Really, by not forcing a codec on HTML5, what does that do/what impact? I don't really understand. Can someone clarify?
What it does is requires you to have a Ogg file to show to Firefox/Opera and a H.264 file for Safari. Chrome will support both (but downstream repackagers of Chromium are stuck with Ogg-only). Who knows what Internet Explorer will do. This isn't technically hard (as the video tag allows for multiple sources already), just annoying (as you need two copies of each video) for websites.
I know that these.net libraries have been implemented in Mono but would we have to write new open-source libraries to replace thier functionality and remain "patent-threat" free?
Re-implementation doesn't protect against patent suits, as patents like these basically cover the functionality. While I haven't done extensive research, I'd be surprised if there was a way to unambiguously implement around the patents while retaining compatibility.
To be fair, it's not necessarily a concession that the code is dangerous. There's a distinction between "known safe" and "believed safe". If Miguel was arguing that all of Mono previously fell under "believed safe", then splitting into "known safe" and "believed safe" packages is not a 180. I'm not saying that I believe the rest of Mono to be safe, but Microsoft has now come out and declared some things to be "definitively safe", a change which would cause any responsible person to split the packages to reflect that, regardless of previous legal standing.
This is a promise from Microsoft not to sue over any patents which cover the portions of dotNet/C# that are EMCA standards. If your C# app depends only on those components, then you can safely port it to Mono without worrying about patent risk. My understanding is that the Novell-Microsoft license deals covered not just Mono, but the entire SLES stack, so if you have one of those, it's still "protecting" you from "patent risk" in other SUSE components, and thus still as valid and useful as it was yesterday. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Anyone Microsoft sues will have a very strong defense based on a very old legal principal. Microsoft can try the "cow people into submission by threatening a very weak lawsuit" approach, but the fact that they can't win that lawsuit is critical - all it would take is for someone to call them out on it and take the fight to them and MS's case would evaporate. Convincing a judge to completely re-interpret a basic principle of contract law isn't a trivial task, and I doubt Microsoft has some crazy Xanatos gambit based around it.
IANAL, but Safe Harbor isn't a guarantee. Just because you have a website with user-submitted content does not automatically grant you its protection. There are a series of criteria to qualify, with some of the major ones being that you have to respond to takedowns promptly, and that if you exert any manner of editorial control (blocking some content and/or highlighting other content) you have to use that control to block infringing works as well. It also doesn't apply if "infringing content" is your primary form of revenue. Even without the discovery violations, usenet.com was hosed on a number of these points, especially the one about filtering and editorial control.
Again, I am not a lawyer, but the bottom line is that Safe Harbor doesn't apply to everyone. It's a "really, I'm honestly trying to do the right thing here" defense, which is laughable from usenet.com.
But what happened if the friend tried to make a copy for his friend, and that other friend tried to make a copy for his other friend. Surely you remember that, don't you? The quality stank so badly nobody wanted to listen to that copy, thanks to lossy analog dubbing.
With digital media, each copy is lossless, so if a friend copies a song for a friend, who copies it for another friend... even 10, 20, 1000 friends down the chain, and the music still has its original quality.
Additionally, even using high-speed dub takes time and manpower and money (blank tapes). You could make a copy for a friend or two, and maybe that cute girl in your science lab, but not for everyone in the school. By contrast, if I decide to share something on Bittorrent or Usenet.com or whatever, I push a button, wander off, and by the time I get up the next morning, I could have shared it with half the school, at no cost (today's hard drives can fit hundreds of thousands of songs, vs. a handful on a cassette tape).
This scale difference matters for two reasons. First of all, it's the massive increase in the amount of sharing possible from one sale. At worst in the tape era, you could make 10 copies of that tape, whereas I could make 100 copies today during my lunch break. Secondly, it creates an atmosphere where it's possible to get all the music you want exclusively from piracy. In your tape-era, I could only "pirate" the songs my immediate friends had purchased originals (or maybe first-gen duplicates) of in their libraries. For any given tape, my odds of finding a "pirate-able copy" on the "sneaker-net" are fairly low. There's a variable chance that I would have no choice but to buy the tape. By contrast, today's Usenet.com or PirateBay or what-have-you can all but guarantee that any song I might want to acquire can be pirated easily. I can't imagine that there exist many songs that you can't find a copy of to pirate within 10 minutes.
