Nope, Apple's mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter is a proper active adapter and any equivalent of it would be too. I know this because people have used them with the mini-DP connectors on high-end Radeon cards which definitely don't have any kind of special VGA hardware and additionally only support at most two non-DP monitors at once, and they've managed to run single card triple-head setups using them.
Follow the timeline of the indictments. It's a bit curious. If you read them, they do talk about e-mails with lists of reward amounts and descriptions of what content the uploader had, including infringing content, but they don't actually mention whether the infringers were paid - they just leave the reader to infer that they were. What's more, if you scroll down a bit the same person that sent those does actually talk a couple of months later about having refused payments where the rewards were obviously for infringing content. That's consistent with what I'd vaguely read online at the time - that contrary to what the indictment says, the clause about refusing payment in cases of infringement was far from toothless and that Megaupload used it to cut costs and avoid paying out wherever possible. (Apparently they were still doing so and even terminating accounts recently.)
They deduplicated the files but if a DMCA request came they only killed that link and reduced the refcount, even though they now knew that file hash was infringing.
Most likely, the argument they're going to rely on is that they didn't know the other references to the file were infringing; they could've been from uploads by an employee of the corporation that created the content, for example. It's not a very good argument but in theory it could be a problem. (This seems to happen a lot in Second Life - someone gets their content copied, sends a DMCA takedown notice, Linden Labs pull all the references to it including legally-obtained ones, and now the original content creator's customers are pissed off with them because their entirely legal items that they paid real money for have gone poof.)
There's no clause forbidding encryption. However, what it does allow is for them to drive out of business any website that has any sign of copyright infringement, and as far as I know it doesn't matter if the files are encrypted and the site owners can't see the contents - probably by design since everyone would just encrypt everything and carry on. I seem to recall that at least Mediafire has a ToS clause forbidding encrypted archives and claims to delete them, because otherwise they'd be putting themselves at too much legal risk even with the law as it is now.
You think they won't be forced into terminating your account for having those unscannable encrypted files? Think again. I'm pretty sure that uploaders to sites like Megaupload have been making widespread use of encryption to hide the content they're uploading already, and the media industry certainly isn't going to stand for it.
It also occurs to me that the copyright infringement elements of the case against MU are just one small part of a long list of crimes in the indictment, some of which would still be serious crimes even if they were selling milk or adopting out puppies. They are being accused of much more serious things than copyright infringement.
I seem to recall that the FBI has been trying to spin out the original copyright infringement into as many different charges as possible. For example, those money laundering charges? Apparently they're based on some theory by which paying for hosting at a third-party company becomes money laundering because of copyright infringement or something stupid like that.
Given that this is a US Government action, I'd lean towards the option which involves the most dishonesty from them. Also, as far as I know all the big file hosts blacklist files that are reported to be infringing based on their hash at this point - it's just that they can't stop their users from sticking the exact same file in an encrypted archive with a meaningless name and reuploading it. Between that and multiple variants it's pretty much a given that all the files that were taken down would still be available for download from somewhere.
It also says some rather deceptive things. For example:
The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded.
If I remember their business model correctly, one of the ways they made money was by charging a subscription fee to users for the ability to store files on the site indefinitely. So at least some of the money the FBI were bragging about in their press release came from a business model expressly designed to profit from people that wanted to use the site for long-term storage of files that weren't popular or regularly downloaded and were probably personal.
The P2P nature of the internet doesn't help that much, because it was always based around having servers. I actually curse when I search for something on Google and find a link to a site on somewhere like dyndns.org; chances are that if its owners haven't shut it down or accidentally broken it long ago, it'll be offline when I try to access it for one reason or another. Services like Megaupload are much more reliable until the Government steps in and destroys them.
Not even then. Even if the records of his site did record which files made him the most money, it's kind of hard to tell the difference between a cryptically named encrypted RAR containing pirated video and a cryptically named encrypted RAR containing internal documents from some small company whose employees are using it as a cheap way to pass files around.
So ASSUMING Lightsquared, operating 100% within their spectrum, and not interfering with GPS frequencies, could still interfere with GPS because the GPS Unit itself is using part of Lightsquared's spectrum for filtering purposes.
