Most people who pay for satellite or digital cable don't realize that most of the money that you pay goes straight to the television channels and not the cable/satellite provider. When you pay your $100 cable bill, a couple of dollars goes straight to Disney/ABC/ESPN. I think just for ESPN alone some cable companies are on the hook for five dollars a month per subscriber. So you are paying to watch channels with advertisements.
On top of the money that goes directly to those channels they also bombard you with advertisements and commercial interruptions. And while for many channels advertisements allows them breaks to reorganize, which can be critical for news and sports programming, there aren't too many reasons other than simply making more money for running commercials during the middle of a sitcom or drama. I don't mind when an NFL or MLB game goes to commercials when the players are running on and off the field. But I stopped watching South Park on its premier night years ago because the commercial breaks were too frequent and killed the momentum of the show. It's one thing when the sport has stopped and then the cut to advertisements. It would be another if they cut to commercials right when a guy delivered a pitch or the ball was snapped. "Stay tuned to see if the Patriots scored after these commercials".
Unfortunately that is how most shows are. "Will this character die...? Find out after we assault your senses with a dozen commercials". Not to mention that most advertisements are BLASTED AT FULL VOLUME compared to the show that is on at the time. It ruins the flow of the show. This is why I almost only watch sports and HBO.
HBO figured out decades ago that people would be willing to pay for premium content delivered to them commercial free. With no advertisers to answer to they could put on shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. They don't have to worry about advertisers pulling out of shows. They don't have to censor anything because of the FCC either. And they can write dramas and comedy shows that are purely art and not meant to sell products or have commercial breaks written into them. Considering the extreme popularity of Game of Thrones right now it is quite evident that people want to pay a premium for high level programming that is free of advertising and doesn't have to answer to sponsors or the FCC. Also HBO has a policy where product placement is forbidden. When you see a real life product on Sopranos or Treme or whatever it is there for realism and not as an in show paid advertisement.
Unfortunately most of these other companies haven't figured out that people will pay money to bypass advertisements. This is essentially what people do when they buy a show on DVD or Blu-Ray anyways. People will also pay extra when it improves the quality of programming. Major League Baseball's internet package that allows you to watch all out of market games online is commercial free. Lots of companies are putting their shows up on I-Tunes or the Playstation Network the day after commercial free and you pay for each episode individually.
If Optus wants to distribute works or broadcasts then let them pay a fee to the right's holders. If Optus won't pay then don't let them rebroadcast or distribute material that they don't own. If the right's holders don't want Optus selling their broadcasts for profit then don't let them either.
If people want to record shows or broadcasts on their own for home viewing then that is fine. No one is disputing that. It's not fine when a company is recording broadcasts that they don't own and then charging people to watch them. Producing broadcasts like sporting events costs a lot of money. I doubt that the companies that produce this content want other companies distributing their work without their permission.
It doesn't matter if people are ripping DVDs for home use or recording radio or TV broadcasts to watch later. But Optus was taking television broadcasts and basically streaming them online live.
Torrent Freak seems highly pro-piracy and against paying for anything. They refer to Kim Dotcom as a "celebrity hacker and internet entrepreneur". He was a career criminal who made a living by deliberately charging for access to content that he didn't own, and didn't create, nor have any license or agreement in place to distribute. Hardly an entrepreneur. Just a guy who figured out that it was easy to distribute copies of games, shows, albums, and films, without paying any of the artists or companies involved and get rich quickly off of it. If a country has a career criminal operating a warez empire and they want to crack down on him then good for them. Kim Dotcom is no hero, he's an insider trader, and embezzler, who moved onto his next scam.
What exactly are copyright holders supposed to do about people like Kim Dotcom? Let him make millions off of other people's work? Allow him to continually ignore their requests to remove their work from his site? The fact is that we live in a world that is much smaller and connected through the internet. Information is connected worldwide so why not have some laws, international laws on the books, that are connected as well. To help spread the flow of information while also protecting copyright holders who want their works protected.
"We have reached a point in Australia where citizens can be arrested and extradited to the United States based on information supplied by Australian spies for breaches of US law on Australian soil. Australia has effectively signed away its right to govern its own in matters of copyright infringement when those matters overlap the interests of the United States".
Australia has determined that if someone breaks a specific law that they can be tried in the United States. That's how they've chosen to govern that particular offense. If this is how the Australian government wants it then that's how it is. As long as they aren't flying high school students to the U.S. for downloading a few songs and are actually going after career criminals then I don't see why anyone (other than pirates who want free stuff) would have a problem.
Is it stupid to arrest someone for downloading music or movies? Yes. Is it ridiculously absurd to assert that downloading a few songs is worth millions or billions in damages? Obviously. Is it wasteful to extradite someone to another country for downloading music or games or whatever? Of course. But it is hardly a waste to arrest the guys who run criminal empires that make millions of dollars off of illegally distributed works and extradite them to the U.S. to answer for their willing participation in an organized criminal business.
I don't really have a problem with the Kim Dotcoms of the world being held accountable for their criminal empires. If they live in a country that will extradite them to the U.S. then they run a risk for operating an illegal business.
I'm struggling here to think of a primitive tool with handed-ness built into it. Anyone?
Not exactly primitive but everything in ancient Roman and Greek culture was built around everyone being right handed. Even the language reflected the value of being right handed compared to being left handed. They would slap students' left hands, even the great Caesars, to get them to learn to be right hand dominant.
