There is no law preventing mozilla buying a H.264 license and using it in official builds of firefox.
The problem is that afaict there is no way of getting a license that would also apply to third party derivitives of firefox so for firefox to support h.264 they would have to screw the community that supports them.
You are, of course, correct. I was referring to "patent law" (laws?), which allows the patent holders to dictate unreasonable (or at least unpractical) terms to Mozilla.
Firefox already features patented technologies, such as jpeg, or did you mean "royalties"?
No, I didn't. I didn't mentioned "patented technologies" either. I mentioned H.264 specifically. I don't recall the patent holder of the wheel complaining because Firefox icon is round. I do recall MPEG-LA not offering any kind of license for use in free software projects. Until they do, this is not an "ideological stand" that you might "disagree a little" with. It is a legal issue that Mozilla has no power to change, and neither your "little disagreement" nor my strong support has any bearing on it.
Mozilla Firefox (~30% of the browser market share) will never have support for H.264. Never.
And Valve said that Half Life 2 would never be on the Mac. Never.
Times change.
Was there any kind of law forbidding Valve from porting Half Life to the Mac?
(just curious about how they went around it, and how do you think that workaround could be applied to Firefox and the H.264 patents... Otherwise, I don't really see your point. Though technically, you are right - when the patents expires, Firefox might be able to include it. Is that what you meant?)
Much less scary than "Apophis threatens to wipe out all life on planet!".
Rumor is that the guys who originally spotted it named it after the Stargate SG-1 character, who (presumably) sent an asteroid to destroy the earth in the episode "Fail Safe."
Actually, that was Anubis. Apophis died a few episodes earlier.
Was just pointing out to many here who believed "other OS" was removed for no reason, that geohot was heroically restoring that functionality, when it was his actions that prompted the removal in the first place.
What? His actions didn't prompt anything - what happened was Sony's decision, and Sony's decision alone. Sony was well within their power to not sell a PS3 to him or anyone he might have known in the first place. (What? Sony can't see the future? Neither could him... the difference is, he was hacking his very own device, and at most teaching others to do the same if they wanted, while Sony decided to break everyone's devices). That Sony's actions aren't clearly in the wrong from a legal point of view speaks very badly of the american legal system, and that they are justified in your mind speaks badly... well, about you. Sony did, after all, take something away from their customers - they did much more than the "pirates" who only copy their stuff.
They were screw one way or the other, so they took what they believed was the lesser of 2 evils.
Out of curiosity, do you really believe that? Given the tone of your first post ("unprovoked", "first punch", removing other OS "in response", etc), I assumed you believed/justified Sony being vindictive. But in this one, Sony is the good guy being forced to do evil by Geohot and taking the righteous path, which incidentally, meant stealing from all their paying customers. Now I'm confused. I suppose one of those is sarcastic or being devil's advocate or something, but I can't figure out which is which.
With reCaptcha, you don't have to successfully OCR the scanned word, just the control word. Usually they are indistinguishable by sight (you don't know which one is the control word), but I've seen reCaptcha instances where one word is clear and the other one is unreadable. In these cases, you can type the control word correctly and just write some gibberish for the other, and you'll beat the captcha.
Which means that the spammer won't have to OCR the hardest of the words... just the simpler one. Run the OCR to the full text, post both words, and if the simpler one matches, you broke the captcha.
(I make it sound so easy! It really isn't! I'm amazed that they did break it! I just wanted to point out that it isn't "OCR words that haven't been OCRd before", rather than "OCR words that have been OCRd previously and are now a bit distorted".)
it is obvious that no one person or entity can guarantee the security, so the only sensible option is to not trust any single entity, and instead, distribute that trust among as many people you can, for as much of the toolchain as you can, and be ready to replace the offending part when a problem is detected.
That toolchain is only as secure as its weakest link. I don't disagree that open source software can be very secure, but your argument for open source software being more secure is uncompelling. Once a problem is detected, it's too late - a backdoor could be inserted that is effectively itself undetectable.
