sorry to burst your bubble - this isn't an elite site
Of course it is.
No one but an elitist uses language like this:
political issues such as this (yes! political! not technical and therefore outside the grasp of the average simian on the street!) will certainly make a large dent in the long run...
But for that, the community must be smart and use the right kind of license, eg GPLv3, but not BSD. If the Linux/embedded systems developers drop the ball and continue to use the wrong kinds of licences (GPLv2 is not good enough), then the future you talk about will certainly happen
There is no "commmunity" here. There are only developers who need to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Developers who will program for any platform - open or closed - that promises a decent return for their time and effort.
Is it more just to officially sanction (in the form of a guilty verdict by a jury) his behavior even though it was done with good intentions...
I don't know how you prove your "good intentions" in court without taking the stand and exposing yourself to a withering, relentless, wholly unconstrained, examination of your character, history and behavior.
The prosecutor will take you apart, piece-by-piece, beginning with your taste for "Goatse."
Refusal to indict or refusal to convict in the presence of proven guilt is an important part of American jurisprudence.
The geek is the wierdo, the out-of-towner.
Who has pissed on someone else's turf.
No brass band.
No key to the city.
What awaits him is a stout oak and thirty feet of hemp. Because that is what "jury nullification" is really all about.
If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the netbook market and has reached two million poor kids in third-world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM-powered Linux laptop market.
Peru: 870,000 Uruguay: 460,000 Columbia 65,000 Argentina 60,000 Mexico 50,000
Africa: 135,000
Rwanda: 120,000
Asia: 24,200
Oceania: 10,000
Australia: 5,000
The geek has some explaining to do when his allegedly potent combination of durable, cheap, laptop hardware, FOSS software and constructivist philosophy of education finds almost no acceptance beyond a single language, region and culture.
As for resuscitating Linux-on-the-Netbook, it isn't easy to make to make the case that OLPC has been a significant force for a broader adoption of Linux anywhere on the planet.
Maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm just dumb. But I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is so difficult for Apple and Microsoft just to ship libtheora with their Operating Systems and stop bothering everbody.
H.264 is a theatrical production standard, a broadcast, a cable and sattelite distribution standard. H.264 is supported by every HDTV set, video game console and set top box on the planet.
H.264 is deeply entrenched in medical, industrial and military applications. The corporate intra-net is H.264.
H.264s development was open? I mean really that is just a bit of a reach.
From the Wikipedia:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
The next-generation codec is already under development:
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time. HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic rangeHigh Efficiency Video Coding (H.625)
Something the geek leaves out of his equation:
The twenty nine licensors of H.264 are dominated by global giants in manufacturing and R&D. Their collective experience in video technologies could be measured in centuries. Google is the new kid on the block and has a lot of actching up to do.
Of late, of all programs that I run on my machine, it's the web browser that takes up the most CPU. I have to upgrade my computers so i can browse the internets. Lame.
This from the geek who lives within the cloud. That grand and glorious HTML5 future in which everything - games, video, animation - will be done from within the GPU accelerated browser.
IIRC it also costs oodles for licensing for those making browsers, which in turn raises the costs of making a browser, which in turns hurts competition.
For...branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = "unit"), royalties...per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an Enterprise(commonly controlled Legal Entities) is...$6.5 million per year in 2011-15
The MPEG LA licensors are dominated by global giants in R&D and manufacturing. Think Cisco. JVC. Ericsson. Mitsubishi. NTT. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba.
The 940 H.264 licensees round out the list nicely.
The odds approach 1 in 1 that every piece of HD capable video hardware - every piece of hardware that supports data compressed video - in every market segment - supports H.264 out of the box.
There is no such thing as a studio production grade HD WebM camcorder.
No such thing as a WiFi WebM surveillance camera or mobile medical ultrasound scanner.
If the working mother can't monitor her nanny-cam in Chrome - then it is back to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer.
The geek is obsessed with the browser.
But Pandora and the Netflix client can be built into your HDTV. Your video game console. They support content protection. OnLive video gaming can be delivered and marketed the same way.
