So, adding many more TLDs could help make the stuff on the left of the dot shorter, but only if you don't allow existing domain holders to get preferential access to the new domains.
Presumably in this proposal, businesses would only be allowed to apply for names under TLDs that match what their business does, much the same as how trademarks work. i.e., until a few years ago, apple.computer would point at Apple Computers and apple.music would point at the record company that made Apple Computers agree that they would never go into the music business. If you have 2 companies after the same name under the same TLD, you have got a trademark dispute (2 companies in the same line of business trading under the same name) which causes legal problems anyway.
I imagine you would need to split this up regionally somehow - i.e. joetheplumberofatlanta.com would become joe.atlanta.us.plumber or similar, since there is no problem with another local plumber trading as "joe" in a different location. This may seem longer than the current system, but since it would be a standard format rather than the adhoc bodge we have today, it would probably be easier for people to remember.
If you don't allow for there to be 300 different people with rights to ford.something then all you're doing is just raising the costs for ford.com to keep registering new TLDs. If you do allow for 300 different ford.somethings then suddenly consumers have to remember which TLD to use, which isn't any better than ford-the-boston-tailor.com.
Since Ford cars don't do tailoring, they shouldn't be interested in registering "ford.tailor". Its pretty trivial for people to remember that when they want to buy a new car they go to ford.car rather than ford.tailor (or ford.boston.us.tailor), surely?
Do I REALLY have to point out the word "Open"? You can't steal it unless the data's been copyrighted. Otherwise, Red Hat & SuSE would be in the same boat.
Ok, where to begin with what's wrong with this post: 1. Theft and copyright have nothing to do with each other. You can steal pretty much anything - break into the location it is stored and walk off with it, thereby depriving the owner of it. Copying something is, at worst, copyright infringement, not stealing - the owner still has the use of the thing they own, its just that someone else who shouldn't also has the use of it. 2. "Open" does not mean "not copyrighted". The OSM dataset _is_ copyrighted (as is practically anything else that has the word "Open" attached to it). "Open" just means that the licence is quite permissive. In the case of OSM, the copyrighted dataset is currently licensed under the CC-BY-SA licence, which requires anyone republishing the data to provide attribution to OpenStreetMap along with the republished data. Apple are not doing this, they are therefore using copyrighted data without complying with a valid licence. I.e. they are infringing copyright. 3. Red Hat and SuSE largely are in the same boat, with the exception that they _are_ complying with the licences for all the software they distribute. Be clear on this - the software that they distribute is _not_ public domain, it is copyrighted and has licences attached. In order to legally distribute the software, you must comply with those licences. These licences are quite permissive, but if you don't comply with them, you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Though I'm not sure how well to trust North Korean OSM. I can just picture some guy in a cubicle in NK building phantom roads and towns all over the place just because.
Unfortunately, Google have already been caught vandalising OSM...
In the UK there's a low emissions zone around the capital that prevents the worst offenders from entering. or they have to pay, or something. Can't remember exactly but it's there!
You pay £100 per day for vans (or van-based vehicles, so some cars count too) if they aren't quite new. It's a pretty stupid law - it doesn't get the polluting vehicles off the road, it simply pushes them outside of London. Meanwhile it encourages Londoners to buy brand new vehicles, which is arguably worse for the environment anyway.
Then again, the government can't usually be accused of any kind of sensible thinking - in 2009 the UK government introduced a scrappage incentive to encourage people to scrap cars over 10 years old. This scheme was launched under the guise of helping the environment and the British economy. The result: lots of perfectly good cars scrapped and new ones purchased (the environmental cost of a new car far outweighs the cost of running a 10 year old car for a few more years until it really meets it's end of life). Meanwhile, since the UK car manufacturing industry is practically non-existent, this didn't really help the british economy, it simply ended up with foreign industry being subsidised by British tax money.
Im so tired of hearing about homosexual marriage already. Just stop. Marriage is a religious ceremony recognized by the state and federal governments.
Personally I dont think state and federal government should recognize ANY marriage. Only the joining of domestic partners for tax purposes. Let organized religion worry about marriage.
Marriage really isn't a religious ceremony - it is a promise between two people. Pretty much all religions have tailored ceremonies around marriage, but the fact that it is pretty much universal (i.e. pretty much all cultures have something akin to marriage, whatever religion they do or don't follow) makes it not a fundamentally religious thing.
Personally, I do think that marriage should mean something legally - it is a contract and should be treated the same as any other contract. In this regard, you shouldn't have to have a marriage ceremony to get the same legal position - a simple paper contract between the two parties should be equivalent.
What I _do_ object to is the government dictating _how_ people get married. For example, speaking from the perspective of UK laws: - You have to get married in a licensed venue - why not let the couple choose somewhere special to them to get married rather than dictating a restricted number of venues? - You have to get married under a roof - no getting hitched on the beach. - You have to get married within certain daytime hours, so getting married under the beautiful stars is a no-no. - If you want a civil ceremony, you're allowed nothing religious in it, so for example, if you're a christian you pretty much have to get married in a church since getting married in your local castle, hotel, etc. is a civil ceremony and therefore cannot have any religious content. (I'm not religious, but I don't see any reason for restricting people from having whatever type of ceremony they like).
Some of rules have caused problems for me personally because they mean that my faincee and I cannot get married where we would choose (on top of a mountain, in the snow in winter - not under a roof so it isn't allowed). I simply don't see why there is any benefit to anyone placing these sorts of restrictions on people - the important thing is that two people are making a contract between each other and it really shouldn't matter where, when or how they choose to do it.
Seriously, think before you write stuff. Mandatory voting just gets you more uninformed morons voting. Even worse, they just vote randomly.
If the morons voted randomly then it wouldn't be a problem - the signal is easilly extractable from random noise. The problem is that morons are usually easy to manipulate, so rather than adding random noise they add bias induced by the press.
If not all Android phones are unlocked in this fashion then Android is not. Otherwise you can say that Apple does not have a walled garden since you just need to use an untethered jailbreak.
No, you can go into a shop and _buy_ an unlocked Android phone. No messing around, no geeky stuff, just buy it. My fiancee (who isn't a geek) did exactly this last year - ordered an unlocked Nexus-S from Play.com and stuck a PAYG SIM in it. Let me know when you find an official retailer selling an off the shelf jail broken iOS device complete with manufacturer's warranty.
Yeah, Google do not prevent you from installing anything you want on your phone, they leave that kind of evil to the manufacturers and carriers instead...
I've done quite a bit of driving on UK motorways late at night and in bad weather and have to say I really appreciate the lit sections. Particularly in heavy traffic with fog, rain and snow it dramatically improves your visibility and I feel I can judge distances a lot better with them.
