There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Miracle Max – The Princess Bride (1987)
So we have lots of people and publications declaring SOPA and PIPA dead.
I have news for you: Cancel the parades, parties, and dancing. SOPA and PIPA are NOT dead. I repeat, SOPA AND PIPA ARE NOT DEAD.
What has happened to SOAP and PIPA, is that they are simply in a procedural hold in both houses of Congress. In plain English, the bills have been moved from the stack of crap coming up for votes to a filing cabinet drawer. At any time these bills can be pulled out of the filling cabinet and put back in the stack of crap. As a matter of fact, I suspect these bills will be pulled out at a later date when nobody is looking because SOPA and PIPA are not about stopping piracy, they are about control.
You hear supporters of SOPA and PIPA, such as the detestable hagfish that is Bill Maher – and oh yes, he supports SOPA - claiming it will have no effect on domestic Internet sites as it only targets foreign sites. This is not true. It is a bold faced lie. As a matter of fact, both bills have a disproportionate effect on domestic sites versus foreign ones.
Here’s a great video in plain English from the well known and well respected Khan Academy explaining exactly how SOPA and PIPA work and will destroy the Internet as we know it.
Khan Academy explaining exactly how SOPA and PIPA work and will destroy the Internet as we know it.
You see the picture and quote by Miracle Max from the Princess Bride up there? Under SOPA and PIPA this site could be taken offline WITHOUT my being able to defend myself or know who my accuser is, EVEN THOUGH I am using those items within US Copyright Law Fair Use Standards 17 U.S.C. § 107 (listed below).
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
-
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
So let’s look at my use versus fair use:
- Well, this blog is non commercial and this post is definitely intended to be educational. We pass there.
- It is a movie that was released world wide and is well known. We pass there.
- It is a cropped image of a single character and a single line of text spoken by that character. All in all, a tiny fraction of the original work. We pass there.
- I would argue that it increases the value of the original work by keeping it in the public eye. It certainly does not detract value from the original work. Again, we pass.
So I am legal in under the current copyright laws, yet under SOPA and PIPA, I could – mind you, could – be taken offline by a single complaint. I stress the word could because this is a small site and would most like slip under peoples radar, but you never know. But for large sites like, um, oh I don’t know, YouTube for example, they are going to be gone very quickly after SOAP or PIPA passes.
OMGWTFBBQ! I wake up with a bad hangover and here we are TWO WEEKS into 2012. I DID NOT GET THE MEMO!
In the theme of not getting the memo, it seems Hulu , SOPA, and PIPA are still alive. AMAZING. Not only is Hulu not dead, it seems to be growing. As for SOPA and PIPA, WTF why are we even talking about these bills, they should have been dead LONG AGO!!!
The wife and I were early subscribers to Hulu Plus, however we put our account on hold last summer before we sailed from Hawaii to Santa Barbara because we were going to be gone for a month sailing across the Pacific. Once we got back however, we KEPT IT CANCELD.
Why?
WE DO NOT WANT TO PAY TO HAVE ADS PUSHED AT US AND WAIT WEEKS FOR NEW EPISODES TO BE POSTED. Especially the lame “what ad do you want to see now” crap style ads from the late 90’s. Stuff like this is why people like <cough>bittorrent</cough>. Content is ad free and they can get in *hours* versus days or weeks. Why pay money for shit service when you can stick it to man and get better product AND service…
Hulu, et al, your only hope is to open the floodgate. The consumers have WON. It is all over. Just give up, fuck SOPA and PIPA. Just let us pay for the shit we want, when we want it. And stop the bloody interstitial ads. Have you not learned anything from history?
To each of you and your families, I sincerely wish you a Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Years!
God Bless, and see you in 2012!
History people, history. And facts, and common human decency.
SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is another one of those bills that sounds like it's going to do something mildly positive but, in reality, has serious potential to negatively change the internet as we know it.
That is why you saw the censorship notice when you came to this blog – many websites could soon be shuttered due to this bill.
More on this horrible bill at the America Censorship Day website, here at Life Hacker, and lots more here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Deep Links blog.
THIS BILL MUST BE STOPED!
Watch the entire video, it’s 9 minutes of economic and societal truth on so many levels delivered with absolute crystal clarity. Professor Epstein just absolutely hits it out of the park.
Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
And that, my friends, is how the world really works. The egalitarian utopia where everyone is equal and everything is “fair” that Obama, the Democrat party, and the Occupiers constantly say we need cannot and will not work. Ever. Period. End of story. You get chaos. Thousands of years of human history teach us this. Professor Epstein compresses that knowledge into 9 minutes of brilliance.
Hat-tip to The Coalition Of The Swilling.
Updated 5:41 AM: James Pethokoukis of the AEI lays out 7 more reasons.
Spent the day in Costa Mesa today at a Windows Phone 7 Code Camp event put on by Microsoft. I had a great time! Some great presentations and some really nice people. I even won a new LG Quantum in a random draw!
I am not giving up my Samsung Focus so this will make a nice present for my sister-in-law. She has an aging Blackberry something or other and has eyed our phones but says she can’t do with out a mechanical keyboard. Lucky for her, there is the Quantum! Now she can know the joys of Mango (I’m updating her phone right now) on a modern smartphone and toss that old Blackberry in a box.
Best part – my wife is a WP7 manic and will show her all the coolness that lives in Mango.
Love you guys, but WTF! No WP7 version?!?!
You guys are so close to losing us as a customer.
Please fix this. Christmas is coming up.
Thanks for dragging us – sometimes kicking and screaming – into the future. You will be missed.
Godspeed.
On September 27th, 2011, Microsoft released the highly anticipated “Mango” update to Windows Phone 7.
After running the Mango beta for a few months, I have to say the final product is much better. It’s so much smoother, faster, and feels much more solid.
As Matt Buchanan at Gizmodo said in his review of Mango: “The thing I like most about Windows Phone, really, is that it's the only phone besides the iPhone that feels like it's got its shit together, from the interface to the core apps to the overall experience.”
I have to agree. I can say without hesitation that in my almost a year of using Windows Phone 7 that it is truly a fun, fast, and rock solid OS that has never crashed or locked up on me.
Overall Mango is a very solid OS and a wonderful evolution of Windows Phone 7. If Microsoft keeps updating Windows Phone 7 and keeps innovating, I think MS will have a big time winner on its hands.
From a developers perspective, Mango is not a large leap from NoDo. Mango does add some new APIs and features that do affect application design – in particular the “fast resume” and multitasking features. Also the new Background File Transfers API looks to have some very interesting potential uses in applications. The new Live Tile and Secondary Tile API is absolutely epic. This is a great addition for developers and will really facilitate development of apps that utilize the “glance and go” design language of Metro. I personally plan on using the deep linking feature in our games.
Also, for us game developers, the graphics frame rate has been unlocked from 30fps. This is HUGE! It now means we can do much more fluid looking 3D graphics. In some of our in-house test applications, we saw a noticeable improvement in smoothness. While 30fps is adequate, some people can see visual strobing at 30fps. I happen to be one of those people.
All in all in Mango there are many new features - 300+ according to Microsoft – in Mango. Some of the major features I really like are the changes to the email and people hub. You can now create groups of people and email or message them all at once. Threaded email and threaded messages (SMS, MMS, and IM) are now standard. Speaking of messages, Live Messenger and Twitter support is now baked into the OS. It is so nice to be able to update my Facebook, Twitter, and IM status from on place without having to jump in and out of different apps.
Another killer feature is the “Internet Sharing” option. It lets you set up a mobile hotspot that up to 5 devices can access. Sadly, this is not enabled on first generation Samsung phones – but you can enable it if you so desire.
I can confirm this hack works as advertised as it is the very same one I used on my Samsung Focus.
First, this hack requires a developer unlocked phone. If you don’t have a developer unlocked phone then stop here.
Next, you will need to do an interop unlock.
These are the instructions I followed to interop unlock my Samsung Focus. I followed the first subset of instructions under step 11 in the Samsung fork and was done.
Next, follow these instructions. One note to clarify the instructions at step 4: What it should read is “Select the checkbox in the app for ADC and then press apply”.
Once you are done, you can uninstall DiagProvXML and the Samsung Tools.
All in all it took me less than 5 minutes to enable Wi-Fi Internet Sharing on my Samsung Focus. No more USB tethering required!
This should make my crewmates happy since we can now have boat-wide Wi-Fi courtesy of Mango.