Science is advancing more all the time and if there was ever a time for optimism based on a scientific society, NOW is it.
I love star trek, but if there's one thing that annoys me endlessly about it is that it's an overly optimistic setting. Sure, the quality of life in the universe will increase, but Star Trek's attitude of "Oh lol, we eliminated monies because today we work for the betterment of ourselves" is just... naive?
"Oh, but don't worry, we've got the gold-pressed latinum loving ferengi." "So wait a minute, you've got something that acts like a currency?" "No, we work for the betterment.." "Oh shush"
Andromeda was, apparently, originally meant to be the sequel to ST:TNG.
Somehow, Hercules hopping around the galaxy doesn't really have the same impact as Picard quoting Moby Dick while staring out of the window into space.
I watched Andromeda a couple of months ago for the first time, and I had a hard time enjoying the show. I gave up somewhere around when they found this big starship made out of planets full of maneating aliens. It tried so hard to be edgy by adding that whole grimdark look and feel to it, but as the show progressed (and that purple girl turned yellow) it wans't even entertaining anymore.
Yes, because trailers are always the best source for determining a film's success.
Oh c'mon, give JJ a break. He's got that dude in the trailer screaming "FIRE EVERYTHING!". Previous Enterprises didn't have a "fire everything" button, so this movie is guaranteed to be one awesome lasershow with torpedos flying EVERYWHERE.
Seriously though, the latest trailer did peak my curiosity. Even if it turns out to be a brain-off action flick set in the Star Trek setting, it's been a long time since Star Trek managed to get my attention.
Incidentally, VLC is not so hot on OS X these days.
VLC is not so hot on windows these days either. Since the 0.9 versions it takes too damn long to start up, and I think Qt has something to do with it. For some reason it also stopped working properly on dual monitor setups on windows, and even though there's a workaround it's annoying at best.
I've reverted back to using a recent version of media player classic and ffdshow. I haven't used 0.9 on OS X yet, but the 0.8 version works pretty well there.
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability and user-friendliness.
True in some areas (as the ones you mention about multiplayer), but I have never bought as many games in retail as I have since I've got access to them through steam. The convenience of being able to buy a game I feel like playing and within the hour playing it far outweighs the problems for me. You could argue that I could pirate/steal/whatever the game and be playing it in the same amount of time for free, but by spending a little bit of disposable income I can be entertained for a couple of weeks and I get the added benefits of steam.
I remember how quickly I could go from playing TFC to Pirates Vikings and Knights in the old WON clients
I remember how much of a pain in the ass it was setting up a game between a couple of friends (not talking about WON here), and with steam that's done with a few clicks. I'm not going to paint a picture of a utopia here, but it's much improved from the old routine of getting on IRC or some IM client and alt-tabbing back and forth between your game typing "Can you connect now?"
The criticisms that I'd have on steam is the DRM (although compared to the draconian forms of DRM, Steam's DRM is acceptable) and of course the big question of "What happens if Valve dies and I want to play my games?"
All in all I'm really happy with Steam. It's made me buy more games than I used to, probably because now I buy on impulse rather than holding a box in a store and saying "Nah, I'll get it through other means", and it's decreased the time wasted on connecting to others.
I hear that DJB never visits his father for years at a stretch. What does that tell you about his upbringing?
Yeah, well, I heard that he eats babies. If you want to smear the guy's reputation go with the part that most people here actually care about: his work. There's ample opportunity in that department to bash him, sometimes even rightly so.
The music industry should start selling flowers - you can't download those for free! Of course, they'll have to make sure the flowers can't produce any seeds.
And taking pictures of flowers would be illegal, and people who make perfume smelling like flowers would have to pay royalties. They would lobby the Dutch government for the illegal tulip growing, and artificially keep the prices of roses extremely high. 1% of the actual revenue of the flower-sale would go the person who grew and nurtured the plant, 2% to the company that shipped it, 3% to the guy who actually sold the flower, and 94% would go to the middle man. After a couple of decennia all the flowers will smell the same, so that you can no longer bear the stink. The flower-tax collection agency will however every year demand that you pay them for the 2 square feet of grass in front of your house, because you might grow flowers in that.