I find that in fog, street lighting just illuminates the fog and prevents me seeing. Whilst my headlights also reflect off the fog, the effect is far less because they are at a lower level (especially front fog lights).
To be honest, the only problem I have driving on unlit sections of road is that when I'm following someone I can't tell if the road ahead is dark because there's no oncoming traffic (and thus safe to overtake) or because it goes around a corner. This is better resolved by installing LED cats eyes instead of streetlights, since it would show the direction the road is going in.
I will accept that some junctions and city centres benefit from lights, but most roads don't need lighting. This is true in the suburbs too - there's a lot of evidence to suggest that whilst lighting makes pedestrians feel safer, it actually reduces safety because it creates lots of dark shadows. Pedestrian safety is improved by simply carrying a torch and wearing light clothing instead of installing street lights everywhere.
It's my understanding* that Lightsquared's equipment was never the issue, but rather the GPS equipment that got interference were just poorly designed. If the GPS equipment was held to the standards it should have been, Lightsquared's equipment wouldn't have interfered. Yet Lightsquared are the ones being shafted, simply because GPS is "too important".
That's not quite true. LS basically bought up a *satellite* band and tried to repurpose it for ground communications. It was then discovered that doing this caused some GPS equipment to malfunction. Whether or not you consider this GPS equipment to be "poorly designed", the fact remains that it was working absolutely fine for decades and LS's attempts to repurpose the ajacent band causes it to stop working. Expecting millions of GPS users to upgrade their GPS receivers just because LS wants to repurpose an existing band for a new use is ridiculous. On the other hand, if LS wants to buy shiny new GPS receivers for all these end-users...
So no, LS isn't "being shafted" - they purchased a satellite band with the intention of using it for ground communications, rather than its existing use, badgered the FCC into letting them repurpose it and then cried when it was found that this repurposing wasn't compatable with millions of existing devices.
But that could be improved if you strip out all the legacy connectors (RCA, VGA, SCART in Europe).
That wouldn't improve things at all. If you buy a TV that has all the connectors then you know it'll work with whatever you want to plug into it. If vendors start stripping out all but the latest connectors then you'll end up with people buying TVs and then realising they won't work with their existing equipment. The vendors might like the idea of the customers having to upgrade their entire set-up to the latest hardware every time they need to replace a single device, but the customers will be taking their brand new TVs back to the shop and finding something that does work with their existing kit.
Have a "soft" remote control (i.e. a cheap tablet or e-ink device) that works over a wireless link to the telly and encourage component manufacturers to produce interactive remote control "apps" for their devices using something standard like "HTML5".
Excellent! Complete lack of tactile feedback. This is exactly why touch-screen keyboards are a stupid idea.
Basically, stop seeing the TV as the "receiver" and design it as the hub for a collection of content sources.
I prefer to see the TV as a monitor. The idea of building a receiver into the TV seems silly to me - unless you're going to build every type of receiver in existence (and those that haven't been invented yet) into the TV, you're going to end up either using it as a plain monitor with an external receiver, or replacing the TV every few years when you change the way you receive content.
That picture you link is 1024x768 resolution. Unless it's from a very old monitor it is from something small (maybe comparable to the 10" tablet you write about) so there won't be much space left for anything else anyway.
I can think of plenty of things that would fit in that space. e.g. a small IM window, server monitoring tools, etc. Are we going to move into a situation where we need to buy a separate monitor for each application because the desktop designers think that running multiple windows per display is a bad idea?
This is also exactly why I didn't say that full-screen-only *always* makes sense on tablets - I can think of situations where I would want multiple windows open on a tablet (maybe using a tiling window manager rather than overlapping windows), it just isn't the predominant use case. I guess there is no fixed point at which you can say "screens below this size always want full screen application" and "screens over this size want multiple windows". As screens get smaller (e.g. down to smartphone size), there are more use cases where full-screen applications are best and as screens get bigger (up to projector display sizes) there are more use cases where windowed applications are best, but I don't think you can ever say "we *never* want fullscreen apps" or "we *never* want windowed apps", but there is a trend as to which will used most based on screen dimensions.
I guess this ties in with the dimensions we naturally give the applications' windows - on my desktop, my music player (with play-list) has similar physical dimensions to my smartphone's screen, so I'm unlikely to ever want to display a similar music player on my phone in anything less than full-screen mode. Conversely, the clocks, weather apps, etc that people have on their desktop PCs are pretty small, and it is highly likely that people won't want them to be full-screen apps on a smartphone (and Android's desktop widgets handles this situation reasonably). Moving up to a 10" tablet, I'm starting to think that I might want the music player to not be a full screen application, etc.
Displaying multiple windows at the same time means that screen space isn’t used efficiently, and it means that you don’t get a focused view of what it is that you are interested in. Windows that aren’t maximised also create additional tasks for people. Often you need to adjust their size, or you have to move them around.
They are clearly on track to eliminate that in favor of maximized windows.
I do wonder what the Gnome developers are smoking sometimes... I actually quite like Gnome 3, so I'm hoping someone forks it before the Gnome devs make it completely unusable. I can only think of 3 real problems I have with Gnome 3: 1. The crazy modal application launcher buttons. These change what they do depending on whether the application is running. For example, if I don't have a terminal running, clicking on the terminal icon will open a new terminal window; conversely if I have 10 terminal windows open, clicking the terminal icon will bring them all to the foreground - this is something I never want to do; the only reason I'm going to click the launcher icons is to open a new window so why not allow me to make that the default? 2. No support for extra mouse buttons. I want my 4th and 5th mouse buttons to raise/lower windows... Gnome 3 won't let me assign these buttons to any thing. 3. Lack of configurability. This is something Gnome has suffered from for a long time - for some reason the Gnome developers thing that making people hack away at gconf/dconf to configure common things is more user friendly than giving them a user interface to do it. I can understand the need to reduce the complexity of configuration interfaces, and reducing the number of knobs to twiddle does this, but there are some functions that they seem to have removed for no reason. For example, in the power management preferences, Gnome 3 lets you configure how long until it turns your monitor off when the machine is idle. It has a drop-down listing times liek "5 minutes", "30 minutes", "1 hour", etc. There is no "Never" option - why not? Would it have made the UI any more complicated? It's obvious what "Never" would do, it would be in the place you expect to find it, I just can't see why this functionality was removed.
If they do take to maximising everything then I may as well be runing Android on my desktop - it would make the machine useless for what I use it for. I can't think of a time when I would ever want to maximise a window on my 24" screen. My work involves me having many windows open at once - this is the reason for having a large screen and if I were restricted to a single window at once I may as well replace it with a 14" monitor.