As opposed to what? Reducing the chances of even detecting the compromise? I didn't just state that it was more secure (did I say that at all?). The more people who can cry foul, the lower the chances of a single entity to silence them all. After the problem is detected, you have the chance of replacing everything on top of the compromised element of the toolchain and prevent future damage. You can't prevent past damage, obviously, with either approach. But with "closed", you may not be able to prevent the future damage either (closed source: hard to detect, can't recompile, must wait until someone else does it for me. Apple model: I can't install the update by myself, I must wait until Apple publishes one, even if the app is opensource)
(confession - I don't think I understood your post correctly. My lack of english skills may have played a part on that. I suppose you were thinking along the lines of, if I learn that my gcc is compromised, I'll replace only gcc and not everything compiled with it, which would be a pretty nonsensical position on my part)
If you don't have control, you have to trust someone to provide security. Depending on who it is and what their experience is, I often prefer to trust.
Exactly. I also prefer to trust. But not blindly: I must be reasonably certain that I can control who I am trusting, and that person/entity has the capacity review the item under consideration.
That rules out non-free software, as only the author has the capacity to review, and the Apple model, as even with open source apps, I have no control. Quoting an Anon comment in this thread,
It is not possible to prove security in a modern computer system for any plausible level of control.
it is obvious that no one person or entity can guarantee the security, so the only sensible option is to not trust any single entity, and instead, distribute that trust among as many people you can, for as much of the toolchain as you can, and be ready to replace the offending part when a problem is detected.
Science & Engineering papers usually depend on new work or research
Not at undergraduate level they don't.
Not in some universities, I grant you that. But at least in Cuban universities, undergraduate level science papers required a lot of original work... Even some undergraduate level exams could require a lot of original work. I used to teach one of them. A typical exam question was, "prove this theorem", where "this theorem" was a something I thought of when preparing the exam.
(Actually, if you didn't include one question like that, some of the students would get really disappointed. Now that I think about it... I've haven't seen a student complaining that the exam/assignment was too easy since I left Cuba, even though the ones I've seen are much easier than their Cuban equivalent.)
So you're annoyed that your carefully crafted message on your state owned media is being undercut by the free flow of ideas on the Internet?
Actually, I do get annoyed when the "free flows of ideas" is used to distribute lies (or half truths) carefully crafted by foreign governments in order to discredit one's government. Why do you immediately assume that the propaganda they are trying to "protect" against is true, and that their message is false?
I do not condone censorship, not even for this reason (I come from Cuba). I do think that censoring the opposition only reinforces the lies they spread (specially when, as with most oppositions, they also say a lot of truth). But it is infuriating to turn on the TV, and see someone contradicting himself. Even worse is to see people around you nodding in agreement despite any logic ("can't you see that he is lying? You were RIGHT THERE when it happened!")
One anecdote. I once got home, and I turned on the TV - american TV, which was illegal (copyright violation on the US side, decoding satellite signals, etc, and just "violation" in the Cuban side, though only the second part gets reported by the opposition). There was a report about "police repression" in Cuba... and the video feed was of me, telling the time to a couple of policemen a few days earlier.
(In case you wonder - I also dislike when the Cuban media lies and people nods in agreement despite all logic.)
So, I'm against censorship, yes, but you shouldn't ridicule the argument. Propaganda is used, extensively, to (try to) destabilize foreign goverments, and a great deal of that propaganda is untruthful.
That is the moral case I'm making. If you disagree that obtaining the fruits of someone's hard work without adhering to their terms and conditions (be they monetary, attribution, opening of derivative works, etc etc) is 'bad', why then that's up to you.
I disagree with your opinion, but as you say, you are entitled to it. You seem to be taking an informed stance rather than spewing mindless propaganda. For that, I bow to you in respect.
But, one reason for my disagreement is... why 20 years? What makes 20 so special, that before ~20 years, it is wrong to obtain "the fruits of someone's hard work without adhering to their terms and conditions", but after 20, you no longer think it is wrong? (Replace 20 by any other number
For me, "attribution" should be forever (because not giving attribution is lying to society), but derivative works should be allowed very shortly (or immediately) after the creation of the original, because if we (society) are going to restrict ourselves for the benefit of the author, we better see the fruits (new works) of that restriction while they are still useful for us (i.e, not 40 years later, definitely not after we die).
