"Funny as it might sound, FunnyJunk's threat of litigation against The Oatmeal raises a very important issue: the extent to which artists can complain in public about perceived or actual infringement of their works by user-generated content websites. Does it matter if the content creator accused the website of condoning or participating in the infringement?"
This doesn't seem like an 'issue' at all. The DMCA places limits on the circumstances under which a copyright holder can successfully sue a web host/file locker/user-upload thing; but the only limits on the rights of an individual to speak would be libel, defamation, slander, etc. Given how trivial it is to demonstrate that there is infringing content(and that the operators have historically been dicks about it, albeit within the bounds of the DMCA), any threat against somebody who says so is pure legal bullying.
Making grossly false statements ("Funnyjunk has no DMCA takedown process/doesn't properly respond to takedown notices") would be a bad idea; but trivially verifiable ("Wow, there sure is a fuckload of other people's stuff being hosted for ad money on funnyjunk") statements or subjective statements of opinion("It certainly doesn't seem like funnyjunk's management is terribly concerned about being a nest of scum and villainy") seem pretty harmless.
IANAL or anything; but one would think that hasty, trivially-verifiable, scrubbing of that offending content that you oh-so-just-couldn't-keep-up-with-the-burden-of-policing-it-was-all-the-users'-fault right up until you send a '20k or a lawsuit' letter worded in outright extortionate tones seems like a bad strategy.
Given the DMCA safe-harbor provisions(much as team MPAA loaths them), it is entirely possible that the offending links did not subject funnyjunk to liability(since Oatmeal apparently didn't feel like playing DMCA whack-a-mole, so they hadn't necessarily received a takedown notice); but axing them after issuing a legal threat alleging that assertions of copyright infringement were defamatory sure smells like destruction of evidence... And courts tend to take a very dim view of destruction of evidence...
What I find interesting is the relative cull rates. As might be expected for a large country with some major IT activity, India was well represented at the starting round, but the subsequent rounds knocked 3 factors of ten off the total. Russia and Belarus both only took about one factor of ten, and the US around two...
Numbers per-capita, much less absolute numbers, aren't wildly interesting; but those are some fairly dramatic differences in attrition...
Thankfully, legal systems, codes of law, and bodies of case law vary nontrivially between jurisdictions, and we have, um, totally vital, regulations to the effect that you need to be certified state-by-state in order to legally practice. This protects vulnerable Americans from an influx of cheap foreign lawyers...
Your proposal sounds dangerously close to advocating that we spend our precious, precious, resources on developing the skills of workers rather than handing performance bonuses to management or dividends to investors. Go back to Cuba, Communist!
Sure, we could apply the radical theory that markets are reasonably good at balancing supply and demand, and tell the people whining to Congress that if their supply is too low, they just aren't paying enough, or doing enough to bolster supply(eg. by hiring candidates and training them, rather than sitting around and pouting because they can't find enough suckers who will pay for 100% of their own education and then accept wages that might let them finish paying down that debt in a couple of decades...)
H-1B is a scam by which white collar companies (not blue collar, because they aren't cool enough)
Jobs that can be outsourced(relatively successful in manufacturing[and if you choose the CNMI you can even use 'made in USA' stickers while paying at roughly Chinese rates!], rather a mixed record in white-collar tech) or done under-the-table with reasonable safety for the people who matter(Gosh, officer, I had no idea that my janitorial contractor's subcontracted cleaning crew might not be 100% on the up-and-up immigration wise... I figured that they were so cheap because they just had a good work ethic...) don't really need H-1Bs...
I know that textbooks were selling(shrink wrapped, of course, with some sort of clickwrap EULA sticker) with a code printed inside that granted limited-term access to some sort of online component when I was in undergrad. And that was a vexing number of years ago. Thankfully, none of the professors actually bothered with the enforcement side of that bullshit; but the groundwork was all there and ready to go. Never mind the, less academic but no less trivially equivalent, emerging practice of selling crippled games along with various 'unlock codes' to deter the used game market.
Not only as this 'invention' in the worst spirit of trampling-on-right-of-first-sale scumsucking, it isn't even remotely novel...
