Not even the Great Firewall of China can stop piracy. I once read that one of the Pirate Bay's top user countries is China despite the site being blocked.
So if not even the Great Firewall of China can stop piracy, then exactly what can? Shouldn't we just face the facts and realize that trying to stop noncommercial copying is impossible and just legalize it already? Copyright law was meant to stop commercial infringement, not noncommercial copying. Enough already.
I love everything about Android except one thing: Vendor/carrier OS upgrades.
As someone who wants to switch from iPhone to the HTC Evo 4G in June, I have one message to Sprint/HTC/whoever is responsible: Please make Android 2.2 available as soon as a stable build is out. If it takes months after stable 2.2 is released, I'm gonna be a very vocally dissatisfied customer.
So please vendors / carriers, do us this courtesy and we'll all love you and happily part with obscene quantities of money for quality service.
True, but I said profoundly anti-competitive. The negative effects on the market in this case vastly outweigh the general incentive created by the monopoly prize for being first to innovate. I simply don't see the benefit to society in legally denying people the right reimplement proprietary software from scratch.
This project is yet more proof that software patents are profoundly anticompetitive. People have written open source H.264 encoders and decoders. Software patents literally make these open source projects illegal. Why should anyone have a monopoly so they can charge for what others are willing to give away for free? How does that benefit the economy, or the progress of technology? Absolutely ludicrous.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason it won't happen. HTML5 is just too open for them. With Flash there are still various tricks to secure the stream (I believe the BBC iPlayer used to XOR it or something like that...)
Perhaps the clearest example yet of how copyfight literally holds back the progress of technology. The content industry quite literally wants to roll back the technological clock so they don't have to innovate their business models to keep up with the progress of technology. They'd rather legislate against technological progress itself.
When I saw the screenshots for Unity I was amazed. Finally defaults that make sense. I'm not a fan of dark themes, but that's easily changed. (e.g., in Lucid, switch from Ambience to Radiance.) There's no reason Unity should be limited to netbooks at all. In a world where widescreen monitors are commonplace, vertical space is always at a premium.
But Unity does more than fix the vertical spacing issue, it brings Ubuntu's default's into the 21st century with task management as well. Even Windows has moved on from it's old school taskbar into something resembling the Dock from OSX. Unity's dock is a step in the right direction and placing it on the left is a smart choice.
Unity should be what all Ubuntu versions ship with. Not just netbooks.
This logic is trotted out frequently in defense of Apple, but it's a false dichotomy. All Apple has to do is add a button in the system preferences buried somewhere that says "allow software installation from non-App Store repositories." When a user clicks that button, a big warning in scary red print says "if you don't know what you're doing, don't do this!"
Then everything's fine. The user experience doesn't change one bit for the vast majority of users who won't do this and the small minority of users who care about this freedom get what they want without having to resort to hacks which not only void their warranty but actually break the law. (Jailbreaking is a violation of the DMCA.)
But what really gets me is people who argue that allowing software to be installed from places other than the App Store constitutes a broad security and stability risk seem to have forgotten that this ability has existed in Mac OS X (not to mention pretty much every other OS in existence) since day one and hasn't led to the doom and gloom consequences people seem to think would occur if the same were allowed on the iPhone.
The App Store as a repository of trusted software is a marvelous option for consumers. It's not unlike an Ubuntu apt repo. But it shouldn't be compulsory. Users should have the choice on whether or not to restrict their software sources. I'm done buying devices running iPhone OS until I can opt-out of App Store lock-in without paying for a developer license or hacking my device, voiding the warranty, and breaking the law.
Yeah that ad was pretty harmless. In fact, I was surprised at how generally wholesome it seemed. A bunch of kids dancing to pleasant pop'ish song. Speaking of which, does anyone know what song that is? I rather liked it.
You make a good point. This has been a concern for me.
However, it's been my understanding that it is reasonable for me to expect the Android community to make an unsupported build of OS updates available for my phone if I choose a relatively popular one.
On top of that, I'm not terribly interested in OS upgrades anyway. Android already has the features I need whereas with Apple, every update has filled in a very substantial gap in my needs.
