The irony is that the emerging markets are the ones who pay least notice to the West's IP, meanwhile we think the best way to regenerate our economies is by stifling innovation and dragging everyone through the courts for every supposed infringement. And the bigger irony is that, once the companies behind the ever more insane IP laws have milked every drop from the average guy in the street, they won't hang around to prop up an ailing economy in a country going down the tubes, they'll up sticks and move their HQ to those same emerging markets and start all over again.
If you mean St. Peter's Basilica, since it's in the independent city state of the Vatican, all photography belongs to the Pope (or, possibly, to God). Interestingly, while on the subject of the Vatican and restricted photography, taking photographs of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is stricly forbidden, the rights now being owned by the Japanese company that restored it, but when I was there pretty much everyone ignored the rule (some guy even had a full tripod setup in the middle of the floor with a remote control and a freind to help create a space around the camera). The guards seemed to shout occasionally that photography was forbidden, but they did very little to actually prevent it even though most people were blatant about it.
It's only really a deterrent in as much as putting a lock on your door when everyone else on the street doesn't have locks is a deterrent. It only works while market penetration is small enough that there are easier targets elsewhere. If this DNA water ever becomes popular enough that it's the norm for everyone to use it, criminals will stop looking for alternative targets and will instead focus on ways to beat the system - that's when we'll see if it's actually any good or not.
My chief concern is, if this is deployed as a "mist", how easy is it for others to get wrongly tagged. Can it get into aircon units and spread around the building? Can it escape the building and tag people in the street? Depending how blunt an instrument this is, it might not be enough to show a few drops, we might expect that only people who are literally drenched in the stuff are likely to be found guilty (and even then, who's to say the real criminal didn't lift a bottle of the stuff and toss it over the most likely suspect). If this is used purely for detection, fair enough; if it's used for conviction I'd be pretty worried.
Maybe you're not looking hard enough. Sure, this time they're going after cheaters, something we can all get behind because, frankly, cheaters are one of the reasons I largely gave up on multiplayer. However, the way the court action is worded, they could apply this to any mod to the game. You want to create a new fun little mod, you'll have to get an extended license from Blizzard before you can even legally play around with the code. Interested in programming and how the game works and want to poke around under the hood of the product you thought you bought? Tough luck, you just rendered your copy of the game an illegal copy, even though you paid in full, and you're now wide open to a copyright infringement action. That is the cancer here, not banning cheaters, but of course everyone's focus is purely on the cheating aspect and how Blizzard are doing the right thing - which is exactly where they want your focus.
The point isn't the ban, it's the court action. I don't care if they want to ban people for ToS violations, in fact I welcome it - we all know cheaters ruin online play - but suing and claiming breach of copyright is ridiculous. It's like selling me a book but claiming in the small-print that I only have the right to read it, not to make notes in the margins, and that if I do make notes my legitimate copy of the book suddenly becomes an illegal copy. I'm sorry, I didn't buy a license, I bought a book.
The problem is not that the monkeys are geeks, it's that the organ grinders are marketeers and accountants. Profit margins are king, design (both function and visual design) and usability are secondary considerations to how fast can it be made, how cheap can it be made and how much can be charged for it. That's not to say they can't do things better when they want to - Windows 7 was worlds apart from Vista - but how much of that was down to the marketeers realising they got a roasting over the last product and needed to pull something out of the bag?
It probably depends where, when and how you deploy it - in the immediate vicinity of a disaster, where all hands are already employed with the more immediate task of rescuing trapped/injured people, then having a unit you can stick in the sun and come back to fresh water is probably not a bad thing. Once the immediate danger has passed, it might be more practical to use people power, or to ship in some generators and fuel as an interim solution.
Or that they even want the hassle when they are. I could rig up my PC to my TV, but I made the conscious choice not to do so for various reasons (being able to separate work time and relaxation time, being able to play games on the PC without hogging the main TV, not wanting an office desk in my living room, having the world's noisiest fan/case combo to name a few). For me it just makes sense to have a subset of my PC's media functionality on a device that's hooked up to my TV (and has a near-zero boot time when I want to watch something). Not to mention I have a console in the living room and one in the bedroom, I wouldn't want to have two PCs set up to do the same thing (note I don't actually use Netflix, but for other similar services this is also a nice, easy, out of the box setup). Sometimes, even as a geek, it's nice to be able to just plug in two cables and have something work.
However, if you gave most people the choice of a free Genesis or an S Class they have to pay for from their own pocket, I can't help thinking a fair percentage would save their money, so you're still not exactly comparing like-for-like.