It is a more uncertain world for Google and AdSense.
But even more so for the geek.
Because the walled garden of the "app" and "app store" takes users away from the relatively open environment of the general-purpose PC. Because the new subscription service models "just work."
Proudly refusing to give you the bandwidth you paid for since 1998.
What you paid for then - and what you pay for now - is 24/7 access and flat rate monthly billing at a mass market price. As oppossed to billing-by-the hour for dial-up sevices like Compuserve --- at a stiff $8 to $12 an hour, unadjusted for inflation.
An insanity defense has nothing to do with whether it was pre-planned or not. Insanity is about whether the defendant knew what he was doing was wrong. Not whether or not it was planned.
From US Code Tile 18 > Part 1 > Chapter 1
17. Insanity defense
(a) Affirmative Defense.-- It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any Federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense.
(b) Burden of Proof.-- The defendant has the burden of proving the defense of insanity by clear and convincing evidence. Insanity defense
The problem here, of course, is that any sort of reasonably clear-headed research, planning or rehearsal of a murder will strongly suggest that you understood perfectly well where you were headed and why you wanted to go there.
The one thing you do not want to be caught researching is the insanity defense itself.
The browser market share in Europe is FF 38.11%, Chrome 14.58%, Opera 4.57%, all of which either support or will support WebM. That's 57% of the browser market, and if YouTube goes WebM IE and Safari will have no choice but to support it as well
The market share of the Flash player in Europe is as close to 100% as makes no difference - and Flash supports content protection.
However, it is also covered by hundreds of patents, which means you can't actually use any of that information without getting a license from the patent holders. One of whom is Microsoft, who stands to make a lot of money from it. Others include Sony and Apple, who stand to make a lot too.
The 30-odd H.264 licensors are - with a bare handful of exceptions - are global giants in manufacturing. Companies like Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung. JVC, Panasonic, Philips and Toshiba.
They are in the business of selling HD hardware - in the consumer market. Studio production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution.
Industrial security and military applications. Medicine.
there is a fear that if x264 were to become so established it were impossible to do without it then there would be a temptation for them to start milking more money from those patents.
Although very crudely worded, "Anonymous Coward" is right. H.264 is created to make money.
As if no one has to pay the bill for ongoing R&D at this level.
But let us begin with a bit of history:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.
The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (e.g. half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264 has never been exclusively a web video codec.
For a small global sampling of video services and applications based on H.264:
A search of Google for "H.264 medical applications" returns about 276,000 hits. A search of Gooogle Images for "H.264," 33 million hits, "WebM," 173,000. A product search of Google Shopping for "H.264," 69,000 hits.
Consumer products, industrial and commercial security and so on.
If your employer can't play his internal videos in the browser, he won't be installing Chrome - he won't be transcoding to WebM - and he has one less reason to choose Linux or Android over the iOS, OSX or Windows 7 platforms.
20% of peak hour network traffic in the states is a Netflix video stream.
Think of it as five hours each evening without a single penny going to AdSense.
Licenced, paid for, and content protected video. No one can simply walk away from a market that size and survive.
Yes, note that firefox doen't ship H.264 either. In Europe, Firefox + Chrome share is 52.69%, IE 37.52%.
Worldwide Ubiquity of Adobe Flash Player by Version - December 2010
Europe
v9 and below 99.7% v10 99.5% v10.1 86.2% [up 10% from September]
The other regional - and global - numbers are - for all practical purposes - the same.
The fundamental problem is that the independent - proprietary - developer like Adobe doesn't have to wait for the global standards committee to get its act together.
It doesn't have to give way to anyone's notion of ideological purity or political correctness.
H.264 is not a free codec and consequently, you have to pay if you wish to encode content in it or decode content encoded with it. They just are gracious enough not to charge you for streaming it.
For...branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = "unit"), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty
The maximum bite for an encoder/decoder is 20 cents a unit.
MPEG LA is geared for licensing production and distribution of H.264 video on a commercial scale. They don't give a damn about your wedding videos until you become a national franchise.
