... which raises some questions: How do you determine whether something has free will? Are you sure you have free will? Even if you have free will, how can you be sure other people have free will?
No matter how hard they try, and they will, MS will not get anything that can be called portable enough to be a 'phone' to also be a person's primary computer, with or without the addition of interfacing to a tv for video output
Well, yeah, really I don't think the prediction is "wrong" so much as "obvious". Phones keep adding more PDA-like features, internet features, etc. They already have an impressive amount of computing power and loads of general computing functionality. If you have a lightweight computer in your pocket all day, how long will it be before someone gives you a means to hook it to a monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it as a desktop too?
The question is, of course, will Microsoft be the company that makes these devices popular? Well, what will be needed is streamlined code so that everything will run quickly on low-powered devices, and a streamlined interface for the tiny phone screen. Is Microsoft known for cutting bloat and well-designed interfaces? No.
I don't know what company will finally make the breakthrough device, but I predict it will be a company that is particularly good at making good interfaces.
Yeah, even people who are fairly computer literate don't always know the difference between a website, a server, a web page, a weblog, a web service, a forum, etc. I mean, they might have a vague idea, but vague ideas don't cut it when it comes down to legal decisions-- minor technical differences can change everything. If a judge doesn't fully understand a topic, it's only appropriate that he asks for clarification (at least).
This is entirely true. Whether you view Global Warming as hard science or a myth, your localized anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. When you have a particularly cold day, this does not mean that global warming has ceased or been disproved. Likewise, if there is a particular warm day, this is not evidence of global warming.
I'm sick of everyone telling me about Global Warming every time there's a warm day. Every winter, there's some 50 degree day in December where I hear some moron spouting about, "This is scary! It's December and so it's supposed to be 20 degrees!! Global Warming is going to kill us!!" Except.... I grew up in the area, and my family has lived in the area for about 100 years, and there have *ALWAYS* been 50 degree days in December. It's not unusual or new.
Most likely, wherever you live, the weather is not noticeably different than it was 50 years ago. Even if the weather is different, it could be due to normal natural causes-- climates change over time and weather goes through cycles. Even with the most extreme Global Warming numbers, you're talking about a rise in temperatures of a couple degrees.
Don't get me wrong-- I'm not trying to dismiss the importance of global warming because it's "only a couple degrees". Geologically, a couple degrees can have a huge impact, and it's possible that these couple degrees could cause a lot of problems. However, Global warming has not increased the temperature of the Earth by 30 degrees in the past 5 years, so if you have a 50 degree day in the winter, it's probably not due to Global Warming. So please, everyone, just shut up about it and let the scientists do there thing and figure things out.
I'm not sure whether it's relevant to this case, but I agree. If you're a big enough company, you can get it so Gold support isn't that outrageously expensive anyway, but it makes all the difference. If you call Dell as a normal customer, their support kinda sucks-- still better than most, but doesn't say much. But if you have Gold support, you'll at least be routed to real support personnel within a couple minutes, and you'll have replacement hardware within 4 hours.
Also, if you're a volume licensing customer, all your current purchases are good for a copy of Vista. If you have SA, all your past purchases are good for a copy of Vista. For example, I have 20 licenses of Vista due to eOpen licenses that I bought, all of which are, in fact, XP installations.
Are these counted? I don't really know, but it would explain the numbers. Think of all the companies with volume licensing.
That sort of "slavery" that these people are talking about exists in any "free market" where workers work for wages. This is not the same as a moral philosophy which endorses unethical behaviors; it's people arguing that paying others for work is inherently a form of exploitation. How old are you? Have you ever read any philosophy regarding these topics?
Sorry, I'm approaching it from an economic realist standpoint. What happens in your nice little world of people charging just enough to get by is that, in the long run, benefits are reduced for everyone.
I didn't say "enough to get by", but a fair price-- with a modest profit. It's true that only generating enough for sustenance doesn't allow for much progress. On the other hand, being overly-greedy in the short term and abusing your partners, suppliers, and customers-- these things can set us back, damage our society, and leave whole markets ruined. Too often, businesses these days are relying on a "broken window" sort of situation. They abuse their position of power to purposefully force the existence of sub-optimal conditions. They create artificial problems so that they can charge you money for fixing those problems. That doesn't really increase quality of life across the board.
If actors are free to act as they will within the capitalist system, and you're not happy with the results, then your problem is with the system, no?
