As it exists right now, countries are just trying to keep pace with each other. The first space race bankrupted the U.S.S.R. Are you sure you want to be involved in a second one?
Make it so that websites can't be taken offline at the drop of a hat (or a suspected case of copyright infringement).
You can't have a thriving economy and strong "IP" protections, because the very purpose of said protections is to allow "temporary" monopolies. Monopolies do not create a thriving economy. Monopolies lead to stagnation and regression.
The purpose of the temporary monopoly is to give the creater or inventor incentive to create and invent. It is not to give the creater or inventor lifetime exclusivity to the creation or invention.
But none of your "advisors" is going to tell you that.
I expect him to be partially correct. In a way, Nokia has already "sold" their smartphone division to Microsoft, so I don't expect Microsoft to unnecessarily purchase all of the overhead of actually manufacturing a phone.
More likely, a patent licensing agreement is going to come out of this along with revenue sharing agreements and some marketing agreements. Microsoft is probably going to buy the rights to market Nokia smartphones in North America or some such.
Considering Nokia's CEO is sympathetic to Microsoft's cause, Nokia might outright sell their vast warchest of wireless and hardware patents to Microsoft for trolling.
Oh, I realized that last bit could be interepreted as Avatar having been a summer blockbuster. Avatar was released in the winter as a Holiday flick, but it's appeal is the same as the appeal of a summer blockbuster.
You should've used The Matrix as a reference. Unfortunately, the first two movies you listed came as a part of trilogies. Granted, Yoda was in only two of the three, but it still stands that they aren't really comparable to Avatar. When Avatar gets three movies, it'd be a more apt comparison. The results of your poll might not be very different, but the comparison itself would be fair.
Avatar is admittedly not a very good movie. And the 3D wasn't seemless either. The non-CG scenes that had bokeh did not look 3D at all. Likewise, the CG scenes were sharp all through the image, which works OK when the objects aren't too far apart, but don't work when the focus is on a plane flying through objects in the background that's supposedly far away.
It's probably what the Transformers sequels should have been: summer blockbusters. But that's about it.
Corporations have no intrinsic rights. Corporations are granted rights by the government. Mind you, this is a government that you, as an individual, participate in (or are supposed to participate in at the very least).
That's why there are laws about collusion, laws about monopolies and trusts, and laws on product labels, etc. Presumably, these laws were created to protect the governed. Presumably, these laws were created to maintain the ability for people to exercise their inalienable rights.
When the laws being passed cease to protect the governed, then it's time to install new lawmakers. And when the system itself fails, then it's time to install a new system.
What I'm seeing is more of the former than the latter. But I think the system might need a hard reset really soon. Corruption is building up and the system might blue screen soon.
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech...
A law that restricts the ability for someone to communicate is a law that abridges (limits, reduces, etc.) the freedom of speech. The Internet is not Speech, but it is a means to speak, just like running television, radio, or print ads, flying a banner behind an airplane, or simply standing on a box shouting into a bullhorn. Should telepathy be the next wave in communication, limiting the ability for people to perform telepathy would still be abridging the freedom of speech.
Limiting the Internet is limiting the ability to communicate--through the Internet, which is still a limit on the ability to communicate.
Note that the First Amendment says Congress shall not pass such laws. Of course, private companies can restrict speech to whatever they feel like within their own domain.
I don't think there's an ESR for Firefox 3.6. It sounds like ESR is only a backport of security and stability fixes for supported browser versions, which, once 3.6 has been phased out, starts at 4.
I've been reading more about SOPA recently, and the list of opponents is actually relatively small. Most of them are internet-based service companies, without tangible products. Google's the biggest of the bunch, followed by Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and AOL. Everyone else is tiny--miniscule even--compared to the list of SOPA supporters.
On the other hand, everybody from cosmetics to media support SOPA. Every industry that involves a tangible product has at least one company or lobbying group within it supporting SOPA.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Apple are staying quiet, though I suspect the BSA's stated reservations are close to their official position. Collectively, they're neutral at best.
But everyone else is in favor of SOPA. Everyone. Except the ones whom the government is supposed to represent.
Well, Chrome does a whole host of things better than Firefox. Stability and memory usage are key. GP was probably weighing whether the stability and memory usage is worth not having control of what Javascript runs and what doesn't.
