These projects seem like an utter waste. The only way to actually preserve this stuff is to wipe out the DRM and preserve the code in an accessible format. Cartridges die. Discs die. Floppies die. The readers for these things die. The players for them die. The controllers for them die. Over time, preservation and usability of the code itself (ie, ability to use on emulators of all kinds) is the only viable goal of archival.
Yeah, since Mark Zuckerberg donated to the Diaspora project right out of the gate, I'd say it's a pretty sure bet that he knew about the Diaspora project.
You have the idiots at reddit to thank for this idiotic trend. The increase of circle-jerk-humor around here also seems clearly derived from the teenagers and colleges kids growing up on reddit and thinking that Slashdot is just like that.
* Facebook is for self-involved attention whores. * G+ is for the navel-gazing crowd of photographers, podcasters, and tech journalists. * LinkedIn is for actual grown-ups who do actual work for a living and don't have time to sit around begging for attention or yanking each other's dicks. * Diaspora is for people who like concepts far better than utility and don't care about the feasibility of it. It's like the flying car. There's always some guy out th ere making one and some company trying to back the invention of one, but the amount of research remaining and the amount of infrastructure that would be necessary to facilitate adoption of it is just not there and never will be. So it'll always be one of those little back-page curiosity stories that we all think is a potentially good idea that will never see any real use.
As much as the Pirate Bay guys have rallied against copyright and the **AAs and all, I still can't help but wonder if maybe they were threatened by some absolutely certain and massive penalties that put them in the position of losing everything *or* cooperating in establishing the largest honeypot *ever* under the guise of a super anti-establishment service that would cater to the people these institutions are targeting. We've seen, repeatedly, that there tends to be a certain point where even the most vocal stalwarts are forced to give in and -- sometimes -- to play ball with those guys.
This could be a long-play that facilitates delivery of all the necessary evidence to put everyone on the receiving end of massive lawsuits in a few years that ever used these services. The weak spot of a VPN is always the logs and the provider of the VPN and all we really have is their word that no logs are kept and that they're not nor will they ever succumb to external pressures to provide information.
I don't give a shit WHAT it takes. As long as I can still enjoy a song or a book or a video game or a movie or conversation or meals or board games, I want to stay alive. I don't care WHAT you have to do. Strap me to some jumper cables. Anything. Life is a blink of an eye. Death and nothingness is god damn fucking FOREVER and I absolutely DO NOT want to die. Period. And I'll say the same thing if I live to be 800 years old. There is never enough life to live. There is always more of mankind and exploration and science and exploration to enjoy. I would give anything to see what we're doing in a thousand years. To be there and witness all the amazing things we've done and places we're going.
I'll tell you what's going on here and what a lot of people are missing.
First, we already gave telcos tens of billions (or maybe it was even a couple hundred billion) dollars to expand infrastructure for just the purpose we're claiming this tax should serve. They did jack fucking shit and just piled it into their coffers, without following through with anything the actual money was given to them for. And we just turned around and left and ignored the whole thing.
Second, the FCC are a bunch of power-hungry cunts looking to stick their noses everywhere they can. Remember how Bill Gates wanted just a tiny slice of every pie out there and that they could get incredibly rich with that strategy? Well, that's what the FCC wants. They don't exist to bring regulation and guidance to things that need regulation and guidance. They exist to further their existence. New technology? Gotta get our fingers in that pie, now!
So, that's where this fee comes in. The Universal Service Fund is going to be winding down in the next few years and they're going to transition it to the Connect America Broadband Fund. Essentially the same thing. With the advent of cell-phones and pretty much anyone today having access to telephony if they want it, the FCC needs a way to keep bringing money through the system (you can't pilfer money that isn't coming through the pipeline in the first place, after all) and oversight of a function that continues to justify their existence as a government regulatory agency. So, they are shoving their fat fucking asses right into the internet world -- a place they really don't belong -- and staking their claim on a nice plot of land. And their way of doing this is by asserting authority and control and power. Oversee taxation and fees and oversee dispersal of this to the guys who power the internet under the guise of providing internet access to those who somehow can't get speeds fast enough to watch double-penetration on redtube out in the sticks.
Oh, and the Universal Service Fund wasn't about getting phone service to everyone. It was about getting it to educational institutions, hospitals, etc that needed it in places that otherwise might be difficult and unprofitable to reach. Any place with a phone line (or even without one, now that we have cell phones) now has SOME access to the internet and I'd love to see a true break down of just how many hospitals and universities and schools are out there that somehow don't have some sort of faster broadband access, to the point that we need some massive national taxation to provide it for them. I bet it's seriously fucking few people.
