For example in Hungary, you don't have to verify the source of legality if it's not explicitly forbidden (so if you come across an mp3 file, you can download it, but for example you cannot redistribute an mp3 from a website if there is an accompanying text (copyright notice) forbidding it from reproducing which of course is uploading already).
hungary is now a signatory to the berne copyright convention. that means that any work is automatically copyrighted at its creation. a copyright notice is not required. therefore, if you do not have the permission of the copyright holder, you cannot download or copy a file, even if there is no copyright notice forbidding it.
what is difficult sometimes is to determine whether you have permission or not, since permission can be "implicit". if a copyright holder - say a musician or record company - puts mp3s on their website without a password, it's reasonable to assume that they have given permission for you to copy them. also, it's not reasonable to expect every person to have to verify the legality of every single file on a website before downloading it. that should be, as you say, the responsibility of the server owner. if you "accidentally" download unauthorized material this way, you will not be held accountable, because you do not have "mens rea" - a knowledge of your wrongdoing. however, this does not give you the right to keep the file, the copyright holder can legally compel you to destroy your copy if they find out you have it.
but if you come across mp3s on a file sharing network like kazaa, it would not be reasonable to assume that the copyright holders have given permission for them to be there. everyone knows they have not. therefore if you download unauthorized files from p2p networks, you are fully guilty of copyright infringement.
that is, unless your country has specific exceptions for personal copying of music - some countries do, the U.S. does not, i don't know about hungary - where you pay a royalty fee on blank media. but this does not extend to movies, software, or anything else.
the NY Times article you quote is about free content online, where musicians like Bob Dylan have given explicit permission for people to download certain specific songs for free.
just because the lawsuits so far have generally been against uploaders rather than downloaders, doesn't mean it's legal. it's expensive to hire lawyers and mount a lawsuit, and so they go after the ones who are most blatantly infringing copyrights.
the U.S. "fair use" absolutely does not make downloading legal. fair use gives you the freedom to use *excerpts* of works for the purpose of commentary or criticism, or in certain educational situations. it allows you to record a public broadcast for the purpose of watching it later (time-shifting). it does not allow you to make copies of your friends' CDs. it definitely does *not* give you the freedom for unauthorized downloading of complete songs, movies, or software for your personal use.
for all practical purposes, downloading, like jaywalking, is okay because you probably won't be prosecuted. but it is still illegal in the U.S.
as far as your "life spent defending something" - maybe you would like to educate yourself a little more about what the situation actually is, and put some pressure on your elected representatives to enact more reasonable laws, such as those in canada and france, where the freedom to download music for personal use is protected by law.
in the U.S., as in virtually every other country in the world, under the copyright law, it is illegal to make a copy of something without the permission of the copyright holder, except for fair use rights etc. so this makes (unauthorized) downloading illegal.
When they kick in your front door, How you gonna come? With your hands on your head, Or on the trigger of your gun? --The Clash
I used to think of these scenarios in terms of 'in Soviet Russia'... but nowadays, my mental picture of someone getting their front door kicked in is situated usually right in the ol' US of A.
And nevermind terrorism, but in the name of fscking trade secrets and Copyright issues?
Seriously, what are people smoking (or not smoking) there, that you can put up with this?
In the past few years, I've heard so many things that make me afraid for the security of my person in the U.S. - even though my biggest crimes are only copying DVDs I rented so I can watch them later, and downloading software I don't own to test out from bittorrent - that I won't even make connecting flights through the U.S. anymore.
Yes this guy wrote a really stupid letter to his employers. But this justifies a total jackboot search and seizure of all his personal stuff, private letters, diaries, and the like? I would feel so violated.
Mod me troll if you like, but, assuming he is innocent of these fairly obviously fabricated accusations, what happened to him is a crime bordering on assault or rape.
And if this happened to me, and the perpetrators weren't thrown in jail, I'd be out shopping for ammunition^H^H^H^H^H writing my congressman.
I sure think it's time that people started making a REALLY BIG NOISE that accusation of intellectual property infringment brought by a wealthy corporation does not override basic human rights to personal security of the average citizen...