That's sort of implicit in the summary. "Bad math" is kind of a clue that AT&T made a number error, and there's a link to Verizon making the identical mistake (a link which explains the error). I mean, thanks for spelling it out and all, but it's not like no one noticed it.
Actually, one could argue that making money is the entire point of this ToS. They provide the service for free, while putting restrictions on reusing the data so that you have to buy a license/subscription/whatever in order to use it in a professional setting. Otherwise, it'd be a completely free service.
There are technology solutions for "here's how you know this is really me". The most common is something along the lines of PGP. If I could host a PGP public key on Facebook and have everything I write use that signature in some kind of meta-tag, then you know I wrote it.
The technical problems with this solution are (1) finding someplace everyone knows is mine for me to host the key (Facebook or MySpace would work well for this) and (2) making it easy to sign arbitrary things with that key while still keeping it secure (if someone copies your key, it's game-over).
The largest hurdle is getting such a thing adopted by (1) users, and (2) web apps.
Having more lawyers is a double-edged sword. If she adopted a strategy of "have my lawyer do the minimum to avoid getting the case thrown out", their legal costs would be 20x hers. While she'd go bankrupt in the long run, Yahoo would figure a settlement is cheaper for them. In fact, I'd wager that said "here's some money, go away" settlement would be for more than if she literally got everything her ex-BF owns.
This is often why companies settle for undisclosed amounts - there's no fault assigned, it avoids bad PR, it saves them piles in legal costs, and removes the risk of "we got a tech-illiterate judge" losses.
He then linked to the picture, completely obviating his achievement.
Additionally, it being published in Esquire (and being the guy's wife), I wouldn't think many would imagine they'd have a shot at actually seeing boobies.
You can't "count the port 25 messages from each host". As others have said, in a botnet, each computer needs only send a dozen emails an hour. That falls within the "heavy email use" normal range for some people.
Additionally, how is your router going to know whether it's got one computer behind it, or a NAT with 100 computers?
Well, yeah, but this film's production budget is $130-150 million. That's versus $47 million for First Contact, and $58 million for Insurrection. That doesn't include marketing/distribution costs ($50m-$90m). Of course, that $75m doesn't include worldwide revenues. It's Hollywood with their creative accounting, so doing the math here on what's profitable is nigh-impossible. But the bottom line is that you can't directly compare the movies because this one was much more expensive.
The problem with vigilantes is that if they do their job perfectly, they're morally gray and ambiguous and opinion on them is split. If they screw up even slightly, then they're unambiguously criminals. That's sort of a huge risk to take, especially since you can't buy vigilante's insurance like you can medical malpractice insurance. Then there's the fact that it's an unpaid risk, and it's game over.
Knowing how most kids fill out reviews and surveys, I'd wager that those 5-7 students with the negative surveys would be the most detailed, you get another 5-7 of "absolutely loved" (either because they were teacher's pet or actually liked the teacher), and about 200 reviews where everyone gives the teacher a 3-4/5 on everything.
No. The brightest kids (I graduated a VA High School in 2005) totally ignored the SoLs. I only prepared for them in the sense of trying to be aware of the schedule changes made to accommodate testing periods (still went to the wrong room a few times). Many of my friends were the same way. If you're in an honors or AP class and not failing, the SoLs are a complete non-issue. Where they are an issue is with the general classes, where the teachers lose the opportunity to try to make classes interesting, and feel constantly pressured to stay on a strict schedule to make it to testing time.
My guess would be that the major problem isn't "out-of-college wages", but rather wages down the road. In other careers, you can advance in such a way that your salary jumps a few times as you move through the ranks. In education, unless you become a principal or superintendent, you only get a few percent raise each year, every year. There's not really advancement prospects.
OK, so if more people want to be teachers, that's good: Make hiring competitive. Go from a teacher shortage to a teacher surplus. "Too many teachers" means that schools can hire only the best ones or the most passionate ones. Sure, that means they need a selection process that's tuned for that, but that's the easy part relative to competitive salaries.
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
Windows XP, filesystem browsing ("Computer Explorer") remote CIFS/SMB shares. Jitter, share, complete application freezeout*. Not hypothetical; I live it every day at a job where most of the documents I work on are hosted 1,000 miles away. (MS Word is a complete pig about temp files over the same remote link, too; that's another example of "jitter and freeze".)
