I will preemptively agree with what I assume will be an outburst at the absurdity of this, but I'll also add that this is really kind of an advancement on the technology already used to put people under house arrest. That being said, it's a very dangerous slope from being sentenced to house arrest and having your whereabouts monitored, and imagine keeping miss Lohan away from out of all bars and liquor stores? Okay, that actually sounds like a good idea, so how about any restaurant with a liquor license? I think the inanity is best exemplified by this quote:
“Because the psychology of the crime of the criminal actually is, they will re-offend and so we’re looking at persons who are recidivists,” Zappala said.
Lack of grammar aside, that's a dangerous thought, and of course patently wrong. Besides, if you are of the twisted mindset that someone will always re-offend, then you should keep them locked up and not in public anyway.
Finally, it alerts the tagged individual. If indeed it does, I hope it does so a tad of discretion. "Hey, pedo, get away from this school. Sicko." doesn't make for good sidewalk conversation.
emPower! lets you switch back and forth between near and far by touching the sides of the frames. Or you can engage an accelerometer that will automatically switch between modes depending on whether you are looking up or down.
Seems pretty easy, either tap your frame or use them just like bifocals. Pretty nifty.
If Verizon can offer an unlimited (or, you know, unlimited until you read the fine print) data plan that's sturdy and reliable and fast, it will be an enormous windfall for them. Verizon is not only huge, but generally accepted as providing better service, especially in the northeast. Verizon wants money and to be bigger than AT&T - offering unlimited data gets more people to switch to or pick up Verizon service with an iPhone. If they aren't priced very competitive with AT&T, they'll minimize that enormous surge, which they don't want. Make less per person, get more people - totally worth it.
The true winners are, of course, Apple. Either way, millions of people will be buying iPhones for the first and probably not the last time. Toss in the iPad 2 and Lion to round out the corners and 2011 is looking up for Apple. Competition amongst telecoms is better for consumers, but it's better for producers as well.
'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus.
Translation: "We are discouraging you from using our product." What VP in their right mind says that? I may disagree with them, though I understand why a company might want to get extra cash, but to come right out and say that this new change will make their service less desirable is just bizarre.
Ars had a nice writeup of this yesterday, referencing a 2006 post of theirs. The basic gist is/was that DRM simply CANNOT be a good sell for tech companies, and given that Intel and the other consumer electronics companies are so massive when compared to production costs, why don't they just buy one? Intel could piss on its shoes and come out with the budget for a dozen major films, which they could then release DRM free, to the joy of all of their customers. Hollywood is big, but there are only six major production houses and a number of smaller ones... all of which are worth far less than the major tech companies. Want more movies on iTunes, Apple? You've got the cash, so BUY a production house.
I didn't mean to editorialize, but I think I started to convince myself by the end there.
The NYTimes has, of course, a lot of coverage on the topic, but many, including the editorial board, make the very strong point - how is this any better? Yes, as countless first posters try to show everyday, nigger is offensive, but nothing is such a blight on American history as the institution of slavery. This censorship wrongly conflates the word to be the problem, when really the problem is the hundreds of years of oppression, hatred, and violence that has and is aimed at blacks that the word represents. Some choice editing won't change the realities of the South in the mid-1800s, to think this fools anyone is a presumption of ignorance amongst teachers, parents, and children.
Note that a full 25% could go either way. Fox is putting the predictable spin on the story that ALL news media will probably put on this to generate readership, but the takeaway is that now we know more. This is generally considered a good a thing, especially when you want to do this sort of thing repeatedly. They have a method, and are looking to expand and perfect it. Mission accomplished.
One of the changes this country seriously needs is a move to more open primaries. As it stands now, party politics are mostly driven by the extreme base, and sensible people who want the best of both worlds (or, heaven forbid, three or four worlds!) are left behind. Open primaries allow everyone to pick the candidates they would indeed most like to see win.
But idiots who want to game the system by registering as Democrat/Republican to vote for the opposing side's least-winnable candidate are why we can't have a more open primary system, and only fuel the brutally and falsely partisan political discourse. This sort of tactic is, in a word, disgusting, and in two words, outright shameful.
Best case scenario - The guy you wanted to win does, despite your wasted efforts/money before the primary Worst case scenario - Your campaign works and she wins. NOW WHAT?!