I think I stretched that analogy a bit too far, but I think I'm going in the flower industry. brb business plan
Sounds like the piece should be called "Ohm's Law".
Since he deals with a lot of techies, I'm sure that he's heard that joke only about a thousand times. This reminds me of a kid I used to go to school with whose name literally translated to "Out of the pants" (don't ask, Dutch names are a hoot) and his parents (presumable the father heavily intoxicated from celebrating his sons birth, and his mother heavily sedated) decided that it would a great idea to call him the local equivalent of the name "Willy".
Every time he introduced himself, people started laughing or made a joke that he'd heard a thousand times. He would then feign being amused, but you knew it annoyed him to a certain extent, which in turn amused everyone who knew him long enough to have heard the joke a couple of times.
Woe are the children of parents with a sense of humor. It's one of the few times that it's apropriate to actually feel sorry for someone while thinking "That's actually pretty funny" at the same time.
I now spend a lot more time watching DVDs (which I believe can be) ripped and transcoded onto my file server.
The same kind of DVDs which are protected with CSS? If you think about it is a form of DRM too. Oh, let's not even start about the silly region code issue. I believe that under the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses you're doing something "illegal" with a product you bought.
And this will probably get me modded for socialist
The developing perception is that people should not have to pay for health care--at least, they do not wish to perceive paying for it.
Actually, as someone from a European country with government healthcare I get confronted with how much I pay for healthcare and welfare each month on the two seperate categories on my paycheck. The thing is, that amazingly it's much much less than what my government is asking me to pay in taxes every month, and still less than what they ask my employer to pay for me every month.
The perception of "not paying" is lost the moment you open the letter and see all the minus signs.
When looking at the situation from that perspective, it's odd that one can choose all of those things, but expect the government to assist with or choose healthcare.
Before we had national healthcare in our country, there was nothing. You got sick? Well, I hope you've got the dough set aside, because those tests are mighty expensive. You would either end up with people in debt, or with people who'd refuse treatment and die of perfectly treatable conditions. Now we pay a certain percentage of the treatment (a very small amount compared to the total sum) and the rest is paid for by the government. The percentage that you pay for varies from treatment to treatment, so that things like cosmetic surgery (for no urgent medical reason) doesn't turn into a government-funded-liposuction.
If I want good healthcare, I'll save my money, and negotiate with the healthcare providers
This is the fundamental difference. I don't have to save up my money in the event I get sick. I pay a fee based on a percentage of my wage, and I don't have to worry about an insurance company that's going to make me pay extra because I might have a hereditary disease, or a heart condition, or because I'm statistically more likely to become overweight at 50.
Being without health insurance doesn't doom us
I tend to agree with this, since the money I pay for healthcare is money that you can save "just in case". But the difference is, what happens to an 21 year old kid with a college loan who gets a chronic disease or who becomes disabled? This person has no money saved up, and needs very expensive treatment and medication. So he gets burdened with an enormous debt. On top of that, his disability or disease prevents him from getting a job that will pay enough to get him out of debt, if he can get a job at all with his condition.
I know that this scenario seems unlikely, but this happens and when there is no safety net for people like that, they live the rest of their lives with a debt they can't pay off or in poverty.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really know how Americans deal with health insurance, and that I can only speak from what others have told me. I'm just glad that to know that when something happens to me or someone I care for, the safety net is there for everyone.
I'm not going to say that the system we have in place is "the best" or "the only" system. In fact, there are many flaws, but from what I've gathered the same applies to health insurance. I feel somewhat reluctant to have to depend on a company, a for profit organization, to have my best interests in mind. Although I can see why someone could have doubts that their government has their best interests in mind.