They can't filter out LightSquared's signal. It'd be the metaphorical equivalent of trying to spot a candle flame standing next to a searchlight. It's just not physically practical. Worse still, LightSquared managed to get their spectrum at a huge discount exactly because it was technically unsuitable for the purpose they're trying to use it for now and the rules forbade that use - and then somehow managed to lobby the FCC into ignoring the technical side of things and let them go ahead anyway.
Not really. He portrays it as some kind of heroic battle between some Goliath GPS industry and their army of lobbyists and the poor innocent LightSquared, failing to mention their billions of dollars of backing, or the fact that their own lobbyists were probably the only reason they managed to push this through despite the obvious technical flaws and all the rules designed to prevent exactly the kind of interference they will cause.
But they're don't own all of the browsers. If this extension is a big enough deal to start moving people to Chrome, then *obviously they were right* and other browsers need to start supporting it.
Not really. If they start using it, regardless of its actual merits it'll render any browser that doesn't support it a second-class citizen, relegated to slower badly machine-converted JavaScript versions of their pages or even reduced functionality.
I don't suppose it covers motherboard damage due to something like the unreliable LGA socket fiasco a while ago. (A lot of the sockets were just good enough to work for a while at stock clocks but destroyed themselves and the processors quickly if you overclocked. I think there may still be motherboards for Sandy Bridge on sale with this problem actually.)
Lua, for example, is around 100kB. Even if bindings take twice or four times that, it's an insignificant blip - just compare to single xul.dll's 16Mb or opera.dll's 15 or chrome.dll's 29.
On the other hand, it looks like the current Dart implementation depends on V8 which is about 4 MB just by itself.
You sure that you actually raised them gender-neutrally? Without inadvertently projecting any of your own assumptions about what toys they were showing interest in onto them and subtly encouraging them to play with those? It's a lot harder than you might expect, perhaps even impossible.
Also, in case you think I'm cherry-picking - every single post of his over those two months was an attack on someone or a group of people who were opposed to the widespread use of Mono and C# in open source, and he's not posted anything on there about gender issues in open source on there before or since. The other blogger pushing this (mjg59) had also taken a very similar aggressive position on Mono in the past but has done other things towards gender inclusiveness in open source.
Of course, it didn't help that the main blogger behind this - the one that you linked to - was fairly obviously just throwing things at the wall in the hope that they'd stick. I mean, if you read his e-mail to Stallman he went on to argue that Richard Stallman was evil for daring to parody Christianity, an idea that's more than a little controversial in hackerdom:
I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.
(Oh, and a few days prior to that he'd done a lovely and rather slanderous attack piece on someone else using the same blog, claiming that person got someone else to contact his workplace and get him fired based on e-mails from an internet troll claiming to be that person. The funny thing was that that the signed e-mail from this person to the troll that he was using as proof they were conspiring to do this included a quote from said troll denying he'd tried to get the blogger fired in the first place. Yet he not only claimed that this was evidence of a conspiracy, he threatened to actually sue the target of his posts for libel for complaining about his slanderous blogging.
What did the target of the prior blog post and Richard M Stallman have in common? They were both critical of Mono and C#, as he mentioned in rather dismissive terms in the blog post between those two. He then went on to call the entire part of the FLOSS community that didn't like them the fake FLOSS community going up against the Mono-supporting real FLOSS community, in case you're not quite getting the message yet.)
Why should it _replace_ JS engine? Sometimes I feel people forgot that <script> element has language="" attribute there for a reason.
It doesn't have to, but the alternative is to bloat the browser with two independent JavaScript interpreters each with their own interface to the DOM and everything. Also, I think that may require some hairy code to allow objects to from one to be accessed in the other.
Google guys seems to have it right, if they managed to include a new scripting layer without disturbing their old V8.
I'm pretty sure that they designed it to be integrated heavily with V8 at the very least, if not an actual part of it. Dart was even created by the same person as V8.
Net result of any new extension is that users of the browser implementing it get a faster and better version.