The Latin (Roman) word for 'right' was 'dexter'. It's where we get the words dexterity, dextrous, and ambidextrous from. So in English someone being 'ambidextrous' means that they have two right hands. And the Latin word for 'left' was 'sinistra'. Which is where we get the words sinister and ambisinister. So someone who is ambisinistrous is someone with two left hands is considered unskilled manually.
In primitive cultures you'd see hand dominance as well. It was innate and the culture was designed around right handed dominance. While technically the tools that they used could be done with either hand, the information how to use those tools were passed down by demonstration, and the demonstrations were usually done by a right handed person. So a human from thousands of years ago hunting with spears and rocks would always throw those weapons with his right hand, and show his son to do it with the right hand, and so on. Sure those rocks aren't designed to be thrown with a specific hand but our natural tendency to be right handed influenced our primitive ancestors to continually practice right hand dominance.
What truly shocked me about the PS3 was to find that attached controllers do not appear to charge unless the console is powered on.
That shocked you? Were you shocked when your I-Pod didn't charge when it was plugged into a powered off PC? Are you shocked when your car battery drains when the engine is off?
There's a reason why they sell charging stations for Wii-motes and PS3 controllers. And why they sell wall charging units for mp3 players and tablet PCs. And why you can purchase a battery maintenance device for your car as well.
Someone put six bullet holes, last night they shot up, a parked police car that was left near the scene of the shooting. The message being that violence against the police is coming if they don't arrest Zimmerman and charge him with murder. They shot up a cop car. As if that neighborhood didn't need a reason for a neighborhood watch now they have guys firing live rounds into police cars? That's a safe neighborhood?
The amount of media coverage. International press. 24/7 news cycle. The constant lies. "Zimmerman is white". Showing images of Trayvon Martin when he was only 12 and not 17 (and 6'3"). Editing the 911 call from Zimmerman to make him seem racist. The media wants a circus. A race riot. They want another OJ trial, or Rodney King riot, or Casey Anthony or Amanda Knox level ratings. Who cares if the guy is innocent or guilty or whatever. What's most important is getting ratings and possibly causing a race riot.
And now we have the political pressure. Elections. Press. Appealing to the base. Even Obama had to give his opinion. "If I had a son he'd look like Trayon". Please Mr. President throw more gasoline on the fire. This is before Obama knew of the facts of the case. Just like when Obama blurted out an opinion about the cop who arrested the Harvard professor and then ended up having to have beer at the White House with the both of them. Will Obama have a beer with George Zimmerman?
This event is exposing the worst of this country. A perfect storm of all that is wrong with where we are today. The media being anything but objective. The politics doing nothing but making everything racial and partisan. And the overwhelming majority of citizens ignoring the facts and rushing to judgement.
I'd like to see a Titanic themed ride at Universal or whatever. Throw in some 1910s decorations. Some classical music. And then have it like a roller coaster or tower of terror but in sub zero degrees at one of the drops to simulate the ship plunging into the ocean.
Mistaken eyewitness identification is one of the leading causes of false arrests and convictions. The average civilian is absolutely terrible with memorizing and correctly identifying the actual guilty suspect.
Even worse is that most police lineups and photo arrays (or photo lineups) are presented as a "multiple choice" test. Where the victim or accuser feels like they must choose someone rather than admit that they don't recognize anyone or are unsure. They'll just pick the closest person that they think fits the person that they saw earlier. And earlier might be hours, days, or even weeks or longer. Academic studies have shown that if you give the average person a lineup of random innocent people that most people will finger one of them for the crime.
And of course we have police that coach someone going into a lineup. "Here we have suspects one, two, three *cough* FOUR, and five. Please identify which suspect you think robbed the convenience store". "Uh....it was person number four".
And lastly, one of my best friends is a cop,and he says as a joke that they put cops into lineups all of the time. Then they bet if the civilian will identify the cop as the shooter or rapist or whatever. I know one department even had a jackpot where if you went into a lineup and got chosen as the criminal you got a free golf club.
Maybe it's different in other countries but in the U.S. people barely seem to care about personal privacy. Between Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Myspace, and so on, people seem more than willing to put their private lives and information out on the internet. And if you look at the type of news that Americans read most often, it is celebrity gossip, tabloids and paparazzi that stalk famous people and report on their every movement.
We put our political beliefs on our t-shirts and bumper stickers. Wear our sports teams on our hats. And now we can share those things on Twitter and YouTube. I think I'm the only employee at my work that doesn't have a LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, or a Twitter.
Between Jeremy Lin, Tim Tebow, Kim Kardashian, and the 15-minutes-of-fame type reality TV show people, we have an endless cycle of gossip news available online and on your television. And people seem to love it. The more invasive the questions are at a sports press conference with Tim Tebow the better. The more we can dig up on Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries the better. Whitney Houston having cocaine in her system was more reported than anything else in the last week on the mainstream news.
The Slashdot crowd is the exception not the rule. When most people are all about getting themselves more friends on Facebook and more followers on YouTube the "geeks" are holding onto their privacy. Personal privacy is simply not cool in America. When America stops everything because Tim Tebow is coming to the Jets (I hope everyone at/. has familiarized themselves with the Wildcat Offense) they are there for the spectacle and not for the actual sport.
Sure no one wants their credit card information online. But too many people in the U.S. seem to think that putting their email, phone number, personal likes and hobbies, thousands of pictures of themselves, and so on, all over the internet, is not only okay but it is preferred. It's fun for them.
I always laugh when a lawyer or judge or politician starts screaming about hitting a business with a financial loss to punish them for fraud or negligence or some other crime or scam. Where do they think that that money is going to come from? Do they think that the CEOs are going to pay it from their own pockets?
