Speaking of ignored petitions, this one was featured on Techdirt a while back (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120521/12463519005/) and while it got over double the required signatures it never got a response. I guess they didn't have a press release/talking points memo handy that quite covered the issue well enough so they just ignored it.
This confuses me as well. Does this mean I'm in the wrong every time I tell somebody that our company has a product or solution for them first instead of telling them that Bob across the street can do it? Last I checked pretty much every company on earth promotes their own products and services above their competitors even if they are not as good, but Google doing this is somehow wrong?
Excellent idea. Because the word torrent is so long and hard to type we need to start using the acronym BPI for Bittorrent Payload Indicator instead. Think of all the time saved by not typing the 4 extra letters!
E. Why are you penalizing the 95% for the 5%? You don’t do this in other areas of discipline at school. Even though you know some students will use their voices or bodies inappropriately in school, you don’t ban everyone from speaking or moving. You know some students may show up drunk to the prom, yet you don’t cancel the prom because of a few rule breakers. Instead, you assume that most students will act appropriately most of the time and then you enforce reasonable expectations and policies for the occasional few that don’t. To use a historical analogy, it’s the difference between DUI-style policies and flat-out Prohibition (which, if you recall, failed miserably). Just as you don’t put entire schools on lockdown every time there’s a fight in the cafeteria, you need to stop penalizing entire student bodies because of statistically-infrequent, worst-case scenarios.
F. You never can promise 100% safety. For instance, you never would promise a parent that her child would never, ever be in a fight at school. So quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology. Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies, and move on.
Seems to me these points extend to well beyond education and should be taught to Congress as well. If they understood that punishing the vast majority for the acts of a few was silly then they would not try to pass new gun regulations every time there is a shooting that makes the national news when 99.999999% of gun owners never do anything wrong with their firearms.
If they understood that 100% safety is impossible they might be less likely to take away our rights and abuse us with the TSA, constitution free zones, etc.
M. ‘Walled garden’ online environments prevent the occurrence of serendipitous learning connections with the outside world.
For some reason that reminds me of this article. I know Serendipity is a major part of how I find and learn about new things online. Few things are as great as finding some random thing you never knew about and wanting to know everything about it.
I believe his point is that if they can't even catch something as minor yet obvious as an expired passport how can we expect them to do anything about something as threatening yet nebulous as terrorism? Its been shown time and again that they are ineffective but the solutions seem to be to get even more intrusive and overbearing without being more effective, mostly just to look like they are doing something to justify their existence.
I think at this point in time we have to accept that violating even more of peoples rights is not effective and that terrorism as a threat is overblown. But between the fact that people fail to understand risk and the government is good at keeping people scared we continue to march in the direction of the US becoming more and more of a police state with no benefits to show from it.
I'm not sure why format shifting would magically be wrong with books but fine with the many ways its been done in the past with audio. The only holdup I know with format shifting is having to get around DRM. This is what makes ripping a MP3 off your CD just fine and dandy but ripping a video file off a DVD or BluRay illegal.
Thankfully there is no DRM on all my old paperbacks.
Very much this. Once you understand how they "license" things this argument falls apart.
See, people don't come to IV and say "that's some awesome tech you have, can we get a license to use it?". Its more like they go out to people who might be doing something that infringes on a patent they hold and say "that's a nice product there, it would be a shame if something happened to it..." and either get people to license patents from them, buy into their patent pool, or they get taken to court (normally through some sort of shell company so their hands stay clean).
Understanding this makes it impossible to look at IV in a good light. They are truly a tollbooth on innovation.
Uh, but was he really in violation of anything? They dropped the trumped up immigration fraud charges that they were only using to try to strongarm him into becoming some sort of informant. Seems to me he did nothing wrong at all.
In my head I kinda meant the monetizing or protecting patents bit more in a general sense than just this Google/Motorola and Apple case. I know that is not what Google is going for here.
I still think that no matter what the ITC injunctions are a low blow. Even the ITC is starting to realize that these injunctions are really anti-consumer actions by the companies involved and often the wrong way to deal with this whole mess.
Also, as proved by HTC and Samsung, ITC injunctions tend to often be trivial to work around. A little tweak to a feature and you can sell your device again, the only people harmed are consumers who have to deal with reduced functionality. This is of course much harder if you can stick them with a hardware patent instead of a software one.
