How the hell should I know. Do you normally get blood work done each time you get a fever and body aches?
The word "Flu" gets thrown around to indicate any non-serious respiratory problem common to industrialized nations. The companies who actually make money devising and marketing these serums can claim X% efficacy all they want, but it means nothing to a public who still gets food poisoning and rhinovirus and don't feel as though they have been protected at all because they have no practical way to ever know if they get the genuine, honest to god "Flu" or not.
Consider this, there are lots and lots of knowledge available in the world, both static like a cooking recipe, or dynamic like the news or a blog. But the fact is, for most of human history, these knowledge are not available cheaply and timely to most people. What Google did is making the knowledge that already exists on the web available to anyone, that alone is providing tremendous value to most people, and I congratulate them for thinking of a business model that can also make a profit doing it.
Oliver's point about the value of Google's service is a point lost on most armchair entrepreneurs these days.
Too many of us get hung up on "creativity" being the only valuable service you can provide digitally, the product of which becomes some kind of "product" which should then be marketed to the masses by least efficient and most pocket-lining means possible.. be that Murdock, RIAA, PRS, whoever.
We then disrespect any second tier services that may organize and present this information to you in a meaningful form. Of what value is data when it is uselessly separated from it's consumers, or lost amidst a sea of inscrutable noise?
Take Google Books as another example. There are books languishing in libraries far from the hands of those who may benefit from reading them, out of print, orphaned and insulated from reproduction by our beloved copyright laws.. just waiting to be misplaced or accidentally damaged beyond repair. Google decides for good or ill to digitize all these tomes and make them available online. Suddenly everyone from authors to slashdotters, even the gutenburg project calls foul about data that was never otherwise practicably accessible to begin with. Apparently Google is "stealing" revenue from creators who have left their creations derelict in the first place. Unlike the water ways, textual information has no "salvage laws".
Regarding Google Books, I am not claiming Google is beyond the ability of making shady business deals, what I am saying is that I never hear press about the bare concept of bringing this content into the digital domain. I get the impression that we would prefer the books rot and the knowledge be lost forever than that anyone makes half a dime as a consequence of bringing the data back into play.
To me, IP has become such an ugly concept recently. One day someone will figure out cold fusion or cure cancer, present the proof on a napkin in order to win a $5 bar bet with their skeptical buddy and then throw the napkin away. Someone else will find the napkin and create the needed business infrastructure to bring this anonymous discovery to the world. The original creator will then shut them down (perhaps even instead of demanding royalties) and it seems like the public will dance around the flames of the demolished industry as we celebrate some kind of a victory for IP, all the while dying of cancer and killing one another over dwindling fossil fuels. Our cultural priorities seem truly and heinously misplaced whenever IP is involved.
I contend that creating or discovering knowledge is not the single most important thing in the world. If the knowledge cannot be used to better human life, if the creator decides to hold out forever for monetary gains it is never reasonable for them to see, then what utility is IP law to anyone? I say all content is devalued when monopolized by it's creators. Having an idea does not automatically make you the best steward for the idea. Information does not spring forth from the mind of a journalist or artist as a shrink-wrapped product, instead it is created by molding from the raw materials of prior information and to be marketable must be molded further still by producers, organized by distributers and delivered to end users. All of these steps add value and everyone who contributes should have some kind of an opportunity to make profit from their contribution without having to cowtow to arbitrary "rights holders" who have normally fleeced the deed from the originator to begin by mere
You talk about having to code to the lowest common denominator (such as IE6; or 5% marketshare and up as you put it) and pander to every possible wealthy client with an established software pathology, but then in the same breath advertise how heavily your work depends upon Ajax and Javascript.
So what happens when your next wealthy client has JS disabled citing security concerns, and they want access to your same product line? Do you expect us to believe you'll blithely support clients who have established themselves to be browserless, offline, or paper-only?
You are being hypocritical if you do not admit that everyone has to draw the line somewhere regarding legacy support. Not all online enterprise markets heavily to
companies who have chosen to entrench themselves in out-dated technology. So should we be chastised not supporting IE6 in markets where the IE6 users are not going to add heavily to our profit margins? In such cases, if CF is a shortcut that magically gives you a slightly larger user base without having to audit your entire stack for compatibility with a browser barely distinguishable from Netscape 4, then why shouldn't we give it a shot?
Google has dropped support for IE6 on Youtube, and they are taking this direction to allow users and potentially enterprises tied into IE6 to use Wave. I don't see how you could equate either of these with "building your personal website." Also, I am glad you have found such peace using the well-made javascript libraries that you cite, but oddly enough some of us wish to provide client-side functionality that ExtJS and Jquery do not cover. Some of us want client-side databasing to reduce or serialize calls to the server. Some of us want to provide a more desktop-like experience in our web-based applications. Is drag and drop really that psycho of a thing to expect out of a web application?
I know that your initial thesis was based on "Really, those are our 2 options?", but what it falls down to is that you and the original poster disagree on the meaning or intent of the term "real web applications". He means "real" as in more desktop like, a "real application" delivered via the web as it were. You infer "real" as in more profitable (I am guessing); such as "my web application is more real than yours because of how well paid I am to code it".
