IMHO, considering all the abuses of non-banks like PayPal, being subject to bank regulations is actually a good idea and one of the very rare occasions where oversight by the State may be desirable.
DNS is just the obvious way to ensure that clients use the best path to content.
Isn't the obvious way a combination of anycast + bgp? It works quite well, and is administred by knowledgable network specialists who also happen to know the exact topology of their backbones. Putting it in DNS instead opens the door to endless misuse by domain owners who believe in geo-specific discrimination. CDNs should work transparently, but allowing end users (a.k.a. domain owners in this particular case) to tinker that is a really bad idea, IMHO.
The irony in all this is that legal file sharers will be harmed, while people torrenting stuff illegally will simply find solutions that are harder to distinguish from normal traffic.
Perhaps that is a good thing, even if it is inconvenient for now: the more uniform and indistinguishable the traffic becomes, the harder can it be censored.
How comes we're so dependent on two major search engines? Isn't that unhealthy on the long run? Wasn't there a project in the past to build our own distributed crawler and indexer? Why won't we "open source" Google... I mean why don't we have a community-driven open search engine? This (hypothetical) open search engine could (or should?) be the default in OSS distributions, IMHO, instead of a closed-source provider (yes, even Google's indexing algorithm is closed-source).
buy windows 7 and save all the pain of using WINE or ReactOS, or ReactOS on WINE.
Following this kind of thinking, Linux or 386BSD would never have been written, as the Unix users of the past (mostly universities and big businesses) would have simply paid for a System V license and be done with it. It's exactly the spirit of challenge that has advanced the free Unices, and not just buying off-the-shelf licenses.
What's the point of buying one-time pads generated from an untrusted third party (even if it were trusted, is it TEMPEST-proof?), esp. when those pads are being shipped via an untrusted carrier, and possibly crossing international boundaries where they could be copied by customs, TSA and other agents?
The question is why Google or any other provider would bother to do that.
Why would Google do that? They need to be able to peek inside the mails to display their context-sensitive ads, so end-to-end encryption is undesirable for them. And if they have your private key so that everything is transparent -- and usable as ad platform for Google --, what's the point of encrypting mails at all? Even though we can use FireGPG with Gmail today (or GnuPG or whatnot) as end-to-end encryption, as soon as more people start to do it, you bet that Google will react and block it.
Well, if you use money, the government is always involved, kind of, because money is nothing more than a promise made by the government to convert it into its equivalent in gold, should you so desire. Money itself is nothing if it doesn't have the full support of the issuing government and the trust of the people using it. Cf. hyperinflation, when this trust and support break down.
Alternately, they could donate the DVDs to the devestated people of Haiti, skipping the middlemen entirely!
What good are DVDs in a ravaged country without food, water, electricity, houses, and DVD players/TV sets to view them? To decorate their new makeshift shanty towns with those funny little shiny silver discs?
If google censored websites about Gitmo for the US government, I would be equally inflamed.
The point is, however, that China and the US/West have different taboos. What political criticism is to China, copyright infringement is to the West. Each one censors what goes against their own taboos.
Just how much material in colleges come in Braille?
Ever heard of Braille terminals? If it's plain text or HTML, it can be rendered and read by the blind. If it's DRMed, Flashified or in a Kindle, it can't.
FreeBSD/amd64 here. Using OpenSolaris in a VirtualBox to access YouTube or other Flash-infested sites. Of course, there's also youtube-dl + mplayer, when I'm in a hurry and don't bother starting a whole emulation environment. Still, it would be GREAT if Google provided a Flash-less version of YouTube!
The cumulative effect of all those wars is that they also breed more terrorists. This terrorism hydra needs resentment caused by the civil casualties we're (un)happily providing where ever we're fighting, to regenerate itself again and again.
Unless you want to start an armed coup and overthrow the government based on a licensing snafu,
Why so extreme? There are a lot of punitive measures that can be leveraged against a foreign government, like protectionist tariffs etc... But in this special case, the US is in no position to strongarm their biggest creditor, because China could just as well flood the market with billions of USD in retaliation, letting the US economy crash and burn.
Personally, I think you have a skewed sense of pricing between mediums. You equate a book to a music single. I would equate a book to an album or movie. A short story would be more equivalent to a single. In short, what you want is never going to realistically to happen. You can create a single in a day. You can't do that with a book. One has a greater production cost.
Right. I'm a published author, and the last tech book I wrote (some 1,200 pages) took about a year of researching, writing, checking for typos, layouting, rechecking, updating... etc. to complete. Equating this to one song is inappropriate, IMHO. Considering that a typical author gets some 12% to 14% of the publisher's (not seller's retail) price, you can imagine that writing any book that is not a bestseller is a matter of love anyway. Still... that the grand-parent poster considers this a $1 work is really discouraging. He may as well "pirate" it if that's what he thinks it is worth.
