'Microsoft will publish an irrevocable pledge not to assert any patents it may have over the interoperability information against non-commercial open source software development projects.' The EU anti-trust people are freaking idiots.
Remember the last 'punishment' they gave MS for anti-trust violations? They forced MS to unbundle media player from XP. But the idiots didn't require MS to proportionally, or even at all, reduce the price of the stripped down XP. So MS sells two versions of XP in the EU - regular XP and stripped XP for the same price and no one buys the stripped-down XP. Doh! Big freaking homer doh!
Now they force MS not to sue any non-commercial open source project. Hello? McFly? That promise has got no teeth because most any serious project gets some form of commercial distribution and often commercial funding too. In the meantime they've implicitly endorsed software patents. Gee THANKS!
Yet again, the EU forces a meaningless concession from MS that actually strengthens the company instead of punishing it.
Anyway, the issue isn't about symmetry. It's about how what you can do with P2P technology. Funny that, considering the title of this topic includes the word "symmetrical" but not any hint of P2P. Perhaps that issue is in your head, but you failed to express it in manner that anyone else could recognize.
Can you see a way to serve up a web page using P2P? I can't. I can, and regularly do. Using the orbit downloader large http transfers are regularly augmented by P2P transfers from other orbit users. Similarly a system based on DHTs, like the Coral Cache, is quite feasible.
That's great for sharing bootleg TV episodes. How about serving up a web page? Doing a banking transaction? Streaming live TV? Running a MMORPG? Equal bi-directional bandwidth does not in any way reduce one's ability to perform those tasks.
If I recall correctly it's Sony, IBM and Toshiba in the cell consortium, and the most obvious vendor of a "compute-node Cell module" would indeed be IBM, not Sony, good point. And yet, it seems that Mercury Computer is the one to most capitalize on the idea of cell-based compute nodes:
Or maybe if drugs were legal, the guy would have just made up a different crime instead to get the SWAT team to go to the house. If drugs were legal, then politicians would not have felt the need to grand-stand so much about "being tough on drugs" and thus would never have funded the SWAT team in the first place.
What the kid did was fake a call from the residence claiming that he had been shot and people were going to kill his sister. If I place a call like that, I WANT the SWAT team to kick in my door, I want 20 heavily armed people coming to save me. You know what? I DON'T.
Forget all the cops and robbers shows on tv. The actual number of cases where that kind of response is desirable is very small. We don't need the service they are selling us, especially at the price of hundreds of millions spent on SWAT training nationwide and the occasional accidental death of an innocent.
Life has risks and always will no matter how hard we try to minimize them. The kind of risks that SWAT are supposed to be for are rare enough that we ought to be spending our resources on more effective avenues - more regular cops walking a beat, better drug abuse treatment, more community watch/involvement programs.
I'd suggest that certain people be allowed to willingly give up privacy in return for fast track at the airport through the TSA. You mean like this program?
Of course the problem with anything like that is how it can be compromised, like impersonation or just convincing the 'cleared' person to do something in error (the classic "have your bags been out of your possession" attack).
However, one smart, but probably unintended idea is that you can pay more for faster screening. Forget giving up privacy to gain less screening, do the same amount of screening but just faster - shorter lines with more competent screeners - would you pay $50 more for an expedited line with a guaranteed maximum 5 minute wait?
Thank all these people whom have uploaded/downloaded music/movies for years. They are the true freedom fighters against the evil corporations.
No they're not -- I mean, I admire the spirit you're trying to paint them in and all, but no, they're (for the most part) just greedy people, just like the record execs, trying to get more for less, even if it's not legal. Freedom fighters implies some higher purpose... What you say would apply to the downloaders, but not the uploaders/sharers. Some 'closed' communities have ratios and what-not, but the general world of filesharing is filled with millions of people who receive no direct benefit from their actions. At 'worst' you could say they benefit by building a robust community of sharing, but community benefit is pretty much what anyone taking a principled stand on any issue hopes to gain,.
To use them, you must adhere to conditions that the majority of people (or their representatives) agree on. These conditions exist to make the roads a better place for all. Quit being such a tool. Whether someone else wears a seat belt has absolutely nothing to do with "making the roads a better place."