That's because copper was then, and still is, pretty ubiquitous. A global move to fibre would result in thieves realising pretty quickly that there's no real money to be made there. It sounds like a better deterrent than DNA water - that's fine if you can catch the criminals, but it's not going to put the average criminal off trying, because he likely doesn't have the foggiest idea what it is. I'd also like to know what stops a thief bottling some of this DNA water and walking into the nearest nightclub and spraying everyone else, suddenly the police are looking for a needle in a haystack.
It also means "acting suspiciously" becomes common grounds for a stop and search by the police. And since "acting suspiciously" is such an incredibly vague concept, it means pretty much anyone can be stopped and searched by the police whenever they feel like it, "Hmm, most people act guilty when the police are around - the fact that you're not acting guilty is highly suspicious..."
Because what French politician wants to leave office and walk into a role as an executive at a publisher or clothing manufacturer? Far less glamorous. On a more serious note, though, if this is really meant to fight filesharing, you are right - why doesn't it apply to movies or books or games, all of which can also be downloaded for free?
Same here - I don't "download", but I've set myself a very strict price cap on buying content, which tends to be around £5 for both music albums and DVDs. That's the maximum I'm prepared to risk on something being poor quality, even then I'm very picky about what I buy and I'll only ever break the cap for something I know I'll enjoy. If they could drop the prices of these things to £2 - 2.50, I'd be willing to risk my money far more often - I'm sure a lot of other people would follow suit.
It would be nice to see them at least experiment with such a pricing model, my feeling is they'd actually generate more money from the massive uplift in sales (£2 would be practically giving it away, which instantly makes "free, but with a chance of legal repercussions" seem less attractive), but it seems nobody in the music industry has the kind of courage or foresight to even trial a model like this. I suspect this is because, while it would be effective for the download market, it would harm bricks and mortar stores selling physical copies who just wouldn't be able to compete at that price point.
EU law is about promoting competition between member states (and theoretically non-member states, although in practice I'm sure they care far less about that). Since this apparently applies to all content providers, it doesn't technically disadvantage anyone unlike, for instance, if they offered subsidies on music performed in French, which would blatantly favour national over international content. Outside this remit, the EU is pretty much powerless to intervene, it's much more a local issue if you feel your government is wasting money during a time of economic crisis and "austerity measures" by propping up an ailing business model.
Considering Nicolas Sarkozy's wife is herself a "singer/songwriter", it's less likely she's paid for my the music lobby and more likely she actually is the music lobby. It's baffling logic, to say the least - to combat the fact that a percentage of young people are consuming music without paying for it, we'll make a percentage of older people pay for music without consuming it!
Pretty ingenious - the only flaw is that it relies on students to get off their arses and make use of your system, and this depends entirely on how easy the French government make it to get the cards. If students have to fill out a form and go buy postage and send them off, I wouldn't count your chickens. If they hand them out in bars, you'll be a millionaire:)
I'd guess to try and improve their public profile (you might find this surprising, but in some parts of society the police are not fondly viewed) and probably to attract funding from the private sector.
Not to mention most of the custom builds are just vanilla builds with the UI tweaked, and where they do something different it's usually to add base functionality rather than removing it, so I'd be surprised if an app that was tested and working on the standard build failed to work on a custom ROM.
So how is this different to developing games/apps for the desktop (or, hell, laptop, tablet, netbook variants thereof), or every other phone OS other than iOS to date? Is this really a surprise to these people? If so they only have themselves to blame for going into the market blindly, as I'd have thought this would be self evident to anyone developing for an OS that's deployed to multiple hardware platforms.
People shouldn't have to re-learn the tools of their trade every 3 years at the whim of a company. The whole point of software like this is to make people's jobs easier so they become more productive. Now, maybe ribbon is better for new users, but if users of older versions are more productive on those versions, just give them the choice to switch out the UI - surely that's not so difficult?
I suspect you're right - I've seen people go shopping (for software, in a real bricks and mortar store!) for Office and end up using some no-name third party product just because it was a a quarter the price, even though there's a free alternative that's probably massively better than their second choice. It's not like MS would even lose out by having a different pricing model for commercial versus consumer users - they pretty much only bother going after commercial users for piracy already so that model would still work plus they'd sell some more stock into the consumer market (and perhaps halt the migration to cheap/free alternatives). I guess they don't want to "cheapen" the product in the eyes of their target audience by offering it for less elsewhere.
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And by "routine stuff" you mean everything apart from glitzy social events and golf weekends, right?
