None of this is really new, just a new location. In the 19th Century in England newspapers serialized stories and then suddenly the story would stop, left hanging as the publisher and author got around to publishing the book or short story.
This was, in large measure, the origin of what the Brit's called penny dreadfuls -- largely horror stories or social commentary. Charles Dickens started out this way.
As the technology changed we rediscover what came before and claim it for ourselves as if it's new. Perhaps it is to China but elsewhere it's on it's second time around the track. If so-called intellectual property laws keep hardening we'll never have the opportunity have a rebirth in literary and other forms of story telling culture we had in the middle and late 19th Century. The Chinese, who seem less worried about the remote possibilities of so-called piracy, will have one of their own. Like so many things regarding China these days we'll be left on the sidelines trying to figure out what happened.
What Anon C is referring to is the concept in the telecom industry of "private line". This is loosely regulated because it can be point to point to the business in question. Where it enters a central office at all it simply passes through it from address A to address B without touching switching or Internet hubs. It can be voice or data.
As to Anon C's abuse of the acronym NOC (Network Operations Centre) for telcos a NOC is a place where constant oversight of the switched network and associated network takes place. The only time it touches DSL is at the last Central Office where the DSL equipment is going to the last mile and they only react to alarms from the equipment.
Equivalents for the actual Internet from the telco's hub exist but they're smaller monitoring stations usually physically close to the hub. They react to failure of, say, DNS servers (always redundant), and reroute or repair on the spot.
For example Centennial Pier in Vancouver may have a data private line from the actual pier itself to the pier owner/operator's office where loading and unloading of ships is monitored, choke points identified and ships scheduled with the Port of Vancouver and crane problems are sent to those charged with repair and maintenance of those.
It's possible to recreate this on the Internet with the use of server and DNS "tricks" which are allowed for in the specifications. This is often done for the military, coast guard and other services where speed and security are of a highest order.
But no one is sending or receiving data at a high rate all the time even in "private line" situations. I can't think of a single situation where one of those configurations would ever be "saturated" in the sense that all the throughput is being taken up all the time.
Incidentally, bandwidth is a radio term that has no meaning when you're taking end to end digital transmission even on twisted pair. In the days of analog modems in the voice band it had a slight meaning but for DSL or fibre it's meaningless.
There's also the fact that provisioning takes into account peak demand periods, for example the Christmas shopping season as well as heavy data and voice spikes the occur on or around Mother's Day (that's by far the busiest voice traffic day and data traffic is rapidly catching up for that day).
All of which means that there's substantial capacity for both voice and data traffic that's idle at any given moment.
Which also refutes Anon C's argument that it's an equipment problem in switching centres that's a major part of the problem.
Cable, I'll admit, is a different beast because of the shared nature of coax as opposed to the private nature of twisted pair.
Still, it goes back to my main argument that what Bell, Shaw and Rogers want subsidized is the build out from central offices to the side of the house, aka, the last mile. That Bell, Shaw and Rogers haven't seen fit to invest in this, as private companies, isn't my problem as a customer, it's entirely theirs and their shareholders. (I am one, by the way.)
On the Internet certain data is dropped or rerouted regularly without notice by end users due to it's design. TCP/IP does this as does the much older PCM which has carried voice and data across the switched network for 60+ years now with no noticeable degradation at the receiving end.
Your Tweet to 911 might be delayed or disassembled and reassembled as will be your voice or cell call. All without notice.
Bell, TELUS, SaskTel, Manitoba Tel have had areas dedicated to that sort of equipment for decades and started to expand that space and equipment some years ago.
Each of these carriers also operate Internet centres and , The largest belonging to Bell and TELUS. In short they operate hubs, fail safe roll over, duplication and so on. No one forced them to do this they did it on their own. Also both TELUS and Bell have physical capacity dedicated to these server operations of two to three times (or more) the current capacity required and, in case you hadn't noticed, each discrete piece of gear is getting smaller, not larger.
The main point is that they're used to it. They've built and continue to build the data centres needed to support the hub operations, increased server capacity, storage, built out routers as necessary, proxies, and just about everything else you can think of. Each discrete piece of gear connected by fibre (not copper) which makes it digital end to end with effective insertion loss of zero and signal attenuation of zero.
