on IP assessed annually would solve several problems.
1) it would help to fund the USPTO which is badly in need of such funding
2) it would discourage submarine patents and encourage legitimate investment
3) it would help to set the fair market value of IP for legitimate patent infringement or disputes
4) with a reduction in filing fees offered in parallel it could lower the entry price for new inventors
.
The only problem (and it's not insignificant) is how to set the value of the IP to begin with. Not every idea is valuable. OTOH why maintain a patent if the idea isn't valuable... so a minimum value would have to be set and anyone who doesn't want to pay could forfeit to the public domain. Possibly a grace period of 5 years before the minimum kicks in during which time if an offer to buy occurs and the offer amount is put into escrow the value of the IP could be set at the offered amount. The owner could then choose to hold on to the patent and start paying the tax or they could sell the the buyer. 10% may be high, 1% would be better. An offer of 10 million for a patent is not unknown and is not out of the ballpark for a deep pocket company to put into escrow.
If the patent is that valuable the owner should have no problems getting investment to pay for the tax and help to monetize if they choose to do so.
If the offer is much less say $100,000 then a tax of $1000 per year is not so much that you'd need investment and if planning to monetize should be able to afford.
If the offer is in between, you have a legitimate valuation of your IP that should get you a bank loan or angel investors interest.
I don't see any pitfalls here.
Hmmm one point. It's easy to catch up to the leader - they've already set the pace and broken the path. Forging ahead is much more difficult. It's uncharted territory. It's the same reason Apple was able to jump into the MP3 player space so quickly and overtake everyone else even though there were players with much more experience.
I would say that it's now a competition for whose platform can be adapted the quickest. Apple still has a really really strong entry with the iPhone OS. Much stronger IMHO than Android or Palm's WebOS - the API and SDK are much more mature and the foundation is really really good.
The only way Android and WebOS can compete right now is by being less restrictive (not necessarily better) and they will run into a limit with the carriers at some point so that will only get them so far.
FYI there are at least 1000x more developers for the iPhone than there have ever been for any other mobile platform. That is a pretty big barrier to overcome. Much like the barrier Apple had on the desktop for the last 2 decades, where most developers targeted Windows.
WebOS at least has leveraged a much larger community of potential developers by going with Javascript. We'll see how that works out.
Android OTOH has shot themselves in the foot by going with Java. Unless they build a Visual Java Studio or some such that lets you author apps with a WYSIWYG interface the pool of developers is going to remain fairly small and small minded. Java is the language of banking and financial systems... that's it really, nobody else uses it. Not the most creative bunch of people.
Regarding Public Domain
Ah but the whole point of GPL is to keep it and any derivatives free and public domain does not do that... it only makes the original free with no consideration for derivatives, so when someone improves upon the public domain version - to the point that their version becomes the defacto standard, the public domain version may as well not exist.
Public domain works well for many things - art, photography, music, novels, poetry, algorithms - ie: anything that is a final work of expression. It does not work for software which is never a final work of expression, which is intended to be modified and improved upon via derivative forks or simply new versions.
Copyright is not a good protection scheme for software as it is too restrictive and public domain is no good as it is too permissive, which is why the elaborate licensing contracts have come about, GPL being one of them.
You don't have kids do you?
When/If you do you'll get to know the joy of children handling their Dora, Diego, Strawberry Shortcake, Wiggles, Weebles, Big Red Dog, Elmo, Baby/Young Einstein, the list goes on - DVDs with peanut butter encrusted fingers. These titles aren't cheap and even if you get them used at garage sales for $1 a piece, replacing them could be $20 - $30 or your child getting pissed randomly because their favorite episode is no longer available (no it's not the end of the world but they act like it is).
Burning to disk and putting them in a media center for quick easy access is a godsend on cranky days when nothing else will work... no more having to wait 10 minutes while the non-skippable commercials and anti-copy notices play through - just straight to the episode you've set as a favorite and peaceful tranquility in your home.
More robust media would actually mean that the media in question should come with it's own backup, in a burnable format so that a consumer could make a duplicate of the DVD/BlueRay/CD/etc *when* that physical media gets scratched or damaged in such a way as to make it non-playable on the intended media reader.
If consumers want to rent a movie or music there are options available. If they want to purchase a movie with a lifetime license to view said movie then they deserve either a) lifetime warranty on the physical media or b) a means to backup and duplicate the media to ensure continued viability of their purchase.
Anything less should be a violation of consumers rights and a violation of the law.
Yes it is a burden the media companies may not like. OTOH they do profit from the sale of the media on these portable yet fragile formats and therefore assume the risk themselves out of business interest.