They say that using unmaximised windows is an inefficient use of screen space, and cite this picture as an example of efficient use of space through maximising all windows: http://afaikblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/music-album-playback.png - am I the only one who can see that about 50% of the screen area is wasted because the window is way bigger than the content?
They also say that it is an inefficient use of the user's time if they have to resize and position windows, but this is a trade off - it *is* an inefficient use of my time to organise my windows, but through spending a few seconds being "inefficient", I gain vast efficiencies in the following hours by being able to see and work on all the content I need. It would certainly be far less efficient and far more frustrating if I were constantly having to switch between maximised windows rather than having everything on screen at once. This isn't even limited to switching to windows I need to work on, it's as simple as switching to a window every few seconds to see if the contents have changed - I quite often have a terminal window open tailing a log file and, as it's on the screen all the time, my peripheral vision will pick up that something h
Being seen on a website for the obvious purpose of being jerking on material may have very real consequences to them, their life, or psychological balance; even though nobody harmed them during the making of the pictures. Children have stricter control on their image than adults, for good reasons.
Firstly, the person depicted in a photo (child or not) are probably never going to find out about it, so arguably no harm has been done to them.
Secondly, even if the subject of the photo does find out about it, I'm not convinced that whether or not they are a child has much bearing on the psychological impact. If anything, a child may well be _less_ traumatised than an adult since they probably won't understand the implications of having their photo posted around the place.
Whilst I'm vary much against people being harmed, I'm also tired of the "for the children" line being trotted out every time some liberties are restricted. As soon as you start censoring and cracking down on "distasteful" behaviour, you're going to restrict the freedoms of innocent individuals as collateral damage - if "cracking down" is going to protect no victims then that collateral damage is too great and itself falls under "people being harmed".
Pedophilia or not, it is fair that these children and their tutors retain control of the way their image is used, and I guess nobody agreed to be a porn material on reddit.
As soon as you release information to the public, you largely lose control of that information. You get some protection from copyright law, but if you don't like the loss of control then you simply shouldn't release the information to the public. This applies to any information, not just photos of kids: when you release information you must be aware of what may happen to it and weigh up the cost of this against the advantages of releasing it.
However, I think that the kiddy-fiddling boogeyman has been blown way out of proportion - For example, there have been plenty of incidents of schools refusing to allow parents to take photos of their own kids at school events in case other people's kids are caught in the photo and used as jerking material. This is ridiculous - there is a vanishingly small risk that a particular photo is going to be used in that way, an even smaller risk that people featured in the photo are ever going to find out about it if it does happen (and therefore be harmed). People just have to accept that this absolutely tiny risk is there and learn to live with it, just the same as the (much bigger) risks of the kids getting injured in an accident on the playground, or while crossing the road. Preventing people from doing completely innocent and normal things just in case an extremely remotely unlikely thing happens is crazy.
Whilst you may say that these groups were intended to be used for distasteful purposes, taking them down doesn't seem to be that helpful. As far as I'm aware, none of the images were illegal in any way, they were perfectly normal photos of fully clothed kids. The only thing that made them seem distasteful was that they had been collected together for a seemingly obvious purpose - a quick google images search would turn up similar images spread across thousands of perfectly legitimate websites, so are we going to start demanding that those images are taken down for the same reasons?
So half the government cries foul and next thing you know it they'll be having a debate on whether or not TOR should be blocked - even though that very same thing is helping dissidents in IRAN to get around political censorship.
I've always found it interesting how foreign governments censoring is a Bad Thing (and condemned by domestic governments), but domestic governments censoring is somehow all fine and dandy.
? Does the fact that someone, somewhere looks at the picture sexually change that? Does it even matter in the least?
Legally, it does: one of the criteria for the Dost test is " whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer."
Which is awfully subjective, of course.
"intended or designed" implies to me that it is based on what the photographer was doing. If the photographer takes a completely innocent picture, then it wasn't *not* "intended or designed" to elicit a sexual response, whether or not it actually does for a vanishingly tiny number of people.
I struggle to believe that anyone is harmed by these pictures, and to my mind it falls into the same category as banning cartoons of underage acts - no children were harmed in the process of producing an animation, so what possible justification is there for banning it? If someone wants to get off to this stuff then I'd rather they do that than go find actual kids to molest...
Yep, Flash is pretty bad. And yet, Vimeo is an order of magnitude worse than Youtube (although I note that recently Youtube seems to have got worse. I can't make up my mine whether this is down to Youtube itself or because my Flash plugin / browser might've been "upgraded" at some point...)
It seems to me that most of the "advances" in computing these days seem to involve using less and less efficient languages to do the same old thing, meaning that you end up having to upgrade purely because of this, rather than because you want your computer to actually do something more than it has been doing for years.
The public library near me still runs desktops with AthlonXP (or something), 256MB RAM, and Windows 2000. My own computer is 4.5 years old, and I'll keep using it till it gives out. As compared to years past, it really isn't that far out of date.
Mine's an Athlon XP 2100+, and somewhat older than that. I'm considering replacing it, but mainly because nVidia have dropped support for the graphics card and Nouveau is unstable as hell (and this is a lesson I have learnt from and will never buy nVidia hardware again - if it doesn't have an open driver I don't want to know about it).
Notably, the 2 things that I notice it being too slow for are:
- Playing Vimeo videos... I have no clue how they made their player so damned inefficient, but I get about 2 frames per second in a tiny box in the browser. Meanwhile, mplayer will happilly play 1080p H.264 content just fine on the same hardware.
- Various over-Javascriptified websites. Anything with rotating fadey background images causes my machine to grind to a halt. Google maps has recently changed their javascript so it animates the map zooming in/out instead of just redrawing at the new zoom level and this renderes Google Maps a bit useless (whatever happened to "degrade gracefully"?).
For actual work, the machine is perfectly fast enough and I'd see no reason to upgrade if the hardware was still well supported.
If you were to attempt to restrospectively pardon every person who was convicted under a law that has since been repealed or replaced, you would be doing it as a full time job.
Which is probably a sign that we should stop damned well passing laws to stop consenting people doing things that produce no victims...
I've always thought it silly that companies say "Pirating cost us x amount of dollars this quarter! To the court rooms to sue!!!" but they don't say "People who didn't buy our product cost us x amount of dollars this year! To their homes to pry the money from their wallets!!!"
It isn't completely silly. Of course, the content industry tend to take the attitude that if 100,000 people copied their content then they "lost" 100,000 sales, which is crazy - if they were unable to copy the content a good proportion of those people wouldn't have gone out and bought it. However, you can't discount it entirely - a proportion (however small) of those people *would* have gone out and bought the content if they weren't able to copy it. Of course, figuring out how big that proportion is is quite hard, and assuming it is 100% makes the numbers sound more impressive even though its complete bollocks.
