I'm not convinced that's a bad thing, whilst Fatah certainly also have their fair share of nutters, they're a lot more reasonable than Hamas (and Hezbollah for that matter). It's sad in a way because whilst tensions between Israel and Gaza/Hamas are at their lowest point in a while, this overshadows the massive improvements in relationships between Israel and Fatah in the West Bank. Of course, whilst Israel is attacking Hamas-supporting Palestinians in Gaza it only increases the anger by Palestinians in the West Bank towards Israel which is a shame.
If Hamas had been whiped out of Gaza rather thank taking it over I sincerely believe we'd be a lot closer to peace over there now - I truly think that a Fatah-led Palestine with no interference and destabilisation of peace processes by Hamas is the best hope for a proper peace deal.
For that reason I'm not sure that the CIA wouldn't help Fatah - if they could've given enough support earlier such that Fatah hadn't been removed from Gaza and instead Hamas had been disarmed and dissolved we'd all be so much closer to fixing the whole Palestine/Israel problem. Of course, that would completely go against America's push for democracy as Hamas were elected but that's a different story, I don't think Palestinians did themselves any favours giving credit to the Hamas movement by voting them in the first place but I can see why they did at least.
The license fees are paying for the creation of iPlayer though that's the issue - it's development and running costs have to come from somewhere and that's the license fee.
If it came out the director of the BBCs own pocket I could care less what they do with it but unfortunately it doesn't.
I think you're misunderstanding the point of the turing test.
It's not attempting to prove that a machine that can pass it is as intelligent as a human, it's merely attempting to prove that a machine is capable of doing something that is indistinguishable than something we deem as being intelligent - a human.
This goes hand in hand with your point about a lack of definition of intelligence, the point is we really don't have a fixed definition. All we know is that we tend to think of some things as intelligent and others as not. The point to take away is this, imagine someone were able to create a robot that looked human and for all intents and purposes seemed identical until it actually acted at which point it didn't look intelligent anymore and you dismissed it as just a robot you simply wouldn't think of it as intelligent. Take that same robot and make it capable of passing the turing test such that you wouldn't know it was a robot and you'd think of it as intelligent.
The problem with defining intelligence is perception. Some people may think of a dog that can give you it's paw to shake as intelligent, but the fact is we can already create robots that are capable of responding in a more complex manner to more complex requests but they still don't get treated as intelligent.
The Turing test does what we need it to do, it deprives us of the ability to see what it is that we're interacting with so that we can't make judgements based on what the entity is, but instead on what the entity can do.
People don't realise what a massively impressive step we made with the first computers towards artificial intelligence and artificial life - we've created something that can continuously process and react to input, something that can be active instead of merely reactive like the majority of mechanical items that existed prior to computers. It's important we realise that that's a major hurdle out the way already. The battle now is improving this thing that we've created to be able to handle more complex inputs and perform more complex processing of those inputs. We're not going to see robots indistinguishable from humans any time soon, but we're well on our way to seeing systems capable of mimicking some of the tasks humans can do be it having a reasonable conversation to recognition and classification of specific objects. The more of these individual actions we can mimic and the more powerful and compact computers become the sooner we can begin to merge these actions we're able to mimic into something that is much more lifelike. Just because current systems can only perform individual tasks out of the many tasks we're capable of doesn't make them stupid, it's simply that we don't have anything to match the power of the human brain or nervous system yet in the same amount of physical space.
I seem to recall a certain case of a bunch of kids being gunned down at a school in Jerusalem that you've missed off your figures.
Or don't terrorist attacks count as is per usual when people and the media comment on events in the middle east and have even the slightest hint of bias towards the Palestinians?
As a UK TV license payer I find it entirely unacceptable that the BBC is using our money to further Apple's profits over other companies by releasing only for their mobile handset. We do not pay the BBC to further Apple and Microsoft's profits, whilst I applaud their attempts at getting the content accessible for Linux users it's a half-assed measure at best.
Whilst the iPhone is popular in the US, it's not that popular here in the UK and as such there is not even the excuse that it's got a large majority of the market segment.
The BBC seems too easily influenced by large corporations and frankly, something needs to be done about it because they are accountable to us - the British citizens that pay the license equally and as such we should be treated equally in how we can access our content. If this is not to be the case, we should have the choice of using our TVs but not watching the BBC and hence opt out of the TV license.
This is similar to saying that MS-DOS 5 has less bugs than Windows Vista hence MS-DOS 5 is far better than Windows Vista
Well yes, of course it has less bugs, because it's much smaller and supports far fewer features, but that doesn't make it better, it's nigh on useless for everything people want to do nowadays.
At the end of the day, IE5.5 supports less features and gracefully falls back where it fails on a feature as it should. IE6 and IE7 are much more ambitious and implement far more features, but when pushed to the limits on these features they fail more horribly than IE5 which doesn't even try. There is an argument that features shouldn't be implemented at all if they don't work perfectly but I disagree, the fact is the features in question almost certainly work in say 90% of cases it's just that Acid3 is specifically exploiting the cases where it doesn't work rather than where it does.
People are free to stick with IE5.5 if they like the fact it does better on the Acid3 test if they want, but don't come crying when you can't use half the features on sites that are designed for the new series of browsers.
Acid3 is doing it's job well, it's highlighting problems in implementations so that they can be fixed in future versions. I'm not sure why some people see Acid tests as a tool to attack browsers with, that's not the purpose. Whilst crappy journalism might like to use it for this purpose one would hope that Slashdot was above Daily Mail type shoddy stories.