That money will come directly from consumers and subscribers. Most who will be completely unaware of this lawsuit. AT&T will up the rates or charge extra for other services or products and that will pay off whatever losses are from this lawsuit.
Basically only the consumers lose. The Nigerian scammers make their money. AT&T makes its money back eventually. The judges and lawyers make their money. And the consumers and taxpayers foot the bill for everything. It's a great system.
I consider myself a hardcore gamer. Thousands of hours of gaming a year every year. But my backlog of games is enormous for this generation. I literally just stared Mass Effect 1 today and I've yet to begin Skyrim or Final Fantasy 13 as well. I've also got a pile of PS3 games, including Uncharted 1, that I've yet to open the box for.
But for the Nintendo Wii I've exhausted the top quality games for that system. And no one makes new games for that system anymore either. So it's perfect time for Nintendo to release another console.
But the 360 and the PS3? There are years left in those systems. We've only gotten one God of War game the PS3. And only one Metal Gear Solid as well. SONY and MS in their console Cold War arms race are going to cut off their noses to spite their faces by killing this generation of consoles early.
Do you really think that the US cares about false flag operations? Bin Laden and 16 of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and we decide to declare war on Afghanistan and the Taliban. The entire UN weapons inspection team claimed that Iraq didn't have WMDs but we ignored all evidence and invaded and overthrew Saddam with no hesitation.
If the U.S. wanted to they could declare war on Iran for an overdue library book. "We know that Iran has the book...it's overdue...we are mobilizing our infantry divisions and MOAB bomber crews as we speak". After the complete lack of WMDs in Iraq it seems obvious that the U.S. government just doesn't care what anyone thinks.
The U.S. military doesn't need any real reason to invade another country anymore. We could just say that Iran posses a large stash of radioactive kryptonite and that they must be stopped.
Nothing good is coming from any involvement between countries in the Greater Middle East and countries outside of it. Diplomacy is awful. The U.S. is waging war all over creating chaos. Humanitarian aid is handled disastrously. And any cultural exchange is met with hostility such as the BBC establishing a television channel.
Just let that part of the world be alone by itself and cut them off completely. Don't send them money. Don't send diplomats. Don't send businesses. Encourage your citizens from touring that area. And don't ever send soldiers and bombs.
All I hear about that part of the world when it comes to foreign relations are horror stories. The Middle East is backwards. They are regressing into even more oppressive religious states and I don't see outsiders feel like they need to be a military or cultural influence over there.
Credit card fraud is a huge illegal industry. It finances drug gangs and cartels, terrorists, small organized crime, major organized crime (mafia), and occasionally the rogue individual hacker. It's the new form of armed bank robbery. Instead of guns they use computers though.
Of course while $700K in fraud by a few people is nothing to ignore, it is a bit ridiculous that the FBI devotes so many resources to catching these scumbags, while virtually ignoring the guys who swindle billions of dollars through stocks, insider trading, and pyramid schemes.
So shutting off PSN access for millions of gamers is now considered hacktivism? Going after Sony's game division, which has almost nothing to do with Sony's corporate division, is now hacktivism?
I know that the Slashdot crowd is extremely anti-Sony but I fail to see how denying paying consumers the ability to play games is hacktivism. Or preventing dozens of new games from getting released on the PSN store, and allowing those companies and artists to sell their titles, is hacktivism.
Right now, schools are under heavy pressure to reduce "bullying". The politicians and money groups have seized on an issue that is easy to win over the hearts of American voters and donors. That's why "bullying" is such a hot issue right now and gets tons of media coverage.
Kids talking about sex, something mentioned in the article as being another reason why the police and school went after this student, is another always hot issue especially with American "conservatives". We must avoid talking to children or exposing them to sex at all costs.
So we have a school where a kid is accused of bullying, and also talking about sex, on Facebook. The school knows if it does nothing they'll get blasted by moms, and the media, about how they failed to protect other children from bullies and perverts. They let a student make hate speech and promote sex talk amongst pre-teens or whatever. But if the school acts then they'll get blasted by people who think that the schools should mind their own business and let the parents handle things. And we know how well parents handle things in modern America.
Instead of finding a middle ground, the school feels the pressure from all sides and.....calls the cops. Huge overreaction in hindsight of course but they must have felt at the time that it was warranted.
But seriously? A kid can't say that they hate their teacher anymore? A kid can't talk about sex with another kid? When I was in school it didn't matter if a kid said he hated a hall monitor or a teacher. Most of the teachers had been around long enough to recognize which kids disliked them. And most of my teachers could tell which boys and girls had started puberty earlier than others because we behaved much differently around the opposite sex. Times have changed.
The school should have just called the student's mother or father and said "some kid tattled on your kid, it's not a big deal, but you should monitor your kid's facebook and just check to see if they are doing anything that is inappropriate". No cops. No teachers. No detention even. Let the parents do their jobs.
The 'optical illusion' might have added to the many reasons that the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage but it certainly was not the main cause. The ship was legendary at the time before it had even made its maiden voyage. The largest and most elaborate and ornate vessel of its time. A floating palace. A moving island on the sea. The Titanic.
The ship's captain and others postulated that running the ship at full speed from its last stop in Europe all the way to America would make enormous headlines. If the ship arrived in New York ahead of schedule by a day it would be a media sensation and basically the best advertising that they could buy. So the ship's operators plowed through the ocean at the fastest possible speed (which was a common practice though).