The CRIA thing was only introduced as a bill, it's not law yet. Contact your MP. I have.
ok, dumb (and off-topic) question - is there any point in someone contacting their MP, if their MP is a Liberal? i mean, the MP obviously can't vote against their own party's bill. is there some chance they might introduce/support an ammendment to it?...suddenly realizing how little i actually know about canadian parliamentary procedure...
It's only illegal if you defeat the copy protection for the _purpose of copyright infringement_, which only applies when you copy a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder and for purposes that are not explicitly protected by the copyright act, such as personal/private use and fair use.
use your brain(?) more carefully next time, before you accuse me of not reading the article when you obviously haven't read the article yourself:
"Professor Michael Geist has apparently seen a copy [of the actual bill] and points out on his blog that..." [...] "As expected, the TPM provisions do not cover devices that can be used to infringe. Rather, they target persons who circumvent for a purpose that is (sic) constitutes copyright infringement or for the purposes of making a private copy. [...] the defense expressly excludes private copying from its ambit. Therefore, Canadians may be asked to pay several times for the same work as they may pay once for the CD, once for the digital download, and once through the private copying levy for the blank CD. Attempts to circumvent protections on the CD in order to make a personal copy (a copy already paid for via the levy) will now constitute infringement in Canada."
this was never mentioned in the previously published "backgrounder" or "faq", but the news is the actual bill will now hand record companies a legal muzzle to prevent private copying, without amending the blank media levy regime that pays them millions in royalties for that very same copying.
the thing that really bugs me is how it makes defeating a copy-protection measure illegal, even though making the copy would not be, i.e. in the case of private copying.
canadians have the freedom to make private copies of music for their own use, and the record companies collect millions of dollars worth of royalty fees charged on blank media. but now the record companies can prohibit private copying simply but putting a copy-protection measure - however technologially ineffectual - on the music.
yet they still continue to collect the royalties on blank media.
at the very least, there should be a provision that music released with copy-protection should not be eligible for any share of the blank-media royalties, since it would be illegal to copy the music onto said blank media.
This exact thing happened in Toronto with radar guns. The government installed automatic radar guns with cameras, on one of the busiest highways. One of those where you just get a photo in the mail, with a ticket.
Well, people started to subpoena the schematics, user manuals, etc. - and they didn't want to give them up. So everyone who did this had the ticket dropped.
For this and other reasons, in the end, they ended up scrapping the cameras.
Steve Jobs has supposedly been credited as saying that OSX could be written to run on OSX fairly shortly.
OS X already runs.
Apple keeps a current version of OS X running on an x86 platform. It is heavily guarded, but it is not a secret. They are ready to switch any time. It would be easy for them. It would be difficult for 3rd party developers, and customers.
on the other hand, as someone who photo-etches my own circuit boards and finds the process quite archaic and annoying, it would be really excellent to have something that would squirt out copper/alloy traces and drill the holes for me. like a little ink-jet printer for pcb's.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about manufacturing that pervades enthusiasts for computer-controlled one-off manufacturing. It's that most manufactured goods are made by some process that involves a "master" or "mould" or "die", and that those processes are incredibly cheap.
i'm confused by what you wrote, you say that the belief that most manufactured goods use an inexpensive mould/die approach is a fundamental misunderstanding? ok, i've read your paragraph several times, and i think maybe you actually meant to say that these enthusiasts don't understand the reality, which is that most manufactured goods use an inexpensive mould/die approach. is that correct?
in that case, i would just want to counter by saying that the process of creating the masters or moulds, eg. the tooling for an injection mould, has traditionally been a relatively large expense.
if you can put the ability in peoples' hands to create inexpensive injection moulds and other masters, i.e. by providing a cheap/open milling machine design, along with sophisticated free software for 3D design and automatic machine control, you open a lot of doors for small businesses - even if the product will ultimately be mass-produced in a traditional factory mould/die process. you reduce the up-front expenses for highly-skilled design engineers, machinists, and pattern-makers, by allowing a more trial-and-error approach to initial design and testing.
ultimately that will mean a lot of really crappy design - in the same way that laser-printers and desktop publishing software fostered a lot of really crappy print design. but at the same time... it was a big paradigm change, and the design and printing industry will never be the same.
this "reprap" project is unfortunately full of the typical fantasy/hype of some student projects. but if you can see past the hyperbole, you can see that it is, if not creating, then at least responding to some quite interesting steps forward.
