<quote><p>as I understood it, China has control over the vast majority of media- would the population even need a reason more than whatever the govt told them? eg. they are taking our resources... why bother with copyright?</p></quote>

How exactly was it the current batch of chinese plutocrats took power? did they have a full free press back then?

If things gets to obvuis and the "bread and circus" bribes cant be upheld due to a cash shortages populations tend to support revolts. And history is littered with example of those revolts being more the a small anoyance even if they fail. And they dont always fail, often because the army is tied to close to the general public to be of much use in actual popular revolts.

But there might exist an implicit contract between the owners of the park and the caretakers that they retain a usage right to it.

Road usage is the clear cut case, here you will loose in court if you close off a road that have been open to the public. Ownership or not, particularly if you bought the road as a part of a deal after public usage was an established tradition. Implicit contracts does need to be honored.

The stadium issue, have if i remember correctly been taken to court and the card holders got awarded compensation.

Land ownership is not actually always ownership, there countries(UK and Sweden for instance) where you cannot actually own land, but only lease it on permanent contracts.

This varies a lot from country to country some, like my native Denmark does not treat written contracts as superior to oral or implicit contracts, while some common law countries gives formal contracts preferable treatment. But i dont think that there is a western legal system where implicit contracts is not acknowledged by the courts

On the internet you have the big big problem of determining jurisdiction.

Games are just that games they are run for a purpose with a certain agenda, and in most games that agenda involves a kind of fair play doctrine that requires ingame assets to be tied to ingame actions alone and not subject to out of game financial transactions. Here theres no context of a implicit real world ownership, but this might differ Second life for instance might by encouraging real world trading of ingame assets create such a cotexts, The DNS system is an other example here there are an tradition for treating domains as property that can be treated as real asset.

What im trying to say is that the written ToS isnt the entire story of the contract.

IANYAL but im fairly sure this is a fair attempt at describing the actual law.

the answer to the question would of cause be 42.

ohh dont beleave that cloud computing is here to stay at least until someone comes up with a cooler name for the dusty old mainframes still running the world.

The way you do redudancy may have changed but in the end the goal of a cloud computer is the same as the mainframe process every business transaction on the same central system with no downtime as cheaply as posible.

As with mainframes cloud computers have enough up-front cost that timesharing and leasing models becomes interesting.

Virtualisation is another mainframe virtue, seperate the software stack from the hardware stack and run whole OS's as if they were application level services. No real news here.

Will cloud be dominant, maybe, theres enough big iron stil around for it to be a light transition in most businesses, and with game/media consoles gaining traction over PC'es that were never ever used for much besides the internet anyway it might not be as fun selling pc software as it used to be, but mostly things arent changing that much. the nuts and bolt techs and the software maintainance and training people will still be doing mostly the same theyve always done, development jobs wont change much either. The internet have alwauys been about interconnected timeshares/BBS'es anyway, the browser just brought it to the masses.

You can make all sorts of feedback curcuits with a few transistors(act as termostats) some swicthes, a few resitors a few LM324 ot similar amplifies and maybe some more advanced sensors, this kind of stuff is a few doller a set at a bulk retailer, you can make oscilating lights controled by stuff happening in the room with some diodes again dirt cheap and som RC(resistor capacitor) circuits.

"AND" gates are also avaliable cheaply so you could do all sorts of digital fun aswell.

AIX is still somewhat in support, HP-UX the same no OpenSolaris will be around for decades to come we might see Oracle stop pushing it actively for new customers but you dont kill a prodoct like that not with the price some organisation is willing to pay for sevice and support deals for existing systems.

Sometimes it's not about the strategic game of cat and mouse and all about the cash flow.

The problem with google is the terms of service, google does not offer you full ownership of your data, they wont negotiate out out clauses they dont make guranties and whont offer fixed compensation when guranties are breached, it's the same deal with apple and a big reason apple is non existiant in the business to business market.

Take a standard linux netbook use non google webtools and you can get those deals but google acts the same way apple does and ignores the business market, this is wry this debate is pointless google isnt even trying to enter this market, they are plotting to take the low end consumer market not the enterprise market.

The reason this is being debated is that the fortune 5000 companies are trying to ditch their PC's and go back to the mainframes as fast as they can and google is the most visible of the new timeshare systems, because they are consumer oriented and not enterprise oriented.

Theres other players like zimbra, zoho or thinkfree that specificly targets enterprise and some of the old forgotten giants still lingers around in the shadows.

If someone else is making profit your not getting full value for your money, in the teoreticly perfect free market noone makes big profits, big profit's is actually a sign that the market mechanism does not work.

Nobody made more profit then the big party bosses in the polit buro or the arab kings and sheiks.

Yes but mission critical wintel deployment it's probably a lot more expansive in terms of redudancy and support cost then the older mainframes. when they grow to the scale where mainframes used to live.

Windows biggest drawback stability wise was always that it had none and now only week self protection features, a renegade application will take a wintel host down while a mainframe will remain mostly unaffected by bad application code. With properly tested application code you can make a wintel stable, but thats not all that common in the cloud world where almost everything is perpertual beta and to keep that stable you need a underlying platform who can protect itself the way windows can't. especially if your going to rent out the hardware on a timeshare basis, to almost anyone. Unix/Linux remains as always the middle ground it runs on any hardware(now even clasical mainframes) and gets a lot closer to mainframe like behavior then windows.

When microsoft claims that most windows crashes are due to 3rd party code they are actually right, the only problem is that Windows is the making it damn easy for 3rd party code to take the entire system down.

for what i hear AIM is pretty popular in russia of all places while MS mmore or less dominate here in europe, where yahoo is more or less unknown with local startups and broadcasting companies rule the part of the portal word that have not been killed by facebook and google yet.

and more important do you want to upload files to a service that charge users for access. and what would youtube be without the worlds funniest home videos. And this is what those services thrive on they connect someone willing to publish but without a name with someone willing to consume.

With a big potion of the content comming from the userbase and the low entry to market for competing services, it's hard capitalise on your userbase without destroying your userbase. if you push to hard they will scatter out on the many different ways they can do most of what you offer on the web.

Pay works when the media hype have already told people they want something, it's harder when the product is unknown stuble upon stuff like what youtube really is all about.

IVe heard users scram bloody murder when they replaced wordperfect with word 2003, im not totally sure this means that MS office 2003 is the inferior product to a more then 10year old version of a competing prodict though it might be the case. Most of the migrations ive heard off from office2003 to office2007 seams to provoke the same kind of reactions.

In some organizations(most offices) it quickly become commonplace to write all emails in word and powerpoint and then send it as an attached file instead of actually write emails as soon as the bandwidth would allow it, to this day that is still happening.

I believe the web would have become one big powerpoint presentation and i a hermit somewhere in the Norwegian mountains in that reality

but is those really in the cloud computing business.

To me they seam a lot more like traditional mainframe/relocation companies i just dont see any cloud in singning a big deal with amazon stating what your entiled to and under what terms as anything different then what you did 20 years ago when different companes rulled the scene, and what exactly is the difference between what google offers and what compuserve AOL and the rest offered those 20 years ago when the internet went mainstram, your still signing in to a service and accepting the terms they offer.

The thing about is that the cloud is simply a big pile of smoke filled with otherwise completely normal businesses providing services that have existed since the dawn of computing.

If you define cloud as parallel computing themn the cloud is also old news. Everyone does that today.

Cats are soft and useless creatues no if you want to get rid of the rats call the PETA and tell them your running a rehabilitation home for freshly freed mink those are vicius and evil creature thats going to rid you of the rats within the week.