No. Your own sentence here acknowledges another possible source of problems, besides the system: the actors. Good social/economic systems will still fail if the people enacting those systems make bad decisions.
hmmm... let's see what some other people have to say about capitalism.
Answers.com:
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
Wikipedia:
Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, and in which investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are determined through the operation of a free market. It is usually considered to involve the right of individuals and groups of individuals acting as "legal persons" or corporations to trade capital goods, labor, land and money (see finance and credit).
Additionally, in my reading of Smith (often thought to be the father of capitalism), there's no notion like what you're talking about. In fact, Smith implies that a smart capitalist (which is what is desired for the good of society) will deal fairly with others.
So, yeah, I just don't get what you're talking about. Please point me in the direction of some philosophic thinking who has described this system and how it's supposed to work.
Oh, most of the people in "the media" are liberal, but they're also lazy, stupid, greedy, corrupt cowards who'd rather talk about Anna Nicole Smith than any real news stories. These things aren't mutually exclusive.
Investigative reporting is practically dead. Unless you hand them a perfectly safe fluff story guaranteed to get ratings, you won't hear about it.
IIRC, the issue with the "lost" e-mails was that people in the whitehouse (Rove) were using e-mail addresses associated with georgewbush.com instead of whitehouse.gov. The difference? georgewbush.com is run by the GOP. The GOP suspiciously failed to archive of backup the e-mails sent to georgewbush.com, and additionally had a policy where old e-mails were automatically deleted after some certain amount of time.
Meanwhile, (apparently) some people accidentally sent their e-mails to georgewbush.org, which is owned by someone who doesn't like Bush.
If Capitalism is the philosophic theory you're suggesting, can you tell me when this theory was formulated and by whom? What great thinker put together the system whereby unethical business practices bring about the "Good" result? I'd be interested to read that.
Though I've gotten the impression that people think capitalism is a moral philosophy which advocates any and all measures which provide short-term profits, I've never been able to discover the roots of this. I've read people like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and it seems neither the capitalists nor the communists have any notion of that moral philosophy. As far as I can tell, this moral philosophy of "capitalism" appeared spontaneously in the minds of morons all over the place, with no support for their theories, but wishing to justify their own immoral behavior.
When I talk about capitalism, I'm referring to the economic system of private ownership and economic freedom.
I agree that piracy probably helps some companies, Microsoft and Adobe included. However, I don't think that issue should be considered in copyright legislation since I'm not sure how this sort of effect could be quantified. If one of these companies feels like it's benefiting from piracy, they have the option of not pursuing pirates.
For me, 150% was pulled out of thin air. You could argue about the amount, but my point is that the punishment should really be somewhat proportionate to the offense. Though I sympathize with copyright holders, a single act of copyright infringement simply isn't a serious crime, and therefore does not deserve a serious punishment.
In my opinion, each instance should carry a penalty higher than the cost of the product, specifically so that, if people intend to profit from the copies, they will have lost money. Further, if they can demonstrate that you're distributing copyrighted material for profit, that should carry additional (more serious) penalties. However, the penalty should be chosen so that an individual downloading software/content for their own use is punished, but not severely.
Well, that's a debate about capitalism. Some would argue that your system is inefficient, and would therefore not make best use of resources, and would therefore result in less for everyone.
That's not the debate about capitalism-- my "system" isn't a system. Capitalism is a system of economic freedom, but "economic freedom" does not require that you adopt ruthless unethical business practices any more than personal freedom requires people to be assholes. It gives you the freedom to do so, but that freedom is not a moral imperative to act viciously.
They're allowed to charge whatever they feel like in much the same way that I'm allowed to be a total asshole. Yeah, it's allowed in a free society, but that doesn't make it good or smart.
Trying to maximize profits at the detriment of your own customers is common practice, and that's largely why so many things are completely screwed up. The world would be better if people were willing to settle for an honest buck, a modest profit, instead of screwing over everyone as far as they're allowed with no consideration for the ramifications.
I think the penalty should be whatever it takes to make piracy unthinkable.
Whatever makes piracy "unthinkable"? Sure, yeah, lets.... how about we kill your firstborn. You get caught pirating, and we kill your children on the spot. That would make piracy unthinkable.
Llsten, I really do sympathize, but as you say, almost no one ever gets caught for piracy, and because punishment is so unlikely, no punishment will ever keep people from pirating unless it's excessively cruel. Instead, let the punishment be commensurate with the crime. We're not talking about killers or child molesters. We're not even talking about theft (no, we're not). We're talking about copyright infringement, and you're talking about one person making an unlicensed copy for himself. The idea of jail time for such a small offense is absurd. We don't even give jail time for speeding (under most circumstances) and driving too fast puts other people's lives in danger!
