Don't you think a reason for this is the lack of support for open formats in popular players?
This is the typical chicken-and-egg problem. No one will support FLAC until there are devices that can play it. If there's no content in FLAC, player manufacturers won't see the need to include it.
My solution to this is to only buy products from companies like COWON that take open formats seriously.
My reply is why bother supporting a proprietary format to incorporate lossless audio when there's already a well-developed open standard already, namely FLAC? By your argument, the expansion of disk space makes lossless storage more attractive. I agree with that, but what I don't want is for everyone to hop on board another standard from Thomson and friends which can't legally be supported in free and open software.
Forward-thinking companies like COWON support open formats like FLAC and Matroska. Other players should as well. We've all suffered long enough with proprietary formats that bring nothing extra to the table other than the marketing power of large corporate backers.
I found this comment in TFA (I believe it's taken from the Roundtree Report) intriguing:
"One of them (the National DNA Database) has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, and both the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats have promised to scrap many of the others (emphasis mine)."
Is the an instance of the Tories saying simply "we're not Labour," or is this some new-found attachment to civil liberties by a party previously known for devotion to monarchy and deference to authority?
The Conservatives have never been very fond of Brussels either, so I'm guessing it's not a new-found devotion to the concept of EU-wide human rights that trump the authority of the member national governments.
So whats the point in going to vote in the first place if theres no guarantee that the will of the people will be mirrored in the actions of the elected goverment until mass protests fill up the streets (or tubes)?
I'm impressed that you think you can assess the "will of the people" on a subject as arcane as copyright enforcement. When I raise these issues with Americans, they generally look at me like I'm speaking gibberish, but when pressed express the belief that what writers, artists, etc., produce belongs to them and should be protected against piracy. Probably most of them would agree a "one-strike" policy is too harsh, but I bet you'd find a majority of the population in this country agreeing with a "three-strikes" policy for persistent file-sharers.
I doubt Americans are wildly divergent in these beliefs either. I did a quick search to see if there was any public opinion data online about this issue in NZ but couldn't find any. Perhaps a Kiwi can point us to some?
Here'a a totally anecdotal, and therefore admittedly only somewhat informative, data point.
I needed a copy of Windows this past week and installed Win7rc1 in a VirtualBox VM on top of a Kubuntu 9.04 alpha. I created a 512 MB virtual machine for Win7 since the machine only has a total of 1 GB physical + 2 GB swap.
In "seamless" mode the VM had no problem running IE or Firefox with associated Silverlight player windows to stream the NCAA Championship games. I could switch quickly between the two VMs as well. My KDE environment wasn't all that lightweight either with Firefox and Thunderbird, a few Konsoles, and smplayer. I'm sure some part of this excellent performance comes from the Linux and VirtualBox code, but the Windows developers deserve some credit here, too.
Next learn the basics of VIM, maybe 5 or 10 commands cover most editing tasks.
I strongly encourage newcomers to Linux not to start with VIM but use nano instead. It provides a handy menu of commands at the bottom of the screen so you don't need to memorize a lot of obscure key sequences.
I use jed myself because I grew up on emacs, but I wouldn't suggest that to newcomers either.
I didn't propose this idea nor endorse it. My observation was more about how the Internet works. Someone with a modicum of technical expertise and an ax to grind could easily implement the OP's suggestion.
For the record, I'm not in favor of spamming anyone with anything, particularly child pornography.
I wasn't talking about linked images; those can be disabled easily in Thunderbird. My comment concerned images attached to the message itself. Oftentimes that sort of messages consists of a line or two of text and an attached gif.
I'm well aware about protecting privacy and disabling linked images. I use MailScanner which automatically disables linked images by default.
You seem to be equating indifference to porn with "indifference to sexuality."
Porn contains lots of messages other than sexuality, and most of those messages tend to degrade and objectify women. I've never discouraged my daughter from an interest in sexuality; if anything, I've told her it's a healthy and rewarding aspect of being human.
I don't think one needs to watch porn to learn how to become an interesting lover; open-mindedness and lots of practice is the best solution for that. I watched little porn as a kid but still managed to figure out how to have a good time in bed. I'll take "on-the-job training" with real members of the opposite sex over voyeurism and misogyny any day.
I've been a single father for most of the past sixteen years. I did hardly anything to screen out offensive material when my daughter was younger. Not only that, I let her have her own computer in her room, so I wasn't there to watch over her shoulder either.