Except they don't necessarily. Canvas and XHR were popular because they were relatively small features that could be added incrementally without disturbing anything else, though XHR wasn't actually entirely compatible between browsers initially precisely because it was a Microsoft-specific feature implemented in a Microsoft-specific way. Dart requires rewriting or replacing the entire JavaScript engine of the browser in question, including its interface to the DOM and every other feature like Canvas or XHR - it basically touches everything. NaCl requires implementing a completely new interface in the browser with its own Chrome-specific NaCl equivalents of the DOM, Canvas, XHR, OpenGL, input handling and more, none of which were designed with implementation by other browsers in mind and all of which probably require bug-for-bug compatibility.
NaCl and Dart are both fundamentally unacceptable to at least Firefox though - they consider them basically impossible to implement. Google is going ahead with them anyway. I don't think any of the other browser manufacturers are any more willing either.
Just because it's open sourced doesn't mean it's of any use to other browsers. NaCl is tied to a huge Chrome-specific set of APIs that are deeply integrated into the browser and probably not practical for anyone else to implement, Dart is part of their JavaScript VM which no-one else uses and again the JavaScript VM and browser are so deeply integrated no-one else could use it, and SPDY is pretty much the same and in addition is undocumented and requires modified SSL libraries.
So the net result is basically that users of Chrome on Google services will get the faster Dart version, whereas users of other web browsers will get a slower version that's been compiled to JavaScript badly. What's more, Google has very little incentive to optimise either the JavaScript version or Chrome's JavaScript support at that point, leaving other websites with a choice: use Dart and get decent performance on Chrome and sucky performance elsewhere, or use plain JavaScript and get decent performance elsewhere but sucky performance on Chome.
(Mozilla seem to reckon that they couldn't actually implement Dart, and Microsoft have shown no interest in doing so at all.)
Also, apparently he was so busy arresting illegal immigrants that hadn't committed any crimes and holding prisoners in inhumane conditions that he and his officers completely failed to investigate a huge number of rapes. That hasn't made him terribly popular except with white rapists.
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Nope, Apple's mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter is a proper active adapter and any equivalent of it would be too. I know this because people have used them with the mini-DP connectors on high-end Radeon cards which definitely don't have any kind of special VGA hardware and additionally only support at most two non-DP monitors at once, and they've managed to run single card triple-head setups using them.
Follow the timeline of the indictments. It's a bit curious. If you read them, they do talk about e-mails with lists of reward amounts and descriptions of what content the uploader had, including infringing content, but they don't actually mention whether the infringers were paid - they just leave the reader to infer that they were. What's more, if you scroll down a bit the same person that sent those does actually talk a couple of months later about having refused payments where the rewards were obviously for infringing content. That's consistent with what I'd vaguely read online at the time - that contrary to what the indictment says, the clause about refusing payment in cases of infringement was far from toothless and that Megaupload used it to cut costs and avoid paying out wherever possible. (Apparently they were still doing so and even terminating accounts recently.)
They deduplicated the files but if a DMCA request came they only killed that link and reduced the refcount, even though they now knew that file hash was infringing.
Most likely, the argument they're going to rely on is that they didn't know the other references to the file were infringing; they could've been from uploads by an employee of the corporation that created the content, for example. It's not a very good argument but in theory it could be a problem. (This seems to happen a lot in Second Life - someone gets their content copied, sends a DMCA takedown notice, Linden Labs pull all the references to it including legally-obtained ones, and now the original content creator's customers are pissed off with them because their entirely legal items that they paid real money for have gone poof.)
There's no clause forbidding encryption. However, what it does allow is for them to drive out of business any website that has any sign of copyright infringement, and as far as I know it doesn't matter if the files are encrypted and the site owners can't see the contents - probably by design since everyone would just encrypt everything and carry on. I seem to recall that at least Mediafire has a ToS clause forbidding encrypted archives and claims to delete them, because otherwise they'd be putting themselves at too much legal risk even with the law as it is now.
You think they won't be forced into terminating your account for having those unscannable encrypted files? Think again. I'm pretty sure that uploaders to sites like Megaupload have been making widespread use of encryption to hide the content they're uploading already, and the media industry certainly isn't going to stand for it.