Well, if his goal is to free us of corporate rule by giving us a machine that can replicate itself, and open sourcing everything, that is VERY awesome.
it would be awesome if it was an actual thing, and not just a lot of talk about how great it would be.
"Layers formed together by lasers or glue" just sounds "cheap" to me. Plus you would have to buy all the different materials first...
at least one of the "3D printers" available prints using just layers of ABS plastic. which is something that, well all kinds of things in your house are made of. it's actually very strong and serviceable. of course you can't make *everything* out of ABS, but you can make a lot (including masters for molds, which you can then duplicate in cast resins, urethane, or metal). problem is that it's still very expensive.
such "home manufacturing" just isn't economically feasible until you have nano-bots doing it
well that's just silly. nano-bots. you've been watching too much star trek.
all this rapid-prototyping stuff is essentially a variation on the milling machine, a kind of x/y/z plotter. being either subtractive (the classic "drill stuff away" milling machine) or the additive (the newer "squirt stuff from a nozzle" approach). it has been an essential part of manufacturing almost everything, for the past century or more. we don't need swarms of magical nano-bots. in the same way that the massive printing press reduced to a laser printer created a revolution in desktop publishing, the massive industrial milling machine reduced to an affordable desktop device will no doubt create a revolution in affordable custom manufacturing.
Too bad that the use of said pen is a violation of the DMCA (circumventing access control).
Not only the use, but the *posession* of said pen. And the posession, manufacture, distribution, sale, etc., of any marking device or piece of sticky tape.
Linux is nowhere near providing a mass market user experience
ah, but it is... just maybe not in the way you think. i'm talking about the linksys and various other cable/dsl/wifi routers, which are most definitely mass market, linux-based computers, and under $50. in a couple of years, when a better display technology comes along, there should certainly be no problem at all in making a sub-$100 computer that might suit the needs (e-mail and web-browsing) of a large percentage of the population.
while the author's design suggestions are naive, the point is, when you get down to this price range for a product, MS Windows just disappears from the picture; the market-share is reversed even today. you just can't think about a $75 computer with a $100 operating system. microsoft goes out the window! it's not even a consideration for these types of products.
the article's author is obviously not a hardware designer, and i agree that the article is mostly full of enthusiastic vintage futurology. the specific suggestions are unrealistic, especially the one that this will "kill microsoft". i do think there could be a very good market for a $75 computer that can do e-mail, word-processing, and web-browsing (oh, and by the way, all this other free stuff...) and that microsoft won't be interested in competing in that market, any more than they are interested in the pocket-calculator market right now. but there will still be plenty of people and businesses wanting $1000 computers, and that will remain the core business of M$.
the thought that this article provokes for me is: what interesting things might happen when computer hardware becomes cheaper than software?
an easy to make mistake given that socialists are just as evil as fascists and the end results of both ideologies when put into practice is a police state complete with secret police and gulags.
That is so true. Canada is a much more socialist country than the U.S., for example, there is free medicare for everyone. Unfortunately this has led to serious problems with gulags and our recently-created Department of Fatherland Security. Unlike the U.S. - which has the lowest per-capita prison population in the world - most Canadians are getting quite fed up with constantly being thrown into concentration camps like Guancanada Bay, without trial or charges, and are now completely ready to give up their free medicare. It's great to see people finally coming to their senses and seeing that these socialist ideas like free medicare, unemployment insurance, toll-free highways, public schools and libraries, and so on, are nothing but pure evil attacks on liberty.
OH WHY would you want it to be? Why would you want to hold a great big thing like that up to your face? Why not shop around to find just the phone you like, and then use this for web stuff? They're quite different functions.
