I think the iPlayer (horrible name by the way) is the application you need to download the content in the first place. Even once you've done that the video is encoded with Microsoft DRM that's supposed to stop the file playing after a couple of weeks to protect the BBC's DVD sales.
Given the MS DRM I don't know how realistic talk of a Linux port is, I don't think I really care much either, there are plenty of other places I can download the content I've already paid for through the license fee without any DRM restrictions.
Cost the US thirty billion in military supremacy like piracy costs the MPAA $5bn annually right:-D Nothing like inflated figures for helping to get than next budget proposal through.
Exactly, I think it's safe to assume that if some braindead blogger can find it the foreign intelligence services have known about it for decades. In general it annoys me that military organizations complain so loudly about their bases being visible on Google earth, anyone who would actually know how to abuse such information already has access to it anyway ffs. They want to prevent the population from knowing what they're up to, nothing to do with national security.
The commentary on this article is extremely misleading.
The judge in this case has ruled that because Torrentspy can log the IP's of requests to the server it must do so and hand them over to the court.
This is absolutely not about the judge misunderstanding the nature of RAM and ordering them to hand over a bunch of DIMM's, yes judges can be technically ignorant but the courts are not stupid either you know. The judge is saying that because this data can be stored it must be.
This actual ruling is of course far, far more disturbing than any technical ignorance could be, as it requires torrentspy to effectively spy on their users on behalf of the MPAA, something which should surely be illegal in itself, nevermind mandated by a court of law.
Saudi Arabia does have a handle on crime. The reason for this is they have a massively well funded secret police force with the right to do pretty much what ever they want, courts that sentence people to death at the drop of a hat and absolutely no civil liberties. I wouldn't like to speculate how many people are wrongly convicted there every year, but it works because people are shit scared of the authorities.
You can't have it both ways. You can either live in a (relatively) free society and put up with the effects of those who will abuse that freedom. Or you can live in a Nazi style state where nobody (except the authorities) has any freedom to abuse. I would suggest the violence inflicted on the Saudi population by their govt. under this system is probably at least an order of magnitude more severe than any violence prevented by the fear of these repressive laws. I would also argue that this applies generally, more repressive legislation can reduce criminality outside the govt. but will increase the criminality and oppressiveness of govt. itself.
Going back to the middle ages will not solve our social problems, as much as you would clearly like it to.
TFA was weak, I don't think the question of whether a few companies choose to leech off open source projects is really that important to OSS development in the long run.
But in general I think the question of what influence all the money coming into the open source community will have is a good one. If, as is increasingly the case, OSS becomes a key component in the businesses of multi-billion dollar corporations, those corporations will seek to control open source development to protect their investment. If OSS development becomes increasing corporatized, and the coders and maintainers of large projects are increasingly professionals employed by larger corporations(whether directly or indirectly via donations to a foundation etc) I think this cannot help but have an impact on the character of the open source community.
Personally I cannot picture that an open source movement largely backed and funded by larger corporations would retain any ideals of openness, freedom or even quality software for long. IMNSHO those ideals are antithetical to the corporate live-or-die-by-next-quarters'-results mentality. I think that the open source community should be wary. Obviously, everything else being equal, more money in open source is a good thing for everybody, more resources and more coders means more great software. But that could well come with a price of it's own, nothing comes free, especially when dealing with corporate America...
Technically you're paying for the programming as well, just not through the cable bill. The money corps to pay the advertising bills doesn't materialize out of thin air, it ultimately comes out of the consumers pocket. The multi-billions spent every year on the salaries of those in marketing/advertising come from there too. Personally I'd much rather pay directly for my entertainment and cut out the useless middleman.
Questions like "are more choices really better" are too big for an easy answer. I don't think TFA even really attempts to address this question though, the guy seems to be talking more about UI design and how to present choices to users than anything else.I think on this issue the answer is pretty obvious, only present the choices the user really wants.... of course how do you determine that, and for what value of user, that's the real question.
What I will say on the issue of choice is that choices are never the same thing as freedom. Politicians and capitalists love to tout how many "choices" they can give people. How much choice the youth of today have, and to an extent it's true. However they are the ones deciding what you get to choose from. 417 Brands of Toothpaste with identical ingredients. 2809 subtly different types Hi-Def Plasma TV's all serving up the same Hollywood crap. 48 different state schools each teaching the same curriculum. etc etc ad naueseum.
I think this is why we have studies coming out with seemingly nonsensical results like "choice doesn't make people any happier", well, no, not if you're choosing between 500 identical things, none of which you really want. That makes you miserable.
Freedom is the ability to define your own choices, most choices in todays world are really just giving you the freedom to do anything you're told.
I don't really care either to be honest. "Peak oil" shouldn't even be an issue. If we even burn all the oil we've already discovered we're going to create a climate change problem our societies are not equipped to deal with. We have to move to carbon-neutral methods of generating energy now, not when we hit "peak oil", whether that's in 10 or 100 years. The oil won't run out soon enough to save us from ourselves anyway.
Exactly, thank you for being the one person here perpared to state the blindingly obvious.
The attitude people on this site have to companies like Google and Apple confuses me deeply.
If this was a story about Microsoft hiring an organisation known for dirty political lobbying there would already be 500 comments (rightly) slating them for using their power and prividge to try and influence the regulatory process. But if it's Google or Apple..... suddendly all your cynicism goes out of the window to be replaced with something along the lines of "But they're nice guys right? They couldn't possibly try and screw us."
Wake up slashdot, any major corporation is only after one thing, cash. If "do no evil" was anything more than clever marketing the shareholders would have every legal right to seek the removal of Larry Page et al and have them replaced with people who will seek to maximise profits.
