Basically, while the telecope was still on the ground, any delays could mean invoking the budget cutting ire of funding agencies, and the lauch could have been scrapped. Now that it's up there, they don't really have to worry about that sort of thing anymore.
No, no,no,no,no. The App Store is itself just a single part of a greater, more restrictive whole. A central part, but only a component in a greater scheme.
With the iPod and now the iPhone, Apple have achieved a level of control over their hardware and their users that hitherto has been enjoyed only by video game console manufacturers (an important case study in walled gardens). Apple, Microsoft and Sony sell not only locked down consoles with the ability to run only certified binaries, they also sell (by now essential) access to a wide yet corralled network without which their devices are severely limited. Access to this network is at the sole pleasure of the company. On it, you operate by their rules. You go only where they want, do only what they want you to do and if you displease them in any way, if off you go and your device is as good as bricked.
In fact, these companies retain the ability to brick any device they like at will, and rescind any rights, or remove any programs that their users currently enjoy. Remember the Baby Shake app? That was taken off the App Store. But, if the media furore had become heated enough, Apple in theory has the ability to remove the application from every iPhone on their network, or at least force the program to be patched.
The worst part of this is just how eagerly people have accepted these walled gardens and all they entail. In return for some flashy applications and a shiny white case, people have literally gone from owning devices to merely paying for services. Normal PC users are not immune. Application and network packages like Steam take control away from users and hold them compliant under threat of expulsion from the garden. Blizzard went so far as to mandate that users install monitoring software on their own PCs to play World of Warcraft, effectively declairing that Blizzard had a right to do as it pleased on a computer it didn't even own.
What companies want is simple. Control. Control over their IP, control over user and their behavior, control over how and where their services and products can be used. Given this control, they will abuse it. The trouble is, people seem more than happy to give it to them.
Any DNS gurus care to explain why they wouldn't simply use UTF8?
Because they know full well that the vast majority of web developers don't really know what unicode is or how it works. Moreover the unicode spec is forever in flux and complete overkill for the international url problem. Lation only urls are a fly, we don't need a bazooka.
Frankly, the current Punycode based system is truly inspired, giving the best of both worlds. Newer browsers can display and use international urls seamlessly, but older systems need never know they exist. People get what they wanted and the entire system chugs on as before. This is exactly what was needed. A simple and effective system that sits on top of existing infrastructure.
If only IPv6 has been designed to be this transition friendly.
If that is the case, then that country is not operating according to free trade principles. Requiring content to meet outlandish local censorship laws is a very obvious form of protectionism favoring locally produced content. This applies in particular to requirements on companies like Google to censor search results or the like in place like China.
China is the single biggest offender here, but there are a swath of other countries who seem to have no trouble whatsoever banning (foreign) goods and services despite claiming to be part of free trade agreements. Why is it that a factory owner in China can sell me as many widgets as it can produce with no restrictions, yet I cannot sell a single book, film, program or search result back to him without satisfying umpteen layers of red tape?
There are plenty of examples of gun CEOs turning $100M companies into $1B companies. If their leadership results in hundreds of millions in extra profit, they deserve a good slice of the pie.
I guarantee you that any CEO who turned a company around like that didn't give himself a slice anywhere near the size of the chunks gouged by some executives. The mentality and ethics of the efficient CEO are entirely at odds with the sponger CEO. One is good for the company, the other is not.
There are people out there curing disease and moving industries. But this guy gets all the air time? I'm reminded of James Woods in the film True Crime, playing a hard nosed newspaper editor, uttering the sage words: "People want to read about sex organs and blood.". This is clearly a mantra that applies to science stories as well as any others. And we wonder why science is held in such low regard by many.
Science journalism, despite all it protestations, is not that beneficial to society or scientists. It's just regular journalism with a different topic and is better avoided by all serious people and scientists alike. Get thee to a blog.
The reality is that the Chinese government's censorship policy and implementation has been the most successful and comprehensive one ever applied. The Chinese population remains both connected to the internet, yet blissfully ignorant of any and all controversial politics in their country. By adopting a strategy of simply making it a nuisance to access prohibited information, the chinese communist party has achieved what no other government before it ever could; Control over mindshare. Searching for information online, in a seemingly open way, will lead most citizens to pro-government sites and information. it is effectively impossible to be a dissident in such an environment without the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in computer science.
This model has been successful and we are beginning to see being implemented in western world. Organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation, who privately and silently block access to swathes of websites are essentially doppelgängers of Chinese censorship boards, behaving and oeprating in precisely the same way. They make information difficult to find, but in a covert way. Technologies like deep packet inspection, pioneered by western companies for the great firewall, are now being sold to western governments and ISPs. The internet genies is not being put back in the bottle, but instead the cap is being screwed down so that only the odd puff can escape, and this is all that is needed.