They don't give a damn about the geek's freely distributed Star Trek fan-flick.
For..where an End User pays directly for video services on a Title-by-Title basis (e.g., where viewer determines Titles to be viewed or number of viewable Titles is otherwise limited), royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a Title 12 minutes or less) are...the lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first Arms Length Sale of the video) or $0.02 per Title (categories of Licensees include Legal Entities that are (i) replicators of physical media, and (ii) service/content providers (e.g., cable, satellite, video DSL, Internet and mobile) of VOD, PPV and electronic downloads to End Users).
Where an End User pays directly for video services on a Subscription-basis (not ordered or limited Title-by-Title), the applicable royalties per Legal Entity payable by the service or content provider are 100,000 or fewer Subscribers during the year = no royalty
For...where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of Free Television(television broadcasting which is sent by an over-the-air, satellite and/or cable Transmission, and which is not paid for by an End User), the Licensee (broadcaster...) pays...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder..or...annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
The Enterprise Cap for H.264 in 2011 is $6.5 million a year. H.264 is deeply entrenched in theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Industrial and military applications. Home video.
And 32 years for that , this just shows how screwed up our courts are where you can get less time for murder then for theft.
In the American federal system, crimes of violence are almost always prosecuted under state law. Economic and property crimes with a significant interstate or foreign dimension are a federal responsibility.
If the feds do have jurisdiction in a murder case, don't expect anyone to get off lightly. It happens so rarely that there is little incentive to bargain.
Wire fraud, in the United States Code, is any criminally fraudulent activity that has been determined to have involved electronic communications of any kind, at any phase of the event. The involvement of electronic communications adds to the severity of the penalty, so that it is greater than the penalty for fraud that is otherwise identical except for the non-involvement of electronic communications. As in the case of mail fraud, the federal statute is often used as a basis for a separate, federal prosecution of what would otherwise have been a violation only of a state law.
The crime of wire fraud is codified at 18 U.S.C. 1343, and reads as follows:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.
In the case of United States v. LaMacchia, a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was charged with wire fraud when, because he had not profitted personally from online distribution of millions of dollars' worth of illegally copied software, he could not be charged with criminal copyright infringement. The United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, dismissed the charges, noting they were an attempt to find a broad federal crime where the more narrowly defined one had not occurred. Congress then amended the copyright law to limit further use of this loophole.Wire fraud
The reference is to the NET Act of 1997. "No Electronic Theft."
Where the debate really needs to be centered is on two things:
What items ought to be kept secret?
Does the federal bureaucracy really need to be so big in the first place?
The land area of the contiguous United States is approximately 1.9 billion acres (770 million hectares). Alaska, separated from the contiguous United States by Canada, is the largest state at 365 million acres (150 million hectares). Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, has just over 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares). The United States is the world's third or fourth largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and just above or below China.United States
The gross domestic product of the U.S. is about $14 trillion dollars a year.
First or second, globally, depending on how you look at things.
There is nothing magic about it.
Big numbers mean big government.
It is the federal government that gets to decide how much of that wealth is to be taxed and spent on programs that serve the national interest.
For example, the Great Depression exposed the weakness of states and cities in providing social services.
If grain prices collapse, the central states go broke.
If heavy industry fails, then there are breadlines in the northeast.
The number of Americans receiving food stamp benefits in May was 41 million. You could add to that the administration of Social Seccurity, SSI benefits for the disabled, federally subsidized low income housing, heating assistance, veteran's benefits and so on.
A gun in a safe is useless. Mine are loaded and kept in convenient locations where I can get them quickly.
Which means they are instantly accessible to anyone in your house. The intruder will have no more trouble finding them.
If I ever need a gun, and I sincerely hope I never do, I don't expect to have time to take it out of a safe and load it. I expect that seconds will count.
The "intruder" has the initiative.
He can find you lying in bed, more than half asleep, and blinded by the light.
