The 750k jobs is a dubious claim from 1986 about counterfeit goods. The $250 billion is a 1993 figure given for the worldwide market of, again, counterfeit goods.
The assumption that every dollar spent worldwide on counterfeit goods is equivalent to a dollar simply thrown into the trash in the USA is mind blowing.
My recollection from a history seminar in which we read a lot of primary sources from the US government and military is that the US was afraid that if Russia were given the time, they'd end up invading half of Japan and keeping it in the same way they ended up keeping East Germany. The atomic bomb was seen as a way to hasten the surrender of Japan (and reduce casualties, they argued, but I'm not arguing that) so that America would be the dominant foreign influence after the conflict ended.
Not really. It was targeted at amateur writers and professionals who had to write stuff as a side-aspect of their real work.
Word, even today, lacks a lot of what professional printing needs, and most publishers started accepting Word documents only because it had become so obiquitous everywhere else. Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.
DTP (when layout matters) or TeX (when it doesn't) is what professional writers used until Word started corrupting things.
You're confusing "professional writer" with "professional publisher." Most writers don't do typesetting or layout work. That's another, separate job. Publishers wouldn't do well to use word, but writers do very well with it.
If one were to make a video grame out of "Pride and Prejudice" for example, it would take some serious ingenuity to figure out a way of designing it such that the game stays true to the book and gives the player something to do besides just running around and talking to everyone (which essentially makes it an interactive movie, and very minimally so at that), has the player participating in the story whereby they have some sort of effect on the outcome, yet can stay true to the book. If it stays too true to the book then everything is predetermined and it doesn't make for much of a game, and if it doesn't then there is little point in tying it to a piece of classic literature.
You are not going to find the back catalog, what used to be the staple of the music business, at your local Walmart.
Well, no. But you won't find the vast majority of that at specialist retailers either, they don't have the space. They would order it for you, but everyone knows its easier (and frequently cheaper) to get it from amazon or their ilk. The web retailer own that long-tail retail space, and that's not going to change.
Specialist records stores will have to survive solely on the quality of information and advice their staff can provide -- it's their only market advantage.
Maybe you live in a small town (like I do at the moment), but in metropolitan areas in the US you can most likely find at least one or two independent music stores with 10-50x the space of the CD section at Walmart. Rasputin and Amoeba in Berkeley have a much better selection of new albums in their used section than Walmart or Target have at all. The used albums are also far cheaper than Walmart/Target prices, while the new albums (with a student ID for a discount) are generally competitive. The same goes in at least SF, Detroit, New York, Atlanta, Denver, Colorado Springs, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, DC, and probably all the large cities where I haven't checked, too. Individual sections in Amoeba (classical, for instance, or punk) are bigger than the entire music section in a Walmart.
EMI is one of the big four RIAA member labels, along with Sony, Universal, and Warner. I stopped buying their shite ages ago, and I don't really care if I'm not buying it from a little store or a big one.
Buy them as much as you want as long as you're buying used. Most independent record stores have a great used collection. In Berkeley I can generally find used albums of the semi-obscure bands I follow that still release through the RIAA labels within 2-3 weeks of the original release. Why? People probably buy the CD and rip it and immediately sell.
I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it. Last I checked, XP could access the internet. I don't see the point in putting Windows 7 on your netbook at all.
7's ~0.5 second sleep and awake times are a nice boost over XP, and on my Mini with 2 gigs of ram Firefox opens under 7 in 1/2 the time it took to open in XP. Also, when I boot up I can start opening programs as soon as the desktop loads, where in XP the whole system would freeze for seconds at a time during the 60 seconds after a boot, possibly because of the JMicron controller in my SSD. I'm not sure how I generally feel about the new taskbar in 7 at its default settings (i.e., OSX Docklike), but on the tiny screen of a netbook the reduced taskbar clutter is great. Windows management features like mouseover-full size Window previews make me feel a lot less claustrophobic in the tiny netbook world, as well.
Re:First cryptographic thriller?
on
Tetraktys
·
· Score: 2, Informative
which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller
Toast by Charles Stross would be a counterexample to this ludicrous claim.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow counts, too. Maybe a bit further away from literature, but it's more than a match for a Brown or Clancy novel.
Experts say that true innovations are hard to detect.
What a bizarre statement. Who are these experts? What is their area of expertise? When did they say this? Are you just trying to use vague language to give extra gravity to your statement?
I would contend that innovation is relatively easy to detect, while innovation that will make a lot of money is hard to detect.
Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.