I'm not sure how you work out that I'm going to end up spending more? I'm not fussed about Bluray until it comes down below £100, I spent £90 on HD-DVD so far including all the content I require. At most I'll be spending £190 therefore to have my current HD kit and switch to Bluray (I wont switch current content to Bluray, no need it's fine in HD-DVD and I can rip it to my PC/Bluray regardless). £190 is still less than the current £200 - £300 I'd need to spend on Bluray and others will have already had to spend to go Bluray.
It's cheaper all round, the difference is I don't have to wait 2 years+
Frankly I don't give a damn whether I can see some actors face in all it's blemished detail, what I do care about is the likes of Planet Earth, Galapagos and so forth in HD.
Fact is, picking up a firesale HD-DVD player + Planet Earth, Galapagos and so on in HD-DVD as well as a few films that do actually suit HD well such as 300 and Transformers I've been able to get the content I actually want to see in HD early. I'd never buy an HD player for the likes of the Bourne series, simply because I already think Matt Damon is an idiot and I don't particularly care about watching a high definition idiot in my room, I'm quite content with people like him remaining standard definition, and in not watching that sort of thing in HD I don't feel like I've lost out on anything whatsoever.
I guess to put it another way, some films you watch for the fantastic visuals, others you watch for the story. The story based films really don't make much difference whether they'd HD or standard def. but you'd never watch something like Planet Earth for the story, whilst it's interesting the main pull to it is the fantastic visuals that make you realise how amazing our planet actually is so I had a choice. Do I wait god knows how long for a Bluray player to come down to £50 - maybe 2years or more? or do I just buy an HD-DVD player addon for my 360 for £50 and enjoy the content I actually care about seeing in HD right now. To me it's really a no brainer, as has been mentioned previously on Slashdot, it's not as if the 360's HD-DVD drive can't be used on a computer to rip the content to disc and burn to a Bluray disc sometime down the road anyway when the prices for burning Bluray discs becomes reasonable.
Some people look at me funny when I say I bought an HD-DVD player and a few films, but I struggle to find myself as being the joke when I've paid £90 for the same player + content they're paying over £300 for. I'm still possibly going to buy Bluray down the line, I just aint going to pay anything over £100 for it. It's all too easy for some people to overlook common sense and logical action due to over the top brand loyalty. I understand there may be some people who do want to see their favourite actors in all their high definition glory rather than enjoy the storyline but I'm not one of those and plenty of others aren't - for those of us who only watch story based discs for the story then even 700mb XviD (i.e. not quite as good as DVD quality even) is plenty good enough.
Could twist "The iPhone is too slow for Flash" into "Flash is too slow for the iPhone".
What does that even mean? Flash wont play at 60 fps or something and that's the speed of video Jobs wants? I know what he means but in trying to dress it as a problem with Flash it stops making sense. It'd have been more correct to say something like "Flash is too resource intensive for the iPhone" but I guess if you put it in a form that makes sense it still makes the iPhone's hardware sound bad.
Whilst I do realise Flash is quite a resource hog, it's also become a rather important part of the web and if the iPhone can't handle it then it can't handle a large portion of the web.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on Flash and wouldn't use it for general web development, but for streaming video, due to YouTube and the likes it's fast become a fairly standard way of displaying video, whilst I'd like to see Flash removed from the web long term, I think it's foolish to not support it short term as that currently only harms consumers. Develop a better alternative (Not Quicktime thanks, it's far, far worse) and support it alongside Flash and phase Flash out in favour of that alternative over time.
But whilst people keep buying products from the likes of Sony et al. such as the PS3, DVDs and so forth then the RIAA isn't going to go away anytime soon by way of financial drought.
Unfortunately the RIAA isn't some isolated entity that can be vanquished, it's made up of a lot of major multi-nationals with massive amounts of resources that can be pooled from other business areas if need be.
The best bet for destroying the RIAA is to ensure the current companies that make up the RIAA don't have control of the next generation of music distribution and that the companies involve in the next generation of music distribution aren't equally as evil as the current generation. Ideally we need to see companies like Sony pull out of their music business altogether in the long term, although that's a tall order and with the massive amount of resources and the massive footing these companies have in the music industry I'd be surprised if we can get them to withdraw altogether.
I'd be surprised if BD+ comes completely free in terms of additional processing load. But even the AACS layer has to be costly.
I'm not sure how the interactivity features compare in terms of additional processor loads, but this could cause differences between the formats also.
Whilst I understand the power required to render HD content I think we must also bear in mind we're looking at 20gb - 30gb of data that needs to be decrypted, that can't be easy on the hardware either surely?
I don't know if there's anything fancy they can do to lower the load, but even if there is dedicated hardware in the drive to offload this from the processor the dedicated hardware is still going to need some power.
It'd be nice to see what proportion of resources are required for AACS, BD+, Java for Bluray discs and the data decoding and rendering itself. Anyone any ideas on this?