The Chinese model works. It works well. It is going to be implemented in the Western world, and indeed the first steps have already been taken. What is needed is a method of mass circumvention so absurdly easy to use and transparent that it is actually easier to use that than it is to silently acquiesce to censorship. Something like a one click install firefox extension which creates a Tor or eDonkey like network hosting censored websites, and that operates completely silently, offering automatic access for people that don't have it.
We need such a system soon, because if the Chinese model goes unchallenged it will become the default model for countries around the world and there will be no more exit nodes, and no more free internet.
They keep cost and quality low because that is what their customers actually want, or at least, that is what they are willing to pay for.
Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better. The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality. AT&T's customers are still with it after all. Why should AT&T attempt to improve the quality of its network if people are a) willing to pay for what they currently have, and b) won't pay for any attempts AT&T will make to improve quality. In the telecoms business, ordinary people can and will jump on the cheapest package available.
It's been a race to the bottom in more industries than this one. So we really can't complain when such shocking lapses in quality occur even in the largest companies.
Now, one of the many things that anti-copyright arguments sidestep is that "everybody is doing it" does not equate with "you can't stop it", and especially "it is good".
This is indeed true. But, as in the case of copyright infringement, when so many people across political, social, cultural, economic and national boundaries have all simultaneously reached the same conclusion with regard to filesharing, this tells us at least that our current copyright laws are in need of modernisation and reform.
At this point, the idea of authors or owners having absolute rights over copying and distribution has become unworkable. My point is not that copyright itself is invalid, but rather that it is in need of reform. Reform that recognises that in the digital age, it is unreasonable to forbid ordinary people to copy works. Copyright can probably find a place in the commercial sphere, where there are few enough companies to make enforcement feasible. But trying to enforce copyright amidst the general population is unworkable and damaging.
Going back to the analogies of the bishops and the bible, the bishops lost their argument, but the bible remained. True, it ceased to be an esoteric scriptural text for a learned few, and became a mass popular work read in the vernacular by millions. But it did continue on, even if the meaning and context had changed. Copyright needs to go through a similar transformation.
Copyright now essentially resembles a religious institution. Modern proscriptions on the copying and redistribution of data in the digital age resemble, if anything, proscriptions on the distribution of translations of the Bible in the 1500's at the advent of the printing press. In both cases the technology exists that enables people to transmit information freely and cheaply. In both cases, this new ability threatens the monopoly of an established order. In both cases, that order goes to extreme and unreasonable lengths to defend a status quo that has become farcical.
So, like the bishops of old, the copyright industry is forced to extreme measures. Attack anyone, at any time, anywhere who seeks to defend or aid or in any way comfort those who break their canon, and do so with the utmost ferocity possible. Our modern legal system enables them to be as vindictive as they like with all the power of the courts behind the. Youtube is and always will be a prime target of their ire, being as it is, the bazaar of modern user content generation and distribution. If they can, they will send the state to smash and tear down the stalls seen here, and send all the meddlers packing. But, they are forgetting the forces that created the bazaar in the first place.
As the supply becomes infinite, what happens to the price? As people have the ability to copy and now distribute data, text, music and movies at virtually zero cost, why is this data worth anything anymore? Trying to argue about creators rights or fairness or legalities is to sidestep the main issue; the data is fundamentally worth zero. Attempt as you like to construct sophistic or legal or moral arguments around this. But you have sidesteped this main issue, and its fundamental and central issue is aptly demonstrated by the stampede of ordinary people from all walks of life crashing through it and filesharing as they see fit. The public has made its decision.
You can protest. You can condemn. You can litigate. But ultimately your position is like that of church leaders who protested against the popular printed Bible. People aren't listening. No argument or law or sermon is going to dissuade them from breaking laws they think are silly or unjust. The concept of copyright is too abstract a thing for most people to see breaking it as criminal. The cost of digital distribution too low for most to see its content as being worth anything. The internet has fundamentally changed the nature of content and copyright in a way just as profound as the printing press and the general public has very quickly woken up to this fact. It's time for our legal system to do the same.
Having spent the majority of the evening trying to get sound on and intel hda board to work properly in Ubuntu 9.04, I will say that the burden of proof is no entirely on the GP troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, while the telecope was still on the ground, any delays could mean invoking the budget cutting ire of funding agencies, and the lauch could have been scrapped. Now that it's up there, they don't really have to worry about that sort of thing anymore.
No, no,no,no,no. The App Store is itself just a single part of a greater, more restrictive whole. A central part, but only a component in a greater scheme.