I wonder if MS would accept that same reasoning if it were applied next time an auditor finds a pile of incorrectly licenses MS product in a company. "Ah, yes, that. I'm on the path toward paying for the licenses I should have."
Yes, actually. When MS finds that a company is using more copies of Windows/Office than are licensed, they send a letter and ask for the payment for the extra machines, threatening legal action if the payment isn't made. They don't just sue, because that would cause them to lose customers. With individuals, they just ignore it. Other companies may sue you right away, but MS will simply ask you to pay up, regardless of how long you've been using the software unlicensed.
A computer worm that spreads through Flash and PDFs on PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
1) This vulnerability exists on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
2) The annual pwn2own competition, among others, shows that Linux and Windows are similarly secure and OSX is much less secure. OSX goes down first every year, while Windows and Linux both last until later days of the competition when more direct access to the systems is granted to the contestants.
A Windows machine is more likely to be compromised, but that's because of market share. "Insecure by design" implies that you're talking about the security of the OS against someone who wants to compromise it. It's proven every year that only OSX lags in this area, and it lags quite badly (this year's winner rated the difficulty of compromising Vista and Linux as a 9-10, and the difficulty of breaking into OSX as a 3, IIRC).
It's not a "problem" that can be "worked on". It's the character of the author. As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
That's quite the claim and quite maddeningly false.
When I was young, AT&T was the only company that acted like this,
Maybe you were naive enough to believe so, but things were then as they are now. No one on Earth is old enough to have been around before this behavior was pervasive.
The next time we send manned missions to the Moon (or Mars), let's get serious and do it sustainably.
You don't know much about the Apollo missions if that's your opinion of it. The ultimate mission of Apollo was to build a moon base. Before we could do that, we had to be able to land on the moon, know what it was made of, if it was living or dead, and if the moon tended to shred equipment. We need to know if it was possible to land within 100 miles of a target, and more. NASA was headed to Mars in a few years with only a few billion dollars if their funding was kept up. However, a recession and an unpopular war and many political factors (including people who were shouting "What's the point?" and then not listening for an answer) drained the NASA budget and instead of being able to apply all they were learning on the moon, it just became an entry in the encyclopedia and a memory.
The funding cut was decided in 1966 or 1967, I believe, before we even set foot on the Moon. I think it was definitely the right choice to continue the plans as long as the reduced funding would last - there was a chance that witnessing what was arguably the human race's greatest achievement would lead to a new source of funding.
1) The vast majority of attacks out there are simple programs that install in the OS. They are not some uber VM root kits or the like. As such, a virus scanner running in the OS is perfectly capable of dealing with them. So no, it doesn't give you 100% defense but I bet it stops 99.99% of the attacks out there and that is worth something.
Having cleared out nastily infected computers of colleagues for a few years, I had the opportunity to look at the logs of the (symantec I believe) antivirus programs that had failed to block the offending malware. Based on the number of "yay, I blocked such and such virus" entries per infected computer, I'd say that AV programs stop about 1/4 of real, active malware. 25% 99.99%.
Unlike many slashdoters i feel the need to keep in touch with my friends outweighs the need to live in a basement with a tinfoilhot keeping my data (that nobody wants as anyway) private, so i do have a facebook account *gasp*.
Imagine the thousands of years of humans struggling to create society without having the benefit of Facebook. These poor longers roamed the dark recesses of Earth's caves in a desperate attempt to entertain themselves without the ability to connect socially with other humans.
Oh wait, that didn't happen. Instead, we as a species and as a collection of cultures evolved to depend on and function with communication that *gasp* didn't depend on Facebook or an analog. If you weren't using FB, you'd be surprised at how undiminished your social life would be. If you spent the same amount of time and effort keeping in touch with your friends, you might even *gasp* do more things with them in person, or talk with them more directly!
The people with the best social lives aren't dependent on Facebook. The hangers-on who are desperate for attention and peer approval are the rabid FB users who use it to stay visible without the strain (oh no!) of actually having to see or speak with people.
DO NOT RUN ANY APPS!!! Sorry for shouting, but I have been saying this to people for years now (since the first time i read the terms for FaceBook apps).
I am not knocking FB as a tool in and of itself, in fact I am very grateful to them for letting my daughter find me after 16 years of seperation (true story - she searched my name and sent me a message) but come on, they state clearly that if you want to plant a garden (or whatever) the developer gets to see all of your info. just Don't Do It.
thanks for the rant-space.
And you also need to not let any friends who you allow to see your page to run any apps. Another possibility is to not put any information at all on FB that you want to keep private. If a conversation turns toward something private, switch to email, IM, or, you know, spoken words.