To make things worse the ship's operators both ignored and missed warnings about dangerous fields of ice that they were approaching. An area of ocean crowded with frozen solid and tremendously large icebergs. A nearby ship, the Californian, stopped near where the Titanic sank that night, only a few miles away, because they were extremely cautious and nervous about smashing the ship into a mass of ice. So they waited to resume travel until the morning. The Californian even sent messages to the Titanic warning them of the ice fields. Those messages were essentially ignored.
At the time that Titanic was built it was considered unsinkable. There had been accidents in the past where large ships had smashed head first into icebergs and stayed above water. And the Titanic had been built stronger, sturdier, and tougher than any ship ever made. The Titanic's captain even said before the first voyage, "there is no condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that".
The ship is going full speed. It's traveling into an area where there are icebergs the size of small islands. The lookouts are not equipped with binoculars and are not aware of what kind of field they are traveling into. The moon is black so there is no light over the ocean. The water is completely calm so they can't hear waves crashing against the icebergs to warn them (years later it is then known that calm water indicates fields of ice). And by the time that the lookouts spot the iceberg...they are traveling full speed right for it and there isn't enough time to turn. They were traveling full speed, blind, deaf, and into a death trap.
The ship smashes into the iceberg and grinds its side into the mass of ice tearing a few small holes into the side of the ship. The tears are only a few feet long and inches wide but the ocean water is relentless. The Titanic was designed to survive the front two below deck compartments flooding with water. Or any other four compartments located below deck flooding completely. Instead, the first five compartments are almost instantly flooded from ocean water raging through the breaches, the ship is doomed. The ship will sink in less than two hours and there is nothing to stop it. Trapped in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go and lifeboats for less than half of the passengers.
While there were only half as many lifeboats as would have been necessary to save everyone, over two-thirds of people on the ship were not able to escape. One reason is that people were so zealous about the "women and children" first rule that they were sending half empty lifeboats off of the ship without loading any men on them. Also they were loading lifeboats according to your travel class. First class passengers were more likely to be saved. Third class passengers had to wait their turns. That's why for the blockbuster Titanic they had a first class woman paired with a third class man. Those two had the best and worst odds of surviving the disaster based on lifeboat placement.
So no it wasn't an optical illusion. It was a series of many things that contributed to the Titanic sinking on its maiden voyage. Poor lookouts. Dangerous speeds. Lack of modern understanding of calm water indicating dangerous conditions. No moonlight. Purposefully ignoring warnings of dangerous conditions including icebergs. Even without an optical illusion that ship unfortunately still sinks.
Seems like it would require an awful lot of force just to float a small house. An interesting idea that might be useful in other areas. But I don't see how this could catch on long term for things like apartment buildings or skyscrapers.
And let's not forget that it wasn't so much the earthquake that devastated Japan. But it was the wall of water that mowed down everything in its path.
A recent discovery of long term space exploration is that being in low gravity for too long literally folds parts of your eye. Causing astronauts who spend too much time up in space to have permanent vision changes that leave them very far-sighted and required to wear reading glasses. Just six months in low gravity was enough for major changes in vision.
Imagine a missions to Mars that takes six months just one way? These astronauts would be blind under our current understanding of how space travel affects sight by the time that they came back.
"What we are seeing is flattening of the globe, swelling of the optic nerve, a far-sighted shift, and choroidal folds," said Dr. C. Robert Gibson, one of authors of the study published in the October 2011 issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. "We think it is intracranial pressure related, but we're not sure; it could also be due to an increase in pressure along the optic nerve itself or some kind of localized change to the back of the eyeball."
The study identified new risks for those who live in space for at least six months. Blurred vision was the primary issue reported by the seven astronaut test subjects.
"After a few weeks aboard the [station]," said Astronaut Bob Thirsk, a Canadian Space Agency physician who spent six months as a member of the Expedition 20 and 21 crews in 2007, "I noticed that my visual acuity had changed. My distant vision was not too bad, but I found that it was more difficult to read procedures. I also had trouble manually focusing cameras, so I would ask a crewmate to verify my focus setting on critical experiments."
The way I see it is that there are two options. The first one is we only send replicants to Mars or more unmanned flights. The other is that NASA gets some awesome new understanding of vision loss or develops technology to overcome vision loss. Either way this would be quite the benefit for society if NASA can develop some new things to combat vision loss.
The plan allegedly was to sell them to developing nations and dupe their governments. The mafia would create a circus theater filled with distractions to make them look like a legitimate outfit. Office space, limousines, fancy suits, lots of showmanship. They'd use foreign diplomats and politicians on their payroll to get presidents or warlords of a foreign country into a face to face meeting.
They get a leader of some inexperienced government, possibly even a wealthy warlord, of a developing nation, and try to get them to transfer $1 billion worth of wealth in exchange for a $1 billion U.S. treasury bond. It is actually very creative. Had they not been caught they might have been able to pull this off. Though I don't see how any bank would have not raised a million red flags for this transaction and the reports are that the criminals wanted to move the money through Swiss banks.
This isn't the first treasury bond scam nor will it be the last. Organized crime loves this scam. Every year a few individuals are arrested with fake bonds on them that are valued at billions of dollars. The Italian police found a bunch of fake $1 billion bonds during a routine car stop a few years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people who pay for satellite or digital cable don't realize that most of the money that you pay goes straight to the television channels and not the cable/satellite provider. When you pay your $100 cable bill, a couple of dollars goes straight to Disney/ABC/ESPN. I think just for ESPN alone some cable companies are on the hook for five dollars a month per subscriber. So you are paying to watch channels with advertisements.