FATAL ERROR: Scene Contrast Parameter Excursion, Lower Bound, in STB Content Viewership Assurance Module. Please Contact Your Service Provider or Authorized Warranty Representative.
Telescreens, Pravda, and assorted dictators' gigantic golden statues and peculiar cults of personality(while undoubtedly dramatic) have the convenient tendency to collapse under the weight of their own inefficiency.
We, in the free world, have had our profit-motivated-innovators tirelessly striving toward a world of constant surveillance, laughably misleading information substitutes, and vapid celebrity worship that is economically self sustaining. Indeed, quite handsomely profitable. Plus, it is much easier to handle upkeep when your citizens carefully charge their own wireless tracking modules and buy protective cases allowing them to be carried as often as possible, and demand to have their telescreens replaced when they break or are deemed insufficiently large for super bowl purposes. Such cooperation... Can you imagine how many threats of torture the Stasi would have had to use to get people to go to Best Buy?
Honestly, even in the land of tight hardware control and contempt for legacy applications that is Apple's little post-PC-playground, the challenges of resolution changes are on display(literally)...
Why is the 'retina display' 960x640? Because that's exactly twice as many pixels in each dimension as the 3GS's display, so trivial 1->4 pixel scaling wouldn't look like total suck. The same thing occurred when the iPad display received a resolution boost.
Arbitrary DPI is a nontrivial problem, especially if you aren't willing to abandon all the legacy crap at the same time, and cherry-picked DPI increases that carefully match trivial special cases in scaling aren't cheap.
We get killed by riot control robots, and eventually there will be a few thousand elite owners in the world served by their robot infrastructure...
It would actually be interesting to see how quickly suitably capable expert systems might kill off the plutocrats:
Some sort of overgrown ERP AI or electronic trading algorithm could presumably execute the tasks associated with controlling large capital market holdings or a major business venture of some sort(if they let people like HP's board of directors tie their own shoelaces, let alone run a multinational, doing it better than the humans might not be so very far off...); but entirely lack any taste for large houses/yachts/expensive hookers/covert drug-fueled orgies in the secret sex dungeon built under their mansion/etc.
I suspect that the legal system would be a trifle befuddled at the notion of a corporation that owns itself; but it isn't so very hard to imagine such a thing being technologically feasible and(by virtue of having no hobbies or human foibles whatsoever, expensive or otherwise) outcompeting otherwise equivalent entities that have meat-based managers who demand stock options and cocaine...
Wouldn't be much comfort, either way, since the machines would likely pick off most of the little people first; but there would be a certain satisfying irony in having the end of human civilization occur without the slightest disruption to its myriad complex systems, just the gradual removal of the people that built them, leaving only civilization's systems behind, quietly grinding out the desires of people long since dust until the last of the thorium runs out...
Given that cops and prison guards are in the enviable position of being 1)Often well unionized and 2)Unionized government workers that even Republican hardliners find it impolitic to hate, I'm guessing that we'll be leaving this one to the humans for a while yet...
The practice of specifying constraints when defining an optimization problem isn't exactly new, whether the problem is intended to be solved by a human or a machine...
Now, if Watson is being operated by your insurance company, you should probably be more worried about the constraint set it is being fed; but the practice of constrained optimization is not a novel matter...
While I understand that telcos are money-grubbing little fuckers who would sell their own family for a plug nickel, I am honestly baffled at how frequently this 'zOMG high-bandwidth sites are terrifying parasites who are getting a free ride!!!' comes up, and even seems to be treated as reasonable.
It's not hard: For Company A and Customer B to exchange data across the magic intertubes, Company A is paying(probably rather a lot, albeit at favorable per-megabyte rates) for upstream bandwidth and Customer B is paying (probably rather less; but at usurious per-megabyte rates) for downstream bandwidth. There isn't any magic free-riding going on. In fact, by offering attractive and data-heavy services, Company A is doing ISPs a favor; by making their otherwise rather unexciting product highly desirable to Customer B.
I can understand that there might be occasional spats about peering between the big backbone guys; but the claim that internet companies are somehow 'free-riding' on the poor, downtrodden ISPs is laughably absurd. They certainly don't get their upstream pipes for free, and their customers definitely pay for the connection that they use to download. I have to wonder what color the sky is in the world of ISPs who have the temerity to attack their greatest benefactors, the people who provide stuff that the public wants so much that they'll buy bandwidth to get it....
