Comment Re:I voted for Skepticism (Score 1) 1142
What if they start questioning the skepticism class?
What if they start questioning the skepticism class?
Except for those of course who can claim to hold patents on AVC and aren't in the MPEG-LA.
Paying off MPEG-LA only protects you from MPEG-LA. Submarine patents can still surface from anyone not in that organization.
Ten years ago, Linux users complained that they could not view the video on the Web because it was in QuickTime containers with Sorenson video and Qdesign audio and that was all proprietary, not standardized.
And the response then would have been something along the lines of "Windows/Internet Explorer is the standard."
Divx just slides in because most devices will play it hardware assisted even though you need to install the codecs on a desktop.
Before MPEG 4 Part 2 (a.k.a. "DivX) became popular on the desktop, how many DivX-compatible devices did you see in the marketplace?
Fine for you, but not everyone is willing or even able to deal with LaTeX's learning curve compared to WYSIWYG applications.
Yes, but people have to both know that it is there at all and how to install new software in Ubuntu.
Free software may have a decent usage share overall on netbooks, but most people come from Windows and nonfree software land. Probably the only words in non-Windows marketing and demonstration that they will understand are "Linux" and "Firefox," and even then the former would instill the idea of a "hacker" OS. Overcoming this barrier is hard enough. By the time you get them to buy the thing, one of the first questions they will ask is "Where is Microsoft Office?" If you mention using Google Docs instead, the inevitable "Can't I just use that on Windows instead?" comes up.
Except that some of us buy and use netbooks because of their portability, not just their Internet access.
I use OpenOffice.org on my netbook to do work, because I do not want to use Google Docs and because carrying around my main laptop has become a hassle. While I'm certainly smart enough to just install the package back in through the repositories, I think it would be much better if Ubiquity asked the user whether he or she wanted to use an online office suite or a local one. Most newcomers to non-Windows platforms aren't going to know that OpenOffice.org is there if they aren't informed of its existence, and I doubt that I am alone in preferring a local suite to an online one, even on netbooks.
Fine. except that the Xbox 360's system link drops connections with ping times longer than 33 ms (Warning, uncited Wikipedia reference). Sure, you can just get an old Xbox secondhand for actual Xbox games, but this doesn't help for anyone who downloaded them from the Xbox Live Marketplace.
If Microsoft is interested in mitigating the damage caused by terminating the service for Xbox games and consoles, the least they could do is lift this restriction on system link connections, at the very least for these soon-to-be-unsupported titles.
PS: the downloads page does not seem to have the source code for the engine, only the UI. Where is the source code for the rest of the software?
That may be how they'll rope websites, and other types of internet services for that matter, into complying with log retention.
That is, until they move overseas.
And pass on all that cost to the possibly-unwilling taxpayer? I think not.
I don't understand patentese or codecs, but could they not also be enforced against H.264/AVC as well?
-20 dB - My PulseAudio volume.
Huh?
Oh yeah. Now I remember.
Oh, you say that if I refuse blockable ads, I should just not watch those sites/TV channels/magazines, because after all that is only fair and they would go bankrupt otherwise? My answer to that is that advertisers are not 'fair' at all either, they just wish to maximise their profits and do whatever they can get away with. So why should I act any better towards them?
While I have not purchased any ad packages for the Internet myself, I would be very surprised if the site owner doesn't know ahead of time exactly how the ad package he or she bought into would present itself to the viewers. Perhaps it is just as much the site's fault for knowingly buying into such an intrusive package as it is for the ad companies to offer such a package in the first place.
It is not 'stealing' (another great act of brainwashing that you think it is, denying someone their profit is not stealing -ever)
At what point did the poster call ad blocking "stealing"? The only time the word "steal" appears in the post is in an example. The example, while extreme, is to drive the poster's point home about how some things being worse than ad blocking is not itself a justification to block ads.
In case you missed it, here is the poster's use of "steal," complete with context:
If your metric on whether something is moral or not is really going to be whether you can find things that I do that are equal or worse, then I think you have bigger problems. Is stealing going to be okay because there are people who kill? The correctness of anothers actions is -not- a prerequisit for the correctness of one's own!
I don't see any indication of "steal" being used here to mean anything other than the physical kind.
It only becomes a moral issue when you start believing in a corporate state where it is amoral to deny the incumbent corporations their profits.
Which you are still free to do. They are ads, not ultimatums. At no point is the company or the site holding anything or anyone ransom. No matter how much the ad gets in your face, you are under no obligation to "obey" it by buying their goods or services.
As a disclaimer, I am not trying to side with the poster whom you replied to, but I nonetheless believe that your response deserved a rebuttal.
If YouTube were to implement HTML5 support with, say, h.264 in an mp4 container, they'd have to do no transcoding, probably not even re-encapsulating. It would Just Work on Chrome and Safari, and there's no technological reason it couldn't work on Firefox -- only political assholes who refuse to implement such support, even in countries which don't respect software patents. If IE ever decides to support HTML5 at all, I very much doubt that Microsoft doesn't have h.264 licenses. Only Opera really has an excuse here.
Really? What exactly is Opera's excuse? Not enough revenue? I doubt that. They probably aren't making much on their desktop browser, but their mobile browsers, combined with their deal with Nintendo to provide their technology for the DS and Wii, should make them more than enough to secure a license with MPEG-LA.
Firefox, however, can not provide AVC support because of legal hurdles. I haven't read the MPL, but I know that the GPL and the LGPL have an all-or-nothing stance about patents. Either MPEG-LA needs to allow all instances of Firefox, including the downstream versions and forks, a license for AVC, or the project is not allowed to secure one at all. What happens if Mozilla gets MPEG-LA sanctioned AVC support for the upstream version only depends on whether they hold the copyright for all of their code. If they do, then anyone who distributes Mozilla's browser further must remove the codecs or risk a license violation (assuming the MPL has a similar patent clause), effectively making it proprietary for anyone who doesn't know how to, or doesn't want to, alter the browser code. If Mozilla doesn't hold all of the copyright to the browser, then they themselves are in violation of the license, and are ironically prohibited by copyright law from distributing their own browser.
Google can take a rather unique approach to this problem. Chrome has AVC and Theora support, but Chrome is actually proprietary, licensed under the Google TOS. The free Chromium code on which it is based, however, does not contain any AVC support.
Heard that the next Space Shuttle is supposed to carry several Guernsey cows? It's gonna be the herd shot 'round the world.
