No, actually you're not. Those had to be some of the best scenes in the movie; I've gotta say I like the manga better, but the movie's special to me and I hope to god they don't play games with the dialogue or pretend they know better than Hisaishi-sensei on the score like they did with Laputa. But we'll see...
Actually, the original Mononoke Hime DVD only had the Miramax logo and "Distributed by Buena Vista Home Entertainment," no Disney logo to be seen. On the other hand, Laputa bears the front-and-center inscription "Walt Disney Home Entertainment presents a Studio Ghibli film" and a nice little Disney logo on the spine. I think they realized at some point that it really does benefit them to have their name on Miyazaki's work.
If I'm reading it right, they want to make their money as an agent between users and labels, iTunes-style, with the twist of trying to tack it onto your ISP bill to try and improve its appeal. I've already outlined why I don't think the ISPs will buy it, and given the lack of DRM inherent in most people's CD rips, I don't see the record labels buying it without a serious clue adjustment either. Alternately, if a DRM requirement becomes part of the bargain, then even with whatever they plan to use to identify any particular file, I see the traffic being considerably less.
1. Sounds like another pay-to-download. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
2. It means they think ISPs would really be sucker enough to buy into letting them say who to bill what charges, based on username or, worse, IP address. I can't imagine anyone biting on this without a *lot* better security and decent proof of identity, and even then, given Sharman's past abuses (start with malware and work from there), I wouldn't be inclined to trust them for even a second with the keys to my coffers.
I tend to agree that if this really is their business plan going forward, they're done.
Some people can't get that elsewhere. (Which usually equates to "can't be arsed to put out the effort," but that's another issue.)
It's not really free anyway. You missed all the costs that aren't expressly associated, but which really are part of the cost. Next to that, some reason, a hooker is cheap.
Offtopic? No, it's a digression. Go give your mod points to that guy down the page who deserves an Interesting.
If I had to guess, it falls under laws designed to prohibit subliminal advertising. Unfortunately, my cursory Google search failed to find anything specifically prohibiting what you're describing; the most I could find was an FCC document describing subliminal advertising on TV as "clearly intended to be deceptive" and presumably therefore prohibited; this, if I had to guess, applies neither to cinematic films nor to simple brown spots on the film (the way I read it seems to require an intent to convey a message via subliminal perception).
While I was looking it up, though, I did find a good article on the development of subliminal advertising and its limitations.
One of the things I noticed in the article is that the spots actually vary on a print-by-print basis. So maybe they just release "spotted" prints to houses where they suspect piracy problems.
Right, at least partially, you are, as the letter itself even confirms:
The three code fragments had been inadvertently included
and in fact were redundant from the start. We found better replacements providing the same functionality already available in the Linux kernel. [Emphasis mine.]
4) Buy a senator, make watching t.v. illegal unless you pay disney for the right.
Which, I might note, sounds remarkably like the system that's already in place in the UK. Now, in fairness, I don't know if that means there's less advertising on British TV, and I doubt there'd be any decrease if it were implemented in the US.
Though, you know, it might start to get the attention to TV advertising that telemarketing and spam have now...
Anyone else find it interesting that he oriented the creation of GNU around his personal beliefs? It would seem he did it mainly for himself.. Anyway, say what you will about the guy, but perhaps if he'd had any other attitude, you wouldn't be reading this now. (among many other things)
ESR nailed it: "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." (Someone please tell me why I had to go looking in Halloween I to find this rather than in CatB, where I swear it originated.) Why does any of us write something new that doesn't somehow cater to our own interest? "Necessity is the mother of invention" because you don't invent something if you don't feel you need it. So there's really no faulting RMS for starting a project because of something he wanted - I think I can safely say that none of us would've done so for any other reason.