Frankly though, my reason for ditching Apple isn't their OS upgrade policy. As you say, the competition isn't much better, if at all. I want to boycott their closed app store-only policy by voting with my dollars. I shouldn't need to break the law (by jailbreaking) to install applications from arbitrary sources.
I'm with you. I bought a 2G iPhone years ago because it was the only smartphone with a user experience I considered to be acceptable. When they launched the app store, I expected openness, but was sorely disappointed. I've been waiting ever since for Android to catch up and in my opinion it finally has. I'm going to switch to Android some time this summer. Currently exploring my options. The HTC Desire looks like the best so far.
Saying this about a project an engineer has devoted 7 years of their life to is an attack on that engineer. It implies that they don't know what they're doing, that they're uninformed, that they're idiots.
No, it doesn't really do that. His comment may have been blunt, rude even, but there's no evidence that he was attacking the engineers personally, only the project's effectiveness in developing a practical application.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with you. His comment was in poor taste. But strictly speaking, nothing he said is an affront to you or your considerable achievement. You're reading too much into it. Maybe he really did mean it the way you interpreted it, but you should try to avoid getting this offended until you know for sure that personal attack was intended.
That said, congratulations on your work. I look forward to the day that this technology matures into practical applications.:)
There's dozens of these lists all over the place. If we empower unemployed folks with the financial means to get trained academically or vocationally for such in-demand jobs, then the unemployment rate will decline.
Marketable skills are the skills the market demands right now. Just because the unemployment rate is 10% doesn't mean there are only enough jobs for 90% of the population. There are plenty of industries with jobs to fill right now but there aren't enough applicants. The proper way for us to deal with our unemployment problem is to get our unemployed folks the skills they need to get the jobs that are available, a tax burden I'm more than willing to bear for the benefit of the whole of society and the economy.
Stop inhaling fear and exhaling anger just long enough to be rational about this.
Why is this pessimistic, paranoid drivel a +5? Of course the answer is educating these people. The bottom line is their skills are obsolete. As you said, we've got millions of people out of work and those jobs are never coming back. It's time for them to go get marketable skills and it's the rest of us who should bear the tax burden of ensuring that they're able to get those marketable skills and return to the workforce as an asset rather than a liability.
This is a common sentiment, but it completely fails to address the real problem.
Even if copyright lasted only one year, piracy would still be rampant. The only answer is to legalize noncommercial copyright infringement (which is what the Pirate Party is campaigning for) and focus on restructuring business models to compete with noncommercial sharing rather than try and pretend that it doesn't exist or matter.
If we can do that, then the length of copyright terms won't matter.
Razor can increase the screen resolution beyond this. As for the Aero thing, as a gamer, what are you doing with those fancy effects enabled in the first place?;)
Social problem: Corrupt government Technological solution: Strict disclosure of information pertaining to government activities on the internet in user friendly way; a logistical nightmare just 20 years ago Result: More informed population makes better voting choices, reducing corruption
so it's clear - unequivocably clear - that all music that people want ends up on P2P networks, for anyone to get hold of. thus it is up to the music providers to realise this, take realistic stock, take advantage of the opportunity, and make some money by providing people what they want!
it is only by NOT selling people what they want (DRM-free music) that they are hurting their profits!
That doesn't solve the piracy problem though. Plenty of DRM-free stuff is being peddled and it gets pirated too simply to dodge the price tag.
There are two solutions:
1. Big brother internet, where DRM becomes (theoretically) enforceable because everything is monitored. Darknets will then inevitable become and we'll all be living in some cyberpunk dystopia.
2. Compete with free. Legalize noncommercial copyright infringement and force businesses to derive all their revenue from advertising, voluntary payments (donations), and value-added services.
One of these two things will happen. It's inevitable. Let's all hope it's not #1.
Restore copyright to 17 years renewable only by the author of the work
If you truly want information to be free, then you should be advocating the legalization of all noncommercial copyright infringement. All this fussing about the length of copyright is completely irrelevant and arbitrary. I don't care if copyright lasts for four thousand years if noncommercial infringement is legal.
I don't think there should be a distinction between commercial and non-commercial, there should be a distinction depending on the amount of damages, and obviously commercial copying would give more evidence of damages.
That distinction already exists today in our legal system and there already is an adjustment to the amount of damages awarded depending on whether or not an infringement is commercial.