Cops have a lot more opportunity to get shot than ordinary citizens - pay or not. If you don't want them getting shot left and right you need to safeguard them to some extent. And keep in mind that I'm normally a fairly libertarian-leaning person... And again, a shoot-first policy does not "safeguard" them to any reasonable extent. Bullshit policies don't help the cops nor do they help society in general. Good training, good protection, good equipment -- those things safeguard cops to more than just "some extent" and they don't screw with the fundamental values of a Free country either.
I have to ask the question, is this type of behavior exhibited by ripoff artists, or inexperienced "technical" people trying to be entrepreneurial?
The end result may manifest itself in the same form, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's malicious. Incompetent? Yes. Scam? Maybe not. Q: What's the difference between a used-car salesman and a computer salesman? A: The used-car salesman knows when he is lying.
This is a BD-J issue, not an encryption issue. They usually fix BD-J issues quickly. Notice no problem with the Pioneer/Sony player. How do you know that? My understanding is that BD+ does not use the BD-J virtual machine, it has its own (non-java) virtual machine.
Keys can actually be revoked on a per-player basis, the math to do it is tricky but available in published papers. So they need not revoke the entire production run or model. But they can only revoke a specific player if they know its keys were compromised (and thus subsequently published somewhere on the net) versus kept private and only decrypted rips being published.
Ultimately, what we're looking at is a situation where telcos aren't satisfied with Y dollars per month from the consumer, and gobzillions more from Google. They want to charge Google more for the right to access their particular bunch of consumers. I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but my theory is that the reason the telcos are driving so hard for network bias is because of the flat-rate pricing model.
Flat-rate pricing means there is a limit on how much income the ISP receives from each customer. So the less bandwidth the customer uses, the more profitable they are for the ISP. Thus it is in the ISP's interests for their own customers not to use their service. That's a bad business model because it pits vendor and buyer against each other and as we know - per user bandwidth usage will only increase over time as new services gain a foothold on the net.
A better business model is one which the more the customer uses the service, the more the vendor benefits. In this case, that means some variation on metered billing.
Put aside the obvious expectation that the telcos will try to over-charge as much as possible in a metered billing scenario. The benefits of being aligned with the customer instead of against them could be very helpful - the more customers use bandwidth, the more money there is available for the telco to build up more bandwidth infrastructure. Instead of looking for alternative forms of revenue like network biasing and ISP-produced/owned content delivery that conflict with the interests of their customers - they can simply concentrate on their primary business - bigger and better pipes to the rest of the world.
I used to be extremely anti-metered-bandwidth, but after seeing things like the network neutrality fight and comcast dropping their "biggest" customers it just seems to me that we would all be better off if the telcos' interests were aligned with ours instead of fighting with them. Kind of like the way Verizon went to bat against the DMCA requests without subpoenas - they didn't give a ratsass about customer privacy, but their business interests were aligned with ours anyway because the cost to process those DMCA requests was too much of a burden.
Do you realize that net neutrality was the rule of the land in the USA until just a couple of years ago? It was only very recently that internet service was reclassified from a "voice" service to a "data" service. The tariffs on "voice" service mandate network neutrality while the tariffs on "data" service do not.
So, if you were right, we've had this "political layer module" in our routers for decades now. And given how slowly infrastructure is upgraded, most routers in use still have that "political layer module" installed and functioning.
My mother was an English teacher and she used to complain about people misusing the word unique in this way all the time. And while I certainly understand the point you and she are making, I have long wondered at what point does a commonly misused word simply become redefined? My high school English teacher used to say, and probably still does say, that language creates environment and environment creates language.
Maybe it's different in places like France where they have government bodies dedicated to maintaining the purity of their language. But I have to think that the threshold is, and should be, pretty low for a language like English where we regularly co-opt terms and phrases from just about anywhere (geographically and semantically) we feel like.
No, I don't think he's responsible for the law, but it falls in with his belief system.
My definition of nut in this case is not somehow mentally incompetent. But anyone who thinks there are no homosexuals in Iran, or that their treatment of homosexuals is somehow acceptable, is a nut. Plain and simple. So basically you ignored my entire point about his response being misinterpreted. Because all I see up there in your own words is a quixotic attack against the misinterpretation.
Well, that's a chicken-and-egg problem, then. No, it is a "Not my problem" then. Most of the guys have no interest in seeing the linux userbase grow. After all, they are already getting what they need from linux as it is.
Well, of course not; it carries the death penalty.
Either way, the man is a nut. What, do you think he's personally responsible for that law?