With the iPod and now the iPhone, Apple have achieved a level of control over their hardware and their users that hitherto has been enjoyed only by video game console manufacturers (an important case study in walled gardens). Apple, Microsoft and Sony sell not only locked down consoles with the ability to run only certified binaries, they also sell (by now essential) access to a wide yet corralled network without which their devices are severely limited. Access to this network is at the sole pleasure of the company. On it, you operate by their rules. You go only where they want, do only what they want you to do and if you displease them in any way, if off you go and your device is as good as bricked.
In fact, these companies retain the ability to brick any device they like at will, and rescind any rights, or remove any programs that their users currently enjoy. Remember the Baby Shake app? That was taken off the App Store. But, if the media furore had become heated enough, Apple in theory has the ability to remove the application from every iPhone on their network, or at least force the program to be patched.
The worst part of this is just how eagerly people have accepted these walled gardens and all they entail. In return for some flashy applications and a shiny white case, people have literally gone from owning devices to merely paying for services. Normal PC users are not immune. Application and network packages like Steam take control away from users and hold them compliant under threat of expulsion from the garden. Blizzard went so far as to mandate that users install monitoring software on their own PCs to play World of Warcraft, effectively declairing that Blizzard had a right to do as it pleased on a computer it didn't even own.
What companies want is simple. Control. Control over their IP, control over user and their behavior, control over how and where their services and products can be used. Given this control, they will abuse it. The trouble is, people seem more than happy to give it to them.
Because they know full well that the vast majority of web developers don't really know what unicode is or how it works. Moreover the unicode spec is forever in flux and complete overkill for the international url problem. Lation only urls are a fly, we don't need a bazooka.
Frankly, the current Punycode based system is truly inspired, giving the best of both worlds. Newer browsers can display and use international urls seamlessly, but older systems need never know they exist. People get what they wanted and the entire system chugs on as before. This is exactly what was needed. A simple and effective system that sits on top of existing infrastructure.
If only IPv6 has been designed to be this transition friendly.
If that is the case, then that country is not operating according to free trade principles. Requiring content to meet outlandish local censorship laws is a very obvious form of protectionism favoring locally produced content. This applies in particular to requirements on companies like Google to censor search results or the like in place like China.
China is the single biggest offender here, but there are a swath of other countries who seem to have no trouble whatsoever banning (foreign) goods and services despite claiming to be part of free trade agreements. Why is it that a factory owner in China can sell me as many widgets as it can produce with no restrictions, yet I cannot sell a single book, film, program or search result back to him without satisfying umpteen layers of red tape?
And people wonder why there is a trade imbalance.
Did somebody say "Lawsuit"?
That's funny. They sound just like the drivers I know who always get into accidents.
This is probably the most insightful post on American culture I have ever read.
Your Google-fu is weak my son. Apparently the quote really is from Heinlein's first published story, "Life-Line", written in 1939.
In post-Soviet Russia, plot runs away from you!
Communist!!!
I'm surprised that web developers haven't copped on to the fact that ads hosted on their own server don't get blocked.
...and the horse you rode in on, sir. And the horse you rode in on.
I guarantee you that any CEO who turned a company around like that didn't give himself a slice anywhere near the size of the chunks gouged by some executives. The mentality and ethics of the efficient CEO are entirely at odds with the sponger CEO. One is good for the company, the other is not.
There are people out there curing disease and moving industries. But this guy gets all the air time? I'm reminded of James Woods in the film True Crime, playing a hard nosed newspaper editor, uttering the sage words: "People want to read about sex organs and blood.". This is clearly a mantra that applies to science stories as well as any others. And we wonder why science is held in such low regard by many.
Science journalism, despite all it protestations, is not that beneficial to society or scientists. It's just regular journalism with a different topic and is better avoided by all serious people and scientists alike. Get thee to a blog.
What makes you think they should?
The reality is that the Chinese government's censorship policy and implementation has been the most successful and comprehensive one ever applied. The Chinese population remains both connected to the internet, yet blissfully ignorant of any and all controversial politics in their country. By adopting a strategy of simply making it a nuisance to access prohibited information, the chinese communist party has achieved what no other government before it ever could; Control over mindshare. Searching for information online, in a seemingly open way, will lead most citizens to pro-government sites and information. it is effectively impossible to be a dissident in such an environment without the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in computer science.
This model has been successful and we are beginning to see being implemented in western world. Organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation, who privately and silently block access to swathes of websites are essentially doppelgängers of Chinese censorship boards, behaving and oeprating in precisely the same way. They make information difficult to find, but in a covert way. Technologies like deep packet inspection, pioneered by western companies for the great firewall, are now being sold to western governments and ISPs. The internet genies is not being put back in the bottle, but instead the cap is being screwed down so that only the odd puff can escape, and this is all that is needed.