Actually, it's my opinion that pirating a piece of software makes it more likely that a purchase will be made on that game, or possibly a future one, once the purchaser is in a better position to buy.
It probably depends on why the person is copying. If they are young with little money then the can't afford the games, but letting them play for free keeps them interested in games so when they are older and richer they are still interested in playing and will buy instead of copy. If they can afford the games but are copying anyway then they will never be in a better position so I doubt they will ever become a good customer.
The likes of Microsoft know all this - you only have to look at their educational packages to see them pushing software at young people for very low prices in order to get them hooked. The end users don't actually need the software in most cases (there are plenty of free alternatives that they could use instead) but getting something for free is attractive and hooks the end user so that when they are older and richer they will go out and spend money buying upgrades instead of already having already discovered that they didn't need the software in the first place.
You can see this as the drug dealer business model: give people their first hit for free to get them hooked, then they will come back and pay for more later.
I'm not sure about computer games specifically but studies have demonstrated that people that habitually infringe on music copyrights spend more on music than people that don't.
I would imagine (and this isn't backed by any study) that the same doesn't hold for games. Certainly, I infringe music copyright to figure out if I like the artist. If I do, then I go buy the CD. So I guess it equates to free advertising for the artist - if I like them then I buy a CD I wouldn't otherwise have bought, if I don't then I wasn't going to buy the CD anyway so they haven't lost anything. If I were a games player (I'm not), I'm not sure any copyright infringement I would participate in would work in the same way.
True. However, do you believe that a habitual copyright infringer (or a habitual used game buyer, for that matter) would buy many new games? Or would they spend their money on other stuff?
You are precariously close to the Broken Window fallacy with that one. A pirate / habitual used game purchaser is not a loss to the publisher, as they are not a sale, yet the pirate has money to spend elsewhere. This is a net gain to "society", not a loss.
And a game publisher cares about the infringer's contribution to society because...?
I simply stated:
1. The used games buyers are probably not going to buy new expensive games, even if you cut off their supply of used games. They will most likely either go without, or infringe the copyright instead. Thus, preventing used games from being sold does not appear to benefit the publisher (note: I'm talking about the publisher, not society in general).
2. People who purchase new games are able to spend more money on new games if they can sell their old games. There is therefore a benefit to the publisher in this regard.
3. Given (1) and (2), allowing used games sales appears to have a net benefit for the publisher.
4. Economically, copyright infringers are _not_ the same as used games buyers - used games buyers put money in the publishers' hands by allowing the people the publishers are selling to to spend more. Whilst its true that there is the same amount of money in circulation either way, the copyright infringers will likley spend the money on other stuff rather than games whereas the money spent by the user games buyers will tend to go to the publishers in the long run. There is a psychological element involved here - a new-game-buyer who has sold an old game for £10 will probably think "I got £10 back from a game, so I can afford to spend more on my next game" rather than just putting the money towards something completely different.
To reiterate: I'm not expressing any opinion on how good or bad copyright infringement is for society, I am explaining how copyright infringement and used games sales will affect the _publisher_ (not the whole of society) in different ways.
I believe that better service will move pirates to customers, as Valve have demonstrated.
I think it is very difficult to convert copyright infringers back into customers: it takes a big push to make people change the way they are doing things. To start with, many people are happy buying used games. Then the used games market is cut off by the publishers - this is the big push that makes a lot of people turn to copyright infringement. To get these people back as customers, there needs to be another push - a big incentive to change. I'm not sure "better service" is going to be a big enough deal - what can the "better service" offer that copyright infringement doesn't? Largely copyright infringement offers exactly the same product but without the hassles of DRM; simply removing the DRM just makes them equal rather than providing a real incentive for people to go back on the straight and narrow.
Of course, neglected for this part of the discussion is that as well as all the used games buyers who had their supplies cut off and switched to copyright infringement, you've also good a few good customers who have been bitten by the DRM and have also turned to copyright infringement - these are probably even harder to get back because they feel they are owed something by the industry for the crap they have had to put up with in the past.
No. The publisher is attempting to prevent resale of used games. The second hand seller still has the game, but cannot sell it (e.g. it has non-transferrable DRM, etc).
This is a "known loss" to the second hand seller, and therefore moot. They accept the inability to not resell the goods, or they decide not to buy the goods.
We have resellers in many countries, and sure you can buy QoS as a value added service on your MPLS line from any decent telco, but none of the ISPs I have ever heard of provide QoS on ordinary public internet ADSL lines. If you can point me towards just one ISP that advertises DiffServ or similar tag based QoS on their public internet ADSL lines
I imagine A&A will do this for you. I'm aware that they do QoS on customer DSL as standard but don't know the specifics. Similarly, I believe even cheapo ISPs, such as PlusNet, do some level of QoS, but good luck getting any detail of exactly what they do.
But if protocol designers at Google (and elsewhere) work under the assumption you just described (roughly paraphrased: "latency sensitive applications do not belong in non-QoS networks") we can all wave goodbye to Skype
Frankly, as far as I care, Skype can indeed go to hell.
However, the solution to this is not to just shove latency sensitive traffic over a non-QoS network and hope that other applications are playing nice (on an internet where very few applications actually seem to bother to follow RFCs, it seems ridiculous to me to expect an application to interact well with other applications in a situation where there are no standards!). The solution is to choose your ISP according to your requirements. For the most part, congestion happens on the links between the ISP and the end user, and this is something the end user can control. If you need VoIP, or other another latency sensitive application, go find an ISP that will accommodate you, rather than expecting the cheapest, most clueless ISP you can find, to be suitable. You _can_ get away with VoIP on a quiet non-QoSed ADSL, but expecting other protocols to restrict what their abilities because you're too cheap to get a decent connection seems silly.
The pirate still has the money he saved by pirating the second hand game instead of buying it to pay for a different game.
True. However, do you believe that a habitual copyright infringer (or a habitual used game buyer, for that matter) would buy many new games? Or would they spend their money on other stuff?
I would think that the market would generally be divided up into a group of people who primarilly buy new games, and a group of people who primarilly infringe copyright or buy used. I'm not sure that preventing the second group from buying used games will tend to move them into the first group.
The second hand seller still has his game to sell.
No. The publisher is attempting to prevent resale of used games. The second hand seller still has the game, but cannot sell it (e.g. it has non-transferrable DRM, etc).
The publisher has lost nothing as neither transaction included them
The second hand seller has less money to spend on games because they can't sell their used games any more - this means that they can't give the publisher as much money (they will buy cheaper games or fewer games).
