> Google is a private, foreign, totally unaccountable organisation.
So are Belgian newspapers.
> They're just getting too much power over the Internet these days.
So obviously do Belgian newspapers.
> And their power is only growing
The power of Belgian newspapers has also just grown a little bit. Now they have the power to prevent you from linking to them, even if you are outside of Belgium.
Twitter itself is worthless as a technology, as it's basically an IRC server publicly displaying querys and #channel logs, nowadays fancily rebranded as #hashtags. The primary worth of Twitter consists of influential users publishing information exclusively on twitter. Nobody important publishes exclusively on Identica, so nobody uses Identica.
> digital copies last in pristine condition even when handled by schoolkids
This problem could have been solved by handing out pdfs, which they can print out over and over again. They could make notes on them and still have the originals. They wouldnt have to carry the whole book around all the time, they could just take a few pages they need. They wouldnt have to take as care of them as of books, becouse they could always be reprinted when destroyed or lost.
Why does the education system rely on overpriced commercial literature at all? Why doesnt it work to hire 1-2 experts per subject and let them write for hire definitive textbooks for the particular subject which then could be used without any royalties for years and decades by thousands of students? Why are they forced to buy new books over and over when everybody has a printer at home?
The so called "due process" wasnt laid out for a case where basically millions and millions of people, i.e. the majority of a country's population, are guilty and have to be prosecuted by comparably a tiny number of prosecutors. Usually, something that the majority of people doesnt consider wrong and does on a daily basis isnt even illegal. But in the case of enforcing copyright, you basically have a small, very small minority trying to force the majority into not doing something very basic like information exchange against their will and against their intrinsic sense of right and wrong. If due process is required in every of all those "educational" lawsuits, the few prosecutors would never get enough of them to have the envisioned shock & awe educational effect on the majority. Since disproportionately harsh example punishments like decimation are politcally and legally not yet possible, getting all the filthy pirates _can_ only work if the assumption is made that every accusation is justified and the wrongdoing highly probable, and the process then fully automated according to this assumption.
We, the people, did NEVER grant them those rights in the first place. Never. Those "rights" were all created and granted in pre-democratic times and simply dragged along for centuries. Those rights have literarily NEVER been confirmed by a populous vote. Never.
What we, the people, did do though, is to never oppose those rights directly, since the established parties of the so called "representative democracy" dont let us vote on it directly. The only way to try to bypass the party shield and to get to vote on copyright directly was by forming worldwide pirate parties, but they all failed because the issue of copyright may be important, but is just too small to justify a dedicated party.
This means: * Established parties will never let us vote on copyright directly because they know the outcome. * All established parties a uniform pro-strong-copyright policy because theyre in bed with paying publishers. * The pirate parties will never become big enough because the issue is too small compared to other issues. * Copyright is effectively, by being comparably a small issue, smuggled under the democratic radar by the parties&publishers.
And leads to the conclusion: * Voters are not, were not and will not ever be able to affect copyright policy in _any_ way.
> "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them
To sum up the answer to your statement: We The People did not make this grant, we do not support this grant, and we are effectively shielded off from disabling this grant precisely _because_ it is precisely us who this grant from the beginning on was directed against.
Let the people vote on copyright (they never did, they never will), and copyright as we know it will cease to exist (and this is the reason).
> Being able to "re-invent" something should nullify a patent completely.
How are you gonna distinguish re-inventing and simply copying? How is somebody supposed to prove having no knowledge of a previous patent after he nullified it by "re-inventing"? The patent system should stay as it is, but up the patentability level way higher, to a level of difficulty where people arent able to simply re-invent something just by sitting down and thinking about it a little, i.e. to the level of the often required, but seldom delivered non-obviousness.
The problems with the patent system arent rooted in the patent system existing, but in the low level of patentability, which allows for stuff to be patented which thousands of independent researchers can come up with. Instead of incentivizing them to solve hard problems, the system incentivizes them to be the first to file patents for easier but unpatented problems, so it is more of a intellectual land rush.
> Good, stick with your mid-90s and earlier window manager.
Why changing something that works, for the worse?
> The rest of us will enjoy the capabilities afforded us by our hardware.
I wouldnt mind if all those fabulos capabilities you allegedly "enjoy", were for the better, but they arent. They are mostly a superficial, never ending designer circlejerkoff in fight for winning the useless "oh shiny, now wheres my starbucks app" crowd. But you cant win that crowd for more than a year, because they change trends faster then you change underwear. You fool yourself by thinking that every time you completely jettison the old, working configuration, for a completely new design, you are improving something, but you arent. Youve just entered the fashion zone, without realizing it.
> If you don't know the name, how are you going to find it in a drop down list of applications?
By picking the right category and then the most fitting function description? "Internet / Firefox Web Browser". "Utilities / gedit text editor".
> How much more intuitive is that versus "Brasero" or "Rhythmbox".