FYI, we also have health insurance here from private companies, who will pay for costs (that percentage mentioned earlier) that the government won't pay for leaving you in the end with only a fraction of the cost and somewhat better accommodations than the standard 4 person room. Most employers cover their employees with that type of insurance because a large part of that insurance is tax deductible for companies.
I guess that both approaches have their merits and their downside.
Consider how little benefit is created for the actual victims by blocking a single sales channel to some of the child-porn customers. When you actually do something to catch the child molesters, then you could potentially stop abuse.
Oh, I agree that the measure is a waste of resources and in reality doesn't change a damn thing. This filtering won't stop anyone who's dedicated enough, but the headlines in the newspaper will look great and quite cheaply compared to international cooperation.
The truth is that a thing like this isn't really "for the children", but most likely a boost for someone's political career. From the summary itself:
Germany's Minister for Families has announced
Oh and look, 2009 appears to be an election year in Germany. Good thing that minister tackled the child pornography problem then, isn't it?
I'm sorry if my previous post seemed that I was endorsing this filtering as opposed to actually dealing with the problem, my cynicism has been acting up lately and it's bitterness is often lost if not read with that in mind.
.. to the point where it is easier to filter the entire pipe rather than having the sites taken down?
The legality of hosting doesn't really matter. Consider for a moment how easy it is to implement a national filtering proxy and add an entry to blacklist, compared to how much work actually goes into taking down a site.
After someone reports an offending site to the national authorities, they have to contact the authorities of the nation where the site is hosted (either directly, or by an organization like interpol or whatever). Then that nations authorities have to find out where this particular site is hosted, get a warrant (if the police in that nation need one), and shut down the site, etc etc etc. This requires trained personnel, which many nations still do not have in their police force. Instead of weeks of paperwork before something goes offline, now you only have 10 seconds of copy pasting the reported URL and have at least on your side of the border dealt with the problem as much as you can.
I'm not particularly fond of censorship on the Internet, but I can see why governments are exploring it "for the children" (and let's assume for the sake of argument that it's only for the children at this point in time). The problem with it is that it's all too easy to circumvent with open proxy lists readily available on the internet, and anonymous networks like Tor. They'd have to lock every possible port, and hope that nobody is able to tunnel traffic over the few ports they allow through (good luck with that).
Finally, blacklists in general are prone to misuse, abuse and human error. There's probably far more filth out there than can ever be blacklisted so it's a never ending process to start with. What is to prevent someone from blacklisting family albums with kids in the bathtub (really, parents please stop doing this), because that has been mistaken for child pornography in the past before the internet became the second most popular boogieman? And what if your website suddenly got blacklisted by mistake (think: typo in the domainname)?
And we haven't even entered the whole "what if they're not doing it for the children" line of thinking at this point.
Oh, and they're selling the software to player manufacturers, but the player manufacturers have to get it from somewhere...
Don't be surprised when that cheapo player you just bought turns out to be using ffmpeg. I owned one of those players, until it let out the magic blue smoke.
I have a feeling MKV is exactly what's needed right now.
And I have a feeling that you're wrong.
Splendid argument! You clearly are victorious on this one.
MPEG (all revisions) and VP1 are also open standards.
For a fee MPEG is very open for you to implement. Have a look here and here. Mind you H.264 is equally open, so the argument about free and open is moot anyway. We can debate the legality of patents and the GPL as much as we want, but the truth is that in some countries you're very likely to get sued if you ship a commercial product without paying the fee.
MKV is here to stay simply because it's perfect for 2009.
I don't know if Matroska is here to stay, but I'm sure seeing a lot of it lately. I personally prefer Matroska because it's worked well enough for me. If it's here to stay is something we'll see if in 5 years. I'm pretty sure that its use will predominantly be by pirates/thieves/ninjas/media-liberators/whatever-term-you-fancy, and that a small minority will actually use it for something legal. The major media outlets will most likely ignore it completely, because they've already invested tons of money in MPEG and both standards still do the same damn thing. The average consumer won't care as long as the moving pictures keep coming to his giant widescreen tv.
