That sounds a bit harsh, for reasons others have already articulated. The motivation behind your comment isn't that far out, though, and if I ran a service that depended heavily on ad revenue, I would definitely look at other models than the currently-popular "client-pull" strategy for serving ads.
I know this would consume some server resources, but still: Why aren't ads proxied through the server side of things & served from the same URL as the resource in the first place? It's not like these services are running from static pages that *need* the ad-rotator links to be on the client-side... This would eliminate so many cookie, image & script-blocking issues that I can't imagine it not paying for the added server stress & behind-the-scenes bandwidth, yanno?
You raise a good point: Unlike just about any other page I visit, I actually make a point of scanning the ads in my GMail messages from time to time, and following those that might interest me.
Granted, the links I follow generally aren't the "We have Boyer Moore algorithm in stock" or "Oops I made a Boo Boo" ones, but those belong on Yahoo anyway...
Sure, if the FCC isn't toothless, then it has the power to do much good for us. No argument there, but I think the old maxim still applies with regard to government authority: "Only relinquish power to your friends that you would not fear in the hands of your enemies."
Put another way, give the FCC as much power as you'd let a Sony exectutive have in setting technology mandates, because one day the Sony executive will be pulling the strings of the FCC's processes.
This is a classic case of throwing the baby out along with the bath water as this will also prohibit FCC to enforce mandatory interoperability and adherence to standards.
I'd like to have my cake and eat it to; I'd like the FCC to be able to enforce interop (mandating *open* systems) without them having the ability to enforce DRM (mandating *closed* systems). Taken as a whole, our laws have never been that philosophically consistent, anyway... why start now?;-)
In reality though, the baby is just as bad as the water. The FCC's mandate is arguably more compatible with them having authority to enforce the broadcast flag than with them having the authority to enforce device interop. The broadcast flag *could* be argued to be part of a standard affecting how signals are broadcast over the public airwaves. Not quite as much with device interop (though there are some gray areas there, to be sure).
If we have to be consistent here, then I think the less they have the power to enforce, the better off we'll all be in the long run. It's not the norm for politicians and bureaucrats to be working hard to guard the interests of your average citizen. When those sorts start mucking around with "devices of class X *must* implement N" and "devices of class Y *shall not* implement Z," we usually get more standards mandated by lobbyists than by a zeal for consumer protection.
As for Sununu, he's trying to legislatively enforce a limit on a bureaucracy's authority. I gotta tip my hat to that.
I actually thought about starting an online service to do just that, but I decided my security skills weren't up to par with the level of attack that *might* come about. I mean, the business plan is to collect a pittance a month from a few thousand tin-foil-hatters, but the reality is that if a service is designed well enough to attract the tin foils, then one day it'll probably actually attract someone with a real and determined enemy.
Ignoring for the moment any issues of inability to push the button, how would one handle such a case? The two objectives are (a) secure the data against any & all attacks (which includes maintaining the means to deliver it to the desired parties under any circumstances), and (b) prevent any inadvertent public disclosures of said data.
I'd imagine that Gnutella, Usenet & TOR could each play a part in a highly redundant, distributed storage system. But even assuming you only needed to run services to send decryption keys & magnet links to the intended recipients, how would you guard the ability to do that against a potential attacker that's heavy on resources, time & motivation?
and I have no time for them as they are rediculous
Unless Canadians spell it differently, I believe it's "ridiculous." Just a friendly tip before one of your students takes a screenshot of your/. post and puts it on YouTube, captioned "written by one of my teachers.";-)
Depending on specifics like whether the defendant admits to using any file sharing software, and if so, what that software was (e.g. LimeWire), it might be relevant to ask:
Did the defendant set the sharing software to filter out copyrighted works that content owners have requested not be shared?
Did the plaintiff have the means and opportunity to identify said file(s) as copyrighted content?
Could the defendant reasonably have expected that using this filter was effective enough to prevent swapping files illegally?
------------------- Best wishes on this case, and my hat's off to you for all the information you make available about how to fight these cases. In the larger scheme of things, it's going to be really difficult to stem the tide against the RIAA's intimidation tactics until a boilerplate, "paint-by-numbers" defense plan is available to victims^^^^^^^defendants without the financial means to retain expert counsel.
