It's good that they're not undervaluing communications, not just between emergency personnel but between regular people. While disaster relief specialists and people like the police need proper communications to organize, many regular people (maybe not Australians, though) will panic in the face of a disaster. Keeping the regular citizen from getting himself killed because of a stupid decision is an important yet underrated thing (since most disaster relief is aimed at poor countries and is intended to do the bare minimum).
The errors (in both shared and commercial content) are usually because they were OCR'd cheaply and quickly without much proofreading. Most OCR software, unless you are willing to pay $20,000 (it's not available through "non-conventional" channels, the developers have so few clients that they keep a tight handle on it) for a suite, will result in many errors. Common ones include the length of a dash (no m-dashes anywhere), 'i' for 'l' for 't' (which is mostly due to funny fonts or printing errors in the paper book), etc... and good luck with special characters, even just ones with accents. Foreign (meaning non-English) language support for OCR software is virtually non-existent, and most seem to have trouble just recognizing basic ASCII characters.
In this case, errors are common. However, good release groups for e-books will generally read them looking for truly egregious errors, usually comparing them to a paper copy.
Be careful of what you pay for. Some works (Orwell's, for instance) are out of copyright in Commonwealth countries but still under copyright (due to Disney's meddling) in the USA. I believe they are hosted at the Australian Project Gutenberg site if you are interested, but they aren't as well-proofread as the main Gutenberg stuff and come in very few formats.
Apple also does some sneaky things that aren't exactly DRM, but are basically locking people in -- for instance, funny implementations of h.264 for AppleTV that won't play well with much things, and anything that you want to use with AppleTV has to be encoded that way. Most torrents of films are aggressively compressed, which is too much for AppleTV to handle (maybe it has a weak decoder). At any rate, it isn't explicit or removable DRM (more a deficiency and weakness in the software and hardware) but it is still a limitation and one that rather cleverly locks users into buying both the content and the means to play it from Apple or Apple-approved sources.
Ha! Where is this magical place where there are no lies? Even in communities as small as two people there are plenty of lies. Not necessarily big, life-affecting lies, but certain small, keep-the-peace type lies.
In the context of "woo" and pseudoscience, disbelief until something is proven to be true is a much better approach, as "I don't know" is generally taken as abstaining from opposition of people making unverified claims. It's similar to an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, except it's more like "guilty until proven innocent". Many people (indeed, everyone) have said things that are false or have later been proven to be false; assuming that all of these statements (unless disproven) are true is an unrealistic approach. If the person making the claims does not bother to back up what their say or cannot, and independent investigators cannot either, then even if it has not directly been disproven, it still has not been proven.
The only good thing about the parent post is that it wasn't modded up. I won't even discuss your opinion -- although, in the future, beginning your wild, unverified statements with "in my opinion" is probably a good idea. There's even an acronym for it: 'IMO', or 'IMHO' if you feel particularly honest.
An bonus comment: If you are going to be wrong in the bulk of your message, at least get the basis for it right. "Skepticism" is essentially an ideal where someone requires proof of claims before supporting them. Even if individual skeptics may be people simply trying to discount others' claims while pushing forward their own, this should not reflect on skepticism as an idea. Second, a common theme is that many skeptics are scientists (and yes, even physicists too) or magicians; people experienced either with proving things or with deceiving people. Rather than thinking of skeptics as people who don't believe in a claim no matter what, think of a skeptic as someone who chooses the default (disbelief) until sufficient proof has been gathered. This, in case you are unsure, is what your physicists actually do - "I don't know", "Not enough data".
The same problem exists with the Bible -- any extremist sect can edit the Christian Bible and issue it as "the 'X' Edition of the Holy Bible". However, copyright has a loophole -- if the censorship is being done by the publisher, no one can stop it. Look at Stranger in a Strange Land, which could only be published in its full form in the 1990s once the mentality of the publisher (and the public) had changed. If something is in the public domain, copyrights can't restrict its publication. At least with a free version, the "correct" or canonical version can exist. The copyrighted work is more similar to 1984: it can be changed at any time, and everyone has to go along with it.
I think that it was intended towards people recovering from odd devices (zip drives?) or old, old hardware, not a CD from 10 years ago. There are all sorts of problems that can arise -- even assuming that you could use the basic device with your computer (say, a very old I
I had to recover a series of essays from 5.25" floppy disks for someone, I basically transitioned through the years -- first an old PC clone with an 8088 that I had working (copied onto its hard drive), then I transferred it into an early-2000s Dell with a USB controller. I then copied the essays onto a flash drive for perusal (and printing off) from my current desktop. I don't remember how old they were, although they were from the mid to late 80s and were probably typed on an Apple II or early Macintosh, based on their use of carriage returns sans line feeds. They were plaintext, which was the saving grace -- I shudder to think of what the proprietary formats for older word processors might look like.