What I did do was set up transparent proxying through Squid on the Linux box that runs as our house firewall so I could scan the logs from time to time and see where she was going. She knew that her usage was being logged, but beyond that I did nothing at all. In reality a much bigger problem than porn was the extent to which supposedly kid-friendly sites actually contained a large proportion of drive-by installs mostly for advertising crap. I ended up with a Squid acl list largely composed of places like atwola.com and Gator. I never had to add a block for any site containing pornographic or other questionable materials. After a couple of rounds of cleaning this type of junk off her (then Windows) computer, I decided the only solution was to block it at the router. These days she uses Ubuntu, so adware is much less of a problem.
The bigger problem actually began when I let her have an email account (indeed she owns her own domain). Despite years of experience scanning email for myself and my clients, it was still impossible to keep the occasional attached gif from getting through. Unfortunately these tend to the more disgusting end of the porn spectrum; I would have been less disturbed by her seeing more conventional sexual behaviors. The couple of times this happened she mentioned it to me and said she had deleted the offending message immediately. We had a talk about not opening messages from people you didn't know, but often a graphic will show up in the message preview windows (in Thunderbird in our case) without any active choice by the reader.
Now I only have the one girl, so I don't know how generalizable this experience might be. I do know that, at seventeen, she harbors little or no interest in porn and had, if anything, even less interest in it at 11-13. If she were male, the story might have been different. However my attitudes about her Internet usage were consistent with the general degree of freedom I permitted her in other realms of life. She always had a lot of freedom and today seems much more mature and self-disciplined than some of her friends and acquaintances who grew up in stricter households. I'm proud to call her my daughter.
It wouldn't be hard for somebody to spam people with HTML Email with links back to those sites.
Interesting concept. I wonder if we'll see a wave of just such messages sent to prominent Australian politicians, businessmen, journalists, clergy, and the like, if the filtering is actually implemented.
KDE 4.2 is in the current 9.04 alpha releases of Kubuntu. I upgraded my 8.10 installation to the alpha release the other night. A couple of hiccups here and there that I'd guess will be smoothed out over the coming month.
The most annoying thing was that I lost my restricted codecs. I understand full well why Ubuntu can't distribute the codecs in some countries like the US, but I don't understand why the existing codecs vanished. Most of the time it doesn't matter to me because I generally use smplayer/mplayer and build the latter from svn snapshots. I only discovered the codecs were gone when I suddenly couldn't play MP3s in amarok.
Nor does it seem to apply to my land-line phone or television services over FiOS. I don't see any settings in my Verizon account that relate to the issues discussed here.
This isn't a defense of the Guild or this suit, but most class-action litigations pay a healthy share of any settlement to the plaintiffs' attorneys. This is seen as just compensation for the fact that the plaintiffs' attorneys cover all the costs of pursuing the case and get nothing if the suit is dismissed (a "contingency" agreement). So it's certainly possible that some $30-40 million of that $125 million is going to the Guild's attorneys.
I'd be even more curious about the procedures that were used to identify and contact the class.
Class action suits require that the plaintiffs make a good-faith effort to contact everyone whose claims might be covered by the suit and offer them the chance to opt into or out of the class action. Since the class of "authors" is presumably very large, I'd be surprised if all, or even a majority, of authors were individually contacted and offered the chance to participate in the class action. In addition, since many of the works in question are older, the rights may belong to the even more difficult-to-locate descendants of the authors.
Contacting, say, only the members of the Authors' Guild would not seem to me to meet the usual requirements for a class. I've yet to see any authors posting here saying they were contacted by the Guild's attorneys about participation in the class action. If so, I believe these authors retain their individual rights to sue Google for infringement at any time.
No, the blame lies with the Portuguese government agency that contracted to build the site but didn't impose a requirement that the developers not employ proprietary technologies that limit open access. I could build a fine procurement site with open-source technologies like PHP and PostgreSQL that would require nothing beyond a generic browser on the client side; I'm sure many others here could do so as well.
The last thing I could imagine doing is building such a site on graphics-heavy technologies like Silverlight or Flash.
If the Portuguese government hasn't heard about open access and open-source software, were their representatives just out of the room for the past half-dozen years during EU and EC pronouncements on these subjects?
Microsoft just needs to do the same thing on the home side to be consistent.
While I generally agree with this post, I'd like to suggest that it costs money for vendors to support XP Home in a world where new computers ship with Vista. Remember that vendors generally provide support for Windows, not Microsoft, so continuing to allow users to purchase XP extends the need for support. OEMs presumably would like to support as few products as possible, so allowing Vista Home users to downgrade to XP imposes additional long-term costs.