Its very sad they have a valid official reason, adds to its credibility, but its a fake one.
Fake it isn't. But, as everyone knows... not the only one.
At the prices they are charging for the dialup access (60 CUC/80hrs per month) (72USD per 80h per month) they can afford to resell satellite bandwidth no problem at all.
Oh, it is cheaper now? But only foreigners can buy it still? Anyway, there may be (if we believe the ministry of informatics, there are) restrictions about how much bandwidth they can buy. If that's true, it wouldn't be as easy as just resell it.
However... they actively look for and seize "illegal" satellite dishes that can be used to connect to the net (dishnetwork, directway, etc). While it may not be easy to just resell the bandwidth, if that were the only objection, they wouldn't penalize those networks. Hell, one of the directors of ETECSA (Cuban telecomunication company) once "explained" to me why connecting my two computers with a network cable/wireless was illegal.
Ok, we dont have internet, what about investing in our local intranet, local websites, local ISPs, local IRC servers.... people are willing to pay, just look at what we pay for cell phones, and the demand is so high the network collapses every now an then.....
The cuban goverment is very clever (nothing original), always operating behind a cloak of technical reasons, the first step of all dictators in history is to size the mass media.
Actually, in this case, they are being extremely stupid. A good way to control the people is to make them believe that they are not being controlled. By having that "national network", they could still control most of what you saw, while unequivocally shifting all the blame to the US. They are not clever - even when they have the perfect excuse, they make it obvious that they have other reasons.
Interesting. I'd think that the US would want Cuba to have plenty of bandwidth as it might help foster a revolt against the government. I guess some folks in the US are still hellbent on the whole embargo thing.
I agree. That shows that US intentions with Cuba aren't as... altruistic as they (government, so called "human rights groups", etc) claim.
However, even with a cable to Venezuela, I seriously doubt the Cuban government is going to make everything free and open. That just isn't in their nature. There will be more internet to go around, but it's still going to be the internet that the Party wants them to see.
I also agree. I would be very surprised if they just made internet access more affordable. They don't really have to wait for the US to show some advances (like, "we can't give you internet access because of the US, but here you have a good national network that you could use in the meantime"). But instead, we have 127/07 (here for those who read spanish).
while most people in his country aren't allowed to do so because it would threaten his power
Actually, the "official" reason is that the US limits who can we get bandwidth from (by owning or threatening those who own the fiber around the island), so we can only get it at ridiculously high prices. I think the total bandwidth for the whole country is about 230Mb/sec download, 100 upload.
I don't believe that is the only reason (clearly, censorship is a big one - I had to censor many things in the name of "lack of bandwithd" even after I proved that it would have a negligible effect). But the "official" reason, by itself, is enough to restrict nearly as much as Cuba does. It's also disgustingly hypocritical that the US gives the Cuban government such a perfect justification for their censorship.
Who knows, maybe with the cable to Venezuela the Cuban government will show the world (and the Cubans) that the US was the only responsible for the lack of internet access in Cuba. I would be very surprised if they did - but I doubt they'll be intelligent enough to see how it would benefit them.
I think you are misunderstanding what the P=NP question means... and I don't blame you. The question itself is very "meta", but it is not self-referencing as you believe.
P is a set of questions (YES/NO questions) that can be answered easily. NP is another set of questions, that may or may not be easy to answer, but when you see the answer (YES/NO) and a proof for the answer, you can easily check if the proof is correct. But the question "P=NP?" doesn't belong to either of the sets. If P=NP, then all problems that are easily "verifiable" are also easily "solvable", and if P!=NP, then there are problems easily verifiable but hard to solve. But, as the question "P=NP?" doesn't belong to P or NP, there is no paradox.