This shows not just an obvious hatred for regulation, but a lack of knowledge about the beginnings of the Web beyond a few names and dates. While showing that any high level of regulation would be used to the advantage of the big companies like Microsoft, it ignores the fact that companies like Microsoft would use their market share to try to create their own standards and to try to force out their competition through incompatibility -- just like they did in the real 1990s with IE.
The way I see it, they let Iran onto the councils they don't care about. If people (and by that I mean important peopel) had really vocally opposed it, they probably wouldn't have got on.
If you think that the UN taking control of the Internet involves the United States losing control rather than gaining it, you're remarkably ignorant of the true state of international politics.
"No original research", etc. The problem is that so many people have added so much factually incorrect (and unsourced) stuff to Wikipedia that had to be deleted, that they are simply trying to set the bar at "sourced". The idea is that, if you provide enough sources on a subject, they will balance each other out. The reality is that most editors with competing ideas or opposing points of view will just delete the additions made by people from the "other side", creating total pandemonium.
... And then no one uses it anyway, simply because they are unaware, uncaring, or afraid. Given a few years of media brainwashing, most people will probably think that circumventing any sort of national filter would lead to arrest, much like the people who believe that the FBI will come in and shoot you after watching too many MPAA ads (props to "The IT Crowd").
I think a part of their defense ("TV is still relevant!") rests on redefining "TV" as a medium and trying to "adapt" it to the internet. By trying to re-implement broadcast television over the Internet, they are trying to maintain their old content restriction techniques and paradigms rather than changing to suit the future. To most people a "television" is a device -- and it is dead. To TV and marketing executives, TV is dying and they want to stop it, to drag us back into the 20th century. It is our duty to stop them.
I think he's speaking more specifically about downloading precompiled binaries from uncertain sources, any of which could have packaged malware in with the source before compilation. Either that or he is uninformed about LOIC.
This seems to me like an attempt to head off intra-national attempts to regulate "cyber-weapons", applying rules to citizens that they don't apply to themselves. By drafting rules for countries they prevent (to some degree) the stopping of individuals and the ignoring of countries. By bringing it to the level of an international treaty, it gives it a level of seriousness that would stop countries from simply DDoS'ing each other on a whim or to put on political pressure, which would make Internet access in some countries sketchy at best.
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It's good that they're not undervaluing communications, not just between emergency personnel but between regular people. While disaster relief specialists and people like the police need proper communications to organize, many regular people (maybe not Australians, though) will panic in the face of a disaster. Keeping the regular citizen from getting himself killed because of a stupid decision is an important yet underrated thing (since most disaster relief is aimed at poor countries and is intended to do the bare minimum).
The errors (in both shared and commercial content) are usually because they were OCR'd cheaply and quickly without much proofreading. Most OCR software, unless you are willing to pay $20,000 (it's not available through "non-conventional" channels, the developers have so few clients that they keep a tight handle on it) for a suite, will result in many errors. Common ones include the length of a dash (no m-dashes anywhere), 'i' for 'l' for 't' (which is mostly due to funny fonts or printing errors in the paper book), etc... and good luck with special characters, even just ones with accents. Foreign (meaning non-English) language support for OCR software is virtually non-existent, and most seem to have trouble just recognizing basic ASCII characters.
In this case, errors are common. However, good release groups for e-books will generally read them looking for truly egregious errors, usually comparing them to a paper copy.
Be careful of what you pay for. Some works (Orwell's, for instance) are out of copyright in Commonwealth countries but still under copyright (due to Disney's meddling) in the USA. I believe they are hosted at the Australian Project Gutenberg site if you are interested, but they aren't as well-proofread as the main Gutenberg stuff and come in very few formats.
Apple also does some sneaky things that aren't exactly DRM, but are basically locking people in -- for instance, funny implementations of h.264 for AppleTV that won't play well with much things, and anything that you want to use with AppleTV has to be encoded that way. Most torrents of films are aggressively compressed, which is too much for AppleTV to handle (maybe it has a weak decoder). At any rate, it isn't explicit or removable DRM (more a deficiency and weakness in the software and hardware) but it is still a limitation and one that rather cleverly locks users into buying both the content and the means to play it from Apple or Apple-approved sources.
Ha! Where is this magical place where there are no lies? Even in communities as small as two people there are plenty of lies. Not necessarily big, life-affecting lies, but certain small, keep-the-peace type lies.
Or even in a community of one.
In the context of "woo" and pseudoscience, disbelief until something is proven to be true is a much better approach, as "I don't know" is generally taken as abstaining from opposition of people making unverified claims. It's similar to an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, except it's more like "guilty until proven innocent". Many people (indeed, everyone) have said things that are false or have later been proven to be false; assuming that all of these statements (unless disproven) are true is an unrealistic approach. If the person making the claims does not bother to back up what their say or cannot, and independent investigators cannot either, then even if it has not directly been disproven, it still has not been proven.
The only good thing about the parent post is that it wasn't modded up. I won't even discuss your opinion -- although, in the future, beginning your wild, unverified statements with "in my opinion" is probably a good idea. There's even an acronym for it: 'IMO', or 'IMHO' if you feel particularly honest.