Where do you get your inspiration from? If it's only from your own personal experience I suspect that your books may have an audience of 1. Games, TV, Books these are all shared experiences with millions of other people. Without incorporating shared experiences you seriously undermine the value other people will get out of your contribution. You are also in serious danger of producing work which has already been done by other expressionists many many times before and likely better, not that your version won't have it's own charm and intriguing twists on the theme.
You may want to re-evaluate your position on popular culture and culture in general. You really don't want to write Buffy the Vampire Slayer thinking that it's a completely new and original idea.
I have the distinct feeling that there is a misunderstanding of the intent of the article.
What is being called for is an SDK which will apply to a multitude of hardware platforms. Call it an OS, call it an API either way it isn't the BIOS equivalent aka firmware. The firmware manages the motors, turns on and off power to sensors, fans, power supplies, etc. Additionally you would have driver equivalents to provide base operating routines for specific modules of hardware ie: a "hand" driver would provide instructions telling the fingers of the hand to contract or extend. These are not things that need to be made common, nor can they. Certainly they would also benefit from a standardized methodology but that is not the topic today.
What is being called for is that the makers of the drivers and the firmware provide a common set of hooks as an abstraction layer and that some higher level OS be developed which knows about said abstraction layer and can interoperate with it, pass instructions to it and generally manage when and what the drivers or the firmware instruct the hardware to do.
This 3rd level of abstraction (firmware, drivers, OS) should have an Open SDK. Individual drivers may or may not be open - up to the manufacturer (think printers, video cards, etc) how much community support they feel will benefit their product.
With an Open SDK independent developers can write software for multiple hardware platforms potentially with several versions which take advantage of available hardware which is not universal.
So for example I could write a program that tells a robot how to perform a particular dance move. I'll call it the "electric slide" - my instructions will tell the robot to move forward 4 units, shake an appendage, move back 4 units shake, move forward 2 units hop or shake, slide left with some easing then start over. How the robot accomplishes this feat is up to it's drivers and firmware... tracks, wheels, 4 feet or 2 feet - but I could add in some checks to discover each type of mobility and enhance the movement routine to make each mobility type perform the movements with slight adjustments to add "character" to the dance.
Additionally my dance may need to be updated so I'll add in an update function which will download the latest version and prompt the owner to install it (never auto install). Each device may have it's own internet connection capability - some will have wifi, some 3G, some will connect through their base station while recharging and others may need a USB drive plugged in with the update. I shouldn't need to write my own TCP stack, WiFi handler, etc. my app just asks for an outside connection and the platform gives me back what is available.
Hopefully this has clarified something for someone.
I dont need my super Roomba 40000 to have a filesystem and keep detailed records. It really does not need to remember that the living room was cleaned 109 minutes ago and the ratio of Cheeri-o's was higher tan the last time, I better twitter about this and watch a movie from the SMB share in the house.
You may not want those things but there are plenty of people who would love to have access to that kind of information (not just Google mind you). Not to mention that the same functionality that allows for your inane examples also allows for finding out that you have mice, monitoring for allergens and keeping track of what your toddler has been getting into lately. All useful information to a lot of people. Enough people that it would be nice to be able to download such tools and not necessarily have to pay the manufacturer's development costs but rather pay for them as after market updates from independent developers.
Without a common platform you are stuck with whatever the manufacturer decides is the lowest common denominator features that will sell the most units and bring a return on their investment. With a common platform you get an extensible hardware device which can be adapted to a variety of individual wants or needs.
Ah to be old... I'm not there yet but it looks so smug and satisfying. I'm really looking forward to the day I can tell everyone around me "Everything before my time was crap and everything after my time is crap" - then take a big poop right in my pants and grin ;-p Must be *loads* of fun gents.
Adrian Bateman did himself and his team a disservice by putting so many unrelated comments into a single post. Yes they are all related to HTML 5 but then again the mailing list itself is about HTML 5 so the context is set and individual posts should be scoped more narrowly. The end result is that the list lacks priority and appears that each of the comments/feedback sections have the same priority when they really do not.
They bring up some interesting thoughts about a few of the tags/implementations but these are lost in the general negativity of the post.
Additionally some of their comments seem to be focused on unrelated topics such as how the header and footer elements should be handled when printing... ??? as if they are expecting the header and footer to be placed at the top of each printed page in a multi-page print out of a web page. While interesting as a topic of discussion this should not be lumped in with other comments as it is obviously a very low priority for a specification dealing with digital media primarily.
Add to this that they had previously stated that the header and footer elements appear to be unnecessary and I as a reader am left wondering which statement is more important - either they are unnecessary or they are useful but not as useful unless they implement something to do with printing the document... pick a stance Adrian. You can't state conflicting opinions like this and hope to be taken seriously.