...can only connect to the net if I happen to be in area with open wifi?
you can also connect it to the net through your regular mobile phone, with bluetooth.
personally i like the idea that my phone is just a phone, and not some huge thing with a qwerty keyboard to hold up to my face. and if i want something for messaging/internet, i'd rather have something with a nice interface and screen like this.
Because CF is based on the ancient ISA parallel bus interface - too many pins, too much overhead. The newer formats use a serial (eg. SPI) interface, more easily supported by microsontrollers, saving a lot of wiring and board space/complexity.
Canadians have had the legal freedom to make private copies of music for their own use, regardless of the source of the copy, for many years.
Because it is 100% legal under the copyright act, and because musicians are paid royalties for their work (through the blank-media levy), it is not considered a "crime", "stealing", or "pirating". U.S. laws don't apply in Canada, sorry. well except marijuana laws. and we're working on that...
Okay, uploading may be illegal, but I was under the opinion that it was "uploading to somebody else's machine" that was illegal. Downloading and leaving stuff on your own boxen where someone else can find it is okay.
that was pretty much true up until this new ruling. it's basically what the judge said last year. but now that's been thrown out by the appeals court.
actually, the current law doesn't say anything at all about sharing on the internet, or uploading or downloading. it just says you can make a copy for your own use, regardless of the source. i believe the copyright board affirmed the interpretation that that makes downloading from the internet ok. however, the law also says that you can't make a copy for someone else's use, nor can you "distribute" copies. the original judge last year ruled that allowing other people to access files on your machine to make copies for themselves didn't constitute either of these, and therefore was legal. but now that ruling has been thrown out, and we are back in a kind of limbo - it basically hasn't been properly tested in court yet, and won't be until after someone is identified and actually sued.
Hey, wait a minute... This could mean that participating in a casual torrent (as opposed to a provider-sanctioned one) runs counter to the statute already because in that case your machine _is_ uploading parts of it to someone else's machine.
yes, it will be interesting to see how torrents are interpreted. under the proposed new law, it will be illegal to "make available" music over the internet. if the private copying provisions stay the same, then it will mean downloading is ok, but uploading is not. but uploading vs. downloading isn't really clear with a torrent. if you go to a torrent website, it *looks* clear enough - there's a torrent posted by "joeblow", with lots of other nameless people downloading it. but then you realize that it's not a simple transaction, rather it's a swarm; that "seeding and leeching" don't exactly correspond to "uploading and downloading", and that roles change over time.
well i guess that's what you get when you try to make laws about technology, when the technology changes ten times faster than the laws can.
the appeals court basically threw out the original judge's ruling that said that placing music in your shared folder on kazaa did not infringe copyright in canada.
it did uphold the ruling that the CRIA had insufficent evidence to show that the 29 people whose identities they wanted revealed, were actually the people who did the file sharing.
however, the court encouraged them to come back with stronger evidence, in which case they would grant the order to divulge the identities and allow them to be sued.
ok, assuming that you are not really trying to be a troll:
theft is still theft
theft is theft, and it is always a crime, even small-time theft like shoplifting. the police lay charges, and you get a criminal record if convicted.
file-sharing is not a crime (unless it's on a large scale or done for profit). you can be sued, but not arrested/charged. therefore, it is not theft.
Ok there are plenty of people willing to argue that it's not illegal, but they're just being daft.
um, the canadian copyright act specifically says that downloading music for your own private personal use is 100% legal. money is collected on blank media, that *pays* the musicians for their work - so how can it be theft? who's being daft? you'll need a better argument than that, if you aren't really a troll.
It looks like the judges want to see evidence of actual file transfers, not just people who have a lot of files their sharing.
no, it's not about evidence of actual transfers. they want to see better evidence that the names they are going to order to be revealed, are actually the people who put the files up for sharing, and not someone else.