The usual way of doing things is searching only once, when you dont know what youre looking for. When you've found it, you either give it a name yourself or accept the name it already has. But when you subsequently want to use it, you usually _dont_ search over and over and over again like a Alzheimer patient, you go straight for the name/key, like in a hashmap (which is by the way, as numerous design and usability studies have confirmed, the next on the way out).
> It doesn't support 1/16th of Skype's vital features, and it doesn't even support video in the desktop client.
I never undestood why Google from the beginning refused to build video into the client. As I remember, the party line back then was that video was "bloat", and that they did want the GTalk client to remain "simple". And it remained half-assed. And then they gave up any further work on it. No video, no Linux/Mac versions, no conference mode, nothing. Half a decade passed and all they had to offer wasa a half-assed, non-competitive windows-only client. For how much they neglected their own telephony during the last 6 years, I would have been more surprised if Google ended up buying Skype instead of Microsoft.
> Who should be called what they truly are: modern day slavers.
Remember that in basically all of today's western democracies, you have the same draconian copyright laws. I wouldnt blame the copyright owners that try to squeeze the most out of the "rights" that the public has granted them by the democratic process. So you have only two options, either the public really _does_ want copyright to be excessively enforced and the spread of information an knowledge limited to incentivize information producers to produce more of it, or simply put, democracy as we know it, doesnt work. In the latter case, how much of a textbook should be allowed to be copied for a course should really not be the primary problem you should be working on.
Shuttleworth is obviously attempting to leverage Ubuntus existing popularity to somehow branch off the main Linux species. Like when a queen bee leaves one colony and takes a large number of worker bees in order to form her own hive. He doesnt want to be associated with Gnome any more, and wants his own distinctive look and feel, no matter whether he alienates a number of existing Gnome users. Its a gamble, he is speculating that a large enough number will follow his lead and switch to Unity, and then keep pushing, hyping and defending it like loyal Apple users do. He wants Unity to bring the (Linux based) desktop where Android brought the (Linux based) phone.
The problem with that, at least from my perspective, is that Shuttleworth is at war with options. In a recent blog post, he made the bizarre statement that in his view, every option you can set differently, divides users who set it differently, so they can't talk to each other any more. So his goal seems to be to allow as few different settable options as possible, i.e. a massive Gleichschaltung in order to build a strongly focused brand. He thinks that iOs like interfaces will be the future of the mass market, and wants to get there better sooner than later.
I dont know where he plans to get his 200 Million users from, but I doubt many of them will originate from Ubuntus current user base. It is a massive farewell to the 90's Linux tinkerer and a hello to the 2011's Apple affictionado.
Except when they completely destroy the Desktop from one release to another and you dont _want_ to upgrade.
> When did MS start giving XP users free win 7 disks?
What you pay up front for MS, you gain by not having to constantly upgrade. The Linux ecosystem evolves _too fast_ and in _too unpredictable_ directions.
Having a stable, predictable platform which you know you still will be able to depend on in 10-15 years, is simply worth it. The Linux ecosystem is not able to provide that. It is too volatile and trying to keep up ist too expensive compared to Windows.
So who is now Gnome3's and Unity's target group? Idiots overwhelmed with Windows and OS X? I dont remember that the race for Desktop domination was meant to be a race to the bottom.
Gnome3 & Unity are so unusable for everyday work (from a business point of view), that they do not even seem to be desktop oriented any more at all. They both seem to bet on a (appleized) smartphone & tablet dominated future and want to get there as soon as possible.
The demise of Gnome2 will absolutely KILL desktop linux used in businesses, at least in mine. Deprecating the familiar Gnome2 workflow for no other reason than some visual art designer masturbation reeks of irresponsibility towards existing customers and _will_ have consequences. Leaving Windows and trying Linux on the desktop on a larger scale was a bet not every business was willing to make. Punishing those who did by arbitrarily destroyng familiar desktops environments will no nothing but prove linux skeptics right and linux enthusiasts wrong and seal its fate on business desktops on years to come.
You do not need complete, court-proof evidence. Since RIM is advertising complete security, without anybody being able to actually check, so you only had their word for it, it is their task to do this in a believeable way.
They were issued a ultimatum by countries which they do much business with, to either make snooping possible or be banned. Since they were neither banned nor did the countries withdraw the ultimatum, there is reasonable suspicion that they indeed did make snooping possible. And with someone who is advertising complete security, you do not need more than reasonable doubt.
It was this CEO's job to use the interview to try to remove this reasonable doubt, i.e. to persuade the remaining customers that, whatever they might have heard in the news, it is not true, and that their communication is still as completely secure as it was.
Instead, he obviously tried to make an agreement with the interviewer to not be asked this question, and when the interviewer forgot the agreement, the CEO was completely unprepared, and considered it better to run out of the interview, than to answer it. He easily could have simply denied everything with a straight face and many people would have believed him. Obviously, even for a CEO of a company selling security, it was too hard lying about their core product, so instead he ran away completely embarassed.
Because you cant check yourself, you have to trust. Its the companys business to create and maintain this trust by acting accordingly. Would you trust this man and his company, or do you simply by default consider any advertised features of any company to be true unless demonstrably proven false?