If you break the educational results down by state, you will see that yes, yes there are.
As long as you don't make the mistake of living outside one of the civilized zones, you can actually see results pretty similar to the wealthy bits of Europe and even parts of Asia. Certain other states, by consistently achieving results that make you wonder if they are actually telecommuting from some hellish African warzone, really drag us down...
It is my understanding that, in broad strokes, retail locations are forced to accept smaller margins on pricier electronics and make it up on accessories and services.
If somebody is dropping $500 on a graphics card, or $1000+ on a TV, or what have you, they are likely to comparison shop. Even a few percent markup over the next-cheapest guy will look sufficiently large, in absolute terms, to drive the customer away. The retail guys have to suck it up and then try to sock you for a few hundred percent on that displayport->DVI adapter or gold-plated Belkin USB cable on the way out...
(Also, while the quality can be variable, the better class of local PC shop is is a hell of a lot better as a resource for non-techies than the geek squad, and sometimes easier to find than a convenient nerd relative...)
Proving the existence of unprovable statements within logically consistent systems doesn't prevent there from being provable ones... If you are very lucky indeed, the ones that are provable and the ones that you care about might even overlap...
Thankfully, we will be able to realize considerable savings, since the scheme is so draconian that we can probably just purchase a Great Firewall implementation from the Chinese at everyday low prices...
If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?
Flag or no flag, team EU?
In all seriousness, this seems like a dreadful idea both on just about every level.
Cultural? I'm trying to think of ways to make more of a mockery of the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Europe managed to produce at one time. I'm having a hard time thinking of one. Yeah, why not build a massive system of sniveling, anonymous censors in order to combat a 'threat' that kills fewer people than seasonal hot/cold snaps by at least an order of magnitude. Good plan there.
Practical? Well, let's see here: As with the relentless 'zOMG Craigslist prostitution!!!' moral panics, what better place for those who wish you harm than shouting about it on the internet? Highly visible, way less anonymous than it feels unless you really do it properly, and comparatively easy to see which fish are biting. You want to drive them away from the venues where your pet geeks can monitor at wire speed and into more clandestine locations where you need to groom human intelligence assets with convincing beards and accents? Dumbass.
Technical? Bots will probably be programmatically flagging things in order to downrank them more or less as enthusiastically as keyword comment spam is currently deployed to uprank things. Never mind the less relentless; but more dangerous and focused, potential for assorted political/commercial/psycho ex/psycho roommate drama.
Legal? Say hello to endless wrangling about what is and isn't 'incitement', most likely with clumsy overreactions against the harmless, clueless, and impolitic, along with free traffic in assorted slang, inuendo, and more or less subtle dog-whistle stuff.
This plan has holes that(where one to be so inclined) a truck bomb could be driven through...
My understanding, back when MS first started talking about the whole 'Azure' thing, was that they were trying to distinguish themselves from Amazon(and others) 'just a bunch of VMs, but easy to buy/release programmatically' product in favor of some sort of more abstracted 'platform' that would hide both the hardware details and the OS guts, in favor of an environment that mostly resembled an application's-eye-view of Windows; but without the Windows administration, along with some similarly abstracted SQL and web-hosting things. It was always presumed that it wouldn't exactly be running on Linux; but that it didn't 'run Windows' in the sense of any 'Windows' SKU that Joe Customer could buy a box of and plunk onto a server at the office...
Was offering just-plain-boring offsite VMs always part of the plan? Did they discover somewhere partway through the execution phase that their pure-cloud application environment just wasn't quite Windows enough for their customers? Are the plain-VM offerings an integral part of the somewhat confusing alphabet soup of 'azure services', or is this a checkbox-filling thing that was tacked on because somebody wanted it and the internal cost of hyper-v licenses is small?
Slashdot Mirror
"Funny as it might sound, FunnyJunk's threat of litigation against The Oatmeal raises a very important issue: the extent to which artists can complain in public about perceived or actual infringement of their works by user-generated content websites. Does it matter if the content creator accused the website of condoning or participating in the infringement?"