Incidentally each discrete piece of hardware is hot swappable heavily reducing maintenance outage time.
So once again we're dealing with throughput, not bandwidth. There is, by design and Internet standards, plenty of excess capacity to deal with traffic bursts or sustained increases such as the Vancouver Olympics.
The largest companies have private "line" build out dedicated to just them which include governments, the military, health care, the movie and tv production industries, air and sea ports (and traffic control), coast guard, BC Ferries,St Laurence Seaway, universities, power companies etc. Most of which have requirements of zero downtime.
The residential and small business traffic is tiny, though growing, compared with these users.
Which makes your, and Bell's claims, that they can't possibly be ready for or handle the increased residential traffic so much bunkum.
Nor is this traffic considered "local network", that's reserved for internal use.
"Also, they tend to average out the cost of maintenance (sp) over a year and apply that to your monthly bill, otherwise you WOULD see a seasonal increase."
No you wouldn't. Maintenance costs per mile of twisted pair are a fraction of a penny a year while the cables placed on poles or underground are reckoned to have a life expectancy of something like 20 years before replacement. Winter weather doesn't increase that, And, as telcos operate their network at a fixed voltage of 48V DC regardless of traffic there's no cold spike as there is for power companies who need to supply more of their product in winter for increased HVAC and lighting.
Fibre cable is rated for life expectancy of between 30 and 50 years mounted aerial or below grade.
That doesn't say there's no maintenance costs for outside plant but it's far lower than you seem to think it is.
If you believe for a single moment that Bell is losing money as things stand you're seriously mistaken.
As I've pointed out, though, Bell has to make a huge, delayed investment in their plant to get things up to date. Mostly outside plant. And that is what they want Canadians to subsidize after ignoring that issue for so long while they diddled around with media "convergence" before they figured out it was a costly mistake.
Unless you have access to internal sales plans you have no idea what Bell actually charges medium and larger customers for access to the Internet or other services. So, I have to assume that you're looking at published rates for residential and small business use.
You are correct that there's no regulatory requirement to provide Internet service but there is one to provide for dial tone. There's no need for a second pair to provide "dark" service on twisted pair as DSL and voice are split at the demarkation point or inside. So if you're envisioning the "dry line" as a second pair you're simply wrong.
Incidentally fibre as no bandwidth as it's all digital light which, in and of itself, has no bandwidth. Speed is determined by the equipment in the central office including multiplexers which control throughput but not bandwidth as there's no bandwidth to control.
Let's look at Bell Canada, shall we, in marked contrast to say, TELUS. Not to say that TELUS is going to come out of this lily white but there are differences.
Bell went nuts during the "convergence" craze of the dot com era and shortly after. It got newspapers, notable the Grunt and Flail, CTV network, radio stations and a whack of other things.
Anything you'll note but investment in their plant, inside and out.
TELUS meanwhile, stuck to it's knitting as a telecom and invested in plant, inside and out, tested out things like video over IP and eventually came up with an offering that works over twisted pair. For those in areas such as mine, small town semi rural, where the plant's not in great shape, there's an option with satellite.
TELUS also built out its DSL system in a way where it's the incumbent it's far ahead of Bell where it's the incumbent.
Now, back to Bell, they lost their shirt with "convergence", fell behind in investment in plant and is now looking for the CRTC to subsidize a build out they should have been doing 5 or 10 years ago. (The same applies to the cable companies in Canada who are still addicted to copper.)
The sell the myth of bandwidth hogs to the CRTC, along with the two big cable carriers and the CRTC comes out with this so called metered structure.
TELUS, meanwhile, sat this whole thing out. Sure they're cheering the ruling cause they can charge more for less service like the other guys. In the meanwhile they're rolling fibre to the house in smaller, semi rural and rural places.
I can't see where you're going with the Cabinet telling the CRTC to withdraw this. The higher cost solution to customers, in the long run, is the CRTC's decision which gives the three carriers who pushed this and removed the competitive pressure to move from copper to fibre. So, like cellular, we get to remain the highest cost jurisdiction in the developed world with the worst service (tied with the USA) and rank somewhere like 45th globally just better than Mauritania and Ghana.
