Best response: “A £2-a-month levy on automobiles could save our horse and cart business.”
Next of course, a levy to save: The recording industry, the movie industry, TV, Radio, schools… pretty soon, all the savings the Internet promised will be spent saving the past.
As Lilly notes:
[The Firefox vs. IE history] puts the current mobile wars in real relief. Apple versus Google is an amazing battle of Goliaths – but it’s clear that we need a purely-public-benefit player to step in to keep both players more honest and focused on doing what’s right for humans. Firefox OS is a first step towards that.
Lest we forget
A few isolated incidents or part of an alarming pattern? It’s time we found out. In the Dotcom case, not only have our law enforcement agencies cut corners – or worse – in their excitement at being part of Uncle Sam’s world police team, in so doing they have broken New Zealand laws designed to protect the rights of the people they’ve sworn to uphold.
They’ve also broken our trust. That’s earned them medals from the FBI. We can’t leave it at that.
FBI, also bowing to demands, from US film studios.
Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No. It is important to understand what the ministerial certificate is. The ministerial certificate is essentially a suppression order that was on the basis of an application by Kim Dotcom’s legal team to release the name of the Government Communications Security Bureau’s activity. It is not normal practice for us to do that. So, because the bureau believed it had acted lawfully, it asked the Acting Prime Minister to sign the ministerial certificate, which avoided it having to make that public statement.
I want to drive on the Web, but instead I’m being driven. All of us are. And that’s a problem.
It’s not for lack of trying on the part of websites and services such as search engines. But they don’t make cars. They make stores and utilities that try to be personal, but aren’t, and never can be.
Take, for example, the matter of location. The Internet has no location, and that’s one of its graces. But sites and services want to serve, so many notice what IP address you appear to be arriving from. Then they customize their page for you, based on that location. While that might sound innocent enough, and well-intended, it also fails to know one’s true intentions, which matter far more to each of us than whatever a website guesses about us, especially if the guessing is wrong.
Shopping carts on rails according to a later analogy from Doc. And that’s really sad. I used to compare railways to telcos, their services, their time-table, their price. And the Internet to the personal vehicle. From Doc’s perspective it appears the mass consumer Internet is trending that way.
We believe that inspiring online educators can come from all walks of life, and we want to find the next generation of educational YouTube stars – people with a talent for explaining tough concepts in compelling ways, and the passion and drive to assemble a global classroom of students. YouTube educational channels like Khan Academy, CrashCourse, Veritasium, Numberphile, MinutePhysics and Ted-Ed have grown to millions of views and subscribers – could you be next?
Another incumbency for disruption.
Overview
Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.
Technology
Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bit-rate narrowband speech to very high quality stereo music. Supported features are:
- Bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s
- Sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (fullband)
- Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms
- Support for both constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR)
- Audio bandwidth from narrowband to full-band
- Support for speech and music
- Support for mono and stereo
- Support for up to 255 channels (multistream frames)
- Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size
- Good loss robustness and packet loss concealment (PLC)
- Floating point and fixed-point implementation
You can read the full specification, including the reference implementation, in RFC 6716. An up-to-date implementation of the Opus standard is also available from the downloads page.
Hamish MacEwan 