It would be quite simple to organize boycotts against products and companies that don't give you adequate information.
The reality of boycotts is that they're a fairly extraordinary measure and not easy to organize on a scale that has an effect. The purpose of laws includes allowing even a single person to get justice in a case where he is the only person who has been wronged.
And should we say, "Hey, no point in having child labor laws. People can just boycott companies who use child labor if they don't like it"? Or "Screw the FDA. If someone is selling ineffective drugs and enough people die from treatable disease as a result, then people won't buy drugs from that company anymore"?
If we all agree that there is some kind of activity that is clearly out of the bounds of responsible behavior, then what's wrong with making a law which bans it?
Yeah, if you can write to the company and they're required to tell you what information they have on you, then that's good. If anyone can write to that company and have all the information that they have on you, that's bad. So what's the security there?
I mean, isn't that always the problem with security? If everything could always be accessible to everyone, security would be easy. If nothing ever needed to be accessed by anyone, then security would be easy. It's making things easily accessible to the right people and inaccessible to everyone else that's difficult.
One thing that caught my attention in the summary:
users should be able to see data collected about them
Seems like a very valid sort of thing to want. If your company has information about me, I should be able to know what information you have. Common sense, right?
On the other hand, if you're going to talk about something like this, don't you also have to talk about other increases in security to go along with the additional transparency? If you're going to make it increasingly easy for me to see information about me, it should go hand in hand with making it increasingly difficult for someone who is not-me to access that information about me.
I really think it's time that we talk about improving our security models. SSL on everything would be a good start.
Yeah, really it's been weird all year. The first black president, record labels drop DRM, Duke Nukem Forever is finally cancelled, The Watchmen is released as a movie, HTML5 and CSS3 are starting to be implemented in almost all the major browsers, and...
...what else? I bet we could keep it going. That stuff was just off the top of my head.
That's a good question, but if you think about it, it's pretty understandable. If you remember, Gmail used to by an invite-only thing that they were testing. When each of these services were first introduced, they were unstable (both in terms of reliability and the unpredictability of changes) enough to warrant the "beta" tag.
So they probably had a vague and intuitive notion of what "beta" meant to them. However, if you don't have a clear and specific definition of "beta", then there will never be a moment when it clearly makes sense to drop the label.
It's not about being cutting edge, it's about being a catch-all. VLC is an open source cross-platform (works well and looks relatively native in Linux, OSX, and Windows) video player that plays and transcodes almost any format you throw at it. And it's not really "another" video player that does this, but pretty much *the* video player that does this.
To be fair, I don't think it's Apple's NIH syndrome that's causing the problem. As others have pointed out, it's more likely that they want video on the web to be in a format for which they can put hardware acceleration into the iPhone, so as to give decent battery life.
Google may have more diverse concerns, including Android battery life, processor usage when transcoding video for YouTube, and storage/bandwidth usage for YouTube. I bet saving even a couple kilobytes per video would add up pretty fast.
I agree, though, that a lack of a consistent standard tends to favor Microsoft and Adobe. Still, H264 support is becoming pretty common. Even if Opera and Mozilla can't support decoding themselves, they may be able to pass the work back to the OS and let the OS do the work.
This isn't "socializing". What we do here on Slashdot is engage in little intellectual arguments about a variety of topics. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes they're inane, often they're impolite, but what they never are is "social".
If you want to live in a society, then you actually then it's probably a good idea to involve living and society. If you want to stop dealing with society for a little while and go kick the asses of super villains with your super powers, that sounds like a good video game.
DRM is becoming more and more prevalent with video and pretty well all DRM leads back to Microsoft.
Can you spell that out a little more? I mean, a few years ago, I was aware of a lot of services selling DRM wrapped WMAs, but I can't think of a service that uses DRM wrapped WMVs. Mostly I hear about people using Hulu, which isn't using Microsoft's DRM. It doesn't seem to me that DRM with video isn't any more prevalent than it was a couple years ago.
But who joins City of Heroes to "live in a society"? I've never played, but I thought about it. It wasn't so I could live in a society, but so I could have super powers, choose a side, and then run around kicking the asses of people on the opposing side with said super powers.
When I was a kid, I didn't play Doom so I could learn about demon culture. If I want to live in a society, video games are not the appropriate place for that.
I think I tried the F2RP and it didn't help. It seemed to be a particular problem with recent ATI cards. But whatever, really my point is that, at some point, none of us will have a system that will play these old games anymore. Microsoft will drop support for something the game requires, or you won't be using Windows anymore. That may be 5-10 years from now, but that day is coming. When it does, it'd be nice to know that you'll still be able to play those games somehow.
