But, let's not act like it's a travesty that a court didn't side with the downloaders.
What is the Law? An arbitrary sequence of rules which must be followed come what may? A code which it is always and everywhere immoral to to disobey, even in spirit? An elaborate ritual which those skilled in the art can obtain whatever outcome they please?
The function of the court system is to interpret the law in such a way that justice is served. When billions across the world withdraw their moral support fro copyrighted works and see nothing wrong with filesharing, are they wrong simply because the law says they are wrong? Or is it rather the law that is wrong, for unjustly imposing outdated or undemocratic views upon the population?
The law and the legal system gets too much of a free pass by too many people. It is as fallible and flawed a system as any other designed by human beings and its decisions are not always morally right, or even ethically so. You'll understand the fantasy when you finally have your day in court.
I'm continually surprised whenever a gender related topic comes up for discussion on Slashdot. There is an awful lot of bitterness towards women on this site. Where it comes from, I don't know; but it is present across the tech sector. Considering how liberal slashdotters tend to be on most issues, this one really stands out like a sore thumb.
The only video codec that every browser can use at the moment is Ogg Theora.
Nnnoo. MPEG-LA have promised us that all H264 hits are free until 2016.
That's so far away, I can't even foresee any future problems with the internet giddily adopting H264 en mass. Now, here; be quiet and take a sniff of this pipe I'm going to pass you. It'll feel good.
Once again, we need a revolution. We need to take control. We must take control and save the world.
Great idea! I'll be the leader. You all just do exactly what I say and we'll topple the bourgeoisie elites and bring about... whatever it is you wanted exactly. The important part is that you have to pick me to be the leader. Every revolution needs a good dic^H^H^Hleader after all.
And you should also realize that there are many organizations that still are stuck with IE6.
I don't accept this as a valid excuse anymore. These organisations were stuck with IE6 over five years ago. Since then there have been umpteen security and technical problems with IE6, and several service packs and new OSes that replace it. Yet we're supposed to believe that these big organisations still have critical backends that will not work ono any other browser? You're telling me these people prefer ActiveX programming over web interfaces or rich clients? I know this is commonly accepted wisdom, but is there any real evidence for it?
IT sometimes moves slowly, but not THAT slowly. The corporate world has moved on. Something else is the cause of all these IE6 browsers still hanging about.
The only limit, the only limit that they will understand is when people get fed up of these restrictions and actively protest or rebel against them.
That's the only thing oppressive, bureaucratic and incompetent governments understand. Until enough people are actually willing to stand up and say: "No, I don't want to be photographed naked by strangers.", the government will simply assume everyone is OK with it. Maybe they actually are; I don't know. I haven't heard one wick of real protest from anyone or any group. People continue to fly in droves--in silence.
You don't write letters. You don't set up a facebook page. You'd don't moan about it on Slashdot. That's not protest. What you have to do is either a) stop flying, or b) refuse the scan and protest and sue like crazy(not for money) when you're not allowed to fly. If the public really is against all this, it may only take one big case to precipitate enough discontent that the restrictions will be removed. Until that happens, nothing will change.
Rights, even the right to wear clothes outside, have to be fought for.
What's really fun about these two comments is that each contain the sort of error that TFA references: "Some say, that Idiocracy" (parmesan comma) and "since it's release" ('its', the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun, does not require an apostrophe). (I'll overlook the emoticon, since this isn't a formal paper, so I would argue it's less inappropriate here.)
You're not so hot yourself. You used a colon to enter a list, but then didn't use semi-colons to separate the items. Moreover you used three bracketed additions to a single sentence. By my reckoning, you've even got a "parmesan comma" yourself in the third bracket; the structure of the sentence suggest to me that "I'll overlook the emoticon since..." is the more correct usage--not that the sentence makes much sense anyway.