And no, the CRTC doesn't understand what it's regulating here. Nor, it seems do you. Bandwidth doesn't cause choking in teleco networks because the choke point is throughput not bandwidth. Bell, Shaw and Rogers networks have really ugly throughput. No wonder they want never ending, CRTC, imposed caps.
At some point, if a system is broken, there comes a time when the break in the system causes a collapse.
Consider the number of times this site and others have pointed out that some patents never should have been awarded due to prior art and a number of other factors overlooked or ignored by the patent examiner.
None of this is fantasy but the way that patents can be overturned is time consuming, expensive, labour intensive and seems not to rest on any evidenciary rules at all.
What we are witnessing is a near explosion of software patents being granted for all kinds of thing including algorithms that have long existed and programs already in existence by a minor rephrasing of the purpose of the patent. Keep in mind that one is not supposed to be able to patent algorithms or other mathematical equations which pretty much sums up software any more that one is not supposed to be able to patent anything occurring in nature. None of these things seems to stop an examiner from saying no.
I'm calmly waiting for the day, which I suspect will be soon, when someone discovers that the same thing has been granted two or more patents under different names and for different "purposes". When the patent owners start to go after each other is the day the entire system starts to fall in on itself because it's been built on so much sand.
Allowing the system and the good it does, and there is some once you get by some of the more ridiculous things surrounding patent law in the USA which has affected patent law elsewhere. Even to the point of so called "examiners" stamping damn near every patent application that wanders by.
Now let's stop of a moment and consider that if the BASIC language had been patented that Microsoft would probably not exist. Remember, it's first product was BASIC for the Altair computer back in the mid 70s. Had patents existed that likely would have stopped MS from producing their BASIC Interpreter cassette.
I can think of a few situations where most computer languages existing today wouldn't exist if the current patent regime had existed other than, perhaps, COBOL. So we'd all be left hacking away at Assembler.
The microcomputer itself may not exist and certainly not on the scale and price it does now becaue I can see just about every peripheral and connector being patented and fiercly defended.
Admittedly it's worst case but think a moment and it's not hard to envision.
Just imagine! No Internet porn and still stuck with Playboy and Penthouse 1960s style complete with vaseline slathered all over the lens!!!!
The current patent system isn't just problematic its so badly flawed that unless it's changed I can see it collapsing on itself far sooner rather than later. And with it whatever good it was originally intended to bring.
Copyright is rapidly heading that way too, for different reasons that I'm not going to go into here because that's off topic (take note trolls!).
IF Ubisoft is, in fact, challenging the crackers I strongly suspect a few black hats out there are at work as we post here cracking the DRM.
Let's not forget that Ubisoft has become a target of crackers because they up the stakes by saying silly things like "you can't break this" which gets followed up by a crack in short order.
Between the company and the crackers this has become something of a silly game or, if you like, like the Generals in WW1 who felt that "if I could only throw more soldiers into this meat grinder I'd win the battle".
I suspect this will be cracked a lot sooner than most people seem to think simply due to the player and after it is then the "pirates" will get into the act.
Oh, and Ubisoft made themselves a target many, many years ago by releasing crappy, expensive games with early forms of DRM and being incredibly smug about it all.
On the topic of the content of the game, I'd want to know about the emotional stability of someone wanting a game built around a man who used to hang his children out of hotel room windows.
When I was a kid, so many years ago, I was constantly reminded that we (Canadians) and Americans were different from those folks behind the Iron Curtain because we weren't constantly spying on each other and living in total paranoia.
So we were free, had liberties and rights those people didn't. Perhaps a bit overstated even for the 1950s but essentially true.
And now we're being asked to be government informants while standing in line to pay for shoddy goods in the world's largest retailer. (BTW, those folks behind the Iron Curtain had shoddy goods, too, when they could get them at all.)
Do you suppose this was what Eisnehower was warning about when he left office warning about things like the Military-Industrial comples and other dangers?