That's an over simplification, of course. For instance, "easy" in the previous paragraph actually means "solvable in polynomial time by a deterministic turing machine", and "not easy" would be "solvable in polynomial time by a non-deterministic turing machine", and there is the widespread confusion about "NP" meaning "Non-P" instead of "P in a Non-deterministic machine". The wikipedia article is really good, but unfortunately, much too formal to understand without previous knowledge. I hope I helped a bit.
Wow, are you seriously comparing sharing with rape, murder, drunk driving and child abuse? A prime example of why you should stop calling it "piracy".
I think what you mean is "are you seriously equating sharing with rape, et al".
I'm not a native English speaker. I don't - can't, in fact, notice these subtleties. But I assume when I write that the ones reading will be intelligent enough to not discard the whole message because of one mistranslated word.
Which would indeed be a bad thing and to which the OP could quite honestly reply "no, I'm not, don't create strawmen". But comparing? He's proving the principle used to justify piracy as wrong by comparing how it would sound if you used the same argument to justify other things. That's fine.
... by giving them equal footing. If the OP can't see that the differences between the two sets of actions are so huge that using one to draw any rational conclusion about the other is absurd, then he is a prime example of why the use of the term "piracy" has succeeded. Can you see the differences? Just a few: victims, damage caused to the victims, whether is deemed acceptable by great portions of society, whether it is done by great portions of society, whether they are enforceable now, whether they'll become easier to enforce in the future, who's interests the laws in question are protecting, and who is paying to get those laws passed.
In pretty much all those aspects, "sharing" and "rape, murder, drunk driving, child abuse" are opposite. Thank you for the word strawmen, because that's exactly what the OP did when he cherry-picked 4 of the original posters words and tried to shoot down the argument with his "comparison"... utterly ignoring the rest of the post. Copyright law is outdated and inefficient, that is a fact, and no good can come from ignoring it (or making it worse) instead of trying to fix it... specially not for the authors, who currently have to deal with people ignoring their copyrights, while carrying the burden of respecting copyright themselves.
Not quite sure what you mean by "fine control of selections", with GIMP I can select and position image elements down to 1 pixel resolution without a problem.
Actually, you can do even better than that... you can "partially select" pixels (it just adds an alpha channel to the selection). But, like you, I've never used photoshop, so I can't compare.
I bought a Mobicarte SIM card with my Cuban passport last time I was in France (actually, I bought it without presenting any kind of ID, but to activate it I had to scan and email the first page of my passport). If a Cuban can, I'm inclined to believe that a US citizen can too.
okay, that's amazing... I hope you have a local copy of wikipedia...
I do. Well, I did - I don't know if they've taken it down since I left (or, more likely, if the server died and there wasn't another to replace it). I hope not. I started a "meta-project" (me and a couple of other professors, and with a canadian university helping out with the supplies) which goal was to make available as much as possible in the intranet, so that students (the weakest link in that chain - they had the most restrictions on internet access) could get at least some access. Wikipedia was the first step. We would ask our professors to bring as many papers and documents as possible to store locally, when they came back from their travels. Unfortunately, the project wasn't very popular among the other professors... they had to do extra work (uploading, cataloging the files if they were not full-text), as it was too much for my small team of volunteers to do it all.
I can't imagine high school without internet
I also tried to kickstart another project for secondary schools and high school students. Most of our high schools barely have computers, most of them are not networked, and if they are, its purely adhoc, no servers. I wanted to at least give them the wikipedia (full, not the CD/DVD with manually selected articles). The static dumps were way too big, I tried to use the compressed dumps + a parser and distribute that on CDs/DVDs. But that project never got the support it needed, and I already had my hands full (real job, fake job, paying job, studies, thesis and my "volunteer meta project") to actually fight for it. In hindsight, it would've been better to drop the meta project in favour of this one.
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There is no law preventing mozilla buying a H.264 license and using it in official builds of firefox.
The problem is that afaict there is no way of getting a license that would also apply to third party derivitives of firefox so for firefox to support h.264 they would have to screw the community that supports them.