The Chinese model works. It works well. It is going to be implemented in the Western world, and indeed the first steps have already been taken. What is needed is a method of mass circumvention so absurdly easy to use and transparent that it is actually easier to use that than it is to silently acquiesce to censorship. Something like a one click install firefox extension which creates a Tor or eDonkey like network hosting censored websites, and that operates completely silently, offering automatic access for people that don't have it.
We need such a system soon, because if the Chinese model goes unchallenged it will become the default model for countries around the world and there will be no more exit nodes, and no more free internet.
They keep cost and quality low because that is what their customers actually want, or at least, that is what they are willing to pay for.
Let's face it. The western consumer values one thing above all else; price. The cheaper the better. The public has shown repeatedly that it will value cost above quality. AT&T's customers are still with it after all. Why should AT&T attempt to improve the quality of its network if people are a) willing to pay for what they currently have, and b) won't pay for any attempts AT&T will make to improve quality. In the telecoms business, ordinary people can and will jump on the cheapest package available.
It's been a race to the bottom in more industries than this one. So we really can't complain when such shocking lapses in quality occur even in the largest companies.
g) Officer Barbrady
h) RMS
i) Chef?
You're assuming an unusually high level of competence in government IT departments.
This is indeed true. But, as in the case of copyright infringement, when so many people across political, social, cultural, economic and national boundaries have all simultaneously reached the same conclusion with regard to filesharing, this tells us at least that our current copyright laws are in need of modernisation and reform.
At this point, the idea of authors or owners having absolute rights over copying and distribution has become unworkable. My point is not that copyright itself is invalid, but rather that it is in need of reform. Reform that recognises that in the digital age, it is unreasonable to forbid ordinary people to copy works. Copyright can probably find a place in the commercial sphere, where there are few enough companies to make enforcement feasible. But trying to enforce copyright amidst the general population is unworkable and damaging.
Going back to the analogies of the bishops and the bible, the bishops lost their argument, but the bible remained. True, it ceased to be an esoteric scriptural text for a learned few, and became a mass popular work read in the vernacular by millions. But it did continue on, even if the meaning and context had changed. Copyright needs to go through a similar transformation.
Because Copyright is Sacred.
Copyright now essentially resembles a religious institution. Modern proscriptions on the copying and redistribution of data in the digital age resemble, if anything, proscriptions on the distribution of translations of the Bible in the 1500's at the advent of the printing press. In both cases the technology exists that enables people to transmit information freely and cheaply. In both cases, this new ability threatens the monopoly of an established order. In both cases, that order goes to extreme and unreasonable lengths to defend a status quo that has become farcical.
So, like the bishops of old, the copyright industry is forced to extreme measures. Attack anyone, at any time, anywhere who seeks to defend or aid or in any way comfort those who break their canon, and do so with the utmost ferocity possible. Our modern legal system enables them to be as vindictive as they like with all the power of the courts behind the. Youtube is and always will be a prime target of their ire, being as it is, the bazaar of modern user content generation and distribution. If they can, they will send the state to smash and tear down the stalls seen here, and send all the meddlers packing. But, they are forgetting the forces that created the bazaar in the first place.
As the supply becomes infinite, what happens to the price? As people have the ability to copy and now distribute data, text, music and movies at virtually zero cost, why is this data worth anything anymore? Trying to argue about creators rights or fairness or legalities is to sidestep the main issue; the data is fundamentally worth zero. Attempt as you like to construct sophistic or legal or moral arguments around this. But you have sidesteped this main issue, and its fundamental and central issue is aptly demonstrated by the stampede of ordinary people from all walks of life crashing through it and filesharing as they see fit. The public has made its decision.
You can protest. You can condemn. You can litigate. But ultimately your position is like that of church leaders who protested against the popular printed Bible. People aren't listening. No argument or law or sermon is going to dissuade them from breaking laws they think are silly or unjust. The concept of copyright is too abstract a thing for most people to see breaking it as criminal. The cost of digital distribution too low for most to see its content as being worth anything. The internet has fundamentally changed the nature of content and copyright in a way just as profound as the printing press and the general public has very quickly woken up to this fact. It's time for our legal system to do the same.
Having spent the majority of the evening trying to get sound on and intel hda board to work properly in Ubuntu 9.04, I will say that the burden of proof is no entirely on the GP troll.
Hmmmm.... I wonder whether the women of Taiwan are so quick to subscribe to it?
Something tells me such jockeys wouldn't be caught dead with an autoexec.bat file either.
Why bother ripping? Your first task on coming home from the hospital should be to grab a torrent like this one.