Hate to mention this but Putin and Russian President Medvedev have commented on all of this and they seem to be not in the least disturbed by it.
There really isn't anything surprising in what WikiLeaks has other than it's the first time the words themselves have come to light, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself.
Fer goodness sake, most of this stuff is diplomatic cables full of observations, "analysis" and opinion (read gossip) that flies around the planet every day of the week to every capital on earth that just about every other capital on earth pretty much already knows about or has figured out on their own.
And who knows. If the Russians are worried maybe they're behind the DDOS attacks on WikiLeaks though, at the moment, that would be a serious overreaction. Maybe a shot across the bow.
Nor am I surprised that the Russian internal security folks are sniffing around to see if there's some disgrunted Private in the Russian Army with access to mid and low level classified documents, which WikiLeak's releases certainly are, who might spill the beans just like what happened in the USA.
I can't imagine any country not looking around for that right now.
I don't know what's worse, the media reaction to this as if it's an intelligence Pearl Harbour (it isn't), the political reaction that's almost as bad or the grandstanding of Joe Lieberman.
Why is it that every time I read about things like this I'm reminded of the story of the boy running around screaming that "the sky is falling! the sky is falling!".
Do you have the slightest evidence to back that up? Other that politicians caught with their trousers down and embarrassed who fall back on the first thing that comes to mind.
Most of the stuff released so far is the diplomatic equivalent of gossip. Useful stuff but not the sort of thing people get killed over Highly embarrassing until you understand that every government the world over does this sort of thing on a daily basis.
Even less embarrassing when you come to realize there aren't many, if any secrets here and even less in the way of things everyone didn't know already such as the Afgan government is corrupt from top to bottom and that the Pakistani military makes an unreliable ally at best and that Canada and Canadians as a whole have something of an inbred inferiority complex viz the USA and Europe and even Australia fer goodness sake!!! :-)
You may argue that the release of this information harms US diplomatic efforts around the world and, to one extent of another you'd be correct. Then again, I'd argue that it doesn't damage things as much as some people seem to think as they look for punishment and worse of Wikileaks.
The reality is that someone on the inside, that is to say American officials, have been leaking this stuff to Wikileaks and who knows where else with Wikileaks down on the bottom of the list. To be cynical the media pays more for a good leak, don't you know. Then again, having your leak mixed in with hundreds of others is a hell of a good way to stay in a position to be able to leak other communications if that's what this person wants to do.
For all of the fuss and furor doesn't it strike anyone as curious that, for example, the Canadian government knew which documents were about to be leaked before they hit Wikileaks? What I'm saying, to those who don't get it, is that everyone affected seemed to know about what would be up on the site before it got there.
That makes it extremely unlikely that Wikileaks is the only place getting this information and others are acting on it sooner rather than Wikileaks is.
Also keep in mind that government secrets, any government's secrets, are fleeting at best so I'm not all that convinced that anything is actually compromised here.
If the United States government and others, including the bunch of semi-competent lots we Canadians suffer with, want to get angry then that anger is better targeted at those doing the leaking and the seemingly easy route(s) they have to get those leaks out.
Of course that would be hard to do and it deflects attention from that problem to have a convenient scapegoat like Wikileaks to whips for governments to raise all holy hell about that rather than fix the problem.
Obviously, then, you would approve of an amicus brief that took EMI's position from, say, Sony.
That is as partisan as you accuse the EFF of taking. As you state the brief is evidence/testimony so EMI would have the full right to call the principals of the EFF and and the others to testify in open court to their position and punch them full of holes if they can. That they are declining to suggests much.
Nor, by the way, is the court bound to make a ruling in favour of summary judgment if it feels there is enough still in play in the action to move to trail.
If the court has changed the ground rules in defiance of past practise and precedence then EMI has a fairly easy appeal on its hands, don't you think?
While such motions are pretty much routine still doesn't change the impression the EMI is concerned that its case really isn't all that strong.
On the post: E-Publishing The Chinese Way: Very Fast And Very Cheap
This was, in large measure, the origin of what the Brit's called penny dreadfuls -- largely horror stories or social commentary. Charles Dickens started out this way.