FB isn't a necessity for fully maintaining anyone's modern social life, despite the frequent claims I see here.
Hate them - love them - or be indifferent - but they won a lawsuit and they should get what they are owed...and in this case its about 3.2 million.
You've fallen for one of the classic blunders. You've confused legality with morality.
The complaints here aren't about the RIAA's legal rights. The persistent discussion on/. is whether the law is just. This seems rather natural, given that the entire case exists due to millions of dollars of RIAA lobbying in the US resulting in political pressure on Sweden.
If the RIAA paid enough senators to made it illegal for your grandma to hum songs, then sued her, would you still stand by the statement that they "should get what they are owed" just because the law says so? Maybe you and I have different definitions of "should."
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
By definition, the average participant in a peer sharing network uploads one copy. There's no way around that. If the actual number of uploads is unknown, the only remotely reasonable assumption for damage calculations is 1.0000000000000000000000000.
I know the defendant in this case wasn't using bittorrent, but is there actually any way to prove a person has uploaded one entire, complete, copy to anyone? I expect it's more like 30% to that person, 40% to another, 30% to a third, but since people are connected to multiple uploaders, how can you tell?
You can't tell without access to the sharer's computer, but it's reasonable to assume the most likely number.
The 1.00000etc number in my GP post is off because I forgot that the initial uploader didn't have to download the file. The real number is slightly under 1.0, at 1-(1/N), where N is the total number of complete downloads across the entire network. I imagine a typical file will have a number like 0.9999. Multiply that by the value of the track and then multiply that product to get actual losses if you make the laughable assumption that every copy equals a lost sale.
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
By definition, the average participant in a peer sharing network uploads one copy. There's no way around that. If the actual number of uploads is unknown, the only remotely reasonable assumption for damage calculations is 1.0000000000000000000000000.
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The 750k jobs is a dubious claim from 1986 about counterfeit goods. The $250 billion is a 1993 figure given for the worldwide market of, again, counterfeit goods.
The assumption that every dollar spent worldwide on counterfeit goods is equivalent to a dollar simply thrown into the trash in the USA is mind blowing.
My recollection from a history seminar in which we read a lot of primary sources from the US government and military is that the US was afraid that if Russia were given the time, they'd end up invading half of Japan and keeping it in the same way they ended up keeping East Germany. The atomic bomb was seen as a way to hasten the surrender of Japan (and reduce casualties, they argued, but I'm not arguing that) so that America would be the dominant foreign influence after the conflict ended.
Word was targeted at professional writers...
Not really. It was targeted at amateur writers and professionals who had to write stuff as a side-aspect of their real work.
Word, even today, lacks a lot of what professional printing needs, and most publishers started accepting Word documents only because it had become so obiquitous everywhere else. Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.
DTP (when layout matters) or TeX (when it doesn't) is what professional writers used until Word started corrupting things.
You're confusing "professional writer" with "professional publisher." Most writers don't do typesetting or layout work. That's another, separate job. Publishers wouldn't do well to use word, but writers do very well with it.
If one were to make a video grame out of "Pride and Prejudice" for example, it would take some serious ingenuity to figure out a way of designing it such that the game stays true to the book and gives the player something to do besides just running around and talking to everyone (which essentially makes it an interactive movie, and very minimally so at that), has the player participating in the story whereby they have some sort of effect on the outcome, yet can stay true to the book. If it stays too true to the book then everything is predetermined and it doesn't make for much of a game, and if it doesn't then there is little point in tying it to a piece of classic literature.
I believe you're looking for this:
http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249308176&sr=8-1
Somehow I doubt the average person runs a mile in under 5 minutes.
In most cases you'd only have to run a couple hundred yards or less at that speed before finding an obstruction impassable to the Segway.
In most areas Romeo and Juliet laws protect people close in age.
I know someone who spent years in jail because those Romeo18 and Juliet17 laws were determined to be inapplicable to Romeo18 and Romeo17.
Well, no. But you won't find the vast majority of that at specialist retailers either, they don't have the space. They would order it for you, but everyone knows its easier (and frequently cheaper) to get it from amazon or their ilk. The web retailer own that long-tail retail space, and that's not going to change.
Specialist records stores will have to survive solely on the quality of information and advice their staff can provide -- it's their only market advantage.
