I think the main issue there is that wirelessly transferring 100+ GB still takes a significant amount of time compared to an SD card or USB cable. Not sure how many cameras have WiFi anyway?
Re: Re: Re: Re.: Ninja's comment about 301 reported countries.
(er sorry, I'm mixing things up - the addition of "education" to the fair dealing list was part of our copyright reform bill, not a court ruling, but right around the same time the supreme court released five rulings that all pushed for expanded interpretations of the fair dealing definition)
Re: Re: Re.: Ninja's comment about 301 reported countries.
Apparently, like some other countries on the 301 list, Canada's rules are as strict or stricter than America's.
Copyright law being as complex as it is, the reality is it's not either/or. Canada's copyright laws do some things way better than the US, and other things way worse.
An illustrative example is our "fair dealing" versus your "fair use". Both have pros and cons. Fair use is far more expansive than fair dealing -- it lists four subjective factors, and leaves the decision up to a judge, which means there are things that are potentially fair use in the US but which stand no chance of being fair dealing in Canada.
On the flipside, Fair Dealing is an enumerated list of specific uses which are "fair". That means it's less expansive than fair use, and arguably doesn't cover as much — but it also means that people doing what it does cover can feel more secure in their protection. Canada's Supreme Court has also been pushing pretty hard for an expansive interpretation of fair dealing laws, and has even stated that the list of fair dealing examples is not exhaustive (which previously many people assumed it was - though this question has not really been tested since that ruling).
Of course, as always, there are like a million layers to this. Law is one thing, practice is another. For example, Canada's fair dealing has a beautiful feature: it is very explicit that any and all educational uses are considered fair. But? Well... but... and it's a big but: this was not always clearly the case (again being recently confirmed by a supreme court ruling) and in the mean time, a huge and robust regime of collection societies for educational use sprang up (if you think the collection society situation in the US is bad... oh man... you have no idea). And, tragically and pathetically, despite the supreme court ruling that educational use is fair, Canada's schools have mostly opted to renew their deals with the collection societies.
That's right: despite an EXTREMELY strong legal position that they should not have to pay for ANYTHING, Canada's universities are still paying licensing fees for photocopies and syllabi. I have some serious questions about how this came to pass... but alas, here we are.
I may be *slightly* exaggerating with 99% but honestly, if you discount texting, i'm still at 99% of my computer-use happening on Macs & PCs -- plus I do have an Intel-powered tablet :)
Sure, and if anyone was talking about building everything to functionally block them out then that'd be bad. But who is suggesting that?
I'm suggesting that within whatever overall global discussion you have, there has to be the ability for people to build and moderate their own communities. That's obvious. But there are those who cry "violating my free speech!" when any community wishes to exclude them - and that's idiotic.
If you want to argue that the concept of a right to free speech can/should/does extend beyond the government, that's fine. Admirable, even.
But does that make the second frame of the comic untrue? Can/should/is anyone required to listen to you, or required to provide to you a forum in which to speak? I don't see how. Not only does that make no sense from a rights/freedom perspective, it's just functionally impossible. It's not even desirable — should a serious medical conference be forced to invite homeopaths and spirit healers, because failing to do so would violate their free speech? Should it be illegal to turn away Jehova's Witnesses without first inviting them in and hearing them out?
The key difference between this and other such devices is that these tags for a mesh network. As far as I know, nobody else has offered that. Systems such as the one you describe use the phone as a hub -- it locates all the various devices that are tagged. That is not the case with Trakkies: each device is independent and they all form a network, and each one is capable of locating and interacting with all the others. There's no hub, no centralization. That's what makes this stand out to me.
As for the charging, I'm not sure if they are chargeable or not, but they DO have replaceable standard flat batteries that you can pick up almost anywhere.
It actually was one of the early popular internet clips as well, but you're absolutely right that it started as a bootleg VHS. In fact it's doubly notable for being a popular clip that bridged that transition. Anyway, I've adjusted the post, because you're right that it's dumb not to mention that.
One very simple example would be a voting system. You can create your own tokens on blockchain technology, and they don't have to represent currency, or follow the same rules, as it's all highly programmable.
