I agree that youtube was probably bought out of fear, but I don't think that it was fear of losing to an upstart so much as losing out to an existing rival. Among others, Yahoo was looking into purchasing youtube when the google deal was made. If it had occurred, google's competitors would suddenly have a large leverage to use against them. As it is, google has the top two video sites, and yahoo must either build their own or purchase a less popular one. Either way, google comes out ahead of them.
No one is free from repercussions of their speech. If I say that I think Windows XP is super-secure and Vista is going to be completely awesome, the likely repercussions are that a horde of people on slashdot will assume I'm an idiot. 'Repercussions' is not synonymous with 'jail time.'
Agreed, I was overzealous in tying repercussions to freedom
And speech free from the kind of repercussions you're talking about does not require anonymity
I disagree with you here. While ideally people would live in a society where free speach is respected, that is not always the case. Anonymity is one of the last safeguards of free speech. Even if one lives in an area where "unacceptable" speach is punished, if a person can keep themselves anonymous they are free to express their viewpoint. So while ideally anonymity is not required, it is an important safeguard to free speech and it would be a bad idea to allow it to erode lightly.
No one is free from repercussions of their speech. If I say that I think Windows XP is super-secure and Vista is going to be completely awesome, the likely repercussions are that a horde of people on slashdot will assume I'm an idiot. 'Repercussions' is not synonymous with 'jail time.'
Agreed, I was overzealous in tying repercussions to freedom
And speech free from the kind of repercussions you're talking about does not require anonymity.
I disagree with you here. While ideally people would live in a society where free speach is respected, that is not always the case. Anonymity is one of the last safeguards of free speech. Even if one lives in an area where "unacceptable" speach is punished, if a person can keep themselves anonymous they are free to express their viewpoint. So while ideally anonymity is not required, it is an important safeguard to free speech and it would be a bad idea to allow it to erode lightly.
I really hope that this is sarcasm, but unfortunately if it is sarcasm, I'm missing it. As a reminder, free speach doesn't just mean the freedom to say things that you happen to like. The answer to ignorance is truth, not repression.
I think you mean "there is no complete freedom from the repercussions of your speech without the ability to be anonymous at times."
Which is also known as freedom of speach. People have pretty much always been able to say whatever they want, that part is nothing new. However, it really doesn't mean much when you can be punished just because someone didn't like what you were saying. Free speach isn't truly free unless it means freedom from repercussions.
They'd get old really fast, since pretty much all of the go something like "In North Korea, you join the army and hopefully manage to avoid starving to death."
Not only that, but building a solid publicly available library could be used to demonstrate the importance of bringing copyrighted materials back to the public. I'm sure that the politicians won't personally care, but if enough people get used to the free availability of information, then it might be possible to turn this into a large general public campaign issue.
It depends on whether this was due to misstatements by mozilla people, or if it was just a stupid writer. Never underestimate how ignorant journalists can be.
Well, the way we are going now looks to be unsustainable, so any species that we'd consider "advanced" in that context would probably have found a much more sustainable way to live. Either that, or they have started taking their resources from other worlds. Like Earth, for example. In that case, we're going to be pretty fucked.
The fact is that Europeans enjoy slaughtering and conquering each other in extreme numbers. England once three quarters of the globe under its domination. Romans and Spaniards conquered by the sword. Scandanavians raped and pillaged across the continent. Anyone remember Bosnia? And as for Germans - well, lets not even go there.
The fact is that Europeans are savage and warlike and desperately need structures to take their minds of the delicious thought of grabbing their neighbour by the throat.
Unlike, say, the Persians, Japanese, Mongols, Azteks, Egyptians, or Incas. Let's face it, if you really want to look at it this way, you'd have to replace the word "European" with human. For the most part, in every place in the world that there has been someone to conquer and someone strong enough to do the conquering, people have fought each other.
It's about control. More and more, it seems as though those in government can't stand the idea that there's something out there that they aren't in control of. Yes, this initiative might bring in a little more revenue, but more importantly requiring a license means that they can revoke that license whenever they decide that they disagree with what is being said.
Sure there was. The dot com survivors (google, amazon, ebay, etc) managed to transition well from startup to an actual stable business. These big "Web 1.0" sites for the most part manage to provide a solid experience without all the old.com bubble flakiness. I'd say that the survivors definitely managed to take care of their "bugs", and I'm sure that whoever survives when the whole social networking thing comes falling down will be similarly improved.
Now, which artist out for money would sing against copyright?
How about artists who think that the money would be better if the current media companies were dethroned. As things stand now, they aren't really all that great for artists in many respects.
Very few people who are against current intellectual property laws are opposed to the idea off copyright altogether. For the most part, we just think that the balance needs to shift back towards society as a whole rather than the copyright owners. It's all about change, for the most part, not abolishing the system altogether.
I hear that, man. What I feel like driving changes from day to day. It's not economically viable for me to own every car model made so when I see a car I want to drive I just take it. If I like it enough maybe I'll buy it.
If you could make a perfect copy of the car near instantly without depriving someone else of the original car, this wouldn't sound that silly at all. Whether or not you deprive someone else of use is a huge difference between the two.
Fable was honestly a pretty goodd game. It's a shame that it didn't live up at all to the hype,but once you distanced yourself from expectations a bit, it wasn't too bad.