Seems more like you've bought into the standard demonization PR. Nobody gets to be president of a country (even one like Iran where the President is not the top guy) by being "a nut." Not in North Korea, not in Iraq, nor even in Serbia. I absolutely guarantee you that the CIA does not consider him "a nut."
Wasn't there an article on how the massive London camera network doesn't actually do any good? And that one has real people monitoring it. Who really thinks a computer will be able to do a better job at something so nebulous as "suspicious behavior?" Actually, if you accept the premise, then computers probably are better than people.
It's the same reason passengers are regularly able to accidentally or even purposely 'smuggle' all kinds of contraband past the luggage screeners at the airport. When 99.999% of the time there is nothing to get alarmed about, the people doing the monitoring get so bored of their jobs that they stop paying attention. This is not an indictment of the TSA's people (there are plenty of other reasons to flame them) it's just human nature, a form of the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome. Computers never get bored, probably because they have no imagination to distract them.
Recently, the president of Iran claimed "we have no homosexuals in Iran." He actually said something in Farsi that was translated as, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country." Given the complexities of translation, it isn't hard to interpret his meaning to be that in Iran, most homosexuals are in the closet, they don't advertise their orientation the way they do in your country.
But of course that doesn't make as good fodder for the evening news round of sound-bites.
I'm not convinced that any other posture would really be appropriate, unless you're willing to find police willing to go into harm's way with a don't-shoot-first-ever rule of engagement. That could be a recipe for dead cops... Cops sign up for hazardous duty, innocent people don't. Any policy that favors the lives of the police over the people whom they are sworn to protect and serve is not justifiable.
Now, if it turns out that she is mentally retarded and not some college student with a chip on her shoulder then I could see a little leniency being in order. And what if she just turns out to be a regular person going about her regular business in her regular way? Some people are just unable to conceive of what its like to be someone else - easily ascribing motive to actions that viewed in the correct context are completely pedestrian.
The police apparently showed tremendous restraint, running into a situation that could have very well ended their lives while using tremendous care in the use of lethal force. Among all the other silly points in your post, this one stands out above all the others for lack of critical thinking. Any reasonably smart suicide bomber will use a deadman's switch, in which case such 'restraint' is meaningless, shoot them dead the bomb goes off, confront them, the bomb goes off.
In which case the obvious policy is to not to shoot, since shooting does not improve the odds of their survival but certainly improves the odds of the survival in case they make a mistake. Which, it is important to note - there have been no suicide bombers in the US yet, so clearly mistakes are the rule.
it has NOTHING in common with the whole "mooninite" incident, save similarities in the type of device. That and the foolish persistence of the police and the prosecutor that they need to arrest and charge someone when it only takes an ounce of common sense to see that the right way to handle the situations would be to let it drop as soon as it was determined that there was no threat, never was a thread and no threat was intended.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the last 'punishment' they gave MS for anti-trust violations? They forced MS to unbundle media player from XP. But the idiots didn't require MS to proportionally, or even at all, reduce the price of the stripped down XP. So MS sells two versions of XP in the EU - regular XP and stripped XP for the same price and no one buys the stripped-down XP. Doh! Big freaking homer doh!
Now they force MS not to sue any non-commercial open source project. Hello? McFly? That promise has got no teeth because most any serious project gets some form of commercial distribution and often commercial funding too. In the meantime they've implicitly endorsed software patents. Gee THANKS!
Yet again, the EU forces a meaningless concession from MS that actually strengthens the company instead of punishing it.
Cue blahblah...
http://www.mc.com/products/productdetail.aspx?id=7374
Forget all the cops and robbers shows on tv. The actual number of cases where that kind of response is desirable is very small. We don't need the service they are selling us, especially at the price of hundreds of millions spent on SWAT training nationwide and the occasional accidental death of an innocent.
Life has risks and always will no matter how hard we try to minimize them. The kind of risks that SWAT are supposed to be for are rare enough that we ought to be spending our resources on more effective avenues - more regular cops walking a beat, better drug abuse treatment, more community watch/involvement programs.
Of course the problem with anything like that is how it can be compromised, like impersonation or just convincing the 'cleared' person to do something in error (the classic "have your bags been out of your possession" attack).
However, one smart, but probably unintended idea is that you can pay more for faster screening. Forget giving up privacy to gain less screening, do the same amount of screening but just faster - shorter lines with more competent screeners - would you pay $50 more for an expedited line with a guaranteed maximum 5 minute wait?