Google has already shown with regard to China etc. that "do no evil" is absolutely nothing more than clever marketing anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the iPlayer (horrible name by the way) is the application you need to download the content in the first place. Even once you've done that the video is encoded with Microsoft DRM that's supposed to stop the file playing after a couple of weeks to protect the BBC's DVD sales.
Given the MS DRM I don't know how realistic talk of a Linux port is, I don't think I really care much either, there are plenty of other places I can download the content I've already paid for through the license fee without any DRM restrictions.
Cost the US thirty billion in military supremacy like piracy costs the MPAA $5bn annually right :-D Nothing like inflated figures for helping to get than next budget proposal through.
Exactly, I think it's safe to assume that if some braindead blogger can find it the foreign intelligence services have known about it for decades.
In general it annoys me that military organizations complain so loudly about their bases being visible on Google earth, anyone who would actually know how to abuse such information already has access to it anyway ffs. They want to prevent the population from knowing what they're up to, nothing to do with national security.
The commentary on this article is extremely misleading. The judge in this case has ruled that because Torrentspy can log the IP's of requests to the server it must do so and hand them over to the court. This is absolutely not about the judge misunderstanding the nature of RAM and ordering them to hand over a bunch of DIMM's, yes judges can be technically ignorant but the courts are not stupid either you know. The judge is saying that because this data can be stored it must be. This actual ruling is of course far, far more disturbing than any technical ignorance could be, as it requires torrentspy to effectively spy on their users on behalf of the MPAA, something which should surely be illegal in itself, nevermind mandated by a court of law.
Saudi Arabia does have a handle on crime. The reason for this is they have a massively well funded secret police force with the right to do pretty much what ever they want, courts that sentence people to death at the drop of a hat and absolutely no civil liberties. I wouldn't like to speculate how many people are wrongly convicted there every year, but it works because people are shit scared of the authorities.
You can't have it both ways. You can either live in a (relatively) free society and put up with the effects of those who will abuse that freedom. Or you can live in a Nazi style state where nobody (except the authorities) has any freedom to abuse.
I would suggest the violence inflicted on the Saudi population by their govt. under this system is probably at least an order of magnitude more severe than any violence prevented by the fear of these repressive laws. I would also argue that this applies generally, more repressive legislation can reduce criminality outside the govt. but will increase the criminality and oppressiveness of govt. itself.
Going back to the middle ages will not solve our social problems, as much as you would clearly like it to.
TFA was weak, I don't think the question of whether a few companies choose to leech off open source projects is really that important to OSS development in the long run.
But in general I think the question of what influence all the money coming into the open source community will have is a good one. If, as is increasingly the case, OSS becomes a key component in the businesses of multi-billion dollar corporations, those corporations will seek to control open source development to protect their investment.
If OSS development becomes increasing corporatized, and the coders and maintainers of large projects are increasingly professionals employed by larger corporations(whether directly or indirectly via donations to a foundation etc) I think this cannot help but have an impact on the character of the open source community.
Personally I cannot picture that an open source movement largely backed and funded by larger corporations would retain any ideals of openness, freedom or even quality software for long. IMNSHO those ideals are antithetical to the corporate live-or-die-by-next-quarters'-results mentality.
I think that the open source community should be wary. Obviously, everything else being equal, more money in open source is a good thing for everybody, more resources and more coders means more great software. But that could well come with a price of it's own, nothing comes free, especially when dealing with corporate America...
Technically you're paying for the programming as well, just not through the cable bill. The money corps to pay the advertising bills doesn't materialize out of thin air, it ultimately comes out of the consumers pocket. The multi-billions spent every year on the salaries of those in marketing/advertising come from there too. Personally I'd much rather pay directly for my entertainment and cut out the useless middleman.
Questions like "are more choices really better" are too big for an easy answer. I don't think TFA even really attempts to address this question though, the guy seems to be talking more about UI design and how to present choices to users than anything else.I think on this issue the answer is pretty obvious, only present the choices the user really wants.... of course how do you determine that, and for what value of user, that's the real question.
What I will say on the issue of choice is that choices are never the same thing as freedom. Politicians and capitalists love to tout how many "choices" they can give people. How much choice the youth of today have, and to an extent it's true. However they are the ones deciding what you get to choose from. 417 Brands of Toothpaste with identical ingredients. 2809 subtly different types Hi-Def Plasma TV's all serving up the same Hollywood crap. 48 different state schools each teaching the same curriculum. etc etc ad naueseum.
I think this is why we have studies coming out with seemingly nonsensical results like "choice doesn't make people any happier", well, no, not if you're choosing between 500 identical things, none of which you really want. That makes you miserable.
Freedom is the ability to define your own choices, most choices in todays world are really just giving you the freedom to do anything you're told.
I don't really care either to be honest.
"Peak oil" shouldn't even be an issue. If we even burn all the oil we've already discovered we're going to create a climate change problem our societies are not equipped to deal with. We have to move to carbon-neutral methods of generating energy now, not when we hit "peak oil", whether that's in 10 or 100 years. The oil won't run out soon enough to save us from ourselves anyway.
Exactly, thank you for being the one person here perpared to state the blindingly obvious.
The attitude people on this site have to companies like Google and Apple confuses me deeply.
If this was a story about Microsoft hiring an organisation known for dirty political lobbying there would already be 500 comments (rightly) slating them for using their power and prividge to try and influence the regulatory process. But if it's Google or Apple..... suddendly all your cynicism goes out of the window to be replaced with something along the lines of "But they're nice guys right? They couldn't possibly try and screw us."
Wake up slashdot, any major corporation is only after one thing, cash. If "do no evil" was anything more than clever marketing the shareholders would have every legal right to seek the removal of Larry Page et al and have them replaced with people who will seek to maximise profits.
Google has already shown with regard to China etc. that "do no evil" is absolutely nothing more than clever marketing anyhow.