On my 56" 1080i DLP HDTV, 360 x ~200 XviDs look *remarkably* good at around 10MB / minute. In fact, the ~4GiB DVR-MS Dr. Who episodes I record at full resolution through S-Video on a media center PC are utter crap compared to those ~350MB XviDs. Where I am, digital cable sources are pretty locked down, so SVid is my only real source option for recording most cable channels. (It's a shame, really, that the content I pay for is so inferior in quality to widely available torrents of the same program from the UK.)
Experimenting with various MP4-related compression schemes on my own -- using 1080i source material -- I'm confident that I can transcode to 720p with an end product that looks as good as or better than a 480p commercial DVD and fits within ~35MB / minute (or 4.5GiB for a 2hr feature). I find that this size constraint is generous enough to remove all but a very few occasional bits of artifacting in the low contrast areas.
That leads me to agree with your conclusion about H.264 @ ~4GB, but so far every H.264 encoder I've enountered is too slow compared to mencoder's MP4 to justify the little bit of quality improvement I see.
If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray cracks become as ubiquitous and easy as DeCSS / libdecss, I might consider buying into one of those formats. Until then, reg'lar ol' DVDs upsampling through an HTPC looks just fine for my dollar.
I guess it's because IANAL that I expect that which looks correct and just to prevail in court. At any rate, the Elektra v. Barker case will be interesting to watch; I'm especially interested in how high (or low) the "standard of evidence" bar ends up for the the RIAA going forward.
Beckerman: [...] I can say that in Elektra v Santangelo, the basis for our motion to dismiss complaint was that the complaint failed to allege any specific acts of infringement. In response plaintiff disagreed, arguing that its vague complaint did satisfy the pleading standards, since it alleged that a Kazaa account attached to Ms. Santangelo's IP address had a "shared files folder". Our reply papers reminded the Court that that alone would not make out a claim for copyright infringement, and that the Courts have consistently required specific acts of copying, and the dates and times of those acts. A fully set of the motion papers is now online. In the unlikely event that our motion is not granted, there are numerous other issues that would come into play later on in the case.
p2pnet: On a scale of one to 10, where do you place your chances of winning?
Beckerman: I think our chances of winning the Santangelo case are a 10. Our motion was based on black letter law. The plaintiff's 'opposition' papers were weak, digressive, and nonsensical. I believe they will be laughed out of court.
IANAL, but from the information at hand, I'd be inclined to buy the opinion you're selling in those statements. Apparently though, the RIAA managed to get that motion denied, otherwise the case should have been over last August. So what happened? How is a case that failed to cite specific acts of copying still in court?
Dalmore has a reasonably priced but hard to find 12-yo Cigar Malt you'd probably enjoy.
And as un-hip as the Glenfiddich brand may be to some (ahem) "real" scotch drinkers, I have to say that their 15-yo Solera Reserve is $40.00USD well-spent.
Anybody know the names of the dumbass judges/prosecutors that approved this?
What incentive do Attorneys General and/or (especially) professional Class Action litigators have not to be dumbasses (or parasites) on geeky matters that make such minuscule media ripples?
Mind you, I enthusiastically support the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one's labor and to engage in commerce with minimal State intrusion. That said, representing a Class in a court of law is not a right, it is a privilege that exists *because* of the State. While I reject price-fixing in almost every case where the commerce involves two private parties, the current Class Action system has become ridiculously unethical, and something needs to change drastically to restore a sense of proportion between legal fees and (class award / # of members).
Step 1: Behemoth Corporation steals Class Y's underpants.
Step 2: Class Y gets ???
Step 3: Lawfirm Z profits!
I'm confused; you replied to the GP's statment that "But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats" with the following:
I am not sure which planet you read Slashdot on, but on planet Earth what you are saying is either completely wrong, or you are not correctly verbalizing you argument. In deference to you extremely low/.ID# I am hoping that it is the latter.
You went on to describe examples of ACCAD doing just this in practice. However, in the context of this thread, when the GP said "But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats", I took it to be saying that AutoDesk could not successfully use the legal system to enforce this denial of interoperability. Of course they can technically deny interop. Wasn't the point that a technological item could have it's intellectual property protections weakened when it exists solely to lock out competition?
"2) The probability that an unpatched PC behind a firewall will get "hacked" in the moment while you are downloading it is what... 0,2?"