So I'd agree that a fine may be in order, and that such a fine should be in excess of the normal licensing costs as a punitive measure. But let's not imagine that copyright infringement is a horrific crime that warrants terrible punishment. Some of these fines are excessive to the point where there can be no expectation that a person can ever pay them, and the result is that a person's life is ruined forever. Permanently ruining someone's finances for minor copyright infringement? That's cruel and unusual punishment.
I'm publicly claiming that I own all the air in our atmosphere. Lucky for you, I'm more interested in renting some of it to you than getting you to stop breathing.
I'd go further: I think it's absurd to think of locking people up for a day for this sort of "pirating". Now, it's one thing if you're talking about actual pirates, cutting people's throats on the seven seas and whatnot. Hell, I'll even grant you that, if you're the head of a software-piracy ring that sells counterfeit DVDs, you probably deserve some prison time.
But for downloading "pirated" software, or for using it? No. You aren't some sort of an irredeemable dangerous criminal just because you've downloaded Adobe Photoshop. Worst case for those sorts of pirates-- those who download or participate in a bittorrent-- should be something like paying 150% of the retail price of the infringing software.
That is what he's saying, but it's really hard to see how this could make sense to anyone. Bill Hilf quote from the article:
They are full-time employees, with 401K stock options. Some work for IBM or Oracle. What does that mean? It means that Linux doesn't exist any more in 2007.
What does that even mean? Linux is well funded, and therefore doesn't exist?
Sure, they (MS) think the MS OpenXML thingy is better, that's their job to think that way. The simple truth is that an open standard would comoditize MS products.
Not necessarily-- well, maybe I don't know quite what you mean by "commoditize". But really, insofar as Microsoft is competing fairly in the Office-suite market, what file formats people use should be relatively unimportant. The only additional cost to them is to include read/write support for ODF into their applications, which I'm guessing would be a pretty minimal cost. Beyond that, there's no good reason why Microsoft should care if my documents are stored in PDF, DOC, DOCX, ODF, HTML, or anything else. So long as they're trying to sell MS Office on the merits of the programs themselves, Microsoft's concern shouldn't be for what file format users choose, but whether MS Office is the best editor for those file formats. They should be eager to support ODF even better than OOo.
However, they aren't doing that, which demonstrates something about the culture at Microsoft. They don't want open competition (no surprise here). They don't want to be in a position where they have to make the best software, but instead are more concerned with maintaining vendor lock-in.
I'm not sure file formats necessarily become "obsolete". I would guess that ODF will be updated and refined, perhaps in a similar way to HTML. Is HTML 3 obsolete? You can still use it, and everyone will be able to read it, so I'm just not sure "obsolete" is the right word. However things turn out, there's no reason why ODF shouldn't remain readable and useful.
To me, "obsolete" means more than just that it's fallen out of mainstream usage. If I call something "obsolete", I usually mean that it actually cannot be used in practical situations anymore because its technology is too old to be used with modern methods. Therefore, open formats should never become obsolete unless computing changes so drastically that those file formats are unusable. Closed formats, on the other hand, can become obsolete when there aren't usable readers/writers anymore.
First, governments have always been in the position of regulating standards in business in various ways-- fair business practices, weights and measures, etc.
Second, this is the government setting a policy for how the government will keep documentation. Certainly, the government must run their own IT-- or don't you agree?
Or maybe they were trying to make a reference to the outdated technology of Tube (CRT) televisions... Is anyone (in their right mind) buying CRT televisions anymore?
Your right, and it's a terrible choice to use the word "tube". Just look at how unsuccessful YouTube is.
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
As will, perhaps, refusing to turn over your life recorder. Sure, the 5th amendment should protect against that, but it probably won't, at least not well enough.
Also, I'm just not sure the idea is useful enough. Are you going to want to carry all the recording hardware around all the time? Are you going to have methods of searching audio and images sufficient that you'll be able to find what you want in all that data?
Ok, lets suppose those problems are taken care of-- high quality cameras and mics are tiny and cheap and rugged and can be put anywhere. Forget that no one has yet build a satisfactory cell phone and that cars still don't get much more than 30 mpg. Forget that we still don't really have solar power working. Still, is it desirable to record everything? Do we really want to consider our lives this way, as something that can be captured in entirety by cameras? Do we want to remember so much? Sometimes a forgetful mind is a blessing.