Maybe you live in a small town (like I do at the moment), but in metropolitan areas in the US you can most likely find at least one or two independent music stores with 10-50x the space of the CD section at Walmart. Rasputin and Amoeba in Berkeley have a much better selection of new albums in their used section than Walmart or Target have at all. The used albums are also far cheaper than Walmart/Target prices, while the new albums (with a student ID for a discount) are generally competitive. The same goes in at least SF, Detroit, New York, Atlanta, Denver, Colorado Springs, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, DC, and probably all the large cities where I haven't checked, too. Individual sections in Amoeba (classical, for instance, or punk) are bigger than the entire music section in a Walmart.
EMI is one of the big four RIAA member labels, along with Sony, Universal, and Warner. I stopped buying their shite ages ago, and I don't really care if I'm not buying it from a little store or a big one.
Buy them as much as you want as long as you're buying used. Most independent record stores have a great used collection. In Berkeley I can generally find used albums of the semi-obscure bands I follow that still release through the RIAA labels within 2-3 weeks of the original release. Why? People probably buy the CD and rip it and immediately sell.
I thought the point of netbooks was to have a computer for accessing the internet and that's about it. Last I checked, XP could access the internet. I don't see the point in putting Windows 7 on your netbook at all.
7's ~0.5 second sleep and awake times are a nice boost over XP, and on my Mini with 2 gigs of ram Firefox opens under 7 in 1/2 the time it took to open in XP. Also, when I boot up I can start opening programs as soon as the desktop loads, where in XP the whole system would freeze for seconds at a time during the 60 seconds after a boot, possibly because of the JMicron controller in my SSD. I'm not sure how I generally feel about the new taskbar in 7 at its default settings (i.e., OSX Docklike), but on the tiny screen of a netbook the reduced taskbar clutter is great. Windows management features like mouseover-full size Window previews make me feel a lot less claustrophobic in the tiny netbook world, as well.
which might be the world's first cryptographic thriller
Toast by Charles Stross would be a counterexample to this ludicrous claim.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow counts, too. Maybe a bit further away from literature, but it's more than a match for a Brown or Clancy novel.
This study also assumes people who drive like jerks have 100% success in not hitting other drivers.
Experts say that true innovations are hard to detect.
What a bizarre statement. Who are these experts? What is their area of expertise? When did they say this? Are you just trying to use vague language to give extra gravity to your statement?
I would contend that innovation is relatively easy to detect, while innovation that will make a lot of money is hard to detect.
Microsoft now says that they had already been on the path for several months toward releasing the software under GPLv2 before Kroah-Hartman got in touch.
I wonder if MS would accept that same reasoning if it were applied next time an auditor finds a pile of incorrectly licenses MS product in a company. "Ah, yes, that. I'm on the path toward paying for the licenses I should have."
Yes, actually. When MS finds that a company is using more copies of Windows/Office than are licensed, they send a letter and ask for the payment for the extra machines, threatening legal action if the payment isn't made. They don't just sue, because that would cause them to lose customers. With individuals, they just ignore it. Other companies may sue you right away, but MS will simply ask you to pay up, regardless of how long you've been using the software unlicensed.
A computer worm that spreads through Flash and PDFs on PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
1) This vulnerability exists on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
2) The annual pwn2own competition, among others, shows that Linux and Windows are similarly secure and OSX is much less secure. OSX goes down first every year, while Windows and Linux both last until later days of the competition when more direct access to the systems is granted to the contestants.
A Windows machine is more likely to be compromised, but that's because of market share. "Insecure by design" implies that you're talking about the security of the OS against someone who wants to compromise it. It's proven every year that only OSX lags in this area, and it lags quite badly (this year's winner rated the difficulty of compromising Vista and Linux as a 9-10, and the difficulty of breaking into OSX as a 3, IIRC).
3) Goto 1)
It's not a "problem" that can be "worked on". It's the character of the author. As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
That's quite the claim and quite maddeningly false.
The biggest arguments here seem to apply to academics no more than to any other field. Why allow stifling of creativity elsewhere?
When I was young, AT&T was the only company that acted like this,
Maybe you were naive enough to believe so, but things were then as they are now. No one on Earth is old enough to have been around before this behavior was pervasive.
The next time we send manned missions to the Moon (or Mars), let's get serious and do it sustainably.
You don't know much about the Apollo missions if that's your opinion of it. The ultimate mission of Apollo was to build a moon base. Before we could do that, we had to be able to land on the moon, know what it was made of, if it was living or dead, and if the moon tended to shred equipment. We need to know if it was possible to land within 100 miles of a target, and more. NASA was headed to Mars in a few years with only a few billion dollars if their funding was kept up. However, a recession and an unpopular war and many political factors (including people who were shouting "What's the point?" and then not listening for an answer) drained the NASA budget and instead of being able to apply all they were learning on the moon, it just became an entry in the encyclopedia and a memory.