So I've finally reached the conclusion that for most of the mainstream press, interviewing Linus is really a way to look like they care about open source without actually risking taking a position. It feels to them like they're writing about something, but because Linus ostensibly views the whole thing as little more than "there," there's no particularly visible position or even evidence that differences of opinion exist on the issue. If you want people to care about OSS issues, you interview ESR or RMS or, on the other side, Steve Ballmer or Darl McBride. Otherwise, making people feel like they're enlightened when they've really learned nothing comes down to little more than masturbation.
(disclaimer: yes, this is offtopic, and I've even got mod points right now, if I wanted to post as an AC and mod myself down. 'Course, that would leave it at -1 and pointless...)
Quick HTML primer for/.:
<tt> gives you the monospaced "typewriter" look.
< for a left bracket/less-than. (<)
> for a right bracket/greater-than. (>)
& for an ampersand. (&)
There's also a quickie list of allowed HTML bits below the entry box. Depending on the look you're after, use of the "HTML Formatted" option is sometimes also helpful.
The scary thing is that you could use 4tst4k3 repeatedly and I wouldn't blink at it. 47s74k3 would require some effort...
Proving that not only can we quickly decipher some words when the internal letters are transposed, but also when digits are substituted for certain letters. Quick! Alert the linguistics department! </snark>
Finally, when you consider the fact that many of these jobs are going over to India, anyway, we lose even the job-creation benefit, and the drain is even greater.
Nitpick: I doubt these jobs are going to India. Rationale goes like this:
A cold-caller is at a disadvantage in communication because people hate cold-calls and react unfavorably from the outset.
A lack of proficiency in the language you're speaking is also a disadvantage in communication, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
India is close to diametrically opposed, geographically, to much of the US. It's hard enough to find enough people who'll spend their time calling people and getting yelled at during the day, let alone in the middle of the night.
So you stack these up and suddenly you've got a triple disadvantage, and chances are you'll end up realizing the same return, dollar-for-dollar, as you would with the more expensive workers in the US. A friend on IRC pointed out where the real shift for these jobs will be: Canada. Sure, the labor cost is about the same, but you don't have the disadvantage entailed in moving ops to India, and as long as your telemarketing firm keeps all of its offices and sweatsh^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcall centers north of the border, there's very little that the FTC or any other US entity can do to stop them. Unfortunately, I doubt that anyone's likely to make a real foreign policy issue of telemarketing.
Now, is someone ready to poke all the holes in this that I'm sure have at least the potential to exist?
The difficulty with the BOFH mentality is that it makes you enemies faster than you can acquire friends to balance them out. Yes, firewalling them is correct and important, preferably in a fashion that involves continuing (elsewhere) to log their connect attempts so you can show the MRTG results to your customers when they ask. But involving the FBI before sending a polite C&D letter (or having your most polite, personable admin call theirs and/or their upstream's for a nice heart-to-heart -- this works surprisingly well in many cases) serves little purpose but to reduce how seriously the FBI takes you coming into the process. It's rather akin to SCO's behavior, filing lawsuits and making loud blusterings in the press before they ever took the time to email Linus (and maybe cc: Alan and Marcelo) with their concerns. Better from a long-term standpoint to make one or two well-documented attempts to ask them to stop, while logging the damage they're causing. What comes to mind here is wisc.edu's recently-reported SNTP problem with Netgear routers, in which good inter-company communication and reasonably-good data collection got reasonable solutions working without needing to haul out the lawyers.
And I don't want to see what happens when google starts bitch slappin' VeriSign.
Honestly, I do. I think it would serve VS a very nice kick in the nads. Alas, kicks in the nads don't work very well in the corporate setting, and so we're left praying that as many US-based registrars as possible will band together and slap VS with a very big suit for anti-competitive practices. I suspect this qualifies.
I was always a little disappointed with just how quickly Mort and Tim (and eventually even Ronald-Ann, who was supposed to be the central character) disappeared from the strip.
The one I don't understand (in the same Onion interview that the Wash Post cited) is his insistence that there's no real value in his old strips today. Quite the contrary, I think editorial cartoons can be one of the most effective ways of learning and reviewing history, and damn fun too. But maybe I'm biased because Bloom County documents a portion of my life where my political awareness was largely due to the funnies.