That being the case, do not allow slashdotters to make you feel guilty about making bank building web applications with the same client-side functionality as desktop apps written for Windows 3.1. For some reason, your very clients do not choose a Windows 3.1 gui for their actual desktops, which implies there must be some value in this user interface work the rest of us are trying to port to the web. But we will not require your assistance breaking vector graphics out of the flash sandbox or shadowing middleware at the client. We'll simply do our job, so that by the time everyone is running whatever 3d, social, mobile OS of 2019 your web apps might start looking like they belong on the Windows XP desktop. You and your clients will still be driving around in nice cars, we are not threatening that for you. We're just building the tools and libraries you'll be depending on to do your work tomorrow.
In other news, it's car analogy time! Google doesn't want progress on the web to be limited by when an established user base feels like unloading their old, substandard, web-defacing browsers. That means Chrome Frame is the internet equivalent of Cash for Clunkers! Get it? Hunh? Hunh? Yeah, whaddayou know!;D
Yes, maybe copyright isn't so bad after all! We always thought that Copyright Holders could just sue third parties into the stone age, but apparently it's all OK now because third parties can sue Copyright Holders into the stone age right back!;D
I live by the maxim: despise whatever law benefits naught but the lawyers. This is not a win for copyright reformists, this is two parties taking turns giving one another black eyes in court. This is revenge served cold. This is proof of one more way in which Copyright law can bankrupt you, even when you're the one holding the copyright.
One of the main benefits of copyright, is that it allows someone creating a product to spread cost of creation onto many consumers, rather than having to find one customer willing to pay e.g. $300 million upfront to see "Lord of the rings" as the first viewer.
Slave labor built the great pyramids in Giza. I'm not too sad that such projects are no longer common. Instead I am glad to have billions of dwellings that suit single (living) families, and glad that people are not forced to serve a centralized master with grand, but stupidly inefficient visions.
At any rate, Assurance Contracts have nothing to do with finding "one" customer. They have everything to do with finding a finite number of customers interested enough in banding together to fund your work however, while the rest of society is left (rightly) out of your transaction.
The good thing about your suggestion, is that everyone who supports it can do it today.
No, not precisely. Today the funds are dry because of the money average people pay to have themselves hogtied by Big Media. On top of that, I cannot produce independent content without the exponential expense of sufficiently obscuring my sources as to prevent the liability of third parties demanding a slice of all possible revenue.. or just squashing my production if that is the level of control they desire.
Feel free to make your 100% genuinely original magnum opus. When someone sues you claiming it's too similar to their work you have never heard of, you'll see where I am coming from. And don't go thinking you can just rely on public domain fables as a backbone for your work, as there no longer is such a thing.
Aside from the cost of connecting with your audience without using any trace of material they have ever actually heard of before, you have the expense of retaining legal counsel for the inevitable lawsuits as you grow.
No wonder a body cannot find sufficient grass-roots funding for projects anything like I am recommending. Well screw it then, we'll just buy the LOTR book. and Pay to watch the movie in theaters. Pay again to have it on DVD, oops forgot the extended edition, oops now we need it in Blu Ray. How much again for the ringtone?
Why? If the most important aim is to stop illegal downloads then a far better solution would be to abolish IP laws.
Ah man, now you're just being crazy. What's next, stop water boarding alleged terrorists? Take down the Great Firewall of China? We'll all get killed.. somehow.:P
Content isn't free to produce, and unauthorized copying/pirateing, while not theft, does often deprive content creators of money they would have gotten otherwise. I don't know how to solve it, but I don't think "giving up" is the answer here - just as in other issues with big problems and no immediate path to success.
Then again, since most of us who promote Copyright Abolition do know how to solve it, you can breathe a sigh of relief.
With a global internet, you need no distribution middlemen. You can create content, market it directly to the masses and use Assurance Contracts to guarantee financing from the first round of recipients to your content. Enter into the contract before you even begin work on the project. Then once delivered, the content can be treated by your financiers as they see fit (including any among their number rebroadcasting to the world, most likely for free) and you won't care as you have already been compensated to produce the content.
Strategy #2: Canned content as advertisement instead of product. If you are a musician for example, record and distribute work locally to encourage people to come to your show. Alternately, produce work pro bono to gain reputation, which can then be used to jump start larger projects backed by contract to first sale, as mentioned above.
Strategy #3: without copyright, none of your work needs to be 100% original. Lean on previously produced material. Remix, backdrop, fill in the blanks. Explore the boundaries of creativity side by side with all other members of the human race, and with no corporate or governmental restrictions. When you find a groove you can express better than everyone else, money will find it's way into that groove as people will wish to experience what you are creating. They will also wish to use that as a starting point for their works, and the more eager they are to do so the more eager they will be for first sale to get the ball rolling.
Copyright is not foundational to the economics of creativity. Copyright does nothing but pervert these economics for the artificial gain of those who are already in power, and it does inestimable harm to the public in the process. Copyright is a form of censorship, and derives it's power by directly preventing individuals from sharing knowledge with one another.Ostensibly this is to generate "profit", but in reality the only coin of interest to Copyright holders is power and control. Profit lasts only a moment, but power and control allow you to squeeze the populace for residual profit in perpetuity.