The funding cut was decided in 1966 or 1967, I believe, before we even set foot on the Moon. I think it was definitely the right choice to continue the plans as long as the reduced funding would last - there was a chance that witnessing what was arguably the human race's greatest achievement would lead to a new source of funding.
It is idiotic for three reasons:
1) The vast majority of attacks out there are simple programs that install in the OS. They are not some uber VM root kits or the like. As such, a virus scanner running in the OS is perfectly capable of dealing with them. So no, it doesn't give you 100% defense but I bet it stops 99.99% of the attacks out there and that is worth something.
Having cleared out nastily infected computers of colleagues for a few years, I had the opportunity to look at the logs of the (symantec I believe) antivirus programs that had failed to block the offending malware. Based on the number of "yay, I blocked such and such virus" entries per infected computer, I'd say that AV programs stop about 1/4 of real, active malware. 25% 99.99%.
Unlike many slashdoters i feel the need to keep in touch with my friends outweighs the need to live in a basement with a tinfoilhot keeping my data (that nobody wants as anyway) private, so i do have a facebook account *gasp*.
Imagine the thousands of years of humans struggling to create society without having the benefit of Facebook. These poor longers roamed the dark recesses of Earth's caves in a desperate attempt to entertain themselves without the ability to connect socially with other humans.
Oh wait, that didn't happen. Instead, we as a species and as a collection of cultures evolved to depend on and function with communication that *gasp* didn't depend on Facebook or an analog. If you weren't using FB, you'd be surprised at how undiminished your social life would be. If you spent the same amount of time and effort keeping in touch with your friends, you might even *gasp* do more things with them in person, or talk with them more directly!
The people with the best social lives aren't dependent on Facebook. The hangers-on who are desperate for attention and peer approval are the rabid FB users who use it to stay visible without the strain (oh no!) of actually having to see or speak with people.
DO NOT RUN ANY APPS!!! Sorry for shouting, but I have been saying this to people for years now (since the first time i read the terms for FaceBook apps). I am not knocking FB as a tool in and of itself, in fact I am very grateful to them for letting my daughter find me after 16 years of seperation (true story - she searched my name and sent me a message) but come on, they state clearly that if you want to plant a garden (or whatever) the developer gets to see all of your info. just Don't Do It. thanks for the rant-space.
And you also need to not let any friends who you allow to see your page to run any apps. Another possibility is to not put any information at all on FB that you want to keep private. If a conversation turns toward something private, switch to email, IM, or, you know, spoken words. FB isn't a necessity for fully maintaining anyone's modern social life, despite the frequent claims I see here.
Hate them - love them - or be indifferent - but they won a lawsuit and they should get what they are owed...and in this case its about 3.2 million.
You've fallen for one of the classic blunders. You've confused legality with morality. The complaints here aren't about the RIAA's legal rights. The persistent discussion on /. is whether the law is just. This seems rather natural, given that the entire case exists due to millions of dollars of RIAA lobbying in the US resulting in political pressure on Sweden.
If the RIAA paid enough senators to made it illegal for your grandma to hum songs, then sued her, would you still stand by the statement that they "should get what they are owed" just because the law says so? Maybe you and I have different definitions of "should."
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
By definition, the average participant in a peer sharing network uploads one copy. There's no way around that. If the actual number of uploads is unknown, the only remotely reasonable assumption for damage calculations is 1.0000000000000000000000000.
I know the defendant in this case wasn't using bittorrent, but is there actually any way to prove a person has uploaded one entire, complete, copy to anyone? I expect it's more like 30% to that person, 40% to another, 30% to a third, but since people are connected to multiple uploaders, how can you tell?
You can't tell without access to the sharer's computer, but it's reasonable to assume the most likely number. The 1.00000etc number in my GP post is off because I forgot that the initial uploader didn't have to download the file. The real number is slightly under 1.0, at 1-(1/N), where N is the total number of complete downloads across the entire network. I imagine a typical file will have a number like 0.9999. Multiply that by the value of the track and then multiply that product to get actual losses if you make the laughable assumption that every copy equals a lost sale.
More importantly, what piece of paperwork do I have to file so I can ignore court orders like they do and get off scott free?
You need to fill out and turn in a huge number of these to be immune to the law.
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
By definition, the average participant in a peer sharing network uploads one copy. There's no way around that. If the actual number of uploads is unknown, the only remotely reasonable assumption for damage calculations is 1.0000000000000000000000000.