Or to a crazy theocracy, which Quatar is, where homosexual fans are at risk of being jailed. FIFAs president, Joseph Blatter, basically told gays to suck it up, and if they really really _must_ fly to Quatar to see the games, like everybody else, they should during this time pretend to be heterosexual to avoid persecution.
If a man could marry n women, and each of these women could marry n men, each of which in turn could marry other n-1 women, wouldnt this allow for a possible situation where every man is married to everyone, or connected to everyone through a chain of marriages? (Which would, by the way, basically lead to a redefinition of the Kevin bacon number to through how many marriage nodes somebody is married to Kevin Bacon.) (And to a renaming of Facebook to be a "marriage network", etc.)
> In general, societies enforced monogamy because otherwise men would marry a whole bunch of women
and leave back an army of unmarried angry young man. As to my knowledge the ban of polygamy was primarily to prevent a few wealthy old men marrying dozens of young women off the market and leaving hordes of young men without a way to reproduce, leading to explosive social unrest. The Bible had nothing to do with it, the Old Testament, on which the model of the Mormon practices and scriptures was based, was highly polygamous itself.
DHL, i.e. "Deutsche Post" isnt participating in De-Mail at all. Since the basic purpose of De-Mail was to obsolete a large part of legally binding snail mail, and Deutsche Post realized they would be hit the hardest by this, they developed their own competitive service called "Deutsche Post ePostBrief", which works exactly the same as De-Mail, but of course isnt compatible with De-Mail, so you cant interchange legally binding emails between providers. Deutsche Post is kinda alone in their camp, since basically everybody else (ISPs, Email-Providers) is in the De-Mail camp.
What both of course have in common is that there is no end-to-end encryption, so now you have not only to trust your lawyer/bank/doctor for confidential stuff, but now you also have to trust the carrier. Oh, and, in order to not hurt their snail mail business, every "Deutsche Post ePostBrief" will cost EUR 0,55, exactly as much as a snail mail.
You are not able to "speak" your belief today if somebody has already spoken that belief. Thanks Cpt. Copyright.
> taking something and refusing to pay
Pirates are not actually "taking" or "refusing" anything. They are exchanging information amongst their peers. People have been sharing information for ages, they used to call it "learning from eachother". It was Cpt. Copyright who started with "lets errect toll booths between people" and then started chasing around people who tried to circumwent this kind of for-profit censorship.
> I reject entirely that people writing are "archaic powers".
They are not. Their business model of "selling copies and simultaneously ruin everyone who makes a copy himself" is archaic. It worked when making a copy of something was a valuable service and when nobody but other for-profit-businesses actually could make a copy. Nowadays everybody and their dog can make a copy because of new technology. Legislating that everyone has to pretend that we're still in the 50s while everbody is carrying 100GB size storage devices in their shirt pockets is archaic.
> they deserve to get paid
So they should invent a business model where their customers want to pay them. They are clinging to an old business model (of manufacturing and selling copies) which worked in the 50s but doesnt today, because people dont want to pay for copies. They can do copying themselves today, thanks. Technology eradicated the business model of "selling copies" but people refuse to adapt to reality and instead legislate a permanent "like back in the 50s"-situation.
> at whatever price they and their customers can meet
The arguing point of modern customers is something like: "I dont want to pay for copies. at all. I can make them myself. I dont want to pay for something I can do myself. And by the way, arent you the guy who tirelessly pushes for laws to ban private copying? Well fuck you, go and starve, I certainly wont buy anything you can offer."
> and agree on
Its impossible to argue with someone who refuses to acknowledge to himself that today everybody has a PC and refuses to abstain from using the "cp" command for the sole reason to enable somebody else to make a living by cp-ing abnd selling copies.
> the biggest thing in the way of that is piracy
Again, what you call "piracy" are simply people sharing stuff. People sending each other bits they like. People networking. The only reason for you to call this basic human behavior "piracy" is in order to associate it with violent ship capturing, i.e. to somehow couple it with a negative emotion to get an advantage in the discussion. You cant discuss something by beginning with "ok, lets discuss, but let me first stretagically rename a few things."
Instead of inventing 1984esque names for stuff you dont like, acknowledge that the main problem of your business model is that people simply prefer sharing stuff amongst eachother instead of buying it over and over and over again from somebody (in this case: you) who permanently keeps threatening them with life-ruining penalties.
> To that end, long-term popular downloads should be treated as suspect
Rapidshare, Hotfile, Megaupload & Co provide a very general, content-independent data transfer service, which is, in principle, no different from what a ISP does.
In order to prevent monitoring, users usually share non-identifiable and encrypted archive files. When you suggest data transfer providers should treat files as "suspect" merely because of their popularity, what _exactly_ are they supposed to do, when they see, that a file named 75x493q5xq9n8475.rar is "suspiciously" popular?
Delete the file merely because of its popularity, because it is "probable" that it "could" be infringing?
Refuse further downloads until the user provides the password to make sure it is not infringing?