So say you issued everyone in your organization or whatnot a single "Votecoin", which has the ability to be "spent" on a candidate or option or whatever the vote is about, but is otherwise non-transferrable. Everyone "spends" their votes.
What has that accomplished? Quite a lot: you get a full public ledger of the entire vote, accessible and verifiable by everyone involved, but in which everyone remains anonymous, and in which fraud is impossible, all completely online without the need for any sort of agency or watchdog to run the whole thing beyond simply issuing the "Votecoins", and no need for any kind of additional security or encryption.
In 32 episodes we've covered a huge variety of topics, including many of the big Techdirt topics that you hoped for. So, so, so sorry that there was one topic you didn't find appealing.
Well, now I know you're just a troll, not even someone sincerely trying to have conversations. Your opening comment was glowing and sycophantic, referring to the new service as easy and convenient. And now you want to deny that. Pathetic.
It's a bullshit anti-piracy campaign targeted at people who already paid to see a movie, which is idiotic, and it's a promotion for a worthless "service". If you have any valid point at all, it's that we didn't mock them as extensively as we should have.
But of course, you're full of shit, because now you're pretending that you knew it was a terrible service all along - and yet your first comment on this post is eagerly promoting it with language straight out of the press release.
For years we've pointed out that the industry's much-boasted-about abundance of legal sources is actually an unnavigable mish-mash of overlapping services with wildly varying quality, availability and limitations, and that even if the average person does have a legal alternative to piracy it's likely that actually replacing piracy would mean signing up for a dozen different services with separate bills, and it still wouldn't get them anything... if they can be bothered to figure them out at all.
Does Hollywood respond by trying to unify some of these services? By opening up new licensing terms to allow wider cross-platform availability? By scrapping all that shit and launching a new, flagship platform that promises to offer all the movies there are, and actually delivers?
No, no, no... It has a genius idea instead. "Clearly what we need," said one bigwig to another, "is a special search engine to help people navigate our dozens of terrible services slightly more easily."
How could they be so dumb? Maybe they just truly don't know how to innovate at all. Or maybe this is what happens when your thought process isn't so much "how can we offer our customers a great service" as it is "how can we seemingly invalidate our customers' complaints, so they can't serve as excuses for the behaviour we want outlawed"
I honestly can't quite tell if you're chastising me for not listening enough or applauding me for doing so... but either way I agree with your point :)
IMO eliminating the anti-circumvention clause just leaves the issue, and the cat and mouse game of breaking drm.
Would it though? I mean, there's already an arms race, and even with anti-circumvention protections, the breakers beat the makers every single time. The ONLY thing that keeps some kind of a lid on it is the fact that people need to be careful about distributing DRM-breaking tools, and so those get relegated to pirate sites and other backwaters that scare off average computer users. Remove that one limitation and I don't see how DRM-makers would stand a chance...
I think Leigh might have a point here, I can imagine that being difficult and problematic to pin down language and eliminate the potential for abuse via contract law and such.
I do think this is something really big that you and Mason aren't fully considering. Law is not great at technology, in general. Either it's very specific, at which point it works well for a short period of time but then rapidly becomes obsolete or nonsensical or begins to apply to new things that weren't intended, OR it's broad and general in an attempt to be future-proof, and ends up having all sorts of immediate unintended consequences.
Some of your notions -- ban DRM! ban closed-source software! ban all that bullshit! -- are admittedly appealing in an anarchist-utopia sort of way. But I'm not at all confident that writing laws to accomplish such things is simply a legal-wording challenge to be overcome — I think it may be an insurmountable task.
Plus, I really do like to focus on things that can be done immediately. Yes, we probably do need some idealists out there pushing for the banning of all DRM - but if we want to see any actual near-term change on that front, what we really need are pragmatists out there fighting against ant-circumvention provisions, because that's still a very meaningful change that would strike a huge blow to DRM, and it's one that's actually legislatively realistic.
Honestly I don't doubt there are areas where we are lacking certain bits of knowledge -- we're a small team covering a lot of topics, and we're also part of a broader community of people covering this stuff, and count on others to bring some of their expertise to the table too.