GP obviously considered being able to control Javascript more important than the stability and memory usage. Since GP just found out there actually is a Javascript filter addon for both browsers, the favor has swung to Chrome, considering Firefox has no answer for the memory usage at all and its solution for stability is weaker than Chrome's.
That's where you're wrong. Many organizations use group policy, but it's certainly not mandatory for a product like a web browser. If that were true, programs like 7zip and textpad wouldn't be used in an enterprise environment either, and that's clearly untrue (especially among engineers and programmers).
This is because most policy objectives can be enforced at a higher level. For example, blacklists integrated into the hardware firewall take care of most of the filtering for major companies. Smaller companies have software firewalls that do feature group policy support to do the same.
Firefox has long been touted as a safer alternative to IE, even and especially in the corporate environment where one infected computer can spread to the entire LAN.
So this does have an impact, as much as them moving to a rapid-release cycle that bumps releases irrespective of the amount of changes by a whole version number. Corporations are sensitive to Firefox's development and release cycles, even if it's marginal for most companies that deploy Firefox.
And they're going to all be unhappy about this news. I'm certain once Mozilla ends support for FIrefox 3.6, all of the sysadmins burned by advocating switching their company's web browser to Firefox will voluntarily, if not forced to, write off all Mozilla products as enterprise-appropriate in perpetuity.
In fact, you can even argue that it's a black mark on all non-enterprise open-source software. Firefox is very visible, and closely associated with both free as in beer and free as in speech. Many places are risk-sensitive, and this kind of behavior can make PHBs think open source, especially open source that does not come with contracted support, is too risky for deployment in an enterprise.
The end of the world timer now might be perpetually stuck at 00:01. It might throw the prediction off completely. And this only because we decided to push our clocks back by one second.
The failure of Buddhists to follow their religious beliefs is not the failure of the religion or the beliefs. This is the same with Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, and even Jedi.
Of course, failure is not necssarily a negative thing. Failure to launch nuclear weapons during the cold war is probably a positive thing. So I leave the judgment of whether the failings of the religious is a good or bad thing to the reader.
Personally, I think humans will act on human nature, irrespective of their religious beliefs of what their religion has codified. If that means killing, torturing, oppressing, then that is what it is. If that means helping, creating, and empowering, then that is also what it is. Religion, if anything, either provides justification for these acts or does not. But even if religion does not provide justification, it cannot actually prevent humans from acting on human nature.
As Christians would like to put it, people have Free Will.
I don't recall the specifics, but I believe re-enabling DOS was more difficult than that. I reall it involved outright replacing the files emulating DOS with the actual DOS executables.
Either way, what you say doesn't invalidate what I said. That you had to "hack several bytes" to enable real DOS is orthogonal to the fact that the prompt was an emulation, and the internals weren't present (or at least weren't being used). And it doesn't invalidate the fact that the lack of a real DOS was the cause of most of Windows ME's stability issues.
The NT line always had DOS emulation. And it is an emulation because a lot of the DOS commands don't work in the NT line. But that says nothing about the 9x line or how and why it ended so abruptly with the flop of ME.
There is that. There is also the fact that if they put up advertisements for their own browser, they'd be subject to anti-trust violations, in fact the same ones that Microsoft were convicted of violating when they bundled IE with Windows.
Letting a 3rd party handle it is not an anti-trust violation, because then it'd be subject to existing agreements Google had with the 3rd party. As well, the 3rd party is free to market Chrome however it desires (not specifically limited to Google search results or products), and theoretically be subject to the same policy restrictions that any other marketing company would otherwise be under.
They pushed the Chrome results back for the very same anti-trust reasons. If they had a double standard, that can and probably does constitute as an anti-trust violation. But if they subject their third party (and the client of their third party, which just so happens to be themselves) to the same rules as they subject every other marketing agency, then they are more likely in the clear.
In Microsoft's case, had they made their browser integration switchable via an API or some such, they'd also be in the clear. But since they didn't, they got slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit (and got away scott free IMHO, but that's another thing altogether).
Possibly, the Google DRM is tied to some unique signature in the firmware. It sounds more like poor DRM design for the platform than any kind of intentional restriction.