An bonus comment: If you are going to be wrong in the bulk of your message, at least get the basis for it right. "Skepticism" is essentially an ideal where someone requires proof of claims before supporting them. Even if individual skeptics may be people simply trying to discount others' claims while pushing forward their own, this should not reflect on skepticism as an idea. Second, a common theme is that many skeptics are scientists (and yes, even physicists too) or magicians; people experienced either with proving things or with deceiving people. Rather than thinking of skeptics as people who don't believe in a claim no matter what, think of a skeptic as someone who chooses the default (disbelief) until sufficient proof has been gathered. This, in case you are unsure, is what your physicists actually do - "I don't know", "Not enough data".
If you have issues, take it up with the FCC.
The same problem exists with the Bible -- any extremist sect can edit the Christian Bible and issue it as "the 'X' Edition of the Holy Bible". However, copyright has a loophole -- if the censorship is being done by the publisher, no one can stop it. Look at Stranger in a Strange Land, which could only be published in its full form in the 1990s once the mentality of the publisher (and the public) had changed. If something is in the public domain, copyrights can't restrict its publication. At least with a free version, the "correct" or canonical version can exist. The copyrighted work is more similar to 1984: it can be changed at any time, and everyone has to go along with it.
I think that it was intended towards people recovering from odd devices (zip drives?) or old, old hardware, not a CD from 10 years ago. There are all sorts of problems that can arise -- even assuming that you could use the basic device with your computer (say, a very old I
I had to recover a series of essays from 5.25" floppy disks for someone, I basically transitioned through the years -- first an old PC clone with an 8088 that I had working (copied onto its hard drive), then I transferred it into an early-2000s Dell with a USB controller. I then copied the essays onto a flash drive for perusal (and printing off) from my current desktop. I don't remember how old they were, although they were from the mid to late 80s and were probably typed on an Apple II or early Macintosh, based on their use of carriage returns sans line feeds. They were plaintext, which was the saving grace -- I shudder to think of what the proprietary formats for older word processors might look like.
This shows not just an obvious hatred for regulation, but a lack of knowledge about the beginnings of the Web beyond a few names and dates. While showing that any high level of regulation would be used to the advantage of the big companies like Microsoft, it ignores the fact that companies like Microsoft would use their market share to try to create their own standards and to try to force out their competition through incompatibility -- just like they did in the real 1990s with IE.
The way I see it, they let Iran onto the councils they don't care about. If people (and by that I mean important peopel) had really vocally opposed it, they probably wouldn't have got on.
If you think that the UN taking control of the Internet involves the United States losing control rather than gaining it, you're remarkably ignorant of the true state of international politics.
Now they have an excuse, and all hell is going to break loose.
Sorry for the accidental rhyming.
"No original research", etc. The problem is that so many people have added so much factually incorrect (and unsourced) stuff to Wikipedia that had to be deleted, that they are simply trying to set the bar at "sourced". The idea is that, if you provide enough sources on a subject, they will balance each other out. The reality is that most editors with competing ideas or opposing points of view will just delete the additions made by people from the "other side", creating total pandemonium.
... And then no one uses it anyway, simply because they are unaware, uncaring, or afraid. Given a few years of media brainwashing, most people will probably think that circumventing any sort of national filter would lead to arrest, much like the people who believe that the FBI will come in and shoot you after watching too many MPAA ads (props to "The IT Crowd").
I think a part of their defense ("TV is still relevant!") rests on redefining "TV" as a medium and trying to "adapt" it to the internet. By trying to re-implement broadcast television over the Internet, they are trying to maintain their old content restriction techniques and paradigms rather than changing to suit the future. To most people a "television" is a device -- and it is dead. To TV and marketing executives, TV is dying and they want to stop it, to drag us back into the 20th century. It is our duty to stop them.
I think he's speaking more specifically about downloading precompiled binaries from uncertain sources, any of which could have packaged malware in with the source before compilation. Either that or he is uninformed about LOIC.
Fiction often portrays the future.
Except for all the science fiction that portrayed conflicts in the 2020s and 2030s between the USA and USSR...
We're seeing that now. This happens in retail, manufacturing, virtually every industry out there.
The best way to undermine a broken, corrupt system is to draw attention to the inconsistencies in its operation.
This seems to me like an attempt to head off intra-national attempts to regulate "cyber-weapons", applying rules to citizens that they don't apply to themselves. By drafting rules for countries they prevent (to some degree) the stopping of individuals and the ignoring of countries. By bringing it to the level of an international treaty, it gives it a level of seriousness that would stop countries from simply DDoS'ing each other on a whim or to put on political pressure, which would make Internet access in some countries sketchy at best.
16 years old? He's over the hill! Fire him and replace him with his 13-year-old subordinate!
It's convenient for authorities to create such Enemies, like Obama Bin Laden.
Funny, intentional or not.