On my end, the frustration is when these things get boiled down into what I consider unfair blanket statements, like the idea that we are "tonedeaf about privacy concerns" or Mason's assertion that we "don't think DRM is bad" (the latter is clearly laughable to anyone who reads Techdirt). But once you move past that, there's plenty of good conversation to be had.
On the post: Awesome Stuff: A Little Box Of Videos
Re:
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re: Re.: Ninja's comment about 301 reported countries.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re.: Ninja's comment about 301 reported countries.
Copyright law being as complex as it is, the reality is it's not either/or. Canada's copyright laws do some things way better than the US, and other things way worse.
An illustrative example is our "fair dealing" versus your "fair use". Both have pros and cons. Fair use is far more expansive than fair dealing -- it lists four subjective factors, and leaves the decision up to a judge, which means there are things that are potentially fair use in the US but which stand no chance of being fair dealing in Canada.
On the flipside, Fair Dealing is an enumerated list of specific uses which are "fair". That means it's less expansive than fair use, and arguably doesn't cover as much — but it also means that people doing what it does cover can feel more secure in their protection. Canada's Supreme Court has also been pushing pretty hard for an expansive interpretation of fair dealing laws, and has even stated that the list of fair dealing examples is not exhaustive (which previously many people assumed it was - though this question has not really been tested since that ruling).
Of course, as always, there are like a million layers to this. Law is one thing, practice is another. For example, Canada's fair dealing has a beautiful feature: it is very explicit that any and all educational uses are considered fair. But? Well... but... and it's a big but: this was not always clearly the case (again being recently confirmed by a supreme court ruling) and in the mean time, a huge and robust regime of collection societies for educational use sprang up (if you think the collection society situation in the US is bad... oh man... you have no idea). And, tragically and pathetically, despite the supreme court ruling that educational use is fair, Canada's schools have mostly opted to renew their deals with the collection societies.
That's right: despite an EXTREMELY strong legal position that they should not have to pay for ANYTHING, Canada's universities are still paying licensing fees for photocopies and syllabi. I have some serious questions about how this came to pass... but alas, here we are.
On the post: This Week In Techdirt History: July 12th - 18th
Re: “99% ... on any kind of computer”
On the post: Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech
Re: Re: Re: That PSA is bullshit
The initial comment I was responding to me says that limiting the concept of a right to free speech to government censorship is "bullshit".
I'm not sure how to interpret that other than asserting that private entities are also required to do something.
On the post: Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech
Re: Re: Re: That PSA is bullshit
I'm suggesting that within whatever overall global discussion you have, there has to be the ability for people to build and moderate their own communities. That's obvious. But there are those who cry "violating my free speech!" when any community wishes to exclude them - and that's idiotic.
On the post: Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech
Re: Re: Re: That PSA is bullshit
OK, so regarding my two examples -- should you?
On the post: Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech
Re: That PSA is bullshit
But does that make the second frame of the comic untrue? Can/should/is anyone required to listen to you, or required to provide to you a forum in which to speak? I don't see how. Not only does that make no sense from a rights/freedom perspective, it's just functionally impossible. It's not even desirable — should a serious medical conference be forced to invite homeopaths and spirit healers, because failing to do so would violate their free speech? Should it be illegal to turn away Jehova's Witnesses without first inviting them in and hearing them out?
On the post: Awesome Stuff: A Mesh Network For Your Things
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Awesome Stuff: A Mesh Network For Your Things
Re: Re:
As for the charging, I'm not sure if they are chargeable or not, but they DO have replaceable standard flat batteries that you can pick up almost anywhere.
On the post: South Park's Matt Stone To Silicon Valley: Screw You Guys, I'm Going Hulu
Re: Hack Failure By 2nd Sentence
On the post: Silicon Valley Was Built On Permissionless Innovation; We Shouldn't Give That Up Just Because 'Bitcoin' Is Involved
Re: Maturity
So say you issued everyone in your organization or whatnot a single "Votecoin", which has the ability to be "spent" on a candidate or option or whatever the vote is about, but is otherwise non-transferrable. Everyone "spends" their votes.
What has that accomplished? Quite a lot: you get a full public ledger of the entire vote, accessible and verifiable by everyone involved, but in which everyone remains anonymous, and in which fraud is impossible, all completely online without the need for any sort of agency or watchdog to run the whole thing beyond simply issuing the "Votecoins", and no need for any kind of additional security or encryption.