As the technology changed we rediscover what came before and claim it for ourselves as if it's new. Perhaps it is to China but elsewhere it's on it's second time around the track. If so-called intellectual property laws keep hardening we'll never have the opportunity have a rebirth in literary and other forms of story telling culture we had in the middle and late 19th Century. The Chinese, who seem less worried about the remote possibilities of so-called piracy, will have one of their own. Like so many things regarding China these days we'll be left on the sidelines trying to figure out what happened.
On the post: Finns And Norwegians Argue Over Who Owns The Northern Lights
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Canadian Broadband Regulators Annoyed That People Are Pointing Out They Don't Understand What They're Regulating
Re: Re: Re: Re:
As to Anon C's abuse of the acronym NOC (Network Operations Centre) for telcos a NOC is a place where constant oversight of the switched network and associated network takes place. The only time it touches DSL is at the last Central Office where the DSL equipment is going to the last mile and they only react to alarms from the equipment.
Equivalents for the actual Internet from the telco's hub exist but they're smaller monitoring stations usually physically close to the hub. They react to failure of, say, DNS servers (always redundant), and reroute or repair on the spot.
For example Centennial Pier in Vancouver may have a data private line from the actual pier itself to the pier owner/operator's office where loading and unloading of ships is monitored, choke points identified and ships scheduled with the Port of Vancouver and crane problems are sent to those charged with repair and maintenance of those.
It's possible to recreate this on the Internet with the use of server and DNS "tricks" which are allowed for in the specifications. This is often done for the military, coast guard and other services where speed and security are of a highest order.
But no one is sending or receiving data at a high rate all the time even in "private line" situations. I can't think of a single situation where one of those configurations would ever be "saturated" in the sense that all the throughput is being taken up all the time.
Incidentally, bandwidth is a radio term that has no meaning when you're taking end to end digital transmission even on twisted pair. In the days of analog modems in the voice band it had a slight meaning but for DSL or fibre it's meaningless.
On the post: Canadian Broadband Regulators Annoyed That People Are Pointing Out They Don't Understand What They're Regulating
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
All of which means that there's substantial capacity for both voice and data traffic that's idle at any given moment.
Which also refutes Anon C's argument that it's an equipment problem in switching centres that's a major part of the problem.
Cable, I'll admit, is a different beast because of the shared nature of coax as opposed to the private nature of twisted pair.
Still, it goes back to my main argument that what Bell, Shaw and Rogers want subsidized is the build out from central offices to the side of the house, aka, the last mile. That Bell, Shaw and Rogers haven't seen fit to invest in this, as private companies, isn't my problem as a customer, it's entirely theirs and their shareholders. (I am one, by the way.)
On the Internet certain data is dropped or rerouted regularly without notice by end users due to it's design. TCP/IP does this as does the much older PCM which has carried voice and data across the switched network for 60+ years now with no noticeable degradation at the receiving end.
Your Tweet to 911 might be delayed or disassembled and reassembled as will be your voice or cell call. All without notice.
So we're back to the last mile again.
On the post: Canadian Broadband Regulators Annoyed That People Are Pointing Out They Don't Understand What They're Regulating
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Reality Check
Each of these carriers also operate Internet centres and , The largest belonging to Bell and TELUS. In short they operate hubs, fail safe roll over, duplication and so on. No one forced them to do this they did it on their own. Also both TELUS and Bell have physical capacity dedicated to these server operations of two to three times (or more) the current capacity required and, in case you hadn't noticed, each discrete piece of gear is getting smaller, not larger.
The main point is that they're used to it. They've built and continue to build the data centres needed to support the hub operations, increased server capacity, storage, built out routers as necessary, proxies, and just about everything else you can think of. Each discrete piece of gear connected by fibre (not copper) which makes it digital end to end with effective insertion loss of zero and signal attenuation of zero.
Incidentally each discrete piece of hardware is hot swappable heavily reducing maintenance outage time.
So once again we're dealing with throughput, not bandwidth. There is, by design and Internet standards, plenty of excess capacity to deal with traffic bursts or sustained increases such as the Vancouver Olympics.