The second hand buyer does indeed have more money because the game is no longer available on the second hand market (either the second hand buyer has gone without the game, or they have illegally copied it). However, I would imagine that the second hand buyer is generally the sort of person who wouldn't be buying new games anyway, so this doesn't benefit the publisher.
Slashdot Mirror
So, adding many more TLDs could help make the stuff on the left of the dot shorter, but only if you don't allow existing domain holders to get preferential access to the new domains.
Presumably in this proposal, businesses would only be allowed to apply for names under TLDs that match what their business does, much the same as how trademarks work. i.e., until a few years ago, apple.computer would point at Apple Computers and apple.music would point at the record company that made Apple Computers agree that they would never go into the music business. If you have 2 companies after the same name under the same TLD, you have got a trademark dispute (2 companies in the same line of business trading under the same name) which causes legal problems anyway.
I imagine you would need to split this up regionally somehow - i.e. joetheplumberofatlanta.com would become joe.atlanta.us.plumber or similar, since there is no problem with another local plumber trading as "joe" in a different location. This may seem longer than the current system, but since it would be a standard format rather than the adhoc bodge we have today, it would probably be easier for people to remember.
If you don't allow for there to be 300 different people with rights to ford.something then all you're doing is just raising the costs for ford.com to keep registering new TLDs. If you do allow for 300 different ford.somethings then suddenly consumers have to remember which TLD to use, which isn't any better than ford-the-boston-tailor.com.
Since Ford cars don't do tailoring, they shouldn't be interested in registering "ford.tailor". Its pretty trivial for people to remember that when they want to buy a new car they go to ford.car rather than ford.tailor (or ford.boston.us.tailor), surely?
Do I REALLY have to point out the word "Open"?
You can't steal it unless the data's been copyrighted. Otherwise, Red Hat & SuSE would be in the same boat.
Ok, where to begin with what's wrong with this post:
1. Theft and copyright have nothing to do with each other. You can steal pretty much anything - break into the location it is stored and walk off with it, thereby depriving the owner of it. Copying something is, at worst, copyright infringement, not stealing - the owner still has the use of the thing they own, its just that someone else who shouldn't also has the use of it.
2. "Open" does not mean "not copyrighted". The OSM dataset _is_ copyrighted (as is practically anything else that has the word "Open" attached to it). "Open" just means that the licence is quite permissive. In the case of OSM, the copyrighted dataset is currently licensed under the CC-BY-SA licence, which requires anyone republishing the data to provide attribution to OpenStreetMap along with the republished data. Apple are not doing this, they are therefore using copyrighted data without complying with a valid licence. I.e. they are infringing copyright.
3. Red Hat and SuSE largely are in the same boat, with the exception that they _are_ complying with the licences for all the software they distribute. Be clear on this - the software that they distribute is _not_ public domain, it is copyrighted and has licences attached. In order to legally distribute the software, you must comply with those licences. These licences are quite permissive, but if you don't comply with them, you are guilty of copyright infringement.
Though I'm not sure how well to trust North Korean OSM. I can just picture some guy in a cubicle in NK building phantom roads and towns all over the place just because.
Unfortunately, Google have already been caught vandalising OSM...
In the UK there's a low emissions zone around the capital that prevents the worst offenders from entering. or they have to pay, or something. Can't remember exactly but it's there!
You pay £100 per day for vans (or van-based vehicles, so some cars count too) if they aren't quite new. It's a pretty stupid law - it doesn't get the polluting vehicles off the road, it simply pushes them outside of London. Meanwhile it encourages Londoners to buy brand new vehicles, which is arguably worse for the environment anyway.
Then again, the government can't usually be accused of any kind of sensible thinking - in 2009 the UK government introduced a scrappage incentive to encourage people to scrap cars over 10 years old. This scheme was launched under the guise of helping the environment and the British economy. The result: lots of perfectly good cars scrapped and new ones purchased (the environmental cost of a new car far outweighs the cost of running a 10 year old car for a few more years until it really meets it's end of life). Meanwhile, since the UK car manufacturing industry is practically non-existent, this didn't really help the british economy, it simply ended up with foreign industry being subsidised by British tax money.
Im so tired of hearing about homosexual marriage already. Just stop. Marriage is a religious ceremony recognized by the state and federal governments.
Personally I dont think state and federal government should recognize ANY marriage. Only the joining of domestic partners for tax purposes. Let organized religion worry about marriage.
Marriage really isn't a religious ceremony - it is a promise between two people. Pretty much all religions have tailored ceremonies around marriage, but the fact that it is pretty much universal (i.e. pretty much all cultures have something akin to marriage, whatever religion they do or don't follow) makes it not a fundamentally religious thing.
Personally, I do think that marriage should mean something legally - it is a contract and should be treated the same as any other contract. In this regard, you shouldn't have to have a marriage ceremony to get the same legal position - a simple paper contract between the two parties should be equivalent.
What I _do_ object to is the government dictating _how_ people get married. For example, speaking from the perspective of UK laws:
- You have to get married in a licensed venue - why not let the couple choose somewhere special to them to get married rather than dictating a restricted number of venues?
- You have to get married under a roof - no getting hitched on the beach.
- You have to get married within certain daytime hours, so getting married under the beautiful stars is a no-no.
- If you want a civil ceremony, you're allowed nothing religious in it, so for example, if you're a christian you pretty much have to get married in a church since getting married in your local castle, hotel, etc. is a civil ceremony and therefore cannot have any religious content. (I'm not religious, but I don't see any reason for restricting people from having whatever type of ceremony they like).
Some of rules have caused problems for me personally because they mean that my faincee and I cannot get married where we would choose (on top of a mountain, in the snow in winter - not under a roof so it isn't allowed). I simply don't see why there is any benefit to anyone placing these sorts of restrictions on people - the important thing is that two people are making a contract between each other and it really shouldn't matter where, when or how they choose to do it.
So the right answer is just C??
Seriously, think before you write stuff. Mandatory voting just gets you more uninformed morons voting. Even worse, they just vote randomly.
If the morons voted randomly then it wouldn't be a problem - the signal is easilly extractable from random noise. The problem is that morons are usually easy to manipulate, so rather than adding random noise they add bias induced by the press.
"Unwhatnow?" says the hired help at Best Buy.
If not all Android phones are unlocked in this fashion then Android is not. Otherwise you can say that Apple does not have a walled garden since you just need to use an untethered jailbreak.
No, you can go into a shop and _buy_ an unlocked Android phone. No messing around, no geeky stuff, just buy it. My fiancee (who isn't a geek) did exactly this last year - ordered an unlocked Nexus-S from Play.com and stuck a PAYG SIM in it. Let me know when you find an official retailer selling an off the shelf jail broken iOS device complete with manufacturer's warranty.