We birthed you, we fed you, we educated you, you owe us.!!
While I agree that there is a case for the copyright and patent terms to be shorter than they are, it is scary that people can make a statement like this in apparently non-sarcastic way and get modded up for it in a forum of generally educated people. It is not some mickey mouse musician trade organizations that are moving us closer to a dictatorship, it is people like you.
It's not sarcastic, it's just hyperbole. Poster is modded up for expressing the general idea that creativity remixes that which already exists in your environment in public, so it is foolish to coin it and then hold it hostage from the public.
Whenever you create media, you build it from the experiential raw materials of your peers. You should not be able to simply charge your peers for access to it without first paying them back for the raw materials. That is what is meant here by "you owe us".
I just think that with fair use and the state of the laws, it's not clear exactly what the legal status of a lot of this sort of stuff is [snip] - which shouldn't be necessary if the legalities surrounding this are as cut and dried as they'd like the public to believe they are.
Fair Use law is pretty cut and dried. You violate copyright in a manner that is protected by fair use. And then you try to make your fair use position as clear as you can make it, but you might still be taken to court if it is not already 100% clear that the copyright holders will lose the case.
Fair Use cannot apply until you are already infringing copyright. Then, it can only be invoked as a protection in court on a case by case basis.
Commercial interests (such as search providers using thumbnails of copyrighted images in their search) can take advantage of fair use, because one court case can endorse an entire business model for them. I'm pretty certain most residential users are not willing to go to court to protect individual habits, however.
In Britain, a pretty large proportion of bandwidth is used for iPlayer downloads, which are legal. Youtube is also very popular, and is mostly legal - they have a royalty agreement with the MCPS.
Youtube cannot be downloaded off-peak and then viewed during the day. At least, not without illegally jail braking the content from the site.
Most people who don't read slashdot find it very difficult to use peer to peer software and to find reliable downloads that actually are what they say they are without any trojans added.
Normally I would just say "use the Pirate Bay" to such users, and things like mind the comments and pay attention to the reputation of content posters. But then Big Media realizes there is a vector protecting luddite downloaders from viruses and trojans, so they try to take down the Pirate Bay.
Never mind that there are a jillion different torrent sites online, this one has a reputation of being a relatively safe and spam-free clearing house. Big Media is happy with torrent sites existing, so long as they are dangerous and diseased as you mention.
In this case, it may be true that unlimited broadband will hurt media companies by making piracy easier, but it could also help their businesses by opening up all kinds of new business opportunities. The problem they're having seems to be that they're dragging their feet on new business opportunities.
You can't use off-peak internet to watch Hulu. Big Media are definitely taking advantage of digital media and the internet, it's just that you cannot serve the needs of copyright and reality at the same time, regardless of the transmission medium.
And the Grateful Dead, who got the idea from old bluegrass musicians. Free music has been around a lot longer than the internet. The internet just makes it so much better.
Haha, it's funny when people say "nuh, not only can piracy walk down this street, so also can free or independently produced content!"
All the while Big Media execs are going "tomaytoe, tomahtoe.."
Beyond the advertising, there is the concern that the only "legal" ways to downl... er, "licence" video and audio content are streaming, requiring you to be physically present to see the ads.
AAPT's service, by only providing unmetered downloads in off-peak hours, encourages the last thing Big Media wants, and I mean ever. "time shifting" and local archival.
Remember, copyright isn't about whether or not you have paid for the content. Not at the core. Instead, it's all about control. Big Media will never sell control, control over how media is consumed guarantees them future revenue.
Big Media wants to control where and how the content exists, they will never allow you to download a copy you can archive or backup. They should always be the only source, and you have to come back to them to see it again, even in circumstances when that means not having to pay every time. When you are done watching it, they never want you to have a copy lying around that could exist after Big Media decides the old content is competing with new content. Big Media gets giddy thinking about old CD's and DVD's that they illegalize your power to "back up" getting scratched and unusable.
Thus, it is understandable why the strategy of transferring data off-peak in order to conserve precious network resources would threaten the basic business model of copyright. The goal of conserving actually scarce resources using real economic strategy will always conflict at the core with the made up game of conserving artificially scarce copyrighted resources for artificially inflated profit.
So, that's what I make of this situation. All marketing aside, copyright holders have a vested interest to prevent us from time-shifting. To prevent us from downloading now and watching later, even when it balances strained network load. Consumers must be online, downloading content realtime. Their every pause, fast forward and rewind and channel change recorded. They must be attached directly to the teat. Then, and only then, can Big Media erase under-selling content from history ensuring noone will have a copy archived.
So yeah, tell me again how downloading content makes me a selfish ingrate?
Some posts above are crying "why not just ask users to switch browsers?" and the answer is, many users (or enterprises) don't know how to run multiple browsers at the same time, and many of them are stuck with IEvX for whatever badly made website they are commercially forced to use.