It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me...
One of the reasons Windows ME had such stability issues was because they removed DOS from it and replaced it with an emulator. While Windows 95 and 98 were essentially the Windows GUI on top of glorified DOS internals, Windows ME was an attempt to move away from DOS entirely while keeping the GUI. The intention was to ultimately elimiate the legacy DOS internals outright.
But this failed miserably. This failure resulted in their subsequent low-cost home OS, XP Home, to be based on the NT line instead of the DOS/9x line. If ME had been successful, the Windows home line might still have been 9x-based possibly until SP2 or Vista/7, when security started becoming a visibly major issue.
I don't think copyright inherently is a bad thing. And I don't think most people here save for the extremists and the uneducated would support its elimination altogether. But I think a lot of people would agree that it is, in its entirety, as it exists, ridiculous. From the length of the copyright term, to the punitive damages levied for infringement, to the wide-ranging destruction its enforcement causes, it cannot possibly be considered sanity, much less conducive to a functioning society. If anything, this ridiculousness around copyright has or soon will have a negative effect on creativity and productivity, where people are now too afraid to create new works because they're afraid somebody with deeper pockets is going to take them to court over it.
Copyrights need to be brought down to levels of sanity in all aspects. For the terms, fifty years irrespective of the author's lifetime is very generous. Any more and it starts becoming ridiculous again. For infringement, the punitive damages should be equal to the retail price per copy made and provably distributed. As for enforcement, it should remain a civil matter, and be applied only to situations of direct infringement. Organized, for-profit criminal copyright infringement can be addressed by real criminal statutes, including tax evasion and racketeering.
It is important to recognize that there is a role for the protection copyright allows. It is also important to recognize when the system of copyrights no longer serve that role.
Actually, we do human expermentation all the time. Such medication takes the shape of herbs and natural remedies. In fact, many of the pills by big pharma out there are derived from a natural remedy base that is presented in concentrated doses and/or synthetically manufactured.
It's not the experimenting or the experiments; it's what you're experimenting with. It's the dosage, concentration, and frequency that needs regulation. The large increases from natural levels that go into mice, rats, and even primates is not safe. The small increases that happen by eating more oranges for extra vitamin C is.
A good test engineer knows not to crank the volume up to 11 and start blasting right away. Things break like that. A good engineer has already determined the known limits and bounds of the system, and slowly pushes the system past those limits and bounds.
But that requires patience, which companies have less and less of these days.
I don't think you give them credit for what they understand.
I think they understand well that the internet is a means of communication. I think they understand all too well in fact. It is because the internet provides every individual human being with their own individual soapboxes that politicians do in fact want to limit it. It is because now, every minor party from the communists to the greens to the anarchists have an effective and cheap way to communicate their message to the masses.
The internet terrifies them. It's not very effective today, but they're thinking about tomorrow. They're thinking about Web 2.0, and user-generated content, in particular, user-generated political speech. They're thinking about ten million people going to Youtube to watch an untelevised debate between candidates without "R" or "D" behind their name. They're thinking about fifty million followers of the green party's twitter feed. And it's a threat that's going to materialize soon--very soon.
Politicians and companies alike are threatened not necessarily by free speech itself, but speech that is easily accessible. The only difference between the two is that politicians are in it for the power while companies are in it for the money. The fact that their interests just so happen to coincide makes it all the more convenient for the politicans to enact such legislation, and for companies to throw money at it.
Why do you think there is limited opposition to the act? It's not just the content lobbies sweet-talking their politicians with campaign donations. The political establishment itself wants to get rid of speech on the internet.
The worst part is, if SOPA fails, there will be another push for a similar piece of legislation sometime down the line. Should that fail, there will be yet another. It will continue like this until either the populace gets fed up and stops objecting (either through compromise or exasperation), or they smarten up and start voting for candidates that really represent their interests.
If I were a betting man, my money would not be on the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
As it exists right now, countries are just trying to keep pace with each other. The first space race bankrupted the U.S.S.R. Are you sure you want to be involved in a second one?
This is for the common people. You can be sure a different set of laws apply to those who can pay enough.
Make it so that websites can't be taken offline at the drop of a hat (or a suspected case of copyright infringement).