The thing I'm most hyped about anyway is H.264, or rather my experiences with x264. I've been using it to do some tests for encoding data from an HD camera and I'm quite pleased with the results.
Registrars need to sell domains only to valid registration data
And exactly how do you propose a registrar check registration data? A photocopy of your passport to be faxed? E-ID? How is that American company going to check my ID if I'm from some other country? If the company has to go through official channels the process could take weeks, double that if you're going to register a domain name for a company.
They used to do this in a few european countries. They stopped doing it because it was economically unsound, and the administrative overhead was holding back the adoption of the ccTLD in favour of.com/.net/.org . Countries like Belgium reserve the right to strip you of your domain name once they discover your identity is incorrect, but the fact of the matter is that the measure is largely ineffective and useless if you lie inconspicuously when you register the domain.
Registrars that willingly sell domains to spammers need to be punished swiftly and severely
And how do you prove that someone is willingly selling domain names to spammers? Require mandatory checkboxes saying "I'm not using this domain name for spam" when they register the domain? Or are you going to statistically measure who's been selling domain names to spammers and if X% of their customers are spammers put them on a blacklist?
Add to that that many of the ccTLDs are more than eager to have their registrars register as many domains as they can. More domains means bigger profits. Don't expect much enthousiasm on their account. ccTLDs need registrars to paddle their wares and keep their boat afloat. Biting the hand that feeds etc... The worst I've seen a ccTLD do is give one of their registrars the proverbial slap on the wrist for something unethical, and then change their code of conduct to explicitly prohibit such behavior.
ISPs that willingly offer services repeatedly to spammers need to face the same
So when you've just enforced mandatory identification, how are you going to get around the problem of strawmen? Why, just because Ivan Spamski is a known spammer, his brother Igor
isn't. Companies don't take very long to be registered (I think it takes a whole of 10 days where I live to get all the paperwork processed). Again, a measure that's impractical and nearly impossible to enforce properly. What good do all these measures do if in 10 days time I can start up another company with a clean slate, which will probably last me another 2 or 3 months before I have to repeat the cycle?
To top it off, how are you going to get every ccTLD in the world to agree to your terms? You're no longer talking about a technical issue at this point, but a lot of political issues will arise. Some countries will simply refuse to cooperate because insert political excuse du jour here.
Nice idea, never gonna happen. It requires too much international government cooperation, which will either slow down the whole process to the point where each business owner is frustrated, and makes owning a domain name almost completely unavailable to private persons, or it will drive up prices for domainnames through the roof because of all the overhead.
Finally, you don't need a domain name for hosting a website. The target audience for spam will happily click on links with numbers in them. Not all of the servers used by spammers have been paid for by spammers either. Some of them may be hacked boxes (although from what I gather, those are mostly used as proxies and sometimes tor nodes).
The problem with spam lies with the nature of SMTP, and the nature of those who fall for spam. The protocol was simply not designed with today's internet in mind, and we can add as many layers on top of it as we want it takes a few weeks at most before it's subverted. I'd say the best route to take is to educate the people, and that is surprisingly hard sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I was tempted to go in and say hi, but I'm not that much of a geek.
You recognized her from her voice alone, and titled your post "I saw Janeway" instead of "I saw Kate Mulgrew".
Stop kidding yourself, you are a geek :)
Science is advancing more all the time and if there was ever a time for optimism based on a scientific society, NOW is it.
I love star trek, but if there's one thing that annoys me endlessly about it is that it's an overly optimistic setting. Sure, the quality of life in the universe will increase, but Star Trek's attitude of "Oh lol, we eliminated monies because today we work for the betterment of ourselves" is just ... naive?
"Oh, but don't worry, we've got the gold-pressed latinum loving ferengi."
"So wait a minute, you've got something that acts like a currency?"
"No, we work for the betterment.."
"Oh shush"
Andromeda was, apparently, originally meant to be the sequel to ST:TNG.