This thing is a scam as big as the fucking eye can see.
This isn't about you paying a tax on your broadband access so you can get faster access. It's about you paying a tax on your broadband access so some guy in some podunk town with an outhouse in his backyard and a well to get his drinking water can get faster internet access, because there is no financial incentive for a broadband provider to expand service infrastructure over tens or even hundreds of miles just so five people at the other end can watch youtube.
Personally, I say fuck them. If you live in the boonies, take what you get. If you want faster internet and all sorts of state of the art services and utilities, move to a more heavily populated fucking area. I mean, that's the whole point of living in cities. You know, pooling resources.
You don't need "net neutrality". If "we" owned the infrastructure (and we should, since we subsidized the infrastracture that is already there), then all "we" have to do is let anyone who wants to use it have access to it. Bam. Competition. Now instead of having just one ISP, you have any ISP that wants to serve you. I mean, it's not like the pipes can only carry one provider's data over them.
All of this idiocy could be resolved if we leased access to the pipes as a wholesale good and then the ISPs competed with each other over service and price. Don't like your ISP's policies or limitations or politics or business practices? Use one of the other ISPs who wants your business.
I don't think you understand the proposition. They don't want to tax you for internet access so they can give you better and faster internet access. They want to tax your internet access so they can give SOME OTHER GUY better and faster internet access. My statement to the 4% who have shitty internet access? Fucking MOVE, if you care about internet access. Is this really hard to figure out? No, instead, we're going to start up some new massive authority to oversee more taxation and corporate welfare that will never pan-out in real results.
Guess what - some people live in a place with shitty cell service. Or none at all. Some live in a place where they don't have a public sewage service. Some even have to use well-water. Instead of running all this stuff out to them over hundreds of miles and billions of dollars, they get what they get *or they fucking move, if it's that important to them*.
I'd love to live on a nice little farm out off the interstate in Wyoming or some other place. The ones you drive by on your way to somewhere else a thousand miles away that are just a tiny little pretty home way off in the distance with nothing but mountains and grass surrounding it and one ten-mile-long winding dirt road leading up to it. But you know what? My options for work and internet access would be fuck all. So I don't do th at. I live in a jam-packed city crammed in by ass-holes on all four sides and within spitting distance, because I've determined what my priorities are and lived by them. Other people can make choices for themselves and nobody has to take each other's money to do it.
That's kind of silly. So by that definition, about 99.94% of the country does not have "broadband". Better crank up those FCC fees (again, wtf does the FCC have to do with the internet?) to a fuck of a lot more than a few dollars a month!
It becomes another Tax that you don't consider as a Tax, because it's collected from you at other times and in other ways than on April 15th on a tax form. Just like your car taxes, your property taxes, your hunting licenses, your public park licenses, your telco taxes and fees, your broadband taxes and fees (I don't know about you guys, but my cable broadband bill already includes taxes and fees that are supposedly government-related).
Hey, I'm stuck in a big city where I have access to more job opportunities and super fast internet speeds, but housing is expensive as fuck here. I demand that everyone who owns a house or rents one in a smaller town be forced to chip in a few dollars for me so that I can afford one of these fancy houses. Oh, wait, nevermind. I made the choice that internet access and job opportunities were more important to me than living out in a less serviced area and having a cheap home.
You can have your cake and eat it, too. But I'm not responsible for buying it for you.
Can someone explain why this was a jury trial, in the first place? The common jury can, typically, barely comprehend even our most fundamental laws. Like the Bill of Rights, in even their most simple forms. They tend to be irrational and uninformed. Regardless of the outcome, here, exactly how is a jury supposed to deliberate on something so deep and convoluted and complex that CEOs, technical experts, legal experts and many others who are thoroughly educated and experienced in these fields can't even come to a conclusion?
Also, can we please avoid linking to breitbart? What's wrong with linking to the actual AP article? Or doing it via google or another website? Does that Matt Drudge coat-tail-riding-nut's site really need the extra attention and traffic driven to it?
It's not entirely unlike how the TSA and DHS have made certain claims about how their scanners are entirely safe and neither passengers nor employees are even remotely at risk. They state they have conducted exhaustive tests and that this is an absolute fact. However, they won't release any evidence or results of said tests nor will they allow anyone else to perform these tests. We say it, therefore it's fact, so shut up slave.