On top of the money that goes directly to those channels they also bombard you with advertisements and commercial interruptions. And while for many channels advertisements allows them breaks to reorganize, which can be critical for news and sports programming, there aren't too many reasons other than simply making more money for running commercials during the middle of a sitcom or drama. I don't mind when an NFL or MLB game goes to commercials when the players are running on and off the field. But I stopped watching South Park on its premier night years ago because the commercial breaks were too frequent and killed the momentum of the show. It's one thing when the sport has stopped and then the cut to advertisements. It would be another if they cut to commercials right when a guy delivered a pitch or the ball was snapped. "Stay tuned to see if the Patriots scored after these commercials".
Unfortunately that is how most shows are. "Will this character die...? Find out after we assault your senses with a dozen commercials". Not to mention that most advertisements are BLASTED AT FULL VOLUME compared to the show that is on at the time. It ruins the flow of the show. This is why I almost only watch sports and HBO.
HBO figured out decades ago that people would be willing to pay for premium content delivered to them commercial free. With no advertisers to answer to they could put on shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. They don't have to worry about advertisers pulling out of shows. They don't have to censor anything because of the FCC either. And they can write dramas and comedy shows that are purely art and not meant to sell products or have commercial breaks written into them. Considering the extreme popularity of Game of Thrones right now it is quite evident that people want to pay a premium for high level programming that is free of advertising and doesn't have to answer to sponsors or the FCC. Also HBO has a policy where product placement is forbidden. When you see a real life product on Sopranos or Treme or whatever it is there for realism and not as an in show paid advertisement.
Unfortunately most of these other companies haven't figured out that people will pay money to bypass advertisements. This is essentially what people do when they buy a show on DVD or Blu-Ray anyways. People will also pay extra when it improves the quality of programming. Major League Baseball's internet package that allows you to watch all out of market games online is commercial free. Lots of companies are putting their shows up on I-Tunes or the Playstation Network the day after commercial free and you pay for each episode individually.
If Optus wants to distribute works or broadcasts then let them pay a fee to the right's holders. If Optus won't pay then don't let them rebroadcast or distribute material that they don't own. If the right's holders don't want Optus selling their broadcasts for profit then don't let them either.
If people want to record shows or broadcasts on their own for home viewing then that is fine. No one is disputing that. It's not fine when a company is recording broadcasts that they don't own and then charging people to watch them. Producing broadcasts like sporting events costs a lot of money. I doubt that the companies that produce this content want other companies distributing their work without their permission.
It doesn't matter if people are ripping DVDs for home use or recording radio or TV broadcasts to watch later. But Optus was taking television broadcasts and basically streaming them online live.
Torrent Freak seems highly pro-piracy and against paying for anything. They refer to Kim Dotcom as a "celebrity hacker and internet entrepreneur". He was a career criminal who made a living by deliberately charging for access to content that he didn't own, and didn't create, nor have any license or agreement in place to distribute. Hardly an entrepreneur. Just a guy who figured out that it was easy to distribute copies of games, shows, albums, and films, without paying any of the artists or companies involved and get rich quickly off of it. If a country has a career criminal operating a warez empire and they want to crack down on him then good for them. Kim Dotcom is no hero, he's an insider trader, and embezzler, who moved onto his next scam.
What exactly are copyright holders supposed to do about people like Kim Dotcom? Let him make millions off of other people's work? Allow him to continually ignore their requests to remove their work from his site? The fact is that we live in a world that is much smaller and connected through the internet. Information is connected worldwide so why not have some laws, international laws on the books, that are connected as well. To help spread the flow of information while also protecting copyright holders who want their works protected.
"We have reached a point in Australia where citizens can be arrested and extradited to the United States based on information supplied by Australian spies for breaches of US law on Australian soil. Australia has effectively signed away its right to govern its own in matters of copyright infringement when those matters overlap the interests of the United States".
Australia has determined that if someone breaks a specific law that they can be tried in the United States. That's how they've chosen to govern that particular offense. If this is how the Australian government wants it then that's how it is. As long as they aren't flying high school students to the U.S. for downloading a few songs and are actually going after career criminals then I don't see why anyone (other than pirates who want free stuff) would have a problem.
Is it stupid to arrest someone for downloading music or movies? Yes. Is it ridiculously absurd to assert that downloading a few songs is worth millions or billions in damages? Obviously. Is it wasteful to extradite someone to another country for downloading music or games or whatever? Of course. But it is hardly a waste to arrest the guys who run criminal empires that make millions of dollars off of illegally distributed works and extradite them to the U.S. to answer for their willing participation in an organized criminal business.
I don't really have a problem with the Kim Dotcoms of the world being held accountable for their criminal empires. If they live in a country that will extradite them to the U.S. then they run a risk for operating an illegal business.
I'm struggling here to think of a primitive tool with handed-ness built into it. Anyone?
Not exactly primitive but everything in ancient Roman and Greek culture was built around everyone being right handed. Even the language reflected the value of being right handed compared to being left handed. They would slap students' left hands, even the great Caesars, to get them to learn to be right hand dominant.
The Latin (Roman) word for 'right' was 'dexter'. It's where we get the words dexterity, dextrous, and ambidextrous from. So in English someone being 'ambidextrous' means that they have two right hands. And the Latin word for 'left' was 'sinistra'. Which is where we get the words sinister and ambisinister. So someone who is ambisinistrous is someone with two left hands is considered unskilled manually.