The largest companies have private "line" build out dedicated to just them which include governments, the military, health care, the movie and tv production industries, air and sea ports (and traffic control), coast guard, BC Ferries,St Laurence Seaway, universities, power companies etc. Most of which have requirements of zero downtime.
The residential and small business traffic is tiny, though growing, compared with these users.
Which makes your, and Bell's claims, that they can't possibly be ready for or handle the increased residential traffic so much bunkum.
Nor is this traffic considered "local network", that's reserved for internal use.
On the post: Canadian Broadband Regulators Annoyed That People Are Pointing Out They Don't Understand What They're Regulating
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No you wouldn't. Maintenance costs per mile of twisted pair are a fraction of a penny a year while the cables placed on poles or underground are reckoned to have a life expectancy of something like 20 years before replacement. Winter weather doesn't increase that, And, as telcos operate their network at a fixed voltage of 48V DC regardless of traffic there's no cold spike as there is for power companies who need to supply more of their product in winter for increased HVAC and lighting.
Fibre cable is rated for life expectancy of between 30 and 50 years mounted aerial or below grade.
That doesn't say there's no maintenance costs for outside plant but it's far lower than you seem to think it is.
What's expensive is build out.
On the post: Canadian Broadband Regulators Annoyed That People Are Pointing Out They Don't Understand What They're Regulating
Re: Re: Re:
As I've pointed out, though, Bell has to make a huge, delayed investment in their plant to get things up to date. Mostly outside plant. And that is what they want Canadians to subsidize after ignoring that issue for so long while they diddled around with media "convergence" before they figured out it was a costly mistake.
Unless you have access to internal sales plans you have no idea what Bell actually charges medium and larger customers for access to the Internet or other services. So, I have to assume that you're looking at published rates for residential and small business use.
You are correct that there's no regulatory requirement to provide Internet service but there is one to provide for dial tone. There's no need for a second pair to provide "dark" service on twisted pair as DSL and voice are split at the demarkation point or inside. So if you're envisioning the "dry line" as a second pair you're simply wrong.
Incidentally fibre as no bandwidth as it's all digital light which, in and of itself, has no bandwidth. Speed is determined by the equipment in the central office including multiplexers which control throughput but not bandwidth as there's no bandwidth to control.
On the post: Canadian Broadband Regulators Annoyed That People Are Pointing Out They Don't Understand What They're Regulating
Re: Work for Bell, do you?
Bell went nuts during the "convergence" craze of the dot com era and shortly after. It got newspapers, notable the Grunt and Flail, CTV network, radio stations and a whack of other things.
Anything you'll note but investment in their plant, inside and out.
TELUS meanwhile, stuck to it's knitting as a telecom and invested in plant, inside and out, tested out things like video over IP and eventually came up with an offering that works over twisted pair. For those in areas such as mine, small town semi rural, where the plant's not in great shape, there's an option with satellite.
TELUS also built out its DSL system in a way where it's the incumbent it's far ahead of Bell where it's the incumbent.
Now, back to Bell, they lost their shirt with "convergence", fell behind in investment in plant and is now looking for the CRTC to subsidize a build out they should have been doing 5 or 10 years ago. (The same applies to the cable companies in Canada who are still addicted to copper.)
The sell the myth of bandwidth hogs to the CRTC, along with the two big cable carriers and the CRTC comes out with this so called metered structure.
TELUS, meanwhile, sat this whole thing out. Sure they're cheering the ruling cause they can charge more for less service like the other guys. In the meanwhile they're rolling fibre to the house in smaller, semi rural and rural places.
I can't see where you're going with the Cabinet telling the CRTC to withdraw this. The higher cost solution to customers, in the long run, is the CRTC's decision which gives the three carriers who pushed this and removed the competitive pressure to move from copper to fibre. So, like cellular, we get to remain the highest cost jurisdiction in the developed world with the worst service (tied with the USA) and rank somewhere like 45th globally just better than Mauritania and Ghana.
And no, the CRTC doesn't understand what it's regulating here. Nor, it seems do you. Bandwidth doesn't cause choking in teleco networks because the choke point is throughput not bandwidth. Bell, Shaw and Rogers networks have really ugly throughput. No wonder they want never ending, CRTC, imposed caps.