Last time I let an unpatched, freshly-built W2K Pro SP4 instance connect to the net sans-firewall, it was pwned and conducting outgoing portscans within 10 minutes.
The blackhats have enough strategies for surmounting firewalls that I'm not comfortable counting on one as my only prophylactic - especially on networks where I don't manage the wall myself. Seems akin to the rhythm method IMO.
I really try not to be anybody's fanboy, but after trying this Offline Update thingamabob, I'm afraid have a stomach full of Kool Aid. All hail heise Security! Join the family, meet a bunch of people who *really, really* love you, and finally attain the everlasting peace you've been seeking your whole life!
To whatever extent a technical solution can be effective here, it will probably need to be one like you describe. Spammers will surely try to degrade such systems as much as they can though, with tactics like complaint floods, bogus certifying authority injection attempts, etc.
This guy has a good idea that could probably be paired with a Certified Email system to enhance its effectiveness: Design of a DDoS Attack-Resistant Distributed Spam Blocklist - http://www.sysdesign.ca/archive/blocklist-presenta tion.pdf
If in addition to blacklists, you could enhance that sort of system with various subscribable whitelists, trust lists, and ranking reports for certifying authorities, etc., then maybe we'd have a viable technical solution -- derisive form letter nothwithstanding.
"IF you're recording for use on your home stero system and IF you have decent speakers and IF you've got the storage space to burn and IF the kind of music you listen to hasn't already been under the sound engineer's knife... THEN you might as well do loseless."
I thought I had space to burn when I built a 1TB RAID, so I started salivating at the prospect of FLAC & OGG encoding my audio library. Now that I'm < 19% free (there's a lot of video too), I thought I'd do my own semi-blind trial between mp3s at 192, 256 and 320, plus the original wavs. I'd load a playlist with all 4, shuffle, then listen to all 4 & write down my guesses before looking at the 'answers.' While I rarely mistook the 192s for any of the others, I did make a substantial number of wrong guesses between each of the rest.
Now I just use FLAC for the archival stuff, like my wife's HS marching band recordings from yesteryear, etc. (No, they don't sound good to begin with, but we nevertheless don't want to lose audio details that are there now.) For the CD collection, 320kpbs LAME encoded mp3s are Good Enough.
Damn, I had to blow off Mod points to respond to this, but...
"Too bad they take it to the other extreme. Zero regulation of businesses, the complete abandonment of any sort of social safety net and privatising everything are just a few of the disagreements that I have with the Libertarian Party."
The nature of government past and present tends toward eternal scope creep. If Libertarians were to sweep all 3 branches of the US government tomorrow and hold power for a decade, we would still not live in a system that actually *had* zero regulation of businesses, complete abandonment of any sort of social safety net, or total privatization of all that is currently in the civic sphere.
Despite my heavy Libertarian sympathies, I do believe that some things *belong* in the public sector. The Libertarian philosophy may appear extreme to you, and it may in fact be extreme. However, Democrats and Republicans alike have lost sight of any sort of sane boundaries on what belongs in the public sector. I can't imagine a pure Libertarian philosophy ever really being actualized, but I think an extreme dose of it would bring sobriety and balance to bear against government's inexorable tendency to intrude further and further into what should be the private sphere.
Think about it - you surely can see extremity of some sort in the Democrat and Republican parties alike, no? But does this country look entirely like an incarnation of the desires of either one of them? No; it's a hodge-podge of policies -- sometimes contradictory -- hailing from all over the political spectrum. So in the end, infusing the system with a bunch of anti-scope-creep politicians would merely introduce some friction to retard the expansion. Like any other party, if they took it too far, populism would push the pendulum of power away from them and things would drift back in the other direction.
Similar idea to what you suggested, except that it doesn't restrict the repository to patented ideas. My goal is to help propel "ideas" -- and combinations thereof -- into the public domain or some free licensing scheme. If such a thing were done right & had significant mindshare 10 years ago, I doubt there would be a One-Click patent, or a patent on being able to rewind & fast-forward streaming music, etc.
Ultimately, I need to find a few people significantly smarter than myself (and more informed in a number of critical areas) to make this work.
So far I've heard reasons for the closure referencing things like there being a mere 800 researchers, the service didn't really take off, it wasn't shaping up as a real long term success prospect, etc...