Somehow, Hercules hopping around the galaxy doesn't really have the same impact as Picard quoting Moby Dick while staring out of the window into space.
I watched Andromeda a couple of months ago for the first time, and I had a hard time enjoying the show. I gave up somewhere around when they found this big starship made out of planets full of maneating aliens. It tried so hard to be edgy by adding that whole grimdark look and feel to it, but as the show progressed (and that purple girl turned yellow) it wans't even entertaining anymore.
Don't fill it with too much technobabble. (Stargate was a good balance in my mind).
I always loved O'Neal's way of explaining things. "It's got something to do with ... wait... I know this one... MAGNETS!"
I loved how in the first couple of seasons the show didn't take itself too seriously.
Yes, because trailers are always the best source for determining a film's success.
Oh c'mon, give JJ a break. He's got that dude in the trailer screaming "FIRE EVERYTHING!". Previous Enterprises didn't have a "fire everything" button, so this movie is guaranteed to be one awesome lasershow with torpedos flying EVERYWHERE.
Seriously though, the latest trailer did peak my curiosity. Even if it turns out to be a brain-off action flick set in the Star Trek setting, it's been a long time since Star Trek managed to get my attention.
Incidentally, VLC is not so hot on OS X these days.
VLC is not so hot on windows these days either. Since the 0.9 versions it takes too damn long to start up, and I think Qt has something to do with it. For some reason it also stopped working properly on dual monitor setups on windows, and even though there's a workaround it's annoying at best.
I've reverted back to using a recent version of media player classic and ffdshow. I haven't used 0.9 on OS X yet, but the 0.8 version works pretty well there.
It still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability and user-friendliness.
True in some areas (as the ones you mention about multiplayer), but I have never bought as many games in retail as I have since I've got access to them through steam. The convenience of being able to buy a game I feel like playing and within the hour playing it far outweighs the problems for me. You could argue that I could pirate/steal/whatever the game and be playing it in the same amount of time for free, but by spending a little bit of disposable income I can be entertained for a couple of weeks and I get the added benefits of steam.
I remember how quickly I could go from playing TFC to Pirates Vikings and Knights in the old WON clients
I remember how much of a pain in the ass it was setting up a game between a couple of friends (not talking about WON here), and with steam that's done with a few clicks. I'm not going to paint a picture of a utopia here, but it's much improved from the old routine of getting on IRC or some IM client and alt-tabbing back and forth between your game typing "Can you connect now?"
The criticisms that I'd have on steam is the DRM (although compared to the draconian forms of DRM, Steam's DRM is acceptable) and of course the big question of "What happens if Valve dies and I want to play my games?"
All in all I'm really happy with Steam. It's made me buy more games than I used to, probably because now I buy on impulse rather than holding a box in a store and saying "Nah, I'll get it through other means", and it's decreased the time wasted on connecting to others.
THE SUN
Flaming ball of fusion, you have thwarted my plans for the last time! You will rue the day!!!
shakes fist angrily at sun
I hear that DJB never visits his father for years at a stretch. What does that tell you about his upbringing?
Yeah, well, I heard that he eats babies. If you want to smear the guy's reputation go with the part that most people here actually care about: his work. There's ample opportunity in that department to bash him, sometimes even rightly so.
The music industry should start selling flowers - you can't download those for free! Of course, they'll have to make sure the flowers can't produce any seeds.
And taking pictures of flowers would be illegal, and people who make perfume smelling like flowers would have to pay royalties. They would lobby the Dutch government for the illegal tulip growing, and artificially keep the prices of roses extremely high. 1% of the actual revenue of the flower-sale would go the person who grew and nurtured the plant, 2% to the company that shipped it, 3% to the guy who actually sold the flower, and 94% would go to the middle man. After a couple of decennia all the flowers will smell the same, so that you can no longer bear the stink. The flower-tax collection agency will however every year demand that you pay them for the 2 square feet of grass in front of your house, because you might grow flowers in that.