But consider what could happen if non-commercial infringement wasn't punished: Let's say Steve Jobs has an argument with someone who happens to be the boss of a record company. So Steve Jobs buys two dozen XServes, goes to a record store and buys all CDs made by that record company, plus orders all their back catalogue, hires someone to load these CDs onto the computers, then makes them available to the whole world, without asking for a penny. For a million dollars, he could drive that record company into bankruptcy. Completely non-commercial.
You don't need a super rich person to do that, it's already being done today on dozens of bit torrent sites...
All I'm advocating here is for copyright law to face reality. Noncommercial copyright infringement in the form of file sharing is never going away. If we just legalize it already we can start focusing on how to build business models that can coexist with it rather than playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.
non-commercial is a bit of an interesting misnomer. If I would download every movie/piece of music i want to watch/listen too, is that non-commercial?
Yes. That constitutes a noncommercial, private use.
Up to a point, i agree that current copyright is problematic. There needs to be a reward for making things people want, limited in time/ownership maybe.
Granting copyright owners an exclusive right to profit from their works is reward aplenty. Legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement isn't going to cause massive market failures across the board, it'll just force people to stop selling digital bits for money and start getting more modern and creative with their business models.
You're trying to start an intelligent and informed debate on copyright? Based on the premise that some copyright is quite reasonable?
On Slashdot?
Good luck with that...
Some copyright is quite reasonable. What we need is a legalization of noncommercial copyright infringement. Leave the rest of copyright law perfectly as it is. I should be able to share all the files I want, but as soon as I start trying to make money doing that, that's when it should become illegal (as it is today).
The exclusive distribution rights granted by copyright were meant to give you an exclusive right to profit from your work. Copyright law when originally drafted could not anticipate a scenario where copying cost nothing, so they simply assumed that any copy must have a profit motive which as of the advent of consumer electronics is no longer necessarily the case.
I'm curious if there are any sources to check how much traffic as ad-related, and how much not. I'd be willing to bet that volume due to ads is not insignificant...
That's an interesting question. I decided to check myself on yahoo.com's front page. I came up with a 354kb total page load. The amount attributed to ads was 57kb. That's approximately 16% or 17%.
The weight of ads per website will vary of course. And whether or not you consider ~20% of your web browsing bandwidth to be ads trivial or not is a matter of personal opinion. I'd wager most consumers wouldn't consider that an unreasonable burden and wouldn't go out of their way to block it like some of the tech crowd does.
However you also wrote in your post that you're seeing sites shoving huge videos down your throat. I can certainly agree with objections to that, but that is not typical of mainstream advertising unless you're on a video site.
The rule of thumb is serve ads in the media of your content. Sites with just text and images should have ads that are just text and images. However, sites like Hulu serving videos can have video ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even the Great Firewall of China can stop piracy. I once read that one of the Pirate Bay's top user countries is China despite the site being blocked.
So if not even the Great Firewall of China can stop piracy, then exactly what can? Shouldn't we just face the facts and realize that trying to stop noncommercial copying is impossible and just legalize it already? Copyright law was meant to stop commercial infringement, not noncommercial copying. Enough already.
I love everything about Android except one thing: Vendor/carrier OS upgrades.
As someone who wants to switch from iPhone to the HTC Evo 4G in June, I have one message to Sprint/HTC/whoever is responsible: Please make Android 2.2 available as soon as a stable build is out. If it takes months after stable 2.2 is released, I'm gonna be a very vocally dissatisfied customer.
So please vendors / carriers, do us this courtesy and we'll all love you and happily part with obscene quantities of money for quality service.
True, but I said profoundly anti-competitive. The negative effects on the market in this case vastly outweigh the general incentive created by the monopoly prize for being first to innovate. I simply don't see the benefit to society in legally denying people the right reimplement proprietary software from scratch.
This project is yet more proof that software patents are profoundly anticompetitive. People have written open source H.264 encoders and decoders. Software patents literally make these open source projects illegal. Why should anyone have a monopoly so they can charge for what others are willing to give away for free? How does that benefit the economy, or the progress of technology? Absolutely ludicrous.