The problem is already deeper though that's the issue, being able to trust DNS servers is one thing, but we can't even trust the nation in control of those DNS servers right now. If we can't trust the underlying hosting providers to point a domain where the owner of the domain wishes to be pointed then we already have a bigger problem. Imagine if a judge decided Microsoft had infringed some lone businessman's patent for some reason and Microsoft wasn't given enough notice to defend themselves much like has happened to Wikileaks and then the judge orders Microsoft.com be pointed somewhere useless or even handed over. It should be the legitimate owner of the domain who decides it's destination in any and all circumstances else we already can't trust DNS records to be correct. The only jurisdiction a US judge should have is to shut down any hosted system in the US at least allowing the site to move to another jurisdiction - essentially this US judge has been allowed to hand down a judgement on an international level, that is simply unacceptable.
My point is that we clearly already can't trust records as such if people in one country can demand changes that effect the rest of the world. To one country (the US) this may be a fair judgement, to the rest of the world this is equivalent to DNS hijacking. What I'm essentially suggesting is we use technical measures to fix something that's already been broken on a political level by hijacking the domain back to it's correct location as defined by the international entity that owns it.
Can't these places take more assertive action?
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EFF, ACLU Back WikiLeaks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why don't universities and so forth point wikileaks.org to a live Wikileaks IP address rather than the one site the judge shut down effectively bypassing the judges wishes?
Whilst many DNS providers may not follow suit, even if some did it would prove a point that a) he shouldn't have the power to shut down a site of international interest because America doesn't own the internet and b) that even if he does it's futile.
I don't really see how it can make a difference, although I'm not sure if you're under the impression the 360 has an HD-DVD drive built in? It doesn't.
Anyone who bought the HD-DVD addon already has a 360, by their HD-DVD drive becoming useless it's not going to somehow un-sell the console and reduce adoption and it's unlikely to stop people buying games for the 360. Chances are if people weren't fussed about the games they'd have bought the much cheaper Toshiba EP30/A30 HD-DVD player.
If anything I'd say it's a burden of Microsoft and the 360's back, they've basically had to support HD-DVD up until now due to their initial decision to do so yet it's not been a real bonus for the console for a long while now as a result of HD-DVDs decline. Now they're free of HD-DVD they can take the option of supporting Bluray and remove one of the PS3's major advantages over their system. 360 owners with the HD-DVD addon at least have the option of running both formats on their same system that way so they're not totally screwed over by the whole format war thing and it'll likely be cheaper to buy any Bluray addon drive that might be released than to ditch the system and buy a Bluray player or PS3 instead.
It's going to be a hard decision for Sony however, do they attempt to sabotage Microsoft's attempts at adding Bluray to the 360 if MS chooses to do so and in the process risk Microsoft sabotaging Bluray on the Windows platform as a result or do they take the hit on PS3 console sales by allowing the 360 to also play Bluray movies but gain Microsoft's support for Bluray in the grander scheme of things?
How else is the US goverment going to convince it's citizens it's time to pony up the cash to produce the B3;) ? B2s are so last century after all!
Besides, on a more serious note, I don't think the status of the fleet matters too much, it's a bomber at the end of the day and as far as I'm aware, the US doesn't need to do any bombing that requires a stealth approach at the moment. Any regime counting on doing something nasty that would require such a stealth bombing response by the US might just find itself in for a suprise in that the investigation is suddenly complete and the fleet is back in service without the same prior warning that it was grounded that they got here.
Any minor air to ground attacks where stealth would help, i.e. vs. Taleban strongholds in Afghanistan can probably be handled quite comfortably by the F117 fleet for the time being but again even then I'm not sure the Taleban really has anything much to threaten conventional jets regardless.
Do sites like Wikileaks really have enough spare funding to pay for something like this?
It's interesting if true, would a nuclear bunker have internet access? Wouldn't it be quite a costly task getting internet access into such a bunker?
To be honest, even then it sounds like overkill, why would Wikileaks even need to survive a nuclear strike? Surely there are plenty of secure enough premises elsewhere that aren't nuclear-proofed that would be just as suitable for a whole lot less cost and hassle? I'm sure if they did get nuked we'd have a lot more to worry about than wikileaks future to be honest!
Bluray wasn't better for me, more storage space for what exactly? HD-DVD was capable of upto 51gb which is fine for any movie even with high quality audio (higher than will make a noticeable difference over most people's sound setups anyway). Of course you could argue that something like Planet Earth might fit on less discs, but it's not the sort of thing I'd watch back to back anyway so I'm only going to be changing discs between sessions in the same way I would for any film.
What did matter for me however was a format that was finished, that wasn't going to require me to buy a new player to get access to new features. Also what mattered was being able to get films as cheap as they are in the US/Canada and without having to wait 6months+, something I'm not going to be able to do with Bluray's region locking.
Sure Bluray was slightly better technically, but the slight improvement technically was negligible compared to the areas it was weaker in for me as a consumer - that of an unfinished spec, region locking and even DRM that can (and already has) cause issues with viewing the film that I've paid to view.
I'd argue Bluray may be better as a generic data format, but for a simple HD video format that the average consumer wants in their living room? HD-DVD really did seem the better, more consumer friendly choice. With Bluray particularly, I, as a British consumer am going to continue to get ripped off whilst having to wait an additional 6 months to get ripped off in the first place or even face the possibility of never getting to watch some films in high def if they simply aren't released in Britain.
There are essentially two problems plaguing the UK, the first is that we don't have particularly good last-mile infrastructure, specifically everyone is on copper lines and as such we're looking at a limit of around 24mbps with ADSL2 if you're lucky enough to be close to the exchange. For us to achieve faster speeds investment is going to be needed to replace all that copper with fibre, that solves the issue of a possible max speed issue that's going to hit the UK hard a few years down the road as other nations advanced their connection speeds and we hit a brick wall.