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For example in Hungary, you don't have to verify the source of legality if it's not explicitly forbidden (so if you come across an mp3 file, you can download it, but for example you cannot redistribute an mp3 from a website if there is an accompanying text (copyright notice) forbidding it from reproducing which of course is uploading already).
hungary is now a signatory to the berne copyright convention. that means that any work is automatically copyrighted at its creation. a copyright notice is not required. therefore, if you do not have the permission of the copyright holder, you cannot download or copy a file, even if there is no copyright notice forbidding it.
what is difficult sometimes is to determine whether you have permission or not, since permission can be "implicit". if a copyright holder - say a musician or record company - puts mp3s on their website without a password, it's reasonable to assume that they have given permission for you to copy them. also, it's not reasonable to expect every person to have to verify the legality of every single file on a website before downloading it. that should be, as you say, the responsibility of the server owner. if you "accidentally" download unauthorized material this way, you will not be held accountable, because you do not have "mens rea" - a knowledge of your wrongdoing. however, this does not give you the right to keep the file, the copyright holder can legally compel you to destroy your copy if they find out you have it.
but if you come across mp3s on a file sharing network like kazaa, it would not be reasonable to assume that the copyright holders have given permission for them to be there. everyone knows they have not. therefore if you download unauthorized files from p2p networks, you are fully guilty of copyright infringement.
that is, unless your country has specific exceptions for personal copying of music - some countries do, the U.S. does not, i don't know about hungary - where you pay a royalty fee on blank media. but this does not extend to movies, software, or anything else.
i'm sorry, but you are completely wrong.
the NY Times article you quote is about free content online, where musicians like Bob Dylan have given explicit permission for people to download certain specific songs for free.
just because the lawsuits so far have generally been against uploaders rather than downloaders, doesn't mean it's legal. it's expensive to hire lawyers and mount a lawsuit, and so they go after the ones who are most blatantly infringing copyrights.
the U.S. "fair use" absolutely does not make downloading legal. fair use gives you the freedom to use *excerpts* of works for the purpose of commentary or criticism, or in certain educational situations. it allows you to record a public broadcast for the purpose of watching it later (time-shifting). it does not allow you to make copies of your friends' CDs. it definitely does *not* give you the freedom for unauthorized downloading of complete songs, movies, or software for your personal use.
for all practical purposes, downloading, like jaywalking, is okay because you probably won't be prosecuted. but it is still illegal in the U.S.
as far as your "life spent defending something" - maybe you would like to educate yourself a little more about what the situation actually is, and put some pressure on your elected representatives to enact more reasonable laws, such as those in canada and france, where the freedom to download music for personal use is protected by law.
in the U.S., as in virtually every other country in the world, under the copyright law, it is illegal to make a copy of something without the permission of the copyright holder, except for fair use rights etc. so this makes (unauthorized) downloading illegal.
When they kick in your front door,
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head,
Or on the trigger of your gun?
--The Clash
I used to think of these scenarios in terms of 'in Soviet Russia'... but nowadays, my mental picture of someone getting their front door kicked in is situated usually right in the ol' US of A.
And nevermind terrorism, but in the name of fscking trade secrets and Copyright issues?
Seriously, what are people smoking (or not smoking) there, that you can put up with this?
In the past few years, I've heard so many things that make me afraid for the security of my person in the U.S. - even though my biggest crimes are only copying DVDs I rented so I can watch them later, and downloading software I don't own to test out from bittorrent - that I won't even make connecting flights through the U.S. anymore.
Yes this guy wrote a really stupid letter to his employers. But this justifies a total jackboot search and seizure of all his personal stuff, private letters, diaries, and the like? I would feel so violated.
Mod me troll if you like, but, assuming he is innocent of these fairly obviously fabricated accusations, what happened to him is a crime bordering on assault or rape.
And if this happened to me, and the perpetrators weren't thrown in jail, I'd be out shopping for ammunition^H^H^H^H^H writing my congressman.
I sure think it's time that people started making a REALLY BIG NOISE that accusation of intellectual property infringment brought by a wealthy corporation does not override basic human rights to personal security of the average citizen...
The CRIA thing was only introduced as a bill, it's not law yet. Contact your MP. I have.