Yeah, Google do not prevent you from installing anything you want on your phone, they leave that kind of evil to the manufacturers and carriers instead...
So buy an unlocked Android phone already
I've done quite a bit of driving on UK motorways late at night and in bad weather and have to say I really appreciate the lit sections. Particularly in heavy traffic with fog, rain and snow it dramatically improves your visibility and I feel I can judge distances a lot better with them.
I find that in fog, street lighting just illuminates the fog and prevents me seeing. Whilst my headlights also reflect off the fog, the effect is far less because they are at a lower level (especially front fog lights).
To be honest, the only problem I have driving on unlit sections of road is that when I'm following someone I can't tell if the road ahead is dark because there's no oncoming traffic (and thus safe to overtake) or because it goes around a corner. This is better resolved by installing LED cats eyes instead of streetlights, since it would show the direction the road is going in.
I will accept that some junctions and city centres benefit from lights, but most roads don't need lighting. This is true in the suburbs too - there's a lot of evidence to suggest that whilst lighting makes pedestrians feel safer, it actually reduces safety because it creates lots of dark shadows. Pedestrian safety is improved by simply carrying a torch and wearing light clothing instead of installing street lights everywhere.
It's my understanding* that Lightsquared's equipment was never the issue, but rather the GPS equipment that got interference were just poorly designed. If the GPS equipment was held to the standards it should have been, Lightsquared's equipment wouldn't have interfered. Yet Lightsquared are the ones being shafted, simply because GPS is "too important".
That's not quite true. LS basically bought up a *satellite* band and tried to repurpose it for ground communications. It was then discovered that doing this caused some GPS equipment to malfunction. Whether or not you consider this GPS equipment to be "poorly designed", the fact remains that it was working absolutely fine for decades and LS's attempts to repurpose the ajacent band causes it to stop working. Expecting millions of GPS users to upgrade their GPS receivers just because LS wants to repurpose an existing band for a new use is ridiculous. On the other hand, if LS wants to buy shiny new GPS receivers for all these end-users...
So no, LS isn't "being shafted" - they purchased a satellite band with the intention of using it for ground communications, rather than its existing use, badgered the FCC into letting them repurpose it and then cried when it was found that this repurposing wasn't compatable with millions of existing devices.
But that could be improved if you strip out all the legacy connectors (RCA, VGA, SCART in Europe).
That wouldn't improve things at all. If you buy a TV that has all the connectors then you know it'll work with whatever you want to plug into it. If vendors start stripping out all but the latest connectors then you'll end up with people buying TVs and then realising they won't work with their existing equipment. The vendors might like the idea of the customers having to upgrade their entire set-up to the latest hardware every time they need to replace a single device, but the customers will be taking their brand new TVs back to the shop and finding something that does work with their existing kit.
Have a "soft" remote control (i.e. a cheap tablet or e-ink device) that works over a wireless link to the telly and encourage component manufacturers to produce interactive remote control "apps" for their devices using something standard like "HTML5".
Excellent! Complete lack of tactile feedback. This is exactly why touch-screen keyboards are a stupid idea.
Basically, stop seeing the TV as the "receiver" and design it as the hub for a collection of content sources.
I prefer to see the TV as a monitor. The idea of building a receiver into the TV seems silly to me - unless you're going to build every type of receiver in existence (and those that haven't been invented yet) into the TV, you're going to end up either using it as a plain monitor with an external receiver, or replacing the TV every few years when you change the way you receive content.
That picture you link is 1024x768 resolution. Unless it's from a very old monitor it is from something small (maybe comparable to the 10" tablet you write about) so there won't be much space left for anything else anyway.
I can think of plenty of things that would fit in that space. e.g. a small IM window, server monitoring tools, etc. Are we going to move into a situation where we need to buy a separate monitor for each application because the desktop designers think that running multiple windows per display is a bad idea?
This is also exactly why I didn't say that full-screen-only *always* makes sense on tablets - I can think of situations where I would want multiple windows open on a tablet (maybe using a tiling window manager rather than overlapping windows), it just isn't the predominant use case. I guess there is no fixed point at which you can say "screens below this size always want full screen application" and "screens over this size want multiple windows". As screens get smaller (e.g. down to smartphone size), there are more use cases where full-screen applications are best and as screens get bigger (up to projector display sizes) there are more use cases where windowed applications are best, but I don't think you can ever say "we *never* want fullscreen apps" or "we *never* want windowed apps", but there is a trend as to which will used most based on screen dimensions.
I guess this ties in with the dimensions we naturally give the applications' windows - on my desktop, my music player (with play-list) has similar physical dimensions to my smartphone's screen, so I'm unlikely to ever want to display a similar music player on my phone in anything less than full-screen mode. Conversely, the clocks, weather apps, etc that people have on their desktop PCs are pretty small, and it is highly likely that people won't want them to be full-screen apps on a smartphone (and Android's desktop widgets handles this situation reasonably). Moving up to a 10" tablet, I'm starting to think that I might want the music player to not be a full screen application, etc.
Displaying multiple windows at the same time means that screen space isn’t used efficiently, and it means that you don’t get a focused view of what it is that you are interested in. Windows that aren’t maximised also create additional tasks for people. Often you need to adjust their size, or you have to move them around.
They are clearly on track to eliminate that in favor of maximized windows.
I do wonder what the Gnome developers are smoking sometimes... I actually quite like Gnome 3, so I'm hoping someone forks it before the Gnome devs make it completely unusable. I can only think of 3 real problems I have with Gnome 3:
1. The crazy modal application launcher buttons. These change what they do depending on whether the application is running. For example, if I don't have a terminal running, clicking on the terminal icon will open a new terminal window; conversely if I have 10 terminal windows open, clicking the terminal icon will bring them all to the foreground - this is something I never want to do; the only reason I'm going to click the launcher icons is to open a new window so why not allow me to make that the default?
2. No support for extra mouse buttons. I want my 4th and 5th mouse buttons to raise/lower windows... Gnome 3 won't let me assign these buttons to any thing.
3. Lack of configurability. This is something Gnome has suffered from for a long time - for some reason the Gnome developers thing that making people hack away at gconf/dconf to configure common things is more user friendly than giving them a user interface to do it. I can understand the need to reduce the complexity of configuration interfaces, and reducing the number of knobs to twiddle does this, but there are some functions that they seem to have removed for no reason. For example, in the power management preferences, Gnome 3 lets you configure how long until it turns your monitor off when the machine is idle. It has a drop-down listing times liek "5 minutes", "30 minutes", "1 hour", etc. There is no "Never" option - why not? Would it have made the UI any more complicated? It's obvious what "Never" would do, it would be in the place you expect to find it, I just can't see why this functionality was removed.