The second issue is the UK's internet backbone, it's simply not up to scratch and doesn't meet todays requirements in terms of bandwidth. Many people laugh when there are articles about how the internet is going to run out of spare bandwidth, but the fact is in the UK it's happening, the whole reason ISPs over the past few years have gone from true unlimited to heavily capped is because bandwidth is having to be rationed, there just isn't enough room on the backbone for everyone's requirements in an unlimited world.
As such, the UK also needs investment in it's internet backbone and whilst BT is bringing implementing 21CN, whilst I don't know the technical details it seems a mere band-aid fix as some people in the industry have commented that there will still be similar bandwidth caps as today.
It's not an unsolvable problem, on the contrary the solution is there - Japan with a population double that of the UK quite happily handles 100mbps connections to end users with the requirement for caps and their internet backbone falling over as a result. There are plenty of other examples like Sweden, however some may argue that as Sweden only has around 1/10th the UK's population that they don't have enough end users to clog the pipes up, hence why Japan is a much better example. South Korea is a decent example also at around 5/6ths of the UK's population. The core issue is politics and who's going to give up short term profits temporarily for vastly improved long term profits.
The UK simply needs investment in it's internet infrastructure, but it needs everyone work together. BT are semi-interested in updating their backbone but quite rightly they think why should they when it's ISPs and content providers that are going to make the money off of it? The fact is that a one off investment (to ensure net neutrality) by the major players is required - BT, ISPs, the Goverment and yes, possibly even the BBC and other major content providers.
It's all very well ISPs complaining it's costing them a fortune currently, but when they're not willing to give up that money to BT for infrastructure improvements then they can't realistically expect a solution.
One final point is that it doesn't help the goverment wasting ISP's time and money with their threats about getting rid of file sharers. It's all very well the goverment, ISPs and BT whining about the problems the UK has with internet access, but when they're all doing nothing about the problems, or in the governments case, making the problem worse then they can quite frankly shut up and put up. The only downside to that is, it's us, the end users that suffer.
Wouldn't it be possible to write a custom BitTorrent client that connects to the swarm but doesn't actually download anything?
Couldn't you then sue the living daylights out of them for falsely accusing you?
What if it was built into BitTorrent clients as a kind of mass protest to connect to but not download from random swarms? Would this cause any problems for those actually wishing to use the torrent properly?
Sure they could monitor for people actually receiving data from them hence actually using the torrent properly but it'd be a hell of a lot more hassle for them no?
They're all bygones, they don't care what it does to the music industry, if it nets them cash damages then that'll keep them rich a bit longer, it's not as if any of them have amazing music careers racking in the fortunes for them anymore.
I'd be more suprised if you saw modern bands that are still making a lot of money involved in this kind of suit for exactly the reasons you say, it'll do them harm long term because they still have a reputation and future loss of revenue to lose, these people suing really don't have much to lose in that respect.
So have you actually tried calling XBox tech. support to switch the DRM licenses to your new console?
That'll solve the very issue you're talking about as mentioned in my other post and you'll almost certainly also get some free extra points as compensation.
I know what you mean, the situation sucks, I didn't like it either but my point here has been that despite the fact I really didn't like the situation, Microsoft did a fair bit to not only resolve but compensate me for the issue too. It is a pain in the arse dealing with those offshore call centres that barely speak your language, but it doesn't take too long and it's worth it to get the problem resolved surely?
If it's a replacement console you can just do it via support, but as I say they do ask for a scan of the replacement receipt so I'm not sure they do it on additionally purchased consoles.
I suppose you could claim your old console died and was out of warranty so you just bought a new one and try that, or even perhaps just be honest it may simply be that the procedure is slightly different for the situation you mentioned. I'm assuming the issue is that they don't want to transfer to a new console if they can't prove the old console is dead, because otherwise that old console might not really be dead and if it's never connected to the internet again it would never get it's licenses revoked so they can be moved to the new console.
It's only because of the recent use of packet shaping that the goverment and BPI have woken up and said "Hey look they CAN treat different traffic differently, they CAN control things!" and taken the opportunity to chime in and get them to shape in the way that suits them as well as the ISPs who oversold their service in the first place.
Whilst I support the ISPs here, it's partly a problem of their own creation. If they hadn't continued to sell "unlimited" internet access, something they do to this day on one hand whilst packet shaping and limiting the hell out of it on the other we almost certainly wouldn't be in this situation now.
The best thing they could've done would be to either:
a) invest in better infrastructure I'm still not convinced by their argument that bandwidth is too expensive - how do other countries like Sweden and Japan cope? Investment in infrastructure is key, but of course that's a cost they don't want.
or
b) Throttle bandwidth as a whole and not just applications that they've decided don't deserve priority. For example, they decided that P2P isn't a time critical application - Sorry? how do they know I don't need that Linux ISO ASAP? or that documentary via some P2P service for my homework? Who are they to decide that some kid browsing Youtube is more important than me grabbing that Linux ISO or whatever?