Basically, grammar is less a formal series of rules for better writing, and is more a formal series of rules for petty "one-upmanship" among writers. That's the primary reason people ignore it; it's too subjective. Spelling is different as there is generally a binary answer people can't harp on once it's done correctly. You don't really get spelling Nazis. But Grammar is an eternal struggle in which generations of good writers have had to hack, chop and staple their prose with correctly place commas, colons, dashes, quotes and brackets; and yet they still don't have the equivalent to expressing themselves yourself--quickly and easily--using a '^_^'.
Emoticons are not a sign of poor grammar. They are a sign of the stagnation of grammar in the hands of its professional custodians, and the corresponding vibrancy of the written word in the hands of an innovative population. JRR Tolkien riddled the Lord of the Rings with punctuation marks. He could count himself lucky if most people noticed one in a thousand of them. Punctuation is not as important as some people think it is. And grammar is too subjective to bother with when writing.
This one was pretty tame. The best I've ever seen was the Hitler rant about the balance in Company of Heroes. Fit the scene like a glove. I think you can still enjoy it without having played the game.
Tell you what? Give me $15 million and I'll give the other $15 million to Mozilla to get them to stop ripping on self signed certs. Then we can finally have (far more) secure web browsing than we already have, and all with existing technology.
What I find questionable is that they don't want their children to attend a school because the children might be confronted with values the parents don't agree with. Yes, that's their official reason.
Frankly, I find that to be the the least questionable thing about it.
So... out of curiosity, what would have been an appropriate response for a curious 10 year old?
Curious ten year olds generally don't give rise to official complaints, withdrawals from school, and subsequent arrests. You are expected to be able to infer subtexts from posts on Slashdot.
Especially for the many millions of Indians without a basic education and sanitation. They'll remain illiterate and crapping in the streets, but they will feel extatic about their fellow Indian in space.
They will! But that's not the whole story.
While it is true that the Indian Government could be said to have more immediate concerns, a space program for a country of its size is not entirely without merit. The Apollo program employed over 400,000 people. People working in high tech jobs, all related to science, technology and mathematics. The technologies developed for that program and the experience of the people who worked on it stood to the economy and society of the US for many years during and after. There's also an effect on even primary education as interest in science and technology is sparked in younger minds. If nothing else, the Indian space program might help persuade their best educated graduates to stay in their home country and improve it rather than emigrate for better paying jobs.
But whatever you might have to say about such a space program, at least the Indians aren't wasting trillions on unproductive foreign campaigns. When you ask yourself why the US has no decent space program anymore, you need look no farther than the money wasted over the last eight years.
Scientologists also fail to meet the other, often unstated, prerequisite for being a terrorist.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
Unlike the Islamic Fundamentialists, the IRA, ETA or even the likes of Timothy McVeigh, no-one considers Scientologists to be freedom fighters of any kind. They have so many freedoms they end up abusing them to take away the freedoms of others.
The question is -- given the above -- were they really?
It's a video of a baby jumping up and down with awful sound quality. Frankly, I'm disgusted that the lawyers involved were not reprimanded for wasting the courts time.
As I see it, the biggest problem with DMCA takedowns is that they don't involve the courts. Takedowns become a giant bluffing game with lawyers puffing up arguments with legalese and threats in an effort to browbeat their victims. It should be up to the courts to reign in this sort of behavior before all respect for the legal system falls apart. Unfortunately, judges appear to be all too willing to condone and even support such nonsense. There is a great rot in Western judiciaries.
It's so obvious, I find it shocking it's not taken into account more seriously.
Our present situation is due in large part to the incompetence of the IPv6 designers and their total and complete failure to plan, or even recognise the need, for a transition.
The IPv4 address space could have been embedded in the IPv6 space. If the existing standard couldn't handle it, then that standard needed to be changed so it could have. IPv6 machines needed native capability to talk to IPv4 devices. Their lack of it is a damning indictment of the design team and puts a serious question mark over their ability to design adequate technologies.
A lesser problem, but still an important one, was the current IPv6 address naming system. The addresses are inherently long, but no serious effort was made to mitigate this. A complex and self contradicting set of "shortcuts" was the extend to which the designers went to try and mollify a problem they knew was coming, but largely ignored anyway. It will fall to third parties to design the neccessary conversion tools and standards that network engineers around the world will need to use IPv6 in daily practice. Again, a clear sign of incompetence.