This plugin (allegedly) fixes that. It's like, look, you can use chrome when you browse to places that specifically require it, and when you're at the badly made websites you still have your IE. Nobody is robbing you of your CoolWebSearch toolbar you love so much. None of the browser buttons or menus have moved around on you which would make your head asplode. And of course, you don't have to pro-actively launch seperate browsers for different locations. It's all handled silently for you in the background.
IT at big companies don't have to support tons of browsers, or support calls about what browser to use where, they can just include a plugin (similar to flash) and the sites who elect to use it work better, the sites who do not are not impacted.
My only question (I'm amazed nobody else here is asking this?;) Is does this plugin dial back to the Google mothership? If developers opt to use it to aid in their IE6 compliance, how badly will they be sacrificing their customer's privacy? In other words, should we expect an IronChromeFrame any time soon?;D
You would change your tune if the content provider was youtube.com or hulu.com, and you discovered you're blocked from access because Your ISP refused to pay the required fee to these sites. Now are you starting to understand the situation?
No, I don't think that I would.
Youtube is a free service which allows people to upload and share their video, which others can then download and watch. They have snazzy features. They also have a bevy of competitors just waiting to snatch that crown.
Accessability is their secret sauce, and were they to lose sight of that they would be replaced in a heartbeat by the browsing public. Just imagine for a moment what would happen if Craigslist banned half their audience. It would instantly become "who'slist?"
Hulu on the other hand is merely a video distribution site for a cartel of copyright holders. I never go there. When I want to see copyrighted content, I simply pirate it and archive it like any morally responsible citizen would.
Copyright holders already screw with and deny access to their client base for an array of short sighted and damaging reasons. So were they to choose new manners to incense the public, I would cheer them on for showing their true colors.
It shouldn't be Comcast's decision. It should be OUR decision to pay or not pay.
Who cares? Content provider lets comcast pay them so that comcast users get free access. Content provider doesn't get paid by Verizon, so Verizon customers either pay themselves the old fashioned way, or else perhaps Content Provider is a serious moron and doesn't want the money.
The important part is that Content Provider in this situation has the right to be a serious moron and block you if they are really that frightened of your wads of cash.
Any transaction is the business of the two people making the transaction. Content Provider can refuse your business for just about whatever reason that they want, just like you can decide not to buy their garbage in the first place. Net Neutrality only comes into play when the third party intermediary in good faith (some ISP down the line) decides to sabotage your transaction with the content provider in an attempt to make their competing service seem more attractive.
Lets not also forget the dangers of teaching a whole generation of kids that its perfectly okay for those in authority over us to track our every movement.
WCLPeter is right, these are important values to instill in our youth. Electronic surveillance of this kind can really do the job of re-enforcing the mindset that you are always watched, you are never alone. Gone are the problems that ensue when children "assume" noone knows what they are up to. Combine this with CCTV networks, and parents can have an on-demand, live video feed of their children in the broad world.
Still, aside from bringing the price point down, the other major improvement this system needs is implantation, similar to RFID tags for pets, yet obviously much more versatile. That way, this won't be a piece of jewelry the user will ever "outgrow". When the child grows beyond the bounds of their parent's responsibility and into the workforce, then their new guardians in upper management will be able to keep tabs on human resources more efficiently. Popularization of technology like this is important to protect your employees from the corruptive influence of hazardous personal lifestyle choices and from competitive job offers.
Well, it's a change that's been a long time coming. I am glad that Lok8u's parent company had the insight to introduce this product to the younger, more impressionable generation by way of leveraging the desperation of overwhelmed parents. Older generations have already been raised in an environment which rewards selfish rebellion, and products like this could not easily be marketed to them. So, let's start with the children and make sure they never have an opportunity to even question the wisdom of the rules we lay out for their well being.:D
Yea, all these 'non-standard' typers seem to be bragging about how their wpm is up into the 60s, but to me that sounds painfully slow. It's been a long time since I took a typing test but last time I did I was averaging in the low 100s and peaking into the 130s. And I do use home row.
Kudos to you for that, anon. Apparently, the world record for sustained typing is 150wpm. So I'm sure your 130wpm accomplishment must be unremarkable among others who attended your high school touch-typing classes? Or did they average at 40-60wpm with many of them getting RSI for the trouble?
My point wasn't that ignoring the home row method would guarantee you would type faster, just that it had little bearing on typing speed. For me, 60wpm with 99% accuracy and no delay for complex keyboard shortcuts is enough to amaze the luddites, and enough that transcribing my thoughts never gets bottlenecked behind my typing speed. Unless I am taking dictation for an auctioneer or playing human OCR, I've never needed more speed lest I might have developed it naturally.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever had a flu?
How the hell should I know. Do you normally get blood work done each time you get a fever and body aches?
The word "Flu" gets thrown around to indicate any non-serious respiratory problem common to industrialized nations. The companies who actually make money devising and marketing these serums can claim X% efficacy all they want, but it means nothing to a public who still gets food poisoning and rhinovirus and don't feel as though they have been protected at all because they have no practical way to ever know if they get the genuine, honest to god "Flu" or not.