Has anyone thought about the other side of this, though? Google is becoming the de-facto data warehouse for the masses, and its success is partly due to peoples' perception (right or wrong) that it will just "always be there." This discontinuation of a service could put a huge dent in that confidence, even if they never make the data unavailable.
I barely used Google Answers, but did every now and then. I use the hell out of my GMail though, and it's really come to replace my Zip disks & USB sticks as my medium of choice for portable storage. That's happened in part because of that same nebulous feeling of permanence -- that fuzzy belief that Google is big enough that I don't need to worry about them discontinuing anything.
To me, even though it doesn't affect me much in a direct way, this decision still inflicts the first real injury to my perception of the Google brand. I used to be willing to invest some time kicking the tires of just about any Google offering, since they could afford to keep services out there even when they weren't big winners, just because they were cool. It's a small shift in thinking for me, but I wonder if it might not have a surprisingly large effect on my Google usage habits in the future.
"Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?"
How about turning that on it's head? "Will the paradigm of an ever-increasing number of features hold up to the reality of having to present them in a UI of some sort?"
I've been using office-style apps heavily since about Office 4, and I haven't seen many new features at all that I consider essential -- *especially* not ones that require adding UI elements to accommodate them. MS's own focus group studies show time and time again that 90% of Office features end up in the "rarely used" category anyway.
I use Office 2007 some, and I'm pretty neutral on the ribbon since I do most tasks via keyboard shortcut anyway. For my money (or lack thereof), let OOo keep its traditional menus & toolbars. Just make keyboard shortcuts consistent across an office suite, get the fundamental features right, minimize the bugs & make the memory & disk footprints as light as you can.
The Ribbon may be da new shiznit and whatnot, and by virtue of MS's market penetration may even end up being the "look" that all others are compared to. Even if that happens, though, I have a hard time seeing *feature bloat* being the driving factor behind what UI paradigm wins out.
Actually, I'll bet the Firebird database guys are picking up some surplus attention due to the name confusion. I'd quite forgotten about the embedded db project myself, and I primarily read this article wondering if was a fork of Firefox, perhaps branching off a pre-name-change version or something.
After reading what's here, I'll probably give Firebird a go in a test project. Who knows, they may have just picked up a user at least partly because of name confusion.
Oh, and Down with Daylight Saving Time indeed. Where do I donate?
Is that the AVX-100TX? I hunted for the specs you describe, and that looked like the closest, but I didn't see anything about.isos. (IFO is listed though.)
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds a bit harsh, for reasons others have already articulated. The motivation behind your comment isn't that far out, though, and if I ran a service that depended heavily on ad revenue, I would definitely look at other models than the currently-popular "client-pull" strategy for serving ads.
I know this would consume some server resources, but still: Why aren't ads proxied through the server side of things & served from the same URL as the resource in the first place? It's not like these services are running from static pages that *need* the ad-rotator links to be on the client-side... This would eliminate so many cookie, image & script-blocking issues that I can't imagine it not paying for the added server stress & behind-the-scenes bandwidth, yanno?
You raise a good point: Unlike just about any other page I visit, I actually make a point of scanning the ads in my GMail messages from time to time, and following those that might interest me.
Granted, the links I follow generally aren't the "We have Boyer Moore algorithm in stock" or "Oops I made a Boo Boo" ones, but those belong on Yahoo anyway...
Sure, if the FCC isn't toothless, then it has the power to do much good for us. No argument there, but I think the old maxim still applies with regard to government authority: "Only relinquish power to your friends that you would not fear in the hands of your enemies."
Put another way, give the FCC as much power as you'd let a Sony exectutive have in setting technology mandates, because one day the Sony executive will be pulling the strings of the FCC's processes.
I'd like to have my cake and eat it to; I'd like the FCC to be able to enforce interop (mandating *open* systems) without them having the ability to enforce DRM (mandating *closed* systems). Taken as a whole, our laws have never been that philosophically consistent, anyway... why start now? ;-)
In reality though, the baby is just as bad as the water. The FCC's mandate is arguably more compatible with them having authority to enforce the broadcast flag than with them having the authority to enforce device interop. The broadcast flag *could* be argued to be part of a standard affecting how signals are broadcast over the public airwaves. Not quite as much with device interop (though there are some gray areas there, to be sure).