Being quick on the trigger means you are only seconds away from making an unforgivable mistake. You stand a very good chance of shooting your wife, you kid, or the cat.
So they are demanding the personal information of a Non-US citizen, that's not in the country and did not access Twitter from within the United States?
You are not a citizen of the United States.
You are not a person within the jurisdiction of the United States.
What rights against a search of Twitter's U.S. based servers can you claim in a U.S. court?
Nor did any of them commit any sort of crime on US soil.
The standard for an ordinary search warrant is "probable cause." You aren't prosecuting a crime, you are conducting an investigation.
You don't escape prosecution under American law by committing your crimes by radio control from across the border. The geek's understanding of jurisdiction has a peculiarly 19th Century flavor.
Had they done that then they wouldn't have had the issues with Intel back stabbing them nor Microsoft wasting their time. Better late than never I guess.
OLPC was sold to the third world education minister as a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it bundle.
The XO hardware. The open source software. The Sugar UI. The constructivist philosophy of education straight from the Western media lab.
The minister wasn't buying.
The plain truth of it is that of the 1.8 million XO laptops deployed, about 120,000 are in Rwanda and all but a tiny fraction of the rest in Latin America. OLPC: Summary of laptop orders [Dec 26, 2010]
Uruguay has been a success story for a OLPC - and, somewhat more modestly, perhaps, for Linux. OS - Uruguay
Slashdot Mirror
sorry to burst your bubble - this isn't an elite site
Of course it is.
No one but an elitist uses language like this:
political issues such as this (yes! political! not technical and therefore outside the grasp of the average simian on the street!) will certainly make a large dent in the long run...
But for that, the community must be smart and use the right kind of license, eg GPLv3, but not BSD. If the Linux/embedded systems developers drop the ball and continue to use the wrong kinds of licences (GPLv2 is not good enough), then the future you talk about will certainly happen
There is no "commmunity" here. There are only developers who need to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Developers who will program for any platform - open or closed - that promises a decent return for their time and effort.
Is it more just to officially sanction (in the form of a guilty verdict by a jury) his behavior even though it was done with good intentions...
I don't know how you prove your "good intentions" in court without taking the stand and exposing yourself to a withering, relentless, wholly unconstrained, examination of your character, history and behavior.
The prosecutor will take you apart, piece-by-piece, beginning with your taste for "Goatse."
Refusal to indict or refusal to convict in the presence of proven guilt is an important part of American jurisprudence.
The geek is the wierdo, the out-of-towner.
Who has pissed on someone else's turf.
No brass band.
No key to the city.
What awaits him is a stout oak and thirty feet of hemp. Because that is what "jury nullification" is really all about.
If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the netbook market and has reached two million poor kids in third-world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM-powered Linux laptop market.
Deployment of XO laptops
Global: 1.8 million
Latin America: 1.5 million
Peru: 870,000
Uruguay: 460,000
Columbia 65,000
Argentina 60,000
Mexico 50,000
Africa: 135,000
Rwanda: 120,000
Asia: 24,200
Oceania: 10,000
Australia: 5,000
The geek has some explaining to do when his allegedly potent combination of durable, cheap, laptop hardware, FOSS software and constructivist philosophy of education finds almost no acceptance beyond a single language, region and culture.
As for resuscitating Linux-on-the-Netbook, it isn't easy to make to make the case that OLPC has been a significant force for a broader adoption of Linux anywhere on the planet.
Mobile vs Desktop - South America
Top 5 Operating Systems - South America
Maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm just dumb. But I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is so difficult for Apple and Microsoft just to ship libtheora with their Operating Systems and stop bothering everbody.
H.264 is a theatrical production standard, a broadcast, a cable and sattelite distribution standard. H.264 is supported by every HDTV set, video game console and set top box on the planet.
H.264 is deeply entrenched in medical, industrial and military applications. The corporate intra-net is H.264.
H.264 supports content protection.
H.264s development was open? I mean really that is just a bit of a reach.