I think I stretched that analogy a bit too far, but I think I'm going in the flower industry. brb business plan
So what do you think would happen if a ball rolled out into the street in front of your car, followed by a laughing child?
Spladder bonus
To be honest, when I started to read that sentence I was thinking about meatballs with the spaghetti
I'm sorry, I'm taking my tasteless jokes somewhere else now
File formats don't have consumer watchdogs up in arms. Their MS Office works just fine unfortunately.
the guy you're talking to is one of the spanish janitors they got working there
"I know noooothing. I am from Barhelona"
Yeah, I'd give up after that too.
Sounds like the piece should be called "Ohm's Law".
Since he deals with a lot of techies, I'm sure that he's heard that joke only about a thousand times. This reminds me of a kid I used to go to school with whose name literally translated to "Out of the pants" (don't ask, Dutch names are a hoot) and his parents (presumable the father heavily intoxicated from celebrating his sons birth, and his mother heavily sedated) decided that it would a great idea to call him the local equivalent of the name "Willy".
Every time he introduced himself, people started laughing or made a joke that he'd heard a thousand times. He would then feign being amused, but you knew it annoyed him to a certain extent, which in turn amused everyone who knew him long enough to have heard the joke a couple of times.
Woe are the children of parents with a sense of humor. It's one of the few times that it's apropriate to actually feel sorry for someone while thinking "That's actually pretty funny" at the same time.
...you should be shot.
out of a cannon, into the sun
I now spend a lot more time watching DVDs (which I believe can be) ripped and transcoded onto my file server.
The same kind of DVDs which are protected with CSS? If you think about it is a form of DRM too. Oh, let's not even start about the silly region code issue. I believe that under the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses you're doing something "illegal" with a product you bought.
volcanic ash may interfere with your experience
DRM would be the last of my concerns if that were to happen though.
Now accepting bets for how long it takes before the first replacement child is cloned.
I can just see the slogan for the advertising already: Who needs Lassy ? When Timmy falls down the well, we'll clone him for $99.999,95.
Warning: Replacement Timmy may not be exactly like original Timmy. Do not feed replacement Timmy after midnight. Education not included.
This will probably get me modded for flamebait
And this will probably get me modded for socialist
The developing perception is that people should not have to pay for health care--at least, they do not wish to perceive paying for it.
Actually, as someone from a European country with government healthcare I get confronted with how much I pay for healthcare and welfare each month on the two seperate categories on my paycheck. The thing is, that amazingly it's much much less than what my government is asking me to pay in taxes every month, and still less than what they ask my employer to pay for me every month.
The perception of "not paying" is lost the moment you open the letter and see all the minus signs.
When looking at the situation from that perspective, it's odd that one can choose all of those things, but expect the government to assist with or choose healthcare.
Before we had national healthcare in our country, there was nothing. You got sick? Well, I hope you've got the dough set aside, because those tests are mighty expensive. You would either end up with people in debt, or with people who'd refuse treatment and die of perfectly treatable conditions. Now we pay a certain percentage of the treatment (a very small amount compared to the total sum) and the rest is paid for by the government. The percentage that you pay for varies from treatment to treatment, so that things like cosmetic surgery (for no urgent medical reason) doesn't turn into a government-funded-liposuction.
If I want good healthcare, I'll save my money, and negotiate with the healthcare providers
This is the fundamental difference. I don't have to save up my money in the event I get sick. I pay a fee based on a percentage of my wage, and I don't have to worry about an insurance company that's going to make me pay extra because I might have a hereditary disease, or a heart condition, or because I'm statistically more likely to become overweight at 50.
Being without health insurance doesn't doom us
I tend to agree with this, since the money I pay for healthcare is money that you can save "just in case". But the difference is, what happens to an 21 year old kid with a college loan who gets a chronic disease or who becomes disabled? This person has no money saved up, and needs very expensive treatment and medication. So he gets burdened with an enormous debt. On top of that, his disability or disease prevents him from getting a job that will pay enough to get him out of debt, if he can get a job at all with his condition.