Finally consider this question: in a future when we record everything we see and hear, how much of the recordings will be of other recordings? How much time will be recording TV shows and movies, or past recordings from your Life Recorder. How much will be recording jittery images from some kind of a screen?
Slashdot Mirror
... which raises some questions: How do you determine whether something has free will? Are you sure you have free will? Even if you have free will, how can you be sure other people have free will?
Well, yeah, really I don't think the prediction is "wrong" so much as "obvious". Phones keep adding more PDA-like features, internet features, etc. They already have an impressive amount of computing power and loads of general computing functionality. If you have a lightweight computer in your pocket all day, how long will it be before someone gives you a means to hook it to a monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it as a desktop too?
The question is, of course, will Microsoft be the company that makes these devices popular? Well, what will be needed is streamlined code so that everything will run quickly on low-powered devices, and a streamlined interface for the tiny phone screen. Is Microsoft known for cutting bloat and well-designed interfaces? No.
I don't know what company will finally make the breakthrough device, but I predict it will be a company that is particularly good at making good interfaces.
Yeah, even people who are fairly computer literate don't always know the difference between a website, a server, a web page, a weblog, a web service, a forum, etc. I mean, they might have a vague idea, but vague ideas don't cut it when it comes down to legal decisions-- minor technical differences can change everything. If a judge doesn't fully understand a topic, it's only appropriate that he asks for clarification (at least).
This is entirely true. Whether you view Global Warming as hard science or a myth, your localized anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. When you have a particularly cold day, this does not mean that global warming has ceased or been disproved. Likewise, if there is a particular warm day, this is not evidence of global warming.
I'm sick of everyone telling me about Global Warming every time there's a warm day. Every winter, there's some 50 degree day in December where I hear some moron spouting about, "This is scary! It's December and so it's supposed to be 20 degrees!! Global Warming is going to kill us!!" Except.... I grew up in the area, and my family has lived in the area for about 100 years, and there have *ALWAYS* been 50 degree days in December. It's not unusual or new.
Most likely, wherever you live, the weather is not noticeably different than it was 50 years ago. Even if the weather is different, it could be due to normal natural causes-- climates change over time and weather goes through cycles. Even with the most extreme Global Warming numbers, you're talking about a rise in temperatures of a couple degrees.
Don't get me wrong-- I'm not trying to dismiss the importance of global warming because it's "only a couple degrees". Geologically, a couple degrees can have a huge impact, and it's possible that these couple degrees could cause a lot of problems. However, Global warming has not increased the temperature of the Earth by 30 degrees in the past 5 years, so if you have a 50 degree day in the winter, it's probably not due to Global Warming. So please, everyone, just shut up about it and let the scientists do there thing and figure things out.
I'm not sure whether it's relevant to this case, but I agree. If you're a big enough company, you can get it so Gold support isn't that outrageously expensive anyway, but it makes all the difference. If you call Dell as a normal customer, their support kinda sucks-- still better than most, but doesn't say much. But if you have Gold support, you'll at least be routed to real support personnel within a couple minutes, and you'll have replacement hardware within 4 hours.
Also, if you're a volume licensing customer, all your current purchases are good for a copy of Vista. If you have SA, all your past purchases are good for a copy of Vista. For example, I have 20 licenses of Vista due to eOpen licenses that I bought, all of which are, in fact, XP installations.
Are these counted? I don't really know, but it would explain the numbers. Think of all the companies with volume licensing.
That sort of "slavery" that these people are talking about exists in any "free market" where workers work for wages. This is not the same as a moral philosophy which endorses unethical behaviors; it's people arguing that paying others for work is inherently a form of exploitation. How old are you? Have you ever read any philosophy regarding these topics?
Sorry, I'm approaching it from an economic realist standpoint. What happens in your nice little world of people charging just enough to get by is that, in the long run, benefits are reduced for everyone.
I didn't say "enough to get by", but a fair price-- with a modest profit. It's true that only generating enough for sustenance doesn't allow for much progress. On the other hand, being overly-greedy in the short term and abusing your partners, suppliers, and customers-- these things can set us back, damage our society, and leave whole markets ruined. Too often, businesses these days are relying on a "broken window" sort of situation. They abuse their position of power to purposefully force the existence of sub-optimal conditions. They create artificial problems so that they can charge you money for fixing those problems. That doesn't really increase quality of life across the board.