We can't turn back time now, so the best we can do is try and fight this current battle and hope afterwards the ISPs stop and think a bit and look at getting a common-carrier status type situation where traffic management isn't their job.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not convinced that's a bad thing, whilst Fatah certainly also have their fair share of nutters, they're a lot more reasonable than Hamas (and Hezbollah for that matter). It's sad in a way because whilst tensions between Israel and Gaza/Hamas are at their lowest point in a while, this overshadows the massive improvements in relationships between Israel and Fatah in the West Bank. Of course, whilst Israel is attacking Hamas-supporting Palestinians in Gaza it only increases the anger by Palestinians in the West Bank towards Israel which is a shame.
If Hamas had been whiped out of Gaza rather thank taking it over I sincerely believe we'd be a lot closer to peace over there now - I truly think that a Fatah-led Palestine with no interference and destabilisation of peace processes by Hamas is the best hope for a proper peace deal.
For that reason I'm not sure that the CIA wouldn't help Fatah - if they could've given enough support earlier such that Fatah hadn't been removed from Gaza and instead Hamas had been disarmed and dissolved we'd all be so much closer to fixing the whole Palestine/Israel problem. Of course, that would completely go against America's push for democracy as Hamas were elected but that's a different story, I don't think Palestinians did themselves any favours giving credit to the Hamas movement by voting them in the first place but I can see why they did at least.
The license fees are paying for the creation of iPlayer though that's the issue - it's development and running costs have to come from somewhere and that's the license fee.
If it came out the director of the BBCs own pocket I could care less what they do with it but unfortunately it doesn't.
I think you're misunderstanding the point of the turing test.
It's not attempting to prove that a machine that can pass it is as intelligent as a human, it's merely attempting to prove that a machine is capable of doing something that is indistinguishable than something we deem as being intelligent - a human.
This goes hand in hand with your point about a lack of definition of intelligence, the point is we really don't have a fixed definition. All we know is that we tend to think of some things as intelligent and others as not. The point to take away is this, imagine someone were able to create a robot that looked human and for all intents and purposes seemed identical until it actually acted at which point it didn't look intelligent anymore and you dismissed it as just a robot you simply wouldn't think of it as intelligent. Take that same robot and make it capable of passing the turing test such that you wouldn't know it was a robot and you'd think of it as intelligent.
The problem with defining intelligence is perception. Some people may think of a dog that can give you it's paw to shake as intelligent, but the fact is we can already create robots that are capable of responding in a more complex manner to more complex requests but they still don't get treated as intelligent.
The Turing test does what we need it to do, it deprives us of the ability to see what it is that we're interacting with so that we can't make judgements based on what the entity is, but instead on what the entity can do.
People don't realise what a massively impressive step we made with the first computers towards artificial intelligence and artificial life - we've created something that can continuously process and react to input, something that can be active instead of merely reactive like the majority of mechanical items that existed prior to computers. It's important we realise that that's a major hurdle out the way already. The battle now is improving this thing that we've created to be able to handle more complex inputs and perform more complex processing of those inputs. We're not going to see robots indistinguishable from humans any time soon, but we're well on our way to seeing systems capable of mimicking some of the tasks humans can do be it having a reasonable conversation to recognition and classification of specific objects. The more of these individual actions we can mimic and the more powerful and compact computers become the sooner we can begin to merge these actions we're able to mimic into something that is much more lifelike. Just because current systems can only perform individual tasks out of the many tasks we're capable of doesn't make them stupid, it's simply that we don't have anything to match the power of the human brain or nervous system yet in the same amount of physical space.
I seem to recall a certain case of a bunch of kids being gunned down at a school in Jerusalem that you've missed off your figures.
Or don't terrorist attacks count as is per usual when people and the media comment on events in the middle east and have even the slightest hint of bias towards the Palestinians?
As a UK TV license payer I find it entirely unacceptable that the BBC is using our money to further Apple's profits over other companies by releasing only for their mobile handset. We do not pay the BBC to further Apple and Microsoft's profits, whilst I applaud their attempts at getting the content accessible for Linux users it's a half-assed measure at best.
Whilst the iPhone is popular in the US, it's not that popular here in the UK and as such there is not even the excuse that it's got a large majority of the market segment.
The BBC seems too easily influenced by large corporations and frankly, something needs to be done about it because they are accountable to us - the British citizens that pay the license equally and as such we should be treated equally in how we can access our content. If this is not to be the case, we should have the choice of using our TVs but not watching the BBC and hence opt out of the TV license.
This is similar to saying that MS-DOS 5 has less bugs than Windows Vista hence MS-DOS 5 is far better than Windows Vista
Well yes, of course it has less bugs, because it's much smaller and supports far fewer features, but that doesn't make it better, it's nigh on useless for everything people want to do nowadays.
At the end of the day, IE5.5 supports less features and gracefully falls back where it fails on a feature as it should. IE6 and IE7 are much more ambitious and implement far more features, but when pushed to the limits on these features they fail more horribly than IE5 which doesn't even try. There is an argument that features shouldn't be implemented at all if they don't work perfectly but I disagree, the fact is the features in question almost certainly work in say 90% of cases it's just that Acid3 is specifically exploiting the cases where it doesn't work rather than where it does.
People are free to stick with IE5.5 if they like the fact it does better on the Acid3 test if they want, but don't come crying when you can't use half the features on sites that are designed for the new series of browsers.
Acid3 is doing it's job well, it's highlighting problems in implementations so that they can be fixed in future versions. I'm not sure why some people see Acid tests as a tool to attack browsers with, that's not the purpose. Whilst crappy journalism might like to use it for this purpose one would hope that Slashdot was above Daily Mail type shoddy stories.