Ban encrypted and name-scrambled archives alltogether in order to prevent hiding "infringing" content?
When you then extend such responsibilities to internet service providers, because their kind of service does not substantially differ from that of data transfer providers, should they similarly be required to:
Prevent users from transferring large amounts of data because it is "probably" that they "could" be infringing?
Require users to provide passwords to all encrypted transferred data in order to check for infringement?
Ban encrypted communication alltogether in order to prevent hiding "infringing" content?
Summarized, your argument goes like this: MPAA might have a case (against Hotfile or against basically any ISP or any kind of human communication) because a large part of data transferred over _any_ kind of anonymous data transfer service is copyright infringement. They should either ban encryption or outright delete any more popular file because it is highly probable that it is infringing.
> Perhaps it's time to start asking questions of which politicians do and don't support these legal actions.
And when they promise not to support this but then do? And then you look for somebody else for the next election, and then they also promise not to but then do?
The fundamental problem here is: you cant punish politicians for outright lying other than not voting for them the next time. But because there always pass several years between the elections, the electorate simply forgets who broke what promise years ago. They tend to trust their guts and weight recent believeable promises way more than on long forgotten lies. Knowing that, in order to get elected you merely have to make believeable promises. After being elected you then can base your decisions on what to actually _do_ solely on who pays the most.
If we had a system like in Switzerland, where any law the public does not agree with can be invalidated with a successful referendum, the politicians could be trained to not to introduce laws which with a high probability would be invalidated anyway _and_ would damage their party's chances to get reelected next time. Also Switzerland has a real and more dynamical multi party system with more than merely two (identical) choices, but thats a another story.
Why did those users need a web based so called "social network" to communicate in the first place? Before FB, they had email, forums, IRC, IMs, why did they need a web based communicaiton tool? Once they were all over those web based networks, why did every 2-3 years one network win over the users of a former network-de-jour? Because every one was purely technically "better" than all the former ones? Dream on.
I think this "ease of use" premise with regard to socal networks way always false, I think what always drove people to new means of communication was the quest for other new people. Communities of any kind, be it RL cliques, IRC channels or social networks, tend to dry up with regard to interesting new content once there is no influx of new blood. Then users one by one, beginning with the influentiel trend setters, like queen bees, tend to wander around in search for a more interesting, cool new beehive. If, no, _when_ they find one, all the lower status worker bees will naturally follow, since the value of the old place drops significantly without the social leaders. People, especially the more easily bored social leaders, are somehow in an eternal quest for change. They tend to easily be bored in a low flox environment. The only thing FB _can_ do is prolong the time the queen bees will be interested enough to stay before their search goes on. They may hold them for 5 years but even that does not sound realistic. They will never be able to simply stop the migration, since this would mean rewiring hardwired behavioral patterns, which one tiny website, no matter how much users it by chance may have at a certain point of time, will simply not be able to do.
A Single Shared CD Lands US Woman in Life-Long Bankruptcy
"A woman in the US has been sentenced to a life of bankruptcy for the crime of 'sharing intellectual property' (which is entirely banned in the US, but popular nontheless). Jammie Thomas-Rasset had shared a few Songs with other people. She has been tried and convicted in the past for several other 'thought crimes,' all involving infringement of US's Recording Party's so called "imaginary property rights".
Different countried, different priorities. China prioritizes its goverment scheme over peoples basic rights, so critics need to get persecuted. The US prioritizes having a creative industry over peoples basic rights, so ordinary people sharing culture will also be fiercely persecuted. China may be somewhat harsher than the US, but in principle they are bot just two different sides of a medal, and both regimes perceive free, uncensored information exchange between ordinary citizens as a major threat obviously to both business _and_ goverment.
Linux (the ecosystem) doesnt have "one API", it has dozens. And all of them are updated so often and so unpredictably that by the time you finished your application, you cant install it on new systems without rewriting parts of it. Bad, really bad "API stability" is the main reason Linux failed so badly in the "industry".
> Part of the reason Windows was successful was that it supported a lot of hardware, with only one API.
The other part was supporting this API for decades, and thus saving their customers the expenses of rewriting their applications over and over and over.
It's not that a big stretch as you'd like it to be.
Enforcing copyright is a form of for-profit censorship. You're not allowing people to privately communicate certain pieces of information in order to enable businesses to sell them those pieces of information as if they were physical goods.
Censorship of private, non-commercial information, whatever the contents may be, is in its essence a infringement of human rights. Censorship for the sole purpose of making a non-natural business method viable makes this even worse. Its like fiercely enforcing a home fucking prohibition in order to encourage commercial prostitution.
Fighting copyright-based censorship, even passively by simply ignoring its there, is a form of human rights fight, or "No, I will not give up my freedom to exchange information!" like Rosa Parks would have said if she were sued for $200,000 for sharing a few songs with other people.
And before some copyright fanboy jumps in with the usual "But this is NOT censorship!" parTy line, this is how for example wikipedia defines it: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." A suppression of communication. Thats what copyright enforcement is. A suppression of communication. How is fighting that much different than fighting the suppression of a group of people because of their color?
