I think we already seeing the initial phases of this. Non-totalitarian societies will adjust and normalize to be more accepting of digressions, and otherwise damaging historic and contemporaneous behavior which will be more transparent for more and more people. What seems like absurd levels of privacy violation today / yesterday, will be taken for granted in the future / present.

To the extent of increased personal hardship from these databases; in non-totalitarian societies its unlikely to result in significant transition towards worse ( or better ) treatment of people outside social and political norms. People outside social norms have been "abused" in small circles for ages; in a larger more "anonymous" society the abuse is built into other layers of the social fabric ( id cards; state oppression etc ); Not to say all circles are created equal; but techno-deterministic dystopianism is a false premise. Technological social changes are bound to the societies in which they take place.

Within "our" global "democratic" "free market" capitalism context the macro implications of concentrated power being able to better micro manage public opinion with powerful tools for life pattern recognition models; may be more problematic then direct loss of privacy abuses that the article outlines. That is to say; all our search for "personal" connections with others may be easier to be mediated. i.e an online video chat "hang out" support group which is moderated by an inquisitive supportive digital agent. That in addition to connecting us to exactly who we needed to talk to and giving us heart felt sense of well being in the short term; is simultaneously creating voids in meaningful existence by commoditizing your values towards particular life style choices, entertaining distractions, and consumption habits that don't enable a sustainable social structure.

Where by every piece of information we look for and every social connection we make is mediated towards these "a-political" life style choices bounding political discourse and participation making it impossible to regulate such abuses enabling increasing concentration of power etc.; there-by creating a vicious cycle in which our autonomy is transformed even more dramatically then in the previous century of mass media consumption.

... But this is far from pre-determined, and these crude statistical models geared toward increased consumption of tomorrow; may in the near future give way to more holistic pictures of who we are with the disposal of much more computational resources and vastly more connected data about our increasing transparent existence. Independently of a slide towards totalitarianism; these databases and cognitive pattern recognition systems; could just as well support connections and social bridging of a cornucopia of personal identities; histories with digressions; and everything in between. If we expand access to build these system with human values we wish to amplify; it could just as well increase "freedom" "autonomy" and sustainable"well being" among the techo-societies participants.

The "game" is defined under terms that are illogical, we should not expect logical behavior. They aim to patent as broadly as possible push the boundaries, shift regulations in their favor. An ecosystem supportive for rapid distributions of disruptive technology may be lost... and society has to spend massive amounts of resources on patent absurdities, but we are living in times of absurd levels of innovation.

In other words If you have to find something positive of this whole mess, it does put a bit of a damper on our march towards singularity.

It remains unclear if the global economies can be aligned to play by these rules for slowing down technological progress, in which case we could see rise of more R&D centers in nation with more favorable systems for intellectual property management. Right now the investment trade offs have not been crossed. But at some point global innovation may transition to lots of smaller non-aligned free platforms of innovation. We can see this in non-aligned open source projects that are not subject to the more absurd patent games since they are not centers of economic power. We can see traditional of highly isolated vertically R&D centers having to reinvent the wheel on many layers of their infrastructure, or work around broad patents. This all helps slow down innovation.

Corporations will transition into organizations consisting almost entirely of lawyers that negotiate the legal implications of distributing something that is a commodity or otherwise freely available. We can see this as an extreme version of what Google is doing with android or what pharmaceutical and gene therapy research centers have become and where they are going ... i.e more lawyers.

Its not a positive trend for innovation..But does damper relative investment into massive R&D projects with shared infrastructure and multiple layers of shared global IP, that is the basis of hyper innovation.

All this "unhealthy activity" may not be that "unhealthy" as it could help push singularity back a few years. Maybe even enable some legal and cultural framework for a structured roll out of the total transformation of everything that singularity will entail. Unnaturally stretching singularity out over the course of a few years instead of ripping apart global economies all at once. This may help avoid some serious problems, like total economic collapse in the "free" automation of "everything", that could leave billions of people without way to sustain their existence.

Really? I don't think graphics have "leveled off". The state of the art real time gaming engine looks pretty different to me from what we see on consoles today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY&hd=1 Sure you can make the "game play is worse or the same as before" argument, but to say there are only marginal improvements in graphics does not seem accurate.

I am surprised at the callus disregard for what mozilla is trying to accomplish. Its like 5 years ago why did they bother with this open standard, royalty free, patent unencumbered html stuff, they should have just shipped a free Microsoft doc "reader" by default, or why bother with javascript standard, when Microsoft had perfectly good active X systems to tie into native windows apis.

Mozilla knows what they doing, yes they may lose market share, but that is the nature of taking a principled decision that many people don't understand. The web will be better by getting people used to the idea that they need to support WebM in addition to H.264. As today smart phones become tomorrows calculators we won't have to pay taxes on the math that mediates contemporary conversations. Thous removing one small barrier to entry for anyone that wants to design or create audio visual communications systems.

Again its not about piracy where you need near 1:1 ratios for seeds to leaches. Its about supplementing http distribution, so its fine if 60% comes from the http it still reduces distribution costs. Its fine if only a few dozen institutions or upload nodes to donate a few mbs here and there, rather than every visitor contributing an equal amount to an upload.

it spawn a separate process that stays open and seeding as long as your computer is on and you don't close the application. It has a small indicator in the lower right of your browser and a system tray icon. If you want to 'turn it off' you can disable uploading which is recommend over complete removal since you can still help reduce server load by using the extension even if you upload nothing.

ah dude... chrome is shipping theora support. If Google is not a big pocket target than what is?

my reading was $10,000 per year per local market service... assuming your internet services hits many thousands of local markets you would hit the maximum royalty for Participation ie millions. This may be an inaccurate reading. Your reading seems logical as well.

typo :( ..meant impending

I think it by definition bait and switch. It is offered for free right now ... once it more widely adopted and all your infrastructure is organized around using it you have to start paying in 2010. Which is not exactly heavily publicized. This may surprise people that already purchased the encoder only to find that because their site is popular they have to pay once again.

The story submit system is kind of confusing the original source link should go to http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html not metavid.org (my contact page)