If we have to be consistent here, then I think the less they have the power to enforce, the better off we'll all be in the long run. It's not the norm for politicians and bureaucrats to be working hard to guard the interests of your average citizen. When those sorts start mucking around with "devices of class X *must* implement N" and "devices of class Y *shall not* implement Z," we usually get more standards mandated by lobbyists than by a zeal for consumer protection.
As for Sununu, he's trying to legislatively enforce a limit on a bureaucracy's authority. I gotta tip my hat to that.
I actually thought about starting an online service to do just that, but I decided my security skills weren't up to par with the level of attack that *might* come about. I mean, the business plan is to collect a pittance a month from a few thousand tin-foil-hatters, but the reality is that if a service is designed well enough to attract the tin foils, then one day it'll probably actually attract someone with a real and determined enemy.
Ignoring for the moment any issues of inability to push the button, how would one handle such a case? The two objectives are (a) secure the data against any & all attacks (which includes maintaining the means to deliver it to the desired parties under any circumstances), and (b) prevent any inadvertent public disclosures of said data.
I'd imagine that Gnutella, Usenet & TOR could each play a part in a highly redundant, distributed storage system. But even assuming you only needed to run services to send decryption keys & magnet links to the intended recipients, how would you guard the ability to do that against a potential attacker that's heavy on resources, time & motivation?
Is that with or without a Heisenberg compensator?
Unless Canadians spell it differently, I believe it's "ridiculous." Just a friendly tip before one of your students takes a screenshot of your /. post and puts it on YouTube, captioned "written by one of my teachers." ;-)
Depending on specifics like whether the defendant admits to using any file sharing software, and if so, what that software was (e.g. LimeWire), it might be relevant to ask:
Did the defendant set the sharing software to filter out copyrighted works that content owners have requested not be shared?
Did the plaintiff have the means and opportunity to identify said file(s) as copyrighted content?
Could the defendant reasonably have expected that using this filter was effective enough to prevent swapping files illegally?
-------------------
Best wishes on this case, and my hat's off to you for all the information you make available about how to fight these cases. In the larger scheme of things, it's going to be really difficult to stem the tide against the RIAA's intimidation tactics until a boilerplate, "paint-by-numbers" defense plan is available to victims^^^^^^^defendants without the financial means to retain expert counsel.
On my 56" 1080i DLP HDTV, 360 x ~200 XviDs look *remarkably* good at around 10MB / minute. In fact, the ~4GiB DVR-MS Dr. Who episodes I record at full resolution through S-Video on a media center PC are utter crap compared to those ~350MB XviDs. Where I am, digital cable sources are pretty locked down, so SVid is my only real source option for recording most cable channels. (It's a shame, really, that the content I pay for is so inferior in quality to widely available torrents of the same program from the UK.)
Experimenting with various MP4-related compression schemes on my own -- using 1080i source material -- I'm confident that I can transcode to 720p with an end product that looks as good as or better than a 480p commercial DVD and fits within ~35MB / minute (or 4.5GiB for a 2hr feature). I find that this size constraint is generous enough to remove all but a very few occasional bits of artifacting in the low contrast areas.
That leads me to agree with your conclusion about H.264 @ ~4GB, but so far every H.264 encoder I've enountered is too slow compared to mencoder's MP4 to justify the little bit of quality improvement I see.
If HD-DVD and Blu-Ray cracks become as ubiquitous and easy as DeCSS / libdecss, I might consider buying into one of those formats. Until then, reg'lar ol' DVDs upsampling through an HTPC looks just fine for my dollar.
+1 Infomative, +1 Fast. Thanks.
I guess it's because IANAL that I expect that which looks correct and just to prevail in court. At any rate, the Elektra v. Barker case will be interesting to watch; I'm especially interested in how high (or low) the "standard of evidence" bar ends up for the the RIAA going forward.
How did this case come to be so heavily litigated? In an interview on P2Pnet, you said...
IANAL, but from the information at hand, I'd be inclined to buy the opinion you're selling in those statements. Apparently though, the RIAA managed to get that motion denied, otherwise the case should have been over last August. So what happened? How is a case that failed to cite specific acts of copying still in court?