Slashdot Mirror
> Google is a private, foreign, totally unaccountable organisation.
So are Belgian newspapers.
> They're just getting too much power over the Internet these days.
So obviously do Belgian newspapers.
> And their power is only growing
The power of Belgian newspapers has also just grown a little bit. Now they have the power to prevent you from linking to them, even if you are outside of Belgium.
> Isn't it time to put a stop to that?!
Yes it is, and it is exactly what Google did.
Twitter itself is worthless as a technology, as it's basically an IRC server publicly displaying querys and #channel logs, nowadays fancily rebranded as #hashtags. The primary worth of Twitter consists of influential users publishing information exclusively on twitter. Nobody important publishes exclusively on Identica, so nobody uses Identica.
> digital copies last in pristine condition even when handled by schoolkids
This problem could have been solved by handing out pdfs, which they can print out over and over again. They could make notes on them and still have the originals. They wouldnt have to carry the whole book around all the time, they could just take a few pages they need. They wouldnt have to take as care of them as of books, becouse they could always be reprinted when destroyed or lost.
Why does the education system rely on overpriced commercial literature at all? Why doesnt it work to hire 1-2 experts per subject and let them write for hire definitive textbooks for the particular subject which then could be used without any royalties for years and decades by thousands of students? Why are they forced to buy new books over and over when everybody has a printer at home?
The so called "due process" wasnt laid out for a case where basically millions and millions of people, i.e. the majority of a country's population, are guilty and have to be prosecuted by comparably a tiny number of prosecutors. Usually, something that the majority of people doesnt consider wrong and does on a daily basis isnt even illegal. But in the case of enforcing copyright, you basically have a small, very small minority trying to force the majority into not doing something very basic like information exchange against their will and against their intrinsic sense of right and wrong. If due process is required in every of all those "educational" lawsuits, the few prosecutors would never get enough of them to have the envisioned shock & awe educational effect on the majority. Since disproportionately harsh example punishments like decimation are politcally and legally not yet possible, getting all the filthy pirates _can_ only work if the assumption is made that every accusation is justified and the wrongdoing highly probable, and the process then fully automated according to this assumption.
> "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them
We, the people, did NEVER grant them those rights in the first place. Never. Those "rights" were all created and granted in pre-democratic times and simply dragged along for centuries. Those rights have literarily NEVER been confirmed by a populous vote. Never.
What we, the people, did do though, is to never oppose those rights directly, since the established parties of the so called "representative democracy" dont let us vote on it directly. The only way to try to bypass the party shield and to get to vote on copyright directly was by forming worldwide pirate parties, but they all failed because the issue of copyright may be important, but is just too small to justify a dedicated party.
This means:
* Established parties will never let us vote on copyright directly because they know the outcome.
* All established parties a uniform pro-strong-copyright policy because theyre in bed with paying publishers.
* The pirate parties will never become big enough because the issue is too small compared to other issues.
* Copyright is effectively, by being comparably a small issue, smuggled under the democratic radar by the parties&publishers.
And leads to the conclusion:
* Voters are not, were not and will not ever be able to affect copyright policy in _any_ way.
> "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them
To sum up the answer to your statement: We The People did not make this grant, we do not support this grant, and we are effectively shielded off from disabling this grant precisely _because_ it is precisely us who this grant from the beginning on was directed against.
Let the people vote on copyright (they never did, they never will), and copyright as we know it will cease to exist (and this is the reason).
> Being able to "re-invent" something should nullify a patent completely.
How are you gonna distinguish re-inventing and simply copying? How is somebody supposed to prove having no knowledge of a previous patent after he nullified it by "re-inventing"? The patent system should stay as it is, but up the patentability level way higher, to a level of difficulty where people arent able to simply re-invent something just by sitting down and thinking about it a little, i.e. to the level of the often required, but seldom delivered non-obviousness.
The problems with the patent system arent rooted in the patent system existing, but in the low level of patentability, which allows for stuff to be patented which thousands of independent researchers can come up with. Instead of incentivizing them to solve hard problems, the system incentivizes them to be the first to file patents for easier but unpatented problems, so it is more of a intellectual land rush.
> Good, stick with your mid-90s and earlier window manager.
Why changing something that works, for the worse?
> The rest of us will enjoy the capabilities afforded us by our hardware.
I wouldnt mind if all those fabulos capabilities you allegedly "enjoy", were for the better, but they arent. They are mostly a superficial, never ending designer circlejerkoff in fight for winning the useless "oh shiny, now wheres my starbucks app" crowd. But you cant win that crowd for more than a year, because they change trends faster then you change underwear. You fool yourself by thinking that every time you completely jettison the old, working configuration, for a completely new design, you are improving something, but you arent. Youve just entered the fashion zone, without realizing it.
> If you don't know the name, how are you going to find it in a drop down list of applications?
By picking the right category and then the most fitting function description? "Internet / Firefox Web Browser". "Utilities / gedit text editor".