Apple has better people working for them, though. I mean, as far as design flaws go, "sometimes left-handed folks get dropped calls" is a lot better than "womprat-sized hole that automatically destroys entire facility when fired into." If Apple built the Death Star, the Rebels would have been defeated but Vader couldn't have called the Emperor to tell him about it.
A lot of the work is being done by http://www.lightingafrica.org/ and you can look at the member list there. It's pretty unwieldy, since Africa is a giant continent, but the article itself mentions at least two companies:
There's nothing inherently wrong with ethanol (unless you're under 21 - shame on you majority of populace!) but how we get our current stock is a terrible deal. Corn and farm policies are troublesome, and current ethanol mandates are indeed another subsidy for a growing and yet still ailing production force, but it need not be. Convert some fields into sugarcane or switchgrass, which is vastly more effective for creating biofuels, and that's without all the genetic advances corn has had. We'll get more efficient energy production, another crop will become incredibly profitable, and the corn cycle of "grow more causing prices to drop so grow more" - that's a win-win-win situation.
Apples and oranges. Vastly more effort has been put into chess AI than go, but I will also say that I feel the game play of chess lends itself to AI better than go does. That doesn't really mean anything, though, because how well a computer can do something is a poor metric for gameplay, and doesn't make something "easier" or "more complex." The worst of computers can easily calculate 684681x32168794x984635131 while the best of computers has a hard time with "Bob really likes Sue but is trying to hide it from Joe." Computers can whoop me at chess and Super Mario Brothers, but I can drive a car better. Sure, computers may be better at chess than go, but that doesn't have to mean anything for us. We're not computers and computers aren't human, and while closing the divide is fascinating it isn't always relevant.
The same argument is sometimes applied to certain fields like math, etc., where men seem to be more successful than women. On average, men and women perform at the same level; the difference comes in the distribution. Men supposedly tend to cluster at the really high and really low levels, so while 4/5 of the best may be male, 4/5 of the very worst will also be male. It's a thought-provoking theory, and there is actually some evidence for it, but there is also plenty of evidence against it and it isn't one to make lightly. Like many other areas, it is likely really smart women are tragically funneled elsewhere or pushed to do something "more appropriate."
More concretely, the concept that chess simulates war is simply outdated. Civilization, Warcraft III, and half the console games these days simulate war. Chess is an artful mastery of planning, brainpower, and pattern recognition that cannot be matched, but it's NOT warfare, not the way it matters.
Well, every form of property infringes on some "freedom" or "right." The alternative is anarchy. Jefferson can spit all he wants, but Government and laws by definition swap some liberties for security, so if you want to live in a civil society you have to sacrifice some so-called "rights." What rights a people are guaranteed is dictated by a lot of things, such as who has the guns and what their governing documents are. The Native Americans learned the former the hard way (along with the rest of Jared Diamond's trifecta) but it remains true that the Europeans' concept of "physical property rights" infringed on some of the Americans' less-than-physical concept of "I live here." There's nothing inherently special about tangible property.
These days, the Constitution spells out pretty clearly what is and what isn't a right. The Constitution dictates copyrights, patents, and privacy, and some other things discussed less often on Slashdot. Those first two are what you call infringing, but things like the Fourth Amendment carry a bit more weight than the "good and useful arts" bit. As I said in my original post, personality rights are a manifestation of personal privacy. Why should your desire to profit off my visage impede my right to privacy? If the concept is confusing, we're lucky to have a common-law system so our system evolves with our society.
Some of the comments on TFA are completely off the deep end, and I (foolishly) hope we don't end up with the same.
This a good thing. Personality rights like this evolve from the protection of privacy, and imply each individual's right to control their usage by the media. Usually those in elected positions forgo such rights, but for the rest of us it's nice to know that we can try to control some of the usage of ourselves as a commodity. In reality, this right translates almost only to celebrities, which unfairly causes a lot of the vilification of the laws; the fact of the matter is that only celebrities (by definition, perhaps) have their personality commoditized. A celebrity is a business, and just like a business they have the right to control the marketing of their brand.
I'm taking the bait on this one, but how Net Neutrality will be saved or broken is a technological issue, not whether or not it should be. That is a first amendment issue, which is how Senator Franken presents it. This is about content, competition, economics, and rights - areas that hopefully all senators are well versed in, but in which Franken, as a writer and radio show host, has taken part in personally.