I actually never managed to see Halley during that time. Saw Hale-Bopp for weeks, though, and that was hella cool. In any case, I'm only 25, so seeing it in '62 doesn't seem like such a stretch.
Not to mention that even before Sharman complained, searching on "Kazaa" and hitting "I'm Feeling Lucky" should have landed on Sharman's own website anyway. So it's not exactly as though removing k-lite sites would've improved their own rank.
I'm going to operate on the assumption that the rip/burn/rip you're talking about involved no more significant intermediate treatment of the data than lossless compression (important to note since my definition of "rip" anymore tends to incorporate "encode").
As for MD5 collision, I can't see it as a very workable defense, even under a "reasonable doubt" standard. By the most simplistic approach (IANAstatistician), the odds of collision are 1:2**128 (assuming full hash and no unobtainable values - I know no way to prove the latter but my math is weak), which I must imagine would be legally indistinguishable from being impossible. Add more checks (say, hashes of the first and last 8K or some kind of tolerant waveform analysis) and the odds only get slimmer. This really makes the use of hashes little more than a footnote, and honestly something I expected since RIAA's been using "fingerprints" of files (which I always figured for hashes) for blocking since the Napster suit.
I'm not saying that I like the fact that they're using this technology, only that it's difficult from a defense POV.
Now unless they decided to hire a couple hundred interns to sort through all that, or they used very small boxes, I seriously doubt Burst.com didn't plan this.
Sure there's a lot of data there, but the e-mails in question were delivered in machine-readable format. Now, Slashbots, how do we handle hundreds of thousands of pieces of pretty well homogeneous data?
(Pauses while the shouts of "MySQL!" ring out around him, shakes his head.)
Close enough, anyway. It would be pretty well trivial from a procedural point of view (though it would likely take an hour or two for someone to write the script and a few days of some poor intern swapping DVDs/tapes) to load all the e-mails into a database. Date-sorting then becomes a matter of a one-line query, and they were probably date-sorted before they were printed anyway. Every DB client I've ever used will return such a query in a tabular format that would make it very easy on a quick scroll through to see a big gap in message dates.
Actually, I'm tempted to short SCO over the long term. Their little house of cards made of litigation will collapse, and when it does, I suspect they'll be bankrupt. When the stock goes in the toilet, short-sellers profit.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually you're not. Those had to be some of the best scenes in the movie; I've gotta say I like the manga better, but the movie's special to me and I hope to god they don't play games with the dialogue or pretend they know better than Hisaishi-sensei on the score like they did with Laputa. But we'll see...
Actually, the original Mononoke Hime DVD only had the Miramax logo and "Distributed by Buena Vista Home Entertainment," no Disney logo to be seen. On the other hand, Laputa bears the front-and-center inscription "Walt Disney Home Entertainment presents a Studio Ghibli film" and a nice little Disney logo on the spine. I think they realized at some point that it really does benefit them to have their name on Miyazaki's work.
This is even better if you ask me. What self-respecting Gothic literature fan/geek-of-all-trades wouldn't love an element called Frankensteinium?
If I'm reading it right, they want to make their money as an agent between users and labels, iTunes-style, with the twist of trying to tack it onto your ISP bill to try and improve its appeal. I've already outlined why I don't think the ISPs will buy it, and given the lack of DRM inherent in most people's CD rips, I don't see the record labels buying it without a serious clue adjustment either. Alternately, if a DRM requirement becomes part of the bargain, then even with whatever they plan to use to identify any particular file, I see the traffic being considerably less.
1. Sounds like another pay-to-download. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
2. It means they think ISPs would really be sucker enough to buy into letting them say who to bill what charges, based on username or, worse, IP address. I can't imagine anyone biting on this without a *lot* better security and decent proof of identity, and even then, given Sharman's past abuses (start with malware and work from there), I wouldn't be inclined to trust them for even a second with the keys to my coffers.