> How much more intuitive is that versus "Brasero" or "Rhythmbox".
The usual way of doing things is searching only once, when you dont know what youre looking for. When you've found it, you either give it a name yourself or accept the name it already has. But when you subsequently want to use it, you usually _dont_ search over and over and over again like a Alzheimer patient, you go straight for the name/key, like in a hashmap (which is by the way, as numerous design and usability studies have confirmed, the next on the way out).
> It doesn't support 1/16th of Skype's vital features, and it doesn't even support video in the desktop client.
I never undestood why Google from the beginning refused to build video into the client. As I remember, the party line back then was that video was "bloat", and that they did want the GTalk client to remain "simple". And it remained half-assed. And then they gave up any further work on it. No video, no Linux/Mac versions, no conference mode, nothing. Half a decade passed and all they had to offer wasa a half-assed, non-competitive windows-only client. For how much they neglected their own telephony during the last 6 years, I would have been more surprised if Google ended up buying Skype instead of Microsoft.
> Who should be called what they truly are: modern day slavers.
Remember that in basically all of today's western democracies, you have the same draconian copyright laws. I wouldnt blame the copyright owners that try to squeeze the most out of the "rights" that the public has granted them by the democratic process. So you have only two options, either the public really _does_ want copyright to be excessively enforced and the spread of information an knowledge limited to incentivize information producers to produce more of it, or simply put, democracy as we know it, doesnt work. In the latter case, how much of a textbook should be allowed to be copied for a course should really not be the primary problem you should be working on.
Shuttleworth is obviously attempting to leverage Ubuntus existing popularity to somehow branch off the main Linux species. Like when a queen bee leaves one colony and takes a large number of worker bees in order to form her own hive. He doesnt want to be associated with Gnome any more, and wants his own distinctive look and feel, no matter whether he alienates a number of existing Gnome users. Its a gamble, he is speculating that a large enough number will follow his lead and switch to Unity, and then keep pushing, hyping and defending it like loyal Apple users do. He wants Unity to bring the (Linux based) desktop where Android brought the (Linux based) phone.
The problem with that, at least from my perspective, is that Shuttleworth is at war with options. In a recent blog post, he made the bizarre statement that in his view, every option you can set differently, divides users who set it differently, so they can't talk to each other any more. So his goal seems to be to allow as few different settable options as possible, i.e. a massive Gleichschaltung in order to build a strongly focused brand. He thinks that iOs like interfaces will be the future of the mass market, and wants to get there better sooner than later.
I dont know where he plans to get his 200 Million users from, but I doubt many of them will originate from Ubuntus current user base. It is a massive farewell to the 90's Linux tinkerer and a hello to the 2011's Apple affictionado.
> Ubuntu. You can just keep upgrading
Except when they completely destroy the Desktop from one release to another and you dont _want_ to upgrade.
> When did MS start giving XP users free win 7 disks?
What you pay up front for MS, you gain by not having to constantly upgrade. The Linux ecosystem evolves _too fast_ and in _too unpredictable_ directions.
Having a stable, predictable platform which you know you still will be able to depend on in 10-15 years, is simply worth it. The Linux ecosystem is not able to provide that. It is too volatile and trying to keep up ist too expensive compared to Windows.
So who is now Gnome3's and Unity's target group? Idiots overwhelmed with Windows and OS X? I dont remember that the race for Desktop domination was meant to be a race to the bottom.
Gnome3 & Unity are so unusable for everyday work (from a business point of view), that they do not even seem to be desktop oriented any more at all. They both seem to bet on a (appleized) smartphone & tablet dominated future and want to get there as soon as possible.
The demise of Gnome2 will absolutely KILL desktop linux used in businesses, at least in mine. Deprecating the familiar Gnome2 workflow for no other reason than some visual art designer masturbation reeks of irresponsibility towards existing customers and _will_ have consequences. Leaving Windows and trying Linux on the desktop on a larger scale was a bet not every business was willing to make. Punishing those who did by arbitrarily destroyng familiar desktops environments will no nothing but prove linux skeptics right and linux enthusiasts wrong and seal its fate on business desktops on years to come.
You do not need complete, court-proof evidence. Since RIM is advertising complete security, without anybody being able to actually check, so you only had their word for it, it is their task to do this in a believeable way.
They were issued a ultimatum by countries which they do much business with, to either make snooping possible or be banned. Since they were neither banned nor did the countries withdraw the ultimatum, there is reasonable suspicion that they indeed did make snooping possible. And with someone who is advertising complete security, you do not need more than reasonable doubt.
It was this CEO's job to use the interview to try to remove this reasonable doubt, i.e. to persuade the remaining customers that, whatever they might have heard in the news, it is not true, and that their communication is still as completely secure as it was.
Instead, he obviously tried to make an agreement with the interviewer to not be asked this question, and when the interviewer forgot the agreement, the CEO was completely unprepared, and considered it better to run out of the interview, than to answer it. He easily could have simply denied everything with a straight face and many people would have believed him. Obviously, even for a CEO of a company selling security, it was too hard lying about their core product, so instead he ran away completely embarassed.