From the Wikipedia:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
The next-generation codec is already under development:
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range High Efficiency Video Coding (H.625)
Something the geek leaves out of his equation:
The twenty nine licensors of H.264 are dominated by global giants in manufacturing and R&D. Their collective experience in video technologies could be measured in centuries. Google is the new kid on the block and has a lot of actching up to do.
This from the geek who lives within the cloud. That grand and glorious HTML5 future in which everything - games, video, animation - will be done from within the GPU accelerated browser.
IIRC it also costs oodles for licensing for those making browsers, which in turn raises the costs of making a browser, which in turns hurts competition.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
For...branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = "unit"), royalties...per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an Enterprise(commonly controlled Legal Entities) is...$6.5 million per year in 2011-15
The MPEG LA licensors are dominated by global giants in R&D and manufacturing. Think Cisco. JVC. Ericsson. Mitsubishi. NTT. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba.
The 940 H.264 licensees round out the list nicely.
The odds approach 1 in 1 that every piece of HD capable video hardware - every piece of hardware that supports data compressed video - in every market segment - supports H.264 out of the box.
There is no such thing as a studio production grade HD WebM camcorder.
No such thing as a WiFi WebM surveillance camera or mobile medical ultrasound scanner.
If the working mother can't monitor her nanny-cam in Chrome - then it is back to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer.
The geek is obsessed with the browser.
But Pandora and the Netflix client can be built into your HDTV. Your video game console. They support content protection. OnLive video gaming can be delivered and marketed the same way.
It is a more uncertain world for Google and AdSense.
But even more so for the geek.
Because the walled garden of the "app" and "app store" takes users away from the relatively open environment of the general-purpose PC. Because the new subscription service models "just work."
Proudly refusing to give you the bandwidth you paid for since 1998.
What you paid for then - and what you pay for now - is 24/7 access and flat rate monthly billing at a mass market price. As oppossed to billing-by-the hour for dial-up sevices like Compuserve --- at a stiff $8 to $12 an hour, unadjusted for inflation.
An insanity defense has nothing to do with whether it was pre-planned or not.
Insanity is about whether the defendant knew what he was doing was wrong. Not whether or not it was planned.
From US Code Tile 18 > Part 1 > Chapter 1
17. Insanity defense
(a) Affirmative Defense.-- It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any Federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense.
(b) Burden of Proof.-- The defendant has the burden of proving the defense of insanity by clear and convincing evidence. Insanity defense
The problem here, of course, is that any sort of reasonably clear-headed research, planning or rehearsal of a murder will strongly suggest that you understood perfectly well where you were headed and why you wanted to go there.
The one thing you do not want to be caught researching is the insanity defense itself.
The browser market share in Europe is FF 38.11%, Chrome 14.58%, Opera 4.57%, all of which either support or will support WebM. That's 57% of the browser market, and if YouTube goes WebM IE and Safari will have no choice but to support it as well
The market share of the Flash player in Europe is as close to 100% as makes no difference - and Flash supports content protection.
However, it is also covered by hundreds of patents, which means you can't actually use any of that information without getting a license from the patent holders. One of whom is Microsoft, who stands to make a lot of money from it. Others include Sony and Apple, who stand to make a lot too.
The 30-odd H.264 licensors are - with a bare handful of exceptions - are global giants in manufacturing. Companies like Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung. JVC, Panasonic, Philips and Toshiba.
They are in the business of selling HD hardware - in the consumer market. Studio production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution.
Industrial security and military applications. Medicine.
there is a fear that if x264 were to become so established it were impossible to do without it then there would be a temptation for them to start milking more money from those patents.
Too late:
List of video services using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
And what about companies smaller than google?
If your broadcast, cable, DVD, or subscription market is 100,000 households or less licensing H.264 costs you nothing.
Although very crudely worded, "Anonymous Coward" is right. H.264 is created to make money.
As if no one has to pay the bill for ongoing R&D at this level.
But let us begin with a bit of history:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.
The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (e.g. half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264 has never been exclusively a web video codec.