It also occurs to me that the copyright infringement elements of the case against MU are just one small part of a long list of crimes in the indictment, some of which would still be serious crimes even if they were selling milk or adopting out puppies. They are being accused of much more serious things than copyright infringement.
I seem to recall that the FBI has been trying to spin out the original copyright infringement into as many different charges as possible. For example, those money laundering charges? Apparently they're based on some theory by which paying for hosting at a third-party company becomes money laundering because of copyright infringement or something stupid like that.
Given that this is a US Government action, I'd lean towards the option which involves the most dishonesty from them. Also, as far as I know all the big file hosts blacklist files that are reported to be infringing based on their hash at this point - it's just that they can't stop their users from sticking the exact same file in an encrypted archive with a meaningless name and reuploading it. Between that and multiple variants it's pretty much a given that all the files that were taken down would still be available for download from somewhere.
It also says some rather deceptive things. For example:
The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded.
If I remember their business model correctly, one of the ways they made money was by charging a subscription fee to users for the ability to store files on the site indefinitely. So at least some of the money the FBI were bragging about in their press release came from a business model expressly designed to profit from people that wanted to use the site for long-term storage of files that weren't popular or regularly downloaded and were probably personal.
The P2P nature of the internet doesn't help that much, because it was always based around having servers. I actually curse when I search for something on Google and find a link to a site on somewhere like dyndns.org; chances are that if its owners haven't shut it down or accidentally broken it long ago, it'll be offline when I try to access it for one reason or another. Services like Megaupload are much more reliable until the Government steps in and destroys them.
Not even then. Even if the records of his site did record which files made him the most money, it's kind of hard to tell the difference between a cryptically named encrypted RAR containing pirated video and a cryptically named encrypted RAR containing internal documents from some small company whose employees are using it as a cheap way to pass files around.
So ASSUMING Lightsquared, operating 100% within their spectrum, and not interfering with GPS frequencies, could still interfere with GPS because the GPS Unit itself is using part of Lightsquared's spectrum for filtering purposes.
They can't filter out LightSquared's signal. It'd be the metaphorical equivalent of trying to spot a candle flame standing next to a searchlight. It's just not physically practical. Worse still, LightSquared managed to get their spectrum at a huge discount exactly because it was technically unsuitable for the purpose they're trying to use it for now and the rules forbade that use - and then somehow managed to lobby the FCC into ignoring the technical side of things and let them go ahead anyway.
Not really. He portrays it as some kind of heroic battle between some Goliath GPS industry and their army of lobbyists and the poor innocent LightSquared, failing to mention their billions of dollars of backing, or the fact that their own lobbyists were probably the only reason they managed to push this through despite the obvious technical flaws and all the rules designed to prevent exactly the kind of interference they will cause.
But they're don't own all of the browsers. If this extension is a big enough deal to start moving people to Chrome, then *obviously they were right* and other browsers need to start supporting it.
Not really. If they start using it, regardless of its actual merits it'll render any browser that doesn't support it a second-class citizen, relegated to slower badly machine-converted JavaScript versions of their pages or even reduced functionality.
I don't suppose it covers motherboard damage due to something like the unreliable LGA socket fiasco a while ago. (A lot of the sockets were just good enough to work for a while at stock clocks but destroyed themselves and the processors quickly if you overclocked. I think there may still be motherboards for Sandy Bridge on sale with this problem actually.)
Lua, for example, is around 100kB. Even if bindings take twice or four times that, it's an insignificant blip - just compare to single xul.dll's 16Mb or opera.dll's 15 or chrome.dll's 29.
On the other hand, it looks like the current Dart implementation depends on V8 which is about 4 MB just by itself.
So they fail. What's the problem?
They have a huge guaranteed user - Google themselves. Think about how many people use GMail, for example...
You sure that you actually raised them gender-neutrally? Without inadvertently projecting any of your own assumptions about what toys they were showing interest in onto them and subtly encouraging them to play with those? It's a lot harder than you might expect, perhaps even impossible.