You can't have a thriving economy and strong "IP" protections, because the very purpose of said protections is to allow "temporary" monopolies. Monopolies do not create a thriving economy. Monopolies lead to stagnation and regression.
The purpose of the temporary monopoly is to give the creater or inventor incentive to create and invent. It is not to give the creater or inventor lifetime exclusivity to the creation or invention.
But none of your "advisors" is going to tell you that.
I expect him to be partially correct. In a way, Nokia has already "sold" their smartphone division to Microsoft, so I don't expect Microsoft to unnecessarily purchase all of the overhead of actually manufacturing a phone.
More likely, a patent licensing agreement is going to come out of this along with revenue sharing agreements and some marketing agreements. Microsoft is probably going to buy the rights to market Nokia smartphones in North America or some such.
Considering Nokia's CEO is sympathetic to Microsoft's cause, Nokia might outright sell their vast warchest of wireless and hardware patents to Microsoft for trolling.
Oh, I realized that last bit could be interepreted as Avatar having been a summer blockbuster. Avatar was released in the winter as a Holiday flick, but it's appeal is the same as the appeal of a summer blockbuster.
You should've used The Matrix as a reference. Unfortunately, the first two movies you listed came as a part of trilogies. Granted, Yoda was in only two of the three, but it still stands that they aren't really comparable to Avatar. When Avatar gets three movies, it'd be a more apt comparison. The results of your poll might not be very different, but the comparison itself would be fair.
Avatar is admittedly not a very good movie. And the 3D wasn't seemless either. The non-CG scenes that had bokeh did not look 3D at all. Likewise, the CG scenes were sharp all through the image, which works OK when the objects aren't too far apart, but don't work when the focus is on a plane flying through objects in the background that's supposedly far away.
It's probably what the Transformers sequels should have been: summer blockbusters. But that's about it.
must trump the rights of the corporation.
Corporations have no intrinsic rights. Corporations are granted rights by the government. Mind you, this is a government that you, as an individual, participate in (or are supposed to participate in at the very least).
That's why there are laws about collusion, laws about monopolies and trusts, and laws on product labels, etc. Presumably, these laws were created to protect the governed. Presumably, these laws were created to maintain the ability for people to exercise their inalienable rights.
When the laws being passed cease to protect the governed, then it's time to install new lawmakers. And when the system itself fails, then it's time to install a new system.
What I'm seeing is more of the former than the latter. But I think the system might need a hard reset really soon. Corruption is building up and the system might blue screen soon.
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech...
A law that restricts the ability for someone to communicate is a law that abridges (limits, reduces, etc.) the freedom of speech. The Internet is not Speech, but it is a means to speak, just like running television, radio, or print ads, flying a banner behind an airplane, or simply standing on a box shouting into a bullhorn. Should telepathy be the next wave in communication, limiting the ability for people to perform telepathy would still be abridging the freedom of speech.
Limiting the Internet is limiting the ability to communicate--through the Internet, which is still a limit on the ability to communicate.
Note that the First Amendment says Congress shall not pass such laws. Of course, private companies can restrict speech to whatever they feel like within their own domain.
I don't think there's an ESR for Firefox 3.6. It sounds like ESR is only a backport of security and stability fixes for supported browser versions, which, once 3.6 has been phased out, starts at 4.
I've been reading more about SOPA recently, and the list of opponents is actually relatively small. Most of them are internet-based service companies, without tangible products. Google's the biggest of the bunch, followed by Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and AOL. Everyone else is tiny--miniscule even--compared to the list of SOPA supporters.
On the other hand, everybody from cosmetics to media support SOPA. Every industry that involves a tangible product has at least one company or lobbying group within it supporting SOPA.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Apple are staying quiet, though I suspect the BSA's stated reservations are close to their official position. Collectively, they're neutral at best.
But everyone else is in favor of SOPA. Everyone. Except the ones whom the government is supposed to represent.
Well, Chrome does a whole host of things better than Firefox. Stability and memory usage are key. GP was probably weighing whether the stability and memory usage is worth not having control of what Javascript runs and what doesn't.