I'm not sure how you work out that I'm going to end up spending more? I'm not fussed about Bluray until it comes down below £100, I spent £90 on HD-DVD so far including all the content I require. At most I'll be spending £190 therefore to have my current HD kit and switch to Bluray (I wont switch current content to Bluray, no need it's fine in HD-DVD and I can rip it to my PC/Bluray regardless). £190 is still less than the current £200 - £300 I'd need to spend on Bluray and others will have already had to spend to go Bluray.
It's cheaper all round, the difference is I don't have to wait 2 years+
Tin foil hats, for RAM!
Frankly I don't give a damn whether I can see some actors face in all it's blemished detail, what I do care about is the likes of Planet Earth, Galapagos and so forth in HD.
Fact is, picking up a firesale HD-DVD player + Planet Earth, Galapagos and so on in HD-DVD as well as a few films that do actually suit HD well such as 300 and Transformers I've been able to get the content I actually want to see in HD early. I'd never buy an HD player for the likes of the Bourne series, simply because I already think Matt Damon is an idiot and I don't particularly care about watching a high definition idiot in my room, I'm quite content with people like him remaining standard definition, and in not watching that sort of thing in HD I don't feel like I've lost out on anything whatsoever.
I guess to put it another way, some films you watch for the fantastic visuals, others you watch for the story. The story based films really don't make much difference whether they'd HD or standard def. but you'd never watch something like Planet Earth for the story, whilst it's interesting the main pull to it is the fantastic visuals that make you realise how amazing our planet actually is so I had a choice. Do I wait god knows how long for a Bluray player to come down to £50 - maybe 2years or more? or do I just buy an HD-DVD player addon for my 360 for £50 and enjoy the content I actually care about seeing in HD right now. To me it's really a no brainer, as has been mentioned previously on Slashdot, it's not as if the 360's HD-DVD drive can't be used on a computer to rip the content to disc and burn to a Bluray disc sometime down the road anyway when the prices for burning Bluray discs becomes reasonable.
Some people look at me funny when I say I bought an HD-DVD player and a few films, but I struggle to find myself as being the joke when I've paid £90 for the same player + content they're paying over £300 for. I'm still possibly going to buy Bluray down the line, I just aint going to pay anything over £100 for it. It's all too easy for some people to overlook common sense and logical action due to over the top brand loyalty. I understand there may be some people who do want to see their favourite actors in all their high definition glory rather than enjoy the storyline but I'm not one of those and plenty of others aren't - for those of us who only watch story based discs for the story then even 700mb XviD (i.e. not quite as good as DVD quality even) is plenty good enough.
Could twist "The iPhone is too slow for Flash" into "Flash is too slow for the iPhone".
What does that even mean? Flash wont play at 60 fps or something and that's the speed of video Jobs wants? I know what he means but in trying to dress it as a problem with Flash it stops making sense. It'd have been more correct to say something like "Flash is too resource intensive for the iPhone" but I guess if you put it in a form that makes sense it still makes the iPhone's hardware sound bad.
Whilst I do realise Flash is quite a resource hog, it's also become a rather important part of the web and if the iPhone can't handle it then it can't handle a large portion of the web.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on Flash and wouldn't use it for general web development, but for streaming video, due to YouTube and the likes it's fast become a fairly standard way of displaying video, whilst I'd like to see Flash removed from the web long term, I think it's foolish to not support it short term as that currently only harms consumers. Develop a better alternative (Not Quicktime thanks, it's far, far worse) and support it alongside Flash and phase Flash out in favour of that alternative over time.
I like the sentiment of your post, I really do.
But whilst people keep buying products from the likes of Sony et al. such as the PS3, DVDs and so forth then the RIAA isn't going to go away anytime soon by way of financial drought.
Unfortunately the RIAA isn't some isolated entity that can be vanquished, it's made up of a lot of major multi-nationals with massive amounts of resources that can be pooled from other business areas if need be.
The best bet for destroying the RIAA is to ensure the current companies that make up the RIAA don't have control of the next generation of music distribution and that the companies involve in the next generation of music distribution aren't equally as evil as the current generation. Ideally we need to see companies like Sony pull out of their music business altogether in the long term, although that's a tall order and with the massive amount of resources and the massive footing these companies have in the music industry I'd be surprised if we can get them to withdraw altogether.
I'd be surprised if BD+ comes completely free in terms of additional processing load. But even the AACS layer has to be costly.
I'm not sure how the interactivity features compare in terms of additional processor loads, but this could cause differences between the formats also.
Whilst I understand the power required to render HD content I think we must also bear in mind we're looking at 20gb - 30gb of data that needs to be decrypted, that can't be easy on the hardware either surely?
I don't know if there's anything fancy they can do to lower the load, but even if there is dedicated hardware in the drive to offload this from the processor the dedicated hardware is still going to need some power.
It'd be nice to see what proportion of resources are required for AACS, BD+, Java for Bluray discs and the data decoding and rendering itself. Anyone any ideas on this?
Proper zone records as defined by who though?