You are, of course, correct. I was referring to "patent law" (laws?), which allows the patent holders to dictate unreasonable (or at least unpractical) terms to Mozilla.
Firefox already features patented technologies, such as jpeg, or did you mean "royalties"?
No, I didn't. I didn't mentioned "patented technologies" either. I mentioned H.264 specifically. I don't recall the patent holder of the wheel complaining because Firefox icon is round. I do recall MPEG-LA not offering any kind of license for use in free software projects. Until they do, this is not an "ideological stand" that you might "disagree a little" with. It is a legal issue that Mozilla has no power to change, and neither your "little disagreement" nor my strong support has any bearing on it.
Mozilla Firefox (~30% of the browser market share) will never have support for H.264. Never.
And Valve said that Half Life 2 would never be on the Mac. Never.
Times change.
Was there any kind of law forbidding Valve from porting Half Life to the Mac?
(just curious about how they went around it, and how do you think that workaround could be applied to Firefox and the H.264 patents... Otherwise, I don't really see your point. Though technically, you are right - when the patents expires, Firefox might be able to include it. Is that what you meant?)
Rumor is that the guys who originally spotted it named it after the Stargate SG-1 character, who (presumably) sent an asteroid to destroy the earth in the episode "Fail Safe."
Actually, that was Anubis. Apophis died a few episodes earlier.
Was just pointing out to many here who believed "other OS" was removed for no reason, that geohot was heroically restoring that functionality, when it was his actions that prompted the removal in the first place.
What? His actions didn't prompt anything - what happened was Sony's decision, and Sony's decision alone. Sony was well within their power to not sell a PS3 to him or anyone he might have known in the first place. (What? Sony can't see the future? Neither could him... the difference is, he was hacking his very own device, and at most teaching others to do the same if they wanted, while Sony decided to break everyone's devices). That Sony's actions aren't clearly in the wrong from a legal point of view speaks very badly of the american legal system, and that they are justified in your mind speaks badly... well, about you. Sony did, after all, take something away from their customers - they did much more than the "pirates" who only copy their stuff.
They were screw one way or the other, so they took what they believed was the lesser of 2 evils.
Out of curiosity, do you really believe that? Given the tone of your first post ("unprovoked", "first punch", removing other OS "in response", etc), I assumed you believed/justified Sony being vindictive. But in this one, Sony is the good guy being forced to do evil by Geohot and taking the righteous path, which incidentally, meant stealing from all their paying customers. Now I'm confused. I suppose one of those is sarcastic or being devil's advocate or something, but I can't figure out which is which.
With reCaptcha, you don't have to successfully OCR the scanned word, just the control word. Usually they are indistinguishable by sight (you don't know which one is the control word), but I've seen reCaptcha instances where one word is clear and the other one is unreadable. In these cases, you can type the control word correctly and just write some gibberish for the other, and you'll beat the captcha.
Which means that the spammer won't have to OCR the hardest of the words... just the simpler one. Run the OCR to the full text, post both words, and if the simpler one matches, you broke the captcha.
(I make it sound so easy! It really isn't! I'm amazed that they did break it! I just wanted to point out that it isn't "OCR words that haven't been OCRd before", rather than "OCR words that have been OCRd previously and are now a bit distorted".)
Imagine if the casino exploited a bug that displayed "you lose" when the randomizer actually produced a winning combination.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166
it is obvious that no one person or entity can guarantee the security, so the only sensible option is to not trust any single entity, and instead, distribute that trust among as many people you can, for as much of the toolchain as you can, and be ready to replace the offending part when a problem is detected.
That toolchain is only as secure as its weakest link.
I don't disagree that open source software can be very secure, but your argument for open source software being more secure is uncompelling. Once a problem is detected, it's too late - a backdoor could be inserted that is effectively itself undetectable.