And yes, I've played Arcanum. I agree, if you're a Fallout fan, it's definitely worth your time.
Now if only there were more of a focus on emulation of the platforms these games play on. I tried playing Fallout 2 on one of my computers a little while back, and even though it should run on Windows XP, it kept crashing because of a conflict with my video card. I've tried playing some old DOS games in an emulator on my Mac, and some worked, but they took a fair amount of mucking around and lots of things just didn't work.
It'd be nice if some company like GOG were to release (or endorse) an open source emulator platform and certify the games to run on them, basically guaranteeing you future proof access to the games you bought.
Well it does matter, it's just that the matter is far from settled.
Honestly, I think it is possible to overestimate the power of Microsoft's vendor lock-in. If they don't get in gear and really compete in the browser market, it's only a matter of time before it bites them in the ass. They've already lost of decent chunk of the market to these other browsers.
If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.
Oh, yeah, I meant, "Expect their products to support H264 and AAC from here on out." I think the Windows 7, Zune, and Xbox already support H264 and AAC. (Though I don't own any of them, so I may be wrong.)
Oh, I don't think Flash will go away overnight. On the other hand, a lot of that will be the inertia of people sticking with Flash particularly, which is exactly the force MS has to overcome to spur Silverlight adoption. But absent that inertia, I think people may well move to open standards, assuming sufficiently good standards exist.
It would be nice if Apple would go ahead and support OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora. Can any lawyerly folk give an idea of the worst possible scenario here? Someone steps forward claiming to have patented something in OGG, and Apple is forced to either strip support or pay a licensing fee?
On the other hand, their method of supporting the video tag seems somewhat reasonable. It looks like any format that Quicktime supports, Safari will support in the "video" tag. It's not hard to go download the OGG Theora codec online, and then Quicktime will support it. Same with DivX and Xvid and anything else.
No, it doesn't really solve the problem of having a single video format that you can assume everyone can play, but it's sort of a reasonable way of approaching the problem IMO. Too bad the government can't just take patents as eminent domain with some kind of pre-set compensation for the inventors. I kind of feel like we'd all be better off if the issues surrounding H264 could just be settled once and for all, without waiting for the patents to run out.
I think Microsoft has lost the media wars, and they pretty well know it. (admittedly, just a guess) Expect their products to support H264 and AAC. The bigger fly in their ointment is probably improved web standards in general. They've been gearing up to fight Adobe (Silverlight vs. Flash) for the proprietary "rich web" market, and if HTML/CSS gets rich enough that we don't need a proprietary plugin, that might not end up being a market worth winning.
This doesn't really seem like a big problem to me. What's the worst-case scenario here? Schools save tons of money and teachers have to come up with their own questions?
Well maybe with all that extra money, you can pay teachers enough to hire teachers who are smart enough to come up with their own busy-work questions. I've never really understood why the teacher editions need answers in them anyway. Shouldn't the teachers know enough about the subject they're teaching to come up with the answers themselves?
Anyway, the internet being the way it is, there are enough opportunities for children to cheat on busy-work questions. Could we possibly spend time educating our children instead of giving them standardized busy-work, followed up by standardized tests?
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them...
How is this adding something? Did you notice in my post where I said:
Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them
The point is the textbook industry as it currently exists is already the product of an unfree market. The current realities of the textbook market are caused by those un-freedoms. If someone has it in their head to try to fix the situation, it isn't too sensible to complain against them on the basis of interference in "the free market".
Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.
There are lots of problems with this comparison. First, we're talking about textbooks and not Ferraris. Ferraris aren't necessary for the education of our youth and the betterment of society. Second, it's not a question of whether anyone in particular is obligated to provide textbooks, but whether schools and students should be obligated to pay exorbitant fees to textbook publishers.
Finally, the expense of Ferraris isn't generated by artificial scarcity created by copyright law. Ferraris are expensive, at least in part, due to the materials and labor to create each one. However, once a textbook is created, it could be copied indefinitely by anyone at practically no expense, if not for copyright law. Seeing as copyrights are an artificial right granted by society for the sake of the betterment of society, publishers using the copyright to the detriment of our education system seems to me to be an abuse.
Anyway, all of that isn't really the point. The point is, open source textbooks would be a boon for education, and I haven't yet heard a reason why it's unworkable. Even if it stops being a valid commercial venture to some extent, that may just be an issue of technology making an industry obsolete-- buggy whips and all.