5 years ago, when IPv6 adoption rates were recognised as a problem, the designers should have taken steps to make the transition smoother. They didn't bother to do that. As a result, IPv6 in its current form can never be used to make the smooth transition that is required. Instead, we will have a painful and troublesome upgrade process which will give headaches and interoperability problems for the next 40 years, if not simply forever.
This problem will never go away. Once IPv4 runs out completely, there will be a mess of an internet with NAT in places and misconfiguration or conflicting IPv4/IPv6 capable clients with two addresses each all desperately trying to send messages to one another over the tangled knots and wires of madness that the internet will have become. Only reliance on the end to end principle will prevent total and utter meltdown.
It's going to be nasty, and we're all going to have to get used to it.
All of the bitching about the patent/royalty situation ignores the following facts:
It ignores them because they are not relevant. We know H264 is a better codec, has hardware support and is currently in use. That's not the issue.
The issue is that H264 cannot be used without paying protection money to MPEG-LA. No amount of technical or commercial metrics are going to make this legal issue go away. A long as MPEG-LAs patents on the mathematics of video compression in H264 are upheld, it cannot be used for mass video on the web. Unless you want the only video on the web to be that provided by big vendors like Google/Youtube, and the only way to watch it being on the browser of big vendors like Google, Apple and Microsoft?
Is that what you want? A pay to play web? Because right now, that's what what you're telling me you want.
It's not about the reencode time. Google has more than enough resources to reencode every youtube video in existance twice over if they choose that route. It's about the bandwidth.
The fact is, Google offers video on a colossal scale. Remember all those statistics about Youtube being 10% or so of web traffic. Perhaps an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Google is shovelling a lot of bits around every day. 5%-15% of that saved on H264s better compression ratio means Google is quite prepared to sink open video formats if it can save some money on its bandwidth costs.
Google is a web service company. Their browser business with Chrome is a sideline. The same goes for Apple, hardware and Safari. Unfortunately, the presence of these two browsers has given both companies a seat at the W3C video tag table, where they have proceeded to sink the sanest solution for web video in order to benefit their other commercial interests. This is what happens when big business decides industry standards. We lose.
Slashdot Mirror
He did. But what I can't figure out is what the hell you were talking about.
What is the Law? An arbitrary sequence of rules which must be followed come what may? A code which it is always and everywhere immoral to to disobey, even in spirit? An elaborate ritual which those skilled in the art can obtain whatever outcome they please?
The function of the court system is to interpret the law in such a way that justice is served. When billions across the world withdraw their moral support fro copyrighted works and see nothing wrong with filesharing, are they wrong simply because the law says they are wrong? Or is it rather the law that is wrong, for unjustly imposing outdated or undemocratic views upon the population?
The law and the legal system gets too much of a free pass by too many people. It is as fallible and flawed a system as any other designed by human beings and its decisions are not always morally right, or even ethically so. You'll understand the fantasy when you finally have your day in court.
Privacy protection; and ad-blocking.
I'm continually surprised whenever a gender related topic comes up for discussion on Slashdot. There is an awful lot of bitterness towards women on this site. Where it comes from, I don't know; but it is present across the tech sector. Considering how liberal slashdotters tend to be on most issues, this one really stands out like a sore thumb.
Thursday is not purple, it's amortized transit.
Nnnoo. MPEG-LA have promised us that all H264 hits are free until 2016.
That's so far away, I can't even foresee any future problems with the internet giddily adopting H264 en mass. Now, here; be quiet and take a sniff of this pipe I'm going to pass you. It'll feel good.
Wrong. Google is just abiding by it's Golden Rule:
Make all of the world's data publicly available and searchable.
Most people still haven't fully considered the implications of this; or just how single minded Google is going to be about this goal.
This does not inspire me with confidence.
Great idea! I'll be the leader. You all just do exactly what I say and we'll topple the bourgeoisie elites and bring about... whatever it is you wanted exactly. The important part is that you have to pick me to be the leader. Every revolution needs a good dic^H^H^Hleader after all.