The irony is that the emerging markets are the ones who pay least notice to the West's IP, meanwhile we think the best way to regenerate our economies is by stifling innovation and dragging everyone through the courts for every supposed infringement. And the bigger irony is that, once the companies behind the ever more insane IP laws have milked every drop from the average guy in the street, they won't hang around to prop up an ailing economy in a country going down the tubes, they'll up sticks and move their HQ to those same emerging markets and start all over again.
If you mean St. Peter's Basilica, since it's in the independent city state of the Vatican, all photography belongs to the Pope (or, possibly, to God). Interestingly, while on the subject of the Vatican and restricted photography, taking photographs of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is stricly forbidden, the rights now being owned by the Japanese company that restored it, but when I was there pretty much everyone ignored the rule (some guy even had a full tripod setup in the middle of the floor with a remote control and a freind to help create a space around the camera). The guards seemed to shout occasionally that photography was forbidden, but they did very little to actually prevent it even though most people were blatant about it.
Or at least lots of people subsequently wished they had.
It's only really a deterrent in as much as putting a lock on your door when everyone else on the street doesn't have locks is a deterrent. It only works while market penetration is small enough that there are easier targets elsewhere. If this DNA water ever becomes popular enough that it's the norm for everyone to use it, criminals will stop looking for alternative targets and will instead focus on ways to beat the system - that's when we'll see if it's actually any good or not.
My chief concern is, if this is deployed as a "mist", how easy is it for others to get wrongly tagged. Can it get into aircon units and spread around the building? Can it escape the building and tag people in the street? Depending how blunt an instrument this is, it might not be enough to show a few drops, we might expect that only people who are literally drenched in the stuff are likely to be found guilty (and even then, who's to say the real criminal didn't lift a bottle of the stuff and toss it over the most likely suspect). If this is used purely for detection, fair enough; if it's used for conviction I'd be pretty worried.
Maybe you're not looking hard enough. Sure, this time they're going after cheaters, something we can all get behind because, frankly, cheaters are one of the reasons I largely gave up on multiplayer. However, the way the court action is worded, they could apply this to any mod to the game. You want to create a new fun little mod, you'll have to get an extended license from Blizzard before you can even legally play around with the code. Interested in programming and how the game works and want to poke around under the hood of the product you thought you bought? Tough luck, you just rendered your copy of the game an illegal copy, even though you paid in full, and you're now wide open to a copyright infringement action. That is the cancer here, not banning cheaters, but of course everyone's focus is purely on the cheating aspect and how Blizzard are doing the right thing - which is exactly where they want your focus.
The point isn't the ban, it's the court action. I don't care if they want to ban people for ToS violations, in fact I welcome it - we all know cheaters ruin online play - but suing and claiming breach of copyright is ridiculous. It's like selling me a book but claiming in the small-print that I only have the right to read it, not to make notes in the margins, and that if I do make notes my legitimate copy of the book suddenly becomes an illegal copy. I'm sorry, I didn't buy a license, I bought a book.
The problem is not that the monkeys are geeks, it's that the organ grinders are marketeers and accountants. Profit margins are king, design (both function and visual design) and usability are secondary considerations to how fast can it be made, how cheap can it be made and how much can be charged for it. That's not to say they can't do things better when they want to - Windows 7 was worlds apart from Vista - but how much of that was down to the marketeers realising they got a roasting over the last product and needed to pull something out of the bag?
It probably depends where, when and how you deploy it - in the immediate vicinity of a disaster, where all hands are already employed with the more immediate task of rescuing trapped/injured people, then having a unit you can stick in the sun and come back to fresh water is probably not a bad thing. Once the immediate danger has passed, it might be more practical to use people power, or to ship in some generators and fuel as an interim solution.
Or that they even want the hassle when they are. I could rig up my PC to my TV, but I made the conscious choice not to do so for various reasons (being able to separate work time and relaxation time, being able to play games on the PC without hogging the main TV, not wanting an office desk in my living room, having the world's noisiest fan/case combo to name a few). For me it just makes sense to have a subset of my PC's media functionality on a device that's hooked up to my TV (and has a near-zero boot time when I want to watch something). Not to mention I have a console in the living room and one in the bedroom, I wouldn't want to have two PCs set up to do the same thing (note I don't actually use Netflix, but for other similar services this is also a nice, easy, out of the box setup). Sometimes, even as a geek, it's nice to be able to just plug in two cables and have something work.
Yes. Right after it gives us the Matrix.
If you listen to some of the simulation arguments, there's a reasonable chance that it already did...