On the post: Intellectual Ventures Files Its First Lawsuits; Giant Patent Troll Awakened
Re: Really?
Consider the number of times this site and others have pointed out that some patents never should have been awarded due to prior art and a number of other factors overlooked or ignored by the patent examiner.
None of this is fantasy but the way that patents can be overturned is time consuming, expensive, labour intensive and seems not to rest on any evidenciary rules at all.
What we are witnessing is a near explosion of software patents being granted for all kinds of thing including algorithms that have long existed and programs already in existence by a minor rephrasing of the purpose of the patent. Keep in mind that one is not supposed to be able to patent algorithms or other mathematical equations which pretty much sums up software any more that one is not supposed to be able to patent anything occurring in nature. None of these things seems to stop an examiner from saying no.
I'm calmly waiting for the day, which I suspect will be soon, when someone discovers that the same thing has been granted two or more patents under different names and for different "purposes". When the patent owners start to go after each other is the day the entire system starts to fall in on itself because it's been built on so much sand.
Allowing the system and the good it does, and there is some once you get by some of the more ridiculous things surrounding patent law in the USA which has affected patent law elsewhere. Even to the point of so called "examiners" stamping damn near every patent application that wanders by.
Now let's stop of a moment and consider that if the BASIC language had been patented that Microsoft would probably not exist. Remember, it's first product was BASIC for the Altair computer back in the mid 70s. Had patents existed that likely would have stopped MS from producing their BASIC Interpreter cassette.
I can think of a few situations where most computer languages existing today wouldn't exist if the current patent regime had existed other than, perhaps, COBOL. So we'd all be left hacking away at Assembler.
The microcomputer itself may not exist and certainly not on the scale and price it does now becaue I can see just about every peripheral and connector being patented and fiercly defended.
Admittedly it's worst case but think a moment and it's not hard to envision.
Just imagine! No Internet porn and still stuck with Playboy and Penthouse 1960s style complete with vaseline slathered all over the lens!!!!
The current patent system isn't just problematic its so badly flawed that unless it's changed I can see it collapsing on itself far sooner rather than later. And with it whatever good it was originally intended to bring.
Copyright is rapidly heading that way too, for different reasons that I'm not going to go into here because that's off topic (take note trolls!).
On the post: State Department, Once Again, Asks Wikileaks To 'Return' Leaked Cables
Re:
On the post: Ubisoft's New DRM: Vuvuzelas
Re:
Let's not forget that Ubisoft has become a target of crackers because they up the stakes by saying silly things like "you can't break this" which gets followed up by a crack in short order.
Between the company and the crackers this has become something of a silly game or, if you like, like the Generals in WW1 who felt that "if I could only throw more soldiers into this meat grinder I'd win the battle".
I suspect this will be cracked a lot sooner than most people seem to think simply due to the player and after it is then the "pirates" will get into the act.
Oh, and Ubisoft made themselves a target many, many years ago by releasing crappy, expensive games with early forms of DRM and being incredibly smug about it all.
On the topic of the content of the game, I'd want to know about the emotional stability of someone wanting a game built around a man who used to hang his children out of hotel room windows.
On the post: Homeland Security Gets Walmart To Tell You To Inform On Your Neighbors
Just Where Have We Gone Wrong
So we were free, had liberties and rights those people didn't. Perhaps a bit overstated even for the 1950s but essentially true.
And now we're being asked to be government informants while standing in line to pay for shoddy goods in the world's largest retailer. (BTW, those folks behind the Iron Curtain had shoddy goods, too, when they could get them at all.)
Do you suppose this was what Eisnehower was warning about when he left office warning about things like the Military-Industrial comples and other dangers?
Just suppose.
On the post: Homeland Security Gets Walmart To Tell You To Inform On Your Neighbors
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Still, the likelihood of it working even as Marx envisioned it is pretty low.
On the post: Russian Press And Pakistani Courts Apparently Have More Respect For Free Speech Than Joe Lieberman
They may not bother as they don't seem disturbed
There really isn't anything surprising in what WikiLeaks has other than it's the first time the words themselves have come to light, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself.