Dalmore has a reasonably priced but hard to find 12-yo Cigar Malt you'd probably enjoy.
And as un-hip as the Glenfiddich brand may be to some (ahem) "real" scotch drinkers, I have to say that their 15-yo Solera Reserve is $40.00USD well-spent.
What incentive do Attorneys General and/or (especially) professional Class Action litigators have not to be dumbasses (or parasites) on geeky matters that make such minuscule media ripples?
Mind you, I enthusiastically support the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one's labor and to engage in commerce with minimal State intrusion. That said, representing a Class in a court of law is not a right, it is a privilege that exists *because* of the State. While I reject price-fixing in almost every case where the commerce involves two private parties, the current Class Action system has become ridiculously unethical, and something needs to change drastically to restore a sense of proportion between legal fees and (class award / # of members).
Step 1: Behemoth Corporation steals Class Y's underpants.
Step 2: Class Y gets ???
Step 3: Lawfirm Z profits!
I'm confused; you replied to the GP's statment that "But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats" with the following:
You went on to describe examples of ACCAD doing just this in practice. However, in the context of this thread, when the GP said "But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats", I took it to be saying that AutoDesk could not successfully use the legal system to enforce this denial of interoperability. Of course they can technically deny interop. Wasn't the point that a technological item could have it's intellectual property protections weakened when it exists solely to lock out competition?
Hear, hear. Shame to see your site is closed until further notice; was the "crap" you refer to spam or just crappy poetry?
"2) The probability that an unpatched PC behind a firewall will get "hacked" in the moment while you are downloading it is what... 0,2?"
Last time I let an unpatched, freshly-built W2K Pro SP4 instance connect to the net sans-firewall, it was pwned and conducting outgoing portscans within 10 minutes.
The blackhats have enough strategies for surmounting firewalls that I'm not comfortable counting on one as my only prophylactic - especially on networks where I don't manage the wall myself. Seems akin to the rhythm method IMO.
I really try not to be anybody's fanboy, but after trying this Offline Update thingamabob, I'm afraid have a stomach full of Kool Aid. All hail heise Security! Join the family, meet a bunch of people who *really, really* love you, and finally attain the everlasting peace you've been seeking your whole life!
I for one welcome our new tuition-paying overlords.
To whatever extent a technical solution can be effective here, it will probably need to be one like you describe. Spammers will surely try to degrade such systems as much as they can though, with tactics like complaint floods, bogus certifying authority injection attempts, etc.
a tion.pdf
This guy has a good idea that could probably be paired with a Certified Email system to enhance its effectiveness:
Design of a DDoS Attack-Resistant Distributed Spam Blocklist -
http://www.sysdesign.ca/archive/blocklist-present
If in addition to blacklists, you could enhance that sort of system with various subscribable whitelists, trust lists, and ranking reports for certifying authorities, etc., then maybe we'd have a viable technical solution -- derisive form letter nothwithstanding.
"IF you're recording for use on your home stero system and IF you have decent speakers and IF you've got the storage space to burn and IF the kind of music you listen to hasn't already been under the sound engineer's knife... THEN you might as well do loseless."
I thought I had space to burn when I built a 1TB RAID, so I started salivating at the prospect of FLAC & OGG encoding my audio library. Now that I'm < 19% free (there's a lot of video too), I thought I'd do my own semi-blind trial between mp3s at 192, 256 and 320, plus the original wavs. I'd load a playlist with all 4, shuffle, then listen to all 4 & write down my guesses before looking at the 'answers.' While I rarely mistook the 192s for any of the others, I did make a substantial number of wrong guesses between each of the rest.
Now I just use FLAC for the archival stuff, like my wife's HS marching band recordings from yesteryear, etc. (No, they don't sound good to begin with, but we nevertheless don't want to lose audio details that are there now.) For the CD collection, 320kpbs LAME encoded mp3s are Good Enough.
Damn, I had to blow off Mod points to respond to this, but...
"Too bad they take it to the other extreme. Zero regulation of businesses, the complete abandonment of any sort of social safety net and privatising everything are just a few of the disagreements that I have with the Libertarian Party."
The nature of government past and present tends toward eternal scope creep. If Libertarians were to sweep all 3 branches of the US government tomorrow and hold power for a decade, we would still not live in a system that actually *had* zero regulation of businesses, complete abandonment of any sort of social safety net, or total privatization of all that is currently in the civic sphere.