So we're just going to write everything as if we're sitting on a bar-stool with a beer in one hand? What "literally happened" was that they took a urine sample. If I went to my doctor and he told me he need a "poo-poo sample", I'd walk out.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe because it's not the National Lampoon? That it's an actual journalist writing an actual article in an actual newspaper? Might as well just replace instances of "fecal matter" with "made a boom boom" and "pregnant" with "baby bump" or something equally as skin-crawlingly wretched. It'd be amateur and off-putting as a slashdot submitter's blurb. Same with someone's blog. But a fucking news article in a paper? Why not just write the fucking thing in txtmsg speak, while we're at it?
I mean, I know it's not the WSJ or something. But this isn't even befitting of a high school newsletter.
For fuck's sake. You're the Washington Post. Can we not talk like we're five years old? Surely there's some other phrase -- if you think super hard -- than "pee in a cup" that a professional journalist for a big-time publication can use?
If you steal a physical good that has a limited quantity and an expense necessary to manufacture it (even if it still involves merely a license to the materials contained therein), you are just a common shoplifter.
If you "steal" an infinitely replicatable thing that has no expense to manufacture (that is, there is no expense to each additional copy created), you are a pirate and infringing copyright and will be assessed a punishment befitting the most egregious white-collar embezzler.
There won't be any evidence of humanity. What motivation (or even facility) will you have for archiving all the great things of mankind, when they are all perpetually copyrighted and eternally DRMed?
There was a time when public domain was reached on an item not only in your lifetime, but within a reasonable time altogether. Perhaps by the time your newborn could get a learner's permit. Today, a thing (assuming no additional retroactive laws in the future) won't reach public domain until your great-great-great-grandchildren are studying for their driver's test.
So the little bastard also effectively stole from a retailer too, who would have also received money for each of those songs! Which retailer gets to sue his ass off, too? I mean, why should only the copyright holder be able to make claims here, right? Or do they all get to sue him and he has to pay multiples of damages to *each* of them, because he *might* have potentially purchased the songs from any one of them, if he hadn't allegedly been a naughty boy!
Huh? You're not even comparing apples to apples, here. This guy downloaded a couple songs for his own use. You're talking about piracy, which is an act with the intention of commercial gain.
Slashdot Mirror
These projects seem like an utter waste. The only way to actually preserve this stuff is to wipe out the DRM and preserve the code in an accessible format. Cartridges die. Discs die. Floppies die. The readers for these things die. The players for them die. The controllers for them die. Over time, preservation and usability of the code itself (ie, ability to use on emulators of all kinds) is the only viable goal of archival.
Also a waste.
Yeah, since Mark Zuckerberg donated to the Diaspora project right out of the gate, I'd say it's a pretty sure bet that he knew about the Diaspora project.
You have the idiots at reddit to thank for this idiotic trend. The increase of circle-jerk-humor around here also seems clearly derived from the teenagers and colleges kids growing up on reddit and thinking that Slashdot is just like that.
* Facebook is for self-involved attention whores.
* G+ is for the navel-gazing crowd of photographers, podcasters, and tech journalists.
* LinkedIn is for actual grown-ups who do actual work for a living and don't have time to sit around begging for attention or yanking each other's dicks.
* Diaspora is for people who like concepts far better than utility and don't care about the feasibility of it. It's like the flying car. There's always some guy out th ere making one and some company trying to back the invention of one, but the amount of research remaining and the amount of infrastructure that would be necessary to facilitate adoption of it is just not there and never will be. So it'll always be one of those little back-page curiosity stories that we all think is a potentially good idea that will never see any real use.
As much as the Pirate Bay guys have rallied against copyright and the **AAs and all, I still can't help but wonder if maybe they were threatened by some absolutely certain and massive penalties that put them in the position of losing everything *or* cooperating in establishing the largest honeypot *ever* under the guise of a super anti-establishment service that would cater to the people these institutions are targeting. We've seen, repeatedly, that there tends to be a certain point where even the most vocal stalwarts are forced to give in and -- sometimes -- to play ball with those guys.
This could be a long-play that facilitates delivery of all the necessary evidence to put everyone on the receiving end of massive lawsuits in a few years that ever used these services. The weak spot of a VPN is always the logs and the provider of the VPN and all we really have is their word that no logs are kept and that they're not nor will they ever succumb to external pressures to provide information.