Perhaps the clearest example yet of how copyfight literally holds back the progress of technology. The content industry quite literally wants to roll back the technological clock so they don't have to innovate their business models to keep up with the progress of technology. They'd rather legislate against technological progress itself.
When I saw the screenshots for Unity I was amazed. Finally defaults that make sense. I'm not a fan of dark themes, but that's easily changed. (e.g., in Lucid, switch from Ambience to Radiance.) There's no reason Unity should be limited to netbooks at all. In a world where widescreen monitors are commonplace, vertical space is always at a premium.
But Unity does more than fix the vertical spacing issue, it brings Ubuntu's default's into the 21st century with task management as well. Even Windows has moved on from it's old school taskbar into something resembling the Dock from OSX. Unity's dock is a step in the right direction and placing it on the left is a smart choice.
Unity should be what all Ubuntu versions ship with. Not just netbooks.
This logic is trotted out frequently in defense of Apple, but it's a false dichotomy. All Apple has to do is add a button in the system preferences buried somewhere that says "allow software installation from non-App Store repositories." When a user clicks that button, a big warning in scary red print says "if you don't know what you're doing, don't do this!"
Then everything's fine. The user experience doesn't change one bit for the vast majority of users who won't do this and the small minority of users who care about this freedom get what they want without having to resort to hacks which not only void their warranty but actually break the law. (Jailbreaking is a violation of the DMCA.)
But what really gets me is people who argue that allowing software to be installed from places other than the App Store constitutes a broad security and stability risk seem to have forgotten that this ability has existed in Mac OS X (not to mention pretty much every other OS in existence) since day one and hasn't led to the doom and gloom consequences people seem to think would occur if the same were allowed on the iPhone.
The App Store as a repository of trusted software is a marvelous option for consumers. It's not unlike an Ubuntu apt repo. But it shouldn't be compulsory. Users should have the choice on whether or not to restrict their software sources. I'm done buying devices running iPhone OS until I can opt-out of App Store lock-in without paying for a developer license or hacking my device, voiding the warranty, and breaking the law.
Yeah that ad was pretty harmless. In fact, I was surprised at how generally wholesome it seemed. A bunch of kids dancing to pleasant pop'ish song. Speaking of which, does anyone know what song that is? I rather liked it.
That only makes Apple hypocritical; banning non-native apps on their platform but happy to peddle their own on other platforms.
You make a good point. This has been a concern for me.
However, it's been my understanding that it is reasonable for me to expect the Android community to make an unsupported build of OS updates available for my phone if I choose a relatively popular one.
On top of that, I'm not terribly interested in OS upgrades anyway. Android already has the features I need whereas with Apple, every update has filled in a very substantial gap in my needs.
Frankly though, my reason for ditching Apple isn't their OS upgrade policy. As you say, the competition isn't much better, if at all. I want to boycott their closed app store-only policy by voting with my dollars. I shouldn't need to break the law (by jailbreaking) to install applications from arbitrary sources.
I'm with you. I bought a 2G iPhone years ago because it was the only smartphone with a user experience I considered to be acceptable. When they launched the app store, I expected openness, but was sorely disappointed. I've been waiting ever since for Android to catch up and in my opinion it finally has. I'm going to switch to Android some time this summer. Currently exploring my options. The HTC Desire looks like the best so far.
No, it doesn't really do that. His comment may have been blunt, rude even, but there's no evidence that he was attacking the engineers personally, only the project's effectiveness in developing a practical application.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with you. His comment was in poor taste. But strictly speaking, nothing he said is an affront to you or your considerable achievement. You're reading too much into it. Maybe he really did mean it the way you interpreted it, but you should try to avoid getting this offended until you know for sure that personal attack was intended.
That said, congratulations on your work. I look forward to the day that this technology matures into practical applications. :)
Specific list: http://careerinfonet.org/indview1.asp?nodeid=45
There's dozens of these lists all over the place. If we empower unemployed folks with the financial means to get trained academically or vocationally for such in-demand jobs, then the unemployment rate will decline.
Marketable skills are the skills the market demands right now. Just because the unemployment rate is 10% doesn't mean there are only enough jobs for 90% of the population. There are plenty of industries with jobs to fill right now but there aren't enough applicants. The proper way for us to deal with our unemployment problem is to get our unemployed folks the skills they need to get the jobs that are available, a tax burden I'm more than willing to bear for the benefit of the whole of society and the economy.