In primitive cultures you'd see hand dominance as well. It was innate and the culture was designed around right handed dominance. While technically the tools that they used could be done with either hand, the information how to use those tools were passed down by demonstration, and the demonstrations were usually done by a right handed person. So a human from thousands of years ago hunting with spears and rocks would always throw those weapons with his right hand, and show his son to do it with the right hand, and so on. Sure those rocks aren't designed to be thrown with a specific hand but our natural tendency to be right handed influenced our primitive ancestors to continually practice right hand dominance.
What truly shocked me about the PS3 was to find that attached controllers do not appear to charge unless the console is powered on.
That shocked you? Were you shocked when your I-Pod didn't charge when it was plugged into a powered off PC? Are you shocked when your car battery drains when the engine is off?
There's a reason why they sell charging stations for Wii-motes and PS3 controllers. And why they sell wall charging units for mp3 players and tablet PCs. And why you can purchase a battery maintenance device for your car as well.
Someone put six bullet holes, last night they shot up, a parked police car that was left near the scene of the shooting. The message being that violence against the police is coming if they don't arrest Zimmerman and charge him with murder. They shot up a cop car. As if that neighborhood didn't need a reason for a neighborhood watch now they have guys firing live rounds into police cars? That's a safe neighborhood?
The amount of media coverage. International press. 24/7 news cycle. The constant lies. "Zimmerman is white". Showing images of Trayvon Martin when he was only 12 and not 17 (and 6'3"). Editing the 911 call from Zimmerman to make him seem racist. The media wants a circus. A race riot. They want another OJ trial, or Rodney King riot, or Casey Anthony or Amanda Knox level ratings. Who cares if the guy is innocent or guilty or whatever. What's most important is getting ratings and possibly causing a race riot.
And now we have the political pressure. Elections. Press. Appealing to the base. Even Obama had to give his opinion. "If I had a son he'd look like Trayon". Please Mr. President throw more gasoline on the fire. This is before Obama knew of the facts of the case. Just like when Obama blurted out an opinion about the cop who arrested the Harvard professor and then ended up having to have beer at the White House with the both of them. Will Obama have a beer with George Zimmerman?
This event is exposing the worst of this country. A perfect storm of all that is wrong with where we are today. The media being anything but objective. The politics doing nothing but making everything racial and partisan. And the overwhelming majority of citizens ignoring the facts and rushing to judgement.
I'd like to see a Titanic themed ride at Universal or whatever. Throw in some 1910s decorations. Some classical music. And then have it like a roller coaster or tower of terror but in sub zero degrees at one of the drops to simulate the ship plunging into the ocean.
Will they remove the torrents of said artist's work?
Mistaken eyewitness identification is one of the leading causes of false arrests and convictions. The average civilian is absolutely terrible with memorizing and correctly identifying the actual guilty suspect.
Even worse is that most police lineups and photo arrays (or photo lineups) are presented as a "multiple choice" test. Where the victim or accuser feels like they must choose someone rather than admit that they don't recognize anyone or are unsure. They'll just pick the closest person that they think fits the person that they saw earlier. And earlier might be hours, days, or even weeks or longer. Academic studies have shown that if you give the average person a lineup of random innocent people that most people will finger one of them for the crime.
And of course we have police that coach someone going into a lineup. "Here we have suspects one, two, three *cough* FOUR, and five. Please identify which suspect you think robbed the convenience store". "Uh....it was person number four".
And lastly, one of my best friends is a cop,and he says as a joke that they put cops into lineups all of the time. Then they bet if the civilian will identify the cop as the shooter or rapist or whatever. I know one department even had a jackpot where if you went into a lineup and got chosen as the criminal you got a free golf club.
Maybe it's different in other countries but in the U.S. people barely seem to care about personal privacy. Between Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Myspace, and so on, people seem more than willing to put their private lives and information out on the internet. And if you look at the type of news that Americans read most often, it is celebrity gossip, tabloids and paparazzi that stalk famous people and report on their every movement.
We put our political beliefs on our t-shirts and bumper stickers. Wear our sports teams on our hats. And now we can share those things on Twitter and YouTube. I think I'm the only employee at my work that doesn't have a LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, or a Twitter.
Between Jeremy Lin, Tim Tebow, Kim Kardashian, and the 15-minutes-of-fame type reality TV show people, we have an endless cycle of gossip news available online and on your television. And people seem to love it. The more invasive the questions are at a sports press conference with Tim Tebow the better. The more we can dig up on Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries the better. Whitney Houston having cocaine in her system was more reported than anything else in the last week on the mainstream news.
The Slashdot crowd is the exception not the rule. When most people are all about getting themselves more friends on Facebook and more followers on YouTube the "geeks" are holding onto their privacy. Personal privacy is simply not cool in America. When America stops everything because Tim Tebow is coming to the Jets (I hope everyone at /. has familiarized themselves with the Wildcat Offense) they are there for the spectacle and not for the actual sport.
Sure no one wants their credit card information online. But too many people in the U.S. seem to think that putting their email, phone number, personal likes and hobbies, thousands of pictures of themselves, and so on, all over the internet, is not only okay but it is preferred. It's fun for them.
I always laugh when a lawyer or judge or politician starts screaming about hitting a business with a financial loss to punish them for fraud or negligence or some other crime or scam. Where do they think that that money is going to come from? Do they think that the CEOs are going to pay it from their own pockets?
That money will come directly from consumers and subscribers. Most who will be completely unaware of this lawsuit. AT&T will up the rates or charge extra for other services or products and that will pay off whatever losses are from this lawsuit.