If it doesn't exist, especially if it is a service in high demand, like free knowledge, then it means that, most probably, it can't exist without massive subsidies
That might be true of an actual free market, but we don't have a free market. Not in textbooks, and not in a lot of things.
For one thing, the existence of copyright already makes this a market in which the government has intervened and set rules. Besides that, schools often require that students use a specific edition of a specific textbook, so students aren't free to shop around for a better textbook product.
Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.
Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them, but there's no evidence that open source textbooks are impossible.
You want to spend $50,000 on a car that forces you to go back to 1909 standards of travel?
No, my point was that everyone bitches and moans about how something might cost them an extra minute here and there like adding 5 minutes to their trip is going to be the end of the world. But society functioned fine when trips took 20 times as long, so adding a tiny little bit of time isn't going to be the end of the world.
It's like those retards who speed and weave in and out of traffic in the hopes of cutting 30 seconds off of a 20 minute trip. The actual benefit to them is minor and the risk to themselves and everyone else is huge, but they do it anyway because, psychologically, those 30 seconds make a huge difference in making them feel better.
Hell, in the long term, you'll save a lot more time then you'll lose on those once-a-year trips, since you won't have to stop at gas stations.
Why fly when you can drive?
Well, if the whole point is that you want to take a 12 hour trip and you can't handle it taking 12 hours and 1 minute, then you might want to look into a means of transportation that will get you there much faster.
Turning my 8 hour trip into an 11 hour trip is a big deal.
First, it wouldn't turn your 8 hour trip into an 11 hour trip. If the Tesla car only needs to be charged every 4 hours, then you only have to stop once to recharge to go 8 hours. So that's 8:45. Plus, there's a good chance your 8-hour trip already includes one stop or more for gas, a couple bathroom breaks, and a stop for a snack, so you extend any one of those stops by a few minutes and charge your car a little more, and you're not necessarily losing much time at all.
But anyway, adding an hour or two to an 8 hour trip really isn't that big a deal. Quit your whining. Go back in time 100 years, and that 8 hour trip would have taken a week, and the world didn't stop spinning. Yeah, sometimes creating a better world requires accepting some mild inconveniences. If you really can't handle an extra 45 minutes on an 8 hour trip, then fly.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be quite simple to organize boycotts against products and companies that don't give you adequate information.
The reality of boycotts is that they're a fairly extraordinary measure and not easy to organize on a scale that has an effect. The purpose of laws includes allowing even a single person to get justice in a case where he is the only person who has been wronged.
And should we say, "Hey, no point in having child labor laws. People can just boycott companies who use child labor if they don't like it"? Or "Screw the FDA. If someone is selling ineffective drugs and enough people die from treatable disease as a result, then people won't buy drugs from that company anymore"?
If we all agree that there is some kind of activity that is clearly out of the bounds of responsible behavior, then what's wrong with making a law which bans it?
Yeah, if you can write to the company and they're required to tell you what information they have on you, then that's good. If anyone can write to that company and have all the information that they have on you, that's bad. So what's the security there?
I mean, isn't that always the problem with security? If everything could always be accessible to everyone, security would be easy. If nothing ever needed to be accessed by anyone, then security would be easy. It's making things easily accessible to the right people and inaccessible to everyone else that's difficult.
One thing that caught my attention in the summary:
users should be able to see data collected about them
Seems like a very valid sort of thing to want. If your company has information about me, I should be able to know what information you have. Common sense, right?
On the other hand, if you're going to talk about something like this, don't you also have to talk about other increases in security to go along with the additional transparency? If you're going to make it increasingly easy for me to see information about me, it should go hand in hand with making it increasingly difficult for someone who is not-me to access that information about me.
I really think it's time that we talk about improving our security models. SSL on everything would be a good start.
Yeah, really it's been weird all year. The first black president, record labels drop DRM, Duke Nukem Forever is finally cancelled, The Watchmen is released as a movie, HTML5 and CSS3 are starting to be implemented in almost all the major browsers, and...
...what else? I bet we could keep it going. That stuff was just off the top of my head.
Maybe there's still a chance?
That's a good question, but if you think about it, it's pretty understandable. If you remember, Gmail used to by an invite-only thing that they were testing. When each of these services were first introduced, they were unstable (both in terms of reliability and the unpredictability of changes) enough to warrant the "beta" tag.
So they probably had a vague and intuitive notion of what "beta" meant to them. However, if you don't have a clear and specific definition of "beta", then there will never be a moment when it clearly makes sense to drop the label.
It's not about being cutting edge, it's about being a catch-all. VLC is an open source cross-platform (works well and looks relatively native in Linux, OSX, and Windows) video player that plays and transcodes almost any format you throw at it. And it's not really "another" video player that does this, but pretty much *the* video player that does this.