I'm not so naive as to ignore the fact that Microsoft's principal motivation for allowing business users to downgrade was the resistance to accepting Vista among corporate IT departments in the first place. Nevertheless I'd bet that business users in general represent a much smaller support cost per unit shipped than do home users.
"Based on the foregoing, there exists a need for an improved system and method for protecting an individual against the potential damage caused by being impacted by a projectile propelled from a firearm."
The best of these was Desqview, essentially a sophisticated task-switcher that loaded on top of DOS. With the advent of the 386, it was a terrific "multi-tasking" solution for that time. There weren't really multiple desktops involved, though; you'd simply switch among the various active programs. I could easily run 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and SPSS on a 386 with 2 MB of memory, and still have room to spare for a DOS box. This was in 1988, though, and Desqview386 wasn't very old at that time. Hell, the 386 wasn't all that old at that time.
The other day I was helping someone buy a new laptop. She wanted something small and had seen an Acer Aspire in a store. We ended up buying her one (with XP) from Amazon for around $350.
In the room with us was my friend who runs an art gallery and has always used Macs. He strongly suggested we look at the Macbook Air in comparison. Unfortunately the Air's price tag of $1,900 or so made this choice a no-brainer.
Oh, and the Aspire is actually about half-a-pound lighter than the Air.
Do I think there's some value in buying the Macbook? Perhaps it's better constructed, more reliable, whatever. But should those things make it five times more expensive than the Acer? Will it really deliver five times the value to someone who wants to read mail, browse the web, and write the occasional document?
Windows 2000 was never marketed or intended to be sold as a consumer OS, it was a business grade OS and that is all.
I realize that, but a lot of smaller and medium-sized businesses didn't need 2000 either. For ordinary desktop usage, 98SE was a perfectly adequate option in many business settings, and 2000 was different enough to induce anxiety about any transition. I saw very few of my clients adopt 2000, but they moved to XP when it was released.
Slashdot Mirror
200 MB for Dolphin? Not here. From 'ps aux' I get
27242 3.2 2.0 68056 21308 ? S 11:27 0:01 /usr/bin/dolphin
I see 60+ MB virtual and 20+ MB physical.
Kubuntu 9.04a6 with KDE 4.2
Firefox, on the other hand, has numbers more like 500 MB and 220 MB.
For one, having sex with within a few years of your age someone should't count (with consent of course).
Yes, but that's the rub. Legally, children can't consent, so by definition they must be victims.
Don't you think a reason for this is the lack of support for open formats in popular players?
This is the typical chicken-and-egg problem. No one will support FLAC until there are devices that can play it. If there's no content in FLAC, player manufacturers won't see the need to include it.
My solution to this is to only buy products from companies like COWON that take open formats seriously.
My reply is why bother supporting a proprietary format to incorporate lossless audio when there's already a well-developed open standard already, namely FLAC? By your argument, the expansion of disk space makes lossless storage more attractive. I agree with that, but what I don't want is for everyone to hop on board another standard from Thomson and friends which can't legally be supported in free and open software.
Forward-thinking companies like COWON support open formats like FLAC and Matroska. Other players should as well. We've all suffered long enough with proprietary formats that bring nothing extra to the table other than the marketing power of large corporate backers.
Here you go: http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/
I found this comment in TFA (I believe it's taken from the Roundtree Report) intriguing:
"One of them (the National DNA Database) has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights, and both the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats have promised to scrap many of the others (emphasis mine)."
Is the an instance of the Tories saying simply "we're not Labour," or is this some new-found attachment to civil liberties by a party previously known for devotion to monarchy and deference to authority?
The Conservatives have never been very fond of Brussels either, so I'm guessing it's not a new-found devotion to the concept of EU-wide human rights that trump the authority of the member national governments.
So whats the point in going to vote in the first place if theres no guarantee that the will of the people will be mirrored in the actions of the elected goverment until mass protests fill up the streets (or tubes)?
I'm impressed that you think you can assess the "will of the people" on a subject as arcane as copyright enforcement. When I raise these issues with Americans, they generally look at me like I'm speaking gibberish, but when pressed express the belief that what writers, artists, etc., produce belongs to them and should be protected against piracy. Probably most of them would agree a "one-strike" policy is too harsh, but I bet you'd find a majority of the population in this country agreeing with a "three-strikes" policy for persistent file-sharers.
I doubt Americans are wildly divergent in these beliefs either. I did a quick search to see if there was any public opinion data online about this issue in NZ but couldn't find any. Perhaps a Kiwi can point us to some?
Here'a a totally anecdotal, and therefore admittedly only somewhat informative, data point.