This doesn't seem like an 'issue' at all. The DMCA places limits on the circumstances under which a copyright holder can successfully sue a web host/file locker/user-upload thing; but the only limits on the rights of an individual to speak would be libel, defamation, slander, etc. Given how trivial it is to demonstrate that there is infringing content(and that the operators have historically been dicks about it, albeit within the bounds of the DMCA), any threat against somebody who says so is pure legal bullying.
Making grossly false statements ("Funnyjunk has no DMCA takedown process/doesn't properly respond to takedown notices") would be a bad idea; but trivially verifiable ("Wow, there sure is a fuckload of other people's stuff being hosted for ad money on funnyjunk") statements or subjective statements of opinion("It certainly doesn't seem like funnyjunk's management is terribly concerned about being a nest of scum and villainy") seem pretty harmless.
IANAL or anything; but one would think that hasty, trivially-verifiable, scrubbing of that offending content that you oh-so-just-couldn't-keep-up-with-the-burden-of-policing-it-was-all-the-users'-fault right up until you send a '20k or a lawsuit' letter worded in outright extortionate tones seems like a bad strategy.
Given the DMCA safe-harbor provisions(much as team MPAA loaths them), it is entirely possible that the offending links did not subject funnyjunk to liability(since Oatmeal apparently didn't feel like playing DMCA whack-a-mole, so they hadn't necessarily received a takedown notice); but axing them after issuing a legal threat alleging that assertions of copyright infringement were defamatory sure smells like destruction of evidence... And courts tend to take a very dim view of destruction of evidence...
What I find interesting is the relative cull rates. As might be expected for a large country with some major IT activity, India was well represented at the starting round, but the subsequent rounds knocked 3 factors of ten off the total. Russia and Belarus both only took about one factor of ten, and the US around two...
Numbers per-capita, much less absolute numbers, aren't wildly interesting; but those are some fairly dramatic differences in attrition...
Thankfully, legal systems, codes of law, and bodies of case law vary nontrivially between jurisdictions, and we have, um, totally vital, regulations to the effect that you need to be certified state-by-state in order to legally practice. This protects vulnerable Americans from an influx of cheap foreign lawyers...
Your proposal sounds dangerously close to advocating that we spend our precious, precious, resources on developing the skills of workers rather than handing performance bonuses to management or dividends to investors. Go back to Cuba, Communist!
Sure, we could apply the radical theory that markets are reasonably good at balancing supply and demand, and tell the people whining to Congress that if their supply is too low, they just aren't paying enough, or doing enough to bolster supply(eg. by hiring candidates and training them, rather than sitting around and pouting because they can't find enough suckers who will pay for 100% of their own education and then accept wages that might let them finish paying down that debt in a couple of decades...)
H-1B is a scam by which white collar companies (not blue collar, because they aren't cool enough)
Jobs that can be outsourced(relatively successful in manufacturing[and if you choose the CNMI you can even use 'made in USA' stickers while paying at roughly Chinese rates!], rather a mixed record in white-collar tech) or done under-the-table with reasonable safety for the people who matter(Gosh, officer, I had no idea that my janitorial contractor's subcontracted cleaning crew might not be 100% on the up-and-up immigration wise... I figured that they were so cheap because they just had a good work ethic...) don't really need H-1Bs...
I know that textbooks were selling(shrink wrapped, of course, with some sort of clickwrap EULA sticker) with a code printed inside that granted limited-term access to some sort of online component when I was in undergrad. And that was a vexing number of years ago. Thankfully, none of the professors actually bothered with the enforcement side of that bullshit; but the groundwork was all there and ready to go. Never mind the, less academic but no less trivially equivalent, emerging practice of selling crippled games along with various 'unlock codes' to deter the used game market.
Not only as this 'invention' in the worst spirit of trampling-on-right-of-first-sale scumsucking, it isn't even remotely novel...
FATAL ERROR: Scene Contrast Parameter Excursion, Lower Bound, in STB Content Viewership Assurance Module. Please Contact Your Service Provider or Authorized Warranty Representative.
No, no, this is better...