If actors are free to act as they will within the capitalist system, and you're not happy with the results, then your problem is with the system, no?
No. Your own sentence here acknowledges another possible source of problems, besides the system: the actors. Good social/economic systems will still fail if the people enacting those systems make bad decisions.
hmmm... let's see what some other people have to say about capitalism.
Answers.com:
Wikipedia:
Additionally, in my reading of Smith (often thought to be the father of capitalism), there's no notion like what you're talking about. In fact, Smith implies that a smart capitalist (which is what is desired for the good of society) will deal fairly with others.
So, yeah, I just don't get what you're talking about. Please point me in the direction of some philosophic thinking who has described this system and how it's supposed to work.
Oh, most of the people in "the media" are liberal, but they're also lazy, stupid, greedy, corrupt cowards who'd rather talk about Anna Nicole Smith than any real news stories. These things aren't mutually exclusive.
Investigative reporting is practically dead. Unless you hand them a perfectly safe fluff story guaranteed to get ratings, you won't hear about it.
IIRC, the issue with the "lost" e-mails was that people in the whitehouse (Rove) were using e-mail addresses associated with georgewbush.com instead of whitehouse.gov. The difference? georgewbush.com is run by the GOP. The GOP suspiciously failed to archive of backup the e-mails sent to georgewbush.com, and additionally had a policy where old e-mails were automatically deleted after some certain amount of time.
Meanwhile, (apparently) some people accidentally sent their e-mails to georgewbush.org, which is owned by someone who doesn't like Bush.
If Capitalism is the philosophic theory you're suggesting, can you tell me when this theory was formulated and by whom? What great thinker put together the system whereby unethical business practices bring about the "Good" result? I'd be interested to read that.
Though I've gotten the impression that people think capitalism is a moral philosophy which advocates any and all measures which provide short-term profits, I've never been able to discover the roots of this. I've read people like Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and it seems neither the capitalists nor the communists have any notion of that moral philosophy. As far as I can tell, this moral philosophy of "capitalism" appeared spontaneously in the minds of morons all over the place, with no support for their theories, but wishing to justify their own immoral behavior.
When I talk about capitalism, I'm referring to the economic system of private ownership and economic freedom.
I agree that piracy probably helps some companies, Microsoft and Adobe included. However, I don't think that issue should be considered in copyright legislation since I'm not sure how this sort of effect could be quantified. If one of these companies feels like it's benefiting from piracy, they have the option of not pursuing pirates.
For me, 150% was pulled out of thin air. You could argue about the amount, but my point is that the punishment should really be somewhat proportionate to the offense. Though I sympathize with copyright holders, a single act of copyright infringement simply isn't a serious crime, and therefore does not deserve a serious punishment.
In my opinion, each instance should carry a penalty higher than the cost of the product, specifically so that, if people intend to profit from the copies, they will have lost money. Further, if they can demonstrate that you're distributing copyrighted material for profit, that should carry additional (more serious) penalties. However, the penalty should be chosen so that an individual downloading software/content for their own use is punished, but not severely.
Well, that's a debate about capitalism. Some would argue that your system is inefficient, and would therefore not make best use of resources, and would therefore result in less for everyone.
That's not the debate about capitalism-- my "system" isn't a system. Capitalism is a system of economic freedom, but "economic freedom" does not require that you adopt ruthless unethical business practices any more than personal freedom requires people to be assholes. It gives you the freedom to do so, but that freedom is not a moral imperative to act viciously.
They're allowed to charge whatever they feel like in much the same way that I'm allowed to be a total asshole. Yeah, it's allowed in a free society, but that doesn't make it good or smart.
Trying to maximize profits at the detriment of your own customers is common practice, and that's largely why so many things are completely screwed up. The world would be better if people were willing to settle for an honest buck, a modest profit, instead of screwing over everyone as far as they're allowed with no consideration for the ramifications.
I think the penalty should be whatever it takes to make piracy unthinkable.
Whatever makes piracy "unthinkable"? Sure, yeah, lets.... how about we kill your firstborn. You get caught pirating, and we kill your children on the spot. That would make piracy unthinkable.
Llsten, I really do sympathize, but as you say, almost no one ever gets caught for piracy, and because punishment is so unlikely, no punishment will ever keep people from pirating unless it's excessively cruel. Instead, let the punishment be commensurate with the crime. We're not talking about killers or child molesters. We're not even talking about theft (no, we're not). We're talking about copyright infringement, and you're talking about one person making an unlicensed copy for himself. The idea of jail time for such a small offense is absurd. We don't even give jail time for speeding (under most circumstances) and driving too fast puts other people's lives in danger!