I needed a copy of Windows this past week and installed Win7rc1 in a VirtualBox VM on top of a Kubuntu 9.04 alpha. I created a 512 MB virtual machine for Win7 since the machine only has a total of 1 GB physical + 2 GB swap.
In "seamless" mode the VM had no problem running IE or Firefox with associated Silverlight player windows to stream the NCAA Championship games. I could switch quickly between the two VMs as well. My KDE environment wasn't all that lightweight either with Firefox and Thunderbird, a few Konsoles, and smplayer. I'm sure some part of this excellent performance comes from the Linux and VirtualBox code, but the Windows developers deserve some credit here, too.
Next learn the basics of VIM, maybe 5 or 10 commands cover most editing tasks.
I strongly encourage newcomers to Linux not to start with VIM but use nano instead. It provides a handy menu of commands at the bottom of the screen so you don't need to memorize a lot of obscure key sequences.
I use jed myself because I grew up on emacs, but I wouldn't suggest that to newcomers either.
I didn't propose this idea nor endorse it. My observation was more about how the Internet works. Someone with a modicum of technical expertise and an ax to grind could easily implement the OP's suggestion.
For the record, I'm not in favor of spamming anyone with anything, particularly child pornography.
I wasn't talking about linked images; those can be disabled easily in Thunderbird. My comment concerned images attached to the message itself. Oftentimes that sort of messages consists of a line or two of text and an attached gif.
I'm well aware about protecting privacy and disabling linked images. I use MailScanner which automatically disables linked images by default.
You seem to be equating indifference to porn with "indifference to sexuality."
Porn contains lots of messages other than sexuality, and most of those messages tend to degrade and objectify women. I've never discouraged my daughter from an interest in sexuality; if anything, I've told her it's a healthy and rewarding aspect of being human.
I don't think one needs to watch porn to learn how to become an interesting lover; open-mindedness and lots of practice is the best solution for that. I watched little porn as a kid but still managed to figure out how to have a good time in bed. I'll take "on-the-job training" with real members of the opposite sex over voyeurism and misogyny any day.
Yes, in fact, she would. We have that kind of relationship.
Are you suggesting that girls who don't love porn are not "fun?"
Is this comment purely theoretical, or do you also have a daughter and speak from experience?
I've been a single father for most of the past sixteen years. I did hardly anything to screen out offensive material when my daughter was younger. Not only that, I let her have her own computer in her room, so I wasn't there to watch over her shoulder either.
What I did do was set up transparent proxying through Squid on the Linux box that runs as our house firewall so I could scan the logs from time to time and see where she was going. She knew that her usage was being logged, but beyond that I did nothing at all. In reality a much bigger problem than porn was the extent to which supposedly kid-friendly sites actually contained a large proportion of drive-by installs mostly for advertising crap. I ended up with a Squid acl list largely composed of places like atwola.com and Gator. I never had to add a block for any site containing pornographic or other questionable materials. After a couple of rounds of cleaning this type of junk off her (then Windows) computer, I decided the only solution was to block it at the router. These days she uses Ubuntu, so adware is much less of a problem.
The bigger problem actually began when I let her have an email account (indeed she owns her own domain). Despite years of experience scanning email for myself and my clients, it was still impossible to keep the occasional attached gif from getting through. Unfortunately these tend to the more disgusting end of the porn spectrum; I would have been less disturbed by her seeing more conventional sexual behaviors. The couple of times this happened she mentioned it to me and said she had deleted the offending message immediately. We had a talk about not opening messages from people you didn't know, but often a graphic will show up in the message preview windows (in Thunderbird in our case) without any active choice by the reader.
Now I only have the one girl, so I don't know how generalizable this experience might be. I do know that, at seventeen, she harbors little or no interest in porn and had, if anything, even less interest in it at 11-13. If she were male, the story might have been different. However my attitudes about her Internet usage were consistent with the general degree of freedom I permitted her in other realms of life. She always had a lot of freedom and today seems much more mature and self-disciplined than some of her friends and acquaintances who grew up in stricter households. I'm proud to call her my daughter.
It wouldn't be hard for somebody to spam people with HTML Email with links back to those sites.
Interesting concept. I wonder if we'll see a wave of just such messages sent to prominent Australian politicians, businessmen, journalists, clergy, and the like, if the filtering is actually implemented.
KDE 4.2 is in the current 9.04 alpha releases of Kubuntu. I upgraded my 8.10 installation to the alpha release the other night. A couple of hiccups here and there that I'd guess will be smoothed out over the coming month.