I don't give a shit WHAT it takes. As long as I can still enjoy a song or a book or a video game or a movie or conversation or meals or board games, I want to stay alive. I don't care WHAT you have to do. Strap me to some jumper cables. Anything. Life is a blink of an eye. Death and nothingness is god damn fucking FOREVER and I absolutely DO NOT want to die. Period. And I'll say the same thing if I live to be 800 years old. There is never enough life to live. There is always more of mankind and exploration and science and exploration to enjoy. I would give anything to see what we're doing in a thousand years. To be there and witness all the amazing things we've done and places we're going.
YES.
I'll tell you what's going on here and what a lot of people are missing.
First, we already gave telcos tens of billions (or maybe it was even a couple hundred billion) dollars to expand infrastructure for just the purpose we're claiming this tax should serve. They did jack fucking shit and just piled it into their coffers, without following through with anything the actual money was given to them for. And we just turned around and left and ignored the whole thing.
Second, the FCC are a bunch of power-hungry cunts looking to stick their noses everywhere they can. Remember how Bill Gates wanted just a tiny slice of every pie out there and that they could get incredibly rich with that strategy? Well, that's what the FCC wants. They don't exist to bring regulation and guidance to things that need regulation and guidance. They exist to further their existence. New technology? Gotta get our fingers in that pie, now!
So, that's where this fee comes in. The Universal Service Fund is going to be winding down in the next few years and they're going to transition it to the Connect America Broadband Fund. Essentially the same thing. With the advent of cell-phones and pretty much anyone today having access to telephony if they want it, the FCC needs a way to keep bringing money through the system (you can't pilfer money that isn't coming through the pipeline in the first place, after all) and oversight of a function that continues to justify their existence as a government regulatory agency. So, they are shoving their fat fucking asses right into the internet world -- a place they really don't belong -- and staking their claim on a nice plot of land. And their way of doing this is by asserting authority and control and power. Oversee taxation and fees and oversee dispersal of this to the guys who power the internet under the guise of providing internet access to those who somehow can't get speeds fast enough to watch double-penetration on redtube out in the sticks.
Oh, and the Universal Service Fund wasn't about getting phone service to everyone. It was about getting it to educational institutions, hospitals, etc that needed it in places that otherwise might be difficult and unprofitable to reach. Any place with a phone line (or even without one, now that we have cell phones) now has SOME access to the internet and I'd love to see a true break down of just how many hospitals and universities and schools are out there that somehow don't have some sort of faster broadband access, to the point that we need some massive national taxation to provide it for them. I bet it's seriously fucking few people.
This thing is a scam as big as the fucking eye can see.
This isn't about you paying a tax on your broadband access so you can get faster access. It's about you paying a tax on your broadband access so some guy in some podunk town with an outhouse in his backyard and a well to get his drinking water can get faster internet access, because there is no financial incentive for a broadband provider to expand service infrastructure over tens or even hundreds of miles just so five people at the other end can watch youtube.
Personally, I say fuck them. If you live in the boonies, take what you get. If you want faster internet and all sorts of state of the art services and utilities, move to a more heavily populated fucking area. I mean, that's the whole point of living in cities. You know, pooling resources.
You don't need "net neutrality". If "we" owned the infrastructure (and we should, since we subsidized the infrastracture that is already there), then all "we" have to do is let anyone who wants to use it have access to it. Bam. Competition. Now instead of having just one ISP, you have any ISP that wants to serve you. I mean, it's not like the pipes can only carry one provider's data over them.
All of this idiocy could be resolved if we leased access to the pipes as a wholesale good and then the ISPs competed with each other over service and price. Don't like your ISP's policies or limitations or politics or business practices? Use one of the other ISPs who wants your business.
I don't think you understand the proposition. They don't want to tax you for internet access so they can give you better and faster internet access. They want to tax your internet access so they can give SOME OTHER GUY better and faster internet access. My statement to the 4% who have shitty internet access? Fucking MOVE, if you care about internet access. Is this really hard to figure out? No, instead, we're going to start up some new massive authority to oversee more taxation and corporate welfare that will never pan-out in real results.
Guess what - some people live in a place with shitty cell service. Or none at all. Some live in a place where they don't have a public sewage service. Some even have to use well-water. Instead of running all this stuff out to them over hundreds of miles and billions of dollars, they get what they get *or they fucking move, if it's that important to them*.
I'd love to live on a nice little farm out off the interstate in Wyoming or some other place. The ones you drive by on your way to somewhere else a thousand miles away that are just a tiny little pretty home way off in the distance with nothing but mountains and grass surrounding it and one ten-mile-long winding dirt road leading up to it. But you know what? My options for work and internet access would be fuck all. So I don't do th at. I live in a jam-packed city crammed in by ass-holes on all four sides and within spitting distance, because I've determined what my priorities are and lived by them. Other people can make choices for themselves and nobody has to take each other's money to do it.