I don't see any reference to codecs in there. It seems like they just aren't addressing that topic in that paper.
And if I don't have Windows 98?
To be fair, I don't think it's Apple's NIH syndrome that's causing the problem. As others have pointed out, it's more likely that they want video on the web to be in a format for which they can put hardware acceleration into the iPhone, so as to give decent battery life.
Google may have more diverse concerns, including Android battery life, processor usage when transcoding video for YouTube, and storage/bandwidth usage for YouTube. I bet saving even a couple kilobytes per video would add up pretty fast.
I agree, though, that a lack of a consistent standard tends to favor Microsoft and Adobe. Still, H264 support is becoming pretty common. Even if Opera and Mozilla can't support decoding themselves, they may be able to pass the work back to the OS and let the OS do the work.
This isn't "socializing". What we do here on Slashdot is engage in little intellectual arguments about a variety of topics. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes they're inane, often they're impolite, but what they never are is "social".
If you want to live in a society, then you actually then it's probably a good idea to involve living and society. If you want to stop dealing with society for a little while and go kick the asses of super villains with your super powers, that sounds like a good video game.
DRM is becoming more and more prevalent with video and pretty well all DRM leads back to Microsoft.
Can you spell that out a little more? I mean, a few years ago, I was aware of a lot of services selling DRM wrapped WMAs, but I can't think of a service that uses DRM wrapped WMVs. Mostly I hear about people using Hulu, which isn't using Microsoft's DRM. It doesn't seem to me that DRM with video isn't any more prevalent than it was a couple years ago.
But who joins City of Heroes to "live in a society"? I've never played, but I thought about it. It wasn't so I could live in a society, but so I could have super powers, choose a side, and then run around kicking the asses of people on the opposing side with said super powers.
When I was a kid, I didn't play Doom so I could learn about demon culture. If I want to live in a society, video games are not the appropriate place for that.
I think I tried the F2RP and it didn't help. It seemed to be a particular problem with recent ATI cards. But whatever, really my point is that, at some point, none of us will have a system that will play these old games anymore. Microsoft will drop support for something the game requires, or you won't be using Windows anymore. That may be 5-10 years from now, but that day is coming. When it does, it'd be nice to know that you'll still be able to play those games somehow.
And yes, I've played Arcanum. I agree, if you're a Fallout fan, it's definitely worth your time.
Now if only there were more of a focus on emulation of the platforms these games play on. I tried playing Fallout 2 on one of my computers a little while back, and even though it should run on Windows XP, it kept crashing because of a conflict with my video card. I've tried playing some old DOS games in an emulator on my Mac, and some worked, but they took a fair amount of mucking around and lots of things just didn't work.
It'd be nice if some company like GOG were to release (or endorse) an open source emulator platform and certify the games to run on them, basically guaranteeing you future proof access to the games you bought.
Well it does matter, it's just that the matter is far from settled.
Honestly, I think it is possible to overestimate the power of Microsoft's vendor lock-in. If they don't get in gear and really compete in the browser market, it's only a matter of time before it bites them in the ass. They've already lost of decent chunk of the market to these other browsers.
If these browsers get to the point where they're all offering a clearly superior experience on the web, and Microsoft is still dragging their feet, they will eventually become irrelevant themselves.
Oh, yeah, I meant, "Expect their products to support H264 and AAC from here on out." I think the Windows 7, Zune, and Xbox already support H264 and AAC. (Though I don't own any of them, so I may be wrong.)
Oh, I don't think Flash will go away overnight. On the other hand, a lot of that will be the inertia of people sticking with Flash particularly, which is exactly the force MS has to overcome to spur Silverlight adoption. But absent that inertia, I think people may well move to open standards, assuming sufficiently good standards exist.
It would be nice if Apple would go ahead and support OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora. Can any lawyerly folk give an idea of the worst possible scenario here? Someone steps forward claiming to have patented something in OGG, and Apple is forced to either strip support or pay a licensing fee?
On the other hand, their method of supporting the video tag seems somewhat reasonable. It looks like any format that Quicktime supports, Safari will support in the "video" tag. It's not hard to go download the OGG Theora codec online, and then Quicktime will support it. Same with DivX and Xvid and anything else.
No, it doesn't really solve the problem of having a single video format that you can assume everyone can play, but it's sort of a reasonable way of approaching the problem IMO. Too bad the government can't just take patents as eminent domain with some kind of pre-set compensation for the inventors. I kind of feel like we'd all be better off if the issues surrounding H264 could just be settled once and for all, without waiting for the patents to run out.