...suddenly realizing how little i actually know about canadian parliamentary procedure...
ok, dumb (and off-topic) question - is there any point in someone contacting their MP, if their MP is a Liberal? i mean, the MP obviously can't vote against their own party's bill. is there some chance they might introduce/support an ammendment to it?
Read the article(s) more carefully next time.
It's only illegal if you defeat the copy protection for the _purpose of copyright infringement_, which only applies when you copy a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder and for purposes that are not explicitly protected by the copyright act, such as personal/private use and fair use.
use your brain(?) more carefully next time, before you accuse me of not reading the article when you obviously haven't read the article yourself:
"Professor Michael Geist has apparently seen a copy [of the actual bill] and points out on his blog that..."
[...]
"As expected, the TPM provisions do not cover devices that can be used to infringe. Rather, they target persons who circumvent for a purpose that is (sic) constitutes copyright infringement or for the purposes of making a private copy.
[...]
the defense expressly excludes private copying from its ambit. Therefore, Canadians may be asked to pay several times for the same work as they may pay once for the CD, once for the digital download, and once through the private copying levy for the blank CD. Attempts to circumvent protections on the CD in order to make a personal copy (a copy already paid for via the levy) will now constitute infringement in Canada."
this was never mentioned in the previously published "backgrounder" or "faq", but the news is the actual bill will now hand record companies a legal muzzle to prevent private copying, without amending the blank media levy regime that pays them millions in royalties for that very same copying.
the thing that really bugs me is how it makes defeating a copy-protection measure illegal, even though making the copy would not be, i.e. in the case of private copying.
canadians have the freedom to make private copies of music for their own use, and the record companies collect millions of dollars worth of royalty fees charged on blank media. but now the record companies can prohibit private copying simply but putting a copy-protection measure - however technologially ineffectual - on the music.
yet they still continue to collect the royalties on blank media.
at the very least, there should be a provision that music released with copy-protection should not be eligible for any share of the blank-media royalties, since it would be illegal to copy the music onto said blank media.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050606/sfm142.html?.v= 9
MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODE!
This exact thing happened in Toronto with radar guns. The government installed automatic radar guns with cameras, on one of the busiest highways. One of those where you just get a photo in the mail, with a ticket.
Well, people started to subpoena the schematics, user manuals, etc. - and they didn't want to give them up. So everyone who did this had the ticket dropped.
For this and other reasons, in the end, they ended up scrapping the cameras.
Steve Jobs has supposedly been credited as saying that OSX could be written to run on OSX fairly shortly.
OS X already runs.
Apple keeps a current version of OS X running on an x86 platform. It is heavily guarded, but it is not a secret. They are ready to switch any time. It would be easy for them. It would be difficult for 3rd party developers, and customers.
i agree that the "self-replication" stuff is b.s.
on the other hand, as someone who photo-etches my own circuit boards and finds the process quite archaic and annoying, it would be really excellent to have something that would squirt out copper/alloy traces and drill the holes for me. like a little ink-jet printer for pcb's.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about manufacturing that pervades enthusiasts for computer-controlled one-off manufacturing. It's that most manufactured goods are made by some process that involves a "master" or "mould" or "die", and that those processes are incredibly cheap.
i'm confused by what you wrote, you say that the belief that most manufactured goods use an inexpensive mould/die approach is a fundamental misunderstanding? ok, i've read your paragraph several times, and i think maybe you actually meant to say that these enthusiasts don't understand the reality, which is that most manufactured goods use an inexpensive mould/die approach. is that correct?
in that case, i would just want to counter by saying that the process of creating the masters or moulds, eg. the tooling for an injection mould, has traditionally been a relatively large expense.
if you can put the ability in peoples' hands to create inexpensive injection moulds and other masters, i.e. by providing a cheap/open milling machine design, along with sophisticated free software for 3D design and automatic machine control, you open a lot of doors for small businesses - even if the product will ultimately be mass-produced in a traditional factory mould/die process. you reduce the up-front expenses for highly-skilled design engineers, machinists, and pattern-makers, by allowing a more trial-and-error approach to initial design and testing.
ultimately that will mean a lot of really crappy design - in the same way that laser-printers and desktop publishing software fostered a lot of really crappy print design. but at the same time... it was a big paradigm change, and the design and printing industry will never be the same.
this "reprap" project is unfortunately full of the typical fantasy/hype of some student projects. but if you can see past the hyperbole, you can see that it is, if not creating, then at least responding to some quite interesting steps forward.