Basically only the consumers lose. The Nigerian scammers make their money. AT&T makes its money back eventually. The judges and lawyers make their money. And the consumers and taxpayers foot the bill for everything. It's a great system.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70_nQpOQczM
Sonic Boom is a charge attack so maybe they are forgetting to charge.
I consider myself a hardcore gamer. Thousands of hours of gaming a year every year. But my backlog of games is enormous for this generation. I literally just stared Mass Effect 1 today and I've yet to begin Skyrim or Final Fantasy 13 as well. I've also got a pile of PS3 games, including Uncharted 1, that I've yet to open the box for.
But for the Nintendo Wii I've exhausted the top quality games for that system. And no one makes new games for that system anymore either. So it's perfect time for Nintendo to release another console.
But the 360 and the PS3? There are years left in those systems. We've only gotten one God of War game the PS3. And only one Metal Gear Solid as well. SONY and MS in their console Cold War arms race are going to cut off their noses to spite their faces by killing this generation of consoles early.
Do you really think that the US cares about false flag operations? Bin Laden and 16 of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and we decide to declare war on Afghanistan and the Taliban. The entire UN weapons inspection team claimed that Iraq didn't have WMDs but we ignored all evidence and invaded and overthrew Saddam with no hesitation.
If the U.S. wanted to they could declare war on Iran for an overdue library book. "We know that Iran has the book...it's overdue...we are mobilizing our infantry divisions and MOAB bomber crews as we speak". After the complete lack of WMDs in Iraq it seems obvious that the U.S. government just doesn't care what anyone thinks.
The U.S. military doesn't need any real reason to invade another country anymore. We could just say that Iran posses a large stash of radioactive kryptonite and that they must be stopped.
Nothing good is coming from any involvement between countries in the Greater Middle East and countries outside of it. Diplomacy is awful. The U.S. is waging war all over creating chaos. Humanitarian aid is handled disastrously. And any cultural exchange is met with hostility such as the BBC establishing a television channel.
Just let that part of the world be alone by itself and cut them off completely. Don't send them money. Don't send diplomats. Don't send businesses. Encourage your citizens from touring that area. And don't ever send soldiers and bombs.
All I hear about that part of the world when it comes to foreign relations are horror stories. The Middle East is backwards. They are regressing into even more oppressive religious states and I don't see outsiders feel like they need to be a military or cultural influence over there.
Credit card fraud is a huge illegal industry. It finances drug gangs and cartels, terrorists, small organized crime, major organized crime (mafia), and occasionally the rogue individual hacker. It's the new form of armed bank robbery. Instead of guns they use computers though.
Of course while $700K in fraud by a few people is nothing to ignore, it is a bit ridiculous that the FBI devotes so many resources to catching these scumbags, while virtually ignoring the guys who swindle billions of dollars through stocks, insider trading, and pyramid schemes.
So shutting off PSN access for millions of gamers is now considered hacktivism? Going after Sony's game division, which has almost nothing to do with Sony's corporate division, is now hacktivism?
I know that the Slashdot crowd is extremely anti-Sony but I fail to see how denying paying consumers the ability to play games is hacktivism. Or preventing dozens of new games from getting released on the PSN store, and allowing those companies and artists to sell their titles, is hacktivism.
Welcome to the New American Nanny State.
Right now, schools are under heavy pressure to reduce "bullying". The politicians and money groups have seized on an issue that is easy to win over the hearts of American voters and donors. That's why "bullying" is such a hot issue right now and gets tons of media coverage.
Kids talking about sex, something mentioned in the article as being another reason why the police and school went after this student, is another always hot issue especially with American "conservatives". We must avoid talking to children or exposing them to sex at all costs.
So we have a school where a kid is accused of bullying, and also talking about sex, on Facebook. The school knows if it does nothing they'll get blasted by moms, and the media, about how they failed to protect other children from bullies and perverts. They let a student make hate speech and promote sex talk amongst pre-teens or whatever. But if the school acts then they'll get blasted by people who think that the schools should mind their own business and let the parents handle things. And we know how well parents handle things in modern America.
Instead of finding a middle ground, the school feels the pressure from all sides and.....calls the cops. Huge overreaction in hindsight of course but they must have felt at the time that it was warranted.
But seriously? A kid can't say that they hate their teacher anymore? A kid can't talk about sex with another kid? When I was in school it didn't matter if a kid said he hated a hall monitor or a teacher. Most of the teachers had been around long enough to recognize which kids disliked them. And most of my teachers could tell which boys and girls had started puberty earlier than others because we behaved much differently around the opposite sex. Times have changed.
The school should have just called the student's mother or father and said "some kid tattled on your kid, it's not a big deal, but you should monitor your kid's facebook and just check to see if they are doing anything that is inappropriate". No cops. No teachers. No detention even. Let the parents do their jobs.
The 'optical illusion' might have added to the many reasons that the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage but it certainly was not the main cause. The ship was legendary at the time before it had even made its maiden voyage. The largest and most elaborate and ornate vessel of its time. A floating palace. A moving island on the sea. The Titanic.
The ship's captain and others postulated that running the ship at full speed from its last stop in Europe all the way to America would make enormous headlines. If the ship arrived in New York ahead of schedule by a day it would be a media sensation and basically the best advertising that they could buy. So the ship's operators plowed through the ocean at the fastest possible speed (which was a common practice though).