Because you cant check yourself, you have to trust. Its the companys business to create and maintain this trust by acting accordingly. Would you trust this man and his company, or do you simply by default consider any advertised features of any company to be true unless demonstrably proven false?
Or to a crazy theocracy, which Quatar is, where homosexual fans are at risk of being jailed. FIFAs president, Joseph Blatter, basically told gays to suck it up, and if they really really _must_ fly to Quatar to see the games, like everybody else, they should during this time pretend to be heterosexual to avoid persecution.
If a man could marry n women, and each of these women could marry n men, each of which in turn could marry other n-1 women, wouldnt this allow for a possible situation where every man is married to everyone, or connected to everyone through a chain of marriages? (Which would, by the way, basically lead to a redefinition of the Kevin bacon number to through how many marriage nodes somebody is married to Kevin Bacon.) (And to a renaming of Facebook to be a "marriage network", etc.)
> In general, societies enforced monogamy because otherwise men would marry a whole bunch of women
and leave back an army of unmarried angry young man. As to my knowledge the ban of polygamy was primarily to prevent a few wealthy old men marrying dozens of young women off the market and leaving hordes of young men without a way to reproduce, leading to explosive social unrest. The Bible had nothing to do with it, the Old Testament, on which the model of the Mormon practices and scriptures was based, was highly polygamous itself.
DHL, i.e. "Deutsche Post" isnt participating in De-Mail at all. Since the basic purpose of De-Mail was to obsolete a large part of legally binding snail mail, and Deutsche Post realized they would be hit the hardest by this, they developed their own competitive service called "Deutsche Post ePostBrief", which works exactly the same as De-Mail, but of course isnt compatible with De-Mail, so you cant interchange legally binding emails between providers. Deutsche Post is kinda alone in their camp, since basically everybody else (ISPs, Email-Providers) is in the De-Mail camp.
What both of course have in common is that there is no end-to-end encryption, so now you have not only to trust your lawyer/bank/doctor for confidential stuff, but now you also have to trust the carrier. Oh, and, in order to not hurt their snail mail business, every "Deutsche Post ePostBrief" will cost EUR 0,55, exactly as much as a snail mail.
> being able to safely speak their beliefs
You are not able to "speak" your belief today if somebody has already spoken that belief. Thanks Cpt. Copyright.
> taking something and refusing to pay
Pirates are not actually "taking" or "refusing" anything. They are exchanging information amongst their peers. People have been sharing information for ages, they used to call it "learning from eachother". It was Cpt. Copyright who started with "lets errect toll booths between people" and then started chasing around people who tried to circumwent this kind of for-profit censorship.
> I reject entirely that people writing are "archaic powers".
They are not. Their business model of "selling copies and simultaneously ruin everyone who makes a copy himself" is archaic. It worked when making a copy of something was a valuable service and when nobody but other for-profit-businesses actually could make a copy. Nowadays everybody and their dog can make a copy because of new technology. Legislating that everyone has to pretend that we're still in the 50s while everbody is carrying 100GB size storage devices in their shirt pockets is archaic.
> they deserve to get paid
So they should invent a business model where their customers want to pay them. They are clinging to an old business model (of manufacturing and selling copies) which worked in the 50s but doesnt today, because people dont want to pay for copies. They can do copying themselves today, thanks. Technology eradicated the business model of "selling copies" but people refuse to adapt to reality and instead legislate a permanent "like back in the 50s"-situation.
> at whatever price they and their customers can meet
The arguing point of modern customers is something like: "I dont want to pay for copies. at all. I can make them myself. I dont want to pay for something I can do myself. And by the way, arent you the guy who tirelessly pushes for laws to ban private copying? Well fuck you, go and starve, I certainly wont buy anything you can offer."
> and agree on
Its impossible to argue with someone who refuses to acknowledge to himself that today everybody has a PC and refuses to abstain from using the "cp" command for the sole reason to enable somebody else to make a living by cp-ing abnd selling copies.
> the biggest thing in the way of that is piracy
Again, what you call "piracy" are simply people sharing stuff. People sending each other bits they like. People networking. The only reason for you to call this basic human behavior "piracy" is in order to associate it with violent ship capturing, i.e. to somehow couple it with a negative emotion to get an advantage in the discussion. You cant discuss something by beginning with "ok, lets discuss, but let me first stretagically rename a few things."
Instead of inventing 1984esque names for stuff you dont like, acknowledge that the main problem of your business model is that people simply prefer sharing stuff amongst eachother instead of buying it over and over and over again from somebody (in this case: you) who permanently keeps threatening them with life-ruining penalties.
> To that end, long-term popular downloads should be treated as suspect
Rapidshare, Hotfile, Megaupload & Co provide a very general, content-independent data transfer service, which is, in principle, no different from what a ISP does.