If they do take to maximising everything then I may as well be runing Android on my desktop - it would make the machine useless for what I use it for. I can't think of a time when I would ever want to maximise a window on my 24" screen. My work involves me having many windows open at once - this is the reason for having a large screen and if I were restricted to a single window at once I may as well replace it with a 14" monitor.
They say that using unmaximised windows is an inefficient use of screen space, and cite this picture as an example of efficient use of space through maximising all windows: http://afaikblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/music-album-playback.png - am I the only one who can see that about 50% of the screen area is wasted because the window is way bigger than the content?
They also say that it is an inefficient use of the user's time if they have to resize and position windows, but this is a trade off - it *is* an inefficient use of my time to organise my windows, but through spending a few seconds being "inefficient", I gain vast efficiencies in the following hours by being able to see and work on all the content I need. It would certainly be far less efficient and far more frustrating if I were constantly having to switch between maximised windows rather than having everything on screen at once. This isn't even limited to switching to windows I need to work on, it's as simple as switching to a window every few seconds to see if the contents have changed - I quite often have a terminal window open tailing a log file and, as it's on the screen all the time, my peripheral vision will pick up that something h
Being seen on a website for the obvious purpose of being jerking on material may have very real consequences to them, their life, or psychological balance; even though nobody harmed them during the making of the pictures. Children have stricter control on their image than adults, for good reasons.
Firstly, the person depicted in a photo (child or not) are probably never going to find out about it, so arguably no harm has been done to them.
Secondly, even if the subject of the photo does find out about it, I'm not convinced that whether or not they are a child has much bearing on the psychological impact. If anything, a child may well be _less_ traumatised than an adult since they probably won't understand the implications of having their photo posted around the place.
Whilst I'm vary much against people being harmed, I'm also tired of the "for the children" line being trotted out every time some liberties are restricted. As soon as you start censoring and cracking down on "distasteful" behaviour, you're going to restrict the freedoms of innocent individuals as collateral damage - if "cracking down" is going to protect no victims then that collateral damage is too great and itself falls under "people being harmed".
Pedophilia or not, it is fair that these children and their tutors retain control of the way their image is used, and I guess nobody agreed to be a porn material on reddit.
As soon as you release information to the public, you largely lose control of that information. You get some protection from copyright law, but if you don't like the loss of control then you simply shouldn't release the information to the public. This applies to any information, not just photos of kids: when you release information you must be aware of what may happen to it and weigh up the cost of this against the advantages of releasing it.
However, I think that the kiddy-fiddling boogeyman has been blown way out of proportion - For example, there have been plenty of incidents of schools refusing to allow parents to take photos of their own kids at school events in case other people's kids are caught in the photo and used as jerking material. This is ridiculous - there is a vanishingly small risk that a particular photo is going to be used in that way, an even smaller risk that people featured in the photo are ever going to find out about it if it does happen (and therefore be harmed). People just have to accept that this absolutely tiny risk is there and learn to live with it, just the same as the (much bigger) risks of the kids getting injured in an accident on the playground, or while crossing the road. Preventing people from doing completely innocent and normal things just in case an extremely remotely unlikely thing happens is crazy.
Whilst you may say that these groups were intended to be used for distasteful purposes, taking them down doesn't seem to be that helpful. As far as I'm aware, none of the images were illegal in any way, they were perfectly normal photos of fully clothed kids. The only thing that made them seem distasteful was that they had been collected together for a seemingly obvious purpose - a quick google images search would turn up similar images spread across thousands of perfectly legitimate websites, so are we going to start demanding that those images are taken down for the same reasons?
So half the government cries foul and next thing you know it they'll be having a debate on whether or not TOR should be blocked - even though that very same thing is helping dissidents in IRAN to get around political censorship.
I've always found it interesting how foreign governments censoring is a Bad Thing (and condemned by domestic governments), but domestic governments censoring is somehow all fine and dandy.
? Does the fact that someone, somewhere looks at the picture sexually change that? Does it even matter in the least?
Legally, it does: one of the criteria for the Dost test is " whether the visual depiction is intended or designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer."
Which is awfully subjective, of course.
"intended or designed" implies to me that it is based on what the photographer was doing. If the photographer takes a completely innocent picture, then it wasn't *not* "intended or designed" to elicit a sexual response, whether or not it actually does for a vanishingly tiny number of people.
I struggle to believe that anyone is harmed by these pictures, and to my mind it falls into the same category as banning cartoons of underage acts - no children were harmed in the process of producing an animation, so what possible justification is there for banning it? If someone wants to get off to this stuff then I'd rather they do that than go find actual kids to molest...
And if someone is sexually attracted to a fourteen year old, I (and most everyone else) will call them a pedophile
A 15 year old (or a 13 year old for that matter) with a 14 year old girlfriend is a peadophile?
This is all Flash.
Yep, Flash is pretty bad. And yet, Vimeo is an order of magnitude worse than Youtube (although I note that recently Youtube seems to have got worse. I can't make up my mine whether this is down to Youtube itself or because my Flash plugin / browser might've been "upgraded" at some point...)
It seems to me that most of the "advances" in computing these days seem to involve using less and less efficient languages to do the same old thing, meaning that you end up having to upgrade purely because of this, rather than because you want your computer to actually do something more than it has been doing for years.
The public library near me still runs desktops with AthlonXP (or something), 256MB RAM, and Windows 2000. My own computer is 4.5 years old, and I'll keep using it till it gives out. As compared to years past, it really isn't that far out of date.
Mine's an Athlon XP 2100+, and somewhat older than that. I'm considering replacing it, but mainly because nVidia have dropped support for the graphics card and Nouveau is unstable as hell (and this is a lesson I have learnt from and will never buy nVidia hardware again - if it doesn't have an open driver I don't want to know about it).
Notably, the 2 things that I notice it being too slow for are:
- Playing Vimeo videos... I have no clue how they made their player so damned inefficient, but I get about 2 frames per second in a tiny box in the browser. Meanwhile, mplayer will happilly play 1080p H.264 content just fine on the same hardware.
- Various over-Javascriptified websites. Anything with rotating fadey background images causes my machine to grind to a halt. Google maps has recently changed their javascript so it animates the map zooming in/out instead of just redrawing at the new zoom level and this renderes Google Maps a bit useless (whatever happened to "degrade gracefully"?).
For actual work, the machine is perfectly fast enough and I'd see no reason to upgrade if the hardware was still well supported.
If you were to attempt to restrospectively pardon every person who was convicted under a law that has since been repealed or replaced, you would be doing it as a full time job.