Well, if his goal is to free us of corporate rule by giving us a machine that can replicate itself, and open sourcing everything, that is VERY awesome.
it would be awesome if it was an actual thing, and not just a lot of talk about how great it would be.
"Layers formed together by lasers or glue" just sounds "cheap" to me.
Plus you would have to buy all the different materials first...
at least one of the "3D printers" available prints using just layers of ABS plastic. which is something that, well all kinds of things in your house are made of. it's actually very strong and serviceable. of course you can't make *everything* out of ABS, but you can make a lot (including masters for molds, which you can then duplicate in cast resins, urethane, or metal). problem is that it's still very expensive.
such "home manufacturing" just isn't economically feasible until you have nano-bots doing it
well that's just silly. nano-bots. you've been watching too much star trek.
all this rapid-prototyping stuff is essentially a variation on the milling machine, a kind of x/y/z plotter. being either subtractive (the classic "drill stuff away" milling machine) or the additive (the newer "squirt stuff from a nozzle" approach). it has been an essential part of manufacturing almost everything, for the past century or more. we don't need swarms of magical nano-bots. in the same way that the massive printing press reduced to a laser printer created a revolution in desktop publishing, the massive industrial milling machine reduced to an affordable desktop device will no doubt create a revolution in affordable custom manufacturing.
Too bad that the use of said pen is a violation of the DMCA (circumventing access control).
Not only the use, but the *posession* of said pen. And the posession, manufacture, distribution, sale, etc., of any marking device or piece of sticky tape.
Linux is nowhere near providing a mass market user experience
ah, but it is... just maybe not in the way you think. i'm talking about the linksys and various other cable/dsl/wifi routers, which are most definitely mass market, linux-based computers, and under $50. in a couple of years, when a better display technology comes along, there should certainly be no problem at all in making a sub-$100 computer that might suit the needs (e-mail and web-browsing) of a large percentage of the population.
while the author's design suggestions are naive, the point is, when you get down to this price range for a product, MS Windows just disappears from the picture; the market-share is reversed even today. you just can't think about a $75 computer with a $100 operating system. microsoft goes out the window! it's not even a consideration for these types of products.
the article's author is obviously not a hardware designer, and i agree that the article is mostly full of enthusiastic vintage futurology. the specific suggestions are unrealistic, especially the one that this will "kill microsoft". i do think there could be a very good market for a $75 computer that can do e-mail, word-processing, and web-browsing (oh, and by the way, all this other free stuff...) and that microsoft won't be interested in competing in that market, any more than they are interested in the pocket-calculator market right now. but there will still be plenty of people and businesses wanting $1000 computers, and that will remain the core business of M$.
the thought that this article provokes for me is: what interesting things might happen when computer hardware becomes cheaper than software?
an easy to make mistake given that socialists are just as evil as fascists and the end results of both ideologies when put into practice is a police state complete with secret police and gulags.
That is so true. Canada is a much more socialist country than the U.S., for example, there is free medicare for everyone. Unfortunately this has led to serious problems with gulags and our recently-created Department of Fatherland Security. Unlike the U.S. - which has the lowest per-capita prison population in the world - most Canadians are getting quite fed up with constantly being thrown into concentration camps like Guancanada Bay, without trial or charges, and are now completely ready to give up their free medicare. It's great to see people finally coming to their senses and seeing that these socialist ideas like free medicare, unemployment insurance, toll-free highways, public schools and libraries, and so on, are nothing but pure evil attacks on liberty.
The thing is, I don't want to use iTunes and neither does my daughter.
Well then it would be pretty dumb to buy an iPod.
There are plenty of other competitive choices out there.
But why OH WHY isn't it a cellphone as well?!?!