As a longtime Mac user, I can say that Tiger (10.4, late 2007) and earlier had this problem, where losing the connection to SMB or AFP mount would lock up the Finder (and most of the FS stuff) for a good 5 minutes. The FS code wasn't properly multi-threaded, so it'd keep looking for the detached network volume, causing locks or something (I read the reason at one point, but was mostly just glad it was fixed)
Make it too short and people can just sit back a bit and wait for the copyright to expire.
If it's a work that I'm so uninterested in that I can wait 10+ years to view/hear/read it, it's a work I'm so uninterested in I couldn't be bothered with even then.
Why would an amount of time that was deemed sufficient protection over 200 years ago when the printing press was a novel creation be ANYWHERE CLOSE to what protection is needed today?
Two or three times what it was then? Try 1/3 to 1/10 of the original time. We now have bestsellers that, in their first week, sell into the seven digit numbers - not of profit - but of units. Five years of protection would arguably be too much with modern technology and distribution methods.
THIS. The goal of copyright is to incentivize creation and promote science and art. 95% of the movies and music and books created today will be in syndicated, cheap form within a year (DVDs, paperback, etc), and off store shelves (except out of the way places or in bargain bins) with 5 years. For most works, if they've not made their money back in 5-10 years, they're not going to. If copyright ended after 10 years, 99% of works would be unaffected.
And the ones that are hurt by that are ones that are already either raking in loads and loads of cash for their creators, or are just being abused to milk them for cash (re-releases, anniversary director's cuts, etc)
Question: how long do I have to be here before I can be said to no longer be new here? In Soviet Russia I would probably be considered old here.
I'm pretty sure it's an achievement-system based on meme use. So I think you're about 1/1000 to date. Next time, throw in some stuff about old Koreans emailing, or Natalie Portman, or Beowulf clusters of our new overlords:-) Next submission will be your 200th, so you should totally go all out:-)
Yeah, but without copyright, DRM-removing tools and decompilers would become legal. FSF/Linux/whoever spend 6 months on making amazing decompilers, and that's the ballgame.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, by not forcing a codec on HTML5, what does that do/what impact? I don't really understand. Can someone clarify?
What it does is requires you to have a Ogg file to show to Firefox/Opera and a H.264 file for Safari. Chrome will support both (but downstream repackagers of Chromium are stuck with Ogg-only). Who knows what Internet Explorer will do. This isn't technically hard (as the video tag allows for multiple sources already), just annoying (as you need two copies of each video) for websites.
I know that these .net libraries have been implemented in Mono but would we have to write new open-source libraries to replace thier functionality and remain "patent-threat" free?
Re-implementation doesn't protect against patent suits, as patents like these basically cover the functionality. While I haven't done extensive research, I'd be surprised if there was a way to unambiguously implement around the patents while retaining compatibility.
To be fair, it's not necessarily a concession that the code is dangerous. There's a distinction between "known safe" and "believed safe". If Miguel was arguing that all of Mono previously fell under "believed safe", then splitting into "known safe" and "believed safe" packages is not a 180. I'm not saying that I believe the rest of Mono to be safe, but Microsoft has now come out and declared some things to be "definitively safe", a change which would cause any responsible person to split the packages to reflect that, regardless of previous legal standing.
This is a promise from Microsoft not to sue over any patents which cover the portions of dotNet/C# that are EMCA standards. If your C# app depends only on those components, then you can safely port it to Mono without worrying about patent risk. My understanding is that the Novell-Microsoft license deals covered not just Mono, but the entire SLES stack, so if you have one of those, it's still "protecting" you from "patent risk" in other SUSE components, and thus still as valid and useful as it was yesterday. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Anyone Microsoft sues will have a very strong defense based on a very old legal principal. Microsoft can try the "cow people into submission by threatening a very weak lawsuit" approach, but the fact that they can't win that lawsuit is critical - all it would take is for someone to call them out on it and take the fight to them and MS's case would evaporate. Convincing a judge to completely re-interpret a basic principle of contract law isn't a trivial task, and I doubt Microsoft has some crazy Xanatos gambit based around it.