Consider this, there are lots and lots of knowledge available in the world, both static like a cooking recipe, or dynamic like the news or a blog. But the fact is, for most of human history, these knowledge are not available cheaply and timely to most people. What Google did is making the knowledge that already exists on the web available to anyone, that alone is providing tremendous value to most people, and I congratulate them for thinking of a business model that can also make a profit doing it.
Oliver's point about the value of Google's service is a point lost on most armchair entrepreneurs these days.
Too many of us get hung up on "creativity" being the only valuable service you can provide digitally, the product of which becomes some kind of "product" which should then be marketed to the masses by least efficient and most pocket-lining means possible.. be that Murdock, RIAA, PRS, whoever.
We then disrespect any second tier services that may organize and present this information to you in a meaningful form. Of what value is data when it is uselessly separated from it's consumers, or lost amidst a sea of inscrutable noise?
Take Google Books as another example. There are books languishing in libraries far from the hands of those who may benefit from reading them, out of print, orphaned and insulated from reproduction by our beloved copyright laws.. just waiting to be misplaced or accidentally damaged beyond repair. Google decides for good or ill to digitize all these tomes and make them available online. Suddenly everyone from authors to slashdotters, even the gutenburg project calls foul about data that was never otherwise practicably accessible to begin with. Apparently Google is "stealing" revenue from creators who have left their creations derelict in the first place. Unlike the water ways, textual information has no "salvage laws".
Regarding Google Books, I am not claiming Google is beyond the ability of making shady business deals, what I am saying is that I never hear press about the bare concept of bringing this content into the digital domain. I get the impression that we would prefer the books rot and the knowledge be lost forever than that anyone makes half a dime as a consequence of bringing the data back into play.
To me, IP has become such an ugly concept recently. One day someone will figure out cold fusion or cure cancer, present the proof on a napkin in order to win a $5 bar bet with their skeptical buddy and then throw the napkin away. Someone else will find the napkin and create the needed business infrastructure to bring this anonymous discovery to the world. The original creator will then shut them down (perhaps even instead of demanding royalties) and it seems like the public will dance around the flames of the demolished industry as we celebrate some kind of a victory for IP, all the while dying of cancer and killing one another over dwindling fossil fuels. Our cultural priorities seem truly and heinously misplaced whenever IP is involved.
I contend that creating or discovering knowledge is not the single most important thing in the world. If the knowledge cannot be used to better human life, if the creator decides to hold out forever for monetary gains it is never reasonable for them to see, then what utility is IP law to anyone? I say all content is devalued when monopolized by it's creators. Having an idea does not automatically make you the best steward for the idea. Information does not spring forth from the mind of a journalist or artist as a shrink-wrapped product, instead it is created by molding from the raw materials of prior information and to be marketable must be molded further still by producers, organized by distributers and delivered to end users. All of these steps add value and everyone who contributes should have some kind of an opportunity to make profit from their contribution without having to cowtow to arbitrary "rights holders" who have normally fleeced the deed from the originator to begin by mere
You talk about having to code to the lowest common denominator (such as IE6; or 5% marketshare and up as you put it) and pander to every possible wealthy client with an established software pathology, but then in the same breath advertise how heavily your work depends upon Ajax and Javascript.
So what happens when your next wealthy client has JS disabled citing security concerns, and they want access to your same product line? Do you expect us to believe you'll blithely support clients who have established themselves to be browserless, offline, or paper-only?
You are being hypocritical if you do not admit that everyone has to draw the line somewhere regarding legacy support. Not all online enterprise markets heavily to companies who have chosen to entrench themselves in out-dated technology. So should we be chastised not supporting IE6 in markets where the IE6 users are not going to add heavily to our profit margins? In such cases, if CF is a shortcut that magically gives you a slightly larger user base without having to audit your entire stack for compatibility with a browser barely distinguishable from Netscape 4, then why shouldn't we give it a shot?
Google has dropped support for IE6 on Youtube, and they are taking this direction to allow users and potentially enterprises tied into IE6 to use Wave. I don't see how you could equate either of these with "building your personal website." Also, I am glad you have found such peace using the well-made javascript libraries that you cite, but oddly enough some of us wish to provide client-side functionality that ExtJS and Jquery do not cover. Some of us want client-side databasing to reduce or serialize calls to the server. Some of us want to provide a more desktop-like experience in our web-based applications. Is drag and drop really that psycho of a thing to expect out of a web application?
I know that your initial thesis was based on "Really, those are our 2 options?", but what it falls down to is that you and the original poster disagree on the meaning or intent of the term "real web applications". He means "real" as in more desktop like, a "real application" delivered via the web as it were. You infer "real" as in more profitable (I am guessing); such as "my web application is more real than yours because of how well paid I am to code it".
That being the case, do not allow slashdotters to make you feel guilty about making bank building web applications with the same client-side functionality as desktop apps written for Windows 3.1. For some reason, your very clients do not choose a Windows 3.1 gui for their actual desktops, which implies there must be some value in this user interface work the rest of us are trying to port to the web. But we will not require your assistance breaking vector graphics out of the flash sandbox or shadowing middleware at the client. We'll simply do our job, so that by the time everyone is running whatever 3d, social, mobile OS of 2019 your web apps might start looking like they belong on the Windows XP desktop. You and your clients will still be driving around in nice cars, we are not threatening that for you. We're just building the tools and libraries you'll be depending on to do your work tomorrow.