USSR, IP, and Southpark
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
There's a theory that you only truly listen to a song or watch a movie once, and every time after that you are (perhaps subtly) analyzing it. When I watch Tron now, I am struck by three things in particular, depending on which lens you look at it through.
First, it's a really interesting interpretation/presentation of intellectual property laws. The whole movie is essentially personality rights projected onto the works created. A programmer has their own personality imbued within the program itself, defining how the program behaves, and from what I gather Tron: Legacy continues this trend. The programs, as works of art, act as extensions of their creators into the digital world. Flynn is essentially trying to win back his intellectual property from Dillinger (creative name, huh?), who is now profiting from Flynn's work through copyright infringement. It's no surprise that Disney portrays a hero as someone who fights to preserve his own intellectual property, a Lockean interpretation (Flynn/we did the work, only Flynn/we should have the rights to programs/Steamboat Willie).
Second, the movie is steeped in the geopolitical conflict between the USA and the USSR. Master Control Program is red, as are all of its input and output streams; once Flynn and Tron succeed all the red turns to blue. Hell, Dillinger is even okay when the sentient MCP hacks the Kremlin, but balks when it goes after the Pentagon. There are obvious ties to IP law on the national scale as well, but the movie is a strong symbol of the struggle between global powers in the 80s, albeit with cooler fight sequences.
And, finally, as a South Park fan, it's hilarious to see Moses as MCP.
Before leaving China, Google censored search results. Hell, Google's altered their algorithm within days of a NYT article about how a sham business survived because of all the bad press he got. They've blocked certain searches, such as those used to find site vulnerabilities.
I'm a big Google fan, but I don't think we need any more tests to see that Google will play ball against certain baddies.
Slashdot Mirror
I will preemptively agree with what I assume will be an outburst at the absurdity of this, but I'll also add that this is really kind of an advancement on the technology already used to put people under house arrest. That being said, it's a very dangerous slope from being sentenced to house arrest and having your whereabouts monitored, and imagine keeping miss Lohan away from out of all bars and liquor stores? Okay, that actually sounds like a good idea, so how about any restaurant with a liquor license? I think the inanity is best exemplified by this quote:
“Because the psychology of the crime of the criminal actually is, they will re-offend and so we’re looking at persons who are recidivists,” Zappala said.
Lack of grammar aside, that's a dangerous thought, and of course patently wrong. Besides, if you are of the twisted mindset that someone will always re-offend, then you should keep them locked up and not in public anyway.
Finally, it alerts the tagged individual. If indeed it does, I hope it does so a tad of discretion. "Hey, pedo, get away from this school. Sicko." doesn't make for good sidewalk conversation.
emPower! lets you switch back and forth between near and far by touching the sides of the frames. Or you can engage an accelerometer that will automatically switch between modes depending on whether you are looking up or down.
Seems pretty easy, either tap your frame or use them just like bifocals. Pretty nifty.
Not to mention the bootleg Safari icon.
If Verizon can offer an unlimited (or, you know, unlimited until you read the fine print) data plan that's sturdy and reliable and fast, it will be an enormous windfall for them. Verizon is not only huge, but generally accepted as providing better service, especially in the northeast. Verizon wants money and to be bigger than AT&T - offering unlimited data gets more people to switch to or pick up Verizon service with an iPhone. If they aren't priced very competitive with AT&T, they'll minimize that enormous surge, which they don't want. Make less per person, get more people - totally worth it.
The true winners are, of course, Apple. Either way, millions of people will be buying iPhones for the first and probably not the last time. Toss in the iPad 2 and Lion to round out the corners and 2011 is looking up for Apple. Competition amongst telecoms is better for consumers, but it's better for producers as well.
'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus.
Translation: "We are discouraging you from using our product." What VP in their right mind says that? I may disagree with them, though I understand why a company might want to get extra cash, but to come right out and say that this new change will make their service less desirable is just bizarre.
Ars had a nice writeup of this yesterday, referencing a 2006 post of theirs. The basic gist is/was that DRM simply CANNOT be a good sell for tech companies, and given that Intel and the other consumer electronics companies are so massive when compared to production costs, why don't they just buy one? Intel could piss on its shoes and come out with the budget for a dozen major films, which they could then release DRM free, to the joy of all of their customers. Hollywood is big, but there are only six major production houses and a number of smaller ones... all of which are worth far less than the major tech companies. Want more movies on iTunes, Apple? You've got the cash, so BUY a production house.
I didn't mean to editorialize, but I think I started to convince myself by the end there.
Yes, but the difference ain't much.
The NYTimes has, of course, a lot of coverage on the topic, but many, including the editorial board, make the very strong point - how is this any better? Yes, as countless first posters try to show everyday, nigger is offensive, but nothing is such a blight on American history as the institution of slavery. This censorship wrongly conflates the word to be the problem, when really the problem is the hundreds of years of oppression, hatred, and violence that has and is aimed at blacks that the word represents. Some choice editing won't change the realities of the South in the mid-1800s, to think this fools anyone is a presumption of ignorance amongst teachers, parents, and children.
It's helpful for the people who use the long-scale when counting.
But http://www.theplantlist.org/ quotes their data right on the front page:
Accepted 298,900 28.7%
Synonym 477,601 45.9%
Unresolved 263,925 25.4%
Note that a full 25% could go either way. Fox is putting the predictable spin on the story that ALL news media will probably put on this to generate readership, but the takeaway is that now we know more. This is generally considered a good a thing, especially when you want to do this sort of thing repeatedly. They have a method, and are looking to expand and perfect it. Mission accomplished.
Do you by any chance recall what the reasoning was for the unconstitutional argument?
And even if you're not willing to game the system out of a sense of right and wrong, that doesn't mean your opponents share the same ideals.
I just wish, for once, people would chose the "Cooperate" option in the Prisoner's Dilemma, not "Defect."
One of the changes this country seriously needs is a move to more open primaries. As it stands now, party politics are mostly driven by the extreme base, and sensible people who want the best of both worlds (or, heaven forbid, three or four worlds!) are left behind. Open primaries allow everyone to pick the candidates they would indeed most like to see win.
But idiots who want to game the system by registering as Democrat/Republican to vote for the opposing side's least-winnable candidate are why we can't have a more open primary system, and only fuel the brutally and falsely partisan political discourse. This sort of tactic is, in a word, disgusting, and in two words, outright shameful.
Best case scenario - The guy you wanted to win does, despite your wasted efforts/money before the primary
Worst case scenario - Your campaign works and she wins. NOW WHAT?!
Apple has better people working for them, though. I mean, as far as design flaws go, "sometimes left-handed folks get dropped calls" is a lot better than "womprat-sized hole that automatically destroys entire facility when fired into." If Apple built the Death Star, the Rebels would have been defeated but Vader couldn't have called the Emperor to tell him about it.
I hate to be a shill, but TG sells a variety of powerful LEDs featuring:
13W Consumption, 100W incandescent light output (900 Lumens)
5W Consumption, 75W incandescent light output (400 Lumens)
10W Consumption, 75W directional incandescent light output (400 Lumens)
They also sell a stupidly-pimped out 5W with no info on output.
A lot of the work is being done by http://www.lightingafrica.org/ and you can look at the member list there. It's pretty unwieldy, since Africa is a giant continent, but the article itself mentions at least two companies:
http://www.fireflyledlight.com/
http://www.huskpowersystems.com/
Corn ethanol: bad
Switchgrass ethanol: good
There's nothing inherently wrong with ethanol (unless you're under 21 - shame on you majority of populace!) but how we get our current stock is a terrible deal. Corn and farm policies are troublesome, and current ethanol mandates are indeed another subsidy for a growing and yet still ailing production force, but it need not be. Convert some fields into sugarcane or switchgrass, which is vastly more effective for creating biofuels, and that's without all the genetic advances corn has had. We'll get more efficient energy production, another crop will become incredibly profitable, and the corn cycle of "grow more causing prices to drop so grow more" - that's a win-win-win situation.
Apples and oranges. Vastly more effort has been put into chess AI than go, but I will also say that I feel the game play of chess lends itself to AI better than go does. That doesn't really mean anything, though, because how well a computer can do something is a poor metric for gameplay, and doesn't make something "easier" or "more complex." The worst of computers can easily calculate 684681x32168794x984635131 while the best of computers has a hard time with "Bob really likes Sue but is trying to hide it from Joe." Computers can whoop me at chess and Super Mario Brothers, but I can drive a car better. Sure, computers may be better at chess than go, but that doesn't have to mean anything for us. We're not computers and computers aren't human, and while closing the divide is fascinating it isn't always relevant.