IANAL, but Safe Harbor isn't a guarantee. Just because you have a website with user-submitted content does not automatically grant you its protection. There are a series of criteria to qualify, with some of the major ones being that you have to respond to takedowns promptly, and that if you exert any manner of editorial control (blocking some content and/or highlighting other content) you have to use that control to block infringing works as well. It also doesn't apply if "infringing content" is your primary form of revenue. Even without the discovery violations, usenet.com was hosed on a number of these points, especially the one about filtering and editorial control.
Again, I am not a lawyer, but the bottom line is that Safe Harbor doesn't apply to everyone. It's a "really, I'm honestly trying to do the right thing here" defense, which is laughable from usenet.com.
But what happened if the friend tried to make a copy for his friend, and that other friend tried to make a copy for his other friend. Surely you remember that, don't you? The quality stank so badly nobody wanted to listen to that copy, thanks to lossy analog dubbing.
With digital media, each copy is lossless, so if a friend copies a song for a friend, who copies it for another friend... even 10, 20, 1000 friends down the chain, and the music still has its original quality.
Additionally, even using high-speed dub takes time and manpower and money (blank tapes). You could make a copy for a friend or two, and maybe that cute girl in your science lab, but not for everyone in the school. By contrast, if I decide to share something on Bittorrent or Usenet.com or whatever, I push a button, wander off, and by the time I get up the next morning, I could have shared it with half the school, at no cost (today's hard drives can fit hundreds of thousands of songs, vs. a handful on a cassette tape).
This scale difference matters for two reasons. First of all, it's the massive increase in the amount of sharing possible from one sale. At worst in the tape era, you could make 10 copies of that tape, whereas I could make 100 copies today during my lunch break. Secondly, it creates an atmosphere where it's possible to get all the music you want exclusively from piracy. In your tape-era, I could only "pirate" the songs my immediate friends had purchased originals (or maybe first-gen duplicates) of in their libraries. For any given tape, my odds of finding a "pirate-able copy" on the "sneaker-net" are fairly low. There's a variable chance that I would have no choice but to buy the tape. By contrast, today's Usenet.com or PirateBay or what-have-you can all but guarantee that any song I might want to acquire can be pirated easily. I can't imagine that there exist many songs that you can't find a copy of to pirate within 10 minutes.
Or use .htaccess to block anything not referred from your site. Even easier.
That's sort of implicit in the summary. "Bad math" is kind of a clue that AT&T made a number error, and there's a link to Verizon making the identical mistake (a link which explains the error). I mean, thanks for spelling it out and all, but it's not like no one noticed it.
Actually, one could argue that making money is the entire point of this ToS. They provide the service for free, while putting restrictions on reusing the data so that you have to buy a license/subscription/whatever in order to use it in a professional setting. Otherwise, it'd be a completely free service.
There are technology solutions for "here's how you know this is really me". The most common is something along the lines of PGP. If I could host a PGP public key on Facebook and have everything I write use that signature in some kind of meta-tag, then you know I wrote it.
The technical problems with this solution are (1) finding someplace everyone knows is mine for me to host the key (Facebook or MySpace would work well for this) and (2) making it easy to sign arbitrary things with that key while still keeping it secure (if someone copies your key, it's game-over).
The largest hurdle is getting such a thing adopted by (1) users, and (2) web apps.
Having more lawyers is a double-edged sword. If she adopted a strategy of "have my lawyer do the minimum to avoid getting the case thrown out", their legal costs would be 20x hers. While she'd go bankrupt in the long run, Yahoo would figure a settlement is cheaper for them. In fact, I'd wager that said "here's some money, go away" settlement would be for more than if she literally got everything her ex-BF owns.
This is often why companies settle for undisclosed amounts - there's no fault assigned, it avoids bad PR, it saves them piles in legal costs, and removes the risk of "we got a tech-illiterate judge" losses.
He then linked to the picture, completely obviating his achievement.
Additionally, it being published in Esquire (and being the guy's wife), I wouldn't think many would imagine they'd have a shot at actually seeing boobies.
You can't "count the port 25 messages from each host". As others have said, in a botnet, each computer needs only send a dozen emails an hour. That falls within the "heavy email use" normal range for some people.
Additionally, how is your router going to know whether it's got one computer behind it, or a NAT with 100 computers?