In other news, it's car analogy time! Google doesn't want progress on the web to be limited by when an established user base feels like unloading their old, substandard, web-defacing browsers. That means Chrome Frame is the internet equivalent of Cash for Clunkers! Get it? Hunh? Hunh? Yeah, whaddayou know! ;D
Yes, maybe copyright isn't so bad after all! We always thought that Copyright Holders could just sue third parties into the stone age, but apparently it's all OK now because third parties can sue Copyright Holders into the stone age right back! ;D
I live by the maxim: despise whatever law benefits naught but the lawyers. This is not a win for copyright reformists, this is two parties taking turns giving one another black eyes in court. This is revenge served cold. This is proof of one more way in which Copyright law can bankrupt you, even when you're the one holding the copyright.
One of the main benefits of copyright, is that it allows someone creating a product to spread cost of creation onto many consumers, rather than having to find one customer willing to pay e.g. $300 million upfront to see "Lord of the rings" as the first viewer.
Slave labor built the great pyramids in Giza. I'm not too sad that such projects are no longer common. Instead I am glad to have billions of dwellings that suit single (living) families, and glad that people are not forced to serve a centralized master with grand, but stupidly inefficient visions.
At any rate, Assurance Contracts have nothing to do with finding "one" customer. They have everything to do with finding a finite number of customers interested enough in banding together to fund your work however, while the rest of society is left (rightly) out of your transaction.
The good thing about your suggestion, is that everyone who supports it can do it today.
No, not precisely. Today the funds are dry because of the money average people pay to have themselves hogtied by Big Media. On top of that, I cannot produce independent content without the exponential expense of sufficiently obscuring my sources as to prevent the liability of third parties demanding a slice of all possible revenue.. or just squashing my production if that is the level of control they desire.
Feel free to make your 100% genuinely original magnum opus. When someone sues you claiming it's too similar to their work you have never heard of, you'll see where I am coming from. And don't go thinking you can just rely on public domain fables as a backbone for your work, as there no longer is such a thing.
Aside from the cost of connecting with your audience without using any trace of material they have ever actually heard of before, you have the expense of retaining legal counsel for the inevitable lawsuits as you grow.
No wonder a body cannot find sufficient grass-roots funding for projects anything like I am recommending. Well screw it then, we'll just buy the LOTR book. and Pay to watch the movie in theaters. Pay again to have it on DVD, oops forgot the extended edition, oops now we need it in Blu Ray. How much again for the ringtone?
Why? If the most important aim is to stop illegal downloads then a far better solution would be to abolish IP laws.
Ah man, now you're just being crazy. What's next, stop water boarding alleged terrorists? Take down the Great Firewall of China? We'll all get killed.. somehow. :P
A certain ISP I happened to bump into viewed that 9600 bps or higher actually encouraged warez transfers.
Remind anyone of why we cannot burn raw data to Blu-ray yet?
Content isn't free to produce, and unauthorized copying/pirateing, while not theft, does often deprive content creators of money they would have gotten otherwise. I don't know how to solve it, but I don't think "giving up" is the answer here - just as in other issues with big problems and no immediate path to success.
Then again, since most of us who promote Copyright Abolition do know how to solve it, you can breathe a sigh of relief.
With a global internet, you need no distribution middlemen. You can create content, market it directly to the masses and use Assurance Contracts to guarantee financing from the first round of recipients to your content. Enter into the contract before you even begin work on the project. Then once delivered, the content can be treated by your financiers as they see fit (including any among their number rebroadcasting to the world, most likely for free) and you won't care as you have already been compensated to produce the content.
Strategy #2: Canned content as advertisement instead of product. If you are a musician for example, record and distribute work locally to encourage people to come to your show. Alternately, produce work pro bono to gain reputation, which can then be used to jump start larger projects backed by contract to first sale, as mentioned above.
Strategy #3: without copyright, none of your work needs to be 100% original. Lean on previously produced material. Remix, backdrop, fill in the blanks. Explore the boundaries of creativity side by side with all other members of the human race, and with no corporate or governmental restrictions. When you find a groove you can express better than everyone else, money will find it's way into that groove as people will wish to experience what you are creating. They will also wish to use that as a starting point for their works, and the more eager they are to do so the more eager they will be for first sale to get the ball rolling.
Copyright is not foundational to the economics of creativity. Copyright does nothing but pervert these economics for the artificial gain of those who are already in power, and it does inestimable harm to the public in the process. Copyright is a form of censorship, and derives it's power by directly preventing individuals from sharing knowledge with one another.Ostensibly this is to generate "profit", but in reality the only coin of interest to Copyright holders is power and control. Profit lasts only a moment, but power and control allow you to squeeze the populace for residual profit in perpetuity.
We birthed you, we fed you, we educated you, you owe us.!! While I agree that there is a case for the copyright and patent terms to be shorter than they are, it is scary that people can make a statement like this in apparently non-sarcastic way and get modded up for it in a forum of generally educated people. It is not some mickey mouse musician trade organizations that are moving us closer to a dictatorship, it is people like you.