If you set the ipod to be used as a hard drive, you can go ahead and get the music manually. I'd be really surprised if there isn't a program somewhere that goes through the ipod's directory tree and gets all the music off of it.
Good point. I can't speak for anyone else, but the majority of the books I read are from the library. Without some way of "borrowing" a book, I would be extremely unlikely to be interested in this.
That said, there really isn't any huge obstacle in the way of a library system for these. They already have a system to "authorize" a fixed number of players, so it doesn't seem like it would be that much more of a stretch to allow libraries to buy licenses to have the books checked out. The library would only be able to check out a certain number of copies per license they own, so it really wouldn't be any different than a library is now. If the file format is going to get hacked, then the books will show up online anyways. If it doesn't, then it would pretty much work the same as a normal library. Either way, it doesn't increase the publishers' risks, and it would greatly benefit the device makers.
Hopefully, they will consider setting up such a system, but I'm not optimistic. After all, when's the last time Sony acted rationally.
We will offer titles on a pay-to-own basis - similar to the way a user expects to purchase and own other digital media today. The user will have the option to purchase this content and read it on up to 6 different activated devices (computers or Readers).
So I'll own the books so much that I get to put them on a whole six different player. Thank you very much Sony, your generosity is awe inspiring.
I agree that it would have been best if they did that, but you have to remember that they only had two bombs at the time. If the demonstration proved unsuccessful, then they would be left with only one bomb to actually use for military purposes. If they'd had more bombs, they almost certainly would have done a demonstration, but unfortunately circumstances were otherwise.
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I agree that youtube was probably bought out of fear, but I don't think that it was fear of losing to an upstart so much as losing out to an existing rival. Among others, Yahoo was looking into purchasing youtube when the google deal was made. If it had occurred, google's competitors would suddenly have a large leverage to use against them. As it is, google has the top two video sites, and yahoo must either build their own or purchase a less popular one. Either way, google comes out ahead of them.
Five different lawyers may give you five different answers, but in all five cases "Profit!" is what they're actually thinking.
It's great and all that they found a new way to organise their company, but I must have missed the part where they actually bring in money.
I really hope that this is sarcasm, but unfortunately if it is sarcasm, I'm missing it. As a reminder, free speach doesn't just mean the freedom to say things that you happen to like. The answer to ignorance is truth, not repression.
They'd get old really fast, since pretty much all of the go something like "In North Korea, you join the army and hopefully manage to avoid starving to death."
Not only that, but building a solid publicly available library could be used to demonstrate the importance of bringing copyrighted materials back to the public. I'm sure that the politicians won't personally care, but if enough people get used to the free availability of information, then it might be possible to turn this into a large general public campaign issue.
It depends on whether this was due to misstatements by mozilla people, or if it was just a stupid writer. Never underestimate how ignorant journalists can be.
Well, the way we are going now looks to be unsustainable, so any species that we'd consider "advanced" in that context would probably have found a much more sustainable way to live. Either that, or they have started taking their resources from other worlds. Like Earth, for example. In that case, we're going to be pretty fucked.
It's about control. More and more, it seems as though those in government can't stand the idea that there's something out there that they aren't in control of. Yes, this initiative might bring in a little more revenue, but more importantly requiring a license means that they can revoke that license whenever they decide that they disagree with what is being said.
Sure there was. The dot com survivors (google, amazon, ebay, etc) managed to transition well from startup to an actual stable business. These big "Web 1.0" sites for the most part manage to provide a solid experience without all the old .com bubble flakiness. I'd say that the survivors definitely managed to take care of their "bugs", and I'm sure that whoever survives when the whole social networking thing comes falling down will be similarly improved.
That's all well and good, but don't forget that we need to choose something that can be broadcast in a finite length of time.
Fable was honestly a pretty goodd game. It's a shame that it didn't live up at all to the hype,but once you distanced yourself from expectations a bit, it wasn't too bad.
Well, whatever it's made of, it's definitely not something you just dump on. It's not a big truck.
If you set the ipod to be used as a hard drive, you can go ahead and get the music manually. I'd be really surprised if there isn't a program somewhere that goes through the ipod's directory tree and gets all the music off of it.
Depending on how far you want to stretch your definition, how about $0.39 http://www.microchip.com/ParamChartSearch/chart.as px?branchID=1009&mid=10&lang=en&pageId=74
That said, there really isn't any huge obstacle in the way of a library system for these. They already have a system to "authorize" a fixed number of players, so it doesn't seem like it would be that much more of a stretch to allow libraries to buy licenses to have the books checked out. The library would only be able to check out a certain number of copies per license they own, so it really wouldn't be any different than a library is now. If the file format is going to get hacked, then the books will show up online anyways. If it doesn't, then it would pretty much work the same as a normal library. Either way, it doesn't increase the publishers' risks, and it would greatly benefit the device makers.
Hopefully, they will consider setting up such a system, but I'm not optimistic. After all, when's the last time Sony acted rationally.
I agree that it would have been best if they did that, but you have to remember that they only had two bombs at the time. If the demonstration proved unsuccessful, then they would be left with only one bomb to actually use for military purposes. If they'd had more bombs, they almost certainly would have done a demonstration, but unfortunately circumstances were otherwise.