Despite my heavy Libertarian sympathies, I do believe that some things *belong* in the public sector. The Libertarian philosophy may appear extreme to you, and it may in fact be extreme. However, Democrats and Republicans alike have lost sight of any sort of sane boundaries on what belongs in the public sector. I can't imagine a pure Libertarian philosophy ever really being actualized, but I think an extreme dose of it would bring sobriety and balance to bear against government's inexorable tendency to intrude further and further into what should be the private sphere.
Think about it - you surely can see extremity of some sort in the Democrat and Republican parties alike, no? But does this country look entirely like an incarnation of the desires of either one of them? No; it's a hodge-podge of policies -- sometimes contradictory -- hailing from all over the political spectrum. So in the end, infusing the system with a bunch of anti-scope-creep politicians would merely introduce some friction to retard the expansion. Like any other party, if they took it too far, populism would push the pendulum of power away from them and things would drift back in the other direction.
Fantastic suggestion, IMHO. I gotta plug this concept, even though I've had time to do little besides registering the domain...
Taxonomy of Obvious Ideas
http://tooi.org/
Similar idea to what you suggested, except that it doesn't restrict the repository to patented ideas. My goal is to help propel "ideas" -- and combinations thereof -- into the public domain or some free licensing scheme. If such a thing were done right & had significant mindshare 10 years ago, I doubt there would be a One-Click patent, or a patent on being able to rewind & fast-forward streaming music, etc.
Ultimately, I need to find a few people significantly smarter than myself (and more informed in a number of critical areas) to make this work.
So far I've heard reasons for the closure referencing things like there being a mere 800 researchers, the service didn't really take off, it wasn't shaping up as a real long term success prospect, etc...
Has anyone thought about the other side of this, though? Google is becoming the de-facto data warehouse for the masses, and its success is partly due to peoples' perception (right or wrong) that it will just "always be there." This discontinuation of a service could put a huge dent in that confidence, even if they never make the data unavailable.
I barely used Google Answers, but did every now and then. I use the hell out of my GMail though, and it's really come to replace my Zip disks & USB sticks as my medium of choice for portable storage. That's happened in part because of that same nebulous feeling of permanence -- that fuzzy belief that Google is big enough that I don't need to worry about them discontinuing anything.
To me, even though it doesn't affect me much in a direct way, this decision still inflicts the first real injury to my perception of the Google brand. I used to be willing to invest some time kicking the tires of just about any Google offering, since they could afford to keep services out there even when they weren't big winners, just because they were cool. It's a small shift in thinking for me, but I wonder if it might not have a surprisingly large effect on my Google usage habits in the future.
Just a thought.
"Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?"
How about turning that on it's head? "Will the paradigm of an ever-increasing number of features hold up to the reality of having to present them in a UI of some sort?"
I've been using office-style apps heavily since about Office 4, and I haven't seen many new features at all that I consider essential -- *especially* not ones that require adding UI elements to accommodate them. MS's own focus group studies show time and time again that 90% of Office features end up in the "rarely used" category anyway.
I use Office 2007 some, and I'm pretty neutral on the ribbon since I do most tasks via keyboard shortcut anyway. For my money (or lack thereof), let OOo keep its traditional menus & toolbars. Just make keyboard shortcuts consistent across an office suite, get the fundamental features right, minimize the bugs & make the memory & disk footprints as light as you can.
The Ribbon may be da new shiznit and whatnot, and by virtue of MS's market penetration may even end up being the "look" that all others are compared to. Even if that happens, though, I have a hard time seeing *feature bloat* being the driving factor behind what UI paradigm wins out.
Actually, I'll bet the Firebird database guys are picking up some surplus attention due to the name confusion. I'd quite forgotten about the embedded db project myself, and I primarily read this article wondering if was a fork of Firefox, perhaps branching off a pre-name-change version or something.
After reading what's here, I'll probably give Firebird a go in a test project. Who knows, they may have just picked up a user at least partly because of name confusion.
Oh, and Down with Daylight Saving Time indeed. Where do I donate?
Is that the AVX-100TX? I hunted for the specs you describe, and that looked like the closest, but I didn't see anything about .isos. (IFO is listed though.)