Which is probably a sign that we should stop damned well passing laws to stop consenting people doing things that produce no victims...
I've always thought it silly that companies say "Pirating cost us x amount of dollars this quarter! To the court rooms to sue!!!" but they don't say "People who didn't buy our product cost us x amount of dollars this year! To their homes to pry the money from their wallets!!!"
It isn't completely silly. Of course, the content industry tend to take the attitude that if 100,000 people copied their content then they "lost" 100,000 sales, which is crazy - if they were unable to copy the content a good proportion of those people wouldn't have gone out and bought it. However, you can't discount it entirely - a proportion (however small) of those people *would* have gone out and bought the content if they weren't able to copy it. Of course, figuring out how big that proportion is is quite hard, and assuming it is 100% makes the numbers sound more impressive even though its complete bollocks.
Actually, it's my opinion that pirating a piece of software makes it more likely that a purchase will be made on that game, or possibly a future one, once the purchaser is in a better position to buy.
It probably depends on why the person is copying. If they are young with little money then the can't afford the games, but letting them play for free keeps them interested in games so when they are older and richer they are still interested in playing and will buy instead of copy. If they can afford the games but are copying anyway then they will never be in a better position so I doubt they will ever become a good customer.
The likes of Microsoft know all this - you only have to look at their educational packages to see them pushing software at young people for very low prices in order to get them hooked. The end users don't actually need the software in most cases (there are plenty of free alternatives that they could use instead) but getting something for free is attractive and hooks the end user so that when they are older and richer they will go out and spend money buying upgrades instead of already having already discovered that they didn't need the software in the first place.
You can see this as the drug dealer business model: give people their first hit for free to get them hooked, then they will come back and pay for more later.
I'm not sure about computer games specifically but studies have demonstrated that people that habitually infringe on music copyrights spend more on music than people that don't.
I would imagine (and this isn't backed by any study) that the same doesn't hold for games. Certainly, I infringe music copyright to figure out if I like the artist. If I do, then I go buy the CD. So I guess it equates to free advertising for the artist - if I like them then I buy a CD I wouldn't otherwise have bought, if I don't then I wasn't going to buy the CD anyway so they haven't lost anything. If I were a games player (I'm not), I'm not sure any copyright infringement I would participate in would work in the same way.
True. However, do you believe that a habitual copyright infringer (or a habitual used game buyer, for that matter) would buy many new games? Or would they spend their money on other stuff?
You are precariously close to the Broken Window fallacy with that one. A pirate / habitual used game purchaser is not a loss to the publisher, as they are not a sale, yet the pirate has money to spend elsewhere. This is a net gain to "society", not a loss.
And a game publisher cares about the infringer's contribution to society because...?
I simply stated:
To reiterate: I'm not expressing any opinion on how good or bad copyright infringement is for society, I am explaining how copyright infringement and used games sales will affect the _publisher_ (not the whole of society) in different ways.
I believe that better service will move pirates to customers, as Valve have demonstrated.
I think it is very difficult to convert copyright infringers back into customers: it takes a big push to make people change the way they are doing things. To start with, many people are happy buying used games. Then the used games market is cut off by the publishers - this is the big push that makes a lot of people turn to copyright infringement. To get these people back as customers, there needs to be another push - a big incentive to change. I'm not sure "better service" is going to be a big enough deal - what can the "better service" offer that copyright infringement doesn't? Largely copyright infringement offers exactly the same product but without the hassles of DRM; simply removing the DRM just makes them equal rather than providing a real incentive for people to go back on the straight and narrow.
Of course, neglected for this part of the discussion is that as well as all the used games buyers who had their supplies cut off and switched to copyright infringement, you've also good a few good customers who have been bitten by the DRM and have also turned to copyright infringement - these are probably even harder to get back because they feel they are owed something by the industry for the crap they have had to put up with in the past.
No. The publisher is attempting to prevent resale of used games. The second hand seller still has the game, but cannot sell it (e.g. it has non-transferrable DRM, etc).
This is a "known loss" to the second hand seller, and therefore moot. They accept the inability to not resell the goods, or they decide not to buy the goods.
No, it
We have resellers in many countries, and sure you can buy QoS as a value added service on your MPLS line from any decent telco, but none of the ISPs I have ever heard of provide QoS on ordinary public internet ADSL lines. If you can point me towards just one ISP that advertises DiffServ or similar tag based QoS on their public internet ADSL lines
I imagine A&A will do this for you. I'm aware that they do QoS on customer DSL as standard but don't know the specifics. Similarly, I believe even cheapo ISPs, such as PlusNet, do some level of QoS, but good luck getting any detail of exactly what they do.
But if protocol designers at Google (and elsewhere) work under the assumption you just described (roughly paraphrased: "latency sensitive applications do not belong in non-QoS networks") we can all wave goodbye to Skype
Frankly, as far as I care, Skype can indeed go to hell.
However, the solution to this is not to just shove latency sensitive traffic over a non-QoS network and hope that other applications are playing nice (on an internet where very few applications actually seem to bother to follow RFCs, it seems ridiculous to me to expect an application to interact well with other applications in a situation where there are no standards!). The solution is to choose your ISP according to your requirements. For the most part, congestion happens on the links between the ISP and the end user, and this is something the end user can control. If you need VoIP, or other another latency sensitive application, go find an ISP that will accommodate you, rather than expecting the cheapest, most clueless ISP you can find, to be suitable. You _can_ get away with VoIP on a quiet non-QoSed ADSL, but expecting other protocols to restrict what their abilities because you're too cheap to get a decent connection seems silly.
The pirate still has the money he saved by pirating the second hand game instead of buying it to pay for a different game.
True. However, do you believe that a habitual copyright infringer (or a habitual used game buyer, for that matter) would buy many new games? Or would they spend their money on other stuff?
I would think that the market would generally be divided up into a group of people who primarilly buy new games, and a group of people who primarilly infringe copyright or buy used. I'm not sure that preventing the second group from buying used games will tend to move them into the first group.
The second hand seller still has his game to sell.
No. The publisher is attempting to prevent resale of used games. The second hand seller still has the game, but cannot sell it (e.g. it has non-transferrable DRM, etc).
The publisher has lost nothing as neither transaction included them
The second hand seller has less money to spend on games because they can't sell their used games any more - this means that they can't give the publisher as much money (they will buy cheaper games or fewer games).
The second hand buyer does indeed have more money because the game is no longer available on the second hand market (either the second hand buyer has gone without the game, or they have illegally copied it). However, I would imagine that the second hand buyer is generally the sort of person who wouldn't be buying new games anyway, so this doesn't benefit the publisher.