Also, in case you think I'm cherry-picking - every single post of his over those two months was an attack on someone or a group of people who were opposed to the widespread use of Mono and C# in open source, and he's not posted anything on there about gender issues in open source on there before or since. The other blogger pushing this (mjg59) had also taken a very similar aggressive position on Mono in the past but has done other things towards gender inclusiveness in open source.
Of course, it didn't help that the main blogger behind this - the one that you linked to - was fairly obviously just throwing things at the wall in the hope that they'd stick. I mean, if you read his e-mail to Stallman he went on to argue that Richard Stallman was evil for daring to parody Christianity, an idea that's more than a little controversial in hackerdom:
I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.
(Oh, and a few days prior to that he'd done a lovely and rather slanderous attack piece on someone else using the same blog, claiming that person got someone else to contact his workplace and get him fired based on e-mails from an internet troll claiming to be that person. The funny thing was that that the signed e-mail from this person to the troll that he was using as proof they were conspiring to do this included a quote from said troll denying he'd tried to get the blogger fired in the first place. Yet he not only claimed that this was evidence of a conspiracy, he threatened to actually sue the target of his posts for libel for complaining about his slanderous blogging.
What did the target of the prior blog post and Richard M Stallman have in common? They were both critical of Mono and C#, as he mentioned in rather dismissive terms in the blog post between those two. He then went on to call the entire part of the FLOSS community that didn't like them the fake FLOSS community going up against the Mono-supporting real FLOSS community, in case you're not quite getting the message yet.)
Why should it _replace_ JS engine? Sometimes I feel people forgot that <script> element has language="" attribute there for a reason.
It doesn't have to, but the alternative is to bloat the browser with two independent JavaScript interpreters each with their own interface to the DOM and everything. Also, I think that may require some hairy code to allow objects to from one to be accessed in the other.
Google guys seems to have it right, if they managed to include a new scripting layer without disturbing their old V8.
I'm pretty sure that they designed it to be integrated heavily with V8 at the very least, if not an actual part of it. Dart was even created by the same person as V8.
Net result of any new extension is that users of the browser implementing it get a faster and better version.
Except they don't necessarily. Canvas and XHR were popular because they were relatively small features that could be added incrementally without disturbing anything else, though XHR wasn't actually entirely compatible between browsers initially precisely because it was a Microsoft-specific feature implemented in a Microsoft-specific way. Dart requires rewriting or replacing the entire JavaScript engine of the browser in question, including its interface to the DOM and every other feature like Canvas or XHR - it basically touches everything. NaCl requires implementing a completely new interface in the browser with its own Chrome-specific NaCl equivalents of the DOM, Canvas, XHR, OpenGL, input handling and more, none of which were designed with implementation by other browsers in mind and all of which probably require bug-for-bug compatibility.
NaCl and Dart are both fundamentally unacceptable to at least Firefox though - they consider them basically impossible to implement. Google is going ahead with them anyway. I don't think any of the other browser manufacturers are any more willing either.
everything Google has done has been open-sourced
Just because it's open sourced doesn't mean it's of any use to other browsers. NaCl is tied to a huge Chrome-specific set of APIs that are deeply integrated into the browser and probably not practical for anyone else to implement, Dart is part of their JavaScript VM which no-one else uses and again the JavaScript VM and browser are so deeply integrated no-one else could use it, and SPDY is pretty much the same and in addition is undocumented and requires modified SSL libraries.
So the net result is basically that users of Chrome on Google services will get the faster Dart version, whereas users of other web browsers will get a slower version that's been compiled to JavaScript badly. What's more, Google has very little incentive to optimise either the JavaScript version or Chrome's JavaScript support at that point, leaving other websites with a choice: use Dart and get decent performance on Chrome and sucky performance elsewhere, or use plain JavaScript and get decent performance elsewhere but sucky performance on Chome.
(Mozilla seem to reckon that they couldn't actually implement Dart, and Microsoft have shown no interest in doing so at all.)
Also, apparently he was so busy arresting illegal immigrants that hadn't committed any crimes and holding prisoners in inhumane conditions that he and his officers completely failed to investigate a huge number of rapes. That hasn't made him terribly popular except with white rapists.