I think Microsoft has lost the media wars, and they pretty well know it. (admittedly, just a guess) Expect their products to support H264 and AAC. The bigger fly in their ointment is probably improved web standards in general. They've been gearing up to fight Adobe (Silverlight vs. Flash) for the proprietary "rich web" market, and if HTML/CSS gets rich enough that we don't need a proprietary plugin, that might not end up being a market worth winning.
This doesn't really seem like a big problem to me. What's the worst-case scenario here? Schools save tons of money and teachers have to come up with their own questions?
Well maybe with all that extra money, you can pay teachers enough to hire teachers who are smart enough to come up with their own busy-work questions. I've never really understood why the teacher editions need answers in them anyway. Shouldn't the teachers know enough about the subject they're teaching to come up with the answers themselves?
Anyway, the internet being the way it is, there are enough opportunities for children to cheat on busy-work questions. Could we possibly spend time educating our children instead of giving them standardized busy-work, followed up by standardized tests?
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them...
How is this adding something? Did you notice in my post where I said:
Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them
The point is the textbook industry as it currently exists is already the product of an unfree market. The current realities of the textbook market are caused by those un-freedoms. If someone has it in their head to try to fix the situation, it isn't too sensible to complain against them on the basis of interference in "the free market".
Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.
There are lots of problems with this comparison. First, we're talking about textbooks and not Ferraris. Ferraris aren't necessary for the education of our youth and the betterment of society. Second, it's not a question of whether anyone in particular is obligated to provide textbooks, but whether schools and students should be obligated to pay exorbitant fees to textbook publishers.
Finally, the expense of Ferraris isn't generated by artificial scarcity created by copyright law. Ferraris are expensive, at least in part, due to the materials and labor to create each one. However, once a textbook is created, it could be copied indefinitely by anyone at practically no expense, if not for copyright law. Seeing as copyrights are an artificial right granted by society for the sake of the betterment of society, publishers using the copyright to the detriment of our education system seems to me to be an abuse.
Anyway, all of that isn't really the point. The point is, open source textbooks would be a boon for education, and I haven't yet heard a reason why it's unworkable. Even if it stops being a valid commercial venture to some extent, that may just be an issue of technology making an industry obsolete-- buggy whips and all.
If it doesn't exist, especially if it is a service in high demand, like free knowledge, then it means that, most probably, it can't exist without massive subsidies
That might be true of an actual free market, but we don't have a free market. Not in textbooks, and not in a lot of things.
For one thing, the existence of copyright already makes this a market in which the government has intervened and set rules. Besides that, schools often require that students use a specific edition of a specific textbook, so students aren't free to shop around for a better textbook product.
Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.
Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them, but there's no evidence that open source textbooks are impossible.
You want to spend $50,000 on a car that forces you to go back to 1909 standards of travel?
No, my point was that everyone bitches and moans about how something might cost them an extra minute here and there like adding 5 minutes to their trip is going to be the end of the world. But society functioned fine when trips took 20 times as long, so adding a tiny little bit of time isn't going to be the end of the world.
It's like those retards who speed and weave in and out of traffic in the hopes of cutting 30 seconds off of a 20 minute trip. The actual benefit to them is minor and the risk to themselves and everyone else is huge, but they do it anyway because, psychologically, those 30 seconds make a huge difference in making them feel better.
Hell, in the long term, you'll save a lot more time then you'll lose on those once-a-year trips, since you won't have to stop at gas stations.
Why fly when you can drive?
Well, if the whole point is that you want to take a 12 hour trip and you can't handle it taking 12 hours and 1 minute, then you might want to look into a means of transportation that will get you there much faster.
Turning my 8 hour trip into an 11 hour trip is a big deal.
First, it wouldn't turn your 8 hour trip into an 11 hour trip. If the Tesla car only needs to be charged every 4 hours, then you only have to stop once to recharge to go 8 hours. So that's 8:45. Plus, there's a good chance your 8-hour trip already includes one stop or more for gas, a couple bathroom breaks, and a stop for a snack, so you extend any one of those stops by a few minutes and charge your car a little more, and you're not necessarily losing much time at all.
But anyway, adding an hour or two to an 8 hour trip really isn't that big a deal. Quit your whining. Go back in time 100 years, and that 8 hour trip would have taken a week, and the world didn't stop spinning. Yeah, sometimes creating a better world requires accepting some mild inconveniences. If you really can't handle an extra 45 minutes on an 8 hour trip, then fly.