For a small global sampling of video services and applications based on H.264:
List of video services using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
A search of Google for "H.264 medical applications" returns about 276,000 hits. A search of Gooogle Images for "H.264," 33 million hits, "WebM," 173,000. A product search of Google Shopping for "H.264," 69,000 hits.
Consumer products, industrial and commercial security and so on.
If your employer can't play his internal videos in the browser, he won't be installing Chrome - he won't be transcoding to WebM - and he has one less reason to choose Linux or Android over the iOS, OSX or Windows 7 platforms.
20% of peak hour network traffic in the states is a Netflix video stream.
Think of it as five hours each evening without a single penny going to AdSense.
Licenced, paid for, and content protected video. No one can simply walk away from a market that size and survive.
What if the EFF or another firm helps him pay legal costs to fight this?
What the geek wants when he goes into court is a brass band, a calliope -- and the pro bono attorney who will tell him what he wants to hear.
Which the EFF will be more than willing to provide.
Is h.264 really that big?
A search of Google Shopping returns about 67,900 hits for "H.264."
The H.264 camcorder ranges from the $150 "Flip" to the $21,000 Panasonic AG-3DA1 which records 1080/60i 3D to two 32 GB SSDs.
H.264 is supported by your HDTV. Your Blu-Ray player. It is deeply entrenched in theatrical production, home video, broadcast, cable and satellite distribution, medical, industrial and security applications. Towards Diagnostically Robust Medical Ultrasound Video Streaming using H.264
Yes, note that firefox doen't ship H.264 either. In Europe, Firefox + Chrome share is 52.69%, IE 37.52%.
Worldwide Ubiquity of Adobe Flash Player by Version - December 2010
Europe
v9 and below 99.7%
v10 99.5%
v10.1 86.2% [up 10% from September]
The other regional - and global - numbers are - for all practical purposes - the same.
The fundamental problem is that the independent - proprietary - developer like Adobe doesn't have to wait for the global standards committee to get its act together.
It doesn't have to give way to anyone's notion of ideological purity or political correctness.
Flash Player Version Penetration
H.264 is not a free codec and consequently, you have to pay if you wish to encode content in it or decode content encoded with it. They just are gracious enough not to charge you for streaming it.
For...branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one
encoder = "unit"), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty
The maximum bite for an encoder/decoder is 20 cents a unit.
MPEG LA is geared for licensing production and distribution of H.264 video on a commercial scale. They don't give a damn about your wedding videos until you become a national franchise.
They don't give a damn about the geek's freely distributed Star Trek fan-flick.
For..where an End User pays directly for video services on a Title-by-Title basis (e.g., where viewer determines Titles to be viewed or number of viewable Titles is otherwise limited), royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a Title 12 minutes or less) are...the lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first Arms Length Sale of the video) or $0.02 per Title (categories of Licensees include Legal Entities that are (i) replicators of physical media,
and (ii) service/content providers (e.g., cable, satellite, video DSL, Internet and mobile) of VOD, PPV and electronic downloads to End Users).
Where an End User pays directly for video services on a Subscription-basis (not ordered or limited Title-by-Title), the applicable royalties per Legal Entity payable by the service or content provider are 100,000 or fewer Subscribers during the year = no royalty
For...where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of Free Television(television broadcasting which is sent by an over-the-air, satellite and/or cable Transmission, and which is not paid for by an End User), the Licensee (broadcaster...) pays...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder..or...annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
The Enterprise Cap for H.264 in 2011 is $6.5 million a year. H.264 is deeply entrenched in theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Industrial and military applications. Home video.
There are over 900 H.264 licensees and collectively they dwarf Google.SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
And 32 years for that , this just shows how screwed up our courts are where you can get less time for murder then for theft.
In the American federal system, crimes of violence are almost always prosecuted under state law. Economic and property crimes with a significant interstate or foreign dimension are a federal responsibility.
If the feds do have jurisdiction in a murder case, don't expect anyone to get off lightly. It happens so rarely that there is little incentive to bargain.