That's kind of silly. So by that definition, about 99.94% of the country does not have "broadband". Better crank up those FCC fees (again, wtf does the FCC have to do with the internet?) to a fuck of a lot more than a few dollars a month!
It becomes another Tax that you don't consider as a Tax, because it's collected from you at other times and in other ways than on April 15th on a tax form. Just like your car taxes, your property taxes, your hunting licenses, your public park licenses, your telco taxes and fees, your broadband taxes and fees (I don't know about you guys, but my cable broadband bill already includes taxes and fees that are supposedly government-related).
Hey, I'm stuck in a big city where I have access to more job opportunities and super fast internet speeds, but housing is expensive as fuck here. I demand that everyone who owns a house or rents one in a smaller town be forced to chip in a few dollars for me so that I can afford one of these fancy houses. Oh, wait, nevermind. I made the choice that internet access and job opportunities were more important to me than living out in a less serviced area and having a cheap home.
You can have your cake and eat it, too. But I'm not responsible for buying it for you.
Can someone explain why this was a jury trial, in the first place? The common jury can, typically, barely comprehend even our most fundamental laws. Like the Bill of Rights, in even their most simple forms. They tend to be irrational and uninformed. Regardless of the outcome, here, exactly how is a jury supposed to deliberate on something so deep and convoluted and complex that CEOs, technical experts, legal experts and many others who are thoroughly educated and experienced in these fields can't even come to a conclusion?
Also, can we please avoid linking to breitbart? What's wrong with linking to the actual AP article? Or doing it via google or another website? Does that Matt Drudge coat-tail-riding-nut's site really need the extra attention and traffic driven to it?
It's not entirely unlike how the TSA and DHS have made certain claims about how their scanners are entirely safe and neither passengers nor employees are even remotely at risk. They state they have conducted exhaustive tests and that this is an absolute fact. However, they won't release any evidence or results of said tests nor will they allow anyone else to perform these tests. We say it, therefore it's fact, so shut up slave.
So we're just going to write everything as if we're sitting on a bar-stool with a beer in one hand? What "literally happened" was that they took a urine sample. If I went to my doctor and he told me he need a "poo-poo sample", I'd walk out.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe because it's not the National Lampoon? That it's an actual journalist writing an actual article in an actual newspaper? Might as well just replace instances of "fecal matter" with "made a boom boom" and "pregnant" with "baby bump" or something equally as skin-crawlingly wretched. It'd be amateur and off-putting as a slashdot submitter's blurb. Same with someone's blog. But a fucking news article in a paper? Why not just write the fucking thing in txtmsg speak, while we're at it?
I mean, I know it's not the WSJ or something. But this isn't even befitting of a high school newsletter.
For fuck's sake. You're the Washington Post. Can we not talk like we're five years old? Surely there's some other phrase -- if you think super hard -- than "pee in a cup" that a professional journalist for a big-time publication can use?
If you steal a physical good that has a limited quantity and an expense necessary to manufacture it (even if it still involves merely a license to the materials contained therein), you are just a common shoplifter.
If you "steal" an infinitely replicatable thing that has no expense to manufacture (that is, there is no expense to each additional copy created), you are a pirate and infringing copyright and will be assessed a punishment befitting the most egregious white-collar embezzler.
He should have just walked into a store and shoplifted the physical albums.
Don't be so certain of that:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080130/020249125.shtml
There won't be any evidence of humanity. What motivation (or even facility) will you have for archiving all the great things of mankind, when they are all perpetually copyrighted and eternally DRMed?
There was a time when public domain was reached on an item not only in your lifetime, but within a reasonable time altogether. Perhaps by the time your newborn could get a learner's permit. Today, a thing (assuming no additional retroactive laws in the future) won't reach public domain until your great-great-great-grandchildren are studying for their driver's test.
So the little bastard also effectively stole from a retailer too, who would have also received money for each of those songs! Which retailer gets to sue his ass off, too? I mean, why should only the copyright holder be able to make claims here, right? Or do they all get to sue him and he has to pay multiples of damages to *each* of them, because he *might* have potentially purchased the songs from any one of them, if he hadn't allegedly been a naughty boy!
Huh? You're not even comparing apples to apples, here. This guy downloaded a couple songs for his own use. You're talking about piracy, which is an act with the intention of commercial gain.