Fer goodness sake, most of this stuff is diplomatic cables full of observations, "analysis" and opinion (read gossip) that flies around the planet every day of the week to every capital on earth that just about every other capital on earth pretty much already knows about or has figured out on their own.
And who knows. If the Russians are worried maybe they're behind the DDOS attacks on WikiLeaks though, at the moment, that would be a serious overreaction. Maybe a shot across the bow.
Nor am I surprised that the Russian internal security folks are sniffing around to see if there's some disgrunted Private in the Russian Army with access to mid and low level classified documents, which WikiLeak's releases certainly are, who might spill the beans just like what happened in the USA.
I can't imagine any country not looking around for that right now.
I don't know what's worse, the media reaction to this as if it's an intelligence Pearl Harbour (it isn't), the political reaction that's almost as bad or the grandstanding of Joe Lieberman.
On the post: Viacom Plays The Insane Hyperbole Card In Claiming YouTube Ruling Would 'Completely Destroy' Content Value
What in the world???
It isn't. Get over it.
On the post: How Denial Works: Library Of Congress Blocks Wikileaks
The same applies to pointy haired bosses.
In this case blocking the site (from whom, I might add) means that it doesn't exist because the bureaucrats have simply said WikiLeaks doesn't.
On the post: Once Again, Feds Found To Be Abusing Surveillance Procedures With Little Oversight
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Most of the stuff released so far is the diplomatic equivalent of gossip. Useful stuff but not the sort of thing people get killed over Highly embarrassing until you understand that every government the world over does this sort of thing on a daily basis.
Even less embarrassing when you come to realize there aren't many, if any secrets here and even less in the way of things everyone didn't know already such as the Afgan government is corrupt from top to bottom and that the Pakistani military makes an unreliable ally at best and that Canada and Canadians as a whole have something of an inbred inferiority complex viz the USA and Europe and even Australia fer goodness sake!!! :-)
just sayin'
On the post: Once Again, Feds Found To Be Abusing Surveillance Procedures With Little Oversight
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On the post: Obama 'Considering Legal Action' Against Wikileaks
Everyone take a deeeep, deeep breath
The reality is that someone on the inside, that is to say American officials, have been leaking this stuff to Wikileaks and who knows where else with Wikileaks down on the bottom of the list. To be cynical the media pays more for a good leak, don't you know. Then again, having your leak mixed in with hundreds of others is a hell of a good way to stay in a position to be able to leak other communications if that's what this person wants to do.
For all of the fuss and furor doesn't it strike anyone as curious that, for example, the Canadian government knew which documents were about to be leaked before they hit Wikileaks? What I'm saying, to those who don't get it, is that everyone affected seemed to know about what would be up on the site before it got there.
That makes it extremely unlikely that Wikileaks is the only place getting this information and others are acting on it sooner rather than Wikileaks is.
Also keep in mind that government secrets, any government's secrets, are fleeting at best so I'm not all that convinced that anything is actually compromised here.
If the United States government and others, including the bunch of semi-competent lots we Canadians suffer with, want to get angry then that anger is better targeted at those doing the leaking and the seemingly easy route(s) they have to get those leaks out.
Of course that would be hard to do and it deflects attention from that problem to have a convenient scapegoat like Wikileaks to whips for governments to raise all holy hell about that rather than fix the problem.
On the post: EMI So Scared Of EFF Amicus Brief In MP3Tunes Case, It Asks Court To Reject It
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That is as partisan as you accuse the EFF of taking. As you state the brief is evidence/testimony so EMI would have the full right to call the principals of the EFF and and the others to testify in open court to their position and punch them full of holes if they can. That they are declining to suggests much.
Nor, by the way, is the court bound to make a ruling in favour of summary judgment if it feels there is enough still in play in the action to move to trail.
If the court has changed the ground rules in defiance of past practise and precedence then EMI has a fairly easy appeal on its hands, don't you think?
While such motions are pretty much routine still doesn't change the impression the EMI is concerned that its case really isn't all that strong.
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