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 32: Are Smart Watches The New Calculator Watches?
Re: Smart Watches...REALLY?
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re:
It's a bullshit anti-piracy campaign targeted at people who already paid to see a movie, which is idiotic, and it's a promotion for a worthless "service". If you have any valid point at all, it's that we didn't mock them as extensively as we should have.
But of course, you're full of shit, because now you're pretending that you knew it was a terrible service all along - and yet your first comment on this post is eagerly promoting it with language straight out of the press release.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re:
For years we've pointed out that the industry's much-boasted-about abundance of legal sources is actually an unnavigable mish-mash of overlapping services with wildly varying quality, availability and limitations, and that even if the average person does have a legal alternative to piracy it's likely that actually replacing piracy would mean signing up for a dozen different services with separate bills, and it still wouldn't get them anything... if they can be bothered to figure them out at all.
Does Hollywood respond by trying to unify some of these services? By opening up new licensing terms to allow wider cross-platform availability? By scrapping all that shit and launching a new, flagship platform that promises to offer all the movies there are, and actually delivers?
No, no, no... It has a genius idea instead. "Clearly what we need," said one bigwig to another, "is a special search engine to help people navigate our dozens of terrible services slightly more easily."
How could they be so dumb? Maybe they just truly don't know how to innovate at all. Or maybe this is what happens when your thought process isn't so much "how can we offer our customers a great service" as it is "how can we seemingly invalidate our customers' complaints, so they can't serve as excuses for the behaviour we want outlawed"
On the post: DailyDirt: Playing Super Mario By Rote... Is Fun?
Re:
The funny thing is, what you hate is arguably one of the core reasons Mario emerged as the definitive platformer/game-in-general in the first place: http://kotaku.com/5558166/in-praise-of-sticky-friction
On the post: Awesome Stuff: Not Quite Google Glass
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:Re:
On the post: Awesome Stuff: Not Quite Google Glass
Re: Re: Mason- Stallman/ general DRM
Would it though? I mean, there's already an arms race, and even with anti-circumvention protections, the breakers beat the makers every single time. The ONLY thing that keeps some kind of a lid on it is the fact that people need to be careful about distributing DRM-breaking tools, and so those get relegated to pirate sites and other backwaters that scare off average computer users. Remove that one limitation and I don't see how DRM-makers would stand a chance...
I think Leigh might have a point here, I can imagine that being difficult and problematic to pin down language and eliminate the potential for abuse via contract law and such.
I do think this is something really big that you and Mason aren't fully considering. Law is not great at technology, in general. Either it's very specific, at which point it works well for a short period of time but then rapidly becomes obsolete or nonsensical or begins to apply to new things that weren't intended, OR it's broad and general in an attempt to be future-proof, and ends up having all sorts of immediate unintended consequences.
Some of your notions -- ban DRM! ban closed-source software! ban all that bullshit! -- are admittedly appealing in an anarchist-utopia sort of way. But I'm not at all confident that writing laws to accomplish such things is simply a legal-wording challenge to be overcome — I think it may be an insurmountable task.
Plus, I really do like to focus on things that can be done immediately. Yes, we probably do need some idealists out there pushing for the banning of all DRM - but if we want to see any actual near-term change on that front, what we really need are pragmatists out there fighting against ant-circumvention provisions, because that's still a very meaningful change that would strike a huge blow to DRM, and it's one that's actually legislatively realistic.
On the post: Awesome Stuff: Not Quite Google Glass
Re: Re:Re: Re: MrTroy...unfairness.
Honestly I don't doubt there are areas where we are lacking certain bits of knowledge -- we're a small team covering a lot of topics, and we're also part of a broader community of people covering this stuff, and count on others to bring some of their expertise to the table too.
On my end, the frustration is when these things get boiled down into what I consider unfair blanket statements, like the idea that we are "tonedeaf about privacy concerns" or Mason's assertion that we "don't think DRM is bad" (the latter is clearly laughable to anyone who reads Techdirt). But once you move past that, there's plenty of good conversation to be had.
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