Comment Silly me... (Score 1) 433
...I thought that that strategy could be wrong because of innocent victims and extra-judicial executions.
So by restricting what people can use their browser for, you think its more free?
Yes. In the same way as restricting what people can take away from other people's houses makes everyone more free.
You can choose not to use DRM content or you can choose not to
You can't choose not to use DRM once it's required to access most content of the Internet thanks to the fact that Mozilla, too, made it possible.
but if the browser doesn't support it, there is no freedom of choice, is there?
This is an injustice that is to be ascribed by the perpetrators of DRM: Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft. Now Mozilla have joined the club of the culprits.
DRM being crackable is not actually that important, what matters is how difficult it is for the average user. You only have to make it slightly tricky or add some slight perceived risk to downloading pirated stuff and they will choose to pay for it instead.
No, skilled users will pirate the contents and serve them to the average users in a form that is even more convenient to consume than the DRM-ridden one.
Refusing to support this part of the standard would have robbed Firefox of more users than they will lose by supporting it.
The EME non-standard cannot be supported by open source platforms. It's not a matter of Mozilla "refusing" to support it, it's mathematically impossible for them to support it in a meaningful way. A EME-enabled site implicitly refuses any user running Firefox on Linux. So it's EME itself that robs Firefox of its users, not Mozilla's decision to support it or not.
The reality is that people who view piracy as some sort of moral duty and right like you do are in the minority, that is why most of the public quite happily go along with more stringent copyright laws being drafted by the politicians they elect.
Even if that were true, it doesn't make those laws any more just. In some places of the world, the vast majority of people believe that gay people should be hanged from a crane in the public square.
Basically you have to pay them money in order to be allowed to do things that are already ethical, perhaps even legal to do. If you already can do these things, then you often have to put up lobbying efforts to make sure that you can continue doing them.
Paying for extortion is unethical and illegal too. Laws punish both the extorter and who omits to denounce.
For example, recall how after Google introduced gmail, California senator Liz Figueroa wanted to ban it.
Presumably she was afraid of the fact that the average Gmail user wouldn''t be aware that Google (and Google's unfaithful employees, and hackers, and the NSA,
In that case, it took some heavy lobbying in order to keep gmail legal.
You mean that Google overrode the people's sovereign will, that they had expressed democratically by electing Liz Figueroa, by corrupting other politicians? If so, it's highly immoral and Google deserves to be punished for this. The government has the monopoly of coercion in modern democracies, and this privilege stems from the fact that it represents the will of the people. Altering this fact is one of the most serious crimes that an entity can stain itself with.
Before gmail they used to suck horribly, the good ones gave you a whopping 10MB of storage
In 2005 my ISP gave me 300 MB of storage which, in a time of 56K modem dialup connections, was plenty. The free offer from the same provider was 100MB, which is still ten times bigger than 10MB.
and each action you took required an entire page reload, making them slow as fuck.
Did your webmail work like that? The one of my ISP looked like MS Outlook and wasn't bad. Why, AJAX was invented by Microsoft for that exact purpose.
when what their user base wanted was yet another rehash of the win 95 desktop layout. The Gnome developers actually tried to do something new in desktop UIs, they actually tried to innovate
Even Windows 8, with all of Microsoft's economical and political prowess behind it, failed, because UI designers decided to drop the excellent "Windows 95 desktop layout" without having a proper replacement for it (Metro solved a different problem). Microsoft's remedies for this situation have all gone in the direction of restoring elements of the Windows 95 desktop layout.
Perhaps so many people want the "Windows 95 desktop layout" not because they dislike change or are irrational beings. Perhaps they want it because it works, and as is the case for most things that work, perhaps its form follows its function, and this could be the reason why most traditional desktop environments tend to appear similar. Most airplanes look like the same, even though aviation is characterized by strong innovation.
And while Apple can readily fix a bug in its own software, at least for users who keep up on patches, "Linux" refers to a broad range of systems and vendors, rather than a single company, and the affected systems include some of the biggest names in the Linux world, like Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu.
And thanks to the LGPL license of GnuTLS, all the users have the possibility to upgrade their systems, independently of whether Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Apple, Microsoft believe that maintaining those systems is still commercially convenient or not. GPLv3 would be better, as it would give the users the warranty of being able to actually install the updated code into their devices, which is important for non-PCs.
Don't like software form Canonical? Don't use it. They're a commercial company, so they have to break even ultimately. I understand if, after listening to everyone, they make their own decision. Their Mir project is all about Ubuntu phones: should that platform be successful, they'll take the merit, should they fail, the Free Software Community will still have Android as their reference platform. Even if Google is a commercial company, too, and compared to them Canonical is Candy Candy.
because they can't just hard code that right into the chip and never let you see it
No, because we would see either the software interfacing with the hard-coded backdoor, or some undocumented hardware means of communication coming out from the chip, and we'd start asking questions.
So if I just embed my code into the processor itself, you won't bitch.
Thats just silly.
Embedding code in (readonly or flash) ROMs is actually preferred from Stallman's point of view, because it allows the hardware to work out-of-the-box when using free software to control that hardware. Binary firmware is problematic for free software operating systems, not because free software enthusiasts have some maniac obsession about not running binaries that they haven't compiled themselves, but because the copyright holders of the firmware binary blobs often attach very restrictive licensing conditions to them, making them very hard or impossible to redistribute.
Now name one that the UN left for the US to hop the bag on for over a decade instead of taking care of business
Then next time Russia or some other country you don't like "takes care of some business" without waiting for the U.N. don't act outraged. Principles can't be bent to one's convenience.
There are other countries that repeatedly defy the United Nations and the U.S. would never invade.
Which is not to say that Saddam Hussein was a nice guy and the U.S. are the empire of evil - I certainly am happier to live under the U.S.' influence rather than Russia's - but let's not paint conflicts of political interests with manicheism.
THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE
