I don't know if Steve Jobs said that -- I can't find a reference -- but, even if he did, chances are he got it from elsewhere, since that sentiment was embedded in the culture since the early 1970's, in the form of the slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste", which was the tag line of a famous ad campaign [0]:
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste — you know the phrase, you've heard it.
That's because the iconic slogan, dreamt up by the advertising agency Young & Rubicam goes back more than four decades. It was meant to promote the United Negro College Fund scholarship program for black students. The slogan practically part of the national consciousness, like Have a Coke and a smile.
Is this about copyright? Aka "If you copy more then X words, your violate the authors copyright" so that one has to negotiate with the author about copying more then X words?
Or do they force Google and Facebook to publish those snippets and pay for them? Making media kind of state controlled? If so, who decides which news have to be included?
Reading Google's point of view on what happened in Spain they had yet another model over there:
"Legislation in Spain requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not."
Maybe it is similar to that? I wonder who defines what "news" are? If part of this text I am writing ends up quoted on a website owned by someone in Spain, I would be forced by law to send them an invoice?
No, copyright union will send the invoice on behalf of you, just as in music royalties. They will have to pay the copyright union, even if you choose not to receive it yourself.
It’s about News Corporation’s exceptionally close ties to the party that currently holds the majority in Australian federal parliament. This grants them the opportunity to use Australia as a licensing model test venue, as well as hoping to normalise the idea as acceptable rather than farcical in at least one western laissez-faire capitalist democracy in the hope this can be leveraged into others.
Also about journalism's complete failure to adapt to a changing business landscape and find a different business model.
In one way, this is good. It will fail miserably, and demonstrate to newspaper CEO's that "Big Tech" is not stealing their revenues. Then they can move on to try something different.
If the system fails, and consequently newspapers fail, while tech companies thrive, how will that demonstrate to newspaper CEOs that big tech isn’t stealing their revenue?
Because newspapers are failing anyway, and tech companies are thriving anyway. So if this system fails, nothing changed.
If this system works, and suddenly Australian newspapers are viable while newspapers elsewhere are still struggling, then it will prove that forcing tech to pay for content works, and that therefore tech was probably stealing media's revenue.
It doesn't seem necessary for tech to be stealing revenue from publishing for this system to function. If I hold a gun to your head and say give me a thousand bucks, and you do, I'll be a thousand bucks richer, whether or not I was stealing your revenue.
Have they been sued over digital lending in general or because they lent out more digital copies then they owned physically?
Either way, I think that there is no legal "digital lending". What makes people buy things is that they can not get them for free easily. Copyright is there to benefit the author. It puts a certain burdon on the consumer: They have to buy a copy. Or - if they want to breach the law - they have to find someone who illegally makes a copy for them.
"Digital lending" would allow the 3rd party to legally make a copy to the consumer. Because bits are not lended. They are copied. That is not how copyright sets the balance between author and consumer.
It basically says that once a person buys a creative work, they can do whatever they want with it, including selling it or lending it.
Controlled Digital Lending is a system that basically says, "Let's make the first-sale doctrine for digital books work the same as it does for physical books."
So, a library purchases a digital copy of a work. Then it lends out that copy, and until that copy is returned, it does not lend out any other copies of the work (even though it is technically possible to do so).
Note that while the library patron gets to borrow and read the work for free, the library has already paid for the work, so it is not as if this erodes copyright any more than it does for print books.
> So, a library purchases a digital copy of a work. Then it lends out that copy, and until that copy is returned, it does not lend out any other copies of the work (even though it is technically possible to do so).
The issue is that IA decided to forgo the rule that they won't lend out copies of the book until it gets returned and instead decided to lend out as many copies as they wanted at a time.
Yes, I agree with you, and I think IA's uncontrolled digital lending was a gross violation of copyright.
I was just explaining the Controlled Digital Lending system because the person to whom I was responding was saying that all forms of digital lending were problematic.
This case isn't about the IA's Controlled Digital Lending program, which is a thing most US libraries already do, and in fact did long before the IA launched their own CDL library program.
This case is about the IA's National "Emergency Library" which was uncontrolled lending, which is not a thing covered by the first sale doctrine or any exemptions provided for by copyright law.
> … Controlled Digital Lending program, which is a thing most US libraries already do …
No, what most libraries do is buy separate (and more expensive, and more restricted) licenses for lendable digital copies of certain works–not everything in their archives is available digitally. The IA's pre-COVID CDL program represented a significant step forward in terms of treating 1:1 digital lending of scans of physical works as equivalent to physical lending.
> … National "Emergency Library" which was uncontrolled lending …
The controversy is primarily over the mostly controlled National Emergency Library, which wasn't quite as controlled as what they were doing before but still had DRM and limits on the duration of the lending. Some few works may have had more copies checked out at a time than the IA had physical copies in their inventory, yes. Consider this an example of time-shifting. The borrower doesn't get to keep the copy, they just get it a bit earlier without waiting in line. On the whole I'm certain the average number of copies per work would have been much less than one, even without considering physical copies languishing in other libraries that were inaccessible due to COVID.
This case, however, is objecting to both the NEL and the previous CDL program. The IA is obviously going to focus on the claims regarding CDL, where they have a stronger defense, while the publishers' propaganda is all about the NEL since that wins them more sympathy.
> Have they been sued over digital lending in general or because they lent out more digital copies then they owned physically?
The publishers are suing over both, though the lawsuit was rather obviously prompted by the latter (ie. The National Emergency Library).
Meanwhile, the IA is pretending (or implying) in its public statements that the lawsuit is only about CDL in general and eliding or minimizing the role the NEA had in poking the publishers hard enough that they pulled the trigger on this lawsuit.
It shouldn't be particularly surprising, given the adversarial nature of the court system, that the publishers, once they decided that the NEA gave them sufficient ammunition to prevail in court, would decide as a tactical matter to tar CDL in general with the same brush. I mean, why wouldn't they make their claims as broad and expansive as possible?
Nor is it surprising that the IA is desperately trying to walk their misstep back with oh-so-careful statements without actually acknowledging that the NEA was a bad move on their part.
What is surprising is that the IA so readily handed the publishers this pretext in the first place.
True. And the tragedy is had they actually tried to raise the money to buy all the books they needed, they probably could have kept waitlists to nearly zero and avoided this whole situation.
The cherry pick will refer to a different history, so it will have a different commit hash (and thus be considered a separate and independent commit by any sane tooling, including Git itself).
This seems to work around that by matching on the commits' summary lines instead, which only (sort of) works because their workflow disambiguates this (1 commit per issue, each commit is prefixed with the issue ID).
Then again, most of their desire for this tool seems to come from their broken rebase-oriented workflow stomping all over commit hashes in the first place (on top of ensuring that what was tested and reviewed no longer matches what was merged, while destroying the history that could help someone trying to diagnose the issue).
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, I guess. Your history isn't, has never been, and will never be linear. Whether or not you rewrite your logs to make it seem that way.
I think making the commit summary the "id" of this workflow is actually interesting. It is a step towards doing project management in git itself rather then an external tool.
He published a 14GB file and one day there were 2700 downloads resulting in ~30 Terrabyte of traffic.
He had the file behind CloudFlare, but since CloudFlare does not cache files larger then 512MB, all the traffic went to his S3 bucket and Amazon billed him $2700 for that.
I think the most important part was left out:
> AWS employee discovered that 3655 partial GETs to the object might have actually been delivered as full file requests
I wonder why one would chose a phone with Ubuntu Touch over some non-linux phone.
With Ubuntu Touch, you can not install anything on the phone. It has a read-only root filesystem that gets updated over the air.
So just like with the locked down phones (iOS, Android), to gain control over the filesystem, you would have to root it. But then your changes would get wiped with the next update.
This seems just as far from a "Linux Phone" as Android to me.
I am looking forward to one day having a phone that runs Linux. But then I want the same freedom I have on my laptop. To install whatever I want from the Debian repos via apt-get and update via apt-update / apt-upgrade.
Well, just so that you don't throw the baby with the bathwater...
Pinephone [0] is a platform designed by pine64 together with the community. A community that is very FLOSS-centric.
That phone has a few pieces of proprietary firmware, that's true[1] (mostly for the RF parts). But besides that, you can pretty much do anything you want with it, even write your own bootloader[2].
By default, the bootloader will try to boot from the SD card over the EMMC, so you can just slap an arbitrary system image on an SSD card to distro-hop. That's right, there are multiple distributions available: Ubuntu touch, which is indeed built like you say, but you should also have root access OOTB, and AFAIK can change every piece of the system (OTA source, system image, build your own). But also a few others like Maemo Leste (a meego spiritual successor, I think), SailfishOS, android[3], or even plain Linux distributions: PostmarketOS [4] is an Alpine-based distribution tailored to phones, but you can also run Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, Nix, and port your own.
The Lima open source graphics driver for Mali GPUs works quite well, so that helps a lot compared to other "open" phones.
A similar phone is the Purism Librem 5, that goes further with the de-blobing effort, though the price point is quite different.
Ubuntu Touch (UBports) is one approach to security, but not the only one. I have no problem with a 'locked down' OS as long as I'm the one locking it down. Ubuntu Touch locks down the phone, under your control. iOS, and to a degree Android, lock you out of your phone. Having used the Pinephone with various distros for a couple weeks now vs the various unlocked bootloader/rooted/alternate Android installs I've used over the years, I can tell you that even a 'locked down' Linux phone still feels more like 'my' device than Android ever did. For those who don't like restrictions, even self-imposed ones, UBports probably won't make a lot of sense.
That said, Mobian is working better for me than UBports right now. Theoretically, I like what UBports should be able to offer. But right now in practice Mobian has the advantage. It will be interesting to see where things stand in 6 months.
> It has a read-only root filesystem that gets updated over the air. ... you would have to root it. But then your changes would get wiped with the next update.
No, given root access you can simply overlay a separate read-write filesystem over the readonly system partition. It can be as "Linux" as any Live distribution with persistence.
Yes, but if it wasn’t already done out of the box (no idea if it is or not!), you’d need to apply the changes to mount the overlay to the root on every update.
I'm not as familiar with UBPorts/Ubuntu Touch, but you can do this with Debian on the PinePhone, or use other package managers like Pacman with Arch/Manjaro. I think you're conflating the phone with UBPorts, which is just the preloaded OS on one edition of the phone. There's nothing Ubuntu-specific about the PinePhone.
Mobian on the pinephone does exactly that. There is nothing stopping someone from a) flashing the eMMC directly to a new distro or b) flashing it to an SD card to try it out.
That's just Ubuntu Touch thing, but there are other distros out there. You shouldn't think about phones like Librem 5 or PinePhone the same way as you think about "Android phones" - there's nothing that ties them inherently to a single operating system. They're rather more like a PC where you can choose your distro by yourself.
However, if you're looking for "out-of-the-box GNU/Linux experience", Librem 5 comes with PureOS, which is essentially a FSF-approved Debian. See https://puri.sm/posts/what-is-mobile-pureos/
Just the idea of a Linux phone! Use what you know and love, same code, same quirks, same features (man, how I hate feature inconsistency).
This is why it felt weird to me that there were special distributions at first, but it seems like we're finally mainlining (pretty standard Debian, Arch, Manjaro), which is nice.
It seems like GNOME shell is also being adapted, which is exactly what I wanted to see. Hopefully some other DEs and large apps will follow.
>I am looking forward to one day having a phone that runs Linux. But then I want the same freedom I have on my laptop. To install whatever I want from the Debian repos via apt-get and update via apt-update / apt-upgrade.
> I wonder why one would chose a phone with Ubuntu Touch over some non-linux phone.
This is a false equivalency. If you don't like Ubuntu Touch. Try Mobian (Debian) or Manjaro for Pinephone. The Linux phone is still in its infancy, but its prospects now are far better than they've ever been. And even if it's in a rough state right now, my next phone is going to be Linux simply because of how much control Google takes away from users (let's not even get started on Apple).
First of all, what do you mean by "this"?
You mention Napster and Limewire. These are things. Things cannot be illegal. Actions can be illegal.
A certain action is illegal if there is a paragraph in the applicable jurisdiction that forbids it.
It might be illegal to manufacture, own, fake, destroy or distribute a thing. But a thing on its own cannot be illegal. What would that even mean.
So who did what, which jurisdiction is applicable and which paragraph forbids it?