So my suggestion for Adrian Bateman is to break up your feedback into more narrowly scoped questions so that they can be responded to in the priority they deserve. I can only think that your intent was to force others to do this work for you and thereby discover what others felt were the priority items to discuss or to set off a generally chaotic discussion of issues and thereby create dissension within the group, bringing up old concerns that have been discussed at length long ago and resolved or agreed to already.
Typically the performance issue in Flash is that designers choose to use compositing at run time so their effects can be dynamic based on user input. Video despite requiring heavy computation to decode is always the same. This makes it easier to optimize and offload to a dedicated processor.
huh... as a temporary fix for others... go and edit your spotlight indexing preferences so that it does not index your entire 2TB filesystem (maybe some subset).
Go to Spotlight in System Prefs and click on Privacy... then add whatever folders you DON'T want indexed.
It's not "putting up with" if the other person isn't "playing a game" - these things can be so ingrained by nurture from childhood that the other party - though educated and sensible and not at all self-centered may go through the motions without realizing it. What's worse is that they may become defensive about it as well being that it is something that is a part of their family culture and denying it is like denying who they are.
It's only a game if the other person is conscious of their role and can step out of that role willfully.
Often this is a result of having been neglected in some way emotionally as a child or watching a family member being neglected in such a way.
For example if a girl sees her mother abandoned by her father and having to take on the role of both parents - she will likely need to test her husband's endurance in the beginning to see if he's going to do the same, before she gets too emotionally invested. It shouldn't be this way but it can be. Doesn't make that girl/woman less of a person - just means that any husband will need to be patient. Communication is of course key here. The girl/woman should admit her past and talk about her concerns to give her husband a "heads up" that he's going to have to work through it with her... and no it's not something she could have done earlier, prior to the relationship - there has to be the husband role involved in this issue for it to be resolved.
There are lots of other relationship issues that need a relationship to get resolved. It sucks that the problems of the parents have to be dealt with by the children when they grow up - c'est la vie.
As a married person I'll agree with one of your statements.. it is even easier to fall out of love than it is to fall in love. It's easy to go on a bender and then not apologize or make up for it. It's easy to have a disagreement about future plans and not choose to compromise. It's easy to cheat - I mean see other people and not respect the emotional bond you've established with someone.
There are so many ways to let a perfectly good relationship fall apart. It's like owning your own house. You can ignore the plumbing problems, ignore the weeds in the yard, ignore the cracking paint on the eaves, ignore the sagging beams in the garage... and when it all piles up and starts to come apart - just sell the house and move to a new one.
It's so much easier to rent or lease right? Heck don't even sign a multi-year agreement, just go month to month so you can pick up and move when the passion strikes you to see someplace new.
Home ownership isn't for everyone - that's a given, but it doesn't have to end in disrepair. Same thing with marriage. You can take care of your relationship and making it a formal contracted arrangement is a part of the investment you choose to make in that decision.
No, not all... just Word and Word clones... the article is arguing that there is no longer a place for a general purpose word processor whose goal is to create a document formatted to be printed.
Wikis and blogs and all other online publishing tools ARE word processors - but their target is not print. They provide the features needed to format for online publishing.
Who needs a word processor for print? Magazine publishers, book publishers, etc. and even they don't use Word except maybe for drafting and editing purposes... when it comes to the formatting they use InDesign or some other full featured publishing tool - not Word.
Who uses a word processor for print... all kinds of companies that never print anything - which is the point of the article. If you're not going to print and instead you need collaborative editing, online publishing, version control, indexed search, etc. then there are way better options available, such as WikiMedia.
Somebody mentioned a paper trail... yes there is that... but it seems that when you're accounting is all online, your banking is all online, your payroll is all online, your invoicing, purchase orders, time tracking - all online - there's not much left. Why would you want to keep a paper trail of memos, reports, research, articles, press releases, etc. which are the least legally important documents?
Besides, you get version control and offsite backups... much better (if you set it up that way, if not it's likely your paper trail wasn't going to do you much good either as you obviously don't put much effort into records management).
It's likely that 90% of the uses for word processors are no longer relevant and should be updated to use an online, networked collaborative tool.
How about during the install ( or on first boot ) - you get a prompt, "How would you like to access web sites? There are several products available to you. Here are a few options: [list of icons, links ] or you can type in the internet address of your favorite web browser here - [input box]" Include an HTTP library like CURL (not necessarily CURL) that will then download the installer for the web browser and auto launch it.
Easy-peasy... done and done... [your quip to indicate something simple to do here]
Ever hear of FTP and HTTP - you don't need a *browser* to open up a an internet connection on those ports and talk those protocols...
Even better the OS could come with their installers with their respective update pages set as the default home page / first run page.
Just FYI Bonjour is the best thing since sliced bread.... you really should try it before you dismiss it. Makes setting up a printer a snap. All modern printers support the ZeroConf protocol (which is the tech behind Bonjour)...