I know that this scenario seems unlikely, but this happens and when there is no safety net for people like that, they live the rest of their lives with a debt they can't pay off or in poverty.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really know how Americans deal with health insurance, and that I can only speak from what others have told me. I'm just glad that to know that when something happens to me or someone I care for, the safety net is there for everyone.
I'm not going to say that the system we have in place is "the best" or "the only" system. In fact, there are many flaws, but from what I've gathered the same applies to health insurance. I feel somewhat reluctant to have to depend on a company, a for profit organization, to have my best interests in mind. Although I can see why someone could have doubts that their government has their best interests in mind.
FYI, we also have health insurance here from private companies, who will pay for costs (that percentage mentioned earlier) that the government won't pay for leaving you in the end with only a fraction of the cost and somewhat better accommodations than the standard 4 person room. Most employers cover their employees with that type of insurance because a large part of that insurance is tax deductible for companies.
I guess that both approaches have their merits and their downside.
Consider how little benefit is created for the actual victims by blocking a single sales channel to some of the child-porn customers. When you actually do something to catch the child molesters, then you could potentially stop abuse.
Oh, I agree that the measure is a waste of resources and in reality doesn't change a damn thing. This filtering won't stop anyone who's dedicated enough, but the headlines in the newspaper will look great and quite cheaply compared to international cooperation.
The truth is that a thing like this isn't really "for the children", but most likely a boost for someone's political career. From the summary itself:
Germany's Minister for Families has announced
Oh and look, 2009 appears to be an election year in Germany. Good thing that minister tackled the child pornography problem then, isn't it?
I'm sorry if my previous post seemed that I was endorsing this filtering as opposed to actually dealing with the problem, my cynicism has been acting up lately and it's bitterness is often lost if not read with that in mind.
.. to the point where it is easier to filter the entire pipe rather than having the sites taken down?
The legality of hosting doesn't really matter. Consider for a moment how easy it is to implement a national filtering proxy and add an entry to blacklist, compared to how much work actually goes into taking down a site.
After someone reports an offending site to the national authorities, they have to contact the authorities of the nation where the site is hosted (either directly, or by an organization like interpol or whatever). Then that nations authorities have to find out where this particular site is hosted, get a warrant (if the police in that nation need one), and shut down the site, etc etc etc. This requires trained personnel, which many nations still do not have in their police force. Instead of weeks of paperwork before something goes offline, now you only have 10 seconds of copy pasting the reported URL and have at least on your side of the border dealt with the problem as much as you can.
I'm not particularly fond of censorship on the Internet, but I can see why governments are exploring it "for the children" (and let's assume for the sake of argument that it's only for the children at this point in time). The problem with it is that it's all too easy to circumvent with open proxy lists readily available on the internet, and anonymous networks like Tor. They'd have to lock every possible port, and hope that nobody is able to tunnel traffic over the few ports they allow through (good luck with that).
Finally, blacklists in general are prone to misuse, abuse and human error. There's probably far more filth out there than can ever be blacklisted so it's a never ending process to start with. What is to prevent someone from blacklisting family albums with kids in the bathtub (really, parents please stop doing this), because that has been mistaken for child pornography in the past before the internet became the second most popular boogieman? And what if your website suddenly got blacklisted by mistake (think: typo in the domainname)?
And we haven't even entered the whole "what if they're not doing it for the children" line of thinking at this point.
Oh, and they're selling the software to player manufacturers, but the player manufacturers have to get it from somewhere...
Don't be surprised when that cheapo player you just bought turns out to be using ffmpeg. I owned one of those players, until it let out the magic blue smoke.
I have a feeling MKV is exactly what's needed right now.
And I have a feeling that you're wrong.
Splendid argument! You clearly are victorious on this one.
MPEG (all revisions) and VP1 are also open standards.