In order to prevent monitoring, users usually share non-identifiable and encrypted archive files. When you suggest data transfer providers should treat files as "suspect" merely because of their popularity, what _exactly_ are they supposed to do, when they see, that a file named 75x493q5xq9n8475.rar is "suspiciously" popular?
When you then extend such responsibilities to internet service providers, because their kind of service does not substantially differ from that of data transfer providers, should they similarly be required to:
Summarized, your argument goes like this: MPAA might have a case (against Hotfile or against basically any ISP or any kind of human communication) because a large part of data transferred over _any_ kind of anonymous data transfer service is copyright infringement. They should either ban encryption or outright delete any more popular file because it is highly probable that it is infringing.
> Perhaps it's time to start asking questions of which politicians do and don't support these legal actions.
And when they promise not to support this but then do?
And then you look for somebody else for the next election, and then they also promise not to but then do?
The fundamental problem here is: you cant punish politicians for outright lying other than not voting for them the next time. But because there always pass several years between the elections, the electorate simply forgets who broke what promise years ago. They tend to trust their guts and weight recent believeable promises way more than on long forgotten lies. Knowing that, in order to get elected you merely have to make believeable promises. After being elected you then can base your decisions on what to actually _do_ solely on who pays the most.
If we had a system like in Switzerland, where any law the public does not agree with can be invalidated with a successful referendum, the politicians could be trained to not to introduce laws which with a high probability would be invalidated anyway _and_ would damage their party's chances to get reelected next time. Also Switzerland has a real and more dynamical multi party system with more than merely two (identical) choices, but thats a another story.
Why did those users need a web based so called "social network" to communicate in the first place? Before FB, they had email, forums, IRC, IMs, why did they need a web based communicaiton tool? Once they were all over those web based networks, why did every 2-3 years one network win over the users of a former network-de-jour? Because every one was purely technically "better" than all the former ones? Dream on.
I think this "ease of use" premise with regard to socal networks way always false, I think what always drove people to new means of communication was the quest for other new people. Communities of any kind, be it RL cliques, IRC channels or social networks, tend to dry up with regard to interesting new content once there is no influx of new blood. Then users one by one, beginning with the influentiel trend setters, like queen bees, tend to wander around in search for a more interesting, cool new beehive. If, no, _when_ they find one, all the lower status worker bees will naturally follow, since the value of the old place drops significantly without the social leaders. People, especially the more easily bored social leaders, are somehow in an eternal quest for change. They tend to easily be bored in a low flox environment. The only thing FB _can_ do is prolong the time the queen bees will be interested enough to stay before their search goes on. They may hold them for 5 years but even that does not sound realistic. They will never be able to simply stop the migration, since this would mean rewiring hardwired behavioral patterns, which one tiny website, no matter how much users it by chance may have at a certain point of time, will simply not be able to do.
Meanwhile in the US...
A Single Shared CD Lands US Woman in Life-Long Bankruptcy
"A woman in the US has been sentenced to a life of bankruptcy for the crime of 'sharing intellectual property' (which is entirely banned in the US, but popular nontheless). Jammie Thomas-Rasset had shared a few Songs with other people. She has been tried and convicted in the past for several other 'thought crimes,' all involving infringement of US's Recording Party's so called "imaginary property rights".
Different countried, different priorities. China prioritizes its goverment scheme over peoples basic rights, so critics need to get persecuted. The US prioritizes having a creative industry over peoples basic rights, so ordinary people sharing culture will also be fiercely persecuted. China may be somewhat harsher than the US, but in principle they are bot just two different sides of a medal, and both regimes perceive free, uncensored information exchange between ordinary citizens as a major threat obviously to both business _and_ goverment.
Linux (the ecosystem) doesnt have "one API", it has dozens. And all of them are updated so often and so unpredictably that by the time you finished your application, you cant install it on new systems without rewriting parts of it. Bad, really bad "API stability" is the main reason Linux failed so badly in the "industry".
> Part of the reason Windows was successful was that it supported a lot of hardware, with only one API.
The other part was supporting this API for decades, and thus saving their customers the expenses of rewriting their applications over and over and over.
It's not that a big stretch as you'd like it to be.
Enforcing copyright is a form of for-profit censorship. You're not allowing people to privately communicate certain pieces of information in order to enable businesses to sell them those pieces of information as if they were physical goods.
Censorship of private, non-commercial information, whatever the contents may be, is in its essence a infringement of human rights. Censorship for the sole purpose of making a non-natural business method viable makes this even worse. Its like fiercely enforcing a home fucking prohibition in order to encourage commercial prostitution.
Fighting copyright-based censorship, even passively by simply ignoring its there, is a form of human rights fight, or "No, I will not give up my freedom to exchange information!" like Rosa Parks would have said if she were sued for $200,000 for sharing a few songs with other people.
And before some copyright fanboy jumps in with the usual "But this is NOT censorship!" parTy line, this is how for example wikipedia defines it: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." A suppression of communication. Thats what copyright enforcement is. A suppression of communication. How is fighting that much different than fighting the suppression of a group of people because of their color?