Telescreens, Pravda, and assorted dictators' gigantic golden statues and peculiar cults of personality(while undoubtedly dramatic) have the convenient tendency to collapse under the weight of their own inefficiency.
We, in the free world, have had our profit-motivated-innovators tirelessly striving toward a world of constant surveillance, laughably misleading information substitutes, and vapid celebrity worship that is economically self sustaining. Indeed, quite handsomely profitable. Plus, it is much easier to handle upkeep when your citizens carefully charge their own wireless tracking modules and buy protective cases allowing them to be carried as often as possible, and demand to have their telescreens replaced when they break or are deemed insufficiently large for super bowl purposes. Such cooperation... Can you imagine how many threats of torture the Stasi would have had to use to get people to go to Best Buy?
We can only hope that a brave transvestite, a crack team of ACLU litigators, and the threat of public ridicule can save us from this dystopia...
If you don't bother with puny details like 'color' you can go a bit higher still...
Don't expect much change from $30k, though...
Honestly, even in the land of tight hardware control and contempt for legacy applications that is Apple's little post-PC-playground, the challenges of resolution changes are on display(literally)...
Why is the 'retina display' 960x640? Because that's exactly twice as many pixels in each dimension as the 3GS's display, so trivial 1->4 pixel scaling wouldn't look like total suck. The same thing occurred when the iPad display received a resolution boost.
Arbitrary DPI is a nontrivial problem, especially if you aren't willing to abandon all the legacy crap at the same time, and cherry-picked DPI increases that carefully match trivial special cases in scaling aren't cheap.
We get killed by riot control robots, and eventually there will be a few thousand elite owners in the world served by their robot infrastructure...
It would actually be interesting to see how quickly suitably capable expert systems might kill off the plutocrats:
Some sort of overgrown ERP AI or electronic trading algorithm could presumably execute the tasks associated with controlling large capital market holdings or a major business venture of some sort(if they let people like HP's board of directors tie their own shoelaces, let alone run a multinational, doing it better than the humans might not be so very far off...); but entirely lack any taste for large houses/yachts/expensive hookers/covert drug-fueled orgies in the secret sex dungeon built under their mansion/etc.
I suspect that the legal system would be a trifle befuddled at the notion of a corporation that owns itself; but it isn't so very hard to imagine such a thing being technologically feasible and(by virtue of having no hobbies or human foibles whatsoever, expensive or otherwise) outcompeting otherwise equivalent entities that have meat-based managers who demand stock options and cocaine...
Wouldn't be much comfort, either way, since the machines would likely pick off most of the little people first; but there would be a certain satisfying irony in having the end of human civilization occur without the slightest disruption to its myriad complex systems, just the gradual removal of the people that built them, leaving only civilization's systems behind, quietly grinding out the desires of people long since dust until the last of the thorium runs out...
Given that cops and prison guards are in the enviable position of being 1)Often well unionized and 2)Unionized government workers that even Republican hardliners find it impolitic to hate, I'm guessing that we'll be leaving this one to the humans for a while yet...
My understanding is that we hire ~10% of the surplus to guard the prisons that hold the remainder.
The practice of specifying constraints when defining an optimization problem isn't exactly new, whether the problem is intended to be solved by a human or a machine...
Now, if Watson is being operated by your insurance company, you should probably be more worried about the constraint set it is being fed; but the practice of constrained optimization is not a novel matter...
Technology and automation were only supposed to drive efficiencies and innovations that made people who weren't me obsolete!
While I understand that telcos are money-grubbing little fuckers who would sell their own family for a plug nickel, I am honestly baffled at how frequently this 'zOMG high-bandwidth sites are terrifying parasites who are getting a free ride!!!' comes up, and even seems to be treated as reasonable.
It's not hard: For Company A and Customer B to exchange data across the magic intertubes, Company A is paying(probably rather a lot, albeit at favorable per-megabyte rates) for upstream bandwidth and Customer B is paying (probably rather less; but at usurious per-megabyte rates) for downstream bandwidth. There isn't any magic free-riding going on. In fact, by offering attractive and data-heavy services, Company A is doing ISPs a favor; by making their otherwise rather unexciting product highly desirable to Customer B.