Wire fraud, in the United States Code, is any criminally fraudulent activity that has been determined to have involved electronic communications of any kind, at any phase of the event. The involvement of electronic communications adds to the severity of the penalty, so that it is greater than the penalty for fraud that is otherwise identical except for the non-involvement of electronic communications. As in the case of mail fraud, the federal statute is often used as a basis for a separate, federal prosecution of what would otherwise have been a violation only of a state law.
The crime of wire fraud is codified at 18 U.S.C. 1343, and reads as follows:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.
In the case of United States v. LaMacchia, a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was charged with wire fraud when, because he had not profitted personally from online distribution of millions of dollars' worth of illegally copied software, he could not be charged with criminal copyright infringement. The United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, dismissed the charges, noting they were an attempt to find a broad federal crime where the more narrowly defined one had not occurred. Congress then amended the copyright law to limit further use of this loophole. Wire fraud
The reference is to the NET Act of 1997. "No Electronic Theft."
This is then foiled when pirates spend $10-20 on a pair of tinted glasses that filter out red light.
The red [or green] light from a military-grade laser weapon? That just might cost you more than $20.
Where the debate really needs to be centered is on two things:
What items ought to be kept secret?
Does the federal bureaucracy really need to be so big in the first place?
The population of the U.S. is 311,864,000.
The world 6,892,466,000. U.S. & World Population Clocks
The land area of the contiguous United States is approximately 1.9 billion acres (770 million hectares). Alaska, separated from the contiguous United States by Canada, is the largest state at 365 million acres (150 million hectares). Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, has just over 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares). The United States is the world's third or fourth largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and just above or below China. United States
The gross domestic product of the U.S. is about $14 trillion dollars a year.
First or second, globally, depending on how you look at things.
There is nothing magic about it.
Big numbers mean big government.
It is the federal government that gets to decide how much of that wealth is to be taxed and spent on programs that serve the national interest.
For example, the Great Depression exposed the weakness of states and cities in providing social services.
If grain prices collapse, the central states go broke.
If heavy industry fails, then there are breadlines in the northeast.
The number of Americans receiving food stamp benefits in May was 41 million. You could add to that the administration of Social Seccurity, SSI benefits for the disabled, federally subsidized low income housing, heating assistance, veteran's benefits and so on.
A gun in a safe is useless. Mine are loaded and kept in convenient locations where I can get them quickly.
Which means they are instantly accessible to anyone in your house. The intruder will have no more trouble finding them.
If I ever need a gun, and I sincerely hope I never do, I don't expect to have time to take it out of a safe and load it. I expect that seconds will count.
The "intruder" has the initiative.
He can find you lying in bed, more than half asleep, and blinded by the light.
Being quick on the trigger means you are only seconds away from making an unforgivable mistake. You stand a very good chance of shooting your wife, you kid, or the cat.
So they are demanding the personal information of a Non-US citizen, that's not in the country and did not access Twitter from within the United States?
You are not a citizen of the United States.
You are not a person within the jurisdiction of the United States.
What rights against a search of Twitter's U.S. based servers can you claim in a U.S. court?
Nor did any of them commit any sort of crime on US soil.
The standard for an ordinary search warrant is "probable cause." You aren't prosecuting a crime, you are conducting an investigation.
You don't escape prosecution under American law by committing your crimes by radio control from across the border. The geek's understanding of jurisdiction has a peculiarly 19th Century flavor.
Had they done that then they wouldn't have had the issues with Intel back stabbing them nor Microsoft wasting their time. Better late than never I guess.
OLPC was sold to the third world education minister as a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it bundle.
The XO hardware. The open source software. The Sugar UI. The constructivist philosophy of education straight from the Western media lab.
The minister wasn't buying.
The plain truth of it is that of the 1.8 million XO laptops deployed, about 120,000 are in Rwanda and all but a tiny fraction of the rest in Latin America. OLPC: Summary of laptop orders [Dec 26, 2010]
Uruguay has been a success story for a OLPC - and, somewhat more modestly, perhaps, for Linux. OS - Uruguay
But that is as good as it gets. OS - Peru