To make things worse the ship's operators both ignored and missed warnings about dangerous fields of ice that they were approaching. An area of ocean crowded with frozen solid and tremendously large icebergs. A nearby ship, the Californian, stopped near where the Titanic sank that night, only a few miles away, because they were extremely cautious and nervous about smashing the ship into a mass of ice. So they waited to resume travel until the morning. The Californian even sent messages to the Titanic warning them of the ice fields. Those messages were essentially ignored.
At the time that Titanic was built it was considered unsinkable. There had been accidents in the past where large ships had smashed head first into icebergs and stayed above water. And the Titanic had been built stronger, sturdier, and tougher than any ship ever made. The Titanic's captain even said before the first voyage, "there is no condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that".
The ship is going full speed. It's traveling into an area where there are icebergs the size of small islands. The lookouts are not equipped with binoculars and are not aware of what kind of field they are traveling into. The moon is black so there is no light over the ocean. The water is completely calm so they can't hear waves crashing against the icebergs to warn them (years later it is then known that calm water indicates fields of ice). And by the time that the lookouts spot the iceberg...they are traveling full speed right for it and there isn't enough time to turn. They were traveling full speed, blind, deaf, and into a death trap.
The ship smashes into the iceberg and grinds its side into the mass of ice tearing a few small holes into the side of the ship. The tears are only a few feet long and inches wide but the ocean water is relentless. The Titanic was designed to survive the front two below deck compartments flooding with water. Or any other four compartments located below deck flooding completely. Instead, the first five compartments are almost instantly flooded from ocean water raging through the breaches, the ship is doomed. The ship will sink in less than two hours and there is nothing to stop it. Trapped in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go and lifeboats for less than half of the passengers.
While there were only half as many lifeboats as would have been necessary to save everyone, over two-thirds of people on the ship were not able to escape. One reason is that people were so zealous about the "women and children" first rule that they were sending half empty lifeboats off of the ship without loading any men on them. Also they were loading lifeboats according to your travel class. First class passengers were more likely to be saved. Third class passengers had to wait their turns. That's why for the blockbuster Titanic they had a first class woman paired with a third class man. Those two had the best and worst odds of surviving the disaster based on lifeboat placement.
So no it wasn't an optical illusion. It was a series of many things that contributed to the Titanic sinking on its maiden voyage. Poor lookouts. Dangerous speeds. Lack of modern understanding of calm water indicating dangerous conditions. No moonlight. Purposefully ignoring warnings of dangerous conditions including icebergs. Even without an optical illusion that ship unfortunately still sinks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NubZJA4c_Rw
Seems like it would require an awful lot of force just to float a small house. An interesting idea that might be useful in other areas. But I don't see how this could catch on long term for things like apartment buildings or skyscrapers.
And let's not forget that it wasn't so much the earthquake that devastated Japan. But it was the wall of water that mowed down everything in its path.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7YK2uKxil8
After Peter Weyland's brilliant TED speech I donated my money and spare computing power to the Weyland Corporation.
A recent discovery of long term space exploration is that being in low gravity for too long literally folds parts of your eye. Causing astronauts who spend too much time up in space to have permanent vision changes that leave them very far-sighted and required to wear reading glasses. Just six months in low gravity was enough for major changes in vision.
Imagine a missions to Mars that takes six months just one way? These astronauts would be blind under our current understanding of how space travel affects sight by the time that they came back.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/20/nation/la-na-blind-nasa-astronaut-20110921
"What we are seeing is flattening of the globe, swelling of the optic nerve, a far-sighted shift, and choroidal folds," said Dr. C. Robert Gibson, one of authors of the study published in the October 2011 issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. "We think it is intracranial pressure related, but we're not sure; it could also be due to an increase in pressure along the optic nerve itself or some kind of localized change to the back of the eyeball."
The study identified new risks for those who live in space for at least six months. Blurred vision was the primary issue reported by the seven astronaut test subjects.
"After a few weeks aboard the [station]," said Astronaut Bob Thirsk, a Canadian Space Agency physician who spent six months as a member of the Expedition 20 and 21 crews in 2007, "I noticed that my visual acuity had changed. My distant vision was not too bad, but I found that it was more difficult to read procedures. I also had trouble manually focusing cameras, so I would ask a crewmate to verify my focus setting on critical experiments."
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/Astronaut_Vision.html
The way I see it is that there are two options. The first one is we only send replicants to Mars or more unmanned flights. The other is that NASA gets some awesome new understanding of vision loss or develops technology to overcome vision loss. Either way this would be quite the benefit for society if NASA can develop some new things to combat vision loss.
What could compete with the glory of undulating breasts in 1080p?
How about a real woman's breasts undulating in front of you?
Come on...this should have been submitted in the slashdot summary within the first two or three sentences.
The plan allegedly was to sell them to developing nations and dupe their governments. The mafia would create a circus theater filled with distractions to make them look like a legitimate outfit. Office space, limousines, fancy suits, lots of showmanship. They'd use foreign diplomats and politicians on their payroll to get presidents or warlords of a foreign country into a face to face meeting.
They get a leader of some inexperienced government, possibly even a wealthy warlord, of a developing nation, and try to get them to transfer $1 billion worth of wealth in exchange for a $1 billion U.S. treasury bond. It is actually very creative. Had they not been caught they might have been able to pull this off. Though I don't see how any bank would have not raised a million red flags for this transaction and the reports are that the criminals wanted to move the money through Swiss banks.
This isn't the first treasury bond scam nor will it be the last. Organized crime loves this scam. Every year a few individuals are arrested with fake bonds on them that are valued at billions of dollars. The Italian police found a bunch of fake $1 billion bonds during a routine car stop a few years ago.