It's not sarcastic, it's just hyperbole. Poster is modded up for expressing the general idea that creativity remixes that which already exists in your environment in public, so it is foolish to coin it and then hold it hostage from the public.
Whenever you create media, you build it from the experiential raw materials of your peers. You should not be able to simply charge your peers for access to it without first paying them back for the raw materials. That is what is meant here by "you owe us".
I just think that with fair use and the state of the laws, it's not clear exactly what the legal status of a lot of this sort of stuff is [snip] - which shouldn't be necessary if the legalities surrounding this are as cut and dried as they'd like the public to believe they are.
Fair Use law is pretty cut and dried. You violate copyright in a manner that is protected by fair use. And then you try to make your fair use position as clear as you can make it, but you might still be taken to court if it is not already 100% clear that the copyright holders will lose the case.
Fair Use cannot apply until you are already infringing copyright. Then, it can only be invoked as a protection in court on a case by case basis.
Commercial interests (such as search providers using thumbnails of copyrighted images in their search) can take advantage of fair use, because one court case can endorse an entire business model for them. I'm pretty certain most residential users are not willing to go to court to protect individual habits, however.
In Britain, a pretty large proportion of bandwidth is used for iPlayer downloads, which are legal. Youtube is also very popular, and is mostly legal - they have a royalty agreement with the MCPS.
Youtube cannot be downloaded off-peak and then viewed during the day. At least, not without illegally jail braking the content from the site.
Most people who don't read slashdot find it very difficult to use peer to peer software and to find reliable downloads that actually are what they say they are without any trojans added.
Normally I would just say "use the Pirate Bay" to such users, and things like mind the comments and pay attention to the reputation of content posters. But then Big Media realizes there is a vector protecting luddite downloaders from viruses and trojans, so they try to take down the Pirate Bay.
Never mind that there are a jillion different torrent sites online, this one has a reputation of being a relatively safe and spam-free clearing house. Big Media is happy with torrent sites existing, so long as they are dangerous and diseased as you mention.
In this case, it may be true that unlimited broadband will hurt media companies by making piracy easier, but it could also help their businesses by opening up all kinds of new business opportunities. The problem they're having seems to be that they're dragging their feet on new business opportunities.
You can't use off-peak internet to watch Hulu. Big Media are definitely taking advantage of digital media and the internet, it's just that you cannot serve the needs of copyright and reality at the same time, regardless of the transmission medium.
And the Grateful Dead, who got the idea from old bluegrass musicians. Free music has been around a lot longer than the internet. The internet just makes it so much better.
Haha, it's funny when people say "nuh, not only can piracy walk down this street, so also can free or independently produced content!"
All the while Big Media execs are going "tomaytoe, tomahtoe.."
sakdoctor should work "pro bono" into the lyrics :3
Beyond the advertising, there is the concern that the only "legal" ways to downl... er, "licence" video and audio content are streaming, requiring you to be physically present to see the ads.
AAPT's service, by only providing unmetered downloads in off-peak hours, encourages the last thing Big Media wants, and I mean ever. "time shifting" and local archival.
Remember, copyright isn't about whether or not you have paid for the content. Not at the core. Instead, it's all about control. Big Media will never sell control, control over how media is consumed guarantees them future revenue.
Big Media wants to control where and how the content exists, they will never allow you to download a copy you can archive or backup. They should always be the only source, and you have to come back to them to see it again, even in circumstances when that means not having to pay every time. When you are done watching it, they never want you to have a copy lying around that could exist after Big Media decides the old content is competing with new content. Big Media gets giddy thinking about old CD's and DVD's that they illegalize your power to "back up" getting scratched and unusable.
Thus, it is understandable why the strategy of transferring data off-peak in order to conserve precious network resources would threaten the basic business model of copyright. The goal of conserving actually scarce resources using real economic strategy will always conflict at the core with the made up game of conserving artificially scarce copyrighted resources for artificially inflated profit.
So, that's what I make of this situation. All marketing aside, copyright holders have a vested interest to prevent us from time-shifting. To prevent us from downloading now and watching later, even when it balances strained network load. Consumers must be online, downloading content realtime. Their every pause, fast forward and rewind and channel change recorded. They must be attached directly to the teat. Then, and only then, can Big Media erase under-selling content from history ensuring noone will have a copy archived.
So yeah, tell me again how downloading content makes me a selfish ingrate?
If this is the case, then we're just replacing one attack surface with another instead of exposing both.
I agree with Parent. Unless some task of the browser is being demonstrably carried out twice, there is no actual increase in attack surface.
Out of curiosity, have you actually *tried* IE8?
Or are you just posting the same ignorant bullshit we see on every Slashdot thread?
1> yes, 2> no, 3> now you answer your own question mebe kthx? :/
I think parent has a good piece of insight here.
Some posts above are crying "why not just ask users to switch browsers?" and the answer is, many users (or enterprises) don't know how to run multiple browsers at the same time, and many of them are stuck with IEvX for whatever badly made website they are commercially forced to use.