For a fee MPEG is very open for you to implement. Have a look here and here. Mind you H.264 is equally open, so the argument about free and open is moot anyway. We can debate the legality of patents and the GPL as much as we want, but the truth is that in some countries you're very likely to get sued if you ship a commercial product without paying the fee.
MKV is here to stay simply because it's perfect for 2009.
I don't know if Matroska is here to stay, but I'm sure seeing a lot of it lately. I personally prefer Matroska because it's worked well enough for me. If it's here to stay is something we'll see if in 5 years. I'm pretty sure that its use will predominantly be by pirates/thieves/ninjas/media-liberators/whatever-term-you-fancy, and that a small minority will actually use it for something legal. The major media outlets will most likely ignore it completely, because they've already invested tons of money in MPEG and both standards still do the same damn thing. The average consumer won't care as long as the moving pictures keep coming to his giant widescreen tv.
The thing I'm most hyped about anyway is H.264, or rather my experiences with x264. I've been using it to do some tests for encoding data from an HD camera and I'm quite pleased with the results.
Registrars need to sell domains only to valid registration data
And exactly how do you propose a registrar check registration data? A photocopy of your passport to be faxed? E-ID? How is that American company going to check my ID if I'm from some other country? If the company has to go through official channels the process could take weeks, double that if you're going to register a domain name for a company.
They used to do this in a few european countries. They stopped doing it because it was economically unsound, and the administrative overhead was holding back the adoption of the ccTLD in favour of .com/.net/.org . Countries like Belgium reserve the right to strip you of your domain name once they discover your identity is incorrect, but the fact of the matter is that the measure is largely ineffective and useless if you lie inconspicuously when you register the domain.
Registrars that willingly sell domains to spammers need to be punished swiftly and severely
And how do you prove that someone is willingly selling domain names to spammers? Require mandatory checkboxes saying "I'm not using this domain name for spam" when they register the domain? Or are you going to statistically measure who's been selling domain names to spammers and if X% of their customers are spammers put them on a blacklist?
Add to that that many of the ccTLDs are more than eager to have their registrars register as many domains as they can. More domains means bigger profits. Don't expect much enthousiasm on their account. ccTLDs need registrars to paddle their wares and keep their boat afloat. Biting the hand that feeds etc... The worst I've seen a ccTLD do is give one of their registrars the proverbial slap on the wrist for something unethical, and then change their code of conduct to explicitly prohibit such behavior.
ISPs that willingly offer services repeatedly to spammers need to face the same
So when you've just enforced mandatory identification, how are you going to get around the problem of strawmen? Why, just because Ivan Spamski is a known spammer, his brother Igor isn't. Companies don't take very long to be registered (I think it takes a whole of 10 days where I live to get all the paperwork processed). Again, a measure that's impractical and nearly impossible to enforce properly. What good do all these measures do if in 10 days time I can start up another company with a clean slate, which will probably last me another 2 or 3 months before I have to repeat the cycle?
To top it off, how are you going to get every ccTLD in the world to agree to your terms? You're no longer talking about a technical issue at this point, but a lot of political issues will arise. Some countries will simply refuse to cooperate because insert political excuse du jour here.
Nice idea, never gonna happen. It requires too much international government cooperation, which will either slow down the whole process to the point where each business owner is frustrated, and makes owning a domain name almost completely unavailable to private persons, or it will drive up prices for domainnames through the roof because of all the overhead.
Finally, you don't need a domain name for hosting a website. The target audience for spam will happily click on links with numbers in them. Not all of the servers used by spammers have been paid for by spammers either. Some of them may be hacked boxes (although from what I gather, those are mostly used as proxies and sometimes tor nodes).
The problem with spam lies with the nature of SMTP, and the nature of those who fall for spam. The protocol was simply not designed with today's internet in mind, and we can add as many layers on top of it as we want it takes a few weeks at most before it's subverted. I'd say the best route to take is to educate the people, and that is surprisingly hard sometimes.
He's a lumberjack and he's okay?
Oh god, now I'm going to have this song stuck in my head for hours. Thanks