I can understand that there might be occasional spats about peering between the big backbone guys; but the claim that internet companies are somehow 'free-riding' on the poor, downtrodden ISPs is laughably absurd. They certainly don't get their upstream pipes for free, and their customers definitely pay for the connection that they use to download. I have to wonder what color the sky is in the world of ISPs who have the temerity to attack their greatest benefactors, the people who provide stuff that the public wants so much that they'll buy bandwidth to get it....
A lot of Irish were blowing stuff up in the 80's...
If you break the educational results down by state, you will see that yes, yes there are.
As long as you don't make the mistake of living outside one of the civilized zones, you can actually see results pretty similar to the wealthy bits of Europe and even parts of Asia. Certain other states, by consistently achieving results that make you wonder if they are actually telecommuting from some hellish African warzone, really drag us down...
It is my understanding that, in broad strokes, retail locations are forced to accept smaller margins on pricier electronics and make it up on accessories and services.
If somebody is dropping $500 on a graphics card, or $1000+ on a TV, or what have you, they are likely to comparison shop. Even a few percent markup over the next-cheapest guy will look sufficiently large, in absolute terms, to drive the customer away. The retail guys have to suck it up and then try to sock you for a few hundred percent on that displayport->DVI adapter or gold-plated Belkin USB cable on the way out...
(Also, while the quality can be variable, the better class of local PC shop is is a hell of a lot better as a resource for non-techies than the geek squad, and sometimes easier to find than a convenient nerd relative...)
Proving the existence of unprovable statements within logically consistent systems doesn't prevent there from being provable ones... If you are very lucky indeed, the ones that are provable and the ones that you care about might even overlap...
Thankfully, we will be able to realize considerable savings, since the scheme is so draconian that we can probably just purchase a Great Firewall implementation from the Chinese at everyday low prices...
If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?
Flag or no flag, team EU?
In all seriousness, this seems like a dreadful idea both on just about every level.
Cultural? I'm trying to think of ways to make more of a mockery of the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Europe managed to produce at one time. I'm having a hard time thinking of one. Yeah, why not build a massive system of sniveling, anonymous censors in order to combat a 'threat' that kills fewer people than seasonal hot/cold snaps by at least an order of magnitude. Good plan there.
Practical? Well, let's see here: As with the relentless 'zOMG Craigslist prostitution!!!' moral panics, what better place for those who wish you harm than shouting about it on the internet? Highly visible, way less anonymous than it feels unless you really do it properly, and comparatively easy to see which fish are biting. You want to drive them away from the venues where your pet geeks can monitor at wire speed and into more clandestine locations where you need to groom human intelligence assets with convincing beards and accents? Dumbass.
Technical? Bots will probably be programmatically flagging things in order to downrank them more or less as enthusiastically as keyword comment spam is currently deployed to uprank things. Never mind the less relentless; but more dangerous and focused, potential for assorted political/commercial/psycho ex/psycho roommate drama.
Legal? Say hello to endless wrangling about what is and isn't 'incitement', most likely with clumsy overreactions against the harmless, clueless, and impolitic, along with free traffic in assorted slang, inuendo, and more or less subtle dog-whistle stuff.
This plan has holes that(where one to be so inclined) a truck bomb could be driven through...
My understanding, back when MS first started talking about the whole 'Azure' thing, was that they were trying to distinguish themselves from Amazon(and others) 'just a bunch of VMs, but easy to buy/release programmatically' product in favor of some sort of more abstracted 'platform' that would hide both the hardware details and the OS guts, in favor of an environment that mostly resembled an application's-eye-view of Windows; but without the Windows administration, along with some similarly abstracted SQL and web-hosting things. It was always presumed that it wouldn't exactly be running on Linux; but that it didn't 'run Windows' in the sense of any 'Windows' SKU that Joe Customer could buy a box of and plunk onto a server at the office...
Was offering just-plain-boring offsite VMs always part of the plan? Did they discover somewhere partway through the execution phase that their pure-cloud application environment just wasn't quite Windows enough for their customers? Are the plain-VM offerings an integral part of the somewhat confusing alphabet soup of 'azure services', or is this a checkbox-filling thing that was tacked on because somebody wanted it and the internal cost of hyper-v licenses is small?