ouch! I thought it's true!

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I am trying to improve my English skills, if you see a mistake please feel free to reply or /msg me a correction

...any of the videos that were obviously victims of illegal false DMCA takedown requests.

"The Collective Will and Impetus of the New Generation to operate their own streaming video servers."

I would say the same thing about MySpace and personal web servers too. The dumbing-down of technology comes at a price. Remember when desktop publishing first broke & people started designing pages with 20+ fonts on them? That's how bad 90% of the MySpace pages I've seen are. It's the age of flaming logos & blinking text all over again.

YouTube is yet another example. How many homemade videos have any kind of decent quality whatsoever? Or are they all drunken coeds eating insects at keggers & the like?

Television at least puts the little "amateur video" bug on the screen as an apology for low-grade content.

For any person who's complaining about being banned or whatever from YouTube - put up your own server. It's not Rocket Science!

What exactly is the Big Rush that you're supposed to get from providing a corporation with royalty-free content to begin with? At least if you run your own server & give your content away for free you get the 'benefit' of the server logs so you have some idea of who's looking at it.

If the kick is to be a User and just watch videos for free - there's always BitTorrent and that sports much better resolution.

You're not missing much.

My main workstation runs FreeBSD, which doesn't have a Flash player either. (There's an entry for flashplugin in the ports tree, but it's marked as broken due IIRC to a security issue.) As far as I'm concerned, this makes an excellent excuse when people send me URLs for Flash sites and bug me about watching them.

If I ever actually want to view Flash content for some reason, I can of course go to another computer and view it. On several occasions I have done this, including twice for YouTube videos, and in all instances it was a complete waste of time, devoid of entertainment value, let alone any actual information. The conclusion I have reached is that most people are *extremely* easy to amuse. (This is probably the same reason so many people watch television, which as far as I'm concerned is *actively* boring.)

So I consider the fact that the flashplugin port is broken to be a major selling point of FreeBSD. When people tell me that there's this uber-cool Flash content I've just absolutely got to see, I can respond without being rude or dishonest. "Sorry, I can't. There's no working Flash plugin for FreeBSD." This is a much better excuse than the one I used to use. Previously I used to tell people that I had uninstalled Flash because of how annoying it was -- I don't want my web experience to have blinky flashy animations. This was true, and seemed like a good reason to me, but for some reason it tended to upset people. (Why? No clue. I don't think I will ever understand humans.) Not even having the *option* to install the Flash plugin, due to my choice in operating systems, doesn't bother people nearly so much.

There are some things I don't like about FreeBSD, and it is possible that I will want at some point to move back to Linux. If so, I'll have to keep the 64-bit version in mind as a way to retain my good no-Flash excuse.

-- 
We're working on a six-year set of freely redistributable Vacation Bible School materials.

Oh, but there is a way if one is /dying/ to see a YouTube video by way of Python, which I found about from some random tech news|web log site. There are other suggestions related to this on Digg site.

I'm much the same way: We have a television, but it's got no connection to the outside world and we live (way out in the sticks) where there's no broadcast reception at all. Most Flash content is insipid garbage, but every now and then a potential new client comes along whose web site navigation is dependent upon Flash -- guaranteed to get 'em a good old gloryhack lecture about accessibility every time.

Be that as it may, I've got to run my business, so I keep a "sacrificial lamb" 32 bit machine handy. With a 64 bit Flash player, I could turn that old machine off and save the electrons for the neighbor's air conditioner and their porch light that's always on.

shhhh!

Other but I will not tell you which one ;-)

I guess that with all the lawsuits going around they will keep removing some of the wonderful material that was out there :-(

In general, though, I don't think they should remove much. If I watch a television show, or a scene from a show, on YouTube, it's just to see if it's worth picking up on Tivo. The quality of YouTube video is generally low enough that it's not worth wasting much of my time on it.

The Colbert Report Threatdowns are what I miss most. :(

I can't stand stuff like You Tube, but I sure do see the positive side of it for a couple of people I care about! :-)

Guess it all depends on your point of view...

If it went away tomorrow, I would be completely oblivious

I am curious: is that really still true?

Actually, No. I am now getting some pretty good information from YouTube. Over the last year or so, I have gotten back into embedded programming on Arduino's and RPi. YouTube has been a source of some pretty good information.

Additionally, I took up bee keeping and YouTube has been damn handy for getting some visuals for becoming familiar with what to look for in bee health and bee keeping in general.

And I have to admit, I have also seen some pretty interesting projects targeting wind and solar installations. ....and every now and again someone will send me a link to some off-the-wall video that just plain cracks me up....

So, my statement is no longer true regarding YouTube. I am stubbornly sticking to that opinion regarding televisions though. We have not had a television that does more than act as a 54" monitor in our house in 12 years. More a matter of principle than anything now I guess. I don't even know what is on television anymore except for Fox News...and the only reason I know about that is that when I visit my 83 y/o mom, she is sitting there watching that crap.... simply blows my mind to see what she is watching.... I guess she has earned the right and then some. >

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...the majority is always wrong, and always the last to know about it...

A solution is nothing more than a clearly stated problem...

wjw

Interesting, but if you were YouTube, would you be worried about some guy complaining on his blog, or the billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom?

If I were running YouTube, I'd be interested in the suggestion that a fair use argument could be applied as an assumption of promotion rather than infringement. The key passage from that rant:

I believe that such cases occupy far more of a gray area, in which the sharing of other people’s content, in small amounts for no profit, constitutes promotion of the content, and should be considered permissable until such time as the copyright holder objects, at which point it should be immediately removed with complete understanding that both parties acted in good faith.

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);

- apotheon CopyWrite Chad Perrin