As opposed to what? Reducing the chances of even detecting the compromise? I didn't just state that it was more secure (did I say that at all?). The more people who can cry foul, the lower the chances of a single entity to silence them all. After the problem is detected, you have the chance of replacing everything on top of the compromised element of the toolchain and prevent future damage. You can't prevent past damage, obviously, with either approach. But with "closed", you may not be able to prevent the future damage either (closed source: hard to detect, can't recompile, must wait until someone else does it for me. Apple model: I can't install the update by myself, I must wait until Apple publishes one, even if the app is opensource)
(confession - I don't think I understood your post correctly. My lack of english skills may have played a part on that. I suppose you were thinking along the lines of, if I learn that my gcc is compromised, I'll replace only gcc and not everything compiled with it, which would be a pretty nonsensical position on my part)
If you don't have control, you have to trust someone to provide security. Depending on who it is and what their experience is, I often prefer to trust.
Exactly. I also prefer to trust. But not blindly: I must be reasonably certain that I can control who I am trusting, and that person/entity has the capacity review the item under consideration.
That rules out non-free software, as only the author has the capacity to review, and the Apple model, as even with open source apps, I have no control. Quoting an Anon comment in this thread,
It is not possible to prove security in a modern computer system for any plausible level of control.
it is obvious that no one person or entity can guarantee the security, so the only sensible option is to not trust any single entity, and instead, distribute that trust among as many people you can, for as much of the toolchain as you can, and be ready to replace the offending part when a problem is detected.
http://groups.google.com/group/shibboleth-users/msg/00591708f5fa479b?pli=1
Science & Engineering papers usually depend on new work or research
Not at undergraduate level they don't.
Not in some universities, I grant you that. But at least in Cuban universities, undergraduate level science papers required a lot of original work... Even some undergraduate level exams could require a lot of original work. I used to teach one of them. A typical exam question was, "prove this theorem", where "this theorem" was a something I thought of when preparing the exam.
(Actually, if you didn't include one question like that, some of the students would get really disappointed. Now that I think about it... I've haven't seen a student complaining that the exam/assignment was too easy since I left Cuba, even though the ones I've seen are much easier than their Cuban equivalent.)
So you're annoyed that your carefully crafted message on your state owned media is being undercut by the free flow of ideas on the Internet?
Actually, I do get annoyed when the "free flows of ideas" is used to distribute lies (or half truths) carefully crafted by foreign governments in order to discredit one's government. Why do you immediately assume that the propaganda they are trying to "protect" against is true, and that their message is false?
I do not condone censorship, not even for this reason (I come from Cuba). I do think that censoring the opposition only reinforces the lies they spread (specially when, as with most oppositions, they also say a lot of truth). But it is infuriating to turn on the TV, and see someone contradicting himself. Even worse is to see people around you nodding in agreement despite any logic ("can't you see that he is lying? You were RIGHT THERE when it happened!")
One anecdote. I once got home, and I turned on the TV - american TV, which was illegal (copyright violation on the US side, decoding satellite signals, etc, and just "violation" in the Cuban side, though only the second part gets reported by the opposition). There was a report about "police repression" in Cuba... and the video feed was of me, telling the time to a couple of policemen a few days earlier.
(In case you wonder - I also dislike when the Cuban media lies and people nods in agreement despite all logic.)
So, I'm against censorship, yes, but you shouldn't ridicule the argument. Propaganda is used, extensively, to (try to) destabilize foreign goverments, and a great deal of that propaganda is untruthful.
That is the moral case I'm making. If you disagree that obtaining the fruits of someone's hard work without adhering to their terms and conditions (be they monetary, attribution, opening of derivative works, etc etc) is 'bad', why then that's up to you.
I disagree with your opinion, but as you say, you are entitled to it. You seem to be taking an informed stance rather than spewing mindless propaganda. For that, I bow to you in respect.
But, one reason for my disagreement is... why 20 years? What makes 20 so special, that before ~20 years, it is wrong to obtain "the fruits of someone's hard work without adhering to their terms and conditions", but after 20, you no longer think it is wrong? (Replace 20 by any other number
For me, "attribution" should be forever (because not giving attribution is lying to society), but derivative works should be allowed very shortly (or immediately) after the creation of the original, because if we (society) are going to restrict ourselves for the benefit of the author, we better see the fruits (new works) of that restriction while they are still useful for us (i.e, not 40 years later, definitely not after we die).