OH WHY would you want it to be? Why would you want to hold a great big thing like that up to your face? Why not shop around to find just the phone you like, and then use this for web stuff? They're quite different functions.
...can only connect to the net if I happen to be in area with open wifi?
you can also connect it to the net through your regular mobile phone, with bluetooth.
personally i like the idea that my phone is just a phone, and not some huge thing with a qwerty keyboard to hold up to my face. and if i want something for messaging/internet, i'd rather have something with a nice interface and screen like this.
Why do manufacturers hate CF so?
Because CF is based on the ancient ISA parallel bus interface - too many pins, too much overhead. The newer formats use a serial (eg. SPI) interface, more easily supported by microsontrollers, saving a lot of wiring and board space/complexity.
Oh yay, we can pirate safely now in Canada!
Canadians have had the legal freedom to make private copies of music for their own use, regardless of the source of the copy, for many years.
Because it is 100% legal under the copyright act, and because musicians are paid royalties for their work (through the blank-media levy), it is not considered a "crime", "stealing", or "pirating". U.S. laws don't apply in Canada, sorry. well except marijuana laws. and we're working on that...
Okay, uploading may be illegal, but I was under the opinion that it was "uploading to somebody else's machine" that was illegal. Downloading and leaving stuff on your own boxen where someone else can find it is okay.
that was pretty much true up until this new ruling. it's basically what the judge said last year. but now that's been thrown out by the appeals court.
actually, the current law doesn't say anything at all about sharing on the internet, or uploading or downloading. it just says you can make a copy for your own use, regardless of the source. i believe the copyright board affirmed the interpretation that that makes downloading from the internet ok. however, the law also says that you can't make a copy for someone else's use, nor can you "distribute" copies. the original judge last year ruled that allowing other people to access files on your machine to make copies for themselves didn't constitute either of these, and therefore was legal. but now that ruling has been thrown out, and we are back in a kind of limbo - it basically hasn't been properly tested in court yet, and won't be until after someone is identified and actually sued.
Hey, wait a minute... This could mean that participating in a casual torrent (as opposed to a provider-sanctioned one) runs counter to the statute already because in that case your machine _is_ uploading parts of it to someone else's machine.
yes, it will be interesting to see how torrents are interpreted. under the proposed new law, it will be illegal to "make available" music over the internet. if the private copying provisions stay the same, then it will mean downloading is ok, but uploading is not. but uploading vs. downloading isn't really clear with a torrent. if you go to a torrent website, it *looks* clear enough - there's a torrent posted by "joeblow", with lots of other nameless people downloading it. but then you realize that it's not a simple transaction, rather it's a swarm; that "seeding and leeching" don't exactly correspond to "uploading and downloading", and that roles change over time.
well i guess that's what you get when you try to make laws about technology, when the technology changes ten times faster than the laws can.
the appeals court basically threw out the original judge's ruling that said that placing music in your shared folder on kazaa did not infringe copyright in canada.
it did uphold the ruling that the CRIA had insufficent evidence to show that the 29 people whose identities they wanted revealed, were actually the people who did the file sharing.
however, the court encouraged them to come back with stronger evidence, in which case they would grant the order to divulge the identities and allow them to be sued.
not sure how this is a "win" for file sharers.
ok, assuming that you are not really trying to be a troll:
theft is still theft
theft is theft, and it is always a crime, even small-time theft like shoplifting. the police lay charges, and you get a criminal record if convicted.
file-sharing is not a crime (unless it's on a large scale or done for profit). you can be sued, but not arrested/charged. therefore, it is not theft.
Ok there are plenty of people willing to argue that it's not illegal, but they're just being daft.
um, the canadian copyright act specifically says that downloading music for your own private personal use is 100% legal. money is collected on blank media, that *pays* the musicians for their work - so how can it be theft? who's being daft? you'll need a better argument than that, if you aren't really a troll.
It looks like the judges want to see evidence of actual file transfers, not just people who have a lot of files their sharing.
no, it's not about evidence of actual transfers. they want to see better evidence that the names they are going to order to be revealed, are actually the people who put the files up for sharing, and not someone else.