However, if you gave most people the choice of a free Genesis or an S Class they have to pay for from their own pocket, I can't help thinking a fair percentage would save their money, so you're still not exactly comparing like-for-like.
That's because copper was then, and still is, pretty ubiquitous. A global move to fibre would result in thieves realising pretty quickly that there's no real money to be made there. It sounds like a better deterrent than DNA water - that's fine if you can catch the criminals, but it's not going to put the average criminal off trying, because he likely doesn't have the foggiest idea what it is. I'd also like to know what stops a thief bottling some of this DNA water and walking into the nearest nightclub and spraying everyone else, suddenly the police are looking for a needle in a haystack.
It also means "acting suspiciously" becomes common grounds for a stop and search by the police. And since "acting suspiciously" is such an incredibly vague concept, it means pretty much anyone can be stopped and searched by the police whenever they feel like it, "Hmm, most people act guilty when the police are around - the fact that you're not acting guilty is highly suspicious..."
Because what French politician wants to leave office and walk into a role as an executive at a publisher or clothing manufacturer? Far less glamorous. On a more serious note, though, if this is really meant to fight filesharing, you are right - why doesn't it apply to movies or books or games, all of which can also be downloaded for free?
Same here - I don't "download", but I've set myself a very strict price cap on buying content, which tends to be around £5 for both music albums and DVDs. That's the maximum I'm prepared to risk on something being poor quality, even then I'm very picky about what I buy and I'll only ever break the cap for something I know I'll enjoy. If they could drop the prices of these things to £2 - 2.50, I'd be willing to risk my money far more often - I'm sure a lot of other people would follow suit.
It would be nice to see them at least experiment with such a pricing model, my feeling is they'd actually generate more money from the massive uplift in sales (£2 would be practically giving it away, which instantly makes "free, but with a chance of legal repercussions" seem less attractive), but it seems nobody in the music industry has the kind of courage or foresight to even trial a model like this. I suspect this is because, while it would be effective for the download market, it would harm bricks and mortar stores selling physical copies who just wouldn't be able to compete at that price point.
EU law is about promoting competition between member states (and theoretically non-member states, although in practice I'm sure they care far less about that). Since this apparently applies to all content providers, it doesn't technically disadvantage anyone unlike, for instance, if they offered subsidies on music performed in French, which would blatantly favour national over international content. Outside this remit, the EU is pretty much powerless to intervene, it's much more a local issue if you feel your government is wasting money during a time of economic crisis and "austerity measures" by propping up an ailing business model.
Is his wife payed for by the music lobby?
Considering Nicolas Sarkozy's wife is herself a "singer/songwriter", it's less likely she's paid for my the music lobby and more likely she actually is the music lobby. It's baffling logic, to say the least - to combat the fact that a percentage of young people are consuming music without paying for it, we'll make a percentage of older people pay for music without consuming it!
Pretty ingenious - the only flaw is that it relies on students to get off their arses and make use of your system, and this depends entirely on how easy the French government make it to get the cards. If students have to fill out a form and go buy postage and send them off, I wouldn't count your chickens. If they hand them out in bars, you'll be a millionaire :)
I'd guess to try and improve their public profile (you might find this surprising, but in some parts of society the police are not fondly viewed) and probably to attract funding from the private sector.
Not to mention most of the custom builds are just vanilla builds with the UI tweaked, and where they do something different it's usually to add base functionality rather than removing it, so I'd be surprised if an app that was tested and working on the standard build failed to work on a custom ROM.
So how is this different to developing games/apps for the desktop (or, hell, laptop, tablet, netbook variants thereof), or every other phone OS other than iOS to date? Is this really a surprise to these people? If so they only have themselves to blame for going into the market blindly, as I'd have thought this would be self evident to anyone developing for an OS that's deployed to multiple hardware platforms.
People shouldn't have to re-learn the tools of their trade every 3 years at the whim of a company. The whole point of software like this is to make people's jobs easier so they become more productive. Now, maybe ribbon is better for new users, but if users of older versions are more productive on those versions, just give them the choice to switch out the UI - surely that's not so difficult?
I suspect you're right - I've seen people go shopping (for software, in a real bricks and mortar store!) for Office and end up using some no-name third party product just because it was a a quarter the price, even though there's a free alternative that's probably massively better than their second choice. It's not like MS would even lose out by having a different pricing model for commercial versus consumer users - they pretty much only bother going after commercial users for piracy already so that model would still work plus they'd sell some more stock into the consumer market (and perhaps halt the migration to cheap/free alternatives). I guess they don't want to "cheapen" the product in the eyes of their target audience by offering it for less elsewhere.