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IMHO, considering all the abuses of non-banks like PayPal, being subject to bank regulations is actually a good idea and one of the very rare occasions where oversight by the State may be desirable.
Isn't the obvious way a combination of anycast + bgp? It works quite well, and is administred by knowledgable network specialists who also happen to know the exact topology of their backbones. Putting it in DNS instead opens the door to endless misuse by domain owners who believe in geo-specific discrimination. CDNs should work transparently, but allowing end users (a.k.a. domain owners in this particular case) to tinker that is a really bad idea, IMHO.
Perhaps that is a good thing, even if it is inconvenient for now: the more uniform and indistinguishable the traffic becomes, the harder can it be censored.
Same here. Skilled code monkeys come and go as tech evolves, but real computer scientists and engineers are still very much in demand.
How comes we're so dependent on two major search engines? Isn't that unhealthy on the long run? Wasn't there a project in the past to build our own distributed crawler and indexer? Why won't we "open source" Google... I mean why don't we have a community-driven open search engine? This (hypothetical) open search engine could (or should?) be the default in OSS distributions, IMHO, instead of a closed-source provider (yes, even Google's indexing algorithm is closed-source).
Pseudocode:
Getting the papers from the printer, putting them in envelopes and sending them to court doesn't look too labor intensive to me.
Following this kind of thinking, Linux or 386BSD would never have been written, as the Unix users of the past (mostly universities and big businesses) would have simply paid for a System V license and be done with it. It's exactly the spirit of challenge that has advanced the free Unices, and not just buying off-the-shelf licenses.
About your idea of distributing one-time pads on DVDs?
What's the point of buying one-time pads generated from an untrusted third party (even if it were trusted, is it TEMPEST-proof?), esp. when those pads are being shipped via an untrusted carrier, and possibly crossing international boundaries where they could be copied by customs, TSA and other agents?
Why would Google do that? They need to be able to peek inside the mails to display their context-sensitive ads, so end-to-end encryption is undesirable for them. And if they have your private key so that everything is transparent -- and usable as ad platform for Google --, what's the point of encrypting mails at all? Even though we can use FireGPG with Gmail today (or GnuPG or whatnot) as end-to-end encryption, as soon as more people start to do it, you bet that Google will react and block it.
Just copyright money. It should make it artificially scarce again.
Well, if you use money, the government is always involved, kind of, because money is nothing more than a promise made by the government to convert it into its equivalent in gold, should you so desire. Money itself is nothing if it doesn't have the full support of the issuing government and the trust of the people using it. Cf. hyperinflation, when this trust and support break down.
What good are DVDs in a ravaged country without food, water, electricity, houses, and DVD players/TV sets to view them? To decorate their new makeshift shanty towns with those funny little shiny silver discs?
The point is, however, that China and the US/West have different taboos. What political criticism is to China, copyright infringement is to the West. Each one censors what goes against their own taboos.
Interesting. I'm wondering how many Chinese government and party officials are using gmail too, and actually need that grace period to migrate.
Ever heard of Braille terminals? If it's plain text or HTML, it can be rendered and read by the blind. If it's DRMed, Flashified or in a Kindle, it can't.
Statistics involve educated guesses while practical common sense relies on uneducated guesses.
He doesn't find a GF, despite 1 of 20 finding him attractive?
Some ISPs tend to throttle encrypted traffic nowadays (or more precisely SSL connections).
That would be SFGF@home (search for girlfriend while sitting @home).
FreeBSD/amd64 here. Using OpenSolaris in a VirtualBox to access YouTube or other Flash-infested sites. Of course, there's also youtube-dl + mplayer, when I'm in a hurry and don't bother starting a whole emulation environment. Still, it would be GREAT if Google provided a Flash-less version of YouTube!
The cumulative effect of all those wars is that they also breed more terrorists. This terrorism hydra needs resentment caused by the civil casualties we're (un)happily providing where ever we're fighting, to regenerate itself again and again.
Why so extreme? There are a lot of punitive measures that can be leveraged against a foreign government, like protectionist tariffs etc... But in this special case, the US is in no position to strongarm their biggest creditor, because China could just as well flood the market with billions of USD in retaliation, letting the US economy crash and burn.
Some inventions deserve to be prevented by patents. This case being an excellent illustration.
Right. I'm a published author, and the last tech book I wrote (some 1,200 pages) took about a year of researching, writing, checking for typos, layouting, rechecking, updating... etc. to complete. Equating this to one song is inappropriate, IMHO. Considering that a typical author gets some 12% to 14% of the publisher's (not seller's retail) price, you can imagine that writing any book that is not a bestseller is a matter of love anyway. Still... that the grand-parent poster considers this a $1 work is really discouraging. He may as well "pirate" it if that's what he thinks it is worth.