Well, yeah, but this film's production budget is $130-150 million. That's versus $47 million for First Contact, and $58 million for Insurrection. That doesn't include marketing/distribution costs ($50m-$90m). Of course, that $75m doesn't include worldwide revenues. It's Hollywood with their creative accounting, so doing the math here on what's profitable is nigh-impossible. But the bottom line is that you can't directly compare the movies because this one was much more expensive.
The problem with vigilantes is that if they do their job perfectly, they're morally gray and ambiguous and opinion on them is split. If they screw up even slightly, then they're unambiguously criminals. That's sort of a huge risk to take, especially since you can't buy vigilante's insurance like you can medical malpractice insurance. Then there's the fact that it's an unpaid risk, and it's game over.
Knowing how most kids fill out reviews and surveys, I'd wager that those 5-7 students with the negative surveys would be the most detailed, you get another 5-7 of "absolutely loved" (either because they were teacher's pet or actually liked the teacher), and about 200 reviews where everyone gives the teacher a 3-4/5 on everything.
No. The brightest kids (I graduated a VA High School in 2005) totally ignored the SoLs. I only prepared for them in the sense of trying to be aware of the schedule changes made to accommodate testing periods (still went to the wrong room a few times). Many of my friends were the same way. If you're in an honors or AP class and not failing, the SoLs are a complete non-issue. Where they are an issue is with the general classes, where the teachers lose the opportunity to try to make classes interesting, and feel constantly pressured to stay on a strict schedule to make it to testing time.
My guess would be that the major problem isn't "out-of-college wages", but rather wages down the road. In other careers, you can advance in such a way that your salary jumps a few times as you move through the ranks. In education, unless you become a principal or superintendent, you only get a few percent raise each year, every year. There's not really advancement prospects.
OK, so if more people want to be teachers, that's good: Make hiring competitive. Go from a teacher shortage to a teacher surplus. "Too many teachers" means that schools can hire only the best ones or the most passionate ones. Sure, that means they need a selection process that's tuned for that, but that's the easy part relative to competitive salaries.
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
Windows XP, filesystem browsing ("Computer Explorer") remote CIFS/SMB shares. Jitter, share, complete application freezeout*. Not hypothetical; I live it every day at a job where most of the documents I work on are hosted 1,000 miles away. (MS Word is a complete pig about temp files over the same remote link, too; that's another example of "jitter and freeze".)
As a longtime Mac user, I can say that Tiger (10.4, late 2007) and earlier had this problem, where losing the connection to SMB or AFP mount would lock up the Finder (and most of the FS stuff) for a good 5 minutes. The FS code wasn't properly multi-threaded, so it'd keep looking for the detached network volume, causing locks or something (I read the reason at one point, but was mostly just glad it was fixed)
Make it too short and people can just sit back a bit and wait for the copyright to expire.
If it's a work that I'm so uninterested in that I can wait 10+ years to view/hear/read it, it's a work I'm so uninterested in I couldn't be bothered with even then.
Why would an amount of time that was deemed sufficient protection over 200 years ago when the printing press was a novel creation be ANYWHERE CLOSE to what protection is needed today?
Two or three times what it was then? Try 1/3 to 1/10 of the original time. We now have bestsellers that, in their first week, sell into the seven digit numbers - not of profit - but of units. Five years of protection would arguably be too much with modern technology and distribution methods.
THIS. The goal of copyright is to incentivize creation and promote science and art. 95% of the movies and music and books created today will be in syndicated, cheap form within a year (DVDs, paperback, etc), and off store shelves (except out of the way places or in bargain bins) with 5 years. For most works, if they've not made their money back in 5-10 years, they're not going to. If copyright ended after 10 years, 99% of works would be unaffected.
And the ones that are hurt by that are ones that are already either raking in loads and loads of cash for their creators, or are just being abused to milk them for cash (re-releases, anniversary director's cuts, etc)
Question: how long do I have to be here before I can be said to no longer be new here? In Soviet Russia I would probably be considered old here.
I'm pretty sure it's an achievement-system based on meme use. So I think you're about 1/1000 to date. Next time, throw in some stuff about old Koreans emailing, or Natalie Portman, or Beowulf clusters of our new overlords :-) Next submission will be your 200th, so you should totally go all out :-)
Yeah, but without copyright, DRM-removing tools and decompilers would become legal. FSF/Linux/whoever spend 6 months on making amazing decompilers, and that's the ballgame.