I don't accept this as a valid excuse anymore. These organisations were stuck with IE6 over five years ago. Since then there have been umpteen security and technical problems with IE6, and several service packs and new OSes that replace it. Yet we're supposed to believe that these big organisations still have critical backends that will not work ono any other browser? You're telling me these people prefer ActiveX programming over web interfaces or rich clients? I know this is commonly accepted wisdom, but is there any real evidence for it?
IT sometimes moves slowly, but not THAT slowly. The corporate world has moved on. Something else is the cause of all these IE6 browsers still hanging about.
The only limit, the only limit that they will understand is when people get fed up of these restrictions and actively protest or rebel against them.
That's the only thing oppressive, bureaucratic and incompetent governments understand. Until enough people are actually willing to stand up and say: "No, I don't want to be photographed naked by strangers.", the government will simply assume everyone is OK with it. Maybe they actually are; I don't know. I haven't heard one wick of real protest from anyone or any group. People continue to fly in droves--in silence.
You don't write letters. You don't set up a facebook page. You'd don't moan about it on Slashdot. That's not protest. What you have to do is either a) stop flying, or b) refuse the scan and protest and sue like crazy(not for money) when you're not allowed to fly. If the public really is against all this, it may only take one big case to precipitate enough discontent that the restrictions will be removed. Until that happens, nothing will change.
Rights, even the right to wear clothes outside, have to be fought for.
You're not so hot yourself. You used a colon to enter a list, but then didn't use semi-colons to separate the items. Moreover you used three bracketed additions to a single sentence. By my reckoning, you've even got a "parmesan comma" yourself in the third bracket; the structure of the sentence suggest to me that "I'll overlook the emoticon since..." is the more correct usage--not that the sentence makes much sense anyway.
Basically, grammar is less a formal series of rules for better writing, and is more a formal series of rules for petty "one-upmanship" among writers. That's the primary reason people ignore it; it's too subjective. Spelling is different as there is generally a binary answer people can't harp on once it's done correctly. You don't really get spelling Nazis. But Grammar is an eternal struggle in which generations of good writers have had to hack, chop and staple their prose with correctly place commas, colons, dashes, quotes and brackets; and yet they still don't have the equivalent to expressing themselves yourself--quickly and easily--using a '^_^'.
Emoticons are not a sign of poor grammar. They are a sign of the stagnation of grammar in the hands of its professional custodians, and the corresponding vibrancy of the written word in the hands of an innovative population. JRR Tolkien riddled the Lord of the Rings with punctuation marks. He could count himself lucky if most people noticed one in a thousand of them. Punctuation is not as important as some people think it is. And grammar is too subjective to bother with when writing.
This one was pretty tame. The best I've ever seen was the Hitler rant about the balance in Company of Heroes. Fit the scene like a glove. I think you can still enjoy it without having played the game.
Tell you what? Give me $15 million and I'll give the other $15 million to Mozilla to get them to stop ripping on self signed certs. Then we can finally have (far more) secure web browsing than we already have, and all with existing technology.
Frankly, I find that to be the the least questionable thing about it.
Curious ten year olds generally don't give rise to official complaints, withdrawals from school, and subsequent arrests. You are expected to be able to infer subtexts from posts on Slashdot.
They will! But that's not the whole story.
While it is true that the Indian Government could be said to have more immediate concerns, a space program for a country of its size is not entirely without merit. The Apollo program employed over 400,000 people. People working in high tech jobs, all related to science, technology and mathematics. The technologies developed for that program and the experience of the people who worked on it stood to the economy and society of the US for many years during and after. There's also an effect on even primary education as interest in science and technology is sparked in younger minds. If nothing else, the Indian space program might help persuade their best educated graduates to stay in their home country and improve it rather than emigrate for better paying jobs.
But whatever you might have to say about such a space program, at least the Indians aren't wasting trillions on unproductive foreign campaigns. When you ask yourself why the US has no decent space program anymore, you need look no farther than the money wasted over the last eight years.