I tend to agree that if this really is their business plan going forward, they're done.
Two possible arguments:
Offtopic? No, it's a digression. Go give your mod points to that guy down the page who deserves an Interesting.
If I had to guess, it falls under laws designed to prohibit subliminal advertising. Unfortunately, my cursory Google search failed to find anything specifically prohibiting what you're describing; the most I could find was an FCC document describing subliminal advertising on TV as "clearly intended to be deceptive" and presumably therefore prohibited; this, if I had to guess, applies neither to cinematic films nor to simple brown spots on the film (the way I read it seems to require an intent to convey a message via subliminal perception).
While I was looking it up, though, I did find a good article on the development of subliminal advertising and its limitations.
One of the things I noticed in the article is that the spots actually vary on a print-by-print basis. So maybe they just release "spotted" prints to houses where they suspect piracy problems.
4) Buy a senator, make watching t.v. illegal unless you pay disney for the right.
Which, I might note, sounds remarkably like the system that's already in place in the UK. Now, in fairness, I don't know if that means there's less advertising on British TV, and I doubt there'd be any decrease if it were implemented in the US.
Though, you know, it might start to get the attention to TV advertising that telemarketing and spam have now...
Anyone else find it interesting that he oriented the creation of GNU around his personal beliefs? It would seem he did it mainly for himself..
Anyway, say what you will about the guy, but perhaps if he'd had any other attitude, you wouldn't be reading this now. (among many other things)
ESR nailed it: "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." (Someone please tell me why I had to go looking in Halloween I to find this rather than in CatB, where I swear it originated.) Why does any of us write something new that doesn't somehow cater to our own interest? "Necessity is the mother of invention" because you don't invent something if you don't feel you need it. So there's really no faulting RMS for starting a project because of something he wanted - I think I can safely say that none of us would've done so for any other reason.
So I've finally reached the conclusion that for most of the mainstream press, interviewing Linus is really a way to look like they care about open source without actually risking taking a position. It feels to them like they're writing about something, but because Linus ostensibly views the whole thing as little more than "there," there's no particularly visible position or even evidence that differences of opinion exist on the issue. If you want people to care about OSS issues, you interview ESR or RMS or, on the other side, Steve Ballmer or Darl McBride. Otherwise, making people feel like they're enlightened when they've really learned nothing comes down to little more than masturbation.
Quick HTML primer for /.:
- <tt> gives you the monospaced "typewriter" look.
- < for a left bracket/less-than. (<)
- > for a right bracket/greater-than. (>)
- & for an ampersand. (&)
There's also a quickie list of allowed HTML bits below the entry box. Depending on the look you're after, use of the "HTML Formatted" option is sometimes also helpful.The scary thing is that you could use 4tst4k3 repeatedly and I wouldn't blink at it. 47s74k3 would require some effort...
Proving that not only can we quickly decipher some words when the internal letters are transposed, but also when digits are substituted for certain letters. Quick! Alert the linguistics department!
</snark>
Nitpick: I doubt these jobs are going to India. Rationale goes like this:
So you stack these up and suddenly you've got a triple disadvantage, and chances are you'll end up realizing the same return, dollar-for-dollar, as you would with the more expensive workers in the US. A friend on IRC pointed out where the real shift for these jobs will be: Canada. Sure, the labor cost is about the same, but you don't have the disadvantage entailed in moving ops to India, and as long as your telemarketing firm keeps all of its offices and sweatsh^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcall centers north of the border, there's very little that the FTC or any other US entity can do to stop them. Unfortunately, I doubt that anyone's likely to make a real foreign policy issue of telemarketing.
Now, is someone ready to poke all the holes in this that I'm sure have at least the potential to exist?