Hey, I know you! Email works, btw :D
Its very sad they have a valid official reason, adds to its credibility, but its a fake one.
Fake it isn't. But, as everyone knows... not the only one.
At the prices they are charging for the dialup access (60 CUC/80hrs per month) (72USD per 80h per month) they can afford to resell satellite bandwidth no problem at all.
Oh, it is cheaper now? But only foreigners can buy it still? Anyway, there may be (if we believe the ministry of informatics, there are) restrictions about how much bandwidth they can buy. If that's true, it wouldn't be as easy as just resell it.
However... they actively look for and seize "illegal" satellite dishes that can be used to connect to the net (dishnetwork, directway, etc). While it may not be easy to just resell the bandwidth, if that were the only objection, they wouldn't penalize those networks. Hell, one of the directors of ETECSA (Cuban telecomunication company) once "explained" to me why connecting my two computers with a network cable/wireless was illegal.
Ok, we dont have internet, what about investing in our local intranet, local websites, local ISPs, local IRC servers.... people are willing to pay, just look at what we pay for cell phones, and the demand is so high the network collapses every now an then.....
The cuban goverment is very clever (nothing original), always operating behind a cloak of technical reasons, the first step of all dictators in history is to size the mass media.
Actually, in this case, they are being extremely stupid. A good way to control the people is to make them believe that they are not being controlled. By having that "national network", they could still control most of what you saw, while unequivocally shifting all the blame to the US. They are not clever - even when they have the perfect excuse, they make it obvious that they have other reasons.
Interesting. I'd think that the US would want Cuba to have plenty of bandwidth as it might help foster a revolt against the government. I guess some folks in the US are still hellbent on the whole embargo thing.
I agree. That shows that US intentions with Cuba aren't as... altruistic as they (government, so called "human rights groups", etc) claim.
However, even with a cable to Venezuela, I seriously doubt the Cuban government is going to make everything free and open. That just isn't in their nature. There will be more internet to go around, but it's still going to be the internet that the Party wants them to see.
I also agree. I would be very surprised if they just made internet access more affordable. They don't really have to wait for the US to show some advances (like, "we can't give you internet access because of the US, but here you have a good national network that you could use in the meantime"). But instead, we have 127/07 (here for those who read spanish).
while most people in his country aren't allowed to do so because it would threaten his power
Actually, the "official" reason is that the US limits who can we get bandwidth from (by owning or threatening those who own the fiber around the island), so we can only get it at ridiculously high prices. I think the total bandwidth for the whole country is about 230Mb/sec download, 100 upload.
I don't believe that is the only reason (clearly, censorship is a big one - I had to censor many things in the name of "lack of bandwithd" even after I proved that it would have a negligible effect). But the "official" reason, by itself, is enough to restrict nearly as much as Cuba does. It's also disgustingly hypocritical that the US gives the Cuban government such a perfect justification for their censorship.
Who knows, maybe with the cable to Venezuela the Cuban government will show the world (and the Cubans) that the US was the only responsible for the lack of internet access in Cuba. I would be very surprised if they did - but I doubt they'll be intelligent enough to see how it would benefit them.
I think you are misunderstanding what the P=NP question means... and I don't blame you. The question itself is very "meta", but it is not self-referencing as you believe.
P is a set of questions (YES/NO questions) that can be answered easily. NP is another set of questions, that may or may not be easy to answer, but when you see the answer (YES/NO) and a proof for the answer, you can easily check if the proof is correct. But the question "P=NP?" doesn't belong to either of the sets. If P=NP, then all problems that are easily "verifiable" are also easily "solvable", and if P!=NP, then there are problems easily verifiable but hard to solve. But, as the question "P=NP?" doesn't belong to P or NP, there is no paradox.