Stop inhaling fear and exhaling anger just long enough to be rational about this.
Why is this pessimistic, paranoid drivel a +5? Of course the answer is educating these people. The bottom line is their skills are obsolete. As you said, we've got millions of people out of work and those jobs are never coming back. It's time for them to go get marketable skills and it's the rest of us who should bear the tax burden of ensuring that they're able to get those marketable skills and return to the workforce as an asset rather than a liability.
This is a common sentiment, but it completely fails to address the real problem.
Even if copyright lasted only one year, piracy would still be rampant. The only answer is to legalize noncommercial copyright infringement (which is what the Pirate Party is campaigning for) and focus on restructuring business models to compete with noncommercial sharing rather than try and pretend that it doesn't exist or matter.
If we can do that, then the length of copyright terms won't matter.
Razor can increase the screen resolution beyond this. As for the Aero thing, as a gamer, what are you doing with those fancy effects enabled in the first place? ;)
I'll bite.
Social problem: Corrupt government
Technological solution: Strict disclosure of information pertaining to government activities on the internet in user friendly way; a logistical nightmare just 20 years ago
Result: More informed population makes better voting choices, reducing corruption
That doesn't solve the piracy problem though. Plenty of DRM-free stuff is being peddled and it gets pirated too simply to dodge the price tag.
There are two solutions:
1. Big brother internet, where DRM becomes (theoretically) enforceable because everything is monitored. Darknets will then inevitable become and we'll all be living in some cyberpunk dystopia.
2. Compete with free. Legalize noncommercial copyright infringement and force businesses to derive all their revenue from advertising, voluntary payments (donations), and value-added services.
One of these two things will happen. It's inevitable. Let's all hope it's not #1.
If you truly want information to be free, then you should be advocating the legalization of all noncommercial copyright infringement. All this fussing about the length of copyright is completely irrelevant and arbitrary. I don't care if copyright lasts for four thousand years if noncommercial infringement is legal.
Sweet! So that means when we find the Algae Planet, it'll solve our food AND fuel problems! Why steal Tylium from the Cylons when you've got algae?
That distinction already exists today in our legal system and there already is an adjustment to the amount of damages awarded depending on whether or not an infringement is commercial.
You don't need a super rich person to do that, it's already being done today on dozens of bit torrent sites...
All I'm advocating here is for copyright law to face reality. Noncommercial copyright infringement in the form of file sharing is never going away. If we just legalize it already we can start focusing on how to build business models that can coexist with it rather than playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.
Yes. That constitutes a noncommercial, private use.
Granting copyright owners an exclusive right to profit from their works is reward aplenty. Legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement isn't going to cause massive market failures across the board, it'll just force people to stop selling digital bits for money and start getting more modern and creative with their business models.
Some copyright is quite reasonable. What we need is a legalization of noncommercial copyright infringement. Leave the rest of copyright law perfectly as it is. I should be able to share all the files I want, but as soon as I start trying to make money doing that, that's when it should become illegal (as it is today).
The exclusive distribution rights granted by copyright were meant to give you an exclusive right to profit from your work. Copyright law when originally drafted could not anticipate a scenario where copying cost nothing, so they simply assumed that any copy must have a profit motive which as of the advent of consumer electronics is no longer necessarily the case.
That's an interesting question. I decided to check myself on yahoo.com's front page. I came up with a 354kb total page load. The amount attributed to ads was 57kb. That's approximately 16% or 17%.
The weight of ads per website will vary of course. And whether or not you consider ~20% of your web browsing bandwidth to be ads trivial or not is a matter of personal opinion. I'd wager most consumers wouldn't consider that an unreasonable burden and wouldn't go out of their way to block it like some of the tech crowd does.
However you also wrote in your post that you're seeing sites shoving huge videos down your throat. I can certainly agree with objections to that, but that is not typical of mainstream advertising unless you're on a video site.
The rule of thumb is serve ads in the media of your content. Sites with just text and images should have ads that are just text and images. However, sites like Hulu serving videos can have video ads.