The most annoying thing was that I lost my restricted codecs. I understand full well why Ubuntu can't distribute the codecs in some countries like the US, but I don't understand why the existing codecs vanished. Most of the time it doesn't matter to me because I generally use smplayer/mplayer and build the latter from svn snapshots. I only discovered the codecs were gone when I suddenly couldn't play MP3s in amarok.
Nor does it seem to apply to my land-line phone or television services over FiOS. I don't see any settings in my Verizon account that relate to the issues discussed here.
This isn't a defense of the Guild or this suit, but most class-action litigations pay a healthy share of any settlement to the plaintiffs' attorneys. This is seen as just compensation for the fact that the plaintiffs' attorneys cover all the costs of pursuing the case and get nothing if the suit is dismissed (a "contingency" agreement). So it's certainly possible that some $30-40 million of that $125 million is going to the Guild's attorneys.
I'd be even more curious about the procedures that were used to identify and contact the class.
Class action suits require that the plaintiffs make a good-faith effort to contact everyone whose claims might be covered by the suit and offer them the chance to opt into or out of the class action. Since the class of "authors" is presumably very large, I'd be surprised if all, or even a majority, of authors were individually contacted and offered the chance to participate in the class action. In addition, since many of the works in question are older, the rights may belong to the even more difficult-to-locate descendants of the authors.
Contacting, say, only the members of the Authors' Guild would not seem to me to meet the usual requirements for a class. I've yet to see any authors posting here saying they were contacted by the Guild's attorneys about participation in the class action. If so, I believe these authors retain their individual rights to sue Google for infringement at any time.
IANAL
No, the blame lies with the Portuguese government agency that contracted to build the site but didn't impose a requirement that the developers not employ proprietary technologies that limit open access. I could build a fine procurement site with open-source technologies like PHP and PostgreSQL that would require nothing beyond a generic browser on the client side; I'm sure many others here could do so as well.
The last thing I could imagine doing is building such a site on graphics-heavy technologies like Silverlight or Flash.
If the Portuguese government hasn't heard about open access and open-source software, were their representatives just out of the room for the past half-dozen years during EU and EC pronouncements on these subjects?
Microsoft just needs to do the same thing on the home side to be consistent.
While I generally agree with this post, I'd like to suggest that it costs money for vendors to support XP Home in a world where new computers ship with Vista. Remember that vendors generally provide support for Windows, not Microsoft, so continuing to allow users to purchase XP extends the need for support. OEMs presumably would like to support as few products as possible, so allowing Vista Home users to downgrade to XP imposes additional long-term costs.
I'm not so naive as to ignore the fact that Microsoft's principal motivation for allowing business users to downgrade was the resistance to accepting Vista among corporate IT departments in the first place. Nevertheless I'd bet that business users in general represent a much smaller support cost per unit shipped than do home users.
From the patent application as quoted in TFA:
"Based on the foregoing, there exists a need for an improved system and method for protecting an individual against the potential damage caused by being impacted by a projectile propelled from a firearm."
That's patent-attorney-speak for getting shot.
The best of these was Desqview, essentially a sophisticated task-switcher that loaded on top of DOS. With the advent of the 386, it was a terrific "multi-tasking" solution for that time. There weren't really multiple desktops involved, though; you'd simply switch among the various active programs. I could easily run 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and SPSS on a 386 with 2 MB of memory, and still have room to spare for a DOS box. This was in 1988, though, and Desqview386 wasn't very old at that time. Hell, the 386 wasn't all that old at that time.
The other day I was helping someone buy a new laptop. She wanted something small and had seen an Acer Aspire in a store. We ended up buying her one (with XP) from Amazon for around $350.
In the room with us was my friend who runs an art gallery and has always used Macs. He strongly suggested we look at the Macbook Air in comparison. Unfortunately the Air's price tag of $1,900 or so made this choice a no-brainer.
Oh, and the Aspire is actually about half-a-pound lighter than the Air.
Do I think there's some value in buying the Macbook? Perhaps it's better constructed, more reliable, whatever. But should those things make it five times more expensive than the Acer? Will it really deliver five times the value to someone who wants to read mail, browse the web, and write the occasional document?
Windows 2000 was never marketed or intended to be sold as a consumer OS, it was a business grade OS and that is all.
I realize that, but a lot of smaller and medium-sized businesses didn't need 2000 either. For ordinary desktop usage, 98SE was a perfectly adequate option in many business settings, and 2000 was different enough to induce anxiety about any transition. I saw very few of my clients adopt 2000, but they moved to XP when it was released.