The same argument is sometimes applied to certain fields like math, etc., where men seem to be more successful than women. On average, men and women perform at the same level; the difference comes in the distribution. Men supposedly tend to cluster at the really high and really low levels, so while 4/5 of the best may be male, 4/5 of the very worst will also be male. It's a thought-provoking theory, and there is actually some evidence for it, but there is also plenty of evidence against it and it isn't one to make lightly. Like many other areas, it is likely really smart women are tragically funneled elsewhere or pushed to do something "more appropriate."
More concretely, the concept that chess simulates war is simply outdated. Civilization, Warcraft III, and half the console games these days simulate war. Chess is an artful mastery of planning, brainpower, and pattern recognition that cannot be matched, but it's NOT warfare, not the way it matters.
As I said above these things tend to go out the window when it comes to political candidates. There's a reason it's called a "public office."
Well, every form of property infringes on some "freedom" or "right." The alternative is anarchy. Jefferson can spit all he wants, but Government and laws by definition swap some liberties for security, so if you want to live in a civil society you have to sacrifice some so-called "rights." What rights a people are guaranteed is dictated by a lot of things, such as who has the guns and what their governing documents are. The Native Americans learned the former the hard way (along with the rest of Jared Diamond's trifecta) but it remains true that the Europeans' concept of "physical property rights" infringed on some of the Americans' less-than-physical concept of "I live here." There's nothing inherently special about tangible property.
These days, the Constitution spells out pretty clearly what is and what isn't a right. The Constitution dictates copyrights, patents, and privacy, and some other things discussed less often on Slashdot. Those first two are what you call infringing, but things like the Fourth Amendment carry a bit more weight than the "good and useful arts" bit. As I said in my original post, personality rights are a manifestation of personal privacy. Why should your desire to profit off my visage impede my right to privacy? If the concept is confusing, we're lucky to have a common-law system so our system evolves with our society.
Some of the comments on TFA are completely off the deep end, and I (foolishly) hope we don't end up with the same.
This a good thing. Personality rights like this evolve from the protection of privacy, and imply each individual's right to control their usage by the media. Usually those in elected positions forgo such rights, but for the rest of us it's nice to know that we can try to control some of the usage of ourselves as a commodity. In reality, this right translates almost only to celebrities, which unfairly causes a lot of the vilification of the laws; the fact of the matter is that only celebrities (by definition, perhaps) have their personality commoditized. A celebrity is a business, and just like a business they have the right to control the marketing of their brand.
I'm taking the bait on this one, but how Net Neutrality will be saved or broken is a technological issue, not whether or not it should be. That is a first amendment issue, which is how Senator Franken presents it. This is about content, competition, economics, and rights - areas that hopefully all senators are well versed in, but in which Franken, as a writer and radio show host, has taken part in personally.
There's a theory that you only truly listen to a song or watch a movie once, and every time after that you are (perhaps subtly) analyzing it. When I watch Tron now, I am struck by three things in particular, depending on which lens you look at it through.
First, it's a really interesting interpretation/presentation of intellectual property laws. The whole movie is essentially personality rights projected onto the works created. A programmer has their own personality imbued within the program itself, defining how the program behaves, and from what I gather Tron: Legacy continues this trend. The programs, as works of art, act as extensions of their creators into the digital world. Flynn is essentially trying to win back his intellectual property from Dillinger (creative name, huh?), who is now profiting from Flynn's work through copyright infringement. It's no surprise that Disney portrays a hero as someone who fights to preserve his own intellectual property, a Lockean interpretation (Flynn/we did the work, only Flynn/we should have the rights to programs/Steamboat Willie).
Second, the movie is steeped in the geopolitical conflict between the USA and the USSR. Master Control Program is red, as are all of its input and output streams; once Flynn and Tron succeed all the red turns to blue. Hell, Dillinger is even okay when the sentient MCP hacks the Kremlin, but balks when it goes after the Pentagon. There are obvious ties to IP law on the national scale as well, but the movie is a strong symbol of the struggle between global powers in the 80s, albeit with cooler fight sequences.
And, finally, as a South Park fan, it's hilarious to see Moses as MCP.
Before leaving China, Google censored search results. Hell, Google's altered their algorithm within days of a NYT article about how a sham business survived because of all the bad press he got. They've blocked certain searches, such as those used to find site vulnerabilities.
I'm a big Google fan, but I don't think we need any more tests to see that Google will play ball against certain baddies.