So I'd agree that a fine may be in order, and that such a fine should be in excess of the normal licensing costs as a punitive measure. But let's not imagine that copyright infringement is a horrific crime that warrants terrible punishment. Some of these fines are excessive to the point where there can be no expectation that a person can ever pay them, and the result is that a person's life is ruined forever. Permanently ruining someone's finances for minor copyright infringement? That's cruel and unusual punishment.
I'm publicly claiming that I own all the air in our atmosphere. Lucky for you, I'm more interested in renting some of it to you than getting you to stop breathing.
I'd go further: I think it's absurd to think of locking people up for a day for this sort of "pirating". Now, it's one thing if you're talking about actual pirates, cutting people's throats on the seven seas and whatnot. Hell, I'll even grant you that, if you're the head of a software-piracy ring that sells counterfeit DVDs, you probably deserve some prison time.
But for downloading "pirated" software, or for using it? No. You aren't some sort of an irredeemable dangerous criminal just because you've downloaded Adobe Photoshop. Worst case for those sorts of pirates-- those who download or participate in a bittorrent-- should be something like paying 150% of the retail price of the infringing software.
That is what he's saying, but it's really hard to see how this could make sense to anyone. Bill Hilf quote from the article:
What does that even mean? Linux is well funded, and therefore doesn't exist?
I don't know how much you're joking, but I really didn't know who Bill Hilf was. I'll give you one guess which company he works for.
Not necessarily-- well, maybe I don't know quite what you mean by "commoditize". But really, insofar as Microsoft is competing fairly in the Office-suite market, what file formats people use should be relatively unimportant. The only additional cost to them is to include read/write support for ODF into their applications, which I'm guessing would be a pretty minimal cost. Beyond that, there's no good reason why Microsoft should care if my documents are stored in PDF, DOC, DOCX, ODF, HTML, or anything else. So long as they're trying to sell MS Office on the merits of the programs themselves, Microsoft's concern shouldn't be for what file format users choose, but whether MS Office is the best editor for those file formats. They should be eager to support ODF even better than OOo.
However, they aren't doing that, which demonstrates something about the culture at Microsoft. They don't want open competition (no surprise here). They don't want to be in a position where they have to make the best software, but instead are more concerned with maintaining vendor lock-in.
I'm not sure file formats necessarily become "obsolete". I would guess that ODF will be updated and refined, perhaps in a similar way to HTML. Is HTML 3 obsolete? You can still use it, and everyone will be able to read it, so I'm just not sure "obsolete" is the right word. However things turn out, there's no reason why ODF shouldn't remain readable and useful.
To me, "obsolete" means more than just that it's fallen out of mainstream usage. If I call something "obsolete", I usually mean that it actually cannot be used in practical situations anymore because its technology is too old to be used with modern methods. Therefore, open formats should never become obsolete unless computing changes so drastically that those file formats are unusable. Closed formats, on the other hand, can become obsolete when there aren't usable readers/writers anymore.
First, governments have always been in the position of regulating standards in business in various ways-- fair business practices, weights and measures, etc.
Second, this is the government setting a policy for how the government will keep documentation. Certainly, the government must run their own IT-- or don't you agree?
Your right, and it's a terrible choice to use the word "tube". Just look at how unsuccessful YouTube is.
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
As will, perhaps, refusing to turn over your life recorder. Sure, the 5th amendment should protect against that, but it probably won't, at least not well enough.
Also, I'm just not sure the idea is useful enough. Are you going to want to carry all the recording hardware around all the time? Are you going to have methods of searching audio and images sufficient that you'll be able to find what you want in all that data?
Ok, lets suppose those problems are taken care of-- high quality cameras and mics are tiny and cheap and rugged and can be put anywhere. Forget that no one has yet build a satisfactory cell phone and that cars still don't get much more than 30 mpg. Forget that we still don't really have solar power working. Still, is it desirable to record everything? Do we really want to consider our lives this way, as something that can be captured in entirety by cameras? Do we want to remember so much? Sometimes a forgetful mind is a blessing.
Finally consider this question: in a future when we record everything we see and hear, how much of the recordings will be of other recordings? How much time will be recording TV shows and movies, or past recordings from your Life Recorder. How much will be recording jittery images from some kind of a screen?