GP obviously considered being able to control Javascript more important than the stability and memory usage. Since GP just found out there actually is a Javascript filter addon for both browsers, the favor has swung to Chrome, considering Firefox has no answer for the memory usage at all and its solution for stability is weaker than Chrome's.
That's where you're wrong. Many organizations use group policy, but it's certainly not mandatory for a product like a web browser. If that were true, programs like 7zip and textpad wouldn't be used in an enterprise environment either, and that's clearly untrue (especially among engineers and programmers).
This is because most policy objectives can be enforced at a higher level. For example, blacklists integrated into the hardware firewall take care of most of the filtering for major companies. Smaller companies have software firewalls that do feature group policy support to do the same.
Firefox has long been touted as a safer alternative to IE, even and especially in the corporate environment where one infected computer can spread to the entire LAN.
So this does have an impact, as much as them moving to a rapid-release cycle that bumps releases irrespective of the amount of changes by a whole version number. Corporations are sensitive to Firefox's development and release cycles, even if it's marginal for most companies that deploy Firefox.
And they're going to all be unhappy about this news. I'm certain once Mozilla ends support for FIrefox 3.6, all of the sysadmins burned by advocating switching their company's web browser to Firefox will voluntarily, if not forced to, write off all Mozilla products as enterprise-appropriate in perpetuity.
In fact, you can even argue that it's a black mark on all non-enterprise open-source software. Firefox is very visible, and closely associated with both free as in beer and free as in speech. Many places are risk-sensitive, and this kind of behavior can make PHBs think open source, especially open source that does not come with contracted support, is too risky for deployment in an enterprise.
no brains
Well, there's your problem right there. Zombies aren't in with the women these days. Vampires and werewolves are.
Performance can be a pain with very large files and with a lot of very small ones,
In other words: It's bad for storing and retrieving pr0n.
The end of the world timer now might be perpetually stuck at 00:01. It might throw the prediction off completely. And this only because we decided to push our clocks back by one second.
The failure of Buddhists to follow their religious beliefs is not the failure of the religion or the beliefs. This is the same with Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, and even Jedi.
Of course, failure is not necssarily a negative thing. Failure to launch nuclear weapons during the cold war is probably a positive thing. So I leave the judgment of whether the failings of the religious is a good or bad thing to the reader.
Personally, I think humans will act on human nature, irrespective of their religious beliefs of what their religion has codified. If that means killing, torturing, oppressing, then that is what it is. If that means helping, creating, and empowering, then that is also what it is. Religion, if anything, either provides justification for these acts or does not. But even if religion does not provide justification, it cannot actually prevent humans from acting on human nature.
As Christians would like to put it, people have Free Will.
I don't recall the specifics, but I believe re-enabling DOS was more difficult than that. I reall it involved outright replacing the files emulating DOS with the actual DOS executables.
Either way, what you say doesn't invalidate what I said. That you had to "hack several bytes" to enable real DOS is orthogonal to the fact that the prompt was an emulation, and the internals weren't present (or at least weren't being used). And it doesn't invalidate the fact that the lack of a real DOS was the cause of most of Windows ME's stability issues.
The NT line always had DOS emulation. And it is an emulation because a lot of the DOS commands don't work in the NT line. But that says nothing about the 9x line or how and why it ended so abruptly with the flop of ME.
There is that. There is also the fact that if they put up advertisements for their own browser, they'd be subject to anti-trust violations, in fact the same ones that Microsoft were convicted of violating when they bundled IE with Windows.
Letting a 3rd party handle it is not an anti-trust violation, because then it'd be subject to existing agreements Google had with the 3rd party. As well, the 3rd party is free to market Chrome however it desires (not specifically limited to Google search results or products), and theoretically be subject to the same policy restrictions that any other marketing company would otherwise be under.
They pushed the Chrome results back for the very same anti-trust reasons. If they had a double standard, that can and probably does constitute as an anti-trust violation. But if they subject their third party (and the client of their third party, which just so happens to be themselves) to the same rules as they subject every other marketing agency, then they are more likely in the clear.
In Microsoft's case, had they made their browser integration switchable via an API or some such, they'd also be in the clear. But since they didn't, they got slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit (and got away scott free IMHO, but that's another thing altogether).