The problem is already deeper though that's the issue, being able to trust DNS servers is one thing, but we can't even trust the nation in control of those DNS servers right now. If we can't trust the underlying hosting providers to point a domain where the owner of the domain wishes to be pointed then we already have a bigger problem. Imagine if a judge decided Microsoft had infringed some lone businessman's patent for some reason and Microsoft wasn't given enough notice to defend themselves much like has happened to Wikileaks and then the judge orders Microsoft.com be pointed somewhere useless or even handed over. It should be the legitimate owner of the domain who decides it's destination in any and all circumstances else we already can't trust DNS records to be correct. The only jurisdiction a US judge should have is to shut down any hosted system in the US at least allowing the site to move to another jurisdiction - essentially this US judge has been allowed to hand down a judgement on an international level, that is simply unacceptable.
My point is that we clearly already can't trust records as such if people in one country can demand changes that effect the rest of the world. To one country (the US) this may be a fair judgement, to the rest of the world this is equivalent to DNS hijacking. What I'm essentially suggesting is we use technical measures to fix something that's already been broken on a political level by hijacking the domain back to it's correct location as defined by the international entity that owns it.
Why don't universities and so forth point wikileaks.org to a live Wikileaks IP address rather than the one site the judge shut down effectively bypassing the judges wishes?
Whilst many DNS providers may not follow suit, even if some did it would prove a point that a) he shouldn't have the power to shut down a site of international interest because America doesn't own the internet and b) that even if he does it's futile.
I don't really see how it can make a difference, although I'm not sure if you're under the impression the 360 has an HD-DVD drive built in? It doesn't.
Anyone who bought the HD-DVD addon already has a 360, by their HD-DVD drive becoming useless it's not going to somehow un-sell the console and reduce adoption and it's unlikely to stop people buying games for the 360. Chances are if people weren't fussed about the games they'd have bought the much cheaper Toshiba EP30/A30 HD-DVD player.
If anything I'd say it's a burden of Microsoft and the 360's back, they've basically had to support HD-DVD up until now due to their initial decision to do so yet it's not been a real bonus for the console for a long while now as a result of HD-DVDs decline. Now they're free of HD-DVD they can take the option of supporting Bluray and remove one of the PS3's major advantages over their system. 360 owners with the HD-DVD addon at least have the option of running both formats on their same system that way so they're not totally screwed over by the whole format war thing and it'll likely be cheaper to buy any Bluray addon drive that might be released than to ditch the system and buy a Bluray player or PS3 instead.
It's going to be a hard decision for Sony however, do they attempt to sabotage Microsoft's attempts at adding Bluray to the 360 if MS chooses to do so and in the process risk Microsoft sabotaging Bluray on the Windows platform as a result or do they take the hit on PS3 console sales by allowing the 360 to also play Bluray movies but gain Microsoft's support for Bluray in the grander scheme of things?
How else is the US goverment going to convince it's citizens it's time to pony up the cash to produce the B3 ;) ? B2s are so last century after all!
Besides, on a more serious note, I don't think the status of the fleet matters too much, it's a bomber at the end of the day and as far as I'm aware, the US doesn't need to do any bombing that requires a stealth approach at the moment. Any regime counting on doing something nasty that would require such a stealth bombing response by the US might just find itself in for a suprise in that the investigation is suddenly complete and the fleet is back in service without the same prior warning that it was grounded that they got here.
Any minor air to ground attacks where stealth would help, i.e. vs. Taleban strongholds in Afghanistan can probably be handled quite comfortably by the F117 fleet for the time being but again even then I'm not sure the Taleban really has anything much to threaten conventional jets regardless.
How would they afford such a premises?
Do sites like Wikileaks really have enough spare funding to pay for something like this?
It's interesting if true, would a nuclear bunker have internet access? Wouldn't it be quite a costly task getting internet access into such a bunker?
To be honest, even then it sounds like overkill, why would Wikileaks even need to survive a nuclear strike? Surely there are plenty of secure enough premises elsewhere that aren't nuclear-proofed that would be just as suitable for a whole lot less cost and hassle? I'm sure if they did get nuked we'd have a lot more to worry about than wikileaks future to be honest!
Bluray wasn't better for me, more storage space for what exactly? HD-DVD was capable of upto 51gb which is fine for any movie even with high quality audio (higher than will make a noticeable difference over most people's sound setups anyway). Of course you could argue that something like Planet Earth might fit on less discs, but it's not the sort of thing I'd watch back to back anyway so I'm only going to be changing discs between sessions in the same way I would for any film. What did matter for me however was a format that was finished, that wasn't going to require me to buy a new player to get access to new features. Also what mattered was being able to get films as cheap as they are in the US/Canada and without having to wait 6months+, something I'm not going to be able to do with Bluray's region locking. Sure Bluray was slightly better technically, but the slight improvement technically was negligible compared to the areas it was weaker in for me as a consumer - that of an unfinished spec, region locking and even DRM that can (and already has) cause issues with viewing the film that I've paid to view. I'd argue Bluray may be better as a generic data format, but for a simple HD video format that the average consumer wants in their living room? HD-DVD really did seem the better, more consumer friendly choice. With Bluray particularly, I, as a British consumer am going to continue to get ripped off whilst having to wait an additional 6 months to get ripped off in the first place or even face the possibility of never getting to watch some films in high def if they simply aren't released in Britain.
There are essentially two problems plaguing the UK, the first is that we don't have particularly good last-mile infrastructure, specifically everyone is on copper lines and as such we're looking at a limit of around 24mbps with ADSL2 if you're lucky enough to be close to the exchange. For us to achieve faster speeds investment is going to be needed to replace all that copper with fibre, that solves the issue of a possible max speed issue that's going to hit the UK hard a few years down the road as other nations advanced their connection speeds and we hit a brick wall.