Scientologists also fail to meet the other, often unstated, prerequisite for being a terrorist.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
Unlike the Islamic Fundamentialists, the IRA, ETA or even the likes of Timothy McVeigh, no-one considers Scientologists to be freedom fighters of any kind. They have so many freedoms they end up abusing them to take away the freedoms of others.
rbrander, Kayne, you make a good case, and I'm going to let you finish--but, the Apollo Moon Landings were the greatest space missions of all time!
It's a video of a baby jumping up and down with awful sound quality. Frankly, I'm disgusted that the lawyers involved were not reprimanded for wasting the courts time.
As I see it, the biggest problem with DMCA takedowns is that they don't involve the courts. Takedowns become a giant bluffing game with lawyers puffing up arguments with legalese and threats in an effort to browbeat their victims. It should be up to the courts to reign in this sort of behavior before all respect for the legal system falls apart. Unfortunately, judges appear to be all too willing to condone and even support such nonsense. There is a great rot in Western judiciaries.
Our present situation is due in large part to the incompetence of the IPv6 designers and their total and complete failure to plan, or even recognise the need, for a transition.
The IPv4 address space could have been embedded in the IPv6 space. If the existing standard couldn't handle it, then that standard needed to be changed so it could have. IPv6 machines needed native capability to talk to IPv4 devices. Their lack of it is a damning indictment of the design team and puts a serious question mark over their ability to design adequate technologies.
A lesser problem, but still an important one, was the current IPv6 address naming system. The addresses are inherently long, but no serious effort was made to mitigate this. A complex and self contradicting set of "shortcuts" was the extend to which the designers went to try and mollify a problem they knew was coming, but largely ignored anyway. It will fall to third parties to design the neccessary conversion tools and standards that network engineers around the world will need to use IPv6 in daily practice. Again, a clear sign of incompetence.
5 years ago, when IPv6 adoption rates were recognised as a problem, the designers should have taken steps to make the transition smoother. They didn't bother to do that. As a result, IPv6 in its current form can never be used to make the smooth transition that is required. Instead, we will have a painful and troublesome upgrade process which will give headaches and interoperability problems for the next 40 years, if not simply forever.
This problem will never go away. Once IPv4 runs out completely, there will be a mess of an internet with NAT in places and misconfiguration or conflicting IPv4/IPv6 capable clients with two addresses each all desperately trying to send messages to one another over the tangled knots and wires of madness that the internet will have become. Only reliance on the end to end principle will prevent total and utter meltdown.
It's going to be nasty, and we're all going to have to get used to it.
Yet we eagerly embrace the promise of new genetics technology and ignore the cautionary messages of films like GATTACA.
It ignores them because they are not relevant. We know H264 is a better codec, has hardware support and is currently in use. That's not the issue.
The issue is that H264 cannot be used without paying protection money to MPEG-LA. No amount of technical or commercial metrics are going to make this legal issue go away. A long as MPEG-LAs patents on the mathematics of video compression in H264 are upheld, it cannot be used for mass video on the web. Unless you want the only video on the web to be that provided by big vendors like Google/Youtube, and the only way to watch it being on the browser of big vendors like Google, Apple and Microsoft?
Is that what you want? A pay to play web? Because right now, that's what what you're telling me you want.
How tragic.
It's not about the reencode time. Google has more than enough resources to reencode every youtube video in existance twice over if they choose that route. It's about the bandwidth.
The fact is, Google offers video on a colossal scale. Remember all those statistics about Youtube being 10% or so of web traffic. Perhaps an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Google is shovelling a lot of bits around every day. 5%-15% of that saved on H264s better compression ratio means Google is quite prepared to sink open video formats if it can save some money on its bandwidth costs.
Google is a web service company. Their browser business with Chrome is a sideline. The same goes for Apple, hardware and Safari. Unfortunately, the presence of these two browsers has given both companies a seat at the W3C video tag table, where they have proceeded to sink the sanest solution for web video in order to benefit their other commercial interests. This is what happens when big business decides industry standards. We lose.