That's an over simplification, of course. For instance, "easy" in the previous paragraph actually means "solvable in polynomial time by a deterministic turing machine", and "not easy" would be "solvable in polynomial time by a non-deterministic turing machine", and there is the widespread confusion about "NP" meaning "Non-P" instead of "P in a Non-deterministic machine". The wikipedia article is really good, but unfortunately, much too formal to understand without previous knowledge. I hope I helped a bit.
I think what you mean is "are you seriously equating sharing with rape, et al".
I'm not a native English speaker. I don't - can't, in fact, notice these subtleties. But I assume when I write that the ones reading will be intelligent enough to not discard the whole message because of one mistranslated word.
Which would indeed be a bad thing and to which the OP could quite honestly reply "no, I'm not, don't create strawmen". But comparing? He's proving the principle used to justify piracy as wrong by comparing how it would sound if you used the same argument to justify other things. That's fine.
... by giving them equal footing. If the OP can't see that the differences between the two sets of actions are so huge that using one to draw any rational conclusion about the other is absurd, then he is a prime example of why the use of the term "piracy" has succeeded. Can you see the differences? Just a few: victims, damage caused to the victims, whether is deemed acceptable by great portions of society, whether it is done by great portions of society, whether they are enforceable now, whether they'll become easier to enforce in the future, who's interests the laws in question are protecting, and who is paying to get those laws passed.
In pretty much all those aspects, "sharing" and "rape, murder, drunk driving, child abuse" are opposite. Thank you for the word strawmen, because that's exactly what the OP did when he cherry-picked 4 of the original posters words and tried to shoot down the argument with his "comparison"... utterly ignoring the rest of the post. Copyright law is outdated and inefficient, that is a fact, and no good can come from ignoring it (or making it worse) instead of trying to fix it... specially not for the authors, who currently have to deal with people ignoring their copyrights, while carrying the burden of respecting copyright themselves.
Neither can rape, murder, drunk driving, child abuse...
Wow, are you seriously comparing sharing with rape, murder, drunk driving and child abuse? A prime example of why you should stop calling it "piracy".
[Remainder of impassioned rant of why theft and piracy should be legal, snipped.]
Funny that you chose to summarize his post with that line... He never mentioned the word "theft".
Sure, just tell your baby to start dancing to another tune so you can film him again.
Not quite sure what you mean by "fine control of selections", with GIMP I can select and position image elements down to 1 pixel resolution without a problem.
Actually, you can do even better than that... you can "partially select" pixels (it just adds an alpha channel to the selection). But, like you, I've never used photoshop, so I can't compare.
I bought a Mobicarte SIM card with my Cuban passport last time I was in France (actually, I bought it without presenting any kind of ID, but to activate it I had to scan and email the first page of my passport). If a Cuban can, I'm inclined to believe that a US citizen can too.
Actually, that's L from the movie.
okay, that's amazing... I hope you have a local copy of wikipedia...
I do. Well, I did - I don't know if they've taken it down since I left (or, more likely, if the server died and there wasn't another to replace it). I hope not. I started a "meta-project" (me and a couple of other professors, and with a canadian university helping out with the supplies) which goal was to make available as much as possible in the intranet, so that students (the weakest link in that chain - they had the most restrictions on internet access) could get at least some access. Wikipedia was the first step. We would ask our professors to bring as many papers and documents as possible to store locally, when they came back from their travels. Unfortunately, the project wasn't very popular among the other professors... they had to do extra work (uploading, cataloging the files if they were not full-text), as it was too much for my small team of volunteers to do it all.
I can't imagine high school without internet
I also tried to kickstart another project for secondary schools and high school students. Most of our high schools barely have computers, most of them are not networked, and if they are, its purely adhoc, no servers. I wanted to at least give them the wikipedia (full, not the CD/DVD with manually selected articles). The static dumps were way too big, I tried to use the compressed dumps + a parser and distribute that on CDs/DVDs. But that project never got the support it needed, and I already had my hands full (real job, fake job, paying job, studies, thesis and my "volunteer meta project") to actually fight for it. In hindsight, it would've been better to drop the meta project in favour of this one.