The second issue is the UK's internet backbone, it's simply not up to scratch and doesn't meet todays requirements in terms of bandwidth. Many people laugh when there are articles about how the internet is going to run out of spare bandwidth, but the fact is in the UK it's happening, the whole reason ISPs over the past few years have gone from true unlimited to heavily capped is because bandwidth is having to be rationed, there just isn't enough room on the backbone for everyone's requirements in an unlimited world.
As such, the UK also needs investment in it's internet backbone and whilst BT is bringing implementing 21CN, whilst I don't know the technical details it seems a mere band-aid fix as some people in the industry have commented that there will still be similar bandwidth caps as today.
It's not an unsolvable problem, on the contrary the solution is there - Japan with a population double that of the UK quite happily handles 100mbps connections to end users with the requirement for caps and their internet backbone falling over as a result. There are plenty of other examples like Sweden, however some may argue that as Sweden only has around 1/10th the UK's population that they don't have enough end users to clog the pipes up, hence why Japan is a much better example. South Korea is a decent example also at around 5/6ths of the UK's population. The core issue is politics and who's going to give up short term profits temporarily for vastly improved long term profits.
The UK simply needs investment in it's internet infrastructure, but it needs everyone work together. BT are semi-interested in updating their backbone but quite rightly they think why should they when it's ISPs and content providers that are going to make the money off of it? The fact is that a one off investment (to ensure net neutrality) by the major players is required - BT, ISPs, the Goverment and yes, possibly even the BBC and other major content providers.
It's all very well ISPs complaining it's costing them a fortune currently, but when they're not willing to give up that money to BT for infrastructure improvements then they can't realistically expect a solution.
One final point is that it doesn't help the goverment wasting ISP's time and money with their threats about getting rid of file sharers. It's all very well the goverment, ISPs and BT whining about the problems the UK has with internet access, but when they're all doing nothing about the problems, or in the governments case, making the problem worse then they can quite frankly shut up and put up. The only downside to that is, it's us, the end users that suffer.
This is the coolest thing Microsoft has ever done and I'm not having anyone say otherwise!
They're like, ninja developer legomen superheroes!
Wouldn't it be possible to write a custom BitTorrent client that connects to the swarm but doesn't actually download anything?
Couldn't you then sue the living daylights out of them for falsely accusing you?
What if it was built into BitTorrent clients as a kind of mass protest to connect to but not download from random swarms? Would this cause any problems for those actually wishing to use the torrent properly?
Sure they could monitor for people actually receiving data from them hence actually using the torrent properly but it'd be a hell of a lot more hassle for them no?
They're all bygones, they don't care what it does to the music industry, if it nets them cash damages then that'll keep them rich a bit longer, it's not as if any of them have amazing music careers racking in the fortunes for them anymore.
I'd be more suprised if you saw modern bands that are still making a lot of money involved in this kind of suit for exactly the reasons you say, it'll do them harm long term because they still have a reputation and future loss of revenue to lose, these people suing really don't have much to lose in that respect.
So have you actually tried calling XBox tech. support to switch the DRM licenses to your new console?
That'll solve the very issue you're talking about as mentioned in my other post and you'll almost certainly also get some free extra points as compensation.
I know what you mean, the situation sucks, I didn't like it either but my point here has been that despite the fact I really didn't like the situation, Microsoft did a fair bit to not only resolve but compensate me for the issue too. It is a pain in the arse dealing with those offshore call centres that barely speak your language, but it doesn't take too long and it's worth it to get the problem resolved surely?
If it's a replacement console you can just do it via support, but as I say they do ask for a scan of the replacement receipt so I'm not sure they do it on additionally purchased consoles.
I suppose you could claim your old console died and was out of warranty so you just bought a new one and try that, or even perhaps just be honest it may simply be that the procedure is slightly different for the situation you mentioned. I'm assuming the issue is that they don't want to transfer to a new console if they can't prove the old console is dead, because otherwise that old console might not really be dead and if it's never connected to the internet again it would never get it's licenses revoked so they can be moved to the new console.
It's only because of the recent use of packet shaping that the goverment and BPI have woken up and said "Hey look they CAN treat different traffic differently, they CAN control things!" and taken the opportunity to chime in and get them to shape in the way that suits them as well as the ISPs who oversold their service in the first place.
Whilst I support the ISPs here, it's partly a problem of their own creation. If they hadn't continued to sell "unlimited" internet access, something they do to this day on one hand whilst packet shaping and limiting the hell out of it on the other we almost certainly wouldn't be in this situation now.
The best thing they could've done would be to either:
a) invest in better infrastructure I'm still not convinced by their argument that bandwidth is too expensive - how do other countries like Sweden and Japan cope? Investment in infrastructure is key, but of course that's a cost they don't want.
or
b) Throttle bandwidth as a whole and not just applications that they've decided don't deserve priority. For example, they decided that P2P isn't a time critical application - Sorry? how do they know I don't need that Linux ISO ASAP? or that documentary via some P2P service for my homework? Who are they to decide that some kid browsing Youtube is more important than me grabbing that Linux ISO or whatever?
We can't turn back time now, so the best we can do is try and fight this current battle and hope afterwards the ISPs stop and think a bit and look at getting a common-carrier status type situation where traffic management isn't their job.