This plugin (allegedly) fixes that. It's like, look, you can use chrome when you browse to places that specifically require it, and when you're at the badly made websites you still have your IE. Nobody is robbing you of your CoolWebSearch toolbar you love so much. None of the browser buttons or menus have moved around on you which would make your head asplode. And of course, you don't have to pro-actively launch seperate browsers for different locations. It's all handled silently for you in the background.
IT at big companies don't have to support tons of browsers, or support calls about what browser to use where, they can just include a plugin (similar to flash) and the sites who elect to use it work better, the sites who do not are not impacted.
My only question (I'm amazed nobody else here is asking this? ;) Is does this plugin dial back to the Google mothership? If developers opt to use it to aid in their IE6 compliance, how badly will they be sacrificing their customer's privacy? In other words, should we expect an IronChromeFrame any time soon? ;D
You would change your tune if the content provider was youtube.com or hulu.com, and you discovered you're blocked from access because Your ISP refused to pay the required fee to these sites. Now are you starting to understand the situation?
No, I don't think that I would.
Youtube is a free service which allows people to upload and share their video, which others can then download and watch. They have snazzy features. They also have a bevy of competitors just waiting to snatch that crown.
Accessability is their secret sauce, and were they to lose sight of that they would be replaced in a heartbeat by the browsing public. Just imagine for a moment what would happen if Craigslist banned half their audience. It would instantly become "who'slist?"
Hulu on the other hand is merely a video distribution site for a cartel of copyright holders. I never go there. When I want to see copyrighted content, I simply pirate it and archive it like any morally responsible citizen would.
Copyright holders already screw with and deny access to their client base for an array of short sighted and damaging reasons. So were they to choose new manners to incense the public, I would cheer them on for showing their true colors.
It shouldn't be Comcast's decision. It should be OUR decision to pay or not pay.
Who cares? Content provider lets comcast pay them so that comcast users get free access. Content provider doesn't get paid by Verizon, so Verizon customers either pay themselves the old fashioned way, or else perhaps Content Provider is a serious moron and doesn't want the money.
The important part is that Content Provider in this situation has the right to be a serious moron and block you if they are really that frightened of your wads of cash.
Any transaction is the business of the two people making the transaction. Content Provider can refuse your business for just about whatever reason that they want, just like you can decide not to buy their garbage in the first place. Net Neutrality only comes into play when the third party intermediary in good faith (some ISP down the line) decides to sabotage your transaction with the content provider in an attempt to make their competing service seem more attractive.
Lets not also forget the dangers of teaching a whole generation of kids that its perfectly okay for those in authority over us to track our every movement.
WCLPeter is right, these are important values to instill in our youth. Electronic surveillance of this kind can really do the job of re-enforcing the mindset that you are always watched, you are never alone. Gone are the problems that ensue when children "assume" noone knows what they are up to. Combine this with CCTV networks, and parents can have an on-demand, live video feed of their children in the broad world.
Still, aside from bringing the price point down, the other major improvement this system needs is implantation, similar to RFID tags for pets, yet obviously much more versatile. That way, this won't be a piece of jewelry the user will ever "outgrow". When the child grows beyond the bounds of their parent's responsibility and into the workforce, then their new guardians in upper management will be able to keep tabs on human resources more efficiently. Popularization of technology like this is important to protect your employees from the corruptive influence of hazardous personal lifestyle choices and from competitive job offers.
Well, it's a change that's been a long time coming. I am glad that Lok8u's parent company had the insight to introduce this product to the younger, more impressionable generation by way of leveraging the desperation of overwhelmed parents. Older generations have already been raised in an environment which rewards selfish rebellion, and products like this could not easily be marketed to them. So, let's start with the children and make sure they never have an opportunity to even question the wisdom of the rules we lay out for their well being. :D
s/Cursive Writing/Printing/;
There. Fixed that for you, I did. :/
Well, at least until the surviving criminals start employing countermeasures.
Bipedal law enforcement robot does not need to climb stairs. Bipedal law enforcement robot simply levels the building.
Mod me up now. You have ten seconds to comply.
My procmail filters at one point were so busy filtering incoming spam that my ISP disabled them for using 80% of the CPU.
That's why they invented Gmail? ;D
Srsly tho, public forums be crunk ways of holding p2p conversations. How about if you email me via jesset@gmail.com?
Yea, all these 'non-standard' typers seem to be bragging about how their wpm is up into the 60s, but to me that sounds painfully slow. It's been a long time since I took a typing test but last time I did I was averaging in the low 100s and peaking into the 130s. And I do use home row.
Kudos to you for that, anon. Apparently, the world record for sustained typing is 150wpm. So I'm sure your 130wpm accomplishment must be unremarkable among others who attended your high school touch-typing classes? Or did they average at 40-60wpm with many of them getting RSI for the trouble?
My point wasn't that ignoring the home row method would guarantee you would type faster, just that it had little bearing on typing speed. For me, 60wpm with 99% accuracy and no delay for complex keyboard shortcuts is enough to amaze the luddites, and enough that transcribing my thoughts never gets bottlenecked behind my typing speed. Unless I am taking dictation for an auctioneer or playing human OCR, I've never needed more speed lest I might have developed it naturally.