No they're not -- I mean, I admire the spirit you're trying to paint them in and all, but no, they're (for the most part) just greedy people, just like the record execs, trying to get more for less, even if it's not legal. Freedom fighters implies some higher purpose... What you say would apply to the downloaders, but not the uploaders/sharers. Some 'closed' communities have ratios and what-not, but the general world of filesharing is filled with millions of people who receive no direct benefit from their actions. At 'worst' you could say they benefit by building a robust community of sharing, but community benefit is pretty much what anyone taking a principled stand on any issue hopes to gain,.
You don't "respect" the OP's freedom one bit.
The end result may manifest itself in the same form, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's malicious. Incompetent? Yes. Scam? Maybe not. Q: What's the difference between a used-car salesman and a computer salesman?
A: The used-car salesman knows when he is lying.
Keys can actually be revoked on a per-player basis, the math to do it is tricky but available in published papers. So they need not revoke the entire production run or model. But they can only revoke a specific player if they know its keys were compromised (and thus subsequently published somewhere on the net) versus kept private and only decrypted rips being published.
Flat-rate pricing means there is a limit on how much income the ISP receives from each customer. So the less bandwidth the customer uses, the more profitable they are for the ISP. Thus it is in the ISP's interests for their own customers not to use their service. That's a bad business model because it pits vendor and buyer against each other and as we know - per user bandwidth usage will only increase over time as new services gain a foothold on the net.
A better business model is one which the more the customer uses the service, the more the vendor benefits. In this case, that means some variation on metered billing.
Put aside the obvious expectation that the telcos will try to over-charge as much as possible in a metered billing scenario. The benefits of being aligned with the customer instead of against them could be very helpful - the more customers use bandwidth, the more money there is available for the telco to build up more bandwidth infrastructure. Instead of looking for alternative forms of revenue like network biasing and ISP-produced/owned content delivery that conflict with the interests of their customers - they can simply concentrate on their primary business - bigger and better pipes to the rest of the world.
I used to be extremely anti-metered-bandwidth, but after seeing things like the network neutrality fight and comcast dropping their "biggest" customers it just seems to me that we would all be better off if the telcos' interests were aligned with ours instead of fighting with them. Kind of like the way Verizon went to bat against the DMCA requests without subpoenas - they didn't give a ratsass about customer privacy, but their business interests were aligned with ours anyway because the cost to process those DMCA requests was too much of a burden.
Do you realize that net neutrality was the rule of the land in the USA until just a couple of years ago? It was only very recently that internet service was reclassified from a "voice" service to a "data" service. The tariffs on "voice" service mandate network neutrality while the tariffs on "data" service do not.
So, if you were right, we've had this "political layer module" in our routers for decades now. And given how slowly infrastructure is upgraded, most routers in use still have that "political layer module" installed and functioning.
Maybe it's different in places like France where they have government bodies dedicated to maintaining the purity of their language. But I have to think that the threshold is, and should be, pretty low for a language like English where we regularly co-opt terms and phrases from just about anywhere (geographically and semantically) we feel like.
My definition of nut in this case is not somehow mentally incompetent. But anyone who thinks there are no homosexuals in Iran, or that their treatment of homosexuals is somehow acceptable, is a nut. Plain and simple. So basically you ignored my entire point about his response being misinterpreted. Because all I see up there in your own words is a quixotic attack against the misinterpretation.
Either way, the man is a nut. What, do you think he's personally responsible for that law?
Seems more like you've bought into the standard demonization PR.
Nobody gets to be president of a country (even one like Iran where the President is not the top guy) by being "a nut." Not in North Korea, not in Iraq, nor even in Serbia. I absolutely guarantee you that the CIA does not consider him "a nut."
It's the same reason passengers are regularly able to accidentally or even purposely 'smuggle' all kinds of contraband past the luggage screeners at the airport. When 99.999% of the time there is nothing to get alarmed about, the people doing the monitoring get so bored of their jobs that they stop paying attention. This is not an indictment of the TSA's people (there are plenty of other reasons to flame them) it's just human nature, a form of the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome. Computers never get bored, probably because they have no imagination to distract them.
But of course that doesn't make as good fodder for the evening news round of sound-bites.
In which case the obvious policy is to not to shoot, since shooting does not improve the odds of their survival but certainly improves the odds of the survival in case they make a mistake. Which, it is important to note - there have been no suicide bombers in the US yet, so clearly mistakes are the rule.