If they figure they can finance this with $1mil, and it looks like they'll probably get around $6mil funding in total, that's $5mil they can put into "free" subscriptions. Not bad. If they set up a donation channel as well, and make the "non-free" subscriptions some sort of matching deal (for each paid subscriber, another free subscription is made available), this could actually work reasonably well.

Plus, if they can make this a web app that'll run on a phone screen, they'll reach a LARGE number of poor people -- poverty often has to do with bad choices as much as lack of access to resources, and in many places now, people below the poverty line have Android phones capable of running this sort of thing.

Anyone with access to seawater and sunshine willing to test this?

I'd like to know who decided that 50 years of human interface science should just be scrapped now that we have new physical input methods.

Sure -- throw out the stuff that isn't needed now that most people have grown up with computers (the entire desktop concept is dated) -- but human beings didn't suddenly morph en masse into Homo Sapiens TouchSocialCloudMultiContext -- we still need to relate to concepts in a physical manner, and key our context off of physical properties, whether real or virtual.

It really reminds me of when everyone started putting virtual knobs on their interfaces in the 90's. Knobs that eventually became sliders in function but stayed knobs in presentation.

Indeed. But Microsoft's in a bit of a pickle. You see, they used to have a static interface that made sense and had the most common items the easiest to access. For the majority of their users who just did basic word processing, the odd mail merge, and a few infographics, this worked great. However, for everyone else, it sucked -- and any time a new feature came along that everyone wanted, it sucked more, as they had to change the entire look and feel, or make that new feature hard to find.

So, they decided to go to a new interface that was capability-centred instead of position-centred. The result was that they could promote new features and the interface would adapt to the user's needs, placing the most commonly used features in the easy-to-get-to locations.

The result of course is that now it's difficult to actually repeat ANY non-standard action as the next time you go to do it, the interface has likely moved/changed since the last time you did whatever you're trying to do... so other than the basic word processing, mail merge and infographics, the ribbon UI sucks -- unless you're doing some very narrow task over and over again, in which case it works fine for that task after you get things set up correctly.

Indeed... most malware can be sent easily via RTF.

Seriously: don't use/accept RTF. It's from the days when security wasn't even an afterthought.

I've never received anything that couldn't be sent in a properly formatted plaintext or MIME/HTML email document, including forms. I'll accept a PDF as well, if it conforms to the 1.3 spec.

Of course, Docx is anything but proprietary, they've made the entire indecipherable morass into a public spec. But most things I see in an OLE document have no right to be there in the first place (spreadsheets embedded in word documents embedded in powerpoint presentations, all for a simple table of non-calculated numbers.... sigh.)

They'll just start hosting the ribbon resources in the cloud, so that you need to be logged into Office 360 in order to actually edit your files. The local app will still work fine as a viewer.

They'll also enable their advertisers to push new features to the ribbon interface so you can always fine those "likely to be missed" features and plugins in your home ribbon.

Well, we all know that 8.3 is a holdover from the DOS days....

Well, considering recently we had a submission on how scientists had discovered new colonies of bacteria living on (and off of) the pacific plastic dump, and how for the first time scientists were seeing this start to form a distinct evolutionary path isolated from the rest of the world, I'd say it's pretty much a given that it's the bacteria.

However, once you get enough buildup of bacteria on the plastic, it would likely sink -- and there's plenty of water to sink into there.

To play devil's advocate, I doubt you're picking up seawater from the grocery store and sitting it in the back window of your car in the sun all day. The ocean doesn't tend to be filtered, and isn't stored in a cool, dark place.

Ask the CIA -- they would probably stamp TOP SECRET on his forehead and mark him as classified if they were allowed. NSA, well, they're a part of the army AND part of national security. You're not dealing with standard trade secrets here, you're dealing with national secrets. Usually they err on the side of caution with those, as we've seen with all the denied/delayed/redacted FOIA requests lately.

He seems like a bright guy and knows his way around political circles, but starting a company that appears to be based on what he did for the government, and charging fees that appear to bank on brand recognition gained while working for the government....

That's like being the head of the IRS and then going into private business as a tax consultant for megacorps and charging similar rates. It's going to raise a few red flags.

In my collection of turn of the century VMs, I've got a similar Deb setup, and it runs just fine in VirtualBox. I've also got YDL running in PearPC, but that's probably further than you want to go.

Exactly. Mod parent up.

There's also the issue of "what constitutes infringement?"

I suppose if someone is intentionally seeding a bunch of stuff to some network and writing the .nfo files that go alongside, that could possibly be argued to be criminal infringement (since their copyright abuse would be against many many claimants).

But what of someone hosting an analysis of a song? Part of a song? Using the preview clips off iTunes as a backing track to a home video? Hosting a song they wrote and recorded themselves on their own website, where they sold distribution rights for a different recording to some studio? The problem here is that interpretation of copyright law doesn't just vary from country to country, but from court to court, and you can even have different rulings from the same judge in the same court, due to the fact that copyright is a social contract codified loosely in civil and federal law.

That said, I think the gist of what the MP said was a good idea; the ability to jail someone for widespread commercial infringement of copyright for profit with no remorse after being warned might merit jail time. But at this point, it's not really the copyright infringement that merits the jail time. Plus, we're entering slippery slope territory here: if they do it for the really bad cases, that leads to lobby groups pushing for it to be applied to "pretty bad" cases due to the effectiveness of doing it for the really bad cases, and so the trip to the splashdown begins.

If we could guarantee a lack of corruption and lazy thinking (letting lobbyists and others do the work for you) in government, this would make sense; otherwise, it needs a social solution for a social issue. Save the courts for issues that directly deprive citizens of their rights. And no, a corporation is not a citizen, and getting paid multiple times for creating something is not a right (that's a contractual issue).

Third: these are accusations; there has been no trial. They're saying after you've been accused x times, you go to jail. I think they missed a few steps.

More of a "Excuse me people of the court, but that IP does not belong to me; it belongs to BT. You should have their board of directors here in court, not me, as they are obviously the ones profiting from this breach of law."