People love certain types of change. They love cool new features.

I fear you're missing the actual driver. People love getting into the same crap that everyone else is getting into, and it barely matters what it is. The "cool new features" are just fig-leafs they use to justify being trendy crowd followers.

I have two favorite examples: I grew up during what now appears to be a fad for "high fidelity" audio equipment, and people competed for large speakers, loud amps, and "clean" sound. After a number of odd flips and flops, everyone switched to competing to see how many mp3s you could squeeze into a gadget (and never mind what they actually sound like). Many households no longer have anything like a half-way decent sound system at all, and hanging around the house you probably listen to music on whatever speakers came with your TV (if you don't get by with whatever came with your laptop). So: what happened to "HiFi"? Did everyone get into HiFi because of what it could do, or just because it was The Latest?

Second example is more recent, which means it'll get a lot of pushback from slashdot quibblers: digital cameras. Remember when everyone wanted more and more megapixels? And then they all switched to crappy cellphone cameras, didn't they? So did they care about image quality, or could it be that was just The Latest?

(Responses I expect: "But I have a MegazillaPixoid for some purposes, and the cellphone camera for others." But the MegazillaPixoid has been sitting at home gathering dust for a year, and you aren't even thinking about upgrading it.)

Where things get interesting though, is even once you know all this, once you learn to recognize yet another deranged fad, you still need to keep half an eye on the fad, because economies of scale and competitve pressures are driving the evolution of some technology that might actually have some utility to something you really do care about -- e.g. in my case I suspect I've got multi-core ARM processor servers in my future, even though I couldn't care less about those smart phones everyone is stupified by.

I aleady feel suicidal - reading this thread for much longer is not a good thing so ill stop here and try thinking happy thoughts. N...

I though Freeman Dyson was a character out of Half Life...

Nationalized healthcare solves this problem. For-profit corporations have no business in health insurance.

What a trusting soul. Such mystical faith in the State. Psssst ... the State has no power to overturn economic realities. Nationalized healthcare may indeed be morally and practically the best solution to health care, but it can't take a gigantic burden off everybody and make it magically go away. If you think corporate profits are the only reason, or even the major factor in the exorbitant expense of health care, you are naive. It's expensive because it takes vast resources to do the job.

More like 50-75 years ago. 30 years ago was 1983; almost every car had at least front disc brakes and nobody had been using bias ply tires for a long time.

That said, constantly cruising all the way up to a green traffic light at the full posted limit (often 40 mph) is just begging for trouble. Better to be coasting, slowed at least somewhat, with the foot 1/4" above the brake. Even a properly set yellow light gives you BARELY enough time to stop in perfect conditions if you hit the brake the instant it turns yellow. I know the guys behind you will HATE you for doing this and a certain percentage of them will tailgate you one inch from your bumper, but if worst comes to worst, its a hell of a lot better to get hit in the back without any legal fault on your part by a dangerous asshole than to get tee-boned and be automatically at fault.

Which, oddly enough, was my entire point ... the Irish judge can make judgements about what they have to do on the servers located in Ireland. And all of those servers not in Ireland are, unsurprisingly, not under the jurisdiction of an Irish court.

Why do you seem to believe that I believe all Google servers are in Ireland? Because I sure as hell never suggested that.

I think you should read more than the subject before commenting and claiming someone else is ignorant

I did read it. And while he can legally put pressure on Google et al to remove it in Ireland, if someone has put it on any server outside of Ireland (which by now I'm sure they have out of sheer spite), then there is nothing at all this judge will be able to do about that.

Trying to take stuff down from the internet tends to be a losing battle, because people then immediately start sharing copies of it.

Google threatening to relocate its business to a friendlier European state is probably enough to make Irish politicians crap themselves and change the law to suit Google.

Except Google uses Ireland as a tax haven, so first they'd need to find another jurisdiction in which it would be beneficial for them. And I'm not sure they'll easily find one.

Methinks the judge may have little understanding of both how the internet works, and what his jurisdiction actually is.

If a judge in Ireland believes he somehow has the authority (let alone the technical ability) to order this, he's grossly mis-informed.

He can make rulings on what happens in Ireland, but for the rest of the world ... well, Iran can make all of the demands they want about taking stuff off the internet too, but nobody will care either.

This basically demonstrates he doesn't understand either the internet, or the application of law as it pertains to the rest of the world.

O'm not sure what that means for "my rights online"

It means that we have yet another shining example of the last bastion of justice in a 1st-world legal system demonstrating their complete incompetence when it comes to making decisions about the most powerful tool ever devised by humans.

Not only does it show an outright scary lack of understanding of how the internet works (in the organizational sense), but it also proves him as so out of touch with the reality of the modern world that he doesn't even recognize the sort of memes we pretty much take for granted - In this case, the "Streisand effect".


/ I've got my copy, and you have no jurisdiction over me, Mr. Peart. Your move.

If it wasn't for the graft and greed or incompetence of the employees of the patent office, they never would have.

And since the US has set themselves up to be an economy highly dependent on patents and copyright, I seriously doubt you'll see these patents repealed.

The people lobbying for expanded IP rights don't want patents lessened, and they're not going to allow the politicians to take away their meal ticket.

When Microsoft makes more revenue from Android licenses (for patents I'm not convinced they've ever disclosed) than they do on their own OS, nobody is going to allow patents to stop being so widespread.

At this point, all of the "too big to fail" companies are so dependent on this as to make it inseparable from their core business.

It's always nice to have someone follow and translate the legalese for the rest of us.

Here's to another 10 years!

So?

What say you?

Lay on, Macduff, And damned be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!"

Not sure why the default response to "I don't give a shit about YouTube" is always to give me links to YouTube.

It's like saying I don't eat meat and you suggesting chicken.

You think I'm going to install Flash so I can find out the wonder of the two links you provided? Thanks, but no -- I genuinely don't care about internet videos, and I genuinely despise Flash.