The only way I see to end this is to manage to make something giant stick that will hit Apple for tens of billions of dollars so they are either bankrupted or forced into a huge cross-licensing agreement that makes all these lawsuits impossible. Sadly I''m not sure either one is very likely.
I still think the proper way to do this and not look evil would be to leave the ITC out of it and either try to hit Apple's pocketbook or even better come up with some kind of cross licensing agreement with Apple, Google, Motorola, and other smartphone manufacturers so Apple has to stop their nonsense.
I understand that "everyone else is doing it" but I think they could have taken the high road on this and left the ITC and their injunctions out of this. They may be trying to hit Apple hard and to force a settlement but Apple has previously shown no interest in such a thing so I don't think they are any more likely to settle this time.
This bugs me. I don't really like seeing Google getting involved in the whole patents war bit but the part that REALLY bothers me is that they are going the ITC route.
I can understand wanting to monetize the patents they have and pushing back at Apple but really trying to get a injunction like this only hurts consumers. It's totally going against the whole "do no evil" motto.
If you feel you were harmed by somebody stealing your patented ideas then take it out on the company. Hell, letting them sell more iDevices in the mean time could just mean a bigger reward for you if you win.
Actually, both Apple and Amazon sell nice versions with few restrictions if any. So your claim is moot. You can now start paying for things again through them instead of holding up this long false argument.
Install the Amazon Unbox Video Player to download movies and TV shows to your PC. Then you can watch your videos on the go--whether you're online or not."
So in other words I have to use either their crappy streaming service or their crappy video player to watch a movie. Plus it only works on Windows so Linux, Android and Mac are out in the cold. How on earth can you actually say that right there is "few restrictions"?
Until I can download a DRM free copy that will work in any media player on any OS I want then there is no reason I should give them my money. I'm not paying for a crippled product.
Android Police also has an excellent writeup on exactly how much China and the inability of anyone there to legally buy things in the Play Store contribute to piracy statistics on Android.
Basically China accounts for 1/3 of all Android users and they cannot even buy apps OR use in app payment systems.
Oh, also there is more info in here from other developers who find that piracy rates are higher on iOS. Oops.
Re:
If you have HTTPS Everywhere then it does not matter that somebody uses a HTTP link so send you there, you will still get the HTTPS version.
Granted it would be nice if everyone transitioned to using HTTPS by default but at least you can take advantage of it where it exists by yourself.
Re:
Huh, this was supposed to be in reply to Gazaro above.
(untitled comment)
Funny, I brought this up just yesterday when we were talking about the uselessness of the administrations We the People petitions.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-a rticles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ
This one got over double the required signatures over half a year ago and yet there has been no response.
There really is no reason that publicly funded researched should not be accessible to the general public.
(untitled comment)
Speaking of ignored petitions, this one was featured on Techdirt a while back (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120521/12463519005/) and while it got over double the required signatures it never got a response. I guess they didn't have a press release/talking points memo handy that quite covered the issue well enough so they just ignored it.
Re: What!!!
This confuses me as well. Does this mean I'm in the wrong every time I tell somebody that our company has a product or solution for them first instead of telling them that Bob across the street can do it? Last I checked pretty much every company on earth promotes their own products and services above their competitors even if they are not as good, but Google doing this is somehow wrong?
Re:
Excellent idea. Because the word torrent is so long and hard to type we need to start using the acronym BPI for Bittorrent Payload Indicator instead. Think of all the time saved by not typing the 4 extra letters!
BPI helps improve pirates lives again.
(untitled comment)
Seems to me these points extend to well beyond education and should be taught to Congress as well. If they understood that punishing the vast majority for the acts of a few was silly then they would not try to pass new gun regulations every time there is a shooting that makes the national news when 99.999999% of gun owners never do anything wrong with their firearms.
If they understood that 100% safety is impossible they might be less likely to take away our rights and abuse us with the TSA, constitution free zones, etc.
For some reason that reminds me of this article. I know Serendipity is a major part of how I find and learn about new things online. Few things are as great as finding some random thing you never knew about and wanting to know everything about it.
Re: Re: Security as tight as a sieve...
I believe his point is that if they can't even catch something as minor yet obvious as an expired passport how can we expect them to do anything about something as threatening yet nebulous as terrorism? Its been shown time and again that they are ineffective but the solutions seem to be to get even more intrusive and overbearing without being more effective, mostly just to look like they are doing something to justify their existence.