The difficulty with the BOFH mentality is that it makes you enemies faster than you can acquire friends to balance them out. Yes, firewalling them is correct and important, preferably in a fashion that involves continuing (elsewhere) to log their connect attempts so you can show the MRTG results to your customers when they ask. But involving the FBI before sending a polite C&D letter (or having your most polite, personable admin call theirs and/or their upstream's for a nice heart-to-heart -- this works surprisingly well in many cases) serves little purpose but to reduce how seriously the FBI takes you coming into the process. It's rather akin to SCO's behavior, filing lawsuits and making loud blusterings in the press before they ever took the time to email Linus (and maybe cc: Alan and Marcelo) with their concerns. Better from a long-term standpoint to make one or two well-documented attempts to ask them to stop, while logging the damage they're causing. What comes to mind here is wisc.edu's recently-reported SNTP problem with Netgear routers, in which good inter-company communication and reasonably-good data collection got reasonable solutions working without needing to haul out the lawyers.
And I don't want to see what happens when google starts bitch slappin' VeriSign.
Honestly, I do. I think it would serve VS a very nice kick in the nads. Alas, kicks in the nads don't work very well in the corporate setting, and so we're left praying that as many US-based registrars as possible will band together and slap VS with a very big suit for anti-competitive practices. I suspect this qualifies.
I was always a little disappointed with just how quickly Mort and Tim (and eventually even Ronald-Ann, who was supposed to be the central character) disappeared from the strip.
The one I don't understand (in the same Onion interview that the Wash Post cited) is his insistence that there's no real value in his old strips today. Quite the contrary, I think editorial cartoons can be one of the most effective ways of learning and reviewing history, and damn fun too. But maybe I'm biased because Bloom County documents a portion of my life where my political awareness was largely due to the funnies.
I actually never managed to see Halley during that time. Saw Hale-Bopp for weeks, though, and that was hella cool. In any case, I'm only 25, so seeing it in '62 doesn't seem like such a stretch.
Not to mention that even before Sharman complained, searching on "Kazaa" and hitting "I'm Feeling Lucky" should have landed on Sharman's own website anyway. So it's not exactly as though removing k-lite sites would've improved their own rank.
I'm going to operate on the assumption that the rip/burn/rip you're talking about involved no more significant intermediate treatment of the data than lossless compression (important to note since my definition of "rip" anymore tends to incorporate "encode").
As for MD5 collision, I can't see it as a very workable defense, even under a "reasonable doubt" standard. By the most simplistic approach (IANAstatistician), the odds of collision are 1:2**128 (assuming full hash and no unobtainable values - I know no way to prove the latter but my math is weak), which I must imagine would be legally indistinguishable from being impossible. Add more checks (say, hashes of the first and last 8K or some kind of tolerant waveform analysis) and the odds only get slimmer. This really makes the use of hashes little more than a footnote, and honestly something I expected since RIAA's been using "fingerprints" of files (which I always figured for hashes) for blocking since the Napster suit.
I'm not saying that I like the fact that they're using this technology, only that it's difficult from a defense POV.
Now unless they decided to hire a couple hundred interns to sort through all that, or they used very small boxes, I seriously doubt Burst.com didn't plan this.
Sure there's a lot of data there, but the e-mails in question were delivered in machine-readable format. Now, Slashbots, how do we handle hundreds of thousands of pieces of pretty well homogeneous data?
(Pauses while the shouts of "MySQL!" ring out around him, shakes his head.)
Close enough, anyway. It would be pretty well trivial from a procedural point of view (though it would likely take an hour or two for someone to write the script and a few days of some poor intern swapping DVDs/tapes) to load all the e-mails into a database. Date-sorting then becomes a matter of a one-line query, and they were probably date-sorted before they were printed anyway. Every DB client I've ever used will return such a query in a tabular format that would make it very easy on a quick scroll through to see a big gap in message dates.
Why not? We've heard of electoral denial of service, why not a judicial smurf attack?
Okay, so it's a fun image, anyway.
Okay, not quite relevant, but it felt like it deserved sharing.
Actually, I'm tempted to short SCO over the long term. Their little house of cards made of litigation will collapse, and when it does, I suspect they'll be bankrupt. When the stock goes in the toilet, short-sellers profit.