Possibly, the Google DRM is tied to some unique signature in the firmware. It sounds more like poor DRM design for the platform than any kind of intentional restriction.
US politicians are not paid millions of dollars every 2-6 years by their voters.
More accurately, voters cannot provide US politicians with lucrative six or seven figure spots on the payroll after their tenure expires.
It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me...
One of the reasons Windows ME had such stability issues was because they removed DOS from it and replaced it with an emulator. While Windows 95 and 98 were essentially the Windows GUI on top of glorified DOS internals, Windows ME was an attempt to move away from DOS entirely while keeping the GUI. The intention was to ultimately elimiate the legacy DOS internals outright.
But this failed miserably. This failure resulted in their subsequent low-cost home OS, XP Home, to be based on the NT line instead of the DOS/9x line. If ME had been successful, the Windows home line might still have been 9x-based possibly until SP2 or Vista/7, when security started becoming a visibly major issue.
Yeah, because they're really strict about international copyrights and patents.
I don't think copyright inherently is a bad thing. And I don't think most people here save for the extremists and the uneducated would support its elimination altogether. But I think a lot of people would agree that it is, in its entirety, as it exists, ridiculous. From the length of the copyright term, to the punitive damages levied for infringement, to the wide-ranging destruction its enforcement causes, it cannot possibly be considered sanity, much less conducive to a functioning society. If anything, this ridiculousness around copyright has or soon will have a negative effect on creativity and productivity, where people are now too afraid to create new works because they're afraid somebody with deeper pockets is going to take them to court over it.
Copyrights need to be brought down to levels of sanity in all aspects. For the terms, fifty years irrespective of the author's lifetime is very generous. Any more and it starts becoming ridiculous again. For infringement, the punitive damages should be equal to the retail price per copy made and provably distributed. As for enforcement, it should remain a civil matter, and be applied only to situations of direct infringement. Organized, for-profit criminal copyright infringement can be addressed by real criminal statutes, including tax evasion and racketeering.
It is important to recognize that there is a role for the protection copyright allows. It is also important to recognize when the system of copyrights no longer serve that role.
Actually, we do human expermentation all the time. Such medication takes the shape of herbs and natural remedies. In fact, many of the pills by big pharma out there are derived from a natural remedy base that is presented in concentrated doses and/or synthetically manufactured.
It's not the experimenting or the experiments; it's what you're experimenting with. It's the dosage, concentration, and frequency that needs regulation. The large increases from natural levels that go into mice, rats, and even primates is not safe. The small increases that happen by eating more oranges for extra vitamin C is.
A good test engineer knows not to crank the volume up to 11 and start blasting right away. Things break like that. A good engineer has already determined the known limits and bounds of the system, and slowly pushes the system past those limits and bounds.
But that requires patience, which companies have less and less of these days.
I don't think you give them credit for what they understand.
I think they understand well that the internet is a means of communication. I think they understand all too well in fact. It is because the internet provides every individual human being with their own individual soapboxes that politicians do in fact want to limit it. It is because now, every minor party from the communists to the greens to the anarchists have an effective and cheap way to communicate their message to the masses.
The internet terrifies them. It's not very effective today, but they're thinking about tomorrow. They're thinking about Web 2.0, and user-generated content, in particular, user-generated political speech. They're thinking about ten million people going to Youtube to watch an untelevised debate between candidates without "R" or "D" behind their name. They're thinking about fifty million followers of the green party's twitter feed. And it's a threat that's going to materialize soon--very soon.
Politicians and companies alike are threatened not necessarily by free speech itself, but speech that is easily accessible. The only difference between the two is that politicians are in it for the power while companies are in it for the money. The fact that their interests just so happen to coincide makes it all the more convenient for the politicans to enact such legislation, and for companies to throw money at it.
Why do you think there is limited opposition to the act? It's not just the content lobbies sweet-talking their politicians with campaign donations. The political establishment itself wants to get rid of speech on the internet.
The worst part is, if SOPA fails, there will be another push for a similar piece of legislation sometime down the line. Should that fail, there will be yet another. It will continue like this until either the populace gets fed up and stops objecting (either through compromise or exasperation), or they smarten up and start voting for candidates that really represent their interests.
If I were a betting man, my money would not be on the latter.