I think at this point in time we have to accept that violating even more of peoples rights is not effective and that terrorism as a threat is overblown. But between the fact that people fail to understand risk and the government is good at keeping people scared we continue to march in the direction of the US becoming more and more of a police state with no benefits to show from it.
Re: Re: Re:
I'm not sure why format shifting would magically be wrong with books but fine with the many ways its been done in the past with audio. The only holdup I know with format shifting is having to get around DRM. This is what makes ripping a MP3 off your CD just fine and dandy but ripping a video file off a DVD or BluRay illegal.
Thankfully there is no DRM on all my old paperbacks.
Re: Re:
Very much this. Once you understand how they "license" things this argument falls apart.
See, people don't come to IV and say "that's some awesome tech you have, can we get a license to use it?". Its more like they go out to people who might be doing something that infringes on a patent they hold and say "that's a nice product there, it would be a shame if something happened to it..." and either get people to license patents from them, buy into their patent pool, or they get taken to court (normally through some sort of shell company so their hands stay clean).
Understanding this makes it impossible to look at IV in a good light. They are truly a tollbooth on innovation.
Re: Re:
Uh, but was he really in violation of anything? They dropped the trumped up immigration fraud charges that they were only using to try to strongarm him into becoming some sort of informant. Seems to me he did nothing wrong at all.
Re: Re:
In my head I kinda meant the monetizing or protecting patents bit more in a general sense than just this Google/Motorola and Apple case. I know that is not what Google is going for here.
I still think that no matter what the ITC injunctions are a low blow. Even the ITC is starting to realize that these injunctions are really anti-consumer actions by the companies involved and often the wrong way to deal with this whole mess.
Also, as proved by HTC and Samsung, ITC injunctions tend to often be trivial to work around. A little tweak to a feature and you can sell your device again, the only people harmed are consumers who have to deal with reduced functionality. This is of course much harder if you can stick them with a hardware patent instead of a software one.
The only way I see to end this is to manage to make something giant stick that will hit Apple for tens of billions of dollars so they are either bankrupted or forced into a huge cross-licensing agreement that makes all these lawsuits impossible. Sadly I''m not sure either one is very likely.
Re: Re:
I still think the proper way to do this and not look evil would be to leave the ITC out of it and either try to hit Apple's pocketbook or even better come up with some kind of cross licensing agreement with Apple, Google, Motorola, and other smartphone manufacturers so Apple has to stop their nonsense.
I understand that "everyone else is doing it" but I think they could have taken the high road on this and left the ITC and their injunctions out of this. They may be trying to hit Apple hard and to force a settlement but Apple has previously shown no interest in such a thing so I don't think they are any more likely to settle this time.
(untitled comment)
This bugs me. I don't really like seeing Google getting involved in the whole patents war bit but the part that REALLY bothers me is that they are going the ITC route.
I can understand wanting to monetize the patents they have and pushing back at Apple but really trying to get a injunction like this only hurts consumers. It's totally going against the whole "do no evil" motto.
If you feel you were harmed by somebody stealing your patented ideas then take it out on the company. Hell, letting them sell more iDevices in the mean time could just mean a bigger reward for you if you win.
Re: Re: Re:
Hey, it could have been worse. They could have all ended up dead from eating "bad food" or their plane could have "crashed".
Re: Re: Re:
Well that's what you get for giving an award to somebody for what they say they are going to do instead of what they have actually done.
Re: Re: Licensed...
Yeah, try again.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/download/ref=atv_sr_download2
So in other words I have to use either their crappy streaming service or their crappy video player to watch a movie. Plus it only works on Windows so Linux, Android and Mac are out in the cold. How on earth can you actually say that right there is "few restrictions"?
Until I can download a DRM free copy that will work in any media player on any OS I want then there is no reason I should give them my money. I'm not paying for a crippled product.
Re: Re: its time
But I want to go to Mars some day, don't ruin it before I can get there.
Maybe we can send them to Venus instead?
Re:
That sounds like something I could really use. You never know when rampaging elephants might come out of nowhere and trample you.
Would you by chance take tiger repellent for trade?
Re: Re:
Android Police also has an excellent writeup on exactly how much China and the inability of anyone there to legally buy things in the Play Store contribute to piracy statistics on Android.
Basically China accounts for 1/3 of all Android users and they cannot even buy apps OR use in app payment systems.
Oh, also there is more info in here from other developers who find that piracy rates are higher on iOS. Oops.
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/07/31/editorial-just-how-